Started bailing floodwater with buckets at 6AM! Everything under control. Please join the mailing list for my first book's crowdfund, which starts in five days. In this story all floodwater would be frozen by a weird ice age, which sounds pretty great right now. www.backerkit.com/call_to_acti...

And yes that is a first-ever preview of the actual handpainted cover art.

"...recognising the selective deployment of science fiction as a political tactic – seeing the militarised drone and the privatised city charter not as neutral tools but as crystallisations of specific, narrow stories about power." aeon.co/essays/silic...

Dug up my concept art for the first Walks-like-a-Rockslide story a few years back:

The most likely reason for the miseries and agonies of the world today: woolly mammoths just aren't trampling enough people. Mammoth stampede fans, sign up to hear more. www.backerkit.com/call_to_acti...

I'll say this much: if norms are being built, it's not tactically sustainable to expect deep handcrafted soul-searching reporting and responses when presses get fooled by something that took a relatively small amount of work. Build norms of simple clear reporting. Hell, put those norms in contracts.

Don't know if there's a right way or place to say this, but after reading the Bona report, the AI user who just sent shockwaves through a dozen-ish markets was clearly a hobbyist with limited resources and skills a couple of years out of date. Defenders need to skate where the puck is going to be.

Nailing this required about two months of facing up to my deepest-rooted, most personal, most insecure skill deficit as a writer, and stomping that skill deficit flat like a mammoth ought to. It is dead. The mammoth prevails.

Here's a story from the same world, reprinted and adapted for audio. But those were better days for the Blue Ochre People. Such better days... www.castofwonders.org/2024/03/cast...

Showed this novella to the most merciless reader I know and she loved it. She disliked exactly one thing, and it was a thing I did on purpose. All the painted-van-circa-1973 visuals did their job, and a painted van circa 1973 is the book I needed to write. Here's the mailing list to get notified.

A real shame. If they'd had only 8% falloff at the verification stage like Forever Canadian had (people answering their phones/giving enough contact info, basically) they'd have passed the threshold easily. 12% falloff put them under and held them under.

Corb Lund's Rockies coal mining petition pulled 196k valid signatures to meet a 177k threshold but not enough were able/willing to verify their signature/provided valid contact info. Elections Alberta's final estimate's only 172k, 12% falloff. (Lukaszuk got 8% — 8% would have worked.) Heartbreaker.

THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. Paper: www.nber.org/papers/w34777

It looks like the 14 fit-for-purpose Churchlands & Five Deserts stories (all published but one) total 79,900 words and have made about $5000 USD over the last three years. My thanks to the eight editors who've believed in them. Seems I got my novel after all. ONWAAAAAARD.

it's only day one, but so far this auction is currently at $101 for a $2000 value, which is, uh. five percent? i think? i'm good at words, not maths. anyway, bid! (don't need a copy edit? there is SO MUCH MORE!)

One hundred people! I'm reliably informed that the first 200 will not be trampled by mammoths. Get ahead of the stampede! www.backerkit.com/call_to_acti...

Chip my flints and call me a chert! 96 brave hominids have signed up for @jonolfert.bsky.social 's stone age fantasy novella, Seers in a Broken Season. Who shall hoist their hammerstones high and knap us to 100?

⚔️SWORD⚔️ AND 🪄SORCERY🪄 🦣M A M M O T H🦣

Old Moon's a strong partner for my first book. It's the grimmest, most furious book about pluralism you'll read this year. Even if you've read other Walks-like-a-Rockslide stories, get ready for something new and weird GRAPPLING with the COLOSSAL threats of our time, with hand-painted cover art.

Saw concept sketches for my first cover art and that's not a bad milestone at ALL.

Just announced: Genndy Tartakovsky Is Making a Conan the Barbarian animated series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gv...

"I do think we need to call out coercion and manufactured tribalism. I do think we need to recognise the impact of raining hellfire on a market."

"Also their Prime Minister’s residence isn’t a rotting, rat infested hovel that no one wants to pay to fix up, so there’s that."

"A fanatic is someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject."

My novella is, I think, my eighth full-sized book. I wrote a lot of dubious longform all through my twenties and the start of my thirties. Glad I wrote that stuff, learned a lot that still benefits me, but it'll never see the light of day any more than I'd dust off my school papers for publication.

1/ Social, political, educational, cognitive, technical consequences of AI take up more and more of my time at work. I know I'm not the only one in that position. Starting a thread of perspectives/data points that have been useful. Inclusion =/= wholesale endorsement. By all means mute the thread.

Only two decades late I've read Peter Watts' BLINDSIGHT and now have the tools to understand, judge, and forgive all the piss-poor decisions I make before coffee.

“How’s the trail ahead?” the captain asked. “Full of children.”

Federal movement against surveillance pricing! www.ipolitics.ca/2026/06/15/o...

Archives: "Here-and-Now-and-Then" @jonolfert.bsky.social BCS #428 (who has a new story in BCS #459 right now) "young Churchmen trembling around a fire... coughing out old soot, talking of deep matters that resolved contradictions and raised new ones." www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/here...

The parliamentary secretary's talking points centre on consent and compensation in the context of AI, unknown copyright law changes, and the creative sector. I'm not optimistic but I'm curious. Even a marginally satisfactory and functional change would be hard to put together. Fair to say? Thoughts?

I'd feel quite surprised if a good chunk of the web's plentiful and popular 'fuck Albertans' content wasn't part of this strategy too.

"Forty million views of manufactured Albertan outrage create a false impression...they believe they are hearing from their neighbours. They are not. They are hearing from content factories optimized for engagement, producing material calibrated to provoke the strongest possible emotional response."

In class for work learning the 'separation' fairness problem in AI governance: systems need to produce the same true and false positive rates across demographics. Flashing back hard to the years when fighting algorithmic proctoring bias was a constant battle and that standard was not on the table.

Easy top three: Sunshine — WHAT DO YOU SEE? Alien³ Gravity The Martian is nipping at their heels, though. Perfect comfort food.

Release the Epstein Files, of course, but spare a thought for a trafficking empire of possibly equal scale, involving Trump, his admin, & foreign gov't leaders, *happening right now.* You knew Tate was a creep. But it's bigger than that. Heidi Blake reports. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Fletcher's Flights, a novelette at the edges of the Churchlands and the Five Deserts, inspired by the Alberta prairies and coulees where I grew up. "Wanted to make my first good memory with someone like you."

Disclaimer/baseline context since I get into a lot of conversations related to the lightning rod of genAI and that won't be changing anytime soon: I'm strongly critical of AI in creative work (writing, illustration, covers) and I never use it in my creative writing. That won't be changing at all.

Everyone I know has opinions on AI. Among the things I wish more knew: 'AI literacy' is the big push, but the bundles of topics labelled that vary a LOT. What's included is in no way a settled question. You can get in on those conversations, talk informed choices, consent, harm reduction, VALUES.

"...the largest empirical study of algorithmic hiring with data for 3.4 million real job applicants...assessed by algorithms from a single vendor: we test whether this algorithmic monoculture bottlenecks job opportunities. We are the first to demonstrate large-scale evidence of racial disparities.."

Thinking of stolidly opinionated people I've met of late. "The accumulation of declarative knowledge seems like intelligence but is not intelligence...intelligence is not a collection of learned skills but an ability to acquire new skills very quickly, with very little or no training." - Yann LeCun

Nifty tool: new global air pollution/quality forecaster out of Monash University in Australia. Would have used something like this in a couple of places I used to live. www.trace-climatehealth.org

Spent unpleasant time with local literacy stats and the latest crop of 'students can't read papers/books anymore' op-eds and finally snapped. We've always pushed/modeled reading (and seen real growth from it); now there's (some) actual $ on the line. Read books, get cash. High-literacy summer ahead.

Here, have a tool that has served me well: 'That's really interesting. I agree with some of it, disagree with some of it, and some of it I'm open to being convinced. Thanks for sharing!' Then move on with your day as desired, blissful and sound in your prioritization of time.

Set out to make noodle soup with a wan fluid whose label ('beef broth') was more aspirational than descriptive. Added a teaspoon of olive oil, teaspoon of sriracha, tablespoon of pizza sauce, nuked a meat scrap to hell and tossed that in, boiled it all up. Broth went from 2/10 to a respectable 6.5.

Lot of context here for anyone curious about why Canada is apparently buying Saab Gripens AND more F-35s:

A nifty new conversation piece for chatting with your IT team. And yes, high-ranking risk ASI09: Human-Agent Trust Exploitation is pretty much what it says on the tin. emmanuelgjr.github.io/genai_incide...

"If a company builds a machine that, when fed descriptions of...ethical dilemmas, emits sentences either of the form “Compromise your values” or “Don’t compromise your values,” it is not building a tool that assists people in their decision making; it is encouraging people to stop making decisions."

I had a great time with Hench and the sequel was worth the wait. A full star ahead of most of what I've read/watched/liked lately.

A friend in the area got me watching the fight over land use rules and what looks like reckless data centre development at the Hamilton Committee of Adjustment. Some of this stuff is extremely sharp and I wish them luck. Livestream right now: www.youtube.com/live/t48MZnx...