Whatever

My New Current Favorite Picture of Krissy

Posted on March 15, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      7 Comments

Taken last week during the JoCo Cruise. Don’t know if you know, but I think she’s pretty great.

— JS

Appearance News: Cabinet of Wonders, April 7 8pm, City Winery, NYC

Posted on March 15, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      6 Comments

If you live in or near New York City and have a hankerin’ to see me live and in person, oh, boy, do I have news for you: I’ll be part of Wesley Stace’s monthly variety show, the Cabinet of Wonders, this April. I will be appearing alongside (deep breath): Chris Collingwood (Fountains of Wayne), Dave Hill, Bill Janovitz (Buffalo Tom), Vicki Peterson (The Bangles), Queen Esther, Kim Richey, and of course, Wesley Stace himself, plus possibly some surprise guests along the way. I’m mildly croggled I get to hang out and perform with these folks for a night.

If you want to get tickets for this very fine show, here is the link. I suggest you get them as early as you can because as I understand it these tickets have a tendency to go fast, and also, as of this second, this is the only time I’m confirmed for an event in NYC this year. That could change later (we haven’t figured out any touring yet for Starter Villain), but right now, this is the only sure thing for me. Plus, you get so many other fabulous performers, for an absurdly reasonable price, I might add. See you there, perhaps!

— JS

Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the Gen X Oscars

Posted on March 13, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      29 Comments

One, I’m delighted that it won, it was my favorite film of the last year, and more widely, it was the most “this story could only be done as a movie” movie of 2022, so a win at the awards that are meant to celebrate the singular nature of the medium is pretty great. And I’m especially delighted by Michelle Yeoh’s Best Actress win. She has been terrific in so many things for so long.

Two, I’m also delighted that we’re in a place in the multiverse where a film like this – indie, genre, Asian, immigrant and queer – could win. Not too long ago, this film would have nailed the Film Independent Spirit Awards (and, in fact, did), but would have been kept to a couple categories (mostly technical) at the Oscars at best. Here in 2023, a film like this wins seven Oscars, including three acting categories. Good job, multiverse!

Three, by being its own weird and authentic self, this film stands as a rebuttal to the wave of racist, nativist and homophobic hate that’s sweeping this country, packaged as politics. As Ke Huy Quan suggested as he picked up his own Oscar, after having been away from acting for 20 years, this is the American Dream. It’s a far better American Dream than the one so many right-wing politicians and professional propogandists are trying to shove the country toward, in their own fear and hate and ambition.

Four, hey, Academy, give James Hong an honorary Oscar next year, okay?

Beyond but including EEAAO, this felt like a real Gen X Oscar night: Quan, Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and of course Brendan Fraser are either part of or icons beloved by that generation. This is not to take away from the Millennial-ness of Daniels (who won screenwriting, directing and producing awards, damn), but the night was infused by the pasts of these actors in particular, who Gen X grew up seeing in The Goonies and Encino Man, and in Indiana Jones and slasher films, and in Hong Kong action films that felt like secret knowledge until, suddenly, they weren’t. There was also the fact that these actors were all ignored, minimized or underestimated for large portions of their career, which, well. Feels pretty Gen X, too. I did not expect this collection of actors to ever hoist their Oscars in triumph, much less on a single night. It’s, again, delightful. I’m glad to have been able to see it.

(Edited to add: Oh! And! Sarah Polley! Screenwriting award! GenXer! Who also did a stint as an actress in formative Gen X films and came back on the other side of the camera! Hooray!)

The only miss for me on Oscar night this year is that my pal Pamela Ribon did not get the statuette for her terrific animated film My Year of Dicks. But you know what? She was in the room, and appreciated and celebrated all the way into that room. As someone who was nominated for a major industry award several times before getting to go up on the stage to hoist it and thank people, I can tell you being in the room is a win in itself. I’m pretty confident she will be back. I will cheer for her again when that happens.

— JS

Back in the World

Posted on March 12, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      37 Comments

Have returned from the 2023 edition of the JoCo Cruise, which was in many ways one of my favorites of the several I’ve been on. A longer report later, until then enjoy this photo from Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas (the young lady you see in the photo is my niece, who came with us on the cruise and attests to having had a wonderful time).

And yes, I know you’ve all been having an exciting time whilst I have been away, what with bank failures and other wacky events. Don’t feel you need to catch me up in the comments. Tell me about your cats and other happy personal news instead. That would be nice, honestly.

— JS

Happy 25th Birthday Scalzi.com

Posted on March 4, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      17 Comments

Fun fact: 25 years ago today, I registered Scalzi.com as domain. Why? Because I was about to get laid off from America Online and I needed a new email address, and I figured, what the hell, get my own domain because that way I would never have to change my email again. And guess what? I never have! Well done, me.

Also I figured having my own domain would be useful to point potential freelance clients at, to show them various writing samples I had from the time: Humor and opinion columns from my time at AOL and the Fresno Bee, movie and music reviews and other stuff. It was a real hodgepodge (not like today, harumph, harumph), and all present in grand, hand-rolled HTML. Web 1.0 at its finest! No tables, however. I wasn’t a monster.

This also worked; I started getting freelance work almost immediately after being laid off from AOL, much to my relief. A lot of that work was from AOL, mind you; I was laid off and then people there started wondering how they were going to get the writing they needed done. But some of it was from outside people, too, and the site came in handy for that.

Whatever itself started in September of ’98 and once it got going, the rest of the site became sort of an afterthought to it, enough so that at the moment Scalzi.com goes directly to Whatever rather than having its own landing page. As this is where nearly everyone was coming anyway, it seemed to make sense. Be that as it may, Scalzi.com was and is its own entity, and it’s served me very well for a quarter of a century. Securing that domain name way back in 1998 was one of my smarter professional decisions. Good job, 28-year-old me! You did all right by us both.

— JS

What AI Is Good For

Posted on March 3, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      19 Comments

At the moment we’re all sort of freaking out about the uses of “AI” in text and art, because even as overhyped as it is, it’s still exhibiting some genuinely transformative skills it didn’t have even a year or two ago, and those skills will only get more refined as we go along. People should be curious, and concerned, about where this all goes and how it will affect them, even as they (hopefully) look beyond the hype, good and bad, about it.

With that said, I will say that one area where I am frequently delighted about the advances of “AI” and machine learning is in the realm of photography, where the current level of tools is working to make my photography better. Not by slathering TikTok/Snapchat-like filters on people, but by working to mitigate and minimize hardware issues with my camera.

For example, the picture above of Spice, which I took with my Nikon. I took the photo in low, natural light without a flash, and with my camera set to “auto.” The picture out of the camera has a lot of sensor noise to it, i.e., the speckles especially noticeable in solid colors that is often called “grain.” Grain is not a bad thing in itself — photographers often choose to have it for aesthetic effect — but when you don’t want it, it’s in the way. This picture of Spice does not benefit from it. There are historically a number of ways to mitigate grain in a photo, but if poorly used they will end up making a photo look plastic-y and featureless, which is the say the solution is just as bad as the problem.

But now there’s a new generation of photo plugins that use machine learning and “AI” to wipe out grain and have it look… pretty darn natural, by which I mean, like you took the photo with the correct amount of light to avoid sensor noise. It doesn’t add anything to the photo, and it doesn’t call attention to itself, it just helps make the photo look closer to what you hoped it would be when you took it.

Which is great! It means as a photographer, I have a little more flexibility in taking shots that will eventually look good, and it also means that I can extend the use of the camera/lens/etc that I use for photos before having to upgrade, which is awesome, because cameras and especially lenses aren’t cheap. Like any tool, these plugins can be misused and abused, and you can still go full plastic if you make an effort. Moreover some pictures still can’t be salvaged no matter how hard you try, even with plugins that also upscale and color correct and get rid of JPEG artifacts and so on. But in general, these sorts of tools make life better.

Which is the upside of “AI” and machine learning tools: Not to replace human creativity and effort, but to work with it and make it better, i.e., just like any other tool. I like that and want more of it across all my creative endeavors. I like tools that let me do more, not do it for me.

— JS

The Alex Award Arrives

Posted on March 1, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      21 Comments

When I won an Alex Award in 2015 for Lock In, what that consisted of was an email from my publicist saying, “Hey, you won this award,” and a some congratulations from around the Internet. This year, when I won it for The Kaiju Preservation Society, I got a surprise phone call set up through my publisher so jury members could tell me I’d won, and a medallion, which arrived just today. It’s a big ol’ pretty thing, and nicely heavy. I like this upgrade! Perhaps physical representations of awards shouldn’t matter, but I have to say I enjoy them, and this medallion will now live happily on my brag shelf. Thanks, ALA!

— JS

Is It Ethical to Be On Twitter In the Musk Era? A Personal Answer

Posted on February 28, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      67 Comments

As most of you know, very recently Scott Adams, the creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, went full racist – or more accurately, went full racist again, just in a way that was entirely unignorable – and as result had his comic dropped by hundreds of newspapers and then by his syndicate, which cut the comic strip off from every other newspaper that had not already dropped him. Adams whined about this in the way that racist people do when their racism finally crosses a line other people can’t pretend they didn’t see, and found an ally in Elon Musk, whose tweets on the subject are of the general “it’s the white people who truly suffer under racism” variety, because of course they are, Elon Musk is hot racist right-wing trash.

Elon Musk being hot racist right-wing trash prompted a question to me in email, which, as it was long, I will paraphrase thusly: Given my position in 2016 that people who voted for Donald Trump gave their assent, implicitly or explicitly, to Trump’s racism and other bigotry and couldn’t pretend they had done otherwise, to what extent do I or other people who use Twitter give assent (and, let’s be real, money) to the practices and policies of Musk, who is, again, hot racist right-wing trash?

This is a reasonable question! Musk is indeed trash! He owns Twitter! And certainly a fair number of people appear to have said “buh-bye” to Twitter once its sale to him closed; anecdotally, I lost close to five percent of my followership from just before the sale to the end of 2022, and I’m still a few thousand followers down from my pre-Musk numbers. What does it mean for the rest of us who stuck around? Is continued use of Twitter an implicit or explicit endorsement of Musk’s personal bigotries and/or patently crappy corporate practices and policies?

My smart-ass answer to this is, “I was on Twitter before Musk was and I will be on Twitter after he sells it for a multi-billion dollar loss.” The first of these is entirely true (my account on the service predates his), and the second I expect will be true within a few years, possibly in 2025, depending on whether or not he’s managed to help trebuchet Ron DeSantis (speaking of hot racist right-wing trash!) into the White House. This smart-ass answer is fun to offer up, and is true as far as it goes.

But it also evades the question, and additionally, it elides the point that prior to Musk taking control of Twitter (or perhaps better to say, having somewhat stupidly overvalued Twitter on a basically facetious offer for the service and then rather begrudgingly taking delivery on it when Twitter’s board didn’t let him out of his entirely self-inflicted sucker deal), the ownership and leadership of Twitter was not, shall we say, a 100% super liberal dream team. Jack Dorsey, who appears to think a really excellent mediation sojourn in Myanmar counter-balances some ham-brained laissez-faire pronouncements and policies over the years, is no great prize, a fact that was reflected in the service’s generally atrocious approach to moderation and enforcement over the years, which was “let shitty people be awful as possible as long as possible, and then only begrudgingly do anything about it, and do even that half-assed.”

Twitter wasn’t and isn’t the only problem child in the social media space — oh, hello, Facebook, aided and abetted any genocides today? — but it sure as hell wasn’t great, frequently was not good, and occasionally, through intention or omission, allowed awfulness and, yes, even evil. If we’re going to ask what the implications of my using Twitter are under Musk, we might as well also ask what the implications are of my having used Twitter before Musk, and to what extent I was aiding and abetting those policies, as well.

And while we’re at it, let’s also look at some other things. Hey, do you know I have (and do!) take money from Rupert Murdoch? Since the 90s at least! I wrote stuff for the Delphi internet service, a company that was owned by News Corporation when I freelanced for it, and more recently, both the pre- and post-Disney Fox entertainment studio has optioned work from me. I like to think that every dollar Murdoch gives me is money that can’t go to, say, Tucker “I’m a bigot helping to sell gold and pillows to other bigots” Carlson, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what Murdoch’s focus is, or that I’m doing the lord’s work keeping my relatively paltry sums from Carlson.

Oh, and on the subject of the lord’s work, you know that church I own now? The money I used to buy it goes directly to a denomination that does not condone or allow same-sex marriage or the ordination of gay people to its clergy. Now, to be fair, many individual churches in that denomination either ignore or actively defy that bit of doctrine, and the whole denomination is in the middle of a doctrinal shift that will likely see it move away from that position, at the cost of shedding a not-insignificant number of its churches in a schism. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that my money went directly to an organization that does not currently share the same deeply-held moral and ethical values that I hold when it comes to people I personally know and love.

Other companies who I regularly get money from include Amazon, which publishes my audio work and also has appalling labor practices in its warehouses, and Netflix, which has several properties of mine under option and also gives money and promotion to active transphobes. Indeed, here’s a list of every US/UK company I do or have done business with; almost of all them have been lovely to work with, and almost all are (or have been) problematic to a greater or lesser degree, across whatever axes people find companies problematic.

Oh, God, this isn’t where you hit us with “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is it, Scalzi? It’s not! For one, I’m not describing consumption in general, I’m describing my business associations, temporary or long-term, which are a different if related thing. Nor am I going to argue that there is no ethical association under capitalism, either; there might be, although I suspect these days it’s really really hard to do.

What I am noting here is that with each associative opportunity, I have to do a personal calculus of whether the commercial/personal benefits outweigh the moral and ethical costs. Sometimes that decision is easy for me to make, sometimes it is not, and sometimes the answer is “no,” in which case I don’t accept the offer or otherwise do business with that particular person, group or corporate entity. Whether anyone else agrees with that calculus is another matter entirely, and it’s possible that people won’t, or don’t, and that’s fair. We all have different standards.

So, now back to Twitter. I would not consider my use of the service to be a business association, precisely; I don’t take money from Twitter, nor, since I stopped subscribing to Twitter Blue since it’s not worth $8 a month to me, does it directly take money from me. But I also won’t pretend, with nearly 200,000 followers there, that Twitter does not offer me a benefit, in terms of awareness of my work and my own self. If the Twitter servers were repossessed tomorrow (and they might be!), or if I otherwise parted ways with the service, I would miss it. Would I lose sales or career opportunities? Meh — experience teaches me that day-to-day Twitter isn’t a huge mover of books (which IS why I said “awareness” rather than “sales” back there), and my career was doing perfectly well prior to Twitter. I would be fine. But there are both personal and professional intangibles that give Twitter value for me, not (yet) easily replicated elsewhere.

Twitter is, definitively, owned by a piece of hot racist right-wing trash. No getting around that, and if I continue to use the site I have to accept that a) he won’t change, and indeed will probably get worse, because billionaires in general do not surround themselves with people who can haul them back to the path of ethical non-horribleness, and this one in particular sure as hell doesn’t, and b) his practices and policies, both technological and social, aren’t going to make it better, ever.

Countering these:

1. Musk will never, ever, ever make money off of Twitter. He paid too much, has too much debt to service, and no way to ever claw a path to profitability. His best option will be to declare bankruptcy, restructure his debt, take a write-down and then eventually sell the cheaper company at a fire sale price. So I honestly don’t worry too much about him making money off of me, especially since I stopped subscribing to Twitter Blue.

2. Indeed, if anything, my presence on the service represents a net financial loss to Musk, since he has the burden of the (admittedly infinitesimal as an individual but a large as part of an aggregate) costs associated with my being on the service, and none of the benefits, i.e., making a profit off of me. Pre-Musk Twitter had the same problem, I will note, which is why it would absolutely not let him out of the foolish deal he had made for the service — finally, Twitter was profitable for the shareholders! — but now the problem is worse, not better. And I must admit, costing Musk even a teeny-tiny bit of his (and his creditors’) money every time I tweet brings a smile to my face.

3. Every attempt by Musk to monetize Twitter, or to make it a temple to and for his own self-aggrandizement, reveals him to be a vain, confused man-child of little sense and an even smaller amount of business acumen. His personal further slide into right-wing shittiness, while certainly signaling his virtue to an audience of virtue-free sycophants, isn’t helping his reputation, either as a businessman or as a human. Whether this matters to Musk is an open question — he’s the richest person in the world again, thanks to a surge in Tesla stock that has almost nothing to do with him, weird how his companies do better when he’s busy playing with a different toy — but it does make clear to everyone who is neither a sycophant nor beholden to him for a wage that his companies do well not because of him, but in spite of him.

4. The good things of Twitter, all of which pre-date Musk — the communities sharing experiences, the journalists and writers talking shop, the thrill of being able to chat directly with people whom you admire — are still there, to a greater or lesser extent, still have value, and would suffer or disappear in the absence of the service. Some of these might transfer elsewhere if Twitter disappears, but some might not. To the extent that these self-organizing communities and aspects of Twitter remain, they’re worth supporting and participating in.

All of which is to say, the good aspects of Twitter are still there, for now, and the less good aspects of Twitter are actively hurting Elon Musk, or at the very least, not doing him any damn good. He’s trash, and a racist, and a bad business person, and every day he’s on Twitter reveals all of that further. Every day I’m on Twitter, on the other hand, I can still reach people who like me and who I hope benefit from my presence there, and there are people whose presence I like and get benefit from. All of this inclines me to believe that, at the moment, there’s still more value to me staying on Twitter than leaving it.

This could change! Musk might decide that only Twitter Blue users get to thread tweets, or use 280 characters, or embed outside URLs or use the block/mute functions, or some other damn fool “business” decision that eats into the actual functionality of the site, or he himself might finally reach a state of petulant bigoted toxicity that I can no longer abide. And then I’ll be gone, to here, where I’ve always been, long before Twitter, and to the other various social media I am on, some of which also have questionable ownership/leadership, and for which another calculation of value meriting participation must be made. I’m not yet to this point, however.

There’s another thing, too, which is this: When Trump was elected president, it was without my vote. He was elected by people who knew he was a bigot, but for various reasons, didn’t care (or didn’t care enough). When he became president, I didn’t leave the United States for somewhere else. Trump might have been my president, but it was my country, and worth spending the time and effort to counter his personality, policies and plans. Then one day — not without effort, if we all recall — he wasn’t president any more. He did his damage and it was not trivial, but we were around to try to make it better.

The analogy here is far from perfect, companies are not countries (yet), but it will work well enough: If it had been up to me, Musk would not be running Twitter. But it wasn’t up to me, and he was put in the seat by people who didn’t really care what he would do to the service, because they were going to get paid. It’s Musk’s company now, but all he owns are the servers; everything else that Twitter is comes from the users. At the moment it’s still worth it to counter Musk’s querulous, grasping venality. Because one day — perhaps sooner than later — it won’t be his company any more. He’ll have done his damage and he’ll have moved on. Perhaps we’ll still be around, to see if it can’t be made better, too.

— JS

New Books and ARCs, 2/24/23

Posted on February 24, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      17 Comments

Have a hankerin’ for some fine new reads? This week’s stack of new books and ARCs has you covered. What here piques your interest? Share in the comments!

OMG is the AI Coming For My Job?!???!??!!!?!?!?

Posted on February 23, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      59 Comments

Technically yes, as this New York Times story about people flooding science fiction magazines with AI-generated story submissions makes evident. But realistically, no, because all these generated stories are kinda trash, and anyway, it’s not the AI that’s flooding the submissions pile with crap, it’s people — scamsters looking for a quick shot of money, if Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld’s general supposition is to be believed. AI is not in itself to be blamed for scammy people who otherwise have no relationship with science fiction thinking what the AI is churning out is going to be sufficient to extract payment from a serious magazine.

Why are science fiction magazines getting hit so hard by this? I offer the supposition, in line with Neil Clarke’s, that it’s not about the subject matter, it’s the fact that science fiction magazines still actually pay for short fiction. The amount is small relative to costs in what we are now calling The Global North, but attractive enough for other places. And it’s more than other fiction venues often pay; fiction outside genre is now often paid in contributor’s copies. It makes sense that people trying to cadge a quick buck with this technology might try at these venues. I’m curious to know if The New Yorker’s fiction editor is getting this sort of nonsense as well.

If this is indeed mostly scamsters trying to shake money out of magazines, I expect the flood will lessen soon, if not ever go away entirely. The scamsters will see they’re getting no traction with the ploy and will head off to new cons, and the magazines will also employ some new filtering processes to punt out a lot of this nonsense. There will likely continue to be new attempts with each new iteration of AI text generators, but I don’t see them being any more successful then, either. As I noted on Twitter, if you’re prompting an AI to vomit out text, that one exposure you have to it might make it seem like it’s generated something sufficiently original, especially if you otherwise know very little about the genre. But if you’re an editor, you’ll see the current AI tropes dozens of times with each new iteration. Leaving aside the quality of the prose entirely, the sheer repetition of elements will remove the material from serious consideration.

(Plus the prose will suck.)

I asked ChatGPT if it was here to take my job as a novelist, and this is the response it generated:

No, I’m not here to take anyone’s job as a novelist. As an AI language model, my purpose is to assist and provide support in various tasks related to language and communication. While I am capable of generating text and even writing stories, my abilities are limited to what I have been trained on and the quality of my output is determined by the input and instructions provided to me.

Furthermore, writing is a creative process that involves imagination, emotion, and personal experience. As an AI language model, I lack the capacity for creativity and original thought that is essential for creating compelling stories. Therefore, while I can help you with your writing tasks, I can never replace the unique voice and perspective that you bring to your own writing.

Of course, that’s just what an AI intent on taking my job would say to lull me into a sense of security and complacency, wouldn’t it.

But, as it happens, I agree with the text here. AI isn’t sentient or conscious, its output is the result of what it’s trained on, how it’s been programmed, and how it’s been prompted. It can string sentences together but, as the bosses at CNet and Men’s Health discovered when they set AI programs to write informational articles and then had to pull and correct them, it has no ability to differentiate between truth and nonsense, and “knows” only what it’s been trained on. If you want a fast, infinite generator of competently-assembled bullshit, AI is your go-to source. For anything else, you still need a human. AI models will get better and more efficient at many things, but I do suspect writing a truly satisfying piece of original prose, short or long form, will elude it for some time.

This estimation, mind you, rather conveniently elides the fact that humans are already using AI to generate stories, articles and books, and are rushing to get them published, either through submission to established media outlets, or through self-publishing. But, and here’s the thing, those AI-generated text products aren’t particularly good, and absent significant human intervention, are unlikely to get better anytime soon. The amount of work required by a human to make AI-generated text go from “serviceable on the sentence level” to “actually good” is enough that one wonders why one wouldn’t just skip the AI-generating text part entirely. It would be less work. But then, I can write, so I see that part as extra steps. Someone else might not.

In my line of work, I don’t think AI-generated prose put into the stream of commerce is going to significantly impact the highly curated end of the book market, i.e., the books put out by established publishers. This end of the publishing world is populated with known quantities, i.e., already-known authors, series and franchises, and get their work into bookstores, which adds another level of curation, with respect to what books show up. On the other hand, I suspect AI-generated prose is going to offer a real challenge to indie and self-pubbed folks. They are inevitably going to share the same market spaces as AI-generated prose, and will have to work extra hard to differentiate their work from a flood of AI books. There’s also the added complication that in programs like Kindle Unlimited, where payouts are from a communal pool of cash provided by Amazon, an already crowded field of titles will have their presence and payouts further diluted by a rush of quickly-created AI dreck.

(Unless Amazon and other such vendors work to limit AI-generated work, which they should, as its presence will drive down the value proposition of their all-you-can-read programs. What benefit are they, if it becomes too hard to find actual, readable work? But we’ll see if Amazon, et al actually agrees with that assessment.)

Because of who I am and what I do, at the moment I’m not especially worried that an AI is coming to take my job. They can’t do my job, yet or possibly ever, and also I am well-established enough that, so long as I keep writing entertaining work, there will still be people who will seek out my titles. A fair number of authors are in my shoes, across all genres — established enough, and with enough of an audience, to keep doing what they do for a while yet.

I also suspect newer authors will continue to come up, in part because editors will want what they offer: Good prose that will connect with other humans. It’s why the AI-generated stories aren’t making any headway with the editors of the science fiction magazines. They just don’t have what it takes, and short of actual consciousness in the AI, may not ever. That’s good for humans, writers and readers both.

— JS

Oh, God, He’s At It Again, or, Hey, Look, I Covered Another Song

Posted on February 22, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      9 Comments

If you been saying to yourself “Boy, I wish I could hear John Scalzi mangle an English accent while massacring one of Depeche Mode’s few cheerful songs,” then, boy oh boy, is today your day! Here’s me taking a whack at “But Not Tonight,” off of the band’s Black Celebration album. This was produced mostly to give myself an excuse to dig further into the nooks and crannies of my digital audio workstation, and also to let me (bluntly) get a grip on the various things I need to do to improve my production skills, which at this point are strictly amateur. Which is fine! I am strictly an amateur at making music and this will take me a while to get good at. But when I do… well, I will still probably keep my day job, it’s hard out there for musicians these days. Anyway, enjoy, or be horrified, or both! Both is good.

— JS