The eight-fingered hand

The morality of AI art. 

The subject has complexities, but it isn't anywhere near as murky as the people trying so hard to sell AI to the consumer are making it. Admittedly, whatever the core issues are, they are hard to untangle from discussions of the purpose of art, the economics of art, the process of art, and empowerment.

Take the last. Art is hard, and talent doesn't strike all of us, but even those with talent need to have time and -- for many arts -- finances to pursue it. It is far from impossible to go from the wrong side of the tracks to the concert hall, but there is no denying that it is harder than it would be for someone who went to properly-funded schools, had parents who could afford tutors, could afford a decent student instrument, etc. (Don't get me started on the heartbreak of Violin-Shaped Objects.)

There are always gatekeepers who, when art is democratized, cry out that it is being debased. Cutting loops in Abelon "isn't real music." And AI makes it so easy to cry "they didn't make art -- they just pushed a button."

But on the other side, there's a difference between enabling people who might not otherwise be able to pursue art, and selling the illusion of making art in order to make a profit. Not exactly peculiar to AI, this. Any hobby you name is almost instantly overrun by people looking to sell the hobby to you (in the form of "must-have" tools you were getting just fine without, and so on). AI, viewed this way, is a digital paint-by-numbers kit.

The potential customers aren't the only ones buying the illusion, either. Artists are right to be concerned, just as musicians were when they began to be replaced wholesale in certain fields. There is always the economic drive to replace what is good but expensive with what is good enough. And that's a race to the bottom, as the current "good enough" soon becomes the "good but expensive" and the search is on for something else...

As long as the intended audience will accept it, and that is one of the fears. Flood the marketplace with "good enough" and keep it there long enough, and the public would lose the ability to tell the difference. That's what the Academy de Beaux-Arts was afraid of...but what they tried to keep out, and failed to, were the Impressionists.

I think the public is canny enough to keep looking for better, if given the economic opportunity. For all the cheap schlock, there remains a paying audience. For all the fast food, grocery stores, markets and restaurants aren't going out of business. 

Enough of the public have learned to despise the quick-and-dirty AI art that the economic model of many of the big art sites has forced them to take steps to control the flood. Which leads into a discussion of the value of gatekeepers to the consumer. Self-publishing, for instance, exploded. There are so many self-published works that the costs to place your work are going up, and the readers are complaining about the difficulty of finding anything.

Self-publishing did flirt with AI. It got smacked down by Amazon the same way that every other get-rich-quick scheme that tried to use their site did (like low-content books). Writing is in a weird position as it seems to promise wealth and fame, but it is currently difficult for software to do the work for you. The people selling dreams to would-be authors are selling books on how to write, world-building software, and services.

And outright scams, because vanity publishing remains the best money-maker.

Not to say people haven't tried AI, but there are no easy riches in publishing. It is a buyer's market, and despite how much effort individual writers may be putting in, to the greater market their labor is cheap; so cheap there isn't a need for an alternative.

AI art, meanwhile, is having trouble pulling up money outside of the flash-in-the-pan niches of, say, monetized YouTube slide shows. The challenge is similar. The world has no lack of hungry artists willing to work cheap; all that AI can offer is its novelty (the surface gloss, largely) and volume. And the latter is self-defeating, just as it is in publishing.

Which slides into another problem with democratization. The big players in AI art have expensive rigs, and spend a lot of time at it. More and more, they are looking less like artists than like bitcoin miners. Even to how critical a high-end video card is.

And that looks like a segue into "but are you really being an artist." I believe that those slide-show makers are prioritizing pushing output. AI is in a peculiar place that might be inherent, or might be the current circumstance of technology -- and I am biased towards the later. Right now, the way to make money is to push out a bunch of art before the market gets over-saturated (too late!) and the way to push out art is not by being an artist but by pushing buttons on a powerful and expensive rig.

Exactly the model all those salespeople are wanting. "You too can be an artist...if you drop a thousand bucks with us on the right graphics card."

So here's the thing. We talk up freeing the inner artist from their inability to hold a pen or afford paints, but much more importantly, from the need to have a liberal arts education and time spent in traditional art classes.

But the infinite world of possibilities is...smaller than it appears. This has always been so in the arts, I hasten to add. An artist that wants to be seen or heard uses the modes and forms that are currently understood by the audience. There are always those (like those Impressionists) who are fighting to get something different accepted by a potential audience, but economically this is at best a gamble. The market reality is "do what everyone else is doing."

Technically an AI art engine can create anything, in practice, the people using it are narrowing the existing constraints of the training data even further in order to pursue the flavor-of-the-month and get those eyeballs they crave.

Let me explain in a little more detail. The training data was what the original academic researchers could scrape off the internet. Which means that a well-known painting is more represented than the output of an outsider artist. Meaning the engine is already primed to regurgitate the "look" of current media (which itself is feeding off itself, looking to other shows or other advertisements or other book covers as to what the audience is primed to expect).

It is very, very focused on what is common and normal in mass visual media. Poses, for instance, trend towards the presentational. "Showing off the new winter jacket" is the pose a figure will take even with a heavily weighted prompt that attempts to put them in an action pose.

As I said, many artists in those social media circles where popularity rules are going after what gets eyeballs. To focus in on that flavor of the month (or, more benignly, to focus in on whatever personal vision they are pursuing) the tool is LoRA (and checkpoints, and embeddings...but let's keep it simple).

And this is the thing. The academics who trained the original models had some shred of honesty and did their best to anonymize by using as much data from as many sources as possible. LoRA are more tightly focused. When a young artist thinks "I want to make stuff that looks like Masamune Shirow" they are drawn to a LoRA that was trained specifically on that artist. On a small number of works. Overtrained on them. So much so, given the right prompts it can and does recreate enough of a specific image you can recognize it.

Again this is implicit in the concept of the training data. Tell the AI to give you a Florentine woman with a mysterious smile and you could get anything. Tell it to give you the Mona Lisa and what you get back will be recognizable as Leonardo's painting. But there's a difference between training on a million images, and training on as little as six (some LoRA are that small.) In the former, you get a guy in a jacket but it isn't a recognizable individual guy or brand of jacket. In the latter...you might get one of the six images back complete in far too many details.

(It gets worse. Some LoRA go right out and say, "For best results use this image." That is, to base the new, supposedly unique image on an actual specific piece of art. And not with text prompts as in the Mona Lisa example above, but by, basically, taking that image, blurring it slightly, then reconstructing it with AI. But more on this when I post about the inpainting process.)

The social art world is fads of the moment and the successful focus is hyper-narrow. The original inspiration is clearly seen. Basically...this is digital fanfic. I mean; there are lists of prompts for the hopeful new AI artist that are the names of other people creating AI artwork.

(This is really nth-generational stuff. It requires LoRA that are trained on the output of artists who were probably already using the same...)

So while the AI proselytizers are going on about how stealing from a million anonymized images isn't really stealing, the practical reality is far from that case. Yes; the big commercialized online engines are filtered now with long lists of illegal prompts that can't be used anymore, including the names of public figures, the names of artists, and even the names of some art styles. But they are only part of the picture -- and the users are really, really good at finding the loopholes because the data is still there. They just changed the names to make it harder to find it.

Is this, though, different from being inspired by the style of another artist, or even the movement they have begun, and doing work in the same way? How does the specific kind of work done in making this derivative matter? Or is it the nature of the link between them?

From one perspective, AI is absolutely stealing the original because that original was fed into the computer. From another perspective, it has been digitally shredded in a way that makes it impossible to reproduce it exactly. No matter how close the AI reproduction may appear to human eyes, the pixel patterns are not the same.

Is a copycat more ethical than a straight clone? Is the fact that on a pixel level, down at the digital heart, it isn't actually the same an important distinction, or is this just a fancier way of filing off the serial numbers and selling it as unique? There are people flipping, cropping, or blurring clips from movies so they can post them on YouTube without getting caught by the automatic check for copyright violations. Is this really, substantially, different?

And does it matter if the creator could have painted it from scratch themselves? Does it make it better if they are a skilled artist in their own right? Does this have to be the same skill set as the original? Does it make it worse if they were "pressing buttons," that is, doing things that don't look like how we conceive of the process of creating visual art?

Because your average "hand painted" art these days is done on a screen with a hell of a lot of computer assistance. And resources which are not original. And some of those resources might not be paid-for commercial stock or copyright-free (cough Greg Lang cough).

On the third hand, it is somehow worse if a forger is skilled enough to have made original art, and chose not to?

This gets really tangled because all the way across the art world, homages, training by copying, working with a mentor in their studio, doing cover versions...this is all how artists learn. And so very many of the good artworks are part of a dialog; Vietnam vet Haldeman reacting to Robert Heinlein's jingoistic Starship Troopers and moved to write The Forever War. Saint-Saens spoofing themes from Offenbach and Mendelson in his Carnival of the Animals. Generations of artists using the pose from Michelangelo's Pieta. 

I mean, look, I'm currently working on a novel that is consciously and openly using "used furniture." Something that is meant to be recognized as retro. The characters and background are being carefully crafted to remind the reader of things they know (or think they know; the thing about retro nostalgia is that so much of it is rooted not in a deep understanding of the original, but an exposure to other people's distillation of those elements they find most cliché).

Thing is, though, it is arguable that AI artists are not having a dialog -- because they aren't engaging with the material personally and at that level. They are dancing about architecture; they are entering text instructions to a computer for it to make a mindless reconstruction of what it thinks is happening in the original work.

Perhaps. It is certainly true that one can go to a model that other people are recommending and copy a list of prompts from some forum, push the button and sit back. But I think that even the most production-oriented, assembly-line artist has that urge to chase their own vision. It is difficult not to engage your aesthetic senses. And there are functional choices that can be made at every step; all the way down to picking which generated image to up-rez and post and which to throw out.

For many, they are engaging with the image itself, on the terms of visual art. Adjusting the composition with their internal sense of aesthetics and whatever understanding they have of traditions. Discarding or altering poses and hands and musculature because they understand anatomy in the way a practicing artist does. Perhaps not as deeply, but not every artist has those years of figure drawing behind them. And, even, choosing prompts because they have some grasp of the history of art and the figures in it.

This is of course the basic Google Query problem; understanding that what you want is not the precise and technical term, but a common term -- one which may even be incorrect. You don't type "Elizabeth Tower," you type "Big Ben" to get the result you are seeking. Often in prompt crafting you know the AI will misinterpret, taking the most popular meaning of a word. It is the visual version of autocorrect gone rogue. Especially if what you are targeting is obscure, the best strategy might be to describe something similar but better known. Instead of "the gadget" (as the Trinity device was known as), type "sea mine with wires" to get a similar-looking thing.

Again, this is why direct cloning of source images gets used. The AI gravitates towards the easy to understand. Dial up the amount of regeneration and your actual source image of a vintage locomotive will be warped into Thomas the Tank Engine. Which is, again, why AI can be stealing to a degree rather more than the AI fan club likes to admit.

(As a sideline -- more when I talk about the process of inpainting -- it is true that you can make an original digital painting, that is, something more akin to manual painting with traditional tools, and then hand that to the AI to add detail and gloss. But the AI doesn't see things the way we do. A fairly decent sketch is actually less effective than blobs of color. The things we do as traditional artists to sell an image are to the AI artifacts that have to be interpreted. Better to paint a blob and dial up the "denoising" to give the AI a relatively clean slate. So, in this way, AI works against the use of traditional painting skills.)

(The exception to the exception is models that are specifically trained -- or different operations such as Control Nets -- that are designed to interpret drawings or paintings. These will bridge the idea expressed in an outline to the object that this line describes to our human understanding. Without it, this isn't the external contours of an object to the AI; it is a physical thing itself, a black string hanging in space.)

(And, even, it is possibly good training for the artist in learning to think in color masses, values, and planes, and not get misled into outlines and external contours.)

So this is work, and it does take skill, and some of it is traditional art skill. It is also not debatable that AI takes "less" work. The AI artist may spend a lot of time, but that time may be hitting a button over and over again and waiting for the next generation to complete. It isn't with pen in hand, strongly engaged with every aspect of the artwork from brush stroke to composition.

This is why we draw a line between a mixer or recording engineer and the musicians. Between actors and playwrights. Between authors and editors. 

I don't think you can say that AI isn't art. But you absolutely can say that it isn't traditional art. Being able to paint, and in fact doing that painting, can be a part of the process. But they can also be omitted.

Does this have anything to say about the morality of it, though?

When you are on the social media sites that are currently flooded with the stuff (and many are actively beating back the tide) it is absolutely stealing art. But that was happening before AI, as these are sites where people are sharing their own versions, or remakes, or mark-ups and distortions, of commercial IPs. Where one person will take an image out of a movie and add some corny dialogue, and another person will like it so much they steal that person's marked-up steal, add some of their own scribbles, and post that.

The questions around the training data are one large reason (that and the backlash) are the bigger reasons why AI is not being used as much for commercial work. Or when it is, they attempt to hide that they have. Sightings out in the wild have included such things as illustrations in a textbook, or in a paper submitted to a scientific journal, though!

AI is tainted, now. Adobe Software is just one entity that is trying very hard to sell it, and mollify the consumers that reacted badly to the first surge of clumsy images and the questions raised about copyright. On the latter, Adobe (and a growing number of other companies) have pledged that they are not using copyrighted work.

Okay, first, this pledge is coming from a company known for suspiciously qualified statements along the lines of "We are not training this AI engine on work that our users have uploaded to this part of the cloud."

But even then...is it still, morally, stealing art when what you are stealing is free to use? Sure, there are copyright free and royalty free resources being used all the time in the arts. They are usually used in a transformative fashion, if for no other reason than that a hundred other people bought that stock photo and you really should do something to make your book cover not look just like the other guy's book cover.

(Guilty. I did my own repainting of the stock images I used for the Athena Fox books, even if I then handed them off to the actual cover artist).

But...the way AI is used is a lot more like the guy that goes to the tray of free cookies and takes two handfuls of them, stuffing some in his pockets for later.

I also worry about small reference pools. If your training data is nothing but what they could get that was royalty free and cheap, it is going to slant the nature of the data. You risk a sameness. You risk artifacts of drawing too deeply on too few sources.

There are already those structural problems within the commercial art world. Already there are external pressures to make the art look like what the market is currently saturated with. The artists are already working with tools (brushes, filters, stock photography) that are a small slice of that infinite possibility, meaning that even without those external constraints the tools themselves are pressuring the artist to do certain things in a certain way. And more so when they are in a commercial setting where the art directors and supervisors and buyers and so forth are tacitly urging them to use the tools that the company is already using.

I worry that AI tools, the data those tools are based on, and the specifics of the look, are going to spread. Basically, the visual equivalent of Autotune.

Will we forget the lessons of classical art because all we are training on (or meme-ing on) is a cliché impression of the most well-known works, or worse, crass commercialized imagery. Will we become so inured to the artifacts and flaws of AI images we cease to see them any more -- and stop trying to correct them. (Like clipping in video games. We just don't notice it any more).

And is it driving out people who are taking the slow path, doing things by hand because they want more than the results of button-push art? As I touched on above, having a traditional approach and skills is, at the current state of the art, counter-productive. Knowing and caring what a Dutch Elm looks like is counter-productive when the AI is over-trained on other trees and is almost impossible to force away from duplicating them. Knowing and caring about weird discontinuities and bad anatomy when, again, the very process conspires against fixing those things?

AI is very good at gloss; at those surface effects, textures, blending, lighting, that are difficult to achieve manually. It is very bad at poses and composition and logic and story. The one conspires against the other, though. You can rarely do a half-decent hand painting that does do good composition and uses the correct historical research or whatever, and then have AI add that last bit of gilding, because the mindless AI will paint the roses gold as well. In the process of adding ground fog or godrays, it will muck the hell out of the foliage.

But that's not...ethics.

The Handbag of Minerva

So every book is a learning experience. I'd never done a contemporary adventure book before, and it took a lot of experimenting before I found the direction the series seemed to want to go.

So that's a lot of choices that were more-or-less made for me as I put in what seemed to work and then found myself stuck with it. No place more than with my protagonist. She started with a checklist of "strong female character" tropes I was determined to avoid. And then accumulated a bunch of baggage I hadn't planned -- things that, again, worked for that book and ended up becoming canon.

She's being pulled in too many directions and is too unfocused as a character. I long for having a single-minded character with a clear emotional goal; "I must find the Lost Talisman of Abraham that my father spent his life searching for."

It hit me over brunch. Maybe it was a couple of BookTube videos on trends in modern fantasy, or a really long dissection of Totally Spies! by a non-French-speaking Canadian (yes, language came up frequently).

I want to write a stock 90s Urban Fantasy heroine. I want to check every one of the little boxes I so carefully unchecked when I created Penny.

A loner that hates crowds, hot as hell but always wears black jeans and leather jackets, never skirts and especially nothing "girly." Hates cheerleaders. Skilled martial artist and fighter and confident in her skills. Viciously snarky. No romantic confidence at all (or experience) but every hot guy in the story -- and there are many -- are all chasing her.

Trouble is, I wouldn't be able to get through it without lampshading. 

Bar of Adventure

That's not actually the name of the TVTropes entry. The idea is a bar or tavern or club that provides a meeting place for the various heroes, and in many cases, is the neutral grounds where they can also meet up with the bad guys.

There is entangled with it the concept of a central spot, a hub location, for loosely connected adventures. This bar might be in the borderlands of space or in a sprawling multi-cultural trading town or a big city with a violent underbelly.

Basically, this bar is not just a place to relax, it is a place where the next adventure begins.

And boy does this tie into tiki culture, because tiki has since its invention packaged exoticism and the lure of adventure right down to the very drinks.

I am working on the first chapter of The Tiki Stars. My protagonist Rick Starr had a Mai Tai in his hands...and I stopped to look it up. Because part of the game I'm playing is that Ray's bar, out on a sandy spit and across the tidal flats from the spaceport of this colony world, is not just a Bar of Adventure where crooks and drunks, smugglers and revolutionaries are known to meet, it is also the Birth of Tiki. An imaginary version that is no less re-invented than Donn Beach's colorful past.

I was also crossing it with the idea of a pilot's bar, with the typical memorabilia (pictures from the war, a prop hanging on the wall, that sort of thing). I wasn't sure if that made a good blend with the tiki decor, which historically started as, basically, all the crap Donn had lying around that he could pin on a wall.

Yeah. That Mai Tai? Aside from the contested origins of the recipe...so there's Victor Bergeron in the mix, and Sven has a word about that, of course...it also was likely based on and certainly has a relationship to the Test Pilot, the Q.B. Cooler and the PB2Y.

Yeah. Q.B. stands for "Quiet Birdmen," a fraternity of...pilots. There is very much already a connection to pilots, and specifically, W.W. II pilots, in the early days of tiki.

***

But outside of that...

I think this is a good project for me. I am still reading up (now a great -- and angry -- book on the relationship between the nuevomexicanos and Los Alamos). And getting new ideas. But the tiki book is bringing me back to very basic writing, writing on the sentence level. Stopping at every adverb (I've got a problem with those) and with every noun of world-building, asking if this detail is really necessary, and if it is confusing.

The incredibly freeing thing is that I don't feel constrained by the real world. This is a big problem for me in the Athena Fox books; I started them in reaction to the bad history of the typical "Archaeological Adventure" and that sort of infected the process to where I didn't want to alter the menu of a (real) restaurant I wasn't even giving the name of in the text.

I'm not the only one. There's a phrase I've forgotten that gets used around writing circles for when a writer goes out of their way to explain something that the audience was, actually, quite willing to just take on faith. This one is so old, it shows up in Homer. There are several bits where Odysseus goes on laboriously about why he didn't do this other thing instead.

One suspects in that case the "imagined reader" was in fact a very much there in person heckler as the story was being told (from memory) by a story-teller. And that answer to audience objections ended up getting codified in text when Homer wrote it all down.

For the tiki book, if something in the world looks like it could raise a question with the reader...I just go and change it.

Retro

Got talking with my tiki advisor and newly excited for that novel. So many basic questions to solve yet. Take world-building. What kind of world am I after? What kind of world-building am I using (that is, how much of the Gernsbakian explain-the-tech stuff is appropriate for the style I'm after)? How much world-building at all?

I mean, I don't even know if there are aliens.

Minor work on my personal tiki shrine -- aka, things I can have around me while I write. Found a nifty (plastic, but it looks okay) mp3 player shaped like an old transistor radio. Have tiki mugs. Thinking rattan mats...maybe even a palm.

***

Also retro is the new LORA I tried out in my SD install. Broke Automatic111 again (which is good) but finding it easier and easier to do a clean re-install so it is working again (which is bad). I'm only doing stuff for my own amusement and all I need in my life is another time sink.

But anyhow. I'd been bookmarking some "look like an illustration" LORA but not using them because I didn't quite see the point. Now I do. There's an unreality about AI creations which is rather off-putting. Well, turns out that making it look like an illustration and not a photograph eases past the worst of the Uncanny Valley. 

That, and this library is just really deep, and seems very good at interpreting. That could be the new model; tried out SDXL, now using a fork off that. It is much better at parsing prompts, though things like color words do have a tendency to go wild and spam over everything (the "man on a beach with a white shirt" problem).

I was having very little luck txt2img with the new LORA and was about to give up on it. See, most illustrations have story in them -- even if the "story" is just "proud engineer points at the new car." And I am all about story. Well, AI can only associate pixel patterns. That's one of the basic problems. There's no underlying logic outside of "this pixel pattern is often found near this pixel pattern" (which is why a wire will turn into a panel line half-way across a control panel, and vice-versa).

And there's no understanding of function, which is not just "the wire needs to be connected at both ends" (and not turn into a painted border in the middle), but the underlying logic to, say, a pose.

But it can inherit that given a proper reference. Turns out between the model and the LORA my local SD install has become really, really good at "reading" a source image and reconstructing what is actually going on. Well, things like humans holding swords or which part of a torch is actually on fire, it still has trouble with. But enough of the original logic of the source image is getting preserved that there is some decent mimicry of, well, story. 

***

And speaking of time-sinks. Still feeling so lousy that Satisfactory is all I feel up for some days. My last video just reached 1K views and a bunch of likes, which is a huge surprise. I guess people like my aesthetic.

But I am contemplating another build, this time heavily modded and with most of the alternate play options switched on, like free materials and no spiders.

One of the mods allows you to replace your trains with more historical-looking ones. With that and a texture mod, could maybe perhaps do something that isn't modern brutalism-plus-neon (which is practically the default look for most of the extreme builders. Called by one of my video commenters "reminds me of Portal."

Moving Day

I am...not sure about the changes in Satisfactory 1.0

I know they play-tested the thing, but that was with a closed beta (unlike the Early Access through version 0.8) There are several things that radically change the paradigm -- and are possibly in need of more balancing than they saw.

One of the biggest crunches in pre-1.0 was getting yourself and building supplies around the map. The two major strategies were either a really good bidirectional network (so you could run out to a remote factory and stock up on some necessary part for the new build) or depots, whether centralized and massive, or more like the "construction shack" buildings I was making that produce locally all the parts you need to build your new factory.

Or simpler "plop" factories, which I've been using a lot in my latest play-through. These are one-blueprint compact things that you set down and leave churning away filling a storage container of basic things like concrete.

To really make a good construction site depot you needed to add facilities to handle trucks and/or trains. Which made the depots more elaborate. And that in a large sense is the greater purpose of the game. Basically, you finish the game in order to get an (in-game) coffee cup. So making things work efficiently, or look cool, or be impressively large (or all three) is the real purpose of play and the reason the game is so addicting.

Yeah, so that changed.

1.0 added the Dimensional Depot. Stock gets teleported from wherever you are manufacturing it, straight into your interdimensional pockets. You don't need to run across the map (much) because you are almost done installing lights in the new factory but ran out of quartz.

They can't be hooked into a production line, at least. So those complicated supply lines are still there for major manufacturing sites. For the process of new construction, though -- these have streamlined it to the point of making it completely different.

And dimensional depots change another paradigm -- when you include things like the way they nerfed the deliverables for Tier 5.

Used to be, you couldn't get past early game on hand-crafting and plopping down a single Manufacturer and a bunch of spaghetti conveyors as the absolute minimum to reach your deliverables and unlock the next technology tier.

Yeah, well that changed. You can skip the hassle of conveyor belts and trains and all of that just by physically dropping by your machines at intervals and refilling them out of your own interdimensional pockets. And that's not the worst. With the addition of Somersloops, you can sloop the parts (it is a two-for-one return for the same amount of supplies) and that brings the targets well within what you can do with a couple of machines and a few containers plopped down on the ground without walls or even a foundation under them.

Basically, most of the reason to build a factory at all just went away. I've unlocked ALL the tech now, and I've just started building anything actually nice looking.

Okay, there was a bit of scale involved. I'm getting better with blueprints and I used saved blueprints from the last game (including some mega-blueprints made with a mod that isn't even installed on the new save) that could create a fairly large factory without anything but hooking them up to power and raw ore.

***

Other than that.

The desert start was a good one. I started this time right at the little oasis, which I carved up with a chainsaw and fed to a huge array of biomass converters for early-game power. Iron copper and coal are all over the place in that part of the world, and there's quartz sulfur and caterium not that far away.

Well, I'm finally at the point of the game where I have all the tech unlocked all the way to the end of the tech tree, all the Awesome shop unlocked, and all the key alternate recipes. And have (mostly with plop factories) enough supplies to build as much as I care to build.

I'm just...not quite as enthralled about building. The new multi-modal railroad system just doesn't look as nice as I'd hoped. And there's a few other odd changes, such as adding new fuels to the tier that mean you can keep expanding and altering your fuel generators and never go nuclear at all. 

And even drones. Used to be drones were restricted by having to use batteries, which were so hard to build you had to ship them (often using a second set of drones). Well, now the little guys will use local fuels. Ouch.

Oh, so here's my second video, messing around with the elaborate transit network I was talking about as a way to handle the personal logistics of a 0.8 build...

Teal Deer

Got another comment on the Paris book. I am so starved for comments and criticism. I have zero reviews on that book, not even any ratings -- it sunk into the Amazon pond with nary a ripple.

I knew it was going to be dense before I even started. The main plot thread was intended to be a sort of Umberto Eco conspiracy theory, winding together multiple weird tidbits of history. The bulk of the book, I rapidly decided, was going to be "friends chatting in cafes." That's what was going to fill the page count, not climbing monuments or solving puzzles or having a knife fight in the catacombs or whatever.

But what are they going to chat about? Well, the Paris art scene is a natural. The real-world alternative is philosophy and I don't do that -- my readers should thank me for that! Which turned out to work for the mystery because then instead of stuff about Bavarian Illuminati I could do stuff about Monet and Gaugin.

From a top-down view of the process, I get too much "stuff" in the books because I start with plot and themes and search for things that will carry that plot and illustrate those themes. And in the bad old world of "Show don't tell" that means being concrete. A specific thing means you can dramatize the delivery instead of having a maid-and-butler walk on to do an info-dump on the reader. And dramatizing implies a scene, which fills out your chapter plan and lets you work out the pacing and timing of your outline.

So we've moved from the necessary plot information of "This is a military base and they have guards" to getting stopped by two Air Force people in a jeep who have some amusing interactions.

And here's the problem, which I seem to increasingly have. And that is that the real world rarely offers the perfect platonic ideal of the thing that demonstrates the thing. Instead you have things that are sort of about the theme you are after, or include part of the clue you are trying to leave, but like any ordinary ornery individual they are also doing a bunch of other things.

And that means this thing, this perfect set-piece that delivers the information, is hairy with extraneous detail. And worse; the thing you turned to for an explanation of something plot-relevant itself begs explanation. 

In the Japan book I have a quick info-dump about the historical ninja, for which I expanded on a display/semi-museum that I'd actually been to. So a real place, the Toei Edo-era standing set. Which is also these days pretty much a ninja theme park. So getting to that museum for the info-dump pretty much required explaining why there is such a museum in this part of town and why it is surrounded by multi-colored ninja.

***

But that may not actually be it.

I'm thinking today that maybe the problem isn't coming from the top down, it is happening at the root, at the sentence and paragraph level. And is potentially an artifact of both the way I craft sentences, and the working method when I am doing them.

I largely write fast, at a sentence level. I don't worry a lot about word choices and I don't really stop that often to look things up. I am these days writing in a strong narrative voice, even when not in First Person. But having a motor-mouth auto-didact who geeks out about history certainly makes it worse; it is the natural narrative "voice" for Penny/Athena Fox to drop a zillion historical and pop-cultural references in as she goes.

Every single one of my critical readers has constructed this version of my work-process in their minds where I stare at a line of text trying to figure out how to cram in yet another bit of history...which I then proceed to waste another week in researching.

That's not what is happening. My natural narrative voice seems to reach for analogy more than description, and it is always drawing comparisons. So my process is actually I do a first-pass which is written almost as fast as that character would talk. Then I go back and take out as much as I can without destroying the integrity of the sentence.

The problem is made worse because I write in spurts, and I dream up new things for the following chapters as I am working on the current one. So in the heat of the moment I might name-drop Xenophon, but I almost immediately realize I could make a running gag of it. Before I've finished that writing session, the Xenophon references are a thread winding their way through the narrative and the scene to where there would be a lot of editing to try to replace them and stitch the wounds closed where they'd been.

And I've already come up with a payoff. And I love payoffs. Plot threads should when possible come to a conclusion that the reader will find justified for the work getting there. 

And I am not entirely ignoring that future reader in this process. One short running gag in the Paris book is about Monet haystacks. He was learning about light, you see, and painting them...but never mind all that. All you need to know is he got a reputation for haystacks in different colors and a critic even called it out.

It came up quite naturally when I was doing a nickel-explanation for Expressionism -- set at a museum exhibit, because fortunately there is such a thing in Paris. My lecturer character was talking about light and mentioned the haystacks, and because it was funny, quoted that critic I mentioned. I think it works and is illuminating as to what the Impressionists were, why they mattered, and what they have to do with the rush of the modern world, the fin d'seicle and the Paris Exposition and future shock and all that (which is, in my essay, at the core of Steampunk.)

But now it was out there. Hux makes a comment about Lo Lo's "Radium Dance" (yes; scientific exploration and future shock, all wrapped in one!) He comments her dresses were in more colors than a Monet haystack.

And when Penny is tailing the would-be treasure hunting gang through a Virtual Van Gogh exhibit, she briefly hides behind a haystack. And comments again.

***

It might even be a flaw with Discovery Writing. There's a big element of seat-of-pants in my process. And I've mentioned before that especially when I am working and there's no time to write, I think about the book and I dream up stuff that I now want to include.

But I still feel it isn't "stuff." It isn't add-ons, chocolate sprinkles. It is the muscles and tendons that make the story move. It is just that, as in real biology, those muscles and tendons aren't neat. They sort of go all over the place and there's a lot of them to keep track of (yes, I studied Artistic Anatomy once).

I hear about writers who write "lean." Not only do they go back to add adjectives and descriptions and otherwise put Color Commentary until their drab retelling of events has become a proper Monet haystack, they also go back later to add the things that I can't see writing the story in the first place without!

Like, the plot. Like love interest. Like the theme; the reason any of this is happening and why the reader should care.

I just don't see it.

And now we're circling around again to why I can't just go around with a red pencil and take out all the haystacks. It isn't just on a sentence level where I am left with a gap in the logic of the sentence. And when the sentence would be three words long and too short for the rhythm if I didn't come up with one more thing to say. One more verbal tick or bit of description, something that will add another three words and make the meter come out.

It is also on a story level. The big plot and the underlying themes aren't expressed in singular well-defined things that I can prune around. There's no "The Empire is evil -- hey, look at this Darth Vader dude!" There's Sith and First Order and merchant princes and Jabba and the underworld and...

The historical vision underlying the book is the fin d'siecle (and no, for my blog posts, I don't look up spelling). The accelerating technological change, the social change that goes with it, and industrialized warfare in the form of W.W.I is racing towards them. Writers and politicians and philosophers and artists are trying to make sense of the new world.

And that's why Monet haystacks.

I'm faster on my own

 Or so Aloy says at various points in the game. 

Most of my play-throughs, though, it's really been the opposite. Horizon Zero Dawn is not quite Metal Gear Solid, or even Alien: Isolation but it really does help to use the stealth mechanics. Or, at least, to plan ahead, scope the ground, and lay traps.

One big reason is, oddly, that stealth is cheaper. You've got arrows that can take down a machine in a couple of shots but they cost a lot of resources to craft.

Stealth kills cost nothing but a little time.

That is, if they are spear kills. Which brings me around to the flip side of the equation. As in all games, the NPCs are dumb as rocks when it comes to combat, and especially the friendly ones prioritize getting close-up in melee -- that is, putting themselves in danger instead of staying up on the ridgeline sniping.

Thing is, the character design is so good in Horizon Zero Dawn I care about these characters. Fallout 4, despite liking several of the companions, I can stand to see them in danger (with the exception of Dogmeat. I'll always go to his aid.) Starfield, well, I've made my feelings clear there. But even with these games, there's an emotional grab when allies are in danger that makes you want to run out there and protect them any way you can.

Which usually involves running into the thick of things. Forget hiding in the bushes and taking carefully aimed sniper shots only when the conditions are perfect. Instead it is jump in with spear swinging. Or as Gordon Frohman put it, "Must kill with my fists because guns too slow!"