Niamh Callaghan, 33, could have simply waited until a lifeguard was present before engaging in such a high-risk sport, but, for reasons known only to her, found the small apple-flavoured rectangle too enticing to resist. Read the whole thing on Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/138862...

Coming Soon: Robot Fabulas Phase 2 Or, for those of you who like ordinal numbers, Part 4. I wasn't sure how to split the rest of this project by time periods but a little empirical perspective helped. Phase -1 was 11 chapters, Phase 0 was 12 chapters and Phase 1 was 10 chapters. So hence forth…

Antifa, tylenol, escalators and teleprompters declared terrorist organisations

A poem No man is an island,Except Mr Island, the human island,A man who exists surrounded by water,He's been like that since he was a bouy

A little song to help me keep track of the names tylenol, tylenol really is para-ceto-mol stupid name but then again better than aceta-mino-phen watch out here comes some tylenol

I was already raptured but it was from a nicer place to here. Wait...I meant "damned"

Portal fantasy side character This is a more of a question than a post. Can people think of an example of a fantasy story (any media) which is technically a portal fantasy but the "real world" character is NOT the main character. Put another way, a fantasy setting with a bunch of characters with…

Susan’s Salon 2025: 21-22 September 🌞🌏 Time for another equinox! Feels like only three months since we had a solstice. Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything…

All my favourite Disney actors are saying the same thing

God Emperor of Dune but with burritos

I promised something stupid Sorry, we are still in Puppy reactions to the Charlie Kirk murder but this post is less relentlessly grim than the last two and really does include something very stupid. Observant readers will notice that I haven't discussed Vox Day's reaction to Kirk's murder. There…

It's very hard for me to tell right now how "real" the boycott of Disney+ is in terms of impact. I've seen people claiming Disney's site was down at the same time I could pretty easily access it. But I'm hopeful that it might pick up enough steam and a strong enough narrative to matter.

Warning: post covers transphobia and stigmatisation of mental illness. Some slurs are quoted in context. camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/09/20/m...

On a right wing account I saw "Kimmel is a distraction" & I had to laugh. Trump-regime strategy is to constantly throw things at the news cycle, so everything is both substantial & a distraction. In this case, Trump etc changed the news story from Kirk & onto Kimmel & now their base are all confused

Both in real life and as "Camestros Felapton", I've been accused of having a Phd as if that is a bad thing and I definitely do not have Phd in anything nor am I ever likely to.

Just talked with my wife, we are cancelling our Disney+ subscription. If you have one, I encourage you to do the same.

MAGA has three insiders working for us to defeat MAGA from within: General Incompetence, Major Overeach, & Captain Asleep at the Wheel

One thing I'll say about DC not only canceling Red Hood, but recalling the first issue and refunding stores for buying it, is that you can still get Neil Gaiman's work through them. They still work with Otto Schmidt. Eddie Berganza worked there for years AFTER the formation of a policy that no women

Fast and Furious Times at Ridgemont Tokyo Drift High

Straw Larry and other mythologies On June 14 this year in Minnesota, state representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated along with her husband. Earlier that same day state senator John Hoffman and his wife had been shot, allegedly by the same man, but survived. Both politicians were part of the…

🚨 THIS IS NOT A DRILL 🚨 We’ve just seen this, by creator “Menapian” - a 4,998-piece set of the Great Exhibition (1851) Crystal Palace - complete with a bonus Megalosaurus and Ichthyosaur… beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

Insert “let them fight” meme here Lots going on in Puppy spaces currently, as you might imagine. I'll cover some of the heavier stuff later in the week. In the meantime here is a sideshow that if anybody in the world could unpack it would be me but frankly I'm just happy for all three of the…

I guess we all knew anyway but the right has been big on its own cancel culture and operates on a "it doesn't count when we do it" basis (just as they do with overt political violence).

More adventures in soft drink This blog continues to explore the boundaries between sense & nonsense, science-fiction & fantasy, and common decency & lemon flavoured beverages. Mountain Dew Summer Freeze is naturally & artificially flavoured with cherry, lemon and raspberry. It retains the sharp…

** For a while now I have posted two annotated story collections for my supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi every month. The September 2022 collection went out today, and the August 2025 will go out in 2 weeks. www.patreon.com/MicroSFF ko-fi.com/microsff **

Susan’s Salon 2025: 14-15 September Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including vulcan sausage recipes🖖. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges…

Eyeball monster gif I made an animated eyeball monster.

You need ethics AND logic. The current media proposition is that it was wrong to say that a person's speech is harmful & dangerous, because saying that about a person might harm them and so is dangerous.

It's easy - just format a brain partition. Install a separate personality in that partition just for going online. Let that separate personality control your life online. Oh, shit – that IS computer madness...

NEW IDSG: The Death and Life of Charlie Kirk. @danielharper.bsky.social & I react to the news, with receipts. idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/135-the-deat...

When Princess Diana died, people went nuts in England – yet, there were still plenty of jokes about it circulating. For all her faults, she was basically a nice person & sure, it was sad for her kids that their mum died but people mock celebrity deaths because the media tried itself is absurd.

I see the right wing of sci-fi/fantasy/funny books has been gloating over Gretchen Felker-Martin being fired by DC. So, let's look at how their circle has reacted to politicised murder in the past, shall we? (Content warning should be obvious)

Anyway, the Pinochet/throw-communists-out-of-helicopters memes people are complaining about violent political rhetoric

Today is a good day to subscribe to some trans/NB writers and comic creators' Patreons. Some I can recommend: @eruditorumpress.com, @ballardiangorse.bsky.social , @teganoneil5000.bsky.social , @midnightpals.bsky.social , @alexandraerin.com , @smolrobots.bsky.social , @kbriggs.bsky.social .

Timothy Cosplay A malicious creature plotting against the humans around it and that's just the cat normally. Here he is with an Alien:Earth eyeball monster but who is possessing whom?

I’m a fan of the alien eyeball-tentacle monster Alien: Earth is such an odd show. I am enjoying watching it but it is meandering and I'm not sure it knows what it is doing with its characters. I do like that I have no idea what is going to happen in the next episode but I don't know if that's…

Alice in Under Land? Katabasis by R.F.Kuang The authors note at the start of R.F.Kuang's new novel includes this: "Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons was indeed published in 1984, which is convenient for my timeline. Aristotle does not use the term “celestial space worm,” but it is a nice way to…

We will know when the US right has moved on from Trump when they start calling him a New York Democrat again

Another year, another con ban Early in early 2017, File 770 carried the story about an obscure right wing science fiction author angrily claiming that he had been excluded from speaking at BayCon, a San Francisco area science fiction convention: (An archive of JDA's own version of the story is…

Vaclav Havel explained how any dissent, even from the powerless, threatens the government's ideology. Hence the freakout over Mamdani.

The Hugo Voting Statistics report has been updated to version three, adding the second through sixth place run-off tallies for all awards. Find the updated report on our 2025 Hugo Award Winners page: seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-aw... #Worldcon #SeattleWorldcon2025 #HugoAward

Susan’s Salon 2025: 7-8 September – Lunar Eclipse edition 🌝 Australia gets a lunar ecplise this morning if I wake up early (and I often do) then I'll take pictures. Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics,…

Looking forward to this. Two of the most thoughtful minds in science fiction

Modern Excel sheets have a max size of 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns or 17,179,869,184 cells or ~17 billion (US) cells. So you could fit all the names of god in one Excel sheet if it is the small billion but not if it is the big billion

Not just numbers but also geometric forms, sets and functions. Left wing recruitment of abstract mathematical entities is at an all time high.

The Week’s Final Science Fiction Puzzle I've posed several question to you all this week, the last one also concerns an ambiguity. In Arthur C. Clarke's famous story The Nine Billion Names of God are there: 1,000,000,000 names of God...or 1,000,000,000,000 names of God The story was written in…

Science-Realism: a sub-genre In the Campbell tradition of science fiction we have stories of heroic engineers or scientists tackling problems that require scientific insight. There can be other dimensions to those problems including ethical ones (perhaps very contrived ones). There is a lot more…

Science fiction edge cases I do enjoy questions of what is and isn't science fiction. Regular readers will know I end up both vague and expansive about what gets included but that approach runs the danger of the genre just becoming everything. Tighter definitions have merit because the edge cases…

The thing with the press being surprised by a sympathetic version of Frankenstein's monster isn't that Shelley's version has empathy for the creature but almost all versions have empathy for the creature. Even cheesy modern versions of the character have him as misunderstood by society.

Hugo Chart Time The nomination data and Hugo longlist have been released by Seattle Worldcon. I've plugged the data into the spreadsheet that was made for the 2023 data and which fuelled Charting the Cliff (which in a nice bit of self-reference is also a finalist so this spreadsheet is now also…