#writerscoffeeclub Mar. 11: Does your work reflect your morals? How so? Writing non-fiction about things which are true, and exploring their good and evil is what I do. Writing about what is false is distinctly less appealing to me (eg, Q-anon)

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@antifaintl/116205117230201503 Of note to Canadians ...

#writerscoffeeclub March 10th—How informal is your prose? Is there a limit to informality? Conversational (I'm writing non-fiction)

I've been searching high and low for a practical guide to using LibreOffice for typesetting books, and I'm surprised there isn't much information out there, which is not a youtube video. Glad to have stumbled upon this by @lydiaconwell But reading through it I wonder why @libreoffice doesn't […]

#writerscoffeeclub March 9th: "Do you prefer to write complex, intricate plots, or more straightforward ones?" I'm writing non-fiction, but the same question applies. Sometimes a chapter depends on several other chapters, some of which want to come *after it*. I reorganize when I can (not […]

RE: https://sfba.social/@CWilbur/116185420556042216 Opportunistic greed

Who is a woman who’s made an impact on your career? #iwd26 Dr Maria Vera Corsini, who lead the languages department in Chatham and encouraged me to do an impossible task, anyway. Brigitte Eve, whose example inspired me to write my second book, since sold. #WritingCommunity

#writerscoffeeclub Mar. 7: What have you given up in order to write? Full-time nerding

#writerscoffeeclub 3/6 Is there a local writing community near you? Do you participate in it? I'm sorta non-local, so I don't know if there are groups in my geography. Are there on-line groups? I'm in Canada and write non-fiction in English.

RE: https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2026/03/05/canada-vs-section-230/ Canada vs Section 230

#writerscoffeeclub 5 March—How do you make sure you don't leave plot holes? I'm trying an experiment right now. I'm writing out the plot as a short story, in part because I hope that looking at the skeleton alone will identify things like a missing hipbone. I promise to blog the results […]

For Canadians: a petition for compulsory declaration of LLM involvement https://c.org/BBRpJCbdMZ

#writerscoffeeclub for 5th March 2026 5. How do you make sure you don’t leave plot holes? My nerd books have no plot, no characters and therefor no character development. They do have holes, which I ask mt friends to spot, quoting my father's dictum "Comments, corrections and well-flung […]

@Albatrossity For some years I've been joking that what I need is a bird-book that shows the usual view of the bird that *I* get: the stern. My wife even bought me a calendar of bird-butts in 2025 Today I was describing a diving-duck stern to her to identify, and she interrupted to say "You […]

#writerscoffeeclub 4. Share a recent experience where something just 'clicked’. I was working on a description of (real) events, and belatedly realized that one of the minor plot items was really *the* major one, why everything happened.

#writerscoffeeclub March 3: On what are you unwilling to compromise? I write about nerd things, so it's a constant tension my between being accurate but unintelligible, and being oversimplified but readable. For my readership, it's a fairly narrow range, which I don't vary from. And yes, it's […]

Danger, Danger, Will Robinson (:-)) As I mentioned before, some of the folks who provided anti-Carney ads in the last election also provided anti-Polyviere ads. Turns out one of them is a well-know American... See […]

Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/27/palantir-sues-swiss-magazine-for-accurately-reporting-that-the-swiss-government-didnt-want-palantir/ Please note that Palantir would rather that you didn't […]

@lauren If you can find something that would motivate their chief counsel, my usula response is to write them in snail-mail and make your point. I famously got an escalation from my in-house counsel at Sun Canada, and you want to *bet* I responded to it!I famously got an escalation from my […]

@mikemcquaid Look up their in-house counsel and send him a snail-mail letter. I once got an escalation for our chief counsel at Sun Canada, and you can *bet* I made it a priority.

Our American cousins propose a "SAVE" act, to keep people like married women from voting. IMHO, this is really the SLAVE act. From the Jim Crow / disenfranchisement days. Stopping Legal Americans from Voting — Ever

A petition for Canadians: stop selling Canadian armoured vehicles to ICE. https://leadnow.ca/campaigns/no-ice-pet/

Nicola Griffith (Aud Torvington books) on resistance. "3.5% of a population can force real and lasting change" https://nicolagriffith.com/2026/02/19/3-5-a-small-number-with-huge-implications/

@karlauerbach You wrote about the vendor who makes the motherboards not shipping to the US. If they'll ship to Canada, I found at least four "freight forwarders" that specialize in importing goods from China and then shipping them to the United States. I'll also volunteer, if they don't meet […]

RE: https://sfba.social/@karlauerbach/116083624108624405 1 of 3

@tod I'm writing a resource guide on fleeing Gilead, pro-bono, and would like your opinion on how to make it broadly available. No, I'm not looking for a plug! I've made the first pass through it, and now need to let the adrenaline from the writing sprint drain out (:-)), before I go back and […]

I was just reading about WWII, and found two books of topical interest, - The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, https://archive.org/details/SOE_The_Art_of_Guerrilla_Warfare_Gus - The Partisan Leader's Handbook, https://archive.org/details/SOE_Partisan_Leaders_Handbook_Gus Both are by Colonel Colin […]

Warning to players and spectators: "ICE Director Says It Will Play Key Security Role At World Cup" https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/02/10/ice-director-says-it-will-play-key-security-role-at-world-cup/

If you’re looking for something Fedi to do in Edmonton today, our very own @dawn from #CoSocialCa will be on a panel with @chad to talk about the new book from @rwg#cosocialca“Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media” Check it out here […]

@rwg Glad to see you're at York: I used to be on staff there. I'm helping a friend collect data for him to do a resource guide for moving to Canada, and I notice that the government of the day, whoever they are, whip-saws at the reins. The poor civil servants then try to keep up, all while […]

Seen on Snopes

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jzb/116046998088757541 Time to go back to decentralization, like the original internet

RE: https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/wrong-ban/ From me, not leafless

For Canadians: a petition calling for a parliamentary investigation into foreign (American) interference in our country. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details...… See more

One of our neighbours, north of Toronto. It's a Great Gey Owl, down from the Canadian Shield for the summer-like weather we're having.

RE: https://hci.social/@tod/115985618780134751 For my American friends, if you know anyone in medicine that wants to live in Canada, we have support groups popping up. See https://healthcareinfusion.org/ For Canadians, come out and help!

My fellow Canadians, if you want to be part of the USA, you can move there freely on your own. I encourage you to do so. "To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is treason," said Eby ahead of the meeting […]

For folks in Canada: a petition to remove the US from the list of "safe third countries" to be a refugee or an immigrant in […]

2025 mood continuing in 2026.

I'm watching the documentary, "Person of Interest", Season 4. Part 15 is a study of how a voice interface to search was used to provide how-to-die information to a depressed person who had asked for the number of a suicide prevention. That was found to be a study of ways to direct prospective […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/115956267436607162 As a Canadian, I strongly support this de-risking

Canada is starting to take US invasion threats seriously. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-military-models-canadian-response-to-hypothetical-american-invasion/ (the Globe and Mail is the "newspaper of record" in Canada)

More evidence that the shooting of Renee Good was unjustified: The NYT has a new video analysis of Renee Good's shooting which is careful, accurate, and clear - he walked across the path of a moving car, then leaned in and shot her with his feet well clear of […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Check My Ads 2026: still fighting the fight against Google Ads https://api.neonemails.com/emails/content/qTTew3RkcDM_if7NR0Yut_LKdychQcHUaJfC2P8MQnc=

@glynmoody You published "Walled Culture" on-line, and my publisher, O'Reilly did the same with "Using Samba". I now want to write a book for on-line distribution entitled "Fleeing to Canada, moving from Gilead to a friendly foreign country", and am looking for publishing advice. I have a […]

Holy cow! I just stumbled over nl2spec, at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.04864 to take human-written narratives and turn them into formal specs* They write "In particular, we introduce a new methodology to detect and resolve the inherent ambiguity of system requirements in natural language: we […]

RE: https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2025/12/28/bubble-memory-perchance/ A new blog post, this time about memory

Canadian company now proposes to sell armoured trucks to ICE in the 'States. A petition against it is at https://leadnow.ca/campaigns/no-ice-pet/

Courtesy of David Knopf: the detailed effect of global warming on the United States and Canada. https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/?utm_campaign=propublica-sprout&utm_content=1755777731&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Ha, Joyce caught me replacing a bench that had been broken by a falling limb