Absolutely excellent article here from @erininthemorning.com summarising, in plain terms, the terrible methodological failures of this evidence review.
www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-nhs-en...
Twin Peaks Lucy commission <3
A hen harrier perched on a branch
A kestrel
Red tailed hawk perched on a branch
bearded vulture on a branch
I have some time free if anyone wants to commission any bird art -
ko-fi.com/c/6911096a6c
I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...
Huge things happening this weekend!
🌊 Way Downstream opens for submissions. Finish polishing up your long stories & essays. Any genre! fifthwheelpress.com/way-downstream
📚 I am launching a secret project I've been working on for MONTHS. Tune in this Saturday for all the deets!! AHHHHH
Image reads "Short Story Sunday" with Carnyx Press boar's head logo
It's been a while, but we're pleased to bring back our weekly #ShortStorySunday thread for recommending online short fiction!
If you've read or released a short story recently, share the link below (and don't drop a link and run, read and repost other people's recommendations too!)
Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight Here’s a tale ripe for telling. Can’t say where I heard it first—in pretty French or Dutch. Perhaps as a young lady walking ‘longside the Rijn. I’ll spin it for you in an English tongue, fine as frost on lace, sweet as malmsey wine. So it goes that young Gawain, strength kissed into his limbs, fresh as the bright dawn, comes trembling down to the Green Chapel. You’ve heard this tale, I know. His breath makes peach fuzz in the air, fear into him like worm to apple. Christmas Morn is too soon, time is short. You have your own life to save, he says, picking through thorn and bough to an ivy-clad cave. The creature is the Jack O’ the Glen / forest prince / the wood’s own laughter. Beard of lichen and eyes like dark elder. I need not repeat their exchange—my boy’s flinching heart—a songbird in a rattled cage. It is after the blows are dealt, he asks, what god is worshipped in these green trees? Boy, the Knight replies, boy, were you not just down on your knees? The Knight is the tang of sap / bark rough and petal soft / everywhere leaves scatter / easily crushed / Gawain clings / hardly knows what he clings to / he is the forest and the flower / a turmoil of roots / where god and tree meet and melt / the birch the oak the fern the deer / mushroom maggot crow / here Gawain is branch and bud / blow returned for blow
This is a sheer indulgence on my part, but it turns out I never actually shared the poem here, so:
🍃
Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough It’s not my fault the rocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you were two-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain of sand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then in the great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that one day would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe your first trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you saw Christ carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a series of shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if you buried a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if you became black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the river washed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice was the great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but the history was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, a haunt, a great unspoken secret?
Blog post: Inspiration behind the poem If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute, I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you what time it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsession with it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossil not measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterly unimaginable for any of us. In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town) when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept a vertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of a cliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported on wooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscaping complete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was his bookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Another year, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as the birthplace of a prophetess. He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend a summer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeology student spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels that supposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found
stone tools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living in and around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on this island. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-five and all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets, medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Roman legionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gasp compared to the stones themselves. Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which given that limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancient sealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking. And look at everything those ghosts have seen! The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered. He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time must have caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I? When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, that green cliff of his own making.
A sample poem from my forthcoming @ninearchespress.bsky.social collection and a blog post. Something about time, booksellers and folklore 💚
Illustration of an old country lane. colours are overlapping blues and oranges. Stone walls and white window frames. cobbled paving and wonky chimneys.
Repost of an old one that was a lot of fun to do.
A shallow creek running through a pine forest with several colourful foliage
A Creek in the Woods
Spinning so many plates that I could open a crockery shop
Lining so many ducks in a row with my press that I could probably start a duck farm
Oi oi, did you know we have a newsletter? And that you can read our archive? buttondown.com/carnyx/archi...
Yes there could have been a bit more nuance to their characters, I think it worked for me though! But yeah stylistically amazing, excellent prose
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Reading some absolutely cracking books at the moment. Recently finished The Spear Cuts Through Water and it rewired my brain. Think Márquez does epic high fantasy with a bit of Wuxia thrown in.
Ely cathedral
Very enjoyable trip to Ely Cathedral today
If you've been enjoying Small Prophets as much as we have, you'll probably find a few treats in our anthology when it comes out later this year...
Four years after adopting a senior cat we've discovered he knows how to high five for treats without us teaching him, an absolutely joyful discovery
I'll stop complaining about this when I see new books stop doing this lol
In almost every instance of a book being called "an x of y and z", just picking y or z makes for a punchier, clearer, and more compelling title. Throne of Blood is a sick movie name. A Throne of Blood and Swords would have added nothing and taken away so much of its power
ah yes, the many-legged Möbius chicken
Tyneside morning, 1950, photo by Harry Morrison.
cathedral of trees form an arch over a small lake/lagoon - two figures sit across the water, facing one another, feeling of expansiveness, divided by a narrow inlet of water, space between, sense of belonging
Tomás Sánchez
Contemplar, 1995
Happy Valentine’s Day on this, the 1,757th anniversary of the day St. Valentine was beaten to death with clubs and then beheaded.
#romance #valentinesday
Gen AI can't be separated from late stage capitalism. It's a digital trash generator. An energy consumer. It undermines labour and hoovers up vast amounts of funding. And for what? Totally speculative future benefits that definitely won't be realised if we chew up our carbon budget.
Obviously the Green Party is going to be a very broad church of environmentalists, socialists and liberals, but it's depressing to see AI advocates crawling their way into the membership and putting forward motions on 'sustainably embracing the technology'. It's inherently unsustainable.
When we tried to get our elderly cat to catch a spider for us, he didn't even notice it was there. He did end up sitting on it though, which I suppose worked in a roundabout sort of way
Another bug up my ass today is the issue of book publishing working with AI companies.
Now, for argument's sake, if you knew categorically that a company had stolen from the people that directly drive your revenue (authors), under any normal circumstances would you consider working with them?
waterfalls going through some woods
Floods, 2021
i think it was the great screenwriter william goldsmith who famously said there are only three stories in all the world. a man goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town, and people fighting their way up and/or down a high-rise building
