John K. Patterson

Author of the Queensland Crater series. Published in "Murderbirds" and "Weird Wilderness," writer/artist of dinosaurs, dragons, and cryptids.

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

Prologue for "Tyrant Strike: A Queensland Crater Novel" https://t.co/rWRdSicAOi

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

@CuriosityonX I paint in coffee, and made portraits of Rocky. He's the best.

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

@lhallwriter Dinosaur hunting in future Australia. What could possibly go wrong?
https://t.co/Bm3gHoeBUX

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

As if we didn't have enough problems with Orwell's "1984" being used as a how-to manual, now "Fahrenheit 451" is becoming reality.

AI outpaces every reactionary attempt at ethical restraint. That is why I fear it is a fire which will keep growing, never to be satisfied.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Lammy @Lammyisback]

Because I’m diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder a lot of people ask me “how do you hurt a narcissist?” My response is always the same. Leave them alone. Glow up and live the life you wanted. Don’t give them validation.

[Parental Alienation @PAcumbria]

A narcissist doesn't destroy your reputation because you're a bad person. They do it because you're a witness. And witnesses need to be discredited before they're believed.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Remain playful as your responsibilities increase. It's easy to become serious when people and results depend on you, but nearly everyone's performance improves when they proceed lightly through the world.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Plenty of growth can be found in removing your vices, but the real leaps are unlocked when you stop clinging to your comforts.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This sentence from Carl Jung hits hard.

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”

[Gabe Pluguez @Gabepluguez]

“Abide in me”

Pray.
Read your Bible.
Do your work.

Take care of what he’s called you to take care of.

It’s ok to just ABIDE in Christ.
Not everything is a catastrophe.

[Jeremiah Knight @iamrjknight]

Men can silence a witness, close a pulpit, burn a Bible, punish a preacher, and train an entire generation to call darkness light. What they cannot do is make God false.

The world does not defeat truth by rejecting it. It only reveals its hatred of the God who spoke it. Scripture says fallen men do not lack truth. They hold it down because truth exposes their rebellion and leaves them without excuse.

“Who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).

Truth may disappear from public approval. It may be driven from schools, mocked in universities, censored by governments, and abandoned by churches that prefer acceptance to faithfulness. But rejection does not alter reality. A nation may outlaw the truth, yet it remains true. A preacher may soften it, yet God has not changed what He said.

“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).

History is filled with rulers who believed they could silence God by silencing His servants. Prophets were imprisoned, apostles were beaten, believers were scattered, and faithful witnesses were killed. Yet the gospel continued because the power of the Word never depended upon the safety of the messenger.

“I suffer hardship even to imprisonment as a criminal; but the word of God is not imprisoned” (2 Timothy 2:9).

The clearest example stands at Calvary. Men arrested the One who called Himself the truth. False witnesses accused Him, rulers condemned Him, soldiers crucified Him, and a stone was placed before His tomb. To human eyes, the lie appeared to have won.

Then God raised Him from the dead.

“But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24).

That is why the church must never panic when truth becomes unpopular. We should grieve when people reject it, and we should tremble when churches compromise it, because souls can perish while embracing lies. But we must never speak as though the truth itself is in danger.

God does not need our cleverness to preserve His Word. He commands our faithfulness in proclaiming it. Our task is not to make truth acceptable to the age, but to declare it clearly, defend it honestly, and suffer rather than change it.

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” (Matthew 24:35).

Falsehood may sit on the throne for a season. It may command applause, control institutions, and punish everyone who refuses to bow. But it cannot survive the judgment of God.

Truth may be rejected, buried, and opposed, but it cannot be destroyed, because it rests upon the character of the God who cannot lie and is revealed perfectly in Christ, who rose from the grave.

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

@japan_nobunaga Oh, wonderful! I'm in Colorado as well. Hopefully the elevation hasn't bothered you too much. If you get the chance, visit the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I went to my daughter's school for a parent meeting.

The teacher shook my hand and said, "You are an amazing father."

I said, "No no no no no."

Five nos. I counted later.

She smiled and said, "Really. She talks about you every day."

I said, "No, she is amazing. Not me. I am nothing. I am just a father. Please. No."

I was sweating. In America. In November. In a classroom.

The teacher looked at me the way you look at a dog who is scared of a vacuum cleaner.

She said, "Okay… well… she's doing great."

I said, "Thank you. Sorry. Thank you. Sorry."

I bowed. In a chair. To an American woman. Who was already looking at her next parent.

In the car, my daughter buckled her seatbelt and said,

"Papa. Why did you say no five times?"

I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.

Because the real answer was:

In Japan, when someone praises you, you must push it away. If you accept it, you are arrogant. If you deny it once, you are humble. If you deny it five times, you are a good Japanese man.

My father denied every compliment for 70 years.
His father denied every compliment for 80 years.
I was raised by a line of men who could not say thank you.

I looked at my daughter in the rearview mirror.

She was 7. She was waiting.

I said,

"Because Papa is stupid. From today, Papa will say thank you."

She said, "Okay!" and went back to her iPad.

Like it was nothing.
Like changing 300 years of samurai DNA takes 4 seconds when your daughter asks.

That night I called my father.

I said, "Otousan. You were an amazing father."

He said, "No no no no no."

I said, "Yes. Five times yes. I am your son. I know."

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, "…arigatou na."

First time in 40 years.

My daughter taught me in the car.
I taught my father on the phone.

America just held the door open.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Simple mindset shifts:

– I'm not hurt, I'm healing.

– I'm not losing, I'm learning.

– I was not rejected, I was redirected.

Negative things happen. Negative mindsets make them harder.

[Giga Based Dad @GigaBasedDad]

Our mission is clear.

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

@PenginRob Well done!

[Jeremiah Knight @iamrjknight]

One of the strange witnesses to the truth of Christianity is how desperately men labour to silence it.

If Christ were only a myth, why does His name still trouble the conscience? If the gospel were only a human story, why does it still provoke such hatred, mockery, resistance, and endless attempts to explain it away?

The world does not rage against fairy tales. It rages against the truth that exposes it.

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light” (John 3:19).

Many reject Christianity not because the evidence is weak, but because the claims of Christ are absolute. He does not come as one religious option among many. He comes as Lord. He does not ask the sinner to admire Him from a distance. He commands repentance, exposes sin, and demands the surrender of the whole life.

“God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent” (Acts 17:30).

This is why unbelief is never morally neutral. Scripture says men suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The problem is not only intellectual confusion. The problem is a heart that does not want God to be God.

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18).

The cross remains offensive because it destroys human pride. It says we are not basically good people needing improvement, but guilty sinners needing a Substitute. It says salvation is not earned by morality, intelligence, religion, or sincerity, but received by grace through faith in Christ alone.

“For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

So when men spend their strength trying to disprove Christ, it does not make Him smaller. It often reveals how deeply His truth has struck the conscience.

[Knight World @KnightWorld]

"A warrior loses not when he falls, but when he refuses to rise."

[The Biblical Man @Biblicalman]

Someone told you to just forgive.

You were still bleeding. The thing replayed in your head every morning before your feet hit the floor. Their name alone made your chest tighten.

And somebody who hadn't carried your wound for a single second looked you in the eye and said "You need to let it go."

Like forgiveness is a light switch.
Like you flip it and the memory dies.

That's not what your Bible says.

Forgiveness is real. God commands it. But He never once commanded you to forget.

He told you to forgive your brother. Not to pretend it didn't happen.

God Himself forgave Israel over and over and He never forgot a thing. He brought them out of Egypt, fed them in the wilderness, gave them the land. And He remembered the golden calf and the grumbling and the day they begged to go back to slavery because the food was better.

He forgave them and still wrote it all down.

You're holding a book full of proof that forgiveness and memory live in the same chest.

So when someone tells you to "just let it go" and you feel guilty because you can't stop remembering, hear me.

You are not failing at forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a decision you make with a wound that's still open.

Forgetting was never in the command. God kept every receipt from Israel and still called them His people.

He asked you to release the debt.
Not erase the scar.

And most of the people pressuring you to forget have never bled the way you bled.

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

@lhallwriter Raiders of the Lost Ark
Back to the Future
Flight of the Navigator

[John K. Patterson @Paleoespresso]

Free Story on my Substack!

"Treading Eggshells" - While tracking an orphaned bear cub in the Gobi Desert, a biologist discovers the fabled Mongolian Death Worm is more than a legend.

https://t.co/KaXNMjx0yp