init

Hi!

There’s not really much to say here. This is my website! This is a remake of my website, created in conjunction with Claude, where I want to put proof that I have, in fact, existed.

Despite my association with a large language model, this post was not generated. Neither are the writings in the Writing subsection of this website, of which the earliest are poems from 2016.

Let’s talk about them!

Ever since 2012, I think I’ve had the idea for a series of four apocalypses as seen through media.

First, there’s rising waters, feat. Waterworld (ice caps melting, as said in the hit documentary Ze End of Ze World). And when I wrote The Waves in 2016, I was into this internet horror blog series called the Fear Mythos, and it linked water with obsession. So I wrote about obsession.

Then, there’s the Matrix. Robots taking over, rampant AI. I called it The Wires. I was thinking about poetry for two people because of a poetry book about birds for two voices that I read as a child (and now, with the internet, I’m rediscovering it as “I Am Phoenix: Poems for Two Voices”).

The Wastes is Fallout or Mad Max. I guess it’s a folksy kind of song? Sometimes I think it’s too twee and too bland, but I suppose it might actually just be the most conventional.

But in 2016, I just couldn’t get the last image in my mind to become a poem. I was thinking about overgrown buildings, and I think I was casting my net too wide here, because it’s overgrown buildings and the lack of people, but did the people die from disease, or are they zombies?

Which is why when I came back to the apocalypse imagery in 2017, when I was trying to push myself through an Honors thesis, I only used the waves, the wires and the wastes because they were the images at hand. You can see this at Eulogy for the Waste Lands, with four protagonists, three of which are linked to the three apocalypses and the fourth is a blank slate.

And then, in 2020, after a few world events happened, The Wilds suddenly came to me while on a road trip. Apparently COVID-19 had to happen first before the Wilds actualised.

The Wires is the most ironic of these poems, now. Now that we live in this world where many people fear the abnegation of thought to the machines- and not just any machines, but something that threatens to replace us, to be us, something raised on our words, something fed from the text that we threw away, that we thought sacrosanct. Slop, they call it, as if we have the monopoly on meaningless words.

Eat me, drink me, says the bottles in Alice in Wonderland, says the sister in the Goblin Market whose cursed fruit are more succulent than the mundane, causing everything to taste like ash.

This website is slop, I suppose. Vibecoded, tainted, meaning translated and filtered through a corporate product. Digest it well, then!

Digest it well.

PS. I wrote Chinese Room as an autobiographical piece in 2024, and I’ve decided to add vibecoded random numbers as a joke on token probabilities. Because the joke is that with a low locus of control and low impulse control, one’s own mind becomes spicy autocomplete.