Unsolicited writing advice, no. 1378: Many would-be authors make the mistake of believing that you "start off" as a children's writer, then "move on" to writing for adults. This is both completely incorrect, and terribly disrespectful to children's authors.

Cats to be banned from sitting on laptops in the UK, Starmer announces.

Immigration is *not* a national security issue. Far-right racist rioting *is*.

Duly signed and herewith reposted.

Catherynne M. Valente is one of my favorite authors and her work laptop just had the screen go out. I’d like to encourage people to give her books a try because that’ll help. The Past is Red, Radiance, Space Opera, Space Oddity, and Deathless are some of my favorites so treat yourself to one today.

Merge two movies: Annie Halloween

A Skeptical Guide to UFO Cases and Claims With Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster film "Disclosure Day" about to debut, scientists and educators will face a new barrage of student and public questions about UFOs (or, as they have been rebranded, UAPs). 🧪 👽️

"AI" boosters are still on about how generative AI is here, it's revolutionary, it's transformative, you mustn't get left behind.... I have been around this series of tubes we call the Internet for a while, now, and I remember another innovation that was hyped in much the same way. 🧵

Denim jacket wearing out quicker than you expected? Twill issue.

Worth a repost, I think. Helpful and informative. Personally, I've been avoiding over-exertion (or, indeed, any exertion) for pretty much my entire life, but the other two points are well-taken.

Dear UK government, since you are being arseholes again:- Trans people are people. People need to piss. Deal with it. The genitals of some random stranger are none of my fucking business, or yours. Stop wasting your time and public money on this bullshit.

Oh, wow, thank you! See, if I *could* do publicity, this is the way I'd want it to look :) (Maybe I should get back to work on the sequel?)

I remember AltaVista. And Yahoo. And Lycos. And not using search engines at all, just following a labyrinth of hyperlinks and bookmarking whatever seemed useful. And then Google came along. And you could just type a query into it, and it would find what you were looking for!

How many times can I repost this..

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

You: please act normal you need these people to like you Me: ok! People: hi Me: Did you know that all heraldic griffins are female? The male of the species is called a keythong; it has no wings, but it has spikes or bursts of flame coming out of random points on its body.

If it sucks ( ) it's a ( ) blood - vampire electricity - ampire water - dampire legs - gampire pigs - hampire conserves - jampire oil - lampire computer memory - rampire whisky - drampire eyeliner - glampire Discuss. Or not.

In 2024, everyone was sick and tired of the Tories. Labour won a gigantic parliamentary majority simply by being Not The Tories. They could have consolidated this by being Not The Tories as hard as they possibly could.

OK Global Southern Bluesky, let's go: share your most beloved non-Anglophone pop culture franchises. We want to know about the Nepali romance novels, the Khmer superhero comics, the Guatemalan detective movies, the Malawian ghost hunter cartoons. Or whatever's out there. Please boost!

I've thought long and hard about the following (trivial) posts, but I believe my small band of followers need some harmless entertainment, so.... Couple of days ago, I decided I needed a haircut. I'm not one for frills, faffing, and fripperies, so when I need a haircut, I do it myself.

At the behest of several therapists, both physio- and psycho-, I have bought myself a little exercise machine. One of those things with pedals that fits underneath your desk. Seems to work. We'll see if it does me any good.

Oh, I see we're back on the "oh, think of the poor disabled people who couldn't possibly write without AI assistance" bollocks again. Time to repost an earlier thread about what I, a disabled writer, think of that stupid notion.

Yf thys skeet doth receive 3,000 reposts then the Tolkien Estate will sue Palantir.

At this point the only reason to call it the Labour Party is it lasts too long, hurts like hell, and people keep popping in and out to check on your genitals.

The way I see it is like this:-🧵 People need stuff to live. People live in places where there is stuff. There are lots of different kinds of stuff, and they are not evenly distributed. So, if you need or want stuff that isn't available locally, you must deal with people who live where it is.

We should be learning from other countries...

The Good Lord knows I have no love for Peter Mandelson (The Sleaze That Walks Like A Man), but it does seem a little silly that he should be done for "misconduct in public office" when that was basically his job.

Signed this one. There is so little I can do, but I will do what I can.

This week, Brexit finally killed our family business. We cleared out our warehouse, handed back the keys, paid the final bills and said goodbye to our last employee. What was once a thriving firm died a slow, sad death, all thanks to Farage, Johnson and the gullible idiots they conned. 1/18

Looks like someone had a better hat than @wulfhelm.bsky.social ....

The general theme is that people supporting "AI" can't find any use for it in $specific_field_they_understand, but can see how it would be useful for $field_they_understand_superficially_at_best. Now, of course, the big boosters for it are claiming that it's useful for *everything*....

My Hugo nominations are complete! If you are eligible to nominate and you cannot say the same, there is still time to fix that!

Bluesky. Come for the left-wing echo chamber, stay for the unbalanced centrifuge discourse.

Signed this one. If Wes Streeting had been around in 1348, he'd have been insisting the problem with the Black Death was "overdiagnosis".

If you don't dig "Telstar", you need to get a bigger shovel. Have a great look at Joe Meek's magnum opus.

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

Post your favourite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.

🧵I find the recent "political" rhetoric about churches being “repurposed” into mosques both misleading and disingenuous. The number of such cases is small, and they have largely involved former Nonconformist chapels already redundant within their denominations. To present this as a widespread

Email from WordPress yesterday: "Upgrade to unlock the WordPress AI Assistant". I'm trying to think of a less appealling offer, but it's not easy.

I hate Dyson with every fibre of my being & will never ever buy anything made by him. He’s a piece of shit who treats people like meat. It was always obvious why he put his money & mouth behind Brexit. More people in this country need to be aware of his Machiavellian ways & boycott the bastard.

I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon whereby an expert engages with any of the LLMs on their field of expertise and is instantly horrified by the wrong answers, and then goes on to use it for things they are not experts in as though it won’t be just as bad for those.

Last, from me - #WSPit AGENT OF DAMNATION - #Dis #PN #LGBT This one hasn't yet been released into the wild, but I wouldn't mind getting some eyes on it anyway - see if the pitch below piques your interest. (Think THE MALTESE FALCON meets THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS.)

Next #WSPit THE NINTH KNIGHT - #P #Dis #F #LGBT Eight knights set out on quests for adventure - but an enigmatic ninth knight shadows them all. Features fights against the traditional enemies of knights - dragons, ogres, poor people, poor map reading, mid-life crises...

OK, let's go: #WSPit First up, FELONS IN THE EYES OF GOD - #P #Dis #SF #LGBT Two ambassadors clash with each other and the baffling AI governing a planet, while a starship captain approaches, carrying a cargo which might mean the end of everything. Diverse cast, high concepts, 'orrible monsters.

Doric Ionic Corinthian Tuscan or Composite

so I don't use AI stuff. There are many arguments to be made against it, but a very fundamental objection for me is that it doesn't work. It has never worked, I'm not optimistic about that changing in the near future. But I'm willing to be surprised, so sometimes I test, and NOPE STILL DOESN'T WORK

Ladies and gentlemen, Please meet Tim Nott, the chair of the Reform UK Party in Bath. He likes to do..."acting." (yes, that is him.)

Share and enjoy.