Tales from the Bitface

A little while ago, which turns out to have been June 2024, I microposted saying I ought to write about my thoughts on the current state of what people like to call AI. LLM-based prediction machines, some might say. Then about a year later I briefly wrote again about my negative reaction to the whole idea.

But I didn’t go into detail. And I’m still not going to; at least not today. I have several thousand words of attempted essays, if that’s not a tautology¹, wherein I try to understand my own thoughts and feelings.

And time passes. And the development of the things is lightning fast. It’s a moving target that annoys me.

Still, I do have thoughts. And feelings. And the best way to understand them is to write about them. And the best way to write about them is publicly. Maybe. So I’m going to try writing about them here. A series of short posts around that theme. This is the first.

Maybe I’ll give them their own category, though I have too many categories as it is. I discovered it’s hard to search my blog for ‘AI’. Micro.blog’s search is good, but that’s just such a common set of letters. Weirdly, it brought up all my Crucial Tracks entries, as if it was also finding the ‘IA’ in ‘crucial’.

📚 Currently reading: How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin

The sequel to one I read last year. I got that for my birthday, this for Christmas.

I’m enjoying it, though so far I’ve got to say it’s not quite as good as the first.

And the third one is coming out this spring.

Yesterday there were people marching through London, ostensibly in support of Palestine, flying the Flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and pictures of Khamenei. They might as well have had swastikas and pictures of Hitler. I mean what the actual fuck is going on in these people’s heads?

The Skids at the Electric Ballroom last night.

Watched early in the new year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 🎥

This is fine, a perfectly acceptable addition to the Spider-Man films. Though I have to say, a few weeks later, I remember little of it. And I blame that partly on its incompleteness: the fact it’s part one of two. Frustrating.

You know what’s a great album? The Absolute Game by The Skids. Who I’m going to see tonight.

Watched just before Christmas: The Shop Around the Corner 🎥

James Stewart, a Christmas movie, and not that one? Not specifically a Christmas movie, but part of it happens then, so why not?

Two shop workers hate each other, but fall in love with their mysterious pen pals. Guess what?

Not bad.

Watched: Hamnet 🎥

This is a fabulous film. It’s about motherhood and magic, and grief and how a genius can turn it toward one of the world’s great works of literature. And also about the special bond between twins.

But mostly it’s about grief. It is heartbreaking, yet also deeply life-affirming.

Minute Cryptic - 27 January, 2026 “Wolf pack roved with uncertainty, initially turning back” (6) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 2 under the community par (55,613 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com

In answer to my earlier question: like this! I’m not sure it all quite hangs together, though. I’ll have to watch Angas’s video.

Every word in today’s Minute Cryptic could be an indicator. Every. Single. Word. How am I meant to solve that?

Watched: Now You See Me 🎥

I believe the third of these recently came out, but we hadn’t seen any of them at the start of the month and year when we watched this. A group of stage magicians — so good they seem that they might have real powers — do heists. Or do they?

A decent romp.

My god, but this is good! As I said the other day, Emily Tesh seems like she’s just dropped out of a clear blue sky in the last few years and taken the science fiction and fantasy worlds by storm with her previous novel and now this one.

We’re in a magic school. It’s a boarding school in the Home Counties of England. A public school, in the English¹ sense, with all that implies about class and wealth, privilege and entitlement. Those issues are addressed in the story, to some degree. There are bursaries, children who are ‘wards of the school’, and so on.

And magic and demons and possession and all sorts of things. It’s the present day, and entities from the demonic plane are drawn to systems, to complexity. There’s an imp possessing the photocopier, and it’s dangerous to turn on your phone in an area where there’s a lot of magic about.

And it’s a story for adults, so we get love and sex and risk-assessment forms and all those sorts of things, too. The viewpoint character is a teacher, the Director of Magic. She’s very, very, good at her job. The magic aspects of it, especially. But sometimes it takes more than being good at magic to save the school. Or the world.

By the time I was about halfway through this I was hoping Tesh had a sequel planned. Maybe several sequels. A magic school is going to be there a long time, after all (this one is already 600 years old), so why not?

I see it’s on the BSFA Awards longlst², which is only right and proper.

Watched: Office Space 🎥

Some of my work colleagues recommended this to me. I was vaguely aware of its existence before that, since it’s been around since 1999.

It’s a comedy about office workers — amusingly enough, they’re specifically software developers working to prevent the year-2000 two-digit date problem, or ‘Y2K Bug’, as it was usually called. Amusing, because I did some of that myself. Or at least tested the system I worked on at the time to make sure it didn’t have the problem (it didn’t).

As to the amusement value of the film itself: it was fine. Not that great, but not a total waste of time. Probably two and a half stars, if M.b had stars like Letterboxd.

Watched: Mrs. Dalloway 🎥

I still haven’t caught up with posting about the movies we watched over Christmas & New Year, but never mind. Watched this yesterday. I read the book about seven years ago, and would have thought it close to impossible to film. Far from it. This actually worked pretty well. It’s not as rich as the book, of course, but it hits many of the points the book makes. The shellshocked veteran of the First World War, Septimus, I though was particularly well played, by Rupert Graves. Who, I learn, played LeStrade in Sherlock.

In the unlikely event that anyone reading this uses the London bus routes 19 or 38, you have until today to comment on TFL’s terrible proposals to reduce the services.

I was wondering why my iPhone was refusing to download my full Obsidian vault.

Had a look at its storage:

Whoops! I’m gonna need a bigger phone.

Existential question: in Springsteen’s ‘Open All Night’, if it ‘takes [him] two hours to get back to where [his] baby lives’, why does he later call her on the phone to say he’s ‘got three more hours but [he’s] covering ground’? Where has he been in the extra hours???

📚 Emily Tesh wrote the best SF book of the last couple of years (not just my opinion, it won the Hugo). Now The Incandescent is an incredible fantasy book, a magic-school story for adults.

She’s so good she almost scares me. Yet she just seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The first book of this year, or the last of last? I started reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand a couple of weeks before Christmas, set it aside for some Christmas books, and then went back to it.

I started reading it once before, years ago, and didn’t get far. And I think that’s because of its very strange style. Ellroy uses a chopped-up style of extremely short sentences, much repetition of names, and almost no use of pronouns. For example:

The witnesses were antsy. The witnesses wore name tags. The witnesses perched on one bench.

Or:

Wayne ducked by. Wayne passed a break room. Wayne heard a TV blare.

And that kind of thing is repeated across 600+ pages. It can be hard work at times. The only relief comes in some chapters that purport to be transcripts of phone conversations recorded by the FBI.

We are in the real world here, in the sixties. Right at the start, JFK is assassinated. The three viewpoint characters are all dodgy members of various law-enforcement agencies (Las Vegas police, FBI, CIA) and are all connected to the conspiracy behind that event (spoiler, it was the mob, but certain others, like J Edgar Hoover, weren’t too bothered and/or were sort of involved).

The story carries on through the sixties up to the other to big political assassinations, of Martin Luther King and RFK. And guess what? Our antiheroes — or some of them, at least — are involved in those too.

It’s a novel of the sixties, then, about conspiracies and secrets. Not unlike my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy. So why don’t I love it, then? Mainly, I think, it’s that stylistic choice. I don’t see the point of it, and I found it quite annoying, until eventually it became almost comical. And I did enjoy the book (otherwise I would have stopped reading, what with life being too short to read a book you’re not enjoying). Just not as much as might be expected from the setting.

There’s also this: I learned when I was around half way through that this is actually the middle volume of a trilogy. I’ve noted before, though perhaps only in footnote, that publishers seem to hate putting numbers on books¹, or otherwise letting the reader know important details like that. And it doesn’t matter that much here. It works OK as a standalone novel. But I realise now, part of the strangeness at the start may have been a kind of sense that we were expected to know the characters to some degree. I wrote about something like this fifteen(!) years ago, and the sensation I had this time (I now realise) was similar.

Lastly, it’s a very brutal book. There are many acts of extreme violence, described in casual, if not loving, detail. And the casual racism of the language will probably upset some people even more than the violence.

So I’m glad I’ve finally read it, but I don’t see me searching out the other parts of the trilogy.

The first book of this year, or the last of last? I started reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand a couple of weeks before Christmas, set it aside for some Christmas books, and then went back to it.

I started reading it once before, years ago, and didn’t get far. And I think that’s because of its very strange style. Ellroy uses a chopped-up style of extremely short sentences, much repetition of names, and almost no use of pronouns. For example:

The witnesses were antsy. The witnesses wore name tags. The witnesses perched on one bench.

Or:

Wayne ducked by. Wayne passed a break room. Wayne heard a TV blare.

And that kind of thing is repeated across 600+ pages. It can be hard work at times. The only relief comes in some chapters that purport to be transcripts of phone conversations recorded by the FBI.

We are in the real world here, in the sixties. Right at the start, JFK is assassinated. The three viewpoint characters are all dodgy members of various law-enforcement agencies (Las Vegas police, FBI, CIA) and are all connected to the conspiracy behind that event (spoiler, it was the mob, but certain others, like J Edgar Hoover, weren’t too bothered and/or were sort of involved).

The story carries on through the sixties up to the other to big political assassinations, of Martin Luther King and RFK. And guess what? Our antiheroes — or some of them, at least — are involved in those too.

It’s a novel of the sixties, then, about conspiracies and secrets. Not unlike my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy. So why don’t I love it, then? Mainly, I think, it’s that stylistic choice. I don’t see the point of it, and I found it quite annoying, until eventually it became almost comical. And I did enjoy the book (otherwise I would have stopped reading, what with life being too short to read a book you’re not enjoying). Just not as much as might be expected from the setting.

There’s also this: I learned when I was around half way through that this is actually the middle volume of a trilogy. I’ve noted before, though perhaps only in footnote, that publishers seem to hate putting numbers on books¹, or otherwise letting the reader know important details like that. And it doesn’t matter that much here. It works OK as a standalone novel. But I realise now, part of the strangeness at the start may have been a kind of sense that we were expected to know the characters to some degree. I wrote about something like this fifteen(!) years ago, and the sensation I had this time (I now realise) was similar.

Lastly, it’s a very brutal book. There are many acts of extreme violence, described in casual, if not loving, detail. And the casual racism of the language will probably upset some people even more than the violence.

So I’m glad I’ve finally read it, but I don’t see me searching out the other parts of the trilogy.