Starting to get a bit excited for @armadacon.bsky.social now. Official programme isn't out yet, but I should be on three panels and a GoH interview. Hope to see some of you there!

The Anglican Communion split today. Complete formal schism. youtu.be/IMxOLiS9DOo?...

The second highly recommended epic fantasy series by an agency client, Lands of the Firstborn by @mytholder.bsky.social , which opens with THE SWORD DEFIANT: www.orbit-books.co.uk/titles/garet...

It's not that I'm not pleased at the Gaza ceasefire. I am. But this isn't a peace deal, it's merely the potential start of a process that could lead to one. At best, this is the first Northern Ireland ceasefire of 1994, *not* the Good Friday Deal of 1998. Peace is far more than the absence of war.

My colleagues & I have taken a huge gamble to set up @thenerve.news We’re trying to build a new independent publication from the ground up. Social media is our only distribution for now. Sharing this article in your networks would make a huge difference. Thank you! 🙏🙏🙏

Doctor Who… It’s a PhD, right?

Latest set of book purchases from @waterstones.bsky.social. Who Will You Save, an SF short story collection by @garethlpowell.bsky.social, and Damascus Station, the debut spy thriller novel by ex-CIA analyst David McCloskey (found via the excellent @restisclassified.bsky.social podcast).

There's nothing like spending a weekend driving our 2014 Nissan Micra with my iPhone + Apple Maps as the satnav instead of our Tesla Model 3 with its built-in satnav to realise just how epically shit the Tesla satnav is.

Just came across a work document where someone has taken the company's standard Word template and set the paragraph spacing for the Normal style to zero, and then put a blank line between each paragraph. Why would you do this? Who hurt you?

'The Nerve', a new female-founded media title is up and running, bringing independent journalism, a dash of culture and a weekly Stewart Lee column. www.thenerve.news

Excellent! Brilliant news. (Gar’s both a great writer and a really good mate).

Nicola Sturgeon on Kamala Harris’s book. Eloquent and blistering. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

My maternal grandfather, born in 1908, had to have his lunch at exactly 1 pm, his dinner at exactly 5 pm, and would only eat certain foods. But yeah, sure, Paracetamol causes autism.

Finally got round to cancelling my Disney Plus subscription. Took quite a bit of searching (and Googling) to find the appropriate menu option. To be honest, I've got more streaming stuff than I know what to do with, so it's a bit of a no-brainer.

I've mentioned before that I will be a guest of honour at @armadacon.bsky.social at the end of next month, but I made a post giving a few more details. buttondown.com/TheNexusFile...

Americans 🇺🇸: We don’t have kettles in our kitchens. Brits 🇬🇧: We have kettles built into our tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

The soles on my deck shoes are so worn that if they were tyres, I'd be illegal. Just went slipping and sliding my way across a freshly mopped floor.

Playing Tiny Frontiers for the first time.

Trans friend of mine, someone I've known for almost forty years, throughout her transition and everything she went through to become who she was all along... ...was assaulted is ASDA yesterday, by a security guard. Told her 'men were not allowed the ladies' loo' and physically dragged her out.

I need you to understand what this country feels like right now for those of us who look different. I'm sitting here, trying to plan for Saturday, make sure I don't even need to go to the corner shop for milk, like it's Christmas Day or lockdown. Why? Because I live near where Yaxley-Lennon will 1/

@somersetccc.bsky.social could be on the verge of an epic victory against Yorkshire if the bastard rain that's been bastard raining for huge chunks of the first three days would just stop bastard raining.

As John says, THE SWORD DEFIANT is available at a big discount for Audible members in the UK at the moment.

Bagpuss is tired. He's been out in the cold for years, and now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment. He must travel back to the place where it all began and betray Professor Yaffle.

My non-economist and very much layman's attempt to explain an apparently true but hugely counter-intuitive fact, which is that when a bank loans you money, they're not moving existing money to you, but creating new money. buttondown.com/TheNexusFile...

To put into perspective just what a massive deal being a guest of honour at Armadacon is for me, here's a YouTube video of one of their previous guests on a panel. (And if you don't mind, I'm now just going to find a quiet corner to hyperventilate in). 😀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hII...

Armadacon's a sci-fi and fantasy multimedia convention that's been running in Plymouth since 1988, and this year, I'll be one of the guests of honour. I'm beyond chuffed, hugely excited, and if any of you are attending, let me know because I'd love to meet up with you (@armadacon.bsky.social).

Reason number whatever why cricket is better than baseball: if someone in the crowd catches the ball they have to give it back, which avoids all the arguments about who gets to keep it.

At a display of electric cars organised by the Yorkshire EV Club at the Rotherham Show. My suggestion that all the Teslas should be grouped together in their own area to the far right of the field was rejected. (And before you come at me, I drive a Model 3 Wankpanzer myself). 😀

This is an incredibly insightful point and goes a huge way to explaining why we’re all in such an awful place.

Made it about four minutes into Netflix's Thursday Murder Club adaptation before noping out. There was a bad touch of Dick Van Dyke about Pierce Brosnan's Ron, but then instead of a retirement village / community of apartment blocks, we got an old people's home in a converted stately home. WTF? Why?

Languages change. If children always spoke in the exact same way as their parents, all of us from India to Ireland would be speaking Proto-Indo-European.

To (mis)quote IBM, an LLM should never be used to provide therapy because an LLM can't be sent to prison if it cruelly and heartlessly goads and encourages a vulnerable child into committing suicide. (And yes, I do know it's merely providing the most typical responses to what they type).

Current location!

Well that’s the name for my next Call of Cthulhu character sorted!

Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon

It’s not that I don’t like small dogs, but I like dogs to be big enough that if I mistake one for a cushion when sitting down, it’s the dog I have to apologise to, not its owner.

Ordered a book recently, and it arrived yesterday. Went to read it, and found that rather than having conventional fiction formatting of an indent on the first line of each paragraph, it instead has no indent, but spacing between paragraphs. I don't understand this as a stylistic choice?

I'm convinced that you can pretty much classify people's political outlook by which of the below two memes they would choose to share (one on the left is a genuine one I saw a few years ago, one on the right is a "woke" version of that which I've just created).

JD Vance's convoy driving along on the wrong side of the road really boils my piss. Yes, traffic around them is stopped, but it's shows a completely casual disrespect to us as a people and a nation. It's like, "We're Americans, so fuck your laws and ways". Least this time nobody died.

British Christians: We must care for God's Earth. American Christians: Drill, baby, drill! When I saw that certificate proudly displayed in a British church I was visiting, I couldn't help but wonder how many American churches would display something like that.

To mark the launch of GPT-5, and the fresh wave of people talking about this technology as if it's capable of thinking like human and even if it's not, it will be soon and it's inevitable and it's not actually stealing people's work, it's just learning like a human. Here's why it's none of that.

A guy called Padraig explained this to me some twenty something years ago outside a gaelcon while on a smoke (him) air (me) break. At the time I thought I must have misunderstood him. A few years later, when the financial crash hit, and I read up a bit more, I realised I had heard him correctly.

My grandma's brother became a mess after the civil war because one side enlisted him to serve in a naval battery while his brother was serving on a ship for the other side. He spent the rest of his life heartbroken, certain that he'd been the one to kill his brother

My mum told me a chilling story today. Her uncle (father’s brother) got married in the summer of 1940. On the morning of the wedding, his bride’s mother got a telegram to say that her son (bride’s brother) had been killed on the beaches of Dunkirk. She didn’t tell her daughter. (1/2)

The MAIN highway between London and Edinburgh. I’m pretty anti-car, but if I was Scottish I’d take this as a massive snub. Beggars belief that the 1960s UK government decided to have the M1 stop at Leeds and not continue it on to Edinburgh.

When I was 17, applying for a provisional license, and got to the question: "Can you read a number plate from 20 metres away", I went outside, paced that distance away from a car, and saw if I could read it. I don't know anyone else outside my family that did that. People laugh when I tell them.

AI is trained on us; as such, it replicates many of our biases. Yet it's treated as objective & unbiased. Dangerous shit.

There’s a trope in military fiction that sergeants are wise, junior offices are inexperienced and incompetent, and top brass are callous glory hunters. This military SF novel leaned so hard into that trope that it came across as satire. Hard DNF midway through chapter one, I’m afraid.

This is an example where the problem is not so much the capabilities of LLMs as it is the fact that we have independently normalized a widespread culture of acceptable lying

We are Dublin2029, a growing group of fans who’d like to host the 87th World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin in 2029. Dublin2029 will be a con that honours fantasy, science fiction, horror, art, music, and the vibrant communities that give them life by building a bridge between them. (2/3)