Old Man’s Wakeup

shlomi on October 25, 2024

⁨Wow, this is actually… “good!” (For some values of the word).

I didn’t have any Red Bull left in the house, didn’t want to drive, didn’t want to boil water…Just wanted to get my day (and billing) started. So…I made this oddity:

Ingredients:

  • 2 tsp nescafe
  • 1 tsp psyllium (artificially orange flavored, of course)
  • 12 oz. fresca
  • 1C water

Directions:

  1. in a mason jar, add the dry + water
  2. Shake until there’s no particulates
  3. Add Fresca. When it’s all in, shake again and wait a few secs.
    Voila.

Disgusting sounding? Yes. Getting my fiber and caffeine 1st thing in the morning? Also yes. Tastes like orange red bull espresso.⁩

And now, back to the world at hand…

ArmadilloCon Cometh!

shlomi on August 28, 2024

ArmadilloCon, the Austin-area Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror convention, will be in town September 6-8.

Like every year, there’s a writing workshop on Friday morning — if you’re interested, you’ll need to register for next year’s conference as this one’s locked and ready. I’m one of the instructors; it’s an amazing way to get quality feedback in a supportive environment.

I’ll be moderating a few panels, and my critique group is hosting a panel, splitting the time reading our works and discussing how a critique group works. Look me up if you’re there!

On LLM (first of many, I’m guessing)

shlomi on July 18, 2024

I’m not a fan of the current qualifications of Chat-GPT and its ilk. Three examples:

  1. writers I know are suing for copyright infringement because Google, MS et al have slurped up their novels into their LLMs.
  2. I’m researching a science fiction book and needed facts on oxygen candles (used, for example, in submarines to produce oxygen). Asked the same prompt and got two answers. “…The amount of oxygen…[is] around 1 to 2 pounds of oxygen per hour…” and, “The total amount [is]…in the range of tens to hundreds of liters per hour…”
  3. The prompt for the image above was “a jewish israeli and palestinian arab stab each other each holding a bloody knife.” It was a test, not a wish or political statement. I wanted to see what the AI would “imagine.” I can’t tell which is who. Forgetting the knives, they’re both wearing combat webbing (the one on the left has what looks to be a belt). How could it dream this when I specified knife? Is this what it creates when prompted for either?

Unfortunately, it’s going to get better. And while this might clear the cruft of Photoshop manipulators from the creative industry, it makes me worry about what dark “hallucinations” AIs might be having.

Sciencing Fiction Be Hard

shlomi on February 22, 2024

I like my science fiction accurate. I mean, Star Trek is fantasy, Star Wars is a space opera, and Firefly is a space western. The Expanse, with a couple of exceptions (and excepting the protomolecule and all that jazz), is pretty accurate. That’s what I look for.

So…last week, my critique group was working on two characters in a lunar lava tube with limited suit oxygen. “But there are oxygen candles,” geeknerd me said. But chemistry, but physics, But real rocket engineers in the critique group.

To the internet I go, trying to figure out how heavy a candle needed to be to provide oxygen for one person for eight hours. and what would be the gas volume for oxygen and how would a space suit accommodate the extra pressure. To say nothing of heat production… Sometimes there are bunny trails, sometimes there are rabbit holes, and sometimes…dragon lairs. Oh, and don’t bother Chat-GPT: to the same prompt, I got two different answers:
1. Asked the same prompt and got two answers. “…The amount of oxygen…[is] around 1 to 2 pounds of oxygen per hour…,” and
2. “The total amount [is]…in the range of tens to hundreds of liters per hour…”

In other words, GIGO, one the first computer acronyms that I learned many years ago.

Watching a Randal Munroe interview was cathartic. Fractal science questioning and answering are what he lives for. (And, also, harassing Commander Hadfield about how a T-Rex would fly on top of an apparent 737s.) Buy his books; What If 2 is brilliant!

Randall’s got more time than I to turn BTUs into thermal conductivity for surface regolith on the Lunar South Pole and how long the tether from the candle to the spike on the surface could be before the cable melted. The solution to all the above? Write out the oxygen candles and have the characters’ situations be more dire. It’s good to be a god. The surviving characters will thank me.

Cartoon Copyright (C) Randall Munroe, https://xkcd.com/1047, used according to site guidelines.

Trigger Warning: Trigger Warnings

shlomi on August 29, 2023

When Sophie’s Choice was released, I went with a date to see it. I didn’t check reviews; I just heard about a great actress. I spent the last half of the movie sobbing and scared the bejeezus out of my date (especially since I had to drive her home). My mother had told me that story, in gory detail, from her multiple personal experiences with the Nazi “selektion” at Auschwitz. Cue “triggering.”

At the last ArmadilloCon, there was a spirited set of discussions, on and off-panel, regarding trigger warnings. Even with the book title “The Property of Blood, ” the author was urged to use a trigger warning for violence.

As someone who’s lived with PTSD for most of their lives and has had the cinematic Vietnam vet flashback, I don’t see it this way. Caveat Emptor needs to be a much finer, more granular warning, if at all. What triggers one person may be fine for another. And where’s the limit? Do we warn if there are giant spiders in the novel? What if there’s non-consensual, non-sexual touching? The echo of trauma from a bully’s beating can be very painful for some readers, but how does one alert the public?

What Ilona said, mostly. But also, if there’s a large amount of specific violence such as anti-<abuse> that’s not on the title or dust jacket, it’s probably not a big deal to add a warning on the back cover just to give a heads-up. My $0.02, IMHO, YMMV.

ArmadillonCon 46 Approacheth!

shlomi on August 1, 2023

I’ll be at the Austin-based con this weekend. There’s an amazing panoply of panels and events that are amazing. You can register on-line, and it’s reasonably priced. There’s no ComicCon hype and not much cosplay, but there are many Austin and area authors in the SF, F, Horror, and even a little MM space.

Dogs, Tricks, New. Damnit!

shlomi on May 12, 2023

I’m a recalcitrant writer when it comes to technology, which is funny considering I’ve been neck-deep in emerging technologies for, um, four decades?

It took me over ten years to slide from Word to Scrivener. I still think it’s got a clunky UI, complex more than necessary. But when writing 90k-150k novels spanning many chapters, it made sense. “Compiling” the manuscript to Word or other formats is an excruciating pain in the ass. But here I am.

Grammarly has been around for years, and I’ve scoffed at using such a crutch. But, lured by claims linking it to AI technology (a whole other post, but let’s not go there now), I signed up for the free version.

I’ve paid the $120/year subscription after spending 2 hours taking a story I deemed finished and being marketed through its wringer. I. Am. Humbled. Not bad: 50 or so corrections for 6,300 words. I didn’t accept about a fifth of the suggestions; they were inappropriate for the dialog or tone I was looking for. However, when I looked at the corrections I made in one of my writing groups and read their feedback on my scenes, it was clear that, had I run them through this tool, I’d have far more effective critiquing.

So I’ve got a new trick, one that’ll help my writing sit up and beg.

On Measurements

shlomi on May 10, 2023

A Pork Sandwich MeteorIn fantasy, describing quantities can be challenging — way beyond the metric/imperial wars uselessly raging for many decades (especially crazy when designing interstellar craft based on using both systems). A Yorkshire friend of mine once said that, in the original tongue, counting there was “one, two, three, four, five…many.”

I have a novel manuscript that featured counting due to a differently advanced culture. Fingers are good measures for humans (better than barleycorns, royal (?) strides, or other “standards”). The difficulty was in scaling. Sure, ten is two hands. And twenty is either “arms and legs” or four hands. Fifty? A hand of two hands? It didn’t scale without changing some kind of measurement standard.

It was odd to see the post from the Jerusalem Post (now devolved to be the UK’s Sun or New York’s Post intelligence level), measuring a meteor to the size of a premierly non-Kosher food item. In a media venue that slavishly caters to the American Evangelical, and Israeli right-wing and ultra-Orthodox factions, they choose this measure.

But really, how big is a “pork sandwich?” Are we talking white bread with crusts removed? A bagel (why not go all the way on culinary blasphemy)? A Subway not-quite-16″ sub? Is it measured by area? Length?

Weight would help, but I’m betting there’s no sandwich of any kind that would weigh what that meteor weighs, chondrite or otherwise.

Wolfram Alpha has a way to express whale weight in pineapples. It’d be fun to see force defined in terms of grand pianos falling from a number of floors. Or lift as a function of the number of chickens (trying to) take flight.
But pork-based measurements in this context goes beyond that absurdity and enters the realm of “are you kidding me?”

P.S. This blog took 47 knee twitches, a nosepick, and 2,460 keystrokes, less the backspace key.

Publishing & Reality… and Magic

shlomi on July 4, 2022

My series, under a nom-de-plum, is finally back in process, after a bout of reality-induced depression and anxiety courtesy of religious fundamentalists in all branches of government. Oh, and nazis. They’re feeling empowered more and more. “This can only end in tears” — ancient parental saying. This was compounded by my having a discussion with a publicist who refused to work with me on the series because the owner is pro-life. (And apparently Jewish practices are anti-life, but I’ll let that one lie.)

So I’m close on the release date of the next book in that series, but having said it would be in “the fall of 2022,” that’s not a small bullseye target.

To restart my engine I returned to a novel I’d completed in first draft, shown to a couple of folks, and knew I needed to make many changes. It’s a YA fantasy novel, with a large world-building component (points a finger at Marshall Maresca’s thoughts and work on that topic).Getting magic right is tricky. Don’t know if I nailed it, but I’ll be reaching out to a few readers in the next couple of weeks.