I almost forgot to write my weekly Ten Grats'… Such a shame… but honestly, I have been doing so much that I actually don't even know what to write about anymore…

Anyway, you can find all the other participants at the link-up… or choose to participate…

Ten Thing of Thankful #21

First—Sixers.

I am so sorry that I haven't yet read or commented on everyone's posts… but I will do it this week. I have been super busy resting this weekend. However, the Six Sentence blog hop gives one a reason to write every week, even if I personally feel that my creativity has been greatly affected by my other responsibilities.

Second—TToT.

This blog hop is a weird one—it makes you look at your week, and no matter how busy or hectic or horrendous it has been, you must find ten things to be grateful for. No matter how small or big… such an awesome way to either end or begin one’s week.

Third—Mechanical editing with a robot.

It seems lately that I am making more and more typos; I myself have set up my ChatGPT to actually assist me in my editing process… because I have found that it interferes with my drafting process less than, say, Grammarly, which honestly gets on my nerves most of the time…

ChatGPT I can tell exactly what and how I want it to do with the mechanical edits… I don't let it change my wording; however, it does spit out the typo and punctuation check at me and gives me some suggestions separately…

Given how many school works I write, it is of tremendous help… of course, you have to manually recheck, but it does make the process a bit faster.

Fourth—.git Version Control.

I use Obsidian to draft for my blog, and I also write all of my school works and lecture/study notes on there. And honestly, after losing my local version history twice because of a stupid bug, I can rest assured that if someone ever asks for the version history of a project I have written for school or anything, I have it.

It is something that, as an IT person, I was very aware of beforehand too, but I never used it for writing. Why… I don't know… it is just so simple to set up and actually see or revert changes that I am feeling like a dummy for not using it earlier for my writing process…

Basically, I can rewrite my thing 1,000 times, decide that I have butchered it, and grab the 400th version, lol… or… as I have it commit every 5 minutes, you can see how my pieces come to life… though it only does this once I am inactive, so in reality, it is not always after every few minutes. If I write for 10 minutes straight and then go on a pause, the interval is 12 minutes, but it is okay… because I usually edit the next day…

Fifth—Keeping more than one kernel.

I use Linux, Fedora to be specific… Simplistically… the kernel is basically the dude in the middle of your software and hardware that tells the hardware what the actual fuck the software wants from it… and a few other things… without going too deep into it…

… the other day I had a huge update with all the drivers, kernel, and everything… after which I had a black screen. After inspecting the logs and forums, I decided to wait for a fix and just switch to an earlier version of said middleman on boot… which shows that my—stupid paranoia, as people tell me—habit of keeping at least 5 of them, and one known to be working for sure, paid off…

And it was a widespread issue with my hardware… AMD 6000 series CPUs with integrated graphics, to be exact… and I do have hybrid graphics with a 6900HS CPU and an NVIDIA 3070 Ti GPU…

Sixth—I have not yet been boycotted for my usage of AI.

I have been very open about the ways I do use AI in my workflow and that human art should remain as human as possible. Also, my views may differ from those of most writers and artists due to my career choice, where we learn to use it professionally and ethically and to actually understand when it spits out utter shite—which actually is the difference...

However, one of my favorite artists is under public scrutiny because their label worked with a studio that uses AI… strictly for promotional things, by the way. Which I actually feel very sad about because I, too, use automated SEO tools and GenAI for meta descriptions for my site that allow me to keep writing. Same with mechanical edits—I see nothing bad in that because this allows me to put my energy into actually creating the story or poem and fixing the flow and such…

And that promotional tool idea was actually quite cool. Perhaps if a human checked and perhaps edited the quotes the daily TAROT-style card—to show you your ‘song of the day’—spat out, it would have been more effective… because the idea is actually kinda cool, having that driving people back to your songs, with all the tour info in one place, plus the AR thing…

Seventh—I had time to rest this weekend.

I spent it cleaning my home, doing laundry, cooking, drinking beer, and spending time with my boyfriend… to me, it was resting…

Eighth—Visited my mother.

On Saturday, my boyfriend wanted to take me to a SPA, but I felt way too lazy to actually go, so… he took me out to have breakfast and then suggested taking the one-hour-plus drive to my mum's place instead… my mother was so happy, and he also decided to stay the night, so we grilled and watched a movie in the evening… I am happy because my mother actually adores this man a lot, and he doesn't visit with me often due to his schedule…

We also went mushroom picking with mummy, and now I have some mushrooms prepped for the winter…

Ninth—Music.

Am listening to it now…

Tenth—Some labs were cancelled for the week.

It means no travelling to school until Wednesday evening, which means I have more time to do all the labs and studying from home, haha. Tomorrow I will lock in and do some serious coding lol…

There's more of my work:

All of the six-sentence stories.

The Nervous Poet Entries for the SSC&B.

There is also a page for all of the poetry.

More personal entries can be found at the Blog.

The IT studies blog in Estonian for a course at the university.

the Band "Chaos in Spring" is on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming services.