Very cool to hear this story performed aloud. "Artifacts of the Library on Shih Shen" is a bit of narrative world building for the universe of several other stories I've published or written.

Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast presents: "Artifacts of the Library on Shih Shen" by Frank Baird Hughes (@cultureworrier.bsky.social) Listen on any podcast app, or at www.patreon.com/posts/150398... Supported by Patreon patrons! #flashfiction #podcastfiction #speculativefiction #SFF

When you read old books, you start to notice moments in history when a new or fashionable medical discovery has created a fad. There are times when every character attributes behavior to nerves, or to glands, or to hormones. Lately, it feels like the anti-trans moral panic is giving us gametes.

The first story I ever tried to sell finally got accepted two weeks ago on its 34th submission. It made its first rounds so long ago that it got an R&R and subsequent rejection from OSC's Intergalactic Medicine Show. That R&R powered me thru a desert of minimal encouragement (also rewrote story 3x).

Just got a rejection for a story I ALREADY SOLD ELSEWHERE THANK YOU.

I find it easy to not use Elon Musk products. It's getting off the Bezos supply that I'm finding challenging.

love when there's an article about how life is sustainable in the superheated waters surrounding a hydrothermal volcanic fissure on the ocean floor and then like six paragraphs in you find out the author's parents are chemosynthetic bacteria 🙄

OH YA? ??? - dashare.zone ADMIN

I wrote this story after walking around Philly and across the Delaware River. gavagai.com/posts/2337

RIP Frederick Wiseman (1930—2026)

Loved this!

Philly South Jersey SF!

What if bad people with bad intentions came to Philly? And the Ben Franklin Bridge wasn’t into it? Read my story exploring that possible future. gavagai.com/posts/2337

Confused as to how Josh Shapiro thinks it is appropriate to compare student protestors to the KKK but inappropriate to compare ICE to the Gestapo

How to run a fic contest: -Don’t be shocked quality varies. That’s why 1st readers exist. -Don’t say you’ll take a tenuous connection to the theme, then complain about tenuous connections. -In the winner announcement, don’t say all subs were bad & you felt embarrassed to pass any to the guest judge.

My story about a transportation worker and the actions he takes when armed kidnappers try to visit his town is due to appear sometime in the near future.

Community member, community liaison and researcher perspectives on the creation of HapMap and 1000 Genomes Project iPSCs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.09.698717v1

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

An item of some national interest: I have just walked into the Oval Office and condensed Donald Trump into "magicite", a magical stone that will retain some of his powers. By equipping this, I can now "summon" him in battle and learn the spell ⚫ PEDOFL.

Government accounts just post like this now and that’s how policy is made

I am, once again, begging non-Philadelphians to google Rochelle Bilal before blindly sharing this video

[sombrely, with tears in eyes] "truly the people of Iran embody the great spirit of Flumpo The Fart Wizard" - author of Flumpo The Fart Wizard

She dresses like Judy Gemstone what the fuck are you on about

Thank you! :D

(trying this again without the error) Things published in 2025: "The Oneiromantic Sheep" in Radon Journal "The Path to the Cornmill" in The Colored Lens "The Space Between Bodies" in Neon Dystopia Upcoming work via Mythaxis Magazine and Inked in Gray Press! Maybe some other stuff!

"The Space Between Bodies," Frank Baird Hughes, Neon Dystopia (2025). Dystopian desert cyberpunk, ex-soldier with PTSD main character, brain-hopping. A+, highly recommend. www.neondystopia.com?p=100043351 #ShortStory #SFF #Review #AmReading

bout to taste that Grussy

Congratulations to Nolwenn Bühler, Nils Graber, Victoria Boydell and Cinzia Greco. Their #OpenAccess book The Chronopolitics of Life published today. Read and download free at: bit.ly/4456tk0 #Health #Anthropology #Ethnography

am I even awake right now?

This is silly and plainly unobservant. I go to SC and NC 1-2x a year and see at least half a dozen Confederate flags from the highway. More on the backroads. Still more in old cemeteries. They nearly rioted in my hometown over changing the HS mascot from the Rebel. They love that shit down there.

imo you're supposed to read asimov in middle school, clarke in high school, le guin in college, and lem in grad school. I fucked up and read lem in college and le guin in grad school and it's set me back a bit.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

bluesky mods retire bitch

A lot of my stories, sold or unsold, are basically about being a guy of some sort who changes careers mid-life. But told through the characters of sentient bridges, surgically mutilated/uplifted whales, thinking necklaces, and rogue extra dimensional terraformers.

Reading How the World Made the West. There's no such thing as the West; glad this book so far agrees. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the...

Oops, I forgot about that thing where you can't have a character waking up at the beginning of a story. Guess I just blew a bunch of submissions. One day I'm going to write something where MC wakes up and finds a gun that doesn't fire because it's broken or something.

(Me to a girl in the club): People would probably be pretty scared if there was a stegosaurus here. Not me - I know that they're herbivores.

yeah we're into LLMs (Large Lamb-bridge Models)

Four story rejections this week. Maybe five, can't remember. But I signed a contract for an anthology story, so that's cool.

No question the average person is going to be underprepared for/overwhelmed by a year in a Philly classroom, but dunno if I'd liken emergency cert teachers to dirty stormwater. www.inquirer.com/education/ph...

Redemption on the migrant trail. www.neondystopia.com?p=100043351

When you’re the paper of record and have definitely understood the franchise up until this point

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend

I feel like this is what has happened to word counts in the spec fit market. Adaptation! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular...

I walk by the old Formost Kosher Sausage Company building a lot, and I'm so obsessed with the concept and spelling that it ended up in a story.

Immigrants are a social good, anti-immigrant propaganda is basically all lies, and any approach to the "problem" that doesn't start form those two points is worthless

It took me way too long to realize Blue Prince ~ blueprints.

What is living? Faceless and enslaved, by birth or contract? Frank Baird Hughes asks such questions in The Space Between Bodies. www.neondystopia.com?p=100043351

My story is up at @realneondystopia.bsky.social "[T]he biots would learn to build uterine tanks, birth each other, live in our cities, maybe thrive in the world we’d broiled and bombed. I was relieved when they told me biots couldn’t reproduce without a lot of outside help."