I would love to write video games (novelist by day-job). The formal possibilities are absolutely fascinating, and so wide, and getting wider by the day with LLMs. ‘Disco Elysium’ is one of the most interesting works of literature I’ve ‘read’ in years, and there’s scope to do so, so much more.

The barrier to entry seems confusing, though. None of my agents seem to understand that world (fair enough!). I’ve written whole scripts for games - as writing exercises - but I find the learning curve of the engines too vicious to realistically have time to do a good job of producing a whole game solo.

I wonder if anyone has any advice. It doesn’t feel like book / film world, where you get an agent, they shop your story around, etc. I wouldn’t even know where to start, given how many production companies there are.

But it’d be incredibly interesting - creatively, and in terms of seeing the other side of the process, the limitations that need to be written around, etc - to work with someone, or a small team. I’d love to try that. There is so much room for innovation in storytelling when compared with writing for the page or screen.

(Though I’m certain there are a million dudes out there who think: “I have a great idea for a game!”, lol.)

Off topic, somewhat: Bukowski’s work - especially the late work - will always be bound, for me, to a boy I knew when I was 16/17 who I’ll call Martin.

Martin was very thin, short, with an already-receding hairline, flaking skin, and tiny, black, always-shifting eyes.

Martin was also very mean: a defense against the bullying I’m certain he endured most of his life. My best friend and I tried to hang out with him. We were weird kids too, and liked strange people, but Martin would never be pleasant or sincere with us. Sometimes he wouldn’t even tolerate our company.

I remember he loved horseracing, and gambling on it (underage).

One day, at a teenage house party - some parents out of town - Martin got far too drunk. He was lying on his side, vomiting onto a friend’s parents’ upholstery, sobbing. He was sobbing because he had been in love for years with a family friend - a pretty girl who was in one of my classes - but who would never, ever love him back, because he was so hideous, and because his personality, or the surface of it, was so abhorrent. That probably he should just kill himself, he thought, etc etc.

I’d just read a late Bukowski poetry collection and loved it the way you love Bukowski when you’re 16/17. I remember it was ‘The Last Night of the Earth’, so it would have contained the poems the article talks about Bukowski typing into his new computer.

I’d read that collection, and the yearning - from a place of perceived ugliness - and the beauty in that - I guess moved me, and made me think of Martin.

So I bought Martin a copy (it was expensive - £18, I think, which was a lot more back then, especially if you’re 17) and quietly gave it to him. I wanted him to see what I saw: that there was a nobility and dignity and a romance in his adoration of this girl, and in his ugliness.

Martin took the book, confused at the gift (kind of a gay thing to do), and then I didn’t see him for weeks. As if he was avoiding me.

When I finally did see Martin, he was so angry. So angry that it surprised me. He was a mean guy but I’d never seen him quite so angry.

He was angry that I’d seen him in the poems. He was angry at the poems themselves. He said he’d never been more insulted in his life.

I stopped trying to hang out with Martin so much after that. I felt bad that I’d hurt his feelings so much.

I check in every year or so using social media. Not to talk, just to look. The girl Martin was in love with is married now. Martin himself has grown into his age: he looked middle-aged then and it suits him better now that he’s approaching it. I think he does something in insurance.

I’ve always wondered: how many of the poems did Martin read? Was he so hurt because of Bukowski’s ugly author photo, and the content of the first few? And whether he read them or not, did he ever return to them, and find them beautiful? Or did Martin just throw the book away?

I hope he didn’t. Or, if he did, I hope he found another way than books of poetry to see himself better, now, compared to how he saw himself then.

What a beautiful story, thanks for sharing.

I think there's a really fundamental misunderstanding of the playing field in this case. (Disclaimer that my day job is 'author', and I'm pro-piracy.)

We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.

I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.

> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.

and from the article:

> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”

The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.

Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?

The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.

Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.

> “… automation became imperative. The intricacies of color and framing management, along with deliverables, must be seamlessly controlled and effortlessly managed by the user, without the need for manual intervention. Therefore, we cannot lean into humans configuring JSON files behind the scenes to map camera formats into deliverables.”

I’d often thought (critically) about the lack of visual diversity in Netflix output - and this is something I often see stereotypical film-enjoyers complain about.

I’d never considered it as a consequence of Netflix’s sheer scale. It’s always really interesting when I discover that something I’d previously put down as an (unimaginably unimaginative) aesthetic choice might in fact be an operational choice. It makes me check myself!

It sounds an incredibly complex and clever system; I can’t help but feel that applying such a strong vertical to the more creative aspects of film and tv production - such as colour grading - will ultimately prove short-sighted.

This. “the medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan.

The actual content is invariably a result of the infrastructure behind it. And it’s not just the image, it’s also what kind of scripts are written, what kind of audience insights are passed on to creative producers, what kind of creative teams are selected.

Is it proving short-sighted? If you’re optimizing for cinematic art, then yeah. But they’re optimizing for subscriptions and global reach. That vertical will likely move to live-streaming, sports and other forms that retain subscribers. And on multiple global markets at the same time (not just U.S.)

It’s a weird vertical, they’re quite sophisticated in their approach, but it’s surprising how they sometimes contract entire chunks out. I’ve read academic papers talking about how Netflix is a very strange disjointed thing.

That’s interesting. I’d love to read those papers, if you remember what they were.

I do wonder if an in-house aesthetic can become ‘tacky’ in the age of global media - can trends ‘die’ when there are still billions more people to reach? And will a creative org structure like this be able to move fast enough should that happen? I don’t think we know the answer to that yet.

I personally believe (maybe optimistically!) that this will be an important question even though Netflix’s natural conclusion is to move towards the subscription-retaining, low-creative products like sports that you mentioned.

The problem with those entertainment products is that they have intrinsic value: if the provider is adding little value besides distribution, some (or lots) of users will pirate that content. Super apparent in sports media.

Maybe it’s a naive hope, rather than a belief, but I hope / believe that because of this, companies like Netflix will be ultimately forced by users to have more idiosyncrasy in their production pipeline and output. It’ll be really interesting to find out!

I think that a vocation - artistic or otherwise - creates a place of safety in any kind of chaos. Life can be as bad as it is, but so long as you believe: “on the page, things are good”, you can always go to work.

I’m not sure if suffering leads to vocation, or if vocation induces neglect of the world that sits outside of that vocation, causing suffering.

From my experience (certainly not Poe-tier) the causality is complicated - a cycle, probably starting with a little of both.

I love Tom Wolfe; I’d not connected his out-of-vougeness to the recent preference for ‘truthiness’ in reporting the reviewer identifies.

I remember reading him at ~13 - my dad gave me a copy of ‘The Pump House Gang’, and told me something to the effect of: “try to write like this - don’t ever try to sound like this.”

We live in Didion times - clean lines and clean sentences - and though maximalism on the page (or in any design) is hard to achieve, especially when written from reality, I think we have room for a few more.

Or at the very least, I think Wolfe deserves to be thought of better by the zeitgeist. He’s so much fun!