Percy Sinclair

@2ProbablyNever This one is a bit rambling but interesting.

Now listening to:

@WCCollier1 Never moving to Austin. That's legitimately insane

@PSinclairWrites Yep. We have Austin refugees at our department who have been subject to such panels. They face the standard departmental scrutiny, plus a convicted criminal panel, which has real influence to boot.

In Austin, every police use of force is ruled on by a panel of convicted criminals who make recommendations to the department regarding disciplinary action and punishment.

@C_3C_3 LOL well done

The Republicans should not be celebrating about the House Maps. The Democrats are just going to redraw all the Congressional maps in New England and remove all the Republican seats…

@HariSel57511397 Yeah it's going to take me a while to get even to your level. :) And I doubt I can afford audiobook narration ever. :) But I may do it myself

They tell authors to be happy making nothing, but I'm a broke Gen Z guy who has expenses to pay, and I believe in not killing your wallet. I raised 5k with Dead Men Running and then 13k four months later with The Last Human. Here's my business model: I believe literature has been hit hardest by the modern attention economy. Books have to compete with doomscrolling, video games, and pretty much every media that has a higher dopamine per second ratio. TradPub's model is Amazon and raw book sales, but the indie author today finds himself making 5 bucks a month because Amazon has been flooded with a sea of AI generated books on top of the slop that was already there. On top of *that* fewer and fewer people read nowadays, and if they read, it's usually old books by dead authors or porn. Also TradPub shut the doors so if you're not on the list, you're out. It's never been harder for new fiction authors to make money. So what I did was lower the barrier of entry as much as I could. I posted my work on free forums, I made audio editions and distributed via every podcasting platform, I maintained a constant internet presence, built a Patreon, commissioned art, etc. etc. Authors are naturally squeamish about distributing their work for free, but the indie economy is not a transaction economy. It's a donation economy. People don't buy books as risky entertainment--on average. They buy books of stories they already like and to support the author. The indie book scene is an audience goodwill scene. Raw book sales are a *terrible* way to make money btw. You get a one-time payment of five bucks and that's that. It relies on constantly bringing people in and maybe they'll come back for the sequel a year later--maybe not. It's super difficult to build any momentum, and it's next to impossible to make profitable with editing and art costs. Countless authors find themselves a grand in the hole with nothing to show for it and promptly quit. This is why I choose an online serialized format that's constantly updated. With Patreon, fans can support money in exchange for early access chapters. My stories are hosted on Royal Road, a webforum where people are looking for new books. That's another trick I've learned about marketing. It's supremely difficult to market on most social media platforms because they are not places people go to look for new books. You have to make them interested and then make the sale. Whereas if you find these niches of the internet where people are looking for the product you're offering, it's much easier. As an addendum for the Kickstarter, I use AI generated images to make promotional book trailers. It's super easy to put together, costs you five bucks, and audiences are pretty forgiving if you add the important disclaimer that AI hasn't touched the actual work itself. Always aim for the highest quality level of presentation you can afford. None of this is to say writing is an easy gig. It's taken me years to get to this point, and it's not an income anyone can live off of. But if you put the hours in, you can make money from this as a side hustle. And if you go *all in* you can make 25k a month writing LitRPGs, but few people can do that.

@bunnyhuggrredux @Panzerpicture It's the AI model. They trained the model to be anti-that and they aren't checking to see if the model is taking down legitimate stuff

@PSinclairWrites @Panzerpicture So they want to pretend that Germans don't exist? Or if they do then they never went through a brief struggle with fascism? That it just never happened? Surely to God there's some glitch in the AI prog that needs fixed? These people can't be that manipulative .. can they? 😳Wtf?

This isn’t a glitch. YouTube’s AI has wiped out 13+ years of WWII tank archive footage and veteran stories. My entire channel is gone, and my account has been disabled 155,000 subscribers erased overnight. People are now calling me a PDF file, because in their minds the channel “wasn’t deleted” even though you can clearly see that it was. youtube.com/channel/UCjejQ… That's the internet for you! First, the channel was removed. Then, my entire account was disabled. YouTube support bots claiming it was a Google product trigger, doesn't make a lick of sense when the channel was deleted first! The content that got flagged? Historical WWII footage. No nudity. No inappropriate intent. Just real history yet it was labeled as “child abuse material.” And I’m not the only one this has happened to. youtube.com/shorts/8uT0C9_… This isn’t just about one channel. It raises serious concerns about how automated systems are handling and potentially erasing historical archives. We can’t let real history be misclassified or disappear like this. #RestorePanzerPicture #YouTubeCensorship #WWIIHistory #SaveHistory Support the effort to restore the archive: patreon.com/Panzerpicture youtube.com/shorts/8uT0C9_…

@mattvanswol Woodrow Wilson

What’s the name of the person you believe did more damage to America than anyone else?

@WriteforLife6 LOL she's a fifteen-year-old girl. So this is definitely in character :)

@PSinclairWrites She sounds relatable! 🤣 - Admin R

"Lania was within earshot and considered getting up and going somewhere else, but her natural curiosity and the convenient clump of tall grass obscuring her from most of their vision convinced her to stay and listen."

@NathanTheAuthor We're really tight on money right now, but this is something I would absolutely support!

The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, recently expanded their Human Authored certification to "all authors whose books are published in the United States". They also updated the imagery. I'm going to have to update the seal on my book and my website. authorsguild.org/news/human-aut…

Just signed New Dawn up for this. Looking forward to it!

@MichaelFKane If/when I use it, I don't usually read what it says, I read the papers it gives me, or play with the code it's made. Helps keep me sane.

AI will tell you what you want to hear more often than not. One tactic to get better use from it is to tell it to be overly critical of you. Better to have a digital foil than a sycophant.

Last night, I had the distinct displeasure of listening to two of my students spend five minutes trying to excuse Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey....Dahmer True crime docs and Netflix have destroyed people's ability to recognize evil.

This video makes me angry. I work somewhere between 3-5 jobs at any given time, and my wife works. We take nothing from the state. Yet we always eat leftovers. And this entitled scoundrel thinks the state should give her enough so she never has to eat leftovers? How about no?

@HariSel57511397 Yeah I had a girl ask me out once in college. I thought she was joking and laughed it off. Find out later from her roommate she was dead serious. Worked out, my wife is much better. :) But yeah, I think we've all got one of those types of stories

I just realized that the girl who made a manga comic out of one of my short stories from high school probably didn’t really care about the story.

@MichaelFKane @Garhom13 The two are not mutually exclusive and, given the credential inflation associated with H1-Bs, likely concurrent, sadly.

@Garhom13 Or AI code. That's what took out Amazon for a day back in March lol.

The consequences of H1B hiring

@MichaelFKane @flyfoxpro We can't even get election integrity passed. :) No chance we're banning foreign citizens from Congress. Too much money laundering relies on them being there.

@flyfoxpro @PSinclairWrites I agree. we're just talking theoreticals. I do think a congressional ban could be possible though.

Actually pretty based. But why stop at politicians in Congress. No dual citizenship should be allowed at all.

@MichaelFKane @flyfoxpro Yeah. I don't much like it either because there are tremendous people, many from ex-Communist countries, who would be great reps/Sens etc. But how many Ilhan Omars can our nation stand? Of course, we're dreaming here, no way it actually happens in the current climate

I don't WANT to do that, though we may need to. All of our founders were once British and they made great Americans. And there are still great Americans who were born elsewhere and keep their head down. But immigration policy of the last few decades hasn't exactly ensured they're the norm.

@MichaelFKane @flyfoxpro Yeah, probably not. But the political office ban is absolutely something that could happen. We could also consider extending the ban on foreign-born individuals to all federal offices. Not sure if that's a good idea or not, though I can see immediate benefits.

@PSinclairWrites @flyfoxpro I thought about the voting prohibition, but I don't think you could do that without constitutional amendment, so probably not a viable solution.