Yes I'm late, mind your business
By a plurality of reports, I have been released from the Gmail dungeon. Big thanks to all of you who let me know whether your copy of the newsletter came through. I still have no idea why that one email was marked as spam, and I suspect I'll never find out.
New Serialized Chapter: "Sebastian Moran Gut-Punches a Pimp," Chapter 3
The building’s interior was essentially one massive room; catwalks and rigging criss-crossed high overhead, and the film’s various sets were arrayed around the concrete floor. The sets were little more than open-sided boxes lined with green or blue screens, each surrounded by cameras and lights and other bits of equipment.
Nobody appeared to be shooting anything at the moment. The crew were all gathered in loose groups, chatting or tweaking their setups or grazing off the craft services table. The cast were at similarly loose ends; some of them had costumes on, but many were in black or green bodysuits dotted with sensors that would be digitally painted over in post-production.
Overall, Sebastian would be hard-pressed to identify exactly what kind of movie was being shot here—and so would Romayne Bellamy.
Chapter 3 of "Sebastian Moran Gut-Punches a Pimp" is now up available to read on the new Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! If you don't want to read the story in serialized form and would prefer to get it all at once, you can also buy the entire novelette as an ebook.
This Week's Links
The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
Iaso, who said she deals with some generative AI at her day job, told me that “from what I have learned, poisoning datasets doesn't work. It makes you feel good, but it ends up using more compute than you end up saving. I don't know the polite way to say this, but if you piss in an ocean, the ocean does not turn into piss.”
Pilot Callsigns: The web's largest collection of callsign stories
The Three Rules of Callsigns
- If you don't already have one, you will be assigned one by your "buddies".
- You probably won't like it.
- If you complain and moan too much about 1. and 2., you'll get a new nickname you'll like even less!
Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased
Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English “translations” he is publishing:
“About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to ‘my artists and seekers’.”
It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works.
Listen, sometimes you get distracted trying to cook a brisket and forget to put your newsletter to bed until the day it's supposed to go out. It's fine. Don't worry about it.
-K
