Kit Walker's Blog, page 8

This one's a bummer

My cat died this week.

There's a banality to grief that art rarely captures. You can lie on the floor sobbing your heart out, but eventually you have to get up and do the dishes. And all that crying pulled a muscle in your abs, so now you need to go take an ibuprofen.

Anyway. Following my usual format for this newsletter feels a bit ghoulish at the moment.

My cat's name was Pam. I wrote about her and her life here.

See you next week.

-K

In Memory of Pam

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On March 19, 2024, my cat died.

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Too hot for Gumroad

Gumroad — one of the services I use to sell my books — has instituted a new content policy on their platform, banning "media that is created for the primary purpose of sexual gratification." This rule strikes me as, among other things, difficult to enforce in any consistent way. If Gumroad points at a sex scene I wrote and says it's intended to get someone off, and I say it isn't, who has the final word? Who decides whether I'm a pornographer?

For now, I haven't removed any of my books from Gumroad. I'll play the situation by ear.

One frustrating element here is that Gumroad is instituting this content ban to stay in line with its payment processors' policies, which are themselves in place to stay in line with a law known as FOSTA-SESTA. Like Gumroad's new content policy, FOSTA-SESTA offers only vague definitions of what it actually prohibits, thus encouraging those under its power to self-censor. This is how censorship works: it's not actually feasible to identify and prosecute every possible infraction, so censors rely on uncertainty and fear to do their jobs for them.

FOSTA-SESTA was also passed into law in the United States, of which I am not a citizen and in which I do not live. Ostensibly it only affects platforms and payment providers based in the US; however, most platforms and payment providers are based in the US. And as the TikTok situation shows, any platform based outside the US can and will be either blocked from operating within it or forcibly divested from its foreign owners.

I was legally prohibited from voting for or against the legislators who passed FOSTA-SESTA; nevertheless, I am expected to comply with it.

This is yet another facet of American empire, by the way. It's more than bombs and guns and client states — it's that the US leverages its dominance over technology and finance to set policy for, effectively, the entire world.

itch.io's Spring Sale is still on!

As of this mailout, there should be roughly 2 days left of itch.io's Spring Sale. All my books are 50% off, or you can get the whole library in a bundle for just $3 USD.

Recommendation: The Paper

Henry Hackett is the workaholic editor of a New York City tabloid. He loves his job, but the long hours and low pay are leading to discontent. Also, publisher Bernie White faces financial straits, and has hatchet-man Alicia Clark—Henry's nemesis—impose unpopular cutbacks.

The Paper is one of those movies I quote constantly, which is unfortunate because the only other people I've met who've even heard of it, much less seen it, are my parents. Both of them worked in newspapers, so I might be genetically predisposed to like this movie.

It's great, though. It's funny, it moves at breakneck speed, and anyone who's worked in a high-pressure production environment will recognize everything about it.

This Week's Links

The Real Harm in "Harmful Content"

After all, there’s a convergence of factors here: anti-intellectualism rises in alignment with anti-sex attitudes. Anti-intellectualism and movements against bodily autonomy and sexual education are about the same thing: control, and maintaining control.

Man spent years trying to create giant hybrid sheep to be "sold and hunted as trophies," federal prosecutors say

Was the giant sheep cloning and breeding operation at risk of causing an ecological disaster? Yes. Is this entire concept really, really funny? Also yes. I'm now imagining a Jurassic Park scenario where the giant sheep get loose and go on a rampage, killing and eating trophy hunters.

How a Foul Ball From 2014 Became Part of a Russian Disinformation Campaign

Then I realized that I probably could determine exactly how ancient this 13-second clip of a foul ball was, because a series of databases—most notably the incredible baseball-reference.com, tracks essentially everything that happens in baseball.

Here is how I performed this critical investigation, which no one actually asked me to do but which does demonstrate the incredible amount of granular statistical data available about the sport of baseball.

News from the front is that Chappell Roan's opening act for the first leg of Olivia Rodrigo's world tour is causing a mass lesbian awakening event. I could not be more delighted.

-K

nobody is normal about Irene Adler

For what may be obvious reasons, I recently read every story in the original Sherlock Holmes canon — all four novels and 56 short stories.

(This is not bragging. 56 is not that many. Harlan Ellison, one of my favourite writers, is said to have written over 1 000 short stories in his lifetime. You’re welcome to try and verify that claim, but you’ll probably get distracted by the “Controversies and disputes” section of his Wikipedia page.)

The Holmes stories were written before we as a culture f...

new novelette: "Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger"

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Revenge brings black-hat hacker Jay Moriarty and former SAS operator Sebastian Moran together once again, with an egomaniacal real estate developer in their crosshairs. Derek Chapman is obsessed with high society and will do anything to climb the social ladder--which makes him the perfect mark for a confidence game involving a West End producer, a private sex club, and a live Bengal tiger. What could possibly go wrong?

"Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger" is part 2 of The Casefile of Jay...

i have a goodreads author page now

Enough of my work is now listed on Goodreads that I decided to claim my author page--mostly to keep anyone else from claiming it, and also to try and clear out a few works from an entirely different Kit Walker. At no point in the 90s was I recording meditation tapes, as I was busy attending elementary school instead.

I don't intend to use Goodreads to track my personal reading, since I use the Storygraph for that. But I've hooked up my blog feed and opened the Ask the Author section, on the off...

new novelette: Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act

So, you know how Sherlock Holmes is now fully in the public domain?

My new novelette, "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act," is a modern-day interpretation of Holmes' most famous adversary that tells the story of how he met Sebastian Moran, his loyal partner in crime.

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When ex-SAS security consultant Sebastian Moran runs afoul of a rich and powerful corporate client, he's thrown into the path of a brilliant hacker named Jay Moriarty. To survive, both of them must work together to u...

Lockout

When Jackie first met her next-door neighbor, she had no inkling whatsoever that there was six figures’ worth of military hardware grafted onto his body.

The man who answered her knock at the door of the neighboring apartment was somewhere in his early 20s, with the permanent five ‘o’ clock shadow of someone who only shaved with an electric razor. It was early autumn, not even cold, but he wore a hoodie and kept both hands tucked into its front pocket.

Jackie did her best to look friendly (a red...

"The Devil Who Loves Me" available now!

The Devil Who Loves Me is out today! It's the second anthology by startup indie publisher GrendelPress and features my story "Move Fast and Break Things."

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This collection of fourteen stories explores love in the darkest of places. From an executioner drawn in by a handsome witch, a knight set on avenging the loss of his friend, to a mercenary touched by the abyss on a rescue mission gone awry, these stories will capture your heart and imagination.

That last bit, about the mercenary touched b...

scabby the chatbot

So it looks like there's going to be a writers' strike in the United States. Among the demands brought forward by the Writer's Guild of America is the regulation of "generative AI" in screenwriting: the use of large language models like GPT, which produce text by calculating where certain words in the English language are statistically most likely to appear next to each other.

No matter what your job is, there's an AI booster out there who thinks GPT can do some part of it better than you can. ...