Besides, I figure the essential flow of any book I would write would approximately be "character comes to some crazy notion of what needs to be fixed in the world and slams gracelessly into the boring confines of reality". I can't imagine it would be narratively satisfying.
I would be more worried if I felt it was a particularly novel idea. Heck, sometimes I'm happy to put ideas into the world in the hope that someone with more ambition to put words to a story will flesh it out. So much of writing is just the quality of the writer's prose and overall flow anyhow.
You're doing great, and I'm glad to listen.
Of course, haha, I have accidentally repeated one or more black mirror episodes, but with switched out antagonists. Could probably use a few rounds through the rewrite machine.
In the end he gets in an armed standoff but doesn't get killed when it's revealed that his paranoia and ability to obtain firearms was priced into the betting. The cops then accidentally kill him immediately thereafter, settling the bet, with a bunch of people saying "well, that happens sometimes".
Of course, a third company with ties to the other two has run everything through actuarial-bot, figures out the most profitable side to take, influences the severity of the collection services by the other companies, as well as hiring other services to crank up his fear and paranoia.
I kind of want to write a short story of a dude with a gambling addiction who loses way more money than he has through some online gambling app, and through some cross-promotion with a prediction market it auto-creates a betting market for whether he will self-terminate within a month.
Ever get the feeling that at some point all this dumbness and graft has sent the US over the cliff-edge of a dark future, half the country collectively denying that anything is too wrong while obviously in the air, and the other half wondering how long until the whole thing slams into the ground?
There was more in the thread, but I sidelined into conspiracy nonsense and general despair. Deleted it as to minimize beclowning myself. Happens a lot these days.
At your recommendation Mr Bariteau, I'm deleting the more conspiratorial bits. I should always endeavor to not speak of what I do not know.
I can only support raising consciousness of the issue, it's the first step towards doing better. I'm just despairing of how divisive moral/cultural issues are asymmetrically more of a problem for non-right coalitions.
Moving backwards to the previous reply, I only bring up the "problem actors online trying to divide" as a sway and focus thing. Justice for Gaza is an earnestly held belief by many people, but the hunch is that it has been pushed online as a wedge issue to sabotage Democratic coalition building.
Do you really think centrist Democrats are without principles?
They're just not your principles, but they're closer to your principles than the principles of Republicans. And terribly, first-past-the-pole elections require coalition building and compromise. It helps because it's the right direction
Conversely, the structural factors in the world seem to still be pushing everything rightward. Even though the US is burning a hundred years of international goodwill for no good reason, even though our federal government leadership is a malevolent clown car led by a lawless grifter, it continues.
The first step to a morally-improved left-leaning American body politic is defeating and shaming Republicans. It's not nose-holding moral equivocation, it's tactical decision making. The first step to a better Democratic party is defeating Republicans so thoroughly and often that they move left.
But am I morally weak for even considering that? It's the common thread I get from my further-left friends: The only moral stance is pro-trans-civil-rights and anti-Palestinian-genocide. And I tend to agree, except that I have apparently internalized the inherent compromises of American Democracy.
I can see the line of thinking - if (some large fraction of) centrist Christians abandon the Democratic party over trans rights or pro-Israli donors abandon the party due to pro-Gaza stances, they fear the party would be untenable outside of major urban enclaves and states dominated by such.
A lot of the mainline Democratic party leadership are convinced that taking uniformly strong positions in favor of trans rights and justice for Gaza would result in permanent electoral suicide in federal elections. Are they out of touch or is there a grain of truth there?
"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is just four episodes of Black Mirror in a trenchcoat. Not a complaint.
Wonder how long before we see a Suno-style "Meaningful Consumption Experience" AI for personalized romance novels. And I'm not specifically talking about self-insert stuff (some people may be into that or not), just allowing all readers to hone exactly what they want from romance novels forever.
Visiting Dallas over the weekend, and I must say that the yeehaw is very real indeed.
Maybe? Not as familiar with the boundaries of magical realism as I would like, but my suspicion is anything like this has a very different vibe due to being a 'highly speculative real-event explainer'. Wild-ass guessing isn't super magical, generally.
I presume it's "Lightly fictional narrative strictly constrained by real world events", though it certainly suggests relatively fantastical explanations for why real world events occurred.
I could see the phrase being used to describe making a narrative work from speculative conspiracy theories.
An additional cognitive load: The sense that many of the people who "think we are deranged" can blame us for all negative consequences that follow because somehow our earlier actions caused them. If anything good happens it's because they beat us; If anything bad happens it's our fault.
Also, I can't agree with virtually anything the Libertarians say generally, but I have to give them credit that they were ahead of the curve on the "US imperial presidency is bad" bandwagon.
So much of this comes back to the Roberts' court bending over backwards to open the doors for Trump's excesses while trying to leave some way to close the door should Democrats hold power in the future. The presidency wasn't designed clearly enough to overcome a deeply complicit supreme court.
The LLM version of AI isn't smart or dumb in any traditional way we think of intelligence. It's more alien than that.
It just occurred to me that this means Asimov's laws of robotics won't apply to it. It doesn't consider potential causality or unintended consequences, only the best next word.
Mine is the music version. "Buying Gear is nice, but have you tried using the gear you have, or finding people to play with?"
Mine are still the various people at the opposite fringes of the hyperextended friend groups I've accumulated over the years, as well as a few family members that I never friended on some sort of separation-of-groups principle.
Fun facts from actuarial tables: a person is approximately ten times more likely to die before their first birthday than the year thereafter. A person living to their first birthday increases their life expectancy by half a year; the next half a year of life expectancy only occurs in one's twenties.
