Got thru to the second round of the 250 word challenge!

The Flash Fiction Challenge — nycmidnight The Flash Fiction Challenge is an annual creative writing competition that challenges writers around the world to create short stories based on genre, location, and object assignments in 48 hours.

Join me in the @nycmidnight.bsky.social Flash Fiction Challenge on May 1st! Learn more at nycmidnight.com/ffc

Social Media Image for FFC2026

The 250-word Microfiction Challenge — nycmidnight The 250-word Microfiction Challenge is an international creative writing competition that challenges participants to create very short stories based on genre, action, and word assignments in 48 hours.

Up for a short writing challenge? Join me in the @nycmidnight.bsky.social 250-word Microfiction Challenge on December 5th! Learn more at nycmidnight.com/250

Right?

HHS's Office of Long COVID Research and Practice has been DOGEd. Closing this week.

Off to Japan soon without the famjam. Hakuba, where the west winds blow and the snow falls frantic.

Don’t these come with a hint of H5N1 these days?

World War III Has Already Begun – And Businesses Need To Take Note The sudden collapse of Assad highlights the interconnectedness of a growing number of global conflicts, revealing a hard truth most of us would rather not think about.

World War III Has Already Begun – And Businesses Need To Take Note

flip.it/FFQ4Sj

It’s a good result, but a very real wake up call. Marburg was on the list of multiple pathogens attempting to be stolen from Canadian and American BSL-4 labs.

Like when I was 13. The Hobbit.

A man walks down the steps of an underground passage. Above him, snow sets on the streets of Tokyo.

Tokyo snow

Ok awesome thanks for the reply!

Dropped off a copy of The Sequence in the local littlefreelibrary.org in Squamish today, chapter #92333. Free books are good!

Reminder to myself

I write fiction about emergent technologies. Does that make my work emergent narrative? Asking for a friend 😎

Bluesky is now the #2 social app in the US, Canada, and #3 in the UK 🦋

On bsky, ~30% of y'all are posters compared to the 1% main characters on other platforms. Turns out there's more chattiness & connection when you have algorithmic choice 🤭

A 5 year recovery. My wife and I both lost our jobs due to covid, no maternity pay for our new baby. Now that I am able to repay tax dollars owed, I receive a message from Bob Hamilton, stating “we accept your payment as long as…”
Take the money and say thank you jackass.

Humans to Achieve Immortality by 2030, Google Engineer Claims - GreekReporter.com A former Google predicted that humans will achieve immortality by 2030 - and 86 percent of his 147 predictions have been correct.

Well this is ahead of schedule.

flip.it/HiC33C

Day one for this paleface

Ukraine War Ending: Putin Gets Crushed in a Coup? In an interview with CNN this January, Putin’s former speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov predicted that a looming military coup could potentially unseat the Russian president over the next year.

#Ukraine #commentary

Ghosts, monsters and mental health struggles: Star Wars writer Ethan Sacks on his most personal stor... Father and daughter team up for A Haunted Girl, coming this October from Image Comics

Haunted Girl from Image Conics looks great!

A few shots from today’s trip to Sardinia and back. Just beat those storms in to PRG this afternoon

Especially useful if you are puzzled or grumpy that I'm dominating your feed...

Also this fabulous thread.

Bizarre!

Speaking of not good. amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/08/09/weather/m...

Is this good? I think it’s not good.

https://flip.it/mwjEwY

If I’m sympathetic to the company at all here, it’s because the tools we have for detecting AI-written text are still pretty bad. OpenAI shut down its own detection tool in June after determining its accuracy rates were too low. (The company has said it is working on other approaches.) But Amazon could still do a better job at removing AI spam, if it would only invest in the customer-service tools that would flag issues like Friedman’s before they turned into viral blog posts. It could also introduce more friction into the account creation process, attempting to verify an author’s identity or at least ask them to disclose when they are using a pseudonym. These and many other signals could help the platform fight spam in a way that cut down on fraud.

I wrote about how Amazon’s bookstore is filling up with deepfaked authors and AI sludge — an early warning of the challenge that text generation poses to platforms. www.platformer.news/p/writers-are-getting-de...

In the consolidation wars, first came the Great Splitting, a fracturing of all social media into many smaller socialmedialets until so many exist, there is no population large enough to support them all @lucientelford.bsky.social lucientelford.substack.com/p/the-bang-and-smash-met...

What’s up? Well Praha is what’s up, the library is where we’re at.