Ian Pierce

Category: Uncategorized

  • non-flushable turds

    There’s been some recent drama between Valve and Epic Games, who run two of the world’s largest online game storefronts. Apparently Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, said in an interview recently that he was opposed to Steam putting disclosures on its storefront informing buyers of AI-generated content. The new version of Epic’s Unreal Engine uses generative AI features that developers can’t turn off, and Sweeney believes that Valve warning gamers about AI slop will be bad for sales. Apparently it’s never crossed Tim Sweeney’s mind that the reason why this would be bad for sales is because people hate AI. 

    You would think that, if there was some invisible hand of the market guiding the laws of supply and demand, companies who make AI garbage generators would recognize that nobody likes their products and would stop making them. But it seems that these corporations have grown so big that they no longer need to worry about what consumers think. If they want us to eat shit, well then, shit we shall eat. And let’s be real: all of the stuff they make is shit. I’ve finally switched away from Google Search because when I search for a website, it seems to think that I want an AI summary of a Reddit post vaguely related to what I’ve typed in. Either that, or they want to shove an ad in my face. 

    Still, even if I’ve finally quit Googling stuff, I’m forced into the Google ecosystem. I have a Gmail address, and all of the (non-pornography) videos that I watch are on YouTube. You kind of have to bend to their will if you want to use the internet these days. It used to be that you could host your own email server out of your closet, but the tubes are so clogged with spam that running your own server is impossible to maintain. We’re forced into the same narrow boxes, the same websites, until Google tries to write our emails for us every time we open a new window. 

    It would be nice to be able to opt out. It would be nice to have a choice. But choices, as far as I can tell, are no longer for people like us. They’re for billionaires, who as far as I can tell, have aspirations far greater than recreating the age of robber barons. They want to bring back feudalism. They want us to pay for everything while they pay us nothing and replace our jobs with AI. 

    This is one of the problems I have with the argument that “we can’t have an income tax in Washington because billionaires ~ * CrEaTe JoBs * ~. If Boeing or Starbucks or Amazon could get away with having no pesky employees demanding annoying things like “paychecks” or “benefits”, they would. Microsoft just spent $110 billion to buy Activision Blizzard, then laid off ten thousand XBOX employees. Corporations don’t create employment out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they are obliged to. 

    I’m hoping that soon this whole AI economy collapses like a giant house of cards. Technocrats like to claim that “AI today is the worst it’s ever going to be”. That’s bullshit. AI isn’t learning or thinking. It’s taking words on the internet, stirring them around, and spitting them out in a (sometimes) coherent order. It’s like if you claimed your alphabet soup was intelligent because sometimes words come out when you dip your spoon in. As more and more of the internet gets taken over by AI, the quality of that alphabet soup will deteriorate, like copies of a copy. It’s like how the Melvins pioneered the genre that would be called grunge, but many lesser bands imitated them, then even lesser bands did the same, until eventually we got Nickelback. Do you want the internet to be Nickelback? Because that’s how you get Nickelback.  

    But that’s how bubbles work. Everyone gets super rich until suddenly they’re not. So if you’re a venture capitalist hoping to make a fortune on the next big thing after AI, I have a proposal for you. I’m selling shares in a company that will hold a monopoly on shipping goods from the South Seas. It’s foolproof, I tell you.  

    ~ Ian (listening to Demon Days by Gorillaz)

  • reflections on hominid mating rituals

    Been a while since I’ve written anything here, eh? Maybe it’s because I don’t have much to say at the moment. My life has lacked interest in recent weeks. Aside from a jaunt down to California to go to a friend’s wedding, not much has happened. The wedding ended up being great, though. The bride is the warlock in my D&D campaign, and it was an honor to be invited. We actually met through D&D. She and I had several mutual friends who played in the D&D campaign I ran during the pandemic, and now I consider her one of my closest friends. For the wedding, she and her husband rented out an entire campground in Carmel Valley for the weekend to do a sort of adult summer camp. Since the groom was Scottish, there were many people in kilts, and copious amounts of alcohol consumption. I definitely indulged in quite a quantity of liquid enjoyment myself. It was a good thing that I had a bed in a cabin, because it meant I could just pass out after the drinks ’n’ dancing were finished. 

    But I’m back in Seattle now. In recent weeks, I’ve been deep in the novel mines, working on a couple of different projects, a vampire horror novel and a secondary world supernatural adventure fantasy. I’ve liked switching between projects in the past. If I’m bored of one book, I can always switch to another. This especially helps when I get stuck on a particular part. Short fiction is also a great way to change it up. This spring, I wrote about ten or so short stories, and it’s a lot of fun to have a finished manuscript after just a couple days or a week. And if you write 1,000 words a day, eventually you’ll end up with a lot of manuscripts… 

    At the same time I’m working on these new projects, I’ve been querying a contemporary YA fantasy. In order to understand the market, I’ve been reading a lot of YA fantasy series as well. This leads me to reading a bunch of what I would consider “young adult romantasy slop”. It’s enjoyable slop, I suppose, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of these books follow the same recipe: 

    1. We begin with a teenage female protagonist that has no real distinguishing characteristics save for being ravishingly beautiful, although no one acknowledges that beauty. 

    2. She encounters a much older supernatural male character, often a member of a royal family who falls madly in love with her, because apparently what ancient vampire/fae/wizard/necromancer/whatever gentlemen crave is a nubile teenage girl with no distinguishing characteristics. 

    3. The teenage girl awakens to supernatural powers. Often she is revealed to be of magical lineage herself. 

    4. A second love interest falls for the teenage girl. Often this is a childhood friend who reveals supernatural powers as well. 

    5. The older supernatural man forms a mystic unbreakable bond with the teenage girl. Angst ensues. 

    6. After a final confrontation with some kind of world-dominating evil, the teenage girl’s powers save the world. But for some reason, the supernatural pedophile – sorry, hottie – cannot be with the teenage girl. Their romance will play out over the course of the next several volumes of the series. 

    Is Twilight to blame for this formula? Because these books all follow the same arc. That’s fair: I guess you gotta follow what’s popular. I get the idea of having a POV character with no real personality: she can become a reader surrogate figure, although I would much rather read about interesting people with strong motivation who set out to achieve their goals in a compelling way. But maybe I’m just a weirdo that way. 

    I also wonder what these books say about the desires of teenage girls. If these books are supposed to be a sort of wish-fulfillment, does this mean that millions of teenage girls secretly desire for a powerful older man to get obsessed with them to the point of insanity? Part of me gets it. I mean, considering what absolute degenerates teenage boys are, the idea of dating someone with more experience or maturity can be appealing. But if these girls want someone at their level of maturity, why don’t they just date other girls? Even if you’re only a 1 or a 2 on the Kinsey scale, surely girls your own age must be so much more appealing than older creeps? 

    Maybe I’m trying to use too much logic. As someone on both the autism and asexuality spectra, I sometimes feel like an alien anthropologist studying the mating behaviors of some lower species of hominid. But seriously! Use your brains for once! Do not listen to your ovaries! They can only lead you astray! 

    I guess I don’t get the desire that people have to spray their genetic material all over each other. This is why asexuality is the most powerful orientation, I suppose. But is sex really so good that humans will abandon of all the higher functionality of their cerebral cortex just to rub against something moist and warm? What exactly am I missing? 

    ~ Ian (listening to Unicorn by GUNSHIP)

  • light a roman candle and hold it in your hand

    It’s July 4 here in America. Well, technically it’s July 4 everywhere, except on the other side of the International Date Line, where I suppose it’s tomorrow. This is America’s Independence Day, and more than that, it’s the 250th anniversary of America’s independence. This is a big deal! As far as I can count, there are eight countries (Czechia, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and South Sudan) that are younger than I am, so lasting this long is something to be celebrated. 

    And yet, due to the Way Things Do Be™, I’m left with more complicated feelings about this anniversary than celebratory ones. A lot of those have to do with the rotting pumpkin man currently occupying the White House. But more than that, it’s about the hijacking of patriotism and even the definition of what it is to be American by billionaires, religious extremists, and bigots of all kinds. As usual, I’ll try to get my thoughts in order by writing them, and I’ll end by saying why I think it’s important to celebrate Fourth of July despite these assholes. 

    When we define a “country”, we’re really talking about three separate things: the people, the current government, and the land itself. Those can become difficult to tear apart for some people, especially since the government supposedly flows from the wishes of the people, but there is a difference between, say, an Iranian person and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is a land rich in culture and tradition, a culture that rivaled Rome at its height, which brought us Persepolis and the Behistun inscription, algebra and the 1001 Nights. I have a great respect for that culture and the people who came from it. I do not have respect for the Islamic Republic, which is a theocratic fascist regime, nor do I have respect for the Shah’s rule that preceded it. I hope that someday a government comes to Iran that reflects that country’s heritage, the wisdom and gifts that it has given the world. 

    Similarly, I can love the people of Israel while categorically rejecting the Zionist project, fight for Palestinians’ right to self-determination without supporting Hamas’ terrorist attacks. One of the most important lessons about the internet is that, most often, the assholes aren’t the majority, even though it seems that way. It’s just that they’re the ones who can scream the loudest – and often, those loud screamers end up in positions of power. 

    Which brings me to my country. In terms of land, America is unparalleled anywhere in the world. What other country has tropical rainforests and arctic glaciers, alligator-filled swamps and mountains that practically scrape the sky? And what other country has cities like New York or Chicago or Seattle, places where people from all around the world can mix, creating new foods, new art forms, entire ways of thinking? We’re the country that created New York pizza and the Mission burrito, hip-hop and rock and jazz, the animated cartoon and the video game. 

    We can do this because “American” isn’t an ethnic identity like “Norwegian” and “Japanese”, because we don’t have thousands of years of history and tradition weighing us down. Because of this, anyone can be an American, and we can all look to the future. 

    That’s what I believe. But there are millions of people – not the majority, but a significant amount of very loud assholes – who reject that idea. They’ve created a restrictive version of America that doesn’t include the masses, that only includes them and the people who look and act and believe like them. They’re trying to force this definition on the whole country, forcing us to get in line with their view or be destroyed. And they just so happen to have elected the loudest, stupidest asshole in the whole world to be their figurehead. 

    These people have hijacked the symbols of patriotism like the flag and the national anthem so that now, in order for people to show that they do not stand with the loud assholes, they are forced to reject those symbols. And by rejecting those symbols, the assholes claim that we hate America. The ironic fact is that these assholes, who paint themselves to be so patriotic, actually do hate America. Or rather, they hate Americans: millions of us, brown and gay and trans and disabled, anyone who does not conform to their narrow, exclusionary vision of what it is to be American. 

    Well, guess what, fuckers. We don’t have to conform to your vision to be American. We reject your small-minded vision of what this country should be. Because America has never been a white Christian English-speaking nation. (Just look up the Treaty of Tripoli for proof of that fact.) And even if it were, we have the right to choose our own path. We have the right to reject the atrocities committed by the past and create a new future where your toxic beliefs remain in the sewer where they belong. 

    I’m not advocating blind patriotism. America has done and continues to do horrendous things, and many of those crimes are still unanswered for. But loving a friend or a family member doesn’t mean loving them only when they do the right thing. It means accepting their flaws while also holding them accountable. One of the most patriotic things we as Americans can do is demand that our government should be better. If you see a friend or a family member hurting themselves, either unwittingly or knowingly, you help them. And America is hurting itself. Stepping in to stop that – to make it and ourselves better – is the most patriotic thing you can do. 

    People don’t protest because they hate America. They protest because that is one of the most profound expressions of love anyone can give: to recognize something is wrong and stepping in to fix it. That’s what true patriotism is about, not blind obeisance to a pedophile rapist dementia-riddled nepo baby snowflake who’s turned the executive branch into his own personal racketeering operation. 

    The assholes have claimed the symbols of patriotism because they see themselves as the only true Americans. The most powerful rebuke of that attitude is not to reject or denigrate those symbols but to appropriate them for ourselves. They do not get to say that only they get to wave the American flag or celebrate the Fourth of July. They do not get to say that only they are the real Americans. They do not get that right just because they say so. They claimed it for themselves, and we can take it back. 

    So, for America’s 250th anniversary, this disabled, queer, progressive, autistic, asexual, democratic socialist, atheist, long-haired, Satanic t-shirt-wearing American citizen is going to be doing exactly that. 

    And eating hot dogs. 

    Because hot dogs. 

    ~ Ian (listening to When the Kite String Pops by Acid Bath)

  • i am a writer and i am digging a hole

    I’ve been down in the editing mines recently, revising a fairly large portion of an unfinished novel before I resume drafting. I would say that editing is one of my favorite parts of the writing process, but since I enjoy every part of the writing process (it’s the publishing that I hate), I would say it’s about equal with all the others. I get the same enjoyment from editing that a lot of Type A people get from tidying up, which is ironic, because I am absolutely terrible at keeping my apartment clean.

    When I’m editing, my goal is generally to cut about 5-10% of the words in the total project, usually averaging to around 7.5%. Interestingly, I almost never have to cut actual story content. Most of the revisions are finding more concise ways of writing sentences and paragraphs: if I have a ten-word sentence, finding ways to say it in eight, and so on. This ends up making the story more effective, as I’m able to get rid of extraneous fluff while keeping the good stuff.

    It’s sort of like pasta sauce. You can make a really good pasta sauce out of a can of tomatoes, garlic, oil, and some spices that tastes better and is cheaper than the jar pasta. But just pouring a tomato can and the rest of the ingredients over cooked pasta doth not a sauce make. You have to simmer it, steaming off the water and condensing the liquid until it is thick and saucy and delicious.

    Revising is just as important as writing. Or rather, it is writing, because coming up with a first draft is only the start of the process. The first draft is the raw material. It’s your job as the writert to sculpt it.

    These are a lot of mixed metaphors, I guess? Whatever. In any case, getting good at editing and revising is one of the most critical skills I can give to a young writer. And don’t give me that “spellcheck is really advanced these days”. If you don’t know how to spell words, revising is the least of your problems.

  • this is kind of like an instagram i guess

    Here’s a dump of some pictures I’ve taken in the last few weeks. Hope you all enjoy!

    Just a few snapshots of our depressing life in the gray, miserable Northwest…

    ~ Ian (listening to Payan by Samavayo)

  • untitled update, june 11, 2026

    I had a visit to the tooth doctor again last week. It ended up with some bad news: it seems like three of the teeth on the upper left side of the mouth are so fucked up that removal is the only option, as soon as possible, along with implants, bone grafts, the whole nine yards. If you’ll recall from last year, I had some additional tooth-related problems that led to a root canal, which was the most painful experience I’ve ever had, since for some reason the anesthetic they gave me didn’t fully work, so I could feel most of the pinching and pulling at my nerve. I hope they give me the gas this time, since three teeth are coming out. Let this be a cautionary tale to all ye Gen Z wastrels who will not go to the dentist! I didn’t go for years, and at this rate, I’m going to eventually look like one of those cartoon characters that gets hit over the head with a piano and stumbles out of the wreckage with piano keys protruding from his toothless gums.

    And yet, even if things are going poorly mouth-wise for me, I can’t help having a bit of confidence, a bit of spring in my step. The news that one of my stories will be published has reinvigorated me, where in the past few months I have definitely been de-invigorated. It’s given me a boost to my spirits that makes me feel like the big weird fish guy in that lake in Resident Evil 8.

    This piscine ebullience also stems from the fact that, after two years of radio silence on the part of agents, a literary agent has requested to see a full manuscript of one of my books! It’s no guarantee that I’m going to get an agent – in fact, considering my luck, I’d still say the odds are stacked against me. But it’s a new start.

    A lot of the time, the process of trying to get published has felt like bashing my forehead repeatedly against a brick wall until the wall crumbles. Usually, that strategy is a failing one. It does much more injury to yourself than to the wall. Over the last few months, however, ever since being nominated for the Resnick Award and going to Dragon Con, I’ve started to see cracks form in that wall. Hopefully it comes down before my skull is as broken and shattered as my teeth!

    ~ Ian

  • PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: “Faerie Stories”

    Ten years ago today, I started querying for my first book. Literally: I keep track of every query I’ve ever sent, every response I’ve received, and the first queries I sent, for a post-apocalyptic novel called Wither, were mailed on May 27, 2016. It’s been a very long time since I started my journey. There have been times that I’ve gotten close to having an agent, but for that decade, my dream of seeing my work in print has been just that: a dream.

    Until today.

    I’ve been sitting on this for a few days, but I can finally announce it: my contemporary fantasy short story, “Faerie Stories”, will be published in the Winter 2026 edition of Illustrated Worlds Magazine! It’s a small publication with a fairly small readership, at least for now, but I’m hoping that this can be the start of something amazing! I’m so thankful to Jennifer Cox, the editor of Illustrated Worlds, for seeing something in this piece, and I’m so excited for what comes next! In the not-too-distant future, I’ll finally have achieved my dream of being a Publicated Authorist™.

    Now on to the next story!

    ~ Ian

  • plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

    At Miniature World in Victoria, they have a room that’s full of incredibly elaborately detailed dollhouses that were constructed over the course of decades by couples who are no longer alive. These dollhouses represent a lifetime of love and labor. They are literally the culmination of these couples’ lives together. But when these couples pass away, their children are faced with a dilemma. Obviously they can’t throw the dollhouses away – that would dishonor their parents’ memories and all the work they put in. But who in the world has room in their house or garage for a gigantic, fantastically-crafted dollhouse? So these dollhouses go to Miniature World, where they linger, memories of the love that dead couples share, until they are entirely forgotten.

    I feel like those couples sometimes when I work on my Big Project, the story that I’ve been making for over a decade now. It started as an outline in college, then became a half-finished novel manuscript, and now it’s a narrative game in an episodic Life is Strange sort of manner. I’ve worked on it off and on for so many years that I can practically see the locations, the design of the characters, all the way down to the UI. This is my own Miniature World dollhouse, only it’s the work of one person, who so far has had to do programming, character design, and write every word of dialogue and every description.

    I did a draft of the script that was well over 150,000 words, then scrapped it to rewrite it in Ink, an open-source markup language developed by Inkle Studios, makers of Heaven’s Vault. This language is useful for my purposes because it has Unity integration, which other narrative game engines like ren’Py and VN Maker don’t allow. My dream is to someday assemble a team and make this game for real. Until then, though, I’m simply tinkering, building this mad dollhouse bit by bit.

    I guess this makes me sort of crazy, I guess. I think all creative people have to be a little crazy. And I will admit, my mental health, she has not been so good since I’ve been unemployed. I’m thinking of getting out of Seattle for a while, at least until the current economic scenario isn’t completely shittered up. I know this place is my home, but still…

    In any case, that’s just an update on what I’ve been doing. I also did a count recently and found that I’d written eight short stories this year, and it’s only May. Perhaps working with my Resnick writing group has kickstarted my imagination in that regard. Or maybe I’m getting better at writing short fiction. Either way, I view this as a positive. It’s been my dream for years to have a short fiction collection one day. Perhaps this is a step towards that goal!

  • the men that don’t fit in

    I wanted to show my dad some of the poetry of Robert Service, a.k.a. “the Bard of the Yukon”, because his poems so often celebrate the beauty of the solitary life in the wilderness. I downloaded a copy of The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses from gutenberg.org, and after reading through the poems again, I was struck by one particular verse. It’s called “The Men That Don’t Fit In”, and I’ll reproduce it below, because the poem’s in the public domain and no one can stop me.

    “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
    A race that can’t stay still;
    So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.
    They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain’s crest;
    Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don’t know how to rest.

    If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
    But they’re always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.
    They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
    What a deep mark I would make!”
    So they chop and change, and each fresh move
    Is only a fresh mistake.

    And each forgets, as he strips and runs
    With a brilliant, fitful pace,
    It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
    Who win in the lifelong race.
    And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
    Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last.

    He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
    He has just done things by half.
    Life’s been “a jolly good joke on him,
    And now is the time to laugh.
    Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
    He was never meant to win;
    He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
    He’s a man who won’t fit in.”

    I wonder how many of the gold miners in the Klondike (and in California, and in Australia, and in every gold rush there was in history) were neurodivergent. They definitely weren’t people who had happy, stable, settled lives. In the days of the Oregon Trail, about one out of every ten pioneers died on the trip to the Northwest. The reward, when they reached the end, was to be cut off from all their family and friends back East, possibly for a lifetime, while they scrabbled in a wilderness devoid of material comforts, far from the madding crowd.

    What would make a person choose to leave all of that behind and go on a trip that they would never return from, that carried a ten percent mortality rate? I expect that the reason was that the slim prospect of something in Oregon was much better than what they had back East. Many of them, probably, didn’t have to worry about leaving friends and family behind because they had no friends and family. They didn’t leave jobs and housing and a stable life because they didn’t have those things. They left, in short, because they had nothing to lose.

    I resonate with those people, and with the men that Service wrote about. I’ve struggled to find work for my whole adult life, lost friendships because of the other person’s intolerance and rigidity. And I think that if I wrote stories that were more commercial, more in line with what the publishing world wants, I would be published by now.

    But my brain doesn’t work like that. That statement isn’t a humblebrag, by the way. So much of my life, my childhood training, my neuroses, are about pretending to be “normal”, whatever the standard definition of “normal” is, and falling short. It’s not that I don’t try. It’s that a “normal” brain is as alien to me as my brain is to the average neurotypical.

    How many people like me have there been throughout history? Sure, some of them struck it rich, but how many of them died alone in the wilderness, lost to history, just a pile of weathered broken bones? How many of them would have survived if their brains had worked in a different way?

    It makes me wonder. I don’t know the answer. All I know is that if it weren’t for the men and women who don’t fit in, neurotypicals would be lost without us.

    ~ Ian (listening to the soundtrack for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine by Ryan Ike)

  • down here near the poison stream our god has gone insane

    On Monday I had a sustained panic attack that lasted for nearly an hour. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, the whole enchilada, if an enchilada can be made of cortisol and tears. I stayed on the phone with my parents for that whole time while they tried to calm me down. It worked, eventually, but the whole time I wanted to die, to have my throat close up and suffocate me, just because that would end the pain.

    I’m sure you can guess why I felt that way. It’s not every day that the president of your country threatens an entire 3000-year-old civilization with extinction just so he and his shitty friends can game the stock market. But that’s where we are. That’s where the last fifty years have led us, ever since billionaires used Ronald Reagan as a shill to sell Americans on the scam that if we let them exist without paying their fair share to the society that sustains and enables them, it will benefit us in the long run.

    We are building dystopia brick by brick, one that combines the surveillance of 1984 with the medicated numbness of Brave New World, and for what? So a handful of people can become trillionaires? So that moneyed pedophiles can escape accountability for raping underage girls? So we can cram AI that no one wants or likes into every physical objects? So boomers can die in their giant air-conditioned houses, surrounded by wealth that my generation will never know, like Egyptian pharaohs in their lavish tombs?

    I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the constant emotional trauma that these brigands force into my mind. I know this blog post is a rant, and that’s fine. Sometimes you need a place to rant. But if the next fifty years are going to be as exploitative and dehumanizing as the last fifty, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get off this elevator bound for the abyss right now.

    ~ Ian (listening to New Day Symptoms by Final Gasp)