Matthew Hurst

BlueSky is just as much a leftish echo chamber as X is of the right - all platforms and communities are echo chambers. But I’d rather have an anchor that skews me left than right, so here I stay, raging at the blockers and virtue performers.

I interviewed Jinwoo Park about his spy novel, The Oxford Soju Club, for the Spybrary podcast, and it’s finally dropped, or posted or up or whatever it is podcasts do. #readingcommunity #books #BookSky

I’ve loved Thea Gilmore’s music for decades. Now she wants people to pay close attention by making it harder to find, temporary. She composites people’s voicenotes into a song, posts it for a while, removes it. This one’s about power hiding. It’s here: www.theagilmore.net/echo

This is fantastic. She’s done a few of these, under the grouping of The Echoline, and I should listen to more of them

I wasn’t sure about artists crowdsourcing ideas. Isn’t the whole point (without getting too disgracefully pretentious) that artistic types burn with urgent ideas that simply must come bursting from them? Isn’t the voice, in the sense of their point of view, their take, their framing, all an artist has? The rest of it is just technique, and can be taught.

The Echoline could be just a way to garner ideas and apply twenty years of craftsmanship, and nothing wrong with that. Their voice is in how they craft. I think it’s more than that though: the point isn’t the source, it’s the transience. If something isn’t online, the algorithm can’t slurp it into its raddled gut like an Mr Creosote, and compost it down in the bubbling digestive juices. (I’ll make my excuses and leave before we get to the next part of that metabolic process).

Then there’s scarcity value. By removing it, the song stops being another entry on the ‘to listen’ streaming playlist. When something’s scarce, we focus on it more, and value it more. It’s a far more authentic way of getting to your audience than TikTok flummery.

Every time I get a website asking ‘are you human?’ I need them to offer a tickbox for ‘no, I am dancer’. Even though I’m one of the least dancey people known to mankind.

Graham Greene made spy novels respectable, but he (probably) never stopped spying himself. I interviewed the director of the Graham Greene Festival about Greene’s writing, spying, and friendship with Kim Philby.

#books #booksky #readingcommunity

spybrary.com/graham-gr…

Quick question. What does ‘the privilege of my life’ actually mean?

I mean, that’s a slightly different thing than writers not using LLMs and there are reasons like the environmental impact and putting people out of jobs for not using LLMs, but the biggest one is that it will only ever produce derivative retreads.

Some books have always been derivative slop of course - they were called ‘pulp’ for a reason - and really the only reason for not using LLMs to create more is that even hacks deserve bread on the table (speaking as a hack).

LLMs are only ever going to come up with the most likely version of the next word given its instructions, and that probability is based on what’s out there already. So, always derivative shit. That’s why not to use AI.

I’ve stumbled into being a sportsfan for the first time in my life, as a 57 year old Brit. Mostly, I’m in it for the incomprehensible commentary.

Recently moved to Canada, just in time to latch onto the Toronto Blue Jays getting narrowly beaten in the final of the World Series, and then my wife announced she’d got a Sportsnet subscription. And now I know what stacking your bases and platooning is.

But 90% of the commentary still sounds like

And here comes Bravetti to the plate, sets his flonkers, gives the wrist-crank, and delivers — oh, that’s a high floopster, drifting toward the schnozz zone, and Palumwick gets under it, tracks it back to the warnle, makes the snab! Beautiful snab by Palumwick, who’s been snabbing everything in the deep dubris tonight. Two gromps, one blurtle, and the count sits at three-and-wumble.

It’s like Debussy writing sports coverage, or Monet in his late ‘lost my glasses’ phase. The details swoosh past in an infinite scroll of pleasurable enough to keep going.

It’s setting the audience (fans? crowd? My arts background still pokes through here and there) up for a massive dopamine spike. Depending on a largely random contact between ball and bat, my alloted champions might go four ahead, or they might lose the series.

I’m pretty sure the rules were written by BF Skinner. A pitch becoming a ball or a strike is the definition of intermittent reinforcement - sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, based on no consistent criteria I can divine. Trying to figure out the rules is enough to keep me pulling the lever for more cheese.

And in the meantime, I’m going to figure out whether a floopster in the schnozz zone is a good thing or a bad thing.

My latest ’excursion’ into podcasting is up - an interview with spy writer Michael Dylan about his latest book The New Spy, for @spybrary. Find it where-ever you get your etc. etc. spybrary.com/the-new-s… #booksky #authorsky

Trump: I want Iran’s oil

ATTACKS IRAN

Media: Let us ponder why Trump is attacking Iran.

I mean. Come on.

Saw #onebattleafteranother. Self indulgent self righteous simplistic mess congealed by four over privileged stars riffing cringey stoner ‘humour’ on Pynchon pretension for spurious intellectual validation and only winning #Oscars because everything else is even worse.

I use AI a lot in writing, to get over blank screen paralysis. I get it to generate a bunch of words which I know will be so infuriatingly bad I’ll be forced to rewrite them entirely till none of its version remains and I have created my first draft #writingcommunity #amwriting #writersky

Down a snow-drifted alley a tipped up wheelie bin wide open like a pm’d corpse and a cheap suitcase ripped apart with cheap clothes scattered in the slush. Like a proxy for a murder victim. #writingcommunity

Can someone suggest a ‘comedy’ podcast that is at least 1/10th as funny as the smug friends interviewing their smug mates and/or straining to crack weak predictable topical jokes think it is? I’ve just been trying a bunch and they all, without exception, ear-meltingly awful and homicide inducing.

Productive happy days make for dull journalling.

When I was a kid, I made pirate treasure maps by drawing on paper then ‘ageing’ it by grilling and scorching the edges. Mocking up a newsletter for tomorrow’s fupperynewsletter.substack.com in Photoshop is far less fun. #crime #thriller

Conceded I not only need progressive lenses but also the reading glasses version too, where the close vision is closer and the long vision is a bit more blurred. Magnificent game changers. I can get absorbed in a book again rather than having to keep moving it to keep the text in focus.

I just heard the best description of generative LLM AI yet: it’s programmed to create what an answer to your prompt would look like. Not an actual answer, so if the two overlap at all, it’s just luck. If that also involves things that are true, even luckier.

Sometimes the right thing to do is admit that the 40 years of anti-U2 prejudice you began as a snotty sixth former was in error, and they are in fact a fucking good band. #musicsky

There are two ways of not writing for your audience’s approval. Either assume they’ll love whatever you write, or assume they don’t exist and nobody cares. I choose the latter.

I know Paul McCartney is a perfectionist, but surely making a choir of children practise all year long to sing their song is overkill. Once a week for maybe a month surely would be enough. They’re only kids, after all.

Is there a way of muting all of America on BlueSky? I’m a more hardcore Marxist than a lot of Bluesky lefties in many ways, but the level of masturbatory smug performative outrage, plus the ongoing malignant arsery of the government the US voted in is really getting unbearable.

Sometimes the music might be great but it’s not helped by the blurb on the website…

EG this from a Bandcamp recommendation: “a tender suite of German trio jazz tinged with Mongolian long song”.

More as I get it.

#MusicSky #wankymusicblurbs

Environment Canada has Very Precise knowledge of snow