Kit Walker's Blog, page 3

I am in Portfolio Hell

I'm job-hunting at the moment, which means updating and polishing up my portfolio. While I've got plenty of documentation and scriptwriting samples in there, I've been thinking I want to include at least one prose fiction sample.

The problem is that, of the two short stories I've written at the appropriate length, one of them is that story about Sebastian Moran taking the strap.

The other one is a story which specifically dunks on tech industry recruiters.

Why am I like this.

New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," Chapter 4

Chapter 4 of "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is now up for all supporters on Ko-fi. If you don't want to read the story in serialized form and would prefer to get it all at once, you can also buy the entire novelette as an ebook.

This Week's Links

Azoth: The Occult Magazine of America

This archive contains 53 issues of Azoth, an occult magazine from the early part of the 20th century. A fascinating look at what America's wizards were into during the latter days of World War I and immediately afterward.

The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis

At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto's 0.85. (In absolute terms, FuelArc found, 27 Pinto drivers died in fires, while five Cybertruck drivers have suffered the same fate, at least so far.)

'I thought it had eaten me': whale briefly takes kayaker into mouth off Chilean coast

Adrián Simancas was kayaking in Bahía El Águila in the strait of Magellan when a humpback whale engulfed him and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go. He was unharmed.

You know, I thought I was a hater until I saw Kendrick Lamar get 70 000 people to sing along while he called Aubrey Drake Graham a pedophile on national television. It turns out I have not been hating to my full potential. I should fix that.

-K

Born to be unmarketable

I'm from Canada, where it's a long-running joke that our celebrities have to wear name tags. It's certainly true that being an artist in Canada is not a job that makes you rich unless your name is Margaret Atwood; as my dad likes to point out, even Pierre Berton — one of our most celebrated writers — had a day job. But Canada also puts a lot of public funding into creative works, even (or especially) works that have no hope of turning a profit; as a culture, we seem to understand that art has value even if it's not commercially viable.

It was only once I started working in the entertainment industry that I realized this attitude is not the norm. Especially when I'm dealing with Americans. It's hard to talk to these people for any length of time before the conversation turns to target demographics and markets, customer funnels and pitch razors. I'm not even sure they know they're doing it; it's like they're incapable of thinking about the craft in any other terms. The idea that a piece of art can exist just to exist, not necessarily to make money, isn't just baffling — it's controversial. I've had people get angry with me for saying it.

This difference in outlook may just come down to the fact that Canadian culture isn't exactly hot property on the global stage. Which could put Canadian artists in solidarity with many other creatives who are too weird, too queer, or too foreign to survive in the US-dominated commercial entertainment machine. If we don't tell our stories, who will?

New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is now up for all supporters on Ko-fi. If you don't want to read the story in serialized form and would prefer to get it all at once, you can also buy the entire novelette as an ebook.

This Week's Links

AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications

The question shows Anthropic trying to get around a problem it’s helping create: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own. It’s also a moot question, as Anthropic and its competitors have created AI models so indistinguishable from human speech as to be nearly undetectable.

Turning Off the TV in Your Mind

The problem is that if you’re “thinking in TV” while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints. I don’t believe in rules for art. But I believe in general principles. One is that it’s typically best to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in. A novel will never beat good TV at being TV, but similarly TV will never beat a good novel at being a novel.

A novelist's guide to poisoning, part 1

Stuff your mediaeval monarch's food taster won't save him from: sauteed mushrooms.

The story I'm working on at the moment requires me to look up how to make a firebomb. I'm definitely getting arrested this time.

-K

Everything happens so much

As previously mentioned in this newsletter, at some point within the past few years I completely lost track of the Hollywood hype machine. I have no idea which movies are being made, or when they're supposed to come out, until I see whichever ads are on the side of a bus this week.

It's thanks to this state of affairs that I just now found out a Kraven the Hunter movie was not only announced, but filmed and released, completely without me noticing. I don't know why this movie exists and from the sounds of it neither does anybody else, including the people who made it.

LGTBQ+ Romance Book Giveaway

Right now on Prolific Works, you can get 21 free queer romance books — including my novelette "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" — for free!

Click here to check out the giveaway; you can claim any number of the available books until February 28.

Podcast Appearance: I Will Fight You

In the tradition of our previous Romeo and Juliet roundup, this month's episode of I Will Fight You compares three more adaptations of the classic Shakespeare play: West Side Story, Romeo Must Die, and Little Italy.

You can listen to the episode here, or wherever podcasts are found.

New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is now up for all supporters on Ko-fi. If you're not a fan of serialized works, you can also get the entire novelette as an ebook.

This Week's LinksThe inauguration of chaos

Monday’s events were yet another worrying sign that the former British colony is failing in its centurieslong effort to become a democracy. The theme of the oath ceremony, “Our Enduring Democracy”, disguised 250 years of voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering to pre-emptively steal elections, minority regimes, and global warmongering.

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha.

EA execs earned $60 million in 2024 despite layoffs and office closures

EA explained that during the 2024 fiscal year, the annual total compensation of its median employee was $148,704. That means [EA CEO Andrew] Wilson earned 172 times more than your median EA worker. Wilson also earned significantly more in 2024 than in both 2023 ($20.6M) and 2022 ($19.8M).

Reading American Psycho and then checking my LinkedIn feed immediately afterward was certainly An Experience. If I just started posting passages from the book, I wonder how long it would take anyone to notice.

-K

Fleeing the digital old country

For reasons that may be obvious at this point, my mother is thoroughly sick of Facebook and wants to leave the site. Unfortunately Facebook is the thing keeping her in contact with friends and family she'd otherwise never see, so she needs a different way to keep in touch with those people.

One of the options she's looked into is Friendica, an open-source and decentralized social network with much of the same functionality as Facebook. But while my mum at 71 years old is pretty tech-savvy, most of her Facebook friends can't say the same — to them, the process of navigating the Fediverse is a daunting proposition.

Of course, the big reason that platforms like Facebook are so easy to use is that the company is handling a lot of technical and logistical decisions for you. Which means they can make those decisions in their best interest, instead of yours.

And the moment that becomes a deal you can no longer tolerate, you really only have two options: you can switch to a platform you control — with all the technical overhead that requires — or you can switch to a new platform that somebody else controls, and hope that this time the benevolent dictator stays benevolent.

Video Appearance: Date Me, Dammit!

I periodically co-host on the YouTube series Date Me, Dammit!, where my friends Annie and Maq play through dating sims of varying quality. We've just started a run of the game Fatal Hearts, which makes vague gestures at being a Dracula adaptation and is stuffed to the gills with confusing minigames.

You can watch the first episode on YouTube here.

New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," Chapter 1

The first chapter of "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is now on Ko-fi and free for anyone to read. Subsequent chapters will be posted on Tuesdays as supporter-only posts. You can also get the entire novelette as an ebook.

This Week's Links

Why This OnlyFans Model Posts Machine Learning Explainers to Pornhub

Dar said she makes more money on YouTube overall because that’s where she gets more views, but in addition to higher rates, an added benefit of posting to Pornhub is that Pornhub is not likely to ban her for sharing adult content elsewhere on the web.

Platforms Systematically Removed a User Because He Made "Most Wanted CEO" Playing Cards

On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003.

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

More fic readers means more people in fandom, right? Instead, I read post after post talking about how distant writers felt from these newer readers—how impersonal and lonely the act of fannish creation has become.

My mum also has a side-hustle reselling rare/discontinued product from an MLM called Epicure. Epicure has just gone bankrupt. The vibe in my parents' house is like the end of that movie The Big Short right now.

-K

There are no dragons in this book

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that it's not a good idea to release a new book on the same day as a highly-anticipated title like Onyx Storm, but I'm pretty sure the overlap between my readership and Rebecca Yarros' readership is, uh, nonexistent.

New Release: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God"

In the wake of narrowly-averted tragedy, Sebastian Moran returns to his old home in Herefordshire; his partner, Jay Moriarty, insists on coming with him. Together, they discover the cash-strapped local council has deployed a piece of software called AlgoDV to prop up its understaffed social services — and that AlgoDV was nearly responsible for the deaths of Moran's only real family. Which means the man behind the whole scheme, Councillor Robert Wallis, is about to have a very bad week.

"Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is the sixth story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one is about AI-as-political project, the deliberate shifting of accountability onto systems that cannot be held accountable, the various ways a decade of austerity has devastated Britain, and tormenting local government officials for fun and profit.

You can get "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" most places ebooks are sold, or by clicking here.

This Week's Links

Brainwash An Executive Today!

The reason that I'm concerned is that the executive in front of me should not be using that term. They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren't specialized in my area, but I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don't understand. This would be like my 96-year-old grandfather asking me about Bitcoin mining—impressive if he had arrived at the question organically, but in practice I'm already dialing the bank to report a massive theft.

Never Forgive Them

You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

what i'm doing about alice munro

There isn’t “the art and the artist” and one does not “separate art from artist.” To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core.

Heads up, Books2Read's relay to Barnes & Noble's website appears to be broken at the moment. If you usually buy my books at B&N, you may have to search this new one manually.

-K

New book preorders (and other stuff)

I have not yet figured out how one builds an effective book marketing strategy when one's target demographic isn't "queer romance readers" or "crime thriller fans" so much as "people who watched a lot of summer replacement shows that aired on TNT or USA Network in the late 2000s and early 2010s."

Preorder: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God"

In the wake of narrowly-averted tragedy, Sebastian Moran returns to his old home in Herefordshire; his partner, Jay Moriarty, insists on coming with him. Together, they discover the cash-strapped local council has deployed a piece of software called AlgoDV to prop up its understaffed social services — and that AlgoDV was nearly responsible for the deaths of Moran's only real family. Which means the man behind the whole scheme, Councillor Robert Wallis, is about to have a very bad week.

The sixth story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, titled "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," comes out on January 21! You can preorder it (from those vendors that allow preorders) here.

Additionally, Ko-fi supporters who subscribe at the Early Access tier ($5 CAD/month) can download the book for free, right now.

This Week's Links

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World’s First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact Checking

"It’s our duty to maintain the unfiltered free speech that sustains our democracy, and that’s why Meta will no longer fact check on any of our social media platforms," said Zuckerberg, concealing his grotesque rat penis transplant scars and a row of engorged pig nipples underneath his trademark t-shirt and jeans.

John Waters Is Still Filthy

Q: I feel like it’s hard for young people to even sit down and watch a full movie nowadays.

A: No wonder! Most of them are so bad!

Art in the Age of Slop

“The problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want,” Entangled’s CEO Liz Pelletier is quoted as saying, “and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be.”

By the way: January 12, 2025 marks the end of the Kaiju war in Pacific Rim. I hope you all celebrated.

-K

The reign of the Vanessas Hudgen

I think the big advantage of writing the way I do is that I'm freed from the tyranny of narrative utilitarianism.

If I were writing about characters intended to be Good People, then every decision they made would be kind of a foregone conclusion: they'd have to do the Right Thing, even if that Right Thing is personally unsatisfying.

But because all my characters are fucked-up horny little freaks, they can make decisions that are petty and selfish and deranged. Which is much more fun to write about.

Anyway. The next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story is almost finished.

Podcast Appearance: I Will Fight You

In the latest episode of I Will Fight You, we recap all three of Netflix's Princess Switch movies and chronicle the ascension of God-Empress Olivia of Montenaro.

You can listen to the episode here, or wherever podcasts are found.

Smashwords End of Year Sale

As of this mailout, there's still a day or two left of the End of Year sale over at Smashwords. A lot of my books are on sale for 50% off or more, and my novelette "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" and short story "Move Fast and Break Things" are both currently free to download!

You can find my books on Smashwords here, and sale prices are valid through to January 1.

This Week's Links

My Doctor Emailed Me Back

This point bears underlining: every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

Kickin’ Jeans

Jeans designed for kicking people. Sold by Century Martial Arts from 1977 to around 2015. Featured an "exclusive gusset in the crotch."

I know there's still a day left in the year but at this point I think it's safe to say Star Trek's predicted Irish Reunification of 2024 isn't happening, folks.

-K

The trash version of the Criterion Closet

I own a lot of DVDs and a growing number of Blu-rays. I've been collecting physical copies since I was a teenager; when everyone else started ditching their libraries in favor of Netflix, I steadfastly refused. Considering how little of what I want to watch is available to stream these days, I feel completely vindicated.

I left a lot of my movie and television library in a storage locker when I moved to the UK, but now that I've got a multiregion Blu-ray player I've been digging those discs out of storage. I've also been buying movies and box sets from charity shops over here, usually for less than £2 apiece.

On one occasion I found two different unrated cuts of Saw in the same shop. I can't help but wonder if they came from the same person, or if two separate individuals decided it was time to let go of their precious extended edition of the movie where Cary Elwes cuts off his own foot.

All of this is my roundabout way of letting you know that my parents sent me the entirety of Babylon 5 on Blu-ray for my birthday, and you may not hear from me for some time.

Smashwords End of Year Sale

We're into the last week of the End of Year sale over at Smashwords. A lot of my books are on sale for 50% off or more, and my novelette "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" and short story "Move Fast and Break Things" are both currently free to download!

You can find my books on Smashwords here, and sale prices are valid through to January 1.

This Week's LinksDefining AI

Defining AI along political and ideological language allows us to think about things we experience and recognize productively as AI, without needing the self-serving supervision of computer scientists to allow or direct our collective work. We can recognize, based on our own knowledge and experience as people who deal with these systems, what’s part of this overarching project of disempowerment by the way that it renders autonomy farther away from us, by the way that it alienates our authority on the subjects of our own expertise.

The Ghosts in the Machine

Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC).

Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam

Always good to remember that if someone is telling you something that's too good to be true, that's usually because it is. In this case: the free browser extension that finds coupon codes for you has to be getting its money from somewhere.

The grand tragedy of my life is that I could make infinitely more money if I were merely, like, 30% more of an asshole than I currently am.

-K

Free & cheap degenerate literature, inquire within

Christ, you post 1400 words of your masc special forces protagonist taking the strap and suddenly everyone's a fucking coward.

Anyway, I've just finished the first draft of the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story. It takes place in Herefordshire, and if you pay close attention to the Sherlock Holmes story "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," you might figure out why.

End of Year Sale

Smashwords' End of Year sale has come around once again! You can now get a bunch of my books either free or at a discount:

"Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" and "Move Fast and Break Things" are available for free! (regular price $0.99 USD)"Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger" and "Jay Moriarty Ruins Everybody's Childhood" are on sale for $0.99 USD (regular price $1.99 USD)"Jay Moriarty Has Seen You Naked" is on sale for $1.49 USD (regular price $2.99 USD) Endling: 600 Years from Home is on sale for $0.99 USD (regular price $3.99 USD)

You can find these and my other books on Smashwords here, and sale prices are valid through to January 1.

Also, since it's That Time of Year, I should mention that Smashwords lets you send ebooks as gifts! Simply select the "Give as a Gift" option from the book page:

... and, at checkout, punch in the email of whoever you'd like to gift the book to.

This Week's Links

Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness

“If anything, the fact that ‘tradwife’ is a trending porn search term reminds me that the entire concept of the tradwife is just influencer marketing in the first place,” Dahl said. “Most tradwife influencers are actually business owners and the primary breadwinners in their homes, so the term itself is kind of an oxymoron if you think about it. Maybe seeing a bunch of porn labeled "tradwife" will help other people to realize that whether it's an Instagram influencer or a Pornhub creator, tradwifery is just a fantasy after all.”

The Last Resort: So close to Fortress Europe’s African outposts, yet so far

Looking at a map, you would be forgiven for thinking that Ceuta is part of Morocco. It is geographically, just not legally. Drive seven hours east on the Moroccan coast along the Mediterranean sea and you will go from Ceuta to another Spanish city: Melilla. Spain refused to give the two up when it recognised Moroccan independence in 1956. It argued, in part, that its rule over these lands pre-dated its hold on the rest of Morocco, and even some parts of mainland Spain.

Today, when European nations are fervent about keeping African migrants out, having territory that touches African borders is proving complicated for Spain.

The phony comforts of useful idiots

OpenAI, in pursuit of its first profits, uses fear of AI as a marketing strategy to secure partnerships and enterprise deals, or as Brian Merchant puts it: "if they want to survive the coming AI-led mass upheaval, they'd better climb aboard." Microsoft claims it is fighting climate change by accelerating fossil fuel extraction with generative AI products that generate tens of billions of dollars for oil companies and the tech giant. Israeli apartheid is powered by AI tech provided by Google, while Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is bolstered by automated systems that function as a “mass assassination factory.” The rise of the insurance tech industry has seen the advent of AI tools that promise healthcare revolutions but are part of a longer line of profit-driven, hyper-personalized reforms that have been degrading conditions. It’s hard to imagine a world where one could, with a serious face, say all of this boils down to: “fake and sucks” vs “real and dangerous.”

I considered doing a "best books of 2024" list for this newsletter, but then I remembered I've only read one book that came out in 2024. It was Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle. It was okay.

-K

The rage of Funko('s IP trolling bot)

Over the weekend, itch.io (an indie games marketplace, and also one of the sites where I host my books) was taken offline by its domain registrar in response to a complaint by an automated piece of "brand protection software" deployed by toy company Funko.

(I initially assumed this complaint was filed against IMMORTAL Pop!bat, but now that the site is back up it appears IMMORTAL Pop!bat is still available, so probably not.)

itch.io claims they took down the offending page immediately. But in addition to Funko's complaint being completely automated, so was the response from registrar iwantmyname; no human being at iwantmyname read itch.io's email informing them the page had been taken down, and their system automatically disabled the domain instead.

The site was back up and running within a day, which I'm sure was a relief to all the developers and creators who depend on itch.io to make a living. But this whole mess highlights how many of the companies that make up the backbone of the modern internet simply do not employ human beings to handle things like this anymore. The complaint was automated, the response was automated, and the resolution process was most likely also automated — and through it all, real people's livelihoods hung in the balance.

New Flash Fiction: "Anytime You Like"

At first, the idea hadn't been much more than a bit of stupid drunken wordplay. Jay's eager reaction made the prospect very real, and one that Sebastian found himself obsessing over in the following weeks.

I've got to be honest with you, folks: this is just 1400 words of Sebastian Moran getting pegged. You can read it for free on Ko-fi or Medium (but if you happen to be one of my parents, maybe don't).

This Week's Links

Moderators Across Social Media Struggle to Contain Celebrations of UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassination

On Facebook, UnitedHealth Group locked comments on its post mourning the death of its “dear friend and colleague,” but it couldn’t block people from reacting with emojis, which more than 73,000 have so far with the crying-laughing face (compared to around 2,400 doing a sad face). Laugh-reacting became a meme of its own on Facebook, with a lot of the more than 6,800 shared posts including people telling friends to go hit the laugh emoji.

Dozens of people in Canada have scurvy, and it's because of food

Food insecurity across the provinces rose to 22.9 per cent in 2023, an increase from 18.4 per cent the year before, according to data from Statistics Canada. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan saw the highest rates of food insecurity between 28 and 29 per cent. Black and Indigenous populations were the most affected.

Tesla Cybertruck Immediately Dies in Canadian Winter

lol. lmao.

-K