Ada Hoffmann

A still from the 1939 promotional film The Middletons At The World's Fair, featuring a gold-coloured blocky humanoid robot. It can count! It can walk! Fairly obviously to modern eyes it's all done with recordings and animatronics, but frankly some modern so called "AI" are equally obviously mechanical Turks , so we shouldn't judge.

Yesterday I watched the 1939 promotional reel The Middletons At The Worlds' Fair. One display has a robot which, we are told, can think for itself and before long we will all have artificially intelligent robot helpers.

This con has been going on a good while, hasn't it?

Yup! Same.

Yup. If I was still teaching cognitive science next year, I'd put this smack into the middle of my first year COGS class.

One of mine was a mechanical engineer who also played French horn. The other was severely disabled for a large chunk of his adult life, so I'm not actually sure.

It's ok, everybody gets that wrong :P

Oh hey I didn't realize it is also EXCERPT DAY!

#IgnoreThisBook

Heh, thanks. I thought a lot, while I was writing the first book in that series, about cosmic horror and irl religious mysticism; for many people in many places and times, the idea that there are things in the universe so big that humans can't understand them is viewed as a good thing, not a horror.

Thank you so much! I'm so glad that you liked the Outside series so much. I can confirm that IGNORE is going to be just as neurodivergent, trans, and queer :)

Later I'll write a longer post somewhere with explanations of the songs, but for now, you can just press Play and bask in the vibes. Since the songs are picked to tell the story, I recommend listening to them in order.

#IgnoreThisBook

Most of my book playlists consist of heavier music, but IGNORE has insisted, since the beginning, on being a pop confection.

@kaseylansdale.bsky.social said it made her want a K-Pop Demon Hunters crossover :D

Ignore All Previous Instructions

It's been the kind of week where I feel a bit weird doing book promo because of everything that is on fire. Nevertheless book promo is part of my job.

So: maybe it would cheer you up to listen to the IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS official playlist!

open.spotify.com/playlist/1fi...

don’t doomscroll.
read a chapter instead.

I am going to link to organizations that I know for sure are helping trans Kansans. This thread will develop slowly as I either know people or will vet them.

At this point we have not heard from anyone being helped via relocation resources. These exist, but I assume they are overwhelmed.

📘 I’ve started reading the concluding episode to @ada-hoffmann.bsky.social “The Outside” trilogy from @angryrobotbooks.bsky.social

I finished 📗 a couple of months ago, so the gentle introduction of this third book has brought me back up to speed very nicely.

📚🚀 #SciFiBooks 🪐📚💙 #BookSky 🦋

As @rst.bsky.social points out: part of the issue is people thinking the ai is infallible, but the other half of that issue is ai companies pushing that idea of infallible. Because actually checking everything would take time and effort, and it's that time and effort the ai is promising to minimize

The cover of Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman

A space heist to steal from an AI company with queer neurodivergent rebellion throughout!

I had a great time reading this for early review, and my favourite part was seeing an autistic character where more stigmatised parts of our condition was left in.

@ada-hoffmann.bsky.social

#booksky #PRgift

"A revelation... 10 out of 10." -John Joseph Adams Hi all, The good vibes are continuing to roll in for IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. My publicist told me that we'd already gotten our last blurb, but then...

Here's a cheeruppy little roundup of recent book news: buttondown.com/ada-hoffmann...

#IgnoreThisBook

There's more to it than this, but I think this is all of the idea that I can really articulate for now.

And I'm not saying this in order to imply that I think the commentators are insincere. I do not think that at all. For the most part I think they are being very sincere, and reacting in realtime like all of us, and weaving it skillfully into a story at the very same time.

And I think this year I've just been watching the coverage and thinking about the craft that goes into it, the quick decisions about what story this is and what it means, the absurd amount of filmmaking work that must go in on the back end in order to be prepared for any ending to the story.

And at the Olympics, the stories are so BIG. The athletes know they are being watched by the whole world. The emotions are outsized. And there is, frankly, so much extra craft and artistry that goes into the storytelling and meaning-making around all these stunning feats and outsized feelings.

A good commentator is partly explaining the sport and its arcane rules to you, but also weaving a story around it, putting it in context, making emotional sense of what's happening. And they have to do this in realtime regardless of how it goes.

Part of the beauty of real sports is that they just *happen* - which is not to discount the immense labor that goes into the event from all sides, but it's just that they are not scripted, they are not bound by narrative convention, you can't tell in advance if it will be a triumph or a disaster.

I don't know what it's like to watch this kind of event in person. I've been watching CBC Gem's coverage, which is excellent coverage, IMO, although I don't really know from sports coverage most of the time. And I've noticed that a good sports commentator is a storyteller in a specific way.

I've been trying to articulate *why* the Olympics fascinate me so much when other sports fail to.

And I think it is partly a question of storytelling.

Because the Olympics are *so* big, and so popular, that we all start to weave stories around them more lushly than for other sports events.

What is the Amazing Pom Butchery Trick?

Thinking about how an "everyman" is actually a very specific type of man.

(*Except for another couple of weeks in March because I am 100% going to do all this over again for PARALYMPICS! Of course.)

It's always sort of melancholy getting to the end but I'm actually not sad it's over, I feel like that was the correct amount of Olympics to hyperfixate on for 3 weeks and now I can go back to my usual habits, and to cheerfully not caring about hockey, for a couple of years.*

Ok I was watching on replay and went to bed just before the handoff ceremony. But I watched the rest of the closing ceremonies over breakfast and WHEW. What a handoff. What an epic version of the Marsellaise.

Followed by a DANCE PARTY. As it should be!!