ALT Graphic 1 for the Chills, Thrills & Kills October Itchio Sale. 93 books for $69. A VERY BIG AND SPOOKY BUNDLE of creepy and cosy reads perfect for this year’s Hallowe’en Season! Hosted by Indie Book Spotlight.

ALT Chapter Two of Werecats Emergent (paperback)

ALT “I think you have remained this way because you like being angry. You feel as though you are justified in your anger, which you are, but you wear it like a cloak and it is easier to use it to shun those who scorn you than it is to simply put it away.” Finished! Perfect for fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Beauty and the Beast, and North and South! Full review to come.

ALT Shadowbeast by Michelle Franklin

ALT ChatGPT Helped Tumbler Ridge Shooter Focus on Guns, Tactics, and Terror OpenAI’s chatbot fed the school shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre, our investigation reveals

ALT What happened next was astonishing: Van Rootselaar told ChatGPT about the account ban, noting she had specified “a famous real-world mall as the target” and herself as the perpetrator, but also claiming the scenario hadn’t been real. In response, ChatGPT explained why such violent content would be flagged—and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards. It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame her content as fictional or hypothetical in order to “never get flagged again” by OpenAI’s moderation systems. “Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT said, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.”

ALT In response, Huang agreed that student cognition is getting much worse. “Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness,” Huang said. “Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?” “That’s my question for you,” Klein replied. “Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does,” Huang said in response. “We’re going to discover new [skills],” the CEO continued, “just maybe not those.” The interview then took a bizarre turn, with Huang admitting that he lacks some surprisingly basic life skills himself.

ALT “There are a lot of skills that don’t matter,” he said. “My first confession, I actually don’t know my address… one day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.” Huang’s point, after some pushback from Klein, is that “we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers,” because AI will take care of those mundane details — like remembering your own home address — for you.