Category: From The Editor

We’re Stuck With Fucking Trump For The Rest of His Fucking Life, Baring A Revolution (Ugh)

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Despite all the gnashing of teeth by liberals and progressives, Trump simply is going nowhere for as long as he lives. He’s going to be president for life. I don’t know, exactly, he’ll do it, but he will.

He’s going to destroy everything before he shuffles off this mortal coil and it will take decades — generations maybe — for us to sort things out afterwards. I think that’s Trump’s historical purpose — to destroy the Second American Republic founded by Lincoln.

What happens after that, I don’t know.

Probably some sort of dystopian techno-autocracy is my best guess. Maybe the Singularity will come while Trump’s still alive and Elon Musk will upload Trump’s into the cloud and he’ll be our Max Headroom-style AI overlord.

Now, obvious, we might have a revolution — especially if Social Security checks stop being cut on time — but then we’d have a civil war and I really would prefer not to have either one of those things happen.

I just want to live in a traditional liberal (Western) democracy. But that is not to be because we just don’t have to grit to fight back against Trump. We’re totally fucked. Totally, completely fucked at least for the rest of my life.

Leave the country if you have the means.

OpenAI Just Dropped An H-Bomb On The Commercial Modeling Industry

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have long said that we’re one severe — or not so severe — recession away from our greedy corporate overlords thinking AI was “just good enough” to eliminate many, many jobs.

Well, just recently we got closer to that being reality in one part of the economy: the commercial modeling industry. The examples I’ve seen of the new image rendering software from OpenAI are stunning — it can create models (who aren’t real) out of whole cloth AND generate text and other imagines.

So, what’s the point of paying a photographer, a model and all the other elements of an ad campaign when you can just use OpenAI? That has got to be a billion dollar industry, at least, that may have just gone…poof!

Now, instead of all those people being paid and that money going throughout the economy, some jackass CEO will casually mumble something about “get an intern to do it on OpenAI” and that will be that.

What happens next will be a good example of how us finding out how quickly it will take for industry to adopt some revolutionary technology. I think, for the moment, the use of this image technology won’t be that wide spread — at least for a few weeks, maybe.

But the moment we slip into any sort of recession, the fucking apocalypse is going to happen for all those people associated with commercial photography.

Rethinking Social Media: Introducing the ‘Gawker’ Concept

March 26, 2025

In today’s rapid-fire digital world, online conversations can often feel shallow, fragmented, or buried under endless, disconnected comment sections. What if there was a platform designed from the ground up to encourage more thoughtful interaction, deeper collaboration, and context-rich discussions?

Over some brainstorming sessions, my friend Orion and I have been fleshing out an idea for a hypothetical social media service tentatively called Gawker. The name itself hints at a core principle: maybe users should observe (“gawk”) a bit, understand the environment, before jumping into the fray.

Inspired by the Past, Built for the Future

Gawker draws inspiration from unlikely sources: the structure of old-school Usenet newsgroups (remember TIN?) and the collaborative power of modern tools like Google Docs. The idea isn’t to recreate the past, but to leverage its strengths in a sleek, modern interface.

The Core Components: Posts and Groups

  1. The Group: This is the heart of Gawker. Think of it like a Usenet newsgroup, a Reddit subreddit, or a G+ Circle, but supercharged. Groups can be public or private, created easily and on-the-fly for any topic, project, or community imaginable – from family updates to global news discussions. They are designed to be numerous and potentially ephemeral, spun up and deleted as needed.
  2. The Post: Within a Group, a Post isn’t just a status update; it’s a full page, a canvas for ideas and discussion.

The Killer Feature: Inline Interaction

This is where Gawker truly diverges. Instead of comments relegated to the bottom, interaction happens inline, directly within the Post content, visualized much like Google Docs:

  • Inline Threading: See a sentence or paragraph you want to discuss? Highlight it and “Spawn Thread.” This creates a distinct, threaded conversation (like Usenet) attached precisely to that point in the Post, keeping debate focused and contextual. Different contributors’ comments could be color-coded.
  • Inline Editing: Especially in smaller or private Groups focused on collaboration, permissions could allow users to directly edit the Post content itself, working together on a shared document in real-time.

This flexible model allows Groups to tailor their interaction style – pure discussion via threads, collaborative editing, or a mix of both.

Earning Your Voice: The Reputation System

To encourage thoughtful participation and manage potential trolling, Gawker would incorporate a point-based reputation system:

  • Getting Started: New users might receive a starting pool of points (N), allowing them to participate immediately but on a probationary basis.
  • Building Trust: Positive contributions – insightful posts, helpful comments, upvotes/endorsements (perhaps weighted more heavily from trusted friends in private groups) – earn points.
  • Consequences: Trolling, spamming, or other negative behavior, flagged by users or moderators, leads to point deductions. Lose enough points, and posting privileges are temporarily revoked.
  • Redemption: Users who lose privileges would need to “prove themselves” again, likely through demonstrating positive, albeit perhaps limited, interactions to earn back points and regain full access.

Gamification & Moderation

We even tossed around the idea of making this system more visible – perhaps a leaderboard showcasing users with high reputation scores? Maybe even tangible rewards like merchandise credits for top contributors? While this could strongly incentivize good behavior, it also carries risks like encouraging “point farming” over genuine discussion, shifting focus from quality to quantity. Careful balancing would be essential.

Robust moderation tools would be available for Group creators, with defaults for casual users. For very large, important public Groups, a small, potentially paid editorial staff might even be employed to help manage discussions.

Bridging Worlds

Gawker aims high: to provide intimate spaces for friends and family (competing with Facebook) and dynamic forums for public discourse (competing with Twitter/X). Features allowing content or discussions to transparently move from a private to a public context (with clear labeling and user consent) could help bridge these worlds.

The Vision

Gawker is envisioned as a platform where context matters, where discussion is woven directly into the content, and where participation is earned through positive contribution. By blending elements of collaborative documents, threaded forums, and a social reputation system, the hope is to create a richer, potentially more civil and productive online environment.

I Got Nothing Against The FBI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While my rhetoric about the FBI may have grown a bit more heated of late, it’s more about me fucking hating what Trump is doing to it than anything else. My sole encounter with the FBI — when I talked to one of the PR people about an element of my novel — was quite pleasant.

It’s because I trust and like the FBI that I’ve grown so fucking angry over what’s going on with it. It’s being corrupted and turned into a fucking arm of the Trump campaign.

Anyway. Live long and prosper, guys. You deserve better.

Finished A Structural Review Of The First Act Of This Thriller I’m *Still* Working On

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So. I’ve finally gotten to a point with the first act of this thriller I’ve been working on for years and years to sit back and slowly go through it on a more tactical basis. I’m trying to make it consistent before I go into the second act.

The second act is based on the second draft of the novel which was a straight murder-in-a-small-town mystery. But the story has drifted so much sense I finished that draft that I suspect there are going to be a lot — A LOT — of structural issues I’m going to have to work on.

And, what’s more, I probably going to have to lean on AI to help rewrite many scenes after the first act.

Right now, my only big concern about the first act is it’s too…saucy. There’s a lot of sex — some of it pretty explicit — and that could be a big turn off for the people I usually turn to to read my work. And, yet, I have a vision and I know what I want to do with it.

So, I’m keeping the sex for the time being. If all else fails, I’ll just query the damn thing, beta readers be damned. I just want to get into that portion of the process just to experience it.

But I do have a number of scifi novels that I’m kicking around, some of them are really good! The only issue with them is they’re not as well formed, right now at least, and also technology is moving so fast that if I don’t pump the damn things out sooner rather than later they will seem rather quaint.

Why I Don’t Think The Trump-Musk Dope Show Is A ‘Smash & Grab’ Operation

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Anyone who thinks the next major Federal election will be free and fair is a fool. The whole thing is going to be so rigged that the already cocky MAGA is going to take things to the next level. That’s why I think all this talk about the reason why Trump and Musk are acting so fast is it’s a “smash and grab” operation before the next election is just dumb.

We’re totally, completely fucked. Totally. The end. It’s over. Stick a fork in America, it’s cooked. There’s no going back. Either we have a revolution then a civil war (which I don’t want) or we turn into a legalistic autocracy like in Russia.

There is no longer any middle grown, no more “muddling through.” That option is long gone.

So, get out of the country while you still can. Maybe my novel will be a hit and I can get out eventually, too. But the way things are going, I’m going to be pushed out a window by either a weaponized ICE or FBI.

Sigh.

I Guess It’s Called A ‘Passion Project’ For A Reason, Huh — Ugh

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I really have no idea what I’m going to do about this thriller. It’s still got a lot of sex in it and there’s a real risk that it will be closer to 160,000 words, not the 100,000 sweetspot for a first-time author.

Ugh.

And, yet, I just don’t want to change anything. I have a vision and I’m going to stick to it.

But I do think I may pick one day of the week, maybe two, where I don’t focus on the thriller but rather work some other novel. I really have to do something because, well, lulz, Bad Things happened to me the last time I “finished” this novel and realized it was no good and I would have to start all over again and I definitely don’t want THAT to happen.

Yet I really like the premise of this novel. It’s really interesting. The crux of this version of the novel is I have a pretty solid first act after really struggling with that in previous versions.

But this version of the novel holds up really well, overall, I think. I’m a little worried that once I reach the second act that is going to be the moment when things slow down dramatically and I’m going to have to do A LOT of re-writing. I’m so tired of rewriting things that I’m really going out of my way to not have to do that — at least with this version.

The next version, before I start to show it to people again, I think I’m going to force myself to actually rewrite a lot of scenes that I’ve been too lazy to.

The Status Of My Thriller, Late March 2025

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that I’ve finally sobered up and have stopped moping for various reasons, I am finally pivoting towards rewriting my thriller AGAIN. My goal at the moment is to finish revising the first act. The first act is actually the second half of the second act of a different novel — with the same heroine — that I gave up on because no one liked it.

The general consensus about that other novel was it was too….bawdy. And, yet, of course biggest reason why people didn’t like the other novel was it centered around a part-time sex worker. THAT part I’ve kept, if I’ve done my best to tone it down.

What can I say, I like strippers. Love’em even. They’re so weird and kooky — and hot — that once I began toying with the idea of including that angle in the novel I kind of fell into it and couldn’t get out.

If, nothing else, the popularity of Anora and Barry at least give me some hope that maybe people will at least give me a chance. Maybe. But people are so judgmental of anyone who is just starting out — especially someone as unproven as I am — that there is a reason why I keep calling this my “passion project.”

I’m probably going to fail in a rather spectacular fashion, but lulz, at least I’ll have fun doing it.

Comparing My Novel To Stieg Larsson’s Works

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One thing I did not know for a long time was that two of the three novels written by Stieg Larsson while he was alive were actually part of one huge novel that was split into two and connected by a cliffhanger. Hence, that was why it was such a struggle for me to figure out the structure of the novel I decided to use as my textbook — The Girl Who Played With Fire.

Now that I’m back into the swing of things with working on this thriller — when I should be using some of my time to work on some scifi, too, natch — I find myself mulling how much of a one-to-one there is between my textbook and my novel.

My goal from the beginning of this process has been to write an American Lisbeth Salander. What I didn’t expect was I would start the series not with my own The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but with what would effectively be a prequel. My novel is set in late 1994 and is about the events surrounding the BIRTH of my Salander-like character.

The other (planned) novels are about my heroine as an adult. But doing things the way I’m doing them gives me a lot of room to distinguish my work from that of Larsson. Since I’m an American (duh) my novels are going to be natively American in their scope and style, even though I use some structure techniques of Larsson just so I can hopefully appeal to his fanbase.

(Even though the novels first came out about 20 years ago.)

Anyway. It will be interesting to see what happens next. I hope to get this first thriller in the series done ASAP — hopefully no later than maybe a year from now, if not sooner.

I really want to query this novel (for the first time.) I’ve never gotten that far in the process before.

Trying To Live A More Healthy Life

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I just recently decided to give up two of my biggest vices — booze and the occasional cigar. I’ve reached an age where things start to fall apart and I’m getting a little nervous.

I know what they say that there’s nothing worse than a dry drunk, but I’m determined to go cold turkey. I’m not one of those people who wants to live forever — unless, like, the Singularity makes that a literal possibility — but I am nervous enough about my health to cut back on things that might reduce my ultimate lifespan.

My dad is still going strong as a very, very old man, so it’s at least possible that I might have a sold 20 years left in me if I just don’t fucking drink so much. At the same time, I will say I had a lot of fun drinking a lot, even though (especially in South Korea) I was known to do the occasional stupid thing because of it.

Anyway. There’s only so much I can do at this point. I just have to believe in myself and write as fast as I can and as well as I can on the thriller I’ve been working on in hopes that I might just sell it while I’m still alive instead of dropping dead before it gets published like Stieg Larsson.