Fredösphere

My latest is live: BEST, the first of a 3-novel series. The story of Mason Best, ambitious scholarship student at Baneberry Hall, the nation's best boarding school. Or worst, depending on how you look at it. amazon.com/dp/B0CZFJTC2K/

@robkroese What are the hours?

Looking into becoming a sociopath

@SunkissedLen @johnloeber Heh, a friend of mine is a prof at a major research university, and he said the first piece of advice he received when he arrived was, "Don't win any teaching awards."

@johnloeber I thought that everybody understood that university professors are all about research, not teaching. I learned that at a community college when a wonderful teacher explained why he decided to not become a university professor.

Teachers vs Professors This has been on my mind since I first encountered it almost 15 years ago. When I was in high school, I had a few teachers in the humanities/social sciences who were really, really good: deep, serious thinkers, with lots of interesting views synthesized over decades of globetrotting experiences. As teachers, even at a nice private school, they were not real “winners” in the sense of climbing a prestigious career ladder, and neither did they publish academic papers. You could call them very advanced amateurs, and as dabblers they got to toy with lots of interesting ideas, kind of randomly assembled, without outside judgment. When I got to the University of Chicago, known for its life of the mind in the humanities, I didn't really find anybody who seemed to be as deep or as interesting a thinker as these teachers I encountered in high school. I always wondered why. Partially, it's because I got lucky with my teachers. They were the best we had. Maybe I didn't get so lucky with my professors. But today I may have figured it out: I think the actual reason is that my professors at UChicago were, in a sense, winners on an academic career ladder. It’s an extremely competitive environment, and they had somehow made it to the top. By definition, this is a tremendously powerful filter. And I think this had actually filtered against a whole group of people whom I consider interesting. This has become especially clear over the last few years, as a lot of traditional academia has been losing prestige rapidly: people are trusting the kind of professorial expert class less and less and less. It turned out that professors of ethics and sociology are just as unethical and susceptible to groupthink as the general public. And the general conformity of ideology and thought in academia is now well-known. These professional humanities academics may publish papers that are respected or even highly esteemed within their own niche communities, but this particular value system has long since been removed from what I consider interesting, or, in many cases, even related to the pursuit of truth. Reflecting on it, the heart of the matter is that those teachers in high school were unconstrained by convention and had been allowed to fully lean into their interests — kind of like the platonic dream of academia — whereas the professors I encountered in university, even when very successful, had been conformed by the academia-industry pressure cooker and their work sanitized, professionalized, and ultimately made uninteresting under the constraints.

@wrowclif chemistry -> alchemy astronomy -> astrology physics -> alchemy psychology -> the occult

Can we all just get on board with going back to calling chemistry alchemy? Alchemy sounds way better.

Have them carve gargoyles onto mile markers and I'll believe it

English has tons of words that are implied by other words but no longer exist. The verb “to weep” used to go with the noun “woop” (“weeping”), just like “to feed” goes with “food” and “to meet” with “moot.”

@robkroese Yeah. And also Herbert > Lucas in this regard.

Herbert uses all sorts of limitations like this to add drama: shields are powerful but they attract sandworms; atomics are powerful but they mean annihilation; the Sardukar are powerful but the Emperor can't use them without revealing his hand

@DavidRoomeAuth (...and you have a right to be proud tbqh)

@DavidRoomeAuth X-cisely!!!

I think there are big problems with all of these pro-AI-writing arguments (professionals are doing it or similar distasteful stuff, you can't tell if something was written by AI, you can't avoid it because it's in all software now, etc etc) But to me-as-a-writer, those arguments don't really matter. I wrote and published two novels that I'm proud of before this technology existed. And I know I can do it again with the same tools, for no other reason than "Because that's how I want to do it"

We can be sure AI didn't write this post at least.

See?

See my problem is that I *know* no AI will ever be able to write a Fredösphere novel as well as I can. Even the people who don't particularly care for my stuff agree that's true. For a lot of other authors, however ...

My value is for you to challenge my value

BREAKING: The number of journalists writing about polyamory has now surpassed the number of people engaging in it. Congratulations to all.

Yeah it happening at Kohl's would be the final indignity

@DavidRoomeAuth "Little" Debbie weighs 400 lbs and has tatoos on her chins

Little Debbie is one of the biggest selling bakers of all time. She's had over 100 bestselling snacks and cranks out 10-15 million cakes a year. She pretty much admitted she writes a formula and has big frigging factories bake the cakes which she stamps her face on

@robkroese I would argue they are not contradictory ;-)

Is the problem that AI can't produce quality fiction, or that it's impossible to tell whether an author uses AI? Because those two things are contradictory.

The surprising thing about Hell, Michigan is that the road is narrow and twisty and you're most likely to fail if you try to go there

rural ruins

I post old barns and barn-adjacent buildings. Like this <ahem> post office.

rural ruins