Okay oooone more Cha Cha Cha post. ‘Cause have we talked about stuff about that song that I recognize that could never come through to an international audience?
He’s from Vantaa. I grew up there in a different time, it’s a working class area.
Finnish ballroom culture leans heavily on Latin American dances, and cha cha is one especially associated with fun and parties in a kind of an uncool way, like a conga line, which the act also references.
Finnish drinking culture is drinking too much. Finnish party culture is also drinking too much. You wanna have fun, get prepared for alcohol poisoning.
Finnish songs tend to be sad or angry. Ballroom songs are sometimes the exception, though they can be melancholy too. Finns are kind of stiff and keep their problems to themselves, and Finnish masculinity means showing anger and competitiveness and being funny and clever, but hiding gentleness or vulnerability or need or anything too queer. It’s the opposite of Latin heat, it’s Nordic chill.
The way to break this is through getting shitfaced. That’s what the song is about. You have locked yourself up inside yourself, all your rage and your gentleness have been held in check, you can’t take another minute of it, but you know now you can drink. And you drink until finally the rigidity releases its hold. You are free. You are gentle. You are happy. You’re not afraid of this world anymore.
The ugliness of the costume, the kind of a comedic reference to Latin culture is not, like, a pisstake on Latin music, but a reference to the bland imitation of it in Finnish ballroom culture. He is mocking himself and his own awkwardness and the specific culture he comes from (I could even say specifically Vantaa), while addressing this experience of being locked inside yourself, needing to drink so it will be socially acceptable or possible for you to defy that which is expected of a Finnish man.
It’s not cringe if you were plastered. And when you’re plastered, you’re brave enough to be cringe.
ok some days being visibly homo is the most wonderful thing in the world. an old woman walking her dog stopped to say hello to me and I asked if i could say hi to her dog. she seemed really excited and told me “his name is rupert brooke. i named him after a gay poet from the era of the first world war. he had red hair just like my dogs fur”. then she leans in and whispers like she’s divulging some great secret and says “i don’t usually tell people about the gay part”
I’ve told this one before, but: I was in a long-distance relationship in 2010. One time, after flying back into Toronto, I got a cab to my apartment. The cab driver, who was a recent Pakistani immigrant, asked where I had been travelling.
And I had to think about my safety as a passenger and a woman, but I decided to just tell him: “I was visiting my girlfriend in New York.” And he went quiet, and I was briefly terrified, and then he said, “It’s good here in Canada, for people like us.” AND THEN I FUCKING CRIED OBVIOUSLY.
It’s good to be visibly or openly queer, when you can be. There are so many more of us out there than you ever realize otherwise.
There was a dude fixing our oven at work, and it had been taking an unexpectedly long time - calls to the manufacturer, cleaning steam valves, ordering parts. We’d been chatting here and there, and he was telling me about how he’d started his own sourdough culture and taken up baking bread during the pandemic.
He says, “Yeah, and my … boyfriend really likes using it for French toast, too.”
And I felt SO good, that this 60+ year old gruff, rough-looking commercial appliance mechanic took a look at me, and could clearly, very correctly read “they’re safe.”
That microsecond pause before “boyfriend” - what a space to bridge.
ok some days being visibly homo is the most wonderful thing in the world. an old woman walking her dog stopped to say hello to me and I asked if i could say hi to her dog. she seemed really excited and told me “his name is rupert brooke. i named him after a gay poet from the era of the first world war. he had red hair just like my dogs fur”. then she leans in and whispers like she’s divulging some great secret and says “i don’t usually tell people about the gay part”
I’ve told this one before, but: I was in a long-distance relationship in 2010. One time, after flying back into Toronto, I got a cab to my apartment. The cab driver, who was a recent Pakistani immigrant, asked where I had been travelling.
And I had to think about my safety as a passenger and a woman, but I decided to just tell him: “I was visiting my girlfriend in New York.” And he went quiet, and I was briefly terrified, and then he said, “It’s good here in Canada, for people like us.” AND THEN I FUCKING CRIED OBVIOUSLY.
It’s good to be visibly or openly queer, when you can be. There are so many more of us out there than you ever realize otherwise.
i was applying for tafe in 2017, and i had on my ‘gay agenda’ tank (the one that has fallen to pieces with wear)
and i was being served by this older guy (I’d say about mid to late 60’s) who just looked like 'average moustached older white guy’
well after I’d finished filling out all the paperwork he says “i like you shirt.” and i say thankyou
and then he says “sometimes i wish my partner could see how far we’ve come, i lost him in 2004, The Sickness, you know. wed been together 38 years. and now there’s queer marriage and you can safely walk around by yourself in that shirt. its truly amazing.”
and we talked a little more, but i bawled my eyes out once i got to my car
ok some days being visibly homo is the most wonderful thing in the world. an old woman walking her dog stopped to say hello to me and I asked if i could say hi to her dog. she seemed really excited and told me “his name is rupert brooke. i named him after a gay poet from the era of the first world war. he had red hair just like my dogs fur”. then she leans in and whispers like she’s divulging some great secret and says “i don’t usually tell people about the gay part”
I’ve told this one before, but: I was in a long-distance relationship in 2010. One time, after flying back into Toronto, I got a cab to my apartment. The cab driver, who was a recent Pakistani immigrant, asked where I had been travelling.
And I had to think about my safety as a passenger and a woman, but I decided to just tell him: “I was visiting my girlfriend in New York.” And he went quiet, and I was briefly terrified, and then he said, “It’s good here in Canada, for people like us.” AND THEN I FUCKING CRIED OBVIOUSLY.
It’s good to be visibly or openly queer, when you can be. There are so many more of us out there than you ever realize otherwise.
I am VERY cis passing, only thing that would tell you I’m trans is my little pin badge on my hoodie that gets hidden by my jacket. I was at the busstop and an older lady mentioned the Build-A-Bear I had and I just went for it and said “Its for my boyfriend haha”. She and the other lady there were so kind they were like “Awww that’s so sweet, I hope he likes it.” and I was like on the verge of tears!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ok some days being visibly homo is the most wonderful thing in the world. an old woman walking her dog stopped to say hello to me and I asked if i could say hi to her dog. she seemed really excited and told me “his name is rupert brooke. i named him after a gay poet from the era of the first world war. he had red hair just like my dogs fur”. then she leans in and whispers like she’s divulging some great secret and says “i don’t usually tell people about the gay part”
I’ve told this one before, but: I was in a long-distance relationship in 2010. One time, after flying back into Toronto, I got a cab to my apartment. The cab driver, who was a recent Pakistani immigrant, asked where I had been travelling.
And I had to think about my safety as a passenger and a woman, but I decided to just tell him: “I was visiting my girlfriend in New York.” And he went quiet, and I was briefly terrified, and then he said, “It’s good here in Canada, for people like us.” AND THEN I FUCKING CRIED OBVIOUSLY.
It’s good to be visibly or openly queer, when you can be. There are so many more of us out there than you ever realize otherwise.
it’s still under investigation for privacy concerns (thank you GDPR) but it’s been allowed to re-open after making a few changes and pending that investigation.
President Biden signed the executive order January 27, 2021. This is the first time I’ve even heard of this. Here are a couple of links with more info:
“A neo-fascist, in all his Italian virility, begins to insult some women participating in Bologna Pride. This until, frightened by other protesters covered with glitter and by a bear far more virile than he, to devote himself to what the Fascists do best: escape.”
EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR. I’M SOBBING
La fuga, pursued by bear in glitter 🤣🤣🤣
“to devote himself to what the Fascists do best: escape.” ROAST HIS ASS
the Strength, the Solidarity, and the Shade here is examplary
Honestly I’m pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.
Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.
This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it’s just in maintenance mode.
Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.
This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven’t figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.
My options in the short term are to
A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or
B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the “smartness” of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.
Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.
I don’t want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don’t want to be doing it at all.
—-
In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.
Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn’t the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn’t do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.
And it was fun to watch the bot “pretend to be me” while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.
In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of “gen AI” app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.
There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.
And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.
I’ve tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I’m doing, without any maps.
Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They’ll make maps, and share them. They’ll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They’ll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I’ll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.
Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.
—-
I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don’t think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.
Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.
Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone’s doing 4-bit quantization now?
(Are they? I can’t keep track anymore – the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It’ll be running in your phone’s browser. And it’ll be using RLHF, except no, it’ll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone’s hyping up at the time…)
“You have a GPT chatbot?” someone will ask me. “I assume you’re using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?”
No, no, I’m not. I’m trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like “PENIS PENIS PENIS.”
Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the “PENIS PENIS PENIS” askers the responses they crave. (“Which is … what, exactly?”, one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.
I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?
I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.
I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.
I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.
—-
Even in 2023, there isn’t really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.
If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.
“But – but how, exactly?”
Don’t ask me. I don’t know. This isn’t my area anymore.
There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot – for everyone except me, that is.
Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.
And you can make the rubric for this question whatever you want. My personal one was that young me would be horrified to know she became current me, but that’s because I imagine it’d be quite horrible to a child learning and growing to no longer get to wonder who you’ll be when you grow up, and I think if she and I just like met somehow, she’d think I was a cool adult. Like one of those teachers you get to banter with a little.
