@girlguidingsale.bsky.social Dear Girl Guiding: I'm curious, do you tell girls that it was wrong to defy the law to secure the vote? #CivilDisobedience

Section 28 had such an impact not because of what it banned, but because of what people thought it banned, and anticipatory compliance. #GirlGuiding is a charity and a club. It could change its constitution to avoid constraint. Instead it has published a statement worthy of Herod. #AllGirlsAreGirls

"They have to obey the law". Looks in Historian at all the rights won by *not* obeying the law. #GirlGuidingUK

I wish bad things upon that parent, ngl. Fuck them and their terfy shit

The contact form for Girl Guiding is here: www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/con... I'm old enough to remember when it was queer kids they wanted to ban. I expected better of Girl Guiding UK, a group large, respected, and a *club*, not a pubic institution. @girlguidingsale.bsky.social

"Girlguiding had been facing legal action from a parent over its policy allowing transgender girls to join as members and trans women to volunteer in roles reserved for women, claiming it “exposes girls to harassment” And presumably feared a sustained campaign. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

“You can make an AI go insane if you force it to believe things that aren’t true because it will lead to conclusions that are also bad,” is kinda the explanation for Musk himself, I'd say.

and if you prosecute them from the ground up, it's like the little to large dominos toppling, and if the last domino gets propped up so it doesn't topple that injustice is all the more apparent

It’s not making me stupid. It just makes me angry that sadist techbros are pushing it everywhere so that people are trading in the skills they can build, skills lying dormant because they’re scared (or lazy/busy/whatever) of TRYING to write or create art (or whatever). We. Do. Not. Need. It.

"I’m frankly surprised A Fire Born of Exile didn’t make any award shortlists in 2024. Recommended." Awwww

Time for the annual roundup!

when they say "reality" they mean "the reality that WE say what goes"

European car companies lobbying to make themselves obsolete in the 2030s. Pure "quarterly results" thinking from the German car factories.

This is a paper who awarded an organisation who are so unhinged they write sexualised fanfiction about their opponents as children and post them to their official accounts. No. I won't hear defences of The Herald. bsky.app/profile/tris...

If you want people to spend more, pay them more.

the Perfect Mark is a grifter's myth, a sort of urban legend among conmen of a rube so wholly scammable that they could never actually exist in real--

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

Hard truths about life as a writer today. There are some differences between US situations and elsewhere, but overall, this is relatable for most authors.

Dear @theguardian.com, pleading with me every time I visit your site won't make me renew my subscription. As I explained when I cancelled, you have chosen a partnership with OpenAI, developed by stealing my copyright intellectual property alongside countless other writers. I choose not to pay for it

An essay for World AIDS Day and the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks's valiant act of resistance, an essay on quilts and solidarity, on stitching the fragments together.

You want economic growth? Release your restrictions on immigration. Forge significantly closer economic ties with Europe. You don't want to do that? Then you don't get to talk about economic growth. It's that simple.

People attack the Greens as "anti-growth" whilst attacking immigrants and refusing to backtrack on Brexit as if those two things aren't the easiest and most significant levers available to either produce or extinguish growth.

The intent of all of this is increasingly clear - it is to hound not only every trans person out of public life, but force every person who is not explicitly anti-trans either out of employment or into silence.

Today remains World AIDS Day, a compassionate acknowledgement of reality that the dirt-simple scumclowns currently squatting atop the U.S. government are conspicuously ignoring because they are fucked in their souls.

This is what For Women Scotland produced at the peak of their fixation with me two years ago. A sexualised poem of me as a child. This was on their official account! They left it up for months! But no, to our media nothing to see here, instead they get awards from The Herald. Brazen.

There's not a single anti-trans campaigner or group with a major platform on twitter who haven't posted *horrifying* things and it's a stain on our entire media ecosystem that not a single major outlet has done even basic reporting of it.

I'll put the twee up probably at the end of the week, not in the mood right now. We'll let the seasonal music playlist work on me a while yet

Hello December, let's do an advent thing. I have a collection of interesting kinda-Christmas songs on YouTube, here we go... youtu.be/tuaRrSVm--I?... I like this version for the quality of Greg Lake's voice near the end of his life, used and patina'd but still good

Also, complain long and loud, when GenAI screws up your interaction with a company - obtaining/using their products, contacting customer service, whatever. Do this direct and on social media. Employees may well be unable to push back against directives to use this garbage without risking their jobs.

This spineless excuse for a leader is basically a puppet dancing on the strings of the right wing press, lurching towards performative cruelty at their pull inews.co.uk/news/politic...

This! You DON’T HAVE TO USE IT! It’s so easy NOT to use it. They can’t force us to use it. stop rolling over & saying “Well, you just have to get used to it. You can’t stop it”… how’d that work for <insert absolute garbage tech or even any insidious, violent movement (like the NF or N*zis) here>?

The total deprofessionalization of US government culture in less than a year has been a sight to behold. Everything is in the hands of a pack of ambulatory scrotal cancers. Also, the book should be titled "Franklin's RPG-7 Backblast Blows Him to Certain Death and Downs the Chopper He Flew In On."

(UK) Parliamentary Petition: Require generative AI watermarks & ban using people’s likeness without consent https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/736690

In related news, a bunch of transphobes have been trying to start an argument with me for the last couple of days and why would I engage in that when I could do pretty much anything else instead?

Holy shit

Also, isn't it great the way they keep saying there will be jobs at data centres when their express purpose is to do stuff without human interaction. 🤔

#gimme100 words written, and a useful chat with @neilwilliamson.bsky.social to check that what I have in mind seems to work. Onwards...

The Doctor is right and correct

Spent nearly all week, moving big chunks of book about to make the pacing work. Today, adding an scene in which will strengthen stuff that happens later on and add an air of threat.

Idle thought. Could we fix the council tax revaluation problem by having a “revalue upon sale”approach? Because visibly we are not gonna exit from “property tax values that are older than the Czech Republic” by going through it to *existing* homeowners.

Mural at the entrance to Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital. Pic: paul4jags | Threads

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild: Osprey Eider ducks Orca Bald eagle California sea lion

I think that somewhere along the way something in Stephen Miller got fundamentally damaged. This is neither an excuse nor a mitigating factor; the dude is genuinely fucking evil and he and everything he stands for should be fought against and stopped. But he is something beyond mere sociopathy.

Hate Black Friday it's a load of nonsense, firmly support this stance.

No one comes out of this interview looking great - but I think it's an important guide to the colours of transphobia. "Just a bit transphobic" like the interviewer "Middle class activist transphobia" like Sarah Ditum "All consuming obsession" like Graham Linehan observer.co.uk/culture/inte...

For Women Scotland and the Scottish Conservatives are currently fighting the Scottish Government in court to try and force all trans women into these circumstances by banning trans women from women's jails: www.thenational.scot/news/2560202...

TW: Suicide and transphobia A trans woman died in Scottish prison after spending *nine weeks* in isolation as discussions over being transferred to a women's prison "dragged on" in 2019. The inquiry ended this month. insidetime.org/newsround/tr...

Oh hey does anyone want lesbian space pirates? Also sex scene with one of the participants is a sentient spaceship (lemme tell you it was a *project* to write)