Tarot Reading for 2023

It's the end of February and I haven't updated with my annual tarot reading. Truth is, I did it at the usual time, but the results were really weird and I didn't know if I wanted to share.

I used to do a "Year Ahead Spread" which would have one central card to symbolize the whole year, then 12 cards surrounding it in the positions of the numbers on an analogue clock. It seems that spread fell out of fashion since it was too much like "fortune telling". Tarot is supposed to give a full picture, including the past and present, and offer options and advice with one or more potential futures based on behaviours that you can choose to adopt or reject. It doesn't usually cement your fate.

So I stopped doing that spread and for the past few years I've just been doing the Celtic Cross, which is the most standard.

For Christmas Lee-Anne got me a tarot journal and it offered a "New Year's Tarot Spread". I tried it, and I'll share the results here and the meanings of the cards, but I won't get too into the analysis since, as I mentioned above, it's a weird reading.

1. The Previous Year In Summary: The Magician

The Magician is card #1 of the Major Arcana. It comes after The Fool, which is card #0. It features a man at a table with a wand, pentacle, sword, and cup laid out in front of him, each item representing a suit in the Minor Arcana. This card is the spark of life that sets everything into motion, and the presence of each of the suits represents limitless potential.

2. Lessons Learned From the Past Year: 9 of Cups Reversed

Cups represent emotions and the element of water. This card features a man sitting in a chair, backed by nine cups. Upright it means emotional contentment and stability. In reverse it represents some kind of emotional stagnancy.

3. Aspirations for the Next 12 Months: King of Swords

Swords are the element of air, the mind, burdens, and strength. The King of Swords is someone that has reached a level of stability and projects a sense of authority. He is able to carry life's burdens without distress.

4. What Empowers You in Reaching Your Aspirations: 6 of Cups

The Six of Cups features a young man passing a cup filled with flowers to a young woman. There are four cups in front of the couple and one behind the young man. This represents generosity and some kind of emotional exchange. Wearing your heart on your sleeve. Usually it's emphasized that there is a playfulness and childishness to this. An inner child surfacing.

5. What May Stand in the Way of Reaching Your Aspirations: The Devil

We have an image of classical devil sitting on a throne. A couple stand before him with chains around their necks. It should be pointed out that the chains are loose. They could be free if they only had the strength to lift the chains off of them. This card represents addictions.

6. Your Relationships and Emotions in the Coming Year: 3 of Swords

This card shows a heart with three swords piercing it. It represents heartbreak and emotional pain.

7. Your Career, Work, and Finances: 9 of Swords

We see a man sitting up in bed, his face buried in his hands. There are nine swords in the background. This card means restlessness, difficulty sleeping, a feeling of heaviness. It shows burdens weighing down on someone, to the point that they feel like they cannot find reprieve even when they try to relax.

8. Your Health and Well Being: 6 of Wands Reversed

This is the first time getting a suit other than cups or swords. Wands represent the element of fire, energy, spirituality, and everyday tasks. This card shows a man on a horse riding forward, lifting a wand high in front of a crowd of people. The people in the audience raise wands in support.

Despite being the spirituality suit, in the latter half wands get weirdly combative. Upright, this card shows a leader bringing forward a group of people to challenge some opponent. In reverse it's the same, but the person is being foolhardy, their bravado is empty or unwarranted.

9. Your Spiritual Energy and Inner Fulfilment: Ace of Cups Reversed

Aces are beginnings, so this card means the beginning of an emotional journey.  In reverse, it means the person feels apprehensive about the path forward.

10. What You Most Need to Focus On in the Year Ahead: 7 of Wands Reversed

This is the natural continuation of my health and well-being card. In that one the person was marching off to battle. In this one they've arrived and are actively in combat. We see a man at the top of a hill, using a wand to fend off the blows from wands striking out at him from below. In reverse it just means that he isn't doing so great. He's taken a few licks.

11. Your Most Important Lesson For the Coming Year: The Star

The Sun is one of the happiest cards in the deck. It means that everything you want is right before you. The star is similarly positive, it's just that what you want is much further away. This card represents reward after long, sustained effort.

12. Overall, Where You Are Headed in the Next 12 Months: 4 of Wands

This card depicts a couple lifting bouquets of flowers in front of a castle, there are four wands before them that are decorated with a wreath. This card represents celebration.

Analysis

Obviously the card I'm most worried about is the Three of Swords under relationships and emotions. Getting the heartbreak card there in the year you're supposed to be married is not nice. It bothered me enough that I pulled a clarification card (which I never do). I got three of cups in reverse, which shows three women dancing and clashing their cups together in celebration. In reverse it represents overindulgence or undeserved celebration. Confusing and unhelpful.

I grew doubtful enough about this spread that I tried a Celtic Cross. I was keeping my eye on the "people in your life" card which is where relationships would surface and got the six of swords reversed. Represents a difficult journey full of burdens, and going in the wrong direction. My advice was Lovers in Reverse. If I take that advice I get King of Pentacles Reversed, and if I don't I get Queen of Swords Reverse. This is all not very reassuring.

There's been a theme lately of anticipated heartbreak and a desired future where I am a bad leader.

As far as this spread goes, my past and future cards look decent enough. Last year was full of potential. I should have learned not to be static in how I feel, and to open myself up to changes of heart. My biggest hope is to get things under control, establish myself and rise above my challenges. I can accomplish this by being generous, vulnerable, and reaching out to others. I might fall short of my goals if I indulge in addictive behaviour. What I need to keep in mind is that it's a tough battle forward, and I'm sure to take some blows in the coming year. What I'm sure to learn is that my goals won't necessarily be achieved this year, but I'm still on the right track. Overall, the next year will be a celebration.

Pretty straightforward. But there also appears to be four "human aspect" cards, and those have me looking pretty miserable. I'm going to be emotionally heartbroken, I'm going to be restless from financial burden, I'm going to be undeservedly confident about my health, and I'm going to be spiritually apprehensive.

As far as personal connections I can see... There isn't much. I've got a lot of swords, cups, and wands, but no pentacles so I guess finances and material goods won't be much of an influence in the coming year. I can see the bit about being overly confident in my health and later getting hit for it being connected to my recent successes in lowering my blood sugar and losing weight. The devil could be explained as me lapsing into old habits after celebrating too early and getting punished for it.

Finances might not be too important, but since the spread pushed the topic and it said I'd feel restless, I anticipate that that's about spending a large sum of money on a wedding while the economy isn't the best. But it doesn't present as especially concerning.

That's all that comes to me at the moment though. Maybe it will become clearer with time.

Health Update

This past Friday I had my regular quarterly doctor's appointment that is recommended for people with diabetes. This was my second session since my diagnosis. Last time, I dropped from a blood sugar level of 10.5 to 6.9.

Over 7 is considered diabetic, meaning I had dropped into pre-diabetic levels, which are between 6 and 6.9. So I was barely in that category and only managed to maintain it with the use of medication. Still, my doctor and dietician were very enthusiastic about my progress.

I was told that the first target was to get my blood sugar beneath 7, and the second target was to get it to 6.5. This time my blood sugar was 5.9.

This means that not only did I meet the new target, I'm beneath pre-diabetic levels. Again, only making it to the new category by a hair and only with the sustained use of medication, but happy that things are moving in this direction.

I got to see a copy of my results before going into the doctor's office, and the form said I was at risk for pre-diabetes. Kind of like saying I'm at risk to be at risk.

I'd brought in my home blood pressure monitor so that we could compare the results between it and there's. It worked the first time we tried, but then kept giving error messages which it sometimes does. At home, I just keep readjusting until it follows through with a reading. The nurse inspected it more closely and found a small break in the cord connecting the cuff to the machine. I think one of my cats chewed it and slightly punctured it. She recommended I get a new cuff so I'll have to get one and bring it in to the next session. Aggravation with medical tech remains a constant, but to be fair it's not the monitor's fault that my cat chewed it.

We did take my blood pressure with their monitor six times to get an average. It came out as 120 over 78. That's normal blood pressure. This was surprising for me, as I never thought I'd get to that level in the office, even if I got my resting BP there. This is because I usually get a case of White Coat Syndrome, confirmed by comparing my office results with my home results and the numbers from the 24 hour cuff. I guess I just got used to getting tested in the office. Taking my pressure six times probably helped.

My pulse was weirdly high and I couldn't get it down though. I don't know why it was like that but it was only during the check up.

I've also lost 15 pounds. If I can do that between each session I could lose another 45 pounds before my wedding. I think the initial weight loss is the most dramatic though, it should go a bit slower from here on out.

There's a bunch of other numbers they look at as well, but I can't remember all of them. They were all mostly good but one was a little high and another was a little low. They were both improved since my last session, though.

My doctor said she was really happy, she said that my improvement is "dramatic" and that what I've accomplished isn't easy.

The goal of all diabetics is to go "into remission", which would basically mean not having the condition anymore. I was told by my dietician to think of it more as "remission" and not "recovery" because my status would be based on whatever intervention was still being practiced, even if it's lifestyle. Basically, if I go back to how I was living before, I'd develop diabetes again. I think to be properly in remission, I'd have to be able to maintain non-diabetic levels without the help of medication.

Since it's usually considered a progressive condition, most people don't get to that remission status, but with the results of my previous two sessions, I'm beginning to feel cautiously optimistic.

Changes

 A couple of weeks ago a friend of Lee-Anne's family passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. She was only sixty and passed from a heart attack with no prior health concerns. Last weekend we went to her funeral.

I wasn't particularly close to her but I did get to meet her. It was at Lee-Anne's parents 40th anniversary. We were sitting at the same table and chatted a lot. I remember being warned about her wicked sense of humour and being worried about getting roasted. But when I met her I found that she was more the type to get information on you and do "bits" like a stand-up comedian. She teased but it made you feel included and "in" on the joke, not bullied like I felt people had prepared me for.

Lee-Anne's parents were close enough to her that they read a passage from the Bible at the funeral ceremony. She was going to be invited to our wedding this September.

We're going to dedicate a spot with her picture so that she'll be with us on the day posthumously. There's a couple of other people that we'll include with that.

In other news, my boss just retired. He'd been working for our agency for thirty years. His first twenty-three were in the position I presently have, and the last seven were as a manager. As a branch of Extend-a-Family, we're a pretty small team of just seven people, so whenever there's a staff change it feels like a big shift. 

Obviously when the person leaving is the manager, that feels even more significant. We know who's taking his role though. It's the person on our team with the most seniority and we all trust her, so hopefully the transition will be smooth.

We'll still need a new employee to take the position that the new boss is leaving. Lee-Anne's joked about applying, since she recently finished a paid internship and is looking for work. I think that would be awkward.

Two weeks ago I taught a Safe Management session. Over the pandemic it was sometimes impossible to teach the course due to lockdowns so it was removed as a requirement. There were times when we were allowed to do the training, but we weren't able to generate enough interest as long as it wasn't required.

During this time, I provided some really awkward virtual trainings for the WALES team (my team) and the Summer Program, and I did one in-person session for WALES.

This was the first time back teaching the general public though. There are usually three instructors at the agency, but the two that aren't me quit during the pandemic. We hired two more people, but only one of them has had an opportunity to teach. It was for the in-person WALES session, and since she used to be on that team, the pressure was off.

Now it is required again, and the pressure was on. The other facilitator had been hired and trained nearly a year ago, and this was her first time teaching. It's almost time for her to recertify as a trainer and she just taught her first course.

It went fine. Usually we host the training once every three months, but because we have such a backlog, we need to host trainings monthly for a bit.

In other news, my Christmas gift for Lee-Anne arrived:

2022 Year In Review

2022 was a very clinical year. I reconnected with my family doctor for the first time in ten years. I got my adult ADHD diagnosis and I also learned that I had type 2 diabetes. I got started on a bunch of medication and made some pretty significant lifestyle changes, especially around diet. So far it's paid off, having made significant progress by my second meeting with my family doctor.

If the theme of 2020 was COVID, and for 2021 it was adjusting to life with Lee-Anne, 2022 was about diagnoses.

Globally, the most significant event was probably Russia invading Ukraine, which happened last February and is still ongoing now, almost a year later. I tried writing a draft for this post and when I was overviewing the war, it wound up long enough to be its own update. So I'll leave this part as is for now. I might make a specific post for it later, since it's basically already written out. I know I said I wouldn't talk on this subject, but I guess I will.

Queen Elizabeth II died. I actually didn't mention this on the blog. She ruled for 70 years and died at the age of 96. She was the longest ruling British monarch.

Otherwise, apparently I'm not the only one creeped out by the new, art-producing artificial intelligence. The general term for systems built to simulate creativity is called "generative AI" and it was released to the public in 2022.

As far as favourite posts of the year, the three updates surrounding my diagnosis, "I'm Diabetic", "My Health Journey" and "Frustration With Medical Tech" felt significant. I waited three months before going public. 

Well... This blog doesn't get enough traffic to really count as "going public", but it was when I made the information publicly available. Didn't feel like I was hiding it after those posts. You kind of have to read all three of those entries to get a full sense of the chronology and my experience. I wasn't able to condense things into one update.

But if I were going to choose a favourite post based on enjoyability, I really liked the one where I talked about my genealogy results. I had a 23AndMe test done and I learned that I am 99.3% Northwestern European with my largest chunk of blood being Scandinavian. My Dutch ancestry from the Landstreet side turned out to be from what is now modern day Germany. Unfortunately, I also found out that I have 90% less Neanderthal DNA than the average modern-day human.

2023 New Years' Resolutions

Let's go over last year's resolutions and see how I did.

Last year I resolved to:

• Make 55 blog posts between this one and my satellite blogs

In 2020 I had the goal to update 40 times, which I did with a total post count of 53. 

Last year I had the goal of updating at least 50 times, which I achieved with 54 total posts. However, some of them were to my other blogs and my main one hit a record low with only 34 updates.  

For 2022 I resolved to update 55 times, which I succeeded at with 63 updates, 35 being on this one. So I surpassed my total updates goal and improved activity on this one specifically, albeit by a single post. Of my other blogs, my recipe blog had by far the most activity with 26 updates. Otherwise I only updated my review blog twice, and didn't update my images blog even once. This means I failed a couple of my resolutions but I'll get to that later.

Going forward, I think it's reasonable to keep my total blog activity to a minimum of 55, with 35 of them being on this one.

Recipes I posted in 2022: yellow coconut curry, spinach artichoke dip, chili, beef stew, coleslaw, soda bread, Irish stew, chicken enchiladas, black bean burgers, lasagna, orange cranberry scones, roasted Brussels sprouts, apple cinnamon waffles, tzatziki, souvlaki, cornbread,  jerk chicken, pulled pork, butter chicken, crispy basa, butternut squash soup, stuffed peppers, Oreo peanut butter tarts, lentil soup, shepherd's pie, and sweet potato fries

Obviously my diabetes diagnosis rendered a bunch of those recipes irrelevant. No soda bread, lasagna, scones, or waffles for me now. I think getting my diagnosis actually motivated me to make a bunch of posts though, as I was trying to find ways to make my diet work (some of the newer recipes have diabetic friendly workarounds, like the shepherd's pie used mashed rutabaga instead of potato)

• Walk 30 km average, weekly

I was keeping track of my kilometers by recording my weekly distance on a wall calendar. It got knocked down and ripped up by the cats. I thought I'd salvaged it but apparently I lost the month of June, so I only have 47 weeks of data. But I don't think it should smudge the numbers much. I don't remember slacking in June.

In 2021 the goal was 25 km and I averaged 33.3. Last year's goal was 30 and I averaged 36.4. This year I think it's reasonable to go for an average of 35 or higher.

• Start twice-weekly body weight workout routine

Results become more disappointing for the resolutions going forward. I don't think I can properly say I made working out a habit, but I have been doing it more often. After my diabetic diagnosis I increased my effort but I'd like to form it into more of a schedule.

• Have one meat-free day per week

We were keeping track of this for awhile, but eventually it just became something we "tried to do" instead of making sure we dedicated a specific day to it. Still had a lot of tofu stirfry, three bean chili, and lentil soup.

• Read six non-work related books and post reviews to my blog for each

I only managed three. I finished my sixth book of 2021 in early 2022, so you could either say I met my 2021 goal, or you could add it to my 2022 list and I come a bit closer with four books completed. Any way you cut it, I failed this goal by a wide margin.

As far as reviewing the books I read, I just haven't been able to get into the mood. There was a time in my life when I was completely addicted to reading and I was obsessed with giving thorough reviews. It was like I didn't know how I felt about something until I externalized it. For whatever reason, I can't even make myself do it for the most part now, haha.

• Update my dream journal and be less reliant on the snooze button

The idea behind this was that I forgot my dreams when I hit the snooze button. I'd have a vivid dream, hit the snooze, doze off and forget it. I fell off of the journaling but I still got a collection of dreams and maybe I should post some of them sometime.

• Do seven paintings

I only did three paintings and none of them were good enough that I felt confident posting them. I'll show them here though

The first one is supposed to me my granddad. It's based on a photo of him during his second wedding. I did it to cope while I was in grief about his dementia. It's a decent painting of a person, but it doesn't capture his essence. He looks way too gaunt, and in the photo he appears genuinely happy while in the version I made his smile doesn't reach his eyes

The polar bear I did this year but the elephant was back in 2020. I'm just showing them as a set because the polar bear only looks okay while next to the elephant. Monochrome and cold environment vs colourful and hot environment.

The sunflower was based on one that we grew this year. The painting doesn't even look complete, but I felt discouraged.

This concludes the results of my resolutions from last year.

I succeeded at my blogging and walking goals but that's it. I think my diabetes diagnosis really distracted me from goals surrounding interests. In fact, I'm going to make the bulk of my resolutions for this coming year around health. I used to think it was kind of boring that everyone made fitness-related goals at the new year, but I get it now. It's a cliche that gyms are packed in January and empty by February, but let's try nonetheless.

Unfortunately, I'm dropping my reading, painting, and dream journaling resolutions. I don't think they're reasonable at the moment considering my health focus and my lack of success reflects this.

Let's add a few new resolutions as well, not just adjustments of previous ones. I'd like to resolve to integrate a 12-hour daily fast into my life before year's end. One of the most effective ways of fighting diabetes is through intermittent fasting. I've done 12 hour fasts for bloodwork and it isn't so bad. Times when you're asleep count, so if you generally dedicate 8 hours to sleep, you're only resisting food for four hours. Basically you just don't eat a bedtime snack. This is a pretty low bar fast, but I think it's reasonable for now.

I would like to make an additional resolution to decrease my time on screens. So, the computer, phone, TV etc. Hopefully if I can do this, I'll get back into painting and reading even if they aren't part of my resolutions.

So for 2023, I resolve to:

• Update my blogs 55 times, between this one and my satellite blogs
• Have at least 35 of my updates be on my main blog
• Walk an average of at least 35 km weekly
• Do three strength workouts per week
• Dedicate one meatless day per week
• Do 12 hour fasts daily
• Find time to dedicate to not being on screens

Artificial Intelligence

Hey everyone, I'm slipping in one last post before the year ends because it will push me past my previous year's count on the main blog.

I wanted to talk a little about artificial intelligence. Recently there have been some significant advancements in this technology, and the focus has been on visual art and script writing. This has led to a lot of controversy between people who enjoy using these tools and those that find them disturbing.

This isn't our first foray into artificial intelligence. When I was younger, Google's Deepmind was being developed to play chess. It eventually managed to beat the world's best human chess player, but after his loss the guy practiced a bunch, came back and beat Deepmind. So they kept developing the AI, had another game, and the human lost again. From there on out he wasn't able to bridge the gap and AI has been consistently better at chess than the greatest human players. This happened as well with the Japanese strategy game Go, which has simpler rules but is far more complex. Eventually AI was able to beat the world's greatest Go master.

They have developed AI to write classical music to the point that it can produce pieces that can fool musicians into thinking they are human-made. The limit here is that the AI can only create music by blending pieces in its dataset, so it can't predict changing music genres. Basically, it can create something passably good and original sounding from an established time period, but it's still not "inventive".

Our most recent developments aren't our first attempts to use AI for visual art or written script either. Even in the early stages of the Internet, we had things like Cleverbot and iGod, which basically had a bunch of pre-programmed responses to common questions and statements that it would present when it saw them, as well as some sassy vague lines that it could say if it didn't recognize what you were talking about. It was kind of  off-base more often than not but this is still sort of the premise of the current technology.

I also remember systems that would let you merge faces to show what a combination of traits shared between two people could produce, and systems that could predict what you might look like at various ages. Kind of similar to the AI art.

The difference is sophistication. Our newer tech is far more sophisticated than it used to be. Visual art and written word are both areas that AI has had incredible difficulty adapting. In fact, both of these fields are listed as belonging to the "humanities", as if they are what distinguishes humans from everything else.

I'll give you a little history on these developments. Things got big when a program called "Dal-E" was created, named as a combination of the artist Salvador Dali, and apparently Pixar's little trash collecting robot Wall-E. I think it would have been self-explanatory for them to leave the "E" as assumed to mean "Electronic". Wall-E isn't an artist.

Anyway, how it functioned was that you could put in some prompts, like "steampunk, vampire, Seinfeld" and it would search the Internet for images of those things, find shared traits between them, blend them together and produce thousands of unique images for you to sift through and decide which ones you like.

But you could take it further and request that it be in a specific genre, like cubism, or even a particular person's style, like Van Gogh. I saw someone request a picture of the New York skyline done in the style of Salvador Dali.

An interesting point about this tech is that it has as much bias as the human hivemind, because it's dataset is the collection of human thought online. So if you ask for a wedding, you'll see only images of white people getting married, or if you ask for a doctor, you'll only see images of male doctors because those are the prevailing human biases. But if you want something more nuanced you can just further specify the traits you're looking for, like "woman doctor". 

Dal-E wasn't available to the public, but a little bit later a clone of the program called Midjourney was developed and released for only a $10 monthly subscription fee. Now I see AI art plastered all over the front page of Reddit.

Honestly, it's still not perfect. Notoriously it still can't draw hands for some reason. They bend in all the wrong places, are disproportionate and not realistic at all. Also, while I can't verify that I haven't been duped yet, I will often think "That looks kind of like AI", check the comments and the OP will say they used an AI system. It has a certain "look" it hasn't been able to get rid of, even with its better pieces. But it will likely get better, the music bots started off "creative but bad" before getting sophisticated enough to create passably good pieces, while admittedly being still a little uninspired.

I'll get to my overall opinion on this, but let's first talk about our written word AI, which is called GPT.

This has been around for awhile and honestly, only tech people seem to care about it. It failed to create the social stir that Midjourney did, but scriptwriting has been an even larger hurdle for AI than visual art. Basically, you can speak to it conversationally and it will respond to you, and you can ask it to write you stories.

I know a guy with the app "Chat GPT". He asked it to write a story about Pikachu and Albert Einstein. The chatbot made something up about how Pikachu got separated from his friend Ash and ran into Einstein experimenting with electricity. Einstein became fascinated with Pikachu as an energy source, and he taught Pikachu that he could one day be a genius too.

So it's a crappy story, but it did a few "human-like" things that are kind of creepy. It screwed up about Einstein experimenting with electricity, because the man was known for other things, but it did figure that he was a genius and that humans associate historical geniuses with electricity. It then gave Einstein this trait because it knew that Pikachu has lightning powers and it could create a connection between the two characters this way. Again, it's not great, but all previous attempts to use AI for script writing has resulted in bizarre, disjointed stories, and who knows how far it can be developed?

So these are the new technologies. What do I think of them? I don't like them. I think they're creepy and weird. I'm not really asking for them to be dismantled, I don't really think that's an option at this point. But from a subjective, human perspective, I find these things gross and disturbing without much potential to fill a need or improve lives.

There is some controversy surrounding who "owns" art produced by an AI. Is it the person who put the prompts in, or the moderators of the AI? Also, some artists worry about people claiming their works by putting it through the AI but having it change almost nothing, then saying they "put it through a filter" and that the almost identical work was just it "taking inspiration".

AI artists, sometimes referring to themselves as "prompt engineers", claim the AI produced work is genuine art, as the program still requires human direction and discernment. They point to the invention of photography and say that classical artists back then said it would ruin the medium as it could produce more accurate images with less effort.

I guess there's a point there. I don't think high-end art is going anywhere anytime soon. Originally, the greatest physical advantage humans had was our long distance running. We weren't the fastest, but we could outlast any other species and we used this skill to stalk and hunt prey. Then we tamed horses and invented cars, which could outspeed and outlast our best runners. The skill of running became less important and less practiced, but we still celebrate and value marathon runners. Also, we wound up getting horse farmers and mechanics. New skills were developed because of the new technology, so society didn't simply become "less skilled", it became more varied.

I mentioned before that AI can beat the best chess and go players, but we still have tournaments and champions for both these games, because even if humans aren't the best anymore, people are still impressed to see a human perform at such a high level.

I do think that the field of commercial art could change significantly, because even if you still need a human to operate the AI, it requires less skill. But commercial art was the worst form of art anyway.

What I don't like about Midjourney is that it changes the medium from one that is visual to one that is descriptive. Also, creativity is about the process of creation, and this changes it to something closer to consumption.

Whenever technology makes something easier, it makes people less skilled at it. This is even true for memory aids, even at the level of photography. In Mali, the people out there didn't have regular access to photograph technology, so everyone had super strong memories. This is because if you forgot something, it was gone forever. Since we're able to instantly look at anything we want, there's no need to remember everything anymore, so we let our brains release more information. This sounds bad, but if we can access our memory aids, what's the point of putting so much effort into remembering everything. Is that skill even necessary?

So from that perspective, maybe it's fine if people become less creative and less skilled at traditional art, if they're able to manifest their creations more easily with new technology. If it gets sophisticated enough, we might wind up in a world with better creations but less creative people.

Or maybe we're capping out on how good this technology can get. In terms of food, highly processed items are more "high-tech" but they're also less appetizing and worse for the body than more organic food. It still has a function because it can be mass-produced and feed a higher quantity of people, but in terms of quality, artificial foods have been used and modified extensively and have never been able achieve as high a quality as their lower tech alternatives. Maybe AI art will be seen similarly, as more accessible but lower quality. 

But what I'm really wondering is, who benefits from the introduction of this new technology? I can see how photography may have been intimidating to realist artists who spent their lives perfecting their crafts only to be outdone by any commoner with a camera, but at least photography had a strong utility for recording information. With this AI art, it just seems like it gives corporations an excuse not to hire a graphic artist.

Also, this stuff might get misused. If you've got access to enough of someone's signature, you could plug them into an AI and get a bunch of approximations of it. The concept of a signature is that the subtle, unconscious habits of the writer can't be reproduced easily but there's still some variation, indicating it's not just a photocopy or whatever. You can get the subtle habits with slight variations through this technology.

The chat stuff might be even worse. You could use it to spread propaganda online. Create lots of dummy accounts and have it auto-generate "creative" dialogue to give the illusion that plenty of people are engaging and agreeing with your cause.

But anyway, for myself the damage has been done. Even if AI art hasn't quite gotten that organic look down, it's good enough that every time I see someone's work online, I have to ask myself "Is that from a person or a robot?" And as silly as that sounds, that has just made my life a little bit worse.

It's 15 minutes to the new year and I haven't had a chance to look over or edit this post. I want this to count for 2022, so I'm posting it now. Hopefully it hasn't been too meandering or nonsensical

Frustration With Medical Tech

Somehow, one of the things I haven't mentioned between my "I'm Diabetic" and "My Health Journey" posts are the frustrations that have come with the use of medical technology. As tools used by some of our most respected professionals to determine highly sensitive information, you would think they would be reliable, but this is not always the case.

After I received my adult ADHD diagnosis and before my home blood pressure monitor was delivered, I decided out of curiosity to test my blood pressure with one of the publicly available cuffs at my local Shoppers Drug Mart. My results were very elevated.

Later, I received my home monitor and my results weren't fantastic, but in a far less alarming range than what I'd got at Shoppers. In fact, I was in an allowable range to begin the stimulant medication for ADHD. I was uncomfortable because I didn't know if I should trust the home monitor over the Shoppers one, but after some encouragement, I decided to try the meds.

I'd been monitoring myself at home for awhile, and my blood pressure hadn't changed significantly. In fact, it was better than before I started the meds. Out of curiosity, I decided to go back to Shoppers to test my blood pressure, to see if my results had improved by their machines standards as well.

My results were far, far worse than anything I'd seen before. I asked the person at the pharmacy if their monitor was reliable, and he said it was "typically reliable", but told me the temperature that day and the fact that I'd been walking could have elevated my numbers, and encouraged me to keep monitoring from home.

The next day I went to work, brought my monitor with me, tested myself and it said that I had an "irregular heartbeat" which was something I hadn't seen before. I panicked and got my coworker to drive me to the ER.

A nurse did my blood pressure and an ECG. When I saw an ER doctor, he told me that my heart rate was elevated, but that I didn't need to stay for monitoring. I told him that I'd tested my blood pressure and it said I had an irregular heartbeat. He said that my heartbeat was fine, it was just moving fast. I told him that I'd had an extremely high reading from a Shoppers monitor, and he said that those cuffs tend to push numbers up. I gave him my exact numbers and said, "Really, do they push them up THAT much?" and he was like "Yeah, I wouldn't trust that reading. Just keep track with your home monitor."

This was weird to me, because I thought that the Shoppers ones would be more reliable. They're larger and seem like more of a commitment to install, and the monitor at home requires me to fasten the cuff myself, which seems to leave more room for human error.

Later on, after I was reacquainted with my family doctor, I brought in my monitor to be assessed for accuracy. Apparently, the monitor that I'd been sent by the ADHD clinic was for 37 cm arms and lower, while my arms were 42 cm

So not only were the Shoppers cuffs pushing my numbers up, but also, the comparably more favourable home monitor was ALSO pushing my numbers up by being too small.

I was then fitted for a 24 hour cuff. This is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a monitor that is attached to you for 24 hours that you can take home, and it measures you every half hour. The idea is that when you're being tested, some people tense up, causing their blood pressure to increase. This is due to the increasing pressure on their arm, anxiety about their numbers, and the presence of an authority figure. The name of this phenomenon is "White Coat Syndrome", based on the idea that a medical professional, likely wearing a white coat, is causing you anxiety with their presence and it's boosting your numbers. 

Apparently you can't get anxious about tension on your arm every half hour, and without a medical professional around and no access to your numbers, the 24 hour cuff is supposed to get a better impression of your baseline blood pressure and heart rate.

So I went through all this. My numbers came back and they were... pretty much ideal. So not only were the Shoppers cuffs pushing my numbers up and the home monitor being too tight, I was ALSO impacted by White Coat Syndrome.

I've got a properly fitted home monitor now, and supposedly it gets roughly accurate results.

It's funny, when I was getting my arms measured, the nurse said "Maybe if you lose some weight your arms will get smaller." Talk about something I've never felt compelled to be insecure about. If there's any part of the male body that is predicted to expand with fitness, I'd expect it to be the biceps.

Another piece of equipment that has caused me grief is my glucose monitors, the freestyle libres. In a previous post, I said that these had judged me favourably, with a 96% rate of being in my target range. Thing is, I'm probably doing even better than that, because most of that outlying 4% is from low glucose events.

When I first started monitoring my blood sugar, I noticed that I would sometimes dip low during the night, and sometimes around 4 pm. I opted to correct this by drinking a glass of milk before bed and after work.

At one point, my sugars were coasting real low so I kept trying to get them back in normal range by sucking on jolly ranchers and eating spoonfuls of maple syrup, but the numbers kept dipping. After about two days of me anxiously eating candy, the monitor died.

I had an appointment with my dietician and told her about this. She said that the machine had likely just malfunctioned, and that with my condition and the medications that I'm taking, I shouldn't be concerned about low blood sugars. I told her that my numbers tend to go low at around 3 am and 4 pm. Turns out, if pressure is put on the monitor, it triggers a low blood sugar event. 

It's fixed to my arm. I toss and turn in my sleep and often take a nap after work. The times that I got the low sugar events were when I was laying on the monitor.