Oh, hey, I’m making my @giantbomb.bsky.social debut with my Top 10 games of the year! From Blue Prince to Clair Obscur, Cast n Chill, Consume Me, and Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, I cover a LOT of ground. (But, of course, you already know my top pick for Game of the Year.)

As a pre-Christmas treat, allow me to explain the true significance of the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the @museecluny.bsky.social, which is the story of the unicorn's increasing disaffection with its career as a standard-bearer.

I used to give a lectures on the history of (TT+C)RPGs and would dutifully start in the 70s because that's what was expected, but then open the last third with this map of Angria and ask if anyone knew what it was. The shared universe of the Brontë siblings! (this is mentioned downthread.)

Awesome thread on the long history of imaginative story games!

Trump released the equivalent of a Baen Books sf cover version of a battleship.

Ask your publisher if AI is integrated into their production process. If it is, you might want a different publisher.

You want to know how bad the use of AI tools in publishing can be? This is a case where you definitely must read the comments.

Apropos of nothing, my own experience with OUP is that they now outsource a lot of editorial work to the company named here. The production of my last book with them was ‘interesting’ and very different indeed from my experience with the same publisher for my previous 3 books.

Ben's weekly round up is one of the the best and most comprehensive for Americanists, covering news, podcasts, blogs, books, and more! (And I happen to get a very kind shout out in this week's edition)

How many times have I been told to give this racist game and its racist creators grace, and second chances? and empathy, and good faith, and and and? Nah. This isn’t just a fundamental misunderstanding of Ghibli. It is colonialist fucking desecration. @obojima.bsky.social Go fuck yourselves.

I don’t want your bullshit AI summary. Reading the article and writing your own summary IS the learning. Jesus H Roosevelt Christmas, we are doomed.

When you lose shitfaced middle-American teenage bros, you have lost America.

Headline makes it sound like Hochul is doing the beatings and deaths

Predictably, publishers have made partnerships with AI companies to handle production. And even more predictably, it's not going well AT ALL. You can and should choose a publisher based on their operational ethics. @leverpress.bsky.social is platinum OA, library-funded, and we *do not* use AI.

A bio of Charles R. Saunders, an important but sadly too often forgotten Black writer of sword and sorcery fantasy (which he called sword and soul), early critic of racism in fantasy, and journalist is coming out in January. The author, Jon Tattrie, will be on @mealofthorns.bsky.social, too!

Christian Kriticos on J. R. R. Tolkien’s long-lost imagination of a motorized world: “With his grand, mythic register, Tolkien defamiliarizes the car enough for modern readers to see it as he does—as truly monstrous.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/isengard-in-oxford/

Skip the terrible new Evangelical retelling of David's story (one of *three* released this year!), and check out Thomas Burnett Swann's much more interesting, queer, religion-critical retelling of King David's story!

My book, Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel, is now out with @uchicagopress.bsky.social! Use discount code UCPNEW for 30% off. I'm so excited! 🥳 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Something I neglected to mention in my essay from a few weeks ago on Swann's 1972 partial retelling of The Aeneid, is that he off-handedly suggests that the "golden fleece" of Jason/Medea is a metaphor for grain exports from Greek colonies in the Black Sea. It's a very neat, passing interpretation!

People who aspire to be academics: I wish to live a life of the mind Actual academics:

I wish BlueSky had a poll thing because this is the first time I've ever heard about this tipping thing and I want a site-wide poll of Americans to see how many people actually know about it!

Yes, please write a literary and cultural history of cyberpunk so I can read it, but I'll also sweeten the deal: I'll publish it!* * If it's good, passes peer review, etc.

There's plenty of author/text studies and thematic studies, but no one has yet written a literary/cultural history of cyberpunk, right? And I mean as a full book, not an edited collections or a monograph with four chapters, each about a single major noves. Am I missing *the* cyberpunk history?

Ok? Will... the dinosaurs be at the Olympics?

Yesterday I published this essay on Thomas Burnett Swann's HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN, his 1974 queer retelling of biblical the story of King David. It's an important early queer fantasy novel that I rarely see discussed and is worth reconsidering today!

It is wild to me how clearly out of his mind Thiel and all of his cronies are. These are deeply, cartoonishly stupid people. These are villains from a story that needs a second draft. It's baffling.

“Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and ‘The Bovadium Fragments’ is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury.” Christian Kriticos explores J. R. R. Tolkien’s long-lost satire: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/isengard-in-oxford/

looking to draw something from your favorite videogame, your rpg characters, fantasy pet portraits, and anything else you think would look sick as hell email me at [email protected] for rates and timeline

Yesterday I published this essay on Thomas Burnett Swann's HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN, his 1974 queer retelling of biblical the story of King David. It's an important early queer fantasy novel that I rarely see discussed and is worth reconsidering today!

I've rebranded the part of my website where I write about genre fiction to make my project a bit more explicit: "My main focus is on fantasy fiction and my goal is to [...] tell a fuller history of how fantasy developed, matured, and thrived in the mass market paperback era of the 1960s–1990s."

Hey look, Peter Thiel wrote an essay about Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in October. Guess who spent the last five years writing a book about a cult of opportunistic bastards who follow these two men's leads in attempting to rule & redefine humanity???

"I use it for, like, philosophical questions that come to me"

Peter Thiel -- yes, the now-evangelic tech billionaire -- has written literary criticism about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's WATCHMEN as a way to understand the coming of the Antichrist.

It's giving Elena Ceaușescu and Eva Perón.

Oh, I missed this but now, having spent most of the year watching Angel for the first time, I have the tools to get and enjoy this piece. And already from the title, I think @readingtheend.bsky.social is on to something!

I love Whelan's covers for Cherryh's books and one thing I enjoy about him being on Bluesky is getting to see his thoughts on illustration, which seem especially apt to Cherryh's novels here given how much Chanur is about aliens communicating and a human being the "problem" in some ways.

Hilarious review of Samantha Harvey's ORBITAL.

For the evening crowd:

For the evening crowd:

Many* are saying: you should read this essay!

Check out my new essay on Thomas Burnett Swann's "controversial" 1974 novel HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN, a gay retelling of the story of King David. Like all of Swann's novels it is strange, beautiful, contemplative. It offers a sharp critique of homophobia and a celebration of queer love.

The "creativity" afforded by AI is the creativity of the Renaissance art patron: it's the creativity of the ability to *tell* (not ask) someone to make what you want to see, to follow your whims, to flatter you. I's an expression of power, a desire to control, a skillless expression of uncreativity.

The era of the mass market paperback is coming to an end, and that’s not good thing for anyone. I jotted down some thoughts about the history of the format and why its end isn’t a great sign for the publishing industry: transfer-orbit.ghost.io/mass-market-...

The "creativity" afforded by AI is the creativity of the Renaissance art patron: it's the creativity of the ability to *tell* (not ask) someone to make what you want to see, to follow your whims, to flatter you. I's an expression of power, a desire to control, a skillless expression of uncreativity.

Trying to process this: Thomas Burnett Swann's most controversial novel, HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN (1974), about the queer love between King David and Jonathan, which was almost banned from distribution, was inspired by a book called GREEK LOVE by "J.Z. Eglinton." And who was Eglinton?

Perfect screenshot. Worf as a focal point is already killer, then your eyes travel to Data in the friar haircut and you think "this can't possibly get any better," and then there's the finishing blow of Geordi in his space visor plucking a lute

I think one of the least interesting or compelling narratives in lit, tv, film, etc. is the story of the artist struggling to create or to find inspiration. 😴

Looking for a novel about love, women's choices, self-fulfillment, sexual liberation, Sappho's poetry (kind of), and queer life among the Fauns -- and with a cover like an upmarket 1970s porno? Then you'll want to read Thomas Burnett Swann's seventh novel, WOLFWINTER (1972). My latest essay:

time to remind the world that potatoes are from Poland

"A demonstrably anachronistic and trifling composition, this opuscule appears to me utterly remiss" What I wouldn't give for a blurb like that on one of my books!