Ahhhhh this is why I keep seeing people talk about something called unwrap!

Lots of reasons to love using Clojure, but Netflix reminded us of why we don’t want to use anything else… In 12 years, over 7 different versions of Clojure (from 1.5.1 to 1.12.0) they had zero migrations! I don’t know how to express how amazing that is

This!

Thus begins Noirvember!

I saw Weapons last night and I’ve been thinking about it ever since… this is usually a good sign.

After a full weekend of nonstop, intense, social interaction I am prepared to avoid talking to anyone until Clojure/conj.

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

Score!

The first AI bubble in the 1980s popped because it had the audacity to be about helping people through technology. The next one will pop because it's about replacing people with technology... but that's also why this one has so much more investment.

Emblogginated: The Bird-Poker Deck blog.fogus.me/games/bird-p...

I’ll admit that when LLMs first hit the scene I was excited for the possibility that perhaps they would finally offer a good recommendation system, but in practice they’re just as garbage as every other recommendation system and in many ways much worse.

The App Store has 20K Christian Bible related apps that provide tools to read, annotate, summarize, index, bookmark, outline, explain, and build reading curriculums. My ignorance is on display but there are far less for other religions and none for Platonism, Aristotle, Homer, Discordianism...

Upon having just returned from Brazil, it strikes me that it’s nearly mid October and I haven’t watched a single horror movie this month. For shame.

Emblogginated “Derek Raymond and 'The Black Novel'” over at Wormwoodania —> wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/09/dere...

Imagine having the arrogance to proclaim that your company is U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc, while trying to running it like Weyland-Yutani but ultimately producing R5-D4.

Came across an old House of Leaves notes site that a friend and I created many years ago. Fun times! fogus.me/fun/HOL/

I want to read the most evil choose your own adventure book of all time... candidates?

We need more new horror movies about doppelgängers. I was sure that Us was going to usher in a new era, but it never did sadly.

If I start reading now then I might just finish it by 2026. I’ve waited for this one since 2019 after reading about it on the Untranslated blog. theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/s...

Maildrop

Did a complete reassessment of my YT watching/subscriptions and didn't keep much. Not surprisingly, my feed has a ton of new channel recommendations and is not gummed up with the things that it thought I already liked.

Finally found the perfect box to make a Marrakesh travel set like the one at boardgamegeek.com/image/376686....

Emblogginated: "18XX: A System of Systems" --> blog.fogus.me/games/18XX/i...

New business idea. Shithub... like Github but all PRs are triaged and merged automatically by AIs.

I wrote about Johan Kugelberg's essay 'Baron Corvo: The Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived' at Wormwoodania. Kugelberg perfectly captures why people are still fascinated by Baron Corvo. wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/08/on-b...

I’m struggling to identify USA equivalents to the old trauma-inducing, hauntological/folk-horror British children’s shows from the 70s-80s. Aside from Doctor Who rebroadcasts, the closest I came up with are bits of Electric Company and Land of the Lost. Maybe they’re just weren’t any equivalents?

Emblogginated "The long season of langdev" --> blog.fogus.me/langdev/long...

My dream is that my band ((( will one day open for Sunn O))).

Clojure companies in Japan --> github.com/athos/japane...

It’s been at least a decade since I last found Icehouse pieces in the wild. @looneylabs.bsky.social

Whenever I visit Japan, I tend to prefer the vast varied and lovely tracks of country where tourist seldom go, and no language but Japanese is spoken save for perhaps the thick dialects of the older generation, which sounds to me like an inscrutably different language altogether.

My favorite occult ritual/artifacts in films, no particular order: Prince of Darkness, The Ninth Gate, A Dark Song, Hereditary

As my first act of not reading I’m gonna go ahead and not read this

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a science fiction book about the dangers of LLMs.

I’ve recently become obsessed with finding out the origin of a 3 player card game played at Magdalene College, Cambridge circa 1900 to WWI. In memoirs, Stephen Gaselee called it “Jacoby” and Arthur Benson called it “Jacobi” but neither of them gave any details save its player count. I will not rest!

A few new additions to 200 and Change this week… • Bit-sliced signatures by Ian Henderson • A JSON parser in Haskell by @abnv.me pdubroy.github.io/200andchange/

Emblogginated a new Clojure post: "Arities as pseudo-protocol" --> blog.fogus.me/clojure/arit...

My favorite reads in April 2025: Fifty Forgotten Records by R.B. Russell, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker, and Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse.

How I imagine Patricia Warrick looked whenever she received a letter from PKD circa 1980.

I started exploring the history of the mystery plot device where ice is used for murder & melting eliminates evidence. An early use was in Green’s novel Initials Only (1911). Baron Corvo also used the icicle to explain a mystery a story in his book In His Own Image (1901). Anyone know any earlier?

Stoked to dig into my latest ILL from @melissae.bsky.social

26 years ago today Sarban crossed into Faerie.

Reading / Listening...

Try as I might, I can’t help but make an eisegesis out of PLD’s Exegesis. 🤷‍♂️

The most distressing part of the decline of reading is that reading's core purpose is to not only present facts, perspectives, and information, but to expose us to the mechanisms of thought itself.

How many times do I need to watch the complete Star Wars saga so that I don’t have to read Plato’s Republic once?

3/28 is a day of great loss for fans of weird, supernatural, and surreal fiction: Virginia Woolf (1941), Francis Brett Young (1954), Clemence Dane (1965), and Eugène Ionesco (1994), and adding to this dark day both Modest Mussorgsky (1881) and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1943) passed on this date.

My two favorite books read in March 2025: Mouse: A Language for Microcomputers by Peter Grogono We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ

In an attempt to branch out with my writing I wrote about a little bit of private "Corvine" research that I did last year at Georgetown University. It was posted as a guest-post this morning on one of my favorite literary blogs Wormwoodania! wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/03/meet...

Another in the same vein as last retrocomputing question.... what was the premier programming environment for Prolog circa 1985?