Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop), page 2

@detritus

Conditional disagreement.

Actual mass deportation won't be feasible but they can lock millions of people in private for-profit prisons, convict them of being in the USA illegally, and then the penal labour exemption to the 13th amendment applies: they become a huge pool of (legal) slave labour. Slaves exert a downward pressure on employee wages, provide profits for the "corrections" industry, and give the MAGAts a demographic to look down on while the bosses pick their pockets.

@spacehobo @Remittancegirl US news media today are for entertainment, not information. The anchors are there to provide the audience with a canned laugh track, telegraphing the correct emotional response to the bite-sized propaganda pieces.

#WordWeavers 20 Your MC can only take one thing on a trip. What is it?

(Laundry files):

Bob: his Necronomipod.

Mo: a violin, just not *that* violin (it eats people).

Derek the DM: his dice bag (it glows and has non-euclidean corners).

... And so on.

@davidleeholcomb The one thing I can say for sure, is that if you pitch a novel as "like X meets Y" you had better be absolutely certain that the person you're pitching to is familiar with both X *and* Y. Which is why folks usually pick huge TV or movie franchises (which don't work on me *at all* because I don't watch TV/movies, but I'm weird that way).

@davidleeholcomb Yes, and the sub-genres are entirely fashion driven in publishers' officers where everyone is desperate to discover the Next Big Thing, but they're condemned to search under the one lit street light. Hence "romantasy" which seems to be defined as "just like ACOTAR only not an *actual* knock-off". Their rise and fall is driven by factors that are opaque to editorial (and usually authorial) insight.

@aes DDC is a straightforward directed acyclic graph: it dates to 1876, although it's now on its 23rd edition. It's really just a hashing algorithm for library storage. There's also the Library of Congress Classification System. Both are enumerative systems: other classification system types exist, notably faceted systems (that use multiple semantic categories), like online keyword-tagged systems.

@tiggy

Initial feedback from my agent on "The Atrocity Archive" in 2001: "I can't sell this, it's way too cross-genre and weird! How can anyone sell a Lovecraftian horror spy comedy thriller about IT and office politics? Who'd buy it?"

Current job: editing book 14 in the series it started …

@aes Library cataloging systems, starting with something like the Dewey Decimal System and then getting more modern. You can't inflict them on casual airport boostore browsers but they're undoubtedly more powerful.

#WritersCoffeeClub 20. Are Novel genres helpful or constraining? A bit of both?

Genres were invented for marketing: they segregate shelf space in bookstores so readers can find the general area with stuff they like. (We have vastly more powerful classification tools but they're not simple and easy to use.)

But a book's genre is a diagnosis, it should never be a prescription.

ebook stores use tagging with multiple categories instead, which (if done right: it seldom is) is more effective.

@jgordon @SteveBellovin @thedarktangent O2 in the UK (mobile phone network) is using an LLM to waste the time of phone scammers.

@Tali My cat likes to claw my Eames recliner knock-off too!

just putting this here as a cool part of history. it has no bearing in the future, at all. there are no lessons here 🧵 13/?

Management of Dead Bodies
after Disasters: A Field Manual for First Responders, WHO et al, 2006

https://archive.org/details/deadbodiesfieldmanual/mode/2up

@annehargreaves I know: I've read the article. Thing is, the current climate of media-promoted institutional transphobia militates against any attempt to fix the law as it stands.

@mark Yup! The article has a whiny aroma of terfery to it (as you'd expect from The Guardian), but inadvertently makes a strong case for GRCs (which the TERFs oppose).

Institutional TERFery claims another victim: Parents told Nottinghamshire registrar’s error on birth certificate cannot be changed

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/19/baby-girl-registered-wrong-sex-mansfield-registration-office

Writing Advice: write what you know

Me: that would be a small, sad-eyed tentacle monster that had just zipped itself inside a human-shaped gimp suit when the zipper pull broke and now it's struggling to get out

I was trawling through some old Facebook posts and came across this corker of a poster that I lifted from b3ta.com over ten years ago.

I recall the artist had his own site at the time and I am glad to report that it is still going strong and still fiery as hell: spellingmistakescostlives.com

#ukpolitics

New blog entry: Project 2015 under the New Management! http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/11/project-2015-under-the-new-man.html

#WritersCoffeeClub 19. Have still images ever inspired your writing?

No.

(While I visualize stuff as I write I don't base my writing on pre-existing imagery.)

CDEphone, with the Lord's own UI.