Author, keen blogger (since 1998), writing teacher.
Adelaide, South Australia
Joined April 2007
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Angela Booth retweeted
Here's Why Reading Old Books Is More Important Than Ever:
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”
— C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books
Blame social media and maybe AI? Please, use a dictionary; I do, every day. I should collect the ridiculous "it doesn't mean what you think it means" examples I find. But that would be obsessive. :-)
Use “but” to find conflict in your fiction
“I always had trouble finding conflict until l realized that it lived in this three-letter word: but. I want to work but my dog wants to play.”
From “Creativity Rules!” by John Vorhaus.
Can’t write? It’s “page fright”; writer’s block...
Overcome it by: handwriting, mind mapping, or journaling. Write, in any way you can. You may need to force it at first, but after a few minutes, you’ll be able to write.
Angela Booth retweeted
Anthropic exploits the work of millions of creatives without paying them.
This is not absolved by donating a fraction of the ill-gotten gains to the ‘public good’.
If you want to work for the ‘public good’, start by not exploiting people.
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
“The more we demand that a theme or a story idea come to us, the more likely we are to be faced with writer's block, and the more we try to write well, the more it sounds forced, pompous, stiff.”
“The Tao Of Writing: Imagine. Create. Flow.” by Ralph L Wahlstrom.
Write snippets…
If you habitually write from stories’ beginnings to endings, try writing in snippets: write whatever occurs to you, in the moment. You can write a couple of paragraphs in the car, or while you’re waiting for a meeting to start.
Well said.
Let’s indulge, shall we?
Let’s delve into a nonexistent fantasy world where #AI Generated imagery was NOT plagiarism and theft (my chief complaint about it)…
Let’s go there for a hot minute…
(Magical portal whisks us away)
I breathe a sigh of relief at not feeling obligated to point out that AI generated imagery is obviously creative larceny…
Then I look at all of the stuff you AI bros have been creating… and guess what?
IT’S STILL DOG SHIT!!! 😂
None of you know anything about storytelling , composition, balance, or any of the disciplines that artists use.
These are tools only a sentient, cognitive MIND can wield.
It’s the trickiest part of being an artist and that’s why you twits hand it over to something else to tackle.
Consequently, any actual ideas you conjured that may have merit are robbed of it entirely by the thing you filtered it through.
Art isn’t made with a pencil, or pen, or paints, or camera, or any other tool… Art is created with genuine intelligence and actual cognition.
This is why all of your stuff looks like shit.
You haven’t spent years cultivating this part of your mind… It’s why you don’t appreciate or understand what Art really is the way most people do.
Most people appreciate Art for reasons they can’t even articulate because it touches something elusive and ethereal.
Somewhere along the line, you rejected those deeper feelings, and that’s why you’re so bitter against everyone else.
Something in you died a long time ago, and you want to get it back, but you’re going about it in precisely the wrong way.
As a result, this stuff you generate and call “art” is not only not art, it’s just waste made manifest.
It’s sad to look at. But I can’t pity you, because you’re just so narcissistic and hateful.
I sincerely hope you find a way to turn this around someday.
#NoToGenerativeAI
“Just write, trust, don’t ask too many questions, go with it. Put your effort into experiencing the tree you want to describe, not on thinking about which words to use. Don’t put your attention on quality or critics. Just write.”
From “Writing With Power”, by Peter Elbow.
Angela Booth retweeted
Gorgeous passage from John Steinbeck on the relationship between writers and loneliness and how even our books leave us in the end. Thanks to
@parisreview
theparisreview.org/interview…
An insight from Miss Marple:
‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Marple fervently. ‘I always believe the worst. What is so sad is that one is usually justified in doing so.’
A Pocket Full of Rye, Agatha Christie.
Makes you wonder who they think creates all the words and images surrounding them everywhere ... But of course AI stole our work, so now it's: "I can do that!" No. You can't. AI slop is horrible.
Respect your creativity. An insight from Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing”:
“… writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not to write, for many of us, is to die.”
If you want to write, write, It’s your gift.
And writing. Don't forget writing. If you expect to be read, for all that's holy, WRITE. We can tell if you don't and it's horrible.
“The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself—and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.”
Quote: The Moving Finger, Agatha Christie.
Angela Booth retweeted
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Start writing now, with a tiny idea…
“It doesn’t have to be a huge idea. It can be a seed of an idea… It can even be a character that interests you, or a collection of inspiring thoughts…”
From “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel”, by Jessica Brody.
Begin anywhere, but begin.
Angela Booth retweeted
📚 100 years ago today, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends opened up a book to their enchanted Hundred Acre Wood. 🍯 🧸🐝🐰🐷
Read the full extent of their stories from a century ago at the Internet Archive. Courtesy of the #publicdomain.👇
archive.org/details/winniepo…
ALT Black-and-white pen-and-ink illustration by E. H. Shepard of Winnie-the-Pooh sitting on a log and gazing upward beside a large tree. Behind him is a dark doorway at the tree’s base, with a sign reading “MR SANDERS” above it, a small bell, a hanging bell pull, and a partial note reading “RNIG ALSO.” A small pile of sticks lies on the ground to the right. Dense cross-hatching forms the tree.