Joel Morris
@gralefrit.bsky.social
15K followers 520 following 20K posts
Writer & highwayman. Ladybird, Cunk, Wipe, Be Funny Or Die, Framley, Candidate band, Comfort Blanket, Broken Veil etc https://ko-fi.com/gralefrit AGENTS, website, links, bio etc: www.gralefrit.co.uk
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gralefrit.bsky.social
Hello new followers!

If you want to know anything, it’s all on my website…

www.gralefrit.co.uk

I’m doing lots of stuff on Substack, including podcasts and writing and that.

joelmorris.substack.com

Also: Be Funny Or Die, How Comedy Works and Why It Matters… from all the usual book places.
Be Funny Or Die book jacket
gralefrit.bsky.social
Anyway, there’s no point putting the AI Marilyn Monroe in things. She’ll just hide in her AI trailer and refuse to come on the virtual set.
gralefrit.bsky.social
It’s to making creative art what football management sims are to scoring a goal.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Creative people can’t imagine what you could use this stuff for, in the main, cos it can’t do the hard things. What it can do is the dull, easy things. Which is great for people who think that’s what creativity is: pitching, deals, famous-casting. That’s lots of non-creative people. Big market.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Yeah. But it’s how commissioning works. Endless pencil cricket. “Hmm. This idea is not very interesting to me, as a person who can’t imagine things. But maybe it would be interesting if I imagined famous people being in it. They’re famous. They’d only be in something good. That makes the idea good.”
gralefrit.bsky.social
RIP Drew Struzan.

I hope this didn’t happen.
Cover art of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath depicting a man on his death bed being dragged to hell by demons.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Modern populist political rhetoric (such as this) relies on a very low reading age amongst the public, in terms of comprehension, reading intent, or the parsing of subtext.

This is going to backfire on the poor dears. They need *more* stupid people, not fewer.
gralefrit.bsky.social
“Why go to Peking when it’s just like Shrewsbury? Why go to Shrewsbury when it’s just like Peking?”

This is great stuff.

Black and White Mirror.
gralefrit.bsky.social
“Have you had any ideas?”

“None of my own.”
gralefrit.bsky.social
Watching that ep RIGHT NOW and it’s wonderful.
gralefrit.bsky.social
How odd. I was looking at the Into The Unknown adaptation of that only a few hours ago.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Anyone who has ever tried to finish doing some writing using British on-train WiFi will know how important it is to have your work somewhere you can access it without needing any digital access at all. It’s like an EMP has gone off.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Fahrenheit 451, kind of, too.
gralefrit.bsky.social
It should be permissible to return Dickens to serial form for portability.
gralefrit.bsky.social
The engines are also powered by burning all the paper corners.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Maybe we can cut the corners off the paper, like in Battlestar Galactica, so it feels futuristic.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Tee hee. Are any of the 21stC tech disruptor solutions going to end up anywhere except where we started, doing without them?

I don’t think anyone predicted this in Sci Fi enough.
gralefrit.bsky.social
What’s annoying is that you can’t even protest by smashing up Teslas in the street. They belong to perfectly nice people who get annoyed instead. And I’ve tried to set fire to Chat GPT and Open AI and Google, but they’re not lighting.
gralefrit.bsky.social
I know meritocracy is a myth, but if aliens fired a gigantic deep space merit ray at Earth, just as a reset, it might help.
gralefrit.bsky.social
All the way down, wealth isn’t to do with what you do, but what someone - you or somebody else - might have done ages ago, and you simply inherited that literal good fortune.
gralefrit.bsky.social
Elon Musk bet there’d be a big market for digital city guides for hard copy local newspapers, and even though that’s the dotcom boom equivalent of starting a Penny Farthing Pop Up, that doesn’t matter, because by the time it had crashed and burned, he had enough money to escape actual work forever.
gralefrit.bsky.social
You can’t hurt billionaires by boycotting the products they sell because - thanks to speculative investment - they’re not rich from the products they sell now, but from the products people thought they might sell in the future, but decades ago, whether that happened or not.
gralefrit.bsky.social
It’s like Kelly at the Onion, isn’t it? There’s a level of revulsion that, in the Onion’s case is deliberate, but with AI is accidental.