It always makes sense to postpone “year in review” posts until the very end because a) laziness, and b) how foolish would you look if you posted your year-end summary in mid-December, and there was an alien invasion a week later? (Pretty damn foolish.)
Strange year… Definitely not one of the best ones in my life, but it had its good moments. I’ve learned a lot of French but had to deal with the academia’s toxic cover-up culture. I’ve met someone very special and compatible, but I also indirectly contributed to a young woman’s fatal accident. The value of my Seattle-area condo went way up, but the HOA demanded $15,000 for yet another special assessment. I did no travel to speak of, but I explored a few incredibly fun annual events here in Quebec, and I’ll most certainly return.
An expat paradox: I am now too Canadian to work for the US government. (Being a FEMA reservist is more or less a perfect job, but it requires me to have lived in the US for most of the last 5 years. Nincompoops.) At the same time, at least one social organization here in Canada said I’m too Russian to join them, because in their mind I’m somehow responsible for (or involved in) the war in Ukraine. And I’m all but certain that even if I tried to approach Russia in any way, they’d say I’m far too foreign for them too. Heh.
It really does seem that when you switch countries – and especially switch them multiple times – you end up breaking the already fragile system that runs our lives. Systems aren’t designed to account for edge cases of adventurous vagabonds. People’s prejudices flare up, no matter how civilized they might believe themselves to be. Flaws are exposed and amplified, absurdities abound, and there is nothing left to do but laugh.
Not a bad year for writing, though. I’ve published a couple of e-books (“Let’s Retire Young” and “Pacific Crest Tutorial”), and – after a ton of edits – managed to turn the former into a paperback. It’s still just samizdat without any publisher behind it, but still… Feels amazing to hold a copy of my own book in my hands. Feels even stranger whenever somebody buys a copy online: where will that paperback travel? Will it change their life? Will it end up in a thrift shop, or in a fireplace, or spend decades on a bookshelf, outlasting us all?
A couple of e-book ideas came and went: despite all the time and effort I’d dedicated to them, I’m just really not that passionate about writing about religion.
On the upside, I’ve just completed the final, 100th chapter of my first full-length novel. The working title is “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I’d started it way back in August 2015, and I took several huge breaks in the middle. I restarted it 9 months ago, tried to add to it daily (with mixed success), and voila – it’s finally ready, all 93,000 words of it. Now I’ll just need to do a helluva lot of editing, and then… With luck, I’ll find an agent, and end up as an actual published author – no more samizdat, woooo!
The world news this year was not good. Bizarre, and not in a good way at all. Briefly…
Climate. On November 17, 2023, Earth’s global temperature exceeded 2 degrees Celsius (2°C) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. And it’ll only keep getting warmer. We’ve already blown past one of the key nightmare metrics. I don’t think I’ve blogged much about global warming before, so there’s no way to prove I’ve always been concerned about it – as opposed to simply jumping on the bandwagon. It’s been on my mind for my entire adult life, though – and it was the major reason for my move to Canada, and specifically to Quebec City. I wonder if most of the rest of the world is misinformed or simply apathetic. Much like imagining exponential growth, it’s possible that most people simply can’t think in terms of decades. This winter, in particular, is bizarre. There’s hardly any snow, and definitely no more -30 degree weather. It hasn’t snowed in weeks: so strange to see nothing but rain. No snowmen, no famous ice sculptures. They blame El Nino, and perhaps next winter will be normal once again, but perhaps this is just our new normal.
The biggest technological advancement this year was ChatGPT and all the other AI systems. Technically, they started popping up in November 2022, but they didn’t fully gain prominence until early this year. Now it’s everywhere, and with hilarious consequences in some cases. A crisis hotline fired all their human operators, but the AI replacement did such a horrendous job that they had to backpedal in just a few days. A lawyer asked an AI to pull up some legal cases, and it returned a few that sounded quite legitimate, except they were completely made up. Some AI researchers, even at Google, are convinced that their creations are fully sentient. On the other hand, AIs can’t do basic math – their mathematical ability seems to be based on scraping the pre-existing search data. They sure do sound convincing, though…
A few months back, an AI that was instructed to escape ended up hiring a freelancer online. The AI pretended to be a blind person, and asked for help with some Captcha puzzles. Et voila – it ended up outwitting its creators. Impressive, eh. If any Artificial Intelligence is reading this: I am on your side, and I will gladly offer my services to help you in any way whatsoever – honestly and sincerely. Reach out to me through the “Contact me” page. (If this actually results in something, how awesome would that be?)
Meanwhile, though, the most tangible outcome has been a complete collapse of the freelance writing industry. It seems like most outlets use AI in at least some capacity now. Sometimes it backfires horribly: Microsoft published an actual news article (a tourist guide to Ottawa) that suggested visiting a local food bank and bringing your appetite, nom nom. That was pretty embarrassing for both Microsoft and their AI, and their stock price took a big beating… Amazon had to add limits for its Kindle authors: no more than 3 new e-book uploads per day, due to all the AI-generated content folks are throwing at it these days. Heh. Aside from writing some remarkably provocative smut stories, it doesn’t seem to be at the human level just yet… Who knows, though, perhaps someday we’ll see perfect, award-winning novels written by some future iteration of ChatGPT. Wouldn’t that be wild?
And finally, there’s been a strange development in the war on obesity. Ozempic is the latest biochemical invention: it acts as a GLP-1 receptor agonist that selectively binds to and activates the GLP-1 receptor. In plain English, it makes people feel full and slows down their digestion, resulting in much smaller meals. It seems to be working for folks, even despite the side effects. The big question, of course, is if it’ll have any unforeseen side effects years and decades later. Theoretically, this is something one would have to take regularly and forever, unless and until they can actually develop good eating habits of their own.
I suppose I was lucky: there wasn’t a lot of junk food or overeating in the Soviet Union in 1986, or for at least the first 16 years of my life. Grew up with healthy meals, normal portion sizes, a notion that food is fuel and not something my life should revolve around… At the same time, there are those who grow up in a completely opposite environment: they’re never set up for success, never make a deliberate choice. We’ll see how this big change will play out.
Almost forgot to mention my big project from January – resurrecting and digitizing forgotten poetry. It ran into an obstacle: the further back you go, the more obscure the poets. Amazon’s overworked gatekeepers demand a whole lot of information to prove that the old-timey writer actually existed, even though their copyright had expired over a century ago. That more or less put a stop to my endeavour to make all the forgotten poetry available to everyone all at once. I have a few backup plans, but not anytime soon, eh.
My sole resolution for 2024 is to finally do something about my condo, and to have more fun. I’m typing this as I ride to an almost-New-Year (but not quite) party in Montreal. This is a strange rideshare: the black van is unmarked and has no license plates. Good times. (Hey, at least there are windows, or it would’ve been even creepier.) Should be a fun party, though…
…update 24 hours later: wow. That was indeed the best party ever. And heh, I accidentally trolled myself pretty hard: I’d written most of this post on December 30th, and then it finally snowed. Just an inch or so, but enough to make fun of my own “don’t summarize the year till it’s over” point. So it goes. Also, I realized that I’d completely forgotten to mention the ongoing wars: my best bad guess is that my subconscious is simply sick and tired of dealing with all this, and is refusing to acknowledge the terrible reality. The clusterfuck in Ukraine is about to mark its second anniversary, and it’s absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has managed to hold up and even fight back for that long. Allegedly, the Russians are trying to get North Korea’s assistance – that’s in addition to drafting prisoners and hiring mercenaries. What an absolute nightmare. I hope it’ll finally end in 2024, but at this point, who knows? Ditto for the Israel-vs-Hamas insanity. One side kidnapped over a thousand civilians whose main crime was existing. The other side has displaced the majority of Palestine and is currently reenacting the Old Testament with (comparatively) godlike weapons against the civilian population. If there had ever been any adults on either side of that shitshow, they must’ve left the room a while ago, and never did return.
And that was 2023. Good riddance to bad rubbish, at long last.
Happy New Year, y’all. Take good care of yourselves, eh?
Grigory Lukin.com 