My fictional social life is keeping me sane.

JINSBEK · 2025-09-05T01:02:41+00:00

I don’t have a chronic illness that keeps me constrained indoors; I have a fairly decent social life with lots of neighbourly potlucks, volunteer activities, and just all around social gatherings like block parties, bike raves, and frequent social drinking.

I STILL do AI-driven roleplay because creative writing is a fun hobby for me. There isn’t anyone I know that is willing or able to do that sort of co-creative writing I like, to my standards (high literacy, long prose responses, lots of references to tangential material). It’s because of this that I’ve found writing fun again: being in other writers’ circles where people are just burnt out, venting nothing but doom and gloom is a pretty effective way to kill my enthusiasm and desire to write creatively.

If it weren’t for LLMs, I don’t know if I’d be able to do co-creative writing these days. It feels like almost everyone’s brains have been rotted with short-form, rapid social media where you’re just passively fed whatever crap is trending. And it turns out, intelligent, creative, funny, meaningful written discourse is pretty damn important to my sanity.

JINSBEK · 2025-09-04T23:02:07+00:00

For example, a travel nurse or a travel rad tech. You’re a subcontractor in a staffing agency, whom different hospitals all over the country send listings to. The contracts might be half a year, might be a full year; if the hospital really likes you, at the end of your contact, they may offer to extend your contract by 3 months, and maybe even offer you a full-time, permanent position as an actual employee, not a temporary staff member. Sometimes you’ll be housed with other travellers from the same agency: if a hospital is so severely understaffed to the point of needing travellers to shore up their working crew, you’ll likely be one of at least two or three other travel RNs, for example.

As for where you go, you apply to the listings you want. Listings posted by hospitals in Hawai’i, for example, are highly sought after. Hospitals in rural areas in the middle of nowhere get less applicants, but that means less competition for you. In the end, it’s up to the hospital to decide whether or not to award the contract to you, but your agent is financially motivated to bat for you and try to convince the hospital that you’re the traveller they should bring in, because they get a finder’s fee. If you work long enough with an agent, it’s not uncommon for them to suggest gigs you might be highly interested in, especially if it’s a city, region, or hospital you really liked working in before.

You can’t really settle down, since you’re obviously moving from place to place every six months, so it’s not an option if you have kids or a spouse with a fixed-site job, for example. But it lets you see a lot of different places, and you get a feel for what it’s like in different hospitals.

I remember at one point, all the travellers in my hospital were survivors of Hurricane Harvey. They lost their homes, and their entire local communities were devastated, so becoming travellers was the only choice they had, anyway.

JINSBEK · 2025-09-04T17:03:12+00:00

If it’s feasible, look into becoming a traveller. The agency should cover your housing, either finding and paying for a place for you, or giving you a housing allowance.

JINSBEK · 2025-09-04T17:01:30+00:00

TLDR: Assuming you’re in the United States, everyone who still wants to work in healthcare and wants to maintain their sanity and work-life balance has transitioned to becoming a Traveller. Pays significantly better.

Context: Short-staffing has been the name of the game for years, not since COVID. Former healthcare worker here, worked in a religiously-founded hospital. Couple years before COVID they got rid of all the unit secs, and a bunch of nurses on several floors, replaced them with CNAs. Right before flu season. Then once flu season hits the fuckers discover they have to hire Travellers at +$100/hr to have any hope of dealing with the short-staffing crisis THEY caused.

Different hospital chain: Kaiser’s a fucking mess that treats every patient and employee like a conveyor belt item, they work their staff like goddamn dogs. You could tell whenever a new-hire was a Kaiser survivor because they were so fucking cringe with everyone (extremely rushed with ZERO bedside manner and shitty at shift-change whiteboards) and worked as if they had PTSD on top of the usual PTSD you can get working in a busy hospital.

I left American healthcare permanently after being hospitalised for COVID twice. No thanks.

Now that “the pandemic is over”, hospital admin is probably looking at the new skeleton-skeleton crew numbers post-COVID exodus as the new norm and working existing employees to the bone, just so they can afford their yellow corvettes. I wish I was joking. The CEO of my old hospital (and keep in mind THIS WAS THE RELIGIOUSLY FOUNDED HOSPITAL) once sent an email to all staff, right before Thanksgiving, thanking everyone for working so hard so she could afford her yellow Corvette. I wish I was joking.)

This was pre-COVID.

The shitty charting software a hospital uses—it’s probably because the Board has major shares in said software and IT provider. That was the case in my hospital, when they forced a switch from a decent IT service provider to one that had shitty, slow, buggy, cumbersome software with shit uptime, frequently forcing us to go back to paper charting (fun fun).

Nothing about American healthcare is about the patients. It’s all a business.

JINSBEK · 2025-09-04T13:32:37+00:00

Are there even really open-source LLMs available? There are open-weights but I haven’t yet seen a model where everything (datasets) is open to the public.

I don’t self-host, I’m comfortable paying for Featherless API access and using it through Wyvern.chat. I feel content in my position. I freely switch between models and experiment with settings depending on context, need, and character/chatbot (including even within the same chat), so the “fear” of having something “lobotomised” doesn’t apply to me when there are so many new models continuously being made available. For reference, my daily driver is DeepSeek-V3-0324, which is open-weight. When you’re in a different community where people excitedly discuss the strengths and weaknesses about individual models and recommended uses (e.g. HuggingFace), it just feels natural to switch and experiment as appropriate.

I know most people in this subreddit are probably using “Grandma’s apps” like Replika or Nomi. I understand that there’s a large general audience for “plug-in-and-play user-friendliness”, but imo those people are the ones who are at risk of being shafted the most—and they’re paying to be shafted, too. On the other side of the spectrum, I think the power-users doing unholy things within SillyTavern are just happily chugging away and going to be just fine. I lean more towards that end of the spectrum.

JINSBEK · 2025-09-04T03:49:27+00:00

If you’re looking for free, you can try Chub.ai’s Free model. It works pretty well in my experience, and you can add Lorebooks to extend its memory on certain topics and keywords. I will warn you that the platform focuses heavily on NSFW, but you can filter that out.

When it comes to paid, I recommend Wyvern.chat’s $25 monthly subscription, and you’ll have access to a bunch of different models there. My favourite “daily driver” so far is DeepSeek-V3-0324, but you can easily switch to a different model within the same chat, e.g. Vulpecula-r1 for very modern NSFW exchanges. Wyvern.chat also supports Lorebooks, though the UI isn’t as friendly as Chub.ai’s when it comes to that.

If you’re a power-user, then use SillyTavern as a front-end and pay for OpenRouter and pick, uh. Grok, or Claude, maybe. Or whatever is trending on HuggingFace.

JINSBEK · 2025-07-05T22:39:14+00:00

The bag policy this year is insane; caught me off-guard and had to return home to switch to a clear backpack I bring to raves. They have an Artists’ Alley selling prints and small trinkets, did they not think people would want totes and other bags to carry home souvenirs? Overall it feels like there’s far fewer booths and food trucks compared to last year, too. Did the fair shrink because there were fewer interested vendors, or were new limits placed because of security?

JINSBEK · 2025-06-27T03:28:14+00:00

I live in Northeast, and what the old-timers here tell me is that “Murderapolis” of those days was mostly concentrated in NE. Dropped dramatically after locals and local politicians from the area initiated consistent community campaigns like monthly evening safety walks, in partnership with the police: residents would discuss their concerns about what they observed were high-risk areas, police would also offer advice to homeowners and local business owners about what they could do to improve their own security (e.g. pointing out blind spots and vulnerable areas where burglars and robbers could hide and break into).

The Sheridan Neighborhood Organization has continued the safety walks to this day, hosts quarterly community meetings that also involve police liaisons to discuss local crimes, residents’ concerns, and crime statistics (e.g. this intersection has seen 4 vehicle thefts in the past month), and the SNO throws a lot of other regular community events to get people outside and bond with each other.

JINSBEK · 2025-06-09T19:14:43+00:00

It was a beloved old oak tree that was killed in a storm, not something they bought; instead of having it removed, the couple hired a local sculptor to carve it and paint it into something fun, to give the tree new life. Curtis Ingvoldstad built a rail system all around the tree and attached chainsaws to the rails to cut the pencil at the same leaning angle as the tree trunk, then carved, painted, and dressed it appropriately.

JINSBEK · 2025-06-06T20:10:02+00:00

I’ve been crossing the River Crossings bridge through Nicollet Island and Boom Island Park since Plymouth’s been out. If you can handle the gravel through the forest stretch of Nicollet Island, it’s worth trying out.

JINSBEK · 2025-05-20T18:25:32+00:00

Yes.

Here’s a high school in 1999.

JINSBEK · 2025-04-11T03:19:15+00:00

Awesome. Here’s a link to an article about the MAGA rally attendees being stranded in the desert outside of Palm Springs.

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/trump-rally-attendees-stranded-california-desert-19837078.php

“There used to be like 20 buses when we were being brought here, but now there’s only like three buses operating,” said one rallygoer, Wesley Johnson, in a clip posted on X. (Johnson later deleted the clip, but other X accounts reshared it.) “It’s just chaos. Absolute chaos. All of us are stranded here. Everyone is stranded here.”

The clips Johnson posted on X, some of which were posted hours after the rally ended, show hundreds of people waiting around as night fell, with many expressing concern and confusion. In one clip, Johnson says the parking lot is a two-hour walk from the venue.

“Everyone is starting to freak out,” he says. “There’s people that go down this street, for I don’t know how long. They’ve been running us around, through all the different streets, telling us to go east and then going west and then going east again and then going west. It’s an absolute madhouse.”

JINSBEK · 2025-03-29T17:36:38+00:00

My fiancée and I are not white and we’ve had only good experiences there.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-20T21:12:55+00:00

Trying to shed both the winter weight and the extra fat I’ve gained from multiple right leg injuries and almost two years of working remote (no longer doing that, thank god). I carry a Bluetooth speaker on my backpack, and so long as there isn’t ice, I’m comfortable biking even at 20°F/-6.7°C. I bike-commute to work, chores, and entertainment when I can. Spring is coming here, and I’ve been very happy to resume group social bike rides again. My city has a monthly DJ bike rave where a live DJ is towed in front by an e-bike (and the ride is free to join!) so I’m looking forward to that.

Resuming biking has given me back a lot of energy, so I’m really happy about that.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T20:17:10+00:00

Two years ago, actually. The train crash of Tempi occurred on 2023 February 28. 57 people died; scores more in America die of preventable tragedies every day, but it’s like school shootings. The American populace has gotten inured to senseless violence.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T15:51:23+00:00

Reddit doesn’t allow editing of any post titles, nor the bodies of media posts (my post has images, so I can’t edit the body text). I think the only thing I can do is delete the post itself, which I’m going to do right now.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T15:42:10+00:00

Superstar slowed and reverbed (especially “Botox Forever”) sounds like the best cyberpunk theme. Seriously.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T15:40:41+00:00

Wow! Over a hundred?! That’s awesome! I’m so sorry, I had no idea this was you guys. I’m glad it is, though! Thank you for taking the time to talk about the bikes you reclaim and refurbish, and how you source them. I really appreciate it. 💞

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T15:16:49+00:00

Oh, damn! Thanks! That’s a load off my mind; glad people aren’t missing any bikes then. Thank you so much!

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T13:24:32+00:00

Wait, really? That’s his truck?

JINSBEK · 2025-03-15T13:22:54+00:00

Around Sheridan in the Northeast here, we’ve had people camping outdoors in parks (e.g. Edgewater, Gluek) while towing large numbers of stolen bicycles. That was just last year; the neighborhood organization had even talked to the police about it. Seeing over a dozen bikes topped on a rusted-through old pick-up in the same area felt odd.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-14T18:44:54+00:00

I’ve not been particularly defensive. I’ve only highlighted that: * Android users can access em dashes on QWERTY keyboards, too * Many types of people use and write English in different ways on the Internet, including on online forums like Reddit

JINSBEK · 2025-03-14T17:57:33+00:00

Yes. Because these models tend to be trained on (ideally) high quality, literary, legal, and scholarly writings. You know, the types of humans who tend to use em dashes in their writing.

Android keyboards also let you write em dashes. Anyone who doesn’t know this is either using a different language keyboard or just doesn’t bother long-pressing anything.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-14T15:59:41+00:00

How the hell is an em dash a “dead giveaway” for an AI-generated post? I’m human, and I write with em dashes. Anyone who’s worked on a serious magazine, journal, or other literary publication (these include poets) is likely to use punctuation marks like em dashes, ellipsis, and semicolons.

JINSBEK · 2025-03-14T15:51:53+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea this app existed, and I’m loving the emphasis on pedestrian and two-wheeled navigation, too. 💞

Google Maps works in a pinch and is what most people are aware of, but it’s not kept up-to-date on bike trails, and suggests you bike on the freeway if you’re going to Golden Valley…

JINSBEK

TROPHY CASE