Matthew Phillion

Hardest: travel scenes. I always worry that they'll feel like filler.

Easiest: dialogue. My great love before I wrote the Indestructibles was writing zero-budget talkies like Certainly Never. I love the ebb and flow of conversation.

(I do love writing a proper fight scene though.)

Meanwhile, currently pitching a story about very different, middle-aged group of weirdos:
"What if Danny Ocean, Irene Adler, John Wick, Poison Ivy, and the Artful Dodger were an aging adventuring party on a revenge kick?"

Filling out some paperwork to donate a book to a fundraiser and 11 years later the pitch for the Indestructibles still makes me laugh.
"A solar-powered girl, a ballerina vigilante, a werewolf, an boy with an alien in his brain, and a Whovian with a black hole where her heart should be."

I've got a couple of signed hardcovers that were gifts, but mostly I've got those single-color mass markets. I don't think I can give them up just because they're so consistent.

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen.

Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

Best job I ever had, psychologically, and I’d still formulate my resignation every time I was sitting in traffic to get into the office. It’s soul crushing.

The upside to owning the mass markets specifically is for books, they REALLY don't take up much space. Just lil guys lined up in a row nice and neat.

My partner will pick up signed copies of his work for me if she comes across them because she knew how much his work made me want to be a writer. I’ll probably hold onto the tiny little mass market paperbacks I own forever, cos they’ll never be made again.

I love those Icons sets. (I'm such an easy mark for building out minis to run games with.)

Well. History, doomed to repeat it, all that.

I just gave the thumbnail description of the plot to Steph and three sentences in I was like "HOW IS IT WORSE NOW."

God Loves, Man Kills was somehow of its time and ahead of its time simultaneously.

The cover of the comic book X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, by Claremont and Anderson. Image features Wolverine, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, and Colossus standing in a black background.

God Loves, Man Kills just came up in conversation and it is amazing that the story still holds up 43 years later and absolutely SHAMEFUL that nothing has changed since it was first published.

I wanted to share probably the most important sermon I’ve given and it’s while I’m being arrested. It’s torture pure and simple what happens at #Broadview. I’m ok, though I was thrown to the ground and choked with my pectoral cross. A review of the video shows I was peaceful - did I deserve this?

This is real. Our govt is Tweeting like a 14 year old and calling Americans imbecilic morons. We worry about children being bullied but this is the example set by the U.S. GOVERNMENT. This is so shameful. I’m embarrassed for any of you that think this is okay or make excuses for it.

A lot of people are going to walk away from the Ghislaine Maxwell coverage with the impression that our prison system isn’t punitive enough but I’d say it highlights how most everyone else is treated with *deliberate* cruelty.

Just noticed the unnecessary apostrophe in Doctors and I swear to fuck the iPhone keypad is getting worse and worse every week. I find typos in the weirdest places to the point I don't even want to post from my phone anymore.

Getting ready to interview a medical expert for an article on Zoom, remembered I was wearing a tee, thought I should throw something remotely more professional on, realized I was wearing a Doctor's Without Borders shirt, and figured that would be socially acceptable to talk about patient safety.

So there’s a lawyer going around BlueSky right now responding to everyone talking about the Anthropic book settlement by (1) urging people to opt out and (2) saying that they are representing authors who are opting out.

We're witnessing the greatest sustained attack on the human spirit in history. Big Tech seeks to destroy the arts. They're destroying the school system. They want to make us lobotomized people who can't read, write or create. They've turned dystopian fiction into a manual.

During the height of the pandemic, Tyson used Palantir to predict Covid-19 infections among meatpacking workers down to a nearly exactly figure. But rather than using this data to increase worker protections, Tyson used it plan for labor shortages + plant closures
My latest for @sentientmedia.org

As I read this, I'm thinking about the man I interviewed who had to be hospitalized from the Covid he caught at the poultry processing plant and he got fired for it and he still has long Covid

She's a missing princess. They're a gang of thieves. The real crime would be giving her back.

After a daring heist to steal the last living descendant of Snow White, Samara and her crew do the unthinkable: they let her go.

But not everyone is happy about the decision.

#booksky #fantasyheist

If you have to get permission to teach in your area of expertise from people who are definitionally not qualified to adjudicate your expertise then you are no longer working at a university.

You’re working at a state propaganda factory.

This is both comically ignorant economically and, on the immigrant count, empirically wrong by a factor of 2-3.

What’s really going on with AI and jobs? Record-breaking layoff reports, Amazon's mass firings, and a slump in entry level employment. Is AI behind it all?

How is AI *really* impacting jobs?

Henley Chiu, the CTO of Revealera, a jobs data analysis firm, analyzed 180 million jobs listings in 2024 and 2025, in an effort to find out. Chiu found an:

-8% drop in all jobs postings
-~30% drop in art, photography, writing jobs
-22% drop in journalism jobs

If you ever wonder why your artist friend is so pissed off whenever they see AI slop used instead of real, human-created art, it's exactly what you think:

Your only possible response, when confronted with someone saying this, is to wait for them to finish, firmly state “What the actual fuck is wrong with you?” and leave the interview immediately.

Anyway, that job was miserable, I got super depressed doing it, quit too work in a bar, made more money doing that, then became a newspaper reporter. The legal services place is long, long gone and I never spoke to anyone from there again, so it feels like it never happened.

Then the best line in the whole exchange:
"We shouldn't joke around like this in email, it could end up in a court case some day and it'll look like we were having an affair."

Anyway, it's incredible what wealthy businessmen who think they're untouchable will put in an email and think it's secret.

I don't remember what the case was about, but two execs were talking via work email about using the company ski lodge and if they would be there at the same time. Not word for word but basically:
"You bringing your wife?"
"No. You?"
"No. Hey, some alone time, just us LOL."