~ Thirty More Novels for #Noirvember ~ Day 27: KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS (1940) Gerald Butler was ahead of his time. Though published in WWII-era Britain, this corker involving a violent drifter and his beloved reads like the greatest Fawcett Gold Medal paperback that never was.

My Christmas wish is to get electric wolves to threaten my neighbors' electric reindeer. Is that wrong?

This is a great thread from Sheila and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. There are many other options for ebooks than Amazon. I still buy two or three ebooks there a week. But I buy 6 or 7 each week from Kobo and Smashwords. We need readers to support authors, not platforms.

Hey, congratulations to all of Olivia Nuzzi’s horny media critic defenders. Heckuva job!

Since I don't want to type "Leviathan" a thousand times in the pirate book for a character's name, I looked up the etymology. Leviathan translates roughly to "twisted thing." So, I looked up "twisted" in Old English... Thus, I've got a character called The Writhen. This is sane behavior, right?

Good thing that the BBC caved on calling him openly corrupt, huh?

Like a lot of you, hopefully, I'll be spending a lot less with huge corporations during the economic blackout that's covering Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So here's a couple of good ways to buy my 1984-set high school crime novel THAT OCTOBER from other than the usual suspects. (more)

Lots of people sharing this clip because it's funny and cathartic but I also genuinely believe it's important. We have to win the narrative battle between "I live in a corrupt society and that's just how it is" and "I live in a corrupt society and we are going to defeat and humiliate these ghouls."

Well, guess I wrote a horror sequence set a pirate ship careening.

Anything Walter Hill wants to do.

Hiraeth (HEE-reyeth) (n.) - An intense longing for a home you can’t return to, or that never was. Used in a sentence: “And evermore, deep in his small and ancient brest, there stirred a sorrow sharp as winter wind—a hiraeth for the numinous lands of Faerie that slipt into legend many ages agone.”

Anything Walter Hill wants to do.

Even now, you have polling showing more Americans blaming R for the shutdown AFTER being informed that they control Congress. People who vote lack even a basic understanding of what's going on now.

I don't know how anyone is supposed to trust this electorate again. I know I don't. *A vibes-based election.* RFK Jr. and Joe friggin Rogan actually influencing enough voters to matter. Legacy media basically shrugging its shoulders in between bothsides takes. This could definitely happen again.

The 2024 election was a basically a test of America's survival instincts. It did not pass.

great poster

I have read this article and, yes, fluffer is the correct term for the alleged journalist.

Billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, pardoned by Donald Trump, has been accused of facilitating millions of dollars’ worth of payments to Hamas in the wake of its attack on Israel on October 7 2023. Zhao also financed the Trump family's entrance into the cryptocurrency market.

A round of applause for the French is in order! 👏👏👏

I heard a snippet of a St. Vincent song on TV so I decided to go down a rabbit hole. I listened to six albums... ACTOR STRANGE MERCY ST. VINCENT MASSEDUCTION DADDY'S HOME ALL BORN SCREAMING I only liked one, but I can't say my time was wasted. I should explore more music.

BOOK MAIL!!!

These Christmas adverts aren't even trying anymore. 😁

"For whom did I drain my heart dry of blood?"

just use the fucking library.

I got some shiny new graphics from @minotaurbooks.bsky.social and this one has, BRAG, my starred review from @publisherswkly.bsky.social on it. WRECK YOUR HEART comes out January 6!

evergreen post about America

Another image by Chris Wormell. This is from his exquisite work in an edition of Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY and I curse the publisher to the Hell of the Upside Sinners for only stating the artist's name in squint print.

If'n you a smart person, you've already pre-ordered the next book in the funniest crime series currently running. I did and I'm only 60% smart! Be like me and smarter-ish people! Get some more Santa Lacrimosa in your diet. You'll laugh. You'll gasp. You might even cry.

art by Chris Wormell (This is what I'd want for the first illustration in a fantasy novel I've been piecing together over the years.)

"The writer's role is to be a menace of the public's conscience. "He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism. And he must focus on the issues of his time." -Rod Sterling, creator of The Twilight Zone

A bad man wants to prove that, deep down, everyone else is just as bad as him.

but it will be necessary to do the cleanup work anyway, because we already know what happens when Reconstruction is abandoned incomplete.

the long-term threat is not MAGA enduring forever, it is the pendulum effect created by the fact that when the regime falls, the minimum necessary amount of cleanup needed to restore democracy will be interpreted by slightly less than half of 2024 voters as a partisan purge that requires vengeance

Oddly enough, they tell the same story.

HBD, the late, great Robert Towne ...

Groak [grohk] (v.) -Staring at someone while they eat, in the hope that they will offer you some food. (n.) -A wistful look on any article greatly desired. Used in a sentence: “The ambrosial redolence wafting from the delightsome smorgasbord had my pups groaking throughout the holiday repast.”

~ Thirty (More) Novels for #Noirvember ~ Day 22: THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE (2006) Bill Pronzini’s versatility is legendary. This novel—narrated by an old sailor with a grim trail of undiscovered crimes—finds him in James M. Cain waters, and he navigates them to perfection.

Ah, the old monkeys-flinging-shit approach to plotting...

A city of 10 million people now has to move. It won't be the last. As impossible as it seems, everything happening now will be a footnote to the climate crisis.

“I guess I’ll have sex, even though it raises my heart rate, it’ll be good for my biomarkers” is a perfect distillation of the life these people are offering their cult members. nothing is ever just living or enjoyment, everything is in service to the delusion of being special enough to escape death

I don't know how well this joke works if you're not a Midwesterner that other Midwesterners consider weird, but I laughed out loud.

Gmail users!! They've turned on AI scraping by default now...Here's how to turn it off. Pass it on!! www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

She was born in 1982 and a lot of her music (of the three albums I've heard) sounds like it was MADE in 1982. Also, curiously, it's as if someone in 1982 is saying "I'm bringing back disco and there's nothing you can do to stop me!" Favorite tracks: Masseduction, Los Ageless, and Slow Disco.

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

This World of Vile Wonder is on sale through Sunday. Ebook is 99 cents! Nine tales that range from the unfathomable depths of the Pacific in 1517 to the height of the Carpathian Mountains in 1687.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel sad that there won't be an Elmore Leonard novel about this.

In 1981, eight Louisiana hillbillies tried to invade Dominica, kill Eugenia Charles, and take over the government. One was Don Black, who later founded Stormfront. They claimed at trial that Ron Paul knew about their plan and encouraged them. A brave headliner writer got “Bayou of Pigs” out of it.

imagine knowing literally anything about Haiti and deciding to try this