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Bill Cooper

@billcoops.bsky.social

Newfie in New Zealand. I like to write. I like to read. I like to videos game. they/them

59 Posts78 Follower111 Folgt
more mr. nice guy@juniorhoncho.bsky.social · 3mo ago

ELON: christopher nolin is desocrating Homer the Odyssey just to qualify for woke oscars award.. only thing he care is industy clout CHRISTOPHER NOLAN (looking at a bunch of clocks he's modified so they're all going at different speeds): haha yes.... hell yeah...

Bill Cooper@billcoops.bsky.social · 3mo ago

got so excited watching league of legends that i legitimately made the Goofy "YEAH-WOO-HOO-HOO!" noise. i want to be clear this was not a bit, I was not trying to amuse anyone, I was sitting alone watching LCK while my wife paints. so anyway what I'm saying is i'm extremely cool

Bill Cooper@billcoops.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Finally decided to cold turkey Twitter. It's long since given up any simulacrum of "town square" and has just started racing to the bottom of the cheapest, sleaziest way to hijack the dopamine pathways of your brain.

Sascha Stronach🏳️‍⚧️, The Sunforge out now@understatesmen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

it's "if you want to cast a shadow, move a mountain." Moorcock articulated the same idea here imo, in a much more citable way, it's just not as damn snappy and memorable. locusmag.com/feature/mich...

JP: I see a lot of fantasy authors credited as worldbuilders, and many cite you as a major influence on their work. I’ve heard you say you don’t do worldbuilding. What do you think is being missed in translation? MM: I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication. Take the Romantic writers of the 19th century, particularly the Brontës. The Brontës loved the idea of depicting weather to suit moods – it’s called the pathetic fallacy, where you give inanimate things animate qualities. The point of that style of writing is that it used landscape and weather, all exteriors, to symbolize internal con­flict within the individual or within a small group of individuals. I only invent what’s necessary to explain the mood of a character. I haven’t thought about an imaginary world’s social security system; I don’t know the gross national product of Melniboné. If worldbuilding is a sophisticated working-out of how a world interacts in and of itself, I don’t really have any of that. People interact in my worlds. Weather systems interact. The weather system is always sup­posed to show what’s going on inside the character. That’s why I don’t see myself as a worldbuilder. The world unfolds in front of the character as the story develops. If the story doesn’t need it, it’s not there. I’ve fought against this kind of anti-romantic rationalization most of my career. That’s why I don’t like Campbellian science fiction as such, because it has to present itself as a pseudo-realism to create a suspension of disbelief. I’m trying to do the op­posite. I’m trying to tell a good story without you having to believe it as ‘‘reality.’’ Cornelius in par­ticular depends on you NOT suspending your sense of disbelief!
Sascha Stronach🏳️‍⚧️, The Sunforge out now@understatesmen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

removing a line from this piece because it's impossible to cite "some guy on the Somethingawful forums two decades who said something incredibly deep and relevant about worldbuilding that has become a permanent part of my lexicon in response to what I'm pretty sure was a troll posting bait"

Anthony Oliveira@meakoopa.bsky.social · 7mo ago

someone asked on insta what “be brave enough to be kind” means and why i say it on my podcast and at screenings being kind is always a vulnerability - it exposes your belly. love puts us in harm’s way always. we gotta find the courage to risk being hurt. or else i don’t know what the point is.

Tade Thompson@tadethompson.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Here's a simple happiness hack: Do something for someone that is truly altruistic. Do it in secret if you can, and take no credit, if you can manage that in a world that sees everything. Do this as often as your circumstances allow, which may be once a year or once a day. Try it and see.

jenna newman phd@jennanewman.bsky.social · 9mo ago

“Imagine if we truly understand complex whale communication & can extend our term ‘language’ to them. Such breakthroughs would not only rewrite biology textbooks but also fundamentally redefine what it means to be human & pave the way to instituting new protections for whales, the ocean & beyond”🧪

“This month we published a study that showed that sperm whales have what appears to our team to be vowels and diphthongs, and use them in ways similar to how humans do. Later this year we will release Whale Acoustics Model, a novel A.I. system that translates any audio into sperm whale vocalizations - allowing humans to potentially experience, for the first time, what it might be like to interact with a whale in its own language. And we're developing the first blueprints for how we could evaluate whale communication translations, dismantling barriers between whale and human communication and opening the door to interspecies communication. Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.”
Apoorva Mandavilli@apoorvanyt.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Mind-blowingly cool use of AI “Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/o...

Catherine Frames@oxinabox.bsky.social · 11mo ago

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious" I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge. We know exactly how LLMs work.

merritt@merrittk.com · 11mo ago

hm, well i don't know who this person is or what she does but based on a screencap someone posted of something she wrote years ago ive decided that she has to be destroyed

Bill Cooper@billcoops.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Absolutely kickass story by C.Z. Tacks up in lightspeed today. a rad as hell cyberpunk story about sex work that is, in case I didn't make it clear enough, fucking rips. you want to read this story. you WILL read this story.

The Girlfriend Experience - Lightspeed Magazine

The company man’s smile showed off his perfect teeth. Evie hated that smile; it meant he was going to kill her again. Him staring down the camera above the Manic Pixie’s door didn’t help. Even with th...

lightspeedmagazine.com

Bill Cooper@billcoops.bsky.social · 12mo ago

If youre not on Twitter right now it's like 90% posts of movie clips where the description is just the first sentence uttered in the clip. Entire site full of "the real understand" energy

Matthew Jackson@awalrusdarkly.bsky.social · 12mo ago

People are shouting "LOOK HE'S THE BEST WE CAN DO" about the Governor of California, meanwhile the Governor of Illinois is out here talking like John Wick while *also* standing up for trans people.

Adam Schwarz@adamjschwarz.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."