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saxbrightwellCore Keeper
I took the last week off writing to explore the 1.0 patch of the game Core Keeper.
My cavelings in Secrets of Sleipnir are an homage to Core Keeper's cavelings, although mine are grey instead of blue, with black compound eyes instead of glowing red ones, and, er, not universally insane with homicidal rage. I've dug into the origin of their name, making it Fiyeli's word for them and matching his word for how they refer to surface-dwelling life forms: skylings, because they live fully exposed to the terrifying sky. (He knows a better translation is probably 'sky-monster' but thinks it politic to go with 'skyling.')
I have squiggly thoughts in the background about how caveling sentiments about skylings line up with Evret's hare theme, because hares are somewhat eldritch when you examine them closely. Did you know they don't dig burrows? Ever? At most they'll hunker down into a dip in the ground or under a bush, but as the second-fastest land animal in North America after the pronghorn antelope (which evolved to outrun a giant cheetah that is now extinct) they're paradoxically safest living exposed instead of sheltered. As Tumblr memes have said, "anyone who can't tell rabbits from hares hasn't looked into the cold wild eyes of a hare and known if it could speak it would speak backward," and, "hares look like rabbits who passed through the black hole at the centre of the galaxy and saw the cold uncaring face of God." Or something like that; AI has killed internet searches too dead for me to hunt down the original quotes successfully. My point is I absolutely mine those vibes when writing Evret.
ANYWAY! Core Keeper! I love resource-gathering, home-building RPGs; my favourite game of all time is Stardew Valley, but I've also really enjoyed Graveyard Keeper and Littlewood, and Core Keeper is in very much the same vein, though heavier on the combat than the others. Its sandbox is ENORMOUS, and I think it would be most fun playing with like 7 other people to just swarm through the concentric biomes like an ant colony. But it's still enjoyable on my own. I tried to keep up writing at the same time for a couple of days and then decided to just take a break and fully indulge in a deep dive into the game. And I enjoyed myself thoroughly, taking shameless advantage of Casual mode to see all the bosses, finish the story (such as it is - there's plenty of lore but very little narrative), and even clear out the new Steam achievements since the last time I played. Then I settled in to make my 'base' pleasing to me. Then a stray caveling blew up one of my doors, which they aren't supposed to be able to do, and I tore myself away before I committed to fully purging the entire innermost biome and walling it off behind the heaviest terrain blocks with turrets around the doors and a moat of lava - a multi-day project all by itself and not one that would have been particularly rewarding in the end, but that the completionist in me would have demanded I finish if I started.
And I didn't want that, because I was growing restless to return to my writing! I got over my classic neurospicy fear that not doing something for a few days means I've completely forgotten how to do that thing (I get the same anxiety every time I have to return to work after a long weekend) and wrote a good chunk this morning. Back in the game, baby! Just in time to have another brutal week of work, but I've mentioned before how that seems to be, paradoxically, good for my writing output. Yeah, I don't think I'd do well trying to write as my only source of income XD
Draft2Digital Courting AI
I, like many others, was emailed a link to a survey where Draft2Digital was asking about writer and publisher attitudes towards an opt-in function to sell works hosted on D2D to scrapers to feed into the databases for Large Language Models (LLMs). The questions were mostly multiple-choice and heavily slanted to "how would you like us to do this?" as opposed to "should we do this at all?" with only two free-text boxes, which I used far more freely than they wanted me to.
Now, I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical of me, when I'm willing to use graphic models like Adobe Firefly (where the database was bought and paid for or legitimate public domain) and audio models like Google Play's digital audiobook utility (which provide serviceable text-to-speech for free but give nowhere near the value of a human reading), but I am not kindly disposed to text models. When they first emerged I thought they were quite interesting for how closely they appeared to imitate thought, and I couldn't bring myself to care about the idea they might be 0.00001% influenced by scraping my fanfic on AO3 any more than a human writer might be influenced the same way. Now, though, it's clear they were badly implemented from the get-go and have already half-destroyed the internet with their gibberish sludge output, just as the venture capitalist investment money is starting to run dry. Had LLM companies begun with an approach like, "We want to buy scraping rights to your book for $10,000" the landscape might look very different for them now, but they didn't do that, and it's too late to try to build that goodwill retroactively.
I'm very fond of D2D. They're the best aggregator in the field, with the widest reach and the most useable website. I've been quite happy with them. But this move was ominous. As others have said, if they're testing the waters in such a pre-slanted way, they're probably already in much, much deeper behind closed doors. I wish I could tell their decision-makers they're so late to the party that the more profitable business choice would be to loudly repudiate all association with LLM companies forever and guarantee none of their hosted works will ever be scraped. "100% AI-Free, Always" is already the attractor, and "nOw wiTh ai!!1! put glue and rocks on ur pizza!" the repellant.
Still, I will probably remain with D2D until/unless they eliminate the ability to opt out of scraping. Even the presence of an "opt in in exchange for a fee" function is something I would make my peace with in time - not compensating creators for feeding models is how these companies shat the bed in the first place. But the fee would have to be VERY high to tempt me to participate myself.
Parting Thoughts
One of the writer's Mastodon memes I participated in recently had the question this week, "If you could write a story in any fictional world, what would you choose?" This question landed a little differently for me, as a writer with their roots in fanfic; I already can write in any fictional world I choose, and have done so many times! But I realised, with great delight, that the world I want to write in most is mine: Sleipnir, that flashy ringed moon swiftly orbiting his vivid blue ice giant parent, Mama Loki. He's filling up with alien fauna, and OCs patiently (and not-so-patiently) waiting for their own novels once I finish with my OTP for a moment. But that's still a queue of 3 books away, and I only just got moving again on the first of those 3, book 4. So I'd better get back to work. Until next month!
I took the last week off writing to explore the 1.0 patch of the game Core Keeper.
My cavelings in Secrets of Sleipnir are an homage to Core Keeper's cavelings, although mine are grey instead of blue, with black compound eyes instead of glowing red ones, and, er, not universally insane with homicidal rage. I've dug into the origin of their name, making it Fiyeli's word for them and matching his word for how they refer to surface-dwelling life forms: skylings, because they live fully exposed to the terrifying sky. (He knows a better translation is probably 'sky-monster' but thinks it politic to go with 'skyling.')
I have squiggly thoughts in the background about how caveling sentiments about skylings line up with Evret's hare theme, because hares are somewhat eldritch when you examine them closely. Did you know they don't dig burrows? Ever? At most they'll hunker down into a dip in the ground or under a bush, but as the second-fastest land animal in North America after the pronghorn antelope (which evolved to outrun a giant cheetah that is now extinct) they're paradoxically safest living exposed instead of sheltered. As Tumblr memes have said, "anyone who can't tell rabbits from hares hasn't looked into the cold wild eyes of a hare and known if it could speak it would speak backward," and, "hares look like rabbits who passed through the black hole at the centre of the galaxy and saw the cold uncaring face of God." Or something like that; AI has killed internet searches too dead for me to hunt down the original quotes successfully. My point is I absolutely mine those vibes when writing Evret.
ANYWAY! Core Keeper! I love resource-gathering, home-building RPGs; my favourite game of all time is Stardew Valley, but I've also really enjoyed Graveyard Keeper and Littlewood, and Core Keeper is in very much the same vein, though heavier on the combat than the others. Its sandbox is ENORMOUS, and I think it would be most fun playing with like 7 other people to just swarm through the concentric biomes like an ant colony. But it's still enjoyable on my own. I tried to keep up writing at the same time for a couple of days and then decided to just take a break and fully indulge in a deep dive into the game. And I enjoyed myself thoroughly, taking shameless advantage of Casual mode to see all the bosses, finish the story (such as it is - there's plenty of lore but very little narrative), and even clear out the new Steam achievements since the last time I played. Then I settled in to make my 'base' pleasing to me. Then a stray caveling blew up one of my doors, which they aren't supposed to be able to do, and I tore myself away before I committed to fully purging the entire innermost biome and walling it off behind the heaviest terrain blocks with turrets around the doors and a moat of lava - a multi-day project all by itself and not one that would have been particularly rewarding in the end, but that the completionist in me would have demanded I finish if I started.
And I didn't want that, because I was growing restless to return to my writing! I got over my classic neurospicy fear that not doing something for a few days means I've completely forgotten how to do that thing (I get the same anxiety every time I have to return to work after a long weekend) and wrote a good chunk this morning. Back in the game, baby! Just in time to have another brutal week of work, but I've mentioned before how that seems to be, paradoxically, good for my writing output. Yeah, I don't think I'd do well trying to write as my only source of income XD
Draft2Digital Courting AI
I, like many others, was emailed a link to a survey where Draft2Digital was asking about writer and publisher attitudes towards an opt-in function to sell works hosted on D2D to scrapers to feed into the databases for Large Language Models (LLMs). The questions were mostly multiple-choice and heavily slanted to "how would you like us to do this?" as opposed to "should we do this at all?" with only two free-text boxes, which I used far more freely than they wanted me to.
Now, I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical of me, when I'm willing to use graphic models like Adobe Firefly (where the database was bought and paid for or legitimate public domain) and audio models like Google Play's digital audiobook utility (which provide serviceable text-to-speech for free but give nowhere near the value of a human reading), but I am not kindly disposed to text models. When they first emerged I thought they were quite interesting for how closely they appeared to imitate thought, and I couldn't bring myself to care about the idea they might be 0.00001% influenced by scraping my fanfic on AO3 any more than a human writer might be influenced the same way. Now, though, it's clear they were badly implemented from the get-go and have already half-destroyed the internet with their gibberish sludge output, just as the venture capitalist investment money is starting to run dry. Had LLM companies begun with an approach like, "We want to buy scraping rights to your book for $10,000" the landscape might look very different for them now, but they didn't do that, and it's too late to try to build that goodwill retroactively.
I'm very fond of D2D. They're the best aggregator in the field, with the widest reach and the most useable website. I've been quite happy with them. But this move was ominous. As others have said, if they're testing the waters in such a pre-slanted way, they're probably already in much, much deeper behind closed doors. I wish I could tell their decision-makers they're so late to the party that the more profitable business choice would be to loudly repudiate all association with LLM companies forever and guarantee none of their hosted works will ever be scraped. "100% AI-Free, Always" is already the attractor, and "nOw wiTh ai!!1! put glue and rocks on ur pizza!" the repellant.
Still, I will probably remain with D2D until/unless they eliminate the ability to opt out of scraping. Even the presence of an "opt in in exchange for a fee" function is something I would make my peace with in time - not compensating creators for feeding models is how these companies shat the bed in the first place. But the fee would have to be VERY high to tempt me to participate myself.
Parting Thoughts
One of the writer's Mastodon memes I participated in recently had the question this week, "If you could write a story in any fictional world, what would you choose?" This question landed a little differently for me, as a writer with their roots in fanfic; I already can write in any fictional world I choose, and have done so many times! But I realised, with great delight, that the world I want to write in most is mine: Sleipnir, that flashy ringed moon swiftly orbiting his vivid blue ice giant parent, Mama Loki. He's filling up with alien fauna, and OCs patiently (and not-so-patiently) waiting for their own novels once I finish with my OTP for a moment. But that's still a queue of 3 books away, and I only just got moving again on the first of those 3, book 4. So I'd better get back to work. Until next month!
