Books in Early 2025
May. 2nd, 2025 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Weird Accordion to Al by Nathan Rabin – An examination of each of Weird Al’s songs on all of his albums in order; which in practice means some combination of Al trivia, music trivia, random recollections by the author, and made-up nonsense masquerading as one of the other three. (Which, honestly, gets a bit repetitive over the course of the book, because there are only so many things to say and he wants to praise 90% of the songs.) An entertaining bit of nostalgia that reminded me that there are a lot of deep cuts I hadn’t listened to in years, but not actually recommended for anyone who isn’t already an Al superfan. (If you don’t know the songs already, the discussions of them often don’t make much sense.) It also reminded me how little time I spent on most of Straight Outta Lynwood and Alpocalypse compared to everything that came before them—despite ostensibly being musically stronger (and more popular), they were parodying an era of music I had less interest in. It’s interesting that while some of Al’s themes over 15 albums are obvious (food, TV), you don’t realize some of the others until they’re pointed out to you, like the juxtaposition of fond nostalgia and gory violence, or the love songs dominated by crazy stalkers. And there are very few songs that mock the original song or artist, though the handful there are were pretty popular and generally well-received. Al deserves and receives a lot of credit for an amazing career, performing skill, and creative output; but this book got repetitive in its attempts to be thorough and suffered for it.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick - I read this for work; it’s written by a business school professor for a business school (or wanna-b-school) audience, which means he doesn’t actually understand the technical level of most things and instead takes a very “treat the symptoms” approach to dealing with AI. He wants to encourage you to try using it for everything on the hope that it’ll make some things easier/better; and he wants to encourage you to believe the illusion that AI is “intelligent” because that’ll make you use it more. (He’s in the group of people who get freaked out by how “human” AI can sound, despite clearly understanding that it sounds that way because it’s mimicking humans; and can turn on a dime from admitting that there’s no “there” there to treating it like an intern.) On one level, this is probably decent business advice, because the technology is going to keep coming whether we like it or not, so you might as well try to find ways to use it to make your life easier. On the other hand, most LLMs are resource-intensive plagiarism bots and none of them are actually intelligent, and encouraging anyone to think they can replace humans (which is what treating them like an “alien intelligence” does) is both bad for business and bad for society. Oh, and he has the delusion that companies care about their employees and will use AI to “assist” workers rather than cutting any and all of them as soon as AI can pretend to do their jobs, so there’s that.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin – A collection of short stories set in her sci-fi “Hainverse;” most of them explorations of life on certain planets where conditions have driven human society to develop differently. Credit to her writing style that even the stories I thought were meandering and over-written I still cared enough about the characters that I stuck with them. (The woman had an understanding of people and an ability to present their rich inner lives that was light-years beyond any of her contemporaries.) It’s particularly interesting that on LeGuin’s worlds, it’s generally a (relatively minor-seeming) difference in biology (or even sociology) that drives the thought experiment rather than any technology. Two of the stories take place on O (where society is divided both by gender and by “moiety” and a marriage is four people) and they should be taught in schools as a deconstruction of the gender binary. Honestly, so much of what she wrote should be seminal texts on gender and sexuality, but we’re in a regressive swing where her acknowledgment that teenagers are sexual beings would get her tarred and feathered by the left; and the casual bisexuality (and often polyamory) in her works makes her terminally Woke. But I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of this bundle of her books.
Warlock: The Pretension by M. Charles – The same guy who put out the Book of Spheres last year has put together an “in-universe” preview 666th edition of the Black Dog Games Mage-equivalent game Warlock: The Pretension, featuring the newest practitioners of Magicque and their factions for the modern era, including (serial-numbers-filed-off) Ghostbusters, Harry Potter wizards, Mortal Kombat characters, magical girls, and Juggalos. Rather than go super in-depth, it’s a series of previews of various books in the line, giving them the opportunity to skewer all the different factions. Then there’s the “in-universe” parody of the parody (Merlin: The Inception), just to make it more ridiculous. It does kinda lose the plot after a while (it gets up its own ass in a very appropriately pretentious way), though it circles back to a H.O.L. reference, which I can appreciate. If you don’t know Mage at all this won’t make much sense, but for those of us who played the game extensively in the 90s and also know the 20th Anniversary edition, it’s a hoot. And it’s peppered with “house ads” for other products. And the best actual rpg ideal to come out of the whole thing is that the Mummy-parody game line revolves around ancient aliens using their hypertechnology, which is absolutely brilliant.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell - A clever twist on a fantasy romance, as the main character is a shapeshifting, man-eating monster who falls in love with a human woman. It’s impressively lighthearted for the amount of death and violence that takes place, and while I saw most of the twists coming, it was generally by way of good foreshadowing rather than bad writing. I suspect there are bits in this that might squick some readers (among other things, the protagonist is constantly extremely aware of her organs and makes good use of her ability to eat people and then mimic them). But it ends happily and it’s something different and interesting in the queer fantasy romance genre.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle – Misha is a TV writer who gets commanded by the “suits” to kill off his two lesbian characters in his hit TV show. And then he starts getting stalked by characters from other horror films he’s written. This didn’t grab me the way Camp Damascus did; I kept drifting away to other books before I finally finished it. But I’ll give him credit that it’s clever and it really, genuinely understands modern AI and the way that modern corporations want to use it. (This is a sci-fi horror novel in the sense that it takes fears about modern society and potential technology and wraps them together into commentary. I think the only problem is that Tingle’s best character writing is autistic characters and Misha is nominally supposed to be neurotypical.)
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick - I read this for work; it’s written by a business school professor for a business school (or wanna-b-school) audience, which means he doesn’t actually understand the technical level of most things and instead takes a very “treat the symptoms” approach to dealing with AI. He wants to encourage you to try using it for everything on the hope that it’ll make some things easier/better; and he wants to encourage you to believe the illusion that AI is “intelligent” because that’ll make you use it more. (He’s in the group of people who get freaked out by how “human” AI can sound, despite clearly understanding that it sounds that way because it’s mimicking humans; and can turn on a dime from admitting that there’s no “there” there to treating it like an intern.) On one level, this is probably decent business advice, because the technology is going to keep coming whether we like it or not, so you might as well try to find ways to use it to make your life easier. On the other hand, most LLMs are resource-intensive plagiarism bots and none of them are actually intelligent, and encouraging anyone to think they can replace humans (which is what treating them like an “alien intelligence” does) is both bad for business and bad for society. Oh, and he has the delusion that companies care about their employees and will use AI to “assist” workers rather than cutting any and all of them as soon as AI can pretend to do their jobs, so there’s that.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin – A collection of short stories set in her sci-fi “Hainverse;” most of them explorations of life on certain planets where conditions have driven human society to develop differently. Credit to her writing style that even the stories I thought were meandering and over-written I still cared enough about the characters that I stuck with them. (The woman had an understanding of people and an ability to present their rich inner lives that was light-years beyond any of her contemporaries.) It’s particularly interesting that on LeGuin’s worlds, it’s generally a (relatively minor-seeming) difference in biology (or even sociology) that drives the thought experiment rather than any technology. Two of the stories take place on O (where society is divided both by gender and by “moiety” and a marriage is four people) and they should be taught in schools as a deconstruction of the gender binary. Honestly, so much of what she wrote should be seminal texts on gender and sexuality, but we’re in a regressive swing where her acknowledgment that teenagers are sexual beings would get her tarred and feathered by the left; and the casual bisexuality (and often polyamory) in her works makes her terminally Woke. But I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of this bundle of her books.
Warlock: The Pretension by M. Charles – The same guy who put out the Book of Spheres last year has put together an “in-universe” preview 666th edition of the Black Dog Games Mage-equivalent game Warlock: The Pretension, featuring the newest practitioners of Magicque and their factions for the modern era, including (serial-numbers-filed-off) Ghostbusters, Harry Potter wizards, Mortal Kombat characters, magical girls, and Juggalos. Rather than go super in-depth, it’s a series of previews of various books in the line, giving them the opportunity to skewer all the different factions. Then there’s the “in-universe” parody of the parody (Merlin: The Inception), just to make it more ridiculous. It does kinda lose the plot after a while (it gets up its own ass in a very appropriately pretentious way), though it circles back to a H.O.L. reference, which I can appreciate. If you don’t know Mage at all this won’t make much sense, but for those of us who played the game extensively in the 90s and also know the 20th Anniversary edition, it’s a hoot. And it’s peppered with “house ads” for other products. And the best actual rpg ideal to come out of the whole thing is that the Mummy-parody game line revolves around ancient aliens using their hypertechnology, which is absolutely brilliant.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell - A clever twist on a fantasy romance, as the main character is a shapeshifting, man-eating monster who falls in love with a human woman. It’s impressively lighthearted for the amount of death and violence that takes place, and while I saw most of the twists coming, it was generally by way of good foreshadowing rather than bad writing. I suspect there are bits in this that might squick some readers (among other things, the protagonist is constantly extremely aware of her organs and makes good use of her ability to eat people and then mimic them). But it ends happily and it’s something different and interesting in the queer fantasy romance genre.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle – Misha is a TV writer who gets commanded by the “suits” to kill off his two lesbian characters in his hit TV show. And then he starts getting stalked by characters from other horror films he’s written. This didn’t grab me the way Camp Damascus did; I kept drifting away to other books before I finally finished it. But I’ll give him credit that it’s clever and it really, genuinely understands modern AI and the way that modern corporations want to use it. (This is a sci-fi horror novel in the sense that it takes fears about modern society and potential technology and wraps them together into commentary. I think the only problem is that Tingle’s best character writing is autistic characters and Misha is nominally supposed to be neurotypical.)
