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Josh Sutphin
@joshsutphin@wandering.shop
mastodon 4.7.3(SUT-fin) Author of horror and hopepunk at https://joshsutphin.com. Shiraki Press co-founder. Veteran video game developer. Permanently exasperated.
365 Followers
94 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 20, 2025
Cooool. I'm so looking forward to half the population being dumb fucks about pneumonic #plague just like how they were dumb fucks about covid. Worst deja vu ever.
Oh and I'm so glad we have RFK at the helm this time around, it's gonna go great. /s
The frequency with which I find myself thinking about social media engagement instead of writing my fucking book is a *problem*
It's awfully suspicious to be going through submissions from a bunch of different people that are all written in the exact same voice, exact same cadence, exact same linguistic tics, despite them all claiming to be from wildly different places around the world... 🤔
Pro tip: if you're going to tell your AI to quote directly from a publisher's submission guidelines in your query, you should probably make sure you're *actually following those guidelines*.
(Or you could just, you know, not use the fucking AI in the first place! What a concept.)
RE: https://scicomm.xyz/@dantheclamman/116954518144682511
AI is the everything-ruiner
Quoting
I have to pay increasing attention to what my phone does to pictures it takes. For example, my new Motorola phone includes a super zoom feature that actually uses generative AI to fill in details as it crops in! I turned it off, but others might not notice and upload such digitally created images to iNaturalist, where they'd actually impact scientific research
https://petapixel.com/2026/07/20/scientists-warn-wildlife-photographers-ai-enhanced-bird-photos-could-threaten-research/
Open quoted postBoosted by @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social
God I hate SCOTUS rulings days. Every time, it's another round of "which rights did we lose this time?" 💀
Tech these days: "You have to work from the office so you can have serendipitous interactions with your colleagues that we replaced with the AI that you have to prompt from the office." 🤡
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@xgranade@wandering.shop Yup. For every piece of hardware, and every piece of software, I now find myself doing threat modeling and having an exit plan for when (not if) it inevitably transforms into user-hostile bullshit. This is energy I should not have to spend! I am tired all of the time!
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TL;DR Mastodon rules, Bluesky drools 😂
4/4
Great work, everyone! 🫠
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Comparing my accounts makes it even clearer that folks in my Mastodon network are just *way more engaged*:
Masto: 280 followers
Bluesky: 323 followers
Fewer followers, but drastically more interactions!
2/x
Amazing! It's as if everything every AI exec ever said was a lie!
Real solid piece on where we're at in bookish culture these days (and I think this could extend to pretty much all long-form media tbh)
https://lithub.com/publishing-has-a-hologram-problem-and-its-growing/
There's a lot of neat stuff going on here, but in particular, I kind of love what they're doing with their images?!
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low-tech-website/
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@susankayequinn@wandering.shop I increasingly believe the only sustainable way forward for creative work is to focus on local first and find ways to afford life without needing to scale much beyond your own community. So much trouble has been caused by the idea that you have to go national/global to be successful.
Unfortunately, of course, there are some capitalism things that get in the way of this. 😫
🚨 This is an incomprehensibly insane thing for Google to do! 🚨
(Context: I tried to use passkey login, which failed because passkeys always fucking fail, then it disappeared the option to use my Google Authenticator for normal 2FA, then it threw a server error trying to request SMS 2FA, then I got this email.)
What the fuck is the *point* of any of this security if you're just going to shut it off the moment someone bangs on the door loudly enough?!
#Google #security
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That followers:following ratio comparison is interesting, too. I'm following way more accounts on Bluesky, mostly because of its Starter Packs feature making that extremely easy to do, and also because there are loads more authors and publishers over there who *aren't* over here.
Following people has long been one of the most reliable ways to increase your own follower count, and yet I'm barely seeing that effect at all here!
3/x
RE: @startswithabang@mastodon.social
They're taking the sky from us and I hate it
I've lost track of how many years it's been since a 4th of July where the random neighborhood fireworks actually sounded like *fireworks* (whistlers, fountains, etc.)
Now they're just random explosions in single, isolated bursts that shake the ground and reverberate everywhere.
Those aren't fireworks; they're just *bombs*.
What are we doing?
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@susankayequinn@wandering.shop @screwturn@mastodon.social Of note (re: the slop being loud), we're out selling at a local market today, and in this environment, literally nobody cares about or is talking about AI. It's such an internet thing! (And yeah, today's sales won't support us for the year or anything, but it's a validating data point nevertheless.)
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@mastodonmigration I do find that Starter Packs somewhat cheapen the follower relationship. I don't even know who all I'm following over there any more, just that it's mostly some mix of folks who showed up on various bookish lists... and then a handful of people I know in person.
I've been running in circles with this story for a while now, trying to make its various parts work and getting repeatedly lost in the weeds. I finally just started cutting shit. Suddenly, magically, things make sense again! #writing #writersofmastodon
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@WorldTravelerAll7 haha I know the specific fascist bigot you're talking about 😅
And yeah, fuck that guy.
RE: @susankayequinn@wandering.shop
We've had a farm share for the past seven years running and it's been one of my very favorite parts of our lives. The produce beats the hell out of anything you can buy at the grocery store, in any season.
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@susankayequinn@wandering.shop @screwturn@mastodon.social Oh yeah the dichotomy is real for sure. But we did okay for it being our first market! Folks responded pretty positively to our hopepunk brand, although I will say the despair feels so deeply rooted into our culture at this point that that positive response was almost always moderated with nervous laughter. 🫠
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@susankayequinn@wandering.shop @screwturn@mastodon.social I so desperately want to produce some. I've got the ideas, but haven't found the time yet amidst the production work for our 2026 slate. This summer should calm down a bit though, so I'm hoping to have them ready by Worldcon at the very least!
Solitude, bottomlessness, speed, and teasing: this is a pretty solid framework for tech addiction, and it's remarkable not only for how well it describes social media, but also for how much we see it appearing in #gamedev.
I barely recognize this industry any more.
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@glyph@mastodon.social I voted "no" but FWIW my more precise answer would be "yes in the short term (fucking around), no in the long term (finding out)"
The toddler parent brain is making everything about my life so much harder than it needs to be 😭
I love the little dude, but oh my fuck he is chaos these days.
My question for our #ai overlords is: what are all these replaced white-collar workers supposed to... do? Because, you see, you have stopped paying them.
When your AI disappears my mortgage debt and makes groceries free, then we can talk.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/23/meta-microsoft-tech-ai-layoffs
I just don't understand how there can be leaf blowers running in my neighborhood *every single day*
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@Mimesatwork I worry about this one, tbh: https://www.techpolicy.press/digital-eugenics-and-the-extinction-of-humanity/
I spent my entire day battling online ad platforms and wow I'm glad I didn't go into marketing as my main career because this shit sucks 🫠
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Re: The Divine Comedy: the Longfellow translation is the classic, if you like your literature poetic. If you find that unapproachable, though, the Singleton translation is also excellent, with a more accessible prose style!
(Also, read the whole thing, not just Inferno. Seriously.)
We've lived in this house since 2020, and our HOA has always been surprisingly chill... until this summer, when we've suddenly started getting violations for "weeds" accompanied by photos of our completely normal yard wherein I have no idea wtf they are talking about. 🙃
Is there any voice #dictation software out there that's reasonably fast and accurate, runs locally (no cloud), and doesn't use AI? I'm looking around and it seems like everything is using LLM-driven post-processing these days.
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