Kit Walker's Blog

My dad has been using the same computer since 2014, and it’s been failing by degrees for the past couple of years now. A few weeks ago, he finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a new machine running Windows 11.

Friends and enemies: I cannot overstate the extent to which Windows 11 is a fucking nightmare, built to harass and exploit the average user at every turn. My dad’s a reasonably tech-savvy guy, but if I weren’t constantly on hand to deal with all the dark pattern button prompts and notification spam he’s been getting from his own fucking OS, this 73-year-old man would be trapped in a hell from which there is no escape.

As a solution, a few of my associates have recommended switching my dad (again, 73 years old) over to Linux. I will not be doing that.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we bring our friend Tanner Vogelgesang onboard to talk about John Waters’ Serial Mom. We then proceed to spend most of the episode gushing about Kathleen Turner and her facial acting.

“Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” is now serializing on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! The first chapter is available now, and subsequent chapters will be posted weekly on Mondays.

Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient.

But a district court in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard that Woods, 59, admitted under questioning that she was trying to save him from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers.

Crypto scammers are targeting the thousands of ships stranded near the Strait of Hormuz—and at least one ship that faced Iranian gunfire may have been tricked into believing it had paid Iran for safe passage.

Ghana has rejected a proposed $300 million US health deal, with officials telling DW the agreement raised major concerns over data privacy, sovereignty and constitutional oversight.

Writing update: I am discovering research questions so obscure that I could basically write whatever I want, since nobody would be in a position to prove me wrong.

-K

In the British government’s latest round of throwing policy at the wall to see what sticks, a bill has just cleared parliament that would permanently ban tobacco products (cigarettes, vapes, dip, etc) for anyone currently under the age of 18.

To be clear: this is not just a ban on smoking for under-18s. It’s already illegal to smoke in the UK if you’re a minor. What this bill proposes is that, if you were born on or after January 1, 2009, you would not be allowed to buy or consume any tobacco product ever, in your life.

You may or may not know this about me, but I’m descended from a long line of thieves, smugglers, and enemies of the state. My great-grandfather, Harry Walker, was a runaway Barnardo Home Boy, rum-runner, World War I veteran, and rural policeman. There is considerable overlap between some of those life stages. Apparently, the only reason he wasn’t kicked out of the Alberta Provincial Police for bootlegging is because he appealed to his local member of parliament—incidentally, also one of his customers—who got him transferred to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police instead. The APP was disbanded shortly afterward.

So when I heard about this upcoming ban, every one of my ancestors sat up and recognized it as a foundation for the easiest bootlegging operation of all time.

Think about it! You wouldn’t even have to go through the hassle of smuggling the product over the border. Tobacco would remain legal to import and sell in the UK; everyone born before 2009 would still be allowed to smoke, after all. All you’d need to do is legally buy the product in bulk, then sell it off at a markup to all the pissed off twenty-somethings who missed the boat. And as time went on, your customer base would only get bigger.

Anyway, if the bottom falls out of this whole writing thing, you’ll find me on the streets of Newcastle selling loose cigarettes.

A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.

“Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” is the eleventh story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one’s a story about navigating a sexual relationship with someone when their trauma keeps looming over the both of you and you’re not really sure what to do about it. It’s also a story about stealing from the English for fun and profit.

It therefore contains, as my friend Ian described it, “twenty pages of theft and fucking.”

Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from “forcefully” being inserted “into every facet of your conscious experience.” At another, he celebrated “undermining democracy.” At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as “actually really sweet and tender and loving,” while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being “so alone.”

For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt.

The NFI Industries employee was promptly arrested in connection with the blaze after a video showing a man lighting tall stacks of toilet paper on fire went viral online.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the man could be heard saying in the video.

On a related note, Green Party MP Hannah Spencer recently set off a minor uproar for pointing out it’s a bit weird how much everyone in parliament drinks. So it turns out the same government officials who want to ban smoking, porn, and transing your gender are a little sensitive about anyone looking sideways at their lifestyles.

-K

Alyx Jones is an independent game developer from the UK. She’s been working on The Quiet Things, a deeply personal game about sexual abuse, trauma, and survival. A trailer for The Quiet Things was slated to be shown during the BAFTA Games Awards on April 17; for an independent developer, this was a huge opportunity.

Until the trailer was pulled from the show at the last minute.

Jones reports that she had already revised the trailer once because BAFTA flagged certain imagery (“an object inspection of a craft knife and a statue breaking out of a mirror”) as potentially violent. Not only is this silly on its face, it’s also incredibly weird considering how permissive game trailers usually are when it comes to violent imagery; to list just one example, the Baldur’s Gate III announcement trailer features a man vomiting his own teeth.

Nevertheless, Jones made the requested changes; she was then informed, the night before the awards ceremony, that her trailer had been pulled from the show anyway. The stated reason was that “there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience.”

24 hours is more than enough time to throw some white text on a black screen with a list of trigger warnings. Even a live warning from someone onstage with a microphone would take less than 10 seconds.

A responsible journalist would be hesitant to draw any hard and fast conclusions from all this, but I’m not a journalist. I’m an artist — one who’s experienced my own fair share of corporate meddling in my work. And if I were in Alyx Jones’ position, I would quite confidently believe I was being jerked around by someone who never intended to let my game see the light of day.

BAFTA has since stated that they “fully support games that engage with difficult subjects, and we made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority.” I’m not sure what the word “support” is supposed to mean in this context, considering what they put Alyx Jones through; if they’re not willing to broadcast a 2-minute trailer in support of games like The Quiet Things, what are they willing to do?

The use of words like “wellbeing” is also telling.

For the record, Jones’ trailer is incredibly tame; it features first-person game footage of the player character walking through various environments while characters in voiceover talk around the protagonist’s traumatic experiences in vague terms. The trailer only alludes to sexual assault; there’s a brief bit of VO where the main character says “stop” twice in a distraught voice.

This, apparently, is too distressing for the average BAFTA viewer — because trauma stemming from sexual abuse, especially childhood sexual abuse, is so stigmatized in polite society that we’d all rather pretend it doesn’t happen. Even the gentlest reminder that it exists is tantamount, in the eyes of some, to a psychic assault. For the sake of everyone’s mental health, victims must be silenced.

Incidentally, this exact stigma is what The Quiet Things was created to address. You can watch the trailer here.

A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.

The eleventh story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree,” comes out on April 27!

What the first few days of ABS are showing is that this system is somehow actually highlighting the human element of the game, and adding another layer of strategy to a game that prides itself as being the thinking person’s sport.

Dave Pelzer’s story is real and it’s his and he can tell it however he wants. But three million copies of that story in a market that rejected everything that didn’t look like it is something different. That’s a monoculture. And a monoculture does political work regardless of whether any individual story inside it is true or false.

It is very worrying that a woman presented by British media and politics as an expert on [trans] healthcare was allowed on the BBC to rehash unchallenged the 75-year-old nonsense of a dead paedophile.

Unrelated to anything, I’ve just finished season 2 of The Wire and I need to know who is feeding Wee-Bey’s fish.

-K

I started using Scrivener in 2012 or so, and I’ve kept the same license going ever since — despite the fact that support ended for my version of Scrivener years ago. I’m now at the point where the app crashes on two startups out of every three. Upgrading to the latest version of Scrivener would cost me $80, so I figured I’d try out some other (cheaper) writing apps and see if they were viable options instead.

This is how I found out I am yet again a severe edge case with the workflow of an insane person, and Scrivener is more or less the only writing app with a design that accommodates my bullshit.

I guess I’m spending $80.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we attempt to say The Bye-Bye Man with a straight face (0% success rate) and find out what happens when somebody decides to make a horror movie by just slapping random spooky elements together.

The Casefile of Jay Moriarty is now available in paperback on DriveThruFiction!

Having held both this and the Amazon proof in my hands, I can tell you the DTF edition is a much nicer print job. If you’re willing to wait 2-3 weeks for shipping, this is the one to get.

When Sara was referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) – the system designed to identify and support victims and survivors of modern slavery – the Home Office asked her to produce extensive evidence of her exploitation and take part in interviews totalling many hours.

Advocates for civil liberties and immigrants have called on Ottawa to back down from a proposed expansion of immigration officers’ discretionary power to cancel documents and terminate processing and have said [Bill C-12] could endanger those who enter Canada under fear of persecution.

When we look at what is compelling and desirable about living in her world, the vision that her characters present, and (yes) the inherent nature of “Hogwarts Houses,” it becomes clear that Rowling’s art embraces tribalism and an ‘us versus them’ ethos with deep earnesty. Its comfort, grown all the more comforting in the cold social-media-addled word we now find ourselves living in, is the warm comfort of ‘belonging.’

And in order to truly belong, others must not.

If you are a Bluesky person or a Fediverse person, you can now follow me over on Wafrn. No, I don’t know how you pronounce that either.

-K

Book publisher Hachette has pulled out of its deal with author Mia Ballard over accusations that her novel, Shy Girl, was written with the assistance of a large language model.

I say “accusations” because the actual evidence here is pretty thin. The arguments presented are all either “the writing looks like AI” or “we ran bits of the novel through an AI detector and it told us the text was AI-generated.”

First off, human beings are quite bad at telling the difference between machine-generated and human-generated art. The logical inconsistencies in the plot and prose could be the result of a chatbot overrunning its context window, or just sloppy writing, or (considering the subject matter) a deliberate attempt at surrealism. Most of the “obvious tells” of LLM-generated text (em dashes, rule of three, etc.) are actually features of a formal African English education, because LLMs were largely trained by criminally underpaid African workers. And guess who most often gets accused of “sounding like a chatbot”?

Then we get into AI detection tools, which The New York Times claims to have used. Many “AI detectors” also use machine learning to some degree — analyzing and comparing two sets of text is something LLMs are built to do — but these tools tend to produce a lot of false results. The differences between human-generated text and machine-generated text are going to be largely invisible to an LLM designed to mechanically produce text that could plausibly pass as something a human wrote.

And that’s not even getting into the “AI detectors” that simply paste the submitted text into ChatGPT and ask it, “hey, did you write this?” To quote a friend of mine with approximate knowledge of many things, “anyone who tells you they have a tool to accurately detect AI is probably a liar, and liars love to use AI, so it’s probably just feeding the text into ChatGPT and asking.”

Three years ago, I noted that because “it looks like it was made by AI” is an accusation that can’t be proven right or wrong, it would inevitably be used as an ideological bludgeon against any art an accuser personally didn’t like very much. And now it looks as though a lot of people really didn’t like Shy Girl, didn’t think anyone else should like Shy Girl, and found the perfect way to bully it off the market.

(Does it feel good to be right all the time? No, it’s awful.)

Trying to suss out whether a book was written using an LLM or not is, in my opinion, pointless. A book should be criticized on the basis of whether it sucks — and, so far, provably LLM-written books have universally sucked. When an LLM manages to write a novel that’s actually good, we can revisit this topic.

And I’m fine with making it a rule that nobody can publish a novel they didn’t personally write, but in that case someone should have a word with Tom Clancy’s corpse.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a young boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

The final chapter of “A Reckoning in Whitehall” has been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.

People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems.

In other words, the employees most impressed by corporate jargon were also the ones least likely to think critically about it.

It’s tempting to reinscribe an essentialist reading, and see Bound as a trans film now because it was made by trans filmmakers. Or we could think of transness in cinema a little more expansively. In his book Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Cáel M. Keegan suggests that we read Bound as an “invitation to sense differently.” Which is a part of the trans experience—we feel a truth via the body that appearances belie. In Bound, we find the beginnings of a journey into a certain trans sensibility that runs through all the Wachowskis’ work.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.

Would you believe this is not even the first time I’ve quoted that bit from Broadcast News?

-K

It’s fascinating to me how the cultural object of The Book, defined as a physical stack of paper with words in it, generates so much more excitement than an ebook. Both take arguably the same amount of effort, and yet one “counts” as an achievement in a way that the other doesn’t.

Anyway: The Book.

A modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous enemies!

Following his polite ejection from the SAS at the end of a decade-long military career, Captain Sebastian Moran is at loose ends. Between cheating at cards and freelance jobs as a security consultant, he’s just barely managing to keep busy — but when a routine penetration test goes awry, Moran is thrown into the path of a brilliant, short-tempered hacker named Jay Moriarty.

Up until now, Moriarty has worked alone. But Moran is clever, unpredictable, and unlike anyone Moriarty has ever met, and the attraction between them quickly escalates into an intense, confusing relationship.

Together, Moriarty and Moran must face an aerospace executive covering up a deadly secret, a real estate developer who will do anything to climb the social ladder, a famous author funding a hate movement, a holiday resort full of international gangsters, and the treasonous leader of a rogue mercenary company.

Collects the first five installments of Kit Walker’s Casefile of Jay Moriarty series, revised and edited, plus three bonus stories!

Paperbacks are currently only available from Amazon, but will be arriving on DriveThruFiction soon! If you want your copy fast, get the Amazon edition. If you’re willing to wait for higher print quality, stay tuned for a link to the DTF edition.

Practice and study are the two ways to improve in any field. Everyone knows this, which is why I kind of love this discourse. It’s so absurd that it loops around from inanity to insanity.

The message of many data labelers and of the lawyers who have been helping them is that artificial intelligence is not a magical tool built by people in San Francisco making millions of dollars a year and pushing their companies to insane valuations. Artificial intelligence is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers around the world.

Xikipedia is a pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia. It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content.

My elderly relatives keep promising/threatening to read the new collection. I can’t exactly stop them, but I’m really hoping they don’t ask me to explain all the gay stuff.

-K

When I was a kid, my mom explained to me why she didn’t really enjoy Mother’s Day: she felt as if celebrating mothers one day a year gave everyone free reign to take them for granted during the other 364. I kind of got it after a while, but I couldn’t relate — until the corporate world started making such a big fucking deal out of International Women’s Day.

A few years ago, one of my previous employers released a promotional IWD video in which various female employees explained how the company made them feel included and supported. The next year, that same company fired their majority-female office support staff and hired them back as contractors so it wouldn’t have to pay them benefits.

Another year, a different company I was working for at the time decided to commemorate IWD by giving all the women in the office (or everyone perceived as a woman, anyway) a potted plant and a personalized card featuring quotes from famous women throughout history. As a dyke with a case of the Genders who had no interest in going to paint nite, I was firmly on the margins of the “Women of [COMPANY]” social group; the card perfectly encapsulated that whole state of affairs. It featured a quote from Margaret Thatcher.

You know, noted LGBT ally Margaret Thatcher.

The plant was also a bit on-the-nose. “Here is a thing you are now responsible for keeping alive whether you like it or not. Happy International Women’s Day.”

There’s one week left before the release of my first Casefile of Jay Moriarty anthology! The collection comes out on March 16 in print and ebook formats, and includes the first five installments of the series as well as three bonus stories.

One article from The Times, published in 2022, claimed that at least 1,000 families were planning mass legal action against the Tavistock gender clinic for rushing youngsters into taking puberty blockers.

However, a freedom of information (FOI) request to the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, shared by Yorkshire Bylines, revealed that, between 2012 and 2022, only eight complaints over healthcare provisions had been lodged.

… the bystander effect is actually more complicated than its mythological version, and it begins with a story that has been distorted beyond recognition—that of the murder of Kitty Genovese herself.

And now we have Thomas Plamburger, someone who clearly does not possess the emotional regulation to help a partner through a difficult hike. The judge said he “struggles to switch from his own abilities to the abilities of others,” but to be clear, the actual problem (in my opinion) is that he just doesn’t view his female partners as fully human or worth considering. Their inability to keep up with him makes him angry, and so he punishes them by abandoning them in dangerous conditions — twice, that we know of.

Apparently the UK has recently been experiencing something called “blood rain.” Wasn’t me.

-K

A few days ago, a mutual of mine on Tumblr asked a pretty interesting question: “why do people get uncomfortable with political fanfic?” She went on to point out that “A lot of you love to boast that you love the dirtiest, nastiest smut ever, why can’t you handle someone writing ‘fascism is bad’?”

It reminded me of the time a book marketer told me The Casefile of Jay Moriarty was too political for queer romance readers, and too gay for political thriller readers. As if those two categories were completely mutually exclusive.

Fanfiction and romance fiction have a lot in common, and not just because fanfic tends to have a lot of sex and romance in it. Both are capable of being really really good — like, “permanently alters your brain chemistry, haunts you for the rest of your life” good — but are largely viewed as inherently frivolous. Both mediums are often read, written, and published by people who don’t particularly give a shit (much to the frustration of readers, writers, and publishers who do).

And so, very often, a reader going into a fanfic or romance novel will be doing so with the expectation that these works are low-effort; that the experience they’re about to have won’t make them think or feel anything complicated. When that assumption turns out to be untrue — when the work demands effort on the part of the reader — they respond negatively. It’s the literary equivalent of a pillow princess suddenly being asked to top.

However, just because I understand this viewpoint doesn’t mean I have to respect it. Fuck your comfort, I’m trying to do something interesting out here. To quote Bruce Sterling, “You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by knocking it off with the bullshit.”

On this episode of I Will Fight You, my co-hosts and I once again review three Romeo & Juliet adaptations at once: Romeo & Juliet (2013), Pizza My Heart, and The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. We will keep doing this every year. You cannot stop us.

“A Reckoning in Whitehall” is now serializing on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website. The first chapter is available now, and subsequent chapters will be posted weekly on Mondays.

There is a likeability crisis in much contemporary queer sff. Authors are unwilling to make their characters look bad, and it compromises the integrity of the story. I don’t think this is the result of individual authors’ incompetence. The state of the publishing industry and the social media ecosystem around genre fiction has refigured the reader as, primarily, a customer, and the customer is always right.

As a sadomasochistic provocation – another of the film’s stated intents – it’s equally limp. A hanged man with an erection drives a village into a Bacchanalian frenzy. A woman wears a dog collar and barks. But these scenes aren’t provocative when they’re so expressly played as a joke, mostly with a fetishistic view of class that categorises poor people as sexual deviants and rich people as clueless prudes.

The Appleby Report only examined patients of [the Gender Identity Development Service]. But in the aftermath of the Bell v Tavistock ruling, wait times for GIDS appointments skyrocketed, now sitting at an estimated average of 25 years.

Here’s some more from that Bruce Sterling speech:

I don’t think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don’t know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid. … Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic courage to recognize your own significance in culture!

-K

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that you’re supposed to adopt a buzzy, overexcited tone when announcing the release of a new book, the better to build up hype. I’m not sure that wisdom holds when the book in question is about a very serious, very horrible thing that won’t stop showing up in the news while you’re writing and publishing the book.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty certainly isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

“A Reckoning in Whitehall” is the tenth story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one gets pretty heavy. It’s about abuse and sexual violence, and the ways in which they’re enabled by structures of power. I originally hashed out the concept early last year in an attempt to understand what were, back then, current events; I was not expecting it to be even more relevant by the time it came out.

I put a lot of love, anger, and grief into “A Reckoning in Whitehall.” It’s not a nice story, but I did my best to make it an honest one.

The surge in genetic testing coincides with rising nationalist fervour in Egypt, where economic crisis, weakening regional influence, and an influx of refugees have converged with government promotion of what some researchers call “neo-pharaonism”.

In between these two buried pieces of context–that both of these writers have an economic interest in the success of AI in the writing space because they sell courses on how to use AI to write books–this article only barely describes whether or not these books are any good or if readers like them.

Animals must have Wikipedia articles.

You have limited time, but get more time for each animal listed. When the timer runs out, that’s game over.

I can’t help feeling like I’ve pulled a mean trick on everyone who showed up after KJ Charles called the Casefile “great fun.”

-K

Draft2Digital has just rolled out distribution through Bookshop.org, which means a bunch of my books are now available on Bookshop. However, it looks like Bookshop is blocking distribution for titles that are under a certain length. My short stories haven’t made it onto the site; neither have any of the Saintstown books, nor the first Casefile of Jay Moriarty book.

Some other writers are also reporting that their erotica books were blocked from distribution through Bookshop. According to Draft2Digital, this isn’t a blanket ban; they claim “additional safeguards” are needed before erotica can be sold on Bookshop, and that “support is coming soon.” I can only assume these “safeguards” will include age verification, which presents its own issues.

It would certainly be a wild choice for Bookshop to suddenly ban sex books, considering how hard they’re riding the Heated Rivalry hype wave. I’ve seen other platforms try to thread the needle between romance and erotica by claiming erotica is “for the purpose of titillation/arousing sexual desire,” and meanwhile romance … isn’t, I guess? I think BookTok would disagree with that assessment.

And also, as I’ve pointed out before, who gets final say over the “purpose” of a piece of art? Who gets to decide whether I’m a pornographer? And why is a pornographer such a terrible thing to be?

I suspect this tension between a publishing industry going all-in on “spicy” romance and a retail industry desperate to crack down on any and all “adult” content will come to a head sooner rather than later.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty certainly isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

The tenth story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, titled “A Reckoning in Whitehall,” comes out on February 16.

Additionally, Ko-fi supporters who subscribe at the Early Access tier ($5 CAD/month) can download the book for free, right now.

The women have accused the company of “trafficking” them, claiming they were hired for legitimate shop-floor positions and then transferred into non-existent office roles created solely to deliver them to Al Fayed. They believe this process involved dozens of other members of Harrods staff, including those in senior roles, who enabled and were complicit in their abuse.

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

It’s been a heavy one this week. Go draw a horse.

It looks like Discord is also rolling out age verification worldwide. They have already leaked age verification data at least once. Do not give Discord your ID.

-K