Please Be Nice to the Bullshit Machine

Appalling, Unnecessary decision by Melbourne Uni and they need to explain themselves. It’s not a financial decision to shut down a cultural institution that runs on the cost of an executive lunch allowance

New from me: On coffee, names and the magic brewed by your local barista.

Adelaide friends: we are officially launching Here Are My Demands at Ern Malley bar in Stepney on 27 August. Come hear me tee off about the state of the future! All welcome, (free) tickets essential. Details here: www.eventbrite.com.au/e/book-launc...

Ripper launch of Alex Cothren and Olivia De Zilva's new books from Pink Shorts Press in Adelaide last night (alongside a new edition of Barbara Hanrahan's Annie Magdalene). Buy the books, it's illegal no to! www.pinkshortspress.com.au/books

Ah bloody hell, call the council, we’ve got Ents again

Amazing to think that in five years time we’ll be able to listen to the kids raised by Grok talking like whispery coke addicts and giving people the “prompt me” stare

In my hands: agent copies arrive of Alex Cothren’s splendid debut, a story collection, out from Adelaide startup Pink Shorts Press next month! (nb/ this might actually be the one that makes me a millionaire, dear Alex!)

Hey friends, my debut novel is out *right now* and you can ask your local bookshop to order it, or else grab a copy here: www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product/here...

“You see, with every block I remove I can make the structure higher. It is very possible that in our lifetime, my Jenga tower will touch the face of god”

Strewth, finished copies of @roffwrites.bsky.social’s debut novel emerge! Out very soon from Adelaide’s Wakefield Press! #HereAreMyDemands

Forty kids with mountain bikes on this train carriage. Covered in dry mud, noisy as parrots but you can’t fault their manners when someone needs to get through

On holiday and reading Salvage. Feels more optimistic than @jennifermills.net.au’s last post-apocalypse, which is good because the last one came true this year and it sucks

A lot of folk who gorged themselves on Mushroom Trial now seem very irate at the fact that they feel sick.

There is a high risk over the next few months of New York starting to think it’s cool again and I don’t know if the world is in a fit state to cope with that

Women are lagging behind on going bankrupt on DraftKings, drinking themselves to death, and fist-fighting anyone who looks at them funny on the subway but they can catch up.

Developing a Venus/Mars theory of LLMs: lonely men uniquely vulnerable to AI bullshit due to a crippling desire for external validation, women instinctively hostile due to valuing mutual comprehension above platitude. Expect my book tour soon

Another incredible review of Salvage. From Rachael Mead in Indaily. “The world building in this novel is a work of art” www.indailysa.com.au/inreview/boo...

But I do love the bullshit machine

The problem with calling them ‘hallucinations’ is it implies that there are times when LLMs accurately perceive the world. It’s ALL hallucinations it’s just that sometimes the vectors line up on things that happen to be true. The bullshit machine doesn’t know the difference.

The man on the train is checking my metro card. A big red X appears on his screen. “Yep that’s all good mate, thank you” A huge red X is your ‘valid ticket’ symbol??

Launch #1 begins in half an hour! So grateful to have support from Imprints, Writers SA and the State Library of SA 💙📚🎉

I think it would be so devastating to be a student these days, having carefully honed over a decade the ability to bullshit confidently and plausibly over and over again to your teachers, to feign insight based on guesswork and skullduggery… to have that all taken away from you by a machine

I don’t want the chip in my brain but I do need a solution to the problem of some of the best writing passages occurring to me in the third kilometre of 15K run. I know it won’t last until the next time I’m at a notebook

I don’t know what it is but max is one of the best doing it

The Madonna/Whore complex for robots is we either need them to be sad bleep boop tin cans that we anthropomorphise lovingly or gleaming super machines that we hate, fear and instinctively want to stamp into pieces with our bare feet

Thread: update on the State Library of Queensland & QLD government's unethical rescindment of my Black&Write Fellowship, with references to their letter that I received today; and a call for action:

Reading some Ursula Le Guin. I can’t believe no one’s ever tried her idea of finding one special kid and making their life as miserable as possible just to see what happens

Don’t go playing in storms kids, it’s not worth it

I don’t understand how to wear an eyepatch. Am I supposed to be winking underneath it. Both of my eyes want to close at once with this thing on. This is what ended the Golden Age of Piracy

Beach was covered in dead cuttlefish this morning. An omen I take VERY personally

Some people say if you want to have a productive day of writing you shouldn’t, on the night prior, climb onto a roof in the middle of the storm and let a tree hit you in the face… but I think I might be onto something here

there's a bit of tension in the Judith Lucy pinterest stan world currently

Grateful for this. stella.org.au/2025/05/mich...

"Unlike the women and girls of Gaza, I’m not brave. Fear is a formidable and insidious opponent. It convinces us to censor ourselves, to obey in advance, to down the Kool-Aid before it’s been offered. I’m still afraid. But I’ve just accepted a prize that is not about obedience."

Great speech by Stella winner Michelle de Kretser discussing the censorship around Gaza. Deeply strange its contents were only reported by The Age. Neither ABC nor Guardian write ups of the event mention her powerful comments at all. stella.org.au/2025/05/mich...

A statement from @asauthors.bsky.social on the appalling rescindment of the black&write! fellowship this week. "This represents yet another alarming instance of the undermining of freedom of expression and arms-length arts funding from a major institution." www.asauthors.org.au/news/state-l...

The day author Ren Wyld was due to receive the Black & Write $15k Indigenous fellowship she was told it had been rescinded. A journo from the Oz seemed to know before she did. Appalling to see QLD govt cave to Murdoch press to punish a First Nations writer for speaking out in support of Palestine.

The Oz is going after a UQP publisher who is a member of the Jewish Council of Australia for wearing a t-shirt that says: READERS AND WRITERS AGAINST THE GENOCIDE.

Crows win the footy, you stick around for the song and next thing you know we’re fading in to the Hollywood Pictures and some intriguing music… names appear… Ed Harris… Sean Connery… Streaming services took the joy away of suddenly knowing you’re watching The Rock on a Saturday evening

Solid gold from Alex Cothren in today’s @thesaturdaypaper.com.au. His forthcoming collection is going to be a DOOZY

Meta has released a new AI chatbot that only tells you it thinks you made a good choice on your new haircut

Meta released a new standalone AI chatbot app last week which includes a social feed to show what other people's conversations. Looking through the feed, it appears that people are accidentally publishing some private and sensitive conversations www.crikey.com.au/20...

History is written by the terminally online

There’s a tension for me between the “LLM suck and are sycophants” argument and “AI can never be creative” because I really relate to a superficially intelligent bullshit artist who just wants to make people like them

I feel like genuine one-click online payments are going to blow up the internet in the next few years and it’s going to rule. Subscription services suck, especially for news. I want to purchase content like I buy a coffee: one click, here’s a dollar, tell me what’s going on in the world

Help BBC! My Agatha Christie AI writing teacher won’t stop talking about how to accurately depict “the perfidious lesser races”. How do I turn this feature off?

Have finally read ‘On the Art of Writing’ and just now learned that Kill Your Darlings doesn’t mean cutting extraneous yet beautiful prose. It’s specific advice on bargaining with otherworldly powers for artistic mastery through ritual sacrifice. Enlightening #amwriting