Category: Fresh News

What's been going on lately

AI Art Adventures: Hamster Accident

You’d think that a cute, fluffy, chubby, adorable little hamster having a mishap on its exercise wheel — a sight common on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the like — wouldn’t be a problem for AI to generate. Especially as it’s an element common to many peoples’ childhoods, a hamster running so quickly he flings himself …

Continue reading

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/3/24: Papua New Guinea Names

Some of the first human beings ever to leave Africa colonized southeast Asian tens of thousands of years ago, using continental land bridges for transit as the sea was much lower. Since the end of the Ice Age, the islands were isolated; but the beginning of recorded history brought more visitors, among them Indians and  …

Continue reading

“It all looked good on paper.”

AI has stepped  in it again! This time, in Glasgow, Scotland. A children’s event called “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” — a none-too-subtle allusion to Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — opened in a sparsely decorated warehouse to parental reactions so violently dismayed some wound up calling the local police. The story is below. …

Continue reading

The Romance Writers Association endorses the use of ChatGPT for writing… or not.

I recently became aware of how far the use of ChatGPT as a writer’s aid has come. NOT the use of it to write a whole book without human aid, because that is very far from the technology that’s available now. But this current trend towards it has a lot of fiction writers upset.

Continue reading

Passing Obsessions 2-24

Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones, a documentary about Rolling Stones guitarists and founder Brian Jones and how and why he may have died. Hint: It was murder, and it was covered up by the police. r/fantasyromance. Youtube livestreams of airport arrivals and departures. My favorites are London Heathrow and LAX. Nirvana and …

Continue reading

The Romantasy Explosion

Since we’re nearing Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about… Romantasy. As implied by the name it’s a mashup of Romance + Fantasy, a subgenre exemplified, perhaps platonically, by Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, whose eponymously named first book came out in 2015. Marketed as YA, the fantasy novel was about a …

Continue reading

Passing Obsessions 1-24

Creating Chinese New Year coloring book images in Midjourney. Author Jenny Trout’s’ lengthy recap of Sarah J. Maas’s Faerie fantasy A Court of Thorns and Roses. If you’ve wondered what all the fuss was about, but don’t want to read the book itself, read this instead. Shipping container houses. Face/Off, an original Syfy show about …

Continue reading

2024 Reading Challenge

I haven’t had much success with reading challenges these past years. In 2023, I finished 5 out of 12. In 2022, it was eight out of twelve, with a little cheating: three-quarters. So THIS year, I’m only going to pick six. That’s make it a little easier to chew. 19. Like a novel, only real: …

Continue reading

Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/3/24: Best of Twittersnips 2023 (Magic Items)

My favorite Twittersnip magic items of the 2023.   2023 Magic Items (Best of) Basket of Adoration: Whatever is put into this large woven basket elicits oohs and aahhs of admiration from viewers, and if it is a living being, the desire to nurture and protect it… no matter what sort of creature it is. …

Continue reading

Merry Christmas!