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My triumphant 28-minute return to blogging, and it concerns:

0. Preramble

In the spring, I’m going to deliver a series of workshops focused on writing fantasy. These are for St. Andrews undergrads only, so I’m afraid, dear reader, you can’t take part. Unless you happen to be a St. Andrews undergrad with a time machine – I’ve already found my students.

This is an “optional” portion of the Creative Writing MFA. As far as I understand it, that means, “do this if you want the street cred (also we got our funding cut, apropos of nothing).” What I would have the undergrads do, in turn, is work towards a 3000-word manuscript. They’re doing this entirely of their own volition, during the second semester, a period of the academic year that I never look forward to.

I feel like I’m the last person on Earth who ought to be teaching anything… but isn’t that just the epistemic anxiety that all teachers feel, at some point? All of a sudden, you’ve got to double back on all the learning you’ve ever done, and prove to others how you know what you know:

https://brologue.net/2024/09/11/we-do-a-little-crafting/

That said, one might make a bigger monster of this prospect if one believes the purpose of teaching is to deposit facts in the students’ heads, like it’s a piggy bank. Teachers in Scotland, however, are required to read Paulo Freire’s nifty educational thesis, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed:”

https://ia801303.us.archive.org/8/items/PedagogyOfTheOppressed-English-PauloFriere/oppressed.pdf

A very brief summary (and teachers, feel free to correct me): Freire balances and re-evaluates the roles of both teachers, students, and the purpose of knowledge. In a “traditional” view of education, knowledge is something a teacher has, something that gives them intellectual power over students; they are expected to memorise the teacher’s facts, but are never told when these facts are tangibly connected to their lives.

Freire argues that knowledge is something that should be sought after by both students and teachers, as co-investigators. This is how the oppressed become more human, and better understand their place in the world against their oppressors.

Who is an oppressor? I’m very tempted to pull out a tried and true Discworld quote from one Granny Weatherwax… but Freire beat her (and Terry Pratchett) to the punch:

For the oppressors, “human beings” refers only to themselves; other people are “things.” For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but merely conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.

In other words: anyone who is affluent enough such that any and all of their needs are met by other people – not on the basis of unconditional love and care, but of a transaction. Things to be discarded. Sometimes we’re pushed to treat ourselves as things and we don’t even notice. (Do you really need to use an LLM to write that book you’ve always wanted to write? Who’s saying you do?)

How do you translate these ideas to the creative writing classroom? Well, my tutors have put Freire’s theories to the test, thoroughly so. In my first year, the cohort would be given texts to read in our seminars – sometimes theory, sometimes short stories. Then, in the seminar, we’d sit in a circle and discuss how we interpreted the texts. I think this arrangement creates a space that respects the subjectivity of your own experiences, and that keeps your mind open to the experiences of others. A writer may intend a certain effect in a story, but not everyone is changed by that effect in the same way.

Balance your cohort’s experiences with your own, and they leave you a different person than when you found them. You will know who they think their oppressors are, because most people are happy to tell you.

1. Introduction to Factfinding

(For my students: any hyperlinks you find beyond this point are not essential reading, but things that may interest you, that you may peruse at your leisure. Take ’em or leave ’em. This is how I post.)

My students will have their own ideas of what fantasy is. Whatever stories I set for them to read, they will tell me something new about them, in a way that I hadn’t thought of before. That’s part of how seminars (and workshops) work.

I imagine my prospective students are… actually, I’ll be much clearer if I define my fantasy journey first. I suppose I’ve been around fantasy in TV and video games all my life, but I think I’ve only been a “serious” fantasy reader for a few years. I had Sky TV as a kid, and never, ever was I without a Nintendo console (except when we had an Xbox 360 for a year). Spongebob, the Fairly Odd-Parents, and Avatar: The Last Airbender were always close at hand; likewise, there was always a Mario, Pokémon, or Kirby on the go. None of these are exactly Tolkien1.

As a teenager, I had my wandering eye on projects that’d started online, like the SCP Foundation. I gave Undertale a fair shake, had friends who were into Homestuck before it ended, and I held a quiet obsession with Cucumber Quest, though I would never, ever admit that to anyone. Again: my eyes ‘wandered.’ Like most teenage boys of that era, I felt compelled to engage the web not through the open door of an inquiring mind, but from behind a wall of irony that had a few bricks loose. Undertale made me feel something, but the fandom was “cancerous,” so therefore, Undertale didn’t make me feel something, actually. I wrote fanfiction, like all wordy kids are wont to do… but Me Tomorrow could never jive with what Me Yesterday did, and so none of it ever saw the light of day.

I think I prefer my fantasy to have a satirical edge, like Discworld. I don’t immediately gravitate to high fantasy, sword and sorcery, and all their trappings (yet my writings can end up there anyways); I’ve never found the time to read Tolkien (he’s a commitment!), but if I never do, I’ve at least read over a dozen authors who have; Brandon Sanderson’s the most popular fantasy writer going, but none of his series have ever gripped me. Again, a commitment. All the same, he’s a fabulous teacher.

I imagine my prospective students are the sort of undergrads who would be into the things that I’m not. Great! Since this will be our first week, I imagine my students will also be shier than they usually are. What I mean by “factfinding,” then, is establishing a workshop environment where the students and I get to break the ice, come to understand our roles as teacher-students, and jump right into answering our raison d’être – the big questions.

Because what, when you get right down to it – and I mean, REALLY get down to the myffic, dawnatime, primordial roots of the thing – is fantasy? What do my students think fantasy is? If I’ve grasped Freire’s theories well enough to turn them into action, this should prompt them to bring their own fantasy experiences to the circle – that is, what they expect of the genre. This is the collective knowledge that we’re creating as a group.

And so, to begin this journey, I’m going to introduce my students to a story they might not have read before…

2. Library of Babel and the Ur-Literature

…Maybe they have read it before. Who am I to presume? I’m not a fucking hipster2. Even still, one cannot read this Borges Banger without feeling a sense of there being something missing, or perhaps even wrong.

Q: What fantasy elements are missing here, that you would normally expect?

From someone else’s POV, Babel might just be a bland, boring list of expository information. For the most part, it lacks anything you could call a ‘plot.’ No events we are told of drive the narrator’s story onwards. His life is over, and these notes are for us, the ones who succeed him. Really, we’re here purely for the spectacle of this vast, infinite library that contains every possible combination of “410-page books of a certain format and character set:”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

There are no dragons here, that we know of… And yet, there are factions in the library who believe there must be meaning in the books, somewhere: slivers of serpentine sentences, wyrm-like clusters of words, set against the backdrop of gibberish. The narrator, himself, spent his life searching for a book that acts as an index to all other books. He implies that such a book would, in a sense, grant him omniscience.

Is Babel fantasy, or is it not? Sure, you can go to its Wikipedia entry and trust the editors’ uncited classification. Sure, Borges’ corpus of short stories, not just Babel, have been a goldmine of inspiration for fantasy writers, for decades. Others will say, ‘We-ell, it’s missing this, and that, so it’s not really fantasy, as such… it’s more like magical realism. You know, looking for the fantastical in the mundane.’

The Socratic dialogue could go on, and on, like a spiral of ants, and the only thing of value we might take away is how to better organise shelves in a bookstore. Better to choose a side, in spite of our better judgement.

I choose Terry Pratchett – fantasy is the ur-literature:

Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus… Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature.

Borges was not writing about the gods who made lightning, but he was exploiting our imagination in exactly the same way. With only a set of very simple rules, he crafted and communicated an infinite universe that literally does not exist, but nevertheless, we are able to imagine. The things you expected to see here, but did not? They’re cut from the same cloth3.

We want to imagine these impossible things, and when stories make us feel something, we want to take those big, numinous feelings, and encode them in stories of our own. We want to answer the questions they leave us with. For instance: I’d like to presume that humans installed the Library’s amenities as the lights, mirrors, and upright sleeping chambers… Or, were these things always in the Library, preceding humanity?

That is fantasy, at least in broad strokes: stories of the supernatural; impossible rules, creatures, or objects, beyond the rules of our natural world. Set in our world, or on Middle Earth, or in the Library, it’s up to you.

What I’ve described above is not a perfect description, but neither is wet clay a work of art. It’s more of a work in progress.

3. Magic Kingdoms and Tremendous Trifles

And that work in progress will continue… right now. Work while the clay is wet, y’know?

Q: How do you methodically extract your research and personal experiences, and transmogrify that into fantasy?

Or, as the journalist said to the author: “Where do you get your ideas from?” And the author responds: either, “From the ideas factory,” OR, if the book tour’s really starting to grate: “The muse who locks me up against my will lets me out the back, sometimes. He gives me a shovel. I’m obliged to dig.”

I had you read a 1999 article by Pratchett–On Magic Kingdoms–and in it, he paraphrases one G. K. Chesterton. Per the nature of paraphrasing, there’s no source, but I think I’ve managed to track the original down. So, what did Chesterton really have to say?

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy.

…Come again?

Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet.

…Quoi ?

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tremendous_Trifles/Chapter_I

Ah, thank you. Chesterton is rambling about the little things. He defined himself against the “Kipling literature” of his day, seeking out experiences “exotic” for the sake of being exotic. Instead, he argued, the fantastical should be found by looking inwards, focusing on the objects in the world around us.

Sometimes, all you need to do to transform mundane, everyday objects into the stuff of fantasy is to turn them over (or inside-out) and re-present them from an unfamiliar angle. Scale has always been a popular mode of alteration – stairs as big as skyscrapers, or the weather of a thousand seasons passing within a minute, or an infinite library (hey, isn’t that what Borges was trying to do?). Reversing cause and effect is always fun – cities popping into existence because we’ve written enough lore about them, and not because they were material places built with our bare hands. Take what you know to be true, and fiddle with the settings a bit.

(As I suggested earlier with Babel, some people might call this approach ‘magical realism.’ Some people need a label to separate Fantasy With Real Bits from Fantasy With Orcs. As writers, we can’t afford to be so picky.)

Visual artists, in particular, seem experts at this mode of seeing – an ordinary photo of a cat in a rucksack is transformed into a merchant – a cat living inside a sentient rucksack with arms and legs:

THE MERCHANT

— Captain Pacito (@captainpacito.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T20:22:27.364Z

Rucksacks are very ordinary. A fabric sack with leather straps, and an optional supporting frame. You carry books in it, I think. It’s as ordinary as the chalk deposits under Chesterton’s feet. And then the cat says, “fuck your books, we haz warez if you haz coin.”

The artist started with the rucksack. Then, they must’ve asked, “What if the rucksack was alive? Is it a bag come to life, or a creature evolved to mimic rucksacks?” Either way, it follows that the cat is in some symbiotic relationship with the rucksack. We, as writers, are invited to fill those details in.

Let’s put Chesterton’s lens to the test for ourselves…

(…and, it’s at this point, blog reader, that I produce for the students a HUMDRUM, ORDINARY ITEM. What is it? I don’t know. But it is very ORDINARY, and the students and I are going to have fun shouting out how that ORDINARY ITEM could be re-presented.)

4. Eggs-istential Problems (Or, “What’s the Fucking POINT??”)

And that brings me to the next big question in this factfinding affair. Fantasy literature is, in my mind, having an existential Moment. It’s a three-way fuckfest between declining reading rates; at odds with TV, film, video games for what little spare time we have; and Big Tech overlords, who genuinely believe large language models have solved the game of literature, as if the number of possible stories us NPCs can tell matches the total number of distinct game states for tic-tac-toe. In the words of one J. B. Crawford:

https://computer.rip/2025-12-08-speed-reading.html

In a certain sense, a very real sense, summarizing text is now the largest single driver of the US economy.

My students are clever enough to know that art is, first and foremost, a human endeavour. If we’re not striving to pin down our big, numinous feelings with our own words, we’re not creating art. So, with that said:

Q: What’s the one thing that fantasy literature has, and excels at, that other mediums just can’t match?

I mean, shit, why stop at fantasy? You could ask that of all literature, the whole damn medium of print. What mystic bullshit keeps drawing people in to writing and reading words? Again, haven’t we had films, TV, and video games for decades now? Hello, Netflix and chill?

Samuel R. Delaney, in his book About Writing, describes writing as:

[U]sing words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order that the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.
That false memory is what a story is.

Then there’s Stephen King, who, in his memoir On Writing, cuts to the chase:

Telepathy, of course.

Telepathy. Now, it’s not picture-perfect telepathy – my mental reconstruction of a passage is not identical to yours, but it’s going to be close enough that we experience the same things. There might be things you see, reading between the lines, that I don’t. That’s fine, too.

Q: “Yeah, but why couldn’t you just make… fuckin’, I dunno, a TikTok, or video game?”

But that’s not the side we’ve chosen. We’ve chosen telepathy. And there are other storytellers out there who want to engage our craft just as much as we want to engage theirs: playwrights, film actors, stage performers, singers, directors, video essayists, shortform vidsmiths, game designers. As Ian Danskin writes, you don’t use a specific medium to tell a story because you think it is the “optimal” medium:

https://www.tumblr.com/innuendostudios/161022117832/video-games-are-better-when-we-dont-get

Giant Sparrow didn’t make What Remains of Edith Finch because they thought it would work better as a game than as a film; they made it as a game because they’re game designers.

The original post is about an age-old debate on whether video games can tell a story. They can – through the medium of video games:

Watching Tom Hanks [in Castaway] say goodbye to Wilson and throwing the Companion Cube in an incinerator yourself [in Portal] are not the same experience. [..] Comparing them is like comparing a chicken egg to a Faberge egg; which is better? The question is meaningless. You can’t cook with a Faberge egg and you don’t leave a chicken egg on your mantle. They are superficially similar but they serve very different purposes.

And as for AI’s eerie-ass prose. There is no-one in the machine who is talking to you, and there never will be. Oh, sure, it can give you pages of prose, but what it will never give you is a word of intent. That comes from you; and if the telepathy ain’t in your own words, then what’s the fucking point?

5. Finally! Finding Facts!

Now, this is a factfinding workshop. Stands to reason that we should finish off on how to find facts.

“Google,” as a verb, used to mean something. If you wanted to know everything, and anything, there was Google. When I was an ethical hacking undergrad, we drilled it into each other’s skulls: Google is your friend. If the top results didn’t have what you were looking for, you could always rely on search operators to separate wheat and chaff. Then Google turned into a giant pile of shit, and now, to “google” anything means pulling up a tumorous load of ads, and LLM-generated guff – not a summary of facts, but a fact-shaped object that you waste even more time trying to verify.

Search engines may be in retrograde, but you know what isn’t?

Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow sums up why Wikipedia works, and why it verifies sources, not facts:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before

Anything you believe to be a fact on Wikipedia is really an assertion with a citation:

Wikipedia doesn’t say “It is a true fact that Cory Doctorow is 54 years old.” It says that a website called “Writers Write” published the assertion that my birthday is July 17, 1971:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#cite_note-3

There’s no ready way for you to verify my birthday, but anyone can verify that Writers Write published this and claimed it was true.

So, what does Wikipedia think fantasy is?

[A] genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or magical elements, often including completely imaginary realms and creatures.

This statement is backed by two citations, both of which are dictionary definitions:

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Fantasy

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fantasy

And these sources, in turn, have been verified as reliable through this policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

Firefox (and its myriad forks) allow you to set Wikipedia as your search engine, too. It’s an excellent resource for learning anything you want to know about fantasy, and beyond. Its special Portal pages are the digital equivalent to categories in physical encyclopedias:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Myths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Speculative_fiction

You might not know what page you’re looking for, but chances are, Portals might have indexed it next to other relevant pages. Chances are, if your fantasy setting starts off medieval, you’re going to spend a lot of time learning about the Middle Ages. There’s a portal for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Middle_Ages

Books

Part of me used to think the magic of teaching is appearing as though you know a lot more than you actually do. I think he came from an insecure place, because that doesn’t make sense. If teaching worked like that, we wouldn’t have reading lists. We’d have to take our tutors at their word. We’d be back to Freire’s piggy bank model of education, which is no good for anyone except oppressors. It behooves me to leave an informal list of books that I’ve found useful, not just for putting these workshop topics together, but for my craft as a whole.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

I’m not gonna lie: I picked up a copy of the most recent edition because, pre-internet, this was an invaluable resource for writers. It still can be: very much like Wikipedia, you flip to one page at random, and pretty soon, you’re looking for bookmarks just to keep a hold of all the interesting stuff that’s in here. Unlike Wikipedia, which throws a lot of information at you all at once, descriptions in Brewer are more concise. You could do Brewer’s first, Wikipedia later.

Owen Davies’ “Magic: A Very Short Introduction”

Per the title, Owen Davies’ contribution to the Oxford Very Short Introductions series gives an overview of how magic has been defined, and practiced, across history and culture.

Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan’s “Spec Fic for Newbies,” Vols. 1 and 2

From the minds of two Clarion Writers’ Workshop graduates, these are excellent written introduction to speculative fiction and some of its many, many subgenres. Each subgenre section has:

  • a brief history;
  • a “spotter’s guide” listing common tropes;
  • why that subgenre might appeal to you;
  • important ideas to think about that you might easily miss – including but not limited to, common pitfalls;
  • and TWO wonderfully-detailed prompts to get you writing in the subgenre, right away.

They’re working on a third volume, too, which will be published… just before my workshops end:

https://www.tiffani-angus.com/blog/spec-fic-for-newbies-vol-3-is-coming-soon

Jeff VanderMeer et al’s “Wonderbook”

Wonderbook is a visual treat, a practically tactile guide that illustrates the writing process using weird little guys:

https://wonderbooknow.com

There’s lots of interviews with weird little guys, too–sorry, authors, I meant authors. Pertinent to fantasy writing is the chapter on worldbuilding, which goes far, far deeper than inventing cool shit.

And then there’s Myster Odd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lGBUsz9eDs

It won’t hold your hand through everything: some lateral thinking is required, but if you’re a writer, then that shouldn’t be an obstacle for you.

Janet Burroway’s “Writing Fiction”

Not available in St. Andrews’ main library, but the first chapter is free to read online:

https://janetburroway.com/books/writing-fiction/

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Steering the Craft”

An incredibly short book (over 130 pages!) and yet chock full of knowledge and exercises from one of the best fantasy writers to ever do it. I believe several copies are available in the St. Andrews main library. Do the exercises; the stories you make of them might not go anywhere, but artists have to sketch. The more you sketch, the more mindful you become of the writing process. Not every great novel sprang from the head of an author, fully formed.

Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”

Skip the memoir portion of the book (‘CV’), unless you really like Stephen King. He’s nowhere near as big on written exercises as Le Guin, and that’s only the start. I think you might have to be hypergraphic to cough up a thousand words per day, as he recommends. A PA and a housemaid wouldn’t come amiss, either. Also available in the St. Andrews main library.

Assorted Blogs on Craft

A scraping of ice and snow from the pertinent iceberg of blogs:

Marie Brennan’s New Worlds

https://www.swantower.com/tag/new-worlds

All the posts on her website are free to read, though you’ll need the Internet Archive for some older posts (they lead to a 404).

Brett Devereaux’s “Resources for Worldbuilders”

https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/

Look, if your fantasy world’s going to have that medieval edge, Bret Devereaux is a self-confessed “unmitigated pedant.” His posts are half-hour reads, and full of these scary things called “facts.” You think it’s easier to emulate the medieval period? Guess again. The pre-industrial societies of history are a touch more complex than working in fields without smartphones. Lest we forget that Devereaux lets this research loose upon the web for free.

D. S. Black’s Deadstar Logbook

https://logbook.deadstar.black

Save this as a bookmark, and set yourself a reminder to check back in six months. Maybe three. Every now and then, on the writing journey, you will believe you will have sufficiently reflected on a certain topic. Researched it. You start thinking you know things. Then along comes a person like D. S. Black to give you a wakeup call: “Hah, fuck no. There’s more.”

Doc Burford

https://docseuss.medium.com

His wheelhouse is not video games – as the surface-level subject matter of his essays might suggest – but the egg-shaped problems of storytelling. We could talk, me and him, prose writer and screenwriter, painter and interior decorator, and never once would we need to say we can’t do this or that in a story. We both know how stories roll.

You will tackle this man’s gargantuan essays, one piece at a time, and if you don’t learn a single useful thing from him, you are lying to yourself.

AI…?

LLMs are bullshit engines that will produce plausible summaries. These will be nonconsensually shoved into your eyeballs no matter what search engine you use. You can use a search engine that doesn’t offer AI summaries, but the company behind it is a little fish swimming against the sea of market trends. Until the AI bubble bursts, if a company can afford to invest in AI, it will, at some point (looking at you, Mozilla). The purpose of a system is what it does.

I really, REALLY do not want to put in a single word about AI that could be misconstrued as being pro-AI, for I am very much immersed in online spaces that are hyper-aware of the damage it has caused. Call me a Luddite: I smash the machine not because I am against its existence, but because my boss (and his bosses) wants to grease its wheels with the blood and sweat of vulnerable people. I put first things first: these chatbots have killed people, through job losses, radicalisation, psychosis, and inhumane policy decisions. Often do chatbots produce mediocre responses, for users to keep hitting the prompt button until they get something that suits them, and all the time, said users are gambling with their attention:

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

The purpose of a system is what it does.

But. Oh, fuck, he’s written but. It isn’t a but that wants you to waive everything in paragraphs prior, and it’s not a but that says, ‘I think these executives are swell people who run swell operations and I endorse everything they do, and I never, ever want the boot curbstomping my face to stop. Please, keep stealing our work with zero compensation!’

I can heavily discourage you from using an LLM. You don’t need ’em, because there’s nothing they provide that isn’t already provided by books, Wikipedia, and your network of peers.

But I can’t stop you wholesale.

If you depend on an LLM to do most of your work for you, then you don’t need me, or the rest of the class. People who copy and paste prose from ChatGPT into their work, with optional editing, are not earnestly practising telepathy. They are knaves, and charlatans, and time-wasters.

For the rest of you, however, I think this article by ploum on his students’ LLM usage is worth a look-in – particularly, those students who he identified as using LLMs on “personal preference”:

https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

They use them only as a last resort, in very special cases or for very specific subjects. […] Another also explained: “If I need to verify what an LLM said, it will take more time!”

These students have gone out and studied subjects for themselves, wrinkling their brains like every student did in a pre-GPT-3 world. And there’s the paradox:

Can chatbots help? Yes, if you know how to use them. But if you do, chances are you don’t need chatbots.

“If you know how to use them.”

If you use an LLM for anything, then all of the sources above have to come first. Write things in your own words, ask yourself questions and try to answer them. Talk amongst your cohort, ask your tutors – email experts in the field, if they’re available. Check Reddit, as a treat4, and dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, ready to write things in your own words all over again. Then, if you can justify why you’d want to ask an LLM, and can verify its output, then you can ask it. Or, if Wikipedia offers too much information for the lizard brain, and you just need a starting point for a subject, you may query it for sources.

This will never, ever save you time. But let me ask you this: would you rather be the radiologist who slaves away at correcting an AI’s cancer diagnoses, at ludicrous speed, and sponge up all the blame when you cannot keep up with its catastrophic misses? Or, would you rather be the radiologist who processes the same or fewer X-rays as you’ve always done, except AI is brought in to offer a second opinion?

The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck.

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

  1. The closest you get with Nintendo is, what, Zelda? Fire Emblem? I’ve played every single Zelda game to date and never finished a single one, out of boredom… Except for Four Swords. Likewise for Fire Emblem. ↩︎
  2. I recently met a guy from Hungary – so he tells me, Borges’ works have been available in Hungarian for so long that he’s “kind of a big meme.” In a good way! His fables, so he tells me, are read as fairy tales. ↩︎
  3. And you would be right to point that those guys sitting around the campfire were not telling stories of magic, but of myth, and how they believed the world worked. We’ll come back to this in the second workshop, on worldbuilding. ↩︎
  4. I do not check Reddit as a treat. ↩︎

TTLY…

oh fuck

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