AI-Generated Celebrity Images Are Getting Good Enough That We May Soon Seen A Deluge Of AI Celebrity Porn

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

They say that every new technological advancement is always used to make porn first and I think we’re careening towards a moment when we’re going to be flooded by AI-generated celebrity porn. We aren’t quite there yet — AI still can’t handle fingers — but I would say in about 18 months AI-generated celebrity porn will be every fucking where.

It is interesting that Emma Watson seems to be someone that all the horny nerds want to see with realistic, yet exaggerated proportions. In fact, to date, that has been one way I have been able to tell for sure that celebrity porn is fake — they all look like what some fucking horny nerd would like this or that female celebrity to look like.

A lot of female celebrities are popular because of their personality, just as much as they are for the size of of their bosom. And, yet, I keep seeing image after image on Twitter of Gal Gadot far more voluptuous than she is in real life. It will be interesting to see if, in 18 months when there is an obscene amount of AI-generated celebrity porn online, if the people generating it even try to stick to the actual dimensions of the women they so admire.

I have my doubts. Horny nerds can’t be stopped.

Of course, at some point in the near future, the law is going to step in. It seems clear that what to do about AI-generated celebrity porn is going to be one of the biggest tests of the courts. It definitely seems as though we’re careening towards a Petite Singularity just as The Fourth Turning is about to happen to us as well.

Good luck.

I’m Please With How The Third Draft Of This Novel Is Shaping Up

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While I continue to drift towards my goal like always, I definitely feel pretty good about the current state of the third draft of my first novel. I’ve come up with a unique, interesting protagonist that I feel readers will want to spend 100,000 words worth of time with.

The more I think about it, the more I see my heroine as looking something like a mixture of Olivia Munn and Nicole Scherzinger, only in her early 30s. I am trying so fucking hard to be as empathetic as possible to the female experience to the point that I, in a very self-conscious manner, try to find every opportunity to pass the fucking Bechdel Test — a test I fucking hate.

My dream is that the women in the audience of this novel will be taken aback that a smelly boy of all people managed to write from a female point of view without making a fool out of himself. This is an issue that I really weighs a great deal on me.

And, yet, I know that, by definition, there will be Tik-Tok influencers who will get the “ick” from my novel simply because I’m a man writing from a female POV — no matter how well I may ultimately show my understanding of the concerns of women.

We can’t all be transgender undocumented Mexicans, you know. Some of us are just white CIS men who want to tell a good story to an audience, regardless of what your gender might be. But that’s not how the woke cancel culture mob sees thing.

They seem me as a white CIS-gendered male who drinks too much and occasionally doesn’t follow the media narrative. Excuse me, I’m tipsy and a little annoyed.

Anyway, things are going really well. I *think* I may have figured out the structure of the first chapter of the third draft after about two weeks of struggle.

I’m At A Loss As To What To Think About Google Scraping Google Docs To Train AI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There is nothing short of panic on Tik-Tok from writers like me who use Google Docs. A number of people have Tik-Tok have urgently suggested that all writers take all of their writing off of Google Docs immediately and use Word instead (or whatever.)

I find this very curious for a number of reasons.

I understand where these writers are coming from, and, yet, I’ve actually looked into the scraping Google is doing and it seems a little too late to worry about such things. Now only is AI everywhere now, but I just don’t know how much my writing is going to make a difference if Google is scraping the entirety of Google Docs to train their LLMs.

Some of the hysterical talk on Tik-Tok seems just that — hysterical doom shit that assumes there’s some way to prevent, completely one’s words from somehow, someway being used to train LLMs.

But I will at amit that I just don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe if I just turn to Word I can somehow, magically, prevent anything I write from finding itself in the maw of AI.

At the moment, I’m taking a very measured wait-and-see approach. While I understand that if I keep my writing on Google Docs that it may, in some way, influence Google’s LLMs, it’s not like my, specific writing and ideas are going to magically pop up somewhere and be produced by Google Movies.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what is going to happen. I just don’t know at the moment.

A Brief Wargaming Of A Second Russian Civil War

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

First, let me be clear — this is silly. Please ignore what I’m about to write. This says more about my personality than any insight I might have about the subject. But I feel like returning to this topic because it’s intriguing.

The key thing to remember about modern Russia is I believe the current regime is a lot weaker than any of us might believe. It’s a corrupt, poorly managed regime that is propped up by fear and greed. What’s more, there is one key thing that is lacking with Russia these days — it seems to me that Russia, to this day, still lacks a strong sense of national identity.

As such, it seems at least plausible to me that a small, dedicated group of people with a clear vision for Russia’s future could topple the Putin regime with a lot less difficulty than you might otherwise imagine. To me, it seems as though adopting the accoutrements of the Whites from the Russian Civil War would be just the thing to paved the way to victory.

You have instant symbols and ideology to tap into, for people to rally around. The vision for a New Russia would be a constitutional monarchy like found in various nations across Western Europe.

But there are some pretty big obstacles to any of this happening. There just aren’t any leaders who serve as the “vanguard of the proletariat” (wink) when it comes to this overthrow. That’s why the Wagner Group uprising got as far as it did — it is clear that the Russian populace would be very receptive to an uprising of some sort . But you would need leadership.

So, for the time being, this is just an idle summer daydream. I hate violence and don’t want anyone to get hurt, so this is just a bit of idle mental masturbation.

A New Beginning

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because the second draft of the novel came in at 80,000 words, I have allowed myself 20,000 extra words for the third draft. I am using most of these additional new words to lay out character and world building. That has been one of the major complaints of those few beta readers who have been willing to give me input — too much of the novel was in my mind and not on the page.

It has taken a lot more time than I expected to think up a new beginning for the novel that satisfies me. But, I am beginning to tentatively believe that one may have come to me. It’s been a lot of work, but the beginning I’ve come up with does exactly what I want — gives people some sense of the world I want them to read about as well as the characters who inhabit that world.

I really have to lean into making these scenes as compelling as possible, even though, in real terms, not a lot really happens. It’s all prep work for the main event. I’m worried that the audience will grow impatient, wanting something of note to actually happen.

And, yet, the counter argument is that only by laying the groundwork of the novel can I produce a work that people care enough about to finish. The current beginning is interesting, but apparently a little too jarring for some people who don’t understand what’s going on.

Like I said, now I’m giving them 20,000 new words at the beginning of the novel so they can get settled and get some sense of the characters I hope they like enough to spend 100,000 words with. It definitely will be interesting to see how successful I am in that regard.

Trump’s ‘Delusional’ Defense

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The moment I heard about the January 6th charges against Trump, I knew what his defense would be — that he honestly believed the bullshit he was peddling. And, sure enough, that seems to be the consensus as to what Trump’s defense will, in fact, be.

And, as such, we’re probably going to spend way, way, way too much time debating the nature of Trump’s delusion just as we’re also debating the fact that Trump is just 60,000 votes in five swing states away from being president again.

This all reminds me of how Trump is an avatar for severe, existential rot within our democracy. That rot is so severe that we will face an existential choice in 2024 — autocracy or civil war / revolution (depending on who wins.)

At the moment, the historical momentum for Trump to win and for the United States to become an “illiberal democracy” like Russia is so powerful as to be nearly immutable. The question is, of course, will Blues do anything when we come to the precipice.

I just don’t see smug Twitter liberals having the gumption to put up any fight on the matter. They’re just going to flee the country and the United States will circle the drain into autocracy.

So. So long and thanks for all the fish, guys. If you have the means to leave the country, I suggest you do so. Trump is delusional and yet he’s probably still going to become president again.

No One Is Going To Save Us

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key issue facing us is there are macro, structural issues swirling around us that we have no control over. Everything looks like it’s going to come to a head in late 2024, early 2025. I say this because the last time we had significant political violence, it was sparked by the presidential election of 1860. So, at the moment, at least, it definitely seems as though the election of 2024 Could Be It.

Or not.

I continue to struggle with the idea that we’ve crossed the Rubicon to the point that the two sides hate each other in the real world to the point that they would take up arms to prove their point. But the key issue for me is not just how radical Trump’s second term agenda is, but how unlikely he is to accept defeat should that happen to occur.

It’s one of those things where you just can’t predict things one way or another. All the conditions are there for revolution or civil war, and, yet, either one of those outcomes for the 2024 election seems rather fantastical at the moment. It just doesn’t seem possible that an otherwise stable hyperpower like the United States would suddenly and abruptly — and wilfully — go tits up because of “vibes.”

And, yet, here we are.

You really could make a case either way. It could be that all of this is just more of my usual “hysterical doom shit” and it could be that I’m being rather prescient. At the moment, even I think we’re either going to punt our problems down the road another four years or we’re just going to slide peacefully into autocracy.

But there is a greater-than-zero sum chance that all hell will break loose. I think this because on a structural basis, the Republican Party has begun to believe its own bullshit to the point that they are prepared to start a civil war if Trump doesn’t manage to win in 2024. The only unknown is if they’re actually prepared to pull the trigger on a “National Divorce” in the real world and not just their usual online mental masturbation.

At the moment, now in the summer of 2023, it really could go either way. I just don’t know. They say you go bankrupt gradually then all at once for a reason. So, for the time being, we’re just going to wait and see, I guess.

The Strange Case Of The Dog With No Bite (Yet?)

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As we rush towards late 2024, early 2025 with the fate of America for decades to come will be decided, there is one thing that hasn’t happened yet that you might otherwise be expecting — political violence.

I definitely don’t want political violence to happen, but if you accept that the country is tearing itself apart like it did in the 1850s, then it would be logical to assume that similar things might begin to happen. As such, I continue to have a lingering fear that we might see some sort of unexpected, spectacular political violence not in the streets — but in the halls of Congress.

Should any such thing tragically happen, that is when I will sit up and take notice. That type of event would lead me to believe that when the moment comes in late 2024, early 2025 that the single biggest event in world history since the French Revolution probably is going to happen — the United States will either have a civil war or a revolution (depending on which side wins the 2024 election.)

We’ve apparently come pretty close in the last few years, but my fear is with all the fucking guns in the country these days, there is a real risk of some sort of mass casualty event in Congress itself when someone — probably a Republican Representative — freaks out and starts shooting people.

I don’t want any such thing to happen, but that’s my fear.

The Vivek Ramaswamy Campaign Agenda Is Bonkers

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If you want any sign of the fascist rot at the core of the Republican Party, look no further than Vivek Ramaswamy. He says shit that is so totally fucking bonkers with a straight face that gives one pause for thought. From what I tell from what I’ve heard of him talking about his campaign, Ramaswamy is running to the Right of Trump.

And he seems so blase and cheerful about his fascist inclinations. He keeps talking about how he wants “move forward.” But forward into what? It definitely seems that with all of this talk of requiring military service to for young people to vote that he wants to move us forward into a fascist state.

What’s more, Ramaswamy comes across as something of a joke because, like a little puppy dog, he refuses to say anything critical of Trump, even as he’s trying to defeat him for the nomination. It’s all very curious.

The Ramaswamy campaign shows how totally fucked we are. The Republican Party is pretty brazen in how fascist it is at the moment and, because of macro trends, it shows no signs of coming to its senses. This is it — either we have a civil war / revolution and somehow win it and destroy the Republican Party as we currently know it, or we turn into a Russian-style autocracy.

It definitely seems, at the moment, that this an immutable fact of our immediate future.

The Era Of Hope Is Over — The Era Of Preparation Has Arrived

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing I’ve noticed from people on both the Left and the Right when it comes to Trump is an odd sense that somehow if we just “hope” enough that he won’t come back in 2024. The thing about Trump is he’s an avatar for deep-seated structural problems in our political system.

As such, barring something spectacular, Trump has a better-than-even chance of being elected president again in 2024. Much like how there came a point when there was a certain inevitability to the fall of Rome, so, too, is America careening towards autocracy on a macro level.

This is a historical Big Idea the likes of which we haven’t faced since 1860. And, at the moment, I think we’re just going to peacefully slide into autocracy. There is, of course, a chance that there be a spectrum when it comes to violence from none to a civil war / revolution, but I’m not convinced that either side has it in them to actually pull the trigger one violence.

Sure, there will be a lot of talk about it no matter what happens in 2024, but now, in August 2023, there just doesn’t seem to be the gumption on either side to risk life-or-death violence on the scale necessary to either start a civil war (National Divorce) or to some sort of Resistance Revolution.

At least, I hope I’m right. Both a Red Civil War or a Resistance Revolution would be a massive fucking clusterfuck on an astonishing scale that would, by definition, prompt World War Three and potentially the DPRK lobbing a few h-bombs our way.

So, in a sense, these months before Election Day 2024 are kind of the quiet before the storm. A decision of some sort is going to be made about the nature of America one way or another. I struggle to believe that we’re going to find some sort of Third Way like we did in 2020 that allows us to punt some severe political problems down the road another four years.

The era of hope is over. The era of preparation has begun.