May 29-31st! Letsgooo

This is the joy they would deprive us of.

Fantastic 1st day at #IcelandNoir, the Rescue Team panel was worth the ticket price alone! Eliza Reid, fab pair @hildur.bsky.social & @alexanderdan.bsky.social, and also finally got to meet the lovely @villimeymist.bsky.social! At Kjarval also got to fangirl at Kalmann author Joachim Schmidt 🤩

Reminder: If you use generative AI for *any of your writing tasks* you are a Slopper not a writer and should be ashamed of yourself. The end.

ah, yes. the anti-climax of finishing a draft. then you get to rewriting or editing or proofreading (which all then have their own anti-climax) until the finished thing is done and ready and by then you're so done with it. which is great motivation to work on a new thing and do it all over again.

Went to a coffee shop to write for a change of scenery and one hour in I became suddenly so self-aware that I was writing in public. When is writing in public not performative? STOP PERCEIVING ME

Ekki gera handritshöfundum þann greiða að eyða allri orku og fókus á hlutverk smjörkúksins. Horfum á leikritið í heild sinni. Það snýst um að skipta í fylkingar, venjuvæða hatur og fá hrætt fólk sem veit ekki betur til að setja X á réttan stað. Móta jarðveginn fyrir öfgahægrið.

want to read something so specific but still too hard for me to explain concisely so badly that it probably means it's just something I have to write

We are not trivialising LLMs. Copyright theft is not trivial. Environmental damage is not trivial. Unreliability is not trivial. Risk to human cognition is not trivial. Ignoring consent when shoving it into every fucking thing while making us pay our hard-earned money for it is not trivial.

Fountain pens are nice. But most often only on good paper. Good paper is good for everything. A Blackwing pencil or a Cinnamoroll gel pen will write beautifully on good paper, just like a Sailor 1911 will. Paper, paper. I love paper. #fountainpens

Non-Icelandic speakers, you’d better pray you get this book by @hildur.bsky.social in translation sooner rather than later. It made me tear up a dozen times at least.

I accidentally opened what was once known as the bird site and thought it was bluesky and just couldn’t figure out why it had become so incomprehensibly and unbelievably shit in just a few days or so

Just a reminder that generative AI is theft of labor and intellectual property, uses vast amounts of energy/ water, provides at best mediocre results (if not outright lies or misinformation), actually affects your ability to think over time (mind duh), and is in general a really fucking bad idea.

Ooh waa we're just big rich babies our industry is dying because of tech taking over so obviously only tech can save us with their anti-art superweapons everyone's doing it stop hating us for it waa. Pathetic.

nature is healing

Image from RÚV (Ragnar Visage) of the eruption that just started, again, in Grindavík. It lies right through the defensive walls and the new fissure is 500 meters from the nearest house in town.

jupiter wishes you a very happy trans day of visibility 🏳️‍⚧️

”Miyazaki said, 'I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.' He also said, 'I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.'"

You should listen to this book!

Audiobook for THE STORM BENEATH A MIDNIGHT SUN is out today! Icelandic weird fantasy ft: Centipede locomotives, chipper brain cylinders, flying demon-fortresses, raven-people, volcanic eruptions, excavating an ancient god-thing, and, of course, the high-stakes drama that is the fishing industry.

Um daginn / The other day

Just another night (I cannot emphasize that enough).

there is no "defensible use case" for chatgpt. do your own work and use your own brain or fuck off

Neil Gaiman is a monster. His statement is idiotic and delusional. Sorry Neil, I don’t think anyone believes that 9 (or 14?) women are lying about you, and it’s cute that you think your “readers” will stick with you after this. Several of the people you assaulted were your readers.

It was your eyes that saw the colour, your brain that interpreted it, your heart that felt its beauty. You didn't love it because they're the Blue Artist, but because you were always a person who could love the sky. 4/

I’m on the third book of the Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb and I know a lot of people know how great these books are and they are huge but I absolutely love reading them and want everyone to experience them there are so many good things here and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series. Pls read.

Reading this, it goes beyond the pale and then just keeps on going and going and going.

People complain a lot about the influence of #Tolkien on fantasy, but I do think it’s fascinating a series about PTSD is so influential, and that ineffable sadness of a world long gone is such an interesting starting place for the modern genre #booksky #writingcommunity

People took all the wrong lessons from Tolkien (fantasy race determinism, long-prophesied return of the king, lore coming out your ears) and none of the right ones (subversive heroes who succeed through failure, overwhelming grief at the passing of an enchanted world).

This is not an LLM—so it doesn't have language-related issues—but it's important to be clear that it is very much part of (and in fact represents a new spearhead into) the neoliberal drive to privatize essential public services, and represents tremendously harmful outcomes globally

if your article or newsletter or whatever has an AI image at the top of it, even if it's there ironically or to make a point or whatever, i'm just going to assume the stuff you wrote is slop too. your name right on the slop list forever. buddy boy??? you've been slopped

I have really nice, new black ink, as well as some G and maru nibs I got in Japan ages ago. However, I can't bring myself to actually use them because I suck at drawing. There is a life lesson in there somewhere.

Can we please make the term "Powered by AI" a kiss of death? Jeez.

These are the Drunk Men of the Heynesbók manuscript (16th century book of law). We know they're drunk because the man on the left says, "Here I lie, drunk," and the man on the right says, "Here I sit, asleep and drunk." They have nothing to do with the text above.

I don't believe in "good reading" & "bad reading". Comic books, graphic novels, manga, picture books, joke books, sports reports, all kinds of poetry & prose: it's all reading, and it's all good! Let kids read for pleasure - and they'll be readers FOREVER! #reading #literacy (Art: Bill Watterson)

Humans will human.

Hosting an “election cafe” is a big tradition in Iceland, where the political parties host an open house where you can drop by to get a waffle and coffee. For the first time ever, the election cafe for Void and Invalid voters (perhaps the most ignored demographic) is held at Tjarnabíó theater.

Fixing this immediately

"The Last War."

I guess English has always loved smashing its words together. Now stop this nonsense and start calling them what they truly are: Grýla's candles. (Or maybe not literally translate from Icelandic and call them trollcandles or hagcandles.)

Annoyingly, turning this off seems to disable the autosave function, too. Good thing I have a ctrl+s twitch hard wired into my typing hands.

Yellow weather warning and the wind is howling and I don't want to go outside but I must.

Goodreads is just bad and Storygraph looks to be much better!

doomscrolling again and I need to stop

This is your reminder that writing is a political action.