Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 69

Bestselling books of February 2023

Here you can see my bestselling books of February 2023:

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION is about 93% of where it needs to arrive by March 13th to justify a sequel, so odds are looking good that the series will continue.

Of course, if you haven’t tried it yet, you could be part of the 7% to propel the book over the finish line! Pretty much everyone who’s tried it has liked it, even readers who don’t normally go in for LitRPG books. Take this comment from Ryan:

“While I originally had no intention of reading creation, as the idea of lit rpg books has never appealed to me, I decided I enjoyed the rest of your books to give it a try. Wow was I surprised!!! This has instantly become one of my favourite series from JM (second only to the cloak games books). I can’t wait for a sequel!”

Or this comment from JB:

“I have to say was skeptical about the idea of this book, but I thought I would give it a try because I almost always enjoy your books. I was pleasantly surprised that I really did like book.”

Or this comment from Alan:

“Well Jonathan I had my doubts about Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation at first but ended up enjoying the book. I very much hope you are able to continue the series.”

So give SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION a read today!

Meanwhile, DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER still outsold SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION for February, so I’m pleased to report I am now on Chapter 11 of 20 of DRAGONSKULL: WRATH OF THE WARLOCK.

-JM

Bing Chat AI: Potentially Useful, Potentially Dangerous Apophenia

I was able to get the new Bing Chat AI, so I gave it a try.

Overall, my opinion about all the new AI tools is very low, much like my opinion of cryptocurrency and NFTs is quite low. I think that while the AI tools have some utility, it isn’t nearly as much as their proponents believe. I also think they’re massively overhyped.

There’s a bit of “Narcissus Effect”, I suspect – the tools just vomit the portions of their dataset indicated by the generative prompt to their users, who gaze in admiration at the reflection of their psyches. Or it’s a bit like the Israelites and the Golden Calf in the book of Exodus. Look at this beautiful thing we made! Surely it must be a god!

In the modern version of the Golden Calf, it’s look at this mathematical formula we made that brute forces probabilities! Surely it must be an artificial intelligence made in imitation of our own minds, and not an Infinite Crap Generator!

It’s not a golden calf and no one thinks generative AI is a god, but I think the same psychological mechanism is at play.

(If I’m feeling really snarky, I’d say that Web1.0 was static content, Web2.0 was user-generated content, and Web3.0 is the Scammers’ Paradise.)

In particular, my opinion about AI image generation remains highly negative – image AI generation is essentially copying the images it’s been “trained” on. I don’t even like the word “trained” to describe it, since it boils down to essentially a million photocopiers taking a million pieces from a million different images. The artificial “intelligence” involved is basically brute-force copying patterns of the images in its data set, and then when a user enters a prompt, it uses those copied patterns to spit out an allegedly new image. For example, if you go to any one of the AI image generators and use “Magic The Gathering Plains Card” as the prompt, the AI will dutifully produce a mishmash of every Magic The Gathering plains card its dataset scraped from the Internet, complete with weird symbols where the text would be because it’s essentially trying to copy every single card and produce an average of them. (You can see an example as the picture for this post.)

While I am dubious about AI text generation, I am slightly less dubious about it than image generation, because it tends to be really fancy autocomplete. Granted, I don’t think highly of it, but I don’t think it’s as ethically sleazy as AI image generation. And it’s possible these tools have a use I don’t see yet. I mean, I don’t like voice assistants at all, but I recognize they’ve been hugely helpful to people, especially during the pandemic – particularly elderly people and people with mobility/health concerns. Or while I am dubious about cryptocurrency, it can be very helpful to people who live in countries with weak financial regulation or authoritarian governments. That said, there are enormous problems with AI text generation, which have already been thoroughly explored by people smarter than I am.

With that long-winded introduction and somewhat cranky introduction out of the way, let’s get to Bing Chat!

When Microsoft started opening up it’s OpenAI-fueled Bing Chat, I decided to give it a try.

It’s possible that they might be on to the beginnings of a good idea. Possibly.

One of the big problems with the present form of the Internet is that search is dominated by Google, and Google derives most of its revenue from online ads. This has a distortion effect, which means that the top search results for many Google searches now is just a bunch of SEO-optimized ad farms. I’m sure we’ve all Googled for a recipe and ended up on a page with a billion ads and the recipe way at the bottom. Finding accurate information with a Google search has become harder and harder because a lot of very smart people have optimized Google search for maximum ad revenue, so the top results for any particular search are are often equally optimized for maximum search ad revenue.

Bing Chat, by contrast, is designed for questions. The way it works is you ask the chatbot a question, it searches for relevant results, and then summarizes them in a few tidy paragraphs. Then you can ask more refining questions to get better results. Every answer also contains hyperlinks indicating where the chatbot got its information for the answer.

This is more efficient than scrolling through page after page of search results, though you can see the weakness – the answers are only as good as the information it is drawing from, so it’s possible the AI could give you a neat and definitive answer full of absolute nonsense.

For example, I was talking with someone familiar with horse research, and she suggested a very specific question related to a very specific equine medical problem. Bing Chat ground out an answer that was authoritative-sounding but both very vague and entirely incorrect, which we suspected would happen because there simply isn’t very much medical research on this particular equine health problem and therefore nothing upon which Bing Chat could draw.

It’s also very bad at value judgments. I was talking about this with some education people, and they suggested that I ask if a very specific question – whether Montessori preschools or Waldorf preschools have better outcomes for child development. (I have no idea what that means, either.) When posed the question, the chatbot ended up providing a summary of both types of preschools. At a casual read, it seemed like it answered the question, but it totally didn’t. Which remains the biggest problem with generative text AI – it sounds authoritative and knowledgeable, but it isn’t at all – it’s just a fancy autocomplete stringing together words that are most statistically probable to be located together in a sentence.

So it’s possible that, in this particular instance, AI could improve search. Though I retain my overall negative opinion of AI.

I think the biggest danger for this kind of chatbot is apophenia – the human tendency of seeing patterns where none exist. (You can see this on Twitter all the time, where many people assume every news event is part of a Sinister Plot perpetrated by a cabal of all-powerful yet highly incompetent conspirators.) Because while typing, it feels like you’re chatting with an actual, well-organized person on the other end of the connection. It’s not, of course, it’s just an illusion created by the way the human mind works. We tend to anthropomorphize everything – our pets, our tools, the weather, and we so often see patterns where one simply doesn’t exist. For many people, this can be an intoxicating illusion. I can easily see people developing unhealthy relationships with this kind of chatbot, and accepting uncritically anything it tells them.

I’m susceptible to this anthropomorphizing as well – I know Bing Chat is just a mathematical formula, but I still use “please” and “thank you” while typing to it. (Or maybe I was just raised well.)

Despite those dangers, Bing Chat might actually be a useful implementation of AI.

Overall, however, my opinion of generative AI as a technology remains negative for 3 reasons – 1.) it doesn’t solve a a serious problem, 2.) the trivial problems it does solve are outweighed by the massive new problems it creates, and 3.) overall, it makes the world slightly worse. If one creates an Infinite Crap Generator, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in the overall level of crap.

Hopefully, all the corporations investing massive resources into AI generation will take a massive loss, and then the technology can be marginalized.

-JM

More Caina?

Mike writes to say:

“Any thoughts on another Caina book?”

Andrew writes to say:

“Has Caina retired?” 

I am tentatively planning to write a new Caina book once the ninth and final DRAGONSKULL book is done this summer.

More details to come later.

But! First, you know, I actually have to dig and finish the DRAGONSKULL series, and I’m only on Chapter 8 of 20 of WRATH OF THE WARLOCK, which will be the 7th book.

-JM

How Many Short Stories Have I Actually Published?

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the traditional start of the Lent season, wherein one is supposed to reflect upon their sins and mortality.

I spent all day shoveling out from the first wave of the blizzard and then getting my tax paperwork sorted out, and since death & taxes are the only constants in life, I suppose that counts as contemplating one’s mortality.

But! Since I didn’t have time to write and spent most of the day in spreadsheets anyway, it occurred to me it was time to figure out a recurring reader question.

Specifically, how many short stories I have self-published.

I know how many novels I have published – SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION was #138. But I am uncertain of how many short stories I’ve published. I know it’s a lot – way back with GHOST IN THE FORGE in 2012 I wrote GHOST ARIA to accompany it as a free bonus for newsletter subscribers, and I’ve done that pretty consistently in the 11 years since.

So that’s a lot of short stories. But how many?

Once I had finished with tax spreadsheets, and dug in and started doing some math!

Frostborn short stories: 9 (This doesn’t include the short stories that went into FROSTBORN: THE SKULL QUEST since I had always intended to combine them.)

Cloak Games/Cloak Mage: 10

Cormac Rogan: 1

Demonsouled: 8

Dragonskull: 7

Shield Knight (Sevenfold Sword & Dragontiarna): 17

Caina (all series): 26

Otherworlds (found in the Otherworlds collection, written before I started self-publishing): 23

Silent Order: 4

Sevenfold Sword Online: 1

I think Caina has the most short stories because her character and the setting lend themselves the most to short side adventures.

Anyway, adds up to 106 short stories. 106! I wasn’t going to spend all day totaling up the word counts, but if you assume a reasonable average of about 5,000 words per story, that means in the last 11 years I have published over a half a million words of short fiction, and then given most of it away for free.

As of Ash Wednesday, 2023, I have published 138 novels and 106 short stories.

So when I say I really do like short stories, I’m clearly not kidding.

-JM

Magic The Gathering Arena Gets A Thumbs-Up

Over the past few months I’ve written quite a few critical things of Hasbro regarding the Open Game License situation, but it’s important to be fair.

Magic The Gathering: Arena is an excellent free-to-play game and I’ve enjoyed it a lot over the last six weeks or so.

Back in the 90s and the early 2000s I played a bit of Magic The Gathering (for ease of typing I’ll refer to it as MTG for the rest of this post), but I eventually stopped for three reasons. 1.) I was really busy all the time for the rest of the 2000s, 2.) those cards get expensive, and 3.) finding people with whom to play was hassle. I still have about a shoebox’s worth of MTG cards sitting in my closet, but I don’t think I’ve opened that box for like 15 years.

Anyway, while I was reading about the OGL problems, I also came across a few posts referencing that MTG had become a billion-dollar brand for Hasbro. A billion dollars? I hadn’t expected that. I recalled vaguely that there was a MTG computer game in the 90s, so I wondered if anything like that existed now.

After some research, I came across Magic The Gathering: Arena, discovered it was free-to-play, learned that it would run on my tablet, and gave it ago.

It’s a very well-designed and slick app. The onboarding tutorials are excellent – it starts with a “color challenge” where you play against the computer using a deck of each of the game’s five colors, and when you win, you get a bunch of free (virtual) card decks you can use to play against actual humans. It also does an excellent job of resolving all the various insane rule combinations you can get in an MTG match.

The game really has the “hedonic loop” (the effort/reward) cycle down pat. Every day there’s a challenge where if you play 20 cards of a certain type you get a bonus in gold and experience. If you win matches, you get gold and experience, and if you get enough experience and you get rewarded with more (virtual, of course) cards. Of course, microtransactions are liberally laden throughout – you can buy custom card sleeves, custom avatars, and “gems” that permit entry to various tournament-style events. Despite that, you can enjoy yourself thoroughly without spending a single actual penny. And the app is great for casual play – you can pop in quick, play a quick match while waiting for the bus or the doctor or something, and then be done in a way that is impossible with physical cards. One of the great strengths of MTG as a game is that the matches can be over really quickly (depending on how the cards are drawn, as quickly as two minutes in some cases), so the app is good for casual play.

It automates out the most annoying part of playing MTG – finding other players, and then dealing with their personality “quirks” which may or may not make for a pleasant gaming experience. The game can usually pair you with a player in under a minute, often less, and interaction is severely limited during the game – basically a few words like “Hello” and “Good Move”, and if someone’s annoying, you can simply mute them. That way you don’t have to deal with someone ragequitting and flipping the table, or endless argumentation over some fine point or another of the rules.

So, I’ve enjoyed the MTG Arena app quite a bit, and it makes playing the game so frictionless that in the past six weeks I’ve probably played more actual matches of MTG than I did in all the 90s and the 2000s.

And I can now say that I’ve won several MTG matches on my tablet while using the restroom.

In the 90s, if you said you had won MTG games while in the restroom, people would have been gravely concerned. Less so in 2023.

-JM

Coupon Of The Week – 2/20/2023

I ran out of time to record a new podcast the last two weeks, but I did have time to set up Coupon Of The Week.

This week’s coupon is for GHOST IN THE SURGE (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), the climactic book of the first THE GHOSTS series. You can get fifty percent off the audiobook with this coupon code at Payhip:

FEBSURGE

The coupon code is valid until March 6th, 2023.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: WRATH OF THE WARLOCK underway

Now that SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION is out, it’s full speed ahead on the next DRAGONSKULL book, DRAGONSKULL: WRATH OF THE WARLOCK!

I am currently 16,000 words into the book, which puts me on Chapter 4 of 20.

If all goes well, it should be out towards the end of March.

Also, WRATH OF THE WARLOCK will be the 7th of 9 total DRAGONSKULL books. While I was editing TALONS OF THE SORCERER earlier this year, I settled on nine total for the series. So if all goes well, I will be able to finish the DRAGONSKULL series in 2023.

After WRATH OF THE WARLOCK is published, my main project will be CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE, since we haven’t seen Nadia for a while.

-JM

Will There Be A Sequel To SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION?

A few people have asked if I intend to write a sequel to SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, and if so, when.

The answer is “maybe”, and it’s edging bit by bit towards “increasing possibility.”

After I posted the first two chapters on my website, I had a few emails along the lines of “how did Calliande get transported into a video game” that made me wonder if CREATION had been a bad idea that was just going to confuse people. Because sometimes you think something is a good idea, only it turns out not to be, and you get confused emails about it for, like, years.

Fortunately, the book had a stronger launch than I anticipated, and the initial feedback has been mostly positive. Thanks for reading, everyone!

However, CREATION needs to hit a specific sales figure within 30 days to make writing a sequel viable, and as of this writing it’s 40% of the way there.

This is less about “the book needs to sell or I will starve”, and more about determining if it’s a good use of writing time or not. Like, people are waiting for the next DRAGONSKULL, the next Nadia book, the next SILENT ORDER, and I often get emails asking if I will start another Caina series. Is it really a good idea to try to start a LitRPG series and take time away from the other books?

Fortunately, ideas can be tested in the wild to see if they are good or bad. The easiest way to determine that is see how CREATION sells in its first 30 days.

Basically, CREATION needs to stay either 2nd or 1st on this list until March 12th.

So we’ll see what happens.

Once again, thanks for reading, everyone!

-JM

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION now available!

I am pleased to report that SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, my first LitRPG novel, is now available! You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and Payhip.

The greatest epic fantasy MMORPG in history has a ticking time bomb at its heart.

Noah Carver used to work for Maskell Entertainment, developing the smash hit virtual reality game Sevenfold Sword Online (loosely based on the fantasy novels of Jonathan Moeller).

Then Carver got fired.

Not for incompetence, or for laziness.

But because he discovered the truth.

The game’s runaway success was built on the deadly technology of humanity’s ancient enemy, and Maskell Entertainment doesn’t want anyone to find out.

And unless Carver finds proof, a lot of innocent people are going to die…

-JM

Sign up for my newsletter and get a free short story!

If you sign up for my new-release newsletter, when SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION comes out, you’ll get a free ebook copy of the short story GRIEFER.

If you read the first two chapters of CREATION I posted yesterday, GRIEFER describers how Noah Carver first meets the ex-wife mentioned in the first chapter.

If all goes well, the book should be out next week!

-JM