Fly Or Die

i attended a writing workshop over zoom on sentence structure last night, and this morning i can feel myself thinking about how sentence structure and content affect a story over time. this is going to sound silly, but i think i can make my stuff longer by adding more sentences. adding more plot doesnt work because then i just take it as a challenge, but it also doesnt work because more plot does not equal a longer story. more sentences equal a longer story.

Extract from The Art of Coarse Acting (1964) by Michael Green.

Extract from The Art of Coarse Acting (1964) by Michael Green.

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.

But yeah, I thought the original post was about: Dif you know everyone is interesting?

*Not* you must force yourself to meet them.

It's like the woman in the woods bear vs man question.

The question was if a woman would rather come across a man or a bear in the woods. That's it.