I recently sent feedback to @anthropic.com about the text box paste behavior issue in the Claude iOS app and they just updated the app. Speedy resolution! Much appreciated.

Completely rewrote the opening chapter to Doors to the Stars. It’s much improved.

AI is extremely handy for tasks that require analysis and strict rules; far less so for anything requiring judgement or understanding. Proofreading and copy editing, for example, they can knock out of the park. Line or developmental editing they fail at spectacularly, and cause more harm than good.

Finally finished Junk Rat. Just a novella but took freaking forever. Worth it though. I’m pleased with it. Now it goes to the editor… <dramatic music>

Looking for something to read? Check out my free novella, Land of the Black Sun.

Mia is five. She asks Mama if it’s okay to hurt things. What if you’re mad? What if they hurt you first? Mama says no—unless you’re protecting someone you love. Mama isn’t strong enough to protect herself from Daddy. Mia decides she can be. 2015 Writers of the Future Honorable Mention.

Great overview of the cesspit Twitter has become.

“I think it’s creepy that adult women basically colonize YA looking to read about teens having sex. You’re telling me they have the whole world of adult literature available to them and they choose to complain about there not being enough sex in books for teens?”

Speculative fiction’s appropriation discourse has spent years arguing about who’s allowed to write what—while a bestselling military SF series sells millions of copies featuring Islamophobic space donkeys as the antagonists and only one reviewer out of thousands raised an eyebrow. Why?

I’m trying hard to give Dune: Prophecy a chance, but…

A boy starts haunting his local Walmart to see a girl with the upside down smile who won’t shake his hand and won’t leave the store. Their friendship grows in a McDonald’s booth until he asks the question she’s been dreading—and offers the thing she’s been waiting forever to accept.

Kling 3.0 is expensive and slow, but it’s *really* damn good. Can recommend.

Lord I have seen what you have done for others and I want that for myself

Wait—is it Lent again already?!

Sometimes what you really need is a damn comfortable sofa.

You’ve heard of the Ass Crack of Dawn. I woke up at the Taint of Dawn. Can’t recommend.

“Je t’aime,” she says, breaking the silence. Her voice is soft, barely audible. Then she becomes self-conscious and pulls her collar around her face. I look at my shoes. A flash fiction piece I wrote a very long time ago, forgotten and then rediscovered. Just needed a little polishing.

SFWA built an AI ethics policy using terms that can’t be defined and rules that can’t be enforced against a threat that doesn’t exist while AI manuscript screening kills books in the slush pile. Here’s the framework they never bothered to construct.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So it turns out Ghost will restrict your account and cut off your ability to send newsletters to your subscribers for the offense of… checks notes… importing your mailing list of your pre-Ghost subscribers. I can’t begin to express how pissed off I am.

Can’t send newsletters because my account is under review—for what, Ghost won’t say. This is some USDA Prime bullshit. The whole reason I hosted with them was for the newsletter functionality.

SecDef is apparently threatening to blacklist Anthropic because they won’t remove restrictions on mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. OpenAI, Google, and xAI have been more accommodating…

Dark Dominion: Immortal Chapter 2.

I’d be much happier with Ghost as a blogging platform if their mobile browser editor wasn’t a complete piece of crap. That would be awesome.

Most space opera ends when the tyrant falls. Maybe there’s a coronation, definitely a kiss. But the real question isn’t whether you can overthrow a three-thousand-year theocracy. It’s what seventy trillion people with competing agendas do the morning after the god-emperor falls.

A significant chunk of America is caught up in a pernicious case of oppositional-defiant disorder that has them risk the health and lives of their children just so they don’t have to admit that the libs could be right about something.

Immortals are taken as children, remade, and deployed as weapons. This is what that process sounds like from the inside—not from the perspective of the institution, but from the voice that lives in every Immortal’s nervous system. The voice that raises them. The voice they trust most in the world.

Sarai wakes on a desolate moon with no memory, severe injuries, and a pregnancy that shouldn’t exist. The child is the god-emperor’s. Her body is proof a three-thousand-year tyranny is a lie. Every faction wants her for what she represents. Only one person wants her for who she is.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Morgan Freeman voice: No, they do not understand.

Mikhael was engineered to be the Dominion’s perfect weapon—a super-soldier who can teleport through combat and heal from anything. When they sent him to kill a rogue operative, he made a different choice: he saved her instead.

The whole “alpha wolf” framework was debunked by David Mech, the same researcher who originally popularized it. He spent decades trying to correct the record: wolf packs are family units, and the “alphas” are just… the parents. And lone wolves who fail to start a new pack starve or are killed.

No, this isn’t satire. It’s the NYT.

Welp, probably not going to get any fiction writing done tonight. Might crack open a book that’s been on my TBR pile forever. Or not. I like to be unpredictable.

Absolutely, we should absolutely be talking about stock prices instead of… checks notes… child sex trafficking.

Today is Gus’s Gotcha Day! One whole year and he’s still peeing on the carpets. (But otherwise he’s a great dog.)

Stanford and Caltech just published a comprehensive taxonomy of why LLMs fail at reasoning. It maps almost perfectly onto experiments I’ve run testing AI against creative writing. And the writing community is making policy based on misunderstanding both while ignoring the real threat to authors.

Writing that fails at its purpose isn’t good writing regardless of how clean the sentences are. I hate a lot of “literature” because performing competence and control in a scene that demands the opposite is a lie, and polished craft in service of a victimized child’s lived truth is masturbation.

K-Pop Superbowl Halftime next year. Let's keep the assholes angry.

Every sacred thing Mormonism claims to have restored and locks behind a paywall has been standard equipment in Catholicism for two thousand years. I spent years interrogating priests, waiting for one to say “no, we don’t have that one.” They never did.

I have Claude exceptionally well calibrated now.

Republican are slowly beginning to wake up and even groggily push back on Trump’s fascism. Day late and a dollar short, buckos. You’re still dead to me.

Oh, and fuck ICE.

From “ICE After Minneapolis” by Nick Miroff, The Atlantic

In Minneapolis, ordinary people are outside schools in subzero temperatures watching for ICE vehicles so parents can safely pick up their kids. A nurse is standing as a human shield between agents and immigrants. And Trump has ordered DHS to pull back. Good men and women doing something still works.

Somewhere along the way “I think women are hot and also complete human beings” became a position too nuanced for either political tribe. Not sure when that happened.

Had to sign a legal document today in pen and ink. I asked if they wanted a wax seal with my sigil too. Do I return the signed document by raven?

Sure, it could have been posted by a staffer. But … probably not. slate.trib.al/ovZDBWA

I find it darkly ironic that the hardest-core Tolkien dudebros are… pretty authoritarian and racist actually. Tolkien would totally punch a Nazi.

The last people who put up statues to celebrate their detention camps lost at Nuremberg.

Yup. This is also why I get annoyed when people start suggesting "golden age" science fiction titles to people who are new the genre and are asking for suggestions. You want to turn a modern 15-year-old off science fiction forever, recommend stories that were old when her grandparents were her age.

People often forget Norman Rockwell quit the Saturday Evening Post in protest of their racist policies and went on to paint some of the most subversive works of his time.