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1000 results for “writing_blind”
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@DemLabs Thank you for responding and being open to improving your communication, making it more accessible for everyone. Here are a couple of basic guides:
https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/
https://afb.org/digital-inclusion/accessibility-resources/writing-effective-image-descriptionsI am sure that folks with sight impairments have other/better suggestions, so I will add some hashtags here to bring others into the conversation: #Blind #BlindFedi #Accessibility #AltText
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Evelyn reached into her pocket and found the ring: smooth and black, cold to the touch, and heavy in the hand. "You left this on the pyre at my mother's funeral. Why?"
"A debt was owed. Your mother died before I could repay it."
"So you gave her this?"
"That's right. My most precious belonging."
"What is it?"
"A binding ring. Used by faeries in their weddings. It allows the wearer to travel between our world and the lands of the fairy courts."
Evelyn felt the weight of it. She didn't know such a thing existed. "How did you get it?"
"It was given to me by the Prince-in-Spring--long ago when I was young and beautiful and full of bad ideas."
"You met the Prince-in-Spring?"
"Met him and married him. In the manner of the woods."
"He didn't skin you?"
"No. Not Salamandra Hedge. Too clever for any man, immortal or otherwise. I am Skraefolk--like you--chosen by the stars. The stars wanted a story from me, so I gave them one."
"Tell me your story!" Evelyn begged, edging closer. Salamandra Hedge grinned slyly in her direction. The old woman's milk-white eyes, blind as they were, brimmed with laughter.
"You want to know about how I came to marry the Prince-in-Spring?"
"Of course!"
"And what will you give me."
Evelyn did not hesitate. "The most precious thing of all."
Salamandra Hedge clucked her tongue. "Most precious, eh? And what is that?"
"Time."
The blind seer flashed a crooked, toothless smile. "Ahh--a good and clever girl. You are Skraefolk, aren't you? That was the very deal I made so long ago--traveling with a caravan on the Ostern Road. I lived as a boy then, and made my living as a scout in the service of the merchant legion."
Evelyn regarded her with some skepticism. "You were a boy?"
"Mm. A disguise--nothing more. You cannot always tell with people."
"What happened?"
The old woman laughed. "Youth. Lust. I caught the eye of two men traveling with the caravan. Tomas, a merchant prince, soft and sweet and smart as could be--and Asmer, an older man--a falcon handler, with tough, strong hands and a thirst for danger."
"You loved them both?"
"I loved the attention. Loved to be chased. I was raised to be a hunter; it was nice to be hunted. Of course, I think that was what called the faerie prince to us. Deep in his barrows he smelled love thickening the air--and because the Prince-in-Spring cannot resist competition, he joined the hunt." -
Favorite spy sagas based on true events – 2025 Rewrite
To this blog author, spy stories are among the most thrilling and intriguing literature that can be read. This is especially the case for those stories that are based on actual historic events. The working list below identifies my favorite books, movies, and mini-series that are based on real spy sagas – both those involving foreign adversaries and those detailing the actions of whistleblowers who reveal inappropriate spying and surveillance activities.
Source: clker.com Source: clipart panda.com Source: dreamstime.comWhile there is some artistic license often employed in movies and mini-series, the basis for the story is still true. Meanwhile, non-fiction and biographical books tend to delve into the actual nitty-gritty details of the spy’s life, their espionage endeavors, as well as their efforts to avoid being caught.
Source: stealthynijas.comNot all of the spies from these stories sneak around foreign capitals in search of important secrets. In fact, quite a few lived in plain sight (Agent Sonya and An Impeccable Spy – Richard Sorge) or were average citizens who find themselves drawn into espionage by circumstances and/or personal beliefs/ideology (The Courier, Official Secrets, and Snowden). Some spies strived to break the enemy’s codes (The Imitation Game), some silently lurk under the sea (Blind Man’s Bluff), while others oversaw an entire spy network (Spymistress).
As more espionage-related books are read and films/mini-series are watched, this list will be updated. I hope you enjoy these amazing stories as much as I do. Any suggestions on other true spy accounts to read or watch are most welcome. Peace!
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PRINT
Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal (2007)
Source: amazon.comThe Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War Hardcover (2018)
Source: amazon.comAgent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (2020)
Source: amazon.comBlind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage (2000)
Source: amazon.comA Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque (2011)
Source: amazon.comAn Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent (2019)
Source: amazon.comRaven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die (2017)
Source: amazon.comCodename: Hero: The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky and the Cold War’s Most Dangerous Operation (2012) – added 5/16/22
Source: amazon.comNo Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (2014)
Source: amazon.comSpymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (2006)
Source: amazon.comOthers:
Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor (2024)
The Lisbon Route: The Lisbon Route: Entry and Escape in Nazi Europe (2011)
Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA (2019)
Surrender on Demand (1997)
Iron Spy (2019)
FILM
The Courier (UK – 2021)
Source: amazon.comThe 12th Man (Norway -2017)
Source: amazon.comOfficial Secrets (UK – 2019)
Source: amazon.comThe Imitation Game (UK – 2014)
Source: amazon.comOperation Mincemeat (UK – 2022)
Bridge of Spies (2015)
Source: amazon.comSnowden (2016)
Source: amazon.comPack of Lies (1987) – added 4/26/26
Source: imdb.comArgo (2012)
Source: amazon.comOthers:
Jack Strong (Poland – 2014)
The Spy (Sweden- 2019) – added 11/3/25
The Two-Headed Spy (UK – 1958) – added 11/16/25
A Call to Spy (UK – 2019)
Red Joan (UK – 2019)
Female Agents (France – 2008)
Wasp Network (France – 2020)
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
Citizenfour (2014)
Wife of a Spy (Japan – 2021)
Syriana (2005)
The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)
The Spy Who Stole the Atom Bomb (2017)
Triple Cross (UK – 1966) – added 3/2/26
MINI-SERIES
The Spy (2019)
Source: imdb.com #books #espionage #intrigue #miniSeries #movies #secretAgents #secrets #spies #spying #surveillance #writing -
To other #blind #students, what tools have you used to help you format your papers with #APA styling and #citations? My #university provides #Perrla for free to students, but it doesn't seem to be the most #accessible with #ScreenReaders, at least not the online version. I haven't tried the add-on for #MicrosoftWord. With the online version, though, I don't see any keyboard shortcuts, and when you move into the edit box to start writing a paper, focus gets trapped there and it's hard to get out, so I don't think it's the best tool for me. The only other tool I know of is the reference manager built into Microsoft Word, but it seems to have fewer features and doesn't really help you format your paper like Perrla does, something I was looking forward to since all the APA rules for styling seem hard to remember.
#College #CollegeStudent #accessibility #JAWS #ScreenReaders #writing
@mastoblind @main -
To other #blind #students, what tools have you used to help you format your papers with #APA styling and #citations? My #university provides #Perrla for free to students, but it doesn't seem to be the most #accessible with #ScreenReaders, at least not the online version. I haven't tried the add-on for #MicrosoftWord. With the online version, though, I don't see any keyboard shortcuts, and when you move into the edit box to start writing a paper, focus gets trapped there and it's hard to get out, so I don't think it's the best tool for me. The only other tool I know of is the reference manager built into Microsoft Word, but it seems to have fewer features and doesn't really help you format your paper like Perrla does, something I was looking forward to since all the APA rules for styling seem hard to remember.
#College #CollegeStudent #accessibility #JAWS #ScreenReaders #writing
@mastoblind @main -
To other #blind #students, what tools have you used to help you format your papers with #APA styling and #citations? My #university provides #Perrla for free to students, but it doesn't seem to be the most #accessible with #ScreenReaders, at least not the online version. I haven't tried the add-on for #MicrosoftWord. With the online version, though, I don't see any keyboard shortcuts, and when you move into the edit box to start writing a paper, focus gets trapped there and it's hard to get out, so I don't think it's the best tool for me. The only other tool I know of is the reference manager built into Microsoft Word, but it seems to have fewer features and doesn't really help you format your paper like Perrla does, something I was looking forward to since all the APA rules for styling seem hard to remember.
#College #CollegeStudent #accessibility #JAWS #ScreenReaders #writing
@mastoblind @main -
To other #blind #students, what tools have you used to help you format your papers with #APA styling and #citations? My #university provides #Perrla for free to students, but it doesn't seem to be the most #accessible with #ScreenReaders, at least not the online version. I haven't tried the add-on for #MicrosoftWord. With the online version, though, I don't see any keyboard shortcuts, and when you move into the edit box to start writing a paper, focus gets trapped there and it's hard to get out, so I don't think it's the best tool for me. The only other tool I know of is the reference manager built into Microsoft Word, but it seems to have fewer features and doesn't really help you format your paper like Perrla does, something I was looking forward to since all the APA rules for styling seem hard to remember.
#College #CollegeStudent #accessibility #JAWS #ScreenReaders #writing
@mastoblind @main -
I just finished writing a novel rooted in mythology, pop culture, and my lived experience as a blind, chronically ill writer (ESKD, celiac, diabetes). It’s heartfelt, weird, and full of emotion.
I’m now looking for beta readers or editors—especially fellow LGBTQIA+ and disabled creatives!
Help me make it shine.https://docs.google.com/document/d/10NskEXMNbBErcgH2-LHVSCBhgql6_G2ztQznoNeWpjs/edit?usp=drivesdk
#WritingCommunity #AmWriting #DisabilityLit #QueerWriters #BetaReadersWanted #ChronicIllness
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Attention, blind Akkoma users! I will be writing to the developer with my concerns about a few problems with accessibility on this platform. Most should be easy to resolve. Please let me know if you find any more, and also state what browser and screen reader you are using. Note: This is in reference to the site itself, not to your client of choice. I will post about that separately. For the record, I use NVDA with Firefox.
- Many buttons are unlabelled and simply say "button". This is true on the main page as well as when viewing posts and tabs in profiles. Most work once pressed. They just need to be labelled.
- Searching for people, tags, groups, and posts is inaccessible. I can enter the edit field and write my text, but then, there are two unlabelled buttons next to that. The first simply takes me back to the edit field. The second does nothing. I am assuming this is a submit button that doesn't work via the keyboard.
- It is impossible to view followers, as well as those whom I follow. I can see the numbers of each but not the people and groups themselves.
- I cannot read my own profile without editing it. There appears to be no link where I can simply view it, either as myself or anonymously. If I go to my page and am not logged in, however, I can view it. I can also easily edit it when logged in.
- The page renders very differently in Chrome than in Firefox. In Chrome, I can't see anything but my notifications, so I can't get to my page or the other timelines.
#accessibility #Akkoma #blind #Blob.cat #Chrome #Fediverse #fediverse #Firefox #JAWS #NVDA #html #ScreenReaders #SemanticHtml #Supermium #Windows
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#OnThisDay Birth Anniversary of Louis Braille (1809) - French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the #Blind or visually impaired. Today is observed as World #BrailleDay.
Birth Anniversary of Floyd Patterson (1935) - One of the greatest #Boxers. He was the youngest boxer in history to win the #Heavyweight championship.
#Sputnik 1, first artificial Earth satellite, falls to Earth from orbit (1958).
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#wordweavers #Writing 11. What emotions did your character experience in the last scene you wrote?
Terror
I felt my sanity slipping as I staggered toward the far end of the cabin. I wish I could say I was seeking another exit, but it was blind fear that motivated me. The dreadful laughter and evil chant drained my energy and sanity, leaving me stuck, unable to move. The foul smell physically choked me.
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Daily writing prompt What gives you direction in life? View all responsesGPS. Get it?? Damn, am I funny! WOOHOO!
I don’t know what gives me direction in life. Does anyone? Does anyone have any direction or are we all just flailing away, blind and clueless? Are the people who claim to have direction just deluded and chasing fairy tales around through life? It seems that way to me.
I guess, like everything else in my universe, what direction I get comes from my family. Jen and the kids. Where they go, I follow. When they need, I try to get. Simple as that. I probably take direction from work too, but is that life or just profession? Is there a difference?
I can say for sure that I do not take direction from the stars or the calendar or any fairy tales. I am as clear on that as clear can be. It makes me sad that I know that a significant portion of the responses to this daily prompt are going to say exactly that. That is pretty depressing to me. Is such a reaction in some part a source of direction? No, I don’t think so.
I’m more and more on team flailing away blind and clueless here. What’s a red head to do, you know?
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Daily writing prompt What gives you direction in life? View all responsesGPS. Get it?? Damn, am I funny! WOOHOO!
I don’t know what gives me direction in life. Does anyone? Does anyone have any direction or are we all just flailing away, blind and clueless? Are the people who claim to have direction just deluded and chasing fairy tales around through life? It seems that way to me.
I guess, like everything else in my universe, what direction I get comes from my family. Jen and the kids. Where they go, I follow. When they need, I try to get. Simple as that. I probably take direction from work too, but is that life or just profession? Is there a difference?
I can say for sure that I do not take direction from the stars or the calendar or any fairy tales. I am as clear on that as clear can be. It makes me sad that I know that a significant portion of the responses to this daily prompt are going to say exactly that. That is pretty depressing to me. Is such a reaction in some part a source of direction? No, I don’t think so.
I’m more and more on team flailing away blind and clueless here. What’s a red head to do, you know?
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Daily writing prompt What gives you direction in life? View all responsesGPS. Get it?? Damn, am I funny! WOOHOO!
I don’t know what gives me direction in life. Does anyone? Does anyone have any direction or are we all just flailing away, blind and clueless? Are the people who claim to have direction just deluded and chasing fairy tales around through life? It seems that way to me.
I guess, like everything else in my universe, what direction I get comes from my family. Jen and the kids. Where they go, I follow. When they need, I try to get. Simple as that. I probably take direction from work too, but is that life or just profession? Is there a difference?
I can say for sure that I do not take direction from the stars or the calendar or any fairy tales. I am as clear on that as clear can be. It makes me sad that I know that a significant portion of the responses to this daily prompt are going to say exactly that. That is pretty depressing to me. Is such a reaction in some part a source of direction? No, I don’t think so.
I’m more and more on team flailing away blind and clueless here. What’s a red head to do, you know?
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In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Who's in?
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/
#accessibility #a11y #AltText #ImageDescription #WorldSightDay #FediverseWorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #BeAnAlly
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In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Who's in?
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/
#accessibility #a11y #AltText #ImageDescription #WorldSightDay #FediverseWorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #BeAnAlly
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In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Who's in?
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/
#accessibility #a11y #AltText #ImageDescription #WorldSightDay #FediverseWorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #BeAnAlly
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In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Who's in?
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/
#accessibility #a11y #AltText #ImageDescription #WorldSightDay #FediverseWorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #BeAnAlly
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In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Who's in?
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/
#accessibility #a11y #AltText #ImageDescription #WorldSightDay #FediverseWorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #BeAnAlly
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Daily writing prompt What makes you laugh? View all responses
Lots of things make me laugh. Laughing is fun. Laughing makes humans feel good. I once wrote a song called “Laughing” and one of the bands I was in played it for a while. It was written in that dark period in my life after I dropped out of college the first time and if I remember it right it was about how sometimes I was so incredibly depressed that I would laugh at how miserable I was. Yeah… so that’s a bad example… maybe.
The question is, what makes me laugh. Jen makes me laugh. My wife has the sharpest wit and the best sense of humor. Every once in a while she’ll blindside me with something so funny that I just lose my shit. It’s one of the billion or so reasons why I love her so much.
My step kids make me laugh too. They are both adults now and they spend their days doing adulting things so the silliness they excelled at when they were little is a thing of the past. Back then they would slay my sense of humor on a daily basis. The Birdie Dance. Raspberry Pickle. Yeah, we laughed a lot. A lot. These days they are more serious most of the time, the way adults are supposed to be, but they can still cause me to erupt into a belly laugh that shakes the universe. They are awesome like that.
There are other things that make me laugh. Things that are funny often make me laugh. Things that are not funny don’t. It’s crazy how that works out, right? Funny stories are funny. Funny movies are funny. I quoted Dodgeball last night. I had an itch on my arm and I scratched it and my razor sharp fingernail cut me a little and I had to unironically proclaim that “nobody makes me bleed my own blood!” I guess I even make myself laugh… you easily self manipulated dumb ass.
Funny is just funny, you know?
Hey https://gencraft.com/generate, generate an image of a jedi knight laughing…
That is one creepy ass a.i. generated image of one creepy ass yoda-sith. I am going to see this in my nightmares forever.
https://robertjames1971.blog/2024/03/29/laughing/
#comedy #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1892 #funny #humor #laugh #laughter
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The Sightless Fighter's Guide to Knockout Kings 2003 has been amended to include a small, but very important, detail about choosing fighters. Also, the text file version is now in Markdown format.
Web: https://www.seedy.gq/retro-guides/SFG_KOK03.php
Text: https://www.seedy.gq/writing/SFG_KOK03.txt
#blind #BlindGamer #BlindGamers #disabled #DisabledGamer #DisabledGamers #RetroGame #RetroGames #VideoGame #VideoGames #WePlayToo #accessibility #a11y -
The Sightless Fighter's Guide to Knockout Kings 2003 has been amended to include a small, but very important, detail about choosing fighters. Also, the text file version is now in Markdown format.
Web: https://www.seedy.gq/retro-guides/SFG_KOK03.php
Text: https://www.seedy.gq/writing/SFG_KOK03.txt
#blind #BlindGamer #BlindGamers #disabled #DisabledGamer #DisabledGamers #RetroGame #RetroGames #VideoGame #VideoGames #WePlayToo #accessibility #a11y -
The Sightless Fighter's Guide to Knockout Kings 2003 has been amended to include a small, but very important, detail about choosing fighters. Also, the text file version is now in Markdown format.
Web: https://www.seedy.gq/retro-guides/SFG_KOK03.php
Text: https://www.seedy.gq/writing/SFG_KOK03.txt
#blind #BlindGamer #BlindGamers #disabled #DisabledGamer #DisabledGamers #RetroGame #RetroGames #VideoGame #VideoGames #WePlayToo #accessibility #a11y -
The Sightless Fighter's Guide to Knockout Kings 2003 has been amended to include a small, but very important, detail about choosing fighters. Also, the text file version is now in Markdown format.
Web: https://www.seedy.gq/retro-guides/SFG_KOK03.php
Text: https://www.seedy.gq/writing/SFG_KOK03.txt
#blind #BlindGamer #BlindGamers #disabled #DisabledGamer #DisabledGamers #RetroGame #RetroGames #VideoGame #VideoGames #WePlayToo #accessibility #a11y -
"Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.
And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming “textpocalypse” that will render the words you’re reading right now—this word, and this one—relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. “Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,” Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? “Rest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,” Forbes promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad.
The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop
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"Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.
And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming “textpocalypse” that will render the words you’re reading right now—this word, and this one—relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. “Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,” Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? “Rest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,” Forbes promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad.
The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop
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"Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.
And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming “textpocalypse” that will render the words you’re reading right now—this word, and this one—relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. “Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,” Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? “Rest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,” Forbes promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad.
The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop
-
"Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.
And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming “textpocalypse” that will render the words you’re reading right now—this word, and this one—relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. “Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,” Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? “Rest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,” Forbes promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad.
The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop
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"Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.
And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop. The literary critic Matthew Kirschenbaum warns of a coming “textpocalypse” that will render the words you’re reading right now—this word, and this one—relics your grandchildren will frame on a wall, a daguerreotype, a needlepoint sampler. “Like the prized pen strokes of a calligrapher, a human document online could become a rarity to be curated, protected, and preserved,” Kirschenbaum writes. Can the textpocalypse be stopped? “Rest assured 2026 will be the beginning of AI slop purge,” Forbes promised, sloppily, at the start of this year. This was hardly reassuring. My anchovies are still sad.
The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms..."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop
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BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter 13: The First Time
Daily writing prompt If you could erase one movie from your memory and watch it again for the first time, which one would it be? View all responsesBRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Thirteen
The First Time
This is Chapter 13 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story written by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. BRECK follows Breck, a veteran courier and former Crystal Wars special operations soldier, as he moves through a medieval world one delivery at a time — and can’t always walk away from what he finds. New chapters post daily at noon Eastern on chadwickrye.wordpress.com.
The Story So Far
Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who arrived in Crestfall on a routine delivery and found a town quietly strangled by a corrupt magistrate named Voss. Over twelve days he has built a case from the inside out: the hidden ledger kept by a dead miller’s widow, the chalk map drawn by a twelve-year-old boy named Pell who has been watching this town come apart from a cooperage step, the gap in the magistrate’s patrol created by a young enforcer named Jorin who moved his post eight feet west every night for four months on the silent hope it would matter. Last night, Breck dismantled Pelk — Voss’s collection enforcer — in four seconds in an alley behind the granary. This morning, Drav sat two stools down at the inn bar and asked which side of the war Breck had been on. Breck told him. Tonight, the side door is unlatched. Tonight, the gap opens between the eighth bell and the ninth. Tonight, everything Breck has been building comes due.
← Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve | Chapter Fourteen — Coming Tomorrow →
Chapter Thirteen: The First Time
This chapter explores what it feels like to see something for the first time — and what it costs when you can’t go back.
Chapter 13 Summary: Breck executes the plan that twelve days of groundwork made possible — slipping through the unlatched side door of the civic building between the eighth and ninth bells, retrieving the original documents stolen from miller Aldric Moss fourteen months ago, and exiting the way he came. In the corridor of the inn, he finds Drav waiting. They say almost nothing. Drav steps aside. Breck goes upstairs with the documents and the evidence he has been carrying, and counts the ninth bell.
He went in through the side door at half past the eighth bell.
Maret had left it unlatched exactly as he’d asked — the hinges oiled at some point in the recent past, because they made no sound, which was either coincidence or the innkeeper’s particular brand of thorough preparation, and Breck suspected coincidence had very little to do with how Maret ran her building. He eased the door open the width of his shoulders — considerable — and stepped into the narrow service corridor that ran between the inn’s rear wall and the magistrate’s stable yard next door.
The corridor smelled of horse and wet straw and the particular cold that collected in spaces between buildings, the cold that had nowhere to go and simply accumulated. A single tallow stub burned in a tin holder on a wall bracket, throwing just enough light to move by and not enough to be seen from either end of the corridor. He stood still for thirty seconds, listening to the night.
Crestfall at the eighth bell had its own specific silence — not the silence of an empty place but the silence of a populated place that had learned to hold its breath on schedule. The market square would be clear. The few remaining vendors who hadn’t packed before the third bell would have packed before the sixth. The streets would hold nothing but the magistrate’s men on their routes and the particular quality of dark that accumulated in a town that had learned not to put lights in windows after sundown if it could be helped.
He moved down the corridor toward the stable yard.
Jorin’s gap ran from the eighth bell to the ninth on the west face of the magistrate’s building — a forty-foot section of wall where the coverage went thin because Jorin had been moving his patrol point eight feet west over the course of four months, one measured increment at a time, building the gap so gradually that no one with oversight responsibility had noticed the pattern. Breck had stood across from that wall in daylight and in rain and had counted the windows and the distances between them and had built the picture of what lay inside from the outside in, the way he’d always built pictures during the war.
Three rooms on the ground floor facing the stable yard. The leftmost would be the clerk’s office — he’d confirmed this from the shadow pattern through the shutters during business hours, the particular stillness of a room occupied by someone who sat at a desk. The middle room was storage — the shadow pattern showed no movement and the smell coming through the gap in the shutters on his third observation pass had been the dry, papery smell of documents and sealed boxes. The rightmost would be Voss’s private office — the room with the heaviest shutters, the room that showed light longest into the evening, the room from which a thin thread of pipe smoke drifted at the end of the working day, suggesting a man who sat with his accounts after the clerks had gone.
It was the middle room he wanted.
Not because of what was there now. Because of what had been put there fourteen months ago — documents taken from a miller’s office in the night along with his correspondence and a deed to river land his father had left him, taken and filed away in the place where taken things went in a town run by a man like Voss. Aldric Moss had been careful enough to make a copy. Breck had that copy against his ribs in the oilskin packet. But the originals would have more weight with whatever authority came after this — and Breck intended there to be an authority that came after this.
The storage room window had a single iron latch that he’d felt through the gap in the shutters on his second observation pass, running his fingers along it in the dark with the particular careful attention of a blind man reading. Standard construction. Nothing complicated. The kind of latch that had been adequate for fourteen years and had never been asked to be more than adequate.
He asked it to be more than adequate now.
It held for approximately three seconds.
The room was exactly what the shadow pattern and the smell had suggested — shelves along three walls, floor to ceiling, carrying the accumulated administrative weight of Voss’s three years in office. Ledger books. Correspondence boxes, each labeled in the neat hand of the clerk who’d processed them. Rolled documents in wooden tubes, sealed and dated. The particular archaeology of a corrupt administration, layered like sediment, oldest at the bottom and working toward the present.
He didn’t light a candle. He worked by the thin thread of the tallow stub’s light through the open window, and by the older light of his own spatial memory, which was a map he’d built of this room from the outside and was now confirming from the inside. They matched. They generally did, if you paid the right kind of attention.
He found what he was looking for in the third box on the second shelf from the bottom, where documents from fourteen months prior had been filed in the methodical, chronological order of a clerk who had no particular feelings about what he was archiving and was simply doing the work. A miller’s license. A deed to river land. A bound collection of correspondence in a hand he recognized from the oilskin packet against his ribs — the same neat, architectural handwriting, the same careful precision of a man who had understood exactly what he was building.
Aldric Moss had been thorough in everything.
Breck placed the documents inside his cloak, against his chest, alongside the copy that had been kept warm beside a hearthstone for fourteen months by a woman who had learned to hope in very small, very careful amounts. Then he stood still for a moment in the dark room, among the filed evidence of three years of quiet theft, and let the weight of it settle.
The first time he’d broken into an enemy position — a Karithian supply cache, second year of the Crystal Wars, a river crossing that had taken three attempts to cross — he had felt afterward something he hadn’t expected and hadn’t been able to name until much later. Not triumph. Not relief. Something more like the specific grief of a man who has seen, for the first time, clearly, the shape of what he is capable of — and understands that having seen it, he can never quite see himself the previous way again.
He felt something adjacent to that now.
Not grief exactly. But the awareness of a threshold crossed. The documents in Aldric Moss’s hand, filed in a box labeled with the date of a night when three men had come and taken them along with the miller himself — those documents existed now in a different place than they had existed this morning. The case had been built. The copy was the argument. The originals were the proof.
Whatever came next, this had happened. That was the nature of certain kinds of action. They existed in the past tense from the moment they were completed, permanent and unalterable, the way a thing seen for the first time could not be unseen.
He crossed back to the window. Eased it open. Stepped out into the corridor and pulled it closed behind him, feeling the latch seat itself back in its frame with a small, final sound.
He heard Drav before he saw him.
Not because Drav made a sound — he didn’t. Because the quality of the silence at the far end of the corridor changed in the specific way that silence changed when it was occupied by someone who had learned, the same way Breck had learned, not to announce themselves.
Breck stopped.
The corridor held them both, twenty feet apart, in the thin light of the tallow stub. Drav stood at the corridor’s entrance to the stable yard, in the plain dark clothing he always wore, his hands at his sides. The scar caught the faint light. His expression was the expression he’d had at the bar that morning — old and complicated and stripped of everything that wasn’t strictly necessary.
He looked at the shape of Breck’s cloak. At the place where it sat differently than it had on any previous day — the bulk of documents against his chest, invisible but present.
He didn’t say anything.
Breck didn’t say anything.
The tallow stub burned its patient fraction lower. Somewhere in the stable yard a horse shifted its weight and blew through its nose in the mild, unconcerned way of animals uninvested in human complications.
Then Drav stepped aside.
Not a wide step. Just enough. The corridor was adequate for a large man to pass if both parties were willing to be in it simultaneously without incident. Drav’s positioning made it clear that he was willing.
Breck walked past him.
At the corridor’s end, at the door that opened back into the inn’s rear passage, he stopped without turning around.
“The north road,” Drav said quietly, from behind him. His voice was the same as it had been at the bar. Low. Stripped. “Tomorrow morning. Before the bells.”
“I know,” Breck said.
“He’ll know by the second bell. When the clerk opens the room.”
“I know that too.”
A pause that contained several things that neither of them was going to say.
“Drav,” Breck said.
“Don’t.”
He didn’t. He opened the door and stepped back into the warmth of the inn, and the door closed behind him, and in the corridor Drav stood alone in the thin tallow light for a moment before the silence resettled over everything.
Breck went upstairs. Set the documents on the table beside the oilskin packet and looked at them together in the candlelight — the copy and the originals, the evidence kept in hope and the evidence filed in certainty, reunited after fourteen months in the dark.
He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at them for a long time.
Then he moved the bracelet from his wrist to the satchel strap, the nighttime version of the habit, and lay down on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about a man seeing something clearly for the first time, and the specific irreversibility of that.
Outside, the ninth bell rang across Crestfall’s quiet rooftops.
Right on schedule.
BRECK: Dead Delivery is a serialized noble dark fantasy story written by Chadwick Rye, published free on chadwickrye.wordpress.com. Set in the world of Lumenvale, it follows Breck — a veteran courier and former Crystal Wars special operations soldier — as he moves through a medieval world one delivery at a time, and can’t always walk past what he finds. New chapters post daily at noon Eastern. Chapter 13: The First Time — Breck retrieves stolen documents from the magistrate’s archive and crosses paths with Drav in the corridor.
← Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve | Chapter Fourteen — Coming Tomorrow →
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