Sci-fi game writing sample.

I did a writing sample for one of my applications:

So far out from Earth, I’m twirling in stardust. At the end of radio waves, where we last heard the warm human voices we knew, at the edge of the two hundred light-year bubble. This is an aimless mission to nowhere places. I think the mission journal should be read as a dark comedy, not reported interactions of an inquisitive human. Every planet a cruel joke where we get life and biomes that seem less and less like Earth. After the first fifty stifling atmospheres, eighty blobs of gelatinous prokaryotes that we laughingly classify as lifeforms, and one hundred poisonous soups called oceans, Earth seems more and more a fairy tale. Will we ever see it again? Farther and farther it seems to recede. The geniuses who sent us here without a reliable star map to get back home with fuel sources along the way set us up to practically go on fumes. Rarely, we encounter sunsets that are a wondrous pale yellow like Sol, dipping into mountains and oceans that look promising, but are only ephemeral dreams of lush green and teeming sea. The bright flecks of burning sand we pass every day through the vacuum incinerate those dreams of mine, which are nothing but vaporous excitement that there would be spiritual life.

– From Eval to…Pt. 2: Empowerment & Education, or Quality & Brand –

Aside from the more technical roles for us evaluators (some say “power users”) I mentioned last, I came upon two other options: AI Documentation & Literacy Specialist and AI Content Specialist.

For the first, I have previously built simple tutorials and led some lunch-and-learns on web skills at my positions and so was interested in that this position can fit “educator-writers.” I want to leverage my writing, explaining, and evaluation skills. I like to make tech, including AI, easy to access and useful, and material of this type produced includes “plain English” guides, interactive tutorials, safety checklists, FAQs, and ethical usage policies. I can create, update, and maintain these materials and help thousands of people. I take the complex, evolving topics and break them down for companies–or grandmothers. It’s about empowerment and education, while simplifying.

The second involves infusing company products with soul and empathy, while maintaining editorial standards. Your products will come across more human, not robot. Products can include: master AI style guides, prompts to generate perfect articles, scripts, and reports. It’s about quality and brand, while performing high-level editing and matching tone.

The first is mission, the second is craft. Educational strategy v. high-level editorial oversight.

In both of these capacities, I can apply my journalism background and my attention to clarity, tone, and usefulness in my AI analysis.

I did a little job projection research and it does seem like the AI Documentation & Literacy Specialist is a role for which demand will remain steadier over the long term. Meanwhile, AI Content Specialist has a current high availability of positions and may evolve into the orchestrator, an expert who manages multiple outputs to ensure quality (much spoken about right now).

I presented these as two more options for the AI analyst/evaluators who like me want to move forward into more responsibility and impact (and career potential). For me, I am leaning more to the education side. It seems like the more “future-proof” because companies are realizing that using the tech safely and effectively is a demand that will not go away. Internal training materials and public-facing literacy guides will always be needed.

I may continue this in a third part as I go, but to my fellow evaluators, do you have a trajectory you are interested in? Love to hear from you on what you are doing or planning!

– From Eval to…Pt. I: Experimentation –

I learned from a prospective employer that the work I and other employees have done is more that of “power users.” It wasn’t diminishing what I’ve done, just a more accurate description. Still made me want to level up.

So one direction is either getting the best out of my experience as a power user or going beyond prompting and response evaluation. Now I’m in the learning trenches, battling it out with my lack of knowledge. I’ve been going deeper into the world behind the tools we use every day.

I’m learning the difference between a few extended career paths, and the first set of options are: LLM evaluation engineers, machine learning research engineers, and applied AI scientists. How do they think, how do they test, how do they iterate, and how do they measure performance beyond just “good output”?

Understanding prompt intuition is only one layer. (It’s different from my JavaScript skills as well, though those help.) Evaluation design, controlled experimentation, model behavior analysis, and measurable improvement are what separate power users from builders. I’m putting on my lab coat.

I’ll keep you updated on how this goes.

Love and Deep Space

In China, there are 30-35 million more men than women and Chinese women have five lovers to choose from.

Love and Deep Space is the first 3D otome video game, originating from China, and has garnered its share of female western players. The player stars as a female protagonist with their choice of one of five androgynous male characters as romantic partners. While the game has a central quest and the typical gacha elements (in-game purchases of virtual items), players can collect photos of themselves with their AR boyfriends in real-world environments.

This past January over 790,000 users played, down to about 475,000 this month, the majority being women aged 18-34, mainly of Chinese demographic.
But what is driving young women to pursue companionship with virtual characters instead of IRL men?

AI characters offer emotional rather than physical interaction. The facts on the ground in China are exacerbating the difference between the genders.

The dynamics resulting from the male-female disparity in China are increased opportunities for educated urban women, rural males having consequently less choice, and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 shutdown, something much more severe than Westerners encountered, resulting in widespread loneliness.

In China, there is a saying that “hand machines” (phones) create ghosts — or suck out your soul. People are known to charge their phones three or more times a day. The addiction breeds more loneliness.

We might look to Japan as the place where tech trends originate (sometimes passing through South Korea to China).
In that country, the AI toy Kirobo is used to keep the elderly company. It has its uses, but at what cost? The machine is family now.

AI, phones, robots, all artificial, all taking the human away.

The CCP’s “Land of Infinite Hope” vision for 2035 (always a lot of plans), where the party aims for more AI automation in factory labor, households, and government services, has the potential to make unemployment and loneliness much worse. Artificial lovers seem a harbinger of what is to come.

Will specialization get you there?

I stumbled into the first full-time work I had. Out of a journalism graduate degree, my skills were general enough to fit into web design and development. But the nature of the work shifted over the years. Now being able to do the rudimentary work of the front end, with a minimum of Javascript, is not sufficient for the development positions of today. As in many other fields, only specialization will get you the long-term role. Additionally, a well-crafted prompt will do the development in short order.

I subsequently got into blogging about cyber. I put up a hard fight against generated pieces and SEO-driven creative predictability.

More recently, evaluating, annotating, and rewriting responses made me realize what the models are capable of, but also of my supreme value to employers who need an indispensable human guide to these processes. However, the roles for generalists are waning and subject matter expertise is becoming more valued.

That’s what I wanted to focus on. The value of the human.

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller with a challenge to the conventional wisdom that early specialization is the key to success. He argues that generalists are the ones who excel, against the grain that says specialization is the way to the future. Epstein asserts that generalists have the creativity, intellectual agility, and connection-building ability that specialized people do not.

But the evolution of the job market challenges this claim. Non-AI companies are “trimming” (firing) those employees who are not specialized, certain roles in particular. Gone are entry-level analysts and loan officers, HR and recruiting professionals, offshore call centers for Tier-1 support, middle management and logistical coordinators, generalist software engineers, and various roles relating to “efficiency” cuts (see DOGE). Simultaneously, hiring of new grads at top firms has dropped 25% since 2023. The rumored cuts were realized.

From 2025 to 2026, the “structural rebalancing” and trimming on certain industries included:
– The finance and fintech sector saw entry-level analysts and loan officers being cut.
– Big tech (non-AI) saw Amazon and Microsoft cut ~45,000 roles combined, mostly in “experimental” hardware and HR/recruiting.
– Customer service saw the disappearance of many offshore call centers.
– Retail and e-commerce saw middle management and logistics fired.
– Software companies have been letting go generalist software engineers and specialists-only employee hiring.
– Government and federal cuts of over 300,000 due to federal “efficiency.”
– Meta and Snap announced cuts to about 10% and 16%, respectfully, of staff prioritizing infrastructure over employee headcount.

The trends are toward the specialist.

In software, AI handles the boilerplate, documentation, and basic debugging. Cybersecurity, cloud, data engineering, qualitative researchers, AI-risk auditors, and supply chain automation engineers are growing areas. Roles around AI ethics and compliance have grown over 142% year-over-year. User experience designers who focus on how humans interact with LLM interfaces are getting a bump.

But Epstein may have a valid argument. He suggests that while specialization is useful for “closed, predictable” environments, the modern world is characterized by problems that require people to connect knowledge across fields and domains. In the new tooled culture, employees who can orchestrate the different models and tools to automate a department’s workflow will get the interest of recruiters. Generalists with the weapon of integrating and synthesizing skillfulness will dominate.

It’s a mess of models and functionality. A hundred models, hundreds of uses. Someone has to organize it. You must either build it or you must make it all happen for your employer.

Back to Helping with Tech

My contract at Google has ended, currently contracting with Mercor, but looking for more stable work.

I am also currently working for Senior Tech Connect, getting my bearings on instructing older adults. It’s my goal. I love helping people learn, protect themselves, and grow. Last week, we were discussing cybersecurity at Solana Beach Community Connections, including being aware of fake Amazon, UPS, Netflix, and other company emails and identifying signs of scams, and what to do if compromised. We encouraged skepticism and proper responses.

This Tuesday we’ll be in Imperial Beach discussing hardware. Looking forward to it.

Foundation

Shaky ground right now. It goes without saying, can’t rely on man.

Been reading Lamb on Shakespeare as unfit for the stage. He was speaking of two different actors, one from a hundred years prior and another perhaps 40 years earlier. The spread of time is incredible and those actors’ and Lamb’s memories are rarely thought of.

There’s comfort that our tears are kept by Him.

The shame that haunts

The turmoils of night and day,
The mistakes that arose,
A celestial voice bade me let you go,
Voices of confused innards,
The pacing of floors at midnight,
Yearning for what was out there
Out beyond myself.
A short respite came,
But still did you need to fly from me,
My poesy misapplied,
My incapable self.
Fly away.
Fly to your love.
Do not think of me,
Only pray for my spirit.

Remaking/destroying

Lewis said someone could be both evil and stupid (referring to Hitler). I’m not going to make the Hitler comparison, but I will focus on one subject, taken together, today: deletion and remaking.

The discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism raised the question of what happened to that civilization? What else had that civilization done?

Was it someone purposefully destructive of culture and technology that had sunken that ship? Was it some politician who had shattered norms and exalted himself? The historic statues on Buddha in Afghanistan were considered blasphemous and were destroyed.

You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. As the flames of Alexandria leapt, the librarian wept.

Construction

Interesting the language of the times of the recent luminaries like Lewis and Tolkien, where the meaning of the sentence depends on its end. Similar to German, where the verb comes at the end. It takes some careful following of each thought until we know the conclusion.

Planning

I had the opportunity to join a web seminar on planning research and writing for the summer, but was embarrassed that i don’t need planning since nothing is going on.

Is this something that happens when you age or just for some people?

I’ve mentioned my lack of family before. There’s no one to live your life for but yourself. But you can leave something created, which is my plan right now.

Comparisons

It’s always revelatory to compare yourself with people who are more successful and/or took a different road than you. Being in your own silo shields from good and bad.

Politics is one such silo. A policy may sound good, but on exposure to real conditions can show its foolhardiness.

Excerpts p.1

Excerpt 1 from Ascension Ceres:

Two hours later, E and Perry saw the TGS headquarters building. Once a gleaming glass and electrically-lit edifice, it had now been shattered by projectile weapons and sparked electricity. The bus stopped and E helped Perry get out and sat her down on the stairs to the main door. He saw people scurrying out carrying cardboard boxes full of possessions.
“I’ll try to be fast.”
E entered the building and found a console kiosk and logged in. He accessed the personnel system, but there was too much to go through. How could he get W’s real name? Useless. Then he remembered Perry mentioning her family. He perused the records for Puncher and found an address. He saved it, but what next?
E ran to the wood and gold building directory and skimmed down the list until he saw “7A-7X.” Hmm. He stopped a security guard as he was leaving.
“Is the seventh floor still occupied?”
“Sorry, no information there,” said the guard, “but you should get out of here ASAP.”
Seeing the elevators were not safe, E took the stairs up. He found himself in a hallway of frosted glass and silver-handled door knobs. Let’s see, A, B, C and he jogged down to W. Finding the door locked, he tried to break in with the butt of his EM gun, but couldn’t. Just then the door opened.
Track 6922 opened the door and E could see a couple of other people clearing out shelves and cupboards.
“A massive cyberattack shut down TGS three days ago,” said 6922. “All management has left. Which model are you looking for?”
“Where is W?”
“She’s at these coordinates,” he said while handing him a mini-crystal. “Be careful out there, and—just know that she won’t know who you are. And you may not like what you find.”

***
E opened the hatch from the selftaxi and a light drizzle hit him. He looked up at the sun covered in red mist.
“Wait here,” he said to Perry. She nodded.
E squished through the mud until he got on the stone path. Around him there was only five feet of visibility in the fog.
He walked until he saw a small, lone, glass-domed building in front of him, right where Track said it would be.
He knocked. She opened the door and looked up at him. She was wearing a yellow parka and her green eyes were under black hair.
“You’re real.”
She nodded.
“Do you remember me?”
“One of my favorites,” she said with her natural-sounding voice.
“What does it all mean?”
“I’m just a stand-in. What are you looking for?”
E shook his head.
There was supposed to be companionship in Eden. This was a farce.
“You’re just an employee. You’re complicit.”
“Look, I didn’t mean any harm to you.”
“No one means harm in the Ocean.”
E turned and jogged back to the taxi.
“Wait,” cried W.
E sat next to Perry.
“What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
The small EV sped toward the aurora nuclearus. They were frightened of what would happen.

***