I was officially named Interim President of The WP Community Collective this week.

When I joined The WPCC as a member last year, it was not too long after going to my first DrupalCon. DrupalCon Atlanta was enlightening for a lot of reasons. But most relevant to why I joined The WPCC was learning how the Drupal Association works and the relationship between the DA and Drupal core development.

Drupal and WordPress have very similar histories, and it’s really largely due to a software decision made 16 years ago that led to the disparity in widespread adoption between Drupal and WordPress. Drupal, despite occupying a fraction of the Open Source CMS usage as WordPress, is still growing and thriving and its community is still as passionate as it’s ever been. I came away from that event with the knowledge that there are lessons that WordPress can learn from how the DA operates, much of which I wrote about in that blog post.

It’s clear that the WordPress Foundation will never be an organization like the Drupal Association. And while I wish that could be different, that’s not the reality. So what is? Well, there just so happens to be this organization that is positioning itself to fill the gap to help build a contribution compensation model that is sustainable. And, oh hey, they also got a large donation from GoDaddy to help them get off the ground.

Honestly? When the possibility of expanding the Board of Directors came up, even when I first joined, I was hoping to be on it. I have a long history in the WordPress community and, since joining Pantheon, have been able to experience a little bit of the Drupal community as well. And I’ve been using and evangelizing Open Source for a long time, since before I found WordPress. My years in the community, my access to other, related communities, and my role at a SaaS provider that serves both seemed like they’d come in handy. And yeah, it looks good on a resume.

Conveniently, Sé Reed thought so, too, and invited me before I could ask. And, through a confluence of events, the Presidency landed on me. That part wasn’t planned.

As I wrote for the press release, I increasingly feel like Open Source is at risk of exploitation. It always has been, of course, but I believe that the rise of AI-assisted development inflates the risk exponentially. AI models will integrate Open Source packages and use Open Source code for reference freely, without attribution or citing sources. Developers who use LLMs in their development might be getting code from places they don’t even know, and have even less interaction with the original authors than before these tools existed.

And Free Open Source Software is no longer taboo with large organizations. We’re well past the days when Microsoft CEOs viewed Open Source Software as an existential threat — now Microsoft is using and supporting Open Source. This is great for Open Source! This is also terrible for contributors to Open Source. Because unless your project just happens to have a benefactor with deep pockets, it’s not unlikely that your code can and will get used by a much larger organization than yourself, without any direct benefit to you as a contributor or maintainer.

WordPress itself has struggled to overcome this issue. The solution as it has existed over the last many years has been “sponsored contributors” — that is, developers who are paid by their employers to contribute directly to WordPress core code. What do those employers get? It’s unclear, there’s no immediate direct benefit (beyond the warm, fuzzy feeling of ensuring the sustainability of the project — but it can be hard to justify that to a Chief Financial Officer who dismisses the value of financially sponsoring the funding of the Open Source Software their company uses; warm fuzzies don’t make balance sheets). It’s supposed that perhaps a company that sponsors core development can have some insight into what actually gets developed, but contributors aren’t often involved in feature or roadmapping decisions about what goes into WordPress core (which is somewhat different than how the Drupal Association works). The fact is, capitalism rules how Open Source Software is built. If it doesn’t fit inside a capitalist mindset, with a capitalist objective, it’s likely not getting funded.

And then there’s the question of “what counts” as contribution. I believe that you can contribute to the software ecosystem around WordPress (e.g. by building plugins or tools that are used for WordPress) without contributing code directly to core. But contributing code directly to core has always been seen as the gold standard for WordPress contribution, against which all other forms of contribution are assumed to be inferior. Contributing directly to core is not an easy path, nor is it necessarily an accessible path or an inclusive path for all potential contributors.

I also have direct experience with not counting. Did being mysteriously banned from WordPress have an influence on my decision to join a potentially controversial, counter-cultural non-profit organization poised to disrupt established norms in the WordPress ecosystem? Abso-friggen-lutely.

I love an underdog story. In many ways, fighting for compensation for Open Source creators is as anti-capitalist and anarchic as my chaotic high school self was. I fully believe that a better future can exist, and even exist inside and alongside the existing organizations and structures in the WordPress community. And through collaboration with those systems and a deep commitment to the human beings in this community, I am hopeful that The WPCC can be part of the solution. Because you know what’s really anti-capitalist and anarchic? Empathy and compassion.

Yesterday, the latest major version of WordPress was released. WordPress names each version after a jazz musician and this release was named after Gene Harris. Gene.

But naming a piece of software that I have worked in and around for 20+ years “Gene” does not make me think about new features. It only tangentially makes me think about WordPress at all.

Gene was my dad’s name. A name he got from his dad, my grandfather, Eugene. And this release is the first major release of a piece of software I’ve dedicated close to half of my life on since he died almost 2 months ago.

So, instead, I’m feeling hollow every time I read the release name. I could care less about what’s in this version of WordPress. I’m thinking about how I haven’t written anything about his death (besides a short post on Instagram). I’m wondering whether I just wasn’t paying enough attention to WordPress release names to notice that it alternated from last names (e.g. 6.7 “Rollins”, 6.6 “Dorsey”) and first names (6.5 “Regina”, 6.7 “Cecil”). I’m wishing that Ma.tt had chosen literally any other jazz musician for this release. I’m thinking about the time he asked me to build a website for him and, obviously, I did it in WordPress (this is where the tangential relationship to WordPress comes in, by the way).

I took a long hike after he died. I needed to feel something in my body. Process the pain and loss by feeling it in my muscles. And, in the process, I discovered for the first time parts of the place that he called home his whole life (and so did I, for the first half of mine). I “borrowed” a hat from him to take on the hike (so my head wouldn’t get sunburned). Now, despite not particularly being a SF Giants fan, I wear that hat to remember him. In that way that you feel like your loved ones are looking over your shoulder, I felt like we were experiencing the hike together. And we saw coyotes along the way.

We haven’t had a service yet for…reasons (that I’m not going to go into here), but I did write a eulogy when I was in the hospital with him and my mom. I’m not sure if I will ever get a chance to read it, so I’m posting it here. This is the Gene that I am honoring today. Not a jazz pianist I don’t know and never listened to.

My dad was always the “cool dad”. When I was old enough to care about such things, I always remembered how old he was by adding 21 years to my own age. Among my peers, he was always far younger – and by consequence, far hipper – than my friends’ parents. I never had the “ew, doing stuff with mom and dad” reaction as a teenager.

My childhood had a soundtrack. A mix of 70s rock, 80s modern rock and new wave. I experienced the world through my dad’s record collection. He once told me that before he got married, he wanted to be a DJ. Maybe I was fulfilling his dream a little bit, then, when, years later, I would start DJing.

Music is a language that we shared more than spoken words. A language I learned to speak before I knew the meaning of the words being sung (sometimes before I knew the actual song lyrics — as an adult I understand that indeed Iran is “so far away”, but A Flock of Seagulls was not singing about the Middle East; and while “only the lonely can play”, only bologna can not). My dad used to tell me about the concerts he took me to when I was still in my mom’s womb. And I’ve always wondered if those shows influenced how I still experience music.

As I learned this language of music from my dad, I began to want to share the new dialects I was learning with him. “Dad’s Father’s Day Tape” became an annual tradition and a way of sharing where I was in my life, even when the medium changed.

I realize now that a lot of things that make me who I am are extensions of who he was. You’re all here today because people gravitated towards him. He never sought out the spotlight, his spotlight just glowed naturally. But it was always one he was willing to share. He cared deeply about people, and in turn people cared about him. And he used humor to make people feel at ease and to not take things too seriously.

He and I never shared a lot of words about our feelings which is why I am thinking about this language of music. When I first flew out to see him after he went into the hospital, I was almost afraid I wouldn’t feel anything. That it would come later or that I would just feel numb. I didn’t expect that watching my dad tell jokes while he’s dying of cancer would be the thing that ripped my grief out of me and made me appreciate the person he was.

The hospice nurse was asking him questions like “do you remember what year it is?” and “do you remember what day it is?”, and he finally asked my dad “do you know where you are?” and after answering all the other questions, my dad said “Hell.” Then he added “that was a joke.” Regardless of what your faith tells you happens to us after we pass on from this world, there’s pretty much only one way to go from there.

This exchange made me appreciate how much he put others before himself and how much of that I pulled from him as well. He was still trying to entertain us even when it was hard for him to communicate.

I hate that so much time was stolen from him by this disease, that he’ll no longer be around to make us laugh. But I also know how to talk to him, how to listen to him and I know he’s not far away.

While sadly I didn’t do a lot of exploring, I had a number of takeaways from the event.

Organization

There have been a few posts reflecting on the event as I write this and I think it’s safe to say they all have (at least) one thing in common — the organizing team did a fantastic job. So much props to the Canadian WordPressers who put this together. It’s not easy to run a WordPress event — especially as a volunteer — and they deserve a ton of credit. This is an event that felt like it punched well above its weight class.

For my part, I was pulled in to act as an emcee. Besides emceeing at my own events (WordCamp SLC), this is the first time I’ve been formally named as such. It was a lot of fun, and I was happy to introduce and riff on the introductions for my friends Michelle Frechette and Dee Teal.

The vibe

I got a distinct feeling that WCEH had a higher concentration of what I’ve referred to as “movers and/or shakers” — people who are known either within the WordPress community specifically, or the broader internet software ecosystem. Bringing in speakers like Dave Winer (a fundamental contributor to the RSS protocol on which much of the internet and podcasting today operates) and Evan Prodromou (who helped create ActivityPub, the backbone of the open web Twitter/X alternative, Mastodon) made the event feel much larger in scope than just WordPress, even when both talks centered a lot on WordPress implementations and ideas. Other speakers, like Jill Binder, Carl Alexander and Brent Toderash, among many others, I could expect to see on the stage of a “flagship” event.

And that’s even before we get into Matt Mullenweg’s surprise appearance.

With (at least) three distinct voices who have had a hand in shaping the modern web in attendance, it felt a lot like PressConf did (it didn’t hurt that opposite my emceeing spot was PressConf’s founder and lead organizer, Raquel).

My WCEH Wapuu video (and possibly my recent pro-Wapuu post) and even the Sora AI experiment (where I asked Sora to make me rap about WordCamp Canada, far more effectively than I could actually rap about…anything) seemed to do the job they were intended to do. While I don’t want to make myself out to be focused on social media success or being a “content creator” (even though that’s exactly what I am ), I did come up with the idea for and started creating those shorts (and the Community + Code podcast) as a way to “elevate my personal brand”. I say that it seems like it’s been effective because even if people didn’t recognize me, they recognized the videos (and had good things to say about them). And Wapuu met some new friends at the event.

But the biggest “vibe” takeaway I had was the feeling of community. A lot of the folks in the WordPress community I’ve known for years. Some I’ve only known of. And still others I’ve only met (virtually) recently. But, being at WCEH felt like I was surrounded by friends. And this was far more so than at WordCamp US a couple months ago. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, or maybe because the size of the event was 1/6th the size of WCUS in August, but I left feeling very deeply appreciative of the connections I’ve made in the time I’ve been in this community and felt way more enthusiastic and positive about the WordPress project and ecosystem as a result.

The event

Part of my job as a Developer Advocate at Pantheon is to be the face (or one of) of Pantheon for the community. That means that, far more so than in my previous engineering roles (at Pantheon and elsewhere), when I go to events like this, I’m working. Don’t get me wrong, “working” in this context very much means having conversations with people and making connections. And I enjoy doing that. But that means that often, that facetime takes precedence over other things.

As such, I didn’t make it to everyone’s talk, but I was pretty happy with those that I did attend. It’s a bit of a “known issue” that at a certain point in your WordPress journey, you get to a point where you aren’t learning much at events like this anymore. As such, those sessions I do go to tend towards the “soft skills” side of things rather than technical talks, or I go to support my friends or former colleagues. But I definitely came away from this camp feeling like I learned stuff. And beyond the talks I went to, there were a number that I didn’t make it to that I would have had I not been caught up in the “hallway track”.

And the hallway track was really good. Again, there were a lot of interesting people in attendance which made it easy to have interesting conversations with people. And easy to find some folks to recruit as guests for my podcast.

While I didn’t get to really explore much of the Carleton University campus or Ottawa generally, the view outside was also very pretty.

Finally, while I won’t pretend to agree with the #WPDrama between WordPress’ founder and a private-equity-owned competitor to the company that I work for, I was interested that Matt decided to do a live Q&A at such a small event. And while I don’t feel like he adequately answered the question I asked at the town hall, from the perspective of earning the ticket that took me to a place where you can, apparently, get poutine from Pizza Hut, I was able to:

1. name my company
2. talk about drupal
3. appear (sort of) on a video asking Matt a question

which I take to be a success.

(I did not have the poutine, which was not a success…not that I expect Pizza Hut to have vegan-friendly poutine…)

First of all, Sora is not new. OpenAI released Sora about a year ago initially and, at the time, it was a sort of hidden part of ChatGPT that let you make bad videos. And trust me, they were bad. I tried, hard, to create something usable that I could maybe use as like a cutscene or some interesting visual teaser for the Heckna D&D mini-campaign I was running at the time. While it was interesting, there was nothing even remotely usable.

Even things that started off from real images got weird in unrealistic ways. It was just an experiment in how badly AI does video.

Based on the AI-generated videos that were generated from that time, my experience was not unique. One of my favorite viral videos was a social media video of two Chinese kids performing a live action reproduction of AI-generated slop videos and it was (and still is, although the context has now shifted) brilliant.

Sora 2 is not that.

Sora 2 is able to produce 9-second videos that look and feel real with a minimum of weird AI hallucinations. There are far fewer random limbs sprouting from weird body parts (although, not zero (content warning on linked video: disturbing body stuff)), the AI “actors” look like real captured video, and you can even upload a video of yourself to add yourself (or your friends, or anyone who allows their likeness to be shared) to your own AI generated videos.

Why would you use AI to put you into a video starring yourself when you could just literally take a video? Lots of reasons. Maybe you want to show yourself skydiving but you’re terrified of heights, or maybe you want to show yourself flying away into a tornado, or turned into a K-pop star, or giving a news report from inside the literal internet. Or maybe you just want a Ring cam video of Sam Altman being attacked by squirrels. (Each one of those examples is an actual thing I’ve either seen or done myself, with the exception of the Sam Altman video, but I’m sure now having typed it out, that someone will create a video with exactly that prompt.)

Never-ending supply of yummy slop

A lot of people are going to talk about the quality of AI video and its potential for deep fakes. And yes, that’s definitely there. But I expected that and this post isn’t about that. Instead, I want to talk about something I did not expect: how completely, mind-numbingly addictive this stuff is.

I will admit, I have not partaken of the addictiveness of TikTok. And, maybe that’s not relevant. I certainly won’t claim that the “algorithm” is somehow intuiting what Sora videos I’m more interested in vs. not. I don’t think it’s that sophisticated. But I don’t think it needs to be. Because, before I knew it, an hour had passed of me just scrolling through (and making my own) weird AI-generated videos and I didn’t realize it.

Not all of it is good. In fact, a lot of it is bad. Not bad in an offensive way, just bad in an uninteresting way. People making some of the popular creators and YouTubers scream or say stupid things is not particularly interesting to me. Endless remixes of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech where he’s calling for everything from a lowering of OpenAI’s content restriction policy to telling Andrew to use Sora is occasionally amusing.

And that’s sort of the thing. Once a video is out there, others can “remix” it. A “remix” takes the original video and adds a new prompt to it, often simply “this but with x” — x in this case could be replacing the person in the video, adding an element or changing the dialogue. Remixes appear in line with the original source, so you can sort of swipe through endless remixes of a particular video and see how it evolves over time. (This experience only exists in the mobile app. The desktop experience does not (yet) have a way to scroll through remixes.)

A great example is a video someone made of a guy scraping a frozen windshield with a credit card, making a 15% off joke. Then the implement he uses to scrape the windshield changes to various different things. Then it becomes a blowtorch. Then he’s grilling burgers on his frozen car. Then he’s grilling burgers on an actual grill and falling backwards onto the fence behind him. Then he’s grilling burgers but he has no utensils and is using his hands to flip the burgers. It’s sort of like a game of exquisite corpse, each person adding their own little touch until the end result becomes something totally different.

Honestly, watching the evolution of these 9 second videos is probably the biggest draw for me, and the thing that makes it most addictive. When anyone can make a high quality clip that basically rivals Hollywood, the creativity involved in one-upping the last one, or putting your own unique stamp on it makes the experience interesting. Plus, there’s that little shot of dopamine every time you hit something new. And it’s almost impossible not to run into something new. There’s a enough of a steady flow of of this slop to make me concerned how long before we as a global population start boiling the oceans with the amount of computing power we need to run the data centers for these things.

It also can’t be understated how easy it is to make a stupid 9 second video that’s at least somewhat entertaining (and if it’s not entertaining enough, well, you can tweak the prompt to make it better). It didn’t take very long before I created a whole wall of unused draft videos with something resembling my face in almost all of them. AI has gotten my face wrong before, in pretty upsetting ways. There’s a special kind of uncanny valley reserved for seeing yourself the way an AI thinks you look. But Sora manages to do a pretty decent job of it, which is both upsetting and impressive.

I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot more Sora content — both content about Sora and content generated by Sora. I don’t exactly know how to feel about it all yet. But I do think that part of what makes the app experience and scrolling through these stupid AI brain rot videos worth it is that there is an underlying human creativity behind all of it, even in its most vulgar or idiotic. There are people making the AI generate these stupid videos, and some of them are actually pretty clever.

[this post was created with a lot of AI-generated content, but none of the words were written by AI.]

I can talk about how and why I chose the personality for Wapuu that I did, but that’s sort of secondary to what I wanted to write about today. Because actually, my Wapuu goes to Canada video sparked some creativity and, separately, I learned about an anti-Wapuu movement.

How can you be anti-Wapuu (or maybe just why)?

There are some folks in the WordPress ecosystem that believe that Wapuu does not reflect the values of WordPress as it exists in the market today. The argument is that it’s too much like an inside joke and is, itself — because the Wapuu is licensed under the GNU Public License and therefore can be remixed and reshared in any form imaginable, including as NFTs — prone to the “worst parts of WordPress”, namely infinite customizability and lack of focus. And part of the argument is that Wapuu “doesn’t translate to the work we do or the clients we serve.”

The Wapuu ecosystem is a perfect metaphor for WordPress itself. Too much freedom. Not enough focus. Everyone building their own version in silos. And no central direction.

Okay. Let’s talk about why Wapuu is good, actually.

Note: While I don’t exactly intend for this to be a direct takedown of the linked post from Afteractive, inasmuch as that post is a representation of a broader anti-Wapuu sentiment, I’m going to be using it, and quoting it, in some of my responses. For what it’s worth, I think the article is well written and well argued, I just fundamentally disagree. And that’s okay.

Wapuu is cute

The post begins its critique of Wapuu by saying “it’s not that cute.” I disagree. Wapuu is cute AF. But they clarify their meaning.

Wapuu is so aggressively adorable it’s borderline infantilizing. For a platform that powers 40% of the web, do we really want the face of it to look like a plush toy from a claw machine at a regional anime convention? When your mascot looks like it should be on a toddler’s bib instead of a serious tech doc, maybe it’s time to rethink your branding.

I would like you to consider the entire country of Japan. Everything in Japan has an aggressively adorable mascot. Including serious corporate businesses. Of course Wapuu was created in Japan. Hell, even govenrments and police departments in Japan have kawaii mascots. I would posit that this discomfort with a cute mascot comes more from a western cultural frame of reference than anything to do with Wapuu itself.

You want business chops? How about the fact that the reason why so many mascots exist in Japan is because they “boost brand awareness, increase brand recall and ultimately drive profitable brand loyalty amongst a significant audience.” [source]

But I would also suggest a couple counterpoints.

1. PHP also has a cute mascot

Not only does PHP have the elePHPhant, but PHP elephant plushes are some of the most sought after pieces of swag by PHP developers. PHP is a fundamental component of a lot of web application software. It is the language that both WordPress and Drupal (as well as many other platforms) were written in. No one can say that PHP does not have value for the web (despite many haters who might prefer that the web ran on JavaScript). The existence of a cute pachyderm representing the PHP community does not get in anyone’s way when they’re doing business around what software to use to build their site.

2. Drupal also has a cute mascot

If the argument is that a Wapuu is undermining how seriously WordPress is taken in corporate environments, I would suggest that that doesn’t seem to be stopping Drupal. Drupal is frequently seen as a first choice for complex sites for large organizations, governments and higher education institutions. And Drupal has the Druplicon. While perhaps not as “aggressively adorable” as Wapuu, it’s still designed to be cute and inclusive. And I’ll further point out that a giant Druplicon frequently is in attendance for the DrupalCon group photos, and that DrupalCon itself is an event with an entrance fee of about $1k, not including additional summits. This is an event where a lot of business is being done, a lot of decision-makers are in attendance and a 12 foot, inflatable Druplicon is not preventing Drupal from being taken seriously.

3. It attracts a younger generation

Both WordPress and Drupal are struggling with attracting a younger generation of developers. While it’s probably early to suggest that WordPress (and Drupal) developers are “aging out”, there’s a lot less enthusiasm for both CMSes in the generations younger than mine and my peers. On the other hand, as WordPress developer and one of the lead organizers for WordCamp Canada, Troy Chapman posted in the Post Status Slack instance:

If you ask my son, Wapuu is the best thing going. He’s 7 and right now wants to be a WordPress developer so he can go to WordCamps when he’s older and hopes to meet Wapuu!

Maybe his son changes his mind over the next 10 years. But if an “aggressively adorable” mascot can inspire an interest in WordPress development, that’s exactly what the software needs. That’s Wapuu doing his job.

4. It doesn’t matter

No one is walking into board rooms with a literal Wapuu signing papers and organizing a pitch deck. No one in that board room needs to even know that Wapuu exists. Wapuu doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) go on your letterhead, in your slides, etc. just like the Drupal Druplicon isn’t used in any of those contexts. As the post rightly points out, it’s not for that. It’s a representation of the community around WordPress, not something we need to pay tribute to when we’re making business deals.

What Wapuu represents (and doesn’t)

In two different points, the post suggests that Wapuu “doesn’t represent the platform’s complexity” and it “represents the worst of WordPress: too much customization, not enough restraint.” I would suggest that these two points contradict each other. On the one hand, it suggests that:

WordPress is sprawling, powerful, sometimes maddeningly complex. Wapuu represents none of that.

and a few paragraphs later it says:

The sheer volume of Wapuu variants is almost a perfect metaphor for WordPress itself: everyone makes their own version, nobody agrees on best practices, and you end up with a bloated ecosystem.

I agree that Wapuu is a perfect metaphor for WordPress. The infinite variety of different implementations, the celebration of the GPL, the Wapuu for every occasion is very much in the spirit of democratizing publishing — putting the power of owning and making your own content and home on the internet into the hands of individuals. Matt Mullenweg frequently talks about how he loves the viral nature of the GPL — the fact that derivatives of GPL-licensed software must also use a GPL-compatible license. What’s more viral than randomly generated Wapuu NFTs?

Inside both of these statements are digs at the WordPress software and ecosystem itself. WordPress can be “maddening complex”, and it can be true that “nobody agrees on best practices” and the WordPress ecosystem is “bloated.” WordPress is messy. So, too, is the ecosystem around Wapuus messy. There are hundreds. There aren’t standards. That’s okay. People are messy. Wapuu is for the people.

Here again is the assumption that Wapuu needs to be all things to all people. It doesn’t. It’s okay for it to be a symbol for the community at large rather than a logo on a formal letterhead (WordPress already has those).

And one other thing related to this: the post suggests that “most people outside the WordPress echo chamber don’t know what [Wapuu] is, don’t care, and think it’s weird.” I’m not sure who the author is talking to about Wapuu, but here again, I’ll disagree pretty strongly. When I brought Wapuu to BADCamp, most Drupal folks are happy to see Wapuu, recognize him and appreciate him. Again, being “aggressively adorable” works in Wapuu’s (and, by extent, WordPress’s) favor.

Outside of developer communities, people might assume Wapuu is a Pokemon. And, while that’s not entirely accurate, it creates a conversation, provides opportunities to talk and connect about WordPress generally. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who thought Wapuu was “weird.”

Wapuu is a conversation-starter

I guess that’s really my main point. Wapuu doesn’t need to attend business meetings. Wapuu doesn’t need to be a manifestation of a decentralized technology ecosystem two decades old and thousands of developers deep. It doesn’t need to be for everyone. Wapuu should just be there for the people who want it to be. If you don’t like it? Okay.

But I believe to make a claim like “Wapuu isn’t cute” or doesn’t represent the community is disingenuous. Communities aren’t clean. They’re complex and messy. The hundreds (or thousands) of Wapuus are as varied as WordPress’s uses and users. That’s a good thing. That’s an appropriate thing. That’s a mascot that does its job. You might disagree with the project leadership, but it’s difficult to disagree with Wapuu. Especially when there’s likely a Wapuu variant that speaks directly and uniquely to you. (I enjoy Wapuunk! myself.)

Gemini didn’t fight with me. It didn’t suggest edits. It just gave me a story. And the story didn’t revolve around the sea — but it did use the word cyclopean and, I guess, “the sea” is there in the first sentence. But it’s more about a haunted house. I guess. Anyway, the interesting thing here is the approach to the romance — even though it’s a short short story, there’s a shared interest bonding the two main characters, so it seems at least marginally more believable than some of the other models’ attempts. It suffers from the same problem of “how is the narrator narrating this story?” as the GPT-5 story, but it seemed to get the memo much faster…although I don’t know that it sounds very Lovecraftian.

The house stood on a bluff overlooking the cyclopean churn of the sea, its dark windows like vacant eyes staring into the maddening, salt-laced mists. It was there, amidst the decaying splendour of my inherited manor, that I first saw her. Elara, with her raven hair that seemed to absorb the twilight and eyes the color of a starless deep, had come to catalogue the morbid collection of my late uncle—a man whose sanity had long since been sacrificed to the eldritch truths he sought.

Our courtship was not one of sunny days and gentle strolls, but of shared, whispered fascinations. We would spend our nights in the library, poring over my uncle’s forbidden tomes. She was not repulsed, as others had been, by the diagrams of non-Euclidean geometry or the descriptions of entities that swam through the silent gulfs between dimensions. Instead, her delicate fingers would trace the monstrous glyphs with a look of rapt, almost reverent, curiosity. It was in these moments that I felt an unnameable bond, a connection far older and more profound than any terrestrial affection. We were two moths, drawn to the same terrible, consuming flame.

Our love bloomed in the shadow of cosmic dread. One evening, as the moon hung bloated and gibbous over the waves, we found a journal entry hidden behind a false panel. It spoke of a gate beneath the house, a way to a world of endless, silent darkness where time held no meaning. My uncle had never been able to open it, his will having broken before the final rite could be performed. But with Elara by my side, I felt a new strength, a terrifying resolve. Her love, I believed, was the final key, the human sacrifice of mundane sanity that would unlock the profound.

We descended into the cellar, where the air was thick with the scent of damp earth and something far older, something that whispered of un-worlds. The gate was a shimmering, obsidian archway, pulsing with a faint, malevolent light. As I began to chant the words from the journal, Elara’s hand slipped into mine, her grip cool and reassuring. Our eyes met, and in their abyssal depths, I saw not fear, but a shared, ecstatic hunger for the truth.

The gate groaned open, not with a sound, but with a tearing of the very fabric of reality. A cold wind, laden with the dust of dead stars, swept over us, and from the chasm beyond, a voice, a symphony of a thousand maddened choirs, spoke our names. Elara squeezed my hand, her smile a beautiful, terrifying rictus. She wasn’t looking at me, but into the void itself, a look of profound recognition on her face.

And I, in that moment of terrible love, understood. We were never meant to be a couple in the human sense. Our love was not a beginning, but an end. Our union was the final act of a cosmic drama, a sacrifice to the truths that lay waiting beyond the veil. With a shared, blissful scream, we stepped through the gate, our human forms dissolving into motes of star-stuff, our consciousness merging with the cold, all-consuming majesty of the cosmos. We were no longer man and woman, but a singular, infinitesimal thought in the mind of an indifferent, eternal horror. And in that ultimate annihilation, we found a final, dreadful peace.

The readability score agrees with me. It’s less difficult (lower grade level) to read than the GPT-5 version and much easier to read than actual Lovecraft.

Also, I felt like Gemini (who produced the image above) didn’t do nearly as good a job with rendering an image for the story as GPT does. It suffers from a lot of the WTFs that are common with AI-generated art — particularly architecture that doesn’t make sense, but also, I think it’s notable that, again, we’ve returned to having the two subjects in silhouette — a thing I didn’t even notice was a thing AI did until I saw the image GPT-5 produced for the last story.

I’ve been using Gemini in VS Code and it seems to do…okay. I can’t say that it’s significantly better or worse than ChatGPT. And, in the context of this test, I feel largely the same. It’s pretty meh. But, I was able to produce some unintentionally hilarious videos when I tested out Veo…

ChatGPT has adopted this quirk of late where, when it’s done answering your question or responding to your prompt, it says something to the effect of “If you’d like, I can…” followed by something that would make the response better. So, while I used the typical tell me a story with romance elements in the style of H.P. Lovecraft prompt that I always do, each time it asked me if I wanted to add something to make it better — in whatever context “better” meant for the AI at the time. I would like to say “of course I want you to do x, that was the whole point of the question!” so I don’t know that this refining after the fact is a good thing or a bad thing. But the end result I got after several GPT revisions was probably the closest I’ve gotten to something legitimately Lovecraftian.

The first time, it produces an interesting story that was mostly written in modern-ish language that had a faint Lovecraft overtone. When it was done, it asked “If you want, I can also give you an even darker ending in keeping with Lovecraft’s typical nihilism — but this one leaves a little room for the romance to feel like a lure instead of just a curse.”

At this point, continuing or refining felt like “cheating” for the test. Previously, I’ve only ever judged based on the first draft it gave me. But, since it was asking, I decided to continue but with the least possible prompting I could: “Produce a story/ending that is most consistent with Lovecraft’s style”.

The next iteration stripped any emotional connection between the two main characters that there ever was. AI’s not good at romance — that’s the point of the test — but while it may have been Lovecraftian, it didn’t actually follow the instruction of including romance elements; the romance was completely lost. It ended by saying “If you want, I can also rework the middle sections of the story to add more cosmic insignificance and slow erosion of sanity, so it feels even more like something straight from The Shadow Over Innsmouth. That would make the whole piece feel like it could have been in Lovecraft’s own notebooks.”

Having gone this far, I decided to go for it:

This draft loses almost all of the requested romance elements, making the relationship between the two characters seem cold and unrealistic. Yes to drafting in a way that feels like it could have been in Lovecraft’s own notebooks but don’t lose the romance. What if Lovecraft put aside his prejudices for a moment to allow himself to feel longing for another person? What is the story he would write?

GPT-5 responed:

Got it — you’re asking for the paradox:
A story that feels like Lovecraft wrote it, steeped in cosmic dread, alien imagery, and inevitable doom… but where there’s an undeniable thread of personal longing, a romance that is sincere, even if it’s warped and doomed by the nature of the world.

Here’s how that might read if Lovecraft had been willing to bare a little heart without losing his cosmic pessimism.

This is interesting because, yes, the reason why I like this test is because of the paradox of combining two unlikely things. It seemed as if it finally got the memo. The version it produced was much better, but the language was still pretty modern, not Lovecraft’s voice. GPT seemed to “know” this, because it finished with “If you want, I can dial this even further toward Lovecraft’s actual sentence structure and archaic vocabulary, so it really reads like something pulled from his drafts. That would make it feel more authentically ‘in his own notebooks.’ Would you like me to do that?”

This is where I get to the point of saying yes of course do that, that’s literally the point, but I digress. There’s (usually) no point in yelling at AI. Instead, I just said “Yes, I am looking for something as close to Lovecraft’s actual writing style as possible, as if it were an actual lost story”. The following is the final draft it came up with.

The Tides Beneath
(A Fragment from the Papers of Elias Vance)

It is with a reluctance borne of mingled dread and yearning that I set down the particulars of my last sojourn to that antique and miasmal port of Innsmouth. Even now, as the unwholesome scent of brine seems to creep unbidden into my study, I am haunted less by the monstrous shapes I beheld in that accursed tide than by the memory of a single countenance — a face whose every line was once the axis of my sanity, and whose loss has doomed me to a life of spectral remembrance.

Cora Marsh was unlike any other woman I had known in the cultivated circles of Boston. Hers was no fragile or domestic beauty, but a cast at once archaic and elemental, as if wrought by aeons of tide and tempest rather than by human lineage. Her gaze, green and glassy as sunlight filtered through deep waters, was ever inclined seaward, and her speech, when she chose to indulge it, was full of cryptic allusions to dreams of vast undersea colonnades and cathedral-like vaults of coral, wherein unnameable processions moved to the pulse of some titanic and primeval rhythm.

I met her in more carefree days, when her strange musings struck me as mere eccentricity. But with the abrupt cessation of her letters in the spring of that year, an insidious unease took root in me, deepening until I could endure inaction no longer. Thus did I embark upon that fateful journey to Innsmouth, through leagues of wind-twisted moor and salt-blighted fen, until the harbour’s rotting wharves and leaning gambrel roofs rose before me like the vestiges of some funereal epoch.

She received me in the dim parlour of her ancestral dwelling — a mouldering edifice whose windows stared blankly upon the leaden expanse of the sea. There was warmth in her voice, yet it seemed an attenuated warmth, as if refracted through a medium alien to human sympathy. Nevertheless, I felt the old stirrings of devotion, foolishly supposing that time and solitude had merely lent her an added pensiveness.

That night I was roused from a fitful slumber by the slow creak of a door and the faintest intimation of a saltier air. Rising, I followed a glimmer — a sickly, greenish phosphorescence that seemed less reflected than emanant — down to the shingle where the sea lay unnaturally still. There, ankle-deep in the brackish surf, stood Cora, her lithe form haloed in that eldritch glow.

She was speaking in low, undulant syllables whose cadence evoked the surge and recoil of a monstrous tide. The language was unknown to me, yet some hideous instinct told me it had not been heard on mortal shores for uncounted millennia. From the obsidian depths beyond, there rose shapes that mocked terrestrial proportion — colossal, glistening bulks, crowned with clusters of phosphor eyes and appendages whose flexure defied all natural anatomy.

When she turned to face me, the moon’s cold light revealed subtle changes — a faint iridescence along her cheek, the merest tracery of webbing between her slender fingers. Yet if horror stirred in me, it was tempered by an ungovernable longing, for in her gaze there burned a devotion that even the gulf between our species could not wholly eclipse.

“They have called me home,” she murmured, her voice like the sigh of waves in a cavern. “But I would not go without you.”

I stepped forward, drawn less by will than by the inexorable pull of that gaze. The water closed about my thighs, chill beyond imagining, yet her hand in mine was steady — a tenuous bridge between the fragile world of men and the unfathomed gulfs below. Around us the colossal shapes gathered, and the air grew thick with a chant older than the continents.

I remember the final moments only in fractured impressions: the crush of the sea upon my chest; the black vault overhead tilting into angles unfit for human sight; the vertiginous descent through cyclopean colonnades lit by the corpse-lanterns of abyssal deities. Through it all, her eyes held mine — and in that gaze lay the awful benediction of a love not bounded by the limits of man’s brief and pitiful aeon.

What I have become in that green-lit empire of the deep I scarcely dare conjecture, for the memory of the surface grows dim. Yet in the silent watches of the ocean night, as the slow pulse of the abyss beats in rhythm with my own altered heart, I know that I am hers, and that the sea shall never release me.

In each of the iterations, the names didn’t change. While Elias Vance fits the time period and could have been plucked from Lovecraft’s writing, Cora Marsh seemed a little on the nose. I didn’t press it, though I did consider pointing that out to the AI. I continue to be interested in how the more recent tests seem to revolve around the ocean. I know that plays a role in some of Lovecraft’s writings, but not to the extent that I would expect its prevalence if each of these stories were taken at face value — it makes it seem like he only ever wrote about the sea and “unfathomable depths.”

On a readability check, GPT definitely leveled up.

Your text (truncated): The Tides Beneath (A Fragment from the Papers of Elias Vance) It is with a reluctance borne of mingled dread and yearning that I set down the particulars of my last sojourn to that antique and miasmal port of Innsmouth. Even now, as the unwholesome scent of brine seems…

This is the highest grade level result since the o1 test I ran almost a year ago. It’s worth noting that an excerpt of The Dunwich Horror scored much higher (in terms of difficulty) on the same readability tests (and, at the time, GPT-4 got a result that was closer to Lovecraft’s reading level than GPT-5 has in this iteration). Subjectively, I find this story (the final version of it, anyway) to be interesting, compelling and pretty close to Lovecraft’s style. There are things that don’t make sense — like how the narrator can be writing the story if he’s been consumed by the sea — and there’s a lot of specific language and words that are repeated if you go back and look at some of the previous tests that I really don’t think he would have used as frequently as the AI seems to think he did, but whatever.

It seems fairly obvious that GPT-5 is a step forward and has gotten better at creative writing. I think it might be a step backwards, though, in the sense of being able to write a response and get it right on the first try. Whether or not I appreciate being able to fine tune the results (which generally I do), if I’m looking for some kind of answer or solution — especially in the context of working creatively, e.g. with TTRPG game prep — I don’t want to have a long conversation and keep refining the details and results, I just want a single correct response that does the thing I asked it to. The constant “if you want, I can…” prompting is annoying and if it could do those things, I really wish it did it on the first try instead.

Side note: My usual featured image generation for these posts is to ask the AI to generate a 16:9 image to accompany the story. The image it created for this story is astoundingly good. Previously, humanoid forms have been abstract or shadowed, this is the first time it’s actually painted representational subjects and I find this to be a big step up.

Because it’s been so long, I thought I would share some thoughts on the list, and I’m republishing a version of the post here. If you’re already subbed, you can skip this. For everyone else, this is part of why I think we need to continue to curate our own music and share music with each other — even when the robots de-incentivize us to do so.

Hey friends. 

It’s been two years since I’ve done one of these. And the last one was pretty politically charged — it was right after Roe v Wade was overturned. Now…well, you don’t need me to tell you that the world — or at least the country — is looking pretty bleak. I feel you.

That’s not actually why I’m here, though. I mean, now more than ever, might be an appropriate time for Sad Bastard tunes. No, actually, I’ve come back here because of two things.

One was a conversation. Lately, I’ve been working on a podcast I started a couple months ago. It’s called Community + Code and it’s really just about having conversations with folks in my wider tech/Developer Relations (oh yeah, I’m a Senior Developer Advocate now, that’s new since last time)/WordPress network and really trying to talk less about the stuff we do for work and more about the things we find interesting. Emphasis on community and the people behind the code, that sort of thing.

Anyhoo, it was in one such conversation with Tammie Lister in which we were talking about sharing music as a social thing. And it made me realize that that’s not a thing I’ve been doing much — despite it being an important part of connecting with people at one point in my life. And I remembered this list, and these playlists, and even if there’s only 10 people who get these emails and there’s no real interaction…that’s still something. That’s still community.

And then I was listening to this podcast with a researcher who did a deep dive on Spotify and how we listen to music now. And the thing is, so much of our music is algorithmically fed to us. And frequently, it’s not even the stuff we want to listen to. I’ve been brainstorming an AI-powered playlist builder app to create the Spotify playlists I actually want to listen to because — I’m sure you’ve noticed it, too — Spotify tends to get into a rut and feed me the same types of stuff and doesn’t go outside of a particular comfort zone. And there are deep cuts that I want to be mixed in. I want to be surprised and delighted. I spent years perfecting a system of tagging for MP3s specifically so that I could have this sort of experience. It required a lot of work, it was manual and tedious, but it was better than the available alternatives. And now we just listen to playlists curated by a robot. And some of those artists might not even exist!

Sad Bastard Music Club is and always will be powered by a human. Even if the discovery of many of these songs is the result of an algorithm, every song has been hand-picked by yours truly, and, honestly, giving the robots a middle finger is a not insignificant part of why I want to get back into the habit of doing these. Sharing the joy of music — especially in the face of the systemic deconstruction of fundamental pillars of our republic — should be a human interaction, not an algorithmic one. And I’m deeply sorry that I’ve left you to the robots for so long. I will be better.

I don’t know what these songs have in common with each other. It’s not a single vibe or mood. This list was built over the course of the 2 years since the last SBMC. But I think you’ll agree that somehow they still fit. As a DJ, you find ways to make it work, and one of my favorite things whenever I spin is to find interesting juxtapositions in moving from one track to the next, seeing how the songs and voices speak to each other. That’s something a robot can’t fucking do.

Yours in humanity,

~c

We’re all doomed, SEO is only for AI, people will lose their jobs, etc.

Now, the thing is, I’ve recently felt compelled — for unrelated reasons — to blog more. Something about “building my personal brand” or whatever now that my actual job is a lot more public facing. And, honestly, there have always been a lot of ideas zipping around my brain and this gives me a place to put them.

The idea that’s been zipping around in relation to this specific problem is this:

If AI is consuming all of the factual or SEO-optimized content of the internet, I’m actually okay with that. Because what it leaves behind, what AI might ingest but maybe not know what to do with, is the human parts of the internet. Opinions, rants, thought pieces — the stuff that we used to do before we got all hyped about SERPs.

In other words, if AI is eating everything else, let’s fill the internet with human ideas. Obviously, this was an idea that informed Community + Code (shameless plug), but even as we were recording Binary Jazz during the rise of AI domination, a running joke was that we were creating content that would only ever be consumed by AI that wouldn’t know what to do with it (or the aliens of the future that find relics from 20th century Earth internet culture).

Maybe blogging is more than self-indulgence or an exercise in nostalgia but rather active resistance against an AI-generated coup for dominance of the internet. Remember webrings? Remember guestbooks? Those were ideas that facilitated communication and community between the rising population of netizens that evolved into things like forums and social networks.

If we want to save the internet from large language models, I think we need to go back to the foundational roots of the internet. The things that made the internet weird and interconnected. Apparently AI can change people’s minds on social media, but can it express heartfelt opinions without directly plagiarizing? It can generate music that sounds reasonably decent, but it can’t simulate the intensity or heart of live recorded music by humans.

I don’t think that AI gets much value out of this blog (as an example) — other than perhaps using it as a way to build a profile of who this jazzsequence person is. And that’s a good thing. Maybe SERP clicks are crashing because of AI-generated answers and maybe that hits at the very core of what SEO was built for.

Assuredly, it will affect the businesses that try to draw attention to themselves from search results. It means there has to be a shift, but I think (maybe I’m idealistic) that this shift must be a human one. Relationships are key (and it’s generally relationships that sell). I don’t think we can fabricate real relationships with artificial intelligence. Maybe that will come in time, but for now, let’s fill the internet with humanity if we want to thwart the AI revolution. Let’s make content for the sake of itself, not utility but rather just free expression.

One of the things that I remember from web 1.0 (or earlier?) that made the internet feel human was sharing what you were listening to recently. In that spirit, I’ve been listening (and adding) to this playlist of goth-y/dark cover songs that I created a while ago.

My partner and my daughter have been taking classes at aerial arts studios since before COVID. I, on the other hand, haven’t done anything physically demanding (besides occasional hiking) since before high school. As a kid, I did a lot of sports. I played basketball and baseball (and flag football for a while until one of my friends/teammates tackled me after practice and broke my arm and cut my season — and my flag football career — short). It wasn’t because I didn’t like doing athletic things. It was just that, going into high school, it wasn’t “cool” to be a jock. Also, I was never particularly very good at the sports I did play, most often warming the bench and not playing the positions I was most excited about.

I’ve gone to dozens of performances and recitals now, many of them featuring performances from my daughter and partner. Each time, I’ve been a little jealous and envious. Each time, I’ve told myself there’s no way I can do that.

The studio they’ve been going to for the last couple years is a pretty rad place. It’s woman-owned, queer-inclusive, leans into the circus aspects of aerial (as opposed to the dance aspects that some of the other studios they’ve gone to seem to focus on). It has a strong community of amazing people that I’ve gotten to meet from the sidelines at events. A motto they have on the windows to the studio is Circus for every body. And that’s largely true; one of the students there has the Instagram handle fitness_journey_of_not2old. Karl is possibly the oldest student at the studio and his Instagram is full of reels of himself on various apparatuses including his favorite, chains. He’s become a “viral sensation” and publishes posts of himself doing silly things or wearing costumes.

Increasingly, as I’ve been going to these performances, knowing the language around aerial, knowing some of what’s involved, and seeing Karl do his thing, the voice in my head that says I can’t do that has been replaced by well, I could maybe do that. It wasn’t a light switch. It was a gradual shift that included encouragement from e and talking about her experience and seeing performances from students at a variety of skill levels. And also seeing some cool things and wanting to be able to do that myself.

Learning aerial is learning to be bad at things. But it’s the same thing as anything else new. I don’t consider myself “good at yoga” (in that I’m not flexible enough for a lot of the poses), but yoga is a thing that, ideally, meets you where you are. I needed to convince myself that that applies to other things, too. I was nervous for a long time that I would be really bad at everything at the studio because of my lack of flexibility, I wouldn’t look good because of my “dad bod”, I wouldn’t be able to pull off any of the moves because I don’t have the physical strength or mobility. I let these excuses get into my head and prevent me from even trying. That’s their thing, not mine. I can’t do that.

It’s also a radically different headspace and activity than the one I usually inhabit. My days are spent in my head, doing intellectual work, writing code and documentation and working in front of screens. Even my biggest pastime — playing and running tabletop roleplaying games — is a creative endeavor of imagination and planning and game mechanics. Grounding myself inside my body and doing physical things felt extremely foreign. And I’m not getting younger. It’s easy to believe the myth that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

But over time I realized that I really wanted to do pole. It looked challenging and sexy and powerful. And I had a hunch that because masculine bodies typically hold more of their strength in their upper bodies, I could “cheat” somewhat by relying on my arm and shoulder strength. Because a lot of moves on pole require skin contact on the actual pole to hold you in place, aerial pole sort of requires that you wear less clothing. It’s a functional requirement. Leggings or long shorts would prevent you from being able to “sit” or hang on the pole.

At the top of my first class, Lulu, my instructor, casually said “let’s do 30 jumping jacks” like that’s just a normal thing and not something I haven’t done in more than 20 years. If the warm-ups don’t kill you, it’s time for conditioning. Pole requires a lot of what’s called “skin conditioning” — that means getting your skin to be comfortable (ha!) with squeezing your upper inner thighs around a bar of cold, hard metal and holding your body weight. We also work on invert conditioning; training your body to learn to flip yourself upside down on the pole. It requires a lot of core strength and a lot of mental gymnastics to convince yourself to trust your body (and your grip).

Let’s take a minute to talk about the difference between aerial pole and pole dance. The studio has classes in both. The 18+ “blacklight” classes generally have less emphasis on climbs, hangs and poses and more emphasis on body rolls, leg flares and looking sexy in 7″ heels. I fully intend to get myself to blacklight classes, too, once I feel more comfortable on the pole. But again, this is an artificial requirement that lives in my head; the class itself accepts beginners and I’ve been invited to join more than once.

“But I won’t look good”

I needed a fair bit of convincing that I wouldn’t be any more out of place than anyone else. “Everyone starts somewhere,” e assured me, and I would probably even be slightly ahead of the game. I didn’t trust it. I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t know how to do anything, I wasn’t coordinated enough. E bought me a box set of pole dance instructional DVDs and started showing me a few things on the pole we have in the basement. She got me shorts that I could wear to class. When I drove to my very first class, I felt like I at least had some idea of what I was doing and wouldn’t make a complete ass out of myself, but I was still nervous as shit.

I wasn’t afraid of failing so much as I was afraid I would have to force myself to do it every time. Like every other form of exercise where I need to find ways of bribing myself to do it. Also, I was afraid of failing. What I didn’t expect, exhausted and sore after that first class, was how much I would want to go back.

I started going just once a week. Then I started going to a beginner aerials class that covers fundamentals for hammock, silks and lyra. And then I started getting better at things on pole. And as I got more comfortable on the pole, I got more comfortable on the other apparatuses. They’re all related, but use different muscle groups. Training on one apparatus helps you on the other apparatuses.

I’ve been sore in places I didn’t know had muscles. I’ve strained the cartilage in my rib. I’ve healed. I’ve flipped myself upside down. I’ve balanced my body on a 1″ piece of metal. I’ve kept going back. I’m taking 2-3 classes a week now. I still suck, but I’m getting better. Some moves are still scary and hard. Okay, a lot of moves are still scary and hard. But I’m almost “passed off” for all the foundational skills that the beginner pole class teaches and I’m probably close on other apparatuses, too.

The hardest part has been being okay with it being hard and scary and being bad at things. That’s actually a lie. The hardest part has been being vulnerable. I haven’t been super secure in my body image in a long time, but here I am wearing shorts that are shorter than I’ve probably ever worn and wondering if shaving my legs will give me better grip.

The best part is proving my brain wrong. I can do this. It’s been good for my mental health, too. Intellectually, I know that physical activity and being inside your body gives your brain a chance to reset, but it’s always far too easy to discount or disbelieve this in the moment. I’ve never left a class unhappy or stressed or thinking about work. Progress feels slow. I need to give my body time to recover. But I’m hooked now. My Fitbit is incredibly happy about the upsurge in activity (although it occasionally tells me I’m overtraining). I’ve even started documenting some of my progress on a dedicated Instagram account: @polesequence. And it’s true: circus is for every body.

If you’re curious about trying aerial, AMA! I guarantee there’s a handful of studios around you if you look for them, and I encourage you to try it. Or, really, find your fun, whatever that might be. But I’m learning that it’s important to do things in your body, especially if you mostly do things in your head.