Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point.
If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.
I remember we had an Epson colour printer that we got just after we got married: it was able to print photos, and this was a great feature, except that this would run through ink like nothing else, and ink, well, you know.
When it eventually died I got a wired Brother B&W laser printer, and it's been incredible. We've put many thousands of pages through it, easily, changed the toner twice, and it just keeps on working. It is a simple, boring, wonderful piece of tech.
In addition to being a software developer (my day job), I also write and publish poetry, reviews, and non-fiction. These pay very little, if anything; I find that US literary publications pay almost nothing, while Canadian ones are usually able to pay a little. I think this is due to Canada Council rules around funding, but may be wrong.
Regardless, it's a field where it's very difficult to make money, and most of the people I know who manage this full-time do some combination of traditional teaching at colleges/universities or via online courses, manuscript editing services, that sort of thing.
As much as I'd like to be able to spend more time on my artistic pursuits, I'm grateful that my day job allows me to do things like pay my mortgage, and eat, and so likely the arts will stay a side thing with me forever.
That was how I did it, too. Monthly, I'd archive posts, to allow archive perusal by months. I wasn't tied to any particular software. I got hosting with friends who set up their own blogs at their own domains. All of us were in or just out of high school, no real plans for the future, lots of free time to post and talk over AIM/MSN.
In retrospect it was primitive, and it worked. There was a huge scene around all this - everyone had their blogs, and those with an eye for colour and design were doing cutting-edge presetation in idiosyncratic ways. I really miss this when taken against today's single-page, "FOL.IO IS A PLATFORM FOR MANAGING WORMS" type of web.
mc's online journal was what drew me into all of this. It's been offline for probably 20 years now, but it was deeply personal and intense, and wonderfully written.
I've had to get up very early to deal with production issues at work (sometimes between 2-3 a.m.), and I actually find those hours very peaceful - just the hum of the heating/AC and my dogs' snoring.
Dollars do not literally make the world go round. The world literally goes around because it was formed from a disc of swirling matter, and the lack of inertia and forces that would stop it.
I just finished Aurelius' "Meditations" last month - my family has a small, leatherbound copy that was a gift to my great-grandfather for Christmas, 1924. I found it particularly resonant, incredible for a text that's almost two thousands years old.
There was definitely a feel of do-it-yourself, especially when installing Linux meant either wiping a partition, or trying to resize an existing one with very primitive tools. I remember using a weird variant called DOSLinux for a while, because my 486 couldn't handle the "real" distros, and then getting a new 350MHz machine and getting RedHat 6 installed. Then realizing I could use X, spending endless hours on themes.net, tweaking WindowMaker and finding new themes, and doing the Web 1.0 by learning perl to write a simple blogging engine.
You're right, though. Different times, and the community feels very different. The feel I get when I'm browsing web forums for answers to questions is a lot of kids who use Linux because it's somehow "cool", and certainly it's ridiculously easy to install these days. But I might just be making assumptions based on the terrible grammar and incomplete sentences.
The iron ring is a Canadian engineering tradition. The original ones were made from iron from a bridge that collapsed and killed a lot of people. It's worn as a reminder of what a few miscalculations or oversights can do.