Heading up to Norwescon to hang out with @cyrusafisher.bsky.social and trick people into playtesting my tarot-based dice game.

I put it down as a "near miss," a book that could have been 5/5 with different editing choices. Some beautiful character moments and rich drama but overburdened by tie-ins to other books (that don't exist) and a few very odd narrative voice decisions. It's worth reading the author's post mortem.

Just got gassed pretty good at the labor union anti-ICE protest in Portland. Massive march, 5-10k strong. Vibes were very much liberal rather than radical. Lots of kids and older folks.

They gassed the whole crowd as soon as it marched on ICE, in broad daylight.

Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they're doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps

SFWA membership *was* the extent of my personal ambitions as a writer.

I guess the earning threshold is still a reasonable target even if membership is no longer desirable.

The LLMs are poisoned fruit.

It's the same as illegally obtained evidence. Everything they touch is automatically disqualified. No arguments can be considered. Throw it all out.

Go back and start over with public domain and properly owned/licensed material. Then we can discuss the dubious merits.

😡

I am once again thinking about Fritz Leiber's The Silver Eggheads.

The closest things to this that I can think of off the top of my head are The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross and the Secret History series by Simon R Green, neither of which is exactly a short story 😅

Listen all of the continuity problems go away immediately if you just accept that James Bond is actually the codename for a series of reanimated bodies possessed by a single Lich whose insatiable hunger for violence, power, and pleasures of the flesh date back to the founding of the British Empire

I'm at the trunkless legs
I'm at the level sands
I'm at the combination trunkless legs and level sands

Summary: Robots are better at boxing than human experts!

Methods: We paid an amateur boxer $75 to cosplay as Mike Tyson and fight Punchbot 5000. Punchbot 5000 is a pneumatic piston bolted to a fencepost, so we tied the boxer to a fencepost too and aimed it at their chin. The bot won 2 of 3 rounds.

Depressing yeah, but also this methodology is weird to me? It says the plagiarism machine is better at plagiarism (or, generously, at ghostwriting) than MFA students are, when limited to the optimal length of output and amount of context for the machine. The MFA students actually got less context?

Save 25% on Misericorde Volume Two: White Wool & Snow on Steam White Wool & Snow is the second visual novel in the Misericorde series.

It's Steam sale time again! Misericorde Volume Two has its deepest discount yet, and Volume One can be picked up for 50% off (!!!). Read it for the first time or give the gift of miserable failnun to a friend 🗡️

Good point, I know I've played with people who struggled with reconciling game mechanics vs in-world stuff for DND...

I'm curious about how common this is, I thought "RPG set in litRPG world" becoming common might be the next wave of this story->game->story cycle but apparently it's already here!

TTRPGs started as simulations of settings that didn't have those mechanics, right? And early tie-in fiction like Dragonlance doesn't have characters who know and understand the mechanics... When did this start? I don't think DnD was designed this way, even in recent editions, but I could be wrong!

When you play a TTRPG, do you treat the game mechanics as diegetic?

I have never played this way, but I just learned from TikTok that some people play DnD with characters knowing about class levels and stats.

To me that means they are roleplaying a character *in a litRPG setting.*
#litRPG #ttrpg

Space Unicorn!

PLEASE SHARE! Writers! Uncanny Magazine is OPEN to Short Story Submissions from August 25 to September 8! We can't wait to read your stories!!! buff.ly/xB0IZOX

I grew up reading Brin off my dad's bookshelves; my paperbacks of The Uplift War, Glory Season, Earth, and The Practice Effect are falling apart from rereads and I have an ARC copy of Practice Effect from the 2021 SFWA/Worldbuilders auction.

So I freaked out when I saw the confirmation email 😅.

Personal Worldcon 2025 Highlights 1/?:

@davidbrin.bsky.social's "Writing Hard SF" workshop, where he described writing as 'incantatory magic' and 'a sadomasochistic relationship' between author & reader, and also threatened to slap us if we put a POV char's last name in the opening paragraph.

Well, that's my first Worldcon wrapped up. Just waiting for the train home now. I met a bunch of cool people, learned a lot, and am absolutely exhausted.

Not a huge event by headcount — but so information-dense. I'll be digesting for a while, and there's gonna be *more* as recorded panels go up.

I accidentally summoned some spam the other day.

I don't know if it's all AI shills, but some of it definitely is.

And it's depressing as hell to think about people getting tricked into paying a middleman flimflammer to deliver them unfiltered vomit from the plagiarism machine.

Broadly. The prototype was 22 blank cards that I scribbled on with sharpie pen. Print production needs high-res image files (scanned or native digital) with consistent quality and style, but not necessarily 1:1 w/prototype images. There is also a non-art side to each card but I can handle that part.

I want to be very excited but I'm also just so overwhelmed at this point by the whole year to date + ahead - I just bought a new roof, I'm struggling through treatment for sleep apnea, my first Worldcon is coming up, the government is attacking my friends, I'm crashing out editing a novella...

Picture of two messy pen drawings - at left, almost unrecognizable as a theater mask and jester hat, at right, a rabbit in front of a magician's top hat.

I accidentally had a successful test of a board game idea this weekend. Including someone asking about getting copies for resale.

Awesome.

Except I have no idea what I'm doing and my dev art looks like this, so to go to print I'd need to commission... 22 to 42 illustrations? Plus box art?

Bit of a longshot to post here, but I'm hosting a sort of "critique mixer" for the writing meetup I organize and I'm looking for links to guides on etiquette, how-to's, etc.

I'm writing my own guide for it too, but I'd love to have more to share with people. Drop a link if you have one?

#writing

The world is a nightmare but at least I can occasionally cheer myself up with cheeky little PRs. 225lb Zercher for shits and giggles on warmup and 415lb x1 back squat today. Might have more in me on a good day but I was having trouble hitting depth on it, so I'll be working on that for the next bit.

Save 20% on Misericorde Volume Two: White Wool & Snow on Steam White Wool & Snow is the second visual novel in the Misericorde series.

Misericorde Vol. Two: White Wool & Snow is on sale as part of the Steam Visual novel sale! You can also pick the first volume up for 50% (!!!) off if you haven't read either of them. Pretty good deal if I say so myself... store.steampowered.com/app/3035990/...

My idea of "little-known" is probably SUPER wrong, as I was born in 91 and read these in the 00s, but I rarely meet people who've read:

Jack the Bodiless, May, 91

Psychoshop, Zelazny & Bester, 98

Phule's Company, Asprin, 90

No YA, but Phule's is a comedy if you want something lighter.

PseudoPod 962: Hemorrhage It’s a dumb fight to pick, but I only learn that later. By the time they drag me out the back door of the bar, my face feels the way a Picasso painting looks. All rearranged, and probably the wrong…

Oopsie doopsie I totally didn't notice that my story went live on @pseudopod.org on Valentine's Day!! Luckily it's never too late to have a bad time in fiction :) pseudopod.org/2025/02/14/p...