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Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

Pisces: Love is in the air. Unfortunately, it’s toxic in concentrated amounts. Side effects include laughter & writing letters.

Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Symposium on 'Reproducing Dystopias', University of York, December 2026. Deadline for submissions: 7th September, 5pm. Submit here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... I'm co-organising this event with the wonderful Brianna Frentzko - please consider submitting!

Wise words from @doctorow.pluralistic.net "'Post-political' movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A 'centrist' is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property." pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/w...

You all need to hold on to whatever learning you have. You may need to teach your kids and grandkids yourself. Hold on to the literature and the arts. This systematic destruction is going to be a long, hard road. We'll need storage silos and stuff. You can learn a few tricks from oral tradition.

There may be a problem. I think Elsie can vote for the Hugos. It's like this, she's going to be on programing, so I registered her for Worldcon. As an attending child. She's 8. (They didn't require that, fyi.) Then I looked at the WSFS constitution. It doesn't say anything about being human.

Gemini: Your lungs are exhausted from all the screaming. But your soul will never grow tired of it.

People only ever use the first half of the quote: it's actually "my country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right, and if wrong, to be set right".

Given today's desecration and appropriation of the work of one of the great antifascist artists of all time, I bring you his opinion on the topic. music.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wlb...

Leonard Cohen - The Future (Official Live in London 2008)YouTube video by LeonardCohenVEVOmusic.youtube.com

“Tech billionaires want us to believe that our embodied/human ways of knowing are useless”. That’s exactly it. All those ads for “AI” products saying “stop hiring humans” and the like — The real target audience isn’t employers. It’s the rest of us. The despair they make you feel _is the point_.

The 2026 BSLS Book Prize is now open for nominations! If you have read, or written, a book published in 2026 that you think worthy of consideration for the prize then check out all the info on our website: www.bsls.ac.uk/2026/06/book...

I've got a new blog post on cognitive offloading. Storing our memories outside our heads. Googling things rather than trusting our knowledge. And a few words on the costs of using AI in terms of learning, ownership of ideas, and feelings of self-efficacy. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ment...

The Cost of Convenience: Calendars, Google, and AIOur memories aren’t contained just within our heads. We offload them to pictures, social media, and devices. But this offloading carries risks.www.psychologytoday.com

It's Joan of Arc's feast day today. Here's a poem for everyone who needs to remember that there's more to life than the fight.

Thanks, Vonnegut. 💜

Happy 9th anniversary to Tom Holland's performance of Umbrella on Lip Sync Battle, a pivotal pop culture moment in history! youtu.be/jPCJIB1f7jk?...

Lip Sync Battle - Tom HollandYouTube video by Comedy Central Latinoaméricayoutu.be

Fifty years ago today, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" was published in the pages of @newyorker.com. What a poem!