Happy Doctor Who day! To celebrate here is the greatest of Doctor Who images: Verity Lambert using a Mechanoid as a lighter.

it's not anything remotely new, but lately i've been more attuned to people reacting to movies (and art) with comments like, "Why did that happen?" and, "I don't understand what it's trying to say," and leaving it at that, as though those are meaningful criticisms those are invitations to think!

New, on Heat Death! Thrilled to run this absolute banger from @goldwagnathan.bsky.social, on the bizarre way that concepts from 20th century Golden Age sci-fi have lingered in the scientific imagination, despite never coming within spitting distance of becoming — what's the word? — real

For me, the most dispiriting thing about all the political discourse on Bluesky is the absolute refusal to admit that we, ourselves, have political agency.

An unconscious assumption behind a lot of online discourse is that we’re political spectators, not citizens with collective agency/responsibility; like The Democrats are a sports team and our role is merely to yell at the TV when they play badly.

I think one reason most people think of ideas as something precious is that we mostly do not notice when we are having them. Noticing your own thoughts is something you have to practice.

Generative AI is based on the faulty premise that your first idea - the half-formed pondering that signals only the beginning of a long, possibly fruitless journey - is already good enough to exist. That it requires nothing but actualisation to be complete.

Any creator will tell you that it's the process, the *work* of creating something, that determines its final form. Your "idea" might be for one thing, but in the *making* of it, you get a thousand new ideas that change it into something else.

Wanting to write more for the blog but my attention span right now is so short I'm barely getting through a sentence without getting distracted. Not great for reading, either; I'm switching between a dozen books at any given time.

William Hope Hodgson was an amazing inventor of monsters. One of my favorites came from the Carnacki story "The Whistling Room," about... well, what it sounds like. Other favorites include the revenant from Percival Landon's "Thurnley Abbey," and L. P. Hartley's Traveling Grave.

A thing the Simpsons writers eventually figured out was that the kind of stories they were telling didn't have to resolve everything at the end of an episode: Homer can quit his job for the thousandth time and everyone will go along with him being back at the nuclear plant the following week.

One of the seminal moments of my media literacy education was tuning in to the S2 premiere of Sledge Hammer to see how they handled Sledge causing a nuclear apocalypse at the end of S1. They scrolled "THE EARLY YEARS" under the title for a few seconds, then chugged along as if nothing happened.

What you need to do is have them not be the protagonist at all, but the person who *helps* the protagonist. Sherlock Holmes is never the one to whom the interesting thing happens, he's the one who investigates interesting things happening to others.

The real problem for Bond is also the problem for Batman, Doctor Who, and dozens of similar characters -- the idea that a melodrama hero must also be a dramatic protagonist. The two roles are fundamentally irreconcilable. I blame George Lucas and Joseph Campbell.

Don Draper is a fantasy of being a 21st century man going back to the 1950s and thinking thoughts like "oh but of course a woman is as good at creativity as a man". It's a fantasy of superiority every bit as seductive as fantasies of 'inferior peoples' who 'need to be governed' by colonisers.

and this feels something big that's happened to us as a culture. a total moral superiority to the past (my instinct is that this is technocratic in origin, but interested to hear other explanations) to the point that we really cannot believe it was like that.

A really great thread on contemporary attitudes to the past, in and out of SF; reminds me of some of what John Rieder wrote about in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.

Tolkien was not, in fact, very interested in realism at all. He was interested in religion, and myth, and language. The mistake people keep making is conflating realism for detail: they're not the same thing, and detail need not be the enemy of imagination.

TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN is a magical book. Post-fascist Italian weird horror novel that seems to predict the internet, our deep need to pour ourselves into it, the isolation and web of espionage it creates, the way it is exploited by power. Adored it

it's not that you can't give a classic a bad review but there's a certain smugness about the way some people do it that I find intolerable. oh you didn't like the great gatsby? should we throw a party? should we invite ernest hemingway

An unconscious assumption behind a lot of online discourse is that we’re political spectators, not citizens with collective agency/responsibility; like The Democrats are a sports team and our role is merely to yell at the TV when they play badly.

A lot of discourse lately about how Democrats fail at messaging. They do often struggle, though a lot of the problem is a hostile media. But it isn’t entirely on elected Dems—we need to admit this is an area where we, ordinary citizens, collectively have a role to play.

and because i can imagine the bad faith reading of this, what i am *not* saying is that everything about the extant democratic party is hunky dory other than its total absence of a communications/propaganda infrastructure. what i *am* saying is that this absence puts a hard limit on reaching voters

My creative process www.worldofmoose.com/collections/...

At the #comics site: The Man Who Loved His Job www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1644

tremendously admire his work and the way he talks abt an exploratory creative process BUT it is very sad to me how little that sort of thinking & working is possible. like u need to have an enormously successful career in a medium that isn't yet perfectly industrialized in order to get to this point

sometimes i think we lost something with the disappearance of not just cheap but cheap *looking* mass market paperback versions of "prestige" books

if you approach even pretty difficult or experimental writers with the presumption that they’re simply trying to while away and afternoon or figure something out, same as every other writer on earth, you may or may not finish the book, but there probably won’t be bad feelings either way

At the #comics site: Keep Off www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1639

I think movies have done a lot to convince people that art or writing or any creative endeavor is when you come up with an "idea" because your dumb friend said a phrase, and all the rest of making it is busy work, a montage, and wouldn't you like to skip the montage? well good news, AI can do it

I think what's impressive about TRON is that, visually, it's still so much more interesting than any of it's sequels. It's crazy that they tried update this digital world by making it as 'realistically rendered' as possible. It's a complete misunderstanding of the original's charm.

I'm kind of coming round to the idea that all of us on social media—even those of us whose followings aren't huge—are basically small-scale influencers, and should think of ourselves as having certain responsibilities on that basis.

Maybe we should all just not repost videos for a while.

I’ve been thinking for a bit that we’ve moved not only into a post-material perspective of the world, but also a post-informational one that privileges collective make-believe and imagining over any other mode of reality

I'm not planning on watching this show, but found this thread interesting. I've been thinking for a while our culture encourages everyone to think about and relate to real people in pretty much the same ways we think about and relate to fictional people.

Social media is very effective at creating sin-eaters. A sin-eater is different from an ephemeral main-character. It's a recurring "well would you look at that guy" person you see screenshotted on your feed constantly, who is meant to stand in for the evils of some larger group you dislike

few better movie experiences than watching something where you’re like “there’s no way they can stick this landing” and then it goes full Kerri Strug. that’s this movie.

I've been seeing a lot of this even in books that seem like they should be more driven, pulpier, more plot & action-focused. What frustrates me about it—to be clear, I adore a contemplative lost-in-the-landscape literary meander—is when it seems to stem from a televisual concept of *time*.

At the #comics site: Things Your Grandparents Knew www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1636

End of the month, and that means: the link round-up is upon us! Some cool reviews, some great interviews, and some insightful essays from around the web: ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/09/29/w...

This morning I randomly remembered the time Lipton tried to appeal to the anxious masculinity market with the slogan "This ain't no sippin' tea."

As an anti-capitalist content creator we are always begging people to share and talk about our work but the dunking/outrage ecosystem is like a bulldozer driven by a geared up gym bro. We've gotta figure out ways to have discourse around interesting ideas too, not just bad ones

was S01 strange? hell yeah. some of the spiciest shit Roddenberry ever thunk up, and a couple of real clunkers in that line-up. they were right to smooth out some of those kinks … but Star Trek has to have some of that weirdness to work. that’s the Great Bird’s truest legacy, we forget at our peril.

these guys are so familiar and domesticated now, it seems hard to properly convey just how weird this pilot was, a different world filled with bizarre shit making no real attempt to color within the lines of the still very popular movies … like a weird day-glo bomb set off right in the living room.

At the comic site: Behold, a Snail Horse www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1632

Re-upping this once for the morning. Specifically, it's part two of a post on stories that got both a Hugo and a Nebula nomination in 1974, which turned out to be a surprisingly thematically unified bunch.