"Find a reason to exist, because the universe will always give you reasons not to." Such a good line, from Pilgrim Machines by @yudhanjaya.bsky.social

Oooh!

I'm glad I got to blow a few minds with the Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines. Reminder: Choir of Hatred is out now! There's a whole trilogy! And they're good, especially if you like your narrators mangling existential dread and Buddhism in the dark depths of space. www.amazon.com/dp/B0D6X7N8J...

The new Asterix series on Netflix is fantastic. Clever, beautiful, and has that classic Goscinny×Uderzo vibe.

This is fantastic idea.

Being a Buddhist

Meet Yudha's Starmap: a little galaxy generator in the browser. My own little slice of No Man's Sky. Something I've been tinkering with on and off for four years now, finally usable! Very happy with this. github.com/yudhanjaya/S...

Fascinating. First time I’ve heard of this. So eerie to see so many American headlines in the last decade come straight out of this plot.

Just got the next two books set in The Salvage Crew universe. @yudhanjaya.bsky.social is a unique voice in the sci-fi space. If you like thought provoking, hard sci-fi, check these out. They're all standalone books set in the same universe.

If you liked The Salvage Crew (2020) and the sequel I spent four years on - Pilgrim Machines (2024) . . . Then I'm utterly delighted to give you something totally different in vibe (again) with CHOIR OF HATRED. www.amazon.com/Choir-Hatred...

Going back to Origami Meteorite . . . The notes just keep piling up

Authors on this list include @robertjbennett.bsky.social, @mattdinniman.bsky.social, @darylwriterguy.bsky.social, @aijiang.bsky.social, @marklawrenceauthor.bsky.social, @jonmcgoran.bsky.social, @adapalmer.bsky.social, @marygthompson.bsky.social, and @yudhanjaya.bsky.social!

Thank you! Glad to see Pilgrim getting some love. PS: love the Bobiverse, and DCC is probably one of the greatest binge-reads I've read in the last ten years. Good taste!

Nerd card: 📚 Fantasy & sci-fi 🔧 Mad engineering 🌱 Gardens and farm life content 🎧 Classical music and Lo-fi beats to chill/study to 🎮 Video games and dev. Think FFVII, Cassette Beasts, Pokémon, Rimworld 🎼 Linkin Park, Audiomachine, Yosi Horikawa, anything scored by Ramin Djawadi or Clint Mansell

Cats for sale!

Got this passage from “The Writing Contest” by the marvellous @yudhanjaya.bsky.social stuck in my head today. Will not leave me alone.

1.4 million words in Obsidian.

We’re packing up for the move tomorrow, but I couldn’t resist buying @charliejane.bsky.social’s Victories Greater than Death. Found it in the store amidst my search for microfiber cloth and gloves. Beautiful book (I have it on my Kindle) and the hardcover is stunning.

Maybe we’re taking this AI business too far

You reckon the machine in Rage Against the Machine was a microwave? Because I’m definitely raging against this machine right now.

Bravo.

Good stuff. If you’re looking for some fantastic reads, go forth!

This is an excellent essay with a lot of food for thought. I keep thinking of Kafka’s or Satre’s various protagonists, where the story is as much about things happening to them as much as it is about them happening to things; where the story is about enduring more than inflicting.

I miss the days when technology was brought to us by excited geeks and the nerds instead of sleazy marketers, MBAs and podcasters

I think the inverse statement holds true: if you don’t enjoy the writing, the audience can tell.

We’ve actually managed to grow something here in Colombo. Our mulberry bush shares its fruits with us daily. Going to take it to Kandy and see if we can get a few plants going. I’ve been told they’re fairly hardy plants!

Honestly, the Internet is still full of promise. It’s just that the promising stuff is hard to find and requires us to dig beneath the noise and the ubiquitous identical interaction templates built for the lowest common denominator of users. It’s what happens when something goes mainstream.

these excerpts, from an essay on the modern use of first person perspective are gonna stay with me for a long time, even if a whole lot of this feels way more like a reaction to literary than speculative fiction. But really interesting food for thought here

Playboy actually published Jack Kerouac, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Nabokov, Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez etc. There was a period where the porn mag was one of the few places willing to publish real transgressive stuff.

Finally. www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblo...

Solid stuff. Every year I have a moment of awe for the creativity the SFFH space gives us.

Good morning!

Really happy to see Pilgrim slowly making waves. In 2021, Google Drive sync issues swallowed 20k words of the opening; in 2024, a water tank leaked through the roof, dousing my computer and burning out the drive just as I was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript.

Just got back on Bluesky and wow! This place is thriving!

What makes a great RPG story? My latest feature dives into JRPGs and why the genre spawned by DQ and FF offers a unique platform for big, sprawling narratives. To help tell this story, I spoke with writers like @yudhanjaya.bsky.social, @emcandon.bsky.social, and @patmakesrpgs.bsky.social.

After weeks of trying different devices, I finally have my perfect, low-power writing setup: my old Boox Air (e-ink) paired with this custom keyboard that I built today. Power consumption is so low that battery life is measured in weeks, and I work directly in Google docs.

KJ Parker’s story in this is such a strong opener. Could see the ending coming from a distance, but the story is so well researched and the voice is so strong that it doesn’t matter. Also, is anyone else in awe of how Tom Holt maintains a massive career as both Tom Holt and KJ Parker?

Closing my tabs and my searches today have been wild it begins with "The dictionary of obscure sorrows" and ends with "Relativistic kill vehicles".

21,912 words on Salvage Crew 2: Humble Space Pilgrim! As a technical challenge, I'm going to simulate crew actions to a point where there's a kind of natural resonance between them. I did this earlier by writing code; die rolls and Markov chains; this time I want to replicate this paper's approach.

Yesterday, in a sudden fit of inspiration, I wrote a complete short story. 8300 words. It isn’t what I was supposed to do… Yet I am tremendously happy about this … Moments like this are rare for me. And on a technical level I feel like I unlocked a new sense of style for myself.

I've been trying to find some Indian/South Asian SFF in bookstores, and unfortunately haven't had much luck... Until today. Spotted The Inhuman Peace by @yudhanjaya.bsky.social and Stolen Hours and Other Stories by Manjula Padmanabhan at WHSmith at Delhi airport. Here's hoping for more 🤞🏽

Genuinely enjoying Starting Point, and I've got Turning Point queued up next. Miyazaki is so refreshingly grounded and unashamedly idiosyncratic with the answers to why he creates a thing. It's great reading for these times when I'm shepherding my energy.

I had written off this year as being a strange liminal period, but it isn't so bad; I've clocked - - The Gratiaen award for fiction - two manuscripts delivered to a (local) publisher - another manuscript done and sent to my agent - my short stories have been compiled and translated into Sinhala