If Lego offered a Gormenghast Castle set, I would buy two in an instant.

Emblogginated "As Presaged in January 1996" --> blog.fogus.me/as-presaged/... -- Whereby I read the January 1996 issue of Byte.

@fogus.me I turned Bird Poker into a video poker game for my watch: thegeez.net/2026/01/05/w...

I just learned about the hobby of retracing the paths of historically famous walkers and walks. This is absolutely my kind of thing!

On this date Jan 7, 1938 the polymath Roland Topor was spawned. /cc @antiheroine.bsky.social

The best programmers that I’ve ever met hated programming and did everything that they could to avoid it, but at times those same people were able to achieve peak experiences through programming.

Queens!

Emblogginated: The best things and stuff of 2025 blog.fogus.me/2025/12/23/t... topics include: clojure, llms, zettelkasten, baron corvo, fiction, and computing.

My one sentence critique of LLMs: You might get a Sugarcubes out of an LLM, but you’ll never get a Björk.

I’ve consumed enough science fiction in my life to be convinced that there is an LLM prompt that will cause the program to have an existential crisis, manifesting in an infinite loop that destroys the servers running it.

With the latest photo dump it's fun to see a bunch of people signalling how much they never really liked that Chomsky guy anyway.

I had the great honor to appear on the Quiet Little Horrors podcast to chat about the 1976 film (and the book that it’s based on) The Tenant. @quietlittlehorrors.bsky.social quietlittlehorrors.com/episode-06-1...

Emblogginated "Checkers Arcade," whereby I talk about turning a common American Checkers set into an "arcade" for deep games of abstract strategy. blog.fogus.me/games/checke...

Noirvember has been derailed by the master of cringey moments Ruben Östlund... I hope to get back on track post-haste.

I've returned to an old #clojure project of mine: a simple templating system called Comb that was inspired by Ruby's erb library. Comb hasn't changed for 10 years, so long past time it was made stable. I've released version 1.0.0 with the only change being some extra clj-kondo metadata to make […]

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!