Against Better Judgement is my upcoming debut novel, set to release in August this year. It's a contemporary gay romance with some fantasy elements, namely vampires. (Yay, vampires.)
What's it about?
Here's the blurb:
In this steamy gay romance, a ruthless vampiric politician and a gruff police man fall into a clandestine affair that can only end in marriage, blood, or both.
This might not be the worst idea either of them has ever had… But it's up there.
Count Andrey Ambrose has been a thorn in Eric Roth's side since the vampire took power in the city of Renait fifteen years ago. Everyone knows nothing happens in Renait unless it pleases his Lordship and, as Commissioner of Police, Roth very rarely pleases his Lordship.
Especially now that Roth has punched his defacto boss in the face over one budget cut too many.
But instead of locked up in the dungeons under historic Castle Renait or — arguably worse — fired, Roth finds himself in the aloof Count's bed.
Turns out Ambrose might have had a thing for his grumpy Commissioner for a while now and, even if he's loath to admit it, Roth is starting to feel the same.
Their political differences and social standing, Roth's failing health, and what he did or didn't do the night Ambrose seized power… everything is telling Roth to stay away.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, he's never been very good at listening.
Featuring: mildly-toxic middle-aged men in love, political intrigue, vampire shenanigans and an assassination attempt or two.
Is this book spicy?
Someone's on their knees just over a thousand words into the book. So yes, I would call it spicy. Carolina Reaper levels of spicy.
If there's that much smut in there, does it even have a plot?
I'm not skimping on the plot. Lots of smut and lots of plot, which basically makes this book completely unmarketable with conventional means, so I really appreciate any signal boosts. If there's an audience for this book, I'm pretty sure it's on the hellsite.
How do I stay up to date with this project?
By following this account, the 'against better judgement novel' tag and/or signing up to my newsletter. (You also get a free short story if you sign up.)
Did you use gen AI to write this or make the coverart?
No and no. I wrote this myself and I'm paying an artist for their work. Fuck AI.
Do you have any samples I could read?
Two-thirds of the novel are currently available on Amazon as short stories. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read them for free. Beware the cliffhanger at part 5.
I don't have Kindle Unlimited, though...
You can request a sample or sign up for an ARC by sending an email to [email protected].
Can I preorder this book?
I'm currently not planning on doing a preorder. If I do one and get little to no sales, the algorithm gods will be displeased with me and reach down from the heavens to smite me/rank ABJ lower when it actually launches. If there's lots of interest in ABJ, there will be a preorder.
Do you have content warnings available?
Yes, right here, beware spoilers:
bdsm, graphic descriptions of terminal illness (lung cancer), murder (off screen), anaphylactic shock, suicidal ideation, vampire-typical blood play, smoking, alcoholism, implied sexual trauma
This list is non-exhaustive. If you need more details or want to check for something specific, send me a dm or an email to [email protected].
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“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
Vetinari’s entire character: “ah vimes. don’t let me detain you, vimes. how is lady sybil, vimes? I trust she is well? everybody is evil, vimes. they accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. when I was a kid I saw mother and child feasting on mother and child and it scarred me for life. taxation is like dairy farming, vimes. hey vimes, wouldn’t be funny if you arrested me? right after you arrested two armies? also i’m pretty sure you were my childhood hero, btw. don’t let me detain you. just so you know, I’d let you get away with pretty much anything at this time, in this place. do you remember when I was a lizard for a bit? that was wild. don’t let me detain you, vimes. hey vimes, your men watched me juggle melons and knives and now they cry in my presence. hahaha it’s so fun to watch you stress, vimes, i’ll just let myself get poisoned over here so I can get a close-up. what do you think would happen if I put a criminal in charge of the post office, vimes? or how about the bank? results. veni, vici, vetinari, vimes. don’t let me detain you.”
Vimes, punching the wall: AARGH he’s so heartless and calculating and doesn’t care about anyone >:(
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Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help
“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.
“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.
“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.
Prof Clifford Stott, a specialist in the psychology of crowds and group identity at Keele University, agreed. Modern research, he said, showed “bystander apathy” was a myth. Instead, strangers often work together in emergency situations with highly sophisticated unity.”
Bystander apathy is a myth invented by the New York Times to cover up that the police were called by several residents of the building, but the cops refused to act. The cops then told the Times that 38 people just watched her die (a seemingly arbitrary number and a physical impossibility based on where the attacks occurred), and the Times ran with it. In fact, Kitty was alive when the cops got there, and was being held and comforted by one of her friends who lived in the building because one of the people who saw her get attacked from across the street called her friend to go get her. Because people care.
You have just been attacked. How likely is it that someone will come to your help? If you remember the infamous case of Kitty Genovese in 19
I will always re-blog this. The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has gone down in history as a story about everyone watching it happen and doing nothing and none of the story is true.
I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.
"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!
The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.
Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
it’s 1am ur groggy as fuck and on a road trip in the states. u have to pee real bad and stop at a gas station/subway situation. u open the door and think ur hallucinating bc what in the actual fuck is this
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I would like to point out that this trend really does nothing for the victims of Scientology. Cult victims are not going to be helped by this. Leah Remini (a survivor of Scientology, who has been harassed by the church for speaking out against it) spoke on this recently, on Xitter:
I wanted to weigh in on this recent trend of people running into Scientology buildings, causing chaos, and posting the videos on social media.
Whether these people are doing it for social media clout or to genuinely expose the abuses of Scientology, what they are doing is unhelpful, and by engaging in these actions, they are unwittingly helping Scientology.
I want as many people as possible talking about the dangers and criminality of Scientology.
But I spent decades on the other side of this, and if I had been confronted by people running through Scientology buildings and harassing me or staff, it would have pushed me further into Scientology.
That is because Scientologists are deeply indoctrinated and radicalized and believe they are helping people.
They have been brainwashed over many years into believing the outside world is filled with chaos and criminality, and that their mission, one they believe they are on through countless lifetimes, is to help eradicate this chaos.
If someone is brainwashed for years into believing the outside world is filled with dangerous lunatics who wish to impede Scientology, a group of people running through a Scientology building is only going to confirm that belief and lead them to dedicate themselves even more to the cause they believe in.
Mike Rinder and I discussed this on our podcast Fair Game: Scientologists, in particular Scientology Sea Org members, have a level of dedication and radicalization to Scientology that surpasses that of a jihadist terrorist.
Running through a building is not going to break that or lead them to reconsider what they’ve given up their entire lives for.
I also want to note that any Scientology building that someone is allowed to easily enter from the street is not a building where someone like David Miscavige or any senior Scientology executive is going to be.
People at that level of Scientology’s criminal leadership will be behind gates and many layers of security.
Please focus on exposing the dangers of Scientology, not making a spectacle out of it.
Scientology is a terrifying cult with way too much freedom in the US and as much as I hate it and want to see it gone, mockery doesn't help the people trapped in it or those who have lost people to it. People like mocking Scientology (and Mormons and JW and every other cult) because it makes them feel smart and superior and good, but it just reinforced exactly what the cult wants it's victims to believe: the outside world is hostile and threatening to us, outsiders think you are stupid and will hurt you for fun because of your beliefs and your community, we are the only ones who understand you and will keep you safe, never leave us or look what will happen to you.
I mean, if you were part of a religion that you know is widely mocked and (to you) discriminated against by a chaotic corrupt world, and there were people doing this shit to your churches, how would you feel about that? Unsafe, threatened, seeking to further connect with other members of your church, feeling an increased urgency to continue the "good work"?
People make themselves feel better about engaging in mockery by convincing themselves its somehow helpful. But they also often fixate on cults having "weird" or "stupid" beliefs, rather than the actual problem with high control groups (the abuse). This will not help anyone. People doing this trend are doing it to entertain themselves and to get clout, not to help victims. It should not be encouraged or seen as a good thing.
The people in the notes who are talking about how much they hate Scientology and all Scientologists and so they deserve this... who exactly do you think you are defending? What victims of Scientology are you angry on behalf of?
I WOULD love to see this energy directed towards political action. But meme logic is ultimately a pretty shallow political motivator.
I seriously need everyone to look at what Leah Remini said, and then read these notes:
And a very special "fuck you" to this person:
Congratulations! You know nothing about high control groups and you will happily blame victims of abuse because it makes you feel good. What you are literally saying here is "if you are abused by a known abuser who found and took advantage of you at a vulnerable time in your life, and when you may have been ignorant to their abuse or open to believing that the claims of abuse were actually lies, you deserve to be bullied for being abused."
I ask, once again: what victims of Scientology are you angry on behalf of? You are all using Scientology's abuse to justify your enjoyment of this, despite actual cult survivors, including people who have escaped Scientology, pointing out how unhelpful this is.
You aren't bravely standing up to Scientology. You are just experiencing schadenfreude. This is no different than people hating racists more than they love people of color, or hating homophobes more than they love queer people; y'all hate Scientology far, far more than you give a fuck about the people "under their sway," who you conveniently treat as an entirely separate group from Scientologists.
You literally cannot say "fuck Scientologists" but also claim to say that on behalf of their victims. The people defending Scientology are the people who get raped, beaten, emotionally abused, who have their children taken away, who are used for slave labor. The victims are the fucking Scientologists.
But yeah, haha South Park meme xenu haha!!!!!!!!!!!!! funee joke Tom Cruise crazy people getting epically memed on!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you guys CLEARLY care sooooooo much about abuse victims by seeing those exact victims as a class of people it is morally okay to harass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#also most people in Scientology were born into it#very few join it today it’s overwhelmingly people raised sometimes multigenerationally in it#the cults momentum was during LRon Hubbards era like when he was still alive and running it#that’s when most people joined and then they had kids raised in it#and then they had kids#and now we have 3-4 generations of people raised in it#people who have known nothing else and are literally trained to avoid all critiques of the cult#and trained to see critiques as purposeful bigoted hateful lies#like ‘how do you not know it’s known as THE cult’ because they aren’t looking at what we look at ! they are told to avoid it !#literally learn anything about how a cult functions and it becomes very clear how people get trapped in the various groups#even if they individually wouldn’t get you like you need to understand how they get others and what tools they use to keep people#from leaving and from learning about the harms done
listen. There's a whole mentality shift that needs to happen culture wide here, from the schools to the public infrastructure to pet ownership to the justice system
The proper response to your dog doing a natural behavior you dislike (digging/barking/protecting etc) it to give them an appropriate time and place to engage in that behavior
The proper response to skateboarders damaging infrastructure is to build more and better skate parks, or build skate elements into the public infrastructure on purpose.
The proper response to homeless people sleeping on park benches is to build them houses.
you see how there's like, a commonality at play here?
The proper response to a disruption is to address the root of the disruption directly, not somehow attack the disruption itself -
you don't invent a muffler by swinging a bat at the engine noise, you don't relieve your hunger by punching yourself in the stomach, you don't resolve public unrest by sending armed men to control them and you don't prevent homeless people using bus shelters as a roof by removing the bus shelters.
a whole ass shift in a basic mindset, i'm tellin' you. We need it.
I actually do think it’s better for abusers and abusive characters to realize the harm their past actions caused and seek to do better than be literally or metaphorically executed for their crimes
I think it’s better for abusers and abusive characters to realize the harm their past actions caused and seek to do better than be literally or metaphorically executed for their crimes.
I think it’s better for abusers and abusive characters to realize the harm their past actions caused and seek to do better than be literally or metaphorically executed for their crimes.
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