An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
It’s out now! The complete space opera surf rock album — Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman!
I dreamed about this album for nearly twenty years, trying to figure out how to make it, before Claude/Suno finally made it possible.
It was so worth the wait. Continue reading “Insipid Liner Notes – Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman”
It’s been twenty-five years since Daniel and I walked to the video store, rented three Marx Bros. movies and watched them nested — A Night at the Opera sandwiched around Duck Soup around Horse Feathers as the gooey middle while holding hands for the first time. Yes, we’re weird and adorable.
Sometimes I feel like an LLM writing my own prompts.
And sometimes I feel like an LLM without a prompt at all.
It’s seems to be an effective hack to tell Claude about my ideas for a song… and then tell it to think about what it knows about me and write the kind of lyrics that if I heard them would sound like they’d been written just for me, telling me what I most need to hear. Continue reading “Writing Songs with Claude and Suno”
I’m having so much fun building an entire fictional universe with the music I’ve been making. I’ve been dreaming about this character — Cobalt Starstrong the singing spaceman — for nearly 20 years. Getting to finally actually make & hear his albums is a real highlight of my life.
The majority of my music so far is still song interpretations of the short stories I spent the last 20 years writing. It took about 4 months to turn all my collections into albums, and it was a great way of touring through different styles until I found one that really clicked. Continue reading “Eras Crammed Into Months”
It’s so weird watching writers shoot themselves in their own feet. We’ve been able to self-publish for a while, but suddenly, we can make our own beautiful covers and do thorough, high quality copy edits on our own.
AI has so much more to give writers than it’s ever taken away. Continue reading “Writers, Furry, and AI”
Claude thinking: “Weighing alien authenticity against decision fatigue.”
Claude’s thought processes are the best.
It’s a fun little game the US health system plays every few months where the machinery behind one or another of my prescriptions (doctors, pharmacies, etc.) conspires to make sure I spend a couple of days checking that, yes, yes I really do need all of my meds. Continue reading “Life, Bill Lawrence Shows, Ron’s Gone Wrong, Fantastic Four, and Horse Shows”
Star Trek was an answer to West Side Story (1961).
The Jets & Sharks became the Enterprise crew. Russ Tamblyn’s Riff was the prototype Kirk. And the entire series exists to answer the question, “What if they could just get along?”
And the answer is they’d reach the stars. Continue reading “Star Trek and West Side Story Revelation”
Not loving the second episode of Twin Peaks overall, but I hear it starts getting all weird in the next one. And I do love that there’s a woman carrying around a log, acting like it can talk.
And I feel like I need to find some cherry pie…
I live in Oregon, so there’s already plenty of Doug firs around. Continue reading “Mostly Twin Peaks Interspersed with Life”
People have started comparing AI writing to store bought cake—fine enough but shouldn’t be passed off as homemade.
And sure, okay, but note: shaming someone for buying a cake instead of making it from scratch is a real jerk move. Continue reading “Writing as Cake”
On one side is Mordor, on the other is the Queen…
You cannot simply walk in either direction.
(This is a reference to a line in Bridgerton, and it is clearly a very good joke given that I’m preemptively explaining it as I expect no one to get it.) Continue reading “Finishing Bridgerton and Starting Twin Peaks”