My dad has been using the same computer since 2014, and it’s been failing by degrees for the past couple of years now. A few weeks ago, he finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a new machine running Windows 11.

Friends and enemies: I cannot overstate the extent to which Windows 11 is a fucking nightmare, built to harass and exploit the average user at every turn. My dad’s a reasonably tech-savvy guy, but if I weren’t constantly on hand to deal with all the dark pattern button prompts and notification spam he’s been getting from his own fucking OS, this 73-year-old man would be trapped in a hell from which there is no escape.

As a solution, a few of my associates have recommended switching my dad (again, 73 years old) over to Linux. I will not be doing that.

Podcast Appearance: I Will Fight You

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we bring our friend Tanner Vogelgesang onboard to talk about John Waters’ Serial Mom. We then proceed to spend most of the episode gushing about Kathleen Turner and her facial acting.

-K

Alyx Jones is an independent game developer from the UK. She’s been working on The Quiet Things, a deeply personal game about sexual abuse, trauma, and survival. A trailer for The Quiet Things was slated to be shown during the BAFTA Games Awards on April 17; for an independent developer, this was a huge opportunity.

Until the trailer was pulled from the show at the last minute.

Jones reports that she had already revised the trailer once because BAFTA flagged certain imagery (“an object inspection of a craft knife and a statue breaking out of a mirror”) as potentially violent. Not only is this silly on its face, it’s also incredibly weird considering how permissive game trailers usually are when it comes to violent imagery; to list just one example, the Baldur’s Gate III announcement trailer features a man vomiting his own teeth.

Nevertheless, Jones made the requested changes; she was then informed, the night before the awards ceremony, that her trailer had been pulled from the show anyway. The stated reason was that “there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience.”

24 hours is more than enough time to throw some white text on a black screen with a list of trigger warnings. Even a live warning from someone onstage with a microphone would take less than 10 seconds.

A responsible journalist would be hesitant to draw any hard and fast conclusions from all this, but I’m not a journalist. I’m an artist — one who’s experienced my own fair share of corporate meddling in my work. And if I were in Alyx Jones’ position, I would quite confidently believe I was being jerked around by someone who never intended to let my game see the light of day.

BAFTA has since stated that they “fully support games that engage with difficult subjects, and we made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority.” I’m not sure what the word “support” is supposed to mean in this context, considering what they put Alyx Jones through; if they’re not willing to broadcast a 2-minute trailer in support of games like The Quiet Things, what are they willing to do?

The use of words like “wellbeing” is also telling.

For the record, Jones’ trailer is incredibly tame; it features first-person game footage of the player character walking through various environments while characters in voiceover talk around the protagonist’s traumatic experiences in vague terms. The trailer only alludes to sexual assault; there’s a brief bit of VO where the main character says “stop” twice in a distraught voice.

This, apparently, is too distressing for the average BAFTA viewer — because trauma stemming from sexual abuse, especially childhood sexual abuse, is so stigmatized in polite society that we’d all rather pretend it doesn’t happen. Even the gentlest reminder that it exists is tantamount, in the eyes of some, to a psychic assault. For the sake of everyone’s mental health, victims must be silenced.

Incidentally, this exact stigma is what The Quiet Things was created to address. You can watch the trailer here.

-K

Book publisher Hachette has pulled out of its deal with author Mia Ballard over accusations that her novel, Shy Girl, was written with the assistance of a large language model.

I say “accusations” because the actual evidence here is pretty thin. The arguments presented are all either “the writing looks like AI” or “we ran bits of the novel through an AI detector and it told us the text was AI-generated.”

First off, human beings are quite bad at telling the difference between machine-generated and human-generated art. The logical inconsistencies in Shy Girl's plot and prose could be the result of a chatbot overrunning its context window, or just sloppy writing, or (considering the subject matter) a deliberate attempt at surrealism. Most of the “obvious tells” of LLM-generated text (em dashes, rule of three, etc.) are actually features of a formal African English education, because LLMs were largely trained by criminally underpaid African workers. And guess who most often gets accused of “sounding like a chatbot”?

Then we get into AI detection tools, which The New York Times claims to have used. Many “AI detectors” also use machine learning to some degree — analyzing and comparing two sets of text is something LLMs are built to do — but these tools tend to produce a lot of false results. The differences between human-generated text and machine-generated text are going to be largely invisible to an LLM designed to mechanically produce text that could plausibly pass as something a human wrote.

And that’s not even getting into the “AI detectors” that simply paste the submitted text into ChatGPT and ask it, “hey, did you write this?” To quote a friend of mine with approximate knowledge of many things, “anyone who tells you they have a tool to accurately detect AI is probably a liar, and liars love to use AI, so it’s probably just feeding the text into ChatGPT and asking.”

Three years ago, I noted that because “it looks like it was made by AI” is an accusation that can’t be proven right or wrong, it would inevitably be used as an ideological bludgeon against any art an accuser personally didn’t like very much. And now it looks as though a lot of people really didn’t like Shy Girl, didn’t think anyone else should like Shy Girl, and found the perfect way to bully it off the market.

(Does it feel good to be right all the time? No, it’s awful.)

Trying to suss out whether a book was written using an LLM or not is, in my opinion, pointless. A book should be criticized on the basis of whether it sucks — and, so far, provably LLM-written books have universally sucked. When an LLM manages to write a novel that’s actually good, we can revisit this topic.

And I’m fine with making it a rule that nobody can publish a novel they didn’t personally write, but in that case someone should have a word with Tom Clancy’s corpse.

-K

When I was a kid, my mom explained to me why she didn’t really enjoy Mother’s Day: she felt as if celebrating mothers one day a year gave everyone free reign to take them for granted during the other 364. I kind of got it after a while, but I couldn’t relate — until the corporate world started making such a big fucking deal out of International Women’s Day.

A few years ago, one of my previous employers released a promotional IWD video in which various female employees explained how the company made them feel included and supported. The next year, that same company fired its majority-female office support staff and hired them back as contractors so it wouldn’t have to pay them benefits.

Another year, a different company I was working for at the time decided to commemorate IWD by giving all the women in the office (or everyone perceived as a woman, anyway) a potted plant and a personalized card featuring quotes from famous women throughout history. As a dyke with a case of the Genders who had no interest in going to paint nite, I was firmly on the margins of the “Women of [COMPANY]” social group; the card perfectly encapsulated that whole state of affairs. It featured a quote from Margaret Thatcher.

You know, noted LGBT ally Margaret Thatcher.

The plant was also a bit on-the-nose. “Here is a thing you are now responsible for keeping alive whether you like it or not. Happy International Women’s Day.”

-K

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that you’re supposed to adopt a buzzy, overexcited tone when announcing the release of a new book, the better to build up hype. I’m not sure that wisdom holds when the book in question is about a very serious, very horrible thing that won’t stop showing up in the news while you’re writing and publishing the book.

New Novella: “A Reckoning in Whitehall”

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty certainly isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

“A Reckoning in Whitehall” is the tenth story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one gets pretty heavy. It’s about abuse and sexual violence, and the ways in which they’re enabled by structures of power. I originally hashed out the concept early last year in an attempt to understand what were, back then, current events; I was not expecting it to be even more relevant by the time it came out.

I put a lot of love, anger, and grief into “A Reckoning in Whitehall.” It’s not a nice story, but I did my best to make it an honest one.

-K