Stayed up until 2.30am for the grand finale of the improbable good vs evil bookshop rivalry. It’s not gone well for my guy. #over/under

I may have slightly misunderstood the vibe at the Blenheim Palace Halloween trail. Prob wouldn’t have brought the toddler if I knew it was going to be this intense!

The #over/under fever has been possessing me, it will only break once I’ve mapped the entire station I think, or I explode…anyways heres my latest batch of pieces. 🫡

Cookie Monster’s date: Can we talk about something else

I know most people I know on here will be baffled by my continued posts about thousand-player ttrpg/wargame #over/under , but I’ve been commissioning real art with pretend money and it’s amazing. See this picture of my imaginary space bookshop, by Atlas Costa Aguilera

Too early to tell, but I reckon Electric Nebraska is better than normal Nebraska.

More #Over/Under stuff - I’ve acquired a logo for my imaginary bookshop. (Credit to @tonytranrpg.bsky.social)

EMILY DICKINSON, JEDI KNIGHT Not so clumsy, nor so random - As a blaster - in its rage More elegant - the weapon More civilized - the age

Bizarre thousand player discord rpg #over/under has been consuming my time recently, and I’ve been trying to work out the weird texture of it. Because, theoretically, this is set on a cyberpunk space station in an SF/horror universe.

This game is insane. iver a thousand players. I’m running a bookshop on a space station. I’m an android. People are buying imaginary books off me with imaginary money so I can pay my imaginary rent. The bookshop is starting to get known in the android rights movement. It’s only been a day.

The glib, reflexive, internetty dismissal of Byron (all that “ooh he was so annoying that Mary Shelley invented the horror genre” stuff) is a sign of cultural rot

One of many reasons that “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” is great is that playing it in full gives you permission to listen to Fairytale of New York in October.

Had a dream the other night where I went on holiday for a second year running to the midsommar cult, because they promised me they “wouldn‘t try that stuff again“.

Ultimately, social media is a helluva poor substitute for sharing a room and singing Stan Rogers songs.

Dog Lamp. Called it years ago.

Very unpleasant seeing a roundabout covered in England flags on the way to work this morning. I mean, I’ve seen street fascism before, but normally it’s aggression, an intrusion, a provocation. Not just the ambient grim mainstream.

My wife was really central to getting this Extremely Cool Website set up. It feels like the Old Internet that I used to browse in the school library in the early 2000s, full of thoughtful free well-crafted stuff for kids.

Meant to write an album review; ended up a much more general wobble around folk music and Playing The Violin calumnm.substack.com/p/seth-lakem...

Among the greatest promotional photos of all time are these for the 1990 television movie of IT, where it looks like a prestige legal drama about a firm of hot young lawyers and one associate who likes to dress up like a clown.

Ok this was amazing.

It's interesting that Radiohead are "The Oxford Band", and part of the fabric of the city. But they don't *feel* like Oxford. Other than being cerebral, I guess. The city is scuffed and old, warm and grand, all lively eccentricity and poor maintenance. The band are cold and angular and paranoid.

Gatwa era rankings: 5)The well 4)Joy to the world 3)73 yards 2)The story and the engine 1)Dot and bubble

@bastionland.bsky.social - I don’t suppose anyone will be selling Mythic Bastionland at UKGE this year? I suspect it’s slightly too early

This week’s Doctor Who: you should always trust secretive paramilitary organisations with unlimited power, and everyone criticising them is a disingenuous coward who doesn’t value the safety of their fellow citizens.

Very funny that this blurb basically says: “we’re warning you - lots of people think this book is bad!”

I was in John Lewis earlier, and they were selling Easter crackers, and Easter decorations for your Easter tree. I think someone got confused.

Good VFX and CGI are wonderful things, but I love how CREATIVE film-makers had to be in the creation of low-tech film miracles like this Buster Keaton visual trick. Imagine seeing Sherlock Jr. when it first came out in 1924 & trying to figure out how these tricks were done.

At this point I think it's imperative you start making more without them

I initially thought "well at least this one is going for surrealist whimsy rather than deep evil", but no, of course it's evil, it's an anti-environmentalist deregulation thing

Seeing a bunch of discussion of Cosy Fiction here today, and I feel like cosiness is a quality I value in food, drink, furniture, lighting and architecture. It’s not a thing I want from my art.

Pirate beautician.

if board games had an indie zine community it would revolutionize the medium

Full walkthrough: vimeo.com/1064057629

This year’s Hamlet at the RSC:

Toothless satire is sort of SNL’s thing, but right now toothless satire makes the whole show feel like a weird horror-art project, like it’s wearing a blindfold and it’s painted on a smile and is chanting in monotone that everything is normal

Image of Time (Barrier) by Emilio Vedova, 1951 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137547

I'm 200 pages into Martin McInnes's "In Ascension", and it's weird that - at a time when old-fashioned Clarkean Sense-of-Wonder hard SF is totally absent from anything that gets hype and marketing budgets in sci-fi/fantasy publishing, a book like this ends up making a stir in litfic circles.

A II (Construction A II) by László Moholy-Nagy, 1924 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137553

I’m not in general against plastic children’s toys that flash and make noises, but the ones that make buzzing “I’m still here!” sounds when left idle, just in case your child has been distracted by something more wooden and artisanal - they can get in the bin.

Brittany Howard being amazing on the various SNL 50th specials convinced me to give The Alabama Shakes another go, and it's still not working for me. It all sounds so polite & respectable I guess that's the nature of good songwriting. Easier to be cool as hell when covering Queen & Sinéad O'Connor

So I finished The Buried Giant, and remembered the existence of this very funny, and not unfair, bit of fury about it from Ursula Le Guin (spoilers if you care about that sort of thing) www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/95-are-...

Made the mistake of making a list of All The Unread Books In The House That I’d Like To Read, and it turns out I’ve got a 3-4 year backlog. And that’s at pre-parenting reading speeds, and doesn’t include ebooks…

It's hardly news, but Pink Floyd's Echoes is quite good, isn't it? Of all the side-long epics of early 1970s prog, it feels like it's the one that most points to Post Rock. You can hear the path to Godspeed You! etc.

Still sharing various poems that mention clouds on here in the run-up to the publication of my book Introduction To Cloud Care..☁️ www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page... This one's by Larkin...

Don't think I've ever encountered a boatman ferrying single passengers across a body of water without them turning out to be some sort of echo of Charon ferrying souls to the land of the dead? There's no one where it's just their job.

Bloody hell.

You know it’s going to be a slow bedtime when the baby starts clapping along to the lullabies.

Not sure apple’s shopping list auto-categorisation has got it quite right here.