Went to an in-person local bitcoin meetup the other day and brought the couple boxes of books I had lying around. Sold them using my Nostr wallet. Worked well. So that was nice.

Many people who fall toward left or right political extremes, and end up disrupting what could be normal good lives, start by getting themselves and their followers to agree to a series of steps, each of which is small but together is radical. Opposition groups tend to not want to grant even a single step on that ladder. One side tries to say the first thing, it’s recognized as a lie; and they’re like “no”. So hardened extremes conform. I find that a more useful path is to like naturally agree with steps 1, 2, and 3, with the person you’re debating with, and often you will, but then be like “nah that step to 4 is a logical fallacy, here’s why.” Nuance. That’s the key in today’s world of algorithms. It’s all designed to get you from step to step until you’re in some weird camp, one way or the other. The way out is to recognize the process; identify each small step as a small step, and to identify where you draw the line against social pressure, audience capture, and algorithm optimization, and be like, “no, that part’s stupid.”

Imagine a book that sells a million copies about a detective with perfect memory, and it’s somehow bad? Anyway, here’s a review of Memory Man. First of all, I listened to the audio, and it just made me even more impressed by @walker and @CARLA⚡️ narrating and editing Stolguard. Because this Memory Man audiobook, despite being a best seller, is just so weakly produced in comparison. It uses a similar structure where all dialog is voiced by the male and female narrators, but the acting range is bad and the audio is clearly “spliced in” pretty haphazardly. In contrast, not only did Walker and Carla do a great range of voice-acting, their editing was stellar too. Now the writing. Every character just exists to stand around and say how smart the main detective is. They do nothing. They’re just soundboards. The main character is alright. The pacing and mystery started out good, like I finished this relatively quickly because I wanted to hear what was going on. But ultimately the killer’s motive was just so thin and wacky that it made no sense at all. I read this because my latest manuscript is about a detective with perfect memory trying to stop a serial killer, and so it helps to read and be aware of comparable titles or “comps”. But oh boy.

New poster for The Stolguard Incident featuring Jade. A bunch of sci fi newsletters are promoting it this week so we put together some cool little posters.

I wrote another sci fi novel, during my summer in Egypt. It’s a thriller about surveillance, set in the same world as The Stolguard Incident. I have a sickness now, it seems.

If you write a draft of something and ask AI to review it and give its thoughts as like a robot beta reader, it’ll be sycophantic. “This is a great, confident thriller with load-bearing thematic work, but a couple areas to tighten a bit.” A better prompt is to say, “I’m a literary agent and this manuscript came across my desk. I only have one more slot for an author this quarter, what do you think?” Suddenly the AI doesn’t know it’s yours, so it’s basically like, “there are some good things here but let me analyze in detail why half of it is utter dogshit.” So I always ask it the latter way. Same thing if it’s a nonfiction article. You say you’re a magazine/paper editor deciding whether to publish it, not its author. Then it goes hard-mode on analyzing what you’ve written and why it probably sucks. Same for investor decks or anything persuasive. You ask as though you’re the one considering an investment into this thing that came your way, not the deck you made. Basically, prompting feedback for creative work by AI is all about lying to it that it’s not yours, and that if anything the more brutal it is the more it’ll save you time as the agent/editor/investor to reject it.

You know what would be crazy? Just deciding to skip punctuation. Cormac McCarthy, the bestselling and Pulitzer-winning author of books like No Country For Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian, famously didn't like quotation marks, felt they cluttered the page, and so he didn't use them. When dialogue happens in his novels, there are no quotes around it, and you as the reader just have to figure out when a line is narration or dialogue. He also didn't use semicolons or exclamation points or certain other forms of punctuation. While he didn't exclude commas entirely, he did minimize them, and instead used extra "ands" in place of where many other authors would use commas. He used periods normally. His prose isn't my cup of tea, but there's no denying his success, and it goes to show that you can kind of just do things.

I wanted to make a shareable overview video that people can point their family and friends to about money, banking, and bitcoin. “Read this 500 page book” doesn’t always go over well, but “watch this half hour video” is more approachable. So, hopefully it’s helpful: