Mostly online yes, but even offline people have been in a very strange edge lately. Like, if you don't take a stance to one of the two main political parties in my country, that means you support the third option which is a far-right party. If any of the members of that party bumped me on the street I wouldn't recognize them. Anyway, once that implication is on the table people start assuming (and saying behind your back) very ugly things about you very fast, which is why I started disengaging.

My heart is with the people, not the corporations or the elites. I just feel none of the choices right now is for the people. I don't understand why that would make me "hate LGBT people or migrants". It just doesn't make sense to me. The team mentality of the whole thing has gone too far in my opinion. And I don't understand why people get so heated up for groups that don't care about them at the end of the day.

I don't even think I'll be alive to see another election after the emergency one next month though. So it's too late for me to make any meaningful change. So I'm just trying to use my remaining time to leave a bit of a legacy as an artist and programmer. Even if I enjoy AI. One thing doesn't cancel the other. I do mostly analog art and even have been pretty excited to try new tools now that my hand works again (surgeries obliterated my hands for a while and they are permanently blue-ish and cold now, but I regained some mobility this month). AI is for me "that thing I wanted since I was a kid when scifi had AIs doing stuff".

In fact, that whole thing is also another can of worms. People can't seem to understand I can be an artist AND enjoy AI. The moment I mention AI people start assuming I flood the world with slop and want to destroy artists, then they ask for proof that I'm an artist, I show them my work (impossible for an AI to replicate because it's mostly analog), they go "but if you can draw like this why do you use AI!?? You should hate it because it's against you" and they can't conceive that for me it's just fun to tinker with it and test what it can do for fun. Like I should immediately take an anti-AI stance BECAUSE I am an artist. The AI is not replacing me because for me art is a form of expression and doing it is its own reward. It's just fun. Both things are fun to me. I don't see why they are exclusive.

It's like there's no room for human nuance and contradictions anymore. You have to be in a neat little box or else you are a bad person so it's right to fight you and hurt you. It's "justified", you know. Even if they are completely wrong, they already passed judgement.