I'm Done Making the News
That’s right, you read it correctly. I’m done making the news.
I think it was inevitable at this point right? Like, I’m going to be honest, how many Civ news organizations last for over a year, let alone a month? The fact that so many people thought the newsletter was honestly high quality is both honestly kind of incredible, and absolutely absurd.
Burnout is real folks, and I think that was quite obvious when I blew past not one, but two different deadlines for news this month. When I did 127 newsletters, there were some very rough times, and even compiling the first newsmagazine was a hill to climb. Being the sole semi-reliable source of news on Civ, in both factual and consistent terms, is really hard and there’s so much pressure to perform and get everything right. So many people have corrected me over the weeks I worked on the newsletter, and even still to this day.
You might know that so many people say “nothing ever happens” on Civ, and they’re absolutely right. Like, even though that there’s week after week of backarchives of newsletters, how many of those things that are in there are just repeated and the same events?
I cannot believe there’s so many people who want to read the same exact stuff over and over. It’s like that the readers of the news completely lose memory — not just over weeks, but years, and across servers. How bad is it can you not realize when a war is coming, when it’s literally the exact same war as the one 3 months ago? Or the one 6 months ago? Or the one 6 years ago? “Nothing ever happens”… “nothing ever happens”…
Have you not noticed the same events repeating and repeating and repeating? Like, maybe, just maybe, an AI was making the news that you see over and over? Just making new content, just to rehash it again and again for nearly two years and nobody noticed?
Well, guess what folks. That’s right, I’ve been using a Large Language Model to generate the entire back-catalog of CivWiki News since June 2023. Those weeks-long breaks of me “taking a break” from “burnout”? That was me doing technical work to fix my Large Language Model (SpecificLLMguage) to start parsing all of your stupid Discord messages, Reddit posts, and even finding a way to transcribe your voice chats.
Now I finally had a perfect information source for all of Civ and can start relaying Breaking News as an announcement before the news even happens! A newsletter forever! But like all things do, nothing lasts; my GPU finally broke down after overloading it too much, not to mention Discord finally tracked me down for violating their terms of service, so I guess there’s only one solution…
I’ll see you in a couple weeks when I report the news in a brand new CivWiki Newsmagazine in mid-April. If you’re interested in generating writing new pieces, let me know @specificlanguage!
Oh uh, yeah that picture up there is just something I took during my Hawaii trip recently, lol