it's that time of the month where i tell you, hey, my steampunk/apocalypse series is the best thing i've ever done and you should tell someone you know to check it out underink.press/pages/maynar...

And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest most courageous people in the world. You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you *know*. That the bourgeois are not human.

Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded.

New ep of the podcast just dropped and it's such a fun one. We crack into a black comedy, featuring @levelstory.bsky.social with additional notes from @esanderson.bsky.social youtu.be/d-4d-b0kxVA

Low key uncomfortable being called sir when I'm served by someone at a bar or restaurant. Millennials will hit you with a "dude" or "bro" but then occasionally a Gen Z will hit you with a "sir" to make you feel ancient

The willingness to scuttle key operations of their hundred-million dollar companies to AI is galling to witness. The same execs insisting on back to office are off-shoring their companies to countries where they can pay "2 for 1" salaries while endorsing AI. Head empty nonsense.

These cretins decimate the mental health of their employees to get a wink from a VC firm , and every 3 months the goal posts move because the target was whatever-the-hell and the new target is whatever-the-hell-B for just... the same BS year on year. Yeah, the free market *really* is working, guys.

Generously: they are so comfortable inflicting scars on the people who work for them because they care and engage so little with themselves that to them they are no scars at all. Really: every moment is an opportunity for profit. Team lunch? Take a photo, that goes on LinkedIn, I'm a good boss!

Darn this choice I made actually impacts me! No no no, the way it works is that *I* do a thing, and then in five years I move to another company and do a bunch of stuff (yeah it destroys lives, no my problem), but you're telling me my actions have consequences? But I live in the kingdom of money...

Nominally, what I have learned over the last 2 years in big tech is that none of these ghouls are capable of understanding what makes life worth living. They place this layer of money between them and the world, and are *always* surprised when something lands on their side of the barrier.

I will shut up about this for a few months, but there is no "responsible" use of AI. We have arrived at one of the pinch points Marx wrote about: they have made the "every task but shitty" tomato harvester that is worse than the labourer doing the work, just to disappear the labourer.

Very interested in doing more in-person only media this year. Thinking Zines, secret novellas etc. - what's the coolest physical media you last snagged?

Colombian President Petro commenting on the US; “A clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy. To keep Epstein's list from coming out, they send warships to kill fishermen & threaten our neighbor with invasion for their oil."

I fucked my back *walking on the beach on holiday* and if that isn't midde age running toward me like an old timey steam train with the break lever snapped off I dunno what is

Is there any precedent for powerful people claiming that a nonsentient process has a personality behind it that only they and their fellow experts can understand and speak for and it knows everything and can do anything and wants to help and also it will destroy us if we dont give it what it wants

See you later, 2025. You truly were a wretched year! And yet... Still here and still alive. Which is still something.

All I can think of this Christmas is that last Christmas, between 70,000 and 120,000 Palestinians were alive that have since been murdered by Israel's genocide. Over half of them were children. That's 500 to 1,000 children murdered per week. Or 82 during a four hour Christmas evening.

Tony’s Macaroni (1999-2000): Little macaroni shaped like the "HBO" logo, in a box covered with images of the cast of "The Sopranos". It was released as a promotional item to the media and collectible outlets for the series premiere

This week I wrote a feature for ZeroIndent about Dustpunk by @jamespatton.bsky.social, a clock-dice RPG that captures the sweaty, desperation of revolution, and the necessity of hope and compassion: zeroindent.com/dustpunk-an-...

So fallout season 2 is just the plot of fallout 3? Just follow the protagonist (your dad) the whole time? Bethesda really gotta find some new plot ideas, huh?

Anyway, as always when I get angry about all these big companies using generative AI pish, I renew my urging to invest your time in the art of smaller creators who believe in their work with a fervour no mega budget project can match

Proof that the best plot device in any novel is dressing up like a Priest and sort of bopping about the forest.

As a professional *human* audiobook narrator, this is a huge help. The more we can push back against the use of AI becoming "inevitable", because it is no such thing, the better off every single person and the planet will be.

"look we're not using AI in the final product we're just using it to speed up the conceptual stage" is what a lot of dopes affecting an enlightened middle position keep saying. I truly do not get that one. You hate imagining stuff? You don't like thinking and conceptualizing? Get a grip

We tried something new this year and we made a tier list of everything I watched or read or played this year with... mixed results. We're all still sore about AC Shadows: www.patreon.com/posts/zeroin...

Hands down our best coverage yet, we continue our Post Apocalypse study with Emily St John Mandel's lightning-fast novel Sea of Tranquility youtu.be/rgc2CNElbs0

"Why Don't You Swallow Broken Glass" - we kick off our coverage of Emily St John's Mandel's fantastic if perplexing novel The Glass Hotel (2020) - absolutely adore how well the podcast has shaped up the last 12 months youtu.be/12Tj-3QLySI

I told this story on next week's episode of The ZeroIndent Review, proof that even in the 90's over-employment was necessary to hold down a mortgage

Lando did it. Dog bless

Some rare good news: Journalists at the PEN Guild won their arbitration case against Politico, which deployed two separate faulty AI products (a "report builder" and a headline and summary generator on the homepage) without their knowledge or input. That violated their contract, the arbiter found.

If any publisher wants to help me bring this to print in a real way, please hit me up. I really want the best for my baby

3 hours into Dustpunk by @jamespatton.bsky.social - will definitely write a full piece in the comings weeks as I digest but I've hit the juice of the squeeze where my choices are spiraling out of my control a little and that vial on my bedside table is starting to look real, real appealing...

If you like particularly the dark fantasy inflections in Caves of Qud, I recommend Zothique (by Clark Ashton Smith), where you get banger openers like this

Over the last month myself and the wickedly talented @esanderson.bsky.social wrote a letters series about legacy, creative integrity and why neither of us can ever finish a god damned household task zeroindent.com/legacy/

HBOMax has started showing a 'remastered' 4K Mad Men and they’ve messed things up so during Roger’s oyster vomit scene you can now see the crew men with the vomit hose on the right

If you have enjoyed any of my work on Video Games as Literature or My Forest Library, now is an excellent time to show your appreciation if you are able! 😊

Words I'm binning in 2026 #1: Elite Demonstrates hierarchy, means nothing but sounds sexy. Liable to eat the best snacks in the break-room with mandibles. The mortal enemy of John 117.

More like SilkDONE am i right?

"Why Don't You Swallow Broken Glass" - we kick off our coverage of Emily St John's Mandel's fantastic if perplexing novel The Glass Hotel (2020) - absolutely adore how well the podcast has shaped up the last 12 months youtu.be/12Tj-3QLySI

In another "logistics really are incredible" moment our copies of @ckunzelman.bsky.social's new book arrived in Australia a week ahead of schedule

Perhaps more any other of Mandel's oeuvre Glass Hotel starts exactly where the story should start, with Paul's failed youth. By contrast Anton's story doesn't really find purchase until around page 30 in Singer's Gun. I'd love to write a paper comparing the deployments of the structuring device.

A book with imagery that will stay with me for a long time, even if I'm left wondering... what the hell the book was trying to do. More thoughts to come on the podcast, but yeah, boy, this book is shaped like a lock, and Sea of Tranquility is the key.

Finished Glass Hotel last night. Clearly the outer limits of what has become Mandel's "house style" of emotional time-skipping as a structuring device, I'm left with the story at once resolved and unresolved - far more complete than The Singer's Gun but nowhere near as cohesive as Station Eleven.

Emily St John Mandel has *such* a gnack for writing slightly unlikeable but otherwise seemingly intelligent characters. She does a great job of getting beneath Melodrama with single sentences.

I took the "bullet" for ZeroIndent and tried to capture the totality of The Last of Us Season 2's fundamental failure to redress a deeply freighted source material, opting for grinning cynicism and moralism where a bold and radical story was required.

IT Welcome To Derry does a thing with it's first episode ending that is the most a writer has ever thought "I'm either gonna get fired and blacklisted forever" or "they'll call me the coolest sexier one in the game" - jury is still out for me, but well done Fuchs, Del Carmen and Steve

Here’s Nick Cave replying to a correspondent called Valerio who was asking him about how to respond to a growing sense of cynicism - here. www.theredhandfiles.com/do-you-still...