#charlie stross

[merelymatt]

"On current polling the Tories are going to go down very hard indeed, so the big beasts are jockying for position in the race to succeed Sunak, who is the hapless figurehead of a doomed regime. Meanwhile, they can't deliver any optimistic news on policy (inflation, health, industry, trade, Brexit ... everything's all in the shitter, including the beaches and waterways) so they have to resort to the same scare tactics as the US Republicans.

"This means doubling down on fear and hatred of immigrants, gays, trans, foreigners, the EU, pit bull cross-breeds, 20mph speed limits, 15 minute cities, and anything else that comes to hand. (The only lever they can't pull is anything to do with COVID19; they own it, and they ain't getting out of that one.)

"So expect ever more sewage to flood the media channels over the next year as the Tory leadership candidates—Braverman, Badenoch, et al— try to out-fascist one another.

Charlie Stross

This seemed like a pretty good summary and assessment of the situation here... Fash Island has been especially fash this week and it's expected to fash harder for some time – we're really in it right now, so hold your people and batten down the hatches

#charlie stross #rishi sunak #uk politics #britannia #kick fascists #tories out #fuck the tories

[lilbluntworld]

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain—not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics.

Charlie Stross, Accelerando

#accelerando #Charlie stross

[mitchipedia]

Charlie Stross: "I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it. Can you?" The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire.

#trillionaires #billionaires #oligarchs #oligarchy #Charlie Stross #Charles Stross #politics

[amatsuki]

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.

#charlie stross #technology #tech industry #sci fi

[absurdly-useful]

#aliens #true love #charlie stross

[stainlesssteellocust]

The Entities from Worm would fit neatly into the Laundry Files cosmology and are also far more detailed and bizarre than the ‘superheroes’ that showed up in Annihilation Score, that would be neat

Also I’m pretty sure Jack Slash’s sabotage power would work on vampires

hell it might work on everyone

#the laundry files #charles stross #parahumans #wildbow #you’d have to do a bit of tweaking #obviously the entities are from a limited subsection of the multiverse where ‘magic’ doesn’t work #but you can easily do that with how the LF setting has alt-worlds where physics don’t support life etc #honestly TAS was well written but it’s genre-parody elements felt weak compared to the others #I felt like Charlie didn’t really like the superhero genre all that much lol #but to get details I’d have to wade through Annihilation Score Discourse and uh #no thanks

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.

There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.

But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/failure-modes-in-machine-learning

For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/when-ais-start-hacking.html

This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.

Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.

Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.

Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.

But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.

The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.

These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.

These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.

This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.

Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.

Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solarcity-maintains-34-residential-solar-market-share-in-1h-2015/406552/

And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.

The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.

I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.

The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/

America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.

To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):

https://www.forbes.com/profile/hayes-barnard/?sh=40d596362b28

If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Future Atlas/www.futureatlas.com/blog (modified)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/3996366952

--

CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

J Doll (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Sky_%28140451293%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #solar #financialization #energy #climate #electrification #climate emergency #bezzles #ai #reward hacking #alignment problem #carbon offsets #slow ai #subprime

[dduane]

(Via Charlie Stross (@cstross) over on Twitter... ) :)

#Commodorion

[nando161mando]

"Every time I see some well-meaning folks advocating "tax the rich!!" I wonder, why not think big and abolish money instead?

Money isn't merely a symptom of poverty, as Iain Banks pointed out: money creates poverty—there's a potentially infinite supply of money generated by allocating debts and issuing credit, but only certain people are permitted to accumulate it.

We need a better resource allocation system; "tax the rich" is a sticking plaster prescribed for a heart attack."

#neoliberal capitalism #capitalist dystopia #capitalist hell #anti capitalist #capitalism #capitalist bullshit #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #fuck neoliberals #anthony albanese #albanese government #eat the rich #eat the fucking rich #anti capitalism #anticapitalista #anti capitalist love notes #anticapitalistically #class war #antimoney #fuck money #killyourlocalcapitalist #killcapitalism #antiauthoritarian #antinazi #money #anti slavery

[fishstickmonkey]

Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer.....

And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

#Charles Stross #Science Fiction #Tech

[trambrosia]

I’m used to history catching up to Charlie Stross novels, but if we’re now chasing Tamsyn Muir, that’s extremely worrying

#uh oh #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #tlt

[terriwriting]

From Charlie Stross, a brief explanation of what happened at the Chengdu Worldcon. Includes links to fansite File 770, where you can find a deep dive into the Hugo rules and analysis of the results.

#hugo awards #worldcon #chengdu 2023

[mitchipedia]

Roe v Wade v Sanity

Charlie Stross:

The opinion apparently overturns Roe v. Wade by junking the implied constitutional right to privacy that it created. However, a bunch of other US legal precedents rely on the right to privacy.

These include Lawrence v. Texas, which determined it's unconstitutional to punish people for "sodomy." Overturning Lawrence v. Texas would make it legal for states to ban homosexuality and extramarital sex.

Griswold v. Connecticut, which protects the ability of married couples to buy contraceptives.

Loving v. Virginia, which allowed interracial marriage.

Stanley v. Georgia, which protects the personal possession of pornography.

Obergefell v. Hodges, which protects the legality of same-sex marriage.

Meyer v. Nebraska, which protects the rights of families to speak languages other than English at home.

Skinner v. Oklahoma, which found it unconstitutional to forcibly sterilize people.

Alito's leaked ruling, if adopted by the US Supreme Court, would turn the legal clock back to the 19th Century, Stross says.

Another point: it is unwise to underestimate the degree to which extreme white supremacism in the USA is enmeshed with a panic about "white" people being "out-bred" by other races: this also meshes in with extreme authoritarian patriarchal values, the weird folk religion that names itself "Christianity" and takes pride in its guns and hatred of others, homophobia, transphobia, an unhealthy obsession with eugenics (and a low-key desire to eliminate the disabled which plays into COVID19 denialism, anti-vaxx, and anti-mask sentiment), misogyny, incel culture, QAnon, classic anti-semitic Blood Libel, and Christian Dominionism (which latter holds that the USA is a Christian nation—and by Christian they mean that aforementioned weird folk religion derived from protestantism I mentioned earlier—and their religious beliefs must be enshrined in law).

I'm no Christian myself, but from what I've learned, Christianity is about peace, love, humility, and poverty. The Republican Party cult calling itself "Christianity" is about hate, violence, guns, hubris, and greed.

#Samuel Alito #supreme court #law #US politics #abortion #reproductive freedom #Republicans #roe v. wade

[booksandchainmail]

Hugo Award Nominees Thoughts

Best Novel:

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Witch King by Martha Wells

Largely makes sense to me: Saint and Glory were my nominees as well, and probably the strongest on my short list. Witch and Translation were on my longlist, both good and unsurprising nominees. Adventures I haven't read but have heard good things about, I wasn't a fan of the author's early work so I hadn't picked it up but it sounds fun. Villain I don't know about but I'm willing to try.

I'm not surprised that my other nominees didn't make it: Chain-Gang All-Stars I think was billed more as literary fiction than sci-fi, He Who Drowned the World I thought might be on the list but I imagine missed the cut, and Furious Heaven was never going to make it (second book in a series, less-known author, lengthy military sci-fi)

Best Novella:

“Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet”, He Xi / 人生不相见, 何夕, translated by Alex Woodend

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

Rose/House by Arkady Martine

“Seeds of Mercury”, Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Thornhedge, Mammoths, and Mimicking were all on my longlist. Rose/House has been on my "want to read" list for a while, but is bafflingly unavailable at the library. Seeds and Life I don't know, but am excited for.

None of my nominees made it in, which I'm sad about. Keeper's Six, The Twice-Drowned Saint, The Narrow Road Between Desires, and Lost in a Moment and Found were all excellent. I nominated less than my total number of slots in an effort to avoid just filling my ballot with everything good that was eligible in a category I don't read much in.

Best Novelette, Best Short Story: I have read none of these, though many of the authors are familiar

Best Series:

The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie

The Last Binding by Freya Marske

The Laundry Files by Charles Stross

October Daye by Seanan McGuire

The Universe of Xuya by Aliette de Bodard

Last Binding was one of my nominees, glad to see it made it. I'd completely forgotten that Imperial Radch would be eligible again, happy that others remembered. October Daye is a perennial favorite, though not a nominee of mine this year. Xuya is a personal pet-peeve: every book of it sounds amazing, and they never work for me, and I keep reading them and being frustrated. Architecture I haven't read, but I've loved everything of Tchaikovsky's I've read. Laundry I'm dubious about, given how hard I bounced of his other series.

My other nominees were the Craft series, which I'd love to see get more attention, Unconquerable Sun, which is my personal darling blorbo books that I desperately want people read and love, and Kushiel's Legacy, which was newly re-eligible thanks to the publication of a companion novel, and never got the critical sff attention it deserved.

Best Graphic Story, Best Related Work: haven't read any of these, but it looks like interesting nominees

Best Dramatic Presentations: I don't really care about these

Best Game or Interactive Work:

Alan Wake 2

Baldur’s Gate 3

Chants of Sennaar

DREDGE

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

New category! I don't know enough about games of 2023 to speak on these nominees, but it looks good at a glance? and it's clearly better than the steam awards at least

Best Editors, Zines, Artists, Writers, and Casts: I don't follow these fields enough to have opinions

Lodestar (not a Hugo):

Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark

Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

Promises Stronger than Darkness by Charlie Jane Anders

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

Shape was one of my nominees, one of my favorite books of the year all over. Very glad to see it here. Since it was published and marketed aimed at adults, even though it's about teenagers at magic school, I imagine we'll see a repeat of the Scholomance eligibility discourse. Booksellers was... fine? But nothing particularly noteworthy to me. Abeni and Liberty I don't know, but like the authors. Unraveller I don't know, but have heard good things about the author. Promises I am going to preemptively not read given how much I disliked (and DNFed) the first two.

I'm sad to see my other two nominees, The Shape of Drowning and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth not on here. Drowning reminded me very sharply of Diana Wynne Jones, and Spirit was one of my best books of the year, with an excellent narrative voice. Maybe teen horror isn't doing that strongly now?

Astounding (not a Hugo):

Moniquill Blackgoose (1st year of eligibility)

Sunyi Dean (2nd year of eligibility)

Ai Jiang (2nd year of eligibility)

Hannah Kaner (1st year of eligibility)

Em X. Liu (1st year of eligibility)

Xiran Jay Zhao (eligibility extended at request of Dell Magazines)

So can we just go ahead and call this one for Xiran Jay Zhao already? Even leaving aside that they are a strong nominee, I can't imagine voters not using this as a protest against last year's scandal. Of those I've read, Blackgoose is my favorite, and was one of my nominees. Kaner and Liu both had good first novels/ellas and are solid nominees, though not my picks. Dean and Jiang I don't know.

My other nominees were Isabel J. Kim, Maya Deane, Vajra Chandrasekera, and C. E. McGill.

Overall:

This is a very reassuring ballot, after last year. Nothing here is deeply surprising, nothing is deeply surprising to be missing. The announcement also included an explanation of nominees that declined (Martha Wells continues to be classy in declining further nominations for Murderbot) or were ineligible, and why.

I have ~15 fiction books to read for voting, which is very manageable. In particular, already having read 4/6 of the series is a major help.

#hugo awards #books #hugos

[atomic-two-sheds]

A bit late, but @lucyaudley tagged me and I figured I'd play.

Last song listened to: Charleston Girl by Tyler Childers. Been deep into self-destructive mountain addiction narratives lately.

Currently watching mostly old stuff. Columbo episodes, classic MST3K, original Iron Chef, classic Kung-fu movies. Started Secret Invasion, not highly enthused yet. AEW. I come to series years late, for the most part.

Currently reading several books right now. I'm actively in a re-read of Seanan McGuire's Once Broken Faith. I put down Jackson Ford's Random Shit Flying Through the Air for a while. I like the series, but some bits were hitting a little close and it felt like a character was about to really pick up the idiot ball for a while. I trust the author, so I'll come back, but I needed a break. Also in the middle of the Night Vale novel and a Charlie Stross book. Haven't picked up nonfiction for a few months.

Current obsessions? Hm. The history of pro wrestling across multiple countries and how it evolved as a performance art in different regions. Uranium glass. Gemstones, particularly opal, amber, and Whitby Jet. Nixie tubes. Siege weapons.

Tagging in @electricpentacle @mbrainspaz and @rabbiteclair , if interested in participating.

Edit to add: @bluestockingbaby

[stainlesssteellocust]

The more I look at politics the more I realise that Charles Stross was absolutely, completely, 100% in the right when his books had a literal demon god be the better option and had the entire British political establishment get castrated by centipedes

#Charles stross #cthulhu mythos #UK politics #the laundry files #Charlie I'm so sorry I doubted you #Save us nyarlathotep