A throwback Thursday post
Someone suggested to the Bodleian Library on Twitter that they should post recordings of ambient library noises on their SoundCloud. I initially misread this as ambient literary noises, like the sound of the snow in Narnia melting… the slight tearing noise made by the Subtle Knife as it opens the way between universes… the ghosts of Christmas tenses manifesting to Scrooge…
That got me thinking about more ambient literary noises that I would like to hear.
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It’s Disability Pride Month, so I thought I would take a look at books written by and for disabled people.
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A Throwback Thursday post
I can’t be the only person who starts reading a Pagan book, gets to an exercise in the middle of the chapter, thinks that I don’t have time to do the exercise right now, and either puts the book down, planning to come back later (and never do), or skips the exercise and reads on.
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When I was a kid and artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking whether AI could become conscious seemed like an interesting philosophical problem, but mostly irrelevant. Why did the Butlerian Jihad destroy all “thinking machines”? Why did humans hunt the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The AI and robots of older science fiction stories are generally presented as benevolent but misunderstood, or on a different trajectory from humans (as is the case in Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, where the AI has retreated from earth and lives on Earth’s artificial satellites).
Now that something like AI has been created, in the form of machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), some people have already started to believe that it could become conscious, or that it is already conscious. Some people find this fascinating, others find it creepy.
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Here at Vox Clamantis Books, we are big fans of the Oxford comma. Not just because we used to live in Oxford, but also because it makes more sense in most situations.
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I’ve been writing for most of my life, so it’s hard for me to analyze what I do. Most of the time I just write. However, even for the most experienced writer, it’s helpful to practice different styles and types of writing, as that’s a good way to improve.
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