TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

Have not been able to get this passage from @vajra.me out of my head:

HOW DARE THEY! Please sign, and then rock up to the rally next Saturday at 12:30. See you there. #Melbourne3000

I love a happy ending.

Is your phone listening to you? Can the government read your text messages? Why is printer ink so expensive? Digital Rights Bytes answers common questions about technology that have been bugging you. www.digitalrightsbytes.org/

Kristie writes eloquently and convincingly about why the idea of a 'nature cure' in nature writing is so reductive...

"While the settlement appears to be a victory for Apple users after months of mediation, it potentially lets Apple off the hook pretty cheaply. If the court had certified the class action and Apple users had won, Apple could’ve been fined more than $1.5 billion under the Wiretap Act alone..."

In terms of what’s understood to be socially acceptable behavior, normalizing the filming/taking pictures of people in public who are minding their own business (and putting it online) is one of the worst developments of the past 15 years.

New! free! essay by Donna Glee Williams, asking pointed questions about Joseph Campbell's conception of the Hero's Journey... Read it now! Tell your friends! www.speculativeinsight.com/essays/hero-journey

If anyone cares at all, EV battery recycling is now hitting 99% recovery for important metals Please remind me again what the recycle rate for fossil fuels is interestingengineering.com/energy/recyc...

No right-wing tech dweebs get to complain about the land use impact of a wind farm ever again

An excellent piece by Yasmin Khan in @theguardian.com – and I’m very relieved the preposterous case against her has been dropped. www.theguardian.com/food/comment...

What I call "moral neuroableism" in my current project strikes again...and again...and again.

Oh @rianjohnson.bsky.social played all innocent "I'm not doing a muppet thing with Knives Out" he knew HE KNEW

I was cruelly #whambushed by SBS Australia with their Christmas TV promo on DECEMBER 1 😖 An a cappella version no less. #whamageddon

I talk about this sometimes to folks not in academic or archival spaces and they scoff, then they get 👀👀, then they drink

Kate makes an excellent argument here. Also trauma plays heck with your memory formation and recall and these kids have been through a lot without adult resources to help.

…Oh. Oh no. Oh no nonono. …And yet: of course. "Gen AI" tells you the thing you are statistically most likely to accept so you keep using it— & research shows that most people who like "AI" like it *Because* it sycophantically tells them their ideas are great & should defs be implemented. So… Yeah.

Why are students having learning challenges? I can't imagine:

Almost got Whammed today but I changed the station in time. It's still November, people!

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025 is ‘And the Walls Became the World All Around’ by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Sigrid Rausing and published by @grantabooks.bsky.social !

This is why OpenAI is selling so aggressively to education at all levels—they want to create entire generations of users incapable of reading, writing and thinking without ChatGPT to hold their hands And teachers and professors should call this out for what it actually is

If writing is so easy why do people argue that they can’t do it without the pablumatic verbiage extruder And if it’s so difficult then why do people think it’s not labour and writers are not workers

I think about all the times in history we've had no sources - where none of the people present were literate, or all of the records were kept on unfired clay tablets, or everything was written in Linear A, or... How much of the chaos of the last ten years have you written on archival quality paper?

"Imagine you stole all of the intellectual property in the world. And you're using it to help people write middling emails and make revenge porn about women, and also children. And you're powering this plagiarism and non-consensual porn machine by eating up what's left of humanity's carbon budget."

Alt text: from ABC news, Zero cervical cancer cases diagnosed in Australian women aged under 25 in 2021 - the first time since records began in 1982. (Please use alt text, people.)

My speaker notes & slides from today's panel on 'Resisting GenAI & Big Tech in Higher Education', co-organised with the Climate Justice Universities Union (CJUU). The full recording, slides and resources will be available soon via the CJUU site. danmcquillan.org/resisting_ge...

THE CREATIVES4SUDAN AUCTION IS NOW LIVE!!!! THE CREATIVES4SUDAN AUCTION IS NOW LIVE!!!! THE CREATIVES4SUDAN AUCTION IS NOW LIVE!!!! app.galabid.com/creatives4su...

This is so relevant to my day-to-day thinking at @hubcitypress.bsky.social. instead of being demoralized and saying, let AI do all the publishing work and pump out more slop to boost sales, our new focus is carefully curated + clearly human created. Hence the focus on short stories, novellas, etc.

I said this when the fake books supplement came out this summer but, if the internet is mostly bots now then that's who's reading and engaging with these fake AI articles. I think that's what's making me feel so untethered--how little humans matter to any of these systems now. Bots talking to bots.

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

since the "google is now training gemini on your email contents" thing keeps bumping around here: it's _not happening_. I say this not to defend google but because I know a lot of people that have broken their filtering and made their lives much more annoying from sheer misinformation.

I'm not against the idea that some sort of silicon intelligence *might* arise at some point--we're not even nearly there as far as I can tell--but humans are SO programmed to regard things that do not have human agency as if they do have human agency, that this seems like a necessary move

my most butlerian jihad coded belief is that we should probably make it illegal – and more importantly, we should work toward a cultural consensus that it is immoral – to design a computer program whose interface uses the first person

I dunno, buddy, maybe if it didn't encourage young folks to kill themselves, or drink all the potable water, or pollute the Infoverse with fallacies, or add glue to recipes, or be that guy who lies rather than admits a mistake, or, and this is important, buddy, or IF WE WERE GIVEN A FUCKING CHOICE!

We’re launching a website of revolutionary speculative fiction, art and poetry set in the world of Everything for Everyone! We’re calling it Project 2052. To support author honoraria, subscribe as a sustainer, make a one-time donation, or pitch a story here: www.commonnotions.org/project2052.

[Blog] In which a typography nerd prevents a Monotype "business development" person from, essentially, scamming his employer out of unpaid font licencing fees that weren't actually owed. Monotype font licencing shake-down | www.insanityworks.org/randomtangen... #typography #fonts #scam

Remember: they used thousands of academic books too! If you’re a scholar, check for your books too. This isn’t just novelists and pop writers, it’s academic books too!

"it is forcing me to be guarded when I should be wowed" This. This right here. I'm so, SO tired of having to scrutinize any piece of art that even remotely resembles genAI slop just to determine whether or not it's worth a second thought or any admiration.

Non-industry compromised scientists keep saying these models don't become safe, no matter what, but people keep thinking just because the concept of guardrails is mentioned it must work. By definition, it doesn't. This is not something open to discussion, unless you're a paid shill.

Panera’s moderately caffeinated lemonade was loosely associated with 2 deaths before it was taken off market. This article alone has 4 examples of ChatGPT encouraging young people to commit suicide, and OpenAI’s own public stats estimate over a million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT each week.

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

In my industry, I am bombarded daily with articles, white papers, events and vendor pitches all telling me that I “must” incorporate AI into everything and that its forthcoming dominance is inevitable. Might start responding by simply providing a link to this article.

**Thunderstorm Asthma Alert** Attention: The Vic. Department of Health has issued a MODERATE Epidemic Thunderstorm Asthma Risk for some weather districts. For current warnings and advice visit: www.health.vic.gov.au/environmenta...

"It's part of a fascist project to offload the work of thinking... If we can offload that cognitive work, it's far too easy to become reflexive and hateful, while having a robot cheerleader telling you that you were right about everything all along.”

"Grief is not over once the body is neatly disposed of, the rubble of the house has been taken away in dumpsters, the final fit on the prosthesis is done, the law is passed and withstands legal challenges, or when the permanent peace is brokered."

Emerging translators! The Stevns Translation Prize 2026 is now open. This year’s prize focuses on Vietnamese, and the selected title is Bảo Tàng Lông [Museum of Hair] by Maik Cây. More info and dates:https://www.catranslation.org/books/stevns-prize/?mc_cid=cfb180f0cc&mc_eid=b3ce6d8578