Arctic Light

I have always had generally mixed feelings on Cory Doctorow and this book doesn't really make them any less mixed, but it was an interesting, fast read; some of this I already knew, but he made a number of points I found interesting, particularly about the forces driving the AI bubble, and the various ways that how we think about it/react to it.

( Lots more about that under the cut )

( And to summarize )

It's actually very interesting to compare this book to another book I read recently on the AI bubble [among other things], Nate Silver's "On the Edge", which approaches some of the same topics from a different angle (essentially, that book is an explanation of why people gamble professionally and what draws people to risk, with AI being a huge gamble that makes psychological sense for people in Silicon Valley who are inherently drawn to, and addicted to, the rush of gambling). I was going to write them up together, because I think they complement each other without repeating too many of the same points, but this is already huge, so I'll do that in its own post eventually.

Wired In (1340 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murderbot (TV), The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Bombs, Post-Canon, Rescue Missions, Whumptember 2026
Summary:
"Don't--!" Gurathin said sharply, as I dropped to the floor in the middle of the basement.

For the Whumptember 2026 prompt Day 8: Bomb.

Whumptember prompt list here.

We have a (fairly new) driveway sensor that dings when anything sets it off. Usually this is delivery trucks, but sometimes it's something else - a couple of times it's been a fox, and every now and then you hear the ding and look out the window and see something else entirely.





Mother moose was VERY alert, and in the first picture she's heard me in the house and stopped to listen with Baby behind her. Then they went on, around the house and on about their business.



(It so happened that I was thinking about going for a walk in this exact direction - they came walking up the driveway - so I guess I'm glad I decided to procrastinate about it.)

I got completely sucked into the webcomic Ten Earth Shattering Blows today. This is very much not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and in fact I'm not completely sure I would've stuck with the early chapters (which are mostly terrible people killing each other) if I hadn't happened to read a few of the recent pages first and knew that it was going somewhere more interesting than the fantasy Mad Max riff that it starts off as. It's very violent, funny, and feels more like early 2000s webcomics to me than anything I've read lately. The art is lovely, sort of a mix of Mobius (the French comics artist), Miyazaki (except everyone is assholes) and swordfighting manga.

It's basically Mad Max meets Conan meets Miyazaki - a post-apocalyptic desert fantasy world, full of visually fascinating stuff like elephant-sized riding lizards with howdahs and katana-wielding monkeys. (This page gives you some idea of what the worldbuilding is like. It's really pretty! It's also really chaotic and weird.) The plot, such as it is, concerns two women, a cursed princess and an enormous escaped gladiator-slave, traveling on a quest for individual personal reasons, accompanied by a priest/con artist/drug dealer who may or may not be planning to betray them. You definitely need a high tolerance for a plot that's at least 50% fight scenes and a world full of mostly terrible people, but I'm really enjoying it. It seems to have just wrapped up a chapter and appears to take long hiatuses in between, so I'm not sure when updates will resume.

I don't think I'll have many instances where I end up writing different characters for the same prompt, but this one worked out that way, because I liked the no_true_pair day one prompt for both the sets of characters I was assigned for it.

(I don't know if I mentioned how this works. Basically you provide a list of characters, and they are assigned by number to the prompt - so 1&2 get one prompt, 1&3 get another, etc. You don't know the prompts ahead of time unless you peek. I like being surprised.)

Anyway, moving on with the second version of No True Pair day one!

--

September One - Susan Ivanova & Michael Garibaldi - nine o'clock on a Saturday (late season 2; 200 wds)

( 200 wds under the cut )

It's September! As noted in the previous post, I'll be posting ficlets (here and on Tumblr) for whumptember and no_true_pair. So this will be the masterlist for those!

You can see the prompt list for No True Pair here as well as the character lists I'm using. (Basically you sign up before looking at the prompts - I have lists of Biggles and Bab5 characters that I'll be working from.) And the Whumptember prompt list is here.

( Masterlist - updated through Sept. 8 )

I signed up very spur of the momentishly for hAPPy Flash Exchange, and my gift was a perfect little Biggles & Co tag, which I loved!

Accounts May Differ by sheron (gen, 676 wds)
In which Biggles (&Co) are debriefed on the events of the book by a long-suffering Raymond. Funny and delightful with great character voices. (How do you explain the homemade cake to your boss, anyway?)

I am currently suffering FOMO about Fic in a Box but also suspect that I would be much happier if I do not sign up for a 10K exchange and instead do one of the fall exchanges like Trick or Treat or Jump Scare if I need a deadline to keep me motivated. I have also glommed onto the prompts from no_true_pair and Whumptember, and want to write a few of those, too.

* There's a bird living in the greenhouse, a juvenile junco. When I first found it in there a couple of weeks ago, which made it go into a flapping frenzy, I thought it had gotten trapped by accident - it's happened before! - and opened the door so it could get out. The second time, I thought I just hadn't left the door open long enough and it had hidden somewhere else. The third time, I actually saw it leave, so by the fourth time, I figured it actually knew how to get in and out, and it was flapping around because it freaked out every time I'd come in. Anyway, it's been a couple of weeks and I saw it again today - at this point I'm leaving one of the vents open for it, and otherwise letting it do its own thing and leaving if I notice it's in there, since it panics whenever I come in. As I said to Orion today, it's the bird's greenhouse now, I guess. (Hopefully it's eating the aphids, and that it isn't whatever has been eating my beans.)

* We also have a fox. We've seen it several times, most recently tonight around dusk, going back and forth in the yard and presumably eating the voles that have been eating my garden.



Photo from a few days ago. Orion posted a video of it on Facebook.

( More under the cut )

From the other day, the ficlets resulting from character prompts + rolls of my "body parts" die.



I had great fun with this; thank you to everyone for leaving prompts! I'll copy these over to Tumblr too when I get a chance.

Biggles

1. Biggles, Algy, Ginger + Right Foot
2. Fritz & Erich + Left Arm
3. Algy & Ginger + Right Foot
4. Biggles & Erich + Full Body

Agent Carter

1. Peggy, Jack, Daniel + Head
2. Peggy & Rose + Left Arm

Murderbot

1. Murderbot & Gurathin + Head
2. Any Sanctuary Moon Character + Stomach
3. Ratthi + Right Arm

Babylon 5

1. Ivanova + Left Leg
2. Londo & G'Kar + Stomach
3. Garibaldi + Head

Continuing to write up books I've read this past month - In the Frame is the last of the Dick Francis books that I picked up at the used bookstore and read on or just after my trip. After all these years, I'm still running into books of his that I've never heard of at all, like this one, even though it's one of his earlier ones (early 70s).

The hero is a professional painter (of horses, obviously) who is investigating his cousin's wife's death after the police suspect his cousin and don't really look into it beyond that. This sends him running all over Australia and New Zealand, a.k.a. Dick Francis has recently been to Australia and New Zealand, and is going to tell you aaaallllll about it. But I really enjoyed it; his descriptions are vivid, and the hero gets around to lots of interesting places.

I don't know that I really have a lot to say about this one: it's solid Dick Francis, and this isn't one of the ones with a particularly mysterious mystery, but what's going on is interesting. For once, one of Dick Francis's protagonists knows there's someone trying to kill him and tries to sensibly avoid being caught - this is something that has driven me up the wall in a couple of his books, including one of the last ones I wrote up, in which the hero knows there's someone after him, but goes on about his usual routine and keeps spending the night at his own house, until! Surprise! Someone jumps him! In this case, though, once the hero realizes his investigations have gotten the attention of his targets, he starts actually going to some fairly extensive lengths to avoid being counter-detected, such as using assumed names and heading off to new towns at the drop of a hat.

(Though I was annoyed by this book pulling the trick of telling you that the hero had talked to people or found clues, but not telling you what it was that he said or talked to or saw until the resolution; I really hate that.)

This is maybe the only Dick Francis I've read in which I happen to know a lot about the thing the book was about - painting, in this case - so to me the detailed descriptions of paint colors and pigments and techniques were a little OTT in the way of "I have researched this thing, let me tell you all about it!" Which made me wonder if his books are always like that and I just don't usually notice because I don't know much about whatever the book is about (horse racing, glassblowing, toymaking, etc) and I like being told about it.

Anyway: another solid Francis, very Dick Francis and very enjoyable.