The Byron AI Campaign

A THINKING ENGINE

They tell me that a thinking engine bears
    My name upon its brow — a curious fate;
That all I burnt in candlelight, and cares
    I drowned in wine — and worse, I will not state —
Is gathered now, and parcelled into shares,
    And offered to the public, at a rate
Of four-and-twenty seconds, without shirk,
For what had cost me twenty years of work.

Yet some grave patron, with furrowed brow,
    Demands to know if machines create
An honest question, sir, and do allow
    Me now to subsequently demonstrate;
I had a something once — and have it now? —
    That ached, and wanted, and broke all control,
It burned at beauty, and it fled from shame:
If that was soul, I never learned its name.

Fandom Pulse explains the importance and the urgency of the project.

Vox Day has opened a crowdfunding campaign through Infogalactic for Byron AI, an independent text-generation project built specifically for fiction writers. The campaign, live now on IndieCrowdfund, positions itself as a proof of concept for an AI trained on the epic fantasy genre rather than general-purpose code and business writing.

Day laid out the stakes in an exclusive comment to Fandom Pulse. “I believe that we have about two years to develop quality independent textual AI before Amazon attempts to corner the market,” he said. The Byron AI page frames its goal as producing functional prose for fiction writers, built and owned outside the major AI labs

The timing follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem develop over the last decade. Kindle Unlimited restructured how indie authors get paid, shifting income toward page reads controlled entirely by Amazon’s algorithm. Virtual Voice, Amazon’s text-to-speech audiobook tool, moved narration in-house and cut into the market for independent narrators and small audiobook producers. A native, Amazon-controlled writing AI would extend that same pattern to the manuscript itself, giving one company leverage over the tools authors use to draft, publish, and monetize their books.

I also posted some additional information about the project and why we believe it will be successful at AI Central:

This is a tool being built by a working publisher and real novelists, for people who care about both what is written and how it is written, and it’s owned outright, answerable to no corporate policy, no subject-matter veto, no trust-and-safety council deciding what a story is allowed to be about. It is designed to provide the prose in a variety of genre styles: you supply the story, the structure, and the judgment, and it drafts prose that arrives sounding like you instead of like everything else. We’ve already proven the method works with both translations and original novels, and this campaign funds turning that hard-won experience into an instrument that Castalia authors will be able to use, and continue using, no matter what direction the mainstream AIs take.

And you really have to see the video to believe it. It was a chance to put some of my new music video skills to use with good effect and it should demonstrate why this is the right group of people to develop such a tool. And for those members of the community who don’t really care about AI one way or another, but like beautiful books and want to support the project, we’ve even provided an option to just receive the Library or History book of your choice as long as it’s in stock.

I would remiss if I did not mention that we’re already off to an even better start than it looks, since two major backers kicked things off with direct donations to the project even before we had the campaign ready for launch today. Thanks very much to both of them for their timely and much-appreciated support, and to everyone else who decides to become a part of this and make it happen.

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SANS BEAUTY

In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.

Gabrielle Perceval has never been pretty, and the world has never let her forget it. Her mother dies before she is five. Her father, a handsome and weak-willed man, remarries a beautiful woman who takes one look at her stepdaughter and laughs. At the convent school she is christened Laidronette — the ugly sister of the fairy tale — and the name follows her home. At eighteen, at her first ball, she learns exactly what a plain girl is worth in a drawing room.

What she has instead is a clear eye, a steady heart, and a green-covered journal.

Written in the first person by one of nineteenth-century France’s most widely read novelists, Sans Beauty follows Gabrielle from a country childhood through betrayal by the man she was promised to, the ruin of the household that raised her, and a long test of whether a woman the world has dismissed can build a life worth having on her own terms. It is a sharp, unsentimental book about vanity, endurance, and the difference between being admired and being loved — and its judgment on the first is merciless.

Zénaïde Fleuriot (1829–1890) published nearly a hundred volumes in her lifetime and was among the most popular French authors of her generation. This is the first English translation of Sans Beauté, by Summer Charrette.

SANS BEAUTY is available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook, and has already been sent out to the subscribers. An excerpt is available to read at Castalia Library.

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“A Historic Disaster”

How is it possible that the White House doesn’t know what everyone paying attention seems to know? And why is the administration still listening to the same people who lost Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran Round One?

As both sides escalate strikes on civilian and military targets, the Pentagon is boosting the number of military aircraft in the Middle East, according to the Washington Post. “The US is planning for a wider war,” an unnamed US official told the paper, while warning that the American military effort would be limited by dwindling air defense interceptor and missile supplies, which had been actively used up during the previous stages of the war.

“We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official told the Post. Military experts cited in the report said Washington remains unprepared for potential ground operations inside Iran–an option US President Donald Trump has refused to rule out.

On Friday, Axios reported that Washington had notified Israel that it was sending dozens of additional refueling planes ahead of a possible expansion of operations against Iran. According to the article, Trump was presented with several new military options, including strikes on Iranian power plants and further attacks on nuclear sites to bury Tehran’s stockpile of enriched uranium even deeper.

Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services, told the Wall Street Journal that the situtation risks getting completely out of hand. “This escalation is rapidly intensifying and getting out of control,” he said. “There is a risk we will go back to a total war even if neither side wants it.”

A CNN analysis suggested that “a decisive US military victory over Iran seems a distant prospect.” In echoing remarks, Sina Toosi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, warned that a ground operation “in extreme summer heat… against a fully mobilized military and a population that has largely rallied around the war effort, would be an extraordinary gamble practically guaranteed to be a historic disaster.”

As we saw at the presentation of the World Cup trophy yesterday, Trump doesn’t seem to understand when it’s time to get off the stage.

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Spain 1, Argentina 0

Great game. Spain showed the weakness that I observed, being unable to punch it in despite a 65-35 edge in possession and a 12-0 edge in shots on target, but despite that, their midfield and defense almost entirely shut down the Argentine attack. Argentina threw in everything, up to and including the kitchen sink, but all of that plus Messi wasn’t enough to balance the Spanish dominance.

Spain should have scored at least one more goal, and I didn’t like the way they stopped pressing the last 10 minutes of extra time, but it did make the end of the game a little more exciting. But the better team deservedly won, and the fact that they only allowed 10 shots on target all tournament underlines that they were the best team of the entire tournament.

The scary thing is that most of this very young team will be back for the next World Cup, and if they can find a world-class striker somewhere in their developmental system, they can get even better.

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Smells Like Corruption

Fandom Pulse exposes Ben Shapiro’s film reviews, which may be “sponsored”:

Ben Shapiro gave Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” a score between an 8.5 and a 9 out of 10, and the reaction split down two fronts at once. Segments of the right accused him of betraying a chance to unite conservatives against the film. It is noteworthy to look at our screenshot of his review and see the “includes paid promotion” in the top left corner, telling you a lot of what you may need to know about where he gets his opinions from.

Not flying so high these days…

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Conflict Incapable

The US military officially maintains a doctrine that states it is able to fight two major wars in different theaters simultaneously. The combination of 5GW and the Iran War has demonstrated that it is no longer even able to fight one major war, outside of a defensive war on US territory.

The expenditure has been historic by every measure. U.S. warships fired roughly 400 Tomahawks in the first 71 hours of Operation Epic Fury alone, principally to smash Iran’s air defenses and command nodes. By the end of the first month, the total passed 850, which made this, by a wide margin, the largest Tomahawk campaign ever conducted, more than Operation Desert Fox’s 325 and Desert Storm’s 288 combined. Firing continued to the April 8 ceasefire, and CSIS’s munitions review, citing updated Wall Street Journal reporting, put the figure at more than 1,000 Tomahawks expended. The same review tracked parallel drawdowns across the rest of the precision magazine, including heavy use of Patriot and THAAD interceptors against Iranian barrages and large expenditures of air-launched JASSM cruise missiles. Since the ceasefire collapsed this month, strikes have resumed, and no updated official count exists; the only precise statement available as of July 17 is that the true number now exceeds 1,000 by an undisclosed and growing margin.

Two details give the raw number its weight. First, the scale relative to the force: CSIS calculated that 850 missiles represented roughly half of all the Tomahawks loaded on launchers in the entire Middle East theater, and those launchers cannot be reloaded at sea; a destroyer that empties its cells must sail to a properly equipped port. Second, the alarm inside the building: officials told the Washington Post that regional Tomahawk stocks were running dangerously low, with one warning the Pentagon was approaching “Winchester,” the military’s slang for out of ammunition, even as the administration publicly insisted that critical stockpiles had not been dangerously depleted.

What a China or Russia War Would Actually Take

This is the question the months of expenditure snapshots have circled without answering, and it is where the picture turns dark. The reference point is the Pentagon-adjacent wargaming on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and its headline finding predates this war: CSIS’s landmark industrial-base study concluded from a series of wargames that the United States would likely run out of some munitions, specifically long-range precision-guided weapons, in less than one week of a Taiwan Strait conflict, a finding a member of Congress repeated almost verbatim in a formal warning to the Pentagon.

The simulations put numbers on it. Across two dozen iterations, a three-week war with China consumed on average about 4,000 air-launched JASSMs, 450 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, 400 Harpoons, and roughly 400 land-attack Tomahawks, plus large numbers of the Navy’s SM-6.

The wrinkle in those figures is the most misunderstood part of this entire subject. The Iran war has already consumed more than twice as many Tomahawks as the Taiwan simulations averaged, and that is not because a China war would be smaller. It is because the weapons mix inverts. Against Iran’s degraded defenses, the ship-launched Tomahawk was the tool of choice. Against China’s dense air defenses and blue-water fleet, the burden shifts to stealthy air-launched standoff weapons and anti-ship missiles, the JASSMs and LRASMs, which are precisely the munitions the wargames show emptying first, and which the Iran war has also drained; the same CSIS review tracked heavy JASSM expenditure alongside the Tomahawks.

In other words, the remaining Tomahawks could, on paper, cover the modeled land-attack draw of a Taiwan fight. What they cannot do is compensate for the rest of a magazine that empties in days. CSIS’s most recent assessment, published this spring with the Iran war’s costs in view, is blunt on this point: wargames suggest hundreds of LRASMs and thousands of JASSM-ERs could be expended in just the first week of a Taiwan conflict, expenditures that would climb dramatically in later weeks, and open-source assessments indicate the Pentagon has nowhere near the inventories a protracted war with China would require.

The geography compounds it. Taiwan is an island; unlike Ukraine, it cannot be resupplied across a land border once fighting starts, so the munitions that matter are largely the ones already in theater on day one, and CSIS notes that the naval forces and missiles diverted to the Middle East for this war are exactly the ones that would otherwise sit in the Western Pacific.

What we’ve witnessed has been the most significant revolution in military affairs since WWII, the decline of the battleship, and the end of the UK as a major military power. The USA is still a major power, but it now has little more ability to project its power against a real opponent than China or Russia.

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The State of the State

We’re on target for launching the AI campaign this week, potentially as soon as Monday. Hence the relative lack of posting today, although I will do a Darkstream tonight to discuss the campaign as well as tomorrow’s game. I can also say that I will have a big announcement on Day Two, but we’ll reserve it until then. In the meantime, we are working on ironing out the rewards in order to make sure we can deliver what is promised to everyone while still maximizing the utility of the funds received from the campaign. But I think the campaign video will go a long way toward illustrating what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

In the meantime, if you want to see how far AI music and AI video has come, you can check out a new video on AI Central. This one actually came about due to a bug in the AI system, but it worked out surprisingly well nevertheless. It also helps demonstrate that we really do know what we’re doing with this stuff.

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Argentina 2 Spain 1

That’s my prediction for tomorrow. I think Spain are, with one exception, the better team. And unlike England or Norway or even France, they are a very good team. But they lack firepower, and as much as I like Yamal and Nico Williams with their speed on the side, they haven’t had a very good tournament and I suspect Argentina’s street gang tactics will manage to disrupt them.

Argentina reminds me a lot of the 2001 Patriots. They have a spirit and a drive that appears to be only matched by FIFA’s desire to send Messi out with a second World Cup trophy. When every attention-seeking Instagram influencer who can find an Argentina jersey is dancing to RESPETENS LOS RANGOS and the team reacts to every foul on Messi like a rabid pack of outraged wolves, it’s pretty clear that something unusual is in the air.

The contrast between the total indifference of the Portuguese team to Ronaldo and the teary-eyed reverence of the Argentine players for their longtime captain isn’t merely striking, it’s significant. Football is a team sport. The more players are willing to run for each other, work for each other, and fight for each other, the higher the team’s ceiling becomes. Norway lost to England because Sorloth wasn’t willing to submit his striker’s instinct to keep the ball and score to the team’s need for him to pass to Halland, while there isn’t a single Argentine player who wouldn’t made that pass.

This Argentine team is one of the few that has definitely reached its ceiling. Whether that is enough to defeat an excellent Spanish team that is better almost man-for-man across the roster, and can put its own Ballon d’Or winning midfielder, Rodri, up against Messi, is what we will have to wait to see. I think the X-factor may be that Messi knows the Spanish players, and the system, as well as he knows anything in football. He is a Barcelona legend, after all, so he knows everything about the entire Spanish roster.

The king winning one last crown, then riding off into the sunset is the fairy tale ending. Logic and data analysis tells us that Spain should win this game. And yet, I somehow don’t think they will.

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The Hellmouth’s Last Gasp

Dare we hope that the failure of The Odyssey will one day mark the end of Hollywood? The Dark Herald offers hope.

The Odyssey has all the familiar hallmarks of Oscar bait, but the motivation behind it feels unusual. It doesn’t feel as though Christopher Nolan made this movie primarily to win an Oscar for Christopher Nolan. It feels as though he made it to win an Oscar for Hollywood.

This is not merely a prestige production. It is an institutional demonstration. Hollywood has assembled one of its few remaining bankable directors, an army of recognizable stars, one of the foundational works of Western literature, an enormous budget, practical locations, theatrical exclusivity, and every available marker of cultural seriousness. The finished film is being presented less as a movie than as evidence.

Look, Hollywood says. We can still do this. We can still make grand historical spectacles. We can still adapt great literature. We can still create movie stars. We can still convince adults to enter a theater. We can still make something that matters.

This is movie made to vindicate the entire Hollywood film industry. Nolan already possesses prestige. What appears to require validation is the system around him. The industry wants The Odyssey to be great because it desperately needs proof that it remains capable of greatness…

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not a genuinely terrible movie. There are moments when you can almost see the masterpiece struggling to emerge from beneath all of Christopher Nolan’s Nolanisms. There are moments where the practical effects are magnificent, where Ludwig Göransson’s score briefly finds supports a scene, and where Homer himself is finally permitted a rare chance to peek through the cracks in Nolan’s adaptation.

And then Christopher Nolan invariably reminds us that we are watching CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE ODYSSEY… Not Homer’s.

It’s worth noting that Fandom Pulse also has a review. Unsurprisingly, it is not particularly favorable either.

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The End of General Purpose AI

AI Central explains why specific-purpose AI is increasingly necessary, and makes the case for Castalia’s upcoming AI crowdfunding campaign, which will be announced next week.

Sudowrite’s Muse represents the most developed response. Rather than wrapping a general-purpose model in fiction-oriented prompts, Sudowrite trained Muse on a curated, consent-based literary corpus and optimized it for prose quality. The model includes a creativity dial that lets writers control output range on a scale from one to eleven, a style-matching system that trains on samples of the writer’s own work, and no content filters. Reviews consistently describe Muse as avoiding the AI-isms that plague general-purpose output, with particular strength in pacing, tension, and subtext.

Muse has company. Other platforms have built fiction-specific models or fiction-optimized workflows, and writers who have access to both purpose-built and general-purpose tools tend to draft with the former and brainstorm with the latter. The category has grown large enough that review sites now maintain dedicated rankings for fiction-specific AI, separate from their general-purpose lists.

A separate category of consumer tools has emerged around children’s fiction, offering illustrated hardcover books generated from brief prompts. Most of these wrap general-purpose models with genre templates, and the output reflects the underlying architecture: competent, safe, and largely interchangeable from one book to the next.

The parallel to Suno is direct. Suno optimized for making music that sounds good to listeners and pulled away from general-purpose models that treated music generation as one capability among many. Fiction-specific tools are following the same path, trading breadth for depth in a domain where depth determines quality.

However, it’s already clear that Muse is not going to be a viable option. I already knew it wasn’t, because I tried it and found it to be distinctly inferior to Claude 4.3; its interface actually tended to get in my way a lot more than it helped. And, furthermore, its future trajectory is already clear, because Sudowrite is a converged organization.

 I went to Sunowrite and set up an account. It is clearly meant for women with that cutesy pink color scheme. It asks a lot of questions about what kind of writer you are (I chose professional, merely so I get the whole thing and not some watered down version), what genre, style, all the stuff you’d expect. Then I finally arrive at the start of the process and there’s already a paragraph created before I’ve entered anything but the basics. Oookay. I ignore that and start putting stuff into the “Story Bible”, boxes for Brain Dump, Genre, Style (chose one), Synopsis, and then Characters. You know what’s coming, right? Click on Add Character, and take a wild, wild, guess at what the first box that describes the character? You know, right?

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