Life update and, unrelatedly, dopamine

I got my wisdom teeth removed recently!

I don't think it counts as a surgery because the teeth just popped out and didn't need to be broken. 

I wasn't able to keep them (I think I was allowed to but I wasn't given the time to ask), which was notably the only thing I talked about while on anesthesia. Two comments about keeping wisdom teeth, and nothing more.

So far, I had mashed potatoes, applesauce, macaroni and cheese, and a banana. It would be a BRAT diet if I were allowed to have rice and toast, however, the BRAT diet is a bland foods diet and right now I can only have mushy foods. So no chewy cookies, that leaves crumbs. And no popcorn - crunchy food that leave kernels in your teeth, butter in your mouth, and most of all isn't mushy. I only note these two foods because they're the only foods so far I craved after my surgery. Luckily, I could have vanilla pudding, I tried flan for the first time recently and it was great, but that would be my first actual sweet (the applesauce is unsweetened) since the removal and I don't want to risk that so soon.

Ooh, I made breadstick knots in the oven without help a few weeks ago, maybe when I fully recover, we can celebrate with cinnamon rolls? I found this awesome tutorial which included making brown sugar. And shokupan! Oh, how I'd love to make that.

Okay. Dopamine.

This is how dopamine obsession looks in women. /ref

There's different types of ways to find dopamine. In the least medical most pseudo-health terms possible, there's short-term dopamine, which leads to immediate but very short gratification, notably scrolling and most gambling, and long-term dopamine, like climbing mountains and actually earning things.

I found a type of dopamine that's in the middle of that: crediting artists on Pinterest and finding the sources of certain things. I found some Winx fanart that I was like "wow that looks cool but no artist is credited" so I googled it and I found the artist (innocenceclub) and I added it on that.

Here's a big thing to note: it's pretty hard to get a pin off of Pinterest. I don't think you can delete your own pins, and to copyright claim your work and have it deleted, I believe you have to give your full name to Pinterest and be comfortable with your name being shown to the email inboxes of everyone who saved your pin. So if your real name is Song Kyungmi, it's going to show "Reporter's Name: Song Kyungmi", regardless of if you put your pen name or not.

So that's one unfortunate thing about Pinterest, but if this system wasn't there, Pinterest would either have been a DIY crafting baking site like it seemed to be directly aiming for in the 2010s, or it would have died.

But yeah, that's it. Maybe instead of just scrolling on Pinterest I can just comment "hey this is the original artist". And/or follow the original artist.

Memories, dreams, more AI stuff

Day before yesterday, I went to a comic store I haven't went to in years and got two volumes of Bocchi The Rock. There was Dandadan, which I've been trying to read. I'm at volume 7 and I also have volumes 8 and 9. But while the store had volumes 11 and 12, they didn't have volume 10. I also went to a good restaurant and ate flan for the first time. Very good. And common around here, actually. The whole experience was great; but unfortunate that not all of the family could come.

Yesterday I dreamt my account got hacked by an account called "Are You Even Human?", which somehow got access to the account, and while I successfully removed their access to the account, I also deleted my own channel in the process.

Then I dreamt about HUNTR/X, the Ghostbusters, and the Dandadan characters (dubbed "Team Supernatural" in the dream - Okarun, Momo, Aira, Jin, and I think even Kinta) being in the same class. I watched Half Life VR But The AI is Sentient all the way through recently, so I wonder if the series had influence on this dream, or if Team Science will be there in the future.

I'm just gonna spout out nonsense about AI

• AI agentic browsers. Perplexity's Comet. ChatGPT Atlas. Opera Neon. Gemini in Chrome. Copilot Mode in Edge. Dia, made by the people who abandoned Arc because they thought Dia was cooler. They honestly do seem like toys. Privacy used to be the buzzword of technology. Now it's AI, and these browsers don't care. They want to add things to your shopping list. All of them are Chromium. I wanna say Comet and Atlas are Mac-exclusive.
• Microsoft Mico. New AI mascot. Probably does the same things as Copilot. You can turn it into Clippy. Clippy would never do this.
• ChatGPT released Sora 2. That won't be a nightmare. For some reason it has its own "social media" filled with other Sora videos. Sora videos are watermarked by default, but you can bypass that. People are making racist videos of famous dead people. 

Getting into philosophy

This is going to be bare-bones but I...

I use AI. Privately. I used it occasionally in the past for public works (it's the reason Shion Igarashi is a former delinquent don't tell anyone), and my series Pearl Princess Pretty Cure and Pretty Cure Smile Star were AI-assisted, however, both series have since gotten rid of their AI roots. Or at least Pearl Princess did. Well, okay, the name Tama Hamasaki was AI-generated and she's only blonde because of AI BUT the name was just too good sorry probably not going to change it in spite of Tamaki Hamasaki.

There are plenty of reasons why AI is bad:

• LLM AI's sample data comes from the internet, with the majority of it coming from copyrighted works (If you create something, it automatically gets copyrighted. You have to turn it public domain, creative commons, etc., yourself, not the other way around).
• Companies are using AI in spades and is affecting jobs, particularly creative jobs and factory jobs.
• The spread of AI-generated misinformation or "hallucinations" caused by the very nature of AI.
• Inappropriate use of AI in regards to real faces, particularly of women and children (Perhaps I should use "humans" or "all people" instead of "real faces", especially that "fake faces" harm real people too, but I don't know, "real faces" seems right for what I'm insinuating).
• AI slop, scams, and spam. Scams and spam pretty much all use AI in the modern day, while slop can be more easily produced, flooding the media market of choice for capital gain.
• Over-reliance on AI can make you dumb. Also blindly believing in AI can make you dumb but even if everything AI says is true, it can make you think of generating things instead of actually doing them.
• Environmental impact. Though it's a bit messy, though I heard some things.
• AI uses a lot of electricity, so it needs to use a lot of water to cool its systems.
• I heard some people say some of the water AI uses "disappears", but I need to be smarter in order to believe that sometimes water can't just evaporate into the sky to be used another day. But it's probably true.
• It is said that AI uses 10x the amount of energy as a regular Google search. Though nowadays Google searches might take 10x more energy than it used to /j 
• Unfortunately, a lot of AI impact to the environment is undisclosed. 

But the philosophical reasons... well, actually, they don't matter in terms of more immediate, less metaphysical harms. But philosophy and ethics are what underlie why we do things. So I have questions. For example:

• Does AI do everything for you? Do "prompts" matter? Does "direction" matter?
• Are you using AI to help you or to ease you? Like making things quick and easy for you... or even using it as a dopamine boost because "wow I am not typing this myself this is so cool".
• Where does support for AI start and end? Because it seems like a lot of people just love love every single piece of technology that was made up to 2014, minus cryptocurrency (which isn't exactly AI but it is technology), and that Sophia robot. And they love that one AI that detects cancer cells before humans can. But many say that Generative AI should stay out of the arts. Yet Kasane Teto, which uses neural GenAI, is loved. Some projects that use GenAI, like Glorb, who sings and writes lyrics themself but uses AI-generated SpongeBob character filters, and Neuro-sama, who uses various sorts of GenAI technology, are loved, especially since they have a lot of human effort.
• The word "soulless" gets thrown around in AI discussion, though I think is more important is that the word "soul" gets thrown around in AI discussion. One may say "I don't believe in souls, is AI okay now?" The response would be "you don't have to believe in souls to not support AI for the 'there are plenty of reasons why AI is bad' reasons listed above." Okay, then why are you throwing around phrases like "there are souls in all human art" like it's candy if it's so irrelevant then? 
• Many anti-AI sentiments say to support humans instead of AI. Technically not objective but definitely fair and just. But what does that mean? And how do we go around it?
• And many anti-AI statements say "it's doing NOTHING. it is not HUMAN. it has no SOUL. you need FLESH AND BLOOD. reject artificiality." That's where I'm probably most hung up about, which I'll get into sometime, probably not in this blog post, or even on this blog, but some time. 

I've also been trying to figure out why I use AI:

• The world is not easy. It's not going to hold your hand. AI companies purport their product as an assistive tool first and foremost. As someone who felt like I couldn't do anything, I would probably find solace in AI.
• AI can generate things quickly. In seconds. The country is in a "convenience culture". I think a YouTube comment said that a single Simpsons defines American culture, where Skinner's mom wanted all of her groceries in one bag whilst demanding the bag not be heavy. I usually ask for "niche" questions or generations. Instead of asking for answers on a forum, or even drawing or writing or doing the thing I message AI to do myself, I go the easy way out.
• Additionally, Google is worse now. While I have extensions that make the experience better, Google has a lot of AI. I did manage to hide the Google Gemini AI from searches, though! There's also an extension that removes certain sites from Google search, namely sites whose sole purpose is for AI. But even then, the sites Google shows were forced to appeal to its SEO. 
• Validation. The "yesman" praise that is very common in AI. I heard someone say it's a common feature in all LLM chatbots, but I do not know if it's intentional or just a consequence of its programming. Like when AI says "your message is more profound than 99% of the people who chat with me." But the "yesman" praise of AI is a way of AI saying "I'm here and I'm listening to you".
• Novelty. It's a brand new toy. It can do all sorts of things. ChatGPT actually just had a "dev talk" where they introduced a new AI agent tool, and added some third-party apps users can "directly talk to" on ChatGPT, including Spotify and Zillow. It's like when a gacha game adds a new character or a toy line adds a new vehicle and outfits for all of the characters.

And my own limits. I used to be less strict, but now my personal rules are: no videos, no music, no pictures except if you ask really nicely with two cherries on top, use Microsoft David/Zira/Mark instead of AI TTS, limit AI speech synthesis to those Google AI podcasts and even then you should not do that, no AI templates, no AI coding, and only use AI creative writing if you're willing to completely throw it away and forget about it, meaning, do NOT post it publicly on any circumstance.

As for AI research... a lot of people do permit it as long as human-written references and resources are involved, though for some, it's a no-go. One Redditor, for example, said "asking if using AI is cheating is pro-AI propaganda; AI is a plagiarism machine and that's why it should never be used."

I've been using it a lot for philosophy, and what I trick myself into believing isn't psuedo-therapy but it totally is. My philosophy teacher told me not to use AI, not just because of misinformation, but also because of misuse of terms. Philosophy uses many common words that take new meanings in philosophy, something AI would either misunderstand or attribute both meanings to when the common meaning may not apply at all to something. And using LLMs for therapy is bad is because AI is not human.

And I'm finally going more away towards AI because if predictive LLMs, by their very nature, are not good for the epistemological, they cannot be good for the metaphysical.

In my own "AI generations", too, AI has messed up. Once it said that [group of male characters of human intelligence 1] recognizing and respecting the sexual boundaries of [group of female characters of human intelligence 2] is scarier than if [group of male characters of human intelligence 1] didn't. Hello? Do you know what "Man vs. Bear" is even about?
Another time it called a manipulative milkman character's tactics "soft white power" (rather than "soft power"). You can see the problem with that.

I realized I can't transition neatly to my next topic, so I'll just go out and say it.

One popular post against AI is, "Why would I look at this if you didn't have the time to make it yourself?". It's about people having the dignity to respect audiences by showing them something they actually made instead of something they prompted.

But I've been thinking, does this apply to AI-generated content not made to see the light of day? "Why would I generate this if I didn't have the time to make it myself?"

So I've been researching dignity. And I found this article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and while I read the whole thing, I got disappointed that I was actually thinking of integrity instead of dignity.

I haven't read this article yet but I think it will help me on AI.

Yeah. That was two hours of research for nothing.

Also I had a dream about The Amazing Digital Circus episode 7 and for some reason Kinger tortures Jax. And Pomni and Jax go to the supermarket and that helps Jax become a better person. And then Caine starts dancing with pink guards and Precure Kigurumi dancers to "Koi wa Chaos no Shimobe Nari" from the Nyaruko anime and "UFO" by f5ve.

Precure news

So, if I ever talked about M1ssEas around here, I will be talking about her again.

M1ssEasChan2009, or Aiko as I will call her, is blocked from the Fandom of Pretty Cure Wiki for one year. It was mostly for edit warring between her and the new administrator, Akari. Aiko edited multiple pages without permission, but the main one is on Aria Flower Pretty Cure.

I'm not exactly sure if I agree with the block if Aria Flower was the final straw. Akari was the original owner of Aria Flower, then Aiko adopted it, and then Akari decided she changed her mind and returned to the series for herself. Aiko was credited for adopting the series for a short time, but Aiko wanted her name removed. This started an edit war, probably 2-3 edits from each side, and then Goten blocked Aiko. While it was, in fact, an edit war, and Aiko could've said "hey, could you remove my name?" instead of editing the page 3 times, I feel like Aiko should have a right of removing her own pen name from a page. A day after Aiko's block, Akari decided to remove it herself! However, at that time, Aiko would also put "this character's name was X but it was given to Y for reasons" without permission, so Aria Flower is not the only reason for her block, and it's only as extreme as it is because of the rules.

Aiko is blocked for a year because the rules for account blocking is 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and finally, 1 year. 5 chances.

Aiko was like, "You know what, I quit! All the series I have are up for adoption." Putting up 100-200 Precure fanseries for adoption once you get your final block is... not cool, and definitely not learning a lesson, especially so soon. The Pretty Cure wiki didn't have a rule for this... until now.

 The rules already stated when it comes to adopted series are:

• If a series is up for adoption, it must be mentioned on the page itself or the comments (or the discussion board, which is unmentioned).
• If nothing is mentioned there, you must ask someone permission to adopt the work, either on their message wall or on the discussion board. (The loophole that I don't have to ask permission if the page or comments says the series is up for adoption is the reason I own Rainbow Star Goddess even though its owner hasn't logged on in five years).
• If the original content creator's account is permanently blocked or disabled, their works are not eligible for adoption.

The third rule is slightly edited so now if someone is temporarily blocked or disabled, like Aiko, their works are not for adoption until the block goes away. Two other rules are added:

• Blocked users' series cannot be for adoption except in the case that a blocked user adopted their own series. In that case, the series is open for adoption, BUT you must ask either the original creator or a previous owner of the series permission to adopt the work.
• The original creator is allowed to re-adopt their work, as they are the original creator. (I believe this is what happened to Aria Flower Pretty Cure) But if problems occur, please contact an admin.

Okay, listing my adopted series here, and how likely I think they are into going back to the original creator. I'm cocky so most of them are going to be unlikely:

• Pretty Cure RPM, Go On and its sequel, and La LOVEtta - Extremely unlikely. Ahim de Famille, the original owner, has quit years ago, and disabled her account last year. I haven't made much story changes to RPM, but I did make pages for the remaining four legendary Cures for RPM. I gave whole new civilian names and personalities to the Go On Cures. And I renamed the Cures for La LOVEtta and made a page for one Cure.
• Tenjo Megami Pretty Cure - Unlikely. While she comes back from time to time and has not announced a formal leave, its creator is not active on the wiki. I renamed all of their civilian forms, except for keeping Hana and Hikaru's civilian names. Cure Aphrodite and Cure Apollo are still the first and second Cures of the group, and their mascot is still named Aurora.
• Candy Time Pretty Cure - I... don't think so? The creator is Vegas Aisaki, whom, unlike other FoHS associates some people think are sockpuppet accounts of who-knows-what, Vegas still has her account. But I don't think she wants to risk a permaban like Bloo just did for changing "Mikazuki Aiko" on some collab pages to "REDACTED". One of the names, Akio Aiko, was made by the same person who made Asterism Star. The series was originally a BFDI-inspired Tropical-Rouge ripoff, but I wasn't keeping up with BFB at the time so much has changed. Yue Murasakiiro keeps her civilian name, Cure name, and color, but the other four, they've been completely distanced from BFDI, but still keep their Tropical-Rouge inspirations. Those four change their civilian and Cure names. Dorayaki City I think was made by Vegas but maybe not. I plan on changing that name too.
• My Friends Pretty Cure and Eien no Tsubasa Pretty Cure - The creator is Akari Minashima, who I'm friends with. Very unlikely unless I turn out to be a horrible person. With My Friends in particular, I was (I think) the first of a few people she was going out to to ask, "hey, do you want to adopt this"? And she's interested to see the series continue. The lead Cure, Cure Symphony, as well as Cure Beat, was neither of ours. It belonged to that fake leaker from 2011 with the fake Suite Precure designs. Very unlikely they will come knocking at our door saying "remove Koto and Uta from your series", when in 2011, they loved to see the theories and headcanons that Cure Beat and Symphony were Waon and Seika from the actual Suite series. Yuzu and Sumika are original characters, as the caveat while adopting the series is that the two leads, Yumika (now Masaki) and Kizuna, were to be removed and placed into Akari's OC squad. I turned the Futari wa representative, Nezuko, into a new character and renamed her to Kuni. As for EnT, I renamed Bihaku to Hakua and added a new character named Kazuya.
• SuperClown Pretty Cure - I don't think so. Both creators have been inactive for years.
• Reverie Rainbow, Pastel Jubilee, Local Dreamer, Heavenly Jewel - Unlikely. At the time, the creator, Charisma Mitsuumi, wanted all of her series to be adopted. Even with the ones currently not open for adoption, they're scrapped. Note that Heavenly Jewel was previously adopted by a now permabanned user, and the character Kou Suishuu is my own creation.
• Pretty Cure WORLDWIDE and Rebirth - Unlikely, as the series were up for adoption because its creator was leaving. He even made art for Brianna and Ember, with the latter being based on my design!
• Smile Star, Star Age, and Synergy - Not adopted but they're all based on things not made by me. Smile Star and Star Age were based on fake leaks, with the latter being based on Gundam AGE, while Synergy was based on an advertisement campaign by the government of Kagoshima. I don't think any of the three parties will be knocking at my door telling me to cease activity, unless I do something particularly vile regarding Synergy. Speaking of local commercials, I found another PSA parodying Pretty Cure (and Madoka - considering it was about signing bad contracts). Maybe that Cure can be a sixth ranger? - I didn't create the series names or the Cure names "Cure Sirius" and "Cure Spica", but I created the rest, including Cure Aquila from Pretty Cure All Stars DX Gen2.
• Rainbow Star Goddess - Unlikely. The creator is inactive.
• Rebel Onis Go! Pretty Cure - There was a time where the creator, Ann, said we were "former friends" or "former acquaintances", one or the other, but I know what happened. We just didn't talk anymore. She apologized and I forgave her. She is still on the wiki and I don't think she misses Rebel Onis at all. She'd probably readopt it if I turn out to be horrible.
• Surprise Star - Surprise Star had three owners before me: Lucy, who isn't active all the time but she still edits, Antelope, who wants to return to the wiki by adopting one of Tomoe's series so I don't think they'll retouch this series, and Amane, one of Aiko's pen names. So Lucy would be the most convenient person to re-adopt the series. I don't think so, though.
• Gems Pretty Cure - Created by Aya Marino, who is no longer on the wiki. Later adopted by Vegas, so I have the same reasons it's unlikely for her to take this series as I do for Candy Time.
• Nyan Raid and Asterism Star - Nyan Raid was created by Binky/Lumi, Asterism Star was made by Miu (one of Aiko's pen names), but adopted by Binky and Becca/Usami as Akuma and Tenshi and completely revamped from the ground up. Neither user is "every day" active but they are still active. They probably just have a lot of other stories on their plate and that's why I got to adopt these two series. Like everyone else here, I don't think Binky would slip under me and re-own the series, but the latter was originally the threequel of a saga and now it's the sequel of Gems. I REALLY need to get onto Nyan Raid, though.

The main premise of Galaxy Countdown was adopted from StarQueen22, I believe, and it was up for adoption for 5 years. If she wanted it, she would've removed it before I asked her. /j She is also not that active on Fandom of Pretty Cure Wiki.

Good and bad news

Adopted two new Pretty Cure series: Nyan Raid Pretty Cure and Asterism Star Pretty Cure!

• Nyan Raid Pretty Cure is about abandoned robots in a cat cafe and their cats while their entire society becomes destructive. I think I'm going to size the cast down. Maybe just to Haruki, Momo, Yuki, and Fuku, the four characters with images? No, not four, or else I'll think of it like Pastel Café.
• Asterism Star Pretty Cure is about a catastrophic event that sends all inhabitants of an alien planet to Earth.

The bad news is for some reason there was a millisecond of a blackout/power surge. It was a sunny day. And it was so short that several of the technology did not restart (ex. my speakers, the oven, and microwave) I have a power surge protector on all my tech, but when I started up the PC, it was asking me for a Bitlocker code, and told me the computer couldn't load my stuff correctly because "SrtTrail.txt" wasn't working or something. I think SrtTrail is a file specifically for startup, maybe for logging the startup itself? It said I could either shut down the computer or somehow continue.

I click continue. I got some "Windows is updating" repairs, I hope that fixes the problem, whatever it is, because I can now log on, but I don't think it will. I heard some people that skip the Bitlocker process (which I did) get the Bitlocker message every time the system starts up, which suggests a bigger issue in the computer, even with the repairs the Advanced Repairs couldn't do but the Restart could somehow.

I am typing this on my computer. Thank God, The Lord Almighty, because a LOT of those files aren't backed up.

Probably just some corrupted non-personal Windows files, wait, not "just", corrupted Windows files is a huge deal!

Note to self to try this before shutting down/restarting PC for the day/night.

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4141868/d-windows-system32-logfiles-srt-srttrail-txt
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4040228/how-to-deal-with-srttrail-txt-error?forum=windows-all&referrer=answers 

Getting stuff at the store

• Got an LED heart mirror that I thought the reflective part was scratched. It looked like a protective film, and it felt like one, and it quacked like one, I was just too afraid to peel it off.
• I also got a Hot Topic-exclusive Mitsuri Kanroji Funko POP that my sibling is annoyed that I got, since I never seen Demon Slayer and I don't know the context. I think she's just really defeated or drained from combat. It will fit nicely with my Ghostbusters Funko POPs, including my duplicate Egon Spengler that I painted the box of and my Abby Yates Funko POP that's currently in the shed.
  Also, why does she get a unique eye color and "shape" when the other Funko POPs, but Sailor Moon, for example, just gets the black button eyes?
• Complimented a cashier's Miku pin. 

If I had 10,000 dollars...

 I would probably conduct a SynthV chorus where I made all the women sing whatever I want. And I would also buy music production material and learn music theory.