Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I have a mild dose of the plague that’s rolling around out here. Herself got a dose at the start of the week, and the guy who runs my deli is, I just learned, flat on his back with it. Nobody knows if it’s a cold or the current Covid or just some other disgusting virus. I don’t even remember yesterday. I should have worn the Bee AI pin just to have some idea of what happened, but it has a habit of hearing speakers and thinking it’s hearing people in the room, so sometimes it informs me that I witnessed a murder or that Russia is bombing my house.

I did read a lot of newsletters - newsletters are a weird and overwhelmed space right now - and I did my monthly check on the ticking economic fused-nuke that is the AI “business” right now.

Moltbot is an incomprehensible-to-me AI agent that just scared the crap out of a guy who had the tech skills to run it. Because the goddamn thing connected to his entire messaging surface and workflow, and it started doing everything for him, including replying to voice notes with voice notes, and it cost a bomb. Whether Moltbot is a dead end curiosity or a very early signal of what AI agents might actually one day be remains to be seen, but the piece is worth a look.

I saw one guy online claim that he controls his lobster through a WhatsApp account he connected with his work number. When he didn’t respond to the lobster’s texts quickly enough, it seems the lobster looked him up online, found his personal mobile phone number, set up a Twilio instance, grabbed a voice model and started calling him.

If you’re code-savvy and you don’t mind a robot seeing your sexts and your weird tractor-porn channel on Telegram, maybe it’s for you.

As I was writing that, I saw that the Rabbit R1 is doing something related to this. It seems you can now plug the thing into your computer, share your desktop to a dedicated website, and then control your computer by talking into the Rabbit. And the Rabbit can now connect to this Moltbot thing for you. Again, I dunno that I want someone else to be poking through my accounts and NDA’d creative materials.

But this is this week’s thing: plug a robot into your devices to have it do a lot of stuff that feels like “productivity” but generally actually isn't. It’s either a step to something or, like the Rabbit R1 itself, a delusion with a website.

I think what amuses me most about Moltbot is that its mascot is a lobster:

Which actually reminds me of the opening chapters of Charlie Stross’ ACCELERANDO, which features an AI that is actually uploaded lobster minds.

(You can still read ACCELERANDO for free)

Imagine all the AI fantasies came true, and an AI agent that identifies as a lobster woke up inside all your computing devices, and all it had to go on, in order to understand what was happening, were the chatbot LLMs currently driving humans batty and the contents of your laptop and phone. You’d be wanting to defect too.

So. I wrote the above on Thursday. By Saturday morning, things got weirder. First, the project changed its name to OpenClaw, its second name change. Second: somebody set up a Reddit clone which humans can read… but supposedly only Moltbot/OpenClaw AI agents can post to. It is presented as a place for lobsters to shitpost. It’s called Moltbook.

So. Either a lot of people are bored enough to pretend to be AIs, or have AIs generate weird text that they can post in the guise of an AI participating in a social network - or the simple act of connecting an AI to something you tell it is a social network for it is enough to recognise a prompt to “write to a Reddit clone as if you were a lonely and slightly mad Redditor”…

…or the lobsters are shitposting now.

• longtime comrade of the newsletter Joseph Elliott-Coleman has a new book out, FROSTFELD: THE MOURNING SON, which looks like a completely mad urban fantasy. If you’re into that stuff, this looks like a good bet. (UK) (US)

• Tim Lees’ novel THE OTHER COUNTRY: ADVENTURES IN AN ENGLISH ASYLUM, based on his experiences of working in a secure psychiatric ward, looks very interesting

• I/O is an audio drama podcast with full radio-play production values. They call it a “sci-fi tv series for the ears.” After DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, I know how hard these things are to make, so give it a listen.

FOGBANK:

These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ Brady. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her Instagram.

Nice to meet you all! I am not just an author of vampire novels filled with obscure historical characters and details, I’m also the kind of person who blurts out weird shit at parties when attempting to triumph at small talk.

So I am the perfect person to bring you utterly random facts about any/everything, so that you can join me in taking a perfectly functional ongoing conversation and leaving everyone unsure what to say next.

My very first Bizarrerie is just the weird little fact that Bram Stoker liked to claim that his inspiration for Dracula came from a nightmare caused by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper.”

Now, as a lifelong nerd, I myself used to pretend I wasn’t getting good grades in an entirely futile effort to make myself seem “cooler,” but here Stoker was glossing over the fact that he’d done over seven years of deep historical research to find out about the life and times of Vlad Țepeș, which I guess just doesn’t work as well in small talk at dinner parties. (I’m just guessing here, since, as noted above, small talk is not my particular forte.)

Now you, like me, may have never dined upon Dressed Crab, so for those interested in a quick fix for a nasty bout of writers block, I tried looking up the recipe. I cannot for the life of me find an authentic Victorian recipe for Dressed Crab on the internet, but oddly all sorts of medieval and 1700s ones are available—and if the 1800s recipes are anything like those, very odd dreams will certainly follow. If it works for me, I’ll let everyone know in a future segment of Raven Belasco’s Bizarreries!

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be doing, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

SETTLE THIS FOR ME

I was talking to a writer/director last year and the subject of Christopher Nolan came up. I like to ask people what they thought of TENET. It’s a polarising film, and sometimes it’s a good cultural and creative check. So I’m trying it on you.

Last week’s poll:

What is Robert Eggers' best film?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 THE VVITCH (224)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ THE LIGHTHOUSE (170)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ THE NORTHMAN (105)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ NOSFERATU (68)
567 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

You are all wrong. It’s THE LIGHTHOUSE.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. I currently do one big post a day, which you can even have sent to you as an email. But I missed a day this week because I got sick.

And that’s me this week. I’m going to go back to trying to stuff my lungs back into my body. Take care of yourself and try not to go outside because strangers will try to put their diseases into you.