#Zine

Are you looking for abZurd, CoSo's homegrown, 99 ⁴⁴⁄₁₀₀% pure, pro-nature, craft-positive, and community-lovin' Zine?

In my profile and this pinned post, I have a Linktree that will be populated by links to the digital editions of each issue.

When we have more ducks in a row for future issues, you'll see a handy link for printing and payment details here, too.

For future issues, mail submissions to:

abZurd_Zine @ proton.me

Thanks for your interest in the mag!
https://linktr.ee/abzurdmagazine

Pinning this for all the new faces!

#MeetTheNauts

✍️ of sci-fi, news analysis, essays, translations, reviews
👨‍🍳 of baked goods, hearty meals
🇨🇦 by birth
🇨🇴 by residence, since 2018
🗣️ English, Español, familial French (learning Arabic)
🏳️‍🌈 Queer & nb (but I don't stress pronouns because I move in 2 very different language contexts)
🌎 Secular humanist
🦋 (nature)-lover: no pets, but will share insects & birds!
📖&🎞️ nerd

And all-around advocate for being kind to yourselves. Life's tough enough as is. 💙

Hey #CoSo! 👋 For my upcoming article at #OnlySky about my first week here, I've put together a visual guide for the new free-account user, to help them make sense of the maybe-new-to-them layout.

I thought it might be a good shareable resource right away for the #CoSoTips crowd, too, though, so I hope this is useful for others just getting started.🤞 If you see someone confused, please feel free to send this image along!

M L Clark's 3 #Writing rules:

1) Write what you *want* to know.

2) When writing another context, always elevate its own storytellers. Be a megaphone to the lesser-heard, not a "voice to the voiceless".

3) Let any given story go. If the theme is true, it will come back to you. 💛

Headed out to work at the mall.

Folks have asked, so to be clear:

Colombia is bemused by the US election being such a tight race, but other than that, it's not really consumed by interest.

I, however, care about what this election means both directly, for friends in the US, & also for Canadian politics--which have been sorely skewed by an adoption of GOP rhetoric in recent years--plus any hope of better climate mitigation globally.

With big love for all of you, I'm offline to write today. 🫂💛

Also for #ScienceFiction readers today, and #StarTrek fans especially, our own @WordsmithFL has a lovely deep dive into production details and other backend considerations for "The Cage" (the first TOS pilot!).

This is more than an episode review. Stephen looks at a key #SFF trope, design influences, and material pressure points that shaped how characters were crafted.

It's a great bit of genre and TV history, well worth the read for creators!

#CoSoTV #WritersOfCoSo
https://thewrittentrek.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-cage-episode-01.html

Today, I'm working off a week's worth of Heebie Jeebies by posting a short sci-fi story that I hope might offer a nice break from all the tense, exhausting news commentary around the US election today.

Best wishes to all of us; may we wake up tomorrow to a slightly less awful world.

For now--

Enjoy "Louise Bel-Adair, Who Grew Up Watching Her Other Selves Die"!

#SFF #ScienceFiction #ShortStory #Existentialism

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/a-little-fiction-for-a-difficult

🤨 Someone just asked me to join them for an election watch party tomorrow. Said it would be 'loads of fun'.

Buddy.

No shade to BDSM as a general wheelhouse, but some kinks you *lead up* to disclosing, you know?

#Politics #Election
#ImWatchingHorrorMoviesInstead
#WayLessIntense

What's the happiest US-election-day story you can write in up to six words?

#Politics #Election

One of my favourite meeting types is the one I just had this morning: in which you know you're competent enough to be in the room at all, AND you know you have room to grow, in terms of both organizational knowledge and personal professional development. It's not like "imposter syndrome"; it's this delicious sense of "I have work to do on myself and now I know how to do it better."

I haven't been properly mentored in years, but BOY HOWDY, do I love it.

*I should add that the only time you'll hear me be an obnoxious twerp about Christianity is when atheists and liberal Christians try to act like conservative Christians have no Biblical founding for their beliefs. This isn't a gotcha; it's about teaching us to come better prepared to policy and moral debate with people who absolutely have New Testament support for their horrible views, and will just think you a cherry-picking fool.

Other than that, though: big-tent humanism, baby! Believe away.

The latest If Books Could Kill takes on Harris's The End of Faith, and is such a wonderful flashback to the second time I was disillusioned by a movement. (First was seeing a punk band in a jeans ad.)

The Four Horsemen taught me that atheism could be enacted *not* to question deeper social constructs built on religion, but to grant individual atheists power in a "debate" that needs to persist so speakers can retain fame within it.

Baby's first time with intellectual hucksters! Ah, memories. :)

Whew! It was *very difficult* to finish that Asimov's issue - but only because each story kept exciting me about the possibilities of #SFF in different ways.

Nevertheless, after pinballing from my computer after each excellent tale, it's now time for a walk, and for me to draft tomorrow's newsletter, so I can record the BookTube first thing ahead of a full day of work. 🤞

(But oof! Shivers! I can't wait until I have a window to write fiction this week myself!)

😅 This is how highways get reopened after being closed for a major event.

I have two hours of reading to do, to prep for tomorrow's BookTube review of the latest Asimov's.

While I'm "under", #RandomQuestions:

If you were a supervillain, what would your origin story be, and your superpower of choice? 🤔

I have no mobile bike (stationary doesn't count), so I must walk.

Time to shake out the stress-ghosts in this meat sack.

The highway's shut down today on both sides, as ciclovía is used for an actual fancy cycling competition. Spectators all up and down the route cheer intermittently as the athletes zip past.

It's charming stuff!

All right, loves.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I think the extra time to let it all percolate was useful.

Here, I talk about volunteering in #SFF, challenges for industry practice, and the importance of balancing everything we do within our literary communities with the broader work of Being Human - work that sometimes requires us to remember there's still a lot of privilege packed into even the most stressful crises in industry we might face.

#WritingCommunity
https://www.patreon.com/posts/on-volunteering-115244614

Conked out after I got home last night and struggled to rise today.

Which is odd, because I'm not actually *doing* much, except a lot of thinking-intensive and people-managing work.

But stress is living in my body, clearly, so I need to solve it.

Fair warning to you fine folks:

Watch for how stress lives in you these next few days.

Our species wasn't made for this. We're supposed to be defending from material threats, not abstract political nightmares and the harm they seed in other brains.

Didn't get oot n aboot early this morning, so I'm going for an evening run before posting a free-to-read Patreon about life! Industry! The dangers of burnout! The power of grace! And... giving a shirt away, though not technically right off my back.

(You'll see.)

But first, we ride - er, run. 💪🏻

This might be the most relatable thing these LLMs have done yet.

"It's perilous to anthropomorphize machine learning models, but if this were a human employee, we'd diagnose them with a terminal case of being bored on the job. As seen in a video, Claude decides to blow off writing code, opens Google, and inexplicably browses through beautiful photos of Yellowstone National Park."

#Technology #AI
https://futurism.com/the-byte/claude-ai-bored-demonstration

And... today's brilliant follow-up. 🔥

#Colombia has been astonishingly forward-looking in its energy investments for decades (& I say this as a Canadian; my country's been a poor performer against peer nations for innovation over the same era). While the rest of South America has had serious blackouts, Colombia's last major system crash was in 1992.

There's so much to learn from how other nations tackle problems and leapfrog ahead of our frozen infrastructure.

(More later!)
#Economics #Energy

No matter what, I carve out time for dedicated Spanish reading, to improve syntax, slang, and overall vocabulary.

(Especially important because so much of my workflow is in English; it's easy to fall into poor Spanish syntax when I'm not switching routinely.)

Just heading out to pick up today's paper, but here were two key articles yesterday: one on Latin American energy crises; the other on the big Colombian challenge, as it tries to phase out oil & gas. Can it handle still-growing demand? 🤞🏻