Before I get to the review, let me talk about what’s going on with me and my writing.

It’s Sunday, almost afternoon, and I’m sitting in Pachamama’s coffee shop downtown. In a little while, there should be a Shut-up and Write here. I think my friend Mike Baltar will show up then. Unless he reads my blog beforehand, my appearance here today should be a surprise.

Yesterday, Melissa and I celebrated Bryanna’s birthday by taking Bryanna and her best friend for a ride. We went through the Jelly Belly Factory tour, something we haven’t done in ages. We spent some time in Benecia, sampling fancy oils, looking at art, eating tasty food, and sitting by the water in the bay. Once back home, we went to the Tower Cafe near downtown. We did our best to make Bryanna feel special, and I think we did a pretty good job.

While on the road, I had some time to think about the next Mel Walker novel. I’ve been a little bit stuck on part of the outline, so I haven’t drafted any of the new story yet. Yesterday, while I sat on the passenger side of the car with my laptop open and my mind focused, I did some free indirect writing and realized that my current outline is probably enough. I’ll revisit it once I get going, but Mel Walker stories rely on my wit in the moment of discovery.

I did not outline The Repossessed Ghost, and I had a very short outline for The Psychic on the Jury. Why do I think I need a broader plan for The Psychic Out of Time?

The next Mel Walker novel is more complicated than the previous stories, no doubt about it. But I already figured out the complicated parts. My outline describes a coherent story. It’s just missing a handful of details, which I’m certain to figure out after I’ve started, and not before.

So, it’s time to start.

Before I begin drafting, I want to talk about The Acolyte since we just received news that there will be no season 2, and I think some people (probably Disney) will walk away with the wrong lesson from the first season.

I sort of wrote a short review once already. It looked like this:

I can go deeper, though, so I will. Let this be your spoiler warning. Hereafter, I will dive into the details of Star Wars: The Acolyte – Season 1. If you haven’t seen it yet and you want to watch it without spoilers, now is the time to bail out on this post.

Let’s talk about some of the things I liked, and some of the things that are quintessentially Star Wars.

• Some fun lightsaber stuff
• Twins are a common Star Wars trope, which works about half the time
• The show looked good, and the scenes on Coruscant were consistent with what we’ve seen of that planet in other movies and shows
• Good choreography
• Good ship designs

There are other good things, but this list feels safe. If you tell someone else that watched the show that you liked those things, they would probably nod in begrudging agreement.

I personally like that they visited new places in the galaxy. No time or mention was made of Tatooine. The new places reminded me places we’ve seen before in the Star Wars galaxy, but that’s fine. There should be multiple forest planets and moons beyond Kashyyyk and Endor.

I like that we got to see Force users that weren’t just Jedi and Sith. The Force is mystical, powerful, and everywhere. There should be other people with connections to it that are different and interesting.

Now let’s talk about some of the things that didn’t work for me.

Starting with some minor, arguable points, I think the Jedi should be good guys. In this story, they… weren’t. Should they be perfect? No. Can their arrogance lead to them making mistakes? Absolutely. How about invading a family’s house, murdering everyone inside, and then covering it up for years and years? No. No, that’s a bridge too far.

To write a good story about the Jedi, it is best to treat them like Superman. There are deconstructions of Superman where they take away or reduce his morality, but then you’re not dealing with Superman anymore. I think the same can be said for the Jedi. Unlike Superman, villains can overpower a Jedi, but the Jedi should continue fighting the good fight with The Force as their guide. They can be corrupted and fall, but then they’re not Jedi anymore.

Does that mean that I did not like the antagonist, Qimir? No. Qimir was a Jedi, but then he “fell” and became something else. He said the Jedi would call him a Sith, but I don’t think Qimir was a Sith, either. He was something different, not entirely evil, but definitely not a good guy. There was a kind of fairness to him which made him a more compelling character.

So far, I’ve talked about minor things. I have a great capacity for forgiveness for most things Star Wars, and everything I’ve mentioned so far, I could handwave away, if necessary.

Not this next point, though. Let’s talk about our main characters, and the real failing: Mae and Osha.

We start with Mae tracking down Indara in a weird bar and trying to kill her. Indara is a Jedi Master, but Mae holds her own for the most part. The choreography is good. I enjoyed the action. Then, at the end of the fight, Mae gets the better of Indara by throwing a blade at the bartender, an innocent bystander. Indara, acting as a hero, changes her focus to save the bartender, and then Mae uses the distraction to kill Indara, a true act of villainy.

After this, we’re introduced to Osha, who seems like a nice person. We’re given an extremely minor mystery in the form of, “what’s up with Osha and did she kill those people in the bar?” The mystery is resolved very quickly, which leaves us with twins: one that has done an unforgiveable act in the process of murdering Indara, and one that we want to see reunited with her master so that she can continue learning the Force and become the Jedi she once wished to be.

This is a fine setup. There’s nothing wrong with this. But then, through the course of the show, we’re shown more of Mae and Osha. The story tries to make us like Mae more, but she’s already demonstrated that she’s willing to kill innocent people to achieve her goal. If she hadn’t tried to kill the bartender in order to kill Indara, I might have been able to get on board with her redemption. She was, after all, going after “bad” Jedi, right? The people that were responsible for the death of her family and stranding her alone all those years ago, right?

Then Osha kills Sol and goes off with Qimir. She turned to the dark side, corrupting the crystal in her old Master’s lightsaber. This leaves us with zero characters to root for and care about.

That is what went wrong with Star Wars: The Acolyte. We had no hero.

In the original trilogy, we love Luke, Han, and Leia. We will go to the ends of the galaxy with them and back. They are heroes, and we love them.

In the prequel trilogy, we love Quigon until he dies. We are on board with Anakin, until he becomes Darth Vader and kills Jedi children. We love Obiwan, but he’s not really given that much screen time. And we mostly love Padme, until she disappears in the third movie, showing up at the end to die giving birth to our next set of heroes.

I’m not going to talk about the sequel trilogy at this time.

The point that I’m trying to make is that Star Wars is best when we have a character to root for. It’s best when we have someone to get invested in.

The Mandalorian series has been good because we like Din Djarin. He’s a hero, and we can follow him around and enjoy his stoic heroism.

We didn’t get a hero in The Acolyte that we could latch onto and root for. That’s the biggest failing of the series, and the lesson Disney will fail to learn. Other Star Wars fans may air other grievances, but I think everything else could have been forgiven if we’d just been given one character to love without reservation.

That’s my extended review of The Acolyte. It wasn’t worse than The Rise of Skywalker, in my opinion, but I understand why people didn’t like it.

I’m typing this post with a brand new keyboard I just put together. This will be a prize on the Writing Excuses Retreat. Here is the keyboard:

I think it looks pretty good!

I built it to match the colors in the WXR Retreat logo: black, green, and yellow. I used yellow keycaps last year, but I think this color configuration is better.

It didn’t come together easily. As I told Melissa this morning, one of the main ingredients of these keyboards is profanity. Every time I made some progress, there would be a little setback. This happens with almost every one of these keyboards, but this one was worse than most. Fortunately, once I’m past the setbacks, the keyboards turn out to be really solid workhorses, and I expect this one will be the same.

It took quite a bit to get myself into a position where I could work on the keyboard at all. I needed to clean a space in my office for doing the soldering. I needed to order more parts. Then there was wrestling with my finicky printer to produce a good base. More importantly, I had to get out of my dark headspace

I’ve been in a funk lately. And slowly but surely, I think I’m crawling out of it. Finishing this keyboard is a big part of that.

I need to start drafting the next Mel Walker story. I have a good idea. I have pent up excitement for the project. I just need to get out of my own way and do the work.

In the mean time, I’m boosting myself by getting little things like this keyboard completed. I think the next one I work on, I’ll reach for a higher difficulty. Maybe my next one will be my first wireless construction. We will see.

This keyboard is working well enough, though, so I’ll stop here, but not before reminding you that The Psychic on the Jury is out, and you should buy it. If you haven’t read The Repossessed Ghost and you’re afraid to commit $15 or a few hours into that story, Psychic is a short, cheap introduction to the world of Mel Walker. And if you have read The Repossessed Ghost, well, Psychic is the next story, and it lays some of the foundation material for the next Mel Walker novel.

It’s Friday. WorldCon is going on in Glasgow and I just finished working an extremely daunting schedule. About 78 hours last week, around 50 hours this week, with just a little bit more to do this weekend. Ouch.

Exhausted and punchy, I keep seeing posts from friends at WorldCon and the FOMO is not only real, it is bitter. So to distract myself, I’m cleaning my room and working on the keyboard for the Writing Excuses Retreat. I’m also thinking about A.I.

Before diving into this topic, let me get some things out of the way:

• I’m not a tech-bro
• I don’t have a ChatGPT subscription. I played around early on to see what the buzz was about. I don’t use LLMs (like ChatGPT) and I don’t advise people to use them
• I have no skin in the game
• I know the difference between different types of A.I., and I think there should be more nuanced discussions about them. While LLMs are A.I., not all A.I. are LLMs
• I think artists should be paid for their work and stealing content to train A.I. is wrong

With that out of the way, let me take one more step towards clarification and say that this post is about LLMs. Most of the chatter online about LLMs, especially ChatGPT and the OpenAI products, simply refer to those products as A.I. That’s why I’m titling this post the way I am.

The enshitification of Google search (and other online services) has to do with plugging LLMs into the mix. LLMs don’t do any actual thinking or analysis of a topic the way humans do. When given a query, an LLM will start generating text that is related to that topic, and it will continue generating text based on interpreting what the next word in its response should be.

If the quality of the source material is high and accurate, the LLM will generate responses that seem well reasoned and sound. If the LLM has been trained on shit-posts from Reddit, it will respond with fantastical, insane answers that no one should take seriously. That’s how we wind up with Google telling people to put glue on their pizza.

This is not new news. LLM and A.I. advancement in general is suffering from bad press and righteous anger from users that really, really do not want this garbage in their browsers, desktops, or phones.

Also, in this post, I’m not considering the environmental consequences of maintaining servers for A.I. What I mostly want to talk about is training LLMs without the developers having to steal from artists, creators, writers, etc.

The Idea

We create a company that will manage an ethically sourced LLM. This might not be a company. It might be a government resource. I’m not sure yet. The main idea is that people can submit their own work to this organization to be part of the training material.

“How do we incentivize people to submit their work to the machine?”

We pay them. It’s not going to be a lot. The person submitting the work retains rights to what they created. It’s like when publishers buy the rights to print and distribute an author’s story. The LLM entity will buy the rights to train using the work, so the author/artist gets some compensation.

“So anyone can just submit anything and get paid for it? That sounds like it would be easy to exploit.”

Before the person submitting the work gets paid, there is a vetting process. Again, we’ll pay people to do this work, which involves three main parts:

1. Make sure the work has not been submitted before
2. Make sure the work belongs to the person submitting it, or that the submitter has the authority and legal rights to submit the work
3. Make sure the material is not poisonous

We have examples of companies/publishers handling the first two tasks already. And, strangle enough, we have an example of the third being handled as well: Wikipedia.

If we pay for the kind of work that people already volunteer to do on Wikipedia, we might be able to make sure only high quality content is fed into machine.

“This sounds like it is doomed to lose money.”

That may be true. The value of this LLM will certainly be low at the beginning, and the entire program will need to be subsidized before it can produce anything of competitive quality. If the endeavor manages to last long enough, however, we can start licensing the use of the LLM to companies and individuals.

Google, Microsoft, and Apple would probably pay significant sums of cash in order to take advantage of an ethically sourced LLM. One that isn’t telling people that pythons are mammals.

“What problem does this solve?”

My suggestion addresses at least part of the problem of stealing content in order to train the LLM. This idea also offers a way to compensate creators for their work, even if the compensation is very small. If we’re going to live in a world with LLMs, I think this is a way to do it without theft.

However, what do we actually need LLMs for? What problem do the LLMs solve?

I can’t think of a compelling need that LLMs satisfy. It is an extremely geeky way of generating text. I think it is interesting, but I’m not sure it’s useful.

If I was forced to guess, I would say that successfully navigating searches with a handful of keywords has always been something of a challenge to non-technical people. There have been attempts to make searches use more natural language since ask.com (Jeeves) was created in 1996.

An LLM tied to a search engine, therefore, allows natural language in and out, without requiring the user to drill through a potentially long search result to find the answer they’re looking for. Maybe there is a little bit of value there. It’s dubious, but I think I can see it.

I’m not sure it’s worth the time, investment, or cost to the environment, though.

That’s my idea. Let me know what you think.