I’m a little blurry and bleary today, so instead of a coherent post, how about some interesting things to read and discuss?
Firstly, I woke up this morning to a cat demanding pats, and while I gave her her due, I read this essay by David Kedrosky with the other hand. It’s very interesting, and after reading it, feeding her to keep her happy, and getting my coffee, I pulled my Thomas Sowell Migrations and Cultures off the shelf to read with Guns, Germs and Steel, since there are resonances I want to get a better feel for. I read Conquests and Cultures a while back, and ordered the other two of Sowell’s trio in paper as they weren’t in eBook at the time (and I am bad about getting through my paper TBR which is years deep at this point.) I’ve been working on Creatures Born of Mud and Slime by Daryn Leroux, which is about the theory of spontaneous generation, how long it endured in the science theories, and why that was. It’s interesting, but dry. Sowell is many things but I never find him dry.
Secondly, in my email this morning was a note about the Anthropic lawsuit. I pulled up a decently balanced article to send for clarity. The suit was not settled for the reason that seems to be shouted abroad on social media, and I’m annoyed at the superficial naysayers. This was big business doing bad things, business as usual, but it wasn’t what the AI-bullies want it to be. “In Bartz v. Anthropic, the AI company was charged with illegally using pirated books to train its large language models. The action came only after Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California ruled that while Anthropic’s training of its Claude LLMs on authors’ works was transformative and therefore fair use, its practice of downloading pirated books from piracy sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror to build a permanent digital library was not.” (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/98493-tentative-agreement-reached-in-anthropic-copyright-lawsuit.html)
The courts ruled, rightly, and I was happy to see it, that the training did not violate copyright laws. It was using illegally-obtained books from pirate sites that Anthropic went down for*. There’s a lot of breathless rhetoric claiming this will apply to all LLM training, and that is incorrect, and there is now legal precedent to protect that training. The mechanism for training an LLM does not involve storing the content, nor copying from it.
Finally, I had a lot of fun yesterday sitting down to do the video announcement of Raconteur Press’s anthologies for 2026. If you’re looking for a home for short fiction, we’ve got some fun themes. There will be two more announcements in the upcoming week, dealing with our children’s line and the novels. Can’t really say ‘adult novels’ here because that implies things we certainly don’t want! I used to laugh about that when I was a librarian. The children’s collection was downstairs, and the ‘adult’ collection upstairs. Other than Dr. Seuss’ book on Lady Godiva, which we shelved very high… Ah, the vagaries of the English language.
Anyway, what’s on your mind this morning, or on your reading stack?
- You have John Van Stry to thank for book piracy sites being illegal, as he lays out in his MGC article about the long and expensive battle against one of them which created the legal precedent for this.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Interesting Things”
My mind is roiled currently, having just posted my second book and first novel as an ebook while waiting on the paperback proof before posting that. I still have a sizable stack of books to be read including Wearing the Cape that I’m in the middle of and the, as yet, unbegun August 1914, at 850 pages, a much more challenging read (and it’s only the first part of Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel trilogy. Yikes!).
So I’m musing today about what to work on next. One of the 3 short stories I’ve started? The novel with an actual soundtrack that I envisioned way back in the 70’s before such a thing was possible? But will people be interested in a novel set in the 60’s?
But then, there is the allure of Raconteur Press that was touted at LibertyCon. I checked out the remaining open calls and am intrigued by Bourbon and Lead. A noir-like take set in the underbelly of “America’s Finest City”? I’m rolling that one around in my mind. By Monday I should either have a story to work on for that or have given up on the idea.
The future’s wide open.
If you need more inspiration, here’s the editor’s homework for that anthology: https://raconteurpress.substack.com/p/bourbon-and-lead-dime-detective-stories
Just two comments on the reading here. When I read Jared Diamond many years ago I remember thinking he could have called his book, _Cereal, Horses, and Babies_ just as easily. And the essay you pointed to does comment on those factors. At that time I was also reading _Noah’s Ark_ by Ryan and Pittman which addresses an issue that Diamond mentions but doesn’t follow up on, that is, a sudden dispersal of a great many people away from the Black Sea. Ryan and Pittman have an interesting explanation for that.
It’s fascinating to dive deeper into history and put together the connections, then find new ones and hare off ever deeper into the rabbit holes.
I’m reading a well-written but “need score card” history of southeastern Europe from 500-1250. I know just enough to be familiar with the major players, but Byzantine politics and foreign policy can be, well, Byzantine, when acted upon by a lot of moving outside forces.
Also reading a book about “how would Paleolithic hominids have survived in Europe?” It is also very dense, because it takes into account ALL THE THINGS!!!!! With citations. It is also very useful, because my writing project at the moment is about someone in Transylvania who is having to live on his own, mostly, and trying to survive in conditions that are not always great. And he’s a high-mileage 40s with a lot of old injuries, so knowledge has to make up for some of his limits. The time is around 1300s, so between the Mongols and the Ottomans.
And IIRC (and I probably don’t) that was a cold era?
1300-1310 was in Western Europe. Poland and southeastern Europe were spared the burnt of it until the 1320s or so, when it was their turn, as best sources suggest. They had been cold and terribly dry, then cold and wet, in the 1000-early 1100s while Western Europe enjoyed the Medieval Warm Period. The weather went to heck through around 1400s, then moderated a bit until the late 1500s. The next period of hard cold started with Russia and China, then slammed Western Europe, North America, China and Japan, and pretty much everyone until 1850 or so.
Aaaaand I see a lecture podium sneaking up on me, so I will stop right here! 😀
I think I have the confusing scene in one isekai in hand. (It’s confusing to the viewpoint character.)
And I think I can finally introduce the love interest in the other isekai and get the heroine past her fighting against ignorance opening.