Writers & authors, with all the nonstop scams going around, you should be aware of @victoriastrauss.com's heroic work at Writer Beware. It's sponsored by SFF by has great info for writers of all genres.

PLEASE REPOST AND SHARE WIDELY!!! We need your help once again, you magnificent Space Unicorns! Behold the Uncanny Magazine Year 13: The Space Unicorn Believes in YOU! Kickstarter!!! buff.ly/Gab1zWu

Saw this ad for a goat on Facebook. It’s perhaps the greatest advert I’ve ever read. It’s just superb.

Re: cheap book covers, I have to say that some of my most-complimented book covers (like Touchstones and A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience) have been premades that cost me less than $100 on sale and did NOT use AI. If you can't afford to commission a bespoke cover, AI is still not the right answer.

Literacy is not an individual skill. Literacy is a public infrastructure.

You're going to get left behind if you don't use Al." Leave me then. Leave me with my critical thinking skills, my ability to read and write long- form, and books without needing Al summaries.

Love this quote. “while she was still arriving.’

Hills I Will Die On, By Marissa Lingen Age Almost 48: Social science fiction is science fiction.

Purrberus

Gif that describes you as a writer

I love otters.

@adapalmer.bsky.social I just started book 1 of the Terra Ignota series. I am *RIVETED*.

Once again : What women on the left already knew before the Epstein files + Platner is that men can imagine a world of class consciousness (Chomsky), a universe more expansive than ever before known (Hawking), a world where you can live forever (Attia) but not a world where women are fully human.

I just responded with the post below in a thread which I encourage you to read in its entirety. Let me expand on the sentiment. /1

here's the thing about artists, it's not a job, it's not a hobby, and it's not a lifestyle. it's a vocation. the flip side of that? it's a compulsion and an obsession.

My feeling about this is fuck it, I'm going to use them when I want to, and if someone accuses me of using "AI" because of it, then I will tell them to go fuck themselves, and that, they can be assured, is not "AI" generated

Just... wow.

I have asked the exact same thing.

I filled out a "suspicious behaviour" report, then blocked the Patreon account in question. Bad enough we have to deal with the slop thievery elsewhere, but we also have to see these grifters charging for the what they stole from us? Ugh.

And to be crystal clear: if you present as "your work" a story generated out of a chatbot, I consider you a scammer. You're claiming to have created a text you did not write. An idea is not a story. A prompt is not a story. Art is born of a thousand choices, and you made almost none. Except to lie.

Yes but... HOW do you use AI checkers, and which ones? Because AI WAS LITERALLY TRAINED ON STUFF I WROTE OVER TWO DECADES and can now regurgitate things written "in my style" - how then do I prove a negative, that I have never used and will never use AI in my writing... /1

The first programmer was neither Ada Lovelace nor Charles Babbage but the French weaver and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard, who was born 7 July 1753 #histsci #histtech thonyc.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/c...

@bluejo.eurosky.social I don't know how long it took you to write "my real children" but I just inhaled it whole at one sitting, in an afternoon. As always, thank you.

...for anyone who might be interested in taking a look, today's post on my Patreon is a public one, open to everyone. Mosey on past if you feel so inclined (and if you like what you're seeing consider subscribing...) www.Patreon.com/AlmaAlexander

My latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com #heatwave

Timeline cleanser.

‘We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.’ ~ Ursula K. Le Guin. 🖼️ Moonlight in the Forest, Joséphine Bowes.

Well, happy birthday to me I guess...

And the same for authors and books

For those who pooh pooh the effects that fireworks booms have on pets... I have just seen a perfectly lovely Boxer/mutt, friendly and full of playful puppyish glee, reduced to a quivering tail-tucked-along- his-stomach pile of jelly, shaking so hard that his teeth were chattering. People. Don't.

...so now it isn't even just "vote for the lesser of two evils", it's just straight up hey let's just VOTE EVIL and be done with it?!

Dear Washingtonians (the state, not the city - DC, you're on your own what with the TONS of fireworks i have read are about to be blown up there) please, likewise.

Um… #Caturday #CaturdogDay

...aaaand. there's a distant boom boom somewhere. Fireworks are strictly verboten in our heavily wooded area but somehow every year some yobbo manages to set off a few close enough for me to be in hearing range of it. I hate this. My more high-strung cat doesn't like it much either. Feh.

I finally got around to reading John Warner's More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. It's a fabulous book and I collected some of my thoughts about it over at the Treehouse Writers blog. treehousewriters.com/wp53/2026/07...

Somebody just called in a bomb threat at my local zoo. I may be feeling some particular rage about this.

[On my second bowl of popcorn] Who knew church squabbles would be this riveting IRL???

What could possibly go wrong? Seems like fodder for a good science fiction movie.

I just want us all to be able to afford bread to eat during the circus

I'm sputtering right now cuz this, and the initial thread, led me to ask "how is one supposed to guess what words you know?" THEN I realized: this is Iowa Writer's Workshop's long, greasy fingers again. By knowing what kinds of things a member of the dominant culture knows, & writing only for them.

It's not easy being meme-d. #Oh-Gee-I-See-Algae 👀

Excellent advice

The stealth attack story is kinda sorta done. We'll, TOLD, anyway. Tweaks will no doubt be forthcoming as always, but now it moves to the back burner for its final simmer. Also, suggestions of markets for a 14,000 word tale will be gratefully accepted. I have two in mind, but if there are more...

TFW you realize that GenAI is destroying the habitats of the animals it generates videos of.

Happy #Caturday. These two were waiting for me to get to bed already last night (not quite like this it's an older but illustrative picture... and i didn't have the phone camera with me last night...) - I was WRITING LATE, and it was way past my bedtime (and theirs...)

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social's comic on this phenomenon is neerly 9 years old and getting truer every day. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

I sat down to add a few words to the Story That Won't End last night. Ended up adding nearly 2000 words. It is now officially a novelette. Sigh.

...okay. I am having a bit of a tussle with this thing i am working on. I need to get it done so I can go back to work on a CONTRACTED project. But the stealth thing just won't let go until it's good and ready. Added a number of words tonight. Please god let it mean it's thinking about the end...

In 2025 data centers used 448T watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries. Don’t use AI for simple things that you used to do without it. “You can generate a chocolate chip cookie recipe with Claude, or you can open a damn book. Like, those still exist.” 🌎 apnews.com/article/ai-e...

Note from my notebook (2017). Still true.