I'll add onto one point about how a machine cannot suggest, only state its themes. Good writing risks going over the heads of the incurious. They'll be upset that it doesn't reward their inattentiveness by saying its emotions or themes point blank. And you have to be okay with upsetting them.

This is a blisteringly good essay from @doriandawes.bsky.social - the anger is righteous, the despair completely understandable, and the hope and desire for smaller, better, weirder work extremely welcome 🔥

A fantastic piece by Dawes, very much rhyming with discussions this weekend; I talked about Isabel Fall on one of my panels. But yes, if you eschew ambiguity and unpleasantness and demand good politics, you will get slop

"so much genre fiction is now flat, dull, and moralistic in the worst ways possible, indistinguishable from machines with the same voice, tropes, aesthetics, and bluntly stated metaphors." - @doriandawes.bsky.social on putting the "genAI" in "Genre" www.patreon.com/doriandawes/...

Dorian echoes a lot of the feelings I have and why I'm making a hard pivot toward erotic visual novels with hard and fucked up kink. That's where the interesting and challenging art is being made.

The thing I found most telling in the Bona Books post was that the story was great until they found out it was AI, and then it became "flat and lacking texture". Which says more about their perspective than it does about the story, and tells me just how much to value that perspective.

This part. "For everyone else, now is maybe the best possible time for you to start your zines and niche publications highlighting the weirdos and freaks in your circles. I will happily submit to a zine before I ever send anything to one of these slop mags ever again."

A key here I think is that just as AI can’t produce narrative writing that’s good in any meaningful way, it also can’t produce writing that’s “unmarketable”

Dorian is correct. It's not what you'll want to hear but it IS correct.

🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻 funny story freydis moon sent an email to my agent trying to get me cancelled bc i called them a race faker and catfish lmao

"You stripped genre lit of everything that made it messy, uncomfortable, uncompromising, and human, and are surprised you wound up being the perfect marks for a machine."

If you quote post me and say something weird or misinterpret me I have every right to not only remove that quote but also block you. I dealt with enough weird bullshit after my L&L essay and I'm not interested in inviting anything further.

“If you are good at writing, you will not please everyone.” 🔥

Absolute heater of an essay here by Dorian Dawes that points to a sickness at the heart of mainstream speculative fiction and gives voice to a revulsion and numbness that I also can't help but feel. It's also a hell of an argument to make more weird, horny, angry, zines.

It’s hard not to feel despair as someone who wants to write, but essays like these remind me why I want to do it and who I want to do it for

Great essay that nails what I was trying to communicate about this over the weekend. I have faith that there’s a path forward for genre fiction— it means embracing work that is innovative, boundary pushing, bold, and unquestionably human over what ticks all the boxes of a “good story”

dorian dawes lays it all out here in this brutal but correct essay. the problem is that AI can produce competent writing rather than good writing, but the bigger problem is that no one in charge seems to be able to tell the difference. or, worse, no one cares that there's a difference

Hi, SFF Apex, Bona Books, Agita Publishing, And all the others who have gotten tricked by AI, Let's have a nice talk.

This being your childhood introduction to these three only to realize, so many other movies and more of their earlier careers under your belt later, what a hilariously psychotic casting this was across the board 😂😂😂

Don’t know who to credit for this. But it is how I feel.

I really, truly, with my whole heart, need people to internalize the fact that there are so many different reasons why an author might want to explore a Thing in fiction - reasons which are often directly contradictory! - that, by itself, the Thing tells you little to nothing about that person.

All Hail one of the original Scream Kings who always gave it his all and was truly inimitable in every role he played. The immensely talented and charismatic Sam Neill. RIP. Thanks for the hours of enjoyment you gave me, and for guaranteeing your presence would always be a memorable one. 🖤📽️🩸

RIP to the incomparable Sam Neill

gonna be working on a piece for patrons this month while on vacation about retail sims and how they differ between the cozy and horror genres but first im gonna tackle this thing where a lot of editors came out this week going "whups we got scammed by ai" and my feelings aren't gonna be kind.

You can help Alaa's children and newborn baby survive Israel's genocide right now by sharing & donating. They're starving, homeless, & plagued by the disease & vermin sweeping the camps because of Israel's destruction of sanitation & healthcare. Her husband is a prisoner of the occupation:

FUCK IT. I’ll start posting it here. I’ll feed it to you in pieces.

Lost one of the best.

The Republican Party is not our enemy because we intend to kill them, but because they intend to kill us--and already have killed a great many of us. Your friendship ought not to have survived that; it is to your great discredit that it did. Our anger, born of discouragement, is real and abiding.

To Democrats and their eulogies: If you say that democracy is under attack by the Republican Party—and it is—and you say that the Republican Party represents an authoritarian threat—and it does—then civility and comity have already been murdered, and shows of comity are utterly incoherent.

when you tell us that the people who murdered comity and civility—who are trying to kill and rob and enslave us—are actually your dear friends, you don’t create civility, but despair; we see you don’t actually believe the danger is real, can’t be trusted to fight the battle that needs to be fought.

Someone who actually deserves articles, speeches and posts flush with accolades about a life well-lived and a career filled with bold and daring choices and thoughtful reflections on passion, hubris, creativity, frailty and obsession. Universally acclaimed and celebrated, yet still underrated. RIP 🖤

Agreed. I think no matter how much someone heals, there will always be that fragment or version of them that stays locked in the dungeon in an abstract sense because anything else is denial. The horrible thing happened. It is part of you now.

Hey, a good way to celebrate Lindsey Graham kicking the bucket is to contact your senators about KOSA and the KIDS Act. Graham was a big proponent of these kinds of laws, as well as of gutting section 230.

I would likewise like to congratulate the American people on the death of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been sent to hell.

QRT Night/dark art

It only just now occurred to me that all those guys making pastoral AI slop about the glorious 80s probably weren't alive back then because if you admitted to owning a Nintendo they would kick the snot out of you behind the gym at recess.

That Democrats see mass-murdering fascists dismantling the country as nothing more than "colleagues they dislike" is why we've been in a non-stop plummet. Incredible this is still debatable, by people who ostensibly oppose fascism, ten years into this?!?

for that matter, getting off on it and finding it horrifying are not mutually exclusive

Can we retire the idea that because a horror author is depicting abuse that they are getting off on it Cause boy I am sick to death of that shallow assessment

Counting down the minutes before the usual outlets put out their obligatory "Could You Guys Please Stop Laughing When We Die" pieces

lindsey graham won't see your jokes and memes because he got diarrhea and is in hell now, but someone writing an op-ed titled "the left's problem with manners" might. So make them really funny.

This is how I found out

Lindsay Graham is dead! 🦀🦀🦀

There's a certain gritty materialism to the film, the way abject poverty influences everything–the anxiety of making enough to survive, slum lords charging extra for shitholes without a toilet and folk desperate enough to take *anything* (even if it means shitting in a bucket).

... still thinking about Driller Killer. What a picture. If you edited out the murderous, homoerotic, rampages, it'd be a perfect snapshot of the late 70s NYC art scene; all punk squalor, gender fluidity, raging dickheads and coked-up weirdos.

To find out what the hell is wrong with me, check out Tiddies in Typebar Magazine! www.typebarmagazine.com/tiddies/