This Week's Monstrosity: The Legacy of Invader Zim, Beatrix Potter's Cottagecore, and more
Updates
I was sad to hear of the passing of Ian McGinty, one of the creators of Invader Zim and Adventure Time. Invader Zim was one of the defining shows of my college experience, and its unique dark, zany humor struck a chord and has never left me.
Beatrix Potter is the unlikely hero of the Cottagecore movement. For an unsettling companion piece, see her guest appearance in Christian McKay Heidicker’s Scary Stories for Young Foxes.
The stylized, quirky, disorienting, completely captivating teaser for Poor Things… a Frankenstein-inspired film featuring Emma Stone in a role unlike anything I’ve ever seen from her before, and I’m hooked.
An older but new-to-me article about ChatGPT from science fiction author Ted Chiang that I discovered through BaltiCon a few weeks ago and finally read in full.
My takeaway: I think when a machine appears to engage in dialogue with us it can feel like they speak the way people speak, so they must learn the way people learn, and thus, that at this rate, they will outpace us Terminator-style. However, they do not. ChatGPT learns not from applyling principles to a range of scenarios (1+1=2 so 11,111+11,111=22,222) but from drawing on the expanse of content already vailable on the question online (1+1 is easy to find online, but 11,111+11,111 much less so). This comes with still very real, but very different concerns about what tools like ChatGPT mean for our present and future.
A random autoplay on YouTube had me listening to Daytona Sand last week and it really set my mood for the morning — it got me thinking about what we lose in a world where more of our music comes from our own playlists and individual selections, instead of the letting the selectison ofthe radio DJ wash over us like I did in my teens. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to speak to you in a given moment.
Can You Help an Author Out?
If you’ve read Tides, have you left a review? Three more reviews will get this book to 50 reviews on Amazon, which can open up promotion opportunities and amp up the algorithm gods in its favor!
Could you be on of those three? Leave your honest review here. You don’t even need to write any text, you can just give your star rating!
In the Wild
Awesome Con, Washington DC’s Comic Con, is this weekend, and I’ll be there with my books, secrets to tell about my works in progress, and a couple panels with some amazing author buddies.
Find me in Author’s Lane at booth C38 and on these panels:
Wednesday & Beyond: Antiheroes, Loners and Introverts in SFF
Saturday, June 17, 4:45-5:30 PM, Room 209
Let's Go on a Quest! A Discussion of Writing SFF Adventures
Sunday, June 18, 1-1:45 PM, Room 209
Reading
Mood
It’s summer, the air isn’t toxic anymore, and I am hyped for AwesomeCon!