John Brownlow
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johnbrownlow.bsky.social
John Brownlow
@johnbrownlow.bsky.social
Screenwriter, author, knowitall, dilettante. AGENT SEVENTEEN won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller of 2022, soon to be a major movie. ASSASSIN EIGHTEEN out now. Tech, math, photography, music. Fan of bicycles and guillotines.
OK. Also getting a fairly random failure to save to Dropbox. This might be because when I created a PDF it gave it the name with .fadein.pdf as the extension.
November 19, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Hey, @fadeinpro.com, FYI hard crash in 5.05 when I click 'proofread' on a fresh document. Tahoe 26.1.

Edit>Writing Tools>Proofread, or Show Writing Tools>Proofread

Works OK in other apps
November 19, 2025 at 7:20 PM
ps thank you for including the option to disable Fade In access, that's a huge one for me!
October 28, 2025 at 1:03 PM
ps on Mac upgrading from 5.0.0 beta in the app doesn't work. It downloads but doesn't install. I had to go to the download page.
October 28, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Does the solve the problem that when you have multiple unsaved document you get stacked dialogs and no indication of which document is being saved?
October 28, 2025 at 12:54 PM
(I have a longstanding cloud solution for all my writing projects and apps so the Fade In feature is not relevant to me... when I press cmd-O I just want to see (and expect to see) the Finder dialog)
October 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
A big one for me is that fact that opening a document now takes an extra very irritating click to specify that it's 'on my mac' when I don't use anything else. Otherwise, great work!
October 24, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Whenever I see a craze like this I think about killer whales putting dead salmon on their heads as a fashion statement.

It's the same thing.
Look, I've got an idea: can we not just tie old beanie babies to handbags. It's vintage. It's 90s core or whatever.
I get it because I was once young and the proud owner of several (counterfeit) beanie babies but I am disappointed that people are still getting suckered into collecting expensive plastic crap that they will not give a single fuck about before long why are labubus
July 12, 2025 at 5:13 PM
War is peace. Peace is war.

Same as it ever was.
June 22, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by John Brownlow
who needs state media when the private outlets will defend the empire to its dying breath?
I can’t fucking believe we’re doing this.
June 22, 2025 at 2:20 AM
Reposted by John Brownlow
My son once asked me, "Is today Father's Day?" And I said, "I don't know, do we do that?" And he said, "No, but I feel badly about it."
June 9, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by John Brownlow
Me: Honestly guys don’t plan or do anything special for Father’s Day, it’s been so busy.

Family: We weren’t planing anything.
June 9, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by John Brownlow
200 people spent millions on Trump’s memecoin and were rewarded with this dinner

www.wired.com/story/a-heli...
May 23, 2025 at 5:26 PM
The panopticon.

I will be selling panopticon hammers.
May 22, 2025 at 9:46 PM
That was Claude. And ChatGPT...

chatgpt.com/share/681a61...
ChatGPT - Message Decoding Attempt
Shared via ChatGPT
chatgpt.com
May 6, 2025 at 7:30 PM
An AI tragedy in three acts (the string I gave it is random)
May 6, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Once upon a time the most famous person in the world -- Christ, Beatles, Elvis, Michael Jackson, the Pope -- was famous for being good at something. Now the two top ones are known for being an idiot and an asshole respectively.

Yes, and you know who I mean too.
May 5, 2025 at 3:52 PM
"It'll never just say, 'Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?'"
this feels like an incredible new urban legend taking shape on reddit otoh I've lowkey seen this happen. like jerusalem syndrome but for talking to the computer
April 30, 2025 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by John Brownlow
Once again, the curse of our age is the Counterreformation of the Most Special Boys
AGI is coming for all of us. It will write symphonies, direct movies, and author the best novels.

The only thing it won’t be able to do is VC investing, which must be reserved as a task only for the most-special people
April 30, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by John Brownlow
personally would like to see every store show what part of the price increase is due to tariffs bc if these tariffs ever come down, i need to see that price go right back down
April 29, 2025 at 6:48 PM
There are three things at minimum that would need to change IMO

- citizens united
- gerrymandering of congressional districts
- the way the senate is elected
April 30, 2025 at 11:16 AM
And the second-order problem is that even if the next admin is relatively sane (deus volens) the US system has shown that it's vulnerable to capture. This is a huge systemic constitutional problem which it's bafflingly hard to see how the three branches / states could go about solving.
April 30, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Applications to Canadian universities are through the roof (but there's also a big foreign student scandal at the moment so that's friction). But you're exactly right -- why would anyone make new investments in the US at the moment when there's no way to plan ahead?
April 30, 2025 at 11:15 AM
So, for example, capital has somewhere else to flow in search of returns, which it didn't the last time.
April 30, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Plus unlike the last time where it was a global phenomenon, this time it's, if not exactly local, then epicentred on the US. The extrinsic supply lines outside the US are working fine.
April 30, 2025 at 11:00 AM