To those who are not familiar with the movies and tv show being referenced, no explanation is possible. To those who are, no explanation is necessary. To those who whine about how awful the source movies are: I have so little respect for your opinions that I am not even doing you the courtesy of putting these beneath the fold.
Category: Weird Science
Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 3
So, here’s my final review on the bookbinding kit that I bought:
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 3”Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 2
The third bookbinding project in this kit was somewhat more complicated. It involved sewing multiple signatures (sets of folded paper leaves) together over linen “tapes” using something called a kettle stitch. The end product was what the instructions called “an adventurer’s journal” and I called a naked text block, ready to be “cased in” (bookbinding term for putting a cool cover on a fully assembled text block). Not everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but a fair amount did…
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 2”Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Book Binding, Part 1
So, sometime back I watched this video and it got me interested in bookbinding and rebinding. I looked at a few videos, and tracked down a self-contained kit on Amazon. Thoughts and pictures below.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Book Binding, Part 1”Where Did That Come From? The Posh Guy in Wolf’s Trail
We’ve discussed the origins of the feisty girl/posh guy idea before, and the evolution of the feisty girl in my head into Chloe Fortabat of Wolf’s Trail. The evolution of the posh guy was less dramatic, because for a long time I thought primarily of him as a foil to the heroine. Here are the different phases, numbered to match the entries under Feisty Girl:
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Posh Guy in Wolf’s Trail”Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl in Wolf’s Trail
(Note to pedants: I use “girl” here in a colloquial sense, as the counterpart to “guy.” All the female character concepts mentioned below were college age or older when I stopped to think about how old the character ought to be.)
As previously stated, the basics of the feisty girl/posh guy teamup came to me while watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. It was a long road from there to Wolf’s Trail.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl in Wolf’s Trail”Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl/Posh Guy Dynamic in Wolf’s Trail
The short version is that I started noodling around with this character dynamic (the Reylo fans would perhaps call it a dyad) when I was first watching Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games. Eventually it would grow into the lead characters from Wolf’s Trail.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Feisty Girl/Posh Guy Dynamic in Wolf’s Trail”Where Did That Come From: The Hunter Healer King Setting Used in Wolf’s Trail
I fell in love with steampunk machinery the same way a lot of people did:
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From: The Hunter Healer King Setting Used in Wolf’s Trail”Where Did that Come From? The Blurb for Wolf’s Trail
I previously discussed (towards the bottom of this post) how I used Google Bard as a tool in working on the blurb for this book. Bard generated 2543 words by my count, of which 16 were usable in a blurb of 172 words.
Here’s what I used as a starting point and fed to Bard. It’s the blurb I wrote when I was serializing the book on Vella:
To claim her inheritance, Chloe must leave her ranch for the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the type of creatures he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…
Note that this is in 3rd person, but the book itself is in first. Here’s the final blurb, with Bard’s contributions bolded:
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
Below the break, I have the Bard-generated content in full, with the bits I used bolded. First come the “long” versions of Chloe’s and Maxim’s POVs which came to around 1858 words and yielded nothing useful. 1-3 are Chloe’s; 4-6 are Maxim’s. Then come the “short” versions, which are where the useful bits (bolded again) come from. 7-9 are Chloe’s POV, 10-12 are Maxim’s. Bard was useful mostly because I’m a little uncomfortable writing blurbs; I can’t imagine this being an efficient way of writing blurbs for someone who was actually good at them.
Continue reading “Where Did that Come From? The Blurb for Wolf’s Trail”Thoughts About LLMs, aka “AIs”
(Note: in this piece, I link to a lot of websites that I’ve played with at different times. This is to allow the reader to make up their own minds about these things. No endorsement is intended, except of course when I am linking to my own books. If I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t publish them.)
First off, what we see today is not truly artificial intelligence, in the sense of “artificial sapient beings capable of exercising judgment and choice.” ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and their many cousins and descendants are Large Learning Models (LLMs), software that has been programmed to extrapolate statistical information from the dataset it is given and offer randomized responses to human commands based on the dataset and the extrapolations. The results are only as good as the initial programming, and the dataset. And in terms of output, they’re only vastly more complicated versions of the random generators available at Seventh Sanctum and similar websites for more than a decade. Here are the situations in which I personally have used LLMs:
Continue reading “Thoughts About LLMs, aka “AIs””
Jaglion Press 