James Aylett

The 4s will continue until security improves

Kent has a new fleet of gritting lorries. One of them is called See It, Say It, Salt It.

Today's selection of random spam: "A six or seven out of ten is now seconds away with AI, but that copy could belong to anyone." Erm, so why wouldn't I do it myself for a ten? (I think they're implying that No Our AI Is Better, or something. Didn't really bother reading tbh.)

Support Both White Ash & Fairy Tale Wars and get a special crossover print by @tinaisoladesign.bsky.social www.kickstarter.com/projects/com... www.kickstarter.com/projects/whi...

Academics, students, anyone. Let authors know that you enjoyed reading their work. It matters.

Now this is a good idea. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, wrote a whole tract on witch-hunting: Daemonology. It’s chillingly rational: rather than being full of overheated fantasies like some such works, it’s coolly consistent. 1/7 www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s...

A lot of people ask me why I am the way I am, so, after many years of holding back, I thought it was time to come clean. It all dates back to the time in 1994 in Nottingham Virgin Megastore when Julian Cope licked my entire face, coating it in mystical saliva... tomcox.substack.com/p/the-true-s...

yeah so this QT led me to their website, where I realise they also publish the incredible Hausa soapfest SIN IS A PUPPY THAT FOLLOWS YOU HOME (just read it okay) plus loads of Manickavel, and I just spent look sod off it's my birthday this week, I'm allowed.

Advertising whistleblowers have just released a damning exposé of their industry's role in "incentivising and enabling" online hate /1

Discussing the fantasy thing where elves age physically to 20ish at around human rates and then much slower, and realizing the guards in Lothlorien must have had brunch discussion all "...you know, when *I* went abroad for a semester, *I* came back with some nice dishes...

Is highland capybara a thing?

And now the Denver B-Gates Tattered Cover Bookstore has signed copies of When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Redshirts, and Old Man's War. Go get them!

I *wish* I could be 1. (I don't, I wish I could be 2.)

bluesky has four types of users

I'd like a weekly summary of the news that sounds like it is framed "this week on a very special episode of Humans...". What we actually seem to get is more like a preview of this week's Big Brother.

I wish I could write SEC filings where I just get to trot out some fiction I had in my head but hadn't found a home for. (I mean I don't, that would mean worrying things about the scale and form of company I'm involved with.)

As an idea for how well my bank has figured out digital communications, I got an in-app alert four hours ago warning me that the clocks were going back yesterday.

I love it when the clocks go back. I love the falling leaves, and the rain, and the chance to unpack all my sweaters and socks. I love lighting candles and incense. I love the windows seen from outside, where the shades of the past year cling to the walls and whisper their age-old secrets.

As I've said before, it's only once I became a professor that I realized the entmoot, a meeting that goes on for three days and three nights, was a professor's joke about faculty meetings.

Are you fucking kidding me? From a quick sample, under 10% of these seem genuinely justified. Some aren't versioning properly so there are multiple for one site. Some I can't think of a reason to have a service worker instead of just handling fetch exceptions.

Weird and somewhat coherent dream: someone I was at university with moved into my mother's village where she and her husband were basically busting community organising around environment/development. (Then it became incoherent: my car turned into a bicycle, which I sold to them for some reason.)

PikaBOO, bitch!!!

Sandhill cranes have returned to the Minnesota farm field where my father was born. His mother remembered them from her childhood, but he never saw them until a decade or two or so back.

It’s Friday night. *breathe in* I’ve done enough this week. *breathe out* You’ve done enough this week.

god, this is so fucking stupid

drilling for more gas then telling us to stockpile because of the climate crisis is like digging a deeper and deeper hole because you know a guy who sells long ladders

The next James Bond has never known the Good Internet, alas

A prime example of why AI 'leaders' are not who anyone should be listening to about AI, right and consciousness. It's not all wrong! In fact, it starts off very sensibly: "AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do". But then...hoo boy 1/n

I'd love to know quite why Amazon's search bot is downloading zipfiles that haven't changed in a quarter century but doesn't seem to be using conditional GET at all. Neither of those choices makes any sense to me.

I do this with my own goddamn child! It's not that hard! Why don't people respect children as humans and want them to learn to take care of themselves? Why aren't we modeling care for them?

New favourite example of a crash blossom

It's good to have PSAs teaching kids that they can say no when an adult wants to touch them in a way they don't want to be touched, even something innocent like a hug. The only people who'd be upset by a PSA like that are people who don't want kids to be able to control who touches them.

please stop replying to game devs saying things like "well look on the bright side those laid off devs can start their own indie studios now" because eventually one of us is going to snap and "WITH WHAT FUCKING MONEY" would be a shitty last thing to hear before you die

this Halloween we're dressing as the ghost of The Museum of English Rural Life's PHP-powered website

did not have "inaugural pick for a book club featured on NHL dot com" on my author bingo card, but HERE WE ARE 🏒

Good morning to everyone, but especially to all the wombats, for today is their special day! To celebrate International Wombat Day, here is an engraving of a wombat from 'The Illustrated Natural History' (1863) by J. G. Wood. 📷 Reserve 590.2/WOO #InternationalWombatDay #WombatDay #RareBooks