Malcolm F. Cross

@foozzzball.bsky.social

438 Followers 258 Following

Lazy. Writes. Is known to write fiction. Is almost fictional. Sometimes furry. Homepage: https://sinisbeautiful.com/ Patreon: http://patreon.com/MalcolmFCross Writing sketchbook: https://scribbles.malcolmfcross.com/

I have copied material, verbatim. I think I copied out Neuromancer’s first chapter or two line by line when I was a little younger, trying to understand how Gibson wrote like that. I didn’t tweak that and present it as my own. I didn’t simplify the text. In that particular case, I didn’t even try and rephrase things in my own voice, I just copied it out. Why? Because engaging with the text, word by word, helped me learn why the infamous opening lines, ‘The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ didn’t feel as strong for me as the following paragraphs where Ratz is tending bar. The way his smile was described as ‘A webwork of East European steel and brown decay’. Just typing it out again, now, almost makes my fingers shiver in delight. I regard it as similar to tracing. Tracing is pleasurable. It is nice to sit with a piece of paper and make something that looks coherent, and the process of tracing an image teaches you in the moment how lines can turn into the representation of something else. And copying out prose, or rewriting it line by line, is a beautiful way to try and sit with the author as they composed that text. To try and embody how that prose was formed.
n example of this may be found in 1898 account of the people who were illegally trafficked to the United States on the Wanderer, which stated that a number of survivors later committed suicide under the belief that "if they would jump into the sea and drown themselves they would be carried back to Africa by the good spirits...among them being one called King Mingo, who decoyed two children to St. Simon's beach, during the absence of his mistress, and all three of them jumped from a high bluff into the swift current and were drowned."[9]
Expenses to needed sales Average Needed Sales: 385 Average Earnings £1,201.53 $1,501.91 Wordcount 90,000.00 Expenses (Cover, edits, etc) £1,200.00 $1,500.00 Per word (my pay) £0.000 $0.00 Total £1,200.00 $1,500.00 Total Profit (my pay) £0.00 $0.00 Total Price (eBook) £3.99 $5.99 Royalty (Each eBook) £2.75 $4.13 Sales Needed 437 364 Total Earnings £1,201.75 $1,503.32 Total Price (Print) £10.99 $15.99 Print Cost £3.85 $4.60 Royalty (Each Print Book) £2.74 $4.99 Sales Needed 438 301 Total Earnings £1,200.12 $1,501.99
About the author Michael Ford began his eBay career in 1998 and first became an eBay Power Seller in 2001. His software business has expanded beyond eBay, but he still enjoys buying and selling on eBay as a collector of antique arcade games. Michael has authored a number of books on antique arcade games, game restoration, and computer security. He is a regular contributor to collector magazines and he is a well known business writer. Michael has always been an entrepreneur and eBay has helped develop those independent business drives into several full-fledged commercial ventures. Michael is known for telling it like it is and has a no nonsense approach to business and writing. He focuses on details which led him to document and analyze eBay auctions in a hard hitting way in order to determine what works and what does not. Michael has continued his quest for knowledge by monitoring the unsavory side of eBay which resulted in protection measures that are commonly used to identify fraudulent buyers and sellers. Michael knows both the good and bad sides of eBay and has shared his experiences and techniques to help eBay members gain the most from eBay without losing their shirt to scammers.
The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) reports that there has been an additional 5 million age checks on a daily basis as UK-based internet users seek to access sites that are age-restricted.
It’s clear in Ofcom’s codes that we expect platforms to ensure that strangers have no way of messaging children. This includes preventing children from receiving DMs from strangers and children should not be recommended any accounts to connect with.  
A screenshot of the Mouse Cage manuscript in word, displaying the number of times the phrase 'Dry Swallow' appears. (95 times.)
A close-up on one corner of the author's corkboard, displaying Patreon supporter pins.
Joe Abercrombie at his best? This one necessitated I dash off a fan letter. It feels like joyous dancing by a writer doing the things he loves best and putting down the equivalent of a gold-medal performance in the discipline of being Joe Abercrombie. To me, no longer is he grimdark, he's Abercrombesque fantasy. He is his own genre, now. For a fan, this is a delight. For an author, seeing him improve again is a heavenly inspiration.
A picture of a bookshelf containing the photographer's collection of Joe Abercrombie books, inclusive of a signed special edition of The Devils.
A screenshot of microsoft word focussed on a paragraph-symbol button in the toolbar.
A similar search-replace window in word, displaying a search to find '^p--' - or caret p, dash dash.
A screenshot of word's find and replace function, showing how a caret and a p (^p) can be used to search for and select paragraph marks in a larger document.
A screenshot of Microsoft Word, displaying a trio of paragraph marks selected in a larger text.
200 The Golden Key In the winter time, when deep snow lay on the ground, a poor boy was forced to go out on a sledge to fetch wood. When he had gathered it together, and packed it, he wished, as he was so frozen with cold, not to go home at once, but to light a fire and warm himself a little. So he scraped away the snow, and as he was thus clearing the ground, he found a tiny, gold key. Hereupon he thought that where the key was, the lock must be also, and dug in the ground and found an iron chest. “If the key does but fit it!” thought he; “no doubt there are precious things in that little box.” He searched, but no keyhole was there. At last he discovered one, but so small that it was hardly visible. He tried it, and the key fitted it exactly. Then he turned it once round, and now we must wait until he has quite unlocked it and opened the lid, and then we shall learn what wonderful things were lying in that box.
The researchers also found that “users with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task, compared to those without. This tendency for convergence reflects a lack of personal, contextualised, critical and reflective judgement of AI output and thus can be interpreted as a deterioration of critical thinking.”
One often ignored reason for state weakness is neoliberalism. A doctrinaire prescription for small government and big business, the proponents of neoliberalism, according to one scholar, ‘proclaim the apotheosis of the unfettered market and private property while fighting against the state and demanding the far-reaching curtailment of its economic intervention, budgetary redistribution, and social policy’. 44 In effect, the state exists simply to promote business. More traditional notions of enhancing public good, strengthening civil society and increasing citizen welfare are jettisoned because they interfere with the market. In short, neoliberalism has encouraged states to relinquish responsibility for the welfare and safety of their citizens. It is not coincidental – although it is counter-intuitive – that neoliberalism has been accompanied by increased corruption. As scholar Sarah Chayes has argued: In a range of countries around the globe, orruption is the system. Governments have been repurposed to serve an objective that has little to do with public administration: the personal enrichment of ruling networks. And they achieve this aim quite effectively. Capacity deficits and other weaknesses may be part of the way the system functions, rather than reflecting a breakdown.45
With regard to where the weapons that circulate in Ecuador were manufactured, it is worth noting the annual entry of more than 500 000 weapons from the United States into Mexico.92 Some of the devices that enter Mexico are destined for that country’s drug cartels. However, another portion of those arms is for criminal groups located in other countries, such as Ecuador, and they are transferred via air and later sold in exchange for drugs, money, technology and advisory services. Several investi- gative, journalistic and academic sources maintain that a form of barter exists between the Mexican drug cartels and Ecuadorian criminal organizations. 93 The exchanges of arms for drugs or money are not new, and follow a logic of economy of scale and yield; nonetheless, a new trend is that the barter system now includes advisory services for evading customs, fiscal and legal controls; on how to launder money; and how to use technology, such as artificial intelligence, to design new and safer routes for transiting and exchanging illegal products
(Note that this screenshot of a text page contains some images, described in the text as they're used.) This is how I use paper notebooks. It is not the only way to use paper notebooks, and that’s one of the reasons paper is great – it’s flexible in a way you can make personal to you. There are a lot of techniques. I informally borrow some methods from common practices for keeping laboratory notebooks, and I’m more murkily influenced by attempts to keep a bullet journal when that was the new fashion. Crossing out material to void it is done with widely spaced single lines, so what’s ‘voided’ remains legible. At the top of the page, if I’m starting a new section, I give it a heading summarizing what I’m trying to do, and I date the page so it’s easier to work out what I was doing later. In the top right corner, or top corner away from the spine, I write the page number. This could be the physical page number – meaning I manually number my notebooks – or numbers on loose sheets I use elsewhere. If the notes I’m making need to jump around the notebook, at the lower right/lower away-from-spine corner I put the page number where things continue from this page with an arrow following it. At the top left/upper near-spine corner, I put an arrow followed by the page number that leads to this page. I try (and usually fail) to give myself wide margins for taking later notes, so sometimes they sneak in elsewhere. When I’m done with an entry, I mark it off with a scribble so it’s clear it doesn’t continue into the next entry, like this.
Bobby nervously combed out his tail’s brush with his fingers. He could smell his own tension – veering from its usual fermented flowers into raw, unburned tobacco. Of course, the contact was human. If the guy was another fox, could actually pick up the intricacies of scent, then Bobby would be in trouble. “Who is this guy?” Katie asked, watching the elevator’s ad display and impulsively tapping it every couple of moments. “Eric the third.” Bobby left his tail alone, and waited with Katie for the sixtieth floor. “Eric the third. What, does he not have a last name?” “Doesn’t use it.” “Why not?” “His great grandpa was that American president who shat himself at the podium.” “The one who died?” She lost all interest in the ad display, blinking at him. “The Russian?” “No, the family moved to Russia after the… ugh. Look. It’s a sore spot – he’s just Eric the third, okay?” “Okay.” “If you mention his great grandpa we’re absolutely fucked, okay?” She nodded nervously, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Okay.” A pair of large, nervous looking Russian men got into the elevator as Bobby and Katie left it. When they got up to the office, Eric the third wasn’t there. He’d had a very Russian sort of accident, and fallen out of a non-opening window. They left, before anyone could assume they were witnesses.
Edane and Eissen shared a look, but they started reloading the LAMW, tossing brick-sized magazines back and forth between them. When they were ready to cover her, Marianna crawled about sixty feet away before getting to her feet and beating through the brush, taking a wandering snake of a path until coming back in towards the truck from a side angle that wouldn’t put her between Edane and the target. “Which bitch are you?” drawled the target. “Master-Sergeant Eckerd, if you call me that again I will rip your fucking throat out and eat you like the surgical waste from Lake North you fed me as a ‘reward’ while laughing at me with your buddies.” Marianna unlatched her custom gas mask, let it hang over her chest. “And I will enjoy doing it, so don’t test me, Master-Sergeant.” Eckerd kept chewing for a moment, then spat a wad of coca leaf out the side-window and looked back at his driver. “That’ll be Marianna or Mladenka, then.” He looked back at her. “You my Dinky, or you my Annie?” “I’m about three words out from killing you, Master-Sergeant, so you’d better say something I want to hear. Now.”
A Kuru Toga Advance Upgrade mechanical pencil on a wirebound grid-paper notebook with a vague attempt at a building floor's layout scribbled on it.
.... An order by Hitler and signed by Keitel on October 16, 1941 stated: “... it should be remembered that a human life in unsettled countries frequently counts for nothing and a deterrent effect can be attained only by unusual severity. the death penalty for 50-100 Communists should generally be regarded in these cases as suitable atonement for one German soldier’s life.” A recent affidavit by Nazi General Heusinger stated: “It had always been my personal opinion that the treatment of the civilian population and the methods of anti-partisan warfare in operational areas presented the highest political and military leaders with a welcomed opportunity for carrying out their plans, namely the systemic extermination of Slavism and Jewry. Entirely independent of this, I always regarded these cruel methods as military insanity, because they only helped to make combat against the enemy unnecessarily more difficult.” - Nuremberg Diary/ G.M. Gilbert
A picture of the earlier design, integrated into a factory.
A screenshot of the interior/underneath the blueprint mentioned in the post, for the game Satisfactory.
A quote from Dog Country: “Ever played football?” Ellis, behind him. “Hnuh?” Ellis wiped his nose off against his forearm, panted down a breath. “Fútbol Norteamericano,” he drawled, laughed. “That hypermasculine shit. They have a crapload of genemodded players. There’s this one guy, a genemod tiger linebacker? I don’t know what the hell he started off as — human or fur or what — but when they finished with him, shit. This guy can take the roof off a truck with his bare hands.”
To whom it may concern at Anlatan, I recently discovered that you are offering work for writing training data for your models. This is to be commended, however it is my understanding that your models are built on the GPT-NeoX framework, which was trained on The Pile, a datasource including stolen books, most notably the books3 dataset. It is my understanding that when running a custom model, like the ones you use, you are able to choose what to incorporate. Could you please check whether your training datasets already include works by myself? (Malcolm F. Cross, have also used the pen name Malcolm Cross) If so, will you be offering me remuneration for the training data you have already used? Thank you, - Malcolm F. Cross
A lengthy text quote from the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/musicians/comments/1dcvyu4/comment/l86v3xd/ where TPain describes the drawbacks to the 'all star' life.
Quoted paragraph from essay at https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/what-im-doing-about-alice-munro, reading: There isn’t “the art and the artist” and one does not “separate art from artist.” To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core. The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.
A screenshot from Microsoft Word displaying the navigation window.
An image of three stickers, two of which bear the powerful slogan, 'Too tired to live - too busy to die' and a stressed out space-dog. One bears the unyielding motto of our generation, 'three coffees - no lunch' and a transcendant overstressed space-dog.