Taking a break

Ladies and gents, I have been informed by my doctor that I have to stop typing so much. So I'm going to have to take a break from blogging. Which is lame, but it's doctor's orders... I'll have some searingly intellectual things to say when I come back, I'm sure. Stay tuned.

Continuing with all the problems I see inherent in the programming of combat robots to have 'functional morality'...

Putting aside the very real difficulties in the mere logistics of trying to program a wartime 'morality' into a machine for a moment, I find a much deeper issue with the moral questions inherent in trying to make a machine act as a human would in such an extreme situation as a war zone, in the first place. What does this say about us, our feelings toward robots and the wars we want to put them in? What would be the point of using robots instead of soldiers in the first place?

Ostensibly, I'm sure, the idea would be that using robots, we could spare the lives of our soldiers, which are worth immeasurably more to us on an emotional level than the thousands and millions of dollars we'd have poured into robot soldiers. But, let's step back for a minute and look at the bigger picture, which will tell us in no uncertain terms that most wars are fought for money these days anyway, and that in the grand scheme of things, human life has never stood up to the powers that be trying to get to the bottom line. Simply through experience, I think we can make the assumption that a military engineer saying he's concerned with protecting human life is kind of like a slave owner saying he believes that all men are created equal. It sounds nice, and we want to believe it, but there's something else going on there. In this case, it seems to me that the something else goes along the lines of: "Dude, let's make a super-powered robot with awesome firepower capabilities to do our work for us!"

Not exactly an irresponsible idea, given that we very well could save human lives with these things. But, given that they're to be 'super-powered robots with awesome firepower capabilities' (according to me), we do not seem to be too worried about anybody's lives but our guys'. We seem to want to kill the crap out of anybody who could be on the other side. Which was all well and good for, you know, the Mongol hordes, but in this day and age, a bit more forebearance and good judgment is required. Good MORAL judgment, that is, which I've already posited, is simply out of the reach of robot soliders, no matter how well-programmed. They're not people, and yes, that's the whole point, but if they can't actually understand the morality we've programmed into them, they can't be expected to use it discerningly to protect innocent lives on both sides. They're just killing machines.

So, if we can take my superior reasoning skills here as scientific fact (which we obviously can), and the robots are not going to save the lives of the innocent, nor are they really at their root being used to save our guys, then what are they for? Besides blowing things up in a science-fiction-awesome way?

I know I'm cynical and will go to almost any length to discredit robots, but honestly, regardless of cynicism, doesn't the idea of a super-powered robot with a very non-functional morality and the ability to kill lots of people in place of soldiers that have historically been trained to do that job, smell just a bit like a placeholder? Doesn't it seem like the robot here would be just an agent that, because it is not technically alive or sentient or capable of understanding the morality with which we have endowed it, can be used to absolve ourselves of all moral culpability for the destruction it will cause? Sure, we made it, and sure, we programmed it, and sure, we sent it into that town with those rocket-launchers, but we didn't actually kill all those people. We can't be held morally responsible if it screwed up. We can't be held morally responsible if it didn't.

This isn't to say that we wouldn't be responsible in other ways, as the government/military behind combat robots would be forced to accept responsibility in a practical sense, but it would sure make us feel better knowing that the agents of destruction we sent in and who blew things up and who got blown up weren't people with a moral responsibility to other people. They're just robots! They must've malfunctioned or something, who knows! But hey, we didn't lose any men, and that's great, right? More champagne!

...see the sliminess in there? I guess I had to dig for it but I think it's just as plain as any gigantic rotting tuber when you find it...

More tomorrow.

Moral machines.

I spent a lot of time in college in Philosophy classes. So much time, in fact, that in my senior year I realized that if I took just one more course, I'd have a minor. So I did, and now I do. Philosophy courses at a Jesuit university tend to have a very religious and often moralistic bent, so I had opted mostly for fun, un-think-y classes like Native American Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy, which pretty much parroted the ideas I already had about the nature of morality and human nature. But then, when I decided to take the plunge for the minor, the only class I could fit into my schedule that would qualify me was an intensely think-y class called Philosophy of Human Nature. I had a really tough time in that class because we kept bringing up questions that to me were simply preposterous and therefore not worth our time. The subject matter ranged from the agency of the human mind (if we took this person's brain and put it in that person's body, whose personality would be the result? where is the personhood of the person? etc) and the possible person-hood of artificial intelligence. I simply couldnt' see a situation in which these questions would actually become applicable, so I almost refused to do well in the class.

Well, that sure came around to bite me in the ass. I can't seem to formulate proper arguments, or bring up the necessary groundwork of philosophy that has already been laid by hundreds of years of moral philosophizing. Serves me right, I guess. I've been trying to piece together what I have to say about the article I linked to on Saturday about the difficulties that military engineers are having with programming morality into robots. I've been giving the matter some thought, have made extensive notes, and even tried to have a calm and rational out-loud discussion with Connor about it. I had hoped, through these processes, to cement a solid idea of just what it is about the idea of morally reasoning combat robots that makes me want to cry. But instead I realized that, far from reaching one solid conclusion, I have more of a tendency to fly into fits of adrenaline-fueled word-flinging that doesn't make sense. I know why I feel the way I do, but I feel it so passionately that I have difficulty articulating. So. I'm going to try to write down just one of the arguments here, to avoid rambling, ranting, and crying.

Ahem.

After some horrendous errors in the past two years in which combat robots opened fire inexplicably on 'friendly' troops, engineers and programmers have decided it might be a good idea to try to equip battle bots with a "functional morality." They are hoping to successfully use a combination of programming techniques to accomplish this goal: "top down" programming would provide the machine with a set of absolute rules (a la "I, Robot") that could not be undermined, while "bottom up" learning would be implemented, enabling the robot to apply rules to new and changing situations and to learn from past experience (Wall-E, you little bastard). This, scientists hope, would make the robots doing our slaughtering for us more capable to deal with the unexpected and morally dubious realities of war zones, while operating on a basic set of principles that would guide them in decision-making.

Lest you think this sounds cool, and without even trying to describe the creepy-crawly sensation I get when I think of robots 'learning from experience,' let me point out a few things that I know about war zones, gleaned from the watching of several war movies and the reading of several similar books. As they say, "War is Hell," and believe it or not, they say it for a reason. And what can you expect from Hell but a complete upending of morality? While might be the place to find some of the most black and white examples of human morality in action, it is also the place where normal morality often goes totally grey, gets turned on its head, and does breakdance spins. In a war zone, "the innocent" become "the enemy," "children" become "soldiers," "machine gun fire" can be termed "friendly fire," and a zillion other f-ed up things can and do go wrong every moment, turning every situation into a scene of horror that moral philosophers would pee their pants to think of. Particularly in modern war zones, where the enemy is often never seen and thus never 100% identifiable as the enemy, where soldiers fight over causes they hardly understand, and where we're trying to send in ROBOTS to do our bidding, for God's sake, to say that a "functional morality" is the end goal seems a little simple-minded. What could the basic tenets, the basic system of rules in the "top down" model possibly be?

If we're going for a general human morality to implement here, or to form as a structure for the robot rules, the author of our article points out that "there is no clear task specification for general moral behavior, nor is there a single answer to the question of whose morality or what morality should be implemented in AI," and he has a good point. But even if we were to aim for the very most general set of rules that applies to as much of the human population's idea of moral behavior worldwide, we'd be screwed. By its very nature, the set of morals we'd have to instill in a combat robot would be sideways from the beginning. "Do not kill"? Doesn't apply. "Do not kill the innocent"? What constitutes innocent when you're taking over a city full of people who would gladly slaughter you and your entire culture? "Do not kill children"? Modern Africa has proven that children can be just as ruthless as adults. ...And on and on we go.

Human beings, who ostensibly have a much more refined sense of right and wrong, produced organically after years of learning through trial and error, who have a mortal fear of reprisal for acting immorally, and whose pasts are filled with genuine decision-making incidents, still have plenty of trouble determining how to behave morally in war times. We've all seen pictures of Abu Ghraib. So then, in all our vast experience with morality, how can we expect a machine, put together and programmed by us and then taught how to react to situations in very controlled lab environments, to make better decisions than we do? And given their superior speed, agility, and strength (which supposedly is why we'd be using them in the first place - not to give ourselves the impression that WE are not the ones doing the killing and therefore not responsible for it... but that's another argument. Maybe tomorrow.), if these robots do make bad decisions based on their imperfect senses of morality, they have a lot more capability for causing serious destruction.

I have to get going because the gallery is apparently closing up early today, but I will contineu with a much more (I hope) nuanced and deeper discussion of why this is balls to the wall batshit fucking insane tomorrow.

You see what I mean?

Ok, I don't have enough time left at work today to write a proper blog about this, but I figure I may as well link to this article because it's EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/the-artificial-morality-of-the-robot-warrior/

On a lighter note...

...I hope to continue my ranting about the reasons behind my fear and loathing of robots soon, but today my head is just not into working with big ideas. I think I may have burned my brain out by being too busy earlier in the week and then put out the fire last night with whiskey. Today I'm having a few cinders spark up and a little smoke puffing up now and then, but I just don't have the willpower to try to kindle it back up into a real fire.

So instead, I've been perusing this Aussie guy's blog. I am getting a real kick out of it. He has a random sense of humor that reminds me very very strongly of my friend's, and weirdly enough that friend lived in Australia for a while. What a happy coincidence.

However, I have a bit of a bone to pick and I'm considering commenting on his page to draw his attention the fallacy of his piece on what he would do if he had a monkey. Now, I actually know a suprisingly large number of people who harbor this same dream of monkey ownership. Granted, I believe I know a larger than average group of openly insane people, but any time that it is brought up, I feel a need to represent the side of sanity. Which, of course, is anti-monkey ownership.

Because, seriously, monkeys? They might be cute in the same semi-human way that makes dogs in little booties and shirts kind of sweet looking, but also creepy. These are creatures who don't need, nor want, anthropomorphizing. They're not people. But they're just enough like us to creep us out. Which makes me hesitant to think of them as pets. They have little... faces. Like ours. Many of those faces are hairless, like ours. Expressive eyes. HANDS. And toe-thumbs and apposable tails, which make them more agile and dextrous than we could ever be. And because they're so smart (like us), they are crafty as hell, and sneaky, and when you add intelligence to a dextrous, agile mix... It gets scary.

But beyond that, even if you don't find their humanoid appearance and smartnessa nd dexterity a little threatening, there's the well-known fact that they are like us in another important way, which is to say very social, which is to say... needy as all get out. They need to be played with constantly or they get bored and start flinging shit (or whatever else is on hand), and they are smart enough to know what is the most valuable and stain-able thing in the room and aim the shit in its direction.

Also, they are batshit crazy. Remember the chimp that went bonkers and almost killed its master's friend? Well, that was an ape with much more strength and higher intelligence than most monkeys, but it's a good example of how primates (and humans do the same thing but that's another story) can just lose it and take out all their frustration - at being cooped up in you crappy apartment being fed Cheetos (you slob) instead of foraging for figs in the treetops - on your face.

I simply cannot see the glamor in having a monkey. Sure, you could teach it cool tricks and probably amuse friends with it, but then that's assuming it likes your friends enough to let them in the house. Monkeys are smart enough to smell douchebag and I bet most of your friends reek of douche, so you have to be careful that your monkey is ok with people before bringing them in to be entertained its tricks, or the shit-flinging will start up all over again. And tricks are all well and good, but you can get a dog to do some pretty cool things and dogs are much more suited to being kept as pets.

I'm just saying, having a monkey only sounds good until you really sit down and start thinking about it. Monkeys are crazy, crafty, sneaky, needy, crazy UN-human animals. They're kind of scary, honestly.

Just wanted to raise some awareness.

A bit in the way of explanation...

So a friend gave me a very interesting essay to read about 'humanoid', 'sociable' robots and their development at MIT. There are a ton of things in here (sorry, it's on paper so I can't link it) that strike me as ridiculously stupid and equally ridiculously terrifying, so if no news stories pop up that strike my fancy for a little while, this may be fodder for a whole lot of posts. Here's one:

The essay describes the development of more human-like robots, their programming to learn like human beings, and the potential for them to experience their own form of very mechanistic emotion, and juxtaposes these developments with the idea that robots are intended to make our lives easier - to do the jobs we find boring or repugnant. And it eventually makes a statement that I found refreshing (and personal):

"To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction - the one between one human and another."

The author, Robin Marantz Henig, has hit the nail absolutely on the head. This idea that one day we may prefer and rely so much on robot interaction is absolutely terrifying to me in many ways, but here I'll try to explain the most practical.

In a word, it's the preservation of human interaction, which modern society seems to be trying to forget is probably the most important aspect to our survival as a species and to the planet entirely, that is at stake here. I fear and distrust robots and other high tech gadgets assimilation into the fabric of our lives for the very simple reason that reliance on them, rather than on other people, for meeting our daily needs, invites rampant individualism on a devastating scale. The more we learn to interact with computers and gadgets and robots, even if they are tools for interacting remotely with other people, the more we forget what it's like to actually interact with people. When we become accustomed to having our coffee ready and waiting for us in the morning because our coffee maker was programmed to do it, and when we're used to having conversations via texting or e-mail (giving the person on the other end ample time to carefully consider every word before sending the message), and when our entertainment options are movies so heavily computer-digitized that we hardly see a person's face on screen, etc etc etc ad infinitum, it's easy to forget that there are real people contributing to all these processes. The hands that picked the coffee beans, the mind that created the text message, the team of people that filmed and produced and labored to make that movie... all are easily lost behind the veneer of robotic precision and easy perfection we get on the receiving end.

We come to assume that all these things are easy to make because they are easy for us to get. We forget that there are people who have dedicated their lives to bringing us these things. We forget how to think about and interact with these people. We become, rather than self-supporting individuals, helpless isolationists who have no idea whose labor went into making the goods that we buy, or the real emotions behind someone's e-mail (much less how we'd deal with these emotions if confronted with them face-to-face with no time to plan out typed responses). We become a bunch of isolated freaks, sipping Mountain Dew in front of our sweatshop-produced computer screens at 3:00 am, making up characters to speak for us in chat rooms and avatars to be us in virtual worlds. Reality drops from our consciousness. We forget about other people.

And in so doing we do what we've seen the people at the top of Wall Street do. The heads of giant corporations with their private jets and gold-inlaid toilets who don't know about or understand or give a shit about what the people he stepped on to get there are doing or experiencing. And it's easy for us in America, using all our gadgets, to do the same exact thing, if on a less-grand scale. It's easy, when you're surrounded by gadgets that do everything for you, to forget that people made these gadgets and made the food they're preparing for you. To forgot that other people exist and have feelings and needs and wants and dreams just like you.

It's a slippery slope, and before you know it we've got people killing each other and dying of starvation in one part of the world, where there aren't computers to send e-mails from, or cameras to record the happenings. And we in places where we have computers and cameras and gadgets just... forget... about those people because they have no presence in our tech world. We forget that our actions affect these people. That our actions affect the world itself. We become so self-centered and self-obsessed that we develop neuroses and allergies and diseases the rest of the world has never heard of, just to keep ourselves busy, because our lives are so easy with all the gadgets we have to take care of our everyday tasks. We sit around and watch other people's neuroses on television.

Real, face-to-face, one-on-one interaction is a powerful antidote to allt hese terrors. Even remembering to make face time with a friend or call a relative on her birthday, remembering that other people are there and are real and legitimate entitites can remind us that our iPods are NOT entities, but the product of the hard work of other people, which is a slippery slope in a more positive direction. Reminders of other people. If we allow ourselves to continue making human connections, we arrive at a kind of globalization of consciousness rather than of wealth or materials goods. If, however, we allow ourselves to continue making and interacting with and relying more heavily on machines to run our lives, we are asking for problems and destruction...

That's enough for now.

Where has my bitterness gone?

Seriously, you guys, I've been sitting here at my desk for like an hour now, poring through all my regular sources of news and blogs and commentary and cute animals pictures and anti-cute animal pictures and trivia... And I haven't seen one piece of information that has enraged me or piqued my paranoia. There were things I'm sure I could have written something pseudo-intelligent and properly rant-y about, for instance, Gmail going down for four hours during the European workday and this being enough fodder for articles in all major publications because it ground business to an almost complete halt. This is a bad sign regarding our total dependence on the internet, and on Google, which is just enough of a cloud site to be sinister, but then I realized that, well, I use Google for Gmail and this blog and some documents and who knows what else, and if my Gmail went down during my business day, I'd be pretty much lost too.

And even though that made me realize that there probably is a conspiracy going on - and not even a robot conspiracy, but a real human one, which is in many ways more infuriating because you can't expect anything but treachery from a damn AI machine, you SHOULD be able to expect some sort of loyalty from your own species, dammit! - to sell all my personal information to anyone willing to pay for it... And even though I have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, and it would probably be best for me to cancel my facebook and myspace and google accounts, or at least remove the vast majority of information I have saved on them all... I just... Well I'm just in too good a mood to go on the long tangent this subject deserves.

I'm just... not upset.

I'm having way too good of a week so far. I've been productive, I got an e-mail from one of my favorite musicians, it's Mardi Gras, I'm getting enough sleep, I had a delicious lunch... I'm just... Content.

Sorry, readers. I'll have to work up some angst for tomorrow.

RIP Russian Rambo

This is interesting, because I've seen headlines about this story a few times in the past week, but the events described actually happened almost a year ago. They happend in Russia, from whence news takes a while to migrate to the States, but a year still seems awfully long.

No matter, though, the point is: this is one of the coolest stories I have ever seen in my life. Why did we not hear about this sooner and see it plastered on as many papers and tabloids and websites as the Rihanna beatdown? As awful as Rihanna's ordeal is (I'm not trying to downplay it - that guy should be locked up with a very large 'top,' if you get my meaning), this Russian Rambo guy went down in, quite literally, a blaze of glory that's worthy of movie deals in as many languages as command a large audience.

Check it out! This guy had been living in a shack in the woods in Russia for 20 years, hunting and trapping and using home-made pistols and myriad other weapons. He was 6'7" and had a giant bushy beard, was batshit insane, and had actually managed to keep all attempts at law enforcement at bay by being, for lack of a better term, absolutely fucking terrifying. He had captured and held hostage several local officials who had wandered into his "territory" in the woods, releasing them with threats after holding them at gunpoint for hours and effectively scaring the shit out of all their buddies, then backed up those threats not to invade his space by torching 30 homes in the area. He'd become such a legend in the area that locals say they wouldn't let their children out of the house without dogs to accompany them - even though many of their dogs had been killed by his traps.

And, when federal officials finally decided to crack down on this "Rambo" figure by sending out six specialists to get him, he wounded two with some of his arsenal before setting a swath of the forest aflame and somehow circling around behind the officers, and preparing to fight them to a man. As one of the officers put it, "It was pure chance the sniper suddenly saw his figure in the trees and pulled the trigger. He shot him right in the head and he died in a flash."

This dude is impressive. I am in awe. I think it's a damn shame they killed him, because I'd love to have heard his stories from in prison, or better yet, to have heard of his legend haunting the Russian forests for years to come.

Not exactly on topic, but impressive as all get-out, and I wanted to share.

The scientific mind.

I will freely admit that my brain is not one that likes numbers and facts. It tends toward fanciful, curlique-d, sparkly fantasies because it finds them more appealing. It doesn't like the concept that according to mathematics, everything has one correct answer, or that according to science, everything can be explained in concrete terms. My brain enjoys mystery and imagination and seeing the magic in everyday occurrences. It is not analytical, reasonable, rational, or in any way modern, and that probably accounts for my innate fear of mathematical and scientific principals being applied to the natural world. To my way of thinking, Nature is not beyond math or science - it embodies them and is made of their principles - but it goes beyond their rules and straight lines and angles and numbers into something so vast and divine that it transcends what we can understand logically. And so when I see things like - ahem - robots, or for that matter genetically engineered food or animals, being made by us in a lab and then put out into the world that, despite our best efforts, is still controlled mostly by the large, unpredictable, uncontrollable whims of Nature, I shudder to think of what could happen. We are striving, in these instances, to control Life itself, which is not only beyond our grasp but beyond our ability to understand.

We cannot predict the future, even if we populate it with artificial things that we have engineered to behave predictably. Because those things, once they leave us and enter into the Natural world, are no longer under our control, whether they are pre-programmed to be or not. Nature is bigger than us and it takes over for us where we leave off. We are not smaller versions of some omnipotent personification of God simply because we understand a few theories about space and time and engineering, and even if we were, who can honestly say that that version of God the Creator we're trying to become didn't monumentally screw up when he made us? We've run absolutely amok. Our robots and genetically altered foods and creatures might do the same to us, and likely will if we don't rein ourselves in, and I don't care who laughs at me for thinking it.

Look at it this way. What's the point of robot technology, at its base? To make human life easier (so we can accomplish more 'worthwhile' things like watching TV and eating our Cheeto's without having to crumple up the bag and throw it away ourselves, presumably). Let's say that, a few years in the future, somebody develops a robot sophisticated eough that its primary goal in existing is to make human life easier. Not sure how you'd go about programming such an abstract idea, but let's go with the robot's reason for being as reducing human irritation, frustration, pain, and suffering. Let's say this sophisticated robot spent some time observing human life and realized at some point that human beings are almost always irritated, frustrated, pained, and undergoing suffering - as long as they are alive. Might not the logic that we have come up with and tried to bestow upon our lab experiment be put to use to conclude that life is suffering, and that therefore humans should be killed, so they will no longer suffer?

That's probably been a movie or sci-fi book plot somewhere along the line, so I don't claim it to be some groundbreaking idea, but you see what I mean, right?

Now let's imagine that rather than just having babies in our chaotic, natural, unscientific (or at least the vast majority being unscientific) way and making a few robots (which I think is a bad idea but it's already being done) and messing around with existing life forms to make them "better" (like we did with Africanizing honey bees, remember how that went? KILLER BEES?) and domesticating other life forms that don't want to be domesticated (the killer chimp? anyone?), we decide to start BRINGING EXTINCT LIFE FORMS BACK BECAUSE IT WOULD BE COOL? Does this seem like a good idea? It does, apparently, to a researcher at Harvard, George Church, who has declared that now that we have mapped the entire Neanderthal genome, we could bring a Neanderthal to life for around $30 million. John Tierny, that genius at the New York Times, apparently thinks that's a really nifty idea. "So why not do it? Why not give Harvard’s George Church the money he says could be used to resurrect a Neanderthal from DNA?" he asks.

...has anybody read about the crazed chimp who tore off his master's friend's face? Or read about the horrible things they do to monkeys in lab experiments and felt bad? Or watched JURASSIC PARK, for God's sake??? (I know, I know, that was science fiction, Lynsey, not reality. Well I have a whole buttload of opinions about why science fiction should be taken seriously, but not enough time or room here to list them.) Neanderthals, for all that we know about them - which is in fact quite a lot, given that we've mapped their genome and studied them ad nauseum anthropologically and paleontologically - were very much, VERY much, like modern Homo sapiens. Modern Homo sapiens being ourselves, being the least predictable or controllable animal on earth (if you put aside what advertising campaigns and brainwashing can do), being the ones who thought it'd be a good idea to stockpile nuclear weapons that could destroy the planet. Who can make robots to do their work but can't figure out how to coexist without shooting each other over whose version of the God we want to be is the best.

And these guys... want to... bring back a near-identical species, the capabilities of which we have no inkling and the reason for whose extinction was probably, like most other of Nature's reasons for extinction except for the ones WE'VE inflicted on other species, very good.

If a chimpanzee (chimps are our second closest living relatives, next to bonobos, and are much, much stronger than humans) who'd been living a pampered life in a woman's home, dressing and feeding himself and using a computer, for years, could rip her friend's face off in a moment of frenzy, what do we think a NEANDERTHAL being raised in a lab, most likely, and poked and prodded and examined and tested to no end by scientists who think it's just fascinating, possessed of an intelligence and self-awareness at least close to that of our own, will do?

I know these sentences are long and confusing, but I find the logic here absolutely mystifying myself. This is madness.

I'm going home, locking myself in my room with my Cheeto's, and not coming out till tomorrow. Forget this. My brain might not be great at calculus, but I'll take my common sense and my imagination and my curliques over this nonsense, thankyouverymuch.

Ok, sorry to disappoint....

But I am TOO excited to write about my paranoia today.

Because...

I just found out I'm getting published!

Aaaaaaaah!

A story I wrote while I was living in Chicago, called "The Hair Cut" (which, to be honest, I don't even particularly like), has been selected for publication in a forthcoming book from Pergola Publishing called "Memoirs of Meanness." The book is a compilation of true and fictional stories, and according to the publisher is being picked up by book groups, and high schools as an anti-bullying aid. Apparently due to financial problems (who doesn't have them?), Pergola underwent a change in management over the past year, but has gotten back on track with its publication schedule. So the story, which I submitted last April, is going in. They say they'd like to print next month!

My story is kind of a two-sides-of-one-brain theme, where I have a narrator telling a story that she keeps messing up, and eventually another part of her brain comes in to help her finish it, and, well, that side is mean. Hence the story fitting into the book.

There's no pay involved, but there's prestige! Fame! Accolades! And I get to do publicity if there are any events.

So, screw paranoia! The Universe LOVES me today!