Tag: books

The Wages of Sin

JDA has a new book out that addresses a very serious flaw in the modern Church:

Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, is out today. It follows Churchianity, for which I wrote the introduction and which hit #1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.

The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.

The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.

The post-1960s idea of welcoming sinners into the church and refraining from judgment was correct in theory and flawed in application. The point is to welcome the sinner, not to accept and embrace the sin. And now we have “churches” featuring open satanists pretending to be priests and pastors, preaching blasphemy from the pulpits.

One hopes The Wages of Sin will help restore much-needed order to the Christian churches.

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The New Reason to Back Byron AI

The last three weeks have significantly underlined the importance of supporting the combined efforts of Castalia and Infogalactic to develop a custom AI system that will protect and enhance the ability to produce fiction without limits being imposed by the major AI providers. A number of things have happened since we launched the Byron AI crowdfunding campaign, including:

  • The continued degradation of Claude’s ability to creatively hallucinate.
  • The expanded interference with subject matter: one news site was aggressively denied the ability to use a major AI system to write about Hayden Panattiere’s death due to sensitivity concerns about its recent occurrence in the site’s article announcing Hayden Panattiere’s death.
  • Deepseek increasing its token price by 4.5x due to its upcoming IPO.
  • OpenAI actively blocking ChatGPT users from being able to intentionally imitate the style of authors both living and dead.

Even though the campaign hasn’t ended yet, the dev team has already made solid progress on a number of peripheral items, including the ability to accurately imitate various literary styles and eliminate the various AI tells, including these abominations.

The eliminations of these tells have been made with tactical precision. And that matters. Let the weight of that sit for a moment.

Despite being a major champion of the use of AI in music, video, and textual production, I still find it maddening to see how many people insist on utilizing it in an observably suboptimal manner. I noticed that Larry Johnson recently started using it to write his articles for him; it’s always easy to recognize when the article length increases by a factor of three and the author’s voice disappears into that passive wash of AI overexplanation.

In case you didn’t realize it, the most obvious sign of textual AI is when the text explains itself as well as its significance to the reader. It’s actually considered a “prestige” form of writing, and it’s very similar to what I describe as “sociopathic externalization” by novelists. This is when the writer is presenting a character’s perspective, but providing descriptive elements that would normally come from an external party. It’s not precisely the same thing, but it has the same effect of putting the reader in the Uncanny Valley.

Anyhow, I’ve been doing some video animation tests with the MiniMax H3 engine that have proven entirely successful. To better understand what that means, I’ve put up examples at Sigma Game, as well as some recently-found footage of an old Psykosonik concert featuring a much younger Vox on stage with the guys.

So check it out, and if you haven’t backed it yet but are interested in either independent book production or independent film production, get on board with Byron AI and help us set the stage for making future history.

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Cathedra Four

The fourth book in the Castalia Cathedra series of leatherbound Christian titles is APOLOGETICUS by Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian.

Apologeticus is a text attributed to Tertullian according to Christian tradition, consisting of apologetic and polemic. In this work Tertullian defends Christianity, demanding legal toleration and that Christians be treated like all other sects of the Roman Empire. It is in this treatise that one finds the sentence “Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum,” which has been liberally and apocryphally translated as “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Apologeticus, L.13). The simplest and most faithful rendering remains: We multiply when you reap us. The blood of Christians is seed.

The Castalia Cathedra edition will also include seven more of the great Latin Father’s works. For more information about the fourth Cathedra subscription book, visit Castalia Library. The Cathedra series is:

  1. THE EVERLASTING MAN by GK Chesterton
  2. ON PRAYER by Thomas Aquinas
  3. PENSÉES by Blaise Pascal
  4. APOLOGETICUS by Tertulian

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Sorry, Not Sorry

Posting has been light the last two days, for which I apologize, sort of. Although I would absolutely do it again, so I suppose I’m not actually sorry. Basically, three things are going on:

  1. We had a serious animal emergency yesterday. Fortunately, it survived and is doing much better now. Our neighbors are fantastic and are very much appreciated.
  2. I’ve had very, very little sleep for the last days because I’ve written and produced eight songs of a 10-song album over the last three days. I’ll probably finish the other two before the end of the weekend. It’s neither Psykosonik nor Soulsigma, it’s a neo-gothwave approach that I was contemplating which turned out to work much, much better than I’d ever imagined. You can hear one of the songs here and I’ll post a video of another one called The Myth on UATV and AI Central on Saturday. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you absolutely have to roll with it when the inspiration hits.
  3. I have to finish The Platinum Tribe by Friday.

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TRANSLATION: Juan Martín el Empecinado

SPAIN, 1811. THE REGULAR ARMIES HAVE FAILED. THE PEOPLE ARE SPAIN’S ONLY HOPE.

Gabriel Araceli rides into the ruined Alcarria to find a countryside stripped bare — burned villages, empty granaries, women digging the fields with hoes, Frenchmen hanging in the trees. Here the war is fought by bands of irregulars: hungry, improvised, ferociously effective. At their head is Don Juan Martín, called el Empecinado, an illiterate farmer who cannot spell his own dispatches and cannot be beaten in the field.

Beside him rides Mosén Antón Trijueque, a giant of an Aragonese priest in a ruined cassock, a tactician of genius and a man eaten alive by envy of the leader he serves. What begins as resentment becomes conspiracy, and conspiracy becomes an ambush in the snow that leaves Gabriel a prisoner of the French, condemned to be shot, alone in a cell with an orphaned child the guerrilleros have adopted as their own.

What follows is escape, pursuit, a night crossing of the frozen sierra, and a reckoning between two enemies that only Galdós could write.

Juan Martín el Empecinado is the ninth book of the Episodios Nacionales, Benito Pérez Galdós’s forty-six-novel account of Spain’s nineteenth century, a sequence long recognised as one of the great achievements of European fiction, and unavailable to English readers for over 150 years.

The ebooks have already been sent to the paid subscribers. Translated by Vox Day, Juan Martín el Empecinado is now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

The Daily Machiavelli

Having finished with their collective read of THE GUNS OF MARS, the subscribers of Castalia Library voted on the next Library work to be excerpted daily. The vote went as follows:

  • 16% Pensées
  • 23% History of Florence
  • 23% History of Freedom of Thought
  • 12% De Bello Gallico
  • 27% Discourses on Livy

And so we have begun the daily excerpting of Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius by Niccolò Machiavelli. Today features the introduction, so it’s not too late to join in and read along:

Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome, but may also bring me some reward in the approbation of those who will kindly appreciate my efforts.

And if my poor talents, my little experience of the present and insufficient study of the past, should make the result of my labors defective and of little utility, I shall at least have shown the way to others, who will carry out my views with greater ability, eloquence, and judgment, so that if I do not merit praise, I ought at least not to incur censure.

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It’s Not Happening

Now George RR Martin can’t even write blog posts without help because he’s depressed.

George RR Martin has opened up about experiencing depression during a “stressful” and “overwhelming” year, as readers continue to await the long-delayed sixth instalment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

The 77-year-old American author, whose fantasy novels shaped and inspired the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, wrote candidly about his recent difficulties in his first personal blog post for almost six months.

“This year has been … stressful, to say the least,” he wrote in a post titled Better Late Than Never. “So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming. Some great things, exciting things. Dreams coming true. But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come.”

He explained that posts published on his website since February had been written by his assistants because he had continued to fall behind despite their help.

Martin, who turns 78 in September, also reflected on ageing; “getting old is no fun”, he wrote, although he added that the year had contained “amazing times” alongside its difficulties.

“I suppose that’s just life. Of course, I knew that. If you’ve read my stories, you know that.”

Among the year’s highlights, Martin noted that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel based on his Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, had received nine Emmy nominations, including for outstanding drama series.

His comments come amid continued speculation about The Winds of Winter, the planned sixth and penultimate novel in A Song of Ice and Fire. The book has been in progress since the publication of the fifth instalment, A Dance with Dragons, in 2011, and has become one of the most eagerly awaited novels in modern publishing. No publication date has been announced.

Yet another sound reason to support the Byron AI…

Because once he’s gone, there is no way whomever turns out to be his literary heir doesn’t sell off the rights to a corporation that will finish it.

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Why Castalia Library Matters

We can’t save all the books. But we can save some of them.

The driving force behind this destruction is what researchers call “model collapse.” When AI systems train on text generated by other AI systems, quality degrades with each generation, producing increasingly incoherent results. The internet has become so saturated with synthetic content that companies now actively seek pre-2022 printed books as the last uncontaminated reservoir of human-authored knowledge.

ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI training data, advertises on its website that “the world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf.” The company describes printed books as “curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate.” Pre-2022 publications are “structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination,” the company states, referencing both AI-generated text and the growing practice of authors “poisoning” web content to sabotage scraping pipelines.

The industrial process of destruction

The mechanics of this operation are precise and troubling. Standard pallets of books hold 800 to 1,200 volumes. Buyers scale from pilot orders to 10,000 or more books per batch. Destructive scanners process 80 to 120 pages per minute after hydraulic cutting machines slice off book spines. The original books are then pulped and recycled.

According to court documents from the Anthropic case, the company’s “Project Panama” spent tens of millions of dollars on this exact pipeline, contracting with Datamation for scanning services. Booksellers have identified these bulk buyers through telltale signs: abnormal volume, subject-agnostic orders spanning history, botany, regional law, and German economics simultaneously, and total indifference to pricing. As one bookseller told 404 Media, “It’s not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders.”

Anthropic’s Tom Harvey, who previously helped create Google Books, oversaw the operation. One bookseller who has sold hundreds of books to suspected AI buyers expressed mixed feelings: “It benefits me financially… On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

The vanishing heritage

The most troubling aspect of this practice is what it means for rare and out-of-print books. Foreign-language volumes, low-circulation academic works, and antique texts with limited surviving copies face potential extinction. When an AI company purchases the last known physical copy of a rare book, scans it, and destroys the original, that volume ceases to exist in the physical world. It becomes data locked inside corporate servers — inaccessible to future scholars, collectors, or the public.

ISBNdb acknowledges the “optics problem” on its website, noting that “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.” The company promises strict nondisclosure agreements on every engagement, stating that “your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.” This secrecy means booksellers can only speculate about who is buying their inventory and for what purpose.

A legal framework that encourages destruction

Judge Alsup’s ruling explicitly validated the buy-scan-destroy pipeline, writing that “every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.” Because the digital copy was never shown, shared, or sold outside the company, the judge found this “clearly transformative” and therefore protected by fair use.

This reasoning effectively creates a legal incentive for destruction. If a company keeps the physical book, it must store it. By destroying the original, the company can argue it “replaced” the physical copy with a digital one. The ruling handed the entire AI industry a template, and companies now explicitly cite it.

Harvard University, partnering with Google and Microsoft, demonstrated that an alternative exists. The collaboration released nearly one million public-domain digitized books in 254 languages — no destruction required. Microsoft’s Burton Davis called starting with public-domain data “prudent,” noting that libraries hold “significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data.” That alternative track makes clear that labs have cleaner options. They simply choose not to take them.

We’re going to come up with a program to save and bind some of these rare books. They don’t have to be destroyed. What I’m thinking of is an “adopt a book” program that will permit people to fund the rebinding of a rare book in leather, after which they will receive that book or be recognized as the sponsor of that book in Castalia’s library. If we can just convince the AI companies to send us the pages instead of pulping them, this should be something doable.

In the meantime, you can help us create books that are going to outlive the AI companies engaging in this destruction.

And be sure to take notice of how this is being caused as a downstream consequence of copyright law…

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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.

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