#pennedpossibilities 1017 Reveal a source of misery for your MC. Oracle (Not the one in Delphi, the company. It's something of a killer acquisitor)

#writerscoffeeclub 5/17. If you work exclusively digitally, could you work by hand? I'm nominally digital, but I actually use three different media. The primary thing is the digital one, a quite large screen plugged into my laptop. Things I refer to a lot (email, bluetooth control) sit on the […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/116584415636701760 At least one manufacturer noticed this some years back. @oxidecomputer@/hachyderm.io saw it as a risk, and wrote their own minimalist boot and a service processor that replaces the "let's throw a random program into ring 3" approach of […]

The biggest tragedy is the difference between what we could be and what we are. - A programmer when I should have been a writer - A poor person in a country that, even in the day, could send you to university. (I was in Canada. They did send me to university. Other places? Not so)

#writerscoffeeclub 13th May 2026. Follow-up: if writing was not your "thing," what would your "thing" be? Programmming: teaching a realy fast literalist how to get a desired result.

#writerscoffeeclub 12th May 2026. If not in your current format, in what format would you write? I write technical books of normal size. A friend suggested I try novella-sized ones. He has one that's Kobo-only and said it's a lot denser (:-))

Anyone hiring? My work told me they will not be giving me a job after my apprenticeship (as a Developer) ends in the summer. I am skilled in DevOps and have great joy in organising things (from confluence spaces to events.. I do it all). I have a permit for carrying weaponised autism in problem […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@rabbleca/116539616232590814 We're buying up the parts and deleting the tolls as fast as the contracts and the owners allow. For example, In March 2025 AtkinsRéalis (formerly SNC-Lavalin) sold its stake to the CPP Investment Board It was a expensive mistake to […]

#writerscoffeeclub May 8: What experience can you identify as having made you the writer you are today?

“War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morphing into a hereditary aristocracy. So, what to do in a war one […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Writers’ Coffee Club for 3rd May 2026 Do you write your works localised to the setting or to your background? One of my non-fiction works is set in and is specific to North America. My first book was very unlocalised, and was translated into French, German, Polish and something I don't even […]

Willow Ptarmigan in Toronto , courtesy of Nehan Fernandes. Down from its subarctic home for the warm weather

#writerscoffeeclub 5/2. Have you ever written a character making one decision, only to later revise them choosing otherwise? Yes. My MC had a setback and was told to "live with it". He tried, but eventually was so dispirited that he rebelled against it entirely.

RE: https://scicomm.xyz/@unchartedworlds/116498452362383599 for Canada, too. We used to have something weaker, but the Conservative/Reform party reduced the amount to zero

#writerscoffeeclub 5/1. Workers' Day: What can we do to support and protect other writers, not only now, but in the future as well? I joined TWUC, the Writers' Union of Canada

#writerscoffeeclub - 30 Apr. How was this month for you, in terms of writing? Pretty good: I wrote a short story to sanity-check an idea for a fifth book (I'm still pitching my fourth (:-)) and it slowly transmigrated into a comedy. I can't *just* write boring nerd!

#writerscoffeeclub 29 Apr: Share the best sentence you wrote this month. A particular brand of disk drive would knock off in the middle of the day, go get a cup of tea and then come back and start doing work again.

"…a damning new study could put #ai companies on the defensive. In it, #stanford and #yale researchers found compelling evidence that #aimodels are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3 […]

#writerscoffeeclub Day 26 – Recommend a non-fiction book on writing. The Language Wars, a History of "Proper" English. Henry Hitchings, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-language-wars-2

#wordweavers Apr 26: How "high maintenance" is your MC? In my one fiction story, Arthur is excitable, but also patient. He's pretty low-maintenance

For people in Canada: The current Ontario government, under Mr Ford, is taking an active public park to put up a parking lot. There's a song about that. And a petition at https://www.mayoroliviachow.ca/hands_off to tell him to stop it.

#writerscoffeeclub April 25 - Share your current biggest creative frustration. Oddly, rain and snow. I like to work in the morning and late afternoon, so in between, I want to go for a walk. Let the stress out. This winter? Much warmer, so less snow, more freezing rain and more ordinary rain […]

#writerscoffeeclub Apr 20: What have you tried to immortalize in your writing? I write non-fiction, so it's the value and/or coolness of my subject matter.

#writerscoffeeclub 18th Apr 2026. Does your writing ever get away from you? Yup. Grabbed me by the throat yesterday and said "put this in!"

eBay only gives me one (1) minute to read their emails, and after that spams me with a complaint.

Dis anyone following me get a post from @leaflessca.wordpress.com entitled "Too Good to be True"? Leafless is my blog: do you get "it's" postings? https://hachyderm.io/@[email protected]/116388766830977900

#writerscoffeeclub, April 12: How does being a writer influence your life outside of the work? The other way around. Back when I was (monomaniacally) nerding, writing influenced my work by tempting me to describe things in short internal posts. Those triggered suggestions and corrections from […]

Ha! Check My Ads has a lovely cover this month. https://api.neonemails.com/emails/tracking/click-link/vw_NWJH43GYz520qqkfSVS32CeopPkoe4cejFdimIA4=/0GYTsxNVv6WPj152vMOBoXGcj_gM7Yht40sxkTrgHpY= Note the URL (;-))

@brendangregg I've written a performance book, "Performance for the Desperate" forthcoming from No Starch Press. I'd like to reproduce the contents of Figure 4 (below) from "The Flame Graph" at https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927299.2927301#F4 […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

#writerscoffeeclub 7 Apr Do you combine poetic fragments and prose paragraphs in your work? Hmmn, I wonder if I can quote Vogon Poetry in an otherwise non-fiction book? Oh freddled gruntbuggly, Thy micturations are to me, (with big yawning) As plurdled gabbleblotchits, On a lurgid bee,

#writerscoffeeclub 6-April Do the plots or characters in your work converge towards a single point? The themes and/or threads in my non-fiction *better* converge before the end (:-))

#pennedpossibilities 975.1 — Author/Artist POV: Sometimes we end up In the Zone. Do you work until you drop? Or to a stopping point? Can you do anything but sleep afterwards? I'm a computer nerd, so flow state is important to me when I'm doing anything non-routine, meaning writing. So I do get […]

#writerscoffeeclub Apr 2: Visual presentation: how do white space and typography become meaningful elements of literary form? In non-fiction, typography for code or examples can be jarring, and illustrations can get into the way.

RE: https://xoxo.zone/@scruss/116329234909169595 Looking at the sites sold to, for example, my dentist, they seem to be written to maximize costs to the purchaser, and minimize usefulness to the patient. They're pre-enshittified, because they have a captive audience and moats preventing […]

#writerscoffeeclub 1 April: What arrangement of plots do you have? No plot? Only one? A main plot and a side plot? Something else? Plots? We don't need no steenking plots! I'm writing non-fiction: I need themes, and not too many of them. Plus a way to distinguish them, so I don't befuddle the […]

@tod I same across this BC case recently. If you're not aware of it, you might want to reach out to the midwifes, and maybe help. A U.K.-trained midwife who completed UBC’s bridging program says she is giving up on staying in B.C. after IRCC denied her work permit for a second time, first over […]

@jeffmcneill That was unkind. I recommend providing information to the effect that the speaker is wrong. That will at least help convince the listeners, if not necessarily the speaker.

#writerscoffeeclub Mar 31 - What are we celebrating regarding your writing this month? First maintenance change in my pro-bono project. It's a "living document" like a looseleaf ... you'll notice my blog is at leafless.ca (:-))

RE: https://mastodon.social/@hootalex/116319659886471802 Note the Osprey turn the fish around head-first, for streamlining purposes

#writerscoffeeclub 30 March: What got in the way of your writing this month? Birds. No, not pigeon droppings on my keyboard, migrating birds. Just yesterday we had a Western Grebe, a bazillion Pintails and an Eurasian Widgeon. A nice day out in the spring weather, chatting with other birders […]

RE: https://chaos.social/@Toasterson/116314504107079961 Holy cow! The technique would utterly work in RISC-V. And it would probably solve the speculation-bug problem of existing systems. See https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2018/05/23/how-to-go-fast-without-speculating-maybe-perhaps/

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@Paulatics/116312792144303291 Daniele Smith has written 9 racist and/or useless questions, to put to Albertans as a referendum. Can you say "push poll"?

#writerscoffeeclub 3/29. Share one of your writing milestones. My first editor changed jobs and started to have chest pains, about two chapters in. So the techie had to pick up the load

#writerscoffeeclub 3/28. Do you ever sacrifice blunt clarity for prose that flows well? No, but I struggle at being both succinct and correct

#writerscoffeeclub 26 March 2026 —How much of a break or hiatus do you take between works? Overlap, so I take random hiatii when my brain gets tired (:-))

In the get people Fedi-hired category, my department is looking to hire some "full stack" people in a research group. I think we're a nice place to work in general, but then I would, I've been here for a long time. Interested parties can see […]

Ice jails Canadians. Have a peek at Snopes , "What we know about Canadian mother, daughter being detained by ..." from 23 Mar 2026 if you're doubtful. https://www.progresstoronto.ca/keep-ice-out?mc_cid=7c2cc3d36a&mc_eid=abef42f240#petition Keep them out of Toronto during the World Cup

I have been ever-so-vaguely interested in "Resist and Unsubscribe" until I listened to a talk on Pivot, in Minneapolis. Turns out it's not something like "run away from the bad companies, use free software". Instead, it's *economically target* tech companies and firms that enable ICE. Their […]