The Worst Witch is Dark Academia

Cool ninety-minute outrun/synthwave/retrowave mix you have there. Be a shame if somebody inserted a couple songs that open with dialogue clipped from some old movie into the middle of it.

Hello! I wrote up a full review for @thomasha.bsky.social 's brilliant, brilliant, unnerving, haunting, and deeply empathetic horror collection, Uncertain Sons itsajumble.blogspot.com/2025/09/revi...

There should be zero duty to serve data centre loads. For once, make corporations pay for some of their their so-called "externalities." heatmap.news/energy/elect...

Crop Art

This is why we must continue to exist as a species, and we need more innovations in this area rather than flawed tech products that just make life more annoying: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

#infinitedetail www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The biggest story in sports right now is not a sports story. Don't take my word for it, but rather that of Lina Khan. What's happening on @pablo.show is the most interesting snapshot of the state (& struggle) of investigative journalism since WSJ's "The Facebook Files."

Beautiful morning to support reader-funded, independent, worker-owned media:

4) novelettes are the best length for fiction. second-best is short novels. third best is really, really long novels. fourth best is duologies.

Just finished @thomasha.bsky.social ‘s book, Uncertain Sons, and wow. The title novelette is a stunning closer. A surreal, violent story of monster hunting in the hills around Los Angeles (and what incredible, grotesque monsters!) that veers into sudden tenderness at the end

_Both realism and modernism are in a sense, attempts to reckon with history_ The Lit Crit Guy on Mann’s The Magic Mountain

Today's a good day for The Jameson Tapes.

The recipe I used is from bon appetit and is probably paywalled for you—but check if your library provides access to ba via libby (like mine does) www.bonappetit.com/recipe/apple...

I made apple cider donut cake over the weekend. It’s very good—moist and dense but not stodgy. The perfect decadent breakfast. Don’t ask how much butter and sour cream is in it.

Kyle Reese: I’m from the future. AI has taken over. Sarah Connor: How are you gonna stop it? Kyle: Can you teach me to make a Zine? Sarah: Like with comics & songs & stuff? Kyle: That’ll do it. Sarah: You can kill the superintelligent robot with Zines. Kyle: Oh yeah. It’s actually pretty mid.

::hums the "trimming out all the thats, alsos, and buts" song::

There's a great gag in the movie PEACOCK, a new Austrian comedy, in which a guy w/ lights that toggle by clapping, flops sadly on his bed and demands his system play him a happy song. It's the Handclappin' Song, and his lights flash on/off until they trip the breaker.

useful stuff but also give me this novel: “Kudzu plot Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”

Finished Web of Angels. What a fucking book. Up there in awkward but raw and super intense passion with Creatures of Light and Darkness, The Demolished Man and Rocannon's World. A blazing, confusing, moving debut. Singular.

ttfw the short stories you wrote several years ago increase in political resonance this must be what it's like to be @timmaughan.bsky.social

I keep a text file of ideas for fiction. It goes back to 2012. Quantity is not better than quality, but my number of items added in a year was way down in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Those are also the years I read (or had read to me) the fewest books per year in my entire life. 🙃

I keep a text file of ideas for fiction. It goes back to 2012. Quantity is not better than quality, but my number of items added in a year was way down in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Those are also the years I read (or had read to me) the fewest books per year in my entire life. 🙃

I love the Criterion Closet shorts, but it's kind of wild how basically going to a video store is now this thing only a niche group of people get to do.

#Booksky New interview with publisher Catherine Lundoff at VoyageMinnesota! voyageminnesota.com/interview/li...

Somebody needs to write an update to Roger Luckhurst’s “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic” (if someone already has, let me know where to find it): www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissu...

I can only speak for myself, ofc. But based on what I know or suspect of many of you, the answer is, at the very least: there are dozens of us.

just dropping this here (I’m not the biggest fan of the parent company overdrive, but kanopy and libby are used by a lot of library systems in the U.S., including my own, and are pretty great): www.makeuseof.com/what-is-kano...

_[Darko] Suvin’s animosity toward the fantasists could actually be read as a kind of peace offering to the powers that controlled the gates of academic legitimacy _

Further in now and Gladys, the witch depicted on the cover, has decided to do a costume change, and I’m now livid this new outfit wasn’t used for the cover.

that feeling that feeling like something has caught in the back of your throat one day a month I just walk away it’s a silence I allow myself

there is in the notion of a singularity (of whatever type and valence) pretty much never any sense of sociality, community, extended family/friend group, creativity, existence for others and just to appreciate existence itself--it's always enlargement and extension of ego wonder why that is 😉

I have a new single out (as w.esp). It’s lurching, strange, melancholy but resolute dirge pop: wesp.bandcamp.com/track/its-a-...

I have a new single out (as w.esp). It’s lurching, strange, melancholy but resolute dirge pop: wesp.bandcamp.com/track/its-a-...

This is good and it should be a thing

Everybody limn!

New single from me (as w.esp) going live tomorrow. I’m calling it dirge pop or fractured synth wave or something like that. Follow me on Bandcamp if you want to hear it before everybody else: wesp.bandcamp.com

Dessert mode ACTIVATE: Best pie: buttermilk Best ice cream: hazelnut gelato best donut: glazed old fashioned Best bar: oat base, raspberry jam, crumb topping Best cake: my family's buttermilk chocolate w/raisin icing Best other: my wife's cheesecake w/gfree vanilla creme sandwich cookie crust

_And so, we have to constantly go back and forth, and the minute we register a theme… then that must be swiftly undermined by another theme_

Dessert mode ACTIVATE: Best pie: buttermilk Best ice cream: hazelnut gelato best donut: glazed old fashioned Best bar: oat base, raspberry jam, crumb topping Best cake: my family's buttermilk chocolate w/raisin icing Best other: my wife's cheesecake w/gfree vanilla creme sandwich cookie crust

“Foundtion’s” Empire troika, except bunches of bananas in my house

I was watching a video on a piece of music gear, and the name Jóhann Jóhannsson came up in the comments, and this triggered me remind everyone who lives in the U.S. that Last and First Men is available on Kanopy, which means you likely have access to it via your local library.

One policy solution to Young Men we should be considering is Universal Basic Electric Guitar (UBEG). I'm not joking, by the way. Kids of any gender should get a low-cost starter kit for some hobby of their choosing once they turn 13. A camera, paints, a cheap sampler, etc.

Maybe, hopefully, I'll find time to write about this, because however this unfolds, certainly it's a story not so much about sports as about kleptocracy, but the medium is the real message. That the investigative reporting was packaged first as a true crime podcast; everything follows from that.

A Standard Books edition of the Clifford D. Simak short stories currently in the public domain is now available: standardebooks.org/ebooks/cliff...

one of my favorite works of fiction published last year:

I read a book that showed how this also happens w/baby names. As I recall, Jessica & Jennifer were two of the main examples. But where you have communities that are shut out from wealth aspirations or are homogenous, unique names are more valued. Thus baby names in UT & among African-Americans.

Happy 909 Day: cdm.link/909-day-free...

"If I had to renounce my dilettantism, it is in howling that I would specialize." – E. M. Cioran