Patrick Freyne: Here’s why AI is making us dumber and more lonely Writing forces people to resolve internal contradictions and confront their own bullshit. It’s why it’s hard. It’s why it’s beautiful

I wrote about why we should keep reading and writing

www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Yeah, Mackenzie Scott is a fascinating case. She is literally ignoring the SOPs of philanthropy in order to give away wealth as quickly and efficiently as possible and she’s still getting richer. At her level it is impossible not to make money. Tax billionaires, A LOT.

4 backers needed!!!!

I am definitely much better at plot than I once was but it’s not something that comes naturally and I have to create great unwieldy mental and physical scaffolds to allow me to do it (happily making it to 40 with undiagnosed ADHD makes me an expert at mental and physical scaffolds)

Took me a long while to understand this too. Without wishing to blow my own trumpet (toot toot) I am great at prose and characterisation but broadly terrible at plot, which is why my first two novels were basically me colouring in a true story.

DOGE turbocharged the deficit.

budgetlab.yale.edu/research/wea...

So’s dying at 35 but I don’t see anyone advocating to bring that back

"Magataotao" on Twitter writes: "I am Catholic. This👇is not my Pope." Attached is a video of the Pope saying that we should search for peace and reject war. A community note under their tweet says: "You are not a Catholic if you do not accept the Pope, but rather a schismatic. Canon 751: “Schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff,” ie. the Pope. https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib3-cann747-755_en.html"

first in my bloodline to see someone get excommunicated by a community note

Starting to feel like we are all involuntary participants in a D/s relationship with a humiliation fetish

This series put me off fantasy for a good decade.

This is such a great thread, and also highlights the extent to which the “male loneliness epidemic” is actually a sense of thwarted entitlement to women’s time, emotional labour, and bodies

Okay Yeongno, it’s time

I do realise the irony of a British person saying this

Hey America, maybe time to give up on the old “moral leadership” canard and just try being a normal country for a while?

Starmer should immediately & unequivocally ban access to British airspace to US warplanes. The UK should not be accomplice to a US President who is threatening more war crimes. Period.

I had the same reaction to hearing Konstantine for the first time. Recently listened to it again after forgetting its existence for years and its impact was undiminished.

My fellow writers might not want to hear this, but AI is a useful tool for certain aspects of the craft, like for instance when you’re engaged in the process of being a talentless shitbag hack who is too lazy to do any fucking writing.

Also jfc let people have their bake sales! What people choose to post about here tells you next to nothing about how they spend their energy elsewhere, and I’m also so tired of the smug assumption that talking about terrible news all the time = activism.

[reading a book in first person] i dont remember doing any of this

I find it so wearying that we’ve reached this point in our collective consciousness that the prevailing assumption is that money and convenience is the greatest motivator for all human beings, which has absolutely never been true

This shit is bleak but also I will continue to write novels from my actual brain until said brain is soup because crafting a novel is one of the single greatest joys in my life, and I will continue to read novels crafted by humans because if I didn’t I would wither and die.

thebookseller ig account saying NEWS: some editors uploading confidential manuscripts to ChatGPT to read quickly, agent claims

the guardian: I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence – but we are as valuable as ever | Stephen Marche

the walrus bsky account: Authors are using AI. Publishers know it. And now, says publishing consultant Thad McIlroy, authors are being forced to lie about it. One cancelled horror novel didn’t just end a career—it exposed an industry-wide reckoning.

idk guys when i see a lot of similar headlines insisting that editors & authors are all already embracing AI, i don't assume these things are true. i assume there are a lot of very rich people with an unpopular product pushing a particular narrative in my industry!

"Do you hate working at things? Do you have profound disrespect for your readers? Do you want to hasten the tech apocalypse?"

"All authors are using AI now! No, of course they are, they're just not saying so yet, but *everyone* is doing it so it's totally okay. You don't want to be left behind, do you? You're not uncool, are you?"

--the slop shillers, sounding increasingly like drug pushers in a 1980s kids TV show

I never feel more neurodivergent than I do in a large supermarket.

Lolsob. "Iran's president remains Pezeshkian" is such an understated burn.

Thank you for writing them! I first came to Sudan 20 years ago and am actually there right now (hello from South Kordofan!) and I cannot express how close the country is to my heart, in all its specialities and particularities.

How to Write About Africa ‘Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.’

(It's a take on Binyavanga Wainaina, which you should also read.)

How to Write About Sudan A critique, a balm, a question

Also, this, also by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, is fantastic.

This is so good and so evocative.

"When I think of my homeland before 2023, [...], I think of my wedding, where we invited a group of ‘foreigners’ and they found this country they knew so little about would become one of their favourite." <3