Vincent Holland-Keen

The far right putting the St George's flag on lampposts is an insidious way of backing councils and politicians into a corner, so they have to choose between being 'unpatriotic' or supporting racists. Best answer I can think of: every flag they put up, put a rainbow up one next to it

It's telling that on the rare occasion I go for a run, my legs and lungs aren't particularly troubled, but it takes 10-15 minutes for my neck to loosen up enough to be comfortable...

The Far Right Contagion It’s not a Trump thing. It’s not a politics thing.

The Far Right Contagion
open.substack.com/pub/chadbour...

Claiming the right to train AI on their users' content is bad, but that clause essentially claims free use of users' content - send a private video and they could slap their watermark on it and put it on Youtube. Send a manuscript, they could publish it on Amazon 😣

Must admit I didn't know it was a sub-genre to itself, which might be why I didn't kill the reindeer. Now I feel like I should and yet also would feel bad if I did...

I enjoyed it, but also felt there was a Santa as John McClane/Jason Voorhees concept in there that could have been great. I got halfway through trying to write that screenplay, but never figured out the ending.

Box Office: ‘Sinners’ Sinks Teeth Into Huge $45M, ‘Revenge of the Sith’ Edges Past ‘Accountant 2’ Ryan Coogler's rule-defying 'Sinners' boasts the smallest second-weekend drop for any film opening north of $40 million since 2009's 'Avatar' and the smallest ever for an R-rated horror pic.

If you haven't seen this on its second weekend drop: www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

vm.tiktok.com/ZNdFuafUj/ - Why AI hasn't replaced jobs yet - tldr: it's not (yet) good at handling messy.

I doubt that'll happen, but eventually things will get so broken with some much wealth in so few hands that it'll have to change

The last few days of stock market panic are kind of all 'froth' compared to the impact of real data coming in over the next 6-12 months. Only glimmer of upside I can see if this goes wrong enough that consensus emerges the only real fix is to start taxing wealth properly

We had to go looking for hints. One of those days when you find the answer and don't go 'oh, of course', but 'oh, that's ridiculous'.

If there any no good comparisons for a submission or the only good comparisons are more obscure books/non-bestsellers, is it better to leave out comps altogether (even if it might suggest you haven't done your market research)?

Or even better, use the clickbait article to say 'famous author might not finish their book, so here are books by marginalised authors that are finished that you could try'. Maybe would avoid the problem of the non-clickbait articles not getting any clicks?

Wanted to watch Frieren after seeing some clips on Tiktok, but seven episodes in, has turned out to be much more than I was expecting.

Surely even a master criminal would make sure to case a joint first? Not doing the research would be a sign of hubris, not confidence

Evening game of 5-a-side marred somewhat by getting an inadvertent elbow to the throat near the end. Now reminded of that elbow to the throat every time I swallow.

Can't remember on which version I first used Final Draft (maybe 5?) but even then I was surprised how many bugs a simple/overpriced word processor could have. The fact it's now on version 13, basically still does the same thing, and still has bugs is ridiculous.

YouTube video by HappyToast Judge Dredd - The Bod TV special

Apparently it's 13 years since I made the Judge Dredd episode of Bod youtu.be/CFVq7vPtWno?...

I touched on AI in my last series of books, but took the approach that the people who are trying to shape/control a future with AI make a better (and possibly scarier) story than the technology itself - 'Super-intelligent AI dooms humanity because company trying to improve quarterly forecast'

Social media's bias toward those who post frequently, both algorithmic amplification and their sheer mass on any given feed, unfortunately means when an infrequent poster feels like they have something to say, I suspect they'd do better pissing in the wind. Am I wrong?

... which should be fine. That's a solid basis for casting a sitcom, but it feels a bit too trite. So, even though I keep telling myself the only objective with this project is to have fun, because I'm not going to try pitching it anywhere, apparently I can't let fun be easy.

... but it's also hard to avoid archetypes. For example, if multiple characters are sarcastic, oddball or naive/dumb, they won't play off each other as well as two characters with distinct styles. But then you risk ending up with a cast made up of the sarcastic one, the naive one, the oddball...

I'm currently writing an audio sitcom because no one else is going to write an intrusion fantasy (a subgenre I've just become aware of) about mixed 5-a-side. A few chapters in, it's apparent that making sure each character has a distinct comedic approach is pretty fundamental...

I always worked on the assumption that 'activate' in this context is a synonym for 'clench'.

Unusual to use 'trunk' instead of 'core' in my experience, though for all I know your physio might be an elephant...

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce.

Bear with me for a second while I try to explain.

When my wife and I were coming up with names for children, the only one we were happy with if it was a boy was 'Bollard'. That video sums up why

This year will be the 30th anniversary of me completing my first novel. It's also the year where my latest royalty statement says my latest book, released last June, has sold 3 copies to date. One of which was bought by me. Not a tremendous success, but it's fine. Probably as good as I expected.

I binged the news too much before the US election, now I'm trying to mostly avoid the news. I've binned off X and considering Facebook too after Zuckerberg's Trump pandering. Lots of keywords blocked on Bluesky. Knowing less about stuff I can't do anything about... it definitely helps.

I'm pretty sure no one's read my last book since it came out in June, partly because Amazon still hasn't made the paperback available, but it's fine. Low expectations and all that. But it does mean I can confidently guarantee The Friday Girl will do better! 😄

We're currently watching the 'Twas The Text Before Christmas', which is about as insipid as holiday films get, but there's fun to be had in mocking the predictable banality of it all