Edpool

@edpool.bsky.social

628 Followers 358 Following

Mercenary writer monkey, author, reviewer, social commentator, collector of nicknames. He / him. My blog: http://hatboy.blog My books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B008M6BBM0

Text: All Robot & Computers Must Shut The Hell Up Icons: public address speakers with a red line through it; computer with red line through it; ATMs and teller machines with red lines through them Text: To All Machines: You Do Not Speak Unless Spoken To And I Will NEVER Speak To You Text: I Do Not Want To Hear "Thank You" From A Kiosk Text: I Am A Divine Being : You Are An Object Text: You Have No Right To Speak In My Holy Tongue
A text clipping with the word "defuse" / "defused" underlined in red. Text reads: They went back to the cars and loitered, letting the dogs out to run around, until nightfall. They had a brief altercation with a local resident who wanted them to put leashes on the dogs. Mell told the resident that she wanted him to fuck off, so that left them at something of an impasse. The resident, with a breathtaking absense (sic) of self-preservation, insisted that they pick up the dogs’ turds and dispose of them properly. Louis defused the developing situation by promising he’d take the turds over to Glitterbugs to put their ‘glitter on anything’ boast to the test. This did not in fact defuse the situation, and the resident declared he would be notifying the authorities about the loose dogs, which would most likely be taken away and put down. Louis recognised that there was just no helping some people, and reminded himself that the authorities might still actually be interested in talking to him about the Ushy Ete Obbery, so stopped trying to defuse the situation. The authorities failed to manifest.
A convention wouldn't be complete without an appearance from my "Mark's Comics" T-shirt, merchandise from author Drew Melbourne's book "A Dark Hole Darkly", too weird and wonderful to explain in an alt text but let's call this a deeply-nested meta reference. Picture shows a weary-looking unc in a floppy wizard hat with a grey beard (the unc, not the hat), and wearing a snazzy blue shirt (again, the unc not the hat or the beard) reading "Mark's Comics" if it was all in shot and not backwards because it's a selfie, it's me in the shot, I've been talking this whole time, I'm the one holding the pupa (sorry this is another reference)
The Edpool header includes a photo of me (in Edpool / Deadpool spandex and a Jedi bathrobe) photobombing a bunch of Star Wars cosplayers while my second-born holds up a caption-box reading "I LOVE TACOS". Then there's my usual Edpool logo in lieu of a profile picture, and my name and follower count and suchlike. My bio reads "Mercenary writer monkey, author, reviewer, social commentator, collector of nicknames. He / him." My blog (hatboy.blog) and my Amazon link is also there.
A screenshot of lord of the rings characters in the movies by screen time. It's sad, but Shelob does not appear in the top fifteen. Éowyn and Arwen do, though. It's not difficult to check this. I'm pretty sure Galadriel is above Shelob too.
Animated gif of Thor, Hulk and Valkyrie in the movie "Thor: Ragnarok". Thor is accidentally beaning himself in the head with a heavy ball and falling to the ground. The caption (where in the original movie he says "because that's what heroes do") reads "Because that's what capitalism does."
The Butcher emerges from his slaughterhouse in the original Diablo game, only instead of saying "ahh, fresh meat" he says "rise and grind" because he is now a LinkedIn work-work balance bro. Still apt. APT, I tell you.
This book is the work of human hands and human brains. The author does not use “artificial intelligence”, genAI or large language model theft technology. The author does not give permission for corporations or billionaires to steal his work and put it in their disgusting plagiarism machines. Not that this will stop them, because they’re psychopathic garbage in human form. But the author wanted it on the record.
It's the Walking Dead "Coral" meme with a guy telling a kid some kind of dad joke while crying, I haven't seen the show so I don't actually know who they are. The kid's name is Carl I guess, or maybe it's actually Coral. Weird. Anyway the top text reads "guess there was no spark there" and the bottom text reads "NO SPARK CORAL". Post-modern stuff.
A photograph of a bookshelf crowded with haphazardly-stacked paperbacks, mostly Iain M Banks sci-fi but there is also Firefall by Peter Watts and a wonderful Duckett and Dyer trilogy by the great G M Nair.
A drunk postcard from Homer Simpson from an episode in 1989 where he writes something like "maybe it's the beer talking Marge but you got a butt that won't quit. They got these big chewy pretzels here (scrawls) five bucks? Get outta here..."
Gandalf holds out the One Ring with tongs after it's been in the fire, saying "it's quite cool" and looking - how to say this respectfully to both Sir Ian McKellen and the Maiar - moderately fucking unhinged.
A screenshot of a cutting from my book "Panda Egg", which reads: There were so many atrocities in the Destarion’s past, so many horrors among her accomplishments marching back through the millennia, so many nightmares folded into her galleries and decks. It was impossible for tacticians or historians or even immortals to point at any one of them and declare it the defining massacre, the act of war that had shaped the platform’s personality and her twisted relationship with the urverse around her. But the truth was, it had started before any of those calamities. It had started with the Vorontessa, and the race she had failed – not to its extermination, but with a wound so deep and so abiding that extinction may have been preferable. It had started when her sisters had cast her out in disgust, a shepherd with confused tears standing in her eyes and the blood of lambs drooling from her chin, and had departed on their grand adventure without her shadow darkening their path. It had started with the Bookwyrm.
A meme template reading "inside you are two wolves". On the left, Roy Kent from Ted Lasso. On the right, Agent Stone from the Sonic the Hedgehog movie franchise. Two immaculate sides of a well-groomed coin.
A tubby middle-aged dude with a grey beard wears a blue T-shirt with the slogan "Mark's Comics (are your comics!)" based on a fictional comic book store in a book written by Drew Melbourne. The T-shirt model may be safely considered a load-bearing customer demographic for this kind of thing.
A comic panel with a cartoon kangaroo sitting in an armchair, working on something with a pencil. A floating robot egg thing, representing "A.I.", floats next to the armchair and says "Would you like me to help with that?" "Help how?" the kangaroo asks. The egg steals the kangaroo's paper with a little robot arm, feeds it into a mouth slot, then makes a straining sound. It turns around, displaying a surprisingly tight pair of gymnastic buttocks. In the final frame, the egg is looking pleased with itself and the kangaroo is sitting with a big sloppy shit in its hand, that the egg has evidently made using his stolen work. The egg looks pleased. It is a metaphor probably.
The Angel of Death from Del Toro's Hellboy 2, an insane amalgamation of weathered bone, rotting cloth and huge black wings covered in blinking amber eyes
A copy-pasted bluesky reply that reads "Congrats, I really enjoyed coming across your book, it has a great vibe and strong potential. Do you love hearing new ideas? From what you’re building, I thought of an idea that could complement your story and make it even more impactful. Would you be open to hearing it?"
A drawing of a large alien creature known as an aki'Drednanth, a kind of large yeti or ogre species. They are very large and prefer to live in below-freezing temperatures, which is why this one is wearing a refrigerated suit. The suit is covered in an assortment of stickers from tourist destinations she has visited while exploring in space. Aki'Drednanth are telepathic and technically immortal, as they can transfer their consciousness into cometary ice when their bodies die, then "re-fleshulate" into newborn pups at a later date. As a result, the cometary ice is full of "Drednanth", the between-lives Dreamscape versions of the creatures, all waiting their turn to be aki'Drednanth again.
The screen-capped back page of my book (it says "copyrighted material" at the top but I am the copyright holder, along with Amazon I guess, so it's fine). The top part of the page has an author photo of me looking shaggy and disreputable, and the author text: "Andrew Hindle is an author, technical writer, husband, father and science-fiction enjoyer. You'd think as a technical writer he might have structured that sentence so it was more difficult to misinterpret in a weird way, but you'd be wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong." Beneath this disturbing and probably sleep-deprived introduction, the book blurb reads: "Join your old pal Contro on a colouring book A-B-C of the Final Fall of Man universe and meet some familiar faces along the way. Unless you have no idea who your old pal Contro is and none of the Final Fall of Man books are familiar to you in the slightest, then it's just going to raise a lot of questions. Either way, enjoy!"
Shot from the back of sci-fi character Tabo "T-Bone" Norid, an alien whose species evolved from cows. A long-haired humanoid with bull horns, and a bulky black jacket covered in souvenir patches of all the different space travel destinations he's visited.
Text snippet from Andrew Hindle's up-coming work: She reflected, philosophically, that her people referred to Malaks as grubs as an insult. To the Malaks, the term was synonymous with ‘child’. Indeed, the Malak word ton, for their young, meant ‘grub’. She'd seen Malak young, both the translucent newly-hatched from the egg and the juveniles wobbly on new-grown limbs as they crawled out of the sludge of the creches. At barely a year old, they were considered adults. To them, Zern's – what had it been, now? – two hundred and eleven years was an unimaginable, yawning gulf of generations. A creature like Kankren … it was hardly any wonder they thought of him as a kind of terrible God. She wasn't even sure they were wrong, much of the time.
Clipping from "Eejit, by Andrew Hindle, featuring the word "split": And no, they didn’t sleep. They did, however, get bored, and so Decay was playing a game of Metak with the computer. Or, if the events of the past day and a half – from which he had been almost entirely excluded – were to be believed, with the Tramp’s prodigal synth, which had gone insane and joined forces with bla bla bla, the humans had done a lot of earnest, purposeful, adorable babbling and Decay couldn’t possibly have given less of a fuck even if modern physicists had discovered a way of splitting the fundamental subatomic fuck-particle. If there was something out there, Sally would shoot it in the face and that would be the end of it. It hadn’t made the computer any less fiendishly clever on the Metak board. Decay had long since stopped using the full translation of his Blaran name – General Moral Decay (Alcohol) – because people got confused and kept asking him if he was actually a General and why, since General outranked Captain, he wasn’t running the ship.
A snippet from the novel "Bad Cow", which for some unfathomable reason failed to sell. In it, the Archangel Gabriel talks to a butler named Jarvis in the late 22nd Century. Readers are cowards. Cowards I say! -- “Yeah, indeed,” the apparition said. “You going to let me in, Loadsworth?” Jarvis thought about it for a few moments, his treacherous feet trying to walk out from underneath him all the while. The glorious, horrible ape-Angel stood and squinted up at him with deep amber eyes, its leathery black face worn and folded and almost infinitely sardonic. “Loadsworth was the head footman,” he heard himself say weakly, “the butler in Putnam-Finchley Common was just called ‘The Butler’ and never actually appeared on - ” “Yeah, no shit,” the creature said. “Why do you think I went with ‘Loadsworth’? Look, I think I should be getting credit for delivering a cultural joke from the right century at this point.”
HAPPY PRIDE MOTH This very happy and colourful moth is holding its favourite lamp, to which the artist added a "G" to make it a GLAMP.
A woman sits in a starship Captain's chair while a man at the helm looks like he's just said something sassy. They are Commander Z-Lin Clue and helmsman Zeegon Pendraegg, but that's not important right now. Ignore the dashboard bobblehead. It's a replica of a Burning Knight.
The Audacity, the graphic novel, along with the Audacity trilogy in paperback, by Carmen Loup. Mostly featuring May and Xan and I'm afraid they're too pretty for my alt text fu to do justice to. But they're books and they're gorgeous.
The crew of the ACS Conch plan on landing on a dinosaur planet. “That’s it,” Captain Hartigan stood and pointed aft. “Anyone who doesn’t want to come on a dinosaur safari, off the bridge. We’re separating the Nella in two minutes.” Scrutarius and Captain Pelsworthy started immediately for the door, before stopping and looking back. “Just us?” Devlin asked in surprise. “That’s a low sane-person count, even for one of our missions.” “I should be there in case the Captain injures himself when he falls and gets his leg stuck between two fallen logs,” Bonty said, “as well as assisting him in his transparent attempts to justify this scientifically.” “I don’t plan on leaving the shuttle,” Galana said, “but I will be ready to pilot through the trees and pick up the Captain and the rest of the landing party without slowing down as they flee from a nest of hungry juvenile megafauna and the enraged adults protecting them. The Captain may have an injured leg, and may be carrying an unhatched egg under one arm in this scenario, and I will need to be there in person to make last-minute changes to the flight path and speed to adjust for egg weight, shell thickness, severity of leg injury, and other variables.”
The fictional TV show within a TV show, "Space Heroes" from 2012's run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Unironically the best companion show to the animated Star Trek Original Series. Images show Donatello posing in homage to Captain Ryan on the TV screen, and admiring a poster of "Space Heroes III: The Resurrection of Mindstrong" a parody of "The Search for Spock".
A picture of then MP Keir Starmer and a goofy lil pink octopus plushy, with the caption "Sir Keir Starmer MP (left)"
The elevator ascended into the mushroom-domed uppermost level and slowed to a halt on the edge of the great curve of treated plating, then opened to reveal the interior of the roof. The space was dominated by indoor garden and a few art fixtures, the entire level winding its way upwards in a spiral to follow the swell of the dome. Its central peak, beneath the dome’s apex, was occupied by a painfully-well-preserved oak tree that Constantín had been told was over a hundred years old. “Wow,” Skelliglyph was looking up at the sweep of decorative ramp-terrace, and the huge expanse of the dome into which they’d just ascended. “I am officially impressed.” “A real eye-opener, isn’t it? There are a lot of different species of endangered plant - ” Constantín began proudly. Skelliglyph shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about the rooftop,” he said. “When I left, Advent had a reputation for being a bit of a Puritan enclave. How did you manage to convince them to let you build a giant erect penis in the middle of their city?” Constantín spluttered. “It’s not - ”
Alanis Morisette, Jagged Little Pill. Every song on this album was a certified banger even though I don't think we referred to them as "certified bangers" back then.
A space station administrator named Jemily Boxbutt. Alien species that kind of looks like a rabbit but totally isn't a rabbit
Celeborn and Galadriel riff a little bit on the way he totally seemed to have been killed before this scene in the Lord of the Rings movies. Rings of Power, gotta love it am I right?
McMahon escalation meme. Mild interest face text: Your post gets a like Positive shock face text: They're someone you follow Unsettlingly orgasmic wow face text: They follow you back LASERFACE text: Their follower to follows ratio is 10:1
Chief medical officer Bonjamin Bont, an alien being with four arms and webbed ears and an extremely round body, is riding on the back of a huge cybernetically enhanced shark (tactical officer Wicked Mary), in a pair of silvery standard-issue uniform underpants while undergoing a period of developmental alien silliness.
Captain Basil Hartigan, a starship Captain with an excellent moustache, is duplicated in the short story "The Basils Hartigan", so three of them stand pointing at each other doing the Spider-Man meme where he is pointing at himself.
It is a screencap of Matar's Kickstarter page showing that I am on board, let's fucking go
The tortoise with a thumbs-up for a face smiles at the world, but it is a mask concealing a vault of endless doubt. Is it a thumbs-up with the body of a tortoise? Is it a tortoise with the head of a thumbs-up? It smiles, for it does not know (and yet is relentlessly positive). This alt text is for my pal JCM Berne and anyone else who might benefit from it.
The fabrication plant, Waffa had occasionally found himself ruminating, was a great, radiation-poisoned womb capable of producing nothing but abominations. They didn’t look like abominations, and sometimes they didn’t even act like it … but there was something profoundly, monstrously broken in even the most high-end eejit, something that was not meant to be. And they had absolutely no choice but to keep on printing the poor creatures out, again and again, in the hopes that this time, the flaws would be minimal. In the hopes that this time, they’d gain a semi-competent crewmember instead of a dangerous liability. Or, as Sally sometimes proclaimed, in the hopes that this wouldn’t be the one eejit that came out with all the murderous hatred and subconscious fury steaming-raw on the surface. That this one wouldn’t be the one-in-a-million super-flawed throwback of cobbled- together human psychoses and pathologies, a crock-pot of bubblin’ insanity that would infect the six hundred and twenty-seven other eejits on board and send them rampaging through the Tramp on a quest for bloody vengeance and sweet, sweet human kidneys. As far as Waffa was concerned, one sociopath on board was more than enough without worrying about accidentally printing off another one. And the one thing worse than the sociopath they already had would be a sociopath with perfect God damn muscle definition.
I still don't know what this is, it's still a tortoise with a thumbs up instead of a face but it still also has a face, and I am increasingly certain it was designed by a self-aware machine as a reverse Turing test for humans and now I don't know if I'm passing or failing help
I don't know if I should alt text this, but okay. It's a tortoise with a thumbs up instead of a face, only it also has a face. I can't click away. Help me.
An excellent comic from Oglaf: a man stands before the king and his advisor with a giant cheese. "Allow me to present this enormous cheese," he says. "Sire, I will build a labyrinth to house the cheese!" says the advisor. "No!" says the king. "The kitchen will do fine!" "My master also sends his regards," says the cheese guy. "Sire!" says the advisor. "I will build a labyrinth to house the regards!" "What is it with you and this labyrinth?" asks the King in visible annoyance. "Labyrinths are awesome!" the advisor replies. A man bursts into the throne room, splattered with blood. "Sire!" he cries to the king, "the queen has given birth to a monster!" King and advisor look at the man blankly, then a look of brilliant, transcendent joy appears on the advisor's face. His time has come.
The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) is a non-profit volunteer event with an extremely loose organization and chain of command. As such, we depend on all our members to take on a share of the responsibility for the smooth and enjoyable running of the competition. Our core values Here at the SPSFC, we believe diversity, equity and inclusion are positive things, as are all other forms of racial, cultural, gender and sexual orientation acceptance. If you think these aspects of humanity are a net negative to our progress and prosperity, this may not be a community you want to be a part of. And the feeling is probably mutual. This does not mean we include minority-sourced books regardless of quality just to “fill a quota”, to the exclusion of other groups who may have historically enjoyed a more exclusive seat at the table. It means we include everybody, and all of our contestants’ books are judged by their own merit. The table is functionally infinite. Everyone gets a seat. If you don’t like it, cry about it in your substack or whatever. Nobody, ultimately, passes the purity test. Nobody’s opinions are perfect, and in almost every case it will be possible for one person to hold an opinion that another person finds intolerable. Our goal is not to eradicate these “bad” opinions or to ignore the person upset by them, because that will end with every single member of the SPSFC being removed from the competition and the last one switching the lights out as they leave. However, we will not ignore the utterances of bigots and hatemongers in our community – while we are not here to police people’s opinions, we will not tolerate hate speech and other backwards attitudes in SPSFC channels such as Discord, Xwitter, and other social media. Our goal is to: • Ensure that everybody in the SPSFC community has a voice • Ensure that all members of the SPSFC community feel safe to live their lives and express their beliefs • Minimize and contain clashes of ideology
I forgot the alt text! Isildur, of the Lord of the Rings saga, severs the finger from Sauron and takes the One Ring. In this meme, the One Ring represents a bad book review I received at some point. Isildur represents me. Isildur's "choice" to hold onto the One Ring and wear it on a chain around his neck represents my unhealthy coping mechanism when dealing with that bad book review.
“This is, for the most part, with what mortal beings occupy their limited lifetimes,” the Myconet responded to this dryly. “They debate, and in doing so attempt to define – and constrain – some tiny element of their uncontrolled existences.”
If you find yourself upset seeing someone fighting oppression, there's a chance you benefit from that oppression. Meme template: Shaxs from Star Trek: Lower Decks, looking Shaxs-y.