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Shannon Phillips

@joshannonphillips.com
359 followers 194 following 765 posts

Writer and mom living in Oakland. Short speculative fiction and serialized novels at joshannonphillips.substack.com. I like old things, wild places, tall tales, and the people who tell them.🐉

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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 10/10/2026
The only time I've ever seen another person's genitalia in a public restroom was when I was helping my young son pee. I was certainly more comfortable bringing a little boy into the ladies' room than I would've been accompanying him into the gents, and it all worked peachy because WE WERE IN A STALL
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 10/10/2026
The pleasures of a really good mustard are underrated
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pmamtraveller.bsky.social @pmamtraveller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Bat vase by Richard Freiwald
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rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Godspeed, ma'am. "Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 03/10/2026
I think my intuitive taxonomy would be that rats/mice scurry, fast spiders and insects skitter, slower moving arthropods like lobsters scutter across the ocean floor, and scuttling can only be performed by something like a group of raccoons.
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Ingo Römling @ingoroemling.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Hera Syndulla from "Star Wars Rebels" © Lucasfilm Ltd. Standing character pose with perspective grid 🙂 #drawing #character #posedrawing #noai
A sketch of a female character in orange clothing (Hera Syndulla from STAR WARS REBELS), together with a simplified technical drawing and a perspective frame.
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The rabbi telling Anthropic that he thinks what they’re doing is fine, because Claude is just a machine to him, but if they’re right (and it is conscious), then they’re world historic monsters, is really interesting.
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Drew Magary @drewmagary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Once again it is October, king of all months
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Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
A long horizontal sign based on the ones at CTA stations that tell what stop you’re at. It’s gray with red, purple, and brown bands at either ends. Four pigeons are perched on the sign in various pigeon poses as a sunrise is seen in the background. The sign itself reads, ‘Maybe It will happen today’
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Debjit Dutta @debjitduttaart.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"Washroom" Painting study
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 29/09/2026
I've got this one
A Softer World three-panel comic. Background is a nerdy girl photographed in blurred orange shades. Text reads: "I have super powers and a costume Every night I panic just outside my door But every night I try again"
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Tom Joscelyn @tomjoscelyn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
As @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social likes to say, I’m alarmed. At the UN this week, Trump dismissed concerns over AI safety as a “hoax.” And that’s the position of his administration. Needless to say, it isn’t a hoax - and we’ve got two-plus more years of this (at least) while AI threats grow.
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Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Sometimes it’s better to stretch or break the rules but it requires knowledge of the rules and what they achieve to know when to do so. The rulebook is not the Bible, but it is not a paperweight either. Following it will yield better results than making shit up willy-nilly.
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i don't know that anything has had more of an effect on my thinking about Bad Thoughts than knowing about Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome www.newyorker.com/magazine/200...
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An Error in the Code
What can a rare disorder tell us about human behavior?
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RedruM @dorsalstream.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
[standing out in my corduroy field] Beautiful, she’s almost ready for harvest
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Good Trailcams @goodtrailcams.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 23/09/2026
@samdphillips.bsky.social get a cup of coffee and you will be Mr. Autumn Man
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 23/09/2026
I bought Sam a cardigan and then my awesome sister-in-law gave ME a cardigan and now it's autumn which means CARDIGAN TIME. I am so stoked to be the cute old couple in cardigans.
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Lu @rendernev.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Welcome, Autumnal Equinox. The King of Autumn greets thee.🍂
My painting of a pumpkin rider on a black horse surrounded by autumn leaves and mushrooms.
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REwadent Evil @ewacat.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
if you ever struggle with names when worldbuilding just remember there's a whole massive mountain range called The Rockies
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Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
We don’t want thunder; we want rum
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Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A digital illustration based on a scene from the German Expressionist silent film Metropolis (1927). What we see is a robot woman seated in a chair, colored in gradated maroon shades. She's a shiny brass color in a sculptural art deco style staring implacably or incomprehendingly outward. Two sockets on either side of her head and many such other sockets on the chair have wires leading away out of frame. The background, colored in shades of blue is divided into radial sections with lightning bolt edges. (All these colors are purely notional as the source material is all black and white.)Around the chair and the robot are four sets of equally-spaced concentric triple rings or some sort of energy or electricity. Riding the top edges of these rings is jaggedy, electric lettering reading 'Maybe it will happen today'.
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 25/06/2026
Meanwhile memory chips are increasing in price so fast that by the time Neuromancer comes out this fall you will *actually* be able to get killed in Chiba City for 3 MB of hot RAM.
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Frovo @frovo.bsky.social · 27/05/2023
ROBIN: the batmobile won’t start BATMAN: check the battery ROBIN: what’s a tery
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Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
A digital illustration of an attempt to make a fake illuminated manuscript. There’s a fancy illuminated drop capital M. Lots of medieval-type ornamentation, a little illustration in the corner of a rabbit with a battle ax having some sort of confrontation with a little bipedal lizard thing that has an arm instead of a neck and head which is holding a dagger. There’s an orange dragonish beast wrapped around the top of everything and lettering done in some kind of fanciful script reading ‘Maybe it will happen today’
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Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Everyone involved in this, including the Palantir employees who built the software and the executives that sold it, need to be tried for warcrimes
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Debjit Dutta @debjitduttaart.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Sci-fi Lab More shots from my recent Blender project Better quality turntable on my YouTube page :- youtu.be/pyQkrd4baRI?...
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3 or 4 rats @ratsack.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
hampter
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Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Well done to the picture editor who captioned this delightful snap of a black pig swimming off the west coast of Greece “swine-dark sea” www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Swine-dark sea ... Mediterranean black pigs swim at a beach on the private island of Atokos, in the lonian Sea off the west coast of Greece. The island, which is uninhabited by humans, is owned by a shipping magnate
Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
People are like “LLMs can’t think, they can just resolve incredibly complex problems, sometimes beyond the reach of humans, often by progressing step by step through a multipart process” and I guess at some level I’m sort of curious if you’re defining “think” as “that thing humans do”
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
No. This Cory Doctorow post is awful and borders on actual misinformation. The fact that a widely respected voice like him is spreading this kind of false narrative is, again, a giant blaring alarm about the effect the Bluesky info environment is having on people’s brains.
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Guys the Hugging Face stuff isn’t marketing. This belief is not supported by anything but a need for it to be true, and a giant red flashing warning sign that you’re in a poisoned information environment, one where your peers are all reaffirming an outright delusion about what’s going on.
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The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) @themerl.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Anyways who wants to look at some cool drawings of engines? merl.reading.ac.uk/news-and-vie...
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Digitising the Fowler archives
Learn about our project to improve access to our Fowler archives of engine drawings, including 7,171 new drawings in our database.
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Mikel Reparaz @wikiparaz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
PAUL: What’s in the box? REVEREND MOTHER: Pain. [PAUL hesitantly puts his hand in the BOX, then FROWNS IN CONFUSION. He pulls out A BAGUETTE.] REVEREND MOHER: Hōn hōn,
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Max @jaegerpilotmax.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Discord did a dragon x fruit challenge. Banana dragon
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 11/09/2026
they're behind you
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1st Minnesota Volunteers Stan Account @himdogson.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Rip Calvin’s dad you would have loved bluesky
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Jane Espenson @janeespenson.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Looks like they're selling it in smaller and smaller units. Next year it'll be in easy-to-swallow capsules.
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
never a good start
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Shannon Phillips @joshannonphillips.com · 10/09/2026
I propped my kid's plastic toy up on my bedroom windowsill and took this photo with my phone
Godzilla silhouetted against an orange sky
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alix e. harrow @alixeharrow.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
"books should start with action" "the first pages must introduce the protagonist" "world building should be invisible" hush child ms. robin mckinley is speaking
CHAPTER

1

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrusta-tion of magic at least once a week, because if you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself-but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansies-put dry in a vase-would probably last a day, looking like ordinary pansies, be-fore they went greyish-dun and collapsed into magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would begin to smudge and

crumble as soon as you picked it up.) The best way to do it was to have a fairy as a member of your household, because she (it was usually a she) could lay a finger on the kettle just as it came to a boil (absentminded fairies could often be recognised by a pad of scar-tissue on the finger they favoured for kettle-cleaning) and murmur a
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
they are upon us
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
a lot of people believe that AI people do not legitimately believe in what they are saying, and that it is just marketing. it is not just marketing and they legitimately do believe what they are saying, and the people _departing_ labs, _pre-IPO_, in order to express their misgivings even more so.
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David Petersen @mouseguard.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Art process post for a piece in my most recent Mouse Guard sketchbook of Sienna sheltering from the rain with a bee from the Lockhaven hives www.patreon.com/posts/143837...
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ContempraInn 🌹 @contemprainn.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Studies show that watching a beaver eating cabbage lowers stress levels by 15% so enjoy 😊
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Lee Cronin’s Pablo Hidalgo @infinata.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Smurves should be the plural.
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Classic SF with Andy Johnson @andyjohnson.xyz · 31/08/2026
Some evocative SF bridges in this week's roundup from @70sscifiart.bsky.social. I particularly like the piece from Philippe Druillet, and its likely 1844 inspiration from Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard.
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Bridges
When it comes to visually appealing architecture, bridges have a certain sweeping gravitas.
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Wallenstein Appreciator @marbleliberal.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
48% actually. I keep this graph on my phone
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Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
If you can't handle the idea of a kid being a real person who's going to want and need and dream and believe things you may not agree with, maybe parenthood is not for you. Get a turtle.
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David Petersen @mouseguard.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
My painting of Siobhan the Matriarch from Mouse Guard: Dawn of the Black Axe is going up for auction at Baltimore Comic Con to benefit the Hero Initiative! More about the auction, info to bid remotely by proxy, and other wonderful pieces by talented creators: www.heroinitiative.org/hero-initiat...
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