Let’s start renewed and motivated or a least let’s pretend (fake it till you make it)
This year I hope I can finally open my art store. Thats my main goal, that and to learn how to drive. Cause I’m a full grown 30-something adult who doesn’t know how to drive and never cared. But I’m realizing that motherhood demands me to learn.
Also I gonna tough up and try to be more active on social. As an introvert it so hard to get out of my shell but if I keep on the path of my chosen career I have to make some sacrifices and get out of my comfort zone which leads me to more self care so the road doesn’t get to bumpy.
Of course I have to create more art if I totally whant my art shop to prosper.
And on a personal level I want to bake and read more, I really do miss reading when I was devouring books.
So that’s it, let’s see if I keep up with my resolutions ❤️
This month I’m beginning 2022 as the first Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building.
It’s weird to think of myself as a futurist. I write a lot about the algorithms we’re calling artificial intelligence (AI), but rather than deal with the humanlike science fiction version, I focus on what today’s much simpler AI is capable of. Since today’s AI relies on using trial and error to get better at predicting its training data, and its training data must necessarily be from the past, its job is really to predict the past. This has a big effect on what it’s like to use AI to predict the future.
Since we’re entering 2022, the folks at the Smithsonian thought it would be interesting if I could use AI to generate New Year’s Resolutions. What does it look like if I try to use AI trained on past data to suggest positive changes for the future?
I decided to use GPT-3, which is how people tend to refer to a group of large text-generating AI models that OpenAI trained on a huge collection of internet text. News articles, food blogs, social media, spam - it’s all in there somewhere. Including plenty of times people have talked about their own New Year’s resolutions.
Give one of the larger GPT-3 models - for example, DaVinci, the very largest - the beginning of a list of New Year’s resolutions and, since its job is to predict what text comes next, it’ll generally add more resolutions to the list.
In the example below, the only text I wrote is the list title in bold. With that as a beginning, DaVinci predicted from its internet training that what would come next is this list of resolutions.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
To attend all Orientation committee meetings
To become more involved in Plattsmouth Community
To go bowling with teammates
To become a good writer
To start a successful business and become a millionaire
They’re plausible resolutions. Ask DaVinci for more predictions and the list will be similar. People who post their resolutions on the internet tend to pick similar sorts of things. At least, they did when DaVinci’s training data was collected in October 2019 - things have probably changed a bit since then.
But I didn’t want to stop here, because I didn’t just want a generic list of resolutions from the average internet human of the past. I wanted something that felt personal. Something a bit weird.
For my next attempt, I started the list with example resolutions that three strangers had mentioned on Twitter in 2021. I chose resolutions that were a bit offbeat. My example resolutions are in bold, and DaVinci’s additions follow verbatim.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
Not to buy any clothes except underwear for a year.
Touch grass and record every time I do it.
Use more insect textures in creature design.
Draw the front cover of a writing manual.
Get the missus to go to the shops for a new hat.
Find wallpaper for the kitchen/bathroom, and then paint it.
Finish the prints for the QI drawings.
Draw more detail into the background of the QI drawings.
Leave all the Christmas trees up and then paint them, as cubist art.
Eat nothing but broccoli and paint everything broccoli related.
Grow broccoli, and paint broccoli.
Make broccoli the national currency and then paint that.
This time it’s a journey. DaVinci, when faced with predicting what would come next on this list, predicted first one drawing-related resolution, and then multiple others. Soon this became not just a list of resolutions, but specifically a list of drawing-related resolutions. It generated a broccoli-and-drawing-related resolution, and then the list became a list of resolutions by a painter/broccoli fanatic.
You can see how this goes. Each of DaVinci’s predictions feeds forward into the future, and can become self-reinforcing obsessions.
I found that I could shape DaVinci’s list by choosing a point to cut it off, deleting the end, and then having DaVinci try to generate the list again. In that way, one resolution or two at a time, I could build up a list of resolutions that, if not exactly advisable, were at least interesting.
List of New Year’s Resolutions
Not to buy any clothes except underwear for a year.
Touch grass and record every time I do it.
Use more insect textures in creature design.
Take photos of each of my toes daily.
Egg every house in the village where I was born.
Lick a branch of a tree and repeat it every day for a year.
Walk down my block backwards looking over my shoulder.
Every time I am alone in the dark I will eat an apple.
Eat my favorite book.
I quickly learned how easy it was for DaVinci to develop themes.
If it generated:
Attend the Rainforest Action Network Benefit.
Then next it might generate:
Ask a rainforest tribe what they think of eco-tourism.
Go on a tour of the Tambopata National Reserve.
Go on a tour of the Manu National Park.
Write letters to the editor about rainforest preservation.
When I let it generate a resolution to eat my favorite book, next it would suggest:
Eat a book every day
and if I didn’t delete that and have it try again, soon it would be suggesting:
Eat a picture of myself everyday.
Super charge my digestive system and then, eat a picture of myself everyday.
I also learned to stay away from gloominess, or platitudes, or anything to do with fitness goals - it was too easy for DaVinci to get stuck in a rut. Anything shocking or mean-spirited also tended to poison the list. I had to delete these:
Every day I will blatantly eavesdrop.
Belch until my teeth explode.
Many were worse. DaVinci is trained on internet text, after all, and so it has a tendency to veer into racism or spam. I needed to be present at every point for careful hand-pruning.
In the end I deleted many, many more predictions than I kept - perhaps about 10 times more.
It began to feel like a metaphor for life choices. Become the kind of person who spends a year licking trees and eating apples in the dark, and who knows what you’ll be doing next. Spend a year trying to belch your way into exploding teeth, and that’ll have an effect on you too.
I present to you my list, my own list that emerged from each prediction that I let stand, and that was also shaped by each prediction that caused me to delete, go back, regroup, retry. These aren’t all things that I would necessarily do myself (I like my sleep far too much to be going out every night at midnight to make grass pancakes), but they are all things that I thought were interesting, that I wanted to hear more about.
Record every adjective I hear on the radio.
Act like a cabbage for a month.
At 4 o'clock every day I will climb a tree.
Speak only to apples for 24 hours.
Jump in front of a moving tree.
On the day of the first snow paint a canvas red.
Dress in a way that only a ghost could love.
Make pancakes out of grass at midnight each night.
Find old man Winter, hug him and let him know everything will be ok.
Ride out of town holding a pelican.
Under every rock I come across for a month I will write “all power to the rocks”.
Every day for a year, at a random time, shout “sausage”.
Make a film about the last sock in the world.
Put on a red shirt and scream ‘I’M NOT WEARING PANTS!’ every time I leave the house.
Throw a party for insects.
Try to convince the dog next door that he is wearing a coat of moonlight.
Every time I press a button I will say 'this is my favorite’.
Search my apartment for secret doors or hidden staircases.
Wear two superman outfits at the same time.
Every time it rains I will stir my tea anti-clockwise.
Every night for a week I will wear a hat lined with lettuce.
I will begin to believe that the trees that I see everyday are my friends.
Every time a bird flies past me I will remember to breathe.
Throw a birthday party for my favorite tree.
I will from now on tell every dog I meet that I am training to be a dragon.
Every time I see a panel van pass me I will dub it a “Slice-a-Wagon.”
Crawl on the ceiling like a spider for a month.
Attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.
Wear a dinosaur costume to every public event I attend.
Go to the beach every day for a week and shout the names of colors into the ocean.
Go on a three-day backpacking trip dressed as a turnip.
Create messages that only the wind can hear by blowing on the blades of grass.
Give a piece of cloud to a complete stranger.
Make a mask out of grass and wear it while I’m sleeping.
I will now treat every worm I see as if it is an old friend.
When I hear a strange noise in an empty room I will assume someone is saying hello to me.
At the Smithsonian AIB website is a generator that I’ve populated with other resolutions from my list. Visit their site and grab yourself a random resolution. If you don’t like the one you got, you have my permission to reload and regenerate until you find a resolution that speaks to you. Or to apples.
Your January 2022 Smithsonian Futurist in Residence,
The dark of our long New England winter is the perfect time to clear what no longer serves us well, and to listen to our heart as we set our goals and aspirations.
The last couple of years, I’ve found it really helpful to work withDanielle LaPorte’s Desire Map process, Ink + Volt’s planners, and returning frequently to the wisdom of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estesto stay grounded in my…
Again, I did this a while back but never got around to posting it. (Thanks a lot, procrastination.) Not that proud of it, considering the weirdly coloured planets and the overkill of dots on the second page butI did compile everything I wanted, so there’s that.
“The turning over of a new year is an opportunity to create ourselves anew. How? The key, I suggest, is in shifting our understanding of the choices we make. […]
The view of choice as a matter of calculating maximal value is assumed in cost-benefit analysis, government policy making and much of economic theory. It’s even embedded in the apps you can download that purport to help you decide whether to buy a new car, get married or change jobs. At the heart of this model is a simple assumption: that what you should choose is always determined by facts in the world about which option has more value — facts that, if only you were smart enough to discover, would make decision-making relatively easy.
But the assumption is false. […] Options can be “on a par” — different in value while being in the same overall neighborhood. If your alternatives are on a par, you can’t make a mistake of reason in choosing one instead of the other. Since one isn’t better than the other, you can’t choose wrongly. But nor are they equally good. When alternatives are on a par, when the world doesn’t determine a single right thing to do, that doesn’t mean that value writ large has been exhausted. Instead of looking outward to find the value that determines what you should do, you can look inward to what you can stand behind, commit to, resolve to throw yourself behind. By committing to an option, you can confer value on it.
When we choose between options that are on a par, we make ourselves the authors of our own lives. Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do. In those cases, we can create value for ourselves by committing to an option. By doing so, we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves.”
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Read Ruth Chang’s TED Talk on ‘How To Make Hard Choices’ here [transcript]
March was a month just for me. After finally recognizing my burnout in February, I set aside all “non-essential” activities and focused on de-stressing and enjoying life. Between a trip home to visit family and friends in Kansas, my birthday, and lots of support from Daniel, it was easier than I expected to relax and recharge.
While I’m recommitting to some goals in April, there are others that I…
Like a lot of people — entrepreneurial and Type A people, in particular — I’ve fallen victim to the romanticism of DOING ALL THE THINGS. Yes, I can absolutely work a full-time job, manage a household, be a good wife/daughter/friend, grow my author business, exercise four times a week, and pursue other personal goals all at once. And yes, that does make me something of a super-human. Yay me!
Whether I’m living in windy Kansas, snow-packed Connecticut, or sunny California, January always seems to be a strange month for me. While I’m filled with excitement and optimism for the year ahead, I also struggle with the mid-winter sluggishness that plagues so many of us. Yes, even in California’s freakishly warm weather, I can’t shake that winter feeling.
I’m looking forward to another colorful year of fashion! So many things in my life are changing right now and I really hope this year can be bigger and better than what 2018 failed to be. I made so many new friends, bought so many new pieces of clothing, and expressed myself even more than I have ever.
My goals are really high for this year, and I wanted to share my top 3 with you so everyone can hold me reliable this year.
Declutter my life: donate and sell the old clothing and items I used to use, I know other people can use my old things way more and I feel like a hoarder for mot doing it sooner.
Finally start -and stick with- Youtube: I tried my hardest to figure out youtube and start, but last year was full of corrupted videos and didn’t have time or equipment for making videos. I hope to post at least every other week this year.
Experience more: This year i’ll be travelling more and attending as many j-fashion events as I can afford, I hope to travel out of country like last year again so I can experience even more of Japan :)
Along with these I hope to wear j-fashion at least 4/7 days of the week every single week of the year, so I have more content to post here and on my instagram (@beckxstarz)
Whenever new year approaches, it’s very easy to focus on examining how the last year went, and deciding what we want to aim for in the next year.
That in itself is a pretty healthy thing to do, but oftentimes the way we go about it is exactly the opposite.
Instead of concentrating on the things we achieved in the last year, the things that made us happy, the progress we made, it is easier to focus on what we didn’t manage to do, the things that frustrated us, the lack of progress.
And that can lead to downplaying the positives, to cancelling them out with the negatives.
It’s good to acknowledge what we achieved and recognise what we didn’t get to do, but the latter has to come with a consideration of WHY it wasn’t possible.
Did you prioritise your mental health and sleep needs? Did you escape the stress of living through a pandemic? Did you avoid social media where negativity is success and positivity is a finite resource that marks you for later destruction? Did you value yourself instead of measuring your worth by what you produce?
The answers are probably “no”, and in such an environment, the positives are all the more impressive!
~
Looking forward, almost all the goals people set for themselves are based on production. To draw more, to write more, to create better, to push your body, to work harder, faster, stronger, longer.
Very few goals are devoted to taking more care of yourself, to permitting yourself to have proper breaks, to allow yourself to step away so that you don’t burn out, to reduce your workload for the benefit of your health.
Obviously there are caveats - we have to work to survive; our hobbies and creative outlets bring us joy.
But there is a balance to be struck that is often missed.
Your worth is not dependent on your output.
Your happiness is not dependent on your output.
But your sense of self-worth and your own happiness can be lost in the pursuit of producing more content.
Conversely, focusing on yourself, on acknowledging your successes, appreciating your progress, celebrating your continued existence, working on caring for yourself FOR yourself, and not just in order to produce more…
All of that can and does lead to a better relationship between yourself and your creativity.
Loving yourself is hard. But caring for yourself is an absolute necessity.
Appreciate your finished work before moving on to the next project
Enjoy your wips that don’t make it, they show how much you are learning
Creating nothing? Good! Take the time to rest! Your brain needs rest to function well
Don’t compare yourself with others negatively, everyone is on their own path
Give yourself permission to take proper time off from creating and social media
Cultivate your social media feeds to trim away the things and people that bring you down
Don’t interact with trolls or people you don’t like
Put your basic needs like diet, water, SLEEP, before everything else
Your brain is trying to protect you from burnout, listen to it!
Slow down - tomorrow is a new day
~
I don’t make new years resolutions. I look back at what stressed me out in the previous year, and I look back at what I achieved despite those issues.
My only goal for 2022 is to keep doing my best, and to remember and acknowledge my achievements as well as the hurdles that appear.
December and January are hard months for folks with depression and other brain related things.
I finally managed to finish these socks! They took so long…
I started them before my Australia trip, at the end of July. However, I was so busy on the trip that I didn’t make much progress. Then, when I came back to Canada, I moved to Toronto, started school, and got started on my Christmas knitting (which I enjoyed more than these socks).
However, I really hate having unfinished knitting projects languishing around. It bugs me, and nags at me until I finish them. Plus, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to make myself a pair of socks each month for 2017. I decided I could cheat a bit, and that even though I started these halfway through 2016, I would count them as my January socks if I finished them by the end of January. Thank goodness I did!
While I really like the pattern (Business Casual by TFA), I’m not such a huge fan of cables in general, so these socks took me forever to get through. While the finished pair is beautiful, I won’t be making another pair (which is too bad for some of my family, who were hinting to me how much they liked them!).
Business Casual on Ravelry, made from Manos del Uruguay. I love love love the yarn, will definitely be using it again. Eventually. My other New Year’s Resolution is to severely reduce the size of my stash, so it’ll be a while before I feel like I can buy yarn again without feeling ridiculously guilty.
While I’m recommitting to some goals in April, there are others that I…
Imagi…
Whether I’m living in windy Kansas, snow-packed Connecticut, or sunny California, January always seems to be a strange month for me. While I’m filled with excitement and optimism for the year ahead, I also struggle with the mid-winter sluggishness that plagues so many of us. Yes, even in California’s freakishly warm weather, I can’t shake that winter feeling.
