iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Challenge: wrong answers only My guess: "Not bloody Liz Truss again!!"

= People

Queen Elizabeth's Final
Diary Entry Contained
Only Five Words

(Photo of Queen Elizabeth II)

Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

They've always had a huge crossover with silicon valley VC culture libertarianism, folks like (the late) Tim May. A lot of them are coiners, a lot of coiners are prosperity gospel evangelicals turned atheist, and they've been under selection pressure for greed and glibness for decades.

Crazed looking beardy guy gesticulating in front of a white board covered in papers connected by red strings

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Date yourself with a snap of your first ever computer... Arguably it was the ZX81 I had for three months, but realistically the first one I really *used* was the Amstrad PCW8256.

A Sinclair ZX81. Black, roughly square, physically small home computer from 1981. The front 40% is covered by a completely flat touch-sensitive four row keyboard (with no space bar). Absolutely ghastly!

An Amstrad PCW8256 home/office computer, pale beige with screen/floppy disk/CPU unit, keyboard, and dot matrix printer (it came as a complete kit).

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

*Stares in Amstrad PCW* (3" floppy disks! Not 3.5"!)

Publicity photo of an Amstrad PCW 8256 home/small business computer.

On the left, the system unit is a white CRT with a pair of vertically stacked drive bays on the right, one of them holding a cartridge: the green-screen CRT shows a file management browser. In front, a keyboard, and to the right, a dot matric printer with a business letter coming out the top.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Fuel tanks get lighter as they empty: a battery doesn't, so you're hauling dead weight throughout the entire flight. On the other hand, electric motors can be small and positioned for best aerodynamic utility, eg en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_GL-10_Gr….

A ten-engined tilt-wing VTOL electric UAV, the GL-10, taking off vertically.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Proof that Trump is chicken! Specifically, an economy class in-flight chicken parmigiana dinner.

Donald Trump in an airline meal trolley. (Probably photoshopped, might be AI, don't care: it's obviously a fake, but stands as political commentary.)

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Apparently the Cone Count in Glasgow hit 7 this afternoon:

Statue of the Duke of Wellington on a horse, atop a plinth, in front of some classical pillars in the middle of Glasgow.

There are four traffic cones in a stack on the Duke's head … and three on the horse's.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

My answer is LOL ROFL (dickbrain) The terminally AI-pilled can't even *imagine* some people have *never* asked stochastic parrots to cheat at their job for them.

Screencap of a social media post by: kavishj611

All the people who are anti-Al or want to
slow Al progress, I have one question:
If Al disappeared tomorrow, could you
still get through an entire workday
without ChatGPT, Claude, or any other
Al tool?

Imagine Al was suddenly banned.
Would you actually be willing to give it
up?

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

You just *know* this is going to end in tears!

The old town of Nuremberg, inside the city walls, is all narrow, steep cobblestone streets and half-timbered buildings. Someone is driving a long white stretch limousine uphill and around a tight curve (gradient steeper than 1:10) between stone walls and a very old well …

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

It's 28 ℃ and THE DAYSTAR IT BURNS here in Nuremberg, so there's really only one thing to do:

Photo of a wooden table with a red and white checkered tablecloth in a room with stone walls, wooden panelling, and windows open on an alleyway. On the table is a stein full of cutlery and two glasses of beer from Hausbrauerei Altstadthof.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Here is a 14 year old kitten, plotting mayhem:

A white-bellied tortoiseshell cat lying on her back atop a red chair, staring impishly at the photographer, flashing a single fang

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

In case you missed it, the England fans at the world cup are enthusiastically chanting: "He's fat, with piles He's in the Epstein files Trump the Cuunt Trump the Cuuuuuntt!!!" I want to know how the pearl-clutching republican senators are going to handle it if they win.

"He's fat.. with piles..he's in the Epstein files...
Trump the cuuunt...Trump the cuuuunnt!!"

HEADLINE: England fans face being
kicked out of stadium for
chants during World Cup

Photo of a stadium full of fans waving the Cross of St George flag (not the Union Jack, which is the UK flag)

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Welp, it's been nice having these computers but it's time to get back in the sea now. (See alt text for deeply alarming abstract of paper about AI-assisted self-modifying network worms …) arxiv.org/html/2606.03811v1

09:23 Fri 5 Jun

arxiv.org

Abstract

A computer worm is malware that spreads on a network by replicating itself from one ma-
chine to another. Traditional worms, like WannaCry, exploited predetermined vulnerabilities,
and their spread can be halted by patching those vulnerabilities. Here we show that artificial
intelligence (Al) agents enable a fundamentally new threat: a worm that generates tailored
attack strategies to each target it encounters. The worm parasitically uses compromised ma-
chines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) to sustain its reasoning, or extend its
reach for further attacks. Deployed on a network of machines spanning Linux, Windows, and
loT (Internet of Things) devices, the worm propagated by exploiting common, real-world cor-
porate network vulnerabilities. Since the worm is powered by stolen compute, the attacker's
marginal cost per new infection is zero. This creates a destabilizing economic asymmetry be-
tween attackers and defenders. Moreover, because the worm requires no commercial Al plat-
form, centralized safety controls, such as service refusals or rate limiting, are structurally irrel-
evant. Our results demonstrate that self-sustaining Al-driven cyber-threats are no longer the-
oretical. We must prepare for autonomous generative adversaries: malware systems that
propagate without human operators and are defined not by fixed exploit code, but by the ca-
pacity to reason about targets, adapt to observations, and synthesize attack logic in real time.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Good night and sweet dreams, my pretties!

Mister Blobby, a bulbous pink humanoid with yellow spots and nightmare eyes and mouth is cradling a swaddled baby with the head of Nigel Farage.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Here's my FAVOURITE blender of all time, the Polytron:

An advert from New Scientist in the 1970s for the Polytron, a wand blender on a stand with an external power supply/controller.

Caption reads "Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds"

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Okay, so there's this mess, most of which is the result of 25 years of me writing. (Only a third of the bottom right shelf is me, the RPG game books are third party merch, and there are multiple editions and some translations: but it's my career in one photo.)

The top five shelves of two full-width floor to ceiling bookcases (from an entire wall of them), loaded with single copies of everything of mine that's been published that I could lay my hands on. Chaotic and not in any particular order, with mass market and trade editions mingled. And some stuff is missing—I have no Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Romanian copies, for example.)

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Damn but this sequel to the Apollo Mission Reports is deeply disappointing:

Text of a NASA over the air message from Artemis 2, accompanying an image of the Earth rising over the lunar surface:

"No joy seeing the device
in the list of available devices
when I attempt to re-pair it
after doing the Bluetooth forget."

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Welp, here's @aliettedebodard.com being eaten by K1's octopus (while knitting):

Aliette de Bodard seated, crocheting, in a hotel conference suite. Her upper torso is almost entirely engulfed by a plush lilac-coloured octopus that appears to be eating her head.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Taps sign: HERE is my only use for LLMs in my fiction. (Text in alt text. This is part of the novel, that's the joke.)

This account has been translated into your language from the original source material using a non-sapient large language model. We would like to thank the Order of the Yellow Map for supporting this project with a generous grant, and for the use of their translation LLM.

Certain terms have been approximated, where possible, by using culturally appropriate cognates. Names of individuals have been replaced by equivalents. Similarly, institutions, ranks, religions, proverbs, idioms, quotations, and other culturally-determined signifiers have been translated into terms that will be familiar to the reader.

Units of duration and distance have also been converted.

The Order of the Yellow Map places guardrails on their LLMs that conform to their religious modesty code. As a result, the translation output may become non-specific, allusive, or flatly nonsensical when the inputs include blasphemous or sexually explicit content.

We apologize in advance for any hallucinations our LLM may have inadvertently introduced while generating this rough translation.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

I feel that Tom Tomorrow absolutely nailed it last Friday: i0.wp.com/www.austinch... (Source: www.austinchronicle.com/comics/this-...)

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

If you see this post a vampire who is not Dracula.

A photo of Beelzebub, wearing an ill-fitting white tech bro's skin as a suit—slicked back hair, goatee and mustache, puffy post plastic surgery eyes and cheeks because he's about a zillion years old—wearing a black turtleneck and dark suit jacket, gesticulating at the camera while leering, against a fiery background.

It's Larry Ellison.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Today's eldritch coffee is The Great Race of Yith (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow out of Time"):

A cup of mocha topped by an eldritch conical alien with a couple of tentacles coming out of it's pointy head

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Sigh. The muse is hard at work. Here's the opening of the new chew toy (space opera sequel to the one I just delivered: only writing the opening for now):

Screencap from an editor window. Text reads:

As the Lady Lydia fell towards the night side of the planet, all Jum could do was gape in dismay.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Asked Tabitha.

"Pretty sure," he said, hesitating slightly. "I mean, I think we left Jaeger at Sabine Dark? And this is Sabine Dark. Unless there's more than one Sabine Dark?"

Tabitha checked her mindscape: there wasn't, she saw, another Sabine Dark. Sabine Dark was a distressingly unique name for a planet. Not like Dirt, Earth, or Mudball, which were all as common as muck.

"There appear to have been some changes," she observed.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

So how's that "The A-Team" re-make going, y'all?

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Having a writers coffee sesh and our coffee artist is knocking it out of the ball park (this was a request for Cthulhu):

Cthulhu in foamed milk floating on a coffee cup

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

"Friends" is a beloved American sitcom that aired from 1994 to 2004, following six young adults—Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe—living in New York City. The show explores their friendships, romances, careers, and personal growth over ten seasons.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Ahem: you called for monkey's paws? Because we have the next generation:

Two open hands, held up. Each fingertip is wearing a tiny model open hand (a plastic molded fingertip glove), and some of these in turn have baby hands …

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Laundry Files TRRPG Specials for the Kickstarter backers who've been waiting are now signed (and awaiting despatch from Limerick) — adding alt text makes this bsky client crash reliably, so the pic is a photo of an office boardroom table stacked five layers deep in slipcased RPG rule books.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Here is how I visualize the typical AI-assisted author:

A cyberman from Doctor Who—a humanoid robotic being with metallic surfaces and an expressionless mask for a face—advances towards the camera in darkness, backlit by blue light, right arm raised menacingly and death ray emitter extended.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

I have ONE use for AI in my current novels-in-progress. This "Translator's Note" (text in alt-text) is itself part of the work of fiction:

TRANSLATORS NOTE

The events described in this account have been translated into your language from the original source material using a non-sapient large language model.

Certain terms have been approximated, where possible, by using culturally appropriate cognates. Names of individuals have been replaced by equivalents. Similarly, institutions, ranks, religions, and other culturally-determined signifiers have been translated into terms that will be more familiar to the reader. Units of duration and distance have also been converted.

We apologize in advance for any hallucinations our LLM may have inadvertently introduced in the process of generating this rough translation.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

I don't think the reviewer liked the movie …

Headline from the INDEPENDENT:

Melania review - First Lady is a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda

[one star]

Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled
with the angry and grieving, the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Memo to self: do not get into a slapfight with Menhit, she will get excited and the claws will come out:

A white-bellied tortoiseshell cat rearing up from a black Eames recliner to slap at an extended human hand that is still some distance away

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

ONE DAY until "The Regicide Report" drops! How did Bob's new ringtone get him sent to deal with a Dalek invasion in a Birmingham comic shop? Which civil service department is trying to murder the Queen? … And is Mo going to play one final encore on the Bone Violin? Coming out January 27th!

UK book cover of "The Regicide Report" by Charles Stross.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Sigh. Because you asked, here's a piece of my WIP, which is a space opera featuring dragons (briefly):

Dragons were derived from wild azhdarchid stock long ago, genetically engineered then tinkered with to optimize their metabolism for racing. Actual azhdarchids were lazy things, capable of flight but mostly hunting on the ground for smaller raptors and their young. In contrast, racing dragons were entirely dependent on human-supplied energy-rich nutrients known as zip fuels, and were bred to go as fast as possible in a straight line without exploding. They weren't particularly intelligent: ideally they reached the finishing line without falling out of the sky from heat stroke, or cannibalizing each other on the wing.

While it was possible to watch the dragon races in absentia, the telephoto coverage lacked some of the rewards of the in-person experience: the angry raptorial screeching, the rich aroma of draconic diarrhea, the potential excitement of a third of a ton of racing termagant detonating a hundred meters overhead. So of course the aristocracy thought it the greatest of sports after hunting, shooting, and whoring, and placed their bets accordingly.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

It'd be a real shame if this photo went viral again today, wouldn't it?

BFFs Nigel Farage and Donald Trump laughing together, in a gold-plated lift.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

"The Regicide Report", final novel in The Laundry Files, comes out in 11 days time! Here's a brief snippet from Chapter One (see alt text) …

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Because the internet is for cat pictures (and everybody needs more cat pictures this week): Here's Menhit, pretending to be broken.

A red armchair and a small tortoiseshell cat with a white fluffy belly and legs. She's lying with her head and neck on the seat cushion, her body and arse twisted through 90 degrees in two different planes and propped up against the back cushion, and her hind legs in front of her front legs. There is a puzzled expression on her face.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

Different. And they're infiltrating your toy shops, Berlin first:

A toy unicorn in a black leather bondage suit, with a grey ball gag for a nose.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Clearly the scriptwriters for the 2026 season of "Planet Urth: 21st century" have given up on plausibility and are working their way up to the season finale, in which the POTUS pupates and emerges in his final boss form, or imago (see pic): it's the only explanation that makes sense.

Pic of the Emperor Dalek from Doctor Two, surrounded by four hovering Dalek attendants. Daleks: evil cyborg aliens that resemble miniature conical battle tanks, bristling with death rays and an arm that started out as a repurposed drain plunger in the early 1960s, animated by pure hatred and spite. Emperor Dalek: a MUCH BIGGER version, its side panels open to reveal a horrible gelatinous tentacle monster and a weird glowy blue energy core of some kind.

If you see this in real life it means your planet and possibly your entire universe is about to be exterminated. (Luckily they're imaginary.)

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Found elsenet: seems to sum up the zeitgeist nicely!

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Okay, here goes: a snippet from my current WIP, a space opera set in a horrible empire, with the prompt HEIR, in which our protagonist realizes that her family are up to their ears in a really dodgy conspiracy (involving her coming arranged marriage) … #FridayFling

Text of screen shot:

At least the boy is about her own age and a viscount, the heir to a long-established earldom who's destined to become a planetary liege. They're not mating her to a septuagenerian widower who will breed her like a prize sow. But there's more: Mater and Pater are clearly part of some conspiracy with House Jaegerskioeld. She and the risibly named Humbert 18th were deliberately conceived to cement some kind of plan going back generations. And not even the high noble houses of the Permanence arrange dynastic alliances six generations in advance unless the payoff is astronomical.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

At least Kemi isn't shitting up the turret of a main battle tank! Unlike this numpty.

UK Defence Procurement Minister, James Cartlidge, in 2024, at the test firing of the new Challenger 3 MBT on a range in Germany. Ahem: *ex* defence procurement minister, that is!

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Guess who had an EPIC attack of The Rips at 2:40am, about 3 hours after this photograph was taken?

A small tortoiseshell cat peeping out of her blanket fort at night, a violet bed cover forming a tent over her head as she crouches on top of a gold duvet cover overprinted with a floral design.

The temperature outside is -3℃.

This is not a coincidence.

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I have ONE use for Gen AI in my fiction: see screencap below. (Full text in image alt-text. It's a very far future space opera, for context.) Note that this was not LLM-generated ...

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Attack monster? How can you POSSIBLY think this gorgeous cutie is an attack monster?

A white-bellied tortoiseshell cat sprawled upside down on top of an old NAD amplifier, languidly extending one white paw towards the camera

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Counterpoint: here is a Menhit welcoming me home after two weeks in Germany (a few seconds later she bit me to put me in my place):

A shaven-on-top bloke with a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses weaering a black turtleneck sits in a red armchair, left arm raised to scratch head. A small tortoiseshell cat with a white belly sits on the left arm of the chair, staring at who-knows-what. (In a few seconds she will turn and nip the author in the armpit.)

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

I am in a real ale pub in Amsterdam and here is the customer at the next table (who drops in regularly for dinner):

A majestic tabby cat sitting up on top of a circular table in a Dutch brown cafe, licking his lips and looking at the bartender (out of frame)

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