Over 50 small press books under the fold! (previous: 1, 2, and 3)

The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex by Cody Daigle-Orians (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 21 Oct 2024): Whether we're talking about friendships, romantic relationships, casual dates or intimate partners, this guide will help you not only live authentically in your ace and aro identity, but joyfully share it with others. (Amazon; Bookshop) And Then There Was One by Michele Castleman (Bold Strokes Books, 1 June 2024): Six weeks after Lyla Smith dragged her sister's dead body onto the Lake Erie shore, she escapes her small Ohio town to work as a nanny for distant relatives on their remote private island. (Amazon; Bookshop) Antiquity by Hanna Johannson, trans. Kira Josefsson (Catapult, 6 Feb 2024): Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson—a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo. (Amazon; Bookshop) Born Backwards by Tanya Olson (YesYes Books, 18 Jun 2024): Olson's third poetry collection "reports from inside butch culture in the 1980s American South as it traces how geography, family, experiences, and popular culture shape one queer life." (Amazon; Bookshop) Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke (Catapult, 23 Jan 2024): At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: Essays by Allyson McOuat (ECW Press, Apr 2024): In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. (Amazon; Bookshop) Dances of Time and Tenderness by Julian Carter (Nightboat Books, 4 June 2024): A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Dragonfly Gambit by A. D. Sui (Neon Hemlock Press, 16 Apr 2024): Nearly ten years after Inez Kato sustained a career-ending injury during a military exercise gone awry, she lies, cheats, and seduces her way to the very top, to destroy the fleet that she was once a part of, even at the cost of her own life. Ennis Rezál, Third Daughter of the Rule, has six months left to live. She is desperate to end the twenty-year war she was birthed to fight. But when she brings Inez aboard the mothership, a chess game of manipulation and double-crossing begins to unfold, and the Rule doesn't stand a chance. (Amazon; Bookshop) An Evening with Birdy O'Day by Greg Kearney (Arsenal Pulp, 16 Apr 2024): A funny, boisterous, and deeply moving novel about aging hairstylist Roland's childhood friendship with Birdy O'Day, whose fevered quest for pop music glory drives them apart. (Amazon; Bookshop) Finding Echoes by Foz Meadows (Neon Hemlock, 30 Jan 2024): Snow Kidama speaks to ghosts amongst the local gangs of Charybdis Precinct, isolated from the rest of New Arcadia by the city's ancient walls. But when his old lover, Gem—a man he thought dead—shows up in need of his services, Snow is forced to reevaluate everything. (Amazon; Bookshop) Firebugs by Nino Bulling (Drawn & Quarterly, 13 Feb 2024): After a trip to Paris, Ingken returns home ready for a break from drugs. Their supportive partner, Lily, is flushed, excited about a new connection she's made. Although Ingken wants to be happy for her, there's a discomfort they can't shake. Sleepless nights fill with an endless scroll of images and headlines about climate disaster. A vague dysphoria simmers under their skin; they are able to identify that like Lily, they are changing, but they're not sure exactly how and at what pace. Everyone keeps telling them to burn themself to the ground and build themself back up but they worry about the kind of debris that fire might leave behind. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan (Counterpoint LLC, 4 June 2024): As a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Hollywood, George Curtis must navigate the McCarthy-era studio system filled with possible communists and spies, the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard, and the inability of the era to cleave love from persecution and guilt. But when Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. (Amazon; Bookshop) Getting Glam at Gram's by Sara Weed, ill. Erin Hawryluk (Arsenal Pulp, 3 Sept 2024): A colourful and celebratory picture book that embraces all gender expressions through a fun family fashion show. (Amazon; Bookshop) God of River Mud by Vic Sizemore (West Virginia UP, Jan 2024): To escape a life of poverty and abuse, Berna Cannaday marries Zechariah Minor, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and commits herself to his faith, trying to make it her own. After Zechariah takes a church beside the Elk River in rural Clay, West Virginia, Berna falls in love with someone from their congregation—Jordan, a woman who has known since childhood that he was meant to be a man. (Amazon; Bookshop) Healthy Chest Binding for Trans and Non-Binary People: A Practical Guide by Frances Reed (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 18 Apr 2024): Binding is a crucial strategy in many transgender and non-binary people's lives for coping with gender dysphoria, yet the vast majority of those who bind report some negative physical symptoms. Written by Frances Reed, a licensed bodywork and massage therapist specialising in gender transition, this comprehensive guide helps you make the healthiest choices from the very start of your binding journey. (Amazon; Bookshop) If We Were Stars by Eule Grey (Ninestar Press, 2 Apr 2024): Best friends since they were ten years old, Kurt O'Hara and Beast Harris tackle the typical teenage challenges together: pronouns, AWOL bodies, not to mention snogging. A long-distance relationship with an alien named Iuvenis is the least of their troubles. (Amazon) Keep This Off The Record by Arden Joy (Rising Action, 31 Jan 2024): A romance: Abigail Meyer and Freya Jonsson can't stand one another. But could their severe hatred be masking something else entirely? (Amazon; Bookshop) The Long Hallway by Richard Scott Larson (University of Wisconsin Press, 16 Apr 2024): Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter's 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter's inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael's potential victims. Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the torments of the closet. (Amazon; Bookshop) Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat Books, 24 Sept 2024): This portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst. (Amazon; Bookshop) Lush Lives by J. Vanessa Lyon (Grove Atlantic/Roxane Gay Books, 20 Aug 2024): With beguiling wit and undeniable passion, Lush Lives is a deliciously queer and sexy novel about bold, brilliant women unafraid to take risks and fight for what they love (Amazon; Bookshop) Medusa of the Roses by Navid Sinaki (Grove Atlantic, 13 Aug 2024): Sex, vengeance, and betrayal in modern day Tehran—Navid Sinaki's bold and cinematic debut is a queer literary noir following Anjir, a morbid romantic and petty thief whose boyfriend disappears just as they're planning to leave their hometown for good. (Amazon; Bookshop) Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte (Drawn & Quarterly, 16 Jan 2024): As she examines her life experience and traumas with great care, Delporte faces the questions about gender and sexuality that both haunt and entice her. Deeply informed by her personal relationships as much as queer art and theory, Portrait of a Body is both a joyous and at times hard meditation on embodiment—a journey to be reunited with the self in an attempt to heal pain and live more authentically. (Amazon; Bookshop) Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books, 6 Feb 2024): An AI child discovers Jewish mysticism. A student can give no more blood to their semi-sentient apartment and plans their escape. A candidate is rigorously evaluated for their ability to be a liaison to alien newcomers. A young magician gains perspective from her time as a plant. A neurodivergent woman tries to survive on a planetoid where thoughts shape reality... (Amazon; Bookshop) So Long Sad Love by Mirion Malle, trans. Aleshia Jensen (Drawn & Quarterly, 23 Apr 2024): This graphic novel swaps out the wobbly transition of weaving a new existence into being post-heartbreak for the surprising effortlessness and simplicity of a life already rebuilt. Cleo not only rediscovers her identity as an artist but uncovers her capacity to find love where she has always been most at home: with other women. Mirion Malle dares to tell a story with a happier ending in a stunning, full-color follow-up to the multi-award nominated This is How I Disappear. (Amazon; Bookshop) Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Seven Stories Press, 30 Apr 2024): This novel tells a story of being locked in: socially, domestically and intimately. Here the Croatian poet and writer depicts a wrenching love between a transgender man and a woman as well as a demanding love between a mother and a daughter in a narrative about breaking through and liberation of the mind, family, and society. (Amazon; Bookshop) Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir by Chase Joynt (Arsenal Pulp, 17 Sep 2024): Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them. (Amazon; Bookshop) You Can't Go Home Again by Jeanette Bears (Bold Strokes Books, 13 Aug 2024): Contemporary romance. Raegan Holcolm thought all they wanted was a proud military career, and that's what they had. But a sudden injury sends them back to their hometown with a wealth of pain, both physical and emotional, insecurities, and the reality that the career they'd chosen above all else has rejected them. The first time they fell in love, Rae left Jules behind. For love to have a second chance, they'll need to realize all along that home might have been a person just as much as a place. (Amazon; Bookshop) Previous roundups 1, 2, and 3 also included Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, trans. Heather Houde (Feminist Press), The Default World by Naomi Kanakia (Feminist Press), Disobedience by Daniel Sarah Karasik (Book*hug), Indian Winter by Kazim Ali (Coach House), Love the World Or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland (Noemi), My Body Is Paper by Gil Cuadros (City Lights), These Letters End In Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere (Catapult), and, finally, How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica (Tin House) which Bookshop included in its Pride Month 15% off sale with code PRIDE24. The Bookshop sale also includes these small press titles that I haven't previously listed:

• All-Night Pharmacy (Ruth Madievsky, Catapult, Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction)
• Birthright (George Abraham, Button Poetry, "every pronoun is a Free Palestine," Bisexual Poetry Finalist in the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards; Button Poetry also has a 3 for $36 Pride Month deal going on, including Birthright and poetry by Blythe Baird, Sierra DeMulder, Andrea Gibson, Ebony Stewart, and more)
• Boulder (Eva Baltasar, trans. Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, a queer couple struggles with motherhood, shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize)
• Brown Neon: Essays (Raquel Gutiérrez, Coffee House Press, "part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree")
• Cecilia (K-Ming Chang, Coffee House Press, an "erotic, surreal novella")
• Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (Isabel Waidner, Graywolf, "A novel that celebrates radical queer survival and gleefully takes a hammer to false notions of success")
• A Dream of a Woman (Casey Plett, Arsenal Pulp Press, short stories by the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning Little Fish)
• Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Eman Abdelhadi & M. E. O'Brien, Common Notions, speculative fiction)
• Feed (Tommy Pico, Tin House Books, fourth book in Teebs tetralogy, "an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness")
• Females (Andrea Long Chu, Verso, provocative genre-defying investigation into femaleness)
• The Free People's Village (Sim Kern, Levine Querido, a novel of "eat-the-rich climate fiction")
• The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs (Lambda Literary Award-winning Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Arsenal Pulp Press, disability justice, care and mutual aid)
• Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (Carmen Maria Machado, Graywolf Press, "blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction... to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies")
• High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir (Edgar Gomez, Soft Skull, "a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo")
• Homie: Poems (Danez Smith, Graywolf Press, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award for Poetry)
• How to Fuck Like a Girl (Vera Blossom, Dopamine/Semiotext(e), a how-to guide)
• I Love This Part (Tillie Walden, Avery Hill Publishing, graphic novel of teen queer love)
• It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (ed. Joe Vallese, Feminist Press, essays by Carmen Maria Machado, Bruce Owens Grimm, Richard Scott Larson)
• Love Is an Ex-Country: A Memoir (Randa Jarrar, Catapult, "Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat femme.")
• Mrs. S (K. Patrick, Europa Editions, a butch English boarding school matron begins an illicit affair with the headmaster's wife)
• Outwrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (eds. Julie R. Enszer, Elena Gross, Rutgers UP, 27 of the most memorable speeches from the OutWrite conference)
• Playboy (Constance Debre, trans. Holly James, Semiotext(e), the first volume of the renowned trilogy on the author's decision to abandon her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and writer)
• Sluts: Anthology (ed. Michelle Tea, Dopamine Books, anthology of essays and stories on sexual promiscuity in contemporary American culture)
• Stone Fruit (Lee Lai, Fantagraphics Books, a queer couple opens up to their families in this 2022 Lambda Literary Award winner for Comics)
• Survival Takes a Wild Imagination: Poems (Fariha Róisín, Andrews McMeel Publishing, "Who is my family? My father? How do I love a mother no longer here? Can I see myself? What does it mean to be Bangladeshi? What is a border?")
• Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through (T. Fleischmann, Coffee House Press, "an autobiographical narrative of embodiment, visual art, history, and loss")
• Thunder Song: Essays (Sasha Lapointe, Counterpoint LLC, what it means to be a proudly queer indigenous woman in the USA)
• The Tradition (Jericho Brown, Copper Canyon Press, Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry that examines black bodies, desire, privilege and resistance)
• When We Were Sisters (Fatimah Asghar, One World, "traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings," longlisted for the National Book Award)
• You Exist Too Much (Zaina Arafat, Catapult: Palestinian American queer coming-of-age novel)
• Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (Chen Chen, BOA Editions, "What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue?")

With management's blessing, I set up a MeFi affiliate membership with Bookshop, so the links above will benefit MetaFilter.

Using bullshit as a term of art (as defined by Harry G. Frankfurt), ChatGPT and its various LLM cohort can best be described as bullshit machines.

Abstract: Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called "AI hallucinations". We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems. And this bullshit might just be 'good enough' to give bosses even more leverage against workers.

People are flipping out over Leopold Aschenbrenner's gargantuan look at the current and future state of AI in Situational Awareness [PDF]. Is it the start of the world? Is it the end of the world? When? 2027! Summary by ChatGPT.

Maybe you can see the future first in Dallas? [Previously] Or is the future no more than what the markets will pay for?

Yesterday at WWDC 2024 Apple announced its long-anticipated machine learning effort, a Siri overhaul dubbed "Apple Intelligence." The new system employs LLMs and diffusion model image generation while attempting to maintain a uniquely high level of privacy by splitting queries across three tiers of increasing anonymity and capability: on device, private cloud compute servers, and anonymized opt-in-only ChatGPT calls. Ars coverage on Apple Intelligence, and the ChatGPT integration.

The system will debut in the pending iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia releases and is composed of three separate layers: 1) On device, the primary mode which draws upon all personal information across apps, contacts, conversations, etc. to create a highly-detailed, user-specific context Apple refers to as a "semantic index." In addition to the ability to parse information currently displayed on screen when requested, there is a new developer API so that third-party applications can specify what kind of information Siri can draw from them, and request appropriate generated text and images. The specific information gathered and any derived data or personalized fine-tuning remains on your device, with the limited exception of difficult queries which are handed off to... 2) Private Cloud Compute, a semi-anonymous cloud-based neural network inference service hosted by Apple with exposure of personal data limited specifically to the query at hand, using a cryptographically-signed software stack and operating with a no-data-retention policy. The segment on Private Cloud Compute featured an unusually candid critique of the data harvesting common to machine learning systems by competing tech giants, without specifically naming... 3) OpenAI's ChatGPT, which will be available later this year and only with explicit user opt-in (on each individual query) for queries the new Siri detects as likely to benefit from scale beyond both on-device hardware and Private Cloud Compute. Data sent to OpenAI is heavily anonymized and multi-modal (meaning combined text and images) for asking questions about an image. Apple mentioned that other models may later become available, but did not specify whether this meant Google's Gemini, Facebook's Llama-3, or potentially even self-hosted endpoints based on open source models like Mistral 8x7b.

TL;DR I used a custom-trained Large Language Model (T5) to create the world's largest online corpus of translated cuneiform texts. It's called the AICC (AI Cuneiform Corpus) and contains 130,000 AI translated texts from the CDLI and ORACC projects.

Also of interest: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative - By making the form and content of cuneiform texts available online, the CDLI is opening pathways to the rich historical tradition of the ancient Middle East. In close collaboration with researchers, museums and an engaged public, the project seeks to unharness the extraordinary content of these earliest witnesses to our shared world heritage. Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus - Oracc is a collaborative effort to develop a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research.

"Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images, Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated. A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too." CW: stereotyping of peoples, nations, cuisines, and more

This October 2023 article by Victoria Turk was shared at a library instruction conference I attended over the last couple days.

given the current discussions around ai and its impact on artistry and authorship, creating a film reliant on the technology is a controversial but inevitable move. however, the software that hustwit and dawes have built may just hit the sweet spot where human meets machine; where the algorithm works to respect the material and facilitate an artistic vision. from B–1 and the first generative feature film.

'eno' is the first documentary about the pioneering artist brian eno, and the first generative feature film. the narrative is structured at the whim of 'brain one', the proprietary generative software created by hustwit and digital artist, brendan dawes. using an algorithm trained on footage from eno's extensive archive and hustwit's interviews with eno, it pieces together a film that is unique at each viewing. as the order of scenes perpetually changes and what's included is never certain, the version you see is the only time that iteration will exist. "in some ways, the film is kind of like exploring the insides of his brain... it's different memories and ideas and experiences over the 50-year plus time frame." ENO Teaser: Australian Premiere of Brian Eno Film @ Vivid Sydney Opera House Sundance 2024: Generative AI Changes Brian Eno Documentary With Every View [Forbes] 'Eno' Review: A Compelling Portrait of Music Visionary Brian Eno Is Different Each Time You Watch It [Variety] 17-track Brian Eno compilation to accompany new doc [Uncut]

Wrapped up in the thrill of discovering this new, delightful art and securing versions of it to gaze at while stirring tea in the morning, my dark, skeptical, spidey-senses failed to engage. High on consumer dopamine and browsing picture frames, I forgot, for an important moment, that we recently crossed over into a different sort of world. The sort of world where it is trivial to prompt a neural network to create an image that pulls on the traditional patterns, subject matter, and motifs of William Morris, but layered with the hyper-realistic, high-definition, pixel-perfect asethetics of the modern web; dramatic lighting and sweeping landscapes ripped from ArtStation, meticulously art-directed details from Wes Anderson film stills, the two-tone color overlays and soft glow effects popularised on Instagram and Pinterest. A system trained on everything we've clicked like on, priming us to like what it makes. from Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History