coolworld

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58646

I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.

Why did Grok misattribute the quote? Well, because nearly all consumer-facing “AI” are essentially “fancy autocomplete,” designed to find the next likely word rather than offer factual accuracy. “AI” is not actually either intelligent or conscious, and doesn’t know when it’s offering bad information, it just runs its processes and gives a statistically likely answer, which is very likely to be factually wrong. “Statistically likely” does not equal “correct.”

Still, I was curious who other “AI” would tell me I had dedicated The Consuming Fire to. So I asked. Here’s the answer Google gave me in its search page “AI Overview”:

I do have a daughter, but she would be very surprised to learn that after nearly 27 years of being called “Athena,” that her name was “Corbin.” I mean, Krissy and I enjoy The Fifth Element, but not that much. Also I did not dedicated the book to my daughter, under any name.

Here’s Copilot, Microsoft’s “AI”:

I have indeed dedicated (or co-dedicated) several books to Krissy, and I’m glad that Copilot did not believe that my spouse’s name was “Leloo.” But in fact I did not dedicate The Consuming Fire to Krissy.

How did ChatGPT fare? Poorly:

I know at least a couple of people named Corey, and a couple named Cory, but I didn’t dedicate The Consuming Fire to any of them. Also, note that ChatGPT not only misattributed to whom I dedicated the book, it also entirely fabricated the dedication itself. I didn’t ask for the text of the dedication, so ChatGPT voluntarily went out of its way to add extra erroneous information to the mix. Which is… a choice!

I also asked Claude, the “AI” of Anthropic, and to its (and/or Anthropic’s) credit, it was the only “AI” of the batch which did not confidently squirt out an incorrect answer. It admitted it did not have reliable search information on the answer and undertook a few web searches to try to find the information, and eventually told me it could not find it, offering advice instead on how I could find the information myself (for the record, you can find the information online; I did by going to Amazon and searching the excerpt there). So good on Claude for knowing what it doesn’t know and admitting it.

Interestingly, when I went to Grok directly and asked to whom the book was dedicated, it also said it couldn’t find that information. When I asked it why a different instance of itself incorrectly attributed a different dedication to the book, it more or less shrugged and said what I found to be the equivalent of “dude, it happens.” I also checked Gemini directly (which as I understand it powers Google’s Search “AI” Overview) to see if it would also say “I can’t find that information.” Nope:

I’m sure this comes as a surprise to both Ms. Rusch and Mr. Smith, who are (at least on my side) collegial acquaintances but not people I would dedicate a book to. And indeed I did not. When I informed Gemini it had gotten it wrong, it apologized, misattributed The Consuming Fire to another author (C. Robert Cargill, who writes great stuff, just not this), and suggested that he dedicated the book to his wife (he did not) and that her name was “Carly” (it is not).

(I also informed Copilot that it had gotten the dedication wrong, and it also tried again, asserting I dedicated it to Athena. I’m glad Copilot got the name of my kid right, but as previously stated, The Consuming Fire is not dedicated to her.)

So: Five different “AI” and two iterations of two of them, and only Claude would not, at any point, offer up incorrect information about the dedication in The Consuming Fire. Which I will note does not get Claude off the hook for hallucinating information. It has done so before when I’ve queried it about things relating to me, and I’m pretty confident I can get it to do it again. But in this one instance, it did not.

None of them, not even Claude, got the information correct (which is different from “offered up incorrect information”). Two of them, when informed they were incorrect, “corrected” by offering even more incorrect information.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again: I ask “AI” things about me all the time, because I know what the actual answer is, and “AI” will consistently and confidently get those things wrong. If I can’t trust it to get right the things I know, I cannot trust it to get right the things I do not know.

Just to make sure this confident misstating of dedication facts was not personal, I picked a random book not by me off my shelf and asked Gemini (which was still open in my browser) to name to whom the book was dedicated.

It certainly feels like Richard Kadrey might dedicate a book in the Sandman Slim series to the lead singer of The Cramps, but in fact Aloha From Hell is not dedicated to him.

Let’s try another:

Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse may be dedicated to his wife, but if it is, her name is not “Kellie,” as that is not the name in the dedication.

Let’s see if the third time’s the charm:

It’s more accurate to say this was a third strike for Gemini, as G. Willow Wilson did not dedicate Alif the Unseen to a Hasan, choosing instead her daughter, whose name that is not.

So it’s not just me, “AI” gets other book dedications wrong, and (at least here) consistently so. These book dedications are actual known facts anyone can ascertain — you can literally just crack open a book to see to whom a book is dedicated — and these facts are being gotten wrong, consistently and repeatedly, by “AI.” Again, think about all the things “AI” could be getting wrong that you won’t have such wherewithal to check.

What do we learn from this?

One: Don’t use “AI” as a search engine. You’ll get bad information and you might not even know.

Two: Don’t trust “AI” to offer you facts. When it doesn’t know something, it will frequently offer you confidently-stated incorrect information, because it’s a statistical engine, not a fact-checker.

Three: Inasmuch as you are going to have to double-check every “fact” that “AI”” provides to you, why not eliminate the middleman and just not use “AI”? It’s not decreasing your workload here, it’s adding to it.

Does “AI” have uses? Possibly, just not this. I don’t blame “AI” for any of this, it’s not those programs’ fault that the people who own and market them and know they are statistical matching engines willfully and, bluntly, deceitfully position them to be other things. You don’t blame an electric bread maker when some fool declares that it’s an excellent air filter. But you shouldn’t use it as an air filter, no matter how many billions of dollars are being spent to convince you of its air-filtering acumen. Use an actual air filter, damn it.

I dedicate this essay to everyone out there who will take these lessons to heart and not trust “AI” to tell you things. You are the real ones. And that’s a fact.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58646

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/11/the-december-comfort-watches-day-eleven-godzilla-2014/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58631

No, the 2014 version of Godzilla, the US-produced one directed by Gareth Edwards, is not the best Godzilla movie in the several-decade, several-dozen-installment history of the franchise. If I had to rank it, I would probably put it at three or four, depending on how I was feeling about Shin Godzilla that day (for clarity, number one is the original 1954 production, the Japanese version, not the cut-up US release, and number two is Godzilla Minus One, proof that $15 million goes a long way if you know how to spend it). So don’t be jumping down my throat about that. Remember that the thing about these “comfort watches” is not that they are the best movies, or, sometimes (but not in this case) even actually good movies. They are the movies I find myself watching over and over.

And why do I rewatch this Godzilla, more than the others? Well, for one reason, I think this movie is one of Godzilla movies that actually gets the kaiju right.

I wrote about this a year or so ago in my film column in Uncanny magazine. You can follow this link to see the whole essay (and I recommend you do!), but the brief version is this: The recurring problem with Godzilla, the monster, is that the longer he sticks around, in sequel after sequel, the less he is an unstoppable force of nature and the more he becomes, if not an outright friend to humanity, then at least an entity whose interests appear to align with ours. That makes him progressively less interesting and, ultimately, boring. When a kaiju gets cuddly, it’s all over. Then the only thing left to do is reboot him and start over.

The 2014 Godzilla was not the first US-based reboot; there was the 1998 version, directed by Roland Emmerich, which was financially successful and a critical and cultural flop, the latter being especially interesting to me, even at the time. The movie did what it was supposed to do: make money (it was the #8 top-grossing movie of its year domestically), but at the cost of Godzilla’s cultural cachet; the humans in the movie were kinda soft and goofy and Godzilla, while not at all on the side of the humans, didn’t feel like Godzilla. Godzilla is (to varying degrees of effectiveness over the years), a vessel for humanity’s fears and a representation of the world smacking us back for our hubris. 1998’s Godzilla was… just a monster, and not one that actually looked like Godzilla was meant to look (also, the laying of eggs in Madison Square Garden didn’t help much). It’s not a surprise that Toho Studios, the owners of Godzilla, later retconned the ’98 Godzilla into “Zilla,” a kaiju, yes, but not the kaiju. Not Godzilla.

For the 2014 movie, Gareth Edwards and the other filmmakers didn’t screw with what makes Godzilla Godzilla, they leaned into it instead. There were some criticisms of the monster design, because of course there would be, nerds are gonna nerd, but this film’s Godzilla looks like it’s sharing DNA with its Japanese predecessors. I remember some complaints about this monster looking too chonky and thicc, but speaking personally I didn’t consider this a problem at all because (and here I get super nerdy myself), look, a 300-fucking-foot-tall monster ain’t gonna be svelte in any of its dimensions. It’s going to have meat on its bones, okay?

(Also, before you get in on me about the square-cube law, remember I wrote a whole novel about kaiju and I get into the square-cube law in it. Whatever you’re going to throw at me, I already thought about it. Anyway, we’re ignoring some elemental physics at the moment for this movie. Accept it, my dudes).

More importantly, Edwards, et al understood Godzilla for what is meant to be, a force of nature — indeed, the force of nature, a huge variable designed to zero out the equation when something threatens to unbalance it. In this movie that would be the MUTOs, a pair of Kaiju who eat radiation, which is why one of them was attracted to a nuclear facility in Japan at the turn of the century, wrecking it and then cocooning there to feed until the time was right to pop out, a weird, sleek kaiju that looks Art Deco, or maybe like the vector tanks from the Battlezone videogame. The monster heads east, looking for a mate…

… and then here’s Godzilla to stop it, at, of all places, the airport at Honolulu.

And what a very fine entrance it is, too. Edwards has learned from Spielberg, Scott and others that your monster is more effective the less you show of it, until, that is, it’s time to show it all. Our first introduction to Godzilla are his back fins and body parts illuminated by spotlights and flares and exploding planes. And then, finally, there he is… and he is pissed.

This is the other thing this film does right. Godzilla is huge and Godzilla should feel huge, but for much of his existence, he hasn’t. For the first several decades of his existence, as much as you might want to, you couldn’t escape the fact that Godzilla, king of the monsters, was a dude in a rubber suit, stomping around a scale model of Tokyo. It didn’t make the early movies bad (note my position of the original Godzilla in the rankings), but special effects tech was what it was. As time went on, more advanced compositing and CGI could have fixed that, but in the 1998 Godzilla, at least, didn’t. That monster moved too fast and had no mass onscreen.

The 2014 edition doesn’t make that mistake. Godzilla’s big, and he’s massive, and he acts and moves like it. Every move Godzilla makes in this movie is a spectacle of heft. There’s no doubt he’s going to do damage with every step he takes. Godzilla and the MUTOs eventually settle their scores in San Francisco, and while there is never any doubt that the city is going to get wrecked, here it’s getting wrecked at a level of special effects mastery that gives it all an extra dollop of, well, not realism, exactly, but certainly consequence. Buildings don’t fall over like cardboard when a kaiju smashes into them. They crumble, and they eventually fall, like they are actually made of concrete and rebar, and the Kaiju get smashed to match.

This wasn’t Edwards’ first time at the monster rodeo. He made his directorial debut with Monsters, a 2010 science fiction film about, you guessed it, monsters, which did some amazing things on a reported budget of half a million dollars. His budget for Godzilla was 32 times as much, for the monster fights alone, he got some good value out of the money.

I’m mostly into this movie for the monsters and the havoc the wreak, but the human stories here, unlike most Godzilla movies I’ve seen, don’t make me want to just fast forward to the good stuff. One, it has a level of gravity to it that I appreciate; all the humans in it take what’s happening seriously, and so does the screenwriter. There’s generational drama, a husband and wife separated by monsters, a mysterious NGO dedicated to the tracking of kaiju, and a race to deal with a nuclear bomb that it was humanity’s fault was there in the first place (there’s that hubris!), and so on. It’s fine! It moves along and no one acts stupidly, which is never a guarantee in a monster movie no matter how high-toned it is. Godzilla, I’m happy to say, gives almost no shits about anything the humans are doing, any more than any of us would worry about ants if we got into a brawl with our cousin at a cookout.

That wouldn’t last. There have been several sequels to Godzilla in the last decade, all as part of a “Monsterverse,” some involving King Kong. The further we go along, the more Godzilla is becoming an ally of sorts to humanity, and the more the stories feel drained of consequence. In the latest movie in the series, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Rio De Janeiro is laid to waste with the same gravity as a bunch of kids knocking over a LEGO set. It’s pretty, and silly, and since New Empire made more money than any other film in the series, the series will almost certainly continue to be pretty silly.

Thus is the nature of Godzilla. At a certain point, the returns will diminish and they will reboot him, yet again, to be a force of nature and not our pal (actually they already did with Godzilla Minus Zero, but that’s not in the same timeline or extended universe, so (jedi wave) forget about that for now). Until they do, I have the 2014 Godzilla to keep me company. It lets Godzilla be Godzilla, and I like that about it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/11/the-december-comfort-watches-day-eleven-godzilla-2014/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58631

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/10/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-ten-swimming-to-cambodia/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58611

It’s difficult to explain Swimming to Cambodia to anyone who hasn’t seen it. More accurately, it’s actually very easy to explain Swimming to Cambodia to someone who hasn’t seen it — literally, it’s actor/writer/monologuist Spaulding Gray sitting at a desk and talking for an hour and a half — but it’s difficult to explain how him sitting at that desk for an hour and a half is so compelling and watchable. Is it because Gray himself is watchable and compelling? Yes he is, in a blue blood nebbish sort of way, but it isn’t that (or not just that). It’s also because what he’s doing, monologuing while sitting, is almost entirely at odds with the very idea of a motion picture. Spaulding Gray just sits there, talks into a microphone, occasionally gesticulates and at a couple points pulls down a map to point to things. And it’s magnetic.

Spaulding Gray himself was something of a character, a New Englander in birth and education who drifted west after college to be part of an “intentional community,” only to drift east again to New York, and a life of writing and theater, becoming a co-founder of The Wooster Group. Eventually Gray started doing one-man shows based on his life, monologues with him and chair and a desk, and a notebook with outlines of what he wanted to say but (as I understand it) no hardened script. He would just go in the direction he would go, and hopefully he would take the audience along with him. Occasionally he would do a movie or some television, because, you know, if you could, why wouldn’t you.

One of those movies was The Killing Fields, a Roland Joffe film about Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era, and two journalists, one American and one Cambodian, caught in the crossfire. Gray did not play the American journalist (Sam Waterston did); Gray played a minor bureaucrat who gives Waterston’s character an important piece of information. A small role, but as your high school drama teacher undoubtedly told you, there are no small parts. Certainly Gray didn’t think so; he played a minor role in the film, but the film and his experiences as part of the cast gave him enough material for a new monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, which was first performed live in 1985 and then published as a book in 1986 before becoming this movie in 1987.

When I first watched Swimming to Cambodia in college, I was trying to find some familiar slot to put it in. Surely there have been “one man shows” committed to film before, albeit usually in the form of some TV special where Hal Holbrooke was portraying Mark Twain, or some British actor was glaumphing about insisting they were Charles Dickens or Winston Churchill or some such. Occasionally, and again mostly on TV (and here in the US, mostly on PBS) you might see some illustrious Shakespearean actor talk about his life, interspersed with a monologue or two from the bard.

There were also, of course, comedy concert films, of which the ones with Richard Pryor are probably the most memorable: one comedian up on a stage with a microphone and ninety minutes to two hours to kill, and an audience to slay. There are even one-man dramatic movies, although those are rare too, quirky films like Robert Altman’s 1984 film Secret Honor, where Philip Baker Hall portrays Richard Nixon rattling around his private office, offering a stream-of-consciousness monologue about how it was he came to resign.

Swimming to Cambodia was like these movies and also not like them at all. Gray is not portraying some historical personage or plucking choice words from playwrights; he’s not pacing the stage or wandering a set. He is sitting at a desk, saying his own words, talking about his own experiences. Those words are funny as often as not, and Gray, a professional storyteller, know how to pace his material like the best comedians might. But this is not a comic performance — any performance that goes into great detail about the horrors of the Cambodian auto-genocide is not one that one would (or should) describe as a nonstop laugh riot. It’s not a concert film, with that call-and-response energy that concert films, musical and comedy, often have.

So: Not precisely a one-man show, not precisely a comedy concert, but a heretofore secret third thing involving one man and his own words, done in a way that, as far as I could remember, really hadn’t been done before and, excepting Spaulding Gray himself, who did more films like this, wasn’t done again, at least not theatrically. Spaulding Gray was and is sui generis as a cinematic genre.

Of the four monologue films he did do (not counting a monologue-laden documentary after his death), Swimming to Cambodia is the first, and, to my mind, the best. It is only Spaulding Gray on the stage, but it’s not only Spaulding Gray making the film. It’s directed by Jonathan Demme, who three years earlier directed Stop Making Sense, one of the greatest concert films ever made, directed Something Wild right before this, Married to the Mob right after this, and The Silence of the Lambs right after that. There may be greater movie directors in the history of American cinema, but few have such a willfully quirky stretch of their career.

Of all of these films, it’s Stop Making Sense that Swimming to Cambodia shares the most DNA with, which is funny to say considering that in that film, the members of the Talking Heads never stop moving, and in this film, Spaulding Gray never once leaves his desk. But just because Gray is relatively stationary doesn’t mean filming him can’t be kinetic. Demme finds his ways to make movement happen, through camera choices, lighting and set design. There is a lot happening here, even if the one person onscreen isn’t moving from his chair. That kinetic style is what makes this pair well with Stop Making Sense, even if they are otherwise polar opposite films in Demme’s filmography.

Again: I can’t think of another film quite like this one, not starring Spaulding Gray. I wonder why that is, and also I don’t wonder at all. Lots of people are comedians, and lots of actors can hold a stage even without the support of another actor. But to do this sort of studied monologuing is an odd duck middle ground, and I don’t think a lot of people do it, or can do it. I don’t think a lot of people have the temperament for it, for one thing: Spaulding Gray, gone more than twenty years now, did the monologue thing on the regular, doing it before this film, and doing it well after. I saw him do it myself in the 90s, when he was touring (touring!) with his monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, which would become his fourth and final monologue film (directed by Stephen Soderbergh, as it happens).

He had a real commitment to the form, which other people don’t have, or perhaps, have not have had with the same amount of success. Perhaps it was the case that even a nation as capacious as the United States could only sustain a single breakout monologuist at a time. Gray died in 2004 and no one has climbed into the role of the nation’s monologuist since, or if they have, I regret to say I have not been made aware of it. This is a shame. The United States needs many things right now, and perhaps a monologuist is one of them.

Of all the films in this “Comfort Reads” rubric, I think Swimming to Cambodia might end up being the most divisive and even the most unpopular. I don’t think it takes any great power of observation to understand why I, who have frequently written about myself and my life, and who even takes to a stage now and again to read to people things I have written, would find this film fascinating. I, too, monologue! (Not at his level, to be clear.) But I don’t know if other people who don’t do these things will find it as interesting, and as rewatchable.

But here’s the thing: like, love or loathe Swimming to Cambodia, you’re not likely to see another film very much like it. Of all the films I’m writing about here, this one is probably the most unique. It’s worth seeing for that alone.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/10/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-ten-swimming-to-cambodia/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58611

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/07/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seven-moana/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58562

I will begin this piece noting that I am not unbiased in my thoughts about Moana, as my friend, the Oscar-nominated writer Pamela Ribon, helped write a significant chunk of this film’s story. I found out about her involvement after the fact, namely, by sitting there in the theater watching the credits when the movie was done, spying her name, and saying “Oh, shit! Pamie!” out loud, thereby confusing the friend I went to see the film with. How much Pamela’s involvement in this film raises my estimation of it is difficult for me to quantify, but I can assure you I liked it very much before I knew she was involved with it. So, there, you have my disclosure.

And in fact, I do like Moana very much. It’s my favorite film out of Disney Animated Studios in the last decade, and even (barely) edges out Coco when you include Pixar in the mix (Coco is wonderful, though, you should absolutely see it if you have not). Moana does many things well, both technically and in the story department, but what I like most about it is that, without making an overt fuss about it, it’s the most feminist and woman-forward animated film that Disney Animation has made.

Disney, mind you, has been mining the “girl power” vein for a while, most overtly since the Disney Renaissance era that began with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. The Disney canon is so replete with these characters that they’re even their own marketing category within Disney itself: The Disney Princesses. The problem with the Disney Princesses, however, is one clear enough that Disney itself parodized it in a scene from Wreck It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet (written — again! — by Pamela Ribon):

Watch on YouTube

Moana is in this scene, but of all the “princesses” in here (not excepting Vanellope!) she is the one whose journey’s intersection with men (and more broadly, with patriarchy) is of a different quality. Men exist in and are even essential to her path through the story, but at every juncture of the story, she is the captain of her own fate. She is continually self-motivating, self-rescuing, and ultimately, the instrument of the story’s resolution in a way that does not depend on a man (it may depend on an ocean, which is never gendered, but let’s not get into that now).

I don’t think Moana, either the film or character, overtly makes a big deal out of any of this — there’s no point where Moana (voiced by a remarkably assured teen named Auliʻi Cravalho) has a story-stopping “girl power” moment, and the only person who explicitly calls out her princess-ness is a dude who does it as a winking fourth-wall crack, and the fact is never really brought up again. Moana’s not rubbing your face in its feminist bona fides. It’s not to say they aren’t there.

In any event, at no point is Moana’s womanhood presented as a disadvantage. She is early on explicitly tapped to be the next leader of the only village on a Polynesian island of no specific provenance (the voice cast of the film is primarily Polynesian, but from varying places in the Pacific: Hawai’i, Samoa, and New Zealand/Aotearoa most prominently). This ascent to leadership is something that Moana accepts with some reluctance, for while her people have lived contentedly on the island for centuries, their antecedents once roamed the waves in big boats, and Moana sees her destiny out there. This fact is a subject of some exasperation to her father, who wants her to focus on where she is.

The issue gets forced when a blight hits the island, killing both the fish and the coconut palms the villagers rely on. This blight, Moana is told by her grandmother, is the result of the trickster demigod Maui stealing the (literal, not figurative) heart of the goddess Te Fiti, inadvertently starting the blight as well as being the cause of the pause in sailing between islands. The good news is, as a baby Moana was chosen by the ocean! For what? Well, as it happens, to leave the island, find Maui, and force him to return the heart of Te Fiti. Simple enough, yes? Well. No.

It does not pass my attention that in this film the initiating problem, and the various obstacles that Moana encounters, originate with men, and the aid and advice she gets is at the hand of the women characters (there is the volcano demon Te Kā, who is coded as a woman, but hold that thought). Again, the film doesn’t dwell on any of this — and both Maui and Moana’s dad have understandable and defensible reasons for what they do — but it’s there. Men in this film, in ways large and small, exist to be routed around and made to understand that they are supporting, not main, characters in this tale.

No one exemplifies this more than Maui, played by Dwayne Johnson in a frankly delightful bit of typecasting. If ever a movie star exuded “main character energy,” it’s Johnson. That same sort of heedless self-regard oozes through Maui, who despite being in exile for a thousand years, settles back into his own internal spotlight the second someone else gazes upon him. That Moana is having none of his guff is neither here nor there to him; she whacks him with an oar with seconds of meeting him and he reacts with mild puzzlement rather than comprehension. His signature song, “You’re Welcome,” is a literal paean to how awesome he is, and it’s perfect that Johnson’s singing voice is, how to put it, deeply imperfect. Maui wouldn’t care if he was off-key. Being on key is for people who aren’t demigods.

But the fact is, this isn’t Maui’s story, it’s Moana’s, and Maui’s journey will be to learn that being of service — the thing he’s always prided himself on — is not about filling the hole in one’s psyche.

Moana’s journey is also one of service — she wants to save her island and her people. She doesn’t know if she can do it, and there are times when she is sure that she can’t, but she is determined to anyway, and besides there is no one else who can do it. She’s learning on the job, so to speak, and what I like about her his that her doubts and fears and acknowledgements of her own deficiencies are right there in her story… and she keeps on regardless, and will do it all by herself if she has to. What saves her, and by extension saves everybody, is her ability to see, not where she has a chance to be a hero, but where she has a chance to heal what has been broken. It’s her story but it’s never been about her, or, rather, just about her.

This is a fairly subtle piece of storytelling — a story where the “big bad” isn’t defeated, or even redeemed, but is restored, from a harm perpetrated long ago. And the hero’s reward? Not riches or fame, or true love’s kiss, or a man in any shape or form. She just gets to go home, with the knowledge there is a home to go back to. This is a hero’s journey, to be sure. But it’s a different hero’s journey than we usually get, and one that I don’t think we often get to see when when the hero is a man. This is what Moana does, that the other “princess” movies up to that point didn’t really manage to do.

(Mulan comes close. But, Shang.)

I think it’s important that, while the film was directed and largely written by people who were not Polynesian, the filmmakers actively consulted and collaborated with Polynesians and Pacific Islanders about the movie, and listened about a number of things, like Maui’s appearance and why Moana wouldn’t be disrespectful regarding coconuts. Likewise, while Lin-Manuel Miranda is the marquee name for the movie’s songwriting, he collaborated with Opetaia Foaʻi, a Tokelauan-Tuvaluan composer and songwriter. I’m not qualified to say that the filmmakers got Polynesia “right” — please listen to others with better knowledge on that score — but at the very least it is good that there was an acknowledgement they were telling a story in a milieu that people currently exist in, and to which they owed respect.

I have not seen Moana’s animated sequel, which came out in 2024 and shoved lots of cash into Disney’s coffers, and bluntly, other than the obvious “for even more money,” I am confused why Disney thinks it’s a good idea to do a “live action” version of the story a mere decade after the animated movie hit theaters (actually, I do have a theory about this — the “live action” remakes of the animated movies serve the same function as re-releasing the classic Disney animated films did before the age of home video: bonding another generation of children to Disney’s character and stories, the better to keep them in the economic chain that continues on to Disney’s theme parks and cruises. Even so). I don’t imagine I will be going out my way to see the “live action” version anytime soon.

But that doesn’t decrease my appreciation for Moana, the original film. Disney doesn’t need me to tell them they got this one right. But they did. Of all the “Disney Princess” movies, this one, in theme and story, is the true queen.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/07/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seven-moana/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58562

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/05/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-five-dredd/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58535

I think it’s important to note, when writing a series of essays about “comfort watches,” that not every movie on that list is going to be a comfortable watch. Some of them might even be hard-“R” movies with lots of violence, portraying a decaying civilization where law is rare and order is even more so, and where everyone in the movie is pretty much just hanging on by their fingernails. These movies are not nice! Nevertheless there is something relentlessly rewatchable about them, something that makes you just settle in on the couch for a couple of hours with a smile on your face, maybe because you’re sure glad you don’t live there. For me, Dredd is one of those films. The world of Mega-City One is a terrible place and I hope never to take up permanent residence, but I’m happy to visit. That is, from behind a pane of bulletproof glass.

For those of you not familiar with the 2000 AD comic feature on which the film is based (and have otherwise and correctly blocked the painfully bad 1995 Sylvester Stallone film made from the same source material from your brain): The world is fucked and irradiated and almost all of it is a wasteland, except Mega-City One, with 800 million people stretching across the Acela Corridor of the United States. Most people there live crappy lives in “megablock” apartment complexes that can house 50,000 people, and along with residents, are filled with crime and drugs. Law enforcement is sparse and in the hands of “Judges,” empowered both to stop and punish crime at the same time. Basically, life sucks, and if you do crime, you’re likely to get away with it, but when you don’t, some extremely well-armed dude is going to shoot you in the head about it. Fun!

The titular character, Dredd, is a judge, who never takes off his helmet and rarely speaks more than a sentence at a time. He’s assessing a trainee judge named Anderson, who also happens to be psychic (in the Judge Dredd mythology there is a whole thing about mutants and such, and it’s not really more than waved at here). Dredd and Anderson enter a megablock after a drug-related crime, which for various reasons annoys the local drug lord named Ma-Ma; she locks down the entire megablock and puts a hit out on the judges. From there, things get real messy, real quick.

As noted earlier, this comic book material was made into a movie before, in 1995. It just did not work, not in the least because it was far more of a Sylvester Stallone vehicle than a Judge Dredd movie — here’s Stallone galumphing around without his helmet so you can see his face, complete with overly-blue contacts, here’s Stallone tromping through a bunch of sets that look like sets, not slums, here’s Stallone bellowing Dredd’s catchphrase “IYAMDELAW” with scenery chewing abandon, and being saddled with Rob Schneider as comedy relief because it was the 90s and apparently that was just what was done back in the day. This movie was made by Hollywood Pictures, which at the time was Disney’s off-off-brand, and while the movie was rated “R,” every inch of it gave off a soft PG-13 vibe. This was a movie that yearned for its hero to be made a figurine in a McDonald’s happy meal.

Dredd, which came out in 2012… is not that. From the opening moments, Dredd makes it clear that this future, shot on location in South Africa, is literally trash; everything is run-down, nothing is new, the color scheme is graded heavily into sicky yellows and greens (except for the blood, which is super, super red). This Mega-City One doesn’t feel like a bunch of sets; it’s ugly and tired and feels all-too possible. Dredd himself, played by Karl Urban, is night and day from the Stallone iteration. When he says “I am the law,” it’s not a bellow. It’s a deeply scary intonation of facts. And he never takes off his damn helmet.

It helps that Dredd isn’t trying to do too much. The movie isn’t trying to jam in seven different storylines and five movies’ worth of worldbuilding into a single film. It keeps to a single story, a single day, and, mostly, a single location. After a brief opening voiceover, you learn about the world diagetically. For longtime fans of the Judge Dredd world, there are little easter eggs here and there but nothing that winks at the viewer. For everyone else, you learn just enough of what you need to get through the story, and everything else is atmosphere. The story is economical, partly because it had to be — the film had a budget of no more than $45 million, half of what the 90s version had to work with more than two decades earlier — but also partly because Alex Garland, who wrote the script (and who largely edited the movie after it was shot) was smart enough to realize every thing he wanted and needed to say about this world could be done with one, admittedly extreme, bad day in the life of its protagonist.

And what is there to say about Dredd himself? Largely that Urban plays him not as a star vehicle but as an archetype. Urban’s Judge Dredd could hang out with Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name quite handily. The two of them wouldn’t say much, but they wouldn’t have to; like understands like. Dredd doesn’t explain himself, has no extended monologues that are a journey into his interior life, and there is no indication that, when he is off the clock, he does anything but stand in a room, silently, waiting for his next shift. In the movie, Dredd isn’t focused on anything other than what’s directly in front of him, and Urban isn’t focused on anything other than getting Dredd to his next scene. Now, you can argue whether Urban’s low and mostly emotionless growl in this film constitutes good acting in a general sense. I don’t think you can argue it isn’t just about perfect for what the character is supposed to be, in the context of the film.

Judge Dredd, the comic book, is known to be a satire of both US and British politics and both nations’ rather shameful but continual flirtation with fascism, but as George S. Kaufman once said, satire is what closes on Saturday night. Even when one acknowledges that satire doesn’t have to be overtly funny, and is often more effective when it is not, there is nothing about Dredd that feels particularly satirical. Garland’s version of Mega-City One doesn’t present as satire or even as a cautionary tale; it just feels like a fact. Shit went bad. This is what’s left.

There is no world in which individuals should be walking around, embodying an entire legal process whole in themselves. “I Am The Law” is the very definition of authoritarianism and in the real world should be actively and passionately fought against. In Dredd’s world, however, this battle has already been fought, and lost. You get the law you get, piecemeal and not enough of it, and if you’re not actively a criminal, you’re happy with what little you get at all.

This is not a world I ever want to live in, and I will be happy to spend the rest of my life fighting against anything like it. But as a spectator, it’s fascinating, and in Dredd, it feels close enough to real to pack a punch. Everything in Dredd is some flavor of bad; everyone in Dredd is some level of desperate. No one is happy and everyone is looking for an escape of some sort. In this context, Judge Dredd is a strange and compelling constant. He’s not happy or sad, or fearful or mad. He is, simply, the law. That’s all he is. That’s all he needs to be.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/05/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-five-dredd/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58535

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/04/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-4-defending-your-life/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58514

There are many ways to die in this world, roughly as many ways as there are to live, but there is one thing I know for sure: I do not wish to die the way Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) dies in Defending Your Life. One, he dies on his birthday, which, while it makes for a tidy headstone, is a terrible way to spend the one day of the year that is all about you. Two, he’s just bought a car, and he’s not going to get to enjoy it. Three, he dies listening to Barbra Streisand, and, no disrespect to Ms. Streisand, but there’s nothing in her oeuvre that I wish to slip the surly bonds of Earth to. The last song Daniel hears is “Something’s Coming”; the title, at least, turns out to be prophetic.

And then Daniel is dead, and where he goes is neither heaven nor hell, and not even purgatory or limbo. He has arrived in Judgment City, which looks rather a bit like Orange County, and which processes all the dead of the Western United States. Judgment City has some nice perks, like the fact that humans who arrive there can eat all the food they want and never gain weight, and also it’s the best food they’ve ever had. But there are drawbacks, too, like the fact that everyone has to wear bulky white caftans, and also that one has to make a good argument for how they’ve lived their life on Earth. If it goes well, they move on. If it goes poorly, they go back to Earth. If it goes really poorly, the universe throws them out.

You’re on trial for your life, in other words, and because this way station is both bureaucratic and strangely Calvinistic, there are subtle hints about how your trial is going to go before you even step into the courtroom. To begin, how is your hotel? If you’re at the afterlife equivalent of the Four Seasons, you’re probably fine. If you’re at something like a bog-standard Marriott, it could go either way. If you’re at the equivalent of a Motel 6, get ready to go back. Likewise, the number of days of your life that the trial will examine is a good hint how things will go; the fewer the better.

Daniel, who is a sharp study, immediately wants to know where he falls on the “go on or go back” spectrum, which amuses Bob Diamond (Rip Torn), his appointed counselor. Mind you, everything about the humans coming through Judgment City amuses the staff there; they are ascended beings who use forty to fifty percent of their brains, unlike the humans, who use five percent at most. The staff of Judgment City look at humans like humans look at clever pets or precocious toddlers. They want good things for them! But they’re not going to socialize after hours or anything.

What Daniel mostly gets from all of this is that some people are shoo-ins to move on, and some people are, to put it nicely, going to have to work for it, and Daniel is in the latter category. Daniel was not a bad person on Earth; he was nice enough and well-liked by co-workers, even if he didn’t have a lot of what you would actually call friends. But in Judgment City, there’s the belief that when you use as little of your brain as humans do, you are ruled by your fears, and Daniel… well. He’s very human.

There’s more going on in this movie, including a budding romance between Daniel and Julia, a woman who may be too good for him, the first clue of that being that she is played by Meryl Streep. But what makes Defending Your Life work for me is both the teleology and the philosophy of Judgment City, as laid out by Brooks, who in addition to starring in the film, also wrote and directed it. Brooks has posited possibly the most practical afterlife ever, a fact that I think is easy to overlook as the story chugs along.

I don’t personally believe in an afterlife, but if I were going to believe in one, this is very close to the one I would believe in — not a place of perfect peace or eternal damnation, but basically a performance review to see how you did in the place that best suited your personal development. If you go on, great — the next place has a new set of problems and challenges for you to experience, solve and learn from. If you need more time back on Earth, that’s fine too — like the California Bar, not everyone passes the first time, and there’s no shame (at least at first) going back and trying again until you get it right. Is there a God? Who knows? Judgment City is not here to answer that. What it’s here to answer is: Are you ready for what comes next?

Well, that’s nothing new, I hear you say, that’s just Buddhism with extra steps. And, well, maybe it is, and if it is, then it makes sense that fear would be the thing that reattaches you to Earth, the thing you have to eventually let go of in order to move on. We are at this moment living in an era where large numbers of people are motivated by their fears, and others derive their power by making people afraid of other people, including their neighbors. I think if the afterlife is anything like it’s depicted here, there are going to be a fair number of people who currently live well who, in the afterlife, are going to be surprised to be staying at a seedy roadside motel, looking at a month’s worth of days of their life. At least the snacks will be great.

Brooks may or may not just be giving the eternal wheel of suffering a new spin, but whatever he’s doing, he’s being smart and funny about it. Brooks’ Daniel is a slightly depressed everyman who is more clever than he is good, someone who is willing to settle even when, in his heart, it’s not what he wants. It gives Daniel a sort of melancholy that’s both approachable (you can see why his co-workers like him) and also a lot to deal with (which is why he doesn’t have a lot of friends).

He’s relatable, and I think a lot of us can see at least a little of ourselves in him. As director, writer and star, Brooks only rarely goes for the laugh-out-loud moment in this film. But over and over again, there are rueful chuckles. You’ll laugh with this film, and you might wince in self-recognition as well. Ultimately, Daniel will have to work for his happy ending, and it’s never obvious whether or not he will get it. And that, too, is like life.

Defending Your Life makes me laugh, but it’s also made me think about my own choices and my own fears in this life. I can say that there have been a few times where I thought about this film when I was on the verge of having to make choices about where my own life was heading. There is a scene in the film where Daniel is up for a job, and he wants a specific salary. He has his (then) wife pretend to be the job interviewer, and they spar over the salary he will accept. Then he goes to meet the actual guy, and takes the first number thrown out at him, even though it’s far below what he actually wanted. We see his face when he realizes what he’s done. He let his fear get in the way of what he wanted, and he knows it.

I thought about that scene a few years later, when I was working as a film critic at the Fresno Bee newspaper. At one point, I was up for a film critic job at the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, and it came down to me and one other writer. I had informed the Bee that I was up for the job, and they were waiting to find out whether I would take the job or not. If it was offered to me, it would come with a largeish bump in pay, which was something I kind of needed; the Bee was a lovely place to work, but they didn’t pay me a lot and weren’t inclined to give me more.

Spoiler: I did not get the job. When I didn’t, I could have just gone back to work like nothing ever happened, without the raise I wanted and needed. Or, I could raise on a busted flush — after all, the Bee didn’t know (yet) that I didn’t get the job. I went into my Managing Editor’s office to tell him what happened with the St. Paul offer, and the first thing I said to him as I came through the door was “give me a twenty-five percent raise and a weekly column, and I’ll stay.” If he said no, I was screwed, because I had implied I had gotten the other job. But I chose to stuff that fear down, and ask for what I needed and wanted.

Second spoiler: He said yes to my proposal and told me he was glad I was going to stay. I thanked him, went to the men’s room in the hall, slipped into one of the toilet stalls, sat down and had a nice five-minute nervous breakdown before going back to my desk and back to work. I had faced my fear, and I had got what I wanted. And it’s made a difference in how I’ve lived my life since then.

I owe Daniel, and Albert Brooks, and Defending Your Life for that. We’ll see what sort of hotel upgrade that gets me in the afterlife. I’d still rather not be listening to Streisand when I go, however.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/04/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-4-defending-your-life/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58514

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/03/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-three-the-untouchables/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58491

I never quite got Brian De Palma. An unquestionably talented director, he knew how to make a hit — see Carrie and the first Mission Impossible film — and if he was going to fail, he was going to do it on a scale so grand that people would write books about it (The Bonfire of the Vanities). He was brash, steeped in film lore, and more than happy to make sure you knew when he was showing off, which was often; what were Body Double and Blow Out other than him paying homage to, and then trying to one up, Hitchcock and Antonioni? The chutzpah! The actual brass balls on this guy!

Some people loved it (Pauline Kael, for one, seemed to eat it up, and who was going to argue with her), but I was, and, I have to say, still am, largely unimpressed. Scratch a De Palma film and you’ll very often find there’s no there there — it’s mostly just surface flash and thrill and some very intentional shock and subversion, all very mannered and very little with any resonance. Outside of Carrie — which made household names out of De Palma, Stephen King and Sissy Spacek all in one go — it’s debatable that De Palma ever made a truly classic movie, a world-beating piece of celluloid that is studied for its quality over its kitsch.

(And yes, my dudes, I see you standing up on a table full of cocaine, beating your chest over Scarface and telling me to say hello your little friend. Grand Guignol as it is, what it has going for it is excess. It’s a lot, and I found it tiring, and when Tony Montana finally ended up face down in the water, what I remember thinking was good, now I get to go home.)

So: Brian De Palma. Mostly, not for me! Maybe for you, fine, okay, you do you! But not for me!

Ahhhh, but then there’s The Untouchables. And suddenly, for length of this one single film, Brian De Palma is indeed very much for me.

Come with me now to 1930 Chicago, smack dab in the middle of prohibition, and Treasury Officer Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner, stalwart) has come into town to take on the bootleggers and gangsters, two groups with, shall we say, a rather substantial overlap. Ness has little success at it until he comes across beat cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, the most Scottish Irish cop ever), who knows where all the bodies are buried around town, and where the rum is being run. Together with their small and select team (Andy Garcia, in one of his first big roles, and Charles Martin Smith as comedy relief, until he isn’t), they take on Al Capone (Robert De Niro) the celebrated gangster who is loved by the press, despite the fact that he’ll happily blow up a kid or two if that’s what it takes to keep his grip on the town.

It’s a rich setting, and of course this film is not the first time the prohibition era had been essayed — heck, The Untouchables itself was an update of a late 50s TV series starring Robert Stack. The film was treading a path that had been trod upon many times before. This reappraisal and reinvention of film and television tropes was nothing new to De Palma, who had by this time had homaged directors and source material, including Scarface (originally a 1932 movie starring Paul Muni), and he would go on to retread Mission Impossible. The Untouchables, as a property and as a mode of storytelling, was old hat, both for De Palma or for the culture at large. So what is it that sets this movie apart?

Weirdly — no really, weirdly, because this is a film where one character bashes in the head of another character with a baseball bat — I think what makes this film work is restraint. Brian De Palma is Brain De Palma-ing himself all over this film, with all his stylistic tics and touches and his oh-look-do-you-see-how-I’m-referencing-Eisenstein-aren’t-I-so-very-clever-ness, but he’s doing it at about an 8, rather than an 11. Yes, there is that (rather famous) scene involving a baseball bat, but here’s the thing: what makes it shocking isn’t the assault, it’s the context. De Palma shows us enough of the assault (and the aftermath) to make the point, but, unlike, say, Scarface, there’s no lingering. De Palma gets in, gets what the scene needs, and gets out.

Now, I am going to accept there is skepticism for this thesis of mine. The Untouchables does not exactly skimp on the blood or the occasional shot of someone’s brains all over a window pane. This is a movie that rather handily earns it “R” rating. But my argument is that in these cases it’s not about quantity, it is about quality. Those brains on the window pane are actually in service to the story. They are just enough to fill in the scene, and then we’re moving on. For De Palma, for whom so much of his directorial style is basically more, of whatever it is, not just blood although certainly blood too, this sort of restraint in the service of story feels a little revolutionary. Turns out you can do a whole lot, if you’re not trying to bludgeon your audience into sensory overload.

De Palma didn’t have to drive his audience into sensory overload in no small part because the whole affair is just so incredibly handsomely mounted. The script, by David Mamet before his metaphorical cheese starting slipping off his metaphorical cracker, is sharp and pithy and melodramatic as hell. The set design offers up a version of Chicago that is a beautiful fable — 1930 Chicago didn’t look like this but how wonderful it would have been if it had. The wardrobe — the wardrobe! — is done by Georgio fucking Armani, and by God you can tell, everyone looks so ridiculously good. You can pause the movie at just about any point where there’s not blood being sprayed about, and it will look like a fashion shoot. It’s all so good that the terrific Ennio Morricone score is almost an afterthought. Almost.

And then there’s the cast. Sean Connery won an Oscar for his portrayal of a cop past his prime who decides to do the right thing, even if he knows how little good it will do, and as it’s the film’s only Oscar, it’s not unreasonable that this performance is what the film is remembered for. With that given, I will yet argue that this is Kevin Costner’s movie. It’s hard to remember on this side of Field of Dreams and Dances With Wolves and even Yellowstone, but this is the film that made Kevin Costner an actual star; before this he was playing corpses (The Big Chill, out of which he was mostly cut) and second bananas (Silverado).

In Elliot Ness, Costner found the character he’d carry forward: The compelling square, the do-right stiff you can’t actually take your eyes off of. He’d occasionally tilt off this character, mostly when Ron Shelton needed him to play a gone-to-seed sportsman, but it’s pretty clear that with The Untouchables, Costner learned how his bread would be buttered going forward. He went with it for a good long while.

As for De Niro as Al Capone; well, scenery is chewed, and the chewing is delicious.

The Untouchables is the one Brian De Palma movie I unreservedly love, and enjoy, and rewatch, but this is not to say it is a great film. Even Pauline Kael, famously a De Palma champion, understood this; she wrote that The Untouchables was “not a great movie; it’s too banal, too morally comfortable… But it’s a great audience movie — a wonderful potboiler.” This is exactly right. Not every film has to be great, sometimes “just really goddamned good” is good enough. It just needs every good thing in proportion, and for the director to understand when enough is enough.

For this one film, Brian De Palma seemed be content with just “enough.” It wouldn’t last, and that’s fine. It didn’t have to.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/03/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-three-the-untouchables/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58491

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/03/the-2025-whatever-holiday-gift-guide-day-three-arts-crafts-music-and-more/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58465

The Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2025 continues, and today we move away from books and focus on other gifts and crafts — which you can take to mean just about any other sort of thing a creative person might make: Music, art, knitting, jewelry, artisan foodstuffs and so on. These can be great, unique gifts for special folks in your life, and things you can’t just get down at the mall. I hope you see some cool stuff here.

Please note that the comment thread today is only for creators to post about their gifts for sale; please do not leave other comments, as they will be snipped out to keep the thread from getting cluttered. Thanks!

Creators: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!

1. Creators (of things other than books) only. This is an intentionally expansive category, so if you’ve made something and have it available for the public to try or buy, you can probably post about in this thread. The exception to this is books (including comics and graphic novels), which have two previously existing threads, one for traditionally-published works and one for non-traditionally published works (Note: if you are an author and also create other stuff, you may promote that other stuff today). Don’t post if you are not the creator of the thing you want to promote, please.

2. Personally-created and completed works only. This thread is specifically for artists and creators who are making their own unique works. Mass-producible things like CDs, buttons or T-shirts are acceptable if you’ve personally created what’s on it. But please don’t use this thread for things that were created by others, which you happen to sell. Likewise, do not post about works in progress, even if you’re posting them publicly elsewhere. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. Also, don’t just promote yourself unless you have something to sell or provide, that others may give as a gift.

3. One post per creator. In that post, you can list whatever creations of yours you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on your most recent creation. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on things available in North America. If you are elsewhere and your work is available there, please note it.

4. Keep your description of your work brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about your work and is interested but easily distracted.

5. You may include a link to a sales site if you like by using dropping in a URL. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.

6. As noted above, comment posts that are not from creators promoting their work as specified above will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting work.

Now: Tell us about your stuff!

Tomorrow: Fan Favorites!

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/03/the-2025-whatever-holiday-gift-guide-day-three-arts-crafts-music-and-more/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58465

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/02/the-2025-whatever-holiday-gift-guide-day-two-non-traditional-books/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58439

Today is Day Two of the Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2025, and today the focus is on Non-Traditionally Published Books: Self-published works, electronically-exclusive books, books from micro presses, books released outside the usual environs of the publishing world, and so on. Hey, I put my first novel up on this very Web site years ago and told people to send me a dollar if they liked it. Look where it got me. I hope you find some good stuff today.

Please note that the comment thread today is only for non-traditional authors and editors to post about their books; please do not leave other comments, as they will be snipped out to keep the thread from getting cluttered. Thanks!

Authors/editors: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!

1. Authors and editors of non-traditionally published books only. This includes comics and graphic novels, as well as non-fiction books and audiobooks. If your book has been traditionally published — available in bookstores on a returnable basis — post about your book in the thread that went up yesterday (if you are in doubt, assume you are non-traditionally published and post here). If you are a creator in another form or medium, your thread is coming tomorrow. Don’t post if you are not the author or editor, please.

2. Completed works only. Do not post about works in progress, even if you’re posting them publicly. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. Likewise, don’t just promote yourself unless you have something to sell or provide, that others may give as a gift.

3. One post per author. In that post, you can list whatever books of yours you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on your most recent book. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on books available in North America. If your book is only available in the UK or some other country, please let people know!

4. Keep your description of your book brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about your book and is interested but easily distracted.

5. You may include a link to a bookseller if you like by using a URL. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.

6. As noted above, comment posts that are not from authors/editors promoting their books as specified above will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting books.

Now: Tell us about your book!

Tomorrow (12/3): Other creators (musicians, artists, crafters, etc!)

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/02/the-2025-whatever-holiday-gift-guide-day-two-non-traditional-books/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58439