Edpool

@edpool

Mercenary writer monkey, author, reviewer, social commentator, collector of nicknames. He / him. My blog: My books:

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Edpool@edpool· 15d

I am human, thy God, ye dull plastic homunculus

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

Edpool@edpool· 15d

Ooh, I've got a triple word score on this one! From "The Last Days of Earth". #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Ea...

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.

Edpool@edpool· 16d

Another #Ropecon behind us, and a grand one it was! My thanks and admiration to all the volunteers who made it happen, and all my fellow attendees who made it magical. Only 364 days until the next one, give or take.

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)

This year my cosplay was "Dark Wizard Deadpool" or I suppose Edpool, featuring a Deadpool mask with horror elements (mainly teeth and tentacles) as well as a floppy wizard hat and magic staff with crystal ball on the end. Hair and beard all natural. The amazing blue-eyed crow is not related or part of my costume, it was another cosplayer dressed as an 8-foot crow walking behind me in this shot just by chance. Anyway it was a great time.

Edpool@edpool· Jun 8

What the heck, I'll join in. We don't usually see each others headers and I quite like mine. Quote post with yours (if you feel like it)!

Edpool@edpool· May 27

This may be a joke, trend or meme I am not getting. Sorry if so.

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.

Edpool@edpool· May 6

Edpool@edpool· Mar 27

Edpool@edpool· Mar 19

God damn right.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Mar 4

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.

Edpool@edpool· Feb 1

Unprompted bookshelf reveal (or at least a fraction of a fraction of a bookshelf reveal). As you can see, nothing but classics here.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Jan 19

New communiqué from the actual president of the United States of actual America just dropped.

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..."

Edpool@edpool· Jan 1

How I resolve to half-arsedly market my book(s) in 2026

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.

Edpool@edpool· Dec 8

Well have a follow (not just for the kind, completely non-binding promise, but because I literally have a side-character called "the Bookwyrm" 😆)

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.

Edpool@edpool· Oct 13

I'm morbidly curious as to whether there's anyone else in the centre of the Ted Lasso / Sonic the Hedgehog Venn diagram with me.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Sep 23

Confirmed, someone in Finland is wearing your merch and feeling pretty smug about it.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Sep 18

Arts and crafts time! #AI #GenAI #HumanMade #SayNoToSlop

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.

Edpool@edpool· Sep 16

Drop some eyes.

Edpool@edpool· Sep 14

I like your enthusiasm but your (I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say copy-pasted) messaging could use some personalisation. I liked the one you sent to the funko pop maker about their book.

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?"

Edpool@edpool· Sep 13

I'll start! These are the kinds of drawings I've got in the book. This big ol' girl is called an aki'Drednanth. They're a telepathic yeti type creature that can store their minds in ice and reincarnate. This one is wearing a freezer suit covered in souvenir stickers of the places she's been.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Sep 13

"Colouring With Contro" is a sort-of-rhyming A-B-C colouring book featuring characters and creatures from my sci-fi series "The Final Fall of Man" and related tales.

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!"

Edpool@edpool· Aug 20

Very excited to see how you handle this crazy collection of stories! Here's a picture of me cosplaying as Tabo Norid to celebrate. It's easy to make a fun cosplay when you make up the character, but it also means I have no excuse for putting him in a big coat.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Aug 17

Ooh, I actually have a #WIPSnip from my actual #WIP this time! This one's from my in-progress highdark fantasy (don't know if I coined that or not, probably not).

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.

Edpool@edpool· Aug 13

The #WIPSnips word for August 12th is "split" - I'm late to the party because of time zones and such, and it's not a #WIP except insofar as my entire collection of published works are connected, but I always liked this little passage from "Eejit". #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

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.

Edpool@edpool· Jul 11

In this snippet, the loyal family butler Jarvis encounters the Archangel Gabriel. Who was made into an Angel at least hundreds of thousands of years ago, if not more. Also contains a pop culture reference from the late 22nd Century. www.amazon.com/Bad-Cow-Or%C...

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.”

Edpool@edpool· Jun 13

I'm pretty sure there was a typo in this "anything A.I. can do, humans can do better" challenge but happy pride moth I guess.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Jun 5

I just finished creating a colouring book that I made using paper, pencil, pen and gimp editor for the scans (eraser took and paint bucket tool). It was delightfully soothing to draw in this style and I'm considering doing more. Screw Clippy's weird grandchild, there's no such thing as A.I.

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.

Edpool@edpool· May 21

Oh boy do I have art. My latest book, The Cursèd Playground, is an illustrated adventure in which a mixed crew of different species work together to circumnavigate the galaxy. If you like spotting sci-fi tropes, this one's for you.

Edpool@edpool· Apr 29

OH DEAR LORD THEY'RE BEAUTIFUL My Kickstarter goodies from @carmenloup.com, featuring but not limited to their wonderful @spsfc.bsky.social #SPSFC entry "The Audacity", has arrived in my grubby little hands.

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.

Edpool@edpool· Apr 28

Your blog posts get comments? Maybe I've had comments turned off for twenty years.

Edpool@edpool· Apr 22

My latest book, "The Cursèd Playground", is out now. Still waiting for a review (or even a rating). Short-form humourous adventure stories for people of all ages who have a love of #scifi and can appreciate a solid trope. www.amazon.com/Curs%C3%A8d-...