Fluid ImaginationFrom If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto:
As Trump prepares to run again in 2024, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the lessons we’ve learned — and committing to the principle that, when covering politicians who are essentially running against democracy, old-style journalism will no longer suffice.
From Boston Is Losing Its Snow Wicked Fast:
…winters in Boston, and the rest of New England, have gotten decidedly too mild. The northeastern swath of the United States and the ocean waters around it have become two of the world’s fastest-warming places… The result is that New England sees fewer snowstorms, and many of the ones that do still appear are harsher and more prolific than the historical average.
Every year, I participate in the Goodreads Challenge, where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books for the year and track your progress.
This year I set a goal of 45 books. I read or listened to 56.
I used to go through the books one by one. Now that I’m cracking 50 books a year, however, I choose my favorites in various categories, then post the whole list with a simple note on each.
The second novel from Scotto Moore, a playwright from the Seattle area, Battle of the Linguist Mages is ridiculous, rowdy, hilarious, touching, and wildly compelling.
It combines virtual-reality video-gaming with linguistics, anarchism, artificial intelligence, magic, raves, and the apocalypse.
One of this year’s best-selling fantasy novels, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R.F. Kuang, also uses the power of language to develop a system of magic, but where Babel is a magical history in the vein of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Moore’s ridiculous novel is more akin to Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. They both take place in the near future, make use of virtual worlds, and have a hyperkinetic energy that keeps the reader flying through the pages.
If you like your books about the potential technodestruction of the planet to be hilarious and fun, Battle of the Linguist Mages will not disappoint.
This book surprised me so many times, and never disappointed me. Another book centered around video games, this novel explores the lifelong relationship between two people.
I read a lot of high-concept fiction: speculative fiction, cli-fi, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. While Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow contains aspects of those, it’s a more character-driven story about two lifelong friends and the successes and challenges they face together…and alone.
Zevin’s book appears at the top of a lot of book lists this year. For me, though, Battle of the Linguist Mages has it beat due to the sheer audacity of what Mr. Moore attempted.
This list is arranged in the order I read them. It does not include books in a series or graphic novels, both of which I discuss further below. Recommended books are starred.
The nine novels of The Expanse are essentially three trilogies that follow the crew of a spaceship named after Don Coyote’s horse.
The first trilogy begins after humanity colonizes the solar system and accidentally uncovers an alien bio-weapon that defies physics while infecting any lifeform it encounters.
The second trilogy takes the characters beyond the solar system via an alien technology that opens a gate to a kind of Grand Central Station for the universe. This section focuses on the politics of who will control the metaphorical Grand Central Station.
The third trilogy explores the mystery of the alien civilization that created the bio-weapon and gate while examining how the Expanse functions when an upstart galactic empire takes over.
Of the nine novels, only one (the fifth book, Nemesis Games) was a disappointment. I could only finish it because one of the characters, Amos, is a joy to read. The subsequent four novels returned to the quality of the previous four, and the whole series ended about great.
The series became a TV show on SyFy (and later Amazon), ending after six seasons in Dec. 2021. People raved about it, but when I tried it, I couldn’t get past the production quality and the way it ignored a vital element of the books.
The Expanse series is the first science fiction I’ve read that takes gravity seriously. It shapes the physical structures of a whole new class of human beings who’ve only ever lived in the zero gravity of space. But it also affects virtually every scene in the story. The writers (“James S.A. Corey” is a pen name for a pair of writers) take great pains to remind readers that things work differently in space.
The TV show avoids this crucial element of the books by giving the characters magnetic boots that allow them to walk semi-normally. I quickly grew bored by the show without the effects of gravity (or its lack) to make this tale different from any others I’d encountered.
I loved the characters in the novels, especially how they adapted and evolved throughout 5,000+ pages of the story. But what I loved most was the gravity.
I read five of the six novels in the series (so far) and found all five fast and intriguing. The titular murderbot is a hilarious, paranoid artificial intelligence who would rather spend time watching soap operas than having to murder so many humans. Most of the books are under 200 pages in this series, but they keep you turning pages fast.
One of my colleagues scheduled me to teach a summer class called “Conspiracy Theories.” Like any well-educated person, I’m familiar with many conspiracy theories. I adhere to some of them (e.g., Oswald did not act alone, nor did Epstein kill himself). Others, I find laughable (e.g., 9/11 was not an inside job, and the moon landing most definitely happened).
I didn’t want the class to be a rehash of various conspiracy theories, though. We’ve seen the consequences of misinformation, disinformation, and poor critical thinking skills getting in the way of reality. Over a million Americans died partly because our President told us to shine sunlight up our ass.
A class that surveyed some of the theories that bedeviled the country since the Salem Witch Trials might be fun for the students, but it wouldn’t prepare them to live in 21st-century America.
Thanks to Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, I could do more than provide a survey. Armed by Kathryn Olmstead, a professor of History at UC Davis, I could present a thesis that would be meaningful in their adult lives. Her book reveals the actual, no doubt about it, 100% real conspiracies enacted by the U.S. government throughout the 20th century that fostered the cancerous growth of the paranoid style of American politics.
Many Americans believe their government conspires against them because the American government admits it conspired against them.
Dr. Olmstead writes in her introduction, “…generations of anti-government conspiracy theorists since World War I have at least one thing in common: when they charge that the government has plotted, lied, and covered up, they’re often right.”
The book debunks many of the conspiracies of the 20th century. At the same time, it reveals the conspiracies that drove the anti-government groups crazy enough to imagine the now-debunked conspiracy in the first place.
For example, those interested in history have heard that President Roosevelt had an advance warning about Pearl Harbor. This “advanced-knowledge conspiracy theory” suggests the president allowed Americans to die and ships to sink because he wanted the U.S. to get involved in World War II. This, of course, is not true.
Thanks to American code breakers, Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack was imminent. But he (along with everyone else) expected it to take place in the Philippines (which, in fact, it also did). Olmstead writes, “American leaders knew only that war was coming somewhere, sometime soon.”
The actual conspiracy was not that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was the target. It’s that, after the attack, he conspired to prevent Congress from investigating his administration’s intelligence failure. As one Congress member said, “There will have to be an explanation—sooner or later—and it had better be good.”
Instead of letting Congress investigate, Roosevelt created a five-person commission to whitewash the administration’s failures. We can look at the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission for how other presidents followed Roosevelt’s lead.
The Roberts Commission’s objective was to determine which, if any, U.S. military officials the U.S. should blame for the attack. Most importantly, the commission was not asked to investigate the failures of civil politicians such as President Roosevelt and his cabinet.
Roosenvelt’s enemies fell into a frenzy when the Roberts Commission pinned the disaster on two of Pearl Harbor’s commanders. Their disbelief led to the creation of the conspiracy that is still debated today.
Olmstead’s book explores conspiracies related to the Red Scare, the Kennedy Assassinations (of course), Nixon and Watergate, UFOs, CIA mind control experiments, Jonestown, the Iran-Contra scandal, CIA-led infusions of crack into the Black community, Ruby Ridge & Waco, and (of course) 9/11.
Throughout each investigation, she shows that the crackpots who saw a government conspiracy in blameless behavior had their origins in the American government conspiring to do something else instead.
As the man said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Elections are bought and paid for by the millionaire and billionaire classes in this country. The working poor and (basically non-existent) middle class has little say over its representative leaders. Nor do these “representatives” serve the interests of their constituents once they take office. The 2020 HBO documentary, The Swamp, clarifies that America’s electoral reality forces politicians (regardless of their original intent) to adjust their objectives to those of the lobbyists.
Surprising no one: electoral politics is all about money, and unless we fix campaign financing in the country, it will not change.
That is unless we decide to get rid of elections altogether.
In Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck argues in favor of replacing politicians with randomly selected Americans — think of Congress as jury duty. As he writes, “Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas they once they gave democracy a huge boost…it now turns out they cause colossal problems of their own.”
He doesn’t suggest replacing elections with sortition is a panacea. “Citizens chosen by lot may not have the expertise of professional politicians, but they add something vital to the process: freedom. After all, they don’t need to be elected or re-elected.”
His book has many examples demonstrating how sortition has worked in the past and practical methods for putting it into practice in the United States.
The jokes about the governing skills of a populace that can hardly name the branches of its government write themselves. They make it easy to dismiss Van Reybrouck’s idea. But I challenge you to give this short book a read and come out the other side not agreeing that the solution to Congressional gridlock is to abolish elections.
This list is arranged in the order I read them. It does not include graphic novels which I discuss further below. Recommended books are starred.
I picked this one up thinking it would be little more than an adult-appropriate Dungeons & Dragons-themed graphic novel, but it turned out to be much deeper than that.
The characters in the book experience a quasi-Groundhog Day existence. There’s a never-ending dungeon with monsters, treasures, and a tavern where they can celebrate their victories. If they die, they return to the start of the dungeon. However, the stakes of their existence are nil, and after several adventures, they question their purpose.
The sections in this omnibus take each character’s story deeper, revealing that there is more to this adventure than meets the eye.
I’m selecting it as my favorite graphic novel of the year because the omnibus surprised me so much. I generally had no idea where each story was going.
This wordless graphic novel tells the story of a man who leaves his family behind in a dangerous country so he can make a start for them in a new land. Its use of “gibberish” symbols for writing and language, its otherworldly architecture, its alien food, and its alien creatures capture (I have to assume) the isolation and out-of-placeness of being an immigrant. By committing to the fantastic elements of his world, Tan makes the immigration story universal, bypassing the prejudices and bigotry that can quickly turn empathy into politics.
The art in this graphic novel is (as it must be in a wordless book) stupendous. Every page is a delight, every pencil stroke, every shadow. Next time you’re in a library or killing time in a bookstore, find this one, sit down in a comfortable chair, and allow yourself to arrive in this intimately drawn, strangely familiar world.
This list is arranged in the order I read them. Recommended books are starred.
Thanks for checking out the books I read this year. I hope you’ve found a few books you can add to next year’s list.
From The House Freedom Caucus push to diminish the imperial speakership:
As Republicans head into the new year with a looming razor-thin majority in the House, …a group of GOP representatives often viewed as “far right,” “radical” or even a threat to democracy…are leveraging their votes for speaker to push for the diminishment of the imperial speakership and a return of power to individual members and committees.
And they’re absolutely right.
The majority of American sports leagues limit what they pay their players. The NFL, NHL, and MLS have “hard caps” that teams cannot go over, while the NBA’s “soft cap” penalizes teams that exceed it.
Major League Baseball doesn’t have a salary cap, which is why we see such obscene payrolls in baseball. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, had a total payroll of $260 million in 2022, which means they spent more money on their 40-player roster this year than the entire state of Vermont did on special-education ($213 million).
Freddie Freeman received a team-high $27 million from the Dogers in 2022.
Even with its hard cap, the NFL had a total payroll of about $6 billion. To put that in relative terms, the NFL’s payroll was higher than or comparable to the 2021 annual spending of four states: Delaware; South Dakota; Vermont; and New Hampshire. There are 1,696 players in the NFL; 1.3 million people live in New Hampshire.
Of course, if NFL owners are spending that much money on players, how much more must they be making on the backs of those players?
The most profitable team in the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys, have an operating income of over $280 million. They’re also the most valuable team at $8 billion. If Jerry Jones, the Cowboys owner, sold today, he would be able support the entire state of Delaware and still have about $4 billion left over to open the “Whites Only” high-school of his youthful dreams.
Salary caps in sports are intended to ensure parity across the league. No offense against Green Bay, Wisconsin, but without a salary cap, there’s no way a city of just over 100,000 people could generate enough revenue to compete for players against bigger markets such as Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, or Chicago. Thankfully, as a result of the salary cap, no one can predict what will happen on any given Sunday and a small city like Green Bay can afford the highest paid player in the NFL.
But let’s go back to Jerry Jones. According to Bloomberg, the Cowboy’s owner was worth roughly $11.5 billion in Dec. 2022. That’s a $2.5 billion dollar increase from a year earlier. Mr. Jones’ income in 2022 was more than 165,271 times the median U.S. household income.
According to Forbes, Mr. Jones isn’t even in the top 40 richest people in America.
Elon Musk lost more money per minute in 2022 than nearly three median American households earn in a year.
Elon Musk, the richest person in the United States according to Bloomberg, lost $107 billion in 2022 (he actually lost $4 billion just in the hours it took me to write this article!).
Don’t feel too bad for him though; Mr. Musk is still doing fine with a valuation of $164 billion (as of this moment, anyway).
If we try to put Mr. Musk’s loss in more relatively down-to-earth terms, his wealth decreased $203,442 per minute, every minute, this year. His minute-by-minute loss was almost 300% of the median U.S. household income — in other words, Mr. Musk lost more money every minute than the combined yearly income of nearly three median American households.
Guatam Adani, the third-richest person on Earth, had the highest year-to-date change in 2022 when he increased his fortunes by $48.7 billion. Mr. Adani owns the largest port operator in India, as well as the largest closely-held thermal coal producer and largest coal trader. His yearly increase was over a million times greater than the median U.S. household income.
Mr. Adani is an Indian industrialist, however, so we should compare his income to his fellow citizens, the median of whom makes less than US $3,400 a year.
Compared to his countrymen, Guatam Adani made 14 million times what the median Indian household made in 2022.
These numbers make no sense. I don’t care what Mr. Adani or Mr. Musk bring to the table, they are not (as individuals) worthy of their wealth. As Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has argued, every billionaire is a policy failure.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tried to address that failure by proposing (in the press, not in the Congress) a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes above $10 million. Millionaires would send the feds ¢70 of every dollar they earn above $10 million (while still paying 10% on their first $19,400; 12% between $19,401 and $78,950, etc., all the way up through the various tax brackets).
No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, 2020
If Mr. Adani paid taxes in the United States under Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s plan, he would still have taken home roughly $14 billion of the $48 billion he made this year. That’s more than the state budgets of Vermont, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined.
The $34 billion the government received from this one individual could cover the expenditures of 20 different states.
Mr. Musk complained of having to pay the world’s largest tax bill in 2021 when he (reportedly) sent the federal government $11 billion.
I’m all for the richest man in America paying the highest tax bill ever, but like those sports-team owners carrying those obscene payrolls — if that’s what he paid taxes, how much richer must he actually be?
I’m a fan of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but I don’t agree with a 70% marginal tax rate. It institutes a soft cap. The nation needs a hard cap.
Between the day the U.S. formally entered a lockdown (March 18, 2020) and the day the U.S. passed one million deaths due to COVID-19 (May 4, 2022), U.S. billionaires increased their worth (as a group) by $1.71 trillion.
Seriously: you can’t even imagine a trillion.
In June 2022, the left-leaning (but factual) Institute for Policy Studies reported that the wage gap between CEOs and median US workers jumped to 670-to-1 (49 of the 300 firms they studied had ratios of over 1,000-to-1). For every $1 a median worker made, a CEO brought home upwards of $670. Only six of the firms studied had pay gaps of less than 100-to-1.
In another report, the Institute demonstrated how several states (and countries) actually have laws on the books to help these billionaires “avoid federal taxation, cheating the U.S. out of revenue with which it could combat poverty or invest in infrastructure.”
More than half of the states mentioned in the report have regressive tax policies, cutting taxes on the wealthy and forcing the poor to pay taxes on a disproportionate share of their income. The poorest 20% of households in South Dakota, for example, pay about 11.2% of their income in taxes, while the top 1% of South Dakotans paid about 2.5%.
The richest of the rich not only have more money than they need but actively conspire to keep what they have despite what our democratic republic requires of them.
These selfish assholes don’t deserve to keep the 30% that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez allows them.
There’s no reason to allow billionaires to exist. Hell, there’s barely a reason to allow millionaires to exist. If an individual can’t satisfy their needs and wants on $1 million a year, then those needs and wants are probably immoral.
I’m willing to grant that a million dollar limit is a radical suggestion in capitalist America, so I’ll judiciously allow our top earners a maximum income of $10 million a year. They’ll just have to send ¢70 of every dollar over $1 million to the feds, and once they hit $10 million, every extra $1 is now ours.
If the US implemented such a drastic (but reasonable) policy, it would be normal to wonder what would happen to the country’s revenues. They wouldn’t include, for example, an $11 billion check from Mr. Musk.
But you also have to wonder how it would affect the country’s outlays. 40% of the 300 firms studied by the Institute for Policy Studies received federal contracts in 2021 totalling over $30 billion. Some of that $30 billion went to the outlandish salaries and bonuses of those firms executives.
Just like in the professional sports leagues, the intent of a national salary cap is to spread the wealth.
According to Salary.com, Walmart Inc.’s CEO made over $21 million in 2021, its CEO of Sam’s Club made over $12 million, and both its CEO of Walmart US and its Global CTO made over $11 million each. Its median (median!) employee pay, however, was only $20,942; half of all of its workers made less than that. Walmart’s CEO made $1,078 for every $1 its median (median!) worker made.
Walmart paid its CEO $1,150 for every $1 it paid to the bottom 10% of its associates.
If $11 million of the $21 million Walmart paid to its CEO would be sent directly to the feds, plus $6.3 million of the $9 million between $1 million and $10 million, it wouldn’t make sense for Walmart or its CEO to agree to his contract. Instead, the company would (hopefully) divert those millions back to the lower half of its other 2.3 million employees (more than half of whom, remember, make less than $20,000 a year).
You can think of this as a new form of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economics (a.k.a., supply-side economics) posits that allowing the rich to keep their money will lead them to invest in their workers and research and development, creating new jobs — in other words, the wealth of the rich should trickle down to the average American.
Unfortunately, trickle down economics underestimated the power of greed. It also forgot that things only trickle down after they fill up a limited container; otherwise, they just keep growing.
In my version of trickle down economics, the maximum limit is $10 million, with money pouring out faster and faster as soon as it breaks $1 million. Extend this idea to corporate profits in general, and all of sudden, the nation itself, and all of its workers, will become as successful as the NFL.
I run a Dungeon & Dragons campaign for four students that meets for two hours a day, two days a week. Our campaign takes place in my home-brew world, Migia.
I don’t have the time or the skills to map a logical geography for a whole world, so I used the open-source Fantasy Map Generator created by GitHub user Azgaar, a JavaScript wizard from Richmond, Virginia, to generate and tweak a world map for Migia.
The generator allows you to customize place names, stylize the design, focus the map on political borders, biomes, cultural zones, religions, etc., and render it as a flat map, a 3D scene, or a globe.
From there, the Internet offers a plethora of D&D-focused generators to help me bring Migia to life. There’s the city map generator, the dungeon generator and cave generator, the random encounter generator, the side quest generator, the backstory generator, the NPC generator, the fantasy name generator, and a whole list of auto-roll tables that will generate everything from a “breakfast at a traveler’s inn” to “resurrection consequences.” On days I prefer rolling dice to pressing buttons, I head over to the D100 tables on DNDSPEAK.com for inspiration.
Generators have been around as long as D&D has. Computers may make them easier and faster to use by combining a slew of tables into one button push, but at bottom, most generators are just the lists of tables Dungeon Masters find in the official rule books or create on their own.
In other words, generators are not artificial intelligence but glorified spreadsheets.
In September, one of my D&D buddies added the Midjourney Bot to our Discord chat server. You enter a few words in the chat, and the bot will create an original image based on your prompt using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
I started using it to create images of non-player characters in the campaign.
Take the image of the harengon, for example (a harengon is a kind of rabbit-like creature). I prompted the bot to create “a ferocious rabbit standing on the edge of a cliff with a sword in her hand.” After about a minute, Midjourney Bot provided me with four drafts based on the prompt.
From there, I selected the draft in the bottom right and told the bot to “upscale” it. A minute later, I had the final image of my harengon. The upscale added brush strokes and more detail across the entire canvas. I could have continued to tweak, but the image served my needs, so boom…two minutes after having the idea for a ferocious rabbit sword fighter, I had a picture I could base the doe on.
The results of my various prompts were interesting and captured the vibes I intended (e.g., “a female elf with long white hair and dark skin standing in the center of a cloud made from daggers”), but they lacked the details that I need to really dig into their characters.
Then I realized that I could use the word “portrait” in my prompts to force the bot to create more realistic images of my NPCs.
For the last few months, whenever I’ve needed an NPC for the campaign, I type a few words into Midjourney Bot that summarize the kind of character I’m looking for and add the word “portrait.” A couple of minutes and a few drafts later, I’ve got an image I can show my players to help them imagine the individuals they encountered during the campaign.
A few weeks after I started using Midjourney, I decided I could use it to create illustrations of the previous D&D session’s scenes.
Most D&D campaigns last weeks, months, years, and sometimes decades. When you sit down with your friends (or students) for a session, there’s usually a few minutes of recap (“Last time on Dungeons & Dragons…”) to remind everyone where we left off.
How much cooler would those recaps be if I could throw in an illustration or two of where they were or the monsters they were still facing?
Thanks to the Midjourney artificial intelligence image creator, my D&D campaigns became much more visual.
I use Craft to manage all the information I need for Migia. Craft is like a note-taking app on steroids. I discovered it a few months back (long after Apple named it the “2021 Mac App of the Year”), and it’s the first app in a long time that I loved using. I immediately converted 90% of my document-creating/managing tasks to Craft; months later, I haven’t looked back (I really should write a blog post about it; it’s so good).
A couple of weeks ago, the folks behind Craft added GPT-3 to the app, calling the feature the “Craft AI Assistant.” As Craft wrote in their announcement, “We believe that GPT-3, one of the most impressive AI systems ever built, which applies machine learning to understand questions and generate human-like text, has now reached the point where it’s more than just a novelty.”
I tried it out — “Generate a list of blog post ideas” — but didn’t really see a way to integrate it into my daily habits, so I moved on with my life.
But on Wednesday this week, I found myself behind the 8-ball for this week’s D&D session with my students. The adventurers were on a ship on their way to a pirate haven named Maroon Cave, about 200 miles off the coast. I knew a giant shark was about to attack them (I’d ended the last session by playing the theme to JAWS), but if they made it past the shark, I didn’t know what they’d find at the pirate haven.
With less than an hour to prep, I opened Craft, brought up the Assistant, and asked it to “write a 400 word history of a pirate haven named Maroon Cave.”
Within seconds, the Craft AI Assistant had written an entire history, explaining why it was named Maroon Cave (from the French word for “fugitive”) and why pirates were safe there. It also attached famous pirates such as Blackbeard to the history, provided details on two specific events that occurred there, and summarized what the cave is used for today (“a popular tourist attraction”).
I couldn’t use all of that in my campaign, but after a few tweaks (French became Elvish, for example, and Blackbeard became a goblin pirate queen; plus, I deleted the section on it becoming a tourist spot), it was perfect.
Next, I needed a popular location at the pirate haven, a tavern where the adventurers could go to find the information that brought them to the island in the first place.
After a quick stop at the tavern name generator, tweaked with the help of some students who were in the room with me, I asked the Craft AI Assistant to “write a biography of a dwarven woman who runs a tavern named the Tipsy Turtle on an island that serves as a pirate haven.”
The Assistant created a story that begins, “Lydia, or ‘Lyd’, is a dwarf who runs a tavern, the Tipsy Turtle, on Maroon Cave. The cave is ruled by the law of the sea – piracy. Lyd, however, brings a touch of stability to this dangerous place.”
First, note how it recognized I wanted the tavern to be on Maroon Cave. I didn’t tell it that. It picked up the information from the other notes in my app.
It continued the story, “She arrived at the cave roughly 15 years ago as the young lover of the infamous pirate queen, Captain Aurora. After Aurora’s disappearance, Lyda decided to stay on the island. Seeing the need and the potential for profit, Lyd decided to build a tavern, and it quickly became a popular gathering place for the locals, as well as for pirates who passed through.”
It wasn’t perfect. I had to edit, tweak, and create D&D-specific details for Lyd. I gave her a dwarven last name (Trueboots), determined her alignment, gifted her a few stats unique stats (+5 to Charisma checks), and figured out her personality traits. Still, by starting with the story created by the Craft AI Assistant, I turned what could easily take 30 minutes into a five-minute task.
From there, I popped into Discord, submitted a similar prompt to the Midjourney Bot that I gave to GPT-3 (“a dwarven woman who runs a tavern on a pirate haven”), and two minutes later, I had a portrait of Lyd to help my students bring her to life.
There’s a lot of controversy around these AI assistants. Artists and illustrators are rightly crying foul because the images the bots come up with have, at their origin, unique works of art that can be found on the Internet. They also work at a high enough quality now to replace the need for human illustrators and artists, and like the Luddites of yore, the skilled workers feel undervalued and dismissed.
Meanwhile, the word-generating AI bots will make teaching students how to write essays incredibly problematic. It’s too easy for an unscrupulous teenager to generate an original report on whatever topic their teacher asks for. These things can create titles (see the one that accompanies this post) or analyze the theme of The Scarlett Letter:
The theme of The Scarlet Letter is that of the consequences of sin and guilt. The novel examines how individuals respond to these consequences, and how societal norms dictate how we process guilt and the importance of justice. In the novel, Hester Prynne wears the scarlet A (for adultery) as a badge of her shame and is ostracized by her Puritan community for her actions. The novel examines themes of confession, repentance, and how the truth is often obscured by the judgment and prejudice of others. It also speaks to the power of secrecy and the importance of owning up to one’s mistakes in the face of public scrutiny. Ultimately, it reminds us that everyone is capable of sin, and that it is important to be forgiving and understanding instead of harsh and judgmental.
– Craft AI Assistant
There are real consequences to these technological advancements, ones that will not always be helpful to humanity.
I get that.
But I’m also a busy and stressed Dungeon Master, and if these things can make that role more manageable and fun, then I’m ready to roll.
My wife and I didn’t watch too many shows released this year. We caught up on old shows we hadn’t seen yet (e.g. Yellowstone) and chased them with faithful sitcoms (e.g. 30 Rock). Separately, I started a bunch of 2022 shows but due to … you know, “life” … I haven’t finished them yet (e.g. House of Dragons, Rings of Power, Sandman).
Of the shows I did finish, here are my top five.
In 1965, Bill Cosby was already a successful stand-up comedian and was just about to become the first Black man in American history to star in the lead role of a nationally-broadcast television drama. He was also already a sexual assaulter.
By the time the accusations against the man who would become known as “America’s Funniest Father” came to light in 2014, Cosby had committed at least 60 instances of rape, drug-facilitated sexual abuse, sexual battery, child sexual abuse, and sexual misconduct. He had even terrorized young women who appeared on his massive hit sitcom, The Cosby Show, women those of us who grew up in the 1980s still remember seeing on TV.
In short, Bill Cosby was a monster.
In W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series for SHOWTIME, we learn the man’s history of violence, but we also learn the ways he contributed to the growth and development of Black America. Bell tells the full story in all its complexity, showing why Bill Cosby really is, as Philadelphia Magazine described him, “Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde.“
This is what documentaries were invented for. Bell doesn’t provide any easy answers. His series shows that humans are messy and complicated and can simultaneously contain the worst and best of our nature.
He was right. We need to talk about Cosby, which is why you need to watch this show.
My wife is from the suburbs of Chicago. I’m from the suburbs of Boston. The first time our families met was at our college graduation party. Her father prepared Italian beef for everyone. After tasting it for the first time, my brother said (not within earshot of my future father-in-law), “Meh. It tastes like Steak-ummms.”
And thus was declared the regional war between Boston-style roast beef and Chicago-style Italian beef.
For the record, I love them both.
I also loved The Bear, FX’s anxiety-inducing series focused on the story of a world-renowned chef who inherits an Italian beef joint in Chicago after its owner, his older brother, kills himself. The series focuses on his attempts to make changes to the restaurant while also respecting its traditions and the people who work there, most of whom he’s known since he was a kid.
But more than just a workplace dramedy, The Bear explores panic and grief as the main character, his sister, and crew deal with the loss of the brother and boss who inspired, angered, protected, and loved them.
The casting is perfect, with no weak link among them, and the pacing of the episodes is fantastic, giving viewers just enough of each character to sense their heart and humanity without (d)evolving into an anthology show (see Atlanta).
Should you watch The Bear if you haven’t yet? Yes, chef.
Despite being a die-hard Dungeons & Dragons player and dungeon master (sometimes playing in three different games per week and going on five or six years of using D&D in the classroom with my students), I do not listen to or watch Critical Role, the most successful D&D-focused podcast on the Internet with Twitch episodes that regularly draw in half a million viewers per week.
Despite not knowing anything about the world or storylines of Critical Role, I thoroughly enjoyed their animated series, The Legend of Vox Machina, on Amazon Prime.
You probably know the basic plotlines of a typical Dungeons & Dragons campaign. A small group of adventurers go on a quest to kill a dragon, find a jewel, save a princess, stop the goblin king, etc. They use special abilities and weapons to overcome their foes, solve mind-bending puzzles, and avoid death-inducing traps. Plus, there’s magic.
But unless you’ve played a game of Dungeons & Dragons, you might not know the experience is typically wildly chaotic and filled with obscene language, rampaging violence, and a dragon’s hoard of double-entendres. On the other hand, players often care deeply about their characters, and they’ll genuinely wrestle with certain decisions, such as whether to sacrifice their character for a compatriot or go against their principles to avoid betraying a friend.
The Legend of Vox Machina does a fantastic job of recreating what it feels like to sit down at a table with some of your funniest and weirdest adult friends and play a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Combine its perfect tone with talented voice actors, a massively experienced dungeon master, and high-quality animation, and you’ve got an almost perfect show.
I can’t wait for Season Two.
First, it’s just nice to see Adam Scott working. I’ve been a fan since the 2007 HBO series Tell Me You Love Me (canceled after one season) and became an even bigger fan thanks to 2009’s Party Down (canceled after two seasons). When he showed up as a regular on NBC’s Parks & Rec in 2010, I thought the same thing I thought in 2022: It’s nice to see him working.
What’s better, though, is to see him working on something so good. Adam Scott’s comedy chops ingratiated him in the Adult Swim universe, which is fine but not something I watch much. His affability also led to a stint as a game show host.
But to see him as the lead character on a high-concept, expertly written, wonderfully cast, sci-fi-influenced, suspenseful drama that kept viewers surprised all season long was just a pure delight.
Of course, there was more to Severance than Adam Scott. He was joined onscreen by the always incredible John Turturro, whose character enjoys a heartwarming relationship with a character played by the surprisingly delightful Christopher Walken. The other two main characters — played by Britt Lower and Zach Cherry — round out our heroes, and each of them is given enough focus to make it a true ensemble. Then we get Patricia Arquette as one antagonist and the incredible Tramill Tillman as the other, both of whom brought so much tension to the screen.
Season One ended on a huge cliffhanger. I’m excited to see how its creator will surprise us next.
This is simply the best show on television right now.
Every episode hits just right. Some of them make you laugh. Others bring tears to your eyes. Most of them do both. Each of the four main characters is perfect, and every supporting character makes you want a spin-off show that focuses exclusively on them.
Whether it’s an episode about a reservation police officer being accidentally dosed with acid and stumbling upon a secret society of fish-fuckers out in the woods or a bottle episode where the entire community rallies around a teenage girl whose grandmother and lone caretaker is dying in her bed, this series about four Native American teenagers dealing with the suicide of their leader and best friend is as good as it gets.
Several times during the season, my wife or I would ask the other, “Which character is your favorite?” And every single time, it’s an impossible question to answer. Each one is so freakin’ good and played so freakin’ well that to choose an answer would be disrespectful.
For example, one of the episodes this season focused on Cheese. His uncle (whom he lived with) got arrested for growing weed, so the state sent him to a boy’s home run by Marc Maron. Each of the characters in the boy’s home, including Marc Maron’s, was played perfectly by the actors, and they each explored the humor and the pathos of their small parts. Meanwhile, the actor who plays Cheese nailed every scene. The character is lovely and sweet without being cloying or losing his edge (gotta love a character who is thoughtful enough to introduce himself with his pronouns while also wearing a GWAR shirt) that at the end of the episode, it only makes sense to say Cheese is my favorite character.
But then in another episode, the actress who plays Elora pulls off a single moment — the moment when she realizes her grandmother has died (note the change in her expression at 1:07) — with such subtlety, grace, and…well, truth…that I made my wife rewind the scene and watch it again. How could she not be my favorite character?
But then there’s Willie Jack, whose depth, loyalty, and “realness” are unparalleled, not to mention Uncle Brownie, Big, Mose & Mekko, and all the wonderful aunties. How can a person choose a favorite from this incredible bounty of talent?
I will say, however, that I find myself giddy whenever we get a scene with the spirit guide.
I love this show, these characters, and these actors so much. And you should too.
