Life Is Amazing publisher
@lifeisamazing.bsky.social
I avoid people on here who want their follower count up because [insert reason]. I've had quite enough of people thinking they're so important they deserve followers.
I remember being taught that a precis was a shortened version of something with the important stuff left in. I was then told to write one. What the teacher didn't say (and I was 7 and knew this) is things are important depending on the point you're making. There isn't an objective "important".
This is perhaps the most succinct precis of the bible I have yet encountered.
Exquisite. Wonder Woman is my actual religion.
Aelfric knowing AI will produce a bad paraphrase, even then.
Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955 – c. 1010) would appreciate if you don't do a shitty job copying his Lives of the Saints.
Also, I came here to get away from all that culture war shizzle. Twitter burned me out. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of bskyers came here for the same reason. The pervading philosophy here seems to be "block and move on". That may be changing, but it's certainly the vibe in my cohort.
Also, I came here to get away from all that culture war shizzle. Twitter burned me out.
Deep syntactical complexity of George Meredith... currently very much enjoying this tough, slow read...
The Tories always criticise redistribution, but what they really mean is redistribution FROM the wealthy TO the poor. The other way round, they're ok with.
Unpaid carers have to pay back £250m in money they were accidentally overpaid, or they face jail.
Rishi Sunak writes of £8.7bn of COVID PPE as an “oopsie”.
Ok, cool. Nothing wrong with this picture.
I'm hoping that the new studies on long Covid, showing how the delivery system of oxygen to tissues is interfered with and how known drugs may enhance that delivery will come to your aid. I feel for you.
Becoming convinced that new Battlestar Galactica is the science fiction series of our era. From AI to trans, from the collapse of democracy to ecological collapse - it has everything.
Just saw Count Arthur Strong at the New Theatre Royal. Oh my God, the second half - a merciless and utterly hilarious "tribute" to The Beatles was a work of surreal genius. Utterly fantastic.
"Brexit freedoms". I mean noone in the EU is allowed to eat outside. Fact.
Just imagine the supreme jealousy Europeans will feel when they discover this 'Brexit freedom' of al fresco dining
The problem with social media is people say stupid stuff all the time and then forget they said it, and they think that's what SM is too, until a drunk tweet from 3am 5 years back when you were mid-crisis suddenly becomes your defining statement in the world's eyes. Remember guys: dont drunk post.
I am microscopic, tbh.
The indie bookstores in my city prefer not to stock POD titles, but hybrid used-and-new stores do. The former blame supply chains and economies. The latter tell me what margin they'd like & pay me upfront. Doesn't mean I'll go Amazon, but some writers don't get how minuscule independent authors are.
She makes me laugh, this one.
Once, I completely forgot the words “changing rooms” and walked up to a shop assistant in Next and said “I’d like to get undressed please.”
I chuckled, tbh.
I respect the Sun's right to fair working hours but making rainclouds work every weekend shift doesn't seem sustainable either
Thinking about the old argument people made in the 80s that what people watched in cinema and on TV didn't affect their behaviour, then literally hearing classmates tell me they'd got in a fight with a stranger who wore a biker jacket after watching Quadrophenia. Funny old world...
The King Charles picture looks less like blood than flames, to me.
When I'm working in the office, I sometimes prepare my food. This is an onion, broccoli and chicken soup, with chilli. Microwaved. It's rather nice, actually.
Newly invented word of the day: adelphonymic, pertaining to a shared name among a sisterhood.
Reading back over a manuscript I wrote last year, and I am convinced there are moments in it of brilliance. There are other terrible moments, but there is something in it that surprises me, even though I wrote it.
Battlestar Galactica is the sci-fi series of our times. AI out of control, paranoia about those who are really and women, martial law, democracy under pressure, wars of extermination... how did it know?
I would never have predicted Battlestar Galactica would become a metaphor for trans integration. Fascinating.
Battlestar Galactica - season 2 just gets better.
I've just started rewatching, too. Am currently on the final episode of season 1. I bought the entire box set of £18 last week on ebay, and it hasn't got old.
The far right chipping away at US democracy. We are in the last days of the the Republic. Feels very much like when Rome fell to tyranny under the influence of the great magnates who had replaced the individual farmers around Rome, thus holding undue influence with their piles of money.
Vigilante Violence Is Part of the Right’s Plan
I wrote this exactly a year ago, and today is, sadly, a good day to repost it: The open embrace of violence plays a key role in the broader rightwing mobilization against democracy.
Some thoughts: 1/
Writing a section of the novel, I realise that the myth I am telling needs to be put into iambic hexameter, as a nod to something Homeric (he wrote dactyls, but, hey). When I break the prose up into verse, I realise I have actually written it in hexameter without realising. Funny old world.
Both teams have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. To decide, we are going to put them in a room to fight to the death. The prize will be given to the family of those who died.
Corporate Feudalism at work. Getting the police serfs to brutalise those who challenge the feudal order.
Corporate Feudalism and Corporate Fascism are basically the same thing under different aspects.
But of course, I stand to be corrected, and it's a moveable feast.
What it can do is cross-reference lots of different data sets, and that is one of its strengths. That's computational analysis, which is a small branch of research. It does that really well.
Sure. It just requires people to have found things already & put it online. So, it does meta-research, not ACTUAL research where you uncover new stuff. It can never be used for that because it doesn't go beyond the data set available in cyberspace. (Btw, I thought you'd put a kiss at the end!) :)
I recently went to Brave. I switched off the AI, and it feels like a competent search engine from, say, 15 years ago. It's OK. I now use many different search engines to do a sweep of results. I've almost completely stopped with Google. I also use my Britannica set: it's great for certain things!
They are switching policy re whistleblowers and "rewarding" them with free flights to make it look less suspicious, I hear.
This was ChatGPT. It averaged out idealised lives of writers in British towns. In some ways this is where it genuinely writes fiction, and that is something I'm sure programmers are already exploring.
Try asking a question where there's a limited data set. It doesn't say "I don't know". I asked it to write 500 words about H G Wells's life in Southsea, Portsmouth in the 1890s. There is so little written about this time the entire essay was a fantasy. This is why it can't be used for real research.
My answer to this is it took amazon 9 years before it turned a profit. Early days. It's going to make huge changes, but not tomorrow. I don't believe it will be good for traditional creatives. Arguments that it can't create will change as they "improve" the algorithms, not the data they draw on.
They will moor up near the moon in an actual space galleon.
If we ever do meet benevolent extraterrestrials I hope they can guide us on the proper use of caulk in exterior wood repair situations
Exactly this when they frame house price drops as a disaster: "the bank-feeding mortgage cartel that makes living unaffordable is in trouble. Oh no!"
Normalize not recognizing that traditional economic indicators are signs that things are “going well” and see them for what they are: measures of how effectively people are being exploited.
Disappointed to discover this was music scores...
Now I get what your comment was about a couple of days ago @tadethompson.bsky.social ... bit slow on the uptake sometimes...
Hunt for Gollum will "gift" us with more of his "backstory". So maybe we'll finally get to meet Gollum's primary physician, see what his fav restaurant was, and hang out with some of his besties.