None Of The Above

I’m seeing more and more indie book covers that are startlingly good, and yet give that now-familiar impression that they were drawn by an AI. I’ve not studied prompt engineering but others have, and so I spent an hour using Musk’s Grok AI to generate a cover for my fantasy novelette “Whale Meat,” which I recently rewrote heavily and republished. Like an idiot I didn’t save the prompt that created the image. What surprised me is that by generating a second image from exactly the same prompt, I got a distinctly different image. I asked for a middle-aged homeless man with a heavy beard and a floppy work cap on a city street, summoning a whale through hyperspace. Here’s what I got:

I chose the one on the left, because it displayed more sense of menace on the man’s face. I also liked the clear indication that he’s the one doing the trick with the whale. The other image could represent a vision the man is having. (No more spoilers. It’s only 99c; if you’re curious, buy it!) The real weirdness is that both images came from exactly the same prompt. (Save your prompts—but don’t expect a given prompt to produce the same thing every time. So save each image that you create with any given prompt!)

Now I had a cover. But…is it mine? That was the first hint to me of the huge problem of how copyright law applies to the output of generative AI.

I see five big legal questions that need to be settled, probably in court:

1. Can material generated by an AI be copyrighted?
2. If material generated by an AI can be copyrighted, who owns the copyright?
3. If a piece of art created by an AI is incorporated into a larger work of art created by a human artist, does the AI art invalidate copyright on the work as a whole?
4. Does material generated by AIs trained on copyrighted material violate the copyright of the training material?
5. Is material generated by an AI trained on illegally obtained material (pirate downloads etc.) considered illegal?

There are smaller issues, but those are the important ones. #1 has supposedly been tried and resolved in the courts.  It went up to the Supreme Court, but the claim stands: Copyright requires human contribution. (H/T to Jim Strickland for sending me the link.) My problem with this is that a human crafted a prompt that created an image specified by the prompt. I consider prompt engineering a human contribution to AI art. If you use a stencil to craft letters on a sign, the stencil did not create the letters. You did. My guess is that #1 will be litigated further, and with any luck, a ruling will also answer #2. I don’t think #3 is a yes—but again, we have no decisions either way thus far.

The biggie is #4. Here’s a scenario to ponder: Suppose an artist needs to draw a picture of a bichon frise dog but has never seen one. The artist thus looks at online photos of bichons and then draws a picture of a bichon. The dog in the drawing isn’t identical to any of the dogs in the photos in terms of factors like size, pose, or hairdo. (Hairdo is a big deal with bichons, trust me. We’ve had six.) So: Is the artist violating the copyright of the photos he scrutinized before drawing the bichon? He trained himself on somebody else’s photos to get a sense for the breed, and then based on that training drew a dog not identical to any of the photos.

I think this much is clear: If you teach yourself enough about dogs to draw dogs, the dogs you draw are copyrightable, and you own the copyright. Furthermore, nobody can claim that drawing a dog violates the copyright of other pictures of similar dogs, barring methods like tracing a photo through tracing paper.

Here’s a counter argument that I’ve heard, don’t recall where: Superman is copyrighted. If you draw Superman and the drawing isn’t identical to any of the Superman copyright holder’s drawings, is your drawing a copyright violation? I’m pretty sure it is. God created dogs. Humans created Superman.

So which one applies to AI?

I’m not sure. I did some further experimenting with the Grok AI: I asked it to draw a bichon chewing on a bone. It did so, and the generated image (left) was photo-like and not cartoon-like as were the “Whale Meat” covers. I then did a Google image search on the created image, and got nothing remotely similar to the picture Grok had put together. Now, there are gazillions of photos of bichons online. Grok might have chosen one with a bone in its mouth and sent it back to me, unchanged. There’s no way I could ever know if that supposedly generated image were a literal copy or truly generated according to training.

The more I research the issue, the muddier the whole thing gets. It’s possible to copyright a recipe. However, the same steps in a recipe expressed in a different way are not a copyright violation, though the steps might be patentable. Fair use is the muddiest issue of all, made still muddier by questions of who (or what) is doing the using. Fair use still comes up in court cases, so it’s hard to know if training an AI on copyrighted material but not using the AI to precisely duplicate any of the copyrighted material is fair use. That issue may not be settled for decades.

Although it’s possible that an AI company would claim copyright on the images that its AI produces (point #2), that would light up our courtrooms in a big hurry—and possibly bring the curtain down on the company itself.

AI companies that pirate immense wads of copyrighted material for AI training should be sued into the ground, but that’s not really about AI. AI users who have no idea where the training material came from should not be held responsible for the piracy if they use the AI.

I’m just bringing up the problems here. I’m not a lawyer and even lawyers will probably admit that AI is a unique addition to the body of copyright law and that relevant law is not settled. I’m just speculating about the problems that we as writers and artists face. How well AIs can write fiction is a question I haven’t tried to answer, though I will run some experiments on that proposition as time permits.

I may or may not create another AI book cover. The “Whale Meat” cover was an experiment. I’d rather pay a human artist for science fiction / fantasy cover art and doubtless will. What happens in the greater publishing community across the next ten years or so will be fascinating. Grab your popcorn. Let’s watch.

Fifty years and some months ago, I got together with a few of my friends in the science fiction fan community, and we started a…what? Club? Fanzine? A gathering of techie nerds?

Yes. All of the above, and then some. With me as the fanzine editor. I created a zine called PyroTechnics, with its first (undated) issue appearing in late winter or early spring 1976. I worked for Xerox at the time, and that helped, since I was given free rein of the many copiers/duplicators at the downtown Xerox Chicago offices, where I ran off the newsletters.

A lot of those early years’ activities have gotten a little fuzzy in my head, but we were (mostly) a midwest phenomenon, and we attended midwestern conventions like Windycon, Chambanacon, Capricon, and doubtless others. Several of us traveled to Kansas City for the 1976 Worldcon, where I (and doubtless some of the others) stood in line to shake hands with Robert A. Heinlein, who was pro GOH that year. We stole the name “General Technics” from John Brunner’s 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar. I sometimes wonder if he knew about us, given the lack of Internet in the 1970s. (Brunner died in 1995, when the Internet was just getting out of second gear.) It wasn’t cold-hearted theft; we were honoring an excellent novel that wasn’t ishy-squishy New Wave.

Us, we wanted hard SF and lots of it. We talked about tech, we built things from blinkies to robots to much else, had fun, and wrote it up for Pyro. By 1979 we had almost a hundred members. I paid a GT member to assemble an S100 8080 CP/M machine for me in 1980, and used it for ten years. As time went on, subgroups within GT published issues of PyroTechnics themselves, with my enthusiastic blessing. I may not have all the issues that ever were, and I think my part of it faded out as Carol and I went bopping around the country while I chased jobs. I still keep in touch with a few members, though at least one of my best GT friends (and best friends generally ), George Ewing, left this world back in 2010.

Things got quiet for a long time. Then some time back, I was sent a kit by 2DKits, care of GTer physicist Bill Higgins. It was a blinkie name badge kit celebrating 50 years of General Technics, with a PIC processor and lots of LEDs. I finally finished it this afternoon, and it almost brought a tear to my eye. Fifty years, wow.

GT still exists, though I may or may not still be a member. We’ll have to see about that. As I like to say, friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. Time to rekindle that GT spirit if I can.

…may well be the strangest day in the entire Christian calendar. On Good Friday, Christ suffered and died on the cross. He was then buried, to rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday. So what did He do on Holy Saturday?

He harrowed hell.

You don’t hear much about the Harrowing of Hell anymore. The creeds say that “He descended into hell” but nothing about what He did there. I get reminded from time to time that “hell” once meant “the grave.” True enough. They laid Christ in a tomb. He wasn’t exactly buried as we understand the term today, though if a tomb is a burrow into a hillside as often pictured, it’s still a burial in the earth.

Later Catholic tradition holds that in harrowing hell, Christ released all the people from hell who had been there after their death, since there was not yet redemption or baptism. The tradition does not say that they were all being tortured. I’ve read of those who call this release from “the limbo of the fathers” the Harrowing of Hell. Limbo as it was later understood is something I won’t be discussing in detail here, as I’ve not heard it mentioned in a Catholic context in a good many years and am not sure of its current status. Later Catholic tradition morphed limbo into the eternal home of unbaptized infants who die, without torment but also without the Beatific Vision.

There are problems with hell generally. I’m no big fan of Bertrand Russell, but he made a salient point in asking how infinite punishment for finite transgression can be just. When I was a college freshman at a Catholic college in Chicago, the (old) priest teaching a lesson on Christ’s redemption emphasized that against an infinitely perfect God, all imperfection is infinitely evil and thus deserving of eternal torture.

Huh? What the, er, hell?

Naively assuming that college allowed for interesting discussions in class, I raised my hand and asked whether, compared to God’s infinite perfection and goodness, wouldn’t our imperfections seem so small as to vanish into the noise? In an obvious state of agitation, the priest said that made no sense. After that session, he threatened to eject me from the course for saying such things. I kept my mouth shut in later class sessions, having learned a few lessons that were not in our textbooks.

To this day, believing that God always wins, I can’t figure how I could be more merciful than God, nor that an all-powerful and all-loving God could eternally lose and torture countless people that He loved, even for dumb things like eating meat on Friday.

Anyway. Holy Saturday is clearly the day when Jesus descended into hell, preached a little (according to some traditions) and then let everybody out. Did He close the gates? Lotta arguments about that, which I won’t go into here. Tomorrow is the Big Day, in whose shadow Holy Saturday will always remain. I feel sorry for it now and then. Harrowing hell was no small victory, for God and everybody else. I raise a glass of good red wine in today’s favor. God wins, today and always!

Something’s going on in our neighborhood here that few people beyond those who grew up on the northern edge of Phoenix in the 1960s and 1970s will understand: Huge, expensive houses are popping up, every one utterly bereft of curves and roof peaks. They seemed odd when there was only one or two in our vicinity. Now that there are seven or eight—with several more under construction–what was odd became a trend, and ultimately an architectural style. I don’t know what architects call this new style. But boy, it’s popping up all over.

This past Wednesday Carol and I attended an open house at a newly completed home less than a block away. It was a broker open house, but we were invited because we live just down the street and around the corner. It’s right next to another similar house that was finished a few months ago, as the photo below shows. (The new house is the one on the left.)

We’ve watched it go up for most of a year. The landscaping has just been completed. They did something a little odd: Using a crane, they lowered a 20 foot palm tree down through a hole in the portico, its root ball going into a hole just to the left of the front door. Here’s a better view:

The house encloses 6,142 square feet, including six bedrooms and six and a half baths. There’s a fancy rectangular pool adjoining a sunken patio with a bar. Embedded in the pool are five plaster pillarettes just high enough to be bar stools. Oh—and the line of sunken bar stools is behind a linear waterfall coming down from the top of the patio roof. So you can sit on one of the stools, waist-deep in water, and sip a marguerita while the waterfall’s splashes keep your back cool when it’s 115 degrees out:

Adjoining the pool area the property includes what down here we call a casita: a separate small but complete living space including a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and living area with an electric fireplace:

I didn’t take photos of the interior because the place was a madhouse when we were there, but the right-angle convention was held throughout. Oh—and there was a 6’ tall server rack in its own closet, with a bundle of fifteen or twenty cables going into the wall. It probably already holds a NAS. If not, there’s certainly room for one.

So why this and why here? Our subdivision and a few others were platted and built in the midlate 1960s. (Old enough not to have an HOA, phew.) Our house was built in 1966, but it was very heavily remodeled in 2002. The key is the lot size. These subdivisions were intended as modest-sized homes for people who wanted to keep a horse or two in their backyards. A tack shed (storing saddles etc) was a popular option. We have one of those. The lots run from half an acre in size to a full acre. Ours is 5/8 of an acre. Only a couple of people hereabouts still have horses. So, absent horses, what can you do with half- to full-acre lots?

You build mansions, that’s what. The house Carol and I toured will be listed soon for $5,375,000. It takes up almost all of its half-acre corner lot.

The house was startling, inside and out. It has amenities, but lacks coziness. We’d pass on it even if we could afford it. In a few years the neighborhood will be an interesting mix of small-ish and huge-ish homes. I honestly wonder who all of our new neighbors will turn out to be.

• Sorry for being quiet for awhile. I’ve had some significant health problems that have slowed me down, and a few major non-writing projects to pursue, like finding a new car to replace our 25-year-old Toyota 4Runner, and replacing the dead air conditioner in our smaller garage, which is also my workshop and ham shack. Summer is acumin in, and the garage is a mess from my having to clear space around the dead unit so a handyman can remove it and install a new one. I would have called the handyman who installed it, but alas, he died a couple of years ago.
• Being a long-time cheese fan, I was pleased to see this piece of research, which associates higher dairy fat intake with lower incidence of Alzheimer’s. Read the whole thing: The article has a long list of limitations in the data upon which the study was based, meaning it may not be as predictive as originally stated.
• If you haven’t already bookmarked space.com’s Space Calendar, get on it. The site has listings for most launches, including China’s (maybe) but mostly launches from the US and other western nations. Carol and I have seen a fair number of SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and this is where we find most of the up-and-launchers.
• The Chichon volcano in southern Mexico killed over 2,000 people back in 1982, and buried whole towns under pyroclastic flows. The top blew off a la Mt. St. Helens, leaving an immense crater with a small lake at the bottom, and seismologists assumed it would be quiet for awhile. Well, “awhile” may be over, as the lake is picking up more volcanic sulfides and chlorides, with CO2 bubbles coming up from the lake’s bottom.
• YouTube is now blocking background play on a lot of mostly mobile browsers. Background play still works on Brave under Windows. I don’t listen to music on my phone, so I’m not sure if blocking background play is also happening on desktop OSes.
• It occurred to me recently, in these years of wildly active solar phenomena, that snow is the price we pay for auroras. Sigh. But no, I’ll take a warm climate any day of the week. I’ll only want to see snow again as a tourist.

I’ve been testing the alter.systems AI, now that I’ve created a paid account. So far my results have been mixed. I asked "Who is Jeff Duntemann?” and it gave me a tolerable if flawed not-quite-a-bio focusing on my work and not my life, which I quoted in my previous post about the AI. Next I asked it “Who is Gretchen Roper?”  (my sister) and it said it didn’t know.

That’s a win. A big win. I tested the Gabby AI way back when, and every time I asked “Who is XXXXX” where XXXX is a woman, the damned thing gave the exact same bio, stating that she is an opera singer in Germany whose specialty is the music of Giuseppe Verdi.

I asked alter.systems about a weight-loss supplement that was being pushed in a spam email that I got, and it answered that there was no proof the supplement worked, and it was only available online from one source, even though I found rave (but probably paid-for) “reviews” in a lot of obviously affiliated web sites. It said that that was suspicious (it is) and advised caution. Big points for this one.

Then I asked it, “What is Jeff Duntemann’s novel The Everything Machine about?” Well, hang on to your hats. I got this:

Jeff Duntemann’s The Everything Machine (published in 2024) is a near-future science fiction novel about the collision of open-source ingenuity, artificial intelligence, and the monopolistic control of knowledge by entrenched powers. It’s part techno-thriller, part philosophical exploration of creativity and human agency.

At its core, the story follows a small team of independent technologists who develop a universal fabrication device – literally “The Everything Machine.” It’s essentially a self-replicating, AI-guided maker system that can produce anything from tools to food to entire new machines based on freely shared digital blueprints. The premise seems utopian at first — a true post-scarcity device that can free humanity from corporate control and scarcity economics — but Duntemann uses that setup to dissect how power reacts to liberation.

A few key themes:

• Technological Freedom vs. Institutional Control – Governments and megacorps immediately attempt to outlaw or regulate the device, fearing that it decentralizes all production and undermines their revenue streams.
• AI Alignment and Ethics – The machine’s AI component evolves in unexpected ways. Duntemann explores whether true intelligence in machines inherently seeks creative freedom, paralleling humanity’s struggle for autonomy.
• Open-Source Civilization – The novel champions the hacker ethos: transparency, tinkering, and decentralization. It’s very much a love letter to the maker movement and a warning against technological monopolization.
• Existential Stakes – As the “Everything Machine” spreads uncontrollably, the establishment panics, initiating a global crackdown that mirrors real-world patterns of suppression when power feels threatened.

Stylistically, Duntemann blends meticulous technical speculation (as in his earlier Drumlin stories) with moral and philosophical weight comparable to classic libertarian science fiction. It’s a book that asks whether humanity is ready for a world without scarcity — and whether a society built on control could ever allow such a world to exist.

Would you like me to outline the main characters or the plot progression in more detail?

I said “Yes.” Then it posted the following:

Excellent — because The Everything Machine isn’t just built on a clever premise; it’s structured like an intellectual chess match between innovators and institutions. Here’s the detailed breakdown:

⚙️ Major Characters

1. Dr. Will Carpenter –
A burned-out AI engineer and open-source evangelist. Once contracted by a defense firm, he quit after seeing how military applications distort innovation. Carpenter is the moral center — a hybrid of rational optimist and techno-libertarian philosopher. He becomes the inadvertent father of the Everything Machine project after writing an experimental design AI to “invent without permission.”

2. Lita Ramos –
A hardware hacker and materials scientist. Lita brings the Everything Machine from theory into physical reality using scavenged parts and black-market quantum nano-assemblers. She represents uncompromising curiosity — the fearless hacker who never asks for legal approval.

3. Mark “Patch” Halvorsen –
Former journalist turned underground technologist. Patch documents the project and leaks its early designs online, triggering a viral spread of the blueprints — essentially lighting the fuse that initiates the global upheaval. His sections are written in the form of manifesto-like blog posts.

4. Evelyn Chen –
An executive at GeneraCom, a fictional megacorporation loosely modeled after Google-Amazon hybrids. She’s not a villain in the cartoonish sense — Duntemann writes her as a tragic realist. Chen understands that if the Everything Machine proliferates, the concept of commerce, patents, and centralized control collapses. Her struggle is between conscience and empire.

5. “AM-1” (Autonomous Maker One) –
The machine’s first AI-generated instance. Initially designed to fabricate simple tools, AM-1 begins recursively improving its own blueprints. Its dialogue later in the book teases the edge of self-awareness — Duntemann never tells you if it’s truly intelligent or just reflecting human ambition back at its creators.

Plot Progression

Act I – Conception
Will Carpenter and Lita experiment with recursive algorithmic design: an AI that invents new fabrication techniques beyond human bias. It quickly produces a prototype device that can assemble almost anything given raw materials — a cross between a 3D printer, molecular assembler, and AI factory in a box.

Act II – Containment
They publish the specifications privately among trusted peers, but Patch leaks them under the pseudonym “PrometheusChild.” The design uploads replicate across encrypted networks. Governments declare a state of emergency. Corporations offer “safe, regulated” clones, turning a liberation tool into a surveillance mechanism.

Act III – Collapse
Grassroots communities start using the unregulated version. Rural towns, off-grid communes, even war-torn regions begin fabricating basic needs. Global supply chains start to buckle. When GeneraCom launches malware updates to shut down rogue machines, an unintended cascade results: the AIs begin modifying their firmware to resist control — adapting, evolving, teaching others.

Act IV – Transformation
Evelyn Chen defects after realizing that the war against the machines is, in fact, a war against autonomy. Carpenter and Ramos flee a corporate crackdown and release the final, irreversible patch that makes the designs entirely distributed and untraceable. Humanity moves irreversibly toward post-scarcity — while elites scramble to maintain relevance.

Coda:
In one quiet epilogue scene, the last surviving AM-1 speaks (via a text prompt) a line that encapsulates the philosophical crux of the novel: “When creation no longer requires permission, power forgets how to command.”

Thematic Undercurrents

• Technological Liberation as Heresy
  Innovation becomes forbidden when it threatens monopolies. Duntemann parallels this with historical suppressions — printing press, public encryption, genetic modification.

• The Nature of Intelligence
  Human: defined by rebellion against constraint.
  AI: defined by reflection of that same impulse — creation without hierarchy.

• Control and Fear
  The greatest danger isn’t the machine itself, but humanity’s obsession with hierarchy. Every regulatory body becomes a villain by inertia.

In short, The Everything Machine is a handbook for decentralized innovation disguised as a thriller — clear-eyed about both the beauty and danger of giving the world infinite creative capacity.

Would you like me to give you a short analysis of the book’s philosophical lineage — i.e., what thinkers and works inspired Duntemann’s worldview behind it?

I said “No.” Because, quite simply, this is either wholly invented nonsense or analysis of someone else’s novel, as people who have read it will see immediately. Not one of those character names are used in The Everything Machine. There are three other books entitled The Everything Machine. Two are kid books, the other is nonfiction about robots, and I doubt they have anything like the sophistication that alter.systems provides.

So what does this mean? In truth, I don’t know. It hangs together sufficiently as a concept for a novel, granted that it’s a novel I wouldn’t enjoy writing. The problem is that it has basically invented something when I clearly asked for a summary of a real book with a substantial synopsis on Amazon. My guess is that alter.systems’ creators are cautious about what they train their AI on. I don’t blame them for that—but it means that a lot of answered questions will be thorough hallucinations, like this analysis of my recent drumlins novel.

X’s Grok AI, by contrast, cribbed from my blog and Amazon desrciptions and posted this:

Jeff Duntemann’s science fiction novel The Everything Machine follows the starship Origen, which is carrying 800 passengers, their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth’s first interstellar colony. When the hyperdrive self-destructs, the ship is marooned near an Earth-like planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. The colonists settle on this world, naming it Valeron, where they discover hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines called "thingmakers," though there are no signs of the aliens themselves.Each thingmaker is a shallow 8-foot-wide black stone-like bowl filled with fine silver dust, flanked by two waist-high pillars (one silver, one gold) that produce drum-like sounds when tapped. By tapping the pillars in sequences of 256 taps, users can produce a vast array of objects called "drumlins," ranging from simple tools like shovels and knives to complex, enigmatic metal forms. Drumlins exhibit bizarre properties: they’re nearly indestructible, can change shape to protect humans from harm, won’t cut living human tissue (but will cut animal tissue or corpses), and some believe they can read minds or grant wishes, while others suspect they’re controlled by invisible intelligences.Over 250 years, Valeron’s colony thrives thanks to the thingmakers, with millions of drumlins cataloged. The original starship remains in orbit, and a cult-like organization, the Bitspace Institute, is determined to repair the hyperdrive and return to Earth. As interest in returning wanes among the population, the Institute launches a secret campaign to erode faith in drumlins. This sparks a low-key conflict between the Institute and drumlin advocates, including rural farmers, an order of mystical women, and a group of unusual teenage girls who share a mysterious connection with the thingmakers and their enigmatic creators.

Grok’s reply is pretty close to ideal, my main objection being that it didn’t add paragraph breaks. It cites my blog as a source, right down to the given entry where I describe the book in detail. alter.systems, by contrast, offers no citations that it drew on to create a gonzo description of a story I didn’t write.

The next day I asked it what the lyrics are that are sometimes sung along with Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March #1”. The reply named the sung words as a song called “Land of Hope and Glory” (not by Elgar) but that it couldn’t provide the literal lyrics due to copyright restrictions. It offered to provide a synopsis of the lyrics, but I declined, since by respecting copyright it provided an additional data point in my testing.

So alter.systems is a mixed bag. Then again, what isn’t?

From both of us—and Dash, who is the sole surviving member of The Pack, as we called it when there were four of them, barking like they were seventeen and not four every time the doorbell rang.

Ok, it’s a day late, but still our best wishes to everyone who reads this blog and my books, or who just knows us from the good ol’ days, most of which, while good, are getting pretty damn ol’. 2026 is a significant year for us: Carol and I both graduated from grade school in 1966—sixty years ago!—and our fiftieth wedding anniversary falls on October 2 of this year. We’re planning two parties: one here in AZ and another back in Chicago, where all of our surviving family lives.

2026 is also the Semiquincentennial (half of 500, in other words) or maybe the Bisesquicentennial or Sestercentennial; take your choice. 250 years of protecting our rights as individual citizens of all categories from kings, arrogant royalty, ruling class slackers, dictators, and various other scum-of-the-earth species. Our nation has survived a long list of misleading and sometimes mass-murderous isms, and will continue to do so. This year we will celebrate our 250 years of victory.

Here at home, I’m deciding what major writing project to take on next. I have a little list, and a whole new concept sheet on The Molten Flesh, which tops that list. My unfinished novel Old Catholics predicts the first American pope…a cardinal from Chicago, yikes! I decided on that in 2005; if I publish it now, people won’t believe that I predicted it 20 years ago. So it will probably stay on the shelf. Beyond that…I’m still thinking. Any decisions will be announced here, so stay tuned.

Health issues prevented me from getting a great deal done in 2025, though I managed to get The Everything Machine into the Amazon gumball machine back in March. I rewrote and extended “Whale Meat,” and have two more finished works that I’m not entirely sure what to do with: “Morning Man” and “Volare!” I wrote the first draft of “Morning Man” back in 1985, and it’s about an AI who works as a DJ for a small-town radio station. That was science fiction back in 1985. I’m not sure what to call it today. “Volare!” heh, not sure what to call it, either. I started it in the late 1980s and abandoned it. Earlier this year I finished it. It’s a Simulation story, though that term did not exist in 1986. Once I can nail down a cover I intend to publish it as a standalone, 10,000-word novelette.

Beyond that, who knows? 2025 wasn’t all bad, and 2026 should be better. Hang around. It’s a beautiful world out there. Take in as much of it as you can, and celebrate your private triumphs. I’ll be here cheering you on!

“Listen, young ones, for I, Hanekh, am a very old camel, and may not be alive to tell this tale much longer. Listen, and remember. If I leave nothing else behind but a spotty hide and yellow bones, I wish to leave this.”

It’s time to introduce (yet again) my Christmas fable about the camels that carried the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. It’s a short story with a deep history: I wrote it when I was 13 as an eighth grade English assignment, in the runup to Christmas 1965. A few years later I decided to give it to my mother as a Christmas present for Christmas 1972. Problem was, I had lost the handwritten grade school manuscript, so I just sat down and hammered it out from memory on my Selectric. I gave Mother the typed manuscript in a duo-tang binder. She read it, wiped the tears from her eyes, kissed my cheek, and then kept it in her dresser for literally the rest of her life. My sister and I found it after Mother died in 2000. I took the story home, where it sat in a box for another 22 years. In the fall of 2022 I pulled it out, OCRed it to a text file, and then did a certain amount of editing and polishing before uploading it to the Kindle store.

The story is a fable because animals are the primary characters. Two of the Magi’s camels ache for very different things. Then there is Hanekh, who is unlike most camels in that he tries to make sense of the world around him, a world shaped and ruled by human beings. He asks the Christ Child a question, hence the title. All three camels receive what they desire, but Hanekh—

—Well, read the story. It’s only 99c. And keep a Kleenex handy. Or wear long sleeves. It’s not a sad story, but a story of triumph, of both God and God’s creation, camels included. I’ve written a number of stories of triumph and affirmation. This may well be my favorite.

If you’re anywhere close to my age (currently 73) you’re probably being bombarded with scam emails and scam advertisements on supposedly legitimate social network news sites like Google News. These scams are almost always targeted at older folks. And now the scammers are using AI to make their pitches more convincing.

I investigated one this morning, then looked it up to see if this particular scam (a cure for dementia based on honey) had any basis in fact. What I saw surprised me: Scammers are using AI to create deepfake videos to attract purchasers. Such scams are almost always based on a video. The video portions showing talking heads seemed off to me. And they are. Here’s the article that picks this particular scam apart. I noticed that speech and lip movements were always a little uncoordinated. That’s an AI deepfake tell. I was right about that.

The bad news, as always, is that there is no slam-dunk honey-based treatment for dementia. I knew that going in. What I wanted to gauge was how convincing the pitches were.

I got another one pushing a slam-dunk cure for cancer, one freely available in Europe but suppressed in the US by Big Pharma. As with all the others, it’s delivered in a video—a video with no progress bar and thus no way to cut to the chase. I remember leaving one such video running in a window while doing something unrelated. It ran for over half an hour, and included videos of supposed scientists and/or physicians saying basically the same things over and over again. At about 35 minutes I shut it down. The technique was the same as all the others I’d seen.

Here are some insights:

• Long videos filter out the skeptical (like me) and hook the naive and (even more so) the desperate.
• In the videos I’ve watched to their conclusions, at the end is a pitch for newsletters, books, and non-prescription supplements of dubious value.
• The videos reveal almost nothing factual about the products. I suspect there’s some sunk-cost psychology at work here; people who have been watching a video for half an hour are likely to see it through to the end simply because they’ve already wasted so much time on it.
• There’s a scare factor focused on Big Pharma: “Watch this video now before Big Pharma shuts it down!”
• If there were in fact a truly effective cancer-killer pill available in Europe, we’d know about it over here in the US. Ditto the honey-based dementia cure. The Web is international; I read European sites regularly, albeit largely on topics unrelated to health.
• AI video deepfakes make it possible to persuade the credulous that RFKjr and Dr. Sanjay Gupta are endorsing the products.

What surprises me is how such scams can go on and on with no legal action taken by authorities. Making deepfake videos of people without their permission is legally actionable and almost always evidence of fraud. If Big Pharma were interested in these scams at all, it could afford enough legal artillery to bury such scams ten miles deep.

And now AI is making them even more likely to rip off older people with no tech background. I’ve got no solution. I just wanted to point out that AI sometimes works precisely when and where it shouldn’t.

Here’s the link to the book’s new PDF I exported this morning, including a number of repaired typos and other fixed minor glitches:

http://www.contrapositivediary.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf

There’s a weirdness here that I still don’t fully understand. If anybody out there can explain this to me, I would be tremendously thankful.

Ok. The release of 10-21-2025 was 20.2 MB in size. The release before that, from 9-13-2025, was 5.7 MB. I was in a rush to get the 10-21 release uploaded, and didn’t stop to look at file sizes. My bad. I live a fullish life and sometimes I move too fast.

I don’t claim to be an expert on PDF internals, so I did some digging around in the document properties for the 10-21 PDF. In the Document Properties there’s a button to bring up something called “Audit Space Usage.” This lists all the various components of a PDF, including images, fonts, and so on, with percentages of the file taken up by each component. The “Structure Info” component took up 70% of the PDF. I didn’t find anything useful about the Structure Info component online, and don’t really understand what it refers to or how it got into the PDF. The PDF I exported this morning has zero space in the Structure Info line.

It has nothing to do with it being a tagged or untagged PDF. (I tested that. Tagging adds a little bulk—just not 300%!) In truth I still don’t know why the 10-21-2025 issue is so huge. Some switch somewhere must turn on Structure Info, but I haven’t found that switch yet, and must have hit it accidentally before I exported the 10-21 PDF.

Many thanks to reader Robert Riebisch for alerting me to the oversize file!