I said that if the person who created the prayer couldn't be bothered to write it, I felt it was blasphemous of them to expect her to listen to it.

It was 29 minutes long. My mother gave up listening half way through, because it was just repeating itself, and not really making sense, but felt guilty, feeling it was vaguely blasphemous to stop listening to a prayer.

I mean, bloody hell, if you're using a machine to talk to God because you can't be bothered, what the hell does that say about your faith?!?!

It's also everything that's wrong with AI. Utterly performative. Someone who likes the *idea* of being a person who produces worshipful prayers, but who can't actually be bothered to put in the work of writing that prayer.

Someone sent my mother a prayer video that I'm pretty sure was entirely created by AI: the too involved visuals, the not quite human narration, and the rambling, repeating contents.

I'm an atheist, but I find this pretty blasphemous.

Especially as tall landers are more risky than wider stocky ones - easier to fall over. They are clearly not playing enough Kerbal Space Program to learn these things 😁

This is particularly shocking given it involves discrimination against a disabled child, but it’s part of a wider problem that we also have in the UK, where the social housing portion of a development is accessed via a “poor door” which blocks access to gardens and children’s playgrounds etc.

Image of Starship HLS landed on the Moon with dimensions (showing it to be 50m tall).

I still just don’t get Starship HLS. It’s as though back in the 1960s, NASA decided to try and turn the Saturn 5’s upper stage into a lunar lander.

How I Fell In Love With The Manchester Storm I’m 56. I did not have becoming an ice1 hockey fan on my 2026 bingo card, but here I am, the morning after yesterday evening’s game again Guildford Flames...

For background, this is how I came to be a supporter of the Manchester Storm: buttondown.com/TheNexusFile...

Text reads: we're off to Nottingham! Elite League Playoffs Final Four 2026. Picture of Manchester Storm player to right.

Late, but huge congratulations to my beloved Manchester Storm for making the final four of the EIHL playoffs for the first time ever. On Saturday, Violet and I watched them win the first leg at home 2-1, and then on Sunday they hung on at Nottingham to win the penalty shootout. Good luck guys!

Once done, the novel will be heading to publishers. Going through it, I like it, and might dare to be quietly confident.

To be an agented but not yet published author is to work in a place of vagueness and limbo, but within the confines of that I think I can say that my agent, @johnj.bsky.social, has returned the manuscript of my latest novel with his thoughts and suggested edits, and I am now working on them.

There's a warning at the bottom of a UK death certificate stating that it "is not evidence of identity". I'm probably missing something, but this does seem a tad superfluous.

"Do you have any documentation to prove that you are Michael Fitzgerald Smith?"

"Here's my death certificate."

Advert for a product called tyreweld. Picture of 70s style American muscle car amid darkness and smoke. Woman crouching by car. Text: no tools. No fuss. No fear. End flat tyre terror.

Yeah. Because who among us isn’t still scarred by the time they broke down in a 1970s American urban dystopia? (Seen in the toilets at a UK motorway service station).

Me, wearing the Manchester Storm jersey, outside Planet Ice in Altrincham.

At the Storm Shelter in Altrincham for the Manchester Storm’s (men) last home game of the season. 1st leg of last eight playoff against Nottingham. #icehockey #manchesterstorm.

They've got a portal (you can get to it via their Discord, which they've already got up and running), where you can submit programme ideas. I've already submitted one idea to it. I'll submit this in a little while.

Anatopisms: Fantasy Writers’ Achilles Heel As an anachronism is to a word out of its time, an anatopism is a word out of its place. In a fantasy realm in which our world never existed, can a bureaucracy be byzantine or a task Herculean? Can you throw a Molotov cocktail or play a straight bat to a Trojan horse? Can you have a character called Dave? Should writers worry? And are there lines they can draw?

Okay, how's this for an idea for a panel for the next Eastercon (@eastercon2027.org)? Any thoughts?

Two author photographs under the title DIGITAL PANEL. On the left, David Quantick, a white man with glasses and a white beard. On the right, Neil Williamson, a bald white man with a short beard.

Totally stoked that I'll be at @cymerafestival.co.uk this year, talking to novelist and TV writer, David Quantick, about writing weird and wonderful stories.

www.cymerafestival.co.uk/programme-26...

holy shit the privilege & ableism of Windham-Campbell Prize people in requiring a chronically ill writer to CONTRACTUALLY AGREE to what were to her onerous publicity requirements that would have gobbled her limited energy and peace of mind in her precious months of dearly bought writing time 💔

Ooh, yeah. That’s a good one. I mean I think that comes under the umbrella of “translation” but it does risk appearing incongruous.

My unboxing of my old books continues to bring up reminders of the absolutely terrible stuff that I consumed as a young teenager (amongst a lot of other, much better stuff).

My series where I unbox my books and fill up my new library’s shelves continues with box 14, General Fiction F to I. #booktok #fiction vm.tiktok.com/ZNR4L3Hpc/

That’s weird in that my concern wouldn’t be that it’s Latin, it’s that it’s a 1920s Italian political movement.

Pedantic piece of shit seems a bit harsh, but I guess YMMV. (I’m an autistic writer, so I do worry about introducing any details into my settings that some readers might find to be something that jars, or breaks immersion. I want my settings to feel organic and coherent.)

Yes, that is apparently indeed the word. bsky.app/profile/kjch...

Vandalised is a brilliant example of how you could end up in a ridiculous hole.

Yeah I think I’m going to enter this as a suggested panel to the @eastercon2027.org programme suggestion portal. Perhaps @julietemckenna.bsky.social and @kjcharleswriter.com might be interested!

Is it from the Masonic secret societies?

For example, you can't use "MacGyver" as a verb meaning an improvised repair or off-label use of an item, because that term came from the name of a 20th century TV show.

But you can use "jerry-rig" (Jerry is 19th century Liverpool slang for "defective"), which isn't WW2 slang like I thought.

The Craft: The Language of Fantasy - Patrick Samphire I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the language we choose when we write fantasy novels, particularly when it comes to the last middle grade I wrote and the current adult fantasy I’m working...

Some of those are very modern, some try for an 'older' sounding choice of words. It depends on the effect you're aiming for. (I blogged about it a long time ago, although I think my thoughts have evolved a bit since then: patricksamphire.com/blog/2018/10...)