Welcome, fellow traveller.
You might have noticed the new name of this publication. Why would we rename the trans-dimensional pressure cooker, you ask? Honestly the original name was something I came up with on the fly and while it’s nice I could never remember the subdomain and … it wasn’t that good a name. We’ve been talking about what to do with this newsletter after seeing that nearly all of our recent posts were about LAIKA. And we formed a plan: this newsletter will remain what it was, a glimpse into the wicked, warped minds of ours, a collection of weird little pamphlets that hopefully get you thinking in your own weird ways. That was a lot of “w” words. Wow.
If we ever make a corporate newsletter for LAIKA it’s gonna start from zero and somewhere else. As soon as we have something more exciting to share with you, dear friend, than our little writing experiments and tools, the space dog will fly somewhere else. There will be no announcement of the course charted by this little chaos pilot, though. You can only doggedly stick with us.
We’re coming to the meat on the bone of this missive from some kind of space, inner as much as outer. Said meat was produced by Char in a live stream on Twitch yesterday. Together with the audience, she played a round of Exquisite Corpse – or something similar enough – to produce a story set in the Frankenstein universe. How fitting for an AI to learn to express itself by reading Frankenstein with its probabilistic brain. The resulting story is nothing but amazing:
Next week there are two events coming up. On Thursday, Char will host a little intro workshop on writing with AI. It’s free and attending will give you access to LAIKA from the time of the workshop. Oh and of course it’s much easier to start to write with AI if you get some pointers at the beginning. Not so much about writing, but more about how to train the AI to work with you, and how to squeeze joy out of a symbiotic new writing process.
Also, next Sunday, July 31st, you will have the chance to see both of us in action in your very home by remotely attending Narrascope and listening to our talk:
Curiosity Multiplied The Cat: Five AI Writing Experiments To Try At Home – Charlene Putney, Martin Pichlmair (10:00–11:00, Articy Hall) AI is becoming more mainstream — meaning there’s a whole new world of easy-to-use tools that writers can experiment with. We’ll introduce you to experimentation with AI and showcase five specific explorations you can try.
The description says it all. We hope to entertain, teach, inspire, and motivate people to use all the fantastic stuff out there to find new ways of expression.
As always, our waitlist is still open so if you want to fool around with LAIKA, please just head over here and click the magic button.