I came because of the _loophole_. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not _crossdress_ in public. That would be _weird_. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, _out-of-distribution_ weird.)
-But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themselves does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
+But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
Conventions are actually _so_ boring that the loophole alone wouldn't have been enough to get me to come out to Fan Expo (been there, [done that](/tag/cosplay/)—seven times), except that this time I had a couple of new accessories to try out, most notably [a "Taylor" silicone mask by Crea FX](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/).
So on the night of Friday 25 November, I threw my [2250s-era Starfleet uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)) in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which had started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money instead of being a YOLO spendthrift, at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid.
-Arguably, just the _time_ was more of a waste than the money. Focusing on [writing my memoir of religious betrayal](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) has been a stuggle. Not an entirely unsuccessful struggle—the combined draft [mss.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ms.) are sitting at 74,000 words across four posts, which I've been thinking of as parts 2 through 5. (["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) being part 1.) But having 74,000 words isn't the same thing as being _done already_ and back to the business of being alive, instead of enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife—and even a single Saturday at Fan Expo instead of being holed up writing (or pretending to) puts an upper bound on my committment to life.
+<a id="memoir-of-religious-betrayal"></a>Arguably, just the _time_ was more of a waste than the money. Focusing on [writing my memoir of religious betrayal](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) has been a stuggle. Not an entirely unsuccessful struggle—the combined draft [mss.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ms.) are sitting at 74,000 words across four posts, which I've been thinking of as parts 2 through 5. (["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) being part 1.) But having 74,000 words isn't the same thing as being _done already_ and back to the business of being alive, instead of enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife—and even a single Saturday at Fan Expo instead of being holed up writing (or pretending to) puts an upper bound on my committment to life.
Worse, in the twelve-day _week_ between Fan Expo and me getting this boring Diary-like post up about it, OpenAI released _two_ new GPT variants ([text-davinci-003](https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1597355354433916928) and [ChatGPT](https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/)). It's not a _timeline_ update (and most days, I count myself with those [sober skeptics who think the world is ending in 2040](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), not those _loonies_ who think the world is ending in 2027), but it is a suggestion that it would be [_more dignified_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) for me to finish the memoir _now_ and go on to sieze the possibilities of another definitely-more-than-five-you-lunatics years of life, rather than continuing to mope around as a vengeful ghost, stuck in the past to the very end.
---------
-Later, I would force myself to read _TransCat_ Vol. 1. I don't want to say it's bad.
+<a id="transcat-review"></a>Later, I would force myself to read _TransCat_ Vol. 1. I don't want to say it's bad.
I mean, it is bad, but the fact that it's bad, isn't what's bad about it.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff