HOW VERY DARE YOU, YOU CLANKIE LOVER! 🤖

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I am guessing it's about editors—who are already so overworked that they read and edit manuscripts on their own time, it's not part of the office job—are using LLMs to offer preliminary reports on submissions. Is it?

Or is there something even worse afoot?

America, let me hold your gun hand in one hand and your trucknutz in the other while I say this, with love; you need to start being a real country.

I know, I know, as an English person I see the irony, and the flaw in our plan to ship all our nutters there in the 1700s, I’m sorry.

hawking a line of branded Mountain Goats smart glasses. no matter where you look things look a little bleaker and also the wearer cannot remove the glasses once worn. I’m disrupting this sector

Note for the uninformed: Kathleen Stock is an outspoken, fanatical transphobe.

A better headline might have been "bully calls on bullying victim to put past bullying behind them (and bend over)".

The biggest problem I’ve found with an all-lesbian bank heist team is that everyone wants to be called Fingers

Welcome to 2026, where the prospect of "chaos with Ed Milliband" is welcomed with "hell yeah! Bring it on."

I don't know how I could explain this situation to my 2015 self, but here we are

But then of course Kathleen Stock wouldn't know that, because she wasn't there

Editors should not upload manuscripts to AI without permission, says Authors Guild The Authors Guild (AG) in the US has warned editors not to upload submitted manuscripts to consumer-facing AI systems.

Ooooh, this is gonna be a mess

www.thebookseller.com/news/editors...

Scotland got a fascinating opportunity to do a boot-from-cold on an all-new political culture back in 2000, and for the first decade or so it was mostly free of the patronage networks and bullshit of Westminster politics. But that reboot happened 26 years ago, and the machines are getting bedded in.

Despite the bullshit about Starmer I'm *fascinated* by the Daily Mail running a feature on Nadine Dorries that pushes gender-affirming healthcare ... /s

An advert from New Scientist in the 1970s for the Polytron, a wand blender on a stand with an external power supply/controller. Caption reads "Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds"

Here's my FAVOURITE blender of all time, the Polytron:

It's time to smaxxdown the maxxmaxxmaxxdown!

I, for one, welcome our new global tetrahedral overlords!

And now for a message from our sponsors—

Nope, I wasn't focussing on that as a problem back in 2005. (But in any case, TJM explicitly baked *awareness* of the Bond canon into its own universe rather than playing *in* the Bond universe. That's pretty safe.)

Need more ghillie-suited killer robot dachshunds hiding in the shrubbery.

I see "Rare Treasures Editions" lists some of the Manning Coles books on Kobo.co.uk, published as ebooks circa 2019-21. So they might be able to tell you who the rightsholders are? Project Gutenberg doesn't have any Manning Coles so I they may be legit ...

The film introduces new copyrighted elements all of its own, and also, in the US, gets a 95 year corporate copyright instead of life plus 70.

Coles died in 1965, so they'll be out of copyright by 2036. Everything before The Basle Express is *already* OOC, so you could reasonably fold, spindle, and mutilate anything that didn't reference the last six books.

And it's a really good thing I'm no longer writing Laundry Files tribute novels!

Exactly. And given the likely profits on a novel-length work of fiction and the likely costs of defending it in court it would be a Very Bad Idea to poke the Orwell estate—let alone the movie studios and other stakeholders—with that particular stick.

(It is November the 52nd in the year 99 of our glorious Big Brother—it's been November '99 for 17 consecutive months so far—and the Y1C problem still terrifies the MiniLove Computer team. Meanwhile the latest heroin shipment for the Junior Anti-Sex League brothels has been stolen ...)

I have had plans, PLANS! I say, for an unauthorized sequel to 1984 (since about 1990) except thanks to the goddamn movies it's still covered by copyright in various places until 2040 and my proposed exegesis on the decay path of Brezhnevite bureaucracy is looking a bit tired these days.

I mean, that would suck. I am a writer whose hobby is choir. :/

I guess I'd just have to spend the entire year writing fanfic of the obscure but still copyrighted 1950s thrillers of which I am one of about 12 living readers.

They'll sell 'em by the thousands to Russia, who will then squander them in human wave attacks that don't bleed.

Review by kjcharles - Relic I was not expecting this book to be good. And indeed it wasn’t. I *was* expecting it to be ba...

I read Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and I will not forgive.

Oh fuck off, techbro troll.

Oh, that was just their pioneering use against their own (white) citizenry: those weapons go back a lot further, but were originally designed for use against foreigners and non-whites.

The tools of fascism always come home to roost ...

The crucial thing to understand about Peter Thiel is that he adores "The Lord of the Rings" and no one in human history has ever so utterly completely missed all the salient points of what a book is about.

Indeed: so we can safely say he was promoted above the level of his competence!

(As was Trump. Who was maybe competent to be a used car salesman or a crooked realtor, but never a president.)