Happy New Year, folks. I’m deep in the lab on a Mysterious Project, while revising a Somewhat Less Mysterious if You’re Paying Attention But Much Longer Project, and gearing up to move, so—it’s all a bit much. I hope you’ve started the year in health and strength; I hope you’re being kind to yourself and those around you; I hope you have at least one good book to hand.
2023 was a busy year for me, so I read a bit less than I have in the last few years. I think I’m still reading more than I did B.P.—before parenting? Pandemic? Why not both! An odd truth: I have less discretionary time now than I used to, but I read more. My guess as to why: I have so much less time that any leisure activity has to be deeply engrossing and rewarding instantly upon commencement, while at the same time being able to be abandoned or interrupted at any moment with little detriment to the overall experience. For me, that means books, almost always.1
I’d guess that the 30-title dip in Books Read from 2022’s list is partly due to listening to War and Peace on audio, in Thandiwe Newton’s reading—it’s about 12 Phrynne Fisher or 10 Nero Wolfe mysteries long, and those would have been my alternative cooking/chore reads. Also, I finished Hollow Knight, which needs a post in itself, and almost finished 13 Sentinels, ditto, both of which took some time. Here’s the list, presented for those of you who can decipher my cursive.
I love how books travel in time. Some new-to-me volumes on here—Djuna’s highspeed psychedelic cyberpunk COUNTERWEIGHT, Jerome K Jerome’s THREE MEN IN A BOAT, any given Nero Wolfe book—feel like I read them decades ago and they’ve been with me ever since—and not just because we’ve been in house reno purgatory for the last six months. They set down deep roots, and talk with other books with deep roots—or they fit into places that have been waiting for them, like that perfect Tetris block. I feel that I must have read Sarah Caudwell when I was sixteen, but I know for a fact that I didn’t until two years ago. (Or three? What is time?)
Speaking of Tetris: recently the all-time human world records were broken in NES Tetris. For years it’s been thought that only a simulated “AI” player2 could reach Tetris’ final “kill screen,”the point where a high-score rollover causes the game to glitch-crash. This upper bound was theorized not because the game is hard at high levels, though it is, but because at a certain point the blocks fall so rapidly that, since the NES controller can only register so many button presses a second, it was impossible to move new blocks from one side of the screen to the other before they hit the accumulating lower rows—transforming a skill game of perfect placement to one of brutal attrition against a fickle RNG.
But this last month, a 13-year old gamer by the handle BlueScuti reached the final kill screen. Soon after, two other humans achieved the feat. The secret? A novel approach to input: tapping the *back of the NES controller* rapidly while applying pressure to the D-pad with your palm, to trigger D-pad presses faster than the controller can technically register them the normal way? I don’t understand it completely, because this technique stands on top of a whole pyramid of other speed-input techniques. I love this multiverse-mario 4 minute mile bare-edge of comprehension skill stuff. Go, Humans, Go! Ars Technica has a write-up and Youtube links.
We’re just about three months away from Wicked Problems—and this month, Three Parts Dead is on sale from US ebook retailers for $1.99! It’s a great opportunity to give a copy to a friend, or get your own—and catch up. Tara’s waiting. And she’s not particularly patient.
Forthcoming events :
On Jan 25th at 12pm Eastern / 11 Central, I’m taking part in TBRCon’s “Why Science Fiction is more than Space Opera” panel alongside Ai Jiang, Sadir S Samir, Gareth Powell, and Jendia Gammon. It’s a fun topic—space opera (which I adore and of which I’ve written a great deal) really is a small piece of science fiction, at least of the written sort, and I hope we’ll be able to talk about the broader spectrum. This is an online event; you can find more details here: https://fanfiaddict.com/tbrcon2024/
March 1-3: I’ll be Author Guest of Honor at CoastCon in Biloxi, Mississippi! This’ll be my first time to Biloxi, and I’m excited to make the trip. If any of y’all are in the area, drop by. Details here: https://www.coastcon.org/
And that’s all from me! Take care of yourselves, friends. Happy reading.
Chocolate also satisfies these conditions, but I try not to think about that.
It’s not really AI. Really. It’s not. Neither is GPT. I understand you’re almost certainly a primate running wetware ingrained by millions of years of evolution with the exceedingly useful-to-primates heuristic that any phenomenon that might be directed by a malicious primate intellect definitely is, including rivers, trees, thunder, fire, etc, because malicious primate intellects make practically everything worse and “assume the worst” is a pretty good bias if you’re a primate—but that tendency is not useful for navigating this moment, in which some pretty smart rich people are trying to take advantage of this ingrained heuristic to scare other, richer people into giving them billions of dollars, which they will use to continue building systems that are not AI but definitely do things, and which can and will be (and already have been) the pretext for appropriating huge amounts of human labor, your work and love and mine. And as a cherry on top they want an abacus wearing a George Carlin mask to tell them shitty jokes for all eternity, for the low low price of a few square meters of burnt rainforest a punchline.
Love to see all these books, and yes, the tetris thing is amazing :)
Ah, the AI question. I am extremely nervous writing basically anything about it because I think it would annoy just about everyone, but my personal take on it is -- the Discourse around AI is suffering from people talking past each other on a massive scale and it is obscuring some real issues, which I am glad to see you bring up. I will try my best to use online spaces to address and lift up voices addressing these very real issues and defer Philosophical Arguments About What Is Intelligence to late night drinks that (hopefully) do not get recorded by machines and incorporated back into themselves in an endless loop of self-reinforcing Content. :D