Has VAN GOGH finally risen...

 ...to paint our garden?

No, it was Chang who took this picture through the kitchen window. 

Rain, finally rain. We never get enough of it during the summer, when the lawn gets thirsty.

And here's, as a bonus, another of Chang's pictures, taken two weeks ago of the kitchen wing:

He posted it on Twitter, where it drew comments such as "fairy tale," "haunting," (one wonders) and yes, "nice sunrise." Chang, the owner of a Tesla Model Y, is becoming very popular on Twitter, drawing hundreds of reposts and uncountable likes for his posts. (We shouldn't crow, we hate social networks).

Meta...metaverse? All you need to know about it

Meta? Metaverse? What happened to Facebook? What happened to Mark Zuckerberg? 

You've been wondering, and so have we. Here's the first report from someone who's actually been there, wo visited the metaverse, and it's devastating, his report, fortunately. It's a bit long, the piece, but well-written, and appeared first in New York Magazine. Enjoy:

Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland

By Paul Murray

 

Paul Murray's avatar in the Metaverse

In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.

Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.

It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?

The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs?

Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!

It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”

I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.

“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.

Beckett 2.0

 (Our friend Glenn sends this:)

How are you doing...?

Michael is posting this especially for Alex (Irene Hogan), the famous editor of GFF, who was wondering how we are doing...

This is "us" (Chang and Michael, plus Charlie, our saviour (in the middle), in November '20, in the garden of our new home in Alcobaça (click on any picture for a slide-show)).

The last couple of years, when Michael was looking at his posts on these pages, he felt that people were being misled to think that we were living in paradise. 

The view from our home on the Cote d'Azur ("Nichts ist schwerer zu ertragen als eine lange Reihe von schönen Tagen" (Goethe))

This was far from the truth, unfortunately, since we were in financial trouble and had to sell the place and leave France. But the housing market was down, we could not sell, and in our suppressed state of mind we suffered under this ruthlessly glorious sun rising each morning over the glorious Mediterranean.

A passing cloud comes to the rescue, for once.

But then Covid struk, the markets turned, and we sold the house and moved to Portugal, where we found---for a song---an underrated hilltop villa in Alcobaça, 100 km north of Lisbon, near the coast.

It's the structure with the red roof, not far from...

 

...the Praia do Norte, the beach with the highest surfable waves in the world.

But then, the internet hit in too many ways and our relocation became much more complicated than expected. Here's one trivial example, concerning our print-copy subscription to The Economist. It's a "chat" with their "advisor": 

The Economist (TE): Hi, Ampersant, you are now in a queue and we'll have an advisor with you shortly. 

Michael (M): I am not receiving my print edition since 2 or 3 weeks

TE: Your current position is 1, thank you for holding. 

TE: Your current position is 1, thank you for holding. 

TE: Your current position is 1, thank you for holding. 

TE: Bill has been allocated to the chat.

Bill: Please bear with me for a minute, while I check the information for you.

Bill: Thank you for your patience, Ampersant.

Bill: I've extended your subscription by a further 2 issues to compensate for the missing copies.

Bill: Is there anything else I can help you with?

M: You have no explanation? Did you send the copies?

Bill: Actually there is a issue in delivery, I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Bill: Hereafter you'll not face the same issue.

M: Could you just be a bit more precise..."issue in delivery"...is that the language I can expect from THE ECONOMIST?

Bill: I'm extremely sorry to inform you that there is an delay with the postal department is I meant.

M: Shall I cancel my subscription, then?

Bill: But now I have forwarded to concerned department, hereafter you will not face delivery delay.

M: I'm not happy about this "chat", I can tell you...

Bill: I'm sorry that you've decided to cancel.

M: I have not decided to cancel...I asked: "Shall I cancel"...

Bill: I'm extremely sorry for that, Ampersant.

M: You are sorry for what?

(Here the chat ended; the "advisor" disappeared from the line).

Are you still there? This is how people have to spend their days these days when they move countries.

Plus, our underrated villa revealed some underrated problems which required all our attention. Plus, Michael developed a problem with his knee.

Not so underrated after all---street view of the house in Nov. '20.

Charlie working on the gate of the driveway

Not all problems are solved yet; we are still somewhat in limbo (etymologically the first sphere of  hell, "limbo", if we recall correctly from memory).

And Michael is not---he's excepting Chang from this, because Chang is everything---we are really not self-help people that believe in self-help slogans.

Anyhow, there we are.

A recent morning lensed from the bedroom; note the pergola.

The new front deck

Entrance; note the ridiculous double doormat

Street view of the house in August 2021

Snow on the Mediterranean

This is a photo from my afternoon walk. Friends of this blog will know that we live in Le Trayas, not far from Cannes, in a settlement of 200 houses nestled into the Domaine forestial de l'Esterel, a small, protected, natural park. Snow is rare at our latitude, but not unheard of:

And the dog? Yes, that's Tara. She belongs to the neighbors, and often joins me for my walk.

See how she stares at the pine cone in front of her? She is playing with me. She puts the cone there, stares at it, and I am supposed to kick it in her direction. She grabs it with her maw, trudges ahead, drops it again, stares at it again, I kick again, and so on...

And while we are at it. Here's a picture I took the other day depicting excavation work for the fiberglass internet connection that has been on the cards since ten years: 

Please don't miss the post about verse repair. Thanks.

For the record

Comments will follow...hint: this ends in tears:


x

Inkitt (3) --- Bestsellers, Amazon sales rank, and much more

James Beamon has already reacted to our letter of yesterday about Inkitt, and here's his answer:

Your theory and discussion on Inkitt's underlying drivers with their touting of AI is definitely worth merit, to the point that I may write a follow-up post covering your analysis.  Oh, and to fill in some of the gaps of where their "bestsellers" lie, I present to you the Kindle Sales Rank Calculator:

https://kindlepreneur.com/amazon-kdp-sales-rank-calculator/

As long as you don't put in commas, this thing will convert the current sales rank to how many books they're selling per day.  Virtually EVERY book I put into from Inkitt's best seller rank was selling less than 1 per day.  To put it into working context, anything higher than a Amazon rank of 100,000 will be less than 1 book.  One book, Eric Olafsson: Midshipman, is at 407,416.  Egan Brass, the guy I interviewed for "The Bright Side of Inkitt", has a series called the Esper Files and the first one is at 321,238, the second is at 650,597, and the third is at 891,640.  At that rate I imagine Egan hasn't sold a single copy of Book 3 in months.

James Beamon

Now I haven't looked at every book in their lineup, but the one book I did see that was doing worthwhile numbers was Chosen by Lauren Chow.  Her rank is 55,707 which translates to her moving about 5 books per day.

Had enough of Facebook?

Inkitt (1) The Algorithm, the algorithm --- whatever you make of this

The GREEN EYES are listed on Inkitt, an AI-agent and publisher---"AI" here in the sense of artificial intelligence, the computer science discipline we taught the last ten years of our previous life, and "agent" in the sense of literary agent. Yes.

And they've just sent us an email. You don't have to read this, but just in case:

"Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!

Congrats! Your novel  [the GREEN EYES in our case] is in the top 10% of novels in the Genre Preliminaries and has been awarded a spot in The Final Round. Your work will now join the best performing novels from the other genres in a face-off for the $1000 Grand Prize. The Final Round is an exclusive, invite only, closed contest.

Announce the big news to your fans, and keep sharing your knockout novel if you want to be top dog! The winner will be selected by the Inkitt algorithm based on level of reader engagement so you will need to win over as many members of the crowd as possible. Call in your hypemen and round up your groupies to help you spread the word about your latest win and find new support to secure your title as Champion. 

Best of luck!

Your Inkitt Team"

Think this through. They have an algorithm---if you scroll down, you'll find a fragment of ours, written weeks ago, involving algorithms, but don't scroll down yet---an algorithm that's supposed to pick winners on the basis of readers' reading behavior. And the next thing is, they ask their authors to work around the algorithm and mobilize their "fans," no matter what. Best of luck. (For more bickering, scroll down-down.)

And here's the fragment---hold on, let's start a little competition of our own: who's the biggest fool in This Is Heaven? The mayor, Bienpensant, John himself perhaps? No---it's Inspector Mario LaStrada of course, the detective (who's still missing from or Green Eyes zoo, inexcusably). Here goes, from Chapter 41, "The Game Is up"---John's fourth and last encounter with the inspector: 


LaStrada must have found time taking a class in creative writing since he says: “Did you bring the handcuffs that you were wearing so convincingly on, on…”

(we make eye contact)

“…Tuesday,” I help out.
“Well-put,” he replies, “Tuesday night.”
“You didn’t ask me to bring them,” I say.
“You should keep them handy. It appears that the long arm of the law is not yet done with you.”

Now you see it, now you don't (updated)

(Scroll down for the update)

We have a page on Facebook, and we're offered a $10 voucher to "boost a post," meaning that you pay FB money so they show your post to more people---it's a transparent form of advertising, of course. Ten dollars for free, what the heck, so we boost Teaser #14 of This Is Heaven...but...wait...the boost is rejected. It wouldn't be a "pleasant experience" for FB users, especially the pecs of Robert Pattinson won't. Next we try Teaser #15 (the balloon dog shorts). That's rejected as well, on the same grounds. Well, let's see, what could be more unpleasant than an ungeheures Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin à la Franz Kafka. We try, and succeed. The boost is accepted --- a pleasant experience indeed.

Along those lines...here we have the cover of Perry Brass' book Carnal Sacraments...

...adorned by the work of the German painter Sascha Schneider, a highly recognized Symbolist artist. Amazon---Amazon, this time, not FB---doesn't let Perry place advertisements for his book because of the 'nudity' on the cover.

NYC (4) --- Modern times

French for beginners

(Hat tip: les diagonales du temps)

A brief note on self-publishing

"I'm not a tourist!"

The self-publishing trend is usually linked to the internet. Along various causal chains, the internet is supposed to facilitate self-publishing, while simultaneously complicating the life of traditional publishing venues.

Yes, sure.

But when you walk through the ultimate tourist trap of Mougin, that historic town north of Cannes, you discover that the self-trend is more pervasive. At least, it includes visual art as well, at least in Mougin it does, even though the internet cannot be the culprit.

Rue du Docteur Buissard, Mougin

A few years ago, Mougin, like every tourist trap---and in particular the ones in Southern France---was packed with galleries of tourist-trap art: garish colors, palette-knife work (faster), sunsets, harlequins, clowns, harlequins, sailing boats, aggressively abstract (faster), Picasso imitations, and so on. That hasn't changed, the galleries are still there, but, in the meantime, in the space of a few years, whole colonies of live artists have entered the mix, exhibiting their own work in one-man/woman shops, outnumbering the galleries 10 to 1. Ten times as many garish colors, sunsets, clowns, aggressively-abstract, Picasso-style, the vieux village of Mougin has turned into an artist colony, literally.

Food for thought. Think this through: the internet cannot have anything to do with this...

When did you stop beating your wife?

We're on Facebook now

(Michael Ampersant) (click)

In case you didn't know

Don't kill me, don't kill me

Artwork on an internet-posted suicide note

Gallia divisa est in partes tres. Along those lines, there are two types of content moderation. Active moderation monitors each post on a social network; reactive moderation lets things float until somebody complains. Content moderation is important, we learn from an article on Wired, not only because we are prudish, but also because we don't wanna lose our grannies or other objectionists (spelling checker objects)---folks who are not going to share their cat-and-dog pictures or their grandchildren's likenesses amidst adult parts and other shockingness. 

More than hundred thousand people are monitoring content worldwide, twice as many as are working for Google. Most of them are based in the Philippines because wages are lower there, and because the locals have a sense for American sensibilities (don't ask).

We (I mean us, Michael Ampersant and his alter egos) have been subject to content moderation two or three times on Facebook, last time with this picture...

(no, wait)

...which was taken down after a few minutes with a stern warning from the Philippines; we got blocked from posting anything for three days. Right, so we've been moderated twice exactly; the first time we've got blocked for one day only. Do the math (catchword "series"), it's frightening if you are one of these people always itching to push the envelope. 

Over-sexed as we are we think about only one thing, but porn appears to be the least of the social network's concerns---it's fairly harmless, especially for the souls of content moderators. Gore is worse, not to mention ISIS clips with beheadings of nosy journalists, or suicide notes, or clips of pet torture. And there's apparently lots of that stuff going on. The average content moderator is given only a few seconds on her Stachanovist clock for each picture. That may be a lot for the active moderators who have to check all those pictures of cats and dogs and birthday cakes, but very little when we talk reactive moderation.

&-t back of the envelope: Assume that half of the moderators do reactive stuff, and that each works 40 hours a week, and each has 10 seconds per flagged post, dum dum dum, we get 144 million flagged pictures per day, except for the weekends when the moderators are off.

What else? Lets keep it short and Socratic. O reader, we ask, would you moderate this picture that we've been dying to post for quite some time:    

(This is the picture that Facebook took down after a few minutes)

Trick or treat (Sacha)

(Wait, we are not yet done. The next morning, this:)

Connecting...connecting (Glenn)