Category: Uncategorized

The End of the Boomer Cons

Not being a particularly social individual, I never really got conventions. I went to Minicon once because I had just published Rebel Moon and joined SFWA, and had been invited there. I loved CGDC before it was taken over by the marketing departments and you could still sit down and talk game design and development details for hours with Julian LeFay, John Romero, and Sid Meiers, but in general, I’ve never understood the appeal of consumer-related conventions. It appears the younger generations tend to agree:

For nearly its entire 39-year run, LibertyCon has sold out the same day registration opens. This year, it didn’t. Four days after badges went live, the convention posted an update fans aren’t used to seeing: “In a strange twist of events, there are still a few badges left for LibertyCon 39.”

That single sentence is a meaningful data point for a convention built the way LibertyCon is built. It’s capped by charter, historically at 750 attendees and more recently around 1,000, deliberately kept small so fans can actually sit down with guests rather than get lost in a crowd. It’s held every June in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it leans heavily on Baen Books as its backbone, with the “Baen Roadshow” as a recurring programming staple and a guest list built around Baen’s own stable: David Weber, Larry Correia, David Drake, Timothy Zahn, and others who’ve anchored the convention’s identity for decades. A convention with a hard attendance cap, a loyal fanbase, and one of the most reliable backfill mechanisms in the genre (publisher name recognition) not selling out immediately isn’t a small shift. It’s a convention that has weathered a lot, including the death of its own founder, Timothy “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo, and a last-minute venue change years ago, still selling out every single time until now.

The reason isn’t a mystery. Baen’s bench of marquee authors is aging, and there isn’t a wave of comparably famous younger names coming up behind them the way there was a decade ago. A convention that leans on its guest list to move tickets needs that list to keep refreshing, and when the same handful of names carry the show every year, the show ages right along with them. Older fans who built LibertyCon’s sellout streak for decades aren’t attending at the same rate they used to either, whether due to health, cost, or simply aging out of convention travel altogether. That’s not a knock on LibertyCon’s organizers, who by every account still run one of the best-managed conventions in the genre. It’s a structural problem no amount of good management fixes on its own.

It’s not a surprise that Baen has struggled post-Jim Baen. Most of the publishing industry is struggling; Castalia would be too if we had relied upon selling traditional hardcovers and paperbacks like everyone has done for decades.

But it’s still sad to see traditions dying, even if you understand the terrible choices that the johnny-come-latelies made thirty years ago that are finally coming home to roost. It’s not the political gatekeeping that has done them in, but it certainly assured their demise given the fact that the winds were against them. For some reason, the more difficult the environmental challenge, the more unreasonable people running these legacy organizations tend to become.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Genre Vote

Due to popular demand, we have added a new support tier to the Byron AI campaign. The $100 tier not only provides an ebook of the first novel produced by the Byron AI, but a vote on what the next genres or styles to be trained will be as well. We’re also going to add a stretch goal of adding the classic science fiction genre to the training when the public campaign hits $50k. The genre vote will be an ongoing right that isn’t limited to the campaign period; as we complete different genres and styles, we’ll turn to the original backers to help us decide what gets added next.

And yes, all of the higher tiers now come with this voting right as well and it applies to everyone who already backed the campaign.

The specific authorial style training will no doubt be controversial in certain circles, but a) those circles are already rabidly anti-AI and b) there is no copyright or trademark or patent or other intellectual protection of “style” or “look-and-feel” since the matter was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1994 and reaffirmed last year in the Anthropic lawsuit.

People tend to think of these things in terms of living authors, but the reality of copyright law is that the only substantive benefits are to the corporations who strip-mine it without respecting either the material or the author.

In other news, UATV is down. The devs don’t know why yet. We’ll keep you posted on that.

DISCUSS ON SG

One Trump, Two Trump

There are, of course, more than just two Trump avatars. We know there were at least six Bidens. The short, fat one in the front is the Clown World puppet. I don’t think we have any way of knowing if the original Trump is even still alive, but it’s certain that the main “President Trump” avatar who doesn’t care about the financial well-being of Americans, is waging a futile mercenary war on Iran, and just slapped 50 percent tariffs on Canada is not the same man who rode down the elevator in 2015.

DISCUSS ON SG

Let’s You and Him Fight

“The State of Israel has no interest in joining the contained confrontation between Iran and the United States — the current situation is the best one for us.” – Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich

No doubt they don’t. But Israel had better use the time Trump has given it wisely, as it appears Iran is gearing up to take Kuwait and perhaps one or two other Gulf States now that it has reason to doubt the US military’s ability to engage in a ground war in the Middle East. That’s the problem with bluffing. Once your bluff gets called, you lose your ability to control the game.

“It is wrong to sacrifice a 19-year-old American girl for the Israeli regime.”

It is wrong to sacrifice any American for any foreign regime. But Trump was right. He’s not going to Heaven. Whether it was out of fear or out of greed, he chose to serve Hell. In fact, he still chooses to serve it. He could end both the Iran and the Ukraine wars tomorrow, but for one reason or another, he refuses to do so.

DISCUSS ON SG

Augmentation, Not Replacement

A Fandom Pulse reader was confused by JDA’s advocacy of Castalia and Infogalactic’s joint Byron AI project:

Is this what I think it is? Is this website, created by an author who writes his own books with his own brain, promoting an AI that will do all the writing for us from now on? What the actual f**k is happening?

The AI doesn’t do everything. Without the human creative spark, it will accomplish nothing. This is more akin to providing battle armor for a soldier, making him stronger, faster, and more deadly. Consider how much faster I have been able to produce both fiction and non-fiction; neither the groundbreaking work demolishing Darwin, Kimura, and Kant would have been published without textual AI. I probably would have eventually got around to writing Probability Zero, especially after becoming aware of the more complete genomic information from the the 2025 study, but would never have gone on to address Neutral Theory and Kimura without the intellectual augmentation provided by AI.

AI is close to worthless without an anchor. That’s why it works so beautifully for translations. That’s why it’s highly effective for non-fiction. But it has no creative spark, and that’s why it can only augment the ideas and stories and experiences that the human element provides. And that’s why the Byron AI project is a positive one, and one worth backing.

For those who appreciated the poem featured in the launch video, I took the liberty of altering it and turning it into a Soulsigma song called Last to Know. It’s technically a Neo-Byronic, since it’s an original, not an adaptation, and it might be the best thing I’ve written yet.

They tell me that an honest man will bear
Her name upon his heart – a curious state!
For all my good intentions it seems
I drowned in wine and worse – a darker fate
Is well-deserved now – and yet without a care
I fall toward the abyss, and at a rate
Measureless across the years,
For what had cost me twenty months of tears…

I had a something once, no longer now,
That ached and wanted and overcame.
It burned at beauty and it fled from shame.
If that was soul I never learned its name.

As for the project, we’re off to a good start. We’ve already hit our base goal and we’ll be adding the requested $100 level soon, so if you’ve got suggestions for that, or for other tiers and rewards, feel free to share them in the comments. I’ll be discussing the project and making an announcement about it on the Darkstream tonight.

UPDATE: No Darkstream tonight. Situation requires attention.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Thumb on the Scale

Come on boys, stay calm. Everyone stay calm. The principle, the main thing, let’s stay calm boys, stay calm, composure. Let’s just think about playing, stay calm. Let’s forget about everything, eh? Let’s just play, let’s just focus on playing, stay calm. Come on.

Those words from Messi show how it appears that he and the rest of the Argentina squad learned right before the game that the wind at their backs they’d been enjoying was going to be benefiting Spain. It also explains why they turned their backs on the trophy presentation ceremony; most of the squad are serious Catholics. Why? Well, as one man has demonstrated, it appears the game itself, indeed, the entire tournament, was a Clown World ritual that was set up more than two decades ago.

There is a lot more than that; the Economist cover is not proof of anything, but it is consistent with the theme, and, of course, we know that FIFA is wholly owned by Clown World, as is most of the so-called “entertainment” industry. And the humiliation ritual of Donald Trump at the end would also appear to have been staged as part of the whole act. Whatever was going on, it was almost certainly a little darker than WWE-style scripting.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Byron AI Campaign

A THINKING ENGINE

They tell me that a thinking engine bears
    My name upon its brow — a curious fate;
That all I burnt in candlelight, and cares
    I drowned in wine — and worse, I will not state —
Is gathered now, and parcelled into shares,
    And offered to the public, at a rate
Of four-and-twenty seconds, without shirk,
For what had cost me twenty years of work.

Yet some grave patron, with furrowed brow,
    Demands to know if machines create
An honest question, sir, and do allow
    Me now to subsequently demonstrate;
I had a something once — and have it now? —
    That ached, and wanted, and broke all control,
It burned at beauty, and it fled from shame:
If that was soul, I never learned its name.

Fandom Pulse explains the importance and the urgency of the project.

Vox Day has opened a crowdfunding campaign through Infogalactic for Byron AI, an independent text-generation project built specifically for fiction writers. The campaign, live now on IndieCrowdfund, positions itself as a proof of concept for an AI trained on the epic fantasy genre rather than general-purpose code and business writing.

Day laid out the stakes in an exclusive comment to Fandom Pulse. “I believe that we have about two years to develop quality independent textual AI before Amazon attempts to corner the market,” he said. The Byron AI page frames its goal as producing functional prose for fiction writers, built and owned outside the major AI labs

The timing follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem develop over the last decade. Kindle Unlimited restructured how indie authors get paid, shifting income toward page reads controlled entirely by Amazon’s algorithm. Virtual Voice, Amazon’s text-to-speech audiobook tool, moved narration in-house and cut into the market for independent narrators and small audiobook producers. A native, Amazon-controlled writing AI would extend that same pattern to the manuscript itself, giving one company leverage over the tools authors use to draft, publish, and monetize their books.

I also posted some additional information about the project and why we believe it will be successful at AI Central:

This is a tool being built by a working publisher and real novelists, for people who care about both what is written and how it is written, and it’s owned outright, answerable to no corporate policy, no subject-matter veto, no trust-and-safety council deciding what a story is allowed to be about. It is designed to provide the prose in a variety of genre styles: you supply the story, the structure, and the judgment, and it drafts prose that arrives sounding like you instead of like everything else. We’ve already proven the method works with both translations and original novels, and this campaign funds turning that hard-won experience into an instrument that Castalia authors will be able to use, and continue using, no matter what direction the mainstream AIs take.

And you really have to see the video to believe it. It was a chance to put some of my new music video skills to use with good effect and it should demonstrate why this is the right group of people to develop such a tool. And for those members of the community who don’t really care about AI one way or another, but like beautiful books and want to support the project, we’ve even provided an option to just receive the Library or History book of your choice as long as it’s in stock.

I would remiss if I did not mention that we’re already off to an even better start than it looks, since two major backers kicked things off with direct donations to the project even before we had the campaign ready for launch today. Thanks very much to both of them for their timely and much-appreciated support, and to everyone else who decides to become a part of this and make it happen.

DISCUSS ON SG

SANS BEAUTY

In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.

Gabrielle Perceval has never been pretty, and the world has never let her forget it. Her mother dies before she is five. Her father, a handsome and weak-willed man, remarries a beautiful woman who takes one look at her stepdaughter and laughs. At the convent school she is christened Laidronette — the ugly sister of the fairy tale — and the name follows her home. At eighteen, at her first ball, she learns exactly what a plain girl is worth in a drawing room.

What she has instead is a clear eye, a steady heart, and a green-covered journal.

Written in the first person by one of nineteenth-century France’s most widely read novelists, Sans Beauty follows Gabrielle from a country childhood through betrayal by the man she was promised to, the ruin of the household that raised her, and a long test of whether a woman the world has dismissed can build a life worth having on her own terms. It is a sharp, unsentimental book about vanity, endurance, and the difference between being admired and being loved — and its judgment on the first is merciless.

Zénaïde Fleuriot (1829–1890) published nearly a hundred volumes in her lifetime and was among the most popular French authors of her generation. This is the first English translation of Sans Beauté, by Summer Charrette.

SANS BEAUTY is available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook, and has already been sent out to the subscribers. An excerpt is available to read at Castalia Library.

DISCUSS ON SG

“A Historic Disaster”

How is it possible that the White House doesn’t know what everyone paying attention seems to know? And why is the administration still listening to the same people who lost Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran Round One?

As both sides escalate strikes on civilian and military targets, the Pentagon is boosting the number of military aircraft in the Middle East, according to the Washington Post. “The US is planning for a wider war,” an unnamed US official told the paper, while warning that the American military effort would be limited by dwindling air defense interceptor and missile supplies, which had been actively used up during the previous stages of the war.

“We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official told the Post. Military experts cited in the report said Washington remains unprepared for potential ground operations inside Iran–an option US President Donald Trump has refused to rule out.

On Friday, Axios reported that Washington had notified Israel that it was sending dozens of additional refueling planes ahead of a possible expansion of operations against Iran. According to the article, Trump was presented with several new military options, including strikes on Iranian power plants and further attacks on nuclear sites to bury Tehran’s stockpile of enriched uranium even deeper.

Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services, told the Wall Street Journal that the situtation risks getting completely out of hand. “This escalation is rapidly intensifying and getting out of control,” he said. “There is a risk we will go back to a total war even if neither side wants it.”

A CNN analysis suggested that “a decisive US military victory over Iran seems a distant prospect.” In echoing remarks, Sina Toosi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, warned that a ground operation “in extreme summer heat… against a fully mobilized military and a population that has largely rallied around the war effort, would be an extraordinary gamble practically guaranteed to be a historic disaster.”

As we saw at the presentation of the World Cup trophy yesterday, Trump doesn’t seem to understand when it’s time to get off the stage.

DISCUSS ON SG

Spain 1, Argentina 0

Great game. Spain showed the weakness that I observed, being unable to punch it in despite a 65-35 edge in possession and a 12-0 edge in shots on target, but despite that, their midfield and defense almost entirely shut down the Argentine attack. Argentina threw in everything, up to and including the kitchen sink, but all of that plus Messi wasn’t enough to balance the Spanish dominance.

Spain should have scored at least one more goal, and I didn’t like the way they stopped pressing the last 10 minutes of extra time, but it did make the end of the game a little more exciting. But the better team deservedly won, and the fact that they only allowed 10 shots on target all tournament underlines that they were the best team of the entire tournament.

The scary thing is that most of this very young team will be back for the next World Cup, and if they can find a world-class striker somewhere in their developmental system, they can get even better.

DISCUSS ON SG