But… but is there *ANY* way this could be a woman’s fault…?

Trust me, the woman of academia are not at all surprised by the number of academic men orbiting Epstein.

I'm going to say this again in case you haven't heard this one: I was a talented writer and it did *nothing whatsoever* because I hadn't put in the work, and I put in the work for ten years (subtracting the bit where I had to quit for my mental health) to write Witchmark talent alone could *never*

The real risk isn’t Chinese software, it’s a compromised software supply chain, in-vehicle architectures that can’t handle such software, and infrastructure that’s not secure. Simply banning one perceived source of risk is not going to do much to eliminate the overall risk.

We have sent out almost 475,000 whistles for free, and our spreadsheet crew just told me that 80% of them are going out within 4 days of the request being made. 7% go out the same day. 98% within a week from this team of entirely volunteers who are just big fuckin' mad & want to help. 💓

Every day some loser ass little shit comes on here whining about how they can't draw or write and that's why they deserve to use the machine that steals from people who did the work to be able to draw and write. And it's tiring. Be a little bitch quietly.

AI can't make you an artist. Only time can do that. And I hear AI users talking about hundreds of hours, but no. That's not TIME. Not the kind I'm talking about. It takes years. Which is where people are like "years of free time is a privilege". Sure. Except the time wasn't free, it was taken.

Which reminds me of a thought I often have: life is finite. You have to make choices. Maybe taking the time required to become a skilled artist isn't something you can do right now without giving something else up, and you don't want to give it up. Okay.

I'm at the Olympics and the entire stadium booed JD Vance. 😌

This is actually brilliant and every self-employed person needs to read it and internalize it Starting with me 😅

just idly remembering when i was assembling my dissertation for final submission in 2017 i was chided by one lovely professor at a conference, who felt my use of the phrase "the return of fascism" to describe the present moment was "alarmist"

1. It was not an accident. 2. It was not a staffer. 3. While the president may have dementia his racism is not due to dementia. 4. He isn’t sorry. He means every racist thought he shares. 5. His base agrees with him. 6. He will do it again. 7. No one in power will hold him accountable.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

What a dire timeline right now - even in romance. I'm going to write words about Harlequin killing the Historical line (a threat for the last decade) and now it's been announced that All About Romance, a 30-year old website is shutting down allaboutromance.com/its-been-a-g... #Romancelandia

I'm 45 years old and the Golden Age stuff made me so fucking annoyed in 1995. Like man just THINK about what you're telling teenage girls to read because I promise that you probably shouldn't be doing it. 😑

The other aspect of this that does not get much attention: There is a deep grief within all of us women every single time we watch men refuse to hold other men accountable. And it happens over and over and over again, right in front of us. A constant refrain of “we don’t care about you”

The fact that being a serial sexual predator is apparently one of the easiest ways to access circles of power and influence should have us all ready to riot.

Extrapolating in another direction: I also often think of just how much human potential has been lost because of systemic racism, classism and imperialism. All the joy, innovation, art and more that we didn’t get - the opportunity cost of systems where one or a few men (its usually men) benefit.

Dust Cover for "In the Age of Blood" by Emma Elizabeth🩸🖤 This is launching on Kickstarter on the 10th of February! Go check it out if you like the cover I made hehe

Me looking at my WIP...

ICE agents, troops at polling locations. Some people will feel intimidated by this move and not go vote. Dems, what are you proactively going to do about this? Maybe Dems need some kind of presence there to counteract this.

The 'wait and see" for Democrats is over ... We see you 👀 What the fuck?!?! Abolish ICE but you wanta keep funding ICE...this is why we keep losing EVERYTHING!

I’m not sure we’ve properly addressed how profoundly disturbing it is that America can largely shrug at the stashing of human beings in giant warehouses.

The thing about saying that genAI will enable the marginalized to create art is that not only is it not true, literally just fucking look at art and music and writing, but it is saying that a handful of rich pedophiles should be allowed to control whether marginalized people can produce art.

They're trying to tell us that they always get what they want. That there is nothing so hideous that they won't do it, even if it's kidnap a five year old child and then, when they lose, really try even harder to make him suffer more. Fuck them.

Make Peter Thiel into the villain, Democrats. It's all there. He is the node that connects Trump, Vance, Palantir, Musk, Epstein, and so many other terrible players. Just expose it and make him and Musk the face of these psychopathic billionaires ruining our lives.

This planet is run by some evil fucking people

Okay, you guys wanted some fun tea on Richard Dawkins? Here you go: one reason he may have gotten super duper angry about me talking about misogyny in atheism skepchick.org/2026/02/epst...

It is really infuriating to see how misogyny really does unite men across the sociopolitical spectrum. And, in so far as the Epstein files go, they sort women into two categories: fuckable or irrelevant. When they near a hint of accountability they complain about not being able to make women prey.

Gen AI should have been smothered in the crib. Its an embarrassment (among the many) that our government and society took the oh no we’re going to be “left behind” approach. Left behind what? Making a few rich guys richer? Fucking hell man.

Commercial use of gen AI should have to pay licensing fees to rights holders of trained works. Like this is obvious. They should also have to pay a worker displacement tax and environmental cost tax. Not to mention regulations around deep fakes, CSAM, and misinformation.

The pivot to video is a tax on women's time and dignity, I will die on this hill.

a real SICKOS YES day for all of us in the "all my apes gone" comedy club

This is only related in a sideways manner, but: the story of any small slice of humanity is the story of humanity, just boiled down and distilled. So: In 2020, we had a lot of conversations about harassment at SF/F conventions, and Isaac Asimov came up several times.

One region of Japan has received 4 metres (12 feet) of snow this season!

i am trying not to joke about the Epstein stuff because it's so horrible but there's also this ridiculous element where it's like... discovering Dracula is real, he's taken over human society at the highest levels, he's involved in tons of evil and also he's a huge dipshit

My instinctive answer is that we need to do something similar to what AO3's founders did in response to the great LJ Strikethrough lo these many years ago: we need to make, not an archive of our own, but a forum of our own. A space that is expressly by and for us, and which we control.

With the power of hindsight, the mistake we collectively made was in treating what happened to Twitter as an outlier instead of the first domino to fall. As Trump's meddling changes to TikTok's TOC have made painfully clear, the billionaire class that controls these sites is foundationally corrupt.

At this point, I think the entire publishing industry needs to have a serious conversation about the degree to which the last 15 years have increasingly seen book promo become an online venture, and what that means now that entire social media and digital platforms are getting torched overnight. 🧵

The morning after mass layoffs, The Washington Post publishes this as their lead editorial. The owner and publisher clearly have no idea why they are losing subscribers. Meanwhile they have destroyed a storied brand. Support independent media. hubs.ly/Q03M8rql0

Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday. It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor.

There's two main reasons there's a segment of society against UBI 1. THOSE people, CERTAIN people will get FREE THINGS!!!! THAT I AM PAYING FOR!!!! This thinking is wrong and bad. If one truly believes that...more money is being spent on all the other bullshit that doesn't help. 2. Divorce.

Happy birthday Suleikha, now everyone else get yourself a present! Tikka Chance on Me is a delight. Actually, all her work is.

My friend lives in this building and said it was truly terrifying. The whole building woke up to their building being broken into by federal agents all to grab some guy who’s posted about being anti facist.

This morning at the Minnesota State Capitol. An ice sculpture that reads "PROSECUTE ICE". I'm told the organization behind the sculpture is Common Defense.

And his responses to Victoria Strauss (!) here: bsky.app/profile/vict... "I didn't write the TOS" is a ridic thing to say in response to criticism of the TOS that YOUR BUSINESS IS USING. I have no horse in this race but my god the # of times I've seen small press owners act like this... (3/3)

I still see people saying "self-published" like it's a dirty word. Something you should only admit to with shuffled feet and muttered shame. Something Less Than, a last resort, a sign of failure. And to those people I say...

If y'all missed it last night, after they gave us tremendous amounts of filament to print whistles (FOR FREE!!!) we lured @protopasta.bsky.social over to bluesky, and if you like companies that show up & have pretty colors, they got you!

This book feeds my soul. The whole Mercenary Librarians trilogy actually. Just big ol’ place in my book heart. There’s so much community and love and hope in these books. Especially with the ongoing fascism. We could all use more mercenary librarians in our lives. Let’s be those librarians. ❤️