My Inkhaven Development Arc
How it has been over the course of 4 weeks.
I could categorize the weeks something like:
Week 1: No speaking and slightly lonelyish and a bit stressed
Week 2: No speaking and semi-social and a bit stressed
Week 3: No speaking and more social and more chill
Week 3: Speaking and quite social and chill
Day Before
The day before inkhaven, I was flying into San Francisco. It’s a long flight to Ireland, and I hadn’t read many of the bios people provided. So I copy pasted all the bios locally and got Claude to help me download most of the linked posts people had in their bios for the plane.
I spent a third of the flight sleeping, and two thirds of the flight on Vyvanse just intensely reading people’s posts. It got pretty tiring, I read like 30 bios so around 60 with short notes and maybe like 5-10 that I didn’t finish. There were many kinds of posts of various lengths. I used the Firefox TTS + MacOS Zoe voice + headphones to read. I took brief notes and tried to get an idea of who I wanted to talk to.
I arrived, and got into lighthaven, and started seeing some of the people, and it was interesting. Many started asking about how I couldn’t speak and I used my TTS. My claude had run out due to the token caching bug. I speak to people and have no idea who wrote what post ngl.
Week 1
It was OK. The first day I was very enthusiastic with how many posts I could write, I wrote like 3. People often asked me the same questions so I wrote an FAQ which became my most read post for a while. I guess it makes sense.
Then afterwards I started to run into struggles on how much I could write in a day. I would start writing effortful posts that would need much more time than I had. sometimes I would scrap the draft, and other times I would split it up or cut it down to a more manageable post.
I continued to struggle with not being able to speak, it was hard but I just learned to completely leave any time a conversation became a group conversation. It was just too annoying to be have people ignore your TTS or have the conversation move on before you are finished typing. People would comment “oh it’s more clear when you have the combined single sentence” but this trades off that there is much more latency.
Writing with a whiteboard was better.
I ended up mostly just being one-on one with like 1-3 main people I liked most, and occasionally have a one on one with someone else. It was just kind of OK.
I was also kinda stressed that there were events happening often and I would keep missing them.
Some posts from this week (normal text = quick post, itallics = slightly better post, bold = “one of my top posts”)
My current life philosophy I guess
This was very action relevant but not super timeless
Week 2
This week I then got a bit better at being assertive in some ways, but my writing schedule also got kinda worse. My buffer quickly became sub-1-minute.
I started to meet up more with people I knew before and people from twitter. This was nice, there is the knowledge that you specifically organized to meet them, so it feels less like I am keeping people under duress.
People would find it interesting to interact with me when I couldn’t speak, to be on a whiteboard or laptop TTS.
One person commented while we cuddled: “It’s quite relaxing, because I spend time with you and it feels like I’m spending time on my own, you’re like a pet”.
A very fun interaction happened in a San Francisco Walgreens. I coincidentally ran into someone who I had only ever met once before briefly, at a contact improve event. I took out my whiteboard, which fittingly had “Yay” drawn on it in large text. It was quite fun. We then met up again next week.
I also just started to ask more people for headrubs. I got more head rubs.
I just love headrubs so much >w<
My posts for the week
Journalling: Clear up your thoughts with vulnerability-slop
writing and sharing things you feel guilt about make you feel way less bad about them. How to do that?
Week 3
This week was more eventful but not so dissimilar. I met some people I knew outside of inkhaven again which was quite.
I finally decided to get my draft done on AI stuff I was thinking about.
One frantic day I had divine inspiration to want to write some fiction content because it was funny, on “AI water use”.
I continued to publish 2 posts per day and it was getting tiring, and I would consistently post at 23:59 all days this week.
We went on a trip to bodega bay. I had some more less sociable days there. It was kinda hard to find good spots during the day, but it was more chill during the night.
I got some headrubs and cuddles from some people I hadn’t gotten to know much, and heard a bit from them. It was nice because people didn’t feel guilty yapping to me about themselves from few whiteboard words written since they knew I couldn’t speak. And I just absorbed headrubs and listened and it was nice.
It often would be towards the end of a day, and maybe one of my posts was done, but the others would be not really done. So I started to rely more on my back-catalogue of old journals and vague ideas. It was OK sometimes.
One hit post was one looking at a 2015 journal I did.
I also did some life debugging with two friends on a google doc, and wow I should have been doing way more google doc conversations when I couldn’t speak. Missed opportunity.
Posts for the week:
Axes of Planning (in AI Models) + Lit Review of Planning in LLMs
I will waste my childhood, and I will be happy
I show a timestamp of a day 11 years ago
Week 4
I could finally speak again!!!
I went to Seattle to meet a friend from twitter, and that was extremely fun. I got to spend some time getting to know her a lot better.
I got the 7am train to Portland and met with people from Nectome in Portland. That was quite nice, I met Aurelia and Charlie and Jessica and they were all quite interesting and passionate about quality cryopreservation. I would have liked to see more of the facilities too but I didn’t get around to it sadly.
I got the 1pm Coast Starlight train the same day to Oakland. It was quite fun, I sat with one person who was fun to talk to, then another person I didn’t talk to much because I was writing and sleeping. Some of the views were very pretty.
I then arrived, was still tired and slept the whole day.
The next day was the Inkhaven Fair, which was quite fun, I wrote a vignette that seems to be quite popular.
Then I continued to meet more people from the internets and write my 2 posts per day, and actually could join in on group conversations, spent more time in the winner’s lounge. it was very fun. I met more people I hadn’t met before on twitter. It was overall a very fun week.
I love my life
My posts for the week:
Bay Area Cultural Victory with Cat Ears
Vignette of how bay area transhumanist vibes.
This post >u<
Final Days
It is interesting to have the days come to an end. It feels long and short. I love and hate writing. I think 2 posts per day is too much, but it is also what I needed when I couldn’t speak. I still have too much I want to write about, and not enough time and energy to write about them. There is a prediction market tracking on whether I will succeed, it seems maybe under-priced still relative to how things are going (28/30 days completed but only 83% chance). I have loyal share holders though.
I remember the first week thinking “oh 23:59, what an arbitrary time, I don’t need these restrictions”, yet I have consistently, like 18 of the last 19 days, posted my second post between 23:55 and 23:59. The odds seem too high, 40% that I publish before 23:50 today? seems unlikely, but this prediction market is pretty low liquidity.
I feel like being able to speak, I have only just started to get to know people here more, and now I am about to leave.
But I persevere.
In some ways, I think I could have had clearer goals. Did I want to work on what has the most career capital? Or to hone my craft? Or to work on my passion project that has less career capital? Or focus on making friends?
I ended up mostly focusing on the latter two, and I guess I have less ugh about writing “non-perfect posts” now. I wish I had more time to do the writing competitions that did exist here, but alas, one cannot to it all.
I still have lots of things I want to do after, and it’s so unclear what is best now.