I'd believe this anecdote because I've met guys like this at conventions. People do ask (politely) about their work and they can't pitch it because what makes it special is that they are the specialest boy. They go to panels and hear queer and BIPOC writers talk about their work and think "ah ha". +

Make a Bond movie casual Live and let live

Merry Christmas!

The US bans ex-EU commissioner for trying to reign in Big Tech. F*ck Big Tech and the fascist push its making alongside the US government. The EU is still a democracy. Respect that. Like Breton himself says: “To our American friends, censorship isn’t where you think it is."

I am not getting anything done this way.

It's a whole genre it's beautiful

Character encoding is where writing and computer science meet, so let's do a deep dive.

No, there isn’t a way. There just isn’t. GenAI is poisoning the water supply of Oregon. It’s boiling inland seas.This tech, at scale, is an anti life equation, and all to spit out stolen collages of other people’s work to plug into a pipeline that has to be fixed by an underpaid real human later.

We are failing our kids

Was reading the IMDB age rating info on the new Fantastic Four movie. So... "is seated in a bathroom wearing a robe as she waits for a pregnancy test result" needed the clarification "this is non-sexual"... Who could read this and immediately go to "oh yeah, sexy times"? Am I the prude here?

Well Daniela, I'm amazed a recipe from by blog turned out yummy, since there are _zero_ recipes on my blog. I also do not find your air fryer recipe helpful for a blog post on screen time for children. But I suppose the word 'obesity' I use in said post is what drew your spam bot. Sigh.

What's that? Screenlife?

Will Arnett was on Conan and told a story about how Conan dealt with the death of his parents by accusing Jason Bateman of killing them. It’s so funny.

I've been seeing a lot of traffic on my website. It's Google crawlers. A quick test with their 'AI mode' on Google search clearly shows the problem. Those f*ckers are scraping and rephrasing my content. So, DDOS-ing my site, mangling my prose, and stealing users with my content. F*ck you, Google.

It says a lot that AI “artists” are so creatively bankrupt they think writing prompts is a difficult, arduous task. You realize coming up with a prompt is what a real artist would call “having an idea,” right? It took them weeks of sleepless nights to have some basic thoughts.

What's deeply stupid about this is it's no different, in terms of results, than just hiring an actor to play George Washington. Like, there's no effects here, it's just a Old Gym Bro with Revolution-era hair.

We are not the only ones in the house who enjoy take-out.

We celebrate Sinterklaas in the Netherlands today, so I'm too late for that, but here are some books tips for the other upcoming holidays.

"Kill your darlings" is possibly the most wildly interpreted writing advice. But it doesn't mean "get rid of the things you like", what would be the point of that? I've always read it as: "Sometimes your favorite line might have to go *for the sake of the story as a whole*."

Yesterday, the Epic Games Store decided at the last minute not to distribute the game, after having previously approved a release build. HORSES is otherwise now available on GOG, Itch, and Humble for $4.99. www.horses.wtf

I found there's a difference between being an LLM sceptic and being anti-LLM. Today, people tried to overcome my scepticism by showing LLMs work. I don't care. LLMs ruin the climate, artists, exploit people, and promote fascism. It's like being anti-gun. I know guns work, I still think they're bad.

Not a big fan of the (sometimes elitist) Dutch literary scene, but this article on the good and bad of Substack has a great quote about why you need editing. In English: "Proclaiming your own literary greatness on Substack is like sleeping with yourself and then telling everybody how good it was."

Why I think gotchas don't work in politics.

And with that, my full Elden Ring Photography Tour is now complete: www.robhainescreative.space/collections/... Any signal boosts would be much appreciated!

I was thinking about the negative frame capitalism puts on labour. Money going to shareholders is called 'profit', money going to employees is called 'costs'. While, in fact, a company without employees would fail, and a company without shareholders would do fine, or even thrive.

CNN doesn't appear to be reporting on this, but the UN climate conference couldn't reach an agreement on ending fossil fuels. That's a nice euphemism for "fossil fuel companies and their allies would rather sacrifice millions of lives and cause enormous communal costs than lose short-term profits."

A Predator movie featuring an actual predator as the main character. Well, that's new.

I dunno, buddy, maybe if it didn't encourage young folks to kill themselves, or drink all the potable water, or pollute the Infoverse with fallacies, or add glue to recipes, or be that guy who lies rather than admits a mistake, or, and this is important, buddy, or IF WE WERE GIVEN A FUCKING CHOICE!

The romantic story of two ships colliding in the night. Well, two black holes anyway. martinstellinga.com/science/sing...

Got an email from Netflix about a price hike. I think Netflix now costs more than Disney+, Prime, and Netflix used to cost together. And in return they all have less that I want to watch than ever before. So... what competing streamer can I watch the Witcher? Oh, none of them. "Capitalism" my ass.

About a year ago, I backed @brandonsanderson.com's Cosmere RPG, because I love the Stormlight Archives, RPGs, and painting miniatures. And today stuff arrived! Cheer! Now I just need more shelf space and time to paint a gazillion miniatures.

Most large companies use vpns..,

Never forget that a Democratic US Attorney’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz for downloading JSTOR PDFs contributed to his suicide but AI firms’ decision to download everything ever will be a justification for hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts and legal exemptions.

For some reason, some web crawler decided that I speak German and would love large shipments of electric bicycles (up to 14.000 per year). It turns out, I don't. Even if I had, the abysmal e-mail would put me off. Or is it some kind of phishing mail or scam? The wonders of the Internet never cease.

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

Magic and science fiction, what's not to like?

With the elections in the Netherlands over, it’s wrangling-for-a-coalition time. Right-wing parties are crowing they can’t work with the left. I guess it _is_ annoying when you want to destroy the climate for profit, criminalize refugees, and do away with democracy, and people won’t let you.

It is absolutely AMAZING how many PROFESSIONALS are STUMBLING ACROSS my books on Amazon and being INSULTED and ANGRY at how few reviews they have! And each of these individuals leads a COMMUNITY of THOUSANDS of voracious READERS who can't wait to help me! Truly, these are special times.

Related: my SW fan theory is that Jedi training is 1% force instruction and 99% brainwashing. Luke achieves Jedi Master status with about ... a few days of training total? Maybe a week? a.co/d/45oK9gx

I notice that 15 years of screaming all-channels terror about librulz helping Asian sex offenders do crimes - for no well-explained reason - has precisely overlapped with it becoming grimly clear that the upper echelons of society are infested with rapists, child molesters and arse-grabbers.

It's unpopular take day! Why I don't like the Mandalorian.

Goodnight beautiful 😘revolution is tomorrow

Tanking blood sats to own the libs, i guess

Roomba should have been a warning.

Unfortunately the satire is entirely indistinguishable from the actual ai industry hype.

"We utilize our life experience to create the perfect juxtaposition of words or colors or sounds to evoke something meaningful. And then some LLM rips that to pieces and stitches those back together into a soulless amalgam that pretends to invoke the same emotions. F*ck that."

Wow. How to insult audiences, directors, and actors in one fell swoop. Imagine the future: "What did you think about Interview with the Vampire?" "Pitt and Cruise were epic! And the end with Lestat and the reporter..." "You mean Dave Bautista and The Rock? And they all kill each other at the end?"

Time to look at one of the biggest things in fantasy at the moment.

Omg what Opus Dei is like the alt right super conservative wing of the church. This is pretty huge

New: embarrassing hallucinations that will get you fired. “Hi, Chat GPT, could you format this spreadsheet for me and send it to my boss.” “I spread something for you, and there are no sheets in what I just mailed.” “You did _what_?”