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Joshua Lavender's avatar

What a lovely gesture! Thank you, Pneumanaut, for generously championing my writing!

For those who want to know, my profile picture (the artwork at the top of this post) is not AI-generated. It's called "The Mirror of Erised," after the artifact in the Harry Potter books, and it's the creation of the photographer Christian Hopkins, whose surreal imagery fascinates me. I first saw it on the cover of a literary journal. By design, I believe, the mirror resembles a smartphone, and I thought the photo perfectly captures the trap and the toll of tech mediation in society, a key theme in my science fiction. Someday, if Quibble comes out in print, I hope Christian will let me use this image for the book cover, even though none of my characters look like this person. You can see more of Christian's artwork here: https://www.christianhopkinsphotography.com/

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Happy Nielsen's avatar

That’s so cool!

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Joshua Lavender's avatar

Ain't it? I don't know how Christian Hopkins gets all the stunning effects in his photos. Some must be devised with photo editing software, but I think he gets a lot of them from careful staging and inventive analog photography techniques. However he does it, he's a genius!

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Happy Nielsen's avatar

Agreed! No matter how it’s done, it’s incredibly cool

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Happy Nielsen's avatar

What a great highlight! Adding his work to my saved list!

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Bill Hiatt's avatar

Nice piece--though it did remind me of the nightmare of tagging. Substack could make it so much easier by just facilitating the copying of tag lists. Sigh! Or maybe just implement hashtags as an easy way to aggregate stories for thematic days.

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