Heh no that's the mushroom forager's bible right there, going back many years, it's assigned reading for mycology students and very reputable. It's funny how much it looks ML generated, but it well predates ML image generation. For reference, he's holding a flesh colored mushroom and a trumpet.

But if I tell you, I doxx myself :)

https://m.alibris.com

yeah, where else do you expect self published authors to make their mark?

I've extremely enjoyed the self-pub route so many authors can take these days. Some of my favorite series come from people who didn't even want to bother with the traditional publisher and I am so much happier for it.

So I mean, if you have some alternatives for self published authors to reach a broad audience with a minimum of fuss, that's great. I'm just not seeing a valid replacement, myself.

edit: that said, some are dumpster fires in a pit of eternal despair. but I'm a big boy, I can figure that out for myself.

yeah thats on me. im old and remember them for selling physical crap forever ago, plus i forgot people pay for digital stuff.. again, not my thing.

Robert Evans wrote a post on it and did multiple podcast episodes.

The TL&DR is that AI-generated children's books are crap, without a coherent storyline or any literary niceties like "foreshadowing" and "beginning middle and end". Kids are still learning what stories look like, so if you hand them AI-generated stuff they might know it's unsatisfying, but they can't put into words why their books are wrong.

Sadly, it's another hustle. If you spend enough time on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TIkTok, you may see ads for "business opportunities," which include a bunch of ways to spend lots of wasted time on things that will supposedly give you "passive income". A lot of them consist of stringing together crude tools to supposedly run a business without actually running anything. For instance, you can learn how to set up a business on Amazon where someone else manufactures your products and Amazon stores and ships them, and supposedly you're now a business owner. Obviously, it doesn't work.

One version of this is becoming a "published author" by having stuff written either by ChatGPT or what are essentially slaves in the global south, and then self-publishing it as ebooks on Amazon.

Again, there's no real money or sense of accomplishment, but people are desperate, and so people try it.

In the United States, where I used to travel often and widely, you have to pay for dialysis and it’s extremely expensive. In New York it cost me $1000 a session.

It's worth pointing out that this is because the author is a foreign national. Americans with permanent kidney failure are guaranteed Medicare even if they're under 65, and Medicare part B covers outpatient dialysis in full. Signing that into law is one of the few good things Richard Nixon ever did.

I don't think it was meant to be reassuring. @rayyyy@kbin.social is right, don't mess around with fungi. You can get irreversible kidney damage.

Also, there are old mushroom hunters and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters.