Happy Wednesday!
Thank you to Sarah for the lovely wedding post and for all the sweet comments and advice. We had a lovely evening, drinking champagne and eating cheesecake in bed while we watched National Treasure.
In other news, our youngest cat, Fig Newton, just turned two and has become a monster. She wants attention in the middle of a Zoom meeting. She wants to eat trash. She wants to use your chest as a springboard to jump onto the headboard at 2am and scratch at the walls.
I’m so tired.
…
Calling all my cozy gaming fans, there’s a Kickstarter currently running for a game where you make your own toys and plushies. It’s already met its funding goal!
…
I’ve been watching a lot of Interior Motives on YouTube. It’s a game show where people send in photos of their living spaces and the host/guests guess the submitter’s identity.
…
In “this timeline is trash” news, Harlequin has announced that they’ll be working with an AI entertainment company to produce animated microdramas of books. Author Jackie Ashenden has made a Threads post, which Sarah and I assume has something to do with this announcement, that she had no clue this was happening.
…
And for a little bit of a cleanse after that news, enjoy this very cute kid and his biking dad.
View this post on Instagram
…
Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Loved the April fools surprise!
Harlequin needs to not. They need to not use machine translation for their French publications (because firing human translators is trash turtles all the way down), and they need to not do this. It’s bizarre that a company that publishes books about human emotional connection is gunning so hard for souless AI slop. We all know it’s about money – keeping more, paying less.
It’s April fools day, bitches!
That vid was an instant joy snack! Just what I needed on a rainy morning doing my taxes.
Honestly, I always felt that if anyone could be the heir apparent to Romantic Times it would be Smart Bitches. If this was a real thing I’d 1000% subscribe. (I’d even help — I was production manager for a publishing company for 10 years. Plus, a free pattern per issue!) 🙂
a03’s April Fool was changing the beta in its logic to omega
Are these microdramas like the ones on Instagram with a lot of slapping, horrible acting and even more horrible family dynamics?
No, I don’t watch them, they just appear in my “for you” because I like the reels with book snippets from new to me authors.
Former Carina Press author here, and the Hqn working with AI news has me LIT up even though I no longer have anything in that fight.
You know why?
They never registered the copyright on my three Carina books. They in fact registered almost no copyrights on Carina books, so very few of us were eligible for a share of the Anthropic settlement. I had no idea – I assumed they registered them, they even asked whether I wanted it registered in my real name or my pseudonym, but then they didn’t. When the settlement was first announced, I searched. My books were on the list scraped by AI, so I started hunting to see if I had a registered copyright. I did not.
Turns out the Carina author contract that I (and many others) signed said Harlequin “MAY” register copyrights, not “SHALL” register them.
They are copyright jokers.
@Anna: GOOD GOD that’s infuriating. I am so fucking sorry.
@ Anna Richard
That stinks – very sorry you publisher let you down before AI company stole your work!