Alex Cassidy

10 years late to the party, but have today acquired an excellent book on one of my favourite nostalgic things @alexcassidy.bsky.social

Thanks Ranno! Really appreciate the share and tag. And hope you enjoyed the book 👊

What do I want to happen here? It to give me the organic results which show the story I'm trying to remember, or make up its own...Google seems to be confused.

I also tested it with two others, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and Borges' The Library of Babel. The 'short story' prefix of the search is triggering the AI to write something itself, and pull directly from various fiction as a source.

Take Kafka's The Metamorphosis, maybe one of the most famous and original examples. By searching 'short story about waking up as an insect'. Google makes its own story up, linking out to university papers, Goodreads, and even an unrelated short story on VICE.

Google's AI overviews have a pretty bad plagiarism and search intent problem. 📖

When using Google in an attempt to remember the names of very famous short stories, it 'created' its own. But, still links to the original source material, in the AI overview and the organic results. 👇

Bonus was an exhibition on surrealism which meant got to see a Magritte

Work meeting in the Hepworth today in a sunny Wakefield

A classic! Sad to see some of my best voice acting only partially survives thanks to the Internet Archive: web.archive.org/web/20160926...

I ended up buying the one quarter piggy bank, a lot weightier than I imagined.

January's finished books (in what was a writing heavy month).

The back-to-back Alejandra Pizarnik made for a quite bleak start to the year, finishing with the Zevon biography helped pick it up.

🥁 Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive! 🥁

We are v excited to share our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of 10k+ out-of-copyright historical images, all free to explore and reuse: pdimagearchive.org @pdimagearchive

Whenever the news about AI replacing writers gets a bit too much - I remember this comment from two years ago on Reddit.

This person gave up on their project because they thought ChatGPT would replace authors, and well, imagine what they could have done in the two years since.

A very 90s leftover bookmark in a second-hand book

Wask Studio (waskstudio.com) 'makes things you probably haven't seen before':

One quarter piggy banks, hard to read dice, match bookmarks

Also was in a second hand book shop here I inexplicably found a signed copy of an autobiography, making the game officially international.

One of Jimbocho Book Town's 130 (!) book stores.

Special nod to Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, Standing Heavy by Gauz, and Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs by Jim DeRogatis. I reckon if I read them later in the year they'd pip a few others.

I’m currently reading Watership Down, having never seen the film. Writing commitments have slowed my reading down the last few months of the year, so I’m taking it slowly, a chapter a night. But I couldn’t have chosen a better book to savour. Already makes the top five and I'm halfway through.

A Month in the Country. Probably a perfect novel. Structured around the reconstruction of a church mural, centering the story around this craft works so well. Also created a new self publishing hero of mine in J.L. Carr. Lead me to read two more of his books and his biography as a result.

I spent a lot of time researching a tennis biography this year, and Kings of the Court was an invaluable resource. Full of great sentences and descriptors about tennis players. It’s such an exquisite history of the sport up to the mid 20th century but completely out of print.

Headshot was on a lot of best ofs this year (including the Booker Prize longlist). The ability to write the action of consecutive boxing matches without it getting repetitive is so unbelievably hard. Incredible example of writing that I took a lot away from.

I’d read On Heroes & Tombs before, but The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato was like a stick of dynamite. Read it in one sitting in the sun over summer. Stayed with me for a while afterwards and I’m looking forward to re-reading it again this year.

In 2024 I read more deliberately than any year before, including stopping books that I wasn't enjoying (a new rule!).

Of the 38 I read, here are my top five 👇.

Getting film developed has been a very humbling experience.

Being happy with <10% of around 40 photos reenforces just how much of an art form this is (or that I am terrible at it).

Going to be fun learning!

Dad bought this for me a few years ago. I have read it at least 4 times, please keep it in the family xxx (but only if you want to)

Found in a second-hand book store.

#booksky

Thank you!

(The coolest thing about the former is having it featured in print as part of the Bridport Prize 2024 Anthology alongside nineteen others' excellent work.)

The Importance of Being Longlisted Last month my work-in-progress novel Mammoth was longlisted for the Peggy Chapman-Andrews first novel award, a part of the Bridport Prizes. Thousands of prospective unagented writers enter every year,...

This year my WIP novel Mammoth was longlisted for both the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award, run by the Bridport Prize, and the Plaza First Chapters Prize.

I've written about how important (motivationally) this has been for me, with some advice too: www.linkedin.com/pulse/import...

#writingcommunity

I agree - quite a fun surprise every time it happens!