Alan Langford

THAT book? One singular book? Now that's hilarious. A lineup down the block is more like it.

I'm afraid we would only be doing "somewhat better" without him. We have a very long way to go.

One would expect that it would be replaced by the constant anxious horror of our systematic destruction of the ecosystem that we rely on for survival. Trump remains a distracting blip in a landscape of existential threat, and that's the worst of the many forms of damage he's doing.

Pizza is a weapon of mass destruction, after all.

And it's written in "easy to understand" language, making it even more porous.

Missing here is that in New Trumplandia, the fabric must be made domestically, from cotton grown in fields and sheep shorn by Trumpians (formerly Americans). This ads $70 to the cost, which makes the retail price $460.

This price is (naturally) no problem for the ruling class, so it's all good.

Text with a variety of edited markup. The original text is "I06N (working title) A new cyberpunk novel coming in October 2023". I06N is crossed out in blue and replaced with "OVERKILL" in hand-written block caps. In turn, that's circled in red and replaced with "Overkill doesn't work. find a title more related to the story!" in script. "Cyberpunk is mostly circled in red, and there is a note "too narrow. Try cyberpunk-thriller?" in red script. "2023" is crossed out in blue and replaced with 2024, also in blue. Then "October 2023 / 2024" is struck out and replaced with "Real Soon Now" in red script.

Find me next Saturday in Ottawa at Can*Con 2025 wearing this t-shirt. I'll have bookmarks (probably, if the gods of logistics cooperate).

I fail to see how rational people can't see that any corporate platform is prone to enshittification, almost by definition.

I guess "Lights. Camera. Democracy-destroying propaganda!" didn't fit.

In Adaptation, a fictionalized Robert McKee says, “The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you've got a hit.”

Bull. Shit.

Nobody’s making it to Act 3 if your Act 1 sucks.
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#Scriptsky #Screenwriting #Filmsky

SF authors working on their story blurbs in 2025:

In a dystopian future...

STRIKE THAT.

In a future that's marginally more dystopian than the present day...

Completely agree. I moved out to the country years ago. All the radio stations are playing old country or dinosaur rock. I get that there's more people a decade older than me who got stuck in that era, but really are they out in stores spending big bucks, or is it people stuck in the 80's/90's?

I'm in my late 60's and I've had my goddamned fill of classic rock. I've also got enough New Order and Depeche mode at home already. Play me something written and recorded in the past five years and don't make it all Taylor Swift (nothing against her, but my wife is a Swiftie, I already get enough).

Damn, this is not easy! First try: When a career-obsessed broker uses blackmail to illegally upgrade his cybernetics, he gains superhuman abilities but is forced to fight an existential battle against an enemy capable of using his new skills for their own nefarious purposes.

“Billy and the Cloneasaurus”? I'll watch that!

Speed tends to replace craft. I think to some extent this has long been the case as we moved from pen and paper to typewriter, to word processor, and now to algorithmically generated prose. Many still stop and finely hone their work (or of their dumb LLM), but over time the underlying art is lost.

"with the importers picking up the extra cost"

Not that I'm shipping a lot, and yeah less than before the tyrant-in-chief, but some customers understand that it's on them, not us.

Everybody is moving to UPS/FedEx/DHL to get to the US with the importers picking up the extra cost. Government postal services in many countries have just stopped shipping to the US. Time to find customers in the UK, Australia, Europe...

We live in interesting times.

I suppose it has a Solar Protection Factor, but with the lead time on projects like this does it have Downrange Kinetic Inertial Mapping?

And they plan to just POP it into space.

I guess that would be a Planetary Orbital Procedure.

She has to be sure you haven't been replaced by a similar-looking clone. I had one like that. It took a few hours before she was sure I was the real me.

It's just an error in choosing the right definition. AIs are fact checkers, where one fact hops over another fact until there are no facts left or all facts are obstructed.

Annalee Newitz 🍜 (@annaleen@wandering.shop) 4.35K Posts, 1.79K Following, 17.3K Followers · I write science fiction and science nonfiction. Author: Automatic Noodle, Stories Are Weapons, The Terraformers. Bylines: Flaming Hydra, New Scientist, ...

Ironic that the linked profile wasn't one to a smaller, non-corporate social media network, like wandering.shop/@annaleen

May's Dumb Password Report is out featuring 5695 login attempts with 470 different passwords on a handful of low traffic sites (password attempts outnumber visitors by about 50:1).
ambitonline.com/nextrelease/...

#hackers #CyberSecurity

Looking for a digital calendar for the 2025 Nebula Awards Conference?

So was I... nothing found, so I made one!

alanlangford.com/2025/06/05/n...

#Nebulas #NebulaAwards

I had someone pop into a forum and ask "how do I self-publish?" This comes up fairly frequently, so I did an opinionated brain dump for them, with a Canadian slant. If you see a panicked new author running for the woods at full speed, it might be my fault. alanlangford.com/2025/06/02/s... #selfpub

On ethics, AI, and writing fiction in the age of Large Language Models. alanlangford.substack.com/p/ai-ethics-...

Ice Storm Cleanup, Steps Two and Three With Bonus Unscheduled Complications

The ongoing Ice Storm Cleanup open.substack.com/pub/alanlang...

I watched The Life of Pi a few days ago and it still has the best horror line for an author:

"I worked on my novel for two years but then it died."

I'm still having nightmares.

Recent writing updates:
On research, and the pains of writing near-future Science Fiction: alanlangford.com/2025/04/23/o...
Plot revisions and characters alanlangford.com/2025/04/25/p...

Not writing but a rambling post on working in software alanlangford.substack.com/publish/post...