← Feed

Posts

• View post

  #WritersCoffeeClub 30 Oct How does your work immortalise those who came before you? How dramatic. Those who came before me and influenced me don't need any help from my work to be recognised.

• View post

  #WordWeavers 30 Oct What tiny detail about your world or a character will probably never matter to the plot, but you created it anyway? Hard to know. I like layers. A throwaway mention of "Holy Lead" as something with an XX import classification (existential threat) in The Silk Mind turned into the first scene I wrote for The Source of Fire and the premise of a steam ship run on a Holy Lead Furnace (i.e nuclear reactor). I might re-use *anything* for a future plot arc.

• View post

  Oh shit it's been Halloween for hours and it never occurred to me to go on about my horror short stories. I am bad at marketing. Never mind. Anyway, you can get most of the best ones in my book bundle if you like.

• View post

  #ScribesAndMakers 1 Nov Is there a particular type of architecture that appeals to you, and if so, what do you find appealing about it? The overlapping influences of Charles Rennie Macintosh, Art Nouveau, and what Antoni Gaudi was doing. I like stained glass, wood, curving asymmetrical shapes drawn from nature, the whole vibe is very cosy and pleasing to me.

• View post

  #WordWeavers 1 Nov What is the most ridiculous argument two of your characters have ever had, and who won? In The Silk Mind, Jenna and Justin are introduced arguing over a hand of cards. Justin's opinion is Jenna's winning with a king wasn't fair because they're not in a proper monarchy so kings shouldn't be worth more. They're playing with badger droppings for stakes, so Ash is of the opinion they shouldn't even want to win the game, but...

• View post

  Oops all nut November

• View post

  Nice chill Friday, a great day to do #ThreeGoodThings 1. Employer recognised our union branch 2. I got all my writing off Google drive and into an alternative storage/online editing solution hosted outside the US. 3. I was feeling like I was down a hole with very slippery sides earlier this week, but now I feel like I have a bit of agency and a plan. Ready for a fun weekend.

• View post

  Of all the big LLM companies, the most ethical one in terms of ripping off copyrighted works is GrokAI, which is only trained on Mein Kampf and Lolita.

• View post

  #ScribesAndMakers Jul 29 From soft to hard, where do your tastes fall on the Science Fiction scale? There's three axes: how much the science is the point of the story idea, how much the science is articulated, and how plausible the science is. So it's kind of a cube rather than a scale. If the science isn't the point, don't go on about it. If the science is the point, get it right (apart from the what-if impossible bit). Either is fine.

• View post

  Ah, AI autumn is upon us again. It's been a while. Now we look forward to AI winter, and AI Christmas, when if we're very good Sam Altman will be visited by 3 ghosts who don't attempt the impossible task of saving his soul, and just kick the shit out of him.

• View post

  The thing about #ClimateChange under unregulated capitalism is: Corporations will implacably and inexorably do the things that are going to kill us all for as long as those things make a profit. If AND ONLY IF we tax and regulate them so the things that are going to kill us aren't profitable any more, we get to live. It is that simple. There is no path to corporations not killing us all and even themselves if the time lag between act and consequence is longer than one financial year.

• View post

  So, I'm told about 37 fash showed up at Glasgow Green today. I didn't bother counting them myself. The counter-demo is at least 500 so far, at a guess, with more coming in.

• View post

  #WordWeavers 21 Jul Do past reviews influence your current writing? Book website reviews are not feedback. Those are for people with plenty of time and opinions to say what they don't like about a book so other people can think "but that sounds good actually" or the other way round. Thoughtful reviews by people who know what they're doing, and maybe even what you're doing, are still for the reader. They're not for the writer. Don't read them as if they're fee...

• View post

  When I get my next phone, I'm going to buy 2 cases for it. Because if you can still get a replacement case for your phone when the first one wears out, you're buying phones too often. Ideally too, this will be after the start of the next AI winter, so my next phone won't be full of features I don't want that keep breaking things because the server owners are bankrupt or in prison.

• View post

  Never break the law for a good reason. If you break the law for gain or just because you felt like it, you might get off lightly. You'll at least only have the usual burden of raising reasonable doubt that what you did was what you're charged with. If you say you had a good reason to break the law, that's an attack on the legitimacy of the law itself. They'll fuckin *get* you for that.

• View post

  @MissingThePt@mastodon.social Can the triathlon guys get far enough through the snow and across the ice cold river before the skiiers with guns come for them?

• View post

  Millions of depoliticised people with no interest in how things work but full of vague grievances are a statistical phenomenon with its own inertia, almost a physical disaster like a tsunami or a pyroclastic flow. Once they get going they are definitely going to wreck everything, and talking a tiny fraction of them back from the edge isn't going to do anything. This is why boring good governance matters. The lesser of two evils always falls to the louder of two evils. Try being actually...

• View post

  Heard on the bus a few days ago: "He's got five sons, wan ae them's twins" This is from a native speaker of Modern Scottish English, so I can't put an asterisk beside it.

• View post

  At some point we need to stop agreeing that someone can own 1000,000 times as much as their equal share of the world and do what they like to everyone else's share by exerting ownership as power. We could just not believe that any more, it's not a law of physics. What's going to happen if we stop? Disastrous climate change, concentration camps, resource wars? Ooo, scary.

• View post

  @art_of_goulwenr@mastodon.art Surely you are not implying that George Lucas isn't a particularly original thinker.

• View post

  I've said it before, but #WesStreeting has huge Young Conservative vibes, and if you showed 1990s me a photo of him, even without any intervening political context, I'd absolutely identify him as the oily Thatcherite simp he is. It would not be a kindness to tell 1990s me any of the intervening political context, now that I think about it.

• View post

  @falcennial@mastodon.social @gabrielesvelto@mas.to Dump and Slump.

• View post

  Let's not sleep on the fact that the outcome of the #ScottishElection2026 was a *comprehensive rejection* of far-right politics. The SNP and Greens together take a pro-independence majority. The moderately progressive unionist party, the LibDems made gains. Unprincipled centrists, Labour, lost a few seats. Reform gained 17, but the Tories lost 19, for a net *loss* of 2 seats for the brexity bigot bloc. This is not an inevitable rise of the right by any reasonable measure.

• View post

  Good morning, all. Today in various parts of the UK, you get to punch Nazis just by drawing a small cross on a bit of paper. Why would you not.

• View post

  I've found a use for AI. If you start typing a sentence and it successfully autocompletes what you were about to say, it was obviously something trite and overdone, so delete it and think of something better.

• View post

  @jdnicoll I feel like fewer observers should have been astounded.

• View post

  @fenixmaster @dangillmor The weakest point of an autonomous vehicle is the cameras. Smear some vaseline over them and without having technically done any criminal damage, you've immobilised the thing (hopefully, as long as its AI doesn't just make shit up when presented with a blurry image, which I can't guarantee).

• View post

  @emmatyping Well, it's not a statically-typed language. In Rust you'd have to define some kind of Fruit trait.

• View post

  @cstross I'd stand over the bananas in Lidl frowning and taking notes on a clipboard with a big radiation sign on it.

• View post

  #ScribesAndMakers 3 Apr Do you think there's a creative element to eating? The way I do it it's mostly destructive.