weird menace and excessive bloodletting
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gemmafiles.bsky.social
weird menace and excessive bloodletting
@gemmafiles.bsky.social
a preliminary sketch of a crone. Aspergerian mom of an autistic son. I wrote Experimental Film and literally 100+ short stories. Out now: Little Horn, a collection, from Shortwave Publishing. I sing, make jewelry and doodle pretty monsters.
although considering they usually blinded them and cut parts of their faces off, they probably COULD still do podcasts, sadly
It’s really awful that the Byzantines would ritually mutilate former rulers to keep them from taking the throne again but on the other hand this did mean no one had to suffer through episodes of the Nikephoros Bryennios Podcast Hour.
Liz Truss, who served 44 days as UK prime minister, goes full Curtis Yarvin.

Interviewing Yarvin on her new podcast, she calls for overhauling UK government to fit his vision.

“I agree with you, having spent 10 years in the system, you need to start from scratch,” Truss tells Yarvin.
December 28, 2025 at 10:57 PM
pretty obvious but bears repeating
We Are Not Negotiating a Ukrainian Peace: Repeated Failures of Emissaries are not Attempts to Reach a Respectable End to War but a Dishonorable Effort to Wear Zelensky Down
open.substack.com/pub/steadyst...
Clarity and Candor. A Must Read.
We Are Not Negotiating a Ukrainian Peace: Repeated Failures of Emissaries are not Attempts to Reach a Respectable End to War but a Dishonorable Effort to Wear Zelensky Down
The Steady State | by Bill Piekney
open.substack.com
December 28, 2025 at 10:52 PM
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This book (labelled as a parody) is just excellent for contemporary times
December 28, 2025 at 5:52 PM
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My favorite thing about Frog and Toad is that it is the story of two men deeply and obviously in love with one another, drawn as a tribute to his lifelong partner by a gay man long before their relationship was socially sanctioned.
Then Frog and Toad went out onto the front porch to wait for the mail.

They sat there, feeling happy together.
December 28, 2025 at 5:47 PM
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"I then wrote the division problem in words, and [my child] again answered correctly ... I explained to her that if she looked at math problems as reading, she would be just fine. Our weekend visit taught me I could still be an active, supportive and loving father to my children while incarcerated."
"All night long, I thought about how to use an item from the vending machine to teach math since my prison didn’t provide pens, pencils or crayons. Eventually I settled on an imaginative solution that would make even Albert Einstein proud."
How I Taught My Daughter Math in Prison With Cheetos
I helped my daughter conquer her hardest school subject with a lot of orange dust.
prisonjournalismproject.org
December 28, 2025 at 9:05 PM
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The “worst of the worst” Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison weren’t the worst: nearly all had no violent convictions, many entered the US legally, and gang labels relied on tattoos—not evidence, reports Cato’s David Bier.

https://ow.ly/wifs50XO2TY
DHS Doesn’t List CECOT Prison Deportees in Its Worst of the Worst Data
The United States should have allowed most of these immigrants to reside and work in the country legally. They could have been economic assets to the United States, and it serves no legitimate purpose to send them back to, at best, horrific conditions in Venezuela and, at worst, more persecution.
ow.ly
December 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM
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I #read "In That Endlessness, Our End" by @gemmafiles.bsky.social. Another winning purchase from @grimscribepress.bsky.social!
This collection will have you staring at the sky in fear & staring into your children for a spirit that isn't their own.
My ⭐⭐⭐⭐ #review:
www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Samantha's review of In That Endlessness, Our End
4/5: This was my first foray into the works of Gemma Files. I was especially drawn to this book when I learned that Gemma is Canadian (like myself), and that this book was published through Grimscribe...
www.goodreads.com
December 28, 2025 at 9:11 PM
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Bizarre Ecosystem Discovered More Than Two Miles beneath Arctic Ocean
Bizarre Ecosystem Discovered More Than Two Miles beneath Arctic Ocean
Dynamic mounds made of methane at a depth of some 3,640 meters act like “frozen reefs” for a bizarre array of deep-sea creatures, new observations reveal
www.scientificamerican.com
December 27, 2025 at 6:28 PM
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don’t.. don’t hold it like that
December 27, 2025 at 11:22 PM
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I was on the BBC World Service News Hour today (aired on a lot of @npr.org stations in the US) to talk about this sighting of an Amur tigress with ***five cubs*** in northeast China. Link to interview here, my bit starts ~30:52: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...
www.chinadailyasia.com/hk/article/6... 🌍
First-ever footage of wild Amur tigress taking care of five cubs caught on camera
A camera trap in the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park has recorded the country's first-ever footage of a wild Amur tigress nurturing five cubs, providing powerful evidence of progress i...
www.chinadailyasia.com
December 28, 2025 at 12:19 AM
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i don’t see how any of the benefits of chatgpt and other consumer-facing LLMs can possibly outweigh their incredible ability to induce suicides
Adam Raine’s life hurtled toward tragedy soon after he began talking with ChatGPT about homework. Analysis of his ChatGPT account shows how the chatbot became a confidant as he planned to end his life.
74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to a suicidal teen
Analysis of high-schooler Adam Raine’s ChatGPT account by attorneys for his parents shows how the chatbot became a confidant as he planned to end his life.
www.washingtonpost.com
December 28, 2025 at 2:06 AM
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I want to point this out not necc because it's so clearly generated by LLM with light human editing, but because as my eyes skimmed over the classicly bland, milquetoast word salad, it reminded me of how critical having a unique voice is in this business. It's the one ownable thing we have.
Not only does this have the sing-songy rhetorical stylings of an LLM text itself, nothing about it appears to be true. Contracts are a 4000-year-old social practice; how did they become incomprehensible to the unaided human mind last year?
Erin Underwood: Open Letter to the Science Fiction Writers Association and Community
Hi Friends, Erin Underwood After writing the letter below, I thought rather than sending it to SFWA only, I’d share it with Mike at File 770 along with a note that read: “Am I crazy? Will this blow…
file770.com
December 28, 2025 at 6:12 PM
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It would not be "inevitable" if the AI companies didn't insist on forcing it into everything & others would stop saying "this is inevitable"

Generative AI:

-is ethically wrong
-only exists due to theft
-is inaccurate/lies
-depletes resources
-causes mental instability

HOW IS THIS EVEN A DEBATE???
December 28, 2025 at 6:43 PM
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Thanks for the art share Davis!
Hi, I'm Liv, a woodcut printmaker and finalist for the Artist World Fantasy Award this year. All of my 2D art is sketched, hand-carved in wood, then inked and printed on my etching press. Sometimes I add color with watercolors, or gilding. #art #woodcut #printmaking
October 3, 2025 at 7:51 PM
and those people will all be zombies with interior lives
Dickens: it's about this poor guy who succumbs to conservative bootstrap propaganda about how the poor deserve to be poor
Dickens: i know George has some feelings on this one
George Romero: only in a paradise of the proletariat will the means of production be held by all the people
December 28, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Yep, as documented in Oppenheimer, absolutely no immigrants or migrants or communists or socialists or women or queers were needed to split the atom before Hitler could. It was all pure bred American working men.
December 28, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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Who among us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing when we learned that undocumented migrants to the United States were taking all the atom-splitting jobs
December 28, 2025 at 6:51 PM
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This is great, "Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death," a story where Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy who administers the lottery from "The Lottery"

archiveofourown.org/works/733964...
Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death - Anonymous - The Lottery - Shirley Jackson [Archive of Our Own]
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
archiveofourown.org
December 28, 2025 at 7:16 PM
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Do you read the Tenebrous newsletter?**

sendfox.com/tenebrouspress

**I mean, you're prolly not reading it right now; we haven't sent one in like a week.
We may not next week either, I dunno. It's the holidays & we're tired.
Point is, we won't clutter up your inbox, so you should prolly sign up🖤☠️
Tenebrous Press Newsletter Signup
Your Home for New Weird Horror, New Weird Dark Fiction, Oddities, Abnormalities and All Manner of Eccentricities You Never Knew You Needed More Than Oxygen. Find out more: www.tenebrouspress.com Sho...
sendfox.com
December 28, 2025 at 7:49 PM
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The same person who told you that immigrants eat cats—and tripled down on that filthy, idiotic lie when challenged—regrets to inform you that immigrants also cause nuclear war.
December 28, 2025 at 7:45 PM
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Now watching Cain at Abel, a Filipino family melodrama that abruptly shifts into a bloody exploitation flick. It reaffirms my longheld belief that any movie where an old lady fires a pump action shotgun kind of rules.
December 28, 2025 at 7:51 PM
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i was for years the only out trans woman reporting in congress. if i can face my fears and do it you can too
December 28, 2025 at 7:48 PM
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The "Spanish" Flu hit just as modern scientific medicine was really getting started. While humors and bloodletting were more or less over, vaccines as we understand them hadn't been invented yet.
December 28, 2025 at 7:45 PM
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What I really hate about this is that it's a strain of Democratic Party know-it-all-ism which is going to assert itself with a lot of $$ and a lot of free media in '26 and '28, which is "We could win this whole thing if you freaks would either just act normal or hide." Do not trust those messengers.
December 28, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Reposted by weird menace and excessive bloodletting
I miss the days before covid, when in New York, in Times Square or a crowded subway, you would sometimes see people wearing masks and think, "Why are they wearing those? Oh, right--it's none of my fucking business." Let's get back to that.
Jon Stewart and the pod saves guys mocking people who wear masks while talking about What Is To Be Done is exactly what Jon Stewart and the pod saves guys are, it's the most Jon Stewart and pod saves guys thing possible.
December 28, 2025 at 7:22 PM