Month: March 2024

Weekly Round-up, March 30, 2024

John Winkelman

The view West from the second floor gymnasium at the West Michigan YWCA.

[The above photo was taken on March 30, facing west out of one of the windows in the second-floor gymnasium of the West Michigan YWCA, at the beginning of tai chi class.]

This was the second week of a hellish two-week sprint at work which had me putting in hours like I have not done in years. But the work is in the bag for the moment, at least until the QA people get their hands on my code.

Reading

In anticipation of National Poetry Month, I have started The Selected Prose and Poems of Paul Celan, which I purchased from Books and Mortar back in the autumn of 2023.

Writing

A lot of journaling. Not a lot of creative writing, except for snippets which sneak into the journals.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Artificial Intelligence, Dragons
Setting: Ship
Genre: Romance

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, March 23, 2024

John Winkelman

Facing south down the connector from northbound Division Ave to Michigan Street.

[I took this photo when walking home from work. The viewpoint is facing south down the connector from northbound Division Ave to Michigan Street, just west of the hospitals.]

We’re in the final stretch of the big project at work so I spent most of this week, well, working. Any time spent not-working was spent recovering from work. I suspect much of the rest of spring will be like this.

Reading

I finished Loaded, which was a good history of the Second Amendment, and its basis in, and magnification of, the built-in racist flavor of American culture. Now I’m reading a few shorter works, like last month, which is appropriate for my unfortunately limited time and attention availability right now. Right now I am working my way through “Bartleby, the Scrivener“, the short story by Herman Melville, in a collection of two(!) short stories published in 1995 as part of Penguin’s 60th anniversary collection “Penguin 60s”. Other than Moby-Dick, this is the only Melville I have read. I love it.

Writing

Bupkis.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Relic, Environment
Setting: Bar
Genre: Utopian

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, March 16, 2024

John Winkelman

Looking East across the Grand River at the Sixth Street Bridge Dam, at sunrise.

[The photo this week was taken from the fish ladder on the west side of the Sixth Street Bridge dam, facing east into the sunrise.]

This past Sunday, feeling exhausted and also nostalgic, I dusted off an old Lenovo ThinkPad 11e, fixed some issues it had with continually dropping its internet connection, and turned it into my retro gaming machine. I have scores of games purchased over the years from GOG.com, so I installed a few of them – Hammerwatch, Ultima IV, and others.

One of my favorite games from back in the 1980s was Telengard, a sort of graphic roguelike which I played A LOT on my Commodore 64. There are a few ports and remakes available now, but while I found a few that could be played online, I didn’t find any which I could successfully install on the ThinkPad. No big deal; there are ways to get around this, including porting the Commodore BASIC source code to Javascript and having it run in the browser. It wouldn’t take long; anything that could run on a C64 is miniscule compared to even the most rudimentary of games available now.

But my research turned up one interesting bit of trivia: Back in 2005 someone released an updated version of Telengard, which I had downloaded and played once upon a time. That person was Travis Baldree, who wrote the absolutely wonderful book Legends and Lattes. Baldree is one of the developers of Torchlight, also one of my favorite games, and one which I played A LOT back around 2012 – 2015.

Reading

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I picked this up in June 2018 at City Lights Bookstore, when my partner and I spent several days in San Francisco at the end of a two-week vacation that started with stops in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Writing

Another week with little writing, though I do have a plan to start some deep worldbuilding for the rewrite of my 2022 NaNoWriMo project Cacophonous. Just too much noise in the world right now.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Reincarnation, Fae
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Literary Fiction

Listening

John Zorn, Baphomet.

I’ve been a fan of John Zorn since I first heard his album The Gift while sitting in Common Ground Coffee House in the early 2000s. “Baphomet” is a single track and also an album, prog rock by way of avant-garde jazz, and a fantastic listen. I think the theme music for writing Cacophonous, when I finally get around to it, will be Zorn’s oeuvre, mixed and randomized and on heavy rotation.

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, March 9, 2024

John Winkelman

Revolving door into the Keeler building in downtown Grand Rapids

Another super-busy week. The only time I had to myself was on the walk to and from work on Monday and Wednesday. That’s when I took this photo of the entrance to the Keeler building on Fountain Street.

Reading

I am close to done with Babel by R.F. Kuang, and loving every page of it.

Writing

Not much writing to speak of this week, other than the March 2024 Insecure Writer’s Support Group post, which discusses generative AI and its effect on creative types.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Aliens, Super Powers
Setting: Bar
Genre: Noir

Listening

John Zorn and the New Masada Quartet

Interesting Links

 

IWSG, March 2024: So This Generative AI Thing…

John Winkelman

Pepper, looking out the window.

February sprinted as much as January dragged. Now here in March maybe we can settle down into something resembling a predicable routine.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2024 is: Have you “played” with AI [sic] to write those nasty synopses, or do you refuse to go that route? How do you feel about AI’s [sic] impact on creative writing?

First, the answer to the first question: I haven’t written a synopsis in a very long time, and in the event I write another I will do it myself. I suppose one of the LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) could be used (if not necessarily useful) but given the time I would undoubtedly need to spend fine-tuning the output, I might as well write the thing myself.

Now on to the second question.

In every case where the (creative, not business-related) output of an LLM has been compared to “real” writing, the output is inferior to text written by a human, unless the original text was also…not that great. Since the output of an LLM is not writing, as such, I will focus on the reaction of writers and the craft of writing, rather than the impact on the culture of creative writing.

As I stated in an earlier IWSG post, the biggest issue is the flooding of markets with the output of LLMs which (in an analog to Gresham’s Law), will inevitably drown out the work produced by real people. And if these machine-produced texts aren’t as good as that which can be produced by a human, that won’t matter to readers who settle for “good enough” when looking for reading material. And, frankly, that’s the majority of readers.

So the current, ongoing, and inevitable flooding of the marketplace with LLM-generated texts will have two major consequences.

First, writers will need to continually improve their craft in order to produce work which is notably more accomplished than that created by algorithms.

And second, the percentage of works which are human-created and genuinely good will continue to dwindle (even if their actual numbers increase) simply because LLMs can produce texts much (!) faster than humans can, and statistically, the number of genuinely good works produced by LLMs will increase (even as, again, the percentage decreases, as the artificial output continues to flood the marketplace), which puts additional pressure on human writers to (a) improve their skills, (b) increase their output, (c) make their writing voice uniquely their own, and (d) spend more time marketing themselves and their works in order to distinguish themselves from the mountain of scratchings extruded by stochastic parrots.

So the effect on creative writing will be that generated writing drowns out creative writing. Readers will be less able – to the extent that it matters to them – to distinguish between text which was written and text which was generated.

There are few easy ways to counter this trend. Such is the world we live in.

For authors the easiest is probably to create, build, and maintain real-world connections with other real people. Establish and strengthen your bona-fides by proving that you are a real person, and by interacting with other real people – readers, editors, publishers, fans, all of them. And this means having a presence outside of social media (which on the major platforms at this point is well over 50% bots and spam accounts). Even a personal blog is a big step in the right direction.

That’s the one thing LLMs, neural nets, and the other technologies can’t do: Impersonate us in the real world.

Yet.

 

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Weekly Round-up, March 2, 2024

John Winkelman

Maple Tree Budding, February 27, 2024

Life is still busy, leaving little time for relaxing and sinking into the state of mind where reading and writing is frictionless. Since the previous update we had a record-breaking warm day, then a sudden drop in temperature which broke the record for the largest 24-hour drop in temperature (50+ degrees F). The maple trees started budding a week ago, and spring peepers are making their little noises in the swamps, and mosquitoes are beginning to swarm around porch lights. And all this in February.

This reminds me somewhat of the previous Year of the Dragon in 2012, when the outside temperature reached almost 80° on St Patrick’s Day. That’s only a couple of weeks from now, and the odds of something like that are looking better every day.

Reading

Currently reading Babel, by R.F. Kuang.

Writing

I am attempting to re-start a writing exercise I practices before the COVID lockdowns – on those days I walk to work, pay attention to the small details of the world, and when I get to work, jot down five things which captured my attention. So far I have managed to do that exactly once. It’s been a busy year. But I am adjusting.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Fae, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Ship
Genre: War

Listening

“Eyeball Kid” is on Tom Waits‘ 1999 album Mule Variations. I listened to this a lot when I worked at Cybernet Engineering, my first “real” web development job, and the second of several terrible web developments jobs. It’s a fantastic album and well worth a listen, particularly when laboring under a bout of existential angst.

I know you can’t speak,
I know you can’t sign;
So cry right here on the dotted line.

Interesting Links

February 2024 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

Now that I am no longer trapped under a volume of Dostoevsky I can resume my normal reading pace. In February I completed 16 books and journals. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but I purposefully picked the shorted unread books on my bookshelves. The combined word-count of these 16 books is probably less than a third of what I read in Dostoevsky’s Demons, which took almost two months to finish. And a lot of that was not because of the length of the book, but because it was Dostoevsky, and 1,000 words of Dostoevsky is, like, at least 1,500 words of anyone else.

A lot of these shorter works are graphic novels, or works in translations from works-in-translation publishers like Deep Vellum, And Other Stories, Open Letter Books, and Two Lines Press.

Acquisitions

Reading material acquired in the month of February 2024

  1. Andrzej Tichý (Nichola Smalley, translator), Purity (And Other Stories) [2024.02.24] – The newest arrival from my subscription to And Other Stories.

Reading List

The books I read in February 2024

Books

  1. Wolfgang Hilbig (Isabel Fargo Cole, translator), The Tidings of the Trees [2024.02.01] – Well written and well-translated, but just couldn’t get into this one. Fortunately I have more Hilbig in my library so I can give him another chance.
  2. Saladin Ahmed and Dave Acosta, Dragon [2024.02.01] – Fantastically written and beautifully-illustrated graphic novel. I will now need to seek out more of Ahmed’s comic writings.
  3. Elizabeth A. Trembley, Look Again: A Memoir [2024.02.01] – An amazing memoir about how the stories we tell ourselves (and about ourselves) change over time, and with the telling.
  4. Duanwad Pimwana (Mui Poopoksakul, translator), Bright [2024.02.05]
  5. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #41 [2024.02.08]
  6. Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages, Wakulla Springs [2024.02.10]
  7. Chris Abani, The Face: Cartography of the Void [2024.02.10]
  8. Ruth Ozeki, The Face: A Time Code [2024.02.11]
  9. Tash Aw, The Face: Strangers on a Pier [2024.02.11]
  10. Oleg Sentsov (Uilleam Blacker, translator), Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.12]
  11. Maurice Broaddus, Buffalo Soldiers [2024.02.15] – Excellent novella in the steampunk tradition. Truly enjoyable reading experience. My only complaint is that this wasn’t a full-size novel.
  12. Anne Garréta (Emma Ramadan, translator), Not One Day [2024.02.17]
  13. Kim Sagwa (Sunhee Jeong, translator), b, Book, and Me [2024.02.21]
  14. Fouad Laroui (Emma Ramadan, translator), The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]
  15. Carmen Boullosa (Peter Bush, translator), Before [2024.02.26]
  16. Valérie Mréjen (Katie Shireen Assef, translator), Black Forest [2024.02.27]

Short Prose

  1. Rachel Ayers, “Magicians & Grotesques”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #41 [2024.02.07]
  2. Nicole Kimberling, “Quarantine Pantry Challenge”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #41 [2024.02.07]
  3. Holly Tamsin, “Fogdog Films”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #41 [2024.02.08]
  4. David Fawkes, “Letterghost”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #41 [2024.02.08]
  5. Oleg Sentsov, “Autobiography (In Literary Form)”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.11]
  6. Oleg Sentsov, “Dog”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.11]
  7. Oleg Sentsov, “Childhood”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.11]
  8. Oleg Sentsov, “Hospital”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.12]
  9. Oleg Sentsov, “School”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.12]
  10. Oleg Sentsov, “Testament”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.12]
  11. Oleg Sentsov, “Grandma”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.12]
  12. Oleg Sentsov, “The Makars”, Life Went On Anyway [2024.02.12]
  13. Jim C. Hines, “The Blue Corpse Corps” (Patreon subscriber story) [2024.12.15]
  14. Fouad Laroui, “The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.21]
  15. Fouad Laroui, “Dislocation”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.22]
  16. Fouad Laroui, “Born Nowhere”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.22]
  17. Fouad Laroui, “Khouribga, or the Laws of the Universe”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]
  18. Fouad Laroui, “What’s Not Said in Brussels”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]
  19. Fouad Laroui, “Bennani’s Bodyguard”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]
  20. Fouad Laroui, “The Invention of Dry Swimming”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]
  21. Fouad Laroui, “Fifteen Minutes as Philosophers”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]
  22. Fouad Laroui, “The Night Before”, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers [2024.02.25]