Back on my Hong Kong toy bullshit! This is Warriors of the Galaxy (1983), the big box play set from Marty Toy. There is a version of this box without the electronic soundboard, which seems to have come out around the same time. There were also smaller sets in blister packs on cards, some just with dudes, some with dudes and a vehicle (“dude” is the term of art my son applies to these sorts of plastic entities, be they men, women or creatures). Marty Toy seems to have been less a real company and more a marketing shell; it pretty much vanishes right after these toys hit this market. They live on under a number of names, mostly from Hong Kong, mostly in increasingly lower quality copies — Galaxy Knights, Superteam of the Universe, Demons & Wizards. The handful of figures I previously posted appear to have been made in Mexico. They don’t, to my knowledge, have any connection to Sungold’s 1987 Masters of the Universe knock-offs, Galaxy Warriors.
Anyway, this play set is pretty great, exactly the sort of thing I would have lost my mind over as a kid (and it honestly hurt me a little to tell my son he couldn’t play with these because they are relatively rare). There is so much to love! Two factions, Golden Heroes (zzz) and Galactic Demons (yea!), both of which are designed to hold brightly colored plastic weapons (which so far are still on the sprues in my set). Because of this, the little guys look like they are dancing when they aren’t holding anything, which I find endlessly charming. The vehicles, a sci-fi tank and a flying saucer, are little blow-molded delights that have holes where radar dishes and guns can get mounted. There are also little missiles on stands so you can put them on the battlefield as they fly to toward their targets.
The real start is the soundboard. My goodness! Six sounds on a console featuring an angry plastic castle — electronic scan, rocket fire, explosions, laser gun, the rumble of space tank treads and a button for the sound of the UFO taking off, flying and, when pushed a second time, landing. I kept this on my desk for a long time when this first arrived and only put it away once I killed the batteries. Imagine if I worked in shared office space. Everyone would love me.
Nancy Garden’s Vampires (1973) is part of Lippincott’s Weird and Horrible Library, 13 volumes of delightful supernaturally themed books that were a staple of my library’s shelf dedicated to “the unknown.” Garden contributed three other volumes (most of which you’ll see this year), which amounts to her entire output in the realm of non-fiction monster literature.
Most of her career was spent writing juvenile fiction, split pretty evenly between supernatural adventures, like Prisoner of Vampires (1985), and social dramas, like Annie on My Mind (1982). The latter is a teen lesbian romance that was frequently challenged and inspired a book burning in Kansas in 1993. Garden (herself a lesbian) said of the incident “Burned! I didn't think people burned books any more. Only Nazis burn books.” She was pretty rad.
Anyway, Vampires. It’s interesting how all the books this week cover the same basic ground (Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Bathory, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and so on) and yet all manage to have their own distinct character. Garden is a sly storyteller and for the most part well researched. There is a real feeling of trying to piece together puzzles of a historical and folkloric nature. I’m afraid I have to take a few points off for her inclusion of the Croglin Grange vampire, in which a vampire crawls through a window to drink a woman’s blood and gets shot in the leg for his trouble. Even though that’s a favorite (the Led Edward painting rules), the story is actually a lift from Varney the Vampire, passed off as truth to a credulous fellow named Augustus Hare, who recorded it in his autobiography, and thus it became a folktale (Montague Summers presents the opening of Varney in his 1928 book The Vampire, His Kith and Kin directly before presenting Hare’s story, and they are shockingly similar, though Summers fails to make mention of the similarity). Garden’s book even includes an illustration of Croglin Low Hall, drawn by Charles G. Harper and published in the very book where he argues there is no such place as Croglin Grange (Haunted Houses, 1924). That’s how folklore works, though—nearly every book on vampires includes the Croglin story, because it’s a damn good story.
Garden earns those points back by starting her book of with a retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872). It’s one of the most important vampire stories (the source of all “lesbian vampire” stories that follow), but it usually gets overlooked in the overviews. It, along with Goethe’s “Bride of Corinth” is the culmination of the most ancient version of the vampire, which was usually a woman — Lilith, Lamia, Gorgo, Empusae, and so on — and both work to reposition their women as complex, powerful characters rather than child-eating parodies of the monstrous feminine.
"Think galactic-or your world is lost" is one hell of a tagline.
1966 Ace books paperback of Babel-17 by the master himself, Samuel R. Delaney. First edition cover art--which is objectively incredible--by Jerome (Jerry) Podwil.
Sometimes, when I am using my beloved isfdb.org for research on the books I am posting, I discover something new about this little niche of collecting I have been inhabiting for years and thought I knew a lot about. It is always fun to find these happy little surprises; in this case, it is Mr. Podwil's work. He was prolific, especially in the 1960s, and did covers for some pretty big names in the speculative fiction world. I highly recommend checking out his page to see some of the awesome covers he did!
Now I have to control myself and not buy a whole bunch of books with his cover art on them, but I do not know how long I can hold off.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.
‡probably
⹋"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI"
A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I'm an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like "So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?"
I said, "Yes, that's right."
He said, "OK, but what can we do about that?"
So I re-iterated the book's thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).
"OK," the young man said, "but what can we do about the crash?" He was clearly very worried.
"I don't think there's anything we can do about that. I think it's already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they'd fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don't think Trump'll do that, so –"
"But what can we do?"
We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.
I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can't be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people's money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don't get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money:
This week, no less than the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy, well-reported story (by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan) on the catastrophic finances of AI companies:
The WSJ writers compare the AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history.
The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it's normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run:
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
The Journal quotes David Cahn, a VC from Sequoia, who says that for AI companies to become profitable, they would have to sell us $800 billion worth of services over the life of today's data centers and GPUs. Not only is that a very large number – it's also a very short time. AI bosses themselves will tell you that these data centers and GPUs will be obsolete practically from the moment they start operating. Mark Zuckerberg says he's prepared to waste "a couple hundred billion dollars" on misspent AI investments:
Bain & Co says that the only way to make today's AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta):
How much money is the AI industry making? Morgan Stanley says it's $45b/year. But that $45b is based on the AI industry's own exceedingly cooked books, where annual revenue is actually annualized revenue, an accounting scam whereby a company chooses its best single revenue month and multiplies it by 12, even if that month is a wild outlier:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
Industry darlings like Coreweave (a middleman that rents out data-centers) are sitting on massive piles of debt, secured by short-term deals with tech companies that run out long before the debts can be repaid. If they can't find a bunch of new clients in a couple short years, they will default and collapse.
Today's AI bubble has absorbed more of the country's wealth and represents more of its economic activity than historic nation-shattering bubbles, like the 19th century UK rail bubble. A much-discussed MIT paper found that 95% of companies that had tried AI had either nothing to show for it, or experienced a loss:
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Trump might bail out the AI companies, but for how long? They are incinerating money faster than practically any other human endeavor in history, with precious little to show for it.
During my stay at Cornell, one of the people responsible for the university's AI strategy asked me what I thought the university should be doing about AI. I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:
Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there's a buyer's market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there's a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.
There's plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:
That doesn't mean "nothing to see here, move on." It means that AI isn't the bow-wave of "impending superintelligence." Nor is it going to deliver "humanlike intelligence."
It's a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they're used.
The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.
The world did Kay Nielsen dirty. He was of the Golden Age, but with Dulac was part of a slightly younger cohort than Rackham and the old guard. By far, the defining feature of his work is an embrace of detailed pattern to a degree that has perhaps never been rivaled. The level of detail in his work is beyond sumptuous and emphasized by a certain flattening of his compositions, which often remind me of sets for a stage play. Individual elements of his illustrations are extremely precise and orderly, but often turn chaotic as the page fills — all that potential energy bounces my eyes around ceaselessly.
This is Kay Nielsen (1975), one of David Larkin’s series of books focusing on Golden Age artists, a prime reason, I think, why he remains in the public imagination. I’d be willing to bet that Nielsen’s figures — pale, oddly proportioned, somewhat alien-looking and featuring a propensity for odd clothing choices, particularly hats — inspired Michael Moorcock’s Melniboneans. Or, at the very least, inspired the artists who illustrated them.
Late in life, he worked for Disney and receives much of the credit for the Night on Bald Mountain sequence of Fantasia, but also did production work for other films, including Sleeping Beauty (once you know this, I think, it’s impossible to not see his hand in Maleficent). Apparently his production work underpins sequences in The Little Mermaid and Frozen, produced 32 years and 56 years after his death. I find this supremely frustrating, considering Disney let him go in 1941 for being too dark; he struggled to find commissions after that and lived in relative poverty for the last decade and a half of his life. Rotten.
kaledo-art
areudirty
dededos
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
