Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Ableist, huh?

Well! Hell of a week to decide I’m done writing about AI for a while!

For everyone playing along at home, NaNoWriMo, the nonprofit that grew up around the National Novel Writing Month challenge, has published a new policy on the use of AI, which includes this absolute jaw-dropper:

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of Al tie to questions around privilege.

Really? Lack of access to AI is the only reason “the poors” haven’t been able to write books? This is the thing that’s going to improve access for the disabled? It’s so blatantly “we got a payoff, and we’re using lefty language to deflect criticism,” so disingenuine, and in such bad faith, that the only appropriate reaction is “hahahha Fuck You.”

That said, my absolute favorite response was El Sandifer on Bluesky:

"Fucking dare anyone to tell Alan Moore, to his face, that working class writers need AI in order to create."; immediately followed by "“Who the fuck said that I’ll fucking break his skull open” said William Blake in a 2024 seance."

It’s always a mistake to engage with Bad Faith garbage like this, but I did enjoy these attempts:

You Don't Need AI To Write A Novel - Aftermath

NaNoWriMo Shits The Bed On Artificial Intelligence – Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

There’s something extra hilarious about the grifters getting to NaNoWriMo—the whole point of writing 50,000 words in a month is not that the world needs more unreadable 50k manuscripts, but that it’s an excuse to practice, you gotta write 50k bad words before you can get to 50k good ones. Using AI here is literally bringing a robot to the gym to lift weights for you.

If you’re the kind of ghoul that wants to use a robot to write a book for you, that’s one (terrible) thing, but using it to “win” a for-fun contest that exists just to provide a community of support for people trying to practice? That’s beyond despicable.

The NaNoWriMo organization has been a mess for a long time, it’s a classic volunteer-run non-profit where the founders have moved on and the replacements have been… poor. It’s been a scandal engine for a decade now, and they’ve fired everyone and brought in new people at least once? And the fix is clearly in; NoNoWiMo got a new Executive Director this year, and the one thing the “AI” “Industry” has at the moment is gobs of money.

I wonder how small the bribe was. Someone got handed a check, excuse me, a “sponsorship”, and I wonder how embarrassingly, enragingly small the number was.

I mean, any amount would be deeply disgusting, but if it was, “all you have to do is sell out the basic principles non-profit you’re now in charge of and you can live in luxury for the rest of your life” that’s still terrible but at least I would understand. But you know, you know, however much money changed hands was pathetically small.

These are the kind of people who should be hounded out of any functional civilization.

And then I wake up to the news that Oprah is going to host a prime time special on The AI? Ahhhh, there we go, that’s starting to smell like a Matt Damon Superbowl Ad. From the guest list—Bill Gates?—it’s pretty clearly some high-profile reputation laundering, although I’m sure Oprah got a bigger paycheck than those suckers at NaNoWriMo. I see the discourse has already decayed through a cycle of “should we pre-judge this” (spoiler: yes) and then landed on whether or not there are still “cool” uses for AI. This is such a dishonest deflection that it almost takes my breath away. Whether or not it’s “cool” is literally the least relevant point. Asbestos was pretty cool too, you know?

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Some Personal News!

Interrupting Icecano’s regularly scheduled programming, I have some personal news!

I have a (very) small piece of writing published in Kobold Press' Guide to the Labyrinth:

 
 

As part of their Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter to pathfinderize 5E, one of the auxiliary books is a Manual-of-the-planes-a-like guide to other worlds/planes/dimensions. They had a sort of contest/open slushpile to submit world designs for that book, and my “Thaecosia Archipelago” was one of the ones that made it in!

As we all know, “settings legally distinct from Planescape written by former members of the Planescape team” is one of my most significant weakness, so this was really fun. Talk about checking off a bucket list item!

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Friday Linkblog, Poets-and-Whales Edition

And these are ones I found this week while I was clearing out the open tabs

To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

As a fellow interdisciplinarian, Paul Ford’s views on “the humanities vs technology” are essentially identical to my own, but better written. This is the sort of essay where once you start quoting it, you end up copying the whole thing, so I’ll just stick to my favorite line:

At least art goes for the long game, you know? Poems are many things, and often lousy, but they are not meant to be disposable, nor do they require a particular operating system to work.

⁂

Scientists had a 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale

This is very, very cool; an actual sort-of almost conversation with a whale. Clearly communication happened, even if neither side really understood it! The attitude was a little weird to me, though: all the amazing breakthroughs in communicating with whales were entirely processes through the lens of “this is valuable because it might help us talk to theoretical aliens”. Whatever it took to get the grant money, I guess, but: Whales! We’re talking to them! That is (or at least should be) way cooler and more valuable than maybe being able to talk to klingons later. Maybe they can tell us about that weird probe thing early.

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Fractals

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Part 1: DFW

  1. Let me tell you a story about something that happens to me. Maybe it happens to you?
  2. This same thing has happened probably a dozen times, if not more, over the last couple of decades. I’ll be in a group some kind, where the membership is not entirely optional—classmates, coworkers, other parents at the kid’s school—and the most irritating, obnoxious member of the group, the one I have the least in common with and would be the least likely to spend time with outside of whatever it is we’re doing, will turn to me, face brightening, and say “Hey! I bet you’re a huge fan of David Foster Wallace.”
  3. I’ve learned that the correct answer to this is a succinct “you know, he didn’t invent footnotes.”A
  4. Because reader, they do not bet correctly. To be very clear: I have never1 read any of his work. I’m aware he exists, and there was that stretch in the late 90s where an unread copy of Infinite Jest seemed to spontaneously materialize on everyone’s shelves. But I don’t have an opinion on the guy?2
  5. I have to admit another reaction, in that in addition to this behavior, most of the people41 you run in to that actually recommend his work are deeply obnoxious.α
  6. So, I’ve never been able to shake the sense that this is somehow meant as an insult. There’s a vague “attempted othering” about it; it's never presented as “I liked this and I bet you will too,” or “Aha, I finally found a thing we have in common!” it’s more of “Oh, I bet you’re one of those people”. It’s the snap of satisfaction that gets to me. The smug air of “oh, I’ve figured you out.”
  7. And look, I’m a late-era Gen-X computer nerd programmer—there are plenty of stereotypes I’ll own up to happily. Star Wars fan? Absolutely. The other 80s nerd signifiers? Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Monty Python? Sure, yep, yep. Doctor Who used to be the outlier, but not so much anymore.3 William Gibson, Hemmingway, Asimov? For sure.
  8. But this one I don’t understand. Because it cant just be footnotes, right?
  9. I bring all this up because Patricia Lockwood4 has written a truly excellent piece on DFW: [Where be your jibes now?].7 It’s phenomenal, go read it!
  10. But, I suspect I read it with a unique viewpoint. I devoured it with one question: “am I right to keep being vaguely insulted?”
  11. And, he nervously laughed, I still don’t know!
  12. She certainly seems to respect him, but not actually like him very much? I can’t tell! It’s evocative, but ambiguous? It’s nominally a review of his last, unfinished, posthumously published book, but then works its way though his strange and, shall we say, “complicated” reputation, and then his an overview of the rest of his work.
  13. And I have the same reaction I did every time I hear about his stuff, which is some combination of “that guy sounds like he has problems” (he did) and “that book sounds awful” (they do).
  14. “I bet you’re a fan”
  15. Why? Why do you bet that?
  16. I’m self-aware enough to know that the correct response to all this is probably just to [link to this onion article] And I guess there’s one way to know.
  17. But look. I’m just not going to read a million pages to find out.

Part 2: Footnotes, Hypertext, and Webs

  1. Inevitably, this is after I’ve written something full of footnotes.B
  2. Well, to expand on that, this usually happens right after I write something with a joke buried in a footnote. I think footnotes are funny! Or rather, I think they’re incredibly not funny by default, a signifier of a particular flavor of dull academic writing, which means any joke you stash in one becomes automatically funnier by virtue of surprise.C
  3. I do like footnotes, but what I really like is hypertext. I like the way hypertext can spider-web out, spreading in all directions. Any text always has asides, backstory, details, extending fractally out. There’s always more to say about everything. Real life, even the simple parts, doesn’t fit into neat linear narratives. Side characters have full lives, things got where they are somehow, everything has an explanation, a backstory, more details, context. So, generally writing is as much the art of figuring out what to leave out as anything. But hypertext gives you a way to fit all those pieces together, to write in a way that’s multidimensional.D
  4. Fractals. There’s always more detail. Another story. “On that subject…”E
  5. Before we could [link] to things, the way to express that was footnotes. Even here, on the system literally called “the web”, footnotes still work as a coherent technique for wrangling hypertext into something easier to get your arms around.F
  6. But the traditional hypertext [link] is focused on detail—to find out more, click here! The endless cans of rabbit holes of wikipedia’s links to other articles. A world where every noun has a blue underline leading to another article, and another, and so on.G
  7. Footnotes can do that, but they have another use that links don’t—they can provide commentary.13 A well deployed footnote isn’t just “click here to read more”, it’s a commentary, annotations, a Gemara.H
  8. I come by my fascination with footnotes honestly: The first place I ever saw footnotes deployed in an interesting way was, of all things, a paper in a best-of collection of the Journal of Irreproducible Results.9 Someone submitted a paper that was only a half-sentence long and then had several pages of footnotes that contained the whole paper, nested in on itself.12 I loved this. It was like a whole new structure opened up that had been right under my nose the whole time.J
  9. Although, if I’m honest, the actual origin of my love of footnotes is probably reading too many choose your own adventure books.17
  10. I am also a huge fan of overly-formalist structural bullshit, obviously.α

Part 3: Art from Obnoxious People

  1. What do you do with art that’s recommended by obnoxious people?40
  2. In some ways, this is not totally unlike how to deal with art made by “problematic” artists; where if we entirely restricted our intake to art made exclusively by good people, we’d have Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and not much else. But maintaining an increasingly difficult cognitive dissonance while watching Annie Hall is one thing, but when someone you don’t like recommends something?38
  3. To be fair, or as fair as possible, most of this has very, very little to do with the art itself. Why has a movie about space wizards overthrowing space fascists become the favorite movie of actual earth fascists? Who knows? The universe is strange. It’s usually not healthy to judge art by its worst fans.36
  4. Usually.
  5. In my experience, art recommended by obnoxious people takes roughly three forms:32
  6. There’s art where normal people enjoy it, and it’s broadly popular, and then there’s a deeply irritating toxic substrate of people who maybe like it just a little too much to be healthy. 30
  7. Star Trek is sort of the classic example here, or Star Wars, or Monty Python, or, you know, all of sports. Things that are popular enough where there’s a group of people who have tried to paper over a lack personality by memorizing lines from a 70s BBC sketch comedy show, or batter’s statistics from before they were born. 28
  8. Then there’s the sort of art that unlocks a puzzle, where, say, you have a coworker who is deeply annoying for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, and then you find out their favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. A weight lifts, aha, you say, got it. It all makes sense now. 26
  9. And then, there’s art24 that exclusively comes into your life from complete dipshits.
  10. The trick is figuring out which one you're dealing with.q

Part 4: Endnotes

  1. What never? Well, hardly ever!
  2. I think I read the thing where he was rude about cruises?
  3. And boy, as an aside, “I bet you’re a Doctor Who fan” has meant at least four distinct things since I started watching Tom Baker on PBS in the early 80s.
  4. Who5 presumably got early parole from her thousand years of jail.6
  5. In the rough draft of this I wrote “Patricia Highsmith,” and boy would that be a whole different thing!
  6. Jail for mother!
  7. In the spirit of full disclosure, she wrote it back in July, whereupon I saved it to Instapaper and didn’t read it until this week. I may not be totally on top of my list of things to read?35
  8. "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (1967)
  9. The JoIR is a forum for papers that look and move like scientific papers, but are also a joke.
  10. The bartender is a die-hard Radiers fan; he happily launches into a diatribe about what a disaster the Las Vegas move has been, but that F1 race was pretty great. A few drinks in, he wants to tell you about his “radical” art installation in the back room? To go look, turn to footnote ω To excuse yourself, turn to footnote 20
  11. I knew a girl in college whose ex-boyfriend described Basic Instinct as his favorite movie, and let me tell you, every assumption you just made about that guy is true.
  12. Although, in fairness, that JoIR paper was probably directly inspired by that one J. G. Ballard story.8
  13. This was absurdly hard21 to put together.39
  14. The elf pulls his hood back and asks: “Well met, traveller! What was your opinion of the book I loaned you?” He slides a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men across the table. To have no opinion, turn to footnote d. To endorse it enthusiastically, turn to footnote α
  15. Or is it five?
  16. You’re right, that bar was sus. Good call, adventurer! To head further into town, turn to footnote 20. To head back out into the spooky woods, go to footnote 22.
  17. You stand in the doorway of a dark and mysterious tavern. Miscreants and desperadoes of all description fill the smoky, shadowed room. You’re looking for work. Your sword seems heavier than normal at your side as you step into the room. If you... Talk to the bartender, turn to footnote 10. Talk to the hooded Elf in the back corner, turn to footnote 14. To see what’s going on back outside, turn to footnote 16.
  18. "Glass Onion” from The Beatles, aka The White Album
  19. Superscript and anchor tags for the link out, then an ordered list where each List Item has to have a unique id so that those anchor tags can link back to them.23
  20. You head into town. You find a decent desk job; you only mean to work there for a bit, but it’s comfortable and not that hard, so you stay. Years pass, and your sword grows dusty in the back room. You buy a minivan! You get promoted to Director of Internal Operations, which you can never describe correctly to anyone. Then, the market takes a downturn, and you’re one of the people who get “right sized”. They offer you a generous early retirement. To take it, turn to footnote 25. To decline, turn to footnote 22.
  21. But did you know that HTML doesn’t have actual support33 for footnotes?23

  22. You journey into the woods. You travel far, journeying across the blasted plains of Hawksroost, the isles of Ka’ah’wan-ah, you climb the spires of the Howling Mountains, you delve far below the labyrinth of the Obsidian Citadel; you finally arrive at the domain of the Clockwork Lord, oldest of all things. Its ancient faces turns towards you, you may ask a boon.

    “Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?”: Footnote 27

    “I wish for comfort and wealth!” Footnote 25

  23. I have no idea how this will look in most browsers.31
  24. This usually still isn’t a direct comment on the art itself, but on the other hand, healthy people don’t breathlessly rave about Basic Instinct,11 you know?

  25. Good call! You settle into a comfortable retirement in the suburbs. Your kids grow up, move out, grow old themselves. The years tick by. One day, when the grandkids are over, one of them finds your old sword in the garage. You gingerly pick it up, dislodging generations of cobwebs. You look down, and see old hands holding it, as if for the first time. You don’t answer when one of them asks what it is; you just look out the window. You can’t see the forest anymore, not since that last development went in. You stand there a long time.

    *** You have died ***

  26. And turnabout is fair play: I’ve watched people have this a-ha moment with me and Doctor Who.

  27. The Clockwork Lord has no expression you can understand, but you know it is smiling. “There is always more,” it says, in infinite kindness. “The door to the left leads to the details you are seeking. The door to the right has the answer you are lacking. You may choose.”

    Left: Footnote a

    Right: Footnote 29

  28. Other examples of this category off the top of my head: Catcher in the rye, MASH, all of Shakespeare.

  29. You step through the doorway, and find yourself in an unfamiliar house. There are people there, people you do not know. With a flash of insight, you realize the adult is your grandchild, far past the time you knew them, the children are your great-grandchildren, whom you have never met. You realize that you are dead, and have been for many years. All your works have been forgotten, adventures, jobs, struggles, lost as one more grain of sand on the shore of time. Your grandchild, now old themselves, is telling their child a story—a story about you. A minor thing, a trifle, something silly you did at a birthday party once. You had totally forgotten, but the old face of the 6-year old who’s party it was didn’t. They’re telling a story.

    Oh. You see it,

    *** You Have Ascended ***

  30. Fanatics, to coin a phrase?
  31. This feels like it should have one of those old “works best in Netscape Navigator”, except Netscape would choke on all this CSS.37

  32. Björk: (over the phone) I have to say I'm a great fan of triangles.

    Space Ghost: Well, I have to say that I am a great fan of Chuck Norris, and he was in the Delta Force, and the delta was a triangle.

  33. Instead you have to code19 them by hand.
  34. Yeah, I see what you did there.
  35. Okay, that's also a lie; I've actually been working on this on-and-off since July.13
  36. Cases in point: I, II, III , IIII
  37. Certified: “It works on my machine!”α
  38. Especially when they themselves don’t seem to like it?
  39. I mean, the writing itself was tricky enough, with three15 interleaving essays.
  40. Not annoying people, not assholes: obnoxious. Hard to define, but like pornography, you know it when you see it.
  41. On the other hand, back in the 90s these people were asking about Robert Anton Wilson or saying “fnord” at me, so some things have gotten better, I guess.
  42. That's not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.

Part 5: No Moral.

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Saturday Night Linkblog, “This has all happened before” edition

There was a phrase I was grasping for while I was being rude about Mitt Romney yesterday, something half remembered from something I’d read over the last few years.

It was this From “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, from the August 1941 issue of Harpers Magazine:

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

…

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.

Haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t.

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Strike Season

All of us here at Icecano are, of course, in full support of the Writer’s Guild strike, and now it’s starting to look like there’s a good chance the Actors are going join them.  Good!  Shut the whole industry down until you all get what you deserve.

From the outside, this strike certainly seems to have an existential,  “final duel on the lava planet” vibe to it that the last writer’s strike didn’t.

As a member of an industry that is not organized—and really needs to be—I’m watching this situation with a mixture of admiration and envy.  It’s a joy to see what mature labor power looks like.  We could all have this, if we wanted!

Here’s hoping the WGA—and the rest of “hollywood”— manages to hold out for as long as they need to get everything they deserve, keep the financialization gig-economy wolves out, and perserve their art form as a viable career.

And maybe their success will help convince the rest of us to organize our industries too.

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