#WritersCoffeeClub #WritingCommunity

28th Sept 2026. Could you work without the internet? What would change?

I'd be a lot happier with an offline wikipedia dump (yes, I have one, just in case!) but I could. I'd be less distractable: but on the other hand, those distractions feed into the complexity of my backgrounds and ideas, so the fiction would suffer unpredictably.

#PennedPossibilities 1141: Does your antagonist personally know your MC? Have they ever met?

This question makes the (often false) assumption that in a work of fiction, the antagonist is a person, rather than the natural world or a vast interlocking system of oppressive hierarchy with nobody in charge (like, say, capitalism).

You can punch a King but you can't punch Monarchism: that's the difference between escapist fantasy and philosophy.

(There's a place for both.)

Recommending self-hosting is the tech equivalent of advocating becoming a tradwife.

I long for a world wide web that goes back to basics: Markdown for text, JPEG or PNG for images, *no* Javascript or other client-side execution, designed to be writable by a human being with a simple text editor and no fucking interactive/dynamic bullshit. Make it as advertising hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small* (as in: a large, sprawling web site should fit on 16Mb USB stick).

In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

If you've never been there/read up on it, Bangkok's greater metropolitan area is home to over 17 million people—we're talking New York/London in scale—and is on the Chao Phraya river delta in reclaimed swampland. There are canals, and drainage is a perpetual problem.

This is as bad as the entire Netherlands facing inundation.

Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock:
https://pointinthecloud.com/2026-04-11-211700.html

I'll go further than that: friends don't let friends buy Samsung products.

NEW MEANINGS FOR OLD VOCABULARY: Claudication (n), sudden acute chest pain caused by realizing the bullshit article you just read two-thirds of was probably AI slop

#WritersCoffeeClub Sep. 23: What "little thing" really helps you write?

Tea. (Because I burned out on coffee 35 years ago.) I get through about 3-5 litres of strong English breakfast tea (b/c Irish or Scottish blends are too hard to find in 1Kg bulk) per day. With milk, brewed to building site strength in batches that get drunk from a Thermos.

Reminder: "reimigration" is a far-right euphemism for what used to be called "ethnic cleansing" 30 years ago, and 40 years before that was "mass deportation and genocide". In both cases, the perpetrators got harsh sentences (up to and including death).

You can rename a pile of 💩 but it's still 💩.

(I see Garius hasn't tooted this here, but said it on Bluesky, and it deserves repeating):

New insult just dropped! Your da shouts at hotels and your ma lives in Piddington.