my fellows in big five publishing are looking to a future in which AI is pushed onto them by the higher-ups with little thought, meanwhile 99% of the indies I know are coming out against it

We have to choose good every day. We have to choose acceptance and equality and equity and justice. None of us are inherently beyond that. And the first step to doing good is recognising that you aren’t better than anyone else.

And if you dismiss people who came to bigotry later in life as “well they must have always been evil”, you are missing how that radicalisation happened. And that’s dangerous, because if we refuse to acknowledge the problem then we can’t address it.

We must constantly push back. You are not good because you were good as a teen. You must keep choosing to grow and evolve as new bigotry emerges and the fight moves on.

One thing that gets me every time this comes up is when somebody turns evil and people act like they were evil their whole life. No. Children are not born evil or hateful or bigoted. That behaviour is learned and people learn it at different points in their lives.

I know that one of my favorite collections this year was @thomasha.bsky.social's amazing collection, titled "Uncertain Sons" (also the name of the fascinating and original novelette that rounds out the collection) undertowpublications.com/shop/uncerta...

Audiobooks featuring the stars of the 2006-9 #RobinHood TV series on sale for the season

The holiday season has passed, but now you can give the gift of Apex all year round! 🎁🛸 For any magazine subscription or book order on our website, you now have the option to send it as a gift to your loved ones. Help the world get weirder and share more Apex with your fellow readers! 📚👽🖤

While “unalive” is one of the tackiest examples, I’ve seen the Holocaust referred to as “The History,” Hitler as “The Dictator,” and Nazis not at all. Who does that help? It sure as shit doesn’t help critics of nazism, but this is how YTers are speaking out of fear of demonization. Pure newspeak.

I have become one of those people who reads Those Who Walk Away From Omelas as an indictment of the foreclosure of the imagination, that we can’t imagine a society where everyone thrives. It’s easier to believe in some weird, unexplained alchemy whereby immense cruelty is transmuted into care.

It’s been said many times, but it’s brutally hard to replicate Lynchian weirdness because you’re trying to be weird and he wasn’t; to him that’s just how stories should be told.

One time I acted in a student film by a director who was obsessed with Lynch and Lost Highway, and he wanted so bad for his movie to have that tone, but all he could think to tell us was “When the other character says a line to you, wait a really long time to respond.”

Said it before, but: The absolute best screen version of LotR would have been made in the mid-to-late 1970’s by ITV, and would’ve been about 4 series long, with a cast mostly made up m of aging British character actors, and have had a synth soundtrack.

what I love about LotR is that it is at its heart about moving through a melancholy landscape largely filled with ruins, faded histories and legends - I would have filmed it that way and cut the fights to a bare minimum, plus add Merry's interest in comparative philology as a major plot element

Discworld QOTD, from Small Gods “Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE? ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.”

Incredible as it may seem, there's a new issue of Kaleidotrope coming in about a week—maybe less!

Time is a flat circle

I'm honestly stunned by the callous dehumanization in the comments.

Like I think it should be self-evident that you shouldn’t always agree with the fictional 9th century monks but what do I know.

More pencils for the gigantic LOTR figure set: some of Faramir's Rangers

you can't say that kind of shit anymore, man

The particular way in which he was choosing to dice recklessly with death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size of a small defence budget with an American Express Card, which was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe.

A brand-new video documentary celebrating the history of Bernice Summerfield on audio debuts today! 🥂 Please raise your glass to the first lady and true queen of Big Finish. Click https://youtu.be/BUCL9eSw5S4 to watch.

Watching THE GREEN KNIGHT again

Cat Clinging To Side Of Christmas Tree Admits That Was Extent Of Plan https://theonion.com/cat-clinging-to-side-of-christmas-tree-admits-that-was-1849899567/

When Hooklanders talk about the county being haunted by an ‘Iron Witch’, you have a moment of confusion. Do they mean Margaret Thatcher or do they mean some other malevolent entity that is withering the land and stealing hope? – Dr. Michael Benn, 1981

Jeremy's books are always excellent and now's the perfect time to pick one up.

Odd that Gender is a biological, immutable certainty AND something you can lose if you own the wrong dog.

We live in a weird age when Arrow will put out a restored print of Beastmaster with ten hours of documentaries and commentaries, and most studio releases are stuffed in cases that come pre-broken.

I’ve basically stopped killing whales entirely at this point?

"Did you see what Mark Cuban posted? Oh did you see the clapb—" You shake yourself awake in the cold North Atlantic water. You are not online. It is July of 1858. You are a baleen whale, and you have changed your mind. The future most not come to pass. The telegraph cable must break.

Die Hard was actually appropriated from pagans

Jim Carrey grinch feels like he somehow internalized every Grant Morrison interview about the joker where Morrison is like “he’s a hyperplex consciousness who has engineered himself to be super-sane to survive in our shrieking electric future”

you can tell when someone is too used to making shit up online because they stop being able to find easy tells in their own lies, such as "why would attendees at an in-person con ask a white man if hes black"

As the year comes to a close, here's a quick look at my publications for 2025. In 2024, I closed out the year with 4 publications in as many months. A streak that rolled into 2025 for 6 months straight. Thankful to each and every publisher that was willing to give my work a home.

Hot tip: if you’re going to interview an author, it’s a great idea to have read some their work first.

But Gollum did not know about potatoes, meaning they had reached Middle-earth in the 500 years since he took refuge beneath the mountains. In this essay I will

12YO girl signed up to do “stand up comedy” at the talent show. 13YO boy decided to heckle her. Teacher started to tell the boy to leave her alone, but the 12YO comedian said “no, no, let him go, this is the closest he’s ever going to get to having a conversation with a girl.”

"I fear you dismiss the laws of war too lightly", comment on a response paper from a professor in undergrad.

Gandalf: Sauron fears what you will become Aragorn (hasn't gotten adequate sleep for months): Yeah. OK.

It's kinda funny that film!Aragorn hears Boromir's last words, tells him to be at peace, and holds him as he dies, just to immediately take his snazzy Tree of Gondor braces.

No literary agent who is going to get you a deal is going to charge you upfront. They make a percentage. That is how it works. If someone says otherwise or tries to "upsell" you, they are scammers.

Red Dwarf was closer to the truth than any of us feared

Happy St. Stephen’s Day! 14th century wall painting fragments from St. Stephen’s Chapel - the Royal Chapel at the Old Palace of Westminster, largely destroyed by fire in 1834. The fragments are now part of the collections at the British Museum. 📷 My own. #StStephensDay

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

A frustrated Pedro Pascal asking Neil Druckmann, who was directing Pascal in a Last of Us episode, “do you like art?”