iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 04/10/2026

Cooool. I'm so looking forward to half the population being dumb fucks about pneumonic #plague just like how they were dumb fucks about covid. Worst deja vu ever. Oh and I'm so glad we have RFK at the helm this time around, it's gonna go great. /s www.newsweek.com/suspected-pl...

Pneumonic plague causes symptoms such as coughing and shortness of breath, and health experts say it is the most contagious type of plague, because it can be easily spread from person to person by respiratory particles.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 23/09/2026

I bought the Oreo cereal somewhat ironically... but it turns out to be kinda lit?! Alright, share your most unhinged cereal recs!

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 22/09/2026

These sure are interesting times in which to be trying to market books 😵‍💫 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Planetary boundaries’ necessary for flourishing of life have been massively breached, scientists warn.

New report shows key indicators of Earth’s health are ‘outside the safe operating space’ as climate disaster looms.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 22/09/2026

Absolutely breathtaking sociopathy on display here. #ai www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

The Authors Guild has highlighted some of the now public comments made by OpenAI executives in the case. "The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon,” OpenAI policy director Jack Clark stated in testimony given in May 2020. He further acknowledged that while “there will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway.”

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 10/09/2026

This argument is absurd. I already have a reverse chronological feed of only the people I follow: it's called Mastodon, I follow no brands on there, and therefore, I see no brand content. QED.

Mosseri said just a "very vocal minority” wants social media to go back to reverse chronological feeds, which he said would just incentivise people to post more.

"What ends up happening is the best way to get more reach is just to post more often and those who can afford to post the most often do and then therefore get the most reach,” he said.

"And it turns out your friends post a lot less than creators, who post a lot less than brands and companies."

He said people would be “overwhelmed” with content from brands, and creators and friends would be drowned out.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 04/09/2026

oh no I got too many books at worldcon my TBR will never recover from this

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 03/09/2026

I had to walk away from this purchase at Worldcon this year and believe me when I tell you it gave me pain to do so 😭

Signed first edition THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. Le Guin, priced at $2,000

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 02/09/2026

Forgive the poor photos—shot quickly through the car window at highway speed—but wow, Shasta Lake is *so low* 😬

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 02/09/2026

This is just gross. I'm so ready to be home. 💀

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 27/08/2026

This Worldcon display is going to print money 😂

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 25/08/2026

Preparation for Worldcon proceeds apace. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Anaheim later this week!

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 22/08/2026

I don't often buy a blind date with a book, but this summary was *cooking* 👀 bookshop.org/a/111499/978...

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 13/08/2026

Hell yeah ✊ www.seattletimes.com/business/kal...

ST

Seattle Times Mobile

16m

Breaking news

A WA judge ruled the online prediction market Kalshi must stop all operations in Washington.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 13/08/2026

The amount of direction thrash I've seen from senior leadership, regardless of studio, seems to have sharply increased along with budgets and team sizes, and that feels like fear of accountability when these huge dollar amounts are on the line. www.productionalchemist.com/p/inever-see...

Dicken's framing is that the bottleneck sits with the people telling the team what work to do. I would add the reason it stays there: it is the only part of the system where nobody keeps score. Every other discipline in a modern studio operates under measurement. Art has throughput and quality bars. Engineering has velocity, defect rates, build health. QA has coverage and escape rates.

Production has burndowns and forecasts and Monte Carlo distributions that will tell you your ship date to a confidence interval.

The decision layer has status updates.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 13/08/2026

Yup, this is every big game I ever worked on. We all *know* the right thing to do, but nobody has the political will to actually *do* it. www.productionalchemist.com/p/inever-see...

A prototype exists to answer a question. The answer is the deliverable. The code and the content are apparatus, and the right thing to do with apparatus is bin it and build the real thing properly, now that you know what the real thing is.

Almost nobody does this. What happens instead is

that the surviving prototype gets promoted. There

is a date, the prototype runs, and proposing a

from-scratch rebuild of something that already

works is a conversation nobody wants to have

with a publisher. So the thing built in six weeks to

test one question becomes the skeleton of a four-

year production, and every system added

afterwards is shaped by decisions that were made

to get an answer quickly.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 12/08/2026

Currently crashing out over the fact that we're all trying so hard to be "visible" and "consistent" on social media and then MacKenzie's just out here chillin' like "lol, lmao" www.seattletimes.com/business/mac...

Scott, the former wife of Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, announced Saturday that she had written a new novel, her first book since 2013.

The novel is sure to draw more attention to Scott, an intensely private person who has only spoken through annual or biannual blog posts since 2020, when she began giving away billions of dollars a year and upending philanthropy.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 29/07/2026

They ran almost 15,000 authors' published, copyrighted books through an AI checker—itself an AI system—exposing their work to genAI without consent, then turned around and accused *the authors* of using AI. Cool study! Very ethical! 🤡 arxiv.org/abs/2607.203...

$Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg, Paramveer Dhillon Generative AI can produce book-length works of fiction at near-zero cost. These books are often dismissed as low-quality ``slop'' that buyers will ignore, and are assumed to carry little commercial weight. We test that assumption with full-text AI detection across 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026, matched to daily sales records through June 2026. None of these books disclose whether or not they contain AI-produced content. We find that books for which we detected substantial AI text (> 25\%) make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales. Even so, they reach commercial scale, winning a growing share of sales over time and taking more of the scarce top-rank positions once held by books with no detected AI text. Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. The market therefore added selling books faster than it added revenue, and revenue per selling book fell across most genres. Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Among top-selling books, those with substantial AI text draw on more distinctive language from existing books than do books with no AI text; for these books overlap rises with revenue, a gradient we do not detect for books with no AI text. Generative AI can thus reshape a creative market through scale rather than quality. Our results bear directly on the market-effect question at the center of the fair use defense to copyright infringement.$

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 24/07/2026

Our last two titles for 2026, feminist speculative drama FRUITS OF OUR LABOR by Ian Patterson and cozy folk horror LIGHT & EARTH & MARROW by Jeannie Marschall, are coming up in August and September. I designed a couple of ads for them for Locus Magazine, which I’m quite proud of!

If the world can change this much by listening to one woman, imagine what would happen if it listened to all of them.

In a near-future America where women have just achieved asexual reproduction, three converging perspectives tell the story of a profound societal transformation.

“Patterson writes the future with the weight of history behind every page.” –S.J. Lee, author of the Altered Earth series and All That Holds Between

10% off with code: LOCUS26

Pre-order Now!
August 25, 2026

shirakipress.com/fol

Neighbors help each other. If they can.

In this cozy horror novella, hedge witch Tilly Reinicke tries to guide her new neighbors, the Bells, to respect the paranormal world around them as they build their new home. But the Bells’ unbelief in—and contempt for—the supernatural threatens everyone, for the Others do not suffer disrespect lightly… and soon they will walk the Paths again.

“My jaw DROPPED at that climax.” –NetGalley review

10% off with code LOCUS26

Pre-order Now!
SEPTEMBER 22, 2026

shirakipress.com/lem

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 27/06/2026

It is absolutely wild to me that we've managed to keep this thing going for this long. 👀 #writing #publishing

Screenshot from my LinkedIn employment history showing that we've been running Shiraki Press for 1 year and 5 months already

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 06/06/2026

#astrology folks: "June 19 Venus and Jupiter meet in Cancer, this only happens once every 12 years and it's gonna be 🌟lit🌟" Me: *does the math* So uhhh 2014 was Gamergate and 2002 was war in Iraq and 1990 was also war in Iraq and that's every "Venus+Jupiter in Cancer" in my generation's lifetime 🫠

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 19/05/2026

Sapphic science fantasy adventure with political intrigue and a building revolution... and you don't realize it until later, but the whole thing is fundamentally about care. It's our third publication, and I love it a lot. shirakipress.com/cot #booksky #sapphic #sciencefiction #fantasy #smallpress

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 24/04/2026

My question for our #ai overlords is: what are all these replaced white-collar workers supposed to... do? Because, you see, you have stopped paying them. When your AI disappears my mortgage debt and makes groceries free, then we can talk. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Meta and Microsoft are cutting thousands of employees as they bet big on AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting productivity needs.

Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees – to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its US workforce of roughly 125,000.

What have they said about AI? Mark Zuckerberg said in January that AI was making some hiring unnecessary. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI chief, said in February that he believed AI would be able to replace most white-collar work within the next 12 to 18 months.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 12/04/2026

What the fuck are we *doing* here?

Philosopher Derek Shiller develops this perspective in arguing that

...our resources are finite, and the same resources that might allow human beings to live ... could be more effectively spent on creating and sustaining artificial creatures. When that becomes the case, the beneficent thing to do is to choose that our children be artificial, rather than natural.

He concludes that we should then "engineer our extinction so that our planet's resources can be devoted to making artificial creatures with better lives."

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 12/04/2026

if you see this post an image you saved because it made you laugh.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 12/04/2026

Woke up to this absolute banger from Rebecca Solnit. Quick, someone inform the rest of journalism! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they're gone - to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 10/04/2026

Saw this at #norwescon and thought it was clever!

ECOLOGY is part of TECHNOLOGY. Let's try to understand both!

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 09/04/2026

This cursed thing was visited upon me and now I'm making it everybody's problem

Shrimp chocolate cups with a cocktail sauce center

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 08/04/2026

Fire Emblem: Heroes is extremely serious business.

Palla, dressed as a rabbit, saying she is pleased to greet me dressed as a rabbit. 😂

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 03/04/2026

Our ad placement for Shiraki Press in the #norwescon program book is 🤩 (we're lower left) I had no idea when I submitted the ad that this is where it would land, but I am 👏not👏mad👏about👏it ♥️♥️♥️

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 03/04/2026

My induction stove is probably my favorite appliance in the house. I'm shocked their market penetration is this low. All the best parts of cooking with gas, without the risk of blowing your house up! What's not to love?

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 02/04/2026

I keep a work log of everything I did each day. Since getting into #publishing, nearly every day's log looks just like this post. 💀

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 01/04/2026

I love these interactive articles. Great visualization of the amount of junk we’re filling our orbit with. The tech bros are gonna undo their own fantasy of moving humanity off-world. www.theguardian.com/science/ng-i...

The surge in orbital activity has created a significant collision risk. There have already been crashes, including a 2009 event where a US satellite hit a defunct Russia military satellite.
Tens of thousands of tiny fragments of metal are now spinning at high velocities.
The big fear is that future collisions will cause a domino effect where Earth's orbit becomes cluttered with tiny, high-speed bits of metal.
That could create a near-impenetrable layer of debris that would make space launches so dangerous it would essentially trap humans on
Earth.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 01/04/2026

Uhhhh is Google Maps okay? This is a mess. 😬

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 28/03/2026

Very good bansai at the Pacific Bansai Museum!

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 28/03/2026

Earlier this week, we took a short little break to Kauai to decompress and shake off the SAD. I know everyone’s all “the beach!” but I’m really quite fond of their mountains. 😍

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 27/03/2026

As someone who currently depends in large part on investments to survive—thanks in part to the tech industry’s AI- and greed-driven implosion—I really cannot overstate how pissed I am at this trash president and his trash minions trashing everything in sight.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 26/03/2026

Book mail! Brianne spotted and insta-ordered this gorgeous Folio Society edition of one of my favorite fantasy stories: THE LAST UNICORN. The animated film is a classic, but the book is so much richer and deeper, and this presentation is a stunner.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 25/03/2026

Book Mail! I actually got this lovely edition from Winter Texts a few weeks ago. It’s a companion book to the Oregon Contemporary exhibit “A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin” featuring some of her texts, and essays by various additional contributors.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 24/03/2026

“We’re laying off a thousand people so we can build a ton of new shit!” 🤡 This industry defies logic. www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/n...

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 24/03/2026

Three Shiraki Press proofs side by side. Making our logo line up consistently on the spine was my personal design indulgence. ☺️ shirakipress.com

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 22/03/2026

"How do you keep doing a thing you love, that you’ve done for decades, when you hate what the industry for it has become (and your continued health insurance and ability to sleep indoors depends on it?)" "Find somewhere else to do what you love." buttondown.com/monteiro/arc...

The cruelest thing the tech industry ever did was to tell you that they cared about you. They built you nice campuses, they called you family, they gave you clothes with their name on it. They fed you, they washed your clothes, they got you to ride in their Pride floats. They made you feel like you had not just a job, but a community. And yes, they paid you well. The stupidest thing we ever did—and I say this with nothing but love for you in my heart—but the stupidest thing we ever did was to believe it. IT was neither true, nor never-ending.

The same industry that once called you family is now using the fruits of your labor to commit war crimes. The same industry whose leaders once posted front-page missives to their sites about doing a better job in terms of diversity and inclusion are now selling their technology to fascists who use it to bomb schools.

The industry has decided what it wants to be.

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 17/03/2026

jfc somebody put the mad king in supermax already, this shit is bananas

Donald Trump has said he expects to have “the honor of taking Cuba” after a US oil blockade caused the electricity grid to collapse, plunging the country’s 10 million people into darkness.

He claimed on Monday that he could do “anything I want” with Cuba amid US negotiations with Havana over the country’s future. “You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When will the United States do it?” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I do believe I’ll be … having the honor of taking Cuba.”

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Josh Sutphin @joshsutphin.com · 14/03/2026

Le Guin will forever remain my hero 🙏

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