Thinking of becoming a single-issue voter

The signs were there, even though I was a STEM kid in high school: I mostly went to those classes and then skipped the rest to play D&D with my friends.

I can only assume the first is, and this is a real thing, a secret menu item from local chain The Burger's Priest, called the Religious Hypocrite: A veggie burger with bacon on it.

If you're a writer, write "I waited" without saying it. - - - The vending machine in the er waiting room has very interesting siding, you really don’t see wood panel very often on appliances these days.

If you're a writer, write "I waited" without saying it. --- Just a little longer, she thought impatiently. Where was he? She was getting nervous. The paranoid part of her brain took the gap in time and spun it out into ten different scenarios, kidnapping, murder, accident.

Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, sigma, omega.

One of my favourite things to do is write vignettes about kinks I don't have. I think my favourite is an emetophilia microfic that got *several* people going "...fuck, I kind of get it now". I am a fetish catalyst and proud of it.

Everyone sees Jolteons as these energetic critters, but I dunno, they've always seemed grounded to me.

I sympathize with this argument, and,

I'm bad at top-1s, but I think it might be Zero-Sum. https://youtu.be/YV2HDb6TD0c — I also have a mashup with Massive Attack's Teardrop which is incredible. https://youtu.be/Z9YIXM0cHB8 Honourable mentions: The Way Out Is Through, Another Crashed Car, Ghosts 15, Not So Pretty Now.

If you want a second reason to do this, I've seen conspiracist nonsense in the alt-text of some unrelated gifs. This was back in 2021, but still.

Now: Isolation and solitude: Autistic people's experience of misundertanding and (un)belonging. Even though this is considered a core feature of autism, it is also often a misunderstanding of what autistic social needs and desires are. #INSAR2026

Lots of people have looked at the practical; I think the mental is the other half of the battle. Writing is an act of god. It can require hubris to do well. When trying to write something, it's frequently useful to make yourself feel like you cannot fail (the purpose of "write drunk, edit sober").

we don't need to become different instruments we need to play different songs

Hexxus from FernGully is on the cutting room floor of this list and I'm not even saying it needs to be on it, I'm saying sixteen iconic performances *aren't enough* for this man.

News used to be better

A friend of mine uses comma splices a lot, and I asked about it once. Fae said it was because a comma splice welds concepts together in a way no other punctuation style does, and represents a connection made by the character. Blew my mind.

Seems like a good time to post this https://archiveofourown.org/works/42639447

Phil Ford: "Science fiction is fantasy for people who need a reason."

In book six of my series, I found out that I had created an unresolveable loophole because two events had to happen in a specific order for the story to work the way I needed it to, but in terms of the overall timeline (some of which was not under my control), they physically could not.

What's up.

There was a post I saw once about how a good way to give characters depth is to give them decompensations, things they're normally good at that break down under stress.

"All authors are using AI now" I watched a colleague of mine switch to handwriting chapters of her novel and her productivity doubled.

I'm sad because this led me to find out that a quote attributed to Margaret Mead about how the earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur is not accurate. Alas. Still, though, I feel like we'd have to define the boundaries of "invention" — mutualism, which is a social technology, could count.

I think the connection is that they both “yes and” you, and give “statistically probable” answers, not true answers. So they accept the premise without question. When trump publicly says something reprehensible, news sites go “well that seems unlikely” and rewrite it to feel “””normal”””

You know, there's gotta be someone more knowledgeable than me who can make the connection from spin to to LLM errors, but, that's what I thought of when I read this. Existing biases led these news organizations to hallucinate a combination of what they expected and what they wanted to see.

Top 10 video game weapons, huh… - Gjallarhorn, Destiny - Fierce Deity Sword, Majora's Mask - Psionic Storm, Starcraft - AWP, Counter-Strike - Naught, Honkai: Star Rail - Spiked Shield, Dead Cells - Murderbeam, Super Metroid - Null Driver, Iji - Yo-yo, Kirby Super Star - Daedalus Stormbow, Terraria

I'm so sorry, but I looked at this and went "oh no, the hail was so big their eyes exploded"

An LLM might be able to write a "western-themed opera" if it were trained on both. It could not write The Ecstasy of Gold, a western theme substantially informed by Morricone's experience in opera. The trick to inspiration is in being able to adapt genres and even mediums, to use things *wrong*.

Add one word to a film to ruin it: The Matrix 5

THE RUSSIAN HISTORIAN STRIKES AGAIN www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wp...

Related to a conversation in comments: I feel like there’s major value in a negotiated antagonistic relationship between reader and writer, prose storytelling as a form of power exchange, and I further feel like not enough people think about it/write about it explicitly in those terms

I also think the visual language of cinema can help with writing. I have performed things like zooms, shot/reverse shot, and match cuts in text. The audience has a mental image of the story (or at least a model of it); the book is its director.

I would call this split affective vs reflective. And both are equally deep. It takes empathy for the audience and an understanding of human psychology to create something that pulls at our emotions in a compelling way. I find myself analyzing why porn makes me feel the way it does all the time.

Oh Indeed afutureworththinkingabout.com?p=5442

I wrote you a piece about the concept of moral injury and why we need the voices of the prophets during times when concepts like "ethical compass" and "basic decency" elude us as a collective. Among other things, it explains moral injury and how to heal from it, which, you know, might be useful.

Some of the work I'm proudest of is To Follow in Their Footsteps, which intentionally ties off every loose end of the previous two stories and ends on a cliffhanger I didn't have a clue how to resolve when I published it, and To Seek what They Sought, which was forced to be something completely new.

This gets worse. A few years ago, a guy bamed Mario Zechner began scraping European grocery chains, and one of the things he found was widespread cyclic discounts leading to it being impossible to know what anything costs. Intentional price obfuscation. mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/11...

Art by Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestami | www.instagram.com/neyestanimana

I made a filterlist for uBlock Origin to remove Generative AI features on websites. Includes blocks for * Google AI Summaries * YouTube Ask button & chat summaries * GitHub Copilot * Facebook AI chat * X's Grok buttons * Deviantart DreamUp * Booru AI images * And more github.com/Stevoisiak/S...

TREBEK: You may see them crawling up walls, but you cannot kill them in a way that matters. me: who are the Chinese psychedelic mushroom people TREBEK: Bizarre little men. You still control the board.

State Azure, "Fragments", a procedurally-generated four-hour eurorack song I've been using to sleep for years. GGEZ.

I have a comedy set from Marc Maron from like 2004 that contains the line "We sure showed those Iraqis for what those Saudis did". It's part of the culture of abuse in the US ruling apparatus. Get mad and take it out on a victim you don't think anyone will care about.

This is an ad for DuckDuckGo. It offers a choice when the real issue is that LLMs are shoved into everything. "You should let the monsters and the vulnerable people preyed upon by LLMs still use it, and look, you don't have to!" Cigarette companies denied the existence of secondhand smoke, too.

I understand that we’re all fighting helplessness and despair right now but one ought to refrain from forcing strangers to be part of one’s maladaptive coping mechanisms

'The button that says your name', in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, which only says "Jim". The narrator has you visualize yourself as Jim in order to get you to react to that name as yours. In the finale, you find dozens of these buttons. They all say "Jim", except one, which says "Stanley".

If we cut the predator out of you, we would be cutting out the way you play with children; the urge you have to walk at night; the holiness you sometimes glimpse upon the kitchen knife

My extension to this: The death penalty is barbaric when applied to people. It is necessary to apply to companies, with the same criteria we have applied to individuals. If a company wilfully kills a bunch of people, it should cease to exist.

Bear with me, I'm going to get nerdy about Starcraft II for a moment.

*Aragorn kicks helmet, breaks toe* FFFFFFFFUCK