#Booksky Spooktacular 2025 Day 23: Feed is the start of @seananmcguire.bsky.social’s engaging and innovative riff on zombie fiction. It’s the first thing I ever read from her, full of exciting twists, and its landscape of a shifting news environment has only gotten more relevant with time.

Possibly the ultimate in Oxford policing - both the technique and the reason for keeping protestors out of the road

A fault I see in UK politics: most of our political leaders speak and act like they're trying to follow what the public desire right now, rather than to lead us from where we are to where we "should" be.

This leads to nasty consequences.

Okay. The people have spoken.

For every reskeet this gets, I will post a random picture from my camera roll with no explanation (other than alt text).

Let the games begin.

I think this is a key insight into incel culture; it's about giving adult men the belief that 13 year old's fantasy relationships ought to be real, and that any other form of relationship involves giving up on enjoying life.

When I worked on The Office, Greg Daniels had a list of questions he asked of every story. Some were show-specific (eg “Are we saying something truthful if exaggerated about office life?”), but many are applicable to any script. Here’s a little thread on them…

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#Scriptsky #Screenwriting

🧵Spotted on Market Day in Aotearoa New Zealand:

A tiny human (1?) is helping Mum sell things. While Mum is greeting customers and taking payments--all one-handed. Tiny Human is propped on her hip, blowing big raspberry kisses of thanks. Giggle-snorting when people blow kisses back. (1)

There's a chunk of people not getting the UK's Online Safety Act.

The core problem is that the OSA assumes that (a) any device or connection might be used by an unsupervised child, and (b) that the world has to be child-safe by default.

Virtually all the issues with the Act fall out from this.

This link provides a passthrough to those who don't have subscriptions to Science (i.e. most of us).

I've found a useful route to clarifying my thinking about AI recently: if you replace "company's AI" with "company's cheap employee", how does your opinion sound now?

For example, training an AI on a work is equivalent in this framing to the employee being trained on that work.

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Nothing like your cat saying HURRY STRANGER to wake you up out of a dead sleep.

Trans men’s insight on this is so fucking valuable in understanding the nuances of what’s going on with men. We need to be amplifying them, and hopefully cis men can realize what is actually the source of their loneliness.

One more thought on trans rights; they often show up the places where your partial solution to a problem caused by male chauvinist social norms is incomplete, or indeed rests on society-endorsed sexism.

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Note that the reason trans people are targeted is that they're an easy first target for bigots.

This is why trans rights matter - they are often the first group bigots come for (per Martin Niemöller's famous poem). And you want them there to speak out when the bigots come for you.

In 2016, I introduced you all to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school for survivors of fantastic adventures, unimaginable dangers, and other realities.

Reminder that one of my life principles is what I call the "Krissy Rule": If I were to do something and my spouse called me up and asked "what are you doing?" and I was tempted to lie to her about it, I DON'T DO THAT THING. This is a good rule that's mostly kept me out of trouble.

If you are a cis person *please* take 2 minutes to do this. Trans people with non-updated gender markers, historical gender marker changes, and X markers are terrified to travel right now; rolling back this policy would mean a lot.