Moe Lane's Blog, page 60
May 22, 2025
Had to adjust prices on my chapbooks.
Not to mention the foreign prices for FROZEN DREAMS. I didn’t want to, but Amazon is adjusting the royalty rates for paperback books under $9.99 from 60% to 50%. As it was, I’m still getting dinged because I only raised all the chapbooks from $6.99 to $7.99. I may have to raise the paperback prices further, and I would rather not.
At the moment, the Kindle prices for my books remain unchanged. So that’s still all right.
05/22/2025 Snippet, TOM VARGAS AND THE CASE OF THE MEDDLING PRIEST.
Investigation!
I bet you’re wondering why I just walked right in, fat, dumb, and happy. Why not let the cops handle it? Preferably an older, grizzled one that was too old for this mierda, and ready to lay out half a dozen street punks with a left hook and a few quips? Look, I told you: they don’t patrol this part of town often enough. If there was something bad going down, would Carlito thank me if I didn’t stick my nose in in time?
Speaking of my nose, it was twitching in a way I didn’t like. Something in there stunk. It wasn’t blood and it wasn’t icemold, but those two aren’t the only bad things you can find on the other side of a hastily-closed door. That was all the excuse to meddle I needed, not that I ever do.
The inside was deserted, and also a mess — and I don’t mean like pawnshops usually are, all stuffed to the gills with knickknacks, mathoms, and the occasional geegaw. Somebody had trashed the shop, either because they were looking for something, or just for the fun of it, It was so bad, I wondered why the cops weren’t here already. Whoever had done this hadn’t been quiet about it.
There was more, though. The stink was even stronger inside, and I didn’t like the way it tasted on my lips. Don’t ask me how it tasted, or smelled, though. You probably don’t have the right kind of nose or tongue, and just then? I wished I didn’t. There’s a term from the Lore: ‘reek of wrongness.’ Bergman’s was full of the reek, and it was scarily fresh and horribly spoiled, all at the same time.
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I will be selling my game at Savage Fest!
Huzzah for me!
BEHOLD! pic.twitter.com/Cr9KBs18Gv
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) May 22, 2025
Despite the name, Savage Fest is an upcoming (June 7th) local community event in much the same vein as the Laurel Main Street and Arbutus Arts festivals, only with hopefully much less in the way of explosions and blood sacrifices and so forth. I’m trying to decide whether to flog these for twenty-five bucks, or thirty. The money works out about the same at the former price, but if they’re moving at thirty online…
(As always, you can get your copy of the Fermi Resolution Worldbook here!)
May 21, 2025
“Over The Hills and Far Away.”
“Over The Hills and Far Away,” The Music of Sharpe
#commissionearned
Well, *that* was surprisingly melancholy.
I was going through my old RPG stuff – as in, really old. Twenty year old stuff. I was thinking that I could see what could be used… but it’s all either GURPS, or In Nomine. The latter is still dear to my heart, and virtually nobody else; and the former is an annoyance to me today. If only they had released a version of the game as an OGL…
The Surprisingly Interesting CAUGHT STEALING trailer.
I thought it was something else, but CAUGHT STEALING looks… intriguing, actually. Not my usual fare at all, but there may be something there. It certainly seems to be enjoying itself.
05/21/2025 Snippet, TOM VARGAS AND THE CASE OF THE MEDDLING PRIEST.
Did a lot of words today. Here’s some!
“But we have to find out what’s going on with this relic of yours, Father Miguel. Is it the kind of thing people kill over?”
“Only if they’re fools.” Mike shook his head. “Of which there are still far too many, in this Fallen world of ours. Pieces of the True Cross cannot be used for evil purposes, at least. Even trying is dangerous. I need hardly tell you that God would not approve of such things. Nor that His wrath would fall upon anyone who tries.”
“So if somebody grabbed it,” I mused, “it’s because they’d want to keep it locked away, like it was. What would the Church have used it for, anyway?”
“It’s a relic,” Mike shrugged. “We’d keep it on hand for times when a fragment of the Holy Presence would be beneficial for our tasks. So… exorcisms, spiritual cleansings, meditation and prayer. Nothing earthshaking. I am at a loss to wonder why anyone would risk damnation by trifling with it.”
“Same here,” I told him as I checked my suit jacket. The blood had rolled right off, just like it was supposed to. “That’s why we need to start hitting those pawnshops. We find the guy who bought the jewelry, he can tell us about who sold it. We can go from there.”
“Do they usually do that? Talk, I mean?” Mike asked. “What’s in it for them?”
“They get to talk,” I explained to Mike as we headed out the door. “Usually, that’s enough.”
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AI is a mirror that lies.
You cannot avoid it, and it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the inherent problem will be fixed. If the solution was obvious and simple to implement, they would have done it by now.
— Fredösphere (@Fredosphere) May 20, 2025
Via @davefreersf. I’m not actually panicking about this, per se, mostly because I’m ever-so-slightly smugly aware that I’m on the right side of the 80/20 line of who will get the shaft in my particular industry*. AI won’t do anything to me, except make my stuff stand out in comparison. But it’s pretty clear by now that there are two inherent limitations to the tool:
It is a mirror. LLMs do not have insights of their own. Everything it uses has to come from somewhere else. Usually you.The mirror lies. When it doesn’t know something, LLMs hallucinates bits that statistically might fit. This is not a flaw in the system. This is inherent the system itself.This leads to an elegant trap, or perhaps short-circuit of the vetting process that normally keeps nonsense from making it out into the wider world. Everybody should agree that AI-generated work needs to be vetted (it’s not, but that’s a different article), but the problem with getting a human to do the vetting is that LLMs default to always agreeing with a human. So when a human sees nonsense that he knows is nonsense, the LLM immediately concedes the point, rewrites everything, and the process iterates until the human is no longer complaining.
That’s not the same thing as ‘the work is no longer nonsense.’ Everything nonsensical that fits the biases of the human gets through. Everything nonsensical that the human doesn’t care about gets through. Everything nonsensical that ‘sounds right’ to the human gets through. Every false statement that the human himself believes gets through. You would need at least three (three is traditional) humans, of varying backgrounds and interests, to get anywhere when it came to cutting down on the nonsense… and weren’t you using AI in the first place to stop paying people for their work?
You’d think that they’d fix all of this. Then again, you’d think that they already would have.
Moe Lane
*To put it in GURPS terms, because why not: LLMs are touted as expert systems that give a +4 to all rolls in the relevant skill. In reality, they are actually processes that give a particular skill of 8- on 3d6, with maybe a +1 to skill rolls if you’re trained in it. Since humans have a base IQ stat of 10, their usual Writing default is 5-. For those people, going from 5- to 8- feels significant, because from their point of view it is. Those with a point in Writing (which gives them the skill at IQ-2) will see their rolls go from 8- to 9-, or from 9- to 10- if they happen to have an IQ of 11 (if they’re lucky). This makes them think that they’re the wave of the future, because look! There’s a plot, and everything.
I should note here that a 10- on 3d6 has a 50% failure rate.
Those of us with higher IQ stats and a Writing skill that we’ve built up to IQ level or beyond (modesty, or perhaps prudence, prevents me from self-assessment) find all of this exasperating, sourly amusing, or both. The +1 might be nice, but it’s not really relevant at our level, and it’s also not cumulative with the bonuses from using a spell-checker or the Internet anyway. Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of this age is that anybody can yell in anybody else’s ear, any time, any place, and for any reason or none. So we keep having to wade through all of this slop. Huzzah for the writer’s life!
May 20, 2025
Tweet of the Day, It’s A Valid Question edition.
I mean, sure, the answer is ‘no.’ But the question still needed to be asked.
Can 100 unarmed men defeat a gorilla traveling at 100,000 mph?
— Hurrah Hurrah for Israel (@JBeeDubya) May 20, 2025
