I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park and in TORONTO on Tues (Jun 23) at Osler Records. After that, it’s NYC, Philly and Chicago.

Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-private-dialog-club-secretly-ranks-its-members/

By all appearances, this is a comically creepy, awful talking-shop for the Epstein Class. It's not all that surprising, in retrospect, to learn that all these terrible people were in a group chat, secretly assigning ratings to one another, and periodically gathering to have tedious panels about, I dunno, "race science" or whatever.

I'm on the oligarchy beat, so stories about Dialog have been popping up in my RSS feed for the past week or so, but it wasn't until last night that I made a connection.

A year or two ago, I got an invite to speak at an event. This is normal, I get a lot of these and I do a lot of public speaking. I'm good at it, and it's a good way for me to reach people and get them energized about the issues I care about. Sometimes, I do these talks for free. Sometimes I get paid.

When I first glanced at this speaking offer, I thought, "Huh, I guess this is one to send on to my speaking agent," because the names the offer dropped were a bunch of rich people, and so I assumed that they were having some kind of summit and looking for a keynoter. Then I read a little more carefully and realized they – these billionaires and their lickspittles! – wanted me to pay them, thousands of dollars, so that I could shlep my ass to some luxury resort in order to have the privilege of speaking to them.

I came up as a science fiction writer, and at some point, every sf writer learns "Yog's Law," coined by James D Macdonald when he was running the science fiction forum on GEnie, under the screen name "Yog Sysop":

money flows toward the writer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald#Educational_work

In other words, whenever you, as a creative worker, are approached by someone who wants to "help" you with your work, and they want you to pay them, they are a scammer, preying upon your essential human need to communicate with others. Run away.

Which is what I did. I deleted the email.

I am translating the novella diaLOG (会話記録) by r-906.

In celebration of DID awareness day, I am posting the prologue and the first chapter. Please follow my blog for updates on new chapters!

And if you have 500 JPY to spare, please consider supporting r-906's official release here.

Finn: atleast its not taxes thats worse than rain.

Jake: atleast the pokemon are liking it

Quagsire: Quag quag !

I'm enjoying watching the race. :3 Thought I'd share these here too since I tend to post things here when I do a translation by request. lol

Spoilers for Dancing Mad (Ultimate) / UMAD below.

Also, this is just an excuse for me to write stupid dialog between the three of 'em (and Alfred & Dick somewhere)

--

Jason: Dad!

Joker: Yes?

Bruce: ?!

Jason: ...

Joker: ...

"Kalau sudah tahu tak sejalan, buat apa dipertahankan? Kalau sudah tahu tak sepemikiran, buat apa menjadi bahan pertimbangan? Kalau sudah tahu tak ada restu, buat apa diteruskan kalau keberkahan itu hilang?"

Dahulu, kata-kataku itu adalah angin yang kau biarkan lewat tanpa sempat menyentuh logika.

Aku berdiri di hadapanmu, merapal mantra tentang "..jalan yang tak seiring, pikiran yang tak seirama, dan restu yang enggan bertamu.." Namun bagimu, saat itu aku hanyalah suara bising di tengah ambisimu yang sedang menyala-nyala.

​Malam tadi, kau datang kembali. Bukan dengan kemenangan yang dulu kau agung-agungkan, melainkan dengan raut wajah yang luruh, seperti bangunan tua yang dipaksa tegak tanpa fondasi keberkahan.

​"Aku bertahan karena yakin," katamu pelan.

Padahal, keyakinan tanpa restu hanyalah bentuk lain dari keras kepala yang sedang menyamar.

​Kini, cerita tentang keteguhanmu berbuah empedu. Tentang pahitnya hari-hari yang kau jalani bersamanya, tanpa perlindungan doa, persis seperti apa yang aku takutkan tiga tahun silam. Ternyata, memaksakan sesuatu yang tak sejalan hanya akan membuat kita sampai pada tujuan yang salah, dengan jiwa yang penuh luka menganga.

Ada rasa sesak yang aneh saat melihatmu sekarang. Ingin rasanya aku berkata, "Sudah kukatakan," namun lidahku kelu. Melihatmu hancur oleh keputusanmu sendiri adalah cara semesta menunjukkan bahwa keberkahan yang hilang tidak pernah bisa digantikan oleh usaha sekeras apa pun.

​Kau telah sampai pada titik di mana ingatanmu tentang ucapanku di tahun 2022 bukan lagi sekadar kalimat, melainkan sebuah kebenaran yang datang terlambat.

Kini, aku hanya bisa bilang : ​"Hidupmu tidak berakhir saat kau menyadari kesalahanmu. Hidupmu baru saja dimulai kembali dengan mata yang jauh lebih terbuka, tapi bukan bersamaku.."