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Lazy. Writes. Is known to write fiction. Is almost fictional. Sometimes furry. Homepage: https://sinisbeautiful.com/ Patreon: http://patreon.com/MalcolmFCross Raw live draft for writing/creativity/motivation advice: #HacksawDraft
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Okay, it's taking donations now. Thanks, y'all www.gofundme.com/f/he-kicked-...
Authors: if you get an email invite from the Greater Hopewell Book Club, it's a scam: it charges an appearance fee (which it misleadingly describes as an honorarium) of $150. (If this reminds you of other AI-generated solicitations you've rec'd recently, that's not a coincidence)
![From: Greaterhopewellbookclub Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2025 9:53 AM To: [redacted] Subject: Invitation to feature](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:uy6mloyr37qtcdml3bq6a6o4/bafkreihytrtq7imblfujgekk3xouoflmbmjn7xa2ez4f7lubob54up6lsi@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Scientists astounded to discover ant species whose queens lay eggs that produce 2 different species www.science.org/content/arti...
Nigel Farage just repeatedly denied – under oath! – to @raskin.house.gov ever banning journalists he doesn’t like from his party’s conventions. This happened to me *literally today*.
A man on the streets of the UK is asked about the “problem of immigration” and dismantles talking points with ease.
I know posting excerpts from 1984 is passé but this is literally the fifth page of 1984
Things a little slowed down, but, slowly getting some interesting things done. Slowly. Fingers crossed.
happy glinner getting arrested day
The start of every 80s movie:
This orphaned reply to a long-lost post deserves to be read and remembered.
You're interested in craft as part of supporting your real vocation: Thom.
PayPal user in the UK lost their account after buying adult ebooks “about monsters and milking,” “some dubcon stuff” “My account got banned a couple of days ago for making purchases which violate the ToS. Upon querying w/ staff over the phone I've been told that it was ebooks that I've been buying”
We’re really going to need readers to start supporting authors on their own storefronts. A lot of people feel morally against using itch now and I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you that sales are down across the board, and if you want things to exist, we need your support
More I learn about driving Uber etc the more I feel like gig work fits into the "everything in our economy is gambling" vision that seems to be taking shape
I appear to have woken up in the midst of some moral panic. I shall go back to bed, instead, to have - I trust - good dreams. And perhaps, when I wake up again, I shall find myself within one.
OUTLAND. Cover art for a 4k restoration from Arrow Video
(sigh) What was that saying? "Everything happens twice... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Yeah. 'Our criminal had an oopsy because virtue and privilege, but your criminal is a reason our bigotry is actually true' type shit is a factor here.
Is it also a mechanism to push the resultant moral outrage over sexual violence onto other minority groups who do not benefit from patriarchal oppression? Does viewing men as having a bio-essential lean to sexual violence, anger, and harm, actually SUPPORT a patriarchal/toxmasc status quo?
A thing I don't know how to phrase: Patriarchal violence against women leads to a bio-essentialist view that men are sexually violent. Patriarchal oppression quashes any ability to really interrogate and challenge this idea. Does the backlash contribute (in part) to transphobia against trans women?
"Violence comes from fear, and love drives out fear" should be such a simple, unassailable, straightforward thing to read, but in a world so saturated with fear and hate it's like a hammer blow.
people have been sharing their anecdotes about horse piss and that's beautiful
"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
memory of going to the computer store to buy bootleg games with my dad
The fact that Reform were trying to run a person who had been dead for six months as their Croydon Mayoral candidate is proof if it were needed that they are not a serious party. It demonstrates abject incompetence and no vetting as well as utter contempt for the electorate.
More folks should watch The Miracle Fighters (1982). Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, the fight choreographer for the Matrix(es), Kill Bill, and Kung Fu Hustle, it's a stylish supernatural action comedy about (in part) squabbling sibling sourcerers teaching a kid kung fu magic for a tournament in hell.
As we seem to be talking ECHR again, here’s my Venn Diagram from more than a decade ago.
Scammers are really intent on scaring authors into not contacting someone like me. For example, this "confidentiality notice", appended to a fake offer of publication from Celadon Books, which threatens "blacklisting" of the author "across the entire publishing industry"
I’ve often wondered why Nigel Farage, who as godfather of the Brexit fiasco engineered the biggest British foreign policy disaster since Suez is continually offered so much space in some newspapers and broadcast media. Serious question. Thoughts welcome.
if a human being was caught talking with a minor about suicide this way they'd face criminal charges
Profoundly important from @davidallengreen.bsky.social. The lack of meaningful restraints against executing power in our system leaves us utterly exposed in the face of a Reform government. They could do whatever they want. open.substack.com/pub/emptycit...
A careful study of every populist episode since 1900 finds catastrophic consequences, which play out slowly. On average, incomes fall behind by nearly 15% over 15 years. For the U.S., this is a cost of about $13k per person per year. Over a lifetime, that's million bucks.
same for artists. no artist is burnt out because their workload would be less with AI or their project managing software could be assisted by AI. we’re burnt out because our work is not respected enough. what we do is seen as disposable and replaceable, rather than valuable.
Jesus fucking Christ
An absolutely harrowing and important story -- ChatGPT and other chatbots are becoming deeply enmeshed in many people's personal and social lives to an incredible degree, and the consequences can be devastating.
Do dice get hurt when you throw them?
(This is shit I think about constantly. CONSTANTLY. Every page, every line, must be as close to a gift as I can get it.)
The quoted average reading speed is 200 words per minute. A novel's page is usually about 350-500 words, so two pages (as are open to face you with each page flick) could be as much as five minutes of a person's life. If you can't make the first two pages mean something, why should they go further?
believe it or not this also applies to fiction writing. While you have more "space" to fit in pure text, you're still fighting for a reader's time. you need dialogue to be efficient, and ideally to carry some action/business that helps emphasise something about the characters or the scene
Unsolicited writing advice, no. 126: Ideas are worthless without hard work. The literary world is littered with the corpses of people with "ideas" who were unable or unwilling to put in the time and effort to develop them (or worse, expected someone else to do the work for them.)
Reading an article titled "Why didn't Brazilian democracy die?" and a key part of the story is a Supreme Court that actually did its job
word gets around quickly here
Also related (or maybe the same): Suspense is not generated by the reader not knowing what happens next. It's generated by the reader CARING what happens next.
"Your AirBnB was my home" Seen in Barcelona
A new wave of delusional thinking fueled by artificial intelligence has researchers investigating the dark side of AI companionship
Wrote this about flags and patriotism in 2021 (in The Decade In Tory). Stand by every word now.
For the sake of promoting my own work, my latest novel, Mouse Cage, and its first pages. More details here: sinisbeautiful.com/mouse-cage/
it's very shrewd to play on the fact that a huge number of people live in tiny shared accommodation with no outdoor space, drying clothes indoors by draping them wherever they can fit, making drying clothes outside aspirational in a way that Moves Units
keep seeing ads for fabric softeners that are meant to make your clothes smell like they've been dried outdoors on the line. this feels like one of the more subtly dystopian products in recent memory
Called it guard.io/labs/scamlex...
So, @derekdel.bsky.social once said: "People... assume that a magician keeps secrets FROM people, but a real magician keeps secrets FOR people." And that strikes to the heart of fiction, too. It's as good a summation of how worldbuilding should work as I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, I've had to resort to bait poisons. This does mean research, though - matching the bait to the specific species can be completely vital.
🐀🐀💕
Let’s talk about age verification and freedom of speech. A short thread. Firstly, a reminder that freedom of speech is about both the right to impart and receive information. It’s not just about the speaker, it’s about the listener. Age verification has an impact on both. 1/10
Yeah. Plus, one of the things that make it work for 'other books by the same publisher' is that there's also a degree of known quality control, there. That's an unknown in the self-pub space. Although given people pay Amazon to put ads next to other people's books... ads in books isn't a jump.
I know what you mean. I've been thinking about the economics of putting together multi-author anthologies, and getting together enough funds to pay everyone involved what they're worth, up front, is... not easy. A lot of magazines used to rely on advertising income for that. But... Ads do suck.
To create a Website with your own domain? There are lots of ways to do that. Personally, I use Wordpress to host my blog and Ionos to manage the rest of my site and domains. Wordpress probably is enough to get started. Other people use Squarespace, Wix, etc. Many options. wordpress.com
I've been trying out Publii lately - sort of like a stripped down Wordpress you run locally, that creates a static site and uploads it for you. So you don't have to have the hassle of having Wordpress actually running online. Static page generators are interesting. Not always user-friendly.
It's ordinarily 'other books from the same publisher', but... given that we're all self publishing, it strikes me that the situation's quite different.
The infamous THIRST Rincewind developed for Maggi Soup. INFAMOUS.
Running across a form to join the fan club of a given book series or whatever, in the back of the books, was always wild.
What's the situation on selling ad-space inside self published works, legally and practically? Been thinking of ways to defray cost-of-publication, especially for anthologies, and I'm just like. The back pages in a self-pubbed book someone bought... ...are pointing directly at paying customers.
🙇 A rat must try.
Thank you. They're a big part of it!
This is a fun and affecting read. What do you see reflected in the mirror/in fiction?
Aussie unions don’t beat around the bush.
Absolutely nothing about this is true. Nothing. Not one part of it.
New from 404 Media: Jimmy Wales says Wikipedia could use AI. Wikipedia's editors aren't exactly thrilled about that, showed Wales that a ChatGPT-reviewed article was full of mistakes www.404media.co/jimmy-wales-...
www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int... Some of you may recall me complaining that the purported numbers being thrown around a couple of years ago indicated things were far worse than during the Global War On Terror. GWOT is basically Afghanistan, right at the bottom of the chart.
It's deeply ironic that Southern Slavery is actually what American history is MOST "politically correct" about, in terms of papering over how bad it was and trying to nuance the Confederate position vs how "good vs evil" much of the Union army saw the cause
Looking up the author, uhhhh. ... Well that's a really interesting market segment he's swung to serving, huh?
Beautifully phrased.
The first thing we do when we're born is scream our lungs out. Our first act in our first moments on this earth is a literal gasping cry for help. We learn how to receive help as we first learn to breathe. It's that important to us. It's just as important that we don't let ourselves forget how.
Feeling a little shaken by this essay currently — definitely worth a read if you’ve found yourself grappling with art whose creators go against your principles.
This is eye-opening. I had no idea there were so many.
I do not have to wish ill on J.K. Rowling, because I believe she has already brought immense illness - emotional, practical, psychological, spiritual - upon herself. #CrossScribbles scribbles.malcolmfcross.com/the-boy-with...
This piece is hauntingly beautiful. It manages to do something quite rare: To clearly and unambiguously condemn the abuses of powerful artists, while extending them charity and compassion all the same. A fantastic read on what it means to engage with art made by artists who have horrible things.
Fuck censorship. They're coming after you next, whether you make porn or not. I have never sold NSFW services or artwork, yet here's my termination from Stripe! Fully SFW, innocent headshots of furries = adult content. This is what we've been trying to fucking tell y'all this whole month!
-- of the idea for this one. So, today, I hammered it out. I would have liked to be in a position to give this one more love, more refinement, more drafts. But, really, it's a story concept for saying how I feel through a narrative. So. I've said it. And maybe that can be enough, for now.
-- Harry Potter once meant, the way the author's actions have made it much less than what it was, and on who really owns it. JKR owns the text. The readers own all the magic and joy of having read it. After posting that essay the other day (which I completed... many months ago), I was reminded --
In an ideal world, where I had infinite time and a place I knew I could sell it, this would get multiple drafts and go to press somewhere nice. In reality... this is a fun idea, and I feel like it needs saying, but it's too awkwardly shaped to really BE anything. It's a commentary, on what --
... This isn't really something I think would take well for fiction-I'm-trying-to-sell. It's a little too... direct. It doesn't really have merits to non-readers (I hesitate to say fans) of Harry Potter, it can't stand alone, and it is entirely there to say something as bluntly as possible.
So this is about as first draft as it gets. I got the idea in my head for this one a few months back (maybe as much as a year ago?) where I was in yet another 'aRRrgGGggh what's JKR the JeRK said now?' phase. Part of me wanted to make it into something really classy and artsy. But... --
It starts off in one, very recognizable way. And then it gets real
I do not have to wish ill on J.K. Rowling, because I believe she has already brought immense illness - emotional, practical, psychological, spiritual - upon herself. #CrossScribbles scribbles.malcolmfcross.com/the-boy-with...
www.reddit.com/r/transgende... Guess what? The story about the trans M&S employee and the bra fitting is a pack of lies and distortions. Want to know what really happened and how colleagues stood up for her? Read her own account here.
The Jojo's Bizarre Adventure model makes perfect sense for James Bond. You don't need to keep modernising it until we have a movie where the bad guy is ChatGPT that can make somebody a psychopath or some bullshit. Do a New Amsterdam Bond. Do a Miami Vice Bond. Add magic. Who cares!
The role of James Bond should be a curse like the Joestar curse. Every movie should be a slightly different Bond, each one weirder. We should already have had 4+ James Bonds in one movie. Spice it up a little. The idea that gender is this divisive is a sign of Mirren's creative death.
The illustration from an article where I make this very point. You’re not being creative, you’re placing an order with a creativity simulator. againstwritoids.org/the-claw-in-...
-- rubric so brainbreaking, for me. 'If you cannot parrot this many things verbatim, your thoughts are irrelevant.' None of those guys were doing that.
To me it's that phrase - 'bare minimum'. Like it's not just about better - there's a desire to establish who is excluded from 'conversation', whose thoughts may be safely discarded because they can't conversation as well, which is where I get the adversarial. Which is what makes the Great Men --
Unrelated, but re: 'conversation as adversarial', and given Nietzsche... A favourite quote: 'Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.' - Friedrich Nietzsche ... If you rely on giants to stand on, what of your own blood can ever be in what you say?
Why the fuck does he list Cellini twice?
🙏 I hope the shaking up helps your thoughts settle down in a good place for you.
I came across an interview with an OnlyFans performer who has been using chatbots to automate her conversations with subscribers. There's a lot of unpack in it, but I want to focus on this part of the interview: 🧵 (Source: archive.today/2025.08.16-1...)
People will just leave this platform if they have to. We've done it before, it wasn't even that hard.