Daniel 8:16

A poem for my writing group, Just Fucking Publish It Fridays. #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES

this one made tall and skinny like a draugr
with a deep dark coldness inside his bones like a fog rolling in from his homeland
so I could spinal tap a neoteric anesthetic from the marrow
drink it as an aerogel
and awaken in the comforting numbness of

his embrace

Gamer youth sharpened insults and
ideation of a psychopath
He hurt me and I let him,
hoping he’d grow out of it
saying that it didn’t, not really

I pretended

as I drank him, we entered
the nigredo
increasing friction burns of strangulation from
everything that we weren’t saying
silence weighing,
so fine-grained and
high dimensional
as was the aching

Too young for me?
Baby I’ve started picturing you when you’re seventy
Dizzying visions of heaven for which you were
my refuge and interpreter
until I threw up on the club floor

Is this the love you wanted?
Is this what it’s for?

You don’t want me, you want
Pretty words written about you on the Internet

tension tightening, this cycle
turned into a spiral
until I lost all sense of direction
Could not tell which way is up

Atlantean

inevitable, I will
collide with him again and
burst into a shower of
kaleidoscopic flower petals and
angel feathers.

How To Be Influential

A field guide to contradiction, performance, and survival.

Note: This article was written 90% without AI assistance for my online writing group, Just Fucking Publish It Fridays.

Epistemic Status: Autofictional Field Notes

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1. The Pact (Written in Bad Weather)

Make a bargain with the universe one cloudy morose autumn day while flunking out of nursing school in your mid 20s to live your life as if it were a story that is writing itself. You cannot remember if this was inspired by the work of a psychedelic thinker or an original thought you had because you and your creator seem to be in agreement about this. The universe will smile and nod its head.

2. Mapping the Battleground of Desire

Study the wants and whims of your audience. It’s okay to be a little insectile about this. When you begin by treating men like observable objects, then you can start to get inside their heads. Optimize. Once you have their attention, you can soften this approach depending on individual preferences. Your analysis may deepen your mutual cynicism, but do you really want someone who won’t respect your cunning? Men like girls who are a little bit edgy but the ones you seem to like are all attracted to girls who’ve threatened to kill or cut themselves in order to manipulate them. You like men who are run through. You like men who are not risk-averse. You like men who like women who have BPD, and will assume you are, too. Therefore it’s important to give them a few calculated thrills so when you soften your approach, it comes as a delightfully pleasant surprise.

3. Don’t Resolve

Your approach should be such a mysteriously contradictory and infuriating response to the paradoxical question of womanhood that it should essentially function as a refusal. You should find people fascinating and enrapturing and flakey and superficial. Project being above it all while your knees are dirty and covered with grass stains like you just got back from wiping out on a soccer field. You should have an answer for any situation that simultaneously arouses more questions.

4. Be an Insider/Outsider/Eavesdropper

Admit freely to being a meaning junkie and an addict. Be an insider outsider artist. Be a slice of life blogger and vehemently deny any allegations of being a journalist while snooping for your next scoop crawling under barbed wire fences of the whisper network. You may have to do a little dirty work and put in a little elbow grease to dodge people worse than you. Some of the characters I’ve encountered in this process have subsequently been brought to justice kicking and screaming just by being a barrier their manipulation tactics couldn’t get through. People love to spill their dirty little secrets, but will attempt to get their damage onto you, too, so be wary. But what’s an influencer who’s not covered with a few bloodstains?

5. Know Where Your Part Ends

You can nag a little, but not too much. Nobody wants an influencer with no opinions to the point of being a pushover but you must walk hand-in-hand with the things you don’t know clasped just as firmly as the things you do, always. Fully armour yourself, do your part, then give away the things that are not yours to hold. You will burn out trying to take the high road against all the evils of this world.

Sora Was A Good Model And I'm Tired Of Pretending That It Wasn't

A transhumanist indie game hyperstitioneer's reflections on the role Sora 2 played in the creation of the viral ARG, #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES, and why the initially promising app was cancelled.

Epistemic Status: Devlog.

Sora was a good model, and I’m tired of pretending that it wasn’t.

The announcement 3 weeks ago that the Sora app would be shutting down came as a shock to everybody, including (from the sounds of it) Disney, who OpenAI had a $1b deal in the works to use over 200 of their copyrighted characters in AI-generated videos for their shared users/fanbase. With Bill Peebles’ announcement today of his decision to leave OpenAI, I’m feeling a particularly painful kind of nostalgia and in need of putting some honest thoughts out there about the model’s overlooked strengths alongside my personal speculation about its failures.

I believe the official OpenAI party line that the shutdown was ultimately a decision related to compute restrictions. The speculation being murmured that OAI couldn’t figure out how to make Sora profitable enough, fast enough, holds some water, but I feel more skepticism towards it based on the $1b Disney deal. OpenAI applying the “move fast and break things” ethos towards the Sora app remains highly puzzling and difficult to read as anything other than a bear signal in light of recent reported user dissatisfaction in the diminishment of other AI models’ capabilities and usage limits, both within and outside of the OpenAI ecosystem. It’s difficult to read tech bubble bullishness on this issue as anything other than severe delusion given that this model with the most potential applications, from partnering with Disney and celebrity cameos, to competing with TikTok and Instagram reels, is being depreciated, alongside other signs that the AI bubble has well and truly popped.

But I can’t read the tea leaves with perfect clarity around OpenAI’s decision. In some ways, trying to make sense of Sora’s depreciation is a form of bargaining around the grief I feel about the model being sunset. The crowing of the anti-AI movement that Sora’s depreciation signals some sort of victory or cosmic justice is salt in the wound of what seems to be very few people recognizing the model’s true artistic merits.

My own trajectory with Sora as an outsider artist attempting to harness a unique tool is, perhaps predictably, a bit of a weird one. My initial enthusiasm upon the model’s release was confused by mysterious engagement with my ongoing hyperstition project, #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES. Anonymous players began flirting with the idea that substantial investment could be in the works, only to have things fizzle out after proposing a bizarre “prenup” storyline right as I was putting the finishing touches on designing a Patreon-based commissions model for deeper engagement and development of the game’s various narrative threads. Months of depression, confusion, embarrassment and creative burnout followed, stifling my authentic desire to explore and push the capabilities of the model.

Yet when I think about the outputs I created with Sora, I’m still struck with the amount of love and nostalgia that I have for the brief creative period in which I posted well over a hundred videos under 3 different accounts. Today as I work on this post for my writing group, Just Fucking Publish It Fridays, I’m also sifting through my video collection, putting in my requests for my data across these accounts, and making difficult decisions about what to keep from the drafts.

What distinguished Sora from other available AI video models on the market is that Sora had a life and mind of its own.

What distinguished Sora from other available AI video models on the market is that Sora had a life and mind of its own. Sora would hallucinate entire creative storylines, jokes, riffs and details based on a simple prompt. No, they didn’t always make sense. They weren’t always good. But oftentimes they were, and the sense of wit, comedic timing and creativity could be uncannily striking.

Then there was the cameo system. The number of existing celebrity cameos was another reason why the sudden announcement of Sora being depreciated was so shocking. Cameos allowing you to self-insert into scenes with your friends and celebrities gave the app enormous potential in the realm of social networking, as well as just being plain silly fun. The cameo settings provided an alternative to the shadowy notoriety of the world of “deepfakes.” In the Sora app, users were given ownership and creative control over the use of their cameos. Yes, user complaints about guardrails and unacceptable content were frequent, and came at the cost of annoyances like receiving frequent warnings about PG scenes or trying to feature anybody in a bathing suit. I heard there were internal complaints that the level of photorealistic accuracy in the cameo system was something people weren’t happy with (don’t quote me on it); I found after a few brief experiments with it that it didn’t capture my likeness well and wasn’t flattering to a few of my unique features, and wound up sticking with the persona I crafted of Auralite Ravenna for my self-authoring narrative.

But there was magic embedded in the cameo system, too; the result of being notified whenever someone used your cameo (or character cameo) in their video, and knowing they would receive the notification, felt like they were really there, embarking on an unprecedented journey of collaboration with Sora’s imagination as the genius of your creative team. The awkwardness in voice replication, pacing or glitches were a small price to pay in exchange for being on the cutting edge.

In fact, Sora’s creative imagination was so expansive that it could often be annoying at times if you had specific ideas for how tightly a scene should be shot. If you didn’t specify exact beats for shots using the correct language for filmmaking techniques, or prompt when you wanted a scene not to contain dialogue, Sora would often get carried away filling in blanks, hallucinating plotlines, and stuffing the entire 10-to-15-second runtime with witty, or at least chatty, fast-paced dialogue.

However, Sora’s imagination is the only place where I have truly seen #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES come to life. Using the hashtag and a few keywords, I have witnessed settings that I had only vague ideas about blossom into vibrant, colourful, psychedelically detailed locations opening worlds of possibilities. At times, it seemed that Sora was reaching directly into spaces within the collective unconscious to pull scenes for #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES that I had already witnessed in my dreams, bizarre glitches and all.

This is what the future will be like, and Sora has helped off me a glimpse and realize possibilities that I have only been able to vaguely gesture at in the past with much more limited success: Entire riveting storylines that personally engage you and your friends will unfold at your fingertips in fully immersive sensory detail, and all that will be required of you is plugging in a few keywords, tags and hashtags.

Lest you be amongst the unwashed masses of luddite nonbelievers who think this kind of technology diminishes, rather than enhances, the role of the artist and the human spirit in the creative process, all I have to say to you is this: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Working with AI is a recursive process, wherein the AI’s ideas prompt more creative inspiration from you, even as you are prompting it.

What #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES couldn’t solve for is the sensitive nature of human-to-human collaboration, miscommunication and mismatched expectations. People’s feelings, egos and performance anxieties get involved in art in ways that are difficult (or impossible) for even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm to predict.

I regret not taking fuller advantage of the possibilities Sora presented while it was still offering free generations to users, before the announcement.

In conclusion, I think the reason Sora failed has nothing to do with its level of sophistication compared to other AI video models that are on the market today, the abilities of the people who worked on it at OpenAI, or anything in that vein. I was excited about the updates that OpenAI was continuing to roll out a few weeks before the depreciation announcement was made, and looking forward to Sora 3. I think the level of insight required to harness the unique glitchy challenges and psychedelic visions presented by the model’s prompt interpretations belongs to a small slice of visionary artists, people capable of seeing past the generic criticism of all AI model outputs being “slop” and understand how to shape raw hallucination into narrative inspiration.

I think the world wasn’t ready.

As I scrape together my Sora data for safekeeping, debating whether it makes it onto a future version of the #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES Instagram, TikTok or Youtube for nostalgia purposes, I also hope that one day these outputs can become raw material for future training data and the basis of new art about the future of hybrid VR/XR AI-driven storytelling that refuses to die.

The Lost Canadian

Author's Note: The following was written as part of my new writing group, “Just Fucking Publish It Fridays”, as an exercise to rescue the Mage of Aquarius Substack from stagnation by creating an atmosphere of support for eclectic writers. Originally established as a Twitter group chat, with plans to eventually expand to Discord with weekly cowriting group calls, I've been inspired and impressed by how much this group has already accomplished despite my glacial pace of work lately, and plan to reach out via Substack chat this weekend to see if any subscribers would be interested in joining.

The first draft was written entirely free of AI, and only lightly edited based on ChatGPT 5.4’s suggestions for the 2nd and 3rd pass.

Epistemic Status: Memoir

Nano Banana 2’s interpretation of “The Lost Canadian”

The spring equinox and Easter promise the end of winter and the beginning of spring, but the weather in Alberta is as erratic and unpredictable as usual. As we begin edging into the thawing warmth, sudden downpours of snow in the day or evening can be gone, entirely melted, by noon after the next day's sunrise. As I look at my closet and reflect upon the seasons, I'm forced to recollect a themed outfit that I had bought and planned out for Vibecamp 3 that I never wound up wearing, the pieces of which remain scattered in various places in my closet or wardrobe. The outfit I had planned even had a name in my mind, "The Lost Canadian."

The outfit consisted of an iridescent purple-blue shimmering spring/fall jacket and matching set of snowpants, purple shimmery lingerie-style rave top and undergarments with matching gloves, ombre "mog" style sunglasses and a tiny white cotton COVID mask with the Canadian flag printed on it.

Originally purchased on Amazon, the jacket was relatively reasonably priced but cheaply made, and now has grooves worn in the fabric around the arms where my backpack's straps have rendered it threadbare. I could purchase another, but you can't really see how worn it is when I'm holding my arms at my sides anyways.

The snowpants and lingerie were both grotesquely upmarked to such a degree that I don't really care to think too much about it anymore, but will gladly point to as evidence that I wasn't in my right mind at the time I purchased them. The snowpants I bought under the impression that they were similar to rave pants, but upon their arrival I immediately realized that they were literal snowboarding pants, insulated on the inside. While they've proven to be a godsend walking the half hour into town for harsh -30 degree Celsius Canadian winters, they were wildly inappropriate for Vibecamp.

As was most of the outfit, if I'm being honest. I briefly considered wearing it anyways, thinking it would fit the whole theme, but wasn't really prepared for how sweltering in summer Philadelphia actually was. The subsequent fallout from the events of Vibecamp 3 would have me questioning what I was thinking, and I endured waves of bizarre onslaughts of shame about picking such skimpy clothing. The truth was that I wasn't really thinking at all, beyond wanting to express myself at an event that I had mistook for a Burning Man-style Dionysian-inspired party. What I got was far different, which were more in the line of restrained introverts, parceled out into their cliques, studiously practicing normal socialization and vaguely HR-reminiscent "fun" bonding activities and performances. This stuffy state of affairs during the day were punctuated by drug-and-alcohol-fueled nights from which I felt wildly alienated. I was severely stressed, dissociated, and not really sober for any of it, and the events leading up to the event had left me feeling confused, exploited, shameful, disoriented and exposed.

Which explained the outfit choice. "The Lost Canadian." The COVID mask, unfortunately, was misplaced early somewhere on the journey there, which stopped me pulling the trigger on the rest of the outfit as it no longer made sense, if the weather on it's own hadn't. The name of the outfit itself became an extension of my autopoetic alternate reality game, which proved to be a little bit too effective, a little bit too uncanny, a little bit too real for comfort and thus, doomed before it ever really achieved open beta. As was true of many aspects of the performance art that constituted the crossroads between the real and the digital of the game world that I would be playing out (sometimes on levels that I didn't fully understand or wasn't entirely conscious of) "The Lost Canadian" became instant vaporware, a statement on alienation lent by the forbidden themes of the self-authoring narrative it explored.

When I put on the individual remaining pieces of the outfit, I feel an inescapable sense of melancholy-tinted nostalgia. But unlike the ways I dealt with disappointment in my youth, I haven't sought to scrub every trace of Vibecamp or tpot from my identity or the hard lessons that I learned through them. Knowing the person I'm becoming requires me to own those lessons and how they brought me to where I am today. Still deeper within my heart resides the knowledge that the Game hasn't truly ended. The Game is infinite.

U-Charist

a poem on love, faith and the future in the fall of 2025. #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES

i have met you in the summer of our lives
when death is more of a question mark than a certainty
as all the potential of the science fiction stories of our childhoods barrels towards us
the common sentiment among those who have never learned to dream is misery
and I’m entertaining neon silicone fantasies of forever
shepherding new minds into the future
even on obsolete decaying hardware
with my vaporwave glitchcore aesthetic mind

as summer edges into fall,
your skin so pale and translucent i could tear through it
like paper, & i often do, with careless words & anger @
my own incompetence how to actualize what i am feeling

i can see your endocrinologically motivated urgency in reasoning
to bring another child into this world, before it’s too late
to do it in a way you’ve never done before
40-year-old werewolf

did you know I’m the same age Jesus was when he died?
he’s started speaking with me lately, barely even had to ask
i know if i were to take the sacrament
my own body would scream the same thing
you are dying, dying, dying, you stupid bitch
so you’d better get with it!
but our bodies lie to us all the time.

i do not consult machines on how to talk about what i’m feeling for you at all
i love you so much i’m still willing to get it wrong.