Olivia Atwater

Olivia Atwater

@oliviaatwater.com

Whimsical historical fantasy author and satirist. Wary of faeries and fond of pineapples. Author of Half a Soul. Wife of Nicholas Atwater.🇨🇦 https://oliviaatwater.com https://patreon.com/atwater_authors rep: Christabel McKinley @ David Higham

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Psst! The ebook of Rosemary & Thyme has been released an entire week early on my author store! I always like to do early releases there when I can; not only do I receive a much larger percentage of the sale price, but newsletter subscribers can get 10% off. payhip.com/StarwatchPress

Y'all, I feel old hearing people say this PHP flaw is proof of the AI apocalypse. Some of us worked through Heartbleed. The real problem was, is, and remains, the way that we take open source for granted. This flaw was not unknown before AI dug it up again. Volunteers just had no time to fix it.

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I know I'm just a silly satire author now, but even when I was at the height of my tech powers I figured the solution was obvious: Governments hoping for tech sovreignty need to fork open source for their own needs and have their teams contribute to base code by default.

France IS switching to a distro based on Ubuntu Linux iirc, which is exactly what I mean, and I hope the people involved are greenlit to improve the underlying distro too.

Y'all, I feel old hearing people say this PHP flaw is proof of the AI apocalypse. Some of us worked through Heartbleed. The real problem was, is, and remains, the way that we take open source for granted. This flaw was not unknown before AI dug it up again. Volunteers just had no time to fix it.

A bunch of companies whose systems all rely on SSL (I mean, like most of the web) swore afterwards that they would donate more money to open source devs and ha ha ha here we are again.

Olivia Atwater reposted

literally this comic except he apparently lives in Czechia instead of Nebraska

Charlie Warzel@cwarzel.bsky.social

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Random aside, but oh my god I love being notified about all of the different locations where people have bought this ebook. (Because the store remits sales tax, it lets me know like "you are paying tax to Germany/Italy/Finland for this ebook", which is... amazing.)

Psst! The ebook of Rosemary & Thyme has been released an entire week early on my author store! I always like to do early releases there when I can; not only do I receive a much larger percentage of the sale price, but newsletter subscribers can get 10% off. payhip.com/StarwatchPress

An aside for those waiting on physical copies: They have been proofed and set live on Ingram, but there's little telling when the feed will actually update and show them for sale. That part is sadly out of my hands—but I want you to know that they are processing!

Intense wealth inequality leads to a shortage of necessities and a corresponding glut of luxury goods, simply by existing. Why? Because a few people with lots of money can only buy so many meals. Food is therefore relatively unprofitable, despite being inelastic. The good money is in yacht-building.

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When the ultra-wealthy are taxed out of existence, yachts* are no longer so profitable, and labour has to be allocated far more sensibly. Some of the yacht-builders become farmers. Food becomes cheaper. This happens without even giving more money to the poor. It is, in fact, enough to soak the rich.

Intense wealth inequality leads to a shortage of necessities and a corresponding glut of luxury goods, simply by existing. Why? Because a few people with lots of money can only buy so many meals. Food is therefore relatively unprofitable, despite being inelastic. The good money is in yacht-building.

Global finance exacerbates this, because money is now blindly invested in whatever gives the highest returns. Farming doesn't give good returns, so it gets starved of private investment. If you have money in the stock market, you're often roped into reinforcing this exact dynamic yourself.

My primary cause of daydrinking today is having to spend several hours convincing a major box store to delete my online account with them FOR THE SECOND TIME, since the first time did not take. Take two. I have to wait a full month before I know whether they've actually done it this time.

I resent that even with all of the privacy laws on my side, I have so many technicalities and people with convenient selective hearing thrown in my way. Account deletion should be simple and straightforward: There should be a button on the back-end that says "delete my account". That's it.

It's not at all difficult to program. I should know. If that button doesn't exist, it is SOLELY because the company is trying to make things difficult, and we all know it.

Just watching France decide whether it wants a sixth republic right now, thinking "okay, that would admittedly be a great reason to lose my paperwork again, I would have to accept that one."

Dear SoA: You're going to go through life believing that authors hate you because they have no reading comprehension and have therefore misunderstood you. I would like you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that this is categorically not true. You're just spineless cowards, and it's embarrassing.

The Society of Authors@societyofauthors.bsky.social

Our position on generative AI remains unchanged. But an increasing number of organisations within the publishing industry are using the technology. In her blog post our CEO sets out why we want to see the adoption of cross-industry standards. buff.ly/DCPZPY2

IMAGINE if we lived in a world where this statement was instead something like: "Publishers are increasingly using AI and hiding it from their authors, so we're encouraging agencies to use this boilerplate anti-AI contract clause, and we will expose and legally pursue publishers who violate it."

Gotta say, the last few weeks have been an abject lesson to most authors never to touch tie-ins with a ten foot pole. If ever I had any interest in them before, it has been safely quashed by conspiracy theory videos about how Neil Newborn secretly hates a book but can't contractually say so.

"How would you like to write a book for less money than you'd otherwise make, about characters you don't own, with a committee of corporate people with no background in writing constantly critiquing your choices? Also, the Internet may go on an irrational witch hunt against you, price that in."

Olivia Atwater reposted

While I'm talking about how tough discoverability is for books these days...I keep hearing that people didn't realize I've got a book coming out! So yes! The third and final book of The Echo Archives, THE LAST STAR IN THE VOID, is out on Nov 10! bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

bookshop.orgThe Last Star in the VoidThe brilliant conclusion to Melissa Caruso's Echo Archives trilogy; a whip-smart adventure fantasy where a detective has to solve the greatest mystery of all--her own murder. Kembral Thorne is back o...

I cannot believe I am saying this about a dressmaking game, but if I am being queer baited I WILL THROW HANDS. You have no idea how much lace I have hand placed trying to get these obvious lesbian enemies to realise they are meant to be together.

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I know you don't appreciate me enough, Prudence. But I'm not doing this giant skirt for you, I'm doing it so your future wife cannot possibly miss your bustle no matter how hard you hide.

I am never in a million years making back the money I have spent on these ruffles, I am going to need an imaginary side job to support my imaginary main job.

I cannot believe I am saying this about a dressmaking game, but if I am being queer baited I WILL THROW HANDS. You have no idea how much lace I have hand placed trying to get these obvious lesbian enemies to realise they are meant to be together.

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There needs to be a warning popup in this game when you select the Belladonna Bodice like "are you sure you want to do this to yourself, your partner, and your therapist"

I cannot believe I am saying this about a dressmaking game, but if I am being queer baited I WILL THROW HANDS. You have no idea how much lace I have hand placed trying to get these obvious lesbian enemies to realise they are meant to be together.

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Okay I swear this dress STARTED off vibrant and colourful and then we ended up in goth territory again and. I can't help it. The lace calls to me.

I cannot believe I am saying this about a dressmaking game, but if I am being queer baited I WILL THROW HANDS. You have no idea how much lace I have hand placed trying to get these obvious lesbian enemies to realise they are meant to be together.

Meanwhile, one of my very next dresses I am like "you asked for this, not me, and if you tell anyone I made this dress I will deny you three times"

Edith, baby, you're amazing and I have the very highest respect for you, but I have messed up the stitching on this skirt like seven times now, so I think you're just getting wonky stitching. It's okay, it's all black material, no one will notice.

Sitting in the kitchen dealing with a burgeoning period migraine, feeling very sorry for myself, when one of the chickens outside starts squawking because she's struggling to get an egg out and. I guess there are worse reproductive systems out there, yeah.

I have only had this progesterone for two days, but like Rosa Diaz, if anything ever happens to it, I will do unconscionable things. Basically, everything in my body is suddenly working the way that it should/used to work, before perimenopause started this heinous, unprovoked war on me.

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Having just the tiniest bit of progesterone at the proper time legitimately feels like coming off hard mode. I'm sleeping properly, my ambient stress is lower, and my body stays the same temperature all day long, instead of spiking up and down without warning.

And frankly, the people who most understand the sheer joy and relief it is to have myself back, the ones who share it with me most fully, are my trans buddies. And that's... just nice. It's nice.

I have only had this progesterone for two days, but like Rosa Diaz, if anything ever happens to it, I will do unconscionable things. Basically, everything in my body is suddenly working the way that it should/used to work, before perimenopause started this heinous, unprovoked war on me.

And this is an excellent lesson in how my transgender friends feel, let me tell you. I have always been of the opinion that you shouldn't need to fully understand something in order to trust that someone knows what they need. So obviously, I support trans rights 100% BUT. Now I ALSO understand.

Our hormones do so many different important things that are rarely, if ever, fully explained to us. Our resting temperature, our digestion, our emotional resilience, our TEETH and BONES. When someone says "I need this hormone, it fixes things", we should be taking that SO seriously.