Love Tourmaline

This prompt might be an ALL-TIMER 😭

➡️ Go to Dropout to watch new Game Changer now

Dingbats have come after our buddy John Scalzi, over the last twenty-four hours, giving him grief for not being AI-friendly.* (eyeroll) So John has had to spell out his feelings about this in more depth.

The same dingbats have also confused him with our old friend Charles Stross (which is deeply funny in all kinds of different ways, but never mind that). So Charlie, too, has had to spell out his feelings about this.

So why not join in? Here's my take, expressed some while back, and a little amplified to reflect the day's business.

TL:DR; I will not use technologies trained with material stolen from my colleagues. "Lie down with pigs, get up with mud," the saying has it. "Lie down with thieves..."? Fill in the blanks for yourselves. ...Me? I refuse to handle stolen goods. Period.

And -- not naming some of the colleagues, but some of you will know who I mean -- this excerpt (in which I speak for @petermorwood, because I know damn well what he'd say):

We do not use, and will not use, ChatGPT, Claude, or any similar tool. Ever. ...Not even "just for research." Not even "just for outlining." Not even "just for brainstorming." You need a brain to brainstorm. "Generative" "AI" has none. As by-choice "brain-only writers", we decline collaboration with the non-brained.

And that's that.

(sigh) Meanwhile: look here! Books written by the honestly, organically brained. And on sale, too!

(Please do consider a purchase... or reblogging this for the sake of the gossip, if nothing else.)

But it would take too long to go into all that stuff you can't remember. Suffice to say, some stuff happened, people were occasionally there. Events occurred. Food was consumed.

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?