Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 66

GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS THREE now in audiobook!

I am very pleased to report that GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS THREE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available! You can get it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, and Apple Books. It contains the final three books of the GHOST EXILE saga – GHOST IN THE THRONE, GHOST IN THE PACT, and GHOST IN THE WINDS.

The combined bundle is 44 and a half hours long. According to Google Maps, theoretically if you drive from New York to Los Angeles without stopping, the travel time will be just about 41 hours. So GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS THREE is long enough to cover a transcontinental trip!

-JM

CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE rough draft done!

I said on Facebook that I could have finished the rough draft of CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE on Saturday, but instead I was going to go see the Super Mario movie.

But I went to see the movie, and as it happens, it was sold out. (Tom Cruise saved the American film industry with TOP GUN MAVERICK in 2022, so I guess Mario’s doing the same thing in 2023.) So instead I came home and finished CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE after all!

Clearly it was what God wanted to happen.

Next up will be IRON DRIVE, a bonus short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free when CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE comes out next month. The story will be something a little different – it will be from the point of view of a CDL truck driver who meets Nadia during a raid on the Great Gate.

Check back later this week for progress updates and the cover image for CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE!

-JM

the dangers of phishing

Phishing messages – designed to trick you into giving up logon credentials to a website – are an ongoing scourge of the Internet.

Most of us can spot phishing messages a mile away.

But there is something important to remember about phishing messages – it doesn’t matter how sophisticated or how well-written the fake message is. What matters is whether or not it hits one of your psychological or emotional weak points. Because no matter how technically knowledgeable or experienced you are, we all have psychological or emotional weak points, and a really effective phishing message is one that mashes one of those buttons.

A few examples may demonstrate the point. Like, say you’re running a low balance in your checking account, and you get a message from your bank that you’re overdrawn and overdraft fees are now applied. Or you have a teenager, and you get a message saying that his or her number has gone over the data cap limit, even after you’ve told the kid again and again to stop wasting data. Or you’re waiting for a test result from the doctor, and you get a message that you need to log in immediately to see the urgent results.

Now, in all three of these cases, the messages are fake. They may even be badly written and have obvious errors. But if the message hits an emotional sore point, the emotional reaction will override critical thinking, and you might click and log into one of the fake links in the email before your brain can catch up to your emotions.

This almost happened to me yesterday – I got an email from “Facebook Ads” claiming that my Facebook Ads account had been suspended for undisclosed violations. My immediate reaction was massive annoyance. As I’ve mentioned before, I (along with many others) had lots of problems with my Facebook Ads account getting banned randomly in 2020 and 2021. It’s gotten better since then, possibly because Facebook burned up 2/3 of its company value attempting to build a bad copy of Second Life and can’t really afford to be so ban-happy with advertisers any more. (Turns out businesses need revenue! Who knew?) Nevertheless, I was very annoyed at the email – this nonsense again?

But! I didn’t click on any of the links in the email. I had the Facebook Ads Manager open in another tab, and I checked it. Everything was firing along just fine, and indeed my ads were getting a good cost-per-click that day. So after a second of confusion, I realized what had happened – I had almost just been phished.

It was a good reminder to always be cautious on the Internet and to always practice good data security – never click on links in an email from an unknown sender, never open attachments from unknown email senders, keep separate passwords for every account, use two-factor authentication when possible, avoid doing anything involving personal data on public WiFi, and similar things. The basics aren’t terribly flashy, and there’s no such thing as perfect security, but practicing the basics will highly increase your odds of avoiding trouble.

I used the Maestro picture for this post because Maestro would definitely approve of a phishing attack aimed at someone’s psychological buttons.

-JM

So what happened to this villain from GHOST NIGHT?

Lately I’ve gotten a couple of questions about the GHOST NIGHT series that spoils the ending of GHOST IN THE LORE.

So if you haven’t read through the GHOST NIGHT series, STOP READING this post right now.

But if you have read through the ending of GHOST NIGHT, read on.

A few people emailed to ask about Rania Scorneus. Specifically, 1.) why she didn’t appear in GHOST IN THE SUN, and 2.) will she be coming back in future books.

For point number one, Rania Scorneus basically “noped out” as the modern parlance goes. She had been killed, the Umbarian Order had been militarily defeated, and she was widely known and hated throughout the Empire. But now everyone thinks she’s dead, and Rania doesn’t seen any reason to correct them. With her cloning alchemy, she’s effectively found a method of immortality so long as no one destroys her alchemical laboratory.

So why not let everyone keep on thinking that’s she dead? Rania can wait until most of the people who know about her die of old age, and she can spend that time profitably in arcane research, experimentation, and study, and also in preparing a covert network. . Then in fifty or sixty years when “Rania Scorneus” is simply a footnote in the historical record, she can act. Trying to conquer the Empire through sheer sorcerous might was clearly a failing strategy, so perhaps subversion and coercion will work better the second time around

As for point two, well…we’ll have to see when I write a new Caina book after DRAGONSKULL is done, won’t we?

-JM

Adobe Firefly Generative AI

I mentioned last week that I was able to get into the beta for Adobe’s new Firefly image generation tool. I’ve been very critical of generative AI, so I want to give it a fair shake. I mentioned before that Firefly might address some of my concerns about generative image AI basically en masse stealing images across the Internet for their training data.

So, here are my thoughts after experimenting with Adobe Firefly for a bit. You can see some of the results in the image attached to this post.

First things first – Firefly is a lot more user-friendly than something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Midjourney is basically like the command prompt of image generation – more powerful and more versatile than the GUI version, but not quite as simple to use. The GUI interface of Firefly is pretty friendly. It has a right-hand sidebar with a lot of buttons for adjusting the output of your image generation prompt. You can choose to create a photo, a graphic, or an “artistic” image, and there are numerous dropdown menus allowing you to adjust lightning and layout and so forth, which requires specific prompts in other image generation programs.

Like other generative programs, you have to adjust the prompt a great deal to get exactly what you want. The image attached to this post is human faces, and it took a lot of prompting with slightly rearranging words each times to get something even remotely close to what I wanted. It is a lot easier to use Firefly to generate things other than human faces, but this is true of anything – any artist or CG artist will tell you that faces are the hardest things to do correctly because the human eye (and subconscious) can instantly spot anything that’s wrong with the face even if the conscious mind can’t quite articulate what’s wrong.

Because of that, I suspect generative AI would be a lot better at generating individual assets than completed scenes. Like, when I make a book cover in Photoshop nowadays, it can have between forty to sixty layers. (People who really know what they’re doing often have a lot more.) If I wanted to use Firefly to make a completed scene suitable for a book cover, it would look terrible. But if I used it to make, say, a sword, and then modified that sword heavily with appropriate adjustment layers in Photoshop, that would look much better.

People familiar with the topic have demonstrated that Midjourney is more powerful than Firefly. Computer scientist Jim Fan did a thread on Twitter where he used the same prompt in both Midjourney and Firefly and compared the results, and Midjourney usually did better.

That said, this inadvertently demonstrated one of the strengths of Firefly. Jim Fan used Deadpool, Pikachu, and Super Mario in his prompts, and Midjourney performed better. However, the reason is that Firefly has been trained on Adobe Stock Photos and public domain stuff, and Deadpool, Pikachu, and Super Mario are heavily trademarked and copyrighted characters owned by Disney and Nintendo, which means Firefly hasn’t been trained on any images of them. Midjourney, by contrast, was trained with a massive data scrape of the Internet, and the legality of that for use in image generation is an open question, since Midjourney is currently getting sued about it. To put it mildly, Disney and Nintendo have lawyers who make the Nazgul look warm and cuddly, and that shows the advantage of Firefly. If you’re a commercial artist and you use an AI-generated image of Deadpool or Super Mario in your client’s project, obviously you are running the risk of getting sued. However, even you’re not using trademarked characters, Midjourney might have been trained on something that will get you sued.

Where something like Firefly would really shine is replacing stock photos. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for exactly the right stock photo for a certain project, because while you can do a lot in Photoshop, it’s much less work if you can get a stock photo that’s at least somewhat close to what you already want. Typing twenty slightly  different prompts to get what you want for a specific asset might one day replace scrolling through twenty pages of stock photo thumbnails. That said, it’s still easier to use something like DAZ or Blender to produce assets because you can control the output exactly in a way that you simply cannot with image AI, but it’s not always possible to get what you want in DAZ or Blender.

To sum up, Firefly is easy to use, and careful sourcing of the images in its training data (if Adobe is telling the truth about it) addresses many of the ethical concerns I have about generative image AI.

However, I would still exercise great caution in using AI generated images for anything. The legality of it all is still very unsettled, and there are several different court cases dealing with it at the moment. So I would wait until it pans out until using an AI-generated image for anything commercial. Adobe’s approach to Firefly might not be able to generate high quality images of Deadpool high-fiving Super Mario or something, but it does seem more ethical and less likely to result in nasty lawsuits.

(Note that I am not a lawyer and nothing here is legal advice.)

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 153: Writers & Generative AI

In this week’s episode, I take another look at generative AI tools and consider what they might mean for writers. I also take a look at March’s ad results and discuss the very excellent board game HEROQUEST.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

progress update & Happy Easter!

I am now 75,000 words into CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE! I think the book is going to be either 100k to 110k, so we are closing in on the ending.

Meanwhile, I’m going to take a few days off for Easter. Have a happy Easter, everyone!

-JM

Adobe Firefly Generative AI & ChatGPT

This is a sentence I never, ever thought I would type, but it’s possible Adobe (Adobe!) might have done something to address my concerns about AI generated art.

This is because before I started using Photoshop during COVID in 2020, my previous history with Adobe products was long, troubled and unhappy, including (but not limited to), my computer crashing in 1994 the first time I tried to install Adobe Reader, many, many, many tech support difficulties related to Flash Player in the 2000s, many, many tech support difficulties related to maintaining Adobe Creative Suite programs on a computer lab, and all the many times that Adobe Updater crashed while trying to install updates to update Adobe Updater.

If you’ve read my previous posts on the topic of AI art, my chief concern is the ethics of it – I remain unconvinced that it’s doing anything other than doing “salami-slicing” plagiarism. The counter-argument is that the AI isn’t copying, it’s “learning” patterns. My counter-counter-argument to that is that a machine is incapable of learning, just applying a more refined formula that generates better results, and it does that by copying a million different images and creating the average of them. That’s why if you go to most of the AI image generations and type in a prompt like “Magic The Gathering Plains Card”, it will generate an image that is an average of all the MTG Plains cards in its data set, including wield symbols where the card would have text because a MTG Plains card is statistically likely to have text in that portion of the card. It’s not “creating” a new image and it’s not “learning” anything, it’s just averaging suitable images from its training data.

However, Adobe recently announced plans for a beta of an AI image generation tool they call Firefly. According to Adobe, their AI has only been trained on public domain images and stuff within the Adobe Stock collection that they have rights to use. If you’re thinking that public domain means the photos will be low quality, remember that every photograph taken by a US federal employee in the course of their duties is in the public domain, so there is a vast amount of high-quality public domain images to use. Adobe also claims that it is working on a payment scheme for people whose images were used in the training.

Obviously this is not a perfect solution – pirated stuff does sometimes turn up on Adobe Stock (and, well, everywhere else on the Internet), and it’s entirely possible Adobe is lying through their teeth in a “technically legally true” way about some of this. That said, this is a clever approach. Most of Adobe’s customer base is image/video-editing professionals, and they were the angriest about the potential abuses of AI art. Adobe doesn’t really have enough goodwill among its customer base to afford yet another viral uproar, but since all the big brains claim that AI is the Next Big Thing, the company needs to compete in the space to survive. So it was a smart move to let others rush into the space first, and then announce their own solution that addresses some of those concerns.

Anyway, I signed up for the beta, and I just got in today. I’ll test it out and share my thoughts.

If it does work and the promises are true, Firefly is the sort of generative AI product I feel I could use in good conscience. I would use it to generate assets I would include in my book covers and Facebook ad images. I already use various stock photos and DAZ 3D for that, so it would be another tool in the toolkit. Doubtless fiddling with the generator to find the exact correct prompt would be no different than scrolling endlessly through stock photo results or trying yet another render in DAZ to make the output look right.

On a related note, a reader asked if I was considering using generative text AI like ChatGPT to help with my writing output.

Short answer: absolutely not.

Longer answer:

1.) At this point, it would feel like committing fraud and cheating readers. Like, if you buy a book that says “Jonathan Moeller” on the cover, the implicit promise is that Jonathan Moeller wrote that book. And if you’re buying that book, you want it to be written by Jonathan Moeller. That means you have decided you like my writing, warts and all (I appreciate that!), and have decided to pay actual money for it. So buying a Jonathan Moeller book that was actually written by an AI is a bit like a restaurant offering french fries that are allegedly 100% potato but actually turn out to be tofu, soybeans, and sawdust.

Granted, if I did write a book with AI and the cover said “by Jonathan Moeller & CrapGPT,” that would be different. But I don’t want to do that any more than I want to eat a french fry made out of sawdust.

2.) Generative AI kind of sucks.

I have to admit that when I listen to people who are very impressed with and enthusiastic about AI, I kind of wonder about their credulity. It’s a like a wizard cast a spell on horse manure to make people think it was the finest pepperoni pizza, and people are wolfing down this horse manure and praising the flavor while the horse looks on in bemusement. A lot of excitement has been generated from the fact that you can tell ChatGPT to write text in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or whoever, but what comes out when you use a prompt like that tends not to be very good.

Granted, in certain applications, horse manure is actually highly valuable. It’s just not pepperoni pizza.

In past blog posts, I’ve joked that generative AI is the Infinite Crap Generator. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that generative AI is the Most Likely Random Crap Generator But Occasionally Not, but you have to iterate a whole lot with your prompt and results to find something that isn’t crap. You can use it to write things, but you would have to wade through a lot of crap to get there first, and then edit it, and then put it all together…

…at which point, you might as well just write it yourself for less hassle.

3.) Copyright.

As of this writing, the copyright situation around generative AI is highly unsettled, but trending towards negative. The official position of the US Copyright Office is that AI-generated images can’t be copyrighted, though legislation might end up changing that at some point. Someone tried to copyright an AI-generated comic book, which was revoked, and then revisited the decision to say that while the images themselves couldn’t be copyrighted, the arrangement and human-written text could.

So, overall, the opinion of the current authorities is that machine-generated art cannot be copyrighted, and presumably that will be the same with copyrighted text.

With those three reasons, I won’t be attempting an AI-written book anytime soon. But perhaps in another ten years, “writing a novel” will involve typing like a thousand different scene prompts into an AI generator and editing the output together.

I doubt it, though.

-JM

Heroquest Is Pretty Great

Back at Thanksgiving 2022, my brother recommended I read GAME WIZARDS by Jon Peterson, a business history of the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. It was an absolutely fascinating book, and I’ve talked about it many times on both my blog and my podcast . It’s honestly one of those books that I think every small businessperson should read, even small businesspeople who wouldn’t touch D&D with a thousand-foot pole. There’s a lot of valuable business lessons to be learned from the various self-inflicted misfortunes of TSR.

There was also quite a lot about related history. One of them was that for a while in the 1980s while TSR was at its peak, a lot of people tried to jump on the fantasy gaming bandwagon with varying degrees of success. One of them was Milton Bradley, which teamed up with Games Workshop to release a boardgame called HEROQUEST, which distilled down D&D into its dungeon-crawling essentials. It also tied in to Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe. The game did quite well, and numerous expansions were released through the late 80s and early to mid 90s, but eventually Milton Bradley stopped producing the game and it vanished into relative obscurity. Milton Bradley let the trademark lapse, and then someone else bought it, and it passed through a couple of other hands.

In 2020, Hasbro brought the trademark, and in 2021 they brought the game back via a crowdfunding campaign. Then in 2022, I heard about it for the first time via GAME WIZARDS.

In January 2023, I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up a copy of the core game via Amazon, since it happened to be on sale at the time.

It’s quite enjoyable. I would describe the game as D&D Lite. It’s boiled down into the essence of dungeon crawling (one of my favorite genres of both games and literature) without a lot of excess baggage. (Or the tedium of listening to someone describing their tiefling bard’s 15,000 word tragic backstory.) You have four characters with different abilities – the Barbarian, the Dwarf, the Elf, and the Wizard, and you lead them on various quests against the forces of the evil wizard Zargon. The game’s board is modular, and using the pieces of furniture included with the game, the board gets reconfigured into different dungeons.

A good selection of monsters come with the games – goblins, orcs, evil fish people, a variety of undead, and Dread Warriors, which are renamed from Chaos Warriors so Hasbro doesn’t get sued by the famously litigious Games Workshop. All the miniatures that come with the game are excellent and detailed, though they are unpainted (more on that below).

The handiest part of modern HEROQUEST is the companion app. Given the complexity of modern board games, quite a few of them now come with companion apps. HEROQUEST’s companion app essentially runs the monsters for you, which is quite useful, though you still need to keep track of quite a bit of information. Which you’ll want to do, since gold coins and various treasures are supposed to carry over between quests. The Barbarian looks formidable charging into battle bare-chested, but he’s actually more formidable once you get the poor guy some armor!

So I thoroughly enjoy the game. I came across it as a middle-aged adult, but if I had found it as a kid, I would have gone nuts over it. One the rare occasions I have a Saturday afternoon free, I’ll relax and run a dungeon. Each one of the dungeons only takes about an hour or so.

Now for an amusing aside:

Whenever I discuss HEROQUEST, a people invariably suggest I should get into miniature painting. Once I started reading about HEROQUEST, I discovered there is a large community dedicated to painting gaming miniatures, complete with YouTube channels devoted to the topic. It is very unlikely I will take this up as a hobby because I hate, hate painting. It is one of my least favorite homeowner chores, and I rather doubt it would enjoy it even more with tiny brushes.

Like, after I paint the porch this summer, that’s totally what I’ll want to do to relax – come inside and paint something else! But for fun!

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 152: Brandon Sanderson vs WIRED

In this week’s episode, we look at the hit piece WIRED magazine published about popular fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, and four lessons this offers for indie authors.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM