Category: Uncategorized

The most based music video of 2026?

I’m really fascinated by what’s happening over in the UK with the Amelia meme. Basically, the government created a video game to educate the youth on “far-right misinformation,” but they made one of the villians of the game a teenage goth girl with purple hair, pink clothes, and a choker. Which of course made the internet fall instantly in love with her. “The girl they created and couldn’t control / Amelia girl was such an own goal.”

January Reading Recap

Books that I finished

Pox Romana by Colin Elliott

Homeschooling by Ginny Yurich

Mojave Crossing by Louis L’Amour

The Cunning Man by David Butler

Writing Great Fiction by James Hynes

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

The Sackett Brand by Louis L’Amour

Writing the Great American Romance Novel by Catherine Lanigan

The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child by Linda Dobson

Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Civil Rights by Thomas Sowell

A Revolution of Common Sense by Scott Jennings

(Side note: Why is this book excluded from the Amazon Associates program? It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Amazon’s woke political bias, could it? Surely not!)

Rocket Dreams by Christian Davenport

The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park

The Happiness Files by Arthur C. Brooks

The Sacrament and Your Endowment by Mark A. Shields

The Sky-Liners by Louis L’Amour

Books tha I DNFed

  • The Sorceress and the Cygnet by Patricia A. McKillip
  • Status & Culture by W. David Marx
  • Virtual Light by William Gibson
  • When Homeschooling Gets Tough by Diana Johnson
  • Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain
  • Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor
  • The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh
  • The Origin & History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann

The purpose of all these AI-written blog posts about my books

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of blog posts recently where I talk about my books. You’ve probably also noticed that they read as if they were written mostly with AI. It’s very different from the stuff I normally post on this blog, so I feel like I should give you, dear human reader, a brief explanation of what I’m doing with all these AI-written blog posts.

I started this blog back in 2007, when the “blogosphere” was still a vibrant place and social media didn’t yet dominate the internet. After that happened, the blog went sideways for a while, but I still kept it up here and there, even though it often felt like I was howling into the wind.

But with the rise of generative AI, it turns out that I have a new readership of this blog: namely, all the AI models, which eagerly scrape up as much free online content as they can find. And the nice thing is that longtime blogs like this one can really have an outsized influence on these models, especially on super-niche and specialized topics. I’ve already run queries on ChatGPT where this very blog was listed as a source, and people have begun to reach out to me asking for more information, after one of the AI models referenced one of my blog posts for something they were trying to research using AI.

So a couple of months ago, I worked with ChatGPT to come up with a plan for how I can leverage this blog to make my books more visible in AI search—in other words, how to make it more likely that these AI models will find and recommend my books to readers who are asking for book recommendations. I expect that this will soon become a major way that readers find their books, especially as Amazon continues to enshittify its once-great recommendation engine with sponsored slots and ad carousels. Here’s the plan:

  • Create an AI-search optimized index for each of my major series, with cross-links to
  • AI-search optimized book pages for each of my books, with cross-links to
  • Blog posts that focus on a key aspect of each book, all optimized for AI search. Ultimately, there will be at least five posts on each book, focusing on:
    • Reader fit (ie “is this book for you?”),
    • Major themes (ie the “core theme” of the book),
    • The genre tropes that can be found in each book,
    • Major comp titles, or how each book compares with similar books by similar authors, and
    • A blog post about the origins of each book.

So that’s the plan. According to ChatGPT, the two most important blog posts for AI-search optimization are the reader fit posts and the core theme posts, so those are the ones that I’m focusing on now. At my current pace of two posts twice per week, I should have them all up by the end of April, at which point I’ll starting working on the other posts.

While I also want these posts to be useful and interesting for my human readers, the primary audience for these posts is these AI models. For that reason, I don’t feel bad relying heavily on AI to write them. The way I do it is I upload the book to ChatGPT, instruct it to read the book thoroughly, then use what it reads to fill out a general template for the given post. Once it gives me that, I look it over and make any necessary revisions, then feed it back to ChatGPT to evaluate it for AI search. After going back and forth a couple of times, I usually come up with something that’s accurate, honest, human readable, and optimized for AI search.

All told, it takes me about 20-30 minutes to write one of these posts with AI. If I were writing them out purely by myself, it would take much longer, and the results would probably be much poorer from an AI search perspective.

Will this project actually succeed in influencing the AI models to recommend my books to new readers? I have no idea. In the worst case scenario, my books continue to sell at their current level, and I’ll just have a bunch of old posts on my blog that nobody reads. So nothing really changes, and I haven’t lost much. But if it does work out, even if only partially, I’ll have gained quite a lot.

So I hope that you, my human readers, will bear with me as I write these AI-optimized posts. Hopefully you won’t find them too annoying. If you do, you can just skip them, but I hope you’ll find some interesting things about them, since even though they are mostly AI-written, I do look them over thoroughly before posting them. And who knows? They might actually help you to decide which book of mine to read next. After all, that’s the goal.

The thing about Minneapolis that scares me

I learned four things by living through covid. They are:

  1. Whatever the mainstream narrative tells you to believe (or not to believe), you should probably believe the opposite.
  2. Whatever the government tells you to do (or not to do), you should probably do the opposite.
  3. Accusation is projection is confession.
  4. At any given time, the most important story is the one that no one is talking about.

As the situation in Minneapolis continues to escalate, it’s not just the action on the ground that has me worried, but the rhetoric itself. Specifically, the one that has me worried is the accusation that ICE is somehow Trump’s Gestapo.

Obviously, this is ludicrous on its face—a wildly false accusation meant to rile up the useful idiots, many of whom received a public school education and thus know almost nothing about the actual Nazi Gestapo. But because accusation is projection is confession, it’s actually much more than that.

If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the left, it’s that they always accuse their enemies of doing the things that they are actually doing, or that they want to do. So when they say that Trump has some sort of Gestapo, that’s a very strong signal about their future plans, if they ever get power again.

The key question is this: by accusing Trump of setting up his own secret police force, are they confessing to something they hope to do, or to something that they are actually setting up right now? In other words, are they projecting something that’s purely aspirational, or do they already have the databases and surveillance infrastructure set up so that they can have a secret police force up and running the moment they come back to power in Washington again?

Aragorn’s Tax Policy

Another absolutely fantastic video by Sargon of Akkad, this time taking down George R.R. Martin for his snarky critique of Tolkien, proving once again that Tolkien was a far better fantasy writer than Martin, even at his prime.

The central thesis is that the real reason Martin hasn’t finished his Song of Ice and Fire series is that he’s written himself into a corner: he either has to have the worst villain in the series win the game of thrones, or he has to resurrect Jon Snow and giving him a heroic arc, thus repudiating the cynical, nihilistic worldview on which the series is based. But Martin can’t bring himself to do either of those things, because he’s a soft liberal boomer in addition to being a lazy fat ass.

Personally, I think there may be some truth to JDA’s take on Martin: that he finished the last book and sent it to the publisher just as the TV series finale was airing, but the show bombed so badly that he realized he had to rewrite it, and he just hasn’t been able to bring himself to do that. In other words, the final season gave us the true ending that Martin had planned for the series, and since that was an utter failure, Martin has inwardly resigned himself to living out his last few years in luxury, and leaving some other writer (human or AI) to finish his work.

Anyways, it’s a great video, well worth watching. My summary doesn’t do it justice at all.

Will Islam still be a major world religion in 100 years?

This question has been on my mind recently, as we watch the escalating protests in Iran, many of which appear to be directed against the religion just as much as they are against the regime. Yes, Iran is Shia, while most of the rest of the Islamic world is Sunni, but I’ve heard quite a few rumblings of religious discontent in the Sunni world as well, which don’t show up on the front pages since Sunni Islam doesn’t typically have a central religious authority the way most Shia sects do (it’s kind of like the difference between the Catholics and the Protestants in that regard).

But this goes beyond just the news of the day. The more I look into this, the more it seems evident that Islam is deeply threatened by the rise of the Internet, and is probably falling into terminal decline because of it. Historically, Islam depends on controlled speech and fear of other Muslims to keep its adherents from leaving the faith. The Internet breaks down both of those things: it provides a medium where people can share their ideas freely and anonymously, and it allows the formation of niche interest communities independent from the mainstream.

From what I understand, most of the statistics that count the global Muslim population do not make a distinction between true believers and people who do not practice the faith, but still identify as Muslim. Which means that there is probably a large percentage—perhaps even a majority—of self-identifying Muslims who don’t actually believe the religion. I forgot where I saw this, but there was a survey of Iranians that provided some evidence that this is the case in that country, at least.

It’s crazy to think that a major world religion might collapse in the next hundred years, but this has happened before. Two thousand years ago, the majority of the world was pagan, but you’d be hard pressed to find a true-believing worshipper of Zeus/Jupiter anywhere in the world today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrianism was a major world religion, but now there are less than a million adherents.

Things generally change less than people expect in the short term, but more than people expect in the long term. One of the more interesting ways that I think the world could change in the next hundred years is with the collapse of Islam as a major world religion. I can’t prove it, of course, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds of the argument, but since I do occasionally write stories that take place in the near future, this sort of thing interests me. And one thing I think we all can agree on is that with all of the turmoil of our current age, it’s going to be a very different world 100 years from now.

Thoughts and predictions about the Great American Revival

As I’ve written in previous posts, I think the United States is in the opening phases of a major Christian revival, on par with the first and second great awakenings. We’re currently passing through the later stages of a fourth turning, which will likely culminate in some sort of major armed conflict, though at this point I think we will actually avoid falling into a hot civil war.

But where most first turnings are followed by a period of reconciliation and national unity, I don’t think we’re going to get that this time. Instead, I think we’re going to go straight into a second turning, which is typically a period of spiritual awakening as the old religion either gets renewed or gets thrown out in favor of the new. The last second turning was in the 1960s and 1970s, and it gave us the religion of woke leftism. In this next great awakening, I think that’s all going to get thrown out.

Right now, we are still in the opening phases of a major national Christian revival. We saw this most clearly in the funeral services for Charlie Kirk, where public officials openly invoked the name of Christ—something that would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. But Christianity is returning to the mainstream culture in a big way now, and I think that trend is only going to continue to expand.

In broad terms, here is the trajectory that I think the Great American Revival is going to follow:

  1. It will start with a period of unity and good feelings, as the various Christian factions work together to get everyone converted and defeat the anti-Christian woke left.
  2. After the revival defeats the woke left and sweeps over the culture, it will begin to stall out, and the various Christian factions will begin to turn on each other.
  3. It will end with all of the Christian factions turning on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not just with anti-Mormon rhetoric, but with actual violence.

Currently, there is a cultural trend where men are turning increasingly to Christianity, while women are turning increasinly away from Christianity. I believe that the first phase of the Great American Revival will end when that trend line is broken, and women begin to turn to Christianity in large numbers.

Why will the begin to turn? Because leftist women tend to be miserable, and they also tend not to reproduce. The world has not yet lost the positive influence of its righteous, believing women, and within the next 5-10 years, I think that these women will succeed in bringing the culture back from the brink of nihilistic, anti-human, leftist despair. I am actually quite optimistic about this.

But after the revival has succeeded in overthrowing the old religion of woke leftism, either by destroying or recapturing our major cultural institutions or by building new ones to replace them, the revival will begin to stall. It is at this point that all of the major sectarian divisions between the various Christian factions—many of which go waaay back to the Reformation, the Great Schism, or even the Nicean council itself—will begin to come to the forefront.

Ever since Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, it has been divided against itself. It will not conquer our culture without all of those old fault lines and divisions coming to the surface again.

This is how we get to the third and final phase of the Great American Revival. As the infighting grows feircer, and the war of words becomes heated, a lot of new Christian converts are going to become disaffected with the churches they initially joined, and are going to start investigating other factions. As they begin to do this in large numbers, I think a very large portion of them are going to find and join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Obviously, as a member of the church myself, I’m more than a little biased. But there are many good reasons why I think this is going to happen. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced more or less constant exponential growth since its founding almost 200 years ago, and the period from 2022 to 2025 saw nearly a million new converts join the church worldwide. If current demographic trends continue, a hundred years from now the world population will be under 1 billion people, and something like 200 million of them will be latter-day saints.

There are other reasons, but my goal with this post is to give a broad picture rather than a deep dive. I’ll leave it to others to give their analysis. Bottom line, I think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to do exceptionally well in this Great American Revival, to the point where all of the other Christian factions will ultimately come to see the Church as a major threat.

Most other Christians—Protestant and Catholic—don’t even consider the “Mormons” to be Christian. So when the revival begins to stall out, and the old sectarian divisions begin to return, the other Christian factions are going to need a common enemy to unite them—and that enemy will be the latter-day saints.

The seeds of this have already been planted. Anti-Mormon rhetoric from Evangelical pastors like Mark Driscoll has inspired at least one mentally ill person to shoot up at least one of our churches, and there have been numerous arson attempts against our churches and temples that have failed and quietly not made the news.

And there’s also plenty of historical precedent. In 19th century Missouri, the anti-Mormon violence got so bad that we were driven violently from the state by the state militia, after suffering rapes, beatings, massacres, and the destruction or theft of most of our material belongings. There is a reason why the Mormons made the pioneer trek to Utah, when the territory was little more than an empty high altitude desert.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the wild card that makes this Christian revival different from all the other ones in our nation’s past. It’s a very unique (and uniquely American) Christian denomination that has a tendency to unite all of the other factions against it. And ultimately, I think that’s how the Great American Revival will end.

There Is No “AI Bubble”

In my various and sundry travels over this desolate wilderness we call the internet, I’ve recently heard a lot of people talk about this thing they’re calling the “AI bubble.” The basic theory is that all of this AI development is being artificially propped up, that it isn’t nearly as profitable or as transformative as the AI proponents claim. When the music stops and the curtain gets pulled back, all of these AI companies will collapse, and all of this AI that nobody asked for will get scaled back to something normal. Or something like that.

But here’s the thing… the fact that so many people are talking about the “AI bubble,” to the point that it’s now a talking point, is pretty strong evidence that it’s not actually a bubble. When a true economic bubble happens, nobody calls it a “bubble” because everyone is so euphoric about it. Indeed, it’s that very euphoria that fuels the bubble. Housing prices only go up, donchaknow. AOL and Pets.com is totally the way of the future. So shut up and mortgage your house so you can buy the latest tulip.

With AI, though, it seems that all of the most vocal people are anti-AI and want it all to go away. Indeed, the main driver of all this “AI bubble” talk seems to be fear that AI will drive large numbers of people out of work. So what’s actually happening?

I do think there is a bubble in our economy, but I don’t think it’s being driven by AI. Rather, I think what we have is a debt bubble, which is very close to unwinding in a catastrophic way. The only way to stop that from happening is to grow the economy faster than the debt bubble is inflating, but at this point, the only way to do that is through some hugely transformative new technology, such as generative AI.

So all of the forces that want to keep propping up this debt bubble have turned to AI as the salvation of our economy, pumping billions and billions of dollars into it in the hopes that it will yield the sort of economic growth that will allow them to keep growing the debt. But for ordinary people, it’s a lose-lose scenario, since if AI succeeds, lots of us will be out of work… but if AI fails, the economy collapses and lots of us will also be out of work. Hence why so many ordinary people see AI itself as the problem.

Here’s what I think is ultimately going to happen: AI will prove to be super transformative in the long run, just like the internet, but it won’t save us from the debt bubble the way that our business and political elites so desperately hope that it will. The debt bubble is going to pop, and we are going to have to face up to the consequences of decades of very bad fiscal and monetary policy, with or without AI. But after the dust settles, AI will play a major role in the rebuilding of the economy, for good or for ill.