Tokenmaxxing!! I'm dying. "You judge me on how much I use AI at work? Ok, I'll spend 10x a single person's salary on tokens every month making fake videos of my dog, you fucking dumbshits." This is such a classic worker "fuck you" that it delights me to no end. youtu.be/cfaZZPjA3g0?...

🧪🧵 🪰 🐜🪲🐞🦗🐛🦋🪳🦟 How many species of insect are there?  A seemingly simple question, but one that has been 'bugging' scientists for years.  Our work out today suggests that there are millions more than we had previously expected.  doi.org/10.1073/pnas... @gdfcf.bsky.social

I photo dump Instagram every couple months, and otherwise avoid it, and jfc, I sometimes forget how much the experience of browsing content there is just depressing. You are just INUNDATED with vast amounts of shit you never consented to.

My hollyhocks all get fungal rust that slowly eats them from the bottom up, but NOT before they flower and seed. I'll take it. 🌱

Fellow authors: without any context, what's the first line of your current WIP? "It was cold in the hab on the day we all died."

This is why being a serial killer was so much more popular

And somehow they are STILL GETTING PAID

Fellow authors: without any context, what's the first line of your current WIP? "Yasha made a promise to the dying girl in the tower, and fled into the fever-twisted wasteland, wishing she was the sort of woman who kept her promises."

Guy in my college creative writing class gave everyone a slip of paper that said something like HAMSTER and then a short essay saying this was postmodern. (I assume he ran out of time to do critique.)

You want 1 in every 6 people on the internet on the planet playing Xbox games every day. Assuming you just mean over 15, that’s just under half of all adults with internet access on the PLANET EARTH playing Xbox every day. And your first crucial move is to *fire* 1600 people. This is madness.

"she wrote at night in order to be free from other people’s thoughts" Big mood here, among many.

If I have to spend much time trying to decide if the person is deliberately being exhausting or accidentally being exhausting, I tend to just block these days. I give grace to people I know from real life. Online, the bar for us to be nice to each other is much much higher.

I also have low confidence in this voicemail transcription

Yup!

Art

Why do these charts make people so mad?? 🤣 I think it's because it makes everyone feel poor. ...so many find themselves at the cusp of understanding!!

If you include what we pay in healthcare premiums, what my spouse's employer pays in premiums (people forget this is in lieu of higher wages!!), and what we pay in med copays, it's roughly 24-28k/year JUST IN MEDICAL COSTS. Saying "40k a year is middle class" is laughable.

Love this thread

No one wants to admit this, but it's TRUE. If you want to actually have savings and go on vacation once a year (NOT on a credit card), and have no debt, and an emergency fund ready for a job layoff, yes: this is what it takes.

Had a client ask if I could swap out a stock photo with one where the people were less “exotic.” I asked him to be more specific. “You know what I mean.” “I need you to say it.” The photo stayed.

Anyone who's told it repeatedly NOT to use em dashes knows this 🙃 What so many don't realize is that it's LIKE THIS WITH EVERYTHING

State of Brand newsletter: "OpenAI pushing its IPO to 2027." Me:

Hailey has done so much for me, and for so many other people in Brazil and elsewhere. She's utterly brilliant and heroic. Thanks to the exchange rate even a small amount of us dollars goes a long way in Brazil. Please help if you can 💘

Oh gosh yes! The flashdrive days!

Bananas!! I need to try bananas. I usually use broccoli or cabbage to lure them Look how pleased he is 😆

A touch of sunburn was worth it.

Italy could be the next country to build a solar railway after Switzerland’s successful trial - Euronews

A lot of people write at work. This is why reception, admin jobs are great. If they monitor your computer, you just bring a notebook. I had reception job for few months where two of us sat in empty floor that was just conference rooms. People pre-booked rooms. We were just there to offer directions

The *best* writing schedule story I've ever heard was @stephengrahamjones.com talking about how he used to keep knives open and facing him so he could stay alert while writing at night after his blue collar jobs were done. That's new you can use, my friends.

Welp. I am 100% stealing "This book is woke trash" for the marketing copy on my new book 😀

Heard an ad about the DC celebration that was like "THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER JULY 4TH CELEBRATION LIKE IT!" And honestly it felt like both threat and PROMISE

My local pub now has a non-alcoholic beer on tap. God bless Genz. They've made my middle-aged life so much easier!

Ahoy there, sophonts! We're totally not late announcing our latest story, because it's a Flashback Friday and this is Friday, see? This week we flash back to the intensity of "When We Fall" by @kameronhurley.com. Check it out!

Intrigued by the notion of wizards who get their powers by consuming the bones of extinct magical creatures from the La Brea Tar Pits in a transformed Los Angeles? Consider snagging my novelette, “The Wolf and the Manticore”. www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/... www.amazon.com/Wolf-Mantico...

All right. The long writing weekend begins.... See you all on the flipside!

Oh, I am BRUTAL. I read as far as one page into chapter 2 and was out 😆 (in this case, I did skip ahead and scan a few places - which I never do - because I was REALLY looking forward to the book, but it appeared to be more of same). I am a very picky reader!!

Started a highly anticipated book from an author who hasn't had a book out in awhile and I admit I was so disappointed and confused in first few pages I literally just said out loud, "What the fuck is this??" and skipped ahead to see if it was really going to continue on like it started, and it DID.

Went out to dinner tonight and saw these lovely garden beds. Really like this composition

Meanwhile, billionaire politicians constantly ask "Why does no one think I'm a good person? I really want to help, but why can't I get elected?"

Scrolled past a reel of a bunch of old guys playing unplugged and thought "oh, that must be The Eagles or someone" and it was fucking Death Cab For Cutie. 💀

Gonna grow a whiskey tree in this one

And now I need to lay upstairs under the window AC unit and recover 🤠 It is quite the DAY today. Luckily the fowl have plenty of shade and fresh water. It's no joke out there.

Middles are often seen as the sagging portion of a story line. In reality, most of any writer's time is spent working on the middle. In this on-demand pre-recorded workshop, learn how to set up and depict interesting try-fail cycles for your characters. members.maryrobinettekowal.com/shop/maintai...

anyway go try to win the glow-in-the-dark FUCK quilt, it is truly the ladylike quilt of 2026

Okay. So. Obscure Military Holy Orders. Bear with me on this one: In 1687 the French were aggressively expanding their trade and slavery operations on the Gold Coast. As part of this two young West African boys were sent back to France, most likely as slaves. One may have been called "Aniaba". /1🧵

Decided to sit in shade and do some day job work outside because I am a Child of the Woods and forgot how useful it is for self cooling to just... Drink a beverage drowned in ice. Refrigerator-chilled has got nothing on the classics.

This is exactly what they are doing, yes. As someone who has personally experienced this at several companies now, yes, LLMs are a huge driver of layoffs. My last team was explicitly told to finish training custom GPTs on their client voices the week before they were let go.

I was part of a seven person marketing team 14 months ago. That "team" is now just... Me. The work load expectations have not changed much 🤠