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Sibling of TB posted:Are there any authors known to write, like with a pen? Neil Gaiman. All of his first drafts are written out longhand with a fountain pen. I tried it once for a personal project and it's quite an experience, you're definitely forced to slow down and it changes your thought processes as a result. It's not necessarily better, but I can see why someone would do it that way.
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Oct 5, 2022 10:19
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For me, the biggest difference is probably that the ability to easily go back and change or delete things on a computer makes it much easier to get stuck redoing the same sentence or paragraph over and over. If I'm writing it out longhand I'm way more likely to just roll with my first version of something, because rewriting it means having a big ugly cross-out or redoing an entire page and I hate both of those options.
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Oct 5, 2022 11:04
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FPyat posted:Queer romances written by straight writers can be great, but sometimes I worry that they're missing the little quirks and changed dynamics that make queer relationships different from straight ones. Or you get your standard anime queer romance, where it gets creepy and weird and into "... Wait, the sexual assault is okay because it was done out of love? What the gently caress?" Territory. In other news, the second Artillerymen book is going places I didn't expect, what with Hints of more moderate elements of the Dominion beginning to ally with the Americans, the Holcano natives outright joining the Americans entirely, and the hints that the Dominion from the Destroyermen books are the radicalized remnants taken over by Blood Priests while more moderate members of the Dominion fled north to help form the New United states
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Oct 5, 2022 12:21
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Fivemarks posted:Or you get your standard anime queer romance, where it gets creepy and weird and into "... Wait, the sexual assault is okay because it was done out of love? What the gently caress?" Territory. That's a failure mode I generally associate with cishet romance novels, personally.
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Oct 5, 2022 14:40
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ToxicFrog posted:That's a failure mode I generally associate with cishet romance novels, personally. It happens a LOT, there's a frequent rec yuri manga that I noped out of in the first chapter because the main character gets raped by the romantic lead and then asked to forgive her. And yaoi gets it largely because it carries over from the male part in cishet romance novels.
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Oct 5, 2022 14:49
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Sibling of TB posted:Are there any authors known to write, like with a pen? Max Gladstone posted on Twitter recently that he has been drafting by hand since the pandemic
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Oct 5, 2022 15:40
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Danhenge posted:Max Gladstone posted on Twitter recently that he has been drafting by hand since the pandemic He wrote a good newsletter update about it: https://maxgladstone.substack.com/p/by-hand
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Oct 6, 2022 00:17
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I'm plowing steadily through the Locked Tomb series (including the two short stories) and just ran into this bit: He sighed and said, “We had the internet. We decided to stream.” She said, “What is this internet?” And he said, “See, I did make a utopia.” I cannot decide whether to roll my eyes entirely out of their sockets or whether to cackle for a minute straight.
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Oct 6, 2022 01:38
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habeasdorkus posted:I'm plowing steadily through the Locked Tomb series (including the two short stories) and just ran into this bit: It's always both, the entire way through.
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Oct 6, 2022 01:40
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Oof, and I was gonna read those. Thanks for the heads up.
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Oct 6, 2022 01:42
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Oof, and I was gonna read those. Thanks for the heads up. That's mostly a compliment, I love the books. 
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Oct 6, 2022 01:56
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Oof, and I was gonna read those. Thanks for the heads up. You're not going to read those three books because of that joke?
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Oct 6, 2022 02:14
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What is it about Locked Tomb that attracts posters, like moths, to leap into this thread declaring how quickly they've judged it trash
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Oct 6, 2022 02:16
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Oof, and I was gonna read those. Thanks for the heads up. Lol yeah if meme stuff makes you barf then you will hate them, unless you don't because they own
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Oct 6, 2022 02:24
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General Battuta posted:What is it about Locked Tomb that attracts posters, like moths, to leap into this thread declaring how quickly they've judged it trash It's the disco elysium effect
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Oct 6, 2022 02:24
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sebmojo posted:It's the disco elysium effect Terrible game, just like Witcher 3. They won't let you create your own character.
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Oct 6, 2022 02:27
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bagrada posted:Terrible game, just like Witcher 3. They won't let you create your own character. You can shave and choose not to wear the tie, what more do you want?
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Oct 6, 2022 02:54
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I'm about 30% of the way into Nona the Ninth and I gotta say, the second book felt like a significant step up in terms of writing chops. The first book was solid, I enjoyed it, and immediately jumped to the next in the series, but Harrow was eye opening.
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Oct 6, 2022 03:44
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I got a new Kindle for my birthday and took the excuse to finally get around to reading Black Prism, by Brent Weeks. I'm not sure what to say about it. It was obviously compelling seeing how I read it cover to cover in a single day, but I don't think I actually liked it and I've got no plans to read the rest of the series. It's not bad or anything, given what I've heard about the rest of the fantasy genre it's probably a cut above, but it's annoying how every character has the exact same voice, slightly too clever for their own good and always quick with a quip. I don't remember his ninja trilogy being like that when I read them a decade ago. But he gets points for only minimally mentioning prostitutes and sex slaves in this one, that's growth.
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Oct 6, 2022 03:45
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habeasdorkus posted:I'm about 30% of the way into Nona the Ninth and I gotta say, the second book felt like a significant step up in terms of writing chops. The first book was solid, I enjoyed it, and immediately jumped to the next in the series, but Harrow was eye opening. Her range is kind of amazing. i have zero idea what alecto is going to read like, but i an extremely there for it
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Oct 6, 2022 03:49
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General Battuta posted:What is it about Locked Tomb that attracts posters, like moths, to leap into this thread declaring how quickly they've judged it trash The frightening lesbian energy. Also Those Posters: You know what else sucks? The Baru Cormorant series. It's just trash. All those women with agency... it makes my penis feel even tinier than it already is.
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Oct 6, 2022 04:23
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Everyone posted:The frightening lesbian energy. Weird thoughts.
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Oct 6, 2022 04:28
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I think the meme humor is a turn-off for a decent number of people, and an absolute deal breaker for some. It's a bit much to absolutely trash a book you haven't read because it contains your pet peeve, but a quick "yuck" and passing on it are reasonable. It's like being on the fence about trying a book and someone telling you "it only has stat screens in some parts."
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Oct 6, 2022 04:59
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i always kind of feel like I took a wrong turn or put my shirt on inside out when everyone else loves something I thought sucked lol.
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Oct 6, 2022 05:01
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That's also one of perhaps.. three memes in the entirety of Nona? I just finished Nona and goddamn it another entire book leaving me on edge for a big Harrow/Gideon reunion, two ENTIRE BOOKS waiting for it and not getting it. Is this edging? Is this what edging is? Goddamn it I loved it. Struggled even harder in this book with following the 7 different names for each character especially now they're just body-swapping and soul-bonding all over the place, but went in like Nona treats life; letting it wash over me, my fingertips just about holding on to understanding while waiting patiently for the next Noodle scene.
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Oct 6, 2022 08:14
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Dabir posted:I got a new Kindle for my birthday and took the excuse to finally get around to reading Black Prism, by Brent Weeks. I'm not sure what to say about it. It was obviously compelling seeing how I read it cover to cover in a single day, but I don't think I actually liked it and I've got no plans to read the rest of the series. It's not bad or anything, given what I've heard about the rest of the fantasy genre it's probably a cut above, but it's annoying how every character has the exact same voice, slightly too clever for their own good and always quick with a quip. I don't remember his ninja trilogy being like that when I read them a decade ago. But he gets points for only minimally mentioning prostitutes and sex slaves in this one, that's growth. Rejoice and feel validated in your choice to DNF. I did not, and I very much regretted it. Too much Whedonesque feminism, lots of male gaze fixations on women breastily boobily doing things, a real  PSA, and series ends on a literal deus ex machina.In other fantasy-related news, the internet has OPINIONS on the latest Malazan UK book cover: https://twitter.com/GoranGligovic/status/1577560899883307009 Current best guess is that the cover was done by the long-time series cover artist using Midjourney to generate a bunch of different elements and then compositing everything together with a bunch of stock photos. https://twitter.com/CoreyBrickley/status/1577763378508009491 I guess Penguin Random House are okay with the murky legalities around AI-generated art...at least, I assume they would be aware since I assume the cover artist/designer would have been upfront with using AI-generated imagery. I am kind of surprised that they're experimenting with it on something as high profile as a Malazan book? Though maybe since it's an Esslemont book, it's less risky since the main target audience for this would be like 15-20 books (or however many) in at this point and probably don't care about the cover at all and would auto-buy regardless.
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Oct 6, 2022 08:17
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The quoted portion implied a tone and sense of humor I wouldn't care for and reminded me of the reasons I bailed on stuff like Kaiju Preservation Society.
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Oct 6, 2022 08:23
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There are murky legalities around AI generated art? Unless they're explicitly copying entire elements of prior work -- not just style, but actual content -- I'm not sure what the legal issue would be. Understandable that artists will be upset if their styles are getting copied by AI, but legally you can't copyright a style.quote:If your book is nothing more than something that has to sell, this is good enough. It has no substance, no message, and leaves nothing behind, but it catches the eye for a split second, job done. A pretentious superficiality. If that's what you are writing for, go on. 
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Oct 6, 2022 08:27
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:The quoted portion implied a tone and sense of humor I wouldn't care for and reminded me of the reasons I bailed on stuff like Kaiju Preservation Society. I'd say the difference is that in a Scalzi novel everyone is in quippy scalzi-voice from start to finish, while in a Locked Tomb only one or two characters occasionally have meme-voice, and everyone around them is sick of their poo poo. (I still enjoy scalzi novels tho so  )
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Oct 6, 2022 08:29
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Cicero posted:There are murky legalities around AI generated art? Unless they're explicitly copying entire elements of prior work -- not just style, but actual content -- I'm not sure what the legal issue would be. Understandable that artists will be upset if their styles are getting copied by AI, but legally you can't copyright a style. The way they trained these AIs to copy those styles is where the murkiness comes from. In order to simply Copy That Style they first had to (semi-legally? fully illegally?) ingest huge amounts of art from online repositories of theoretically copyrighted art. Mix the theoretically with "online repositories of art often have clauses that make this legal even though you wouldn't think it is legal". Morally lovely, whether or not it's by-the-books illegal.
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Oct 6, 2022 08:32
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Why is ai art bad? I mean I get the legal murkiness of it but like, generally speaking it looks like generic fantasy book cover example #3. I don't see the skynet is falling doomsday prediction being anywhere near as bad as just generic cover art.
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Oct 6, 2022 08:37
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Lord Bob posted:The way they trained these AIs to copy those styles is where the murkiness comes from. In order to simply Copy That Style they first had to (semi-legally? fully illegally?) ingest huge amounts of art from online repositories of theoretically copyrighted art. Mix the theoretically with "online repositories of art often have clauses that make this legal even though you wouldn't think it is legal". As for where the art came from that was trained on, that's a good point, so I looked up Stable Diffusion's training data, and wikipedia says quote:Stable Diffusion was trained on pairs of images and captions taken from LAION-5B, a publically available dataset derived from Common Crawl data scraped from the web. The dataset was created by LAION, a German non-profit which receives funding from Stability AI.
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Oct 6, 2022 08:39
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ai art is just one of the many things where stem nerds are trying to bypass the artistic process and, arguably, the entire concept of art as human communication. wouldn't it be great if you could input some words into a screen and output a picture/movie/game/novel to your exact preferences and tastes? yeah, i guess. but that's closer to masturbation than art. even star trek understands the idea of the holodeck is basically masturbatory. you'd think people would understand that further driving down the price of artists and writers is a bad idea but, well, one of them's the thread litrpg guy who thinks "it's not illegal" is an ironclad argument for doing anything, much less handing yet another aspect of humanity over to algorithms. why shouldn't art come down to putting the right terms and keywords in the right order so an algorithm can plagiarise-bash something together? why should a publisher pay a few thousand dollars to an artist to get something nice for their investment? let's embrace wholeheartedly the spectre of machine thinking.
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Oct 6, 2022 09:01
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Cicero posted:What law would this actually break though? A human can look at an artist's work at 'train' themselves off the same style, and that's not illegal because 'reading' a work in order to mimic its style is not illegal, you have to reproduce specific content before you're in trouble. Looking at a picture of Mickey Mouse is not theft of intellectual property; you are not asserting a claim on the image itself, or the likeness of the character. Drawing your own picture of Mickey Mouse for non-public use is not theft because you generated an original work, though you may correctly be accused of plagarism. Photocopying a picture of Mickey Mouse is technically theft, but only becomes legally actionable if you show it to anyone - there's a potential legal carve-out if it's for purposes of parody as would be understood by a hypothetical reasonable person, but historically that has not held water when Disney comes knocking. Selling several thousand copies of an algorithmically-generated Mickey Mouseses, only he's occasionally got a hosed up eye or his hands turn into tentacles because your processing system is poo poo and pretending you've never heard of this "Mickey the Mouse" is going to get you sued into the dirt, because it is very poorly-disguised theft of a recognizable design that relies on training a computer to reproduce recognizable elements of an existing illustration. Only, see, the feds aren't going to prosecute anyone to protect small artists' work and they don't have the legal resources of a megacorporation, so someone else gets to profit off those artists' work while simultaneously excluding them from their career field. If I program a Markov chain to regurgitate randomized samples of cultivation fiction by feeding it an input of all the usual Kindle Unlimited suspects, and it is obvious that paragraphs are taken wholesale from the work of others, and I dump hundreds of thousands of copies of this crap onto KU for pennies and kill the entire market except for my creations, that is clearly ethically faulty, it is legally suspect at best, and it is a clear net negative for the written word as an art form and a way to make a living. grassy gnoll fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 09:11
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Also, in the nicest way I can I think to phrase this, "maybe this poorly-tested and ethically-dubious piece of technology used by corporations to gently caress people is good because it's not explicitly illegal" is one spicy take in this, the science fiction and fantasy thread.
grassy gnoll fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 09:14
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i don't want software companies to make more bullshit that invades my life. not that i particularly care for art outside of books anyway.
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Oct 6, 2022 09:33
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It seems like it would be pretty easy for a US court to rule that you are infringing on intellectual property rights by using an artist's work as part of your data set that is used to train your machine learning model that you then use to earn a profit. Or rather, that would be the case if all the big tech companies were not firmly against such a ruling. The algorithms are pretty much black boxes and even the creators can't really tell you how they are generating images except in a vague, generalized way. A judge could pretty convincingly go either way on the decision. In the end I'd be absolutely shocked if any decision against ML stood for long due to the sheer amount of money there is to be made from it by Google and others. I'd be pretty surprised if we don't see a lot of IP licenses popping up that explicitly forbid using art for machine learning purposes though. Computers are almost definitely going to end up producing a lot of art that is indistinguishable from human art, and possibly even "superior" in many ways. When you can crank out thousands of high quality paintings per hour, and do thousands of variations on the most appealing ones, you're going to end up with some real gems. A lot of people will say it's not real art at first, but they won't be able to tell them apart in the end. Artists are going to have a field day getting reactions from people on their human-made art, only to reveal that it was made by a computer, then later on coming back and saying it was actually made by a human, maybe.
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Oct 6, 2022 09:50
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Lord Bob posted:I'd say the difference is that in a Scalzi novel everyone is in quippy scalzi-voice from start to finish, while in a Locked Tomb only one or two characters occasionally have meme-voice, and everyone around them is sick of their poo poo. Yeah, this keeps coming up and I'm just like, what the gently caress? I know I've said it before but I remember like 3 instances of meme jokes or whatever. I would say the vast majority of the books are pretty deadly serious, maybe with a sarcastic tone but definitely not majority jokey. I would argue the jokes just bring some levity to the bleak poo poo happening. It's not like the loving Bobiverse books or something. I don't know, maybe I'm just biased. I love these books. A Proper Uppercut fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 10:31
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grassy gnoll posted:Looking at a picture of Mickey Mouse is not theft of intellectual property; you are not asserting a claim on the image itself, or the likeness of the character. Drawing your own picture of Mickey Mouse for non-public use is not theft because you generated an original work, though you may correctly be accused of plagarism. Photocopying a picture of Mickey Mouse is technically theft, but only becomes legally actionable if you show it to anyone - there's a potential legal carve-out if it's for purposes of parody as would be understood by a hypothetical reasonable person, but historically that has not held water when Disney comes knocking. quote:If I program a Markov chain to regurgitate randomized samples of cultivation fiction by feeding it an input of all the usual Kindle Unlimited suspects, and it is obvious that paragraphs are taken wholesale from the work of others, and I dump hundreds of thousands of copies of this crap onto KU for pennies and kill the entire market except for my creations, that is clearly ethnically faulty, it is legally suspect at best, and it is a clear net negative for the written word as an art form and a way to make a living. But seriously, at least currently the models aren't advanced enough to put out something actually coherent as far as long form text goes. They can keep a story going, but it'll be very dream-like in how random it is. Though some writers are using them to 'assist', as I understand it. grassy gnoll posted:Also, in the nicest way I can I think to phrase this, "maybe this poorly-tested and ethnically-dubious piece of technology used by corporations to gently caress people is good because it's not explicitly illegal" is one spicy take in this, the science fiction and fantasy thread.
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Oct 6, 2022 10:31
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No. No more dancing! posted:Artists are going to have a field day getting reactions from people on their human-made art, only to reveal that it was made by a computer, then later on coming back and saying it was actually made by a human, maybe. I have a feeling that this isn't going to be the biggest impact AI art has on the livelihood of professional artists
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Oct 6, 2022 10:33
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