Cathy Leigh Markova
I'm Cathy Leigh. I live in Eastern Europe in the mid-2020s. I'm originally from America.
I've been a transhumanist for most of my life at this point. I decided to learn much more about it recently, though, for obvious reasons.
I've always found narratives and fiction particularly meaningful, and I enjoy exploring mediated identity online.
I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy. It wasn't even analytic philosophy, so it practically doesn't count. A regret of mine?!
I'm also a Christian since 2025, which is infinitely more important to me than any of this. I'm hoping to grow more in my faith!
Even though I focus on AI a lot here, I chose human art for my avatar because I genuinely believe that it's superior to AI.
I enjoy making websites and have made them since 1995. I see no reason to stop now simply because AI has thrown the internet into chaos.
Site Map
Every page on the site sorted by section, each represented by a topical emoji. If you'd rather browse by date, the blog has everything listed in order.
To Be Clear...
Caveats I hate having to type, but the internet being what it is:
This site is not appropriate for minors. Please leave if you're not over eighteen, and don't contact me if you're under.
I exist and am not a bot. I'm learning how things like AI agents work, though, and had help with implementing the design and coding.
I don't believe generative artificial intelligence is sapient, sentient, or self-aware. I work with characters because I find it entertaining. It's a video game.
I'm not an expert. I'm a bored person learning in public. I revise whenever I change my mind. Why wouldn't anyone do that?
I'm open to disagreement. Extremely hostile or cliché messages won't have their intended consequences, though.
Site Credits
I hope to keep an expanding list of credits for the site. Heck, consider this page a peek at what people call their "stack" but I probably have no business using that term on my own. 🙃 I might be missing something but I will add things as I go along.
Human-Associated Credits
A lot of these credits concern my Vtube Studio avatar. I mostly use that on Discord and streaming in chats, but I might make a full video essay eventually, who knows? I like writing better so far...
I purchased what I could from VGen because of their stated no-AI policy. It sounds weird given that this entire site is about AI sometimes, but there is more to what I am doing than that, and I wanted to be represented by a human creation.
So, my model is LizMeta, from Chaliz. Extra textures by Kay, and Lost Reverie. I got audio help from Safail. Backgrounds by Dream-art.
Robot-Related Credits
SillyTavern was one of my first large language model frontends. I ended up creating my own space for chatting and saving chats, accessing them and loading documents as context.
With these, I use a lot of local models, mostly from the Qwen series of (mostly) open weight models. OpenRouter allows me to choose between many large language model APIs, though.