In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol Building, every major social media platform in the United States decided to ban outgoing US President Donald J. Trump. These decisions were made in part — but only in part — because of Trump’s alleged role in instigating the violence that rocked the Capitol building.
For many people, this was seen as a relief. Trump has been one of Twitter’s most relentless plagues of hatred and demonstrably false conspiracy theories since long before he entered public office, and he has repeatedly violated the company’s terms-of-service. To others, however — many of whom lean conservative — this move was seen as an egregious assault against the First Amendment. What right does Twitter have, they ask, to silence a fairly elected President? …
Ready Player One was bad—shlock wish-fulfillment fantasy that rewards the reader for understanding fairly-basic nerd pop culture references, instead of providing any value or satisfaction derived from character, plot, emotion, philosophy, prose, or anything else that typically constitutes good writing. I say this, knowing that I should have been the target audience.
And thus it was inevitable that Ready Player Two would be worse.
So I took a few paragraphs from the free sample on Amazon, and fed them into several different AI text generators to see what would happen.
Here’s the source text I used:
Darkness fell upon the small New England where I had been attending university. Under cover of the night, I travelled surreptitiously from the boarding house to the basement of the local mortuary, where I had established a makeshift medical practice of sorts.
My clientele were not of the typical warm-bodied ilk, but rather, the independent parts and limbs of human cadavers. Once thought to be deceased, I believed that, in my brilliance, I had discovered a method of re-animation — that I could restore them to their liveliness, as one might do with a machine. For indeed, what is any organism but a complex biomechanical device? …
This is the final chapter of True Believers, a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book has been serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Hope you’ve enjoyed the journey!
Chad’s instincts keep alternating between wanting to hug Calvin, and wanting to slap him. The kid is sweet, of course, but his naivety is a super power in its own right. But Chad knows what happens when he lets his impulses get the best of him, and now that there’s nothing left for him to lose, well, he knows that he should try to make the best of it, instead of opening his big mouth again. …
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
Calvin’s not quite sure what’s going on. Why is Chad Mailer showing such a sudden interest in him? He’d noticed Calvin’s costume a few times before, but he didn’t think that Chad would actually care enough to have a conversation with him. …
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
Paralysis washes over Ted for the second time today as the small, sweet, innocent girl he’d fallen for dances out the door and out of his life. He is frozen and alone in the center of the crowd, overwhelmed by embarrassment in the wake of his mounting failures. …
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
Chloe feels like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. She had accepted that his thinning hair was just a premature quirk. She even went along with it when he said he was divorced, something that she’d always thought was reserved for older, unhappy people — why get married so young in the first place if you’re just going to break it off a few years later? …
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
The boozy heat of adolescent scotch flickers like fire at Ted’s temples. He only had two drinks before he left his apartment and made his way over to the Omni Hotel and — okay well maybe the second one was more like two-and-a-half-fingers’ worth of sweet, smokey goodness. But still. …
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
The room seems to open up as Chad watches Kt go, the din and buzz from the busy bar fading around him. For the first time in years, he feels the weight of his frustrations fall away, sees the path before him finally becoming clear. …
True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.
The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!
It would be a disservice to refer to the mood-lit vaulted ceilings and immaculately carved mahogany molding in the front room of the Omni Hotel as a mere “lobby.” To Chloe, it feels more like the foyer of a majestic but mysterious mansion, the kind of place where important Hollywood parties happen. …
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