Not in Our Stars

The fault is not in our stars, but in Amazon.  The time has finally come, for me to abandon (literally walk away, which I guess from the musical term andante, which means at a walking pace) Goodreads.

Goodreads was initially quite a reasonable idea: to be a website where readers reviewed the books they read.  But, inevitably, Amazon bought the site, and now it is powered by the online bookseller, whose programmers are less interested in making the site (and its software) robust and easy to use, than it is in driving up the reviews of books that Amazon sells.

I headed up to Goodreads earlier today, hoping to leave a glowing review of Nancy Springer, the author of the Enola Holmes series of books about the younger sister of the fabulous Sherlock Holmes, the first two of which were adapted into a fine movie on Netflix, starring Millie Bobbie Brown.  But I could not even find a reference to Ms. Springer, who is a celebrated author of fiction for young adults (and even their older cousins and aunts).

I suppose it could be that I was trying to navigate the site on my phone, rather than on a computer.  Amazon's programmers write such clunky software that it's hard to believe that it's ineptness.  No, they're trying to pull off some dastardly sneaky tricks on both their shoppers, and on these reviewers.

For years, they hosted reviews of their books right on their site.  But now they vet the reviews, and remove both the insulting ones (in line with 'hate speech' principles coming out of Washington) and unflattering reviews, which discourage sales.  All their books just cannot be excellent; at least some have to be clunkers.

I'm not clever enough to argue the case against allowing Amazon to police it's own reviews, but Goodreads is no longer any use to me.

Robotic Art Creation: AI

I'm finally talking about something that's been around for a year or two, namely art using Artificial Intelligence.  The basic principle--as far as I can understand it--is to give a program lots of images to 'eat' and digest, after which you can ask it to make a picture of a certain kind.

Obviously, it isn't enough to just shove a pile of images down it's throat.  The images have to be categorized.  For instance, if you're giving it geometric shapes, you've got to tell it: these are triangles, these are squares, and do on.  (This is an explanation for complete laymen; if you're an AI insider, you can stop reading now!)  So after digesting enough shapes, you would have succeeded in teaching it what the names of these shapes are.

This was back in the old days; modern AI Programs can be taught--what is the most exciting word for the guys who wrangle these programs--a girl!  (For some obscure reason, all the images of girls these programs are familiar with are those of girls with very ample chests, so naturally if one of these programs is requested to supply a picture of a girl, it's going to be one of a woman that appears to have been breast feeding for a while.)

The amazing thing about these programs is how they are able to combine different elements together.  Spitting out an image of a girl is not going to be a problem for a program that has access to a file with a few dozen pictures of various girls; similarly for an image of a tree, if it has a database of a few score of trees.  But you can see that it isn't simple for it to make a picture of a girl and a tree in the same picture!  The designer of the program must give it rules about how to combine images together in a satisfactory way, and they have certainly done this; this is why AI art is such an immense achievement.  Clearly, people have worked on the problem for a long while, and it isn't all the achievement of a single individual.

A while ago, I posted an image of a face I wanted to use as a selfie.  In the interests of complete disclosure, I made it clear that the image wasn't exactly me.  How did I pull it off?  Well, there's a free online app that combines faces, to produce a single face.  You give it two or more jpegs of faces, and it somehow averages them.  How does it do that?  It distills each face into a sheaf of numbers.  (For the moment, let's imagine that these are measurements, e.g. height of the nose, etc.)  Then, when it's given two faces, it just averages the numbers together.  Just as it can boil a face down into a vector of numbers, so it can "reverse-boil" the numbers back into a face, and that's what it did.  Now, I don't know exactly how all this is done; in fact, it's quite possible that some of the numbers aren't lengths, but angles, or ratios.  As you can imagine, averaging ratios might not work as easily as averaging simple lengths.  I'm just making sure we don't oversimplify the problem, and the solution.

Kay.

New Word for our Collection of Homonyms

 I have been reading an (incidentally, very interesting) lesbian retelling of the Robin Hood story, called Heart of Sherwood.  It isn't easy to get enough of the idiom right, to convey a feeling of distance in time, without confusing ordinary readers who may be unfamiliar with the speech of medieval England.  This author does an amazing job of it, but she confused the words "might" and "mite", which leads me to believe that she was using a voice-to-text program.  So there's another entry in our Homonyms list.

In addition, she presents some of the interesting historical characters of the time, including Eleanor of Aquitaine, in addition to the usual suspects of the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Sir Guy of Gisborne, and of course, Prince John.  (But, if I'm not wrong, it was the dastardly John who put in place the Magna Carta, which set out the rights of English serfs.)

The author of this book is Edale Lane, an American author from Mississippi, now living in Canada, reportedly.  She has absorbed the features of the speech of old England very well, at least as found in Sir Walter Scott, and other writers of historical fiction and fantasy of those times.  (Some modernisms have crept in--which I believe should be weeded out--but even with those minor flaws, this book is a remarkable achievement.)

Finally, I must place on record that Edale's characters have a vitality and a realness that are amazingly convincing.  It seemed to me that her depictions of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian and Little John are all true to various types I have encountered.  Robin and Marian, in particular, seem to be the sort of women we would like to have known, but rather uncomfortably modern!  Marian's sunny disposition was exactly as I had imagined it all these years.  When I wrote an alternate Bronze Age story a decade ago, I too had to compromise my firmly anti-anachronistic stance, in order to permit a little of the intimacy that would drive the story along.  The story was Prisoner, though a more accurate title would have been "Slave".)

Vampires?

Why are young people of a certain age fascinated with vampires?

What is it about vampires that captures people's imagination?  Is it because they drink blood?  Is it because they live for ever?  Is it because they sleep in coffins?  Is it the main elements of the vampire myth that fascinated them, or is it the numerous details?  Is it the tragedy of their lives, the romance of it, the hopelessness of it, or the fact that they're fugitives for most of the time?  It saves authors from having to set up a dramatic hostile situation; it's all done for them.

Then, there's the comedic aspect; one of Terry Pratchet's characters is a vampire, Otto Chriek, who has sworn off human blood, joined something analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, and goes to regular meetings, etc.  He is the photographer for a newspaper, and when he takes a photograph, the virus* thinks it is daylight, and reduces poor Otto to a small pile of ashes.  But, each time this happens, he carefully arranges to spill a little of his own blood on the ashes, and whoosh, he rises from it (unfortunately without any clothes on), and continues as before, only with a severe headache.

* The latest theory about vampires is that vampirism is caused by a virus, which also gives vampires all the special powers they are reported to have.

Something I Just Realized

I have been reading a whole lot of romances on Kindle, re-reading a few I had whizzed through before, and I'm noticing:

their covers aren't very satisfying.  In fact, my own covers, by and large, are far better than these professionally produced book covers!

I guess that's only to be expected; after all, I had the final say on my own covers, and these authors must have controlled their own covers, to a large extent.  I was trying to think of a reason why this was happening, and I could not.

My biggest sorrow is that I could never find an image of Helen, my favorite OC, as we on DeviantArt call them.  Helen's signature feature is that she has a long blonde braid.  It was longer when she was young, and gradually got shorter.  Her hair was tightly curling when she was a kid, and straightened out over the years.  But DA artists could never draw her to my satisfaction.  But my covers were definitely superior.

Kay.

And Another Thing ...

Well, maybe I'm showing my age.  But this has bothered me for years and years.

"I couldn't care less." Writers today, old and young, misquote this saying as "I could care less!". The obvious retort is, well, why don't you just go ahead and (care less) and stop bothering us?  The whole point is that being unable to care less, you've already arrived at the nadir of your caring.

I don't want to include this in my Homonyms post, for fear that someone would spot it from the corner of their eye, and carelessly use the wrong phrase.  (Even articles intended to be helpful can be inadvertently misused.)

Ok, bye bye until I get annoyed at something else!

Kay H. B.

Elfed!

Erick Schubach (?) has written a fantasy trilogy about Elves living in New York--and all over the world--and I just finished the first book in the trilogy, and I'm halfway through the second.

He writes good, colloquial prose, steeped in the idiom of millennials and younger readers, with really snappy dialog (which I can't write for love or money).

However, Eric uses the word tenant to mean something like axiom, a sort of basic principle, which puzzled me, until I realized he meant tenet.  I wonder whether tenet is a common enough word for readers to understand what he intends, in the first place, and for them to infer that he means tenet when he writes tenant.  'Basic principle' might server him better.