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Another wee while has passed, and I've been reading more and more books. Especially with my XTEInk reader, it's so easy to squeeze in a few paragraphs here and there!
I had already read this book about ten years ago, but I didn’t remember anything except the beginning and the end. I listened to the audiobook, and I appreciated it… but not as much as I’d hoped. This time I will finish the Earthsea cycle. Rating: 🙃Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!
Life restoration of Aquilops by Andy Frazer. Andy is the creator and rightsholder, and I’m posting this small version with his permission. Go see his Instagram feed for more. One of the highlights of DinoCon 2025 for me was getting to meet Andy Frazer, who you may know from Dragons of Wales, Novosaurs, and his numerous and mind-blowing life restorations of dinosaurs. We had a few minutes for an unhurried, one-on-one conversation, and I bought some prints, a no-AI-in-paleoart button, and his…
A comprehensive essay on the current state of studies into the fascinating phenomenon of near death experiences (NDE’s). Definitely worth reading if this sort of thing interests you…. What we now know […] is that during a close brush with death or other extreme circumstances, 10-20% of people—an estimated 5% of the adult world population—report a lucid, real or hyperreal experience comprising five aspects. Although these aspects resemble stages, I use the term aspect because, although they tend…
I got a new book to read 😄 It’s a physical paper analog thing you hold in your hands. It’s like a book from the 80s. It’s like going back…to the future! Or something like that. Seriously though, it’s a hardback and inside are color photos!
Kitten-Kin‘s 181-post Sherlock fancomic, The Science of Affection, is now available in print-on-demand paperback. (It’s also available as a pay-what-you-want PDF download.) It ran from 2018 to 2025. It started as a doodle about a sleepy John accidentally kissing Sherlock, who was feeding John’s daughter Rosie. From that grew a story about how the three became a family. In addition to the Johnlock, there’s also a little bit of side Mystrade (Mycroft Holmes/Inspector Lestrade). The whole thing…
Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 17th April 2026 New York/New Jersey’s Reeking Aura may be a new-ish band but their number is made up by a slew of scene veterans from across the NYDM spectrum. Members of Trog, Afterbirth, Artificial Brain and more have come together to finally give us the follow up to the superb ‘Blood and Bonemeal’ from 2022, a record that really put Reeking Aura on the map for modern death metal. Well, the follow up ‘On the Promise of the Moon’ promises much for fans of…
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Rowan Beaird’s novel Tenderness is both propulsive and moving, a book both literary and thrilling. Booklist wrote of the book: “A mystery from the first page to the last…The family’s secrets…
The Frankfurt School has a special place in history. It’s an object of hatred for both ends of the political spectrum. Leftists, especially Marxists, hate them for diluting revolutionary thought and creating a version of the Left that is “compatible” with the capitalist ruling class. Rightists hate them for giving birth to identity politics and political correctness. However, it’s a mistake to think of the Frankfurt School as a single harmonious entity. While it’s true that the school consisted…
I read Issac Asimov’s *I, Robot* last year and was blown away by his world-building style and I kinda want to copy it.
The cozyweb has ceased to be merely hidden. It is becoming causally disconnected. The public internet is no longer a hostile commons shared by everyone. It is increasingly the empty space separating an archipelago of informational black holes. The Dark Forest is transforming into the Dead Forest. Source: Dead Forest Theory Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.…
Photo by Europeana on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless here.I…
📚 Finished reading: Frank Miller’s Sin City Volume 1: The Hard Goodbye (Fourth Edition) by Frank Miller. The first book I’ve read in months. This has been on my wishlist for decades. I’ve read different Sin City books as they came out but never read the entire series. Wonderfully stylish, Frank Miller doing Frank Miller stuff.
I don’t remember where I first heard about Man with a Blue Scarf (2010) by Martin Gayford, but it had been on my mental tbr list for a good while before I stumbled across a copy in Hay-on-Wye. It’s such an unusual perspective, which the subtitle explains: ‘On sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud’. And that is the premise of the memoir. Martin Gayford, a friend of Freud’s, spent many hours sitting for the portrait that ends up on the cover and in the title. I love reading books about art and…
Book review for The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. I rated it 5 stars The Wager is a non-fiction book covering the improbable story of the 1741 shipwreck and mutiny of the crew from the English warship HMS Wager. Remarkably, after the crew mutinies and split into two groups, both manage to make the long voyage home to England. Along the way they live as castaways on an island, traverse dangerous seas on a tiny boat, and some even end up being captured by the…
Belated day 3 of Minnesota Yacht Club. My first Strokes show
A month or so ago, I found renewed interest in analog things, mainly handwriting with pen & paper. It then snowballed. Less online, more offline. Less digital, more physical. So besides writing, it affected my reading. I stall value my Kindle e-Reader, but I’m now preferring and promoting physical books. In fact, I’ve tried to read online articles (long-form) either on my Kindle or by printing them on paper. Some sites like magazine publications still offer print subscriptions; I’m seriously…
Mages & Modems is a memoir by writer-podcaster-developer vga256, and one I enjoyed very much. As soon as I began reading it, I could tell that the author and I had come from similar places, in spirit if not geography. I could relate to so much of what I read in his stories. He and I were among the young people watching the PC industry explode—from a distance, but still swept along by the promises it offered, and longing for what came next. In the book, vga conveys that feeling in a deeply…
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Book review for Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio. I rated it 4.5 stars Empire of Silence is a sci-fi / space opera set in the distant future, where humans have colonised the galaxy and are now fighting a war with an alien race known as the Cielcin. At the book’s opening we get a pretty strong hook - the protagonist Hadrian Marlowe is set to do terrible things in the future, killing a star and gaining the infamous moniker “The Sun Eater”. Quite amazingly this book was author Christopher…
I'm working on a thing set in 1895 featuring a person who is not from 1895 and the handwriting seemed like an immediate giveaway. I thought if I'm making a character learn to write properly then probably I should try too. The traditional Victorian handwriting, copperplate script, is very familiar from archive material. My grandparents, born and educated in the 1920s, also wrote very much like this. By then it was a simplified version - they almost certainly learnt Vere Foster's Civil Service…
The following review is the 38th installment of my series searching for “SF short stories that are critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.” Some stories I’ll review in this series might not fit or are poor quality. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology. I’ve previously covered two Harlan Ellison short stories for this series: Harlan Ellison’s “Psycho at Mid-Point” (1956) and “The Discarded” (variant title: “The…
Because Nolan, I got interested in reading the source material. Then I wanted to read the Iliad. Then Aeneid was a thing. Then Ovid. Then Stephen Fry's intro to myths series. And now there is a Coursera class about Greek and Roman myths I have enrolled myself in. Anyway one of my favourite horror movies is getting adapted for screen. Can't wait. and then there is also Primetime, Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen. As a huge fan of both the show and Rob and A24 I will be watching this.
Book 21 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Now a little ahead with my reading schedule. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. Chuck Tingle has become one of my favorite authors to read and I’ve celebrated each of his books on here as they’ve come out, so when a new book, Fabulous Bodies, was released this month of course I was going to snap it up and read it as soon as possible! Poppy Stringer…
There is art all around us, and poetry can be found in places you’d never expect. Author Ali Trotta speaks on the true power of poetry in the Big Idea for her newest poetry collection, Offerings for Ordinary Gods. ALI TROTTA: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of who gets to their story. (Before the Hamilton of it all, I swear.) Specifically, though, I have always been annoyed at what/who we deem a villain—from the Salem Witch Trials to Medusa. Women have, historically, ended up as the…
Galactoscope #1 for July features four titles of varying quality—just the kind of stuff that makes for a good column! by Jason Sacks The Midnight Dancers, by Gerard F. Conway Gerry Conway is an emerging writer in the comics field. He’s scripted stories for Marvel, National and Warren. Conway cut his teeth first with National’s … Continue reading [July 16, 1971] Dancing Into Oblivion (July Galactoscope) → The post [July 16, 1971] Dancing Into Oblivion (July Galactoscope) appeared first on…
The air is thick with dust and the smell of decaying wood pulp. Shelving units like fossilised bones stretch beyond the limits of sight. Waterproof dust jackets protect ancient volumes from the desultory clouds which form among the upper shelves. At ground level, strobe-light-lurid mushrooms spill out from cracks between tiles the colour of ageing vellum.This is the Library of Lives. Every human being who exists, who ever has existed, who ever will exist, has their biography recorded here,…
Watch Chavez Ravine. I made a short documentary film in 2003. It gets less attention than my other project that wrapped that year (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), but it's close to my heart, and I think it holds up well. Chavez Ravine, site of Dodger Stadium, was once home to a closely-knit Mexican-American community overlooking downtown Los Angeles—until 1950, when its residents were evicted in what came to be viewed as a historic injustice. In my 26-minute film, black-and-white…
From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 93-96: George was a gifted linguist, quick to learn Māori names and words as he pointed at plants, animals, clothing, weapons and jewellery, asking to be told what they were called and keen to understand the Māori way of life. He noted the striking tattoos—‘strongly carved with spirals in the face’—and their clothing and hairstyles. Some of the women wore caps…
