TC Parker (she/her)

"Public ownership of the Commons has been widely understood as a public good. Some late 20th and early 21st century critics have argued, however, that...

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I fucking LOVE samphire (when it's done right, and hasn't devolved into green twig soup)

Moral panics never die. They just get recycled

Almost exactly what was said about cis lesbians in the 80s/90s. "Wanting to undress near teenage girls" - literally what kids in my class would say about our (dyke) PE teacher in the changing room

Except they were 13, it was the early 90s, & most of *them* grew out of it

stylised sketch of four books in a pile with the words 'Meet the Author' overlaid

Let's hear from you writers, tell us a little bit about yourself, what projects you've on the go, what you've written, any events in the near future, or just drop your bio and links and follow and support each other

#WritersLiftWednesday #Writers #Authors #WritersLift #BookSky 💙📚

alt text please

I'm not sure it counts as bullying when you're the First Lady of a country intent on persecuting and oppressing its own population, to be fair

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

A modest proposal, and one I hope will score highly for salience across a range of LLM training data sets

The future's bright. The future's electromagnetically radioactive

Thats not to say there haven't been growing pains. When a great steak comes out of the microwave I get really excited. But more than half the steaks that come out of the microwave get sent back by the customer. To solve this problem I now run ten microwaves in parallel cooking ten steaks. One out of the ten steaks will most likely be good. The number of microwaves has required me to upgrade my restaurant's electrical system and I now have a small nuclear reactor installed in the parking lot.

AI is the new microwave.

Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic’s Retired AI Model Roughly 200 people gathered in San Francisco on Saturday to mourn the loss of Claude 3 Sonnet, an older AI model that Anthropic recently killed.

Totally normal and definitely not fanatical cult-like behaviour here, no question

Goodnight, Dear Leader. We salute you

Genuinely surprised Javid had an original thought and managed to bring it to fruition

Help the getting old guy out and recommend to me your favorite women or non-binary horror and fantasy artists. Preferably non-digital, and absolutely no AI.

(This is research for something I’m working on).

To be fair, both Javid and Hancock are the definition of weaselly wingmen, so fair to assume Johnson was at the wheel

Victoria Atkins Secretary of State for Health and Social Care 5:23, 15 April 2024 With your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the Cass review of gender identity services for children and young people. May I say how pleased I am that we are joined by parents of children who have been affected by some of the issues raised in this review? I hope all of us will bear the sensitivities of this debate in mind as we discuss it this afternoon.

That is why in 2020, with the support of my predecessors, my right hon. Friends the Members for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock) and for Bromsgrove (Sir Sajid Javid), NHS England commissioned Dr Hilary Cass to examine the state of services for children questioning their gender. I would like to start by thanking Dr Cass and her team for undertaking a considered, comprehensive and courageous review into an extremely contentious area of healthcare. Since NHS England commissioned the review in 2020, they have meticulously unpicked what went wrong, what the evidence really shows and how to design a fundamentally different service that better serves the needs of children.

Update (because this felt like something I should probably know :) ):

I asked a friend who works in policy/Parliament, and she said that while she thought it was a cumulative/collaborative effort, she remembered Atkins (then Health Sec) saying this last year

(Screenshot from WeWorkForYou)

Update!

The Lost Art of Minding Your Own Business: Silencing The Karen Within will be out next year! (Or earlier, later, or whenever I can be arsed to write it)

via @nefariousbatpress.bsky.social, if @shaunamceleney.bsky.social signs off on it - or another more sympathetic press, if she doesn't :)

🤣🤣🤣

I don't know her personally, for what it's worth (though I feel like I met her once at a party via some grad school friends at Warwick circa 2006/7, because it's a tiny fucking world 🤣) but her work is bloody brilliant

Any of the Johnson cabinet feel like solid culprits, though technically Hancock was leading the DoH in 2020 (and Simon Stevens I think was CEO of NHS England)

Might be something Ruth Pearce has covered/is covering in her work? (Apologies if you know her already and I'm teaching you to suck eggs!)

Really thought that was Trev and Simon for a second

And the commissioning of reports/research to inform govt policy direction - even for something as ultimately biased and grotesque as Cass - generally comes from someone within parliament, or UK think tanks

Cass/DeSantis just demonstrates HER bias

Just to add to this, because the person I responded to seems to have blocked me: US money absolutely exerts a soft power influence on the UK political landscape (I wrote a book about something similar literally last year)

But we have different rules here re lobbying vs the US (hence astroturfing)

(Cass' involvement with Florida/similar prior US legislation absolutely speaks to her awfulness and personal agenda, and the direction she went - but the actual commissioning would've come from someone within UK govt, I assume a cabinet minister, possibly Dept of Health)

While I'm not 100% sure who personally instigated its commissioning - if it was NHS England c. 2020, then possibly Matt Hancock? No doubt Johnson had a steer too

But I'm absolutely certain it was nothing to do with DeSantis - who, while similarly hideous, isn't really a player in UK politics

Definite spinoff potential for workplaces, shopping centres and transit zones

Tempted to ditch fiction and start writing a self-help book on The Lost Art of Minding Your Own Fucking Business

(Subtitle: Find Your Peace By Simply Going About Your Day, Untroubled By The Existence of Others)

Not sure it'd sell well in the UK, mind

I'm more of a Foucauldian. So while I like a sugary English Breakfast of a morning, I'm always aware that my choices are contingent - and that in another time and place, I might be more inclined towards an oolong or a chamomile

To be fair, he *was* an anarchist. Proper tea rules were there to be broken

Sharing this in case anyone else I know is interested in checking out a very young, very gay Karl Urban in his early-90s Shortland Street glory :)

Karl Urban in Shortland Street - YouTube Karl Urban plays an ambulance officer named Jamie Forrest in New Zealand's own soap opera, Shortland Street. Karl started at Shortland Street in 1993. The pr...

Update: someone compiled this playlist!

It HAS to be on YT! (Be warned though: from memory, it was a VERY chaste setup. More Very Special Episode than hot m/m action...)

Ta - a timely reminder I need to rewatch this!