The cover of Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, a street Milwaukee in 1932

Moderately (insanely) excited that this arrived today

Silksong is wild because i’m miserable but i can’t stop

I love London so much. So much.

Did you know that London has the lowest level of ethnic violence of any city of comparable size in the world?

Multiculturalism has in fact worked here. They just don’t want it to be true because we happen to have a Muslim mayor.

Text mounted on a screen reads as follows: WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION? 1. DOESN'T MATTER 2. WHO CARES 3. MARKETING DEPARTMENT'S PROBLEM 4. NOT YOURS

Simply the best slide I have ever seen in a powerpoint presentation care of @premeemohamed.com’s talk at @banffcentre.bsky.social re: Putting the Science in Science Fiction

anybody else’s gyre feel wider lately

I suppose this is the point when I should say again that:

the amount of money the videogames industry brings into the UK economy every year is *more than double* the value of the fishing and steel industries *combined*

what this country is really good at is producing culture

A few years into my TV writing career, I was struggling! But one simple piece of advice changed the entire trajectory of my career. So I wanted to do a #Scriptsky #Screenwriting thread about that advice and the ways in which CREATIVITY CAN FLOURISH (and also how it wanes).

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"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." -Brian Eno

“The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."

-Brian Eno

Letter from a young reader today who was “forced” to read a book by his teacher and “forced” to write a letter to the author, but who’s going to buy the book (More Than This) over the summer to finish it, “which is a big deal if you know me”. Honestly, best compliment a writer can get.

We need to not safely park Unbound as an outlier.

Treat it more as an example of how even the most author-centric model can easily leave the people who make the damn product in the first place as disposable raw materials, plundered, drained and scrapped, part of a messy game of luck and hope.

Teaching STEM without teaching the Humanities is how you get Spider-Man villians. Teaching Theater without teaching the Humanities is how you get Batman villians.

This made me laugh. And then I sat and thought about it. This is correct.

The cover of a Richard Scarry book showing the occupants of Busytown. The title has been changed to read “all We Do Is Work on Documents, That’s All Anyone Does Anymore.”

Good to see them updating the Richard Scarry books

NO IT FUCKING ISNT ALL THE CREATIVES ARE FUCKING **BROKE**

"too many people have main character syndrome" not me. i love being an npc. just idly standing around, watching the birds. oh you going on a quest? can you bring me back something

Confessions of a reality poacher turned gamekeeper: some thoughts on “Storytelling for Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality” by Rob Morgan “Storytelling for Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality” by Rob Morgan is a practical manual, fun activity book, and manifesto for storytelling in mixed reality. Writing about spatial storytelling is a ...

I wrote an overview of Rob Morgan's excellent book about immersive storytelling, “Storytelling for Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality,” and the way those who want to play with the nature of reality have found themselves thinking more and more how to safeguard it
www.linkedin.com/pulse/confes...

The copyright war between the AI industry and creatives We have surely gone beyond being able to give the tech sector the benefit of the doubt

'the creative industries represent much of the best of what the UK and humanity does. The idea of handing over its output for free is abhorrent.'

Photograph of one of the fictional videogame stills "Is this the beginning of an unsolved mystery?"

My favourite part of the Electric Dreams exhibition at the Tate is Suzanne Treister's "Fictional Videogame Stills" that she made on an Amiga 1000 in the early 90s.
We only have them now because she took photographs of her art on the screen back then - the original Amiga discs have corrupted!

A series of Tumblr posts: The old magic persists thanks to its unfathomable power." No, the old magic persists because the new magic can't run the legacy spells I need to do my job, and keeps trying to install spirits I don't want or need onto my orb. Look, if the new magic didn't have a personality construct that kept trying to tell me which spells to use, maybe I wouldn't still be using the old magic. Yes it had a deep blood cost, but at least it was a one time sacrifice and not this monthly bloodletting nonsense new age magic has The old magic is robust enough to survive a decade of use and it's compatible with every wand, staff, scroll, and charm in our collection. The new magic stops working after three days and every spell uses proprietary runes. Our preferences, as an archiving institution, should be pretty clear. You try to get guidance for the new magic and the king's sorcerers maybe will answer you in a few days with an unhelpful suggestion to buy the newest orb. You need guidance for the old magic and a dozen retired middle-aged wizards will pop up to explain it to you rune by rune if necessary.

All of these spoke to me, deeply.

A cartoon by Tom Gauld about An Expensive Notebook Company which removes stories from old novels and sells the blank books in upmarket stationers.

It is weird:

META BOOK THIEVES - They Must Do The Write Thing The Society of Authors are protesting Meta’s HQ today This image shows illustrations of authors holding placards saying “make it fair” and “do the write thing”

Today UK authors are protesting against Meta for stealing our work to train their AI model. Authors earn an average of £7000 per year, we are not rich, and yet a trillion dollar company decided it didn’t want to license our work fairly as it was “too expensive”

Theft is not a valid alternative.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is beautiful and sometimes transcendent about the Earth, but it’s the lives of the astronauts that I think I loved even more, the ordinary wonder of being in a tiny metal thimble forever falling towards but never quite hitting its home.

Four years since my son wrote the best opening to a mystery novel ever written.

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Venetian Empire Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise and eventual decline of the Venetian Empire.

I'm listening to In Our Time after a long break, and it struck me again how interesting, thoughtful, and simply humane it is. This should not be a novelty. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Here are over 150GB of free sound effects, royalty-free and commercially usable on your #gamedev projects sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc

Panel one: "A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us." says Franz Kafka. He looks solemn, and holds up a finger to show that he is serious. Panel two: The publishers across the table say "That's all very well, Franz. But we commissioned a board book for toddlers". Panel three: "And here it is!" Kafka answers proudly, holding up a colourful book. It is titled "Choppy Helps out" and shows a cute axe with a friendly face (presumably Choppy) and his friend, a frozen, smiling sea. note: Herr Kafka gave me the manuscript for "Choppy Helps Out!" on the undertanding that I destroyed it after his death. I could not bring myself to do so. If you are a publisher and interested in purchasing the rights, please contact me via my website.

A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us - Kafka.

(My cartoon for today’s Guardian books.)

Fun film fact. In Escape from New York (1981) they used reflective tape on a miniature model of the city & filmed it under black light to approximate 'cutting-edge' wireframe CG, which would have blown the budget at the time.

Love this explanation of the game myth that "foxes lead you to treasure" in Skyrim by @joelburgess.bsky.social. (Abbreviated for repost.)

Who’s the new guy?