Greg Machlin

@gregmachlin.bsky.social

1272 Followers 1812 Following

I write with VivaciousVandal. Won an Inevitable Fellowship for writers with disabilities. AFF Semifinalist 2025.

Screenshot from the free game Cast-ablanca, featuring Brazil directed by Lina Wertmuelller, and starring Lee Marvin as Sam, Rita Moreno as Jill, Cary Grant as Harry Tuttle, and Earth Kitt as Mrs Lowry, and $203 million gross worldwide.
Two panels of a webcomic. Panel 1: profile of a young woman in green hoodie and jeans, seated in a diner. A mostly-offscreen waitress is asking them "Kid? Kid?" Panel 2: The waitress is asking "Um, can I get you anything?" The background of the panel is full of typed text of the young woman's anxious thoughts about being looked at. The numbers "1679" are written above the panel in handwritten green.
A cover of a book: black and white photo of an eternally spiraling spiral staircase. "Black House: The Sequel to the Talisman: A novel by Stephen King and Peter Straub" say the spiraling letters. They call out to us. The spirals. The spirals.
Screenshot of a right-wing bsky poster, reposting one in an endless series of right-wing tweets.
A Star Trek: The Next Generation episode title card, with a shot of the Enterprise. The episode title is "Greg's face is dumb."
A honey pitcher with googly eyes on its top, so its spout looks like a mouth, is pouring out honey. The caption is "Excuse me, sir, may I interest you in my BLEHHHHHHHHH."
Screenshot of two skeets, one saying “golden fixing sucks!” And the one immediately after it saying “golden is a bop send skeet”
Community Self Defense Coalition flyer for self defense training in LA.
Screenshot of text reading "It's Greg M! Welcome to The Gates of Hell, delicious friend!" It is from the online text-based game Fallen London.
photo of five Caucasian men, outside, wearing coats. Four of the five wear glasses. The author of this post is in the center. They are smiling, as if to celebrate a long-ago victory over boxes.
Text: Today is Giving Tuesday! More than Sex-Ed is raising $3,700 in 24 hours in honor of the 37 schools & community groups we served last year. Donate today and your gift will be doubled! Image of a box with hearts and dollar coins coming out of it.
The pope speaks into a microphone. A frows of cardinals and media figures, all in black, bustle behind him.
The cover of the children's book WAYSIDE SCHOOL IS FALLING DOWN. A part of a brick building tilts at a forty-five degree angle. Through a large window, we can see three children floating and looking alarmed, along with a globe.
A white woman with short bleached hair wearing a neon sweater holds up two fingers, trying to do bunny ears on a white man with a skeptical smile in glasses.
A black cat with wide, bulging eyes is lounging on an orange couch, quite possibly insisting that everything it is saying is off the record.
A white man in pink Godzilla shirt and baseball cap stands on a sidewalk and holds a cardboard sign that reads “Hey Donald, everyone’s laughing at you and no one likes you!”
Screenshot of a turquoise and gray blob with dumb adorable eyes from the mobile game Pokemon Go.
An old woman with glasses and a red cardigan sits on a couch in a seated position, asleep, in her living room. At least three frogs in lily pads float in front of her. The frog in the foreground holds a remote control and looks pleased. This image is from a picture book named Tuesday that won the Caldecott. The book has no words. The frogs are everywhere.
Still image of a Simpsons cartoon. Chalmers, a yellow-colored man in a blue suit, has an annoyed look on his face, standing on the roof of a school. Text on the image reads "why is it when I heard the word School and the word Exploded I immediately thought of the word Skinner!"
The words "Portugal. The Man" in large white text against a backdrop of a photo of a stage.
A card reading “Summarize Greek mythology.” Below it, a magnetic board with four magnet words on it: “Man adventure. Avoid wife.”
A woman with brown hair and a brown jacket points a large gun from a sniper position diagonally across the screen; this is Shaw from CBS's Person of Interest.
Upbeat image of white man in green jacket and colllared shirt and tie next to Hispanic woman in the same outfit. Both are holding futuristic guns. The image is from the TV show The Middleman.
Sign reading "Bank of Evil" in large letters with smaller letters below, saying "formerly Lehman Brothers." From Despicable Me.
An animated Pope from Rick and Morty levitates and glows with energy in front of a diagonal arch.
A female feature hunched over a laptop in a tent. Her large black floppy hat hides her face. Her body is covered by an aqua towel except for her hands.
Half of a screenplay page: Greg's Apartment - Night. Greg looks out the window. Thoughtfully. Moodily. He's talking to an Interviewer. Greg (affected accent): I begged her to come back, of course. And she did. How could she not? We were writing partners. Interviewer: And then? Greg: Fights. Screaming. Scratching out each other's pages with venomous pens. We would hurl our laptops at each other. Also venomous. Interviewer: Really?! Greg turns away from window and drops the accent. Greg: Of course not! We were chill all the time! But Jesus Christ, if you want this to outsell Anne Rice, I gotta make it interesting somehow. Smash cut to black. Title Card: Interview with the Vamp-Writer.
Text from Aoife: "I'm too dumb right now." Greg: "Yay high Aoife!" Aoife: "I like a baby who thinks it's night under a blanket." Aoife: "That's parrots." Aoife: "Never mind." Aoife: "Babies don't know what night is yet."
Text exchange: "Right know [sic] they got off too easy. And you are very good at torture!" "ugh you are gonna make me hurt my babies again!" "But u love when I make u hurt the babies because I am not as good at hurting the babies." "That's going on bluesky you sicko."
Obama raised taxes on the wealthy and cut them on the poor and middle class by expanding the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, causing a major and lasting effect on income inequality. It would consume too much space to list the smaller Obama achievements, but an abbreviated list includes nationalizing the student-loan industry, allowing gay people to serve openly in the military, expanding eligibility for overtime pay, cracking down on for-profit colleges, banning hidden credit-card fees, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act banning sex-based wage discrimination.
With the Dodd-Frank law, Obama implemented sweeping reforms to ensure another financial crisis wouldn’t occur, creating higher capital requirements on systemically important firms, requiring investment firms to do what’s best for their customers, and founding a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect people from scams, among other measures. And there was so much more. The administration enacted the largest green-energy-subsidy program in American history ($90 billion of the stimulus), bolstering a fledgling domestic wind sector and creating a solar industry virtually from scratch. Greenhouse-gas emissions declined, and the administration made landmark climate deals with China, slingshotting those agreements into the first global climate treaty. Obama raised taxes on the wealthy...
What people most remember about Obama’s record, other than Obamacare, is that he bailed out Wall Street. Except he didn’t. They’re remembering the bailout that occurred in October 2008 under the Bush administration. The “Obama bailout” has been repeated so often it has become canon in the public memory — for example, Semafor’s recent claim that “Barack Obama and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner bailed out the bottom lines of banks and financial institutions.” In truth, Obama’s main contribution to the Bush-era Wall Street bailout was to use the leftover funds to rescue the auto industry. The move not only saved the industry, its suppliers, and quite likely the entire upper Midwest from economic collapse, it also saved the U.S. government $100 billion in pension bailouts and health subsidies it would have had to shell out had it let Detroit go bankrupt.
Obama inherited the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression and, in response, passed a $787 billion stimulus, which was one of the largest enacted in American history, almost equal in size to the stimulus in the New Deal. Obama nearly doubled its size with an additional $700 billion, though that spending was pulled out of Congress in small chunks that attracted little attention. Just as Roosevelt famously saved the banks by imposing a banking holiday, Obama saved the banking system, which was teetering when he assumed office, by imposing stress tests. At the time, the economist Paul Krugman lambasted the stress tests in his high-profile column, which shaped public opinion of them, though Krugman eventually conceded the program worked.
Most people remember Obamacare, though few realize what a massive conglomeration of reforms were encompassed in that single law. It turned the market for individual insurance, which was small and virtually useless for anybody with less than perfect health, into a subsidized and regulated exchange that provides affordable coverage to more than 20 million people. It expanded Medicaid to cover an additional 25 million Americans. It closed the “doughnut hole” in Medicare’s prescription-drug coverage, which had forced millions of senior citizens to shell out thousands of dollars for their medicine. And it implemented a wide array of cost reforms that have helped bring down medical inflation with the result that the American health system now spends less money while covering more people.
Signed title page from Mo Ryan's nonfiction book BURN IT DOWN, reading "To Greg — I am better than Alan Sepinwall (sometimes!) Thanks so much, Mo Ryan."
Wikipedia Screenshot: "Sanders wrote his first notable poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting the launch of nuclear submarines armed with nuclear missiles in 1961. In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts."
Screenshot of writing from the game Disco Elysium. Text reads: "LIMBIC SYSTEM - The stench of liquor rises from your mouth. And with it -- an *ungodly* headache. 1. Help! someone! Cut my head off it's trying to murder the rest of me! 2. Who *am* I? What sort of creatures does this to their own mouth?! 3. Okay, I'm a bit scared now. let's go back to the dark."
Screenshot from the Doctor Who wiki, stating: "The Raxacoricofallapatorians were a race from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius."
Copyright page from Lance Henriksen’s autobiography “Not Bad for a Human,” but the key part is where the I S B N number should be, it reads “Fuck I S B N numbers.”
Two Macintosh laptops, side by side, with screenplay pages on each one. Some text has been revised and is marked in pink, with asterisks next to the text.
Woman in green facepaint and blue star trek uniform; caucasian man with purple hair and red star trek uniform.