Dave Morris

Age of distraction: two simple principles to keep readers’ attention in longform stories Is longform fiction dying? Everywhere we’re told attention spans are shrinking, readers want brevity and writers should be adding flash fiction or essays to their repertoire. So today I’m speaking …

How do we keep readers gripped? One scene pulls the reader into the next...
How to do that. nailyournovel.wordpress.com/2025/09/14/a... #writingcommunity #writingtips #authorcommunity #skywriters

The Visit (2015) ⭐ 5.9 | Documentary 1h 23m | Not Rated

Main takeaway from Madsen's brilliant what-if doc The Visit is that humans are rightly nervous of revealing their worst side (xenophobia, war, racism, injustice, prejudice) to aliens.

It's probably too late to keep AIs from seeing right through us, unfortunately.

www.imdb.com/title/tt3833...

And the same comic’s back cover featuring The Daleks!

Wouldn't that be a root node problem?

YouTube video by hjdoom Bonus Episode - Frankenstein

I admit the bits I enjoyed writing most were the bits Mary Shelley skimmed over -- how Clerval's body ends up in Ireland, how Victor and the Creature get to the Arctic, etc. Anyway, great review here by @hjdoom.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAhI...

Cosmic inflation's biggest criticisms can't undermine its success Inflation's two main criticisms, that it can predict anything and that the "measure problem" remains unsolved, can't erase its successes.

Cosmic inflation’s biggest criticisms can’t undermine its success

There are always lots of arguments to be made against a leading scientific theory.

But good ones?

Take a close look at the ones against inflation, & see how weak-sauce they are.

bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #physics #astro

Demis Hassabis on AI, game theory, multimodality, and the nature of creativity Podcast Episode · Possible · 04/09/2025 · 57m

#DeepMind made ~1 billion years' worth of Ph.D work on protein folding available to all for free. You're welcome, humanity.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...

Faulty mitochondria cause deadly diseases: fixing them is about to get a lot easier CRISPR-based tools can’t easily access the DNA in these organelles, but researchers are finding other ways in.

CRISPR-based tools can’t easily access the DNA in mitochondria, but researchers are finding other ways in

go.nature.com/3J94Zhk

Coming soon from Red Ruin Publishing. A prologue to the epic Blood Sword quintet from @davemorris.bsky.social , Oliver Johnson, and Jamie Thomson.

Cover art and interiors by @deanspencerart.bsky.social

Two hundred entries of adventure from Martin Dangov.

#solo #gamebook #bloodsword

Cover of the Blood Sword 5e book.

Nice to come across this at Orc's Nest...
#BloodSword #5e

www.orcsnest.com/blurber.asp?...

Readers reply: Why do people become leftwing or rightwing? The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

"Holding rightwing views is associated with strong disgust responses in individuals [...] Populists try to gain power through 'othering', and when they do gain power their first attack is on teachers and education."

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

"Morris gives an arch nod to #BladeRunner too."

More than one, if I remember rightly.
#Frankenstein

www.bsecs.org.uk/criticks-rev...

Great fun at the Oxford Half today - and a good warm-up for the London Marathon.
Overwhelmed by the support so many people have given to Teenage Cancer Trust. We're through £7000 now! Thank you. If you fancy chipping in some more, here's the link:
www.justgiving.com/page/tim-har...

Plan smart, write fast, finish strong: my guide to writing a novel in 30 days

Soon it will be NaNoWriMo time! The official National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) organisation closed earlier this year, but the writing world is still hard wired to Nano in November, come what may. (What’s…

Réédition de la série de #livrejeu "L'Epée de Légende" (@davemorris.bsky.social, Jamie Thomson & Oliver Johnson) par Alkonost : ça se précise !

Traduction corrigée, règles revues & peut-être des illus 🇬🇧 inédites en 🇫🇷 rétablies.

Visuel des couvertures de Laurent Centro:
fr.ulule.com/livres-jeux-...

Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of comput...

"Colossus was the brainchild of a degreeless Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers."

In fact Flowers did have a degree in electrical engineering, earned in his early 20s via University of London evening classes.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Seems to be the thing now to hoist flags everywhere. Here's the only one I want to see.

It's in the trees! | Dave Morris Get more from Dave Morris on Patreon

"If you go down to the woods today..."

As a child that always struck me as a wonderfully sinister song, which is probably the seed that eventually grew into Jewelspider.
#ttrpg
www.patreon.com/posts/its-in...

Dave Morris (@davemorris1) Answers like “I choose to believe” to a factual question have infuriated me my whole life. It’s very disappointing (as it will have been to @Richard Dawkins too) to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali using them. ...

Errors in simple reasoning like Ayaan Hirsi Ali is making here suggest that natural general intelligence is still a long way off.

substack.com/@davemorris1...

"The Flameheart's Heir" (a Legend scenario for Dragon Warriors) This scenario  for Dragon Warriors   adapts The Fortress of Assassins ( Knightmare book 3) into a quest to discover the fate of King Rigar ...

*Another* #DragonWarriors #RPG adventure?! You'd think it was the 40th anniversary or something.

This one's based on a #Knightmare novel: The Fortress of Assassins.

fabledlands.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Danse Macabre (a rattling good adventure with Dragon Warriors and D&D 5e rules) The Vulcanverse series consists of five open-world gamebooks designed for solo roleplaying, but they provide such a sweeping story arc that...

"When the Spartoi catch a living person they skin them & stitch their preserved flesh into a garment that the Spore puts on like a suit of clothes. The Spartoi wearing the freshest skins are the chieftains."

#5e #rpg #DragonWarriors #Vulcanverse
fabledlands.blogspot.com/2025/09/dans...

We are different from all other humans in history Countless experiences that have become routine for us are unprecedented in the history of our species. Here's why that matters.

I wrote about all the lived experiences and strange structures of modern society — many of which we take for granted — that were literally impossible for all previous generations of Homo sapiens. www.forkingpaths.co/p/we-are-dif...

Dark emperors Dark Emperor was an Avalon Hill boardgame of the mid-1980s that had a decent stab at rules evoking the story arc of a fantasy epic. One pla...

Once a player spots the loophole that breaks the game, that's it. No going back.
flatearthsgaming.blogspot.com/2025/10/dark...

A photo of copies of The Golden Shadow and The God Beneath the Sea by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen. The cover art and interior illustrations for both books are by Charles Keeping.

"The child shook his head free of the goddess's hand, and fixed her with his savage eyes.
'The fearful tale. Give me another nightmare to ride.'"

Brubaker's Criminal series is the perfect modern noir. Now I'm wondering, as Chandler was inspired by Mallory, whether Lancelot is hardboiled and Gawain is noir...

"A very clever bag of tricks" Thirteen years ago I published my interactive version of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein . Reviews were mixed, largely because many criti...

It's Mary Shelley's rhino. I just shot it for her.

#Frankenstein #gamebook
fabledlands.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-ve...

29 September 2025 - nine Trump authoritarian actions A very quick overview of nine authoritarian Trump and his administration did on Monday 29 September

"Well, what have we got: a republic or a monarchy?"

Or the third option...

christinapagel.substack.com/p/29-septemb...

Hardboiled and Noir Are Not the Same Become the classic crime fiction snob you've always aspired to be!

"Hardboiled stories are about fighting the darkness. Noir stories are about being swallowed by it."

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Illustration from the 1952 magazine publication of "The God in the Bowl" by Robert E Howard.

REH's "The God in the Bowl" as a #DragonWarriors #ttrpg scenario for the game's 40th anniversary.

As to setting, take your pick between Nemedia or Legend.

fabledlands.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-...