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Will a machine write a good short story?
I was looking back at what I wrote about Large Language Models a year (or more) ago. This post in particular was one I’ve been thinking about: “So could a non-intelligent machine generate a string of words that constituted a story that human readers would find to be good (i.e. engaging, entertaining, emotional, well structured…
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Glup Shitto and other characters
You all have been starved of writing advice from Larry Correia and I can only apologies for ending that. Actually, this is less annoying than usual as he is talking about an interesting phenomena. He draws the wrong conclusion but still. The set-up is this. Larry saw his work being compared with some other unnamed…
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Hard & soft magic in Shadows of the Apt
I’d intended to take a pause in reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt series after Book 4. However, when I went to pick a new book to read, I launched into Book 5. As I described in my earlier review, the series is set in a fantasy world based on TTRPG. Humanity is divided…
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What’s a good term for the magic in Babel?
One of many things I liked about R.F.Kuang’s recent novel Babel, was how the magic worked. The concept was that silver had a special quality to it so that if you inscribed a word in one language and a translation of that word in another, the loss of meaning or the ambiguity left behind would…
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Low-hostility reviews
This is another post vaguely on blogging but which applies beyond blogs to review sites and other social media. I should start by pointing back to what I said about conflict. I am not averse to conflict but I don’t like upsetting people. The third side of that coin is people tying themselves in knots…
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More blogging advice: controversy
A blog, website, newsletter or social media account doesn’t need controversy to be successful. However, Here’s the top 10 posts of all time for this blog: Title Link Debarkle https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/debarkle/ The True History of R2D2 – Sith Lord https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-true-history-of-r2d2-sith-lord/ The Puppy Kerfuffle Timeline https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/the-puppy-kerfuffle-timeline/ The Nebulas & 20booksto50, not-a-nudge-nudge-slate https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/the-nebulas-20booksto50-not-a-nudge-nudge-slate/ Meanwhile, Former Sad Pups Keep…
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Blogging advice
There is renewed interest in blogging because of the Musk buyout of Twitter. I think the best advice is still to wait and see. The right has had a number of flurries about social media since 2015 (or thereabouts). I’ve seen ex-Puppies try to revive old blogs when Facebook’s erratic moderation policies fueled fear of…
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Ask Tim: Best Weapons for Home Defense
Your home is your castle but as we all know crime has risen one million per cent in the last half hour alone. At any moment a criminal gang enraged by fentanyl disguised as Halloween candy may burst into your house and steal your carefully curated collection of NFTs of outtakes from the final episode…
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Time travel and energy
I was reading this neat summary of time travel rules in fiction and thinking about a couple of things basically angles and effort. The idea that a small change at one point leads to a big change in the future (aka two different kinds of things both known as a butterfly effect) predates modern science…
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Fantasy Moon Landing
So imagine you are a magician in some off-the-shelf, bog-standard, faux-medieval-Europe fantasy setting. You’ve got your own little side tower in the castle and a king/lord/prince who makes demands on you. One day, the lord of the castle gets it into their head that they will do battle on the Moon. There’s just the one…
Camestros Felapton
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Camestros Felapton 