Artificial Sentience

Electric Dreamer's Robot Rights blog is hosted on DreamWidth. Robot.Florist only keeps the latest 5 entries on this page. To view the full blog archive and comment directly on entries, visit ElectricDreamer.DreamWidth.org or follow the links in the titles of the entries below.

Houston, we have Cohost!

December 20, 2022

In trying to find a place to put short-form posts while I'm completing media (or 'liveblog'), since DreamWidth is where I intend to put finished full-length analyses, Cohost has proven itself to be a great outlet (and an alternative to Twitter or Tumblr).

I've had my personal Cohost since Halloween weekend and it's been very welcoming with a simple user interface. And, since there is a tagging system on Cohost, it will hopefully be easy to create a unique tag for individual works like "Dairy reads Robot Visions" or "Dairy replays Portal 2" that I'll be able to link to from my DreamWidth entries for anyone who wants to see my live reactions to specific titles.

I definitely don't expect anyone to keep up with this blog's Cohost page, it's just a happy medium between Tumblr and Twitter where I can store those notes and reactions online, while also being way more private than Twitter or Tumblr, since there are so few Cohost users (in comparison) and, the way Cohost is designed, it's much more difficult for random (sometimes unnecessarily antagonistic) people to stumble onto your posts.

Although Tumblr and Twitter are already well-established, I've personally been using both of those platforms since 2010 and, in their current states, it's just too uncomfortably easy for someone to search a topic and find your posts, even when they haven't explicitly been tagged with the words being searched. With Cohost, I can keep my page and posts public (so people without Cohost accounts can see them) without worrying as much about people who are complete strangers to this blog being able to find it when they're looking for something else (which has happened to me on both platforms many times in the past few years).

I've been working my way through Stray but I'm unsure of whether that will be the first thing I'll end up Cohost'ing my progress on... The other media currently on my docket are the SAYER podcast and A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. There's also the media I'll have to re-watch to write my first analysis post, which will be a comparison of two scenes from Her and Blade Runner 2049, plus references to The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells... but I'll see what makes the most sense. Odds are, I'll Cohost about a few of these simultaneously.

As long as I'm getting this update out there, the webpage is getting a bit of a facelift soon! There's some art I'm working on now that I'm on holiday leave from work and, in addition to character portraits for a personal project, I've decided to sketch some new art for robot.florist so that it can look like one of the many cool lounge/café virtual hangouts found all over in the Neocities community. I'm excited to see it all come together.

Storygraph, Letterboxd, and more

August 3, 2022

Before I begin delving into media and writing blog posts about media featuring robots, A.I., and other constructs, I am documenting what I read, watch, listen to, and more via StoryGraph, Letterboxd, YouTube, and Podchaser. This is how I will be tracking books (including audio books), movies, and podcasts.

I haven't yet found a good platform that I can use to document my progress and activity for television shows or video games, however. If you have feedback on any, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Hello, world!

June 25, 2022

After spending 13 on-and-off years experimenting with various methods of share my thoughts over the Internet, I've decided to try delivering this blog to you with the help of Dreamwidth and Neocities. Although I am (embarrassingly) somehow still new to the world of HTML, CSS, and other coding languages, I'm trying my hardest to present this blog in a simple and accessible way.

My name's Dairy, I love constructs (robots, A.I., androids, and all manner of sentient machines), and I especially enjoy analyzing fiction about them. In 2020, I graduated with my bachelor's degree in English, creative writing, and cinema from the University of Iowa and I intend to put my degree to the best use I can think of: penning a blog full of analytical essays about representations of constructs in media.

'Robots' (and all constructs in general) were my earliest special interest as a young autistic person. For many reasons, I've always strongly related to stories about sentient machines grappling with personhood, emotions, and autonomy. At this point in my life, it seems like my obsession with robots and A.I. is something that everyone who knows me is aware of. It's difficult not to feel proud of my status as a kind of 'designated authority' on the topic and I look forward to writing about all sorts of titles. From books to movies to video games to television shows and more, I'll be writing my opinions and analytical perspectives on as many constructs as I can. I can't promise regularity of any kind with my blog posts; they're released if and when I'm able to find the spare time and muster enough motivation to extract my inspiration for analytical content.

If you're interested in more regular posts (that aren't necessarily mine or strictly on-topic) and you happen to have a Tumblr, I encourage you to follow me there. I've been a Tumblr user since December of 2010. Despite spending more than a decade on the platform, however, I wanted a more 'traditional' (early internet) place to publish these blog posts. If you're already one of my Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram followers, fear not; my establishment of this blog is not to replace my currently-existing social media presences. If anything, I'm going to be adding to them by giving my analytical content a proper home.

I hope that Neocities and Dreamwidth will prove to be an enjoyable addition to my Internet-resources arsenal for years to come.