Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 54
October 24, 2023
The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 172: Autumn Movie Roundup
In this week’s episode, I take a look at the movies I watched during fall 2023. We also have a brief digression about historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles.
You can listen to the show (with transcript) at the official Pulp Writer Show website!
-JM
October 23, 2023
Another 10k word day!
I am very pleased to report that I wrote 10,000 words of CLOAK OF EMBERS today, for my 7th 10k word day of 2023! (The 2nd for this book in particular.)
Since I’m pretty sure that CLOAK OF EMBERS is going to be the longest book I write in 2023, the progress is welcome!
-JM
Coupon of the Week, 10/23/2023
It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week!
This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF WOLVES, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF WOLVES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:
OCTWOLVES
The coupon code is valid through November 8th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out soon, why not start with an audiobook?
-JM
October 22, 2023
Your Crossword Is Wrong!
Recently someone I knew was working on a crossword puzzle, and one of the prompts was “sacker of ancient Rome”, three letters across.
The answer was “Hun”.
Which is wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Huns never sacked Rome.
The Huns did, however, sack a lot of the western Roman Empire. In the 400s AD, the western Roman Empire had entered its final decline, with a lot of its former territory getting carved up into new barbarian kingdoms. The Huns were a group of Eurasian nomads, and were indirectly one of the causes of the collapse of the western Empire. Their migration westward had inspired a lot of terrified tribes to flee westward to get away from them. Those terrified tribes became the barbarian invasions that overran much of the western Empire – but the Huns were still coming from the east. Under the leadership of their king Attila, the Huns became even more formidable, capable of taking walled and fortified cities, which was traditionally difficult for nomad horsemen to do.
Anyway, the Romans and their Visigothic allies had previously repulsed the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD. Attila returned the next year and essentially destroyed northern Italy, and his army pushed towards Rome. Emperor Valentinian III sent envoys to meet with Attila at the River Po, and one of the envoys was Pope Leo I.
No one exactly knows what happened next.
According to one story, when Attila looked at Pope Leo, he saw Saint Peter and Saint Paul flanking the Pope in all their holy radiance, with drawn swords in their hands, promising Attila that he would die if he entered Rome. So impressed was Attila that he turned his army around and left Italy, and Leo was credited as the savior of the city.
The truth is probably somewhat more prosaic. Attila’s army was running out of supplies since Italy had already suffered a bad famine before Attila had burned down most of the northern half of the peninsula. In addition, a serious disease, probably dysentery, was spreading through Attila’s army. The eastern Roman Emperor had sent an army to attack the Huns’ current homelands beyond the Danube, and Attila needed to go deal with them. Another account says that Attila’s advisors feared that Attila might suffer the same fate as the Visigothic king Alaric, who died shortly after sacking Rome a little over forty years earlier. There is a good chance that Attila was superstitious in a way that is hard for the modern mind to grasp, but until the start of modern science in the universities of the Middle Ages, people generally did not distinguish between natural and supernatural causes for events. Considering Alaric’s fate might not have been outlandish for him.
Pope Leo was also a man of great intelligence and charisma. Perhaps he simply pointed out all these facts to Attila, and the Hunnic king, knowing that he was overextended and potentially in trouble, decided that the possibility of divine wrath was an acceptable face-saving excuse to turn around.
We will never know what happened at that meeting, but whatever the reason, Attila turned his army around and left Italy without attacking Rome. The new eastern Emperor had stopped paying tribute to the Huns, and Attila planned to deal with him next, but died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in 453 AD. Attila’s sons immediately embarked on a civil war with each other, and the Huns’ empire fell apart in short order.
So the Huns never sacked Rome. Granted, a lot of other people did in the 400s AD, but the Huns never did. And that crossword puzzle annoyed me so much that I just wrote 600 words about it. 
-JM
October 21, 2023
Adobe Photoshop Generative AI
Adobe recently updated their AI image generation, integrating it further into Photoshop.
Is Photoshop’s new Generative AI feature any good?
Yes, it’s actually quite well done.
Does that mean I’m going to use it?
Most probably not! With certain caveats.
Reasons follow.
The first thing to note is that Adobe has actually done a good job of integrating its Firefly generative AI into Photoshop. The most versatile use is Generative Fill – you select an area of a layer, type a prompt in for what you want, and 5 to 15 seconds later, an AI-generated image appears in the selected area. Like with the Firefly web interface, you can choose between four options, and pick the the result that best matches your prompt.
You can also use Generative Fill to expand an image. Let’s say you have an image that is 1000 x 2000 pixels but it needs to be 3000 x 3000. You can have Generative Fill expand the image, and it usually does a good job of generating enough stuff to match the original image. Overall, Generative Fill is a powerful tool that can nonetheless be as precise as you need it, so long as you make careful selections and are willing to experiment with prompts.
That said, I’m not going to use it for any of my ebook projects. Possibly ad images, but definitely not ebook covers or any images I will have on my websites.
The first reason is that Amazon has been making some changes to deal with the flood of AI-generated books that are turning up on Kindle Unlimited. I opted mostly out of Kindle Unlimited back in April, which turned out to be a good idea, because over the summer the KU payment rate dropped to its lowest level in the history of the program. Amazon didn’t release any details, but the prevailing theory is that the Kindle Unlimited section of the store got flooded by AI-generated scam books. The business model for this scam works like this – you use ChatGPT to crank out some text, you use Midjourney or a similar tool to generate a cover, then you post the resultant book on the Kindle Unlimited store and have your click farm generate page reads. The best time to do this is on a Friday, since many of the higher-ranking Amazon support people often have the weekend off.
Because of this, for several weekends in the summer of 2023, the entire Top 100 category of various genres on Amazon was filled up entirely with scam AI books. They would all disappear on Monday when Amazon support realized what was happening and started banning scam accounts, but it happened often enough that the KU payment rate dropped very low.
Amazon is in a constant game of Whack-A-Mole with scammers, much like the US government with Medicare fraud, so after the summer some changes came to Kindle Unlimited Publishing. (I once heard an Amazon employee liken it to trying to keep rabbits from digging under your garden fence. As soon as you patch one hole, the rabbits have already excavated another.)
The first change was upload limits. Amazon limited the daily number of new books you could upload to the store to three. This was to keep scammers from uploading hundreds if not thousands of new books a day for their click farms to use. I think this is a reasonable limitation. Even as fast as I write, I tend to only upload two new titles a month, a novel and a bonus short story.
The second change was that on the publishing page, Amazon now makes you state whether or not any AI tools were used in the creation of your book or its cover. There doesn’t seem to be any detection attached to this, so I suppose you could lie if you wanted, but it’s never good to lie in general (ethical considerations aside) since the truth often comes out at very inconvenient times. No one also seems to know why Amazon has done this. Gathering market data? Protecting the Kindle store? Covering their bases in case of a sudden change in the legal or regulatory environment?
Which brings us neatly to the second reason I won’t use AI for ebook or cover projects – the copyright question.
The copyright situation around AI-generated stuff is currently unsettled, and every actual lawyer and expert I’ve heard on the topic agrees that copyright law was not intended to address the technology and will probably have to be updated. The flip side of that is that the courts and the US Copyright Office have consistently maintained that human authorship is required for copyright. You might recall a news story from a few years ago where a monkey took a selfie, and the courts decided that the photo wasn’t copyrightable because a human person has to create something in order for it to be copyrightable. So far the Copyright Office and the US courts have ruled against people seeking copyright for AI generated works, which means there is a small but steadily growing collection of precedent against it.
And courts love precedents and default to it whenever possible.
So no one knows how the legal situation around AI generated art will turn out, though so far it’s not looking likely that it will be copyrightable. Granted, that might change in a few years – the whole thing might end up before the Supreme Court, or Congress will pass changes to copyright law. Admittedly, neither outcome seems terribly likely. Whatever one might think of the Supreme Court, nothing about the justices indicate they would look favorably on AI art, and it seems like the sort of case the Supreme Court would defer to the lower courts and decline to hear. The US Congress is too paralyzed to deal with an entire range of far more serious and urgent problems, let alone the less pressing and relatively arcane concern of copyright changes. There are also the large lawsuits against OpenAI underway right now. It’s not likely, but the courts could rule that all AI-generated art is infringement.
In which case the “does your book contain AI-generated material” prompt would provide Amazon a quick and convenient way to nuke a lot of the AI-generated content if something like that happened.
So that is why I won’t use any AI generated stuff for my books and book covers. Laying aside the ethical concerns of whether or not it would be plagiarism, I have too much professional pride to use AI generation for writing. For using AI art in a cover, suppose I use AI art for like eight or nine book covers, and then Amazon decides nope, we’re not doing that any more. I would have to redesign those eight or nine covers pretty quickly. That’s a lot of unnecessary work I could have avoided.
One possible exception would be for ad images. Facebook’s primary rule for ad images is that they don’t show violence, don’t show nudity, don’t encourage ethnic or sectarian hatred, and don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright or trademark. Given that fairly closely matches Adobe’s policies for Firefly, it would be easy to create ad images that remain within those bounds. If AI art isn’t eligible for copyright, that doesn’t particularly matter for an ad image, since those get swapped out so quickly.
So AI artwork is a tool that most likely won’t explode in your hand. However, if I’m using a tool, I prefer it to have reached the “this definitely won’t explode in your hand” phase, rather than just “probably won’t.”
All that said, Adobe is probably in a better legal position with AI instead of OpenAI and Midjourney and the other AI sites. When Adobe started developing AI generation, the company made sure to emphasize that its models were only trained on public domain photos or Adobe Stock photo images. Adobe also is confident enough in its AI image generation model that it has offered to indemnify anyone who gets sued for using it. That’s a big show of confidence, though that might turn out to be a bad idea, akin to designing a new kind of bulletproof vest and insisting that people shoot at you to test it out. You’d better really hope you knew what you were doing when you built that bulletproof vest!
So, if you’re running any kind of commercial enterprise, it is probably best to avoid AI in any of your products for now. I suspect if you’re using it for non-commercial applications, like character portraits for your homebrew D&D campaign or something, you’re probably going to be all right.
But note that I am not a lawyer and that none of this is legal advice!
-JM
October 20, 2023
Autumn 2023 Movie Roundup
We are well into fall now, with winter just over the horizon. That means it’s time to share my opinion about the shows and movies I watched since the end of summer!
THE FLASH (2023)
This movie very famously failed at the box office, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s like the CG artists finally had their revenge on Warner Discovery for being overworked and underpaid, because a lot of the CG looks like something a beginner might crank out in an older version of Unity or DAZ Studio. Plus, there’s all the various serious crimes the lead actor has been accused of, which makes the main character rather less likeable. Also, THE FLASH, like many modern movies, simply cost way too much to make, which meant it had to make big money to earn back a profit. If your movie cost $50 million to make, a $200 million return is good news. If it cost $220 million, you’re in big trouble.
To be fair, the movie was not without its good points. The Flash realizes he can run faster than the speed of light, which means he can travel back in time and attempt to save his mother. Unfortunately, doing so breaks the space-time continuum and threatens to destroy Earth, and Flash tries again and again to set things right. Michael Keaton does well as an older Batman, and Supergirl was pretty cool. There were also several genuinely funny bits.
However, the movie leaned hard into two of my least favorite plot devices – time travel and The Multiverse. The problems with time travel and The Multiverse is that with an infinite number of alternate versions of the characters, the stakes ultimately becoming meaningless. I think it also shows how the superhero genre of film has run out of gas. Instead of telling new stories and new plots, all the multiverse movies are just churning up alternate versions of old stories and characters. It’s like playing a computer game you’ve already finished but making slightly different choices this time, like playing a fighter/mage instead of a thief/mage or something.
Overall grade: C-
BLACK ADAM (2023)
I think this was slightly better than THE FLASH, though not by very much.
There’s a somewhat complicated backstory involving the Council of Shazam Wizards, a demon-possessed crown, and a magical Champion. In the modern day, the story takes place in the nation of Kahndaq, which is meant to evoke modern Egypt and Iraq. Kahndaq is currently ruled by a British mercenary company called Intergang, but don’t worry about them, they disappear halfway through the movie without any explanation. The leader of the resistance against Intergang is an archaeologist named Adrianna and her son Amon, who is the kind of annoying kid who uses words like “neo-imperialist occupier” with a straight face while outrunning mercenaries on his skateboard.
Anyway, Intergang is looking for the evil magic crown, and Adrianna tries to stop them. In the process, she accidentally releases Teth Adam, the Champion of Kahndaq, from his tomb. Adam annihilates the mercenaries chasing Adrianna and then tries to come to term with the fact that he’s been asleep for the last 5,000 years.
Now that would have been a more interesting movie – a superpowered Bronze Age warrior wakes up and tries to come to terms with the modern age. Or he decides that the modern age needs enlightenment to reach proper Bronze Age warrior values.
Instead, we get the “Justice Society” (I assume they’re the store brand Sam’s Choice version of the Justice League) show up to fight Black Adam. Unfortunately, after they convince Black Adam to stand down, the crown’s evil magic wakes up and chooses a host, and only Black Adam can stop it.
Like THE FLASH, it had its strong points. The CG was better than FLASH, and Dr. Fate was an interesting character. So was Hawkman. Unfortunately, like FLASH, the plot didn’t make much sense, and it relied too heavily on hooks to the rest of the DC universe.
But on the plus side, no time travel!
Overall grade: C
HAUNTED MANSION (2023)
This flopped at the box office, but it wasn’t that bad for a movie about a Disney ride. It wasn’t a scary movie, it was a scaaaaaaAAAAaaary movie, in the tongue-in-cheek way that jack o’lanterns are “scary.” Like, the original purpose of jack o’ lanterns in Iron Age societies was apparently to keep malevolent spirits at bay during the harvest. Serious Business back then, but now it’s sort of play-acting to entertain children. HAUNTED MANSION is kind of the same tongue-in-cheek scariness overlaid with quite a bit of comedy.
The plot centers around a bittered, disillusioned former ghost hunter hired to use his ghost camera to take photos of spirits at a haunted house. The ghost hunter goes along with it, hoping for a quick payday, but quickly becomes ensnared in the curse surrounding the titular Haunted Mansion. He then has to team up with a crazy professor, a fast-talking priest, a medium with good Yelp reviews, and a widowed doctor and her precocious son to defeat the malevolent Hatbox Ghost who rules over the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion.
I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of the Disney Corporation, but I am told that the movie has many Easter eggs referring to the original ride for people who appreciate that kind of thing.
The movie didn’t do well in theaters, but I expect it will have a long afterlife (ha!) on streaming.
Overall grade: B-
MEN IN BLACK 3 (2012)
The original MEN IN BLACK was a near-perfectly constructed science fiction comedy. MEN IN BLACK 2 was good, but not quite on that level. MEN IN BLACK 3 falls at about the same ranking, I think.
In this one, a lethal alien named Boris the Animal breaks out of a secure lunar prison and embarks on a rampage of revenge against Agent K. To facilitate his vengeance, Boris steals a time travel device and goes back to 1969 to kill a younger K at a critical junction in the timeline. Once Agent J realizes what has happened, he obtains another time jump device and goes back to fix things.
As I’ve mentioned before many times, I don’t really like time travel stories. However, this one works because it’s pretty funny – to make the time “jump” work you literally have to jump off a building of sufficient height to trigger the device. The other comedy bits are good. Josh Brolin does a pitch-perfect impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones as the younger Agent K.
Overall grade: B
MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL (2019)
I’d heard bad things about this movie, but it was actually quite enjoyable. Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth start as Agent M and Agent H. Based on the movie’s advertising, I thought Agent M would be one of those tediously infallible #girlboss characters, with Agent H as her dimwitted sidekick. Fortunately, this turned out not to be the case. Agent M is a nerdy probationary agent who desperately wants to prove herself, while Agent H is a charismatic, somewhat lazy hedonist who always manages to pull off his assignments in the end. Agent M’s and Agent H’s first assignment together is to bodyguard an alien royal, who promptly gets himself killed by two mysterious shapeshifting assassins. As things go haywire in the aftermath, the agents realize that the royal had a dark secret, and there is a traitor somewhere within the Men In Black.
I thought it was an entertaining movie. Agent M and Agent H made a great comedic duo, and there were so excellently funny bits. Liam Neeson was also good as Agent T, the commander of the branch office.
And no time travel or multiverses in this one!
Overall grade: B+
AHSOKA (2023)
Good, but unfinished, since only two of the major plots get resolved, and in such a way that it sets up future adventures.
I realized the other day that STAR WARS is the American equivalent to DOCTOR WHO. The similarities are remarkable. 1.) Both are long-running sci-fi franchises. 2.) Both are definitely not hard science fiction. 3.) Both are under the stewardship of large, ponderous, frequently ineffective organizations, whether Disney or the BBC. 4.) Both have spawned a vast maze of tie-in novels and comics and games. 5.) Both have fandoms that act like religions, complete with a crazy fringe. 6.) And like religions that break into warring sects, both have fandoms that decide upon a particular era or release as the best one, and argue vociferously about which part of the franchise is the best, with almost the same fervor as people arguing about whether Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or John Calvin had the correct interpretation of the Bible.
This isn’t to be glib, but to note that the same self-destructive tribal instinct that humanity exhibits in politics and religion also seems to appear in far less serious arenas, like football supporters and science fiction franchises. Or even in something as silly as game console brands, as a single glance at an online argument about the respective merits of the Xbox and the Playstation will demonstrate.
Anyway! That was a philosophical digression. Back to the AHSOKA show.
It was better than I expected. I thought that Ahsoka would be yet another tediously infallible #girlboss type character, but she was nothing like that. Instead, she made several serious mistakes, faced enemies that were stronger than her, and had to learn and adapt and grow to survive her challenges. In other words, a compelling protagonist! All the performances from the actors were good. Especially the late Ray Stevenson – his Baylan Skoll character really stole Episode 4, and if this was destined to be Mr. Stevenson’s last performance, at least it was a great one. Diana Lee Inosanto was great as Morgan Elsbeth, who has to be one of the single most competent villains in all of STAR WARS. Evil, but she gets results!
I also really liked the lightsaber duels. They seemed more like something out of a samurai movie – the combatants careful of their footing and their stances, only to explode into sudden motion – than the more acrobatic flipping and spinning around in the prequel trilogy.
I have to admit, in the publicity stills for the show, I kind of thought that the show’s version of Grand Admiral Thrawn looked sort of like Elon Musk transmogrified into a Smurf, but that was just a bad angle – combined with his voice and mannerisms (ie, the acting performance) Lars Mikkelsen’s performance really works. I suspect Mr. Musk only wishes he had this version of Grand Admiral Thrawn’s air of gravitas and authority.
The show ends on a sort of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK style cliffhanger. I hope the story will continue, but I have my doubts. Disney wasn’t in a great shape even before the writers’ and actors’ strike, and I wonder if the company is simply going to run out of financing.
One more point – the soundtrack by the Kiner family was A+ work, with the Japanese-style musical motifs for the lightsaber duels, the long ominous horns for the Nightsisters’ motif, and the blasting pipe organ for when Thrawn makes his return.
Overall grade: B+
COLLATERAL (2004)
This is a superb neo-noir thriller. Jamie Foxx stars as Max, a hapless LA taxi driver who picks up Vincent, played by Tom Cruise, who claims to be in town to secure signatures for a real estate deal. Vincent offers Max $600 to drive him around for the night, and in need of the money, Max agrees. Except it turns out Vincent is actually a hit man in LA to kill five targets, and when Max realizes what is happening and tries to bail, Vincent forces him to continue.
I really liked this one. Tom Cruise’s perpetual intensity works very well in a villain role, and the psychological duel between Max and Vincent was compelling to watch. Vincent claims that his targets are bad people who deserve their fates, but once Max figures out that Vincent’s final target most definitely does not deserve it, the race is on to save the target’s life. The movie did have the overused trope where the LAPD gets mad the FBI is taking over their case, which was a thing even way back in DIE HARD. In fact, that was a major plot point in DIE HARD, now that I think about it. In Real Life, the FBI’s interaction with local law enforcement mostly involves provides consulting and lab services, and local law enforcement is often eager to hand a troublesome case over to the feds because it then becomes Somebody Else’s Problem. I also thought the soundtrack seemed a bit off in the first half of the movie.
But these are minor quibbles – COLLATERAL was a thoroughly enjoyable thriller. Definitely recommended if you like this genre of film.
Overall grade: A
A HAUNTING IN VENICE (2023)
The third of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies. I really liked the first one he did, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, though I thought DEATH ON THE NILE was only so-so, which was disappointing, because DEATH ON THE NILE is in my opinion one of the best of the Hercule Poirot books. But A HAUNTING IN VENICE is on par with ORIENT EXPRESS.
The movie takes place in 1947, and Hercule Poirot, soul-sick and world-weary after the horrors of World War II and all the depths of human evil he has seen in his cases, has decided to retire in Venice. His friend Ariadne Oliver (Agatha Christie’s self-parodying author insert in the Poirot novels) turns up to ask him to help debunk a medium preying upon a grieving mother. Poirot immediately demonstrates the medium as a fraud, but soon afterward someone tries to kill him, and a few moments later the medium herself is killed. It’s then up to Poirot to solve the case, even as the suspects become increasingly convinced that supernatural powers are behind the killing. It also had one of my favorite plot devices from the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES movie – the rationalist detective confronted by a seemingly supernatural mystery.
Branagh’s version of Poirot is darker and rather more angsty than the book version, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Tina Fey was also an excellent choice to play Ariadne Oliver.
Overall grade: A
So those are the movies I saw this autumn!
-JM
October 19, 2023
DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER now in audiobook!
October 18, 2023
CLOAK OF EMBERS now underway
Now that GHOST IN THE SERPENT is out, it’s full speed ahead on CLOAK OF EMBERS.
I am 30,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 5 of 22.
What will CLOAK OF EMBERS be about?
The dwarves of Nerzuramaxis want to make a treaty with the Elven free cities of Kalvarion. The dwarves also want to sign the treaty at the Great Gate complex – which means Nadia is in charge of it. Naturally she expects trouble. Except there’s more trouble coming than she realizes, because her old enemy Michael Durst realizes this will be his best chance of killing her.
And another, potentially bigger problem is about to blow up in everyone’s faces.
Ever since the character of Victoria Carrow made her first appearance waaaaaaaay back in CLOAK OF ASHES, I’ve had a few readers who have been suspicious of her (hi, Juana!), and email their suspicions every time she appears in a new CLOAK book.
This is the book where we’ll find out if those readers’ suspicions were correct or not.
One little preview. Victoria Carrow has a huge secret.
Except she doesn’t know it yet.
The main POV characters will be Nadia, Russell, Riordan, Victoria, and Michael Durst.
If all goes well I hope to have CLOAK OF EMBERS out before American Thanksgiving, though it might slip to December.
-JM
October 17, 2023
The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 171: The Different Genres Of Fantasy
In this week’s episode, I take a look at 10 different types of popular fantasy. A preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER as narrated by Brad Wills is included at the end of the episode.
-JM
October 16, 2023
10k words of CLOAK OF EMBERS!
I am pleased to report that I wrote 10k words of CLOAK OF EMBERS today, for my 6th 10,000 word day of 2023!
As you might guess, this also means I have started writing CLOAK OF EMBERS. More details to come about the book on Wednesday.
-JM
