Jay Wolf

Hey all! I am officially hanging out my shingle for book layout and design work outside of my immediate if-you-know-you-know circle. I can't start work outside my current client portfolio until sometime in mid-August so I am canvassing for work that would start in MID-AUGUST OR LATER for now. ¹/

One thing about the whole "you have to read books if you want to be an author" thing is that if you aim to do more than just genre inbreeding, you have to read stuff outside the genre you're writing, too. May even have to read [shudders] nonfiction.

You have to be familiar enough with the genre you're writing that you don't just show up all "heh, bet you slop-eaters have never seen anything like this: [unoriginal work derivative of the most mainstream entries in the genre]" and you also have to bring in ideas from outside the genre.

Heads up: this website also "reviews" publishers, writer-beware-style. Lists big reliable publishers as safe, warns about many known scams, and then... Lists a few scam presses as "safe and reliable". Couched in professional language with buzzwords about transparent contracts and payment schedules.

It is also, obviously, ethically grotesque, just a fucking evil thing to do, which is perhaps something we ought to start caring about with regards to elected officials.

I always liked that bit from the beginning of Snow White

When creating PDFs, avoid using "Print to PDF." A screen reader user may still be able to access the text of PDFs created this way, but heading structure, alternative text, and any other tag structure will be lost. Using "Save As" or "Export" can preserve these tags.

Composer Austin Wintory was once in talks to make music for Mass Effect 5, and now that EA has shuttered BioWare and canceled the game, he's released his drafts online. https://bit.ly/4evMujI

The Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing.

The way reading this article gave me an instantaneous migraine

In the last few weeks i've been bombarded with emails from people who have minor tech support problems. ChatGPT is telling them to email me, writing their emails, and compiling "evidence packets" after convincing them they have stumbled on a major story: www.404media.co/chatgpt-keep...

Long post, no paywall: I wrote about meeting the love of my life during the worst time of my life, and the song I sent him to say I liked him: jude-doyle.ghost.io/e-bow-the-le...

I love how On-Some-Other-Shit Penzy’s is, man

Congratulation to all of the finalists and winners of the World Fantasy Awards! locusmag.com/2026/10...

Noachian King, personal project illustration. "Noachian" means something so old it's obsolete ("belonging to the times of Noah"). This guy meant to be an old king of an old kingdom not existing anymore, but still attached to the throne and the power.

I was worried if my comic is perhaps too self indulgent, but then I remembered the words of Björk and now I need to make it even more self indulgent 🥰

Oh hey guess who owns Head of Zeus. I do not know what's going on at Bloomsbury, a publisher that has lots of money and at least had a lot of great people.

I have quite strong feelings on publishers taking 92.5% on paperbacks and 75% on ebooks and not actually providing a competent human editor. And I think an additional factor in the great GenAI discussion is that if you're going to provide less of a service you shouldn't expect to take the same cut.

Reading preview of a self pub book. A fair few spelling/grammar/word choice errors, which I get, costs and all, but it's offputting in a sample. Tsk. Then I looked at the sample of a book published by Bloomsbury and it had a catastrophic punctuation fail *in the first line*.

Seeing photos/reports that the weathered, twisted tower of the derelict St. Olaf Church near Tioga in western North Dakota finally toppled a few weeks ago. It’s amazing it held on as long as it did. Glad I made it back out there for these photos earlier this year

The death of the monoculture makes us all anthropologists.

"Ethical" AI models is an oxymoron No matter what they do, or who they ask for help, this cannot exist as they were implemented using stolen knowledge and everything they do perpetrates & imitates the worst impulses of their creators Glorified cheaters & hackers trying to crack humanity's code

Yes yes "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human." We've all read Count Zero

The rich guys with zero internality or theory of mind who keep inventing the torment nexus make more sense when you realize They're This. They're not engaging with a story. They're just watching (not reading lol) cyberpunk stories going "wow what if your health insurance had flying ambulances"

Do you ever think about how there's a kind of guy who genuinely engaged with Science Fiction as like... Stories whose entire purpose is to ask "what if your car was a doctor"? Just purely wish fulfillment what ifs about fake inventions and nothing narrative at all. Fucking incredible 

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

if you ever happen to see someone post a joke you don't understand or discuss a subject you aren't familiar with, you are well within your right to complain, and perhaps even scold them if necessary. you are their customer and you have rights

IMHO no one who Grew Up Weird And Alone can say the internet has made social life worse without some pretty serious caveats. Doesn’t mean it’s improved life in all respects or that its failures should be accepted! But there’s such a tendency to focus only on things that were _okay for you_ as a kid.

We acknowledge that no one has the bandwidth for this, but if it helps: -It’s ‘sleight of hand’ -It’s ‘bated breath’ -It’s ‘lo and behold’ -It's 'buck naked' -It’s ‘brass tacks’ -It’s ‘free rein’ -It’s ‘toe the line'

New term: Occam's wallet, when the simplest explanation is "money" and it's probably right

Sweeney tries to make out he's saying this in defence of the beleaguered indie devs who want to use AI, but remember that his company laid off 1000 people earlier this year before pivoting to AI. He's taking this stance for one reason: he loves money

also I mentioned this one a bit back, but def my fav read this year. Peak religious horror and delightfully brutal. I still am thinking about the scenes that got under my skin

[flustered costanza voice] george is walkin' away from omelas!!!

What is going on my seminar syllabus next semester: “You are more than a future source of profit, and humanity's survival depends on all of us understanding this.”

Look I can tell the difference a good narrator brings to sales. It matters. A lot.

We are right on the cusp of AI utopia*. *-agentic AI makes the internet both unsafe and unusable, so I am forced to go outside and write everything longhand by candlelight

SHE'S DONE!! SHE'S FINISHED