It’s pretty jarring we’ve just come to expect that the feds will lie to us and publicize false information and that there is virtually no consequence for it.

CNN@cnn.com · 5d ago

The Justice Department is admitting that a $14 million renovation on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, was flawed, and is dropping the criminal case against a former Olympian that accused him of damaging the pool, according to a new court filing. https://cnn.it/3RJJnwj

I wrote a whole essay in some poor person’s replies again. This 🧵’s for teachers who deal with group projects and creative fields in the age of the capitalist plagiarism hagfish slime machines.

Captain Awkward@captainawkward.bsky.social · 5d ago

As a prof this is how I dealt with the person in the group project who everyone else complained privately about because they did no work come presentation time: “Nice work, everyone! For the Q& A, why don’t you start us off [Obvious Fuckup Name]! Can you tell us a little about [creative choice]?”

Every writer I know, and for my sins I know a lot of them, is absolutely 100% delighted for you to get their book out from your local library.

“You’re a schmuck for following the rules“ is how we badly damage society. “Rich and/or famous people can escape accountability forever” is how we destroy it for good.

Having just rewatched season 1, this is 100% why a show like Reacher is popular. There's a vicarious thrill to watching a very large, competent person punish a lot of malignantly stupid people.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 5d ago

it’s never a great sign for your society when all the competent people who believe in doing a good job for the sake of it conclude that they’re actively being punished for these qualities, while malignantly stupid criminals are making bank

This Florida story is just a sliver of a glimpse of what will happen with voting if the SAVE act ever passes.

Jacqueline Antonovich@jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 5d ago

"A Port Charlotte woman says her complex marital history and missing documents have left her unable to obtain a Florida driver’s license, highlighting a statewide issue affecting others with identity verification challenges."

No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this. theonion.com/translator-o...

Translator Of Original ‘Minions’ Epic Poem Slams ‘Sexless, Bloodless’ Film Adaptation

PHILADELPHIA—In a 4,500-word essay published in Harper’s Magazine, Emily Wilson, known for her popular translation of the Minions epic poem, blasted the latest film Thursday as a “sexless, bloodless” ...

theonion.com

If anybody was excited that Science Fiction Weekly is aiming to "revive" Daily Science Fiction, you should know they are straight-up lying about having gotten permission from writers to republish DSF stories on their website. (Yes, I have sent a DCMA takedown notice.)

WRITER FRIENDS: if you distribute books using INGRAM SPARK you *need* to fill out this opt-out form so they don't sell your books to AI corps to rip apart and feed to their machine for training AI.

Susan Kaye Quinn is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱@susankayequinn.bsky.social · 2w ago

www.ingramcontent.com/page/ai-opt-...

An autistic man with a special interest in the Harry Potter series has made the decision to value the lives and dignity of his trans friends more than a book about a wizard who grows up to be a cop, sources have reported.

Autistic man with special interest in Harry Potter gets over it, leaving you with no excuse

An autistic man with a special interest in the Harry Potter series has made the decision to value the lives and dignity of his trans friends more than a book about a wizard who grows up to be a cop,…

thedailytism.com

A baguette needs to be javelined for best effect whereas you can frisbee a naan which means that while distance on a baguette is dependent on your shoulder and effectiveness of your kinetic chain, the naan will travel further even with worse pronation due to physics. Naan win everytime

Sophie Hall@sophlouisehall.bsky.social · 2w ago

Finally, someone asking the important questions

Requesting your library acquire copies of a book is one of the best ways to uplift the authors you love.

Sunny Moraine@dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social · 2w ago

If you want to read a book and your library doesn’t have it, it is truly a massive favor to an author to request that the library acquire it. It really and truly is

matthew always brings the receipts

Matthew Cortland (they)@matthewcort.land · 2w ago

It's a scam all the way down. Taylor Farms gave MAGA Inc. $1M USD less than a week after FDA postponed implementation of food traceability rules. www.patreon.com/mattbc/posts...

This is probably the most important video you'll watch this month. Who do we have to pester to make this illegal? This should never have been legal in the first place.

David Dayen@ddayen.bsky.social · 3w ago

I was happy to participate in this video from Chris the Producer. He created an LLC, hired an actor who built a miserly profile online, and flew a phone via drone into a ritzy area to try to influence the prices derived from data collection. And it worked! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCSw...

Perfection.

also this isn't a taco bell problem, it's a taco bell has unusually good ability to trace their supply chains and strong relationships with local public health authorities so they're the first affected company to provide traceability problem

Seth Cotlar@sethcotlar.bsky.social · 3w ago

This administration, supposedly representing the “real” salt of the earth Americans, is filled with people like this who have no idea how Americans actually live. For context, each Taco Bell outlet serves about 900 people PER DAY and there are over 300 Taco Bells in Michigan.

"Trains didn't exist yet, the last time the Necromancer and I were alive."

K Lykkebo 🖤 Fantasy author@karenlykkebo.com · last mo.

Fellow authors: Without any context, what's the first line of your current WIP? “I’ll admit, I wasn’t terribly surprised the morning I woke up as a rat.”

As some outlets are still in the “Trump says…” phase of coverage, just a reminder he’s made a lot of these (or similar) claims before and they turned out to be bullshit — this thread’s a quick refresher.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver@lastweektonight.com · 3w ago

Trump’s primetime speech tonight will reportedly contain yet another effort to discredit the 2020 election, so here’s a quick refresher on the greatest hits of his election-denial claims that immediately fell apart!

Cue Shirley Jackson's epic response to a person who was under the mistaken impression that informing a writer that you don't approve of their work/conduct/ideas/etc. will somehow shame/inspire them to change everything about themselves just to please a random idiot.

We’re close to the end of our fundraiser and still haven’t met our goal — we need ~$4k in four days. Frankly: I’ve used… a lot of personal funds to keep us afloat over the years between Kickstarters. I now have a child who’ll need daycare. I won’t have enough left over to bridge khōréō’s gaps.

khōréō magazine@khoreo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our Kickstarter is live! Help support another year of speculative fiction by immigrant & diaspora writers over at @Kickstarter. 🧡 With your help, we can keep funding our work, expand to regular author interviews, raise our artist pay, & more! Support us at: www.kickstarter.com/projects/kho...

RIP Wally Funk (1939-2026), one of the Mercury 13 (which inspired For All Mankind) Also: "In July 2021. Funk became the oldest woman to travel to space at the age of 82. During the 11-minute flight, Funk experienced a few moments of weightlessness and marveled at the darkness of space."

CNN@cnn.com · 4w ago

Wally Funk, a pioneering aviator who volunteered to be an astronaut for NASA’s “Women in Space Program” in 1961, has died at the age of 87. https://cnn.it/4foiJlL

godzilla #art

I packed this story full of things I love and blended together genres I adore. In a nutshell, it's Narnia in space. It's got characters fighting against injustice, but also the nostalgia and sense of wonder that brought so many of us to these genres in the first place.

Every day it's like "Republican-Appointed Supreme Court to Decide Whether the FDA Can Stop People From Selling Ground Glass as Flour"

A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.

Anti-trans politics is a major plank of the republican party because they just replaced the previous plank that was anti-gay, they just swapped one for the other when it wasn't working any more, and this is the most obvious thing ever. Surely everyone remembers how vile they were about gay people?

EA summer sale is live on Steam. EA don't want to pay artists to make a single splash screen so they have used entirely AI generated art instead.