My beach romances have been disasters.

On the Silver Strand in Coronado, a date tried to teach me to surf. I nearly drowned. I called it quits after a hard face-plant off the surfboard and into the wet sand. A date once left me stranded on McAbee Beach in Monterey when I refused to sing a Kenny Rogers song with him during karaoke. I sat in the dark on the cold sand for an hour, waiting for a ride home. On East Beach in Santa Barbara, I tried to impress a date with a from-scratch picnic, but sand got into everything. (Pro tip: Sand always gets into everything.) He teased me about the inedible, sand-crusted “crunchy chicken.”

But I thought my luck had changed when I met a handsome musician in Pismo Beach.

He was playing guitar and singing at Harry’s Night Club & Beach Bar, a block from the pier. He was tall, good-looking and funny. I was there with friends for a wedding after-party. He flirted with me from the stage and made me laugh. After his set, he invited me to go for a walk. Daylight on the beach is nice, what with the sunshine and all, but moonlight on the beach is incredible. He leaned in and kissed me, and I let him. I blame moon magic and too many Coronas with lime.

A month later, a friend took me to Pismo Beach for my birthday. We drove south in my Ford Mustang convertible with the top down and parked in the beach parking lot. Across the street from Harry’s. Where the hot musician was playing. Again. We spent the afternoon there. He asked us to stay when his band loaded in for the nighttime set, and we did.

And then … well, it was my birthday. I hooked up with the hot musician.

I didn’t see it as anything more than a starry-eyed fling that began on a warm summer night in a funky little beach town. Turns out, flirting was his thing. He flirted with women in every town with a beach in San Luis Obispo County: Avila Beach, Moonstone Beach, Spooner’s Cove, Cayucos State Beach, Morro Strand State Beach. It was part of the act, he said, and besides, we weren’t serious.

When we were alone, he was charming and attentive. He drove to the North County to be with me every night, even after late-night gigs that were often an hour or more away. Over time, I let myself fall hard. The only problem was that I was looking for long-term love, and he wasn’t.

He broke my heart again and again. And I beat my head against the wall trying to turn him into someone he was never going to be.

Then one day, he said the most honest words I’ve ever heard anyone say: “I know I can be self-centered, and I know that doesn’t work for you. But it’s worked for me all my life, so I don’t see that changing.”

I know he meant it when he told me that he loved me. He waited almost a year to say those words for the first time. But I realized then that being in love meant something different to him from what it meant to me. Our mistake wasn’t falling in love. It was trying to force a love that didn’t suit either of us.

Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I didn’t believe him the dozens of times he showed me that he wasn’t going to settle down, but I believed him when he told me flat out. And I knew I deserved something more.

I’ve never had a knack for keeping a boyfriend. But I do have a knack for staying friends with ex-boyfriends, and the hot musician was no exception. We went to the movies sometimes and we stayed in touch, even after he moved a thousand miles away nearly 10 years ago to care for his elderly mother.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I moved south from downtown San Luis Obispo to Pismo Beach to be closer to the water. I am a writer and an introvert who kind of enjoyed having an excuse to stay home all the time. But the isolation was too much even for me. So I moved into a 100-year-old beach bungalow a half-block from the ocean. After being confined to my house for months alone, I felt such freedom walking on the beach every day without a mask. There were always other human beings on the beach with me, and although we were physically distant from one another, I felt a connection to them. I breathed in the cold, crisp air so deeply my lungs hurt.

Then the hot musician reached out to me after his mother died. He was sad and alone too. I invited him to come back home, back to Pismo Beach, to rent the spare bedroom in my bungalow, two blocks from the beach bar where our failed romance began. He moved in, and we took walks together out to the end of the pier, on the same beach where we’d once shared a kiss.

First, we fell in love. Then we were friends. We were friends for a long time. And then 20 years after we first met, we became roommates. He’s in the other room as I write this, probably watching basketball. Maybe “Family Guy.” He takes the trash out now and then. He brings me tortilla chips, so I get enough salt. Sometimes cheesecake — last night, my favorite Meyer lemon. He still makes me laugh. But we’re both different people now, and he no longer breaks my heart.

I never found lasting love at the beach. But I did find a lasting friendship. And it took me way too long, but I found a determination to be true to myself. For now, those things are more than enough.

The author, a lifelong Californian who earned an MFA from UC Riverside Palm Desert, is the fiction editor for Kelp Journal. You can read her work at leannephillips.com. She’s on Instagram: @leannebythesea

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

The character Aerith Gainsborough in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

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If you’re not entrenched in the world of video games, you might not realize how much real actors have to do with modern gaming.

They provide everything from a few lines of dialogue for side characters in games, to recording hundreds or even thousands of very emotional lines, says Michigan State professor Amanda Cote, who studies the industry and culture of gaming.

“So really storyline-driven games, something like Mass Effect or a Far Cry, you’re recording hundreds of lines of dialogue to cover the many different storyline branches that a player could potentially encounter. And you’re trying to make sure that all of those make sense with the changing storyline,” she says.

“This isn’t like a movie where there’s one version of the script and you might do several takes of it, but the overall story is the same. This is recording potentially different endings, different storyline arcs, making sure that those all stay coherent with how your character might develop along those different lines.”

There are also performance capture artists – they wear bodysuits with sensors and their movements are captured digitally on camera, which later gets computerized.

Some of the biggest game studios rely on voice and performance capture artists, and all this adds up to big bucks. The video game industry made close to $185 billion last year.

But not everyone is happy.

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Generative AI is a sticking point

Video game performers are currently on strike.

Their union, SAG-AFTRA, had been in contract negotiations with major video game companies for more than a year and a half. Cote says performers are seeking things like clearer safety and protection measures — such as receiving a five minute break per hour of on-camera work, or having an on-set medic present when they’re performing stunts — and that it appears the union and video game producers have found good terms on most of those issues.

But those talks have stalled over artificial intelligence.

Veronica Taylor is one of the many video game actors who are worried that the companies they work for could replace them with artificial intelligence or use their voices and motions in ways they did not consent to. She says it’s already happening.

“I have found my voice in voice banks where people can take my voice and make it say things I’ve never said,” she told NPR.

The companies say they offered AI protections, but union members say they don’t extend to everyone.

Stunt performers and those whose motions are captured digitally are concerned that video game companies could create digital replicas of their physical work without their consent.

“What they are saying is that some of these performances, specifically for movement, is just data,” says Andi Norris, a member of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee who has worked on games like Predator: Hunting Grounds. “I can crawl all over the floor and the walls as, you know, such-and-such creature, and they will argue that that is not performance, and so that is not subject to their AI protections.”

She argues her work is not just a data point, it’s done by her as a real person.

Performers who spoke to NPR say it’s important to recognize that they aren’t arguing that AI can never or should never be used in games — they just want to make sure that uses of AI are clear, understandable and compensated.

Members go on strike

Zeke Alton, who is also on the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee, says performers are the canary in the coalmine of the new technology.

“We are setting a precedent for how the workforce in both the United States and around the world is going to be treated,” he says. “Are they going to use this new emergent technology as tools for creatives, and for workers, to create efficiency? Or is this tool going to be used by executives to remove the worker?”

SAG-AFTRA union video game performers strike outside Warner Bros. Games on Thursday.

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Cote says generative AI is potentially destabilizing to the creative industries in general, but specifically in gaming.

“When we look at something like AI in live action settings, we run into the issue of the ‘uncanny valley’ where the face of an AI character looks just a little bit odd to us,” he says. “But when we’re thinking about industries like voice acting or motion capture, the work that performers do in that context is then attached to digital avatars in animation. So we don’t get that ‘uncanny valley’ effect because the final result is a digital avatar. And so this may make the use of generative A.I. easier in games than other industries.”

Video game voice and motion actors, whose human performances become computer data, say they are especially vulnerable to being replaced by generative AI. And their collective bargaining now will inform the ways we think about this technology going forward.

A spokesperson for the video game companies involved in the negotiations released a statement saying the companies and the union have already found common ground on 24 out of 25 proposals — and that they are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when they are close to a deal. The video game companies say they’re prepared to resume negotiations.

Editor’s note: Many NPR employees are members of SAG-AFTRA, but are under a different contract and are not on strike.

This episode was produced by Brianna Scott. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon and Clare Lombardo. NPR’s Art Correspondent Mandalit Del Barco contributed reporting. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.