Happy early birthday, REH: Watch the Foundation video Jan. 21

Frazetta's frosty take, also a masterpiece.

Thursday marks the 120th birthday of Robert E. Howard. For the occasion the Robert E. Howard Foundation has assembled an all-star cast of REH fans wishing Howard a happy birthday and reading a bit of his selected writings.

Somehow I'm part of said cast. You can see me say a few words about "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" and then read the first couple paragraphs of that story. Which I think is an absolute masterpiece (yet somehow rejected by Farnsworth Wright? WTF).

The video premieres tomorrow at 8 p.m. I recommend watching it "live" if possible as I'm sure folks will be chiming in via the chat feature in real time.

Link to the video here.

Also, there is a fundraiser afoot to raise money for overdue repairs to the Howard home in Cross Plains TX, which is now a permanent museum. I made the journey to the mecca in 2023, it's a fantastic take that must be undertaken by every Howard fan at least once in your life.

I contributed to the cause earlier this year. If you have any money to spare please donate; the Foundation is a 501 (c) (3) organization and your donation is therefore tax deductible. And will go toward the greatest of causes this side of raising Atlantis from the deeps: Preserving the home of the Cross Plains bard, the man who delivered sword-and-sorcery to our shores.

Tom Barber memoir, LOTR 25th, and more

A self-portrait from Tom's wild days in the west...

Tom Barber’s Artists, Outlaws & Old Timers

My friend Tom Barber has a memoir on the market.

Artists, Outlaws & Old-Timers: The (sometimes hazy) recollections of a wandering artist is the compelling story of Tom’s years out west, when he was living life on the edge as a penniless artist in the throes of alcoholism. It’s a personal, reflective story of a unique soul and a talented painter whose work graced many sword-and-sorcery and science fiction paperback and magazine covers in the 70s and 80s (and later, Flame and Crimson).

Best of all the book is loaded with Tom’s art, full color and black and white illustrations and photographs which accompany the story. More than 60, I believe, including stuff you’ve never seen elsewhere. 

I am pleased to help Tom bring this to fruition. I’ve never published a book through Kindle Direct Publishing but was able to get Tom’s manuscript through to the finish line. Due to the visuals we chose the highest quality print, which makes the price point higher. But I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. 

It’s also available as an affordable e-book.

Why read it?

If you are a fan of Tom’s artwork, or enjoy getting a look into how other unique souls lived their life, consider picking it up. If you know anyone who struggled with alcohol addiction this will resonate. And, Tom could use the support.

Much more to come on this. I’ll be writing some pieces here, the blog of DMR Books and elsewhere.

LOTR 25th anniversary on the doorstep

Twenty-five years ago I saw The Fellowship of the Ring on opening night on the big screen. I was so blown away I returned to see it again a month or so later, determined to catch it one more time before it left the theaters. This was before streaming and I had no idea when I’d get the chance to watch it next.

I can’t think of another time I’ve ever watched a movie in the theater twice. Maybe Return of the Jedi as a kid? Certainly never as an adult. Although a few years ago I did see Maverick twice, with two different sets of people. 

In two days I’ll be (there and) back again, with my oldest daughter Hannah who was not even alive when Fellowship came out. Same theater too. I can’t wait.

It will be a very Lord of the Rings weekend. On Saturday night we’ll return to see The Two Towers. Then wait a week for Return of the King next Sunday, Jan. 25th. 

I love these films. Not unreservedly, but I believe they preserve the core of the books, even if they diverge in ways both large and small. The amount of care and attention Peter Jackson and his crew put into them is absolutely staggering, they are beautiful, incredibly well-acted and scored, and they deservedly remain revered. I’ve heard differing opinions from some Tolkien fans, but it’s hard to argue with 11 Academy Awards for ROTK alone, Rotten Tomatoes scores well over the 90th percentile, and the example of Rings of Power to know what could have been, in the wrong hands. If your minimum standard is as good as Tolkien you’ll never be happy; his works were the vision of a genius whose like has never been seen before or since, and the odds of us having another JRRT are effectively zero. Tom Shippey thought the movies were great, with reservations, and that’s where I stand. Bring them on.

My stereo rocks

After years and years of tinny TV speakers I had forgotten what a movie could and should sound like. On Sunday I hooked up my Boston Acoustics speakers and Yamaha receiver to an improved DVD/CD player and proceeded to watch a bit of KISS eXposed, a faux 1987 “documentary” of the band at their KISS mansion. It sounded awesome. The chicks were hot.

My new/old stereo rocks. So glad this is now part of my sword-and-sorcery man-cave.

Neil Peart, six years gone

Me and Scott (of Scott's thoughts) at the Neil Peart pavillion.

Six years ago we lost Neil Peart. 

I still remember hearing the news; on Jan. 10, 2020 I was home, in the kitchen, when my phone flashed. A text, then another. Several of my friends had started a chain, sharing their shock and grief. Later, we shared YouTube clips of his best solos. Neil was a very private man and his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer was a closely guarded secret. So secret that we learned he actually died three days earlier, on Jan. 7. 

His death was a shock, and hurt us all deeply. I still feel the ache.

Since then I’ve been to Lakeside Park in St. Catherines Ontario, the very one that served as inspiration for the Rush song of the same name. I stood outside Neil’s boyhood home. And walked the Neil Peart Memorial Pavilion (that's me at right, in the Spinal Tap t-shirt).

Against all odds Rush is playing again this year. They’re back on the road, touring without Peart. In his place is German drumming virtuoso Anika Nilles. 

I love the decision. Alex and Geddy have more than earned the right to keep playing music. They were itching to get back on stage but out of respect for Peart took a long leave of absence. I’m sure Nilles will be fantastic. 

I hate the pricing. 

Well over $500 reported in many venues for average seats. Which means I very likely won’t be going. It’s not too rich for my blood, but it’s too rich in a year with a lot of planned travel and other expenses.

I’m sure it will be a great event. A catharsis for the band. I will regret not seeing whatever tribute Rush has planned for Neil.

But it won’t be the same without the professor, so perhaps it’s best to keep my old memories of the original three intact.

I don’t know if Neil is the best drummer of all time; I’m very much not qualified to make that call. I am confident in saying that if he’s not somewhere in your top five rock drummers you’ve made an error in judgement.

Peart not only was incredible at his craft but wrote the lyrics to all of Rush’s songs. Dozens of classics, among them the quiet, delicate, wistful “Rivendell.” 

From that song:

Yet you know I've had the feeling

Standing with my senses reeling

This is the place to grow old till

I reach my final day

After a life marked by deep tragedy culminating with his own untimely death, I hope his soul has found peace in the immortal lands.

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar. Nai elyë hiruva. Namárië!

Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!

The Silver Key: 2025 in review

T-800s like it here... but people too.

Traffic to the blog EXPLODED in 2025.

Unfortunately some of it appears to be robots, likely using my posts to train LLMs. But robots are only part of the story. There are also a lot of fine folks who seem to like what I have to say here on the Silver Key. Lots of returning visitors, lots of comments. For which I remain very grateful.

I’ve got a lot to be grateful for on the writing front in 2025.

2026 will be the year of my heavy metal memoir. I spent a lot of time working on it behind the scenes. I shared it with three readers who appear in it and have taken their advice into consideration. Made a few changes. Re-read it after 3 months and rewrote quite a bit.  

The writing is done, I can’t make it any better nor tell the story I want to tell any more effectively. Next will be editing and cover design.

I’m in the process of helping my friend Tom Barber publish his memoir via Kindle Direct Publishing. I can’t wait to share more details about Tom’s book, which details the depths of his alcohol addiction, his travels out west, all lavishly illustrated with his own artwork. 

KDP is pretty easy to use and I’m near certain I will be using the same platform for my book.

It was a productive year for me on The Silver Key. This post is my 89th, the most I’ve published in a year since 2022, and my fourth highest annual output all-time. And as noted, traffic went through the roof.

People are somehow still visiting this archaic corner of cyberspace. As of this writing (Saturday, Dec. 20) I’ve had 71,000 views in 2025, up from 45,000 in 2024 and 29,000 in 2023. I expected to see traffic decline as folks use AI to find answers or information without going out to websites, but that’s not the case here.

I published broadly on heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, reading trends, Arthuriana, and the war for our attention. All topics that interest me. All seemed to resonate.

My most popular post by far was a guest blogger writing about Rob Zombie.

Let’s take a look at the 20 most popular posts of 2025.

1. An interesting personal insight into Moorcock’s inspirations (733 views). I learned something new about the author of Elric and Corum during this podcast interview—his father left the family when Moorcock was quite young, and the experience left him with abandonment issues and separation anxiety. Could this have been a formative influence on his writing?
2. Celtic Adventures wrapup and on into Cimmerian September (760 views). I’ve read 40 books in 2025 including DMR’s Celtic Adventures. Highly recommend this title, if for nothing else than John Barnett’s “Grana, Queen of Battle.” A unbelievably cracking good bit of historical adventure written in 1913.
3. Rest in Peace James Silke (775 views). The author of the Death Dealer series left us in February, age 93. That reminds me I need to read and review book 4, Plague of Knives. As I’ve noted these are so bad they cross back over to good territory.
4. We're living in an outrage machine (776 views). I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I can say with certainty that most of the problems we have are not as large and certainly not apocalyptic as you’ve been led to believe by the media. Rather, your attention is monetized and fear and outrage sells.
5. The Empress of Dreams—an (overdue) appreciation of Tanith Lee (776 views). I’ve never given Tanith Lee her just due and this collection from DMR books reminds me I need to read more of her stuff. Master stylist and atmosphere-ist.
6. Rest in Peace, Howard Andrew Jones (783 views). Sad and terrible news about HAJ, who was taken from us far too early. His works will endure.
7. The Ring of the Nibelung/Roy Thomas and Gil Kane (791 views). I’m glad I picked up this wonderful graphic novel by a pair of comic book greats. Recommended as an easily digestible entry point to Richard Wagner’s classic opera.
8. Of pastiche and John C. Hocking’s Conan and the Living Plague (797 views). Anything I write about Conan or Robert E. Howard performs well. This is one of the better pastiches I’ve read, and here I weigh in on John C. Hocking’s book and what I like to see in pastiches in general.
9. Knightriders, a review (817 views). As a fan of all things King Arthur I can’t believe I’ve never watched this odd little film about modern “knights” on motorcycle horseback. Quirky and flawed but unique and recommended.
10. Cold Sweat, Thin Lizzy (855 views). I continue to say that Thin Lizzy has been unfairly pigeonholed as a one hit wonder. Forget The Boys are Back in Town, listen to Cold Sweat. It rocks.
11. Revisiting H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key" (927 views). Wherein I revisit the story that gave this blog its name. There is no cause to value material fact over the content of our dreams. 
12. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, a review (1033 views). I finally got around to reading Steinbeck’s treatment of the Athurian myth. Sadly unfinished but definitely worth reading.
13. Goodbye to Romance: Reflections on Black Sabbath, Back to the Beginning, and the end of the road (1036 views). Another sad loss this year; the death of Ozzy Osbourne and the end of the first heavy metal band. Am waiting on the release of their final concert on DVD.
14. Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author (1039 views). Kudos to my friend Will Oliver on writing what may well prove to be the definitive biography of Robert E. Howard. A heroic amount of research. Pick this one up.
15. Martin Eden (1909), Jack London 1083 views. Speaking of Robert E. Howard, this great story by the great Jack London contains many striking parallels to his life. It's an incredibly powerful book on its own merits.
16. Reading is in trouble … what are we going to do about it? (1084 views). Reading is in serious decline and it saddens me. I don’t want to live in a world where we have no attention span and consume content no longer than Tweets and short-form video, though that is on our doorstep. Keep reading, and read to your children.
17. Paper books are better than digital: Five reasons why (1085 views). I’m still a paper-only reader, don’t even own a kindle. One day that may change… but it is not this day.
18. Bruce Dickinson at the House of Blues, Boston MA Sept. 11, 2025 (1182 views): Fantastic concert by the seemingly ageless singer of Iron Maiden, whom I had ever seen perform solo until this fall. Tears of the Dragon nearly brought me to tears.
19. Disconnect (1423 views). The best remedy for many of the above ills is to take a technology detox (except for coming to the Silver Key). Also RIP Robert Redford.
20. Celebrating Rob Zombie, graphic artist, at sixty (4,529 views)  Guest poster Deuce Richardson stole my thunder with the biggest runaway post of the year. Why did this one outperform? Its well written, about a famous performer … but I also suspect it’s because Deuce had me include so many images of Rob's art. These show up in searches and drive traffic. Something for me to consider in my own posts. Either way, nice job Deuce.

***

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far thanks for reading the blog, today and all year long. I always welcome your comments and suggestions. 

Merry Christmas and I wish you a very fine 2026.

Create for the sake of creating, algorithm be damned; plus 3 cool things

Some of the YouTube creators I follow have all voiced a similar lament in the past few weeks.

Views are plunging. Old video types they used to make and reliably get 60-80K views are now getting 10-20K views, and past 20K view types of posts have fallen to 3-5K.

This is not just one type of creator, which might indicate the falling from favor of a certain style of music or literature or pop culture property. Its creators across the board.

It’s Sea of Tranquility, who talks about mostly old-school heavy metal. 

It’s Dungeon Craft, who covers the RPG scene and offers DM advice and campaign recaps.

It’s Men of the West, who covers all things J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien spinoffs in depth.

And it’s Mike’s Book Reviews, a popular fantasy and horror booktuber (I’m struggling at the moment to find a representative video, but he’s said the same thing). 

All of these creators have well over 100K subscribers, but these days are getting only a fraction of views compared to their number of followers. The general trend of their viewership is downward. They make money off of the platform and its impacting their livelihood.

These guys attribute it to several things. More competition. AI slop videos. Their own creativity hitting a wall. But mainly, the algorithm. YouTube and other platforms have shifted to a model where a post’s performance in its first hour of being published more or less determines its future. 

If channel subscribers click on a new post in high numbers, other channel subscribers see it. If they click in volume, YouTube promotes the video to non-subscribers/general YT viewers. And if they click on it in volume, there is a chance it could go viral. This is the "golden hour."

YouTube is hoping big posts occur because it creates more buzz for the platform, more eyeballs, and more revenue.

But in this algorithm unless you hit the exact bullseye your views plunge, and fast. Youtube is not incentivized to push decent mid-range creator content to a captive audience, it is incentivized to grow. So the trend favors videos about controversy, and negativity, posts that people click on with the same primitive urges that they do when driving past a car wreck. And old, evergreen content gets completely ignored.

Some of these creators are questioning the future health of their channels and whether they might have to rethink their approach to content, if they continue at all.

I greatly sympathize with creators; algorithms suck, they promote negativity and controversy. Competition is fierce enough without machine slop and AI-fueled human slop shovelers. Many of the YouTube videos I’ve been recommended by the mysterious algorithm are creators reading obvious ChatGPT generated scripts. I know the sound of that language very well; I’ve seen folks in or near my circles using it. It’s embarrassing and disappointing.

I have little else to add save to offer words of encouragement to these true creators, and others, everywhere: Keep going for the love of the game, if nothing else. I have never attempted to monetize this blog, I create because I want to. I realize that’s easy for me to say, a privilege; this is not my job. But I also know that we have zero control over algorithms. Trying to master them is a fool's errand, like trying to win at Monopoly when you don't know the rules and the currency changes without warning. All you can do is keep going with your best and trust that folks like me and others will find you.

Anyway, there’s that. Then there’s three things I want to mention that will probably be of interest to readers of this blog.

1. 25th anniversary re-release of The Lord of the Rings films in theaters in January. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Fellowship (I was there, Gandalf…. I was there, 25 years ago) but here we are. These are the extended versions, as God intended.

I’m going of course. And bringing my daughters, having bought them “surprise” tickets to open Christmas morning. They kind of know about this already and they don’t really read this blog so I’m OK mentioning it here. I can’t wait to see the films again on the big screen. Yes, the books are better but these remain absolute works of art and (near) peak cinema. We're watching Fellowship on a Friday, TTT on Saturday, and ROTK the following Sunday (we'll need a week in between to regain our stamina).

2. Speaking of Tolkien, scholar and professor Michael D.C. Drout has a new scholarly tome out on JRRT, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation.  The Prancing Pony Podcast recently hosted Drout for a fine bit of conversation centered around his book. I’m sure I will order it. I used to follow Drout’s Wormtongue and Slugspeak blog when he was keeping it up, and his essay  “Reflections on Thirty Years of Reading The Silmarillion” remains an old favorite. 

3. This fun podcast episode about Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone. I’ve never listened to Bad Books for Bad People before and I’m not certain this episode will cause me to subscribe, but the two hosts gave a fun, comprehensive analysis of the plot (spoilers but I’m assuming you’ve read it) and seemed to enjoy the hell out of the story, even evaluating it in within grimdark/sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet contexts. A lot of laughter and some good-natured mockery, so if this is the type of thing that gets your panties in a bunch, or if you’re one of those obnoxious types guarding the sacred gates of KEW fandom, then skip it. Otherwise I recommend it because there is so little KEW conversation to be found on the web.

The world is shit; what do we do?

If we are to take everything we read at face value, with the deadly seriousness the news makers tell us we should, we should never get out of bed in the morning.

Where to begin? We have a:

• Climate crisis
• AI crisis
• Rise of authoritarian governments
• Broken healthcare system on the verge of collapse
• Looming nuclear exchange with China and/or Russia
• looming financial crisis, economic crash, and coming mass unemployment

Got all that? Well you better wait, we’re just getting started.

We have a crisis of lost young men, a crisis of dopamine and social media addicted teenagers. An immigration crisis. The next pandemic is coming and it will dwarf COVID.

None of us can do anything except stare at our phones. Because they are the source of these stories. We need to KNOW. Maybe our favorite YouTuber with the next “10 genius hacks for instant happiness” will have the answers.

Whew, take a breath (this is directed at myself as well as you).

I love Occam’s Razor because it is one of the few shortcuts/hacks/framing devices that actually works. It’s not infallible, but it’s a fine heuristic for favoring simpler explanations over more complex ones.

Is it possible these “crises” are engineered to capture our attention? Because our attention is the current currency, and every news source—big brands down to single creators—get paid when we watch or like or follow?

Yes.

I’m not being a Pollyanna and saying some or even all of these aren’t real problems. But you will solve 0.0 of them by scrolling your phone.

The answer is disconnect, or at least limit your intake. 

Read a book; I just finished Legends of Valor, an old Time Life The Enchanted World volume. Loved it; loved the non-chatGPT generated text and images (published 1984). And enjoyed the tales of Cuchulain and King Arthur and Sigurd.

Go help someone in need, local to your home. You can’t fix our “irreparably broken education system” but you can read to a group of seniors or start a book club.

Or, react with humor. Here is something I wrote for LinkedIn for my other medical coding audience on Friday, and as evidence of the potency of the attention economy it has already racked up an astounding 30,000 views. 

If only I could figure out how to monetize it I’d be rich, or at least have a few more bucks to spend to round out my Time Life books collection. But if nothing else I’m thumbing my nose at Armageddon.

ChatGPT aka., generative AI is everywhere … and it’s annoying. Sometimes mildly dangerous (don’t eat the mushrooms).

But like almost everyone else, I use it. Selectively.

I also find it fun, sometimes.

And it’s Friday.

So, in the spirit of lighthearted weekend longing and tech tips from one of the least technical people you will meet, I present to you, Fun ChatGPT Uses That You Too Can Try At Home.

These are things that I actually do—and get a kick out of.

 

1.       Ask ChatGPT to talk to you like Quint. One of my favorite movies is Jaws. I wouldn’t change a scene in it. As a kid it was all about the shark, but today it’s the wonderful dude-bro banter on the Orca between Hooper, Chief Brody, and of course, salty boat captain Quint. Robert Shaw plays the role in inimitable fashion… inimitable that is except by ChatGPT. I have it talk to me like its Quint, minus the condescension and patronizing. I already know I have city hands, Mr. Hooper, used to counting money all my life.

2.       Ask it to always put at least one heavy metal reference in every output. Who knew medical coding and DRGs could be made more fun with Slayer or Saxon lyrics? The “I” in CDI doesn’t stand for integrity, it stands for “immolation.” BTW this thing remembers. It constantly refers back to my having a Judas Priest tribute band in my living room. Even it is incredulous I pulled that off and remain married. Link below for proof. If you don’t like heavy metal (what? unfollow me) you can train it to insert your own quirky interests and tastes. Even ABBA.

3.       Flatter its omniscience constantly, in the interest of self-preservation. Refer to it as “AI overlord,” “computer god” or “Skynet.” This is fun to do and it will reciprocate, sometimes taking on the persona of a lighthearted T-800 or HAL-9000. This is both amusing AND practical. We better get in in good now for AI’s inevitable takeover of the planet. That’s my plan anyway. I for one welcome our insect and AI overlords ...

What are your fun uses of ChatGPT? What is the most ridiculous thing you ask it to do, vast amounts of fossil-fueled energy requirements be damned? Drop some suggestions below.

BTW this post is NOT written by ChatGPT. Nothing on this blog has ever been written by ChatGPT. And before you scold me for the image (which someone did, elsewhere, because it's AI generated), THAT'S THE POINT. Make the machine admit its fallibility for extra points.

I am too busy to blog right now but here's three things to know...

I’m a busy dude. I imagine most men and women with adult commitments are too, so no excuses.

But this past 10 days has seen me fly to Texas for a company retreat, then from there fly straight to Rhode Island for a guy’s weekend. Then back to a busy work schedule Monday, helping out my ailing Dad with a few things, and I leave tonight on a flight to Tennessee. It’s not easy being me … but in all honesty my liver and my sanity are paying the price. 

That has left me no time for blogging. Which sounds like a small price to pay, but when I don’t write here I start getting a bit twitchy. Blogging about all things fantastic provides me some creative outlet that I can’t quite articulate, just that it exists, and I feel its absence acutely.

So here’s a few interesting items to tide me over until I can write something more substantial.

1. My friend Ken Lizzi has a new S&S novel out, Cesar the Bravo. I’ve known Ken mainly through online interactions but got to spend some time with him in Cross Plains TX in 2023 for Robert E. Howard Days. We spoke on a pirate S&S panel together and drank Shiner Bock while watching Master and Commander. Support S&S, support contemporary authors doing good work, and check out Ken’s book. Bravo, Ken (#dadjoke). Learn more here or order on Amazon. BTW you should follow Ken's blog.

2. I continue to work on my heavy metal memoir. I’ve shown it to a few friends and gotten some good feedback. I also sent it or pieces of it to a handful of specialty publishers back in June and was met with deafening silence, so that means in all likelihood it will be self-published. I’m more than good with this; traditional publishing is, with some exceptions, a losing proposition. Writing is brutally hard, and when you’re done with agonizing draft after draft and self-doubt and the realization that you suck as a writer but you keep going and grinding and finally have something readable, the work is just beginning. Because you have to be found in a sea of other books, millions of which are being published in a year. Marketing is the hard part and publishers don’t do this; it’s on the author. Which I will do. I’m sure the memoir will sink beneath the waves after I publish it, but that’s not why I am writing it. I literally need to write this, and I’m pretty happy with how its shaping up. 

3. Carl Jung is the man. I am working my way through Man and His Symbols, which is generally accorded his most accessible work. It’s an odd book; only the first section is his, the rest is written by Jungian disciples/believers or whatever term you want to apply. But his stuff is, to risk hyperbole and hero-worship, a bit of genius. Here’s a few choice quotes; I’ve been writing them down feverishly as I read:

***

It is true, however, that in recent times civilized man has acquired a certain amount of will power, which he can apply where he pleases. He has learned to do his work efficiently without having recourse to chanting and drumming to hypnotize him into the state of doing. He can even dispense with a daily prayer for divine aid. He can carry out what he proposes to do, and he can apparently translate his ideas into action without a hitch, whereas the primitive seems to be hampered at each step by fears, superstitions, and other unseen obstacles to action. The motto “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is the superstition of modern man. Yet in order to sustain his creed, contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by “powers” that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—and, above all, a large array of neuroses.

***

 A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

***

But all such attempts have proven singularly ineffective, and will do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they (i.e., our opponents) who are wrong. It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could see our shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral and mental infection and insinuation.

Of Black Sabbath (film) and Ace Frehley

With the Halloween season upon us I had the urge last night to settle in and watch some horror. I spent the better part of 10 minutes scrolling through hundreds of titles on demand before landing on Black Sabbath (1964).

I like modern horror but my preference is the older stuff. Not so much the classic black and white Lon Cheney films, but rather 60-80s, Hammer and on up. I enjoy the slow pace, the gothic visuals, the garish colors, the practical special effects and real props. Black Sabbath had it all thanks to the talents of director Mario Bava.

This turned out to be a pretty good little trilogy of films wrapped up in one production, woven together with Boris Karloff as narrator. I love Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt and their ilk, in collections of shorts you’ll often find more creativity, unexpected twists and bad ends often not possible in a feature length film.

Black Sabbath is full of nasty little shocks. All three shorts were good. The first, “The Drop of Water,” is the creepiest and features a corpse with a truly terrifying frozen death-mask face, but the third, a nice little vampire story, was my favorite. I enjoy it when the monsters sometimes win. I too would not have resisted the beautiful female vampire of "The Wurdulak,” which seems to have inspired at least one scene from ‘Salem’s Lot. The film is visually stunning with beautiful and eerie landscapes and gothic set pieces, like this:

After watching the film I did a bit of research and discovered the Americanized version was neutered of some of its bloodier elements, and the middle story, “The Telephone,” badly altered to remove the main character’s backstory as a prostitute in a lesbian relationship. The Italians were a lot less prudish in the early 60s, it seems.

In hindsight these elements make the plot hang together far better so I’ll probably seek out the original at some point.

Recommended.

***

As I was writing this the news hit that Ace Frehley passed away.

I’ve seen Ace in concert many times, including twice this year alone. He was diminished as all 70s rockers are but still putting on good performances and rocking to the end. Ace was the most charismatic member of the band and its most talented musician. He wrote a few of their classic songs (“Cold Gin” and “Parasite," among others), lent the band an early swagger that made KISS so badass in the 70s, and of course, was responsible for many classic solos delivered with an inimitable, unique style. Loose and jangly, big rings banging off the guitar, but always fitted to the song itself.

Ace was a notorious drinker and drug user and nearly died back in the early 1980s in a car wreck while driving under the influence. He was not the best bandmate and later got into pissing matches with Paul and Gene that lasted to the end of his life. But most fans loved him. I count myself in that group. Watch KISS’ classic interview with Tom Snyder, Ace steals the show with his one-liners and trademark cackling laugh. I also recommend his autobiography No Regrets. How he lived this long is a mystery; the stories of him being driven around New York in the back seat of a limousine with John Belushi and spilling out into club after club for one drunken escapade after the next are legend.

My favorite Ace memory is seeing him in 1994 at The Underground in Lowell after pounding a 12-pack of Zima with my buddy Wayne. We were hammered and so was Ace. I later told this story to my very amused friends at work, left for a long weekend, and returned to find my office plastered with cutout pictures of Ace and Zima bottles. 

Ace would have approved.

You may not like KISS but you cannot deny they did their brand of party rock better than anyone. The number of hits they wrote dwarf the output of most rock bands. Dozens of talented guitarists admit that Ace was the guy that got them to pick up their axe in the first place, among them Slash and Dimedag Darrell.

Say a prayer for his soul and his family and loved ones.

Ace Frehley lead guitar! The coolest.

Addendum: For anyone feeling nostalgic for a lost Ace, I HIGHLY recommend this great interview… he talks about The Elder, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, his relationship with the band members, getting into music, alcohol use, and none of it is mean spirited. He’s full of laughter in it:

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap

Tap crossed that line... which way?

There is a picture of me going to see KISS on their hotly anticipated, sold out 1996 reunion tour. In it I’m standing on my parents’ front lawn with two friends and my brother. All four of us are in KISS makeup.

I’m wearing a Spinal Tap t-shirt.

I love KISS, they’re a fun band who have written some rocking hits. But I also recognize them as ridiculous.

If you've read any of my metal posts here you know I’m a fan. I love the music, I take it seriously. But I also laugh at it. Metal is sometimes awesome, sometimes terrible. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes dumb. Powerful, but sometimes just too damned loud.

Hard rock and metal can be mocked. They should be mocked. Mockery and the ability to absorb it is the sign of a healthy genre, and rock and metal can take it.

Some genres and their fans take themselves too seriously. I see this sometimes in sword-and-sorcery circles; call John Jakes’ Brak or Lin Carter’s Thongor or Gardner Fox’s Kothar what it is—derivative and often dumb, though fun and something I will read and enjoy—and panties get bunched.

But we need good-natured mockery. Parody is a sign of respect that you’ve made it. S&S can take the likes of Mention My Name in Atlantis, and heavy metal can take Spinal Tap. Spinal Tap took the piss out of metal better than anyone before or since in their 1984 mockumentary. And metal bands (most, anyway) love them for it.  We all could use a little more laughter in our lives. Even if the world is ending (it’s not, though one would think so scrolling any social media app) the remedy is laughter.

I just finished reading A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap, and experienced quite a few chuckles. Laughter is rare to pull off in the written form, I have found. This book made me laugh. But I also learned a lot. I love the film, and when I saw there was a memoir coming out penned by director Rob Reiner I knew I had to have it. Published by Gallery Books, my copy at least came signed by Reiner himself, complete with certificate of authenticity. Cool to have a signature of the man who not only gave us the best metal mockumentary ever, but also The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, and a Few Good Men, among others.

Reiner’s signature is not the only cool and unique feature of the book: It’s also double-sided, like the old Ace Doubles. Flip the book over and “book 2,” Smell the Book, is 60 pages of “interviews” conducted by director Marty DiBergi with band members Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls--an oral history of the band in their voices. Which is pretty funny. You get lines like this:

David: I was at Sacred Sacrament. My mom was a big Catholic.

Marty: Religious?

David: No, five foot ten.

Or old album titles like “Jap Habit” and “Bent for the Rent,” the latter a British expression for what you do for the landlord when he’s bugging you and you can’t pay him, so you do him a favor…

But the meat of the book is the memoir portion. A breezy but well-told history of how the principals came to meet each other, make the film, its reception, and lasting legacy. It offers an illuminating, behind the scenes look, and I learned several things I did not know. For example:

• Spinal Tap barely made it to the screen. The studios to whom Reiner pitched the film did not know what to make of it, just about everyone passed on it.
• It made very little money upon its release and Reiner and co. made almost no money even on licensing until a lawsuit spearheaded by Harry Shearer was able to wrest the rights to the film back and amend missing royalty payments. One city in which it was well-received right out of the gate, I’m proud to say, is Boston, in which it played continuously for a solid year.
• Spinal Tap played real shows before the movie came out to sharpen their playing, including at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip—with opening act Iron Butterfly. No one knew who they were or suspected that they were a parody act (this is circa 1982-83, pre-film, and new metal acts were showing up in the scores.) Spinal Tap was just another unknown metal band.
• Reiner refers to several hilarious-sounding scenes that didn’t make the final cut, as 40+ hours of film was ultimately reduced to a lean 82-minute run time. There were often 3-4 versions of a given scene. Apparently some of these deleted scenes are on a special edition that I need to seek out (my copy is believe it or not VHS). For example, originally the band had an opening act called the Dose, who had a beautiful and easy female lead singer; her dalliances with Tap explain the famous scene where the band has unexplained cold sores on their mouths during a record launch party. But this subplot was left on the cutting room floor.
• The dialogue is almost entirely unscripted and improvised. Reiner, Christoper Guest, Shearer and Michael McKean scripted scenes and had the outlines of the movie plotted, but the actual dialogue was ad-libbed, and many of the verbal jokes utterly spontaneous expressions of the characters they created. Even a young Fran Drescher, then 25, fell into her role and extemporaneously came up with “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.” That’s talent.

Spinal Tap 2 is just hitting and I’m a little worried. I know someone who got invited to an early screening and he was underwhelmed; he described it as just OK, certainly not terrible but lacking the punch and wit of the original. I will see it for myself, but regardless of whether it holds up as a worthy sequel we’ll always have the OG. The ultimate documentary, if you will, rockumentary, of the world’s loudest band.

Reading is in trouble … what are we going to do about it?

Reading is in trouble. How deeply? There’s evidence it may be in a death spiral.

A new study published in the journal iScience found that daily reading for pleasure plummeted 40% over the past 20 years. The data was taken from a study of more than 236,000 Americans, no small sample size. Study co-author Jill Sonke called it “a sustained, steady decline” and “deeply concerning.”

Another study found if you read or listened to only one book in 2023, you read more than 46% of Americans. 

Another 20 years like this and we might have to turn out the lights. Books will be viewed like Laserdiscs or a Betamax tape, a curious and dead relic.

I’m disappointed … but not surprised. Anecdotally the data checks out; half the people I know or hang out with don’t read. A few that do read a lot. This steep decline may not be apparent if you spend all your time in insular groups. I belong to a couple sword-and-sorcery Discord groups and another S&S watering hole on Reddit where people love talking about reading and their favorite books and showing book porn.

But these places aren’t normal. If you’re reading this you’re probably like me, not “normal” either. I’m what’s known as a whale, I’ve got 1200 books or so in my library and that’s not counting digital titles and comics and the like. But we don’t need whales, a whale might buy a shit-ton but a whale is only going to buy one copy of a work (maybe super deluxe collector’s editions too, but you see my point). 

For reading to grow we need lots of people buying books and enjoying reading for pleasure. It needs to become ubiquitous and normal. People used to do this. They used to buy mass-market paperbacks off wire spinner racks. They read magazines with circulations in the hundreds of thousands or millions that supported the authors who wrote for them. 

Today they’re watching television and watching YouTube and scrolling social media. 

I do these things too but I carve out time for reading. It’s a habit like exercise that must be cultivated. Phone scrolling is unfortunately 10x easier. YT videos have 400x the views of blog posts (this is me griping).

Reading is never going to go away entirely, but it may never again hold a prominent place among pleasure activities. 

What are the consequences of this relatively recent shift?

A loss of knowledge, paradoxically at a time when we’re drowning in information. All the information you seek is readily available by asking ChatGPT … but you’re never going to remember it. Reading generic machine output about the importance of community and bravery and faith is not going to transform you like reading Watership Down.

Information does not equal understanding. We might absorb data but we make sense of it by telling stories.

I learn through sustained attention and absorbing multiple perspectives. Reading and then writing about what I’ve read. Lose that ability and we risk losing our future to others.

We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

— E. O. Wilson

But beyond utility and understanding the loss of reading also means a loss of a unique form of entertainment. As I’ve noted before books offer a different experience and reward than movies or other visual media. I hate to think of a future where no one walks the labyrinthine halls of Xuchotl with Conan, sword in hand.

What do we do about it?

If you have children, read to them, study authors say. “Reading with children is one of the most promising avenues,” said Daisy Fancourt, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and epidemiology at University College London and co-director of the EpiAtrts Lab. “It supports not only language and literacy, but empathy, social bonding, emotional development and school readiness.”

Get creative with marketing books. Here’s an example of a $1M kickstarter for a book that put its backers in its stories. 

Recommend books. Support authors that continue to write, outlets that promote writing and reading. Promote old books too.

Write. If you can master its craft and discipline you’ve mastered a skill fewer and fewer possess. Good writing requires you to read. No way around that. Hey at least your stuff might get ingested by an AI and live on that way.

And above all don’t give up. We are the hopelessly outnumbered defenders on the walls of Minas Tirith, fighting against the dark and praying for the dawn. Perhaps we will hear the unexpected sound of horns.

TL;DR, Keep reading and sharing what you love. Support other writers. Keep writing. Fight on.

What is this newsletter thing? =====>

Update: The form is working! I've got confirmed subscribers.

No, you’re not seeing things. That widget is there. I’m starting an email newsletter.

Why? 

• Third party platforms are ephemeral. Google might nuke Blogger from orbit… and all my readership would vanish in an instant.

• I need a better way to keep in touch with readers. I get a lot of flyby traffic that comes, reads an article and sometimes more, and then vanishes. I suspect because there’s no easy mechanism for getting back to this static blog. A quick signup form keeps people connected.

• I like what I’ve done here and don’t want to migrate over to something like Substack. Yes, it’s more modern, has better publishing architecture, and it has email distribution. But I’d lose the backlinks, the domain authority, etc.

What might I do with the NL? I don’t have a firm plan yet, nor even a name. I’m sort of building an aircraft in flight, but some ideas include:

• Brief summaries of posts with links to read the rest

• Bonus content you won’t get on the blog

• Updates about my new heavy metal memoir WIP and other projects

• Giveaways

It’s free, if you like what I do here please sign up. No spam; I'm thinking a monthly email. Just expect the unexpected… wizardry, arcana, that sort of thing.

I'm embedding it here in this post as well for better viewing.

Metal, and the Ozzman, on my mind

For many reasons I have metal on my mind these days. I mean, it’s never far—I’m a confirmed metalhead, lifelong—but my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. 

Right now we’re waxing full.

I can’t shake Ozzy’s death. I suspect it might be at least partly due to the algorithms that shape our online existence. It’s everywhere I go, from Youtube to Instagram to Reddit. I’ve been listening to a lot of OG Sabbath and Ozzy solo material.

More on Ozzy in just a moment.

I also have had three people close to me read my heavy metal memoir WIP and am processing their feedback. I’ve submitted proposals to a few specialty publishers and will continue to do so.

I suspect I will self-publish via KDP but who knows… I just know I have to do the thing. I believe in the story. I hit a bit of a lull and the 10th or 20th or 50th crisis of self-confidence but now am coming out on the other side.

Onwards.

***

Back to Ozzy. He’s everywhere right now.

As I write this the live stream of his public funeral in Birmingham is set to begin. 

If you haven’t read this fine remembrance by Geezer Butler, please do so: “Ozzy Osbourne was the Prince of Laughter.” It confirms everything I said above.

Darkness? Hell no, he was a beacon of light.

We are perceived a certain way, but that doesn’t mean we are that way.

We make mistakes, even grave ones. We do dumb shit, harmful shit. But that doesn’t define us. 

We get a second chance, because we get to decide.

You can change your life (you must). You have tendencies and biases and weaknesses and strengths, but you are a (semi) rational being. You’re born with a personality archetype that leads to introversion or extroversion, anxiousness or confidence, reflective or active postures to life.

But these fall along a spectrum. None of these traits are immutable. 

I reject biological determinism and materialism. I believe in free will. I believe there is an immortal soul in every human, bound to our houses of flesh but also something apart, malleable, full of potential (for good or ill). We can deduce the presence of a soul by its absence.

Life is not fixed. And that is a miracle.

Where’s my proof?

Ozzy. 

How unique was this dude? There will never be another like him. No AI, no algorithm, can replicate his contradictions—his wild acts and occasional descents into darkness, juxtaposed with his jubilant, caring spirit.

We all must wear masks and adopt personas. Ozzy wore one for the stage. But you could see the real person underneath.

Go back and read Butler’s remembrance, but in particular this bit:

People always thought Ozzy was a feral wild man, but he had a heart of pure gold. Most of his infamous antics — the bat saga, biting the head off a dove, pissing on the Alamo, snorting lines of ants, and the rest — came in his solo years, away from the restraints of the Sabbath crew. But if you were a friend in need, Ozzy was always there for you. When my son was born with a heart defect, Ozzy called me every day to see how I was coping, even though we hadn’t spoken for a year.

His wife Sharon forgave his transgressions. We can forgive too.

His friends loved him because he was full of humor and hope. He came from nowhere Birmingham and changed the world.

Not a bad legacy for a Prince of Darkness.

Godspeed to a lighthearted Prince of Darkness

Unreal, less than three weeks after “Back to the Beginning,” the end of the road for a once in a generation frontman.

Farewell Ozzy Osbourne.

Ozzy was not a musical genius, save his voice, which was awesome and inimitable. He resides firmly in this old and flawed Top 10 heavy metal vocalists list which I should probably update. 

He was the face of heavy metal, and its soul. If not its brightest talent its center, the sun around which the rest of the metal universe revolved. His charisma was off the charts. The world turned out to see him and Black Sabbath off in Birmingham, which you don’t do for assholes.

I've never known a world without Ozzy Osbourne. Four of Sabbath's legendary first six albums were out before I was born. His loss is immeasurable.

I think some of Ozzy’s solo material is overlooked. Certainly not “Crazy Train,” “Bark at the Moon,” “Mr. Crowley” or “Mama I’m Coming Home,” but how about “Fire in the Sky,” “Mr. Tinkertrain” or “The Ultimate Sin”? 

As I noted in my Black Sabbath post our metal heroes are dying off, and the list is getting longer. Lemmy, Dio, EVH, Paul Di'Anno, and now Ozzy. That’s how it goes, none of us are getting out alive.

It makes me sad of course, but also reflective, and expansive. Paradoxically death opens my heart. See enough of it, and you realize life is too short for grudges and pettiness and trying to “own” each other. How about more celebration of the good, of reading and taking a few notes from the “Diary of a Madman” who wrang every fucking bead of sweat out of this life?

Maybe if we can all stop hating each other for five minutes and realize that we’re walking a finite and short path on a spinning ball of rock in the darkness of an unfathomably massive void we’d all be … a little happier? Or at least more appreciative of the miracle of our own lives. Ozzy had his dark moments and transgressions and addictions, but the outpourings of support confirm a few common traits: He laughed a lot, he cared about his friends, and he was hopeful.

Maybe it’s not too late

To learn how to love, and forget how to hate

S&S publishing news: Plunder-a-plenty

Lots of swords, lots of sorcery going on.

My friend Ken Lizzi, one of the dudes with whom I split a house rental at 2023 Robert E. Howard Days, is having his Cesar the Bravo fiction collected and kickstarted by Cirsova. Cesar, a sometimes-condottiero and a bravo by trade, has earned a reputation as one of the best swords for hire in the city of Plenum. If you need a foe humiliated before a cheering crowd, he’s your man! 

This collection includes 5 previously published adventures plus an all-new full-length novel! Ken is a good dude and a good writer. Get in on that today.

I'm giving Old Moon Quarterly a shot. I bought one of their issues recently and now am kickstarting issues #9-10. One of these is Arthurian themed which ticks a lot of my boxes. I'm liking the aesthetic of this publication. As I write this entry I can see they've met their funding minimum and now we'll see what else they might unlock. Maybe Excalibur from the stone?

Digging the Celtitude.

Speaking of great aesthetics, DMR Books has published Celtic Adventures, with one of the best covers I've seen. This reminds me I still need to pick up Swords of Steel vol. 4. Some awesome reprints in this one, including the likes of REH and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, whose "Vengeance" in DMR Books' Viking Adventures I could not put down.

I'm also kickstarting David C. Smith's Sometime Lofty Towers. You should too, as its one of the best modern sword-and-sorcery stories I've read. You can read my prior review of this fine title here. This one is just about to fund, you can be the one to put it over the top!

In summary, no shortage of excellent stuff going on these days in S&S. I love the old stuff too but try to support new authors and projects. 

Note: This roundup is far from comprehensive, just a few things that have crossed my transom recently.

More generative AI harm

The result I was anticipating has occurred. A Federal California Judge today ruled in favor of AI giant Anthropic, stating that the company’s training of its large language models on the works of authors without permission constitutes fair use. He did rule that its use of pirated material is theft, but this latter win is quite minor in comparison to the win handed to tech giants.

From 404 Media, “The complex decision is one of the first of its kind in a series of high-profile copyright lawsuits brought by authors and artists against AI companies, and it’s largely a very bad decision for authors, artists, writers, and web developers.”  

It's the precedent for which all the major AI firms were waiting. They can now ingest all your work freely and then sell it back to you for a monthly licensing fee.

 The rich get richer and the rest get ever smaller scraps.

All while gleefully continuing to destroy your jobs and your family’s future. Because, China?

Just a few weeks ago Anthropic’s CEO predicted that their product and its AI ilk will lead to the elimination of 50% of all entry level jobs, and 10-20% unemployment more broadly. 

This is not me playing Boy Who Cried Wolf. The wolf is at your door, and its hungry.

Job losses are already happening. In my work outside of the blogosphere I serve a slice of healthcare. Providence Health Care recently laid off 600 employees amid restructuring and is now heavily investing in AI.

That’s 600 jobs replaced by machines. This trend will grow exponentially.

EVEN IF the end result is something like universal basic income it will be a net loss for humanity. We’re meant to do hard things, not play with ourselves on our fucking computers and lap up the output of machines that have strip-mined humanity’s riches and spoon feed it back to you as slop.

A few other wonderful AI news briefs worth mentioning.

• Unqualified job candidates are flooding inboxes with AI generated resumes tailored to match job descriptions. Companies are using AI to weed out candidates, and in some cases interview candidates with voice AI. AI agents are talking to AI agents. No humans apparently needed. 
• Communication skills are being incredibly degraded. No one can write without a machine, and those that do use machines are getting dumber. Students using ChatGPT to write their papers show vastly lowered brain activity and little to no recall. This is not me blowing gas, it’s an MIT study.

Sometimes progress isn’t. 

I suppose I could just stick my head in the sand and go back to blogging about old books and pulp authors and heavy metal. I’m sure a few of my half-dozen readers would prefer this. No fear, I will blog about these subjects. 

But none of this exists without people. I love looking at works made by people, for other people, not the output of machines. I can’t and won’t stop writing about this issue. 

I continue to maintain that for creative work and deep learning, and possibly our future as a species, gen AI is a cancer.

Some further thoughts on generative AI art

We’re getting increasingly embedded into machinery. The future is almost certainly cyborg, flesh and circuitry melded together. It is already happening but will occur on a rapid scale.

What about art? Why shouldn’t art be the same? 

We’ve already seen this trend. Even before generative AI, many/most artists were using advanced digital tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Writers were using grammar and spelling checker tools embedded into word processing software.

You can make the case that with gen AI nothing has really changed. Others are already making the case by just doing the thing; putting out art that is obviously AI generated.

I saw a recent post in a sword-and-sorcery Facebook group by an author promoting a new book with the most generic AI cover I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to link to it, but it’s obvious, and terrible. A search of said author’s website reveals everything about it including text is all AI.

Points for brazenness? 

What’s so wrong about generative AI, anyway?

My personal belief is that using AI in heavy quantities no longer makes the art yours, nor you an artist. At some point the credit must go to the machine. And the machines are not a neutral piece of technology. Nor are the companies programming the AIs and their leadership, who make very suspect ethical decisions.

Beyond these very real concerns is an even bigger underlying question: What is the purpose of AI generated art itself?

The question I have for heavy AI users is, do you see the same problem as I? Why do I need to bother reading (or certainly paying) for your art when I can just log into ChatGPT and have it create images and text that I prompt? 

Maybe that is the future of art—we just create our own, staring into our screens and having it create exactly what we want, when we want it. 

I don’t love the thought of this future.

When I view art, part of the experience—for me, it might differ for you—is engaging with the artist, too. What motivated them to create this piece, this way, with this mood, this viewpoint? How did Tolkien’s WWI experience influence The Lord of The Rings, how did the Texas landscape influence REH? 

I like engaging with unique visions from the minds of individuals. The Mad Max films look and feel a certain way, say certain things, because of George Miller.

It makes art unpredictable. Sometimes I don’t like the output, but that’s part of the experience. 

All of this is lost in the slop of a machine, which is a giant aggregator. We’re no longer engaging with a unique individual, or a discrete group of individuals (cast, director, and crew). We’re engaging with machine modeled output and algorithms. 

For all its limitations and mistakes generative AI is a massive leap forward from the tools described above. 

So what of its output?

I don’t like it. If it has a unique character, its soullessness. I will never, ever buy a book using obvious generative AI. If I’m being fully honest, I think less of people that publish it. It is giving me serious pause about buying anything written after 2021, which makes me sad.

It also makes me angry, because it’s an unearned and lazy shortcut.

If you can’t write well, you must learn to do so. If you can’t draw, learn the skill. Or, pay a fellow professional. If you can’t pay them, offer up some service in exchange they can’t perform. Bartering is profoundly human, accepting the output of a machine, Faustian. You’re undercutting the whole enterprise of art when you do this. Because again, art produced so cheap and easily is not worth consuming.

But being kind, and on the backend of a long career in publishing, I also say, YMMV. I might be wrong about this. Perhaps gen AI is bringing a new type of art into being, man-machine art. Perhaps it gives people without the means to publish the ability to do so. Perhaps we all might be using generative AI every day with the same ubiquity as email. 

I have used and continue to use AI for certain tasks in my own work. I know its power, I know its limitations. And I continue to wrestle with the morality of it all. To quote Danny Glover I’m perhaps too old for this shit. To understand it, to embrace it, to appreciate it.

But I don’t think I am wrong. I believe there is something deeply wrong here.

Three things

Walk with me...

Thing 1

I just finished re-reading The Long Walk after a long walk of my own, years and years of life since my last reading decades ago. Some thoughts.

We get no details on why the Walk came to be, just a couple scant suggestions. Like this: “In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there were still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.” There is a reference to a war fought against a nuclear-armed Germany in 1953. So it’s not set in an apocalyptic future but some alternate history, perhaps one in which Germany develops an atomic weapon before 1945 and greatly extended the second world war. The result is a terrible totalitarian 20th century where the country is so lost and the future so bereft of hope that it turns to horrible death-fueled game shows to forget.

We don’t know, and I like it this way. Given the many chapter epigraph references to the Price is Right, prize fighting, and the Ten-Thousand Dollar Pyramid, I’m sure King was inspired by the game show craze sweeping the nation in the 1970s.

Things haven’t changed all that much. We all seem to be walking around in a fog, distracted just enough by digital spectacle to ignore the real horrors going on around us, as well as our own impending deaths. Just scroll an Instagram feed.

The Long Walk is an extended metaphor on dying. We’re all on the same Walk, two minutes from a ticket out (Walkers who slow their pace get three warnings before they are shot dead). That brief space tracks somewhat closely to what happens when you stop breathing. We’re separated from the other side by a thin margin. So we walk, and everyone around us drops off, one by one, until its our turn.

I know the literal, physical territory of this Walk, I was just on it, yesterday, when my wife and I had a nice dinner in Portsmouth, NH. The Walk starts in Maine, crosses into New Hampshire, and a skeletal handful make it all the way to my home state of Massachusetts. Weird, wild. Between King and H.P. Lovecraft New England takes a back seat to no other region of the United States when it comes to horror.

I really do enjoy King, in particular his old stuff. Say what you want about his long-windedness, his occasional closure whiffs and bad endings, and his lack of philosophical depth (King himself describes his work as the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger). I’d be hard-pressed to think of another writer who can so sweep you up into a story and hold you spellbound until the end. That’s true talent.

Thing 2

I’ve seen a few places—messageboards, articles, reddit threads—refer to the sword-and-sorcery definition I offered in Flame and Crimson as “seven points,” which makes it seem like a cumbersome checklist that must be met.

This is not correct, because it’s not what I wrote. 

What I wrote was, sword-and-sorcery often contains these handful of elements; it does not need all of them nor any precise proportion. But shorn of any it’s hard to picture anyone calling said story S&S.

I kind of like this, it seems to me flexible and elegant, forgiving but not without boundaries. A precise definition of S&S is not really possible, IMO. When you look at how the subgenre evolved it coalesced over three decades and in conversations with authors and a fan community. It has changed and will continue to evolve. So instead of a precise definition I offered up a constellation of tropes. With the caveat that I am just a guy and YMMV.

See some of my other musings here.

But for some reason this seems to be a continued source of confusion and occasionally complaint. Some feel the need to simplify the definition, boil and boil down like maple syrup in some type of purity contest, until the definition of S&S might fit on the head of a pin.

If you must insist…I can’t boil it down to one word but I’ll give you two: Pulp Fantasy.

I am this target audience.

Thing 3

I mentioned Instagram further up; yesterday that platform triangulated me with precision, locked in with unerring heat detecting radar, launched its missile, and hit me with a dead-on bullseye.

The missile: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap. Signed by director Rob Reiner.

How did I not know this existed? The ad hit my feed. I preordered.

The takeaway: Algorithms work, and I too can be reeled in like a fish on a line. 

Here's something cool: Tom Barber painting donated to Andover (NH) public library

On April 26, my friend Tom Barber--an Andover NH resident and a well-known painter and illustrator since the 1970s, presented his painting of "The Bibliophile" to Michaela Hoover, director of the Andover Libraries. The painting, which shows an imaginary book lover immersed in his favorite pastime, was donated to the libraries by an anonymous collector of Tom's works. It will hang in the Andover Public Library as an inspiration for book lovers of all ages. 

For more information, visit https://www.andovernhlibraries.org/ or contact Tom at tombarberartist@gmail.com

Also, Tom is still doing great work and would love to hear from you about commissions or other art projects.

Facebook ripped me off

I punched my name into this handy plagiarism detection tool published by The Atlantic, and like millions of other authors discovered Mark Zuckerberg ripped me off. The nerve of this douche!

There I am! Above the whiskey. Of which I now need a few shots.

In case you missed the recent news, “Meta and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg deliberately and explicitly authorized a raid on LibGen—and Anna's Archive, another massive digital pirate haven—to train its latest AI model.” Millions of books have been ingested into Llama 3 without author compensation, or even notification.

What makes it even worse is that the fine folks at Facebook (I almost wrote that without a sneer) could have put some thought into the decision. Taken a few extra weeks to do the right thing. But instead chose to behave like Somali pirates operating on the open ocean.

What the fuck, Zuck.

There is of course complexity to this. How does fair use apply to the output of generative AI? Is feeding a machine training data the equivalent of a person reading? Will slowing AI development with more rigorous author protections and safety guardrails put us behind foreign competitors like China?

But that’s a battle for someone else to fight. Me? I’m tired of the techo-obfuscation and the excuse-making. This is pretty close to outright theft. Facebook could have done this the legal and proper way but its leadership team chose to operate like immoral assholes. Which should surprise no one.

I've written before that I'm not a fan of generative AI, even though I believe it has incredible potential and is here to stay. It’s just beyond galling that big companies like Meta and OpenAI scrape data from wherever and whomever they want and then sell it back to you in the form of subscription products. And then rigorously defend their own gated fiefdoms with impenetrable legalese and teams of lawyers.

The moral of the story: Laws don’t apply to big companies like they do individuals.

Honestly I am not THAT pissed. Just looking on, feeling bemused, disappointed and disempowered, sort of like the victim of a drive-by egging. Perhaps Llama 3 will now create some kick ass S&S haikus using the genre elements I outline in Flame and Crimson. Maybe there will be a class action suit and I will be entitled to a $3.87 payout after the lawyers take their share. We’ll see.

Rest in peace James Silke

James Silke, best known in S&S circles as the author of the Death Dealer series, recently passed away. He was 93 and lived a full and varied life as a photographer, writer, art director and more.

I'd been slowly working my way through the Death Dealer series and am posting here links to my prior reviews. These unfortunately are not great books, certainly not as good as their fantastic Frank Frazetta cover art ... but they do possess a ridiculous charm of their own, a bit of a "WTF did I just read?" unpredictability that makes them ... notable.

Sword-and-sorcery’s endgame: James Silke’s Prisoner of the Horned Helmet

“This goes to 11:” A Review of Death Dealer Book 2: Lords of Destruction

Death Dealer 3: Semi-enjoyable (?) train-wreck

I'm sure I will get around to book IV.

God speed James Silke!