Bronwyn Clarke

"My husband complains about the cold," the man said. "Can you teach me a spell to keep him warm?"

"I can teach you to bind hair into a net to catch heat," the wizard said, "using arcane counting and a pair of fine wands."

After a while, the man said "Isn't this knitting?"

"This, too, is magic."

Discworld QOTD, from Wyrd Sisters

[“Take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.” — Mr Beaver, The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe]

C. S. Lewis tried to warn us about AI

From Bridgerton to Heated Rivalry, what’s the secret to a good book-to-TV romance? More and more romance adaptations are starting to appear – but what makes the translation from page to screen really sing?

In @aunz.theconversation.com today, @profromance.bsky.social and I have a piece about adapting romance to the screen. What makes a good adaptation?

The will of the rich and powerful: Brexit and the Epstein files The Epstein files reveal the role of Brexit in a global network which stands to gain from undermining democracy itself

The Epstein files show that Brexit was never a “plucky British revolt”. In reality, Brexit was fed, and empowered, by an entire class of oligarchs and autocrats, who thrive on chaos, weak regulation and brittle institutions.

the existence of billionaires is ethically indefensible

A tan and white border collie lying on her cushion, staring intently at the camera.

Pippin thinks I should stop staring at the screen and take her for a walk. She’s probably right. She thinks everyone should go for a walk, ‘cos that would be more people to meet and pat her.

I'll shout it from the rooftops: No, it can't. It is a complex code running in a machine. It has no emotion, love, fear, grief, joy. It copies words and word order from the texts written by humans that it gorged on. Words we chose, every single one, with care & purpose & hope & tears of our own.

Looks to me like Herzog made an offer that couldn’t be refused. Leibler sent the formal invitation and the PM didn’t have much choice without insulting the loved ones of the people who had been murdered at Bondi. There was going to be an uproar whatever he did.

To be very clear, that lady in the NYT article is not making any money with her hundreds of AI slop books.

She makes money by *convincing people* she makes money that way and getting them to pay her to teach them how to do it.

It's an evolved MLM, and the NYT is helping market it.

Part 2 - the Speech

“Imagine that you see the wretched strangers…
their babies at their backs…
plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation.”

Then the turn of the blade:

If you were forced from your home,
would you be pleased to find
“a nation of such barbarians?”

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

I'm so sad about both. All About Romance was so influential in giving the genre a place and a voice. And Harlequin Historicals made up a good part of my reading at one stage. As someone who is older than the internet by many years, I do miss the days of blogs and (good) forums.

Not Groundbreaking Enough

Shonda Rimes’ Shondaland production company has taken Julia Quinn’s charming, lively, sexy Bridgerton novels and adapted them for a groundbreaking Nexflix series. The Bridgerton series has presented a character landscape featuring people of more than one colour.…

How? How do you double-check the accuracy, if you're not already an expert? Ask a different GenAI? Or do you, you know... Have to go and do the research you would have done anyway, pre-AI? Because I'm buggered if I can think of how you do that in a way where the GenAI saved you time.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

There are a lot of men out there who do not see any of the logistics happening around them and they're like "wait, where the fuck did these hand warmers come from?"

Look at every kid wearing mittens, and that's your answer. From the people who have been silently keeping hands warm for centuries.

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

All the traits that you have been taught to value and look for in special individuals - courage, intelligence, strength - are actually collective traits. There is no genius or hero coming to save us from our problems. We solve them together or not at all. Socialism or barbarism.

“We’ve invented a machine the destroys our own planet, drives inequality and the rise of global fascism, destroys truth and veracity, undermines all of human achievements in knowledge, science, medicine, arts and culture. And frankly we’re upset that you’re not that into it and call us names.”

But we're all walking in the night, now, on ground we don't know. When the day comes we may know where we are, or we may not.

A tan and white border collie holding her green stuffed dinosaur in her mouth and looking up at the camera in expectation.

Pippin thinks I should stop doom-scrolling and throw her Dino for her to catch. She is probably right. She is a wise doggy, full of love and energy.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

I'm not religious either. But thinking seriously about which book encapsulates and influenced my ethics and values, probably Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Trouble is, so are most Dems it seems.

Thanks for this link! Rosemary Sutcliff is one of my favourite authors - I must re-read The Eagle soon. (And Tristan and Iseult - best version of that story ever).

Discworld QOTD, from Mort