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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou...
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No Longer Using TheStoryGraph due to their continued use of AI

Due to TheStoryGraph's continued use of generative AI, specifically in the book summaries, I am no longer using TheStoryGraph or adding new links to their book listings. Their generative AI summaries are at least partially created from the various reviews provided by readers and reviewers like myself. 

Regardless of whether something buried in the terms and conditions gives them permission to do this, the end result is harmful to authors and readers alike. When I write a review, even if I'm wrong about the book in a material way, the review is a single piece of writing that someone can read and decide I was wrong about the book. If the whole of my review conflicts obviously with those of other people, then it may be discounted. If my review is put in a slurry with everyone else's, it turns into a mass of contradictory garbage. My materially incorrect opinion is put in a jumble with those who may have been more astute, creating a morass which will be misleading as to the nature of the text. It frustrates those who start reading a book on the basis of an incorrect summary, and it dissuades those who would have enjoyed the actual text but are put off by the AI-generated description which has little to no basis in reality.

Very popular books with many, many reviews might have better summaries due to how many reviews are available to be blended together. I do not care, this is not better than them all being inaccurate. This leaves Indie and less well-marketed authors to flounder, once again, hurt by the very platform which is supposed to be a way for them to gain visibility for their work. Additionally, only persons who have already read the book will be able to know if the AI summary is accurate or misleading. It does not matter if the summary is sometimes correct, because potential readers whose first impression of the text is from the AI summary will never be able to trust whether they're being informed or misled.

This choice means that, for now and possibly in the longer term, I'm not cross-posting most of my reviews on a review aggregator platform. This is personally disappointing to me because I supported TheStoryGraph early one due to their robust support for content warnings, and many tools for genuinely helping readers and authors.

I will continue to post review of Indie books on Indie Story Geek. 

I'll be able to keep up with publishing news and current releases on Fantastic Fiction. 

I recommend Book Trigger Warnings Wiki for looking up trigger/content warnings for books generally.

Thank you to everyone who reads my reviews and other posts.

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