I was just reading AI ‘tells’ advice and, with the best will in the world, if you come for me because I refuse to give up the Oxford comma until it’s torn from me, we will have words. Ditto em dashes. 🤦♀️🤦♀️
A trade deal with Trump’s America is a lot like haemorrhoid cream … unpleasant but necessary, and nothing to publicly celebrate.
Oh my … this is going to be a fantastic anthology in all categories 😍
#Curae prize results announced at 12. The bursary fund will close at the end of the day. If you can help, please do. The prize - an unique initiative for unpaid #carers - receives no industry funding at all. www.gofundme.com/f/curae-2025...
❤️❤️ So proud of all the carer-writers for being brave and sharing their hard-won creativity. So excited to see what will be an amazing shortlist ❤️❤️
Our Absolute Zero writers’ collective is an amazing group of STEM-centred folk who are exploring the collisions between the creative and scientific. We have a zine launch event in a week’s time. Come hear us read! www.storyology.co.uk/shop/p/absol...
Thank you ☺️
You don’t need to say a thing! You do all the lovely! 🥰
So thank you @bookwormvaught.bsky.social because the prizes and visibility #Curae gives are amazing, but it’s also much more than that, and that value helps lift all of us skywards, sometimes by increments but we are rising.
Owning the impact of caring on our lives enables us to own the depth it brings to our creative perspective, and more, it enables us to own who we are in a relationship with a status that can become one-sided and all consuming. #Curae is the only opportunity out there that does this so explicitly.
but that also takes back a piece of ourselves by saying ‘I am a carer. I am a writer. I am both and they can co-exist’.
I think that’s the most valuable thing about Curae. It is a point where we can inhale deeply and click ‘submit’ on something that doesn’t just send a piece of ourselves into the electronic ether for judgement …
In that moment, we have a choice as carers. We can lose ourselves entirely to the all-consuming, daunting cascade of responsibility that becomes our day-to-day, or we can find some path to owning our creativity in a new form, a different incarnation.
Until we can’t.
Until we realise, suddenly or gradually, that trying to carry on as normal in the torrent is like walking into the waves of the 100 Year Storm with a laptop and a saucepan and expecting to float.
Yes, I have to do more around my previous life … but that’s just life, right? We all pick up a bit extra here and there. I can do this. I can spin all the plates. I can care and create and work and not lose myself in the torrent.
For a long time, many people ‘just keep swimming’. We minimise the impact on us personally and creatively. We think the only way to keep our previous sense of self is to embrace the ‘doing it all’ mentality.
No matter how slowly or suddenly the condition of those we care for changes, our sense of self and understanding of our new identity, one that immeasurably changes us and entwines us with the responsibility and care of another, isn’t guaranteed to arrive on schedule with the responsibilities.
There is something more valuable than the physical prizes #Curae provides. It means that everyone who submits to the Curae Prize wins.
My experience is that becoming a carer isn’t an event that happens to you. It’s a mindset change that creeps up on you slowly.
… but then publishing is not inclusive on so many levels, and honestly doesn’t seem to want to be unless it’s by publishing a niche the machine thinks it can profit from.
🧵 I want to tell you why I think this is one of the most important prizes running and I’m sorry that the book press and mainstream publishing hasn’t dived on it with bells on and support …
This isn’t politics. This is a regime modelling itself on an ideology we have already had to deal with the consequence of in Europe.
I bloody love my vibrant and neurodiverse people. I see you. You do not deserve this
When does ‘eradicating autism by September’ become eradicating autistic people? Then what? Are they coming for all the neurodiverse people? Then are they going to chase down anyone with an SLD? Can we expect those with dyslexia to be up next for the curative cull?
What’s next? I mean, we know there can be a genetic element so when can we expect the forced sterilisations and reproductive restrictions that the next ‘Nazism for Dummies’ chapter deals with?
Creating a US government registry to track autistic people using private medical records is like a ‘How to Nazi in Easy Steps’ manual. It’s not science. Science has an ethical foundation based on consent. Science already studies autism, and many other neurotypes ethically.
In the true spirit of nature writers, I talk to the red kites that fly low over our garden every day. I love the proximity-but-distance. I wish it was something poignantly profound, but most often, I just say “Please don’t poo on my head.” 😂🤦♀️
Oooh it’s only a few weeks until we announce the #Curae 2025 shortlist I AM EXCITED ARE YOU EXCITED.
Fundraiser for writers’ bursaries is still running, below. Do please help me if you can. This is the only opportunity of this kind for unpaid #carers 💙📚
We just launched a 16TB archive of every dataset that has been available on data.gov since November. This will be updated day by day as new datasets appear. It can be freely copied, and we're sharing the code behind it to help others make their own archives of data they depend on.
Well the award for most cowardly, boot-lickingest academic society has squarely gone to the American Society of Microbiology, who has taken down features of various non-white scientists. Absolutely pathetic behavior. Those articles are now coming up as “under review”. Truly sickening cowardice here.
CDC DATASETS on 1.28.2025
According to @altcdc.bsky.social
The entire archive of CDC datasets can be found here. archive.org/details/2025...
You need to know which data set you would like. Use CTRL+F to find a keyword from the list.
🧪🛟 #Episky #Statsky
The entire archive of CDC datasets can be found here.
HUGE shoutout to data archivists- this work is important 👏🙌🏻
archive.org/details/2025...