68:Hazard:Cold

by Janelle Shane

Unknown Binding

Published June 29, 2020

About the author

While moonlighting as a research scientist, Janelle Shane found fame documenting the often hilarious antics of AI algorithms.

Janelle Shane's humor blog, AIweirdness.com, looks at, as she tells it, "the strange side of artificial intelligence." Her upcoming book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place, uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the minds of the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning both accessible and entertaining.

According to Shane, she has only made a neural network-written recipe once -- and discovered that horseradish brownies are about as terrible as you might imagine.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!

this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.

this is the SEVENTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your annual reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.

GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i've read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that's still a work-in-progress. however, because i don't have a lot of time to waste, and because my brain has felt scraped clean ever since my bout with covid, i'm not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap 'em again.

i am doing my best.
merry merry.

DECEMBER 23

special thanks to murderbot who, although not part of this story, nonetheless paved the way for me to enjoy a story like this - whose AI/outer spacey SF themes i would formerly have avoided at all costs. now, i've come around, you see, and this one's a real goody.

tl;dr: beep.

read it for yourself here:

http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/68...

2022:

DECEMBER 1: PORGEE'S BOAR - JONATHAN CARROLL
DECEMBER 2: SKELETON SONG - SEANAN MCGUIRE
DECEMBER 3: JUDGE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT - LAVIE TIDHAR
DECEMBER 4: QUANDARY AMINU VS THE BUTTERFLY MAN - RICH LARSON
DECEMBER 5: IN MERCY, RAIN - SEANAN MCGUIRE
DECEMBER 6: CHOKE - SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
DECEMBER 7: THIS PLACE IS BEST SHUNNED - DAVID ERIK NELSON
DECEMBER 8: RED PYRAMID - VLADIMIR SOROKIN
DECEMBER 9: HOSPICE/HONEYMOON - JOYCE CAROL OATES
DECEMBER 10: MY FIRST CAR - JOY WILLIAMS
DECEMBER 11: HOW MANY - BRYAN WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 12: KENNY BOND SHOT MY DOG - CHRISSY KOLAYA
DECEMBER 13: I KNOW YOU'RE THERE - PAUL TREMBLAY
DECEMBER 14: THE THERESA JOB - COLSON WHITEHEAD
DECEMBER 15: CATTLE HAUL -JESMYN WARD
DECEMBER 16: I LIKE YOUR SHOES - KEVIN BROCKMEIER
DECEMBER 17: SOME OTHER ANIMAL'S MEAT - EMILY CARROLL
DECEMBER 18: THE MOM OF BOLD ACTION - GEORGE SAUNDERS
DECEMBER 19: THE WEIGHT - ANNE ENRIGHT
DECEMBER 20: THE FIFTH STEP - STEPHEN KING
DECEMBER 21: OUR LIFE AS THE VOLCANO CULT - KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN
DECEMBER 22: WRONG OBJECT - MONA SIMPSON

FROM THE BEFORETIMES:

2016 short story advent calendar
2017 short story advent calendar
2018 short story advent calendar
2019 short story advent calendar
2020 short story advent calendar
2021 short story advent calendar

[Baily · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ship began, unnecessarily, to beep.

Brilliant and heartwarming.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this more than once; at first I was too distracted by my emotional response to Greki. I couldn't imagine being in her position, or being a droid at all. Then I could imagine it and felt - encumbered, I suppose, as if I was stifled with no way to breathe or speak or be me again. Then I read again and thought - yes, encumbrances can be made to feel lighter, and there are ways to take deeper breaths, though the breathing apparatus has changed. Really glad I read this.