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."

Very nice when a story that's been stuck in incomprehensible garbage mode for 6 months finally coheres into a decent rough draft after a 1400-word burst of effort.

"papa snoop, what's this 'murder trial' section of your Wikipedia entry?"

LOL "Oklahoma will require teachers coming from New York and California to pass a test to combat what it calls “woke indoctrination” before being hired, according to the state's public schools superintendent." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/e...

:( many unproductive moments in grad school spent here. never ate the hotdogs though.

New Schuylkill River Trail extension has great views; wish they'd also put up signage to teach bikers and runners how to share outdoor space correctly (probably shouldn't run three ppl side-by-side or tear down a two-lane mixed use path like yr in training).

"even if faulty" Obvs not the main thing here, but one of the odd things exposed by GC thinking is this wild sense in which the Darwinian revolution is incomplete, teleological conceptions of nature wherein some physical arrangements are not performing their real functions, remain widespread.

A wealthy big-game hunter from Texas was killed on Sunday when a Cape buffalo that he had been eying for his next trophy attacked him during a safari in South Africa, according to the company that arranged the expedition.

Took a walk to Penn's campus and found these bullfrogs

Oh no, Chuck Mangione , too?

The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God. Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well. forward.com/opinion/7575...

uh oh, things are happening dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

:( I visited for a museum class in grad school. DW patiently gave me a tour and answered my terribly unoriginal questions, obviously never once breaking kayfabe.

real bad news/good news here: museum of jurassic tech had a fire, but they stopped the worst of it.

youtu.be/s2-LEBc2sO8?... Also, the Challenger explosion.

I am the rejection hydra; every time you reject me, I submit to nine more markets (or, in this case, two).

This is not mere rhetorical hyperbole either. Insinuating that teachers with politics the ADL opposes are affiliated with Hamas could easily be a way to open the door for the federal government to crack down on teachers further. This sort of rhetoric is really dangerous at this moment in history.

Goodbye, little Parker Pile. I would have liked to see both you and our city workers' wages grow a little more.

New iPSC resource with long-read whole genome sequencing characterizations for enhanced in vitro modeling https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.17.660113v1

Coast and mountain combo vacation over

Without exaggeration, the last 50+ years of biological research completely discredits every race science claim. It is the single biggest indicator of being a malicious dullard and a reactionary ideologue. The fact I’ve had to dedicate a single minute of my career to addressing it is absurd

You know when people said the 90s were back I didn't think they meant the 1890s Scientific racism can eat my ass

Last 2 things: 1) This also is deeply unfair to authors who don't have the time and energy to stay jacked in to whatever the current internet drama is. Some people have to work for a living because short fiction isn't going to pay the damn rent. I only heard abt this bc of ppl going "damn IZ"

I’m 100% against AI art but I’m sorry @interzone.press, a writer might not even know if a publication they’re in has used AI art or whether they did so knowingly. They might also have done so AFTER the writer had worked published there. Are we meant to be held responsible for all of that?

Decided against it.

It's the fourth anniversary of that time I tweeted the wrong Sisters Of Mercy

Cremieux’s real name is Jordan Lasker. I put his name in the newspaper. He’s a scientific racist www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The sheep get a shoutout; recommendation for my story in Radon Journal, Issue 10 mythaxis.co.uk/issue-42/sho...

If Penn isn't going to use their resources to fight this stuff, maybe they should put those toward the PILOTs and Philly schools they are cheaping out on.