My arm hurts
Before I talk about my sore delt, I’d like to address specifically those of you who respond to these emails. Thank you so much for taking the time! Every writer is afraid she’s just shouting into a void. When someone takes the time to respond, and really engage with what I said, it helps me feel like maybe it’s not just a void staring back. I’ve mussed the metaphor but I hope you understand me.
Anyway, my arm hurts because I, along with my family, just got my COVID and flu shots! I consider myself very fortunate to live in a state where the governor has not only made the vaccines available for everyone, but required insurance to cover it. If you can get these vaccines, do it. And if you can’t because certain entities are out to screw us and our health, well, I hope you’ll make some noise.
Bartz v. Anthropic
Speaking of entities out to screw us, some of you may have been following the Bartz v. Anthropic law suit in the US. (In my best John Oliver voice:) Very basically, Anthropic is a company that used millions of copyrighted books to train an LLM. That included The Night Library of Sternendach. A class action suit was brought on behalf of the authors. There was talk of a settlement to pay $3000 per book to authors in the class, if they met certain criteria. That settlement has been dismissed without prejudice, so we’ll see what happens next, but I was not really happy about it in the first place.
Yes, three grand is more than I was expecting to earn from my book. Less than I dreamed, of course, and someday someone will pay me millions to make a musical out of it (right?). But the settlement had a ceiling, so only so many authors were going to be compensated; thousands out of millions affected. And the money, next to the worth of Anthropic, was nothing. Other companies could look at it and decide it was worth the risk of a similar settlement, and go on stealing work to create more plagiarism machines they claim can do a writer’s job. This is bullshit. Writing is hard. It’s a skill. It’s worth something. So if you use an LLM, chatbot, “AI,” this is what you’re supporting. There’s no ethical way to do that, and I haven’t even gotten into the environmental costs.
Enough moping!
Yes, I grumble a lot. I’ve got grumbly feelings. Stewing in them is no good, but sometimes I need help finding alternatives. I’m sharing this post from Sarah McAnulty, someone I follow on BlueSky who has created a zine with some positive ideas. If the link below doesn’t work, you can read it here. She has some good ideas of small steps we can all take to make the world suck less.
ALRIGHT! Version 1 of the fall zine is ready for ya. For your reading enjoyment, Everything Sucks! Full Zine (for digital reading) here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cYXFgh3aM88bcJ_Claxdzb21czuDH_zT Print-and-fold version coming soon, I need to test print it first and can't do that right now lol
— Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. (@sarahmackattack.bsky.social) 2025-09-05T23:14:40.503Z
More Stuff I’m Reading (and Seeing and Writing)
Speculative Whiteness, by Jordan S. Carroll, won the Hugo award for non-fiction. It’s a neat examination of racist tropes in classic (and modern) science fiction. It ruined Dune for me, or at least dinged it, but I’m still glad I read it. The book is available for free online here: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/speculative-whiteness
This weekend I went to Maine and took in a really, really good production of Next to Normal. It’s a difficult show; the score is hard, the content is challenging, and they did an excellent job. I don’t know if you’re going to be in Maine, but here’s the information.
Speaking of musicals, I wrote an essay the other day because something about that recent Hollywood Bowl Jesus Christ Superstar was bugging me. I gave it a pretentious title because my inner academic will never die. You can read it here on my blog.
I hope the weather is getting cooler by you, you’re getting ready to enjoy carrot and apple baked goods (no pumpkin for me, not ‘til October, but you do you) and take some time to breathe.