Two hooded figures with lamps approach a moonlit, isolated cottage. A woman answers the door. We have come for the child, says the hooded figure So soon? she asks It is time, says the hooded figure. The woman is distraught. We should never have got him a library card! What is done cannot be undone, says the hooded figure We couldn’t see the harm! We just wanted him to enjoy reading! For most, it ends there, says the hooded figure, turning away and walking into the wilderness Oh lord, What have I done! says the woman, the child walks past her and out into the darkness with them. Do not cry mother. I am a writer now.

my latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com

This comparison is so apt on so many levels I might need to write about it because YESSSS

Lynne Thigpen as "The Chief" from Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego

Lock the fuck in, Gumshoes. Carmen Sandiego stole a priceless wax pressing of "One of These Nights" by the Eagles. You've got to stop her before she travels back in time to 149 BC Carthage and trades it to Scipio Africanus the Younger for a kilo of the good shit.
*Rockapella bops on stage*

Emerson writing his Concord Hymn while holding a lahge Dunkin' regulah

Patriots Day runs on Dunkin', at least in Concord
www.universalhub.com/2026/patriot...

they’re gonna run a bunch of candidates who make vague noises about how badly we need ‘change’ that isn’t actually change and all the people who yearn above all else for a return to norms and decorum will be so relieved to vote for them

Just a professor standing in front of BlueSky demoralized because exams my students used to get a mean of 83% on prior to 2020 are now failed in large numbers. It seems that their ability to APPLY concepts to new contexts/domains has all but disappeared.

I love these students & I am worried.

do not try to come at me with a genre of pornography being universally immoral unless you have a very strong argument that you learned from sex workers. i saw what happened when we all turned our fucking backs on weird porn. it never stops with the shit you think it will.

actually aside from banning them entirely, smart glasses should be forced to look like this, no stealth, no cool

I don't yet have a search-by-tag method (I'm waiting until I get a bit more material accumulated to write the search tool), but there haven't been many items tagged The Dredge yet (ten, I think; the earliest was sometime in Feb)
eccentricflower.com/utopia/

No, The Dredge is what I've been calling the pages of my project to unearth and repost old journal entries and essays and other stuff like that. That's the tag I use for it in my journal.

That, and email wasn't ruined yet

I have it as a kind of implied theme in one of my universes, but I've never brought it up explicitly: the people who crew ships live on them and it's kind of a lifetime commitment, because the journeys take so long. (The passengers travel in stasis but the crew can't.)

I swear every time I Dredge a month of old journal entries I age an extra month on the spot.

I'll say that the approach of those two sites is better than the Daz site itself, which has NO marker for this content. I have already been burned at least once -- a kit that used gen tools for some of the surfaces. One of those surfaces APPEARED IN ONE OF MY STORIES, which shames me.

There are two PAs whom I probably will not buy anything else from because they've admitted using this crap at least once and to my mind that means if they say they've stopped, they're lying. I can afford an overabundance of caution. They cannot. Fuck them. I do not forgive on this matter.

... and the creators are going to have an incentive to lie, any second now, when they realize that marker means "do not under any circumstances buy that product" for a lot of us. In a good timeline they would learn "hey, maybe I shouldn't use those tools," but no. They'll just lie.

The deal right now is that two of the large sites for Daz Studio resources have added a marker "AI was used in the creation of this product" (good, apart from terminology), but it is only self-reported and only can be, really (bad). There's no good way to check on whether this is reported accurately

I am very, very tired of arguing about use of generative tools, and having to explain to everyone* over and over the many reasons why any policy other than absolute zero tolerance is wrong.**

* I know ONE person using LLMs in a useful and nondestructive way. Hi, Len
** Except for Len.

Five L's would be Llowlyll and you'd be in Wales.

Not wrong tho

hello. i am a hamburger

Keridwen is a bird woman. She has pale skin and white-gray feathers, including around the back of her neck like a high collar and in a cockatoo-like crest in place of hair. Her body is not completely feathered and her exposed skin is painted with glowing designs in red-orange. Her beak is stained red, like a blood splash.

Eilonwe is also a bird woman. She is more muscular than Keridwen but you can't tell here. Her skin is gray-black, with black feathers. Her head crest doesn't stand up as vertically as Keridwen's does, it has more of a "slicked-back" look, and her collar/ruff feathers aren't as high. Her body markings glow green.

Keridwen doing magic. The actual effect of what she's doing is off-camera, but she is focused on whatever it is and gesturing. She is lit by a strong red glow from below.

I paused work on this story last night to completely redesign Keridwen and Eilonwe (I have much better stuff than I did when they were last seen, in 2023) and I'm so glad I did.

(Also it has Denuvo and I have to really really really want a game to allow it to put that malware on my computer, but if I thought for a moment I could play the damned thing, I would.)

I don't have the reflexes to play Pragmata, with its ingenious "Hugh is fighting and shooting WHILE Diana, riding on his back, is trying to hack things" control scheme, I don't think ... which is a pity because it looks great. (Some people are calling it Space Dad Simulator.)

But first, the new Car Pal

Nobody else better have anything else for me the rest of the day because I am absolutely OVER this week and I plan to do almost nothing for the next 2.3 days which is not My Stuff.

(To wit, getting as done with this furshlugginer comic as I can, and possibly doing another dose of The Dredge.)

Yuuuup

Unfortunately yes. See my reply to Iain. I think a lot of people are miscalibrating. Imna take that charitable theory.

I think the issue there is they don’t think anyone else can oust Collins. Which does very much need to happen.