The Goodreads Choice Awards are upon us & I'm honestly really staggered & thrilled to see THE RIVER HAS ROOTS made it into the first round of Fantasy picks! It's in tremendous company, & y'all should go vote for your faves if you're so inclined! The first round runs from Nov 11 - 23.

I will volunteer to frog-march Bill Clinton to jail myself to get justice for his victims and the victims of every other powerful person in that conspiracy

Seeing someone say "Yes, prosecute Bill Clinton too" in reference to the files, and people are still thinking that's some deterrent? If it will make you feel better, you can put him in jail first. Then all the rest of them. 🤷‍♂️

Release the documents because the victims have been demanding this for years. That should really be the bottom line here. RELEASE ALL OF THE DOCUMENTS (including photos and videos)

The idea that sexual abuse is part of “private” life instead of a public crisis has done incalculable damage. Anti-rape activists have to fight to even make it possible to expose sexual abuse as a wrongdoing in public without being silenced and undermined. That fight is far from won

I know those terrible consultants didn't like the insults and the talk about how weird and evil the republican party is, but genuinely we all have to be extremely loud about how fucked up this!! bc they are going to try (are already trying!) and normalize it

Okay, so, we’re all going to have to agree that it’s wrong to have sex with children. Like, if you don’t agree with me inside your own head, you should keep that inside until you tell a therapist. Also, people who defend pedophiles can not be trusted with your children. At all. AT ALL. EVERRRRRRRRR.

The strike is not about whether or not you approve of Starbucks coffee. It's about the workers, who like all workers deserve equitable treatment and fair pay. That is the issue. Why bring up your personal feelings about the coffee? Nobody in this conversation cares. Start another thread about it.

Because this is the world we live in--I have no problem with people who never drink Starbucks or dislike their coffee. I myself pretty much only ever drink it in airports. You enjoy whatever hot drinks you like! Be a snob about what you drink, no worries!

RE starbucks picket line--the relevant detail is "picket line, do not cross." Pass that along. Proclaiming that you are in no danger of doing so because you are too aesthetically pure to let Starbucks coffee pass your lips is...unhelpful and does not give the impression you perhaps imagine it does.

This is a useful thread about the policies behind a three day suspension of a well known poster.

Of all the potential moderation policies a site needs to have, the violent rhetoric one is consistently the one that causes the most uproar, because people will almost never agree that two posts are equivalent if they are directed at two different targets, even if the words are identical.

There's also the issue of people using quotes, paraphrases, indirect references, and implications, where both they and their audience know exactly what they mean (and the moderators do as well) but the exact phrasing is right on the line of the policy as written.

It's even more complicated because users will phrase things to work around what they perceive is the line -- and sometimes they're correct where they think the line is, and sometimes they aren't.

But even without that, the violent rhetoric policy is a fucking bitch to create and apply consistently. It often comes down to single words in a post: "I will" may be a violation while "I would" might not be, etc.

When you are a small social media site getting the same letter as Meta, Google, and TikTok, that's a sign that you're under a degree of scrutiny that is quite frankly terrifying, especially in this current climate!

It likely does not help that Bluesky was one of the six social media sites that got the letter from Clay Higgins, chair of the law enforcement subcommittee of the House oversight committee, about violent rhetoric after Charlie Kirk's death: clayhiggins.house.gov/2025/09/15/h...

Bluesky used to use a much less stringent threshold for removing violent rhetoric than they do today, and it changed to the current more-stringent policy early on, when a large number of users objected to hyperbolic violent rhetoric used against a prominent poster that was not moderated.

Violent rhetoric is not only strongly embedded in our cultural expression, it is an extremely well-known phenomenon that people consistently rate violent rhetoric used against them and people they like as significantly more severe than violent rhetoric used against people they dislike.

There is a very good reason why the thing I say most consistently about situations like this is "the violent rhetoric policy is my least favorite policy to write and enforce, and the policy that creates the most upheaval among the userbase when it is applied"!

If the Biden administration had sent federal agents to do a law enforcement operation 10X milder in a white suburban neighborhood in order to apprehend a serial pedophile and violent domestic abuser who happened to be a white Christian pastor, the MAGA crew would have reduced the country to rubble.

a “Space Force”, if you will

we need a department of kerning

I simply refuse to accept that police ever have to look like this. this is just pure cosplay. it should be illegal for cops to be dressed like soldiers going to war.

New story this morning! The Crow's Second Tale in @bcsmagazine.bsky.social ! www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-... This is one of my stories that is 100% not autobiographical except the part that is, which is that I tell stories to crows too, just in case.

obviously horrible things are happening already, but that's not a good reason to rush to push more horrible things. esp. when those things include voting changes which could effectively make the gop impossible to remove.

I think "we want the gop to be forced to do every bad thing immediately" is...a really bad idea if you focus less on strategy and more on people who are actually going to be harmed. people will die. people will effectively be tortured. 1

I mean Megyn Kelly seems like exactly the right spokesperson for the ACTUALLY IT’S EPHEBOPHILIA movement. Shitty people, shitty values, shitty culture.

If only someone could have foreseen this...

NEW: Trump says America needs more foreign workers. His company requested a record 184 of them for 2025. me, for @Forbes 1/

I'm told B&N and Bookshop may price-match? I'll check back later. Although right now, this pneumonia'd up writer needs to conk out and sleep. I hope my book brings a little weird joy to some folks today!

Yooo! Someone You Can Build A Nest In was picked as a Kindle Gold Box Deal! For today only, get it for just $4.99. A shapeshifting monster *accidentally* falls in love with the woman who's hunting her. We've all been there, right?

🚨HAPPY EXPLODING WHALE DAY🚨 1/n www.oregonlive.com/travel/2024/...

If I’m talking about dinner or TV or the dog, I probably don’t want a bleak joke about the state of the world. I promise: I know about it.

I want to very gently say something, and I hope nobody will be mad: If somebody on the internet says something that is NOT about politics and NOT about how terrible everything is, it’s a kindness not to reflexively make a comment (in jest or not) that brings it back to those things.

see the right got into classics just in order to learn what hebe and ephebe meant.

This is one of the weirder bits of fundamentalist rhetoric. There's an school of thought in several churches including some old Catholic ones that women are supposed to suffer because of Eve. I am not telling you it makes sense. I am telling you he's parroting a line that is a giant warning sign

Btwn this and the fedora kid from the Louvre, potential YA pitches are having a helluva week

In light of today’s email dump, I will say I have at various times found my way into online discussion spaces containing a fair number of important and powerful men, and it is the greatest cure to imposter syndrome that humanity has yet devised

AOC: "It is unconscionable that what we are debating right now is legislation that will give 8 senators over $1 million a piece & we're robbing people of their food assistance & healthcare to pay for it. How can we vote to enrich ourselves by stealing from the American people?"

Wasn’t expecting the Epstein scandal to blow up the New York Times but sure, why not

BREAKING: Rep. Adelita Grijalva signs the Epstein discharge petition, serving as the 218th vote to force the bill to the floor for a full vote of the House.

No more Black or trans staffers. No politics of any kind. The cowardice of mainstream media isn't just insulting, it's *boring.* Now TV is just like any other beauty rag. Why not just kill it quickly? Why the slow-motion pretense?

Would be helpful if the journalists who fawn over #ElonMusk would follow his actions supporting fascism at the expense of democracies around the world. AfD are literal unabashed Nazis. He appeared virtually at a campaign rally. h/t @notesfrompoland.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/note...

Watching Death by Lightning and seeing the many bearded men led me to this fascinating article about the "great Victorian beard craze..." influenced by figures like Charles Dickens and events like the Crimean War (a backdrop also for the new Frankenstein film). www.bbc.com/news/magazin...

August 2025 @teenvogue.com: We're honored to get this award for "reporting on our democracy." November 2025 @teenvogue.com: We have fired all of our staffers who report on our democracy.

On August 12, 1971, 16-year-old me mailed the first story I ever wrote off on its first submission to my dream market, F&SF. My tale was quickly rejected. On July 17th, 2025, I finally sold a story to that magazine. Here's why I felt I had to withdraw that story. www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/20...

they're all treating it like some sort of stunt. there are survivors waiting and hoping for justice as these scumbags play peek a boo with possible evidence of horrific sexual violence.

can't overemphasize how cynical this is. he could have switched his vote anytime over the past months and made an actual difference; instead he waited till the exact moment he became irrelevant.

Even as a 14-year-old, I read Harlequin romances featuring teenage girls as young at 16 and adult men up to age 40 and was repulsed. But then, I'd already been accosted by a man wanting to show me his dick at 13, and touched inappropriately (and highly confused thereby) by a family friend at age 9.