The Portrait With the Missing Piece
Digital Mirror Project — Entry #1
“So yeah, I have another story about my trip again. You might be asking, ‘why does this shit always happen to Ernie, and only Ernie?’ Half exaggeration, half fucked-up life. Always entertaining to read. (I’d wish to think, anyway)”
I wrote that in 1999. On Usenet. Before blogs were a thing, before I knew I’d eventually have a newsletter, before I had any idea I’d one day feed this sentence into a local language model and watch it get analyzed back at me with a flourish, like an up-close magician during cocktail hour.
I could have written that paragraph this morning.
Here’s what I’ve been doing: I’ve been trying to get all my writing ever (30 years, many of which hide in corners of the web and have been difficult to find), dump it in an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT, give it some prompts, and... well, see what happens.
The idea was to split everything into eras and ask the AI to characterize who I was in each one. What I cared about. What I was afraid of. How I saw myself.
Era Zero turned out to be weirder than I expected.
What the corpus found: a bunch of articles I wrote for iistix, an online defunct Asian American zine. And a stack of Usenet posts from my chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, a national co-ed service fraternity I ran for a semester.
The AI’s read on 1999 Ernie: preoccupied with his family’s dysfunction, specifically his sister’s schizophrenia and his parents’ refusal to deal with it. Angry underneath all the jokes. Trying to find community after college because home had never been a safe place to land. Worried about being left behind while everyone else paired off. Watching Asian men disappear from culture in real time and writing about it out loud when almost nobody else was.
It quoted me back to myself. The Bambi thing. The line about not having anywhere to turn. The one about my sister, about knowing her illness wasn’t her fault, and being furious anyway.
It was thorough.
It was kind of devastating.
And it was completely incomplete.
What it didn’t find: a parallel set of Usenet posts where I was quietly, clumsily trying to figure out how to come out.
Those posts existed. They’re just not in the corpus. I’m 100% sure I didn’t look hard enough, but I can’t recall the name of the Usenet group -- I think the word “college” is there? “lgbt”? Maybe? Either way, the machine did its best to analyze who I was in 1999 and produced a portrait that got a lot right but missed the thing I was most privately carrying.
Which is, honestly, kind of exactly what it felt like to be alive in 1999.
The analysis found all the right symptoms. The loneliness, the not-belonging, the fear of being left behind. It just didn’t know why.
It couldn’t.
But it did get the anger down. At first, I thought it was exaggerated, but thinking about it some more, I realized that, no, I really was very angry in college. People actually told me that verbatim. Ernie, you were so angry in college, and I thought to myself if my father and mother could be angry to each other in public like that then I would be ten times angrier and then after a while it became clear: if I didn’t walk that rage back somehow it would double up and consume itself, and I would be very lonely for a very long time.
There are more eras. I’ll keep going.