Find the Cat (4)
Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
So good that I answered the reverse writing prompt 10 months ago! Biggest challenge over the next months? Nailed it!
The hard answer is – dealing with uncertainty without dwelling on the endless negative outcomes. I need my imagination to be helpful.
To translate this unnecessarily complicated sentence that contains the word “dwelling” (who uses dwelling?), imagining versions of the future is a tricky beast. We can plan for it, we can dream about it, but we can’t really know what’s going to happen. So I do my best to not picture future versions of myself and to avoid the Fortune Telling Thinking Error but I try to set some personal goals and chase them.
Apart from my fortune telling negative predictions, I set myself a bunch of personal goals about 1 year ago (November to January):
- 10k steps on average for a year (a New Year resolution)
- Use Jetpack Mobile for reading (since November 2022)
- Blog daily (since mid-January)
- Visit Cherni Vrah (from 2022)
I plan to write a summary about these goals in January but I’m quite happy with myself. My goals were not ambitious enough.
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, Book Review
We have to start imagining a world in which sentient robots exist.
We’ve had I, Robot and R. Daneel Olivaw. We now have Annie Bot. Lots of others in between. I read about a smart spaceship not long ago (We Are Legion). The main issue I have with all these books is that the robots are really immortal humans with some computer assistance.
Sierra Greer asks the question – what will a sentient robot be first used for? There are two obvious answers, weapons and sex toys. She starts her exploration with the unlikely choice. Annie Bot is a sentient sex toy. What happens is as likely as the movies with highly intelligent dogs. A sentient robot will not be that. However, an imprisoned human in a robot body can be that. We’ve had enough Mechanical Turks already – androids being remotely controlled by humans – to make that theory likely.
So is Annie Bot a a sentient robot or a human, imprisoned in a robot body? Sierra Greer leaves that question open to interpretation.
I give a 5*/5. The book is disturbing, it’s terrifying that this could be done one day.
Did you just visit McDonald’s?
Meeting Robert Blond at the Christmas Book Fair
Today was the last day of the International Book Fair in Sofia. My book harvest this year was primarily gamebooks because there was a shortage of books I wanted and didn’t already buy before it. The Black Friday promotions were too good.
The Gamebook association organized a signing with one of our local gamebook celebrities, Robert Blond, who published a new book and a short story. I had a chance to read both. I finished the short story before it was published and the book – before writing the post.
The 2024 edition of Agamor is also out, which holds 4 gamebooks. One of the books is an official spinoff of Blood Sword. It’s expected to be published in English as well.
We also got a translation of Simon Duhope’s Shadow Chaser, which was surprisingly sophisticated. Took me 3 days to discover the path to the end.
The Shadow Chaser is available in English. Agamor is of local significance as of today.
Another writer who visited the city this week was Rhianna Pratchett. Despite being subscribed for updates on the publisher’s Facebook page, Facebook let me see the event’s announcement after it was over. Missed that opportunity.
Rhianna Pratchett is the author of Crystal of Storms. Would’ve loved to attend her signing.
