This was a loooong week. Recovering from last week’s sickness, getting some last minute details done on Become the Sky (cover by Sonya Lano) and, of course, finishing up Watching Jekyll and Hyde. Plus the usual little stuff like vet appointments, drugs to pickup, etc.
Exhausting. But productive. First off, my illness seems to have passed, though as usual the sore throat is lingering. I intend resting my voice over the weekend, giving my throat steam baths, etc. and then hopefully I’ll be ready to talk again without making things worse. I hate not talking but rest is essential with this, trust me. Unfortunately I’m still sleeping poorly — I’m not sure I’ll get back to normal until Watching Jekyll and Hyde is done.
Speaking of which, today I finished going over the galleys and making all necessary corrections (Mark Blankfield, in the photo above from Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again, was identified as Mark Blankfield, for instance). I’m disappointed, but not shocked, how many corrections I had to make. More disappointed that I don’t think my prose flows quite as smoothly as it did on The Aliens Are Here —I haven’t achieved the goal (as Kaye Gibbons put it once) of writing so the next word is inevitable. It’s still readable and informative and it’s possible I’m being hard on myself (we writers often are). Still next McFarland book I’ll definitely allow more time for polishing the prose.
I’d intended to make out the index before the galleys came back to me but oops, it seems I forgot. In fairness, it has been a hectic year—as you know if you read me regularly, taking care of our dogs sucked up a lot of energy this year. And it’s still doable by next Wednesday, just more of a push.
And in good news, the care for the dogs paid off. We took them in for their annual wellness exam today and everything looks good. Huzzah!
We have finished work on the Become the Sky anthology. Now it’s just a matter of telling Amazon and D2D to release it, assuming no odd problems crop up in them processing it (it happens). We have a launch party scheduled but we may not get the books in time to have them on hand—Amazon can be slow sending out author copies.
And that’s pretty much it. Intense work but not many colorful stories. Though speaking of stories, I have one Local Reporter story on the impact of federal SNAP program budget cuts to Orange County and one about a group fighting suicide on college campuses.
I’ll be working this weekend yet I’m still glad it’s here. Have fun, y’all. All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under The Dog Ate My Homework, Writing
I mean, accusing them of apathetic floats?
Or of ebbing energy levels and a lack of unity?
I came across these photos flipping through a yearbook during the Choctaw High School tour at my reunion. Fifty years later I’ve no idea if this denunciation of the 11th grade made sense to me at the time. Sure doesn’t now.
Filed under Personal
I ran into a bizarre, but apparently genuine post online recently. A tech guy bragged that when his wife wanted him to read their daughter a bedtime story over the phone he proposed an audiobook. Mom: no, she should hear your voice. Dad: I’ll have AI read it in my voice! Because when you work in AI, that’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking you come up with.
Next this assessment (not of that incident) by Rebecca Solnit: “A lot of what AI use amounts to is the abandonment first of mildly demanding activities and then the abandonment of your own belief you have capacity to do them, and then the actual ability to do them them. Maybe an abandonment/atrophy of natural intelligence.” She’s writing about Marissa Mayer, a techpreneur whose new LLM is supposed to save women the costs of emotional labor. In this case, a teacher asked Mayer for a list of three cool things about her kid; Mayer “likes cracking a hard problem” but for a challenge like this, she had her new proprietary AI, Dazzle, come up with answers. As Solnit says, this is undoubtedly partly a PR push for the tech — but it fits with so many other things I’ve blogged about. People repeatedly outsourcing stuff that’s within their power because it’s uncomfortable or they’re not sure they can say it perfectly and everyone knows a computer can do it better.
Wired, for example, looks at how tradpublishing is embracing AI, often without telling authors. Why have staff write responses to authors or offer critiques when you have a machine? Isn’t that better.
For another aspect, let’s talk this post:
Needless to say, I do not think the author of this post was ever writing a book And that’s said. It’s not just the ethics of pirating everyone else’s work, though that’s certainly a factor. Lots of authors start out imitating other authors. I did bad Lord Dunsany and Bad Lovecraft; I improved. Robert Bloch started out doing Bad Lovecraft and he improved a lot. If all you do is tell the LLM “turn my prompt into a Cthulhu Mythos story” you’ll never learn to do better.
Or consider Marc Andreessen’s argument that thanks to AI, someone with no set, no camera, no actors and no movie-making skills can still make a movie. That shit has never stopped a determined low-budget filmmaker: they’ve shot films in their basement, their living room, the street outside. They’ve used their neighbors or strangers on the street as actors. A lot of these films suck; some of them are great. Post-WW II Italian neorealist films were almost all shot on location with non-actors because Italy was in no shape for anything more sophisticated. And even the directors who made bad films had a chance to learn by doing. Telling your AI to make a movie — again, you learn nothing.
Like writers, tand-up comics steal from each other but there’s a limit to how much damage one comedian can do. Instagram, however, is allegedly allowing hundreds of AI comics to perform (for want of a better word) and they’re straight up stealing real people’s routines. After all, why should we get the benefits of our creativity or imagination when Silicon Valley wants it all?
In other AI notes:
Using LLMs to verify the logic of math proofs has become a game changer. Like so much else done with LLMs, the results aren’t reliable.
The hell of facing a job-application system run by computers.
“without feeling anything, without caring, they convince people that they are empathic, that people are being heard when they speak to machines. And what’s missing in that behavioral judgment of whether something is empathic is all of the things that empathy really does for a person, which involve my commitment to you, my caring about you, my being willing to sort of walk a little bit of the road with you”
It’s difficult to explain the utter nausea and dread that slid over me the morning after the 2016 election. I wasn’t sold by all the talk of a blue wave, I feared it could go the other way, but the stomach-churning unease when I discovered the Toddler had indeed been elected was nightmarish. TYG and I seriously discussed leaving the country, as a few people I know have done since. It wasn’t just the Toddler. It was seeing Republicans embrace him and how quickly they slid to an even more extreme position.
2020, by contrast, was a relief. Biden, sane, sober, sensible old dude, won the race. I knew the threat hadn’t gone away, but Biden and Harris beat it back. However we didn’t get the prophesied Blue Wave then either, making it rough going for Biden’s term.
Last night, though … shit. First black woman governor. The odiously corrupt Ken Paxton went down. Greg Abbott lost his grip on Texas (apparently all their statewide offices went to Dems). Suzanne Collins bit the dust. North Carolina replaced Thom Tillis (who wasn’t running) with former Dem governor Roy Cooper. Darlene Graham lost in South Carolina. Vivek Ramaswamy’s odious pro-pedophile ads didn’t save him in Ohio. We have a majority in the House and we flipped the Senate — and a year ago, plenty of smart politics nerds were saying that was an unattainable dream.
None of the scenarios where the Toddler declared martial law, seized all the voting machines, sent storm troopers to the polling places etc. happened. My occasional worries that techbros would somehow subvert the tech didn’t happen either.
The Toddler will undoubtedly respond with rage and irrational behavior, but let’s face it, if he’d retained control of Congress he’d push the envelope then too. The Toddler’s gonna toddle, no matter what.
There will be lots of analysis about what it means, what Dems should do when they’re seated in January. I may have some thoughts down the road. For the moment, I’m just going to groove on last night. It’s not the beginning of the end for Republican extremism, but it may turn out to be the end of the beginning. And it feels good.
Filed under Politics
My high school was Choctawhatchee Senior High School (in contrast to the junior high schools equivalent to middle schools). As you can imagine, the name lead to the school using a lot of Native American imagery. The fight song, for instance:
No, I have no idea why he’s green. And yes, the cultural appropriation aspect is more obvious to me now than it was back in the 1970s.
Anyway, all of that is a lead in to the first event of my 50th high school reunion last month, a tour of the school. A couple of years ago, I’d heard news reports Choctaw was falling apart. Despite tougher security than in our day—
It’s looking really nice inside.
Even the parking lot looks cooler.
Then came the pep rally
And here I am in the middle of the Class of ’76
If I look less than peppy, well, pep rallies were never my favorite thing to do. I went for the people, which was worth it.
I ran into quite a few friends but I’m uncomfortable about posting their photos online, especially as they wouldn’t mean anything to y’all. So I won’t.
All rights to art remain with current holders.
Filed under Personal
“The president has been accused of raping two women, one when she was as young as 13, and sexually assaulting three more. They are among 11 women who provided evidence or testimony that Trump “abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most infamous sex trafficker in history.” The NYT, however, is paying the charges less attention than Dem’s alleged hardball tactics in Alaska (which even if true, would be legal). From the first link (a piece at The Nation), a theory: “If asked, mainstream media types would no doubt argue that the lack of coverage of these latest rape allegations stems from the fact that previous rape allegations failed to “move the needle.” Trump’s sexual misconduct (both alleged and litigated) is “baked in” to people’s understanding of the man.”
As The Nation goes on to point out, so what? New accusations of rape are news. serious news. They should be reporting on them whether or not they “move the needle.” Plus, numbers matter. As Alec-Nevala Lee once put it, Isaac Asimov’s history of harassing and groping women stands out because he groped so many. Groping was common back then (which is not an excuse) but sheer numbers make Asimov a bigger deal. The more rapes the Toddler is accused of, the more serious the issue becomes.
And the idea that it won’t move the needle — which I suspect is the rationale — is bullshit because media coverage moves the needle. That’s why they wrote dozens of stories about Clinton’s email practices and Biden’s age. By contrast, the Times’ Patrick Healy says they ran a story on one of the allegations last year (it’s down in the comments here) so no point in running another. They can always put in diligent effort to shape perceptions of a candidate if they want to (consider a WaPO editorial shaping perceptions of the anticipated Democratic victory: a historic win would be bad news for Democrats).
And, of course, the DOJ covering up the Epstein case is an ongoing scandal and ongoing scandals remain news. Todd Blanche, a liar who claims you have to show ID to get into any restaurant (so why not for voting) appears to have steered Ghislaine Maxwell away from saying anything potentially awkward in interviewing her.
People Magazine has done much better than the NYT covering the new allegations. Hunter Lazzaro offers a depressing but plausible theory: “People’s journalists have long focused most of their coverage around young, attractive celebrities—people who are frequent targets of the entertainment industry’s grotesque and rampant rape culture. That is their wheelhouse.” It’s in their interests not to treat assault as a terrible problem. Maybe they don’t think it is. As Moira Donegan says, “Complicity, too, is typical, not uncommon, for responding institutions. Impunity for rapists is cast as good sense, or as responsibility; as fairness, or compassion.”
Filed under Politics
“Reunion rot” is still making me feel “meh” so why not some recent reading that did the same?
THE BULLET SWALLOWER by Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a magical realist Western jumping between a hardened Mexican outlaw in the 1800s (the title refers to a bullet that should have killed him ending up going down his throat with minimal damage) and his descendant, who plays cowboys in Mexican films and is slowly learning his family’s tangled, bloody history. The magical realist part is an angel of death watching over them to find out if his decision to spare a baby during an earlier tragedy will work out well for subsequent generations. This one’s not a bad book and well-written but very much not my kind of thing (literary and Western is the wrong mix for me).
(I fully realize Jack Kirby’s Omac isn’t swallowing bullets in the scene above, but work with me).
WHERE THE GRASS IS GREEN AND THE GIRLS ARE PRETTY by Lauren Weisberg (of Devil Wears Prada fame) has an anchorwoman mired in scandal when it appears her husband bribed Princeton to get their daughter into the Ivy League; in reality Mom did it herself, but grabbed his checkbook as the most convenient. Weisberg published this right after a similar real-life scandal but even if I’d read this when the topic was fresh, I can’t say I’d care for it. The arguments how this is totally different from the legal ways to bribe colleges (endow a chair say) are pretty flimsy and even though this proved a career-wrecking scandal in real life, it’s impossible to take seriously (a comedy about how shallow this is? That I might have accepted). I threw in the towel after 100 pages.
BATMAN ’66 MEETS THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES by Lee and Mike Allred (cover by Laura Allred) has the Legion travel back in time in hopes of recruiting the greatest teenage superhero of all — Robin the Boy Wonder — into their team only to wind up with Egghead running lose in the future and Universo hypnotizing Gotham City (I suspect the scene where the two bald villains notice how similar they look is a riff on a Silver Age meeting between Rama-Tut and Doctor Doom). This had some fun moments but they didn’t mesh as well as the other off-the-wall Batman’ 66 crossovers did.
SAY NOTHING: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe is something of a bait-and-switch (like One Fine Day and The CIA Book Club). While the book’s hook is the IRA murdering informant Jean McConville in 1972 (Keefe concludes that while the IRA was riddled with informers, she was probably innocent), the bulk of the book is a history of the Troubles, the IRA and prominent figures such as activist/hit-woman Dolours Price, occasionally and randomly jumping back to the McConville family. While the IRA history is certainly interesting, the book still feels off, like why is Keefe paying attention to this murder out of so many?
All rights to images remain with current holders.
The con crud I got from my reunion trip left me too wiped to get any movie reviews written, but bey, it’s October 31st …
First, from our local Walgreens.
From a store we sometimes stop at when we’re taking the dogs to PT.
A house in our neighborhood.
And a little black cat Trixie and I spotted just off the local walking paths a few weeks baack.
Filed under Miscellanea
As y’all already know, last Thursday I flew into Fort Walton Beach for Choctawhatchee High School’s Class of ’76 reunion. As I often do I dithered about when to fly and was I picking the best flight and so I wound up paying more and traveling at less convenient times. I left from Raleigh-Durham Airport at 6:30, got there well ahead of time (as the airlines always recommended) and it was indeed surprisingly busy.
One of my must-have requirements is a big enough time when I change flights (I always have to) that I can make it. I had an hour in Nashville and fortunately the flight was on time as the arrival and departure were gates were literally at the very end of two different terminals. Made it, then to Fort Walton Beach.
As usual I stayed with my best friend Cindy, her sister Debbie and my sister Tracy (they’re housemates). And Cindy’s dog Raven, a very friendly, licky black lab. Here Raven checks me out on the airbed.
My brother Craig showed up too, as it was his 45th reunion. No photos of him though.
The events included a school tour, a round of Goofy Golf, dinner at the Yacht Club, an afternoon on the Okaloosa Island Boardwalk and Sunday brunch at a local restaurant. In between I hung out with Cindy and my siblings and occasionally stared out at the back yard.
It’s even better seen with the naked eye.
Sunday, after all was wrapped up, I got the bad news that my flight out had been delayed … and eventually delayed so much it would land in Charlotte after my flight to Raleigh left. Siiiigh. Tracy and Craig went with me to the airport. The American Airlines desk booked me into a hotel for the night with a $12 food credit. It turned out to be a “minitel” as you can see from this shot of the room.
It was a good enough room under the circumstances, even if the desk clerk’s reference to a “bug problem” elsewhere had me expecting the worst (apparently no bedbugs in my room at least). Unfortunately by the time I got in I had very little time to sleep before I had to get up and get back to the Charlotte Airport (CLT — some people read a lot into that particular airport code). And the timing of the minitel’s shuttle meant I had to spend money on a Lyft.
Once I got to the airport everything was smooth and I finally got home. Unfortunately I had the reunion equivalent of “con crud” — reunion rot, I’m calling it. Much like past viral incidents, it starts in my throat which is vulnerable because of asthma, and because my breath control when I speak is terrible and puts a strain on my voice. And I spoke a lot last weekend. It’s been so long since I had an incident, I’ve gotten slack about improving that; that’s going to have to change. Fortunately as it’s not my first rodeo I drove to the Urgent Care (a five minute walk, not that I wanted to walk) and got meds. I’m on the mend but still keeping largely silent; talking because I’m all better is how I undercut being all better. Oh, and the hacking has largely robbed me of sleep.
So my plans to bounce back with four days of work became a cropper. I did somehow get two stories in for The Local Reporter (not up online yet) and two Atomic Junk Shop posts: a look at the advertising for Jonah Hex’s debut and Gary Friedrich’s gratuitously sexist run writing Captain America.
His black power scenes aren’t too hot either (art by John Romita).
But now all that’s done, I can focus almost entirely on proofing and indexing Watching Jekyll and Hyde! At last!
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Nonfiction, Personal, Time management and goals, Writing
