Writing is a wild tiger ride. At the end of last month, after I'd gotten like 10 rejections in a row: Should I even be touching a keyboard? This month: Short list! Yay!

Story day! "The Agentic Necklace" is now free to read on @mythaxis.bsky.social. Thanks to @noumenon.bsky.social for thoughtful edits. A pleasure to work with. mythaxis.co.uk/issue-45/the...

Mythaxis Magazine – Issue 45 – Fiction The Agentic Necklace – Frank Baird Hughes @cultureworrier.bsky.social On Miracles – P. W. Lewis @pwlewis007.bsky.social The Perfect Mother – Jude Clee The Negotiation – Vanessa Fabiano Search History – Jon Clendaniel Pultu’s Lesson – Sean Myers

Instead, animals are conceived as agency-free biological units, who simply respond to environmental pressures as their genes dictate. It's almost impossible to talk about ethics under these assumptions. It's a lot of work to respond, and I'm finding it very tiring and frustrating.

Definitely some things I've never thought of here (that data/frameworks can be used to harm research populations totally make sense from a cultural anthropologist perspective).

What a great day to pay my taxes.

NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.

Early spring in the Poconos

It’s actually not okay to pay someone with a PhD $2500 to teach a college course

That when doctors give you medical treatment or testing based on your supposed race, you’re getting medical care left over from the 19th century.

Thanks to Sci Phi Journal for publishing my found SF piece told via paperwork. The Green Handbook for Refugees from Earth, in the Order in Which a Female Refugee Read It and Filled It Out www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/20...

Fans of Harry Potter should have just read IT in seventh grade like a normal person

“Aw, shit, Lord, now why you doin all that to me now?”

What's My JND? 0.0032 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd... #WhatsMyJND

In today's Surreal Sunday Editor Pick: A meditation on fate and fury spiraling toward a final act of defiance. It's Evan Simon-Leack's Rage Against the Spiral. Read it for free at gavagai.com

The way for the Inquirer to expand coverage to areas they largely abandoned is to HIRE MORE REPORTERS JESUS FUCKING CHRIST www.wsj.com/tech/ai/can-...

friends, please share ❤️👹: everyone who follows my bsky account between now (1:08PM EST) and when i’ve crashed into bed with my yasso bar (8PM EST) will be entered into a raffle for a free full edit of 3k words or less i’m tired of being unpopular lfg

Nothing worse than hearing "y'all" from someone who went to a cold liberal arts school. Like an American tourist trying to speak French in Paris.

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

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.