Our Westjet raffle is in 14 hours, and I'd be remiss if I didn’t draw this to your attention: right now, one ticket gives you one-in-270 chance of winning (think of the chances if you buy multiples!) Support employment inclusion here!

[dalek voice] EXCOMMUNICATE EXCOMMUNICATE

They're victims. Humanity sees them as demons, but they _were_ human once, until an ambitious man with no awareness of consequences got manipulated by a zealot very aware of said consequences.

Scene linking. Once I'm in it, I'm fine, but soft transitions make me struggle. I'm much better at hard cuts, but I'd love to figure out how to get the written equivalent of the Spielberg Oner.

Oh look an excuse to post the short story I put on my site for free this summer :) www.ianmrountree.com/fiction/shor...

I would rather live next door to someone who speaks another language than live next door to someone who doesn’t want to live near people who speak other languages. I know nothing about Person A but I know person B is a shitbird.

Remember how Circuit City failed? The first visible flub was getting rid of commissioned salespeople - the knowledge keepers who gave a shit about the company's success. Corpos learned nothing from this.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Twitter had so much promise fifteen years ago. Now look at it.

Trump is betting, smartly, that since only 65% of Americans vote that most won't even notice when elections just don't happen. And he knows the news will never report on it honestly. They'll say "Elections delayed until 2028 and here's why Trump is right to do it"

Thanks for the recommendation, watching this now!

MY ANCESTRESSES DID NOT BIND THOSE KIRK/SPOCK ZINES BY HAND FOR THIS SLANDEROUS ASS OMISSION

A space in the downtown Millennium Library designed to help vulnerable people, including the homeless, has reopened after closing at the end of 2024.

Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney nails it.

"They'll pay for the wall" with a lot of extra steps and too many words.

Slightly intensify a band. Flock of Canada Geese

Internet BEDS!?

They want Web3 so fucking bad, man. They want to build rent seeking for nothing on top of rent seeking for nothing.

DAMN but The Diplomat is good.

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually. The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

I call it “joyful rigor” when I explain this effort to my students. I don’t believe in or rather, I’m not a “suffering poet.” I’m a writer who enjoys writing. The work works on me and I’m grateful for the opportunity to delve into the process at my own pace and to be changed by it.

i don’t normally endorse block lists (i’m on some, weirdly lumped in with people i myself have blocked) but i don’t see how blocking all these accts with one button is bad. most importantly, DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THEM. they already own X so they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t trying to start shit.

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

You should read Don't Give Your Name ;) It's a short story, ~6k words, and it's fae-centric. I put it on my website for free. www.ianmrountree.com/fiction/shor...

What I think of as the distinction between early blogging and what we have now:

OUR PARENTS AREN'T HAVING CHILDREN??

"Detach Quote" is one of the best Bluesky features. . When someone quoted your post do dunk on you - tap "..." in your quoted post, and select "Detach Quote." It will be removed from the quote, and the would be dunker will look like a moron.

As someone else said on here, if this technology was so great at creating things, its owners would sell us the great things it produces, rather than access to the tech itself.

Amazing

From Empyrean Sword: Cal decided to DM because he has nothing but time to prepare and is bored. Grev looks like the meta gamer but is actually party mom. Rook is the lone murder hobo. Laiet just rolls dice and everyone tells her the result was good even if it's a nat 1 because that's fun too.

One of the wildest issues AI creates is that it makes people who shouldn't do things they don't understand, do those exact things believing they understand.

Grevault has a twin, who shows in in the first book. He also has two elder brothers, -neither of whom- show up in books 1 or 2 (if I follow the current plan), but a cousin does. His family being so split up is a plot point. He and his twin are the ones dutiful to their House; the others, less so.

Ask a chef who loves their craft if they'd rather be whisking up dry-powder smoothies, because it solves nutrition. Ask a model kit builder why they don't just buy figurines, despite that being a different hobby entirely. That's how "Wouldn't you rather have the plagiarism machine do it" sounds.

“A second inflatable frog has now been spotted wiggling through Portland.”

Real Genius had it right in 1985: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X...

"Laj."

this is one of the sweatiest and most desperate documents the the united states government has ever produced

I get why TechCrunch would write it this way, but I largely disagree with this framing. The broad conversation here is about power, respect, control and whether the voices of the vulnerable are taken seriously. This is the story of a leader and a team showing that they don’t get that.

Happy 30th anniversary to treatment resistant depression

The creator is a visible, tangible *thing* - a gas giant planet the world co-orbits with. It's easily visible. The pantheon, before (an event) was embodied as the gas giant's moons. One, the goddess of magic, was slain and became rings around the creator, hiding the other gods within her remains.

increasingly convinced preventing americans from getting their little packages is the thing that will take this government down

🫡

ITT: This site's CEO explains why they won't ban someone whose sole use for this site is building a system of harassment.

Imagine being the CEO of a company that solely exists, & attracts investment, because a critical mass of people abandoned your competitor over bigotry. Now imagine crashing out publicly & asserting your userbase has no value to you because you don't want to eject a specific & named bigot.

This made me go and reread my (glowing and, sadly, pretentious as hell) review of Average is Over from *ten years ago* and remove it from my website.

AI as wage depression tool is a very useful and compelling framing

Let me try one of these

This is an advertisement. They are so out of money lol.

I spent the week at the police surveillance convention and let me tell you my biggest observation: The name of the game now is consolidating as much information as humanely possible from surveillance devices, the internet, other governmental data, and literally a million other places. 🧵