Avani

Mother, Darling Wendy knew it wouldn’t be long now before her daughter was taken. She had put the idea from her mind as long as she could, but now Jane was days away from turning thirteen.

A dark and lovely reimagining of Peter Pan that explores the pain and joy of motherhood and the roles women are often forced to play - Mother, Darling by @apottern.bsky.social

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fi...

FICTION Quote From the window of the nursery, Wendy saw Jane wobbling her way down Kensington Park Road on a borrowed bicycle, hair unbraided and wild like she’d been flying. Wendy’s throat seized with fear. Was that gold glittering in the girl’s hair? Had the neighbors seen? Was that his laughter that rang out from Kensington Park across the way? end Quote Mother, Darling  by Allison Pottern 2 February 2026 Strange Horizons

Mother, Darling
by Allison Pottern @apottern.bsky.social

"Was that gold glittering in the girl’s hair? Had the neighbors seen? Was that his laughter that rang out from Kensington Park across the way?"

Link ⬇️
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fi...

#shortstories #fiction #fantasy

Hey folks!

Due to a series of unforeseen expenses, I need to raise some cash before royalty season rolls around at the beginning of April. Because of that, I am going to do something I don't usually do and offer paid mentoring sessions for aspiring writers.

Brilliant talk tonight by @indyjohar.bsky.social at @longnow.org . I'm still unpacking his model where doubt is foundational to intelligence, and wondering where do ml systems, where uncertainty is defined with respect to a axiomatically problematic ground truth, fit in this framework.

Just passed 11 empty charter buses at the endpoint of the San Francisco 'walk for life' march.

A wild update: these two stories are releasing *on the same day.* Stay tuned on 2/2 for two very different, feminist tales.

Make sure you name, save, and enable in the left menubar, and reload your docs page to test.

Style to your hearts content! Mine looks like:
/* Hide "Refine" pop-up when text is selected*/
#docs-instant-bubble {
display: none !important;
}

/* Hide "Ask Gemini" button*/
.appsElementsSidekickEntryPointRoot {
display: none !important;
}

(2/4)
Step 2: make a custom style for docs.
* Go into the Stylus extension menu and hit plus for new style
* Change the "Everything" dropdown above the text box to "URLs starting with", and put in docs.google.com/document/ for docs

(1/4) For anyone else who wants to make the Gemini pop-up in Google docs go away, I just figured out an easy method.

Step 1: Download the Stylus Google Chrome extension: chrome.google.com/webstore/det...

there’s stuff circulating about Wikipedia and AI; I’d ask that you dig into this thread before getting concerned.

Fair. I'm not arguing at all that they didn't accept dirty money.

Giving them faster speeds *also* saves server load, which makes Wiki better for everyone. A version of this fast, complete dump is also publicly accessible.

Getting a broad base of Wikipedia editors is definitely an issue and one of the reasons I am engaging here. We need more women! We need more non-CS folk! If people think wiki is selling out, the groups less willing to join the conversation are going to be the folks we need most.

The big companies aren't the ones ddosing wiki. It's mostly smaller open source models, many from China. I have the graphs if you're curious :) I'm guessing the big companies are interesting in keeping a known clean data source fast and accessible.

For context, I'm also a writer, and i do a lot of academic work warning against ai content proliferation. AI content in wiki is something I'm personally actively working against and have been for over a year.

Wiki are the people getting the money, not giving it. There isn't extortion. Crawling the content for model training is allowed under the CC license the content is under. Wiki has had years of heavy AI crawler traffic. The only change post deal is that Wiki has convinced some folks to help pay.

In case it helps, this isn't "AI generated articles". This is wikimedia negotiating with large companies to get paid for the bandwidth they use crawling the site. All they are giving the companies are faster downloads and some custom data formatting. The data itself is public.

A vase full of flowers, some of which are pink and red and at odd angles

These truly ridiculous blooms all opened up today after spending half a week in hiding, and that's the energy I wish all of you to have today.

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences) (Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

Asimov’s Editor Sheila Williams Hospitalized The Must Read Books Team has shared that Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s, has been hospitalized after suffering a brain aneurysm. Asimov’s senior managing editor Emily Hockaday will…

If you haven't already done so, please write a positive note or story for @sheilawilliams.bsky.social as she recovers from a brain aneurysm. Sheila Williams is an amazing person and editor. The SF/F genre wouldn’t be what it is today without her decades of hard work.
locusmag.com/2026/01/shei...

Congratulations!

I will die on the hills of sweet peppers with the onions but otherwise 100% with you.

So excited to announce my motherhood horror story "Hollow Pines" will be published by 34 Orchard in November of this year!

obligatory

H/t @smikes.bsky.social

TIL: An Oreo cookie translates to about 60Wh of energy. Our brains do the amazing pattern recognition and extrapolation they do on about an Oreo and a half of power.

(The conversation this came from was about car batteries, which I've learned are also incredibly Oreo efficient!)

the best antidote to blackpilling is remembering that every video you see of an ICE thug abusing their power was recorded by an American who volunteered to put themselves in harm's way for the sake of people they've likely never met and never will

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