Hi did you move your newsletter away from substack? drop it in the replies so people can find you and subscribe! I am big on rewarding good choices
Ash. Writer of stories, novels and poems.
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Hi did you move your newsletter away from substack? drop it in the replies so people can find you and subscribe! I am big on rewarding good choices
Trump’s mysterious disappearance from public raises new questions about Joe Biden’s advanced age
Jerry Nadler ends his remarkable career, conceding that his brand of politics on the Middle East is over. “I don’t know what to say at this point,” he said. “I can’t defend what Israel is doing.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/n...
He's literally abstracting the question into meaninglessness
A particularly bad case of long covid
This is seriously the nucleus of the whole present era of transphobia in which we find ourselves: in order for any of it to make sense, we must suppose that the idea of being transgender popped into existence 10 years ago (and it's a rolling 10 years, like Bart Simpson's date of birth).
"What should students be using AI to do?" Ideally nothing.. At best, to learn all the faults in LLMs so they don't really on them for anything important
I don't know all of them, mine is Prospective Press, based out of North Carolina
This whole thing is great but the highlighted bit made me laugh out loud. 😂 Marlon on Snoop:
Nicholas Florko’s entire beat on The Atlantic is to legitimize RFK Jr.
Every republican fascist policy was test driven against faculty and students at universities, often to thunderous applause
If fascists tell you to throw marginalized people under the bus and you do, you are just collaborating with fascists. At no point in history has appeasing Nazis stopped Nazis from committing more crimes, it is literally enabling them. There is no justification for being a craven coward.
trumpwatch is the bluesky version of buying a powerball ticket. It's not about the odds, it's about the dream
Update: yep, article: www.editorialboard.com/how-gavin-ne...
You there, gay boy, did it happen yet
What will America be under President JD Thiel, excuse me, I meant JD Vance? Time to start seriously thinking about this as Trump’s health continues faltering.
If he's undergoing a medical procedure WHO IS IN POWER
There are small presses that you can directly query, and that's the route I went with my books. It was a good experience but I haven't sold that many copies
for as long as i’ve seen, CA has been blue on these maps. thanks to newsom’s massive rightward lurch, it might no longer be safe for trans kids. anyone pushing this man for president needs to own the fact they’re advocating for abandoning the most vulnerable among us to people who’d exterminate us
only voting for dems who promise to prosecute every single ice agent
BREAKING: Social Security Administration chief data officer and whistle-blower Charles Borges has resigned after bombshell report that SSA put highly-sensitive data at risk. He sent out an email to colleagues moments ago. Here is the text of his email shared with me:
The more grounded and realistic version of unrealistic AI hype is rooted in the idea that if we can get the resemblance close enough, then it might as well be thought and can be used in place of actual thought.
That sounds really useful!
Yes! That's what I do hahaha
I'm so jealous!
Anecdotally I don't think so? But I love that this is helping me find that I'm not that unusual
Alas, no agent, but in retrospect I think I should've tried to get one
Hell yes. One of the things I did in my thesis was look at ring composition and found examples of it in the lay of finn in Beowulf, suggesting it was an interpolation from an oral poem
You... I like you :D
Ha, yeah, I score very low on the apple test. I just don't really visualize what's going on in books
It's a trip when you really think about it hahaha
Presumably people who have never heard spoken language don't, so there's got to be! But anecdotally I think you and I are in the minority
If reading with your ears isn't reading why would reading with your fingers? Of course they're all reading, but that's the point I'm making.
I wish I could read faster than speaking speed but honestly, the fastest I can go is like a podcast at 1.2x I'm physically required to read carefully. Helps with the copyediting though
Resignations of CDC staff directly related to misinformation, weaponizing of public health, which is coming from RFK Jr. Untenable situation for them to serve under these conditions. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...
![In his resignation letter, Daskalakis wrote, “I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponizing of public health.” Houry’s resignation letter spoke about the continued spread of misinformation around vaccines. “Recently, the overstating of risks [of vaccines] and the rise of misinformation have cost lives, as demonstrated by the highest number of US measles cases in 30 years and the violent attack on our agency,” Houry wrote.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2rrp7amblhg3xoly5n5huiqv/bafkreiboml2a3p7qlqb4qmlbhb76rzanvnpkvlpw34wggsq6wsv27wvy5m@jpeg "Click to view full size")
In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on
But it's also how I've always read. And do blind people not read? It's a strange argument that privileges not just an ableist perspective, but one that misses out on a range of human experience. Reading is more than seeing words
If audiobooks aren't reading because it uses a different part of the brain, then I've never read a book in my life I'm AuDHD, and for all long as I've been reading, I've been processing it the way I process heard language. When I read, I essentially read aloud to myself in my head Yes it's slow
they’re calling the most recent shooter in minnesota trans to ignore the fact that there has been an organized group of far-right suicidal school shooters and this person is very likely going to be linked to them as well
Nobody's talking about extermination! No one ever talks about it. They just do it. And you go on with your lives, ignoring the signs all around you. And then one day, when the air is still and the night has fallen, they come for you.
It's AMAZING so far! I have a hold on the next book, should be 4-6 weeks!
It's the attention span, and the mental association with work from eight years of PhD studies. But this is different enough that I can manage it and it's so lovely
I got my PhD in English, and it turned reading into work :( I'm still fighting with that but at least I can read audiobooks while I cook and clean and refinish furniture (lol)
I have a PhD in English too and it is reading, thanks very much
Now I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Moon while I wait to see which of my five permitted holds comes in next lol
The others have been John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model, and Martha Wells's All Systems Red (yay Murderbot!)
Just read NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season, making it the 4th book I've read since June. (Amazing, amazing book.) I haven't read four books in a year since grad school burned me out. Audiobooks are the best 🩷 I'm finally reading again
Cue “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”
"It is without a doubt the most illegal search I've ever seen in my life," U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said from the bench. "I'm absolutely flabbergasted at what has happened. A high school student would know this was an illegal search." Judges push back against D.C. criminal charges
Free pizza no class Free pizza no class eh yeah Free pizza for all seniors Free pizza no class
Preventing food poisoning is woke
The "His lie, others disagree" framing needs to die a quick, painful and complete death in a conflagration such that nothing so evil grows in it place.
This is why I get very impatient with e.g. Adam Curtis's guff about how 'the left has no fresh narrative'. The narrative is created by the news media. This is seemingly invisible to people who work within the news media.
The truth isn't "more complicated". It is not even remotely true.
the “be warned, we are taking names” part is what has been missing from most major politicians’ responses
the thing I love about Zohran’s campaign is that instead of “this place fucking sucks and I alone can fix it” his message is “being a New Yorker rules, we live in the best city in the world, let’s make it even better together” show some damn pride in the places you want to govern
So, over my past 6 years of publishing scifi, my biggest improvement has been in characterization — was once a weakness but became a strength. The way I achieved this was by sitting with emotions we avoid— embarrassing, cringey, regret-laden moments in our lives. We push those down but they drive us
Rock Looked Way Cooler Wet
Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."
A landlord turned off Tenant Client's family's heat upon learning Client was an immigrant. Landlord hired three different law firms to argue this was legal, then fired each one after they couldn't get our case dismissed. This week, landlord settled for enough that Client will buy a house.
Just WAIT til people start saying "we don't need perfection, we need a safe pair of hands" because Newsom has just given the most transphobic, anti-left speech of all time AND it's been really fucking boring. ENJOY, BLUE MAGA!
"Preventing puberty will limit brain development and will lower IQ" Whew! Good thing nobody's trying to prevent puberty 🙄
Sometimes I wonder if FRBs are what happens when your warp bubble goes badly 130 million years later a backwards civilization stares at their radio telescopes and says "huh, wonder what that was?"
Stellar Democratic Party voter outreach is still going strong. 😒
What confuses and infuriates me the most is, so what? They never point to any actual harm that transitioning “too young” does. It seems like there are about five people in the world who regret transitioning, and it doesn’t really seem like anything that bad happened to them, they just went back.
“No one should be allowed to transition before X age.” Why? Spell out what bad things you think could happen if they do. And show me someone it’s happened to. Because there are millions of people who have transitioned at all ages. If what you’re saying is true there would be examples.
It’s like this with every trans issue. It’s like this with sports. “We have to ban trans women from sports because they’ll dominate.” Okay, then surely you have ONE example of that happening. But no, it’s always “I had to share fifth place with a trans swimmer, and for some reason that’s awful.”
You know what's crazy? There have been no op-eds or editorial statements in major newspapers this year calling on Trump to resign. None calling for his impeachment. None asking if he's medically fit to be in office. Not one in any major newspaper all year.
Pretty cheap to offer student loan forgiveness to ICE officers
Newsome will never be president. He is a dangerous bigot and an authoritarian if we have free and fair elections in 2028, which is highly in doubt and he is the nominee he will lose. Centrists are dangerous, and must be removed from the party if this country ever wants to rebuild democracy.
Gavin Newsome is a vile, disgusting transphobe
Gavin Newsom is a demon. Truly. Just a vile excuse for a human being,
They’re teetering the line between normal paper and Volkischer Beobachter and my hunch is they tip that way very very soon. AGs brain isn’t working
In the 1990s version of the U.S. political system, you would appoint a Democratic independent counsel to investigate Trump’s connection to Epstein and he’d try to make a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell to implicate Trump. Now we have the extreme opposite with Trump making a corrupt deal for exoneration.
I’ve seen so many people spreading the misinformation that PBS is shut down or is shutting down. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been shut down and PBS has been defunded. HOWEVER!!! PBS still exists. It is more important now than ever that you donate to PBS if you can.
One accurate way of understanding this is that online extremists have direct contacts with the head of the FBI, who will fire the FBI agents they identify, even though it is against the law. Any principled agents who resist will also be fired. Same pattern holds broadly across lots of the govt
Extraordinary new detail about the FBI purge. *Senior officials were asked to fire lower level officials tagged by online right wingers as being anti-Trump. *When they asked for a reason - required by law - they were not given any. They refused. Then they were fired. www.cbsnews.com/news/politic...
New House bill requires GAO probe Trump deals w/ law firms Rep Dave Min (D-CA) “Trump did not receive approval from Congress to make settlement agreements w/ law firms totaling nearly a billion $.. nor is it clear how he plans to use these funds, or funds his admin. is demanding from universities”
Being a Harry Potter adult.
"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense
When democratic politicians tell me they will not even pay lip service to meeting the low bar I have set for them… when they won’t even LIE about it to try and secure my vote, then I won’t vote for them. This isn’t a purity test, it’s called having morals, and standards and self respect.
KBJ is quickly becoming the powerful dissenting voice that is clearly highlighting the FedSoc Coup’s stranglehold on the federal judiciary and its resulting mangling of any semblance of sensible legal logic
I’d like to be very clear about what’s going on with Gavin Newsom’s talk about trans kids playing sports. This is not about student athletes playing competitively only. The right has been very clear about this being applicable to gym classes in schools too.
It is not 'deception' if the pretty girl you boink doesn't share her medical history with you beforehand, no matter what bigoted laws exist. If it bothers you retrospectively that you boinked a trans girl, that's on you for being a bigot. It's not her problem.
Man gets blowjob from trans woman. Has a nice time. Ejaculates. Then calls the police. Man gets anonymity. Woman gets accused of sexual assault. Fuck 🇬🇧 🖕🤬🖕 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
DOGE and EVERY PERSON IN IT is a murderer
Can I live there
The question every one of you should be asking
Hahahahahahaha
I know the Third Reich analogies are overwrought, but come on
if you are blessed to be just now learning about James Dobson, having grown up not knowing anybody who thought he was a prophet, here’s a good thread to read to see what it was like for kids parented by people who took his advice to heart. www.reddit.com/r/Exvangelic...
I don't believe in an afterlife, but I truly hope that every single person who loved and cared for Dobson is seeing how happy people are that he's dead and that it feels very, very bad for them.
i went to a southern baptist school for a stint goddamn focus on the family shit everywhere
"everyone will see how criminal and corrupt these people are so we don't have to make that argument ourselves" is one of the most singularly wrong pieces of conventional political wisdom in Dem circles and yet it will not die
I can remember telling people he was driving the conversation in a dangerous direction like a decade ago? And every one thought I was crazy
How bad was slavery? Why does Trump ask that question? @henrysnow.bsky.social and I have a piece up in @damemagazine.bsky.social on that issue, out today! www.damemagazine.com/2025/08/21/t...
Yeah, women can be terrible doctors too, people
If you will humor me in suspending your disbelief, as I do know this is both shocking news and entirely unexpected, but as it turns out, when you make chatGPT talk to itself on social media literally nothing u do makes it not polarize toward fascism and most things u try actually make it worse
lolsob
Bottom line: The final text of the EU-US trade deal delivers $5,000 less to the average American household than the handshake agreement Trump boasted of on August 5.