geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

📚 Clarkesworld Issue 209 edited by Neil Clarke

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13/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Standouts this month are “The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin” by Zohar Jacobs, “Kardashev’s Palimpsest” by David Goodman, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim, and “Lonely Ghosts” by Meghan Feldman.

Me holding Clarkesworld 209 on my iPad

All Your Images Are Belong to Zuck

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If you have what you consider to be a hard-line stance against AI-generated images, and you post your photos and/or artwork to Instagram, Threads, and/or Facebook, you should likely either rethink that hard-line stance or stop posting your images.

Zuckerberg’s Going to Use Your Instagram Photos to Train His AI Machines:

During his earnings call for Meta’s fourth quarter results yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear he will use images posted on Facebook and Instagram to train his generative AI tools with.

Last month, Meta announced a standalone AI image generator to compete with the likes of DALL-E and Midjourney.

Meta has already admitted that it has used what it calls “publicly available” data to train its AI tools with.

Essentially, if you have a public Facebook or Instagram profile where you post photographs, there is a strong chance that Meta is using your work to train its AI image generator tools.

Yeah, this sucks, though it’s not surprising. I’ve stopped posting to Instagram, but still post a lot on Facebook, because this is where most of my friends are. I wish Mastodon would get more traction (I’m not tempted by either Threads or Bluesky; Threads is just another arm of Meta, Bluesky is more Jack Dorsey, neither is actually federating yet despite a lot of lip service, and neither currently allows post schedulers to tie in, which keeps me from using them for Norwescon posts), or, even better, that there was more of a push back towards actual self-owned blogs (like this one!) that aren’t locked behind virtual walls. But I don’t want to lose track of all of my friends, so until something major shifts, I’ll stick around, which means I’m probably going to end up shrugging and resigning myself to feeding Zuck’s AI machines, which I have definite ethical issues with.

📚 The Prisoner of Vega by Sharon Lerner and Christopher Cerf

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12/2024 – ⭐️⭐️

Another late-70s children’s book. The Enterprise arrives at a planet to sign a trade treaty, only to find the planet captured by Klingons! Only apparently the illustrator had never watched Star Trek; the main character likenesses are shaky, and the Klingons look hilariously unlike Klingons (and much more like 1950s Sci-Fi villains).

Me holding The Prisoner of Vega

Year 50 Day 281

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Me tucked in bed, reading an old Star Trek children’s book.

Day 281: Just a little light reading before going to sleep. Read both of the two Star Trek children’s books (exclusively produced for libraries in 1977) in my Christmas haul tonight; they were just as good as you’d expect. As long as your expectations weren’t very high, at least. One of them at least had decent artwork; I’m not sure the illustrator of the other had ever actually seen Star Trek.

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📚 Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds

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10/2024 – ⭐️⭐️

This is not a good Star Trek book. The Enterprise, with a crew at risk of what’s essentially violent cabin fever, is dispatched to the Horatius system to investigate a distress call. There, they find three planets: one with a stereotypical Native American civilization (“backward savages”, of course), one with a mid-20th century American civilization, and one with space Nazis. Oh, and there’s a “B story” involving a plague-infested rat loose on the ship. So, no, as a Star Trek adventure, there’s not much to recommend it.

However: It’s the first officially licensed Star Trek novel, and therefore gets a bit of leeway…or at least recognition that the treklit landscape was far different (nonexistent, actually) in 1968 than it is today. Not really recommended unless you’re a collector, but if you are and can track it down (especially if you can find an original rather than the 1999 reprint), it’s a quick read and kind of fun to see where the print side of Trek began.

Me holding Mission to Horatius

🎥 Haunted Mansion

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Haunted Mansion (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Cute, mildly amusing, and inoffensive. Not outstanding, and certainly not likely to get multiple sequels like Pirates of the Caribbean did, but for a theme-park-attraction-turned-movie, it wasn’t bad. Though I’m mystified by the costuming choices for the kid — I mean, okay, it’s convenient shorthand for “odd socially inept geeky child”, but it was really pushing the concept harder than necessary.