robot_mel

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

Okay, I suppose that maybe the model is 'Disney princess' rather than any princess in history ever, but even then, don't they display a certain degree of agency?

This is A Thing where apparently women display princessiness by performatively giving up agency - sitting in restaurants with castdown eyes being ordered for, not speaking until spoken to - also certain forms of helplessness which suggest they actually need a team of Ladies of the Bedchamber fighting over whose hereditary right it is to put on their stockings and whose to lace their stays....

This boggles the mind of someone raised in an actual monarchy in which there were two princesses around who did not, actually, model docility - I don't think Princess Margaret conceding to the strictures of the day and Giving Up The Man She Loved because he was divorced really qualifies as she'd been going around with him, as far as I can recall WITHOUT A CHAPERONE for some time.

Historian is obliged to point out that for centuries princesses - apart from bearing necessary heirs - quite often had to undertake regnal tasks, either as consort or regent, or at least aid in the general work of Being Royal, even if they did not actually take the throne themselves. Note here conference paper I heard on the preference for female regents in medieval Europe when there was a minor heir.

If you're going to Be a Princess, perhaps do not take Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst as your model, though on another hand, why not? Girl-Bossing It to the Max!

but we commend Princess Sophia Duleep Singh to your attention.

Observe also the daughters of Queen Victoria: e.g. Princess Alice, who married Louis, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, was known for her commitment to philanthropic work, interested in nursing, met and befriended Florence Nightingale, and also set up military hospitals; Princess Louise who attended the The National Art Training School and designed a full-size statue of her mother as well as a memorial sculpture for the Boer War. No meek sitting about for them.

(I will cop to have read Alot of historical novels in my misspent youth very much contradicting the notion that princessing was sitting still and being silent.)

What I read

Well, Presidential Agent kept me going for quite a while - boy, Upton Sinclair chucks a lot in - this one was particularly gripping.

I decided not to go straight on the next one - needing a break from the grim extension of Fascism over Europe - and therefore read Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed (2025), which was a considerable disappointment. What I'd read about it led me to expect something fresher, more original, sparkier - I found this meh and towards the cosy women's fiction end. We note that back in the 60s/70s women were trapped like woodcock in springes by getting pregnant prematurely and thus stuck in unwelcome marriages or finding themselves tied down, and the gen X/millenial narrative is Biological Clock is Ticking On, so the trajectory is a bit different. The other thing I noted is that, as with All Fours, I feel Lessing's 'To Room 19' is somewhere in the DNA and it's a bit like the Omelas revisionism thing?

On the go

I've been wondering about Elizabeth Bear's The Folded Sky (White Space #3) (2025) and there was a very tasty deal on UK/European sites for the ebook - I found it a bit slow-starting but then we got the 'murder-mystery in enclosed setting' while a whole lot of other shit goes down.

Up next

New Literary Review.

Read a review of Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right, which made these sound intriguing, and I read the preview sample on Kobo, and fell to the temptation of preordering. Should turn up this week.

Volume in which I have a chapter has arrived - I ought to at least riffle through the other contributions.

I was reading this article about a book I actually have no particular desire to read myself, however much (or perhaps particularly because?) of a cult thing it is -

What our obsession with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life says about us

(Who even are 'we')

(Copping to having read the author's The People in the Trees because I had a copy lying around received free and gratis in connection with the project #ifitoldyouidhavetokillyou some years back, and it was considered it didn't quite fall within parameters.)

But reading about this book, and people's response, I was wondering, does the author read/write fanfic? and if so, what?

Because there was something about the way this work was being described and people's reactions which were making me think of the term 'id vortex' and that the way people were responding to this very literarily-okay work did not seem to me entirely distinguishable from responses to certain fat fantasy series.

The article almost goes there - does cite one critic who makes a comparison with YA - but tries to make a case for Significance and Zeitgeist.

It sounded like something that provided the satisfactions that the reader gets from genre, while not being That Sort of Thing, perish the thort.

Or maybe I'm just being cynical.

What I read

Kris Ripper, Runaway Road Trip: A Definitely-Not-Romantic Adventure (2019) - a certain predictability that goes with the genre, really but kept up a reasonable momentum.

Annick Trent, By Marsh and by Moor (Marsh and Moor, #1) (2025): felt a bit so-so about this, not perhaps as taken by it as others of hers I've read.

Miranda July, All Fours (2024) - this was a Kobo deal so I gave it a try and eventually gave up. Is this maybe a generational thing? Hear it is quite A Thing, but really. (Was having pervasive flashes of my 'is it time to do some Doris Lessing re-reading?')

Also marked The Kellerby Code as DNF.

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was a Kobo deal and which I had not read for something like 50 years - had forgotten how talky it is. Some points for having Village Lesbian Couple, but these were fairly frequent in crime novels of the time, weren't they?

LM Chilton, Everyone in the Group Chat Dies (2025). I found this did the suspense thing pretty well once it got going but I had some cavils over the tone and the general idea of 'hilarious serial-killer thriller involving true crime social media mavens'. I am not sure this is quite the same thing as Universal Horror movies cycling round to 'Abbott and Costello meet [Monster]' as franchise grows tired.

On the go

Back to Lanny Budd - have now started Presidential Agent (1944).

Up next

That's likely to keep me going for a while, but I've got my eye on Jessica Stanley, Consider Yourself Kissed, of which I have heard good report.