Thomm Quackenbush

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

(Sorry for the formatting on this; I'm on mobile.)

Why use grammar software? Because I'm a human who makes errors, and it can be helpful to have tools that I, as a writer and editor, can fall back on to catch very basic things that sometimes get missed.

I don't rely on it because sometimes (quite often, as of late) it can be wrong, but it can be helpful when checking your work. I use them to scan quickly for excess commas or the occasional homonym before I fire my files off to another human to give them the final pass. Or I used to.

I've talked a lot about how the integration of AI is making a lot of grammar software dumber. This is because they are not being trained exclusively on grammar rules anymore but on user-suggested data.

It's why, for a long time, when you tried to type "quirked" into Google Docs, GD would suggest "querched" instead because that is how a lot of people misspell the word "quirked."

It is a flawed, lousy system that is getting exponentially worse. Especially now, so many of them have "Let AI rewrite your sentence for clarity and engagement" options.

It's not really an issue for me because I have the knowledge and the support to turn things like this into an annoying issue that makes for an amusing post on social media.

But if I were a less experienced author and didn't have an editor who knew my writing style well enough to know something was wrong, that manuscript could have gone to print as is, and that's also why I suspect a lot of books right now read like carbon copy clones.

People aren't being taught these skills, but they are being trained to appease the software, which is, in turn, trying to please an algorithm.

Pro-Writing-Aid has become very bad for this, offering a "grade" at the top of your file. And yeah, it looks just like getting your term paper back. The last time I accidentally turned on the grading system, it gave me 50% out of 100 for grammar and style, based on what the algorithm thinks Romance should read like.

When I asked it to find grammar and style errors, it couldn't find any. It just didn't like that I was different from what it was being trained on. (Girl help, I was assigned Not Like Other Girls by the Algorithm and got a bad grade in vampire smut.)

And again, were I not me, were I a younger or inexperienced author, I might take that to heart and start altering my style to get a Good Grade based on what the machine wants.

And that's how I know we're in the Bad Place because there are people doing that. They think the machine is smart because someone tacked the word "intelligence" onto it, and they are writing to appease the software instead of using it like a tool that you can and should ignore.

And that's an issue.

You are not intellectually superior for never using or paying for grammar software.

Regardless of the fact that some corporate jobs now require you to use programs like Grammarly (it was required to be on my company machine when I worked with certain clients), grammar software is an accessibility feature.

The fact that it's being made intentionally shit by the companies that own them is a major issue and is not the fault of the people who do struggle to read and write and who would benefit from easily accessible, competent writing aids.

It's the fault of the people pushing for the enshitification of everything we know and love to please an algorithm.

Get off your fucking high horse and think with some compassion instead of your ego. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone has the same experience or opportunities. That doesn't make them stupid or worthy of your derision or scorn.

Me : “Do you get dental insurance?”

Scary prison dude: HELLO

Me: Nice to meet you!

Specifically, I remember;

There were zombies walking around in the waiting room. I said “Hi!” and he gave me a high five. Every time he passed from then on, I got a high five.

Near the end, there were these twin little girls. “Come play with us.” They said. “Okay!” I said. “Forever.” They said. “Oh, sorry, can’t do that. I’m busy.”

Me: thanks dad

Source

Robert the Doll was given to Robert Eugene Otto in 1906 by the family maid. Eugene named the doll after himself, and loved it dearly. The family, however, noticed that something wasn’t right with Robert. They would often hear their son talking to himself in his room at night with two distinct voices. Their son also woke the family up with his screams multiple times, and was found in his bed with the furniture overturned. He claimed that Robert the doll did it.

Mutilated toys began to show up, the parents said they could hear the doll giggling, and others said they could see the doll moving from window to window. He was finally left in the attic, until a young girl in the 70s found him. Not long after she began claiming the doll was evil, and was trying to torture and kill her. She still maintains that Robert tried to kill her.

See, it's not just that he writes mediocre, churned-out thrillers; there are many, many authors of mediocre, churned-out thrillers out there, he ain't special.

It's also not that he "writes" them with "coauthors" and slaps his name on them - again, this is not unique.

It's not even - though this is starting to get there- that he chases every publishing trend and creates His Version of everything from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Nicholas Sparks, which nobody likes as well as they like his thrillers but still buy because they have His Name on them like a summoning charm.

No, what makes James Patterson uniquely loathed is the combination of the frequency of publication and his popularity. Because, to be honest, I'm not sure that anyone even likes his books anymore, but it doesn't matter, because if they have the James Patterson name on them then readers will be queuing up like zombies desperate for a fix of decaying cerebral matter. Which would be tolerable if he had the decency to only write one book a year like most other bestselling authors, but "James Patterson" (quotes VERY intentional) puts out roughly two books per month. So as a librarian, not only do you have to buy every new book James Patterson puts out, you have to buy multiple copies in order to fulfill demand. Somewhere around 5% of my fiction budget is spent ENTIRELY ON JAMES PATTERSON. Every new James Patterson that comes out means a dozen or more queer romances, inventive sci-fi novellas, unique cultural viewpoints, etc, etc that you can't buy because YOU HAVE TO BUY JAMES PATTERSON INSTEAD. (See also, you just weeded and shifted the Ps in fiction to make room and now it's full again oh god why.)

And the clincher - the absolute clincher - is the knowledge that the publishers will be "finding" "unfinished manuscripts" by "James Patterson" for a minimum of fifty years after his death, so even if some right-minded bibliophile with a claymore takes one for the team, we will never, ever be free.

Plus some more^^

(via 1717 thru 61117 KALEIDOSCOPIC HUMANOIDS PORTFOLIO)

  The cold reader exploits that the human mind is a whiz at making senses of information, shaping faces out of leaves, finding religious icons on pieces of toast, and letting us believe general sentences and uncertain questions add up to prophesy.  ~Thomm Quackenbush  

Facial Pareidolia & Snarky Galactics

I live with facial pareidolia, Google it.  This is why all I create has faces. I love creating non traditional humanoid faces using any medium I can, beginning in 2017 I have devoted to creating kaleidoscopic humanoids within images based off of both fractal prints, random patterns generated using Tapet and reworks based on images of some of my favorite artist friends. Oh yes and sometimes the base image I process using Google’s Deep Blue AI - Dream Deeply for added intensity and awesomeness. This video presents the total of 183 unique 24" x 42" Digital Prints (I prefer prints on Glass) I created in the first 6 months of 2017. The Kaleidoscopic Humanoids collection so far are broken down into 13 series each with their own unique sense and flare. The series are identified by a unique number associated with the unfolding point when my snarky galactic friends begged to be created in image. The series numbers are 1717. 11917, 13117, 2117, 3217, 3317, 31317, 32217, 32517, 4217, 42217, 52617, 61117. Full resolution print downloads are available at http://flickr.com/sethd8/ for you to use. Additional PS, Apophysis settings and source images available upon request. Please view this video on your largest screen in fullscreen mode (up to full UHD 4k) whenever possible, since many times you will find a multitude of faces in each individual print from different head tilts or just shifting your gaze. I create my work for you to explore and then explore again and be amazed. So floss your brain, expand your perceptions and have fun playing with me and my snarky Galactic friends I have unfolded for you to see.

Faces in Faces within Faces!

InJoY!