I've been getting bookbinding lately on a whim. My computers are full of ebooks but my home is scarce on real books. Ordering books online is playing roulette -- some of the counterfeits being sold are unreadable. The good news about bookbinding is, aside from the initial investment for a printer, books are very cheap to make! And a book takes less time to make than it does to read.

the state of my workplace, after being vandalized by a naughty boy

Cardboard, paper, thread, glue, and fabric are all quite cheap. It costs me under $5 to make a book. Against the admonishment of "frugal" friends, I purchased a Brother DCP-L2540DW laser printer. It prints good quality prints and refills are relatively affordable. I am quite blessed to live in a place where all the physical components of books are dirt cheap, and the local fabric, especially, is quite beautiful.

My first "casebound" book was the Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. The cover is quite luxurious and feels good to hold. The inside is a collection of "signatures" (little booklets); I poke holes through the spines of the booklets before sewing them together. Then, I glue the spine with a small piece of cardstock on it; while that dries, I glue cardboard panels the size of the spine and each cover to fabric with 0.7mm spacers to act as a "hinge." Glue it all together and it's complete.

...But the inside is a crappy PDF, oh no!

I got on top of this issue by working out a process to push Epub files through LaTeX to imposed pages, so the insides of my newer books are beautiful and look as books should. Shout out to Pandoc!

How I turn epub to html to markdown to LaTeX to PDF:

https://wiki.gikopoi.com/o/BookPrinting.4

This process works quite well with the collection on StandardEbooks but it has also worked well on commercially available Epubs.

My first book: Pale Fire, bound in a cardboard box that once contained Mentos candy.

It is not a question of "if" but "when" AI voices will dominate public online spaces. There are many reasons for why AI will become the majority speaker in public spaces: monetization potential by operators, political motivations by corporate and state bodies, etc. And there is no question as to whether AI voices will be indistinguishable from human voices in the future : they already are.

In 10 years or even 5 years from now, I cannot imagine a situation where in any currently existing online space, it is possible to discern an actual human from an AI agent posing and operating as a human, for whatever motivations.

If this is a scenario that concerns you, there are two steps you can take now to "inoculate" yourself from the coming epidemic of AI, as it were:

1. Establish a cryptographic identity -- there will be a date in history, perhaps assigned arbitrarily, that will be called the date at which new "users" cannot be distinguished between AI and humanity. Creating a public and private key TODAY and distributing the public key around will serve as a proof of humanity pre-dating the AI takeover of the internet. One public key should be created for each online identity -- and despite our side of the internet's general tendency toward anonymity, a public key for a "real name" should definitely be created and published as well. When necessary, "online identities" can and should be cross-referenced against an operator's "real identity" -- given that all communication in a private-key public-key environs is encrypted, anyway, with "plausibly deniable" text, it should not be a concern what is addressed in a state of forward secrecy.

Purchasing cryptocurrency remains a viable means to "establish identity" as it

(a) requires a financial stake to occur, and (b) is linked with a cybernetic identity, with public + private keys, which give people a contact address and a means of private, personal communication.

2. Purchase a domain name that is obvious to the greater community in identifying you in some way, shape, or form: even if AI agents may dominate Twitter, Mastadon Network, et al, paying real money to a quasi-governmental agency is a measure of stability, if not a proof of identity. As with point 1, this should be done sooner, rather than later.

Even without encryption tools at his disposal, as long as someone is renewing a domain name, an objective log of ownership of the domain name continues: a sudden shift in domain name ownership should set off alarm bells in cautious watchers.

To conform with my principle of vaccination against AI-fication of the WWW, grab my public key for the email address 52 at 4x13.net here: https://4x13.net/me/key.txt