Five Things: December 19, 2024
This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. While I’m flattered you care about my commentary, I also encourage you to click through the main links, too. There are only five (the others are easter eggs for hardcore tea sippers) and I promise they’re usually more interesting than just excuses for my own ranting! And if you enjoy something, send me an email, leave a comment, or share it on the socials.
NOTE: 2024 has been a weird year; personally great in several ways but ending on a sour note that suggests 2025 is going to suck hard for a lot of us. I hope you get extra pleasure from whatever annual rituals you celebrate, and best wishes for the new year. “Go with what is. Use what happens.” (Tom Piazza in Why New Orleans Matters, tattooed on my left leg.)
_ONE
We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation Is Not an AI Problem. | Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan
“To our surprise, there was no deceptive intent in 39 of the 78 cases in the database.”
This is an extremely weird way to frame research that shows 50% of AI use *WAS* deceptive and is an obvious accelerant for creating and distributing misinformation — for which there is also A LOT of demand from people who know how to use it. It’s literally the “flood the zone with shit” strategy that has proven so effective over the past several years, particularly with mainstream media outlets. The main goal is to sow mistrust and confusion that spreads through social channels and influences mainstream media coverage, and deceptive intent doesn’t need to be involved 100% of time for it to be effective.
I’d expect this kind of “analysis” from the NY Times op-eds and Substack newsletters, but coming from academic researchers via an organization that aims “to promote a system of free expression that is open and inclusive, that broadens and elevates public discourse, and that fosters creativity, accountability, and effective self-government,” is a huge disappointment. Kapoor and Narayanan are also the authors of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, the description of which sounds like the typical academic approach of erring on the side of “objectivity” that always ends up defending a side anyway — usually the wrong one.
__TWO
Stupidest Drama Ever | Ernie Smith
An apparent extortion scheme involving famous writers and entrepreneurs lit up Bluesky the other night. It raises some important questions about whether Bluesky is up to the task of moderation.
Bluesky has had a very rough couple of weeks, as their desire to claim Twitter’s former place in the digital ecosystem as quickly as possible is being hampered by their inability to scale the various systems required fast enough to credibly handle that position. This extortion scenario, basically a new spin on cybersquatting, is tied to the seemingly great option of using your own website domain as your account name, which also acts as a form of verification. I’m using it on my account, and it remains one of the few interesting things about the platform as it and its most avid users fast-forward through years of predictable mistakes in record time.
Smith does a great job of breaking down the extortion attempt and how easy it is to do, and it’s kind of funny that owning your own domain might end up becoming a requirement to avoid being impersonated on centralized social networks, rather than just being the smart thing to do for many, many years. Ironically, although that’s something I’ve long advocated, and I’ve owned loudpoet and guygonzalez forever, glecharles has been my primary social handle for just as long, and I realized that I didn’t own it as a domain. I took care of that shortly after reading this, and glecharles.com now redirects to loudpoet.com, as it should have been doing long ago.
As for Bluesky, I’m still mostly in lurker mode there, primarily engaging with a handful of people and occasionally sharing a link, but I was planning to prioritize it for the day job since a lot of comics and library people have finally fled Twitter and landed there. Now I’m giving that a second thought.
___THREE
Comics and The Big Lie | Heidi MacDonald
Almost every day it seems someone is launching a new comics publisher or imprint, promising that “the stories come first” – but a look at the talent and loglines shows that getting media money out of the deal is a major goal of the venture – or at least a VERY prominent slide in the pitch deck.
The only thing I hate more than AI startups are comics startups that pretend to care about publishing but are really just farming IP and taking advantage of creators, hoping for the big Hollywood payday. I’m actually surprised that specific combination hasn’t appeared yet, but maybe it has and I’m blissfully unaware of its existence?
MacDonald takes a sanitized but insightful walk down memory lane through some interesting and sordid history, reminding me that my adult return to reading (and eventually writing about) comics coincided with one of the previous waves of comics as proof of concept for Hollywood pitches, most notably for me, Speakeasy Comics.
Anyone who’s been in the industry for more than five minutes can translate a publisher’s press release and gauge how serious they are about publishing vs. acquiring IP for options, and several publishers’ terrible contracts are open secrets that still manage to find creators willing to risk it all just to get their comic published. As I learned the hard way during my two stints at Writers Digest, though, no amount of education and freely available resources to guide people in the right direction can overcome ego and hubris at the intersection of creative and financial decisions.
____FOUR
How difficult is a Dakar car to drive? | Stephen Brunsdon
With experience and seat time in the Ultimate class now more important than ever, the arrival of the next generation of Dakar competitors may well give cross-country rallying a positive shot in the arm as it looks to build upon its world championship billing. For 2024 Challenger winner Gutiérrez, it’s proof that the ladder is working.
The Dakar Rally moving to Saudi Arabia turned a guilty pleasure into a problematic one, but it’s the only rally event I can easily follow, so I live with the hypocrisy. I try to offset it a bit by rooting for the alternative fuel cars, because events like this do eventually impact what hits the road, but there’s no question that there’s a lot of greenwashing (and sportswashing) happening with the whole event — not only for the host country.
I’ve been a fan of Cristina Gutiérrez for several years now (first through Extreme E), so it’ll be exciting to see her step up into the big cars, while Seth Quintero and Aliyyah Koloc are intriguing, too. None of them are likely to be frontrunners, but it’ll be nice to see some fresh faces getting attention this year.
My favorites, though, are the privateers and the solo bikers — partly because it feeds my fantasy of being able to participate myself, despite my bank account and video game experience knowing otherwise! I’m hoping Dakar continues to improve their coverage of them this year because they really do represent the “spirit” of the Dakar more than the big money factory teams do.
_____FIVE
Oh, Just One More Wing | The Naming Way
Bottlebright is, as mentioned, a BIRD ? IN ? A ? TRENCHCOAT ?.
One of my to-dos early in the new year is to add a blogroll back to my site, because two years post-Twitter, I’ve slowly been rebuilding my “feed” across a few different platforms, and some people are just consistently insightful, entertaining, and/or provocative that an occasional shoutout here doesn’t do them justice.
The Naming Way (the blog/blogger formerly known as itsthebageler.com) is a good example of that, someone I stumbled upon via WordPress’ clunky “network” a while ago and have enjoyed reading ever since. It’s an old school blog in all of the good ways; randomly personal and insightful, very often funny, and we frequently have overlapping tastes in various media. This post, in particular, is about a Pathfinder character he created, and it’s a great example of his quirky sense of humor and writing style, both of which I’m a fan of.
As for the character itself, my D&D-playing and Pathfinder-curious daughter gave them a rave review when I shared the post with her: “10/10 interesting concept, I approve of the bird in a trench coat.”
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One: Fuck intent–first, because who determines it and when (we’ve all lived through hearing the person who harmed us whine to a higher authority that they “didn’t meant (to harm us)” and get scot free with that bullshit), and second, because if harms happens, intent is entirely irrelevant, period, end of.
Two: cybersquatting, copyright trolls, etc. what a difference would it make if we had good systems to protect the public from fraudsters–even when the public doesn’t have big bucks behind them. Tangentially: one of the people mentioned in the piece (Sam Parr) was part of a scam by one of his pals, almost ten years ago. (I wrote two posts about the plagiarism and asshattery involved, here and here; sadly, The Book Thingo blog is no longer, so part of the context is now gone, though the other links should still work) All of that to say, about someone trying to extort him over his own name on social media: karma?
Receipts! I’m glad to say I don’t even remember The Hustle but it sounds like the kind of douchey snark factory I hated during that time, but maybe second rate? Thanks for throwback!
My pleasure!
(I sadly seem to have a good memory for grudges, and those guys whole, “it’s romance, therefore schlock, therefore we can steal it” thing grated)
Also: somehow I managed to find a way to follow you through WordPress just now; woot woot! (that also allows me to ‘like’ your posts when reading them in my feed as opposed to reading and replying to them on your blog, but hey, it’s something.
Nice! It’s a Jetpack feature so I suspect it’s tied to having a WordPress login, but I’m not sure. I only see it on my own site when I use their app; I can’t like anything when I’m on a browser.
It’s weird; I have what I presume it’s the bare bones basic version with my free blog, and it has been glitching something fierce over the past couple of months. Somehow this one time it showed me a “subscribe to blog” screen when I was looking at your blog, and when I grabbed it, it actually subscribed me. May be another glitch, but hey, I’ll take it!