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I haven't had a LiveJournal-like account in a long time, about... 20 years, maybe?
Christ, I'm old.
So, who am I, and what do I do?
Professionally, I am a mathematician, receiving my doctorate in 2011. I had a teaching career for about a decade before I burned out during the COVID-19 pandemic. I could only take 18 months of teaching from my bedroom. I spent about a year trying to parlay my hobby streaming games into a Twitch or YouTube career, but neither caught on. Ultimately, I made my way to a research-and-development position, which is where I am now.
Circa 1996, when I was around 16, I first saw Tenchi Muyo! in Love on the SciFi Channel, back when it was spelled correctly. While I had seen anime before then, i.e. Macross cut into Robotech, this first Tenchi film really caught my attention. Over the intervening months, I started to collect the corresponding TV series Tenchi Universe on VHS. Now nearly 30 years later, my collection has grown quite well.
By 1997, my parents had gotten broadband internet, so I searched the young internet for anything related to Tenchi. In so doing, I stumbled upon the Tenchi Muyo! fan community and fell into the fan fiction scene. I found a story entitled "Tenchi Muyo vs. Aliens", which captured my imagination. I hadn't thought of having my favorite worlds interacting in such a way, and I began thinking about what it would be like for a xenomorph queen with Jurai's power, or Ryoko battling a swarm of warrior aliens.
Those thoughts were swimming through my mind as I went to see the 1997 Men in Black feature film.
During my senior year of high school, I first penned "Tenchi Muyo! vs. Men in Black", which I have now revised and rewritten about four additional times. As my college years began in 1998, I would write two sequels, "Tenchi Muyo!: Reunion" and "Tenchi Muyo!/Men in Black: Inheritance", which I have also continued to maintain and update through undergraduate and graduate school. During this time, I would hang out on the chat applications of the day (e.g. IRC, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ), where I would share ideas with other fans and authors. We would even role-play as our favorite characters, and our original characters!
Now aged 46 years, I have been reflecting on younger years, and the dreams I put to paper. I admit that I was a terrible author when I was 17, but in my defense, I was 17! Looking back, I put a lot of myself into those characters, both those from Tenchi proper and those from my own imagination. I see facets of myself clearly manifesting in each character, ranging from my greatest strengths to my most shameful fears. At the time, I merely thought I was pushing out storylines racing through my mind. Now, however, I can see the emotions that were behind several of those characters and plotlines. I am thankful for those stories, as they gave me solace from my troubles, introduced me to several good friends online, and helped shape what would become my professional writing voice.
Starting in 2015, I began one final revision of "Tenchi Muyo! vs. Men in Black", with the goal of putting it and its sequels into my modern writing voice. Sadly, this project has been fraught with delays due to real life events and trauma. In a strange twist, I think that has been a good thing, as I have had far more time to think and reflect on what I want to say, what each characters thinks and feels. Retracing and rewriting the adventures of Ryoko and Ayeka in Manhattan grounded me in a time when I really needed something I could understand and control.
And so, here I am, continuing this passion project. I have posted on various platforms: Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt, ArchiveOfOurOwn, and now SquidgeWorld. Over the years, I built different incarnations of my own website, which has now manifested into the present form of evilpii.com, where I maintain a blog and post ebook versions of my stories when they are complete. I've even started an audio narration of "Tenchi Muyo! vs. Men in Black" on YouTube.
Sadly, with the advent of generative models, I have found that the older platforms are now full of generative slop, and the comment sections read like duplicates of the exact same scam advertisement. As you might imagine, I despise such slop, and with the understanding I currently have about such models, I vehemently refuse to call an ensemble of affine transformations and logistic functions anything more than a "stochastic parrot". I am certainly not willing to pay for its output, or fund someone who utilizes it. I'm sure that I have been, and will be, fooled by an artificial neural network or a transformer model, but I hope to admit my mistakes upon recognition.
I have a couple colleagues who have started using such generative models, specifically Gemini and Claude, to provide "insight" and "inspiration" to their professional work. Upon hearing this, I was immediately repulsed, but I acquiesced to read and consider what my colleagues had written. What I read was fundamentally flawed: blatant misunderstandings of concepts, incompatible structures being smashed together, propositions easily refuted with elementary counterexamples. I have repeatedly voiced my dismay at this pivot, as have several of my other peers, citing the very problems listed above in arduous detail. Unfortunately, much like with some of my former students, you can't convince someone who refuses to listen.
I certainly will not be using such a generative model in my own writing, professional or otherwise.
Coming here, I hope to find some genuine comments and criticisms, to minimize the slop, and perhaps to find a few friends. I will be posting story segments as they are completed, and perhaps another reflective post like this one. I will aspire to keep the posts marked properly to distinguish the former from the latter.
Christ, I'm old.
So, who am I, and what do I do?
Professionally, I am a mathematician, receiving my doctorate in 2011. I had a teaching career for about a decade before I burned out during the COVID-19 pandemic. I could only take 18 months of teaching from my bedroom. I spent about a year trying to parlay my hobby streaming games into a Twitch or YouTube career, but neither caught on. Ultimately, I made my way to a research-and-development position, which is where I am now.
Circa 1996, when I was around 16, I first saw Tenchi Muyo! in Love on the SciFi Channel, back when it was spelled correctly. While I had seen anime before then, i.e. Macross cut into Robotech, this first Tenchi film really caught my attention. Over the intervening months, I started to collect the corresponding TV series Tenchi Universe on VHS. Now nearly 30 years later, my collection has grown quite well.
By 1997, my parents had gotten broadband internet, so I searched the young internet for anything related to Tenchi. In so doing, I stumbled upon the Tenchi Muyo! fan community and fell into the fan fiction scene. I found a story entitled "Tenchi Muyo vs. Aliens", which captured my imagination. I hadn't thought of having my favorite worlds interacting in such a way, and I began thinking about what it would be like for a xenomorph queen with Jurai's power, or Ryoko battling a swarm of warrior aliens.
Those thoughts were swimming through my mind as I went to see the 1997 Men in Black feature film.
During my senior year of high school, I first penned "Tenchi Muyo! vs. Men in Black", which I have now revised and rewritten about four additional times. As my college years began in 1998, I would write two sequels, "Tenchi Muyo!: Reunion" and "Tenchi Muyo!/Men in Black: Inheritance", which I have also continued to maintain and update through undergraduate and graduate school. During this time, I would hang out on the chat applications of the day (e.g. IRC, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ), where I would share ideas with other fans and authors. We would even role-play as our favorite characters, and our original characters!
Now aged 46 years, I have been reflecting on younger years, and the dreams I put to paper. I admit that I was a terrible author when I was 17, but in my defense, I was 17! Looking back, I put a lot of myself into those characters, both those from Tenchi proper and those from my own imagination. I see facets of myself clearly manifesting in each character, ranging from my greatest strengths to my most shameful fears. At the time, I merely thought I was pushing out storylines racing through my mind. Now, however, I can see the emotions that were behind several of those characters and plotlines. I am thankful for those stories, as they gave me solace from my troubles, introduced me to several good friends online, and helped shape what would become my professional writing voice.
Starting in 2015, I began one final revision of "Tenchi Muyo! vs. Men in Black", with the goal of putting it and its sequels into my modern writing voice. Sadly, this project has been fraught with delays due to real life events and trauma. In a strange twist, I think that has been a good thing, as I have had far more time to think and reflect on what I want to say, what each characters thinks and feels. Retracing and rewriting the adventures of Ryoko and Ayeka in Manhattan grounded me in a time when I really needed something I could understand and control.
And so, here I am, continuing this passion project. I have posted on various platforms: Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt, ArchiveOfOurOwn, and now SquidgeWorld. Over the years, I built different incarnations of my own website, which has now manifested into the present form of evilpii.com, where I maintain a blog and post ebook versions of my stories when they are complete. I've even started an audio narration of "Tenchi Muyo! vs. Men in Black" on YouTube.
Sadly, with the advent of generative models, I have found that the older platforms are now full of generative slop, and the comment sections read like duplicates of the exact same scam advertisement. As you might imagine, I despise such slop, and with the understanding I currently have about such models, I vehemently refuse to call an ensemble of affine transformations and logistic functions anything more than a "stochastic parrot". I am certainly not willing to pay for its output, or fund someone who utilizes it. I'm sure that I have been, and will be, fooled by an artificial neural network or a transformer model, but I hope to admit my mistakes upon recognition.
I have a couple colleagues who have started using such generative models, specifically Gemini and Claude, to provide "insight" and "inspiration" to their professional work. Upon hearing this, I was immediately repulsed, but I acquiesced to read and consider what my colleagues had written. What I read was fundamentally flawed: blatant misunderstandings of concepts, incompatible structures being smashed together, propositions easily refuted with elementary counterexamples. I have repeatedly voiced my dismay at this pivot, as have several of my other peers, citing the very problems listed above in arduous detail. Unfortunately, much like with some of my former students, you can't convince someone who refuses to listen.
I certainly will not be using such a generative model in my own writing, professional or otherwise.
Coming here, I hope to find some genuine comments and criticisms, to minimize the slop, and perhaps to find a few friends. I will be posting story segments as they are completed, and perhaps another reflective post like this one. I will aspire to keep the posts marked properly to distinguish the former from the latter.
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