skElly Bangs 💀
@ellybangs.bsky.social
3K followers 650 following 1.9K posts
Author of the apocalyptic cyberpunk novel UNITY, available in bookstores and libraries near you. Short fiction and more at elbangs.com. Queer and trans. Loneliness elemental. (She/her)
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ellybangs.bsky.social
I wrote this novel about a remorse-stricken master assassin who takes one last job guiding the last surviving fragment of a collective consciousness across the post-apocalyptic American West under the looming specter of a final world war. I hope you like it.
Unity - Tachyon Publications
“Unity is an astonishing debut, twisty and startling . . . an absorbing, thrilling ride.” —New York Times In a desperate escape, Danae and her lover Naoto hire the enigmatic ex-mercenary Alexei to gui...
tachyonpublications.com
ellybangs.bsky.social
It seems like people are getting worse
Reposted by skElly Bangs 💀
unraveledpress.com
Thinking about how much of their violence has been normalized already, how scenes that caused shockwaves 6 weeks ago are now part of the rhythm of daily life. Watched a TikTok from a daughter who has to do her parents' laundry & get their groceries because they're in hiding. This is just it now
ellybangs.bsky.social
😢 Wishing you speedy healing
ellybangs.bsky.social
That title gets me every time. You just know somewhere out there there's another ultraviolet-classified government document titled PROJECT PUPPIES or PROJECT CHEERY DELIGHTFUL HAPPINESS detailing a mind-shattering moral abomination.
pookleblinky.bsky.social
Project SUNSHINE is closer to the original tooth fairy

In 1955 the Atomic Energy Commission stole 1,500 dead infants and children, cremated them, then tested the bone dust for radio-isotopes.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...
Project SUNSHINE - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
ellybangs.bsky.social
Lot of people out there walking around with holes in their heart they don't even know about anymore.
Reposted by skElly Bangs 💀
pedsortho.bsky.social
Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....
ellybangs.bsky.social
Life is spent not getting the things you need to live. So you adapt, mutate, learn to need less, become ratlike. The hardest thing is you have to never completely forget what it is you're starved for -- or else you may find yourself unable to even recognize it, should it ever finally arrive.
Reposted by skElly Bangs 💀
gregpak.net
Let's make a promise here, friends... we ARE going to abolish ICE. Not REFORM it. ABOLISH it. And we're going to put that massive budget back into funding all the things that actually HELP people.
Reposted by skElly Bangs 💀
charliejane.bsky.social
Hey, I know books are expensive and money is tight right now.

But if there's a brand new book you really wanna read — including my own Lessons in Magic and Disaster — you can help get the book into way more hands by requesting it from your local library!

It's easy! Check your library's website.
ellybangs.bsky.social
Not saying you're wrong about the ego massage, but I'm curious why the car companies would want to spend so much money doing it.
ellybangs.bsky.social
Huh. Like... to stop them from returning it? Can a car even be returned? Or is the idea that it makes them boastful around their friends?
ellybangs.bsky.social
"You know, I wasn't GOING to shell out $60,000 for a Ford Superduty... but since you burst into my home uninvited and interrupted the show I was trying to watch with images of it flailing around in dust and rocks on five thousand separate occasions... I guess I will!"
ellybangs.bsky.social
On a fundamental level I've never understood why seeing an ad would incline someone to actually buy the thing being advertised instead of inclining them against that out of spite.
ellybangs.bsky.social
I can only hear this text in my head in his voice. Nice, pithy, reasonably optimistic.
ellybangs.bsky.social
(And the only reason I have a Roku is so that I can restrain my TV from ever getting online in case *it* decides to brick itself! A lot cheaper and easier to deal with a bricked Roku than a bricked TV.)
ellybangs.bsky.social
This skeet brought to you by Roku™
Reposted by skElly Bangs 💀
karlbode.com
you'd think a prominent news outlet like the New York Times might mention that "antifa" isn't an actual organization in a long story about antifa, but nope!

and the subhead helps props up a false claim this professor was up to something seedy as something up for debate
NYT headline: "Rutgers Expert on Antifa Tries to Flee to Spain After Death Threats"

subheadline: "Mark Bray was teaching courses on antifascism. Turning Point USA accused him of belonging to antifa, which he denies. His flight to Spain was canceled abruptly on Wednesday night."
ellybangs.bsky.social
Agreed! And only short-term corporate gains followed by a spectacular pan-economic corporate implosion when the bubble pops!
ellybangs.bsky.social
🧵
tedmccormick.bsky.social
A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.
Reposted by skElly Bangs 💀
newseye.bsky.social
This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen.

By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza
ellybangs.bsky.social
In a more civilized age, if somebody wanted to break your stuff, they had to care enough to come into your home and do it by hand.
ellybangs.bsky.social
The only thing I'm nostalgic for about the 90s is that there were no software updates. Altering the code running on a user's device, remotely and without their knowledge or consent, is a responsibility of which software makers have again and again proved themselves manifestly and grossly unworthy.