Thank you @freypalm.bsky.social for sharing my little story!

Translators work hard to make sure that the translated words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc, not only convey the author's meaning, but also the author's *style.* Translators are alchemists. They are artists, and poets, and researchers, and editors. They are magicians and wizards.

First snow of the year ❄️❄️❄️

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

This! The emphasis on respect is so important. So often AI is hyped up to “solve problems quickly” but these “solutions” always lack respect for the people that will be impacted by AI outputs.

This!

A halloween cartoon for @newscientist.com

Read in public. Read in private. Read e-books, genre books, comics, fanfiction. Read literature. Read nonfiction. Read books you’ve already read. Listen to audiobooks. Read what you want. There’s no such thing as “doing reading the wrong way.”

A skeet review of my story. @cypayseur.bsky.social called it "a moving experience"! *happy dance* Go read it if you haven't yet!

Yay, my little story is now available to read on @diabolicalplots.com !!!

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 13: If you are lucky enough to be translated into other languages, always know this: you are NOTHING without your translator. Your translator has skills far beyond just putting words into another language. A good translator is a stylist, an interpreter, a composer.

Happy publication day to meeeee... My new story is now available for subscribers on the Diabolical Plots Patreon. Go subscribe, maybe? www.patreon.com/diabolicalpl...

"The chatbot gives the impression of an intelligence that is specifically engaging with you and your work, but that impression is nothing more than a statistical trick."

In a Venice state of mind...

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Welcome to the world, @fantasymagazine.bsky.social I'm so happy about this!

Happy birthday to our Italian Republic! #Italy

tomorrow.

We're living through the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore, while the government stomps its uncaring boot on our necks. But there's an easy way to fight back: Care. I wrote about it: dansinker.com/posts/2025-0...

We tend to assume boredom is something to be avoided, but in centuries past you would go wandering through the woods or stare at the walls of a cave for an hour and accidentally invent beer or a new religion or write Alice in Wonderland.

On this day in 1797, the sun finally set on the Venetian Republic. On 12 May, the Maggior Consiglio voted itself out of existence in the face of the overwhelming threat from Revolutionary France's Army of Italy. Napoleon claimed to bring liberty and democracy. He brought neither.

Writers: before you sign a contract with a publisher, make sure AI isn't replacing your illustrator, your translator, your editor, your jacket designer. Readers: if you're thinking of buying a book, do the same. Refuse. Resist. If AI garbage doesn't sell, people will stop making it.

If this all feels too much to fight, start small. Take "aspiring writer" out of your bio and replace it with "writer." Stop saying things like "I don't have a proper job." Support creators; translators; illustrators. Boycott AI generated junk. We are many. They are few. And we have the words.

Christ the Redeemer statue. [📷 Leonardo Sens] Source: www.instagram.com/leosens?igsh...

I've been thinking about this since the rise of machine translation, and even more since I started teaching TL. When I came up as a translator, I did a lot of brute force translation work—reams of emails about shipping delays, HR presentations, customer surveys, just the drudgiest of drudge work.

Was at a conference dinner a while back and one guy said "The future is AI. It doesn't replace senior developers, but no more need for juniors." To which i replied: "Where do you think senior developers come from. Straight from the womb?" He went quiet, then wandered off to a different huddle.

Coliseum at Night Rome, Italy #photography #travel #rome #italy #BlueSkyPhotographers #NightPhotography

Language is human and the best way to learn a language is from other people who have similar experiences learning languages. My best Japanese teachers have all been people who have studied English to an advance level because they understood what a language learner needs.

Happy birthday, Rome! 2778 years, and as beautiful as ever! #Rome #Italy

A lot of creative folks are demoralized right now. Hell, I'm one of them. Maybe some of them are helping you through this rough time. If so, do me a solid: Share their stuff. Drop them a kind word. Tip their Ko-fis, or join their Patreons. It seems like nothing, but it's everything right now. 🤘

“I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.” —Rabindranath Tagore #quote

Children’s books should be scarier, and sadder. Original fairy tales were terrifying because they give children the opportunity to explore difficult emotions before they have to deal with them in real life

You HAVE to celebrate good things. Even if they’re tiny and fragile and may blow away. In fact, you have to celebrate the fragile ones EVEN HARDER because who knows how many chances you get? If you constantly think how it will all go wrong, if every triumph is met with “but…” you will burn out.

⚡️HIGH VAULTAGE⚡️by @jensugden.bsky.social and me is out TODAY in paperback in the UK! Check out the affordable luxury via geni.us/5zk3n. Thank you Adam Roberts, @schneiderjamz.bsky.social, @morepeoplehappy.bsky.social, @misterabk.bsky.social and the BSFA for the kind words!

When it comes to boycotting, just a thought. It’s okay if you can’t quit a company cold turkey. In Master Gardeners, when we encourage people to switch to native plants, the goal is 70% native, not 100%. If you were shopping at a store 80% of the time and cut it back to 60%, that 20% still hurts.

Please sign this open letter if you're a UK resident. 🙏 Objection to the Government's Proposed Copyright Exemption for Generative AI Training docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Like, the abundance of murder mystery novels doesn’t mean murder is the typical way of solving disputes in our society.

A few years ago I wrote a comic about miscommunication and missed connections. It's called The Beetle and the Butterfly, and you can read it at my website: johnlechner.com/the-beetle-a... 🪲🦋

This is very urgent. The UK government is planning to change copyright law. If you are an artist, author, musician or work in the creative industry please read this. www.chrishaughton.com/blog/ai-and-...

#SomethingBeautiful the Duomo

#SomethingBeautiful looking at the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio at sunset

And what’s happening today is that millions are eager to relinquish having to read, having to create, because it means the discomfort of being alone with your own thoughts. You have to wrestle with yourself in order to create something, and we are scared of that process.

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.bsky.social

"Imagine a world in which an A.I. can analyze your reading patterns and alert you that you’re about to buy a book where there’s only a 10 percent chance you’ll get past Page 6..." Fuck off. That's not empowerment, that's outsourcing your soul. That's outsouling. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/o...

This 👇

But the idea that you, as an individual, can solve the world’s problems is bullshit. You do not need to solve the world’s problems. You just need to see a problem that you can solve and try to solve it, and then that’s one less problem. If lots of us do that, it’s a lot less problems.