Just got what I would call the most epic ChatGPT based shitty author marketing scam email yet, like this is so clearly written by a chatbot that was fed my back cover copy it is WILD

You'd think that by now every horrible thing that has happened would reveal if anyone you've known a long time has a really deeply held and kinda evil belief, but still, in 2025, something happens and someone I thought was a decent human will be like "yeah I don't think food is a human right"

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”

Morning.

I remember falling in love with Rumours (and Fleetwood Mac in general) when I was like 15 or 16 and feeling like I was from another planet. This was 30+ years ago. Yeah, every generation loves Rumours. It's a perfect work of art.

I got very lucky with timing, an unsustainably large amount of extra writing work at the same time the housing market was at its last reasonable state, and I sometimes joke that I will die in this house, but I'm not really joking. They truly do not want anyone to ever own a home again.

Ah, I see I'm now getting sponsored ads by people trying to get authors to opt out of the Anthropic lawsuit to "get even more money." I knew they were out there but holy shit man, a sponsored social media ad? Are they using the same marketing as HIMS?

Post you from a different era. Late 90s. Headshot from... I think a performance of Into the Woods? I guess in a Dylan McKay era or something. I was usually more grunge than this back then but most photos of me before then were lost in a house fire.

I feel like we have the opportunity to turn David Lynch's quote into this moment's "Keep Calm and Carry On" and it's a far better rallying cry too.

I really don't feel like sharing a clickbait article but really, it's never a serious take if someone asks "are we making too much [art]?" Nah dude, that's the thing about art, you just keep making it cos it brings you joy and none of us are so unique that nobody else likes what you're creating.

Click bait headline aside. The simple answer is: no. And the more complicated answer is: also no. AP as an art form is at an early stage, and for those of us toying with form/presentation in this bonkers medium, I’d welcome thousands more. Make weird things and tell stories.

Cached US Kindle giveaway: 10 copies of The Uplift War (The Uplift Saga Book 3) by @davidbrinks.bsky.social, which I *have* and *have read* and *have enjoyed*, and in fact have given out before. This is my favorite of the Uplift books! #KindleBookGiveaway

Remember when Spider-Man 2 for PS5 came out and people realized the NPCs on the street all had dialogue with each other that you could eavesdrop on and then players in. A. SPIDER-MAN. Game. Took time out of swinging above the city just to follow people around on the street and listen to them? 🤔

This Outer Worlds 2 clip was posted on Reddit with the note: "This tiny moment is my favorite in the entire game, a guard NPC is singing the radio songs to himself." I worked on that mission so heard that clip 100x and it was never not funny to me. Thanks Andrew Kishino for the great performance!

And the man who masterminded those cuts is set to become the world's first trillionaire.

"World's first potential trillionaire has killed 600,000 people, including 400,000 children" is the only headline that anyone should ever read about Elon Musk

Uninstall Grammarly NOW. They've partnered with an AI company and actively scrape your writing to train its models.

Cached US Kindle giveaway: 6 copies of Feedback (Newsflesh Novels Book 4) by Mira Grant, whom most people know by her alter-ego @seananmcguire.bsky.social. I think we really want this book to sell a lot of copies. #KindleBookGiveaway

They LITERALLY campaigned on making children go hungry as a political statement and they can't figure out why they lost.

Watching this, particularly when red face-plants, and imagining people wondering why their Amazon packages start to arrive smashed to bits as the company finds any way they can to not pay humans a living wage and decides to use something like these instead.

Curse of Strahd Deep Dive Episode 9: Crypt Walk. Castle Ravenloft Final Level: Exit here for Entombed Enemies, Plot Devices, Bat Guano, and Bridal Returns. Trust me, you don't want to talk to customer service. critical-lit.simplecast.com/episodes/cri...

Last night I went to the Puca Festival in Trim, Ireland. It's all fun and games until someone unleashes a giant demonic hare.

Things I didn’t have on my bingo card today: sent a link to one of the novellas to a couple of other creatives and someone asked “but why is your author photo so sexy?” Not on purpose! My old publisher picked that one!

“the techno-fascist assault on universities increasingly comes from within. (…) Far from offering genuine solutions, these technologies exacerbate social injustices and corrode the ecosystem of human knowledge.” www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a... Open access link: archive.ph/ZHGCm

it's utterly wild how the Heritage Foundation president talks about other people if you found a guy talking like this outside, you'd probably call the cops

US citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents children would be coming to get bus, lawyers say

Best 3 minutes you will spend on the internet today.

Between 2012 and 2024, nearly every person I lived with worked in hospitality or culinary. And yet, every single one of us had to sneak food out of our work places. Getting caught taking the food we made home, rather than letting it get trashed, was one of the fastest ways to get fired.

I always thought the Venn diagram between ren faires and D&D players was a perfect circle, but at a faire a few weeks back, while wearing a shirt with polyhedral dice on it, two younger women asked I'm a math teacher, cos they always thought the dice were a math thing. This conversation haunts me.

Doing my annual November 1 tradition of seeing everyone's photos from Halloween and thinking next year I'll finish up work early enough to actually go out and do something fun. But hey I stayed in with a terrier dressed as candy corn so it wasn't that bad a night.

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

Just for fun - Blood & Bone, an Indestructibles novelette about werewolves, vampires, and the scariest of monsters, humans, is free from now til midnight on 11/1. Because Halloween! (As I'm trapped indoors here in Salem tonight.) www.amazon.com/dp/B01MDQBVM8

Multiple accounts on ICE Watch Facebook pages are reporting that agents pulled a couple out of their vehicle in Aurora, Illinois, arrested them, and then abandoned the couple’s toddler in the backseat.

So pre-orders are used to set the size of that print run. I mentioned that 5,000 to 10,000 sales gets us on the NYT list, which is a very, very good thing for a book. If we don't have a solid number of pre-orders, they won't print that many copies to begin with.

Hey everyone, here's a real simple way to disable "Super Resolution" on your channels: • YouTube Studio • Settings • Channel • Advanced settings • Uncheck "Let YouTube enhance visual quality" • Uncheck "Let YouTube enhance audio quality"

At this point I would have body slammed the fucking merc, damn the consequences. You are sleep walking into Germany 1933, Murica......

*Screams in patient safety futurism.com/neoscope/goo...

Cannot believe that a judge has to tell the fucking border patrol not to tear gas kids on Halloween. Makes me so angry I could cry.

Somehow, Adobe has created something designed to both allow companies to steal work from human actors, while also creating a technology that is rife with potential to commit fraud and harass people. If anyone in tech had spent half a semester in an ethics course...

Strange Horizons will be open to fiction submissions from Indigenous authors only on November 3rd at 9am UTC! The window will close after 500 submissions are received. More information: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no... If you sent us a story in April or June, you CANNOT submit in this window.

The aunt thing? I actually have no accurate count how many kids in my life call me "uncle" cos my huge family is very close and "2nd Cousin Matt" is ridiculous. Also one friend's child still calls me "Uncle Batman" due to a misunderstanding when they were very little and never grew out of it.

The depth of the shame of a country this wealthy and abundant allowing its people to go hungry is impossible to measure. The fact that a handful of people could fix this by paying their fair share of taxes while still remaining obscenely wealthy makes it even worse.

Pretty much everything is awful, but the dog just came into my office to tell on the cat for sleeping in his bed and indicated he'd like me to evict the cat from his bed in S's office please, and sometimes little things prove this world is worth trying to save I guess. (We failed to move the cat.)

If this isn't the most perfect encapsulation of it all, I don't know what is. Up to and including air-punching the computer.

Racists are putting out AI videos of Black women threatening to be violent if the prospect of them losing their SNAP benefits next week. It's rage bait and it's racist and it's fake

I found 17 Stephen King Easter eggs, nods, and bits of foreshadowing in It: Welcome to Derry episode 1. I will say this: even if I didn't get every single one (fairly sure I did?), I am certain that I got more than any other site I've read yet. screenrant.com/it-welcome-t...

A must-read for everyone (but highlighting for my current and ex-journalist colleagues):

Heads up: BABEL by @rfkuang.bsky.social is on US ebook sale right now for $2. I got some copies for random giveaway.

The Power Fantasy of Superman is you still have a staff job on a newspaper.

"I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear." - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Remembering the incredible work of the late great Bernie Wrightson on his birthday 🖤