IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI. I deleted my account this morning.

Went to the UK games expo. Um… bought some games.

Alas.

When I say I won’t read your Substack this is what I mean:

AI slop is a) everywhere and b) must be destroyed.

A huge loss. There are few people as foundational to Star Wars as Marcia Lucas was.

They say never meet your heroes, but that doesn’t count when he’s Nigel Planer.

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry are great, aren't they?

Uhhh, what on earth is going on with the NYT bestseller list? Top 15 this week includes FIVE Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Has one author ever occupied so many places in a single list?

Another one gone, dammit.

from playboy's 2004 interview with "the google guys"

So we’ve been cooking up some thoughts on Gen AI at @amnesty.org and I’m ecstatic to finally see it out in the world! Our 🗝️ conclusion: standalone gen AI systems, built on unlawful web scraping, constitute mass invasions of privacy by design & should be prohibited www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

Why have I never read SUPERMAN: MIRACLE MONDAY by Elliot S. Maggin before? It’s magnificent! It’s like the Revenge of the Sith novelisation, the author tapping something special. “It was in a universe where there was a right and a wrong and where that distinction was not difficult to make.” Wow.

bear in mind Rosenbaum is the guy whose book on the seductions of AI was just exposed as having multiple examples of false quotations made up by AI

Tenet.

I recently read a novel written (and set) in 2007, and everything about it is entirely informed by the culture and technology of 2007. You would have to entirely rewrite it to reset it in 2026, and I'll bet that whoever's currently tinkering with older books is doing a shitty patchwork job of it.

Holy CRACKERS. What is wrong with these people? I am not using AI. I never will. AI must be destroyed.

“editor/proofreader/polisher for an ai writer” “remote driving for a waymo taxi” “waldo controller for household robot” Not living your life, helping automated services live their lives.

Doomscrolling as a state of existence. Swiping up on time, seeing the start of your life as ideals and dramas until all that’s left in your own personal life doomscroll are weird sci-fi adjacent ideas…

Theory: this new slate of liminal horror Shows/films (backrooms/level 8/severence) are a reflection of the current time when we all feel like we’re stuck in a liminal time period. No longer Making any progress, rather a slow degradation of the present. Things getting weirder the more time goes on.

Some people still need to read SHADOW OF THE SITH it seems.

REVIVAL. Nobody ever mentions this book, ever, and I have no idea why. It is the only King book that has actually scared me. The existential horror in Revival is beyond anything else he has done, and is so brutal and bleak, and... nobody seems to have noticed. It is SO wild. So yeah read REVIVAL.

A quick check and I can see 17 mutuals follow Jorge R. Gutierrez on here. Time to block him.

Bring back the network television format! 22/24 x 42-minute episodes, which allowed for important episodes, character episodes, comedy episodes, experiment episodes. Just look at a show like The X-Files. Some of its BEST episodes would be dismissed as filler these days.

This is a great movie in its own right, with the added bonus that it introduced me to the original ALL YOU NEED IS KILL manga and novel, which are amazing. I'm not 100% sold on the forthcoming anime movie though...

Thanks for all the replies to this! To clarify the intermission thing, I meant that the film was literally just stopped and a slide went up telling you to get some more snacks. This may have been regional, as I grew up in New Zealand in the 1980s. Different to a proper in-built intermission!

There's a lot of people out there who argue "the intent of the creator" or "the magic of cinema." My take is: If you enjoy the way you watch it, then you're not doing it wrong. If you prefer to marathon every Star Wars movie at once -or- split Oppenheimer into a 3-episode miniseries, g'wan ahead.

Better to watch a movie with interruptions than to never watch it. If you can watch it uninterrupted that's great, but pause when you need to.

All of which is to say, I'm allowed to watch the rest of the new @88films.bsky.social blu-ray of 1993's ARCADE tomorrow, right? This movie is wild but I have a cold and the direct-to-video wonder of it is doing my head in right now :p

Yeah I did wonder about this. I grew up in New Zealand, and even in the 1980s, it was probably a little bit old-fashioned, but NZ was usually behind the times.

Question (no right or wrong answer, I'm just interested): Should a movie be watched all in one go, or is it OK to break it into chunks? There is an argument that the filmmakers intend the audience to go on an uninterrupted journey, but when I was a kid, **EVERY** movie had an intermission anyway.

The controversy over an AI comic that rattled this years Eisner Awards. New story up at @publisherswkly.bsky.social.

This is brilliant, and also the Anthrophic author settlement needed to be 100 times larger.

Haven't seen this yet, but I have the excellent @arrowvideo.bsky.social blu-ray ready to go! www.arrowfilms.com/p/blu-ray/bl...

Hey! Talking a little about why you should preorder THE CALAMITIES (tl;dr, preordering books is good, but also, you get some cool stuff if you preorder from my local, @doylestownbookshop.bsky.social). Tell everyone! EVERYONNNNNE. /garyoldman

Out of Order Book Club is amazing and you should all listen to it! outoforderbookclub.alitu.com/1?order=newest

"The Generative AI industry is the single greatest scam in history. It is the high watermark of the dumbest timeline possible, where we are meant to believe that an industry that has spent $1 trillion developing products it cannot monetise is not just a viable thing,

Ok this is a truly great tweet

I mean, he believes it cuz it's true. If they were telling the truth, the story wouldn't keep changing. First, it was gonna make 5 blockbusters a day, 10 bestsellers a week, GTA V with a team of 10 in 6 months. Then, cure cancer. The, replace doctors, therapists, college. They're bullshitting.

Loving this cover for The Mandalorian and Grogu: Danger in the Dark! It's by Arianna Florean, who is also doing pencils/inks. We got to work together on Star Wars Adventures and The X-Files! Huge thanks to @madcavestudios.com and @msiglain.bsky.social for the chance to write my favorite guys!

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Social media is fragmenting like the rest of the internet, so it's time to resurrect my newsletter - at a new home! First issue coming soon! If you were a previous subscriber, you've been moved across. You can unsubscribe at any time. If you haven't signed up, visit: visibleconfusion.beehiiv.com

The Love Rocket, baby! I mean the... X-45 Heartbreaker. Can't have WoW players getting too excited.

Okay totally lost down the Star Wars Celebration Anaheim 2022 nostalgia trip now. With @lotcosplay.bsky.social, @delilahsdawson.bsky.social, @kierstenwhite.bsky.social, @kristinbaver.bsky.social and some green rabbit

Ahhhhh, four years ago today? Wow. It was 30 days out from Shadow of the Sith, I remember that. What a whirlwind trip that was. I have stories. Boy, do I have stories. Also means it is four years and 3 (?) days since me and @kristinbaver.bsky.social got the best photo of us together ever.

It’s out! My first graphic novel as publisher! Salvation’s Child is a mind-blowing SF saga by @aptshadow.bsky.social a prologue to his Final Architecture series. In association with @comixology.bsky.social www.amazon.co.uk/Final-Archit... 1/3

AI is profoundly unpopular. A recent NBC News poll found that among 18-34 year-olds, AI's net favorability rating is -44. *Negative 44*. Those are basically serial killer numbers. It's not much better among women 18-49. (Men over 50 and upper class are the only ones who like AI, and just barely.)

Have the massively hot data centres calculated how to solve climate change yet or are they too busy answering idiots requests to write an email, generate a picture or vibe some code for a stupid app?