5. My grumpy takes on some recent Hot Topics of Discourse.

That sounds like it should be a mall store, huh? I’m talking about various and sundry current fiery discussions on social media and in the Opinionverse. I don’t type or think words fast enough to engage online, but here? After I’ve had plenty of time to ruminate, ponder, and words up my gut reaction? Oh, hell yes. My space, my takes.

1. Nobody who’s held elected office owes us ANYTHING of their time once they’re out of office. Leave Kamala Harris the fuck alone, not to mention Barack Obama, others from the Biden Administration, their families, and whoever else you think “ought to be doing more for the resistance.” Would I vote again for Kamala Harris if she decided to run for, oh, just about anything? Hell, yes. But she didn’t win the election, she holds no political office currently, and frankly, if she emigrated to Canada, I wouldn’t blame her.

2. Unauthorized downloading/hoarding/AI-training use of copyrighted material is wrong. Period. That said, “book piracy” isn’t the same use case as artistic plagiarism, and it’s far from the evil-vs-good binary it’s made out to be by zealots on both sides.
   The pirates who are most vocal about “It’s Mah Right To Pirate Whut I Want" are asshatted chuckleheads who think their experience is the only one that matters, and they’re WRONG. There’s an adjective for people like them. It’s SELFISH. I’d add snotty, pathetic, and whiny, but that’s cuz I love me a good strong of pejoratives.
   And that said, the “Pirates Are Bankrupting Authors” people over-simplify the complex issue so much it undermines their good and accurate position.
   For those who care, piracy bankrupts writers less due to lost sales (The pirate vs purchaser Venn diagram is two barely touching circles. That’s been demonstrated via a multitude of studies) The lost income is mainly indirect, from diminished visibility/discovery, lost contracts from publishers who don’t care if an author got popular enough to pirate at book 2 or 3, a flat sales curve is still commercial death, and my least favorite, publishers who refuse to support the library market to make ebooks available to readers who can’t pay. (LOOKING AT YOU, TOR, FUCK YOUR WHACK EBOOK PRICING MODEL AND YOUR 6-MONTH LIBRARY EBOOK EMBARGO PERIOD, I HATE YOU FOR MAKING ME WAIT BECAUSE I CAN’T READ PAPERBACKS <but I still lurve your authors, so anyway fuck you.>) And publishers who vampire libraries dry with licensing, and libraries who don’t buy indie ebooks when they can….it goes on and on.
   Hard to fit all that in a skeet or a post. A few have done a good job, credit where it’s due.

3. Generative AI/LLM generated text is a plague of stupid brain-eating locusts. It’s everywhere, confidently assuring everyone that it’s GREAT! It’s HELPFUL! It’s EASY TO USE.
   But it’s lying. It’s made of lies. ALL IT DOES IS LIE. The experts call the obvious lies that get caught “hallucinations,” as if LLM’s only lie sometimes, but that is simply, um, a LIE. LLM AI’s generate their nonsense with all the confidence of a cis white American man because they’re trained on text overwhelming produced by that demographic, but there’s no thinking involved. All they do is cut-paste together words that existed elsewhere first, and that means the chance that they put together things wrong is 100%.
   If you use an LLM AI to generate any writing that you will show to anyone else anywhere ever, rest assured you will end up pantsing yourself in public big time and badly.

Okay, I should get off the computer and do something else now. Like play silly games on my tablet. Or bake something. Or both.