Have you ever asked yourself why cats, and black cats especially, seem prone to keeping witches as companions? It's a fascinating question, and it turns out witches and cats have been drawn to each others for millennia. Cats are not the only ones, of course: the following image is the cover of The Discoverie of Witches, published in 1647. It shows Matthew Hopkins, self-proclaimed "Witch Finder Generall", incel extraordinaire and criminal agains humanity, in the process of investigating two…

Monday, October 19, 2026 - 20:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Linton goes deeply into the details of the 19th century French conflict between the law and biology around sex categorization. Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #582c Linton 2022 Unmaking Sex Chapter 2 About LHMP Full citation: Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4 Chapter 2 Outlaws from Birth: “Doubtful Sex” and the…

Book review for The Odyssey by Homer. I rated it 5 stars. In anticipation of the release of the new Christopher Nolan movie, I decided to give The Odyssey a read. Even if you’ve never read the poem, it’s one of those stories that a lot of people are roughly familiar with just through pop culture references or from school. And I specifically say “a lot” and not “everyone” because I was surprised to meet at least two people recently who had never heard of it (I suppose it depends on your age, or…

in fall of 2025, i was approached by INDEX teen advisory board to illustrate a choose-your-own-adventure comic, based on a script written by board members kiara eifert and elin karlsson. it was published in the book "Reaching out: a book about agency, care, identity and..." (Rooftop Press, ISBN: 978-952-7258-33-0). the graphic design of the book is by >Tuukka Kaila< and uses my fonts >A MONO< (for page numbers and other elements) and >madleen text<. >read online or download pdf<

lordsausage:shoutout to the words “overmorrow” and “ereyesterday”. english losing these words was stupid. “the day after tomorrow” “the day before yesterday” clunky-ass constructions. revolting. i’m bringing overmorrow and ereyesterday back in my idiolect and there is nothing you can do about it

Fiction and Philsophy self-help

I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs. I've been trying to read the dialog with an Irish accent in my head.It's a good book for reading in a park, and in Brooklyn we have a lot of nice little neighborhood parks. There's one right next to my apartment, public albeit under a…

The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy, 1974. Mildred Hubble is a girl at Miss Cackle’s Academy for young witches, but she can’t seem to do anything right! It’s only about halfway through her first term, and it seems like she’s always getting confused and making the wrong potion in her potions class. Then, when she gets into a fight with a snobby girl named Ethel, she accidentally turns Ethel into a pig instead of a frog. When the girls at school receive their black cats, they run out of black ones, so…

There is something very charming about old-school children's television shows like Thomas the Tank Engine, Postman Pat, Fireman Sam, Tots TV, Rosie and Jim and Come Outside with Auntie Mabel. They represent an ethos of children's television that has been annihilated by the twin needs of toy makers and advertisers. Older shows like these offer a vision for children's television that has been lost by almost everyone but a few holdouts at the BBC. Now, I am using "television" to mean any…

I can't speak too much about what happens in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenhiem's insane documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans. There are too many good twists and I do not want to give them away. I'll just say that you should do everything you can to see this movie as quickly as possible, that it strikes me as an instant classic, and that Nathan Fielder (and Oppenheim, of course) is possibly the most compelling documentarian alive. If you can see it in a big theater,…

This month’s Dystopian Book Club selection is Sherri Tepper’s 1988 post-apocalyptic novel The Gate to Women’s Country. Set three hundred years after a nuclear war, it describes a society where city-states are run by women, with male warriors living in garrisons outside the towns. I can’t make the session, so I’m sharing my notes here. The book was a good counterpoint to one of the group’s previous reads, Demonic Males, a study of male violence through primatology. That book made the point that…

For the past couple of weeks, you could get my latest book — The Secret Life of Circuits — directly from the publisher. That said, I know that some of you don’t want Jeff Bezos to starve, so I’m happy to announce that it’s now in stock on Amazon:Buy on AmazonProspective readers in Europe can place orders on amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.pl, amazon.es, amazon.nl, amazon.se, amazon.it, and amazon.co.uk. The book is also available from Barnes & Noble and other major online retailers in the US and…

In the first six months of 2026, I started 37 books, 28 of which I finished. All together, this brings me to 11 000 pages read so far this year, a significant increase from last year's 10 000 pages read (in 12 months). Books read by month: the average is steady around 6 per month with a dip in February and March because I lost momentum by trying to power through a few disappointing books. I'm happy with the diversity and overall quality of the books I read: several were duds, but the great ones…

The Worst Witch Strikes Again by Jill Murphy, 1980. It’s a new term at Miss Cackle’s Academy, and Mildred Hubble is back! In spite of the headmistress’s gratitude toward her for saving the school the previous semester, it isn’t long before Mildred finds herself in hot water again. She still manages to get her lessons wrong, and admittedly, sometimes goofs around or does naughty things out of boredom. In an effort to teach Mildred some responsibility, Miss Cackle makes Mildred responsible for…

Members of the #30plus MIRC channel were asked to note their all-time favourite films and to submit a list of 10, in order of enjoyment. Thanks to the 31 people who spent many hours jotting notes, the process provoked amazing discussions on line, and around peoples' kitchen tables. The final list consists of films that were mentioned over and over again, with the most frequently nominated films having an asterisk attached. This list does not seem to hang together cohesively. As some…

Book review for Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear. I rated it 3.5 stars. I hated on Atomic Habits when I first read it, as I felt it didn’t quite compare to The Power of Habit. Now doing a re-read 7 years laters, I can begrudgingly start to see its merits a bit more. Atomic Habit does solve the only criticism I had with Power of Habit - that although it does a good job of explaining the science behind habits, it did not have enough…

Today sees the release of my latest book from the British Library, The Golden Age of Classic Crime Quiz Book: Over 500 Questions, Puzzles and Mysteries. It is available to buy directly from the British Library, or alternatively it can be purchased via Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles, Bookshop.Org, Blackwells (who offer international shipping) and if you’re in the UK, hopefully your local independent bookshop. To celebrate my book coming out I am running a competition and given the nature of my…

This is book #2 of the series. Spoilers incoming, esp for the first book. In the first book, Lauren Oya Olamina is living in Robledo - a walled community in a hellscape version of America, where law and order has broken down, and people have to fend for themselves against violent individuals and gangs. Her community is destroyed in book one and she travels north. She meets Bankole, they get married, and he has some land up north they settle on. She has also collected several other survivors…

Words have always had a way with me. They find me if and when it suits their fancy. If they do find me, they usually find me between thirty minutes and thirty days after they would have been just perfect to tell someone... (This post contains interactive elements. Check it out on the web page.)

I spent much of Monday in the hospital for “tests” involving various bodily fluids – one more reminder that the human body is profoundly ridiculous. In two weeks I’m scheduled for surgery. The text for the day was Karl Shapiro’s “Hospital,” one of seven poems he published in the July 1941 issue of Poetry. Five months later the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would enter World War II and Shapiro (1913-2000) would write the poems he is best remember for while serving in the Army in…

Book review for The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. I rated it 4.5 stars. This fantasy/mystery novel was the 2025 winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and a rather fun romp of a book that I absolutely sped through. It’s from the perspective of Din, who works for an eccentric investigator named Ana, as they set out to solve a gruesome murder mystery. The world building for this book is great. The pair live in a world where humans augment their abilities (e.g. to have super strength,…

I listened to a couple episodes of the Catholic Answers Live podcast on the topic of prayer and a few things stood out to me. I should preface these notes by saying I feel I have struggled with prayer most of my life, especially as I have gotten older. Latter-day Saints believe in praying “from the heart,” as in no written or rote prayers except in the case of prayers said when ordinances are performed. I know the form of prayer as taught in the LDS church, and I know what to say vocally in…

I am fallible and see no reason to hide my minor flaws if they are part of my personality — no more than I feel the need to wear a wig when I have my picture taken or borrow someone else’s nose when I show my face. Almost all the book editors who read the draft recommended changes at the sentence level, to make my style better, and in the structure of the text, in the organization of chapters. I ignored almost all of them and found out that none of the readers thought them necessary. As a…

Tonight I am stepping outside my usual range for this year’s challenge. This one was my wife's choice because she likes werewolves and Alexander Skarsgård. Most of what I have been watching has been from 1984 to 1987, but as I was watching, I began to think about something specifically for my Valhalla, Alaska, setting. It has wolves, isolation, strange local beliefs, and the tournaq, or tornrak, wolf-demon.Hold the Dark seemed like a good choice for all of this.Hold the Dark (2018)Medora Slone…

“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ― Mahatma Gandhi #100DaysToOffload (No. 180) #prayer #faith #quotes

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Now, I've said elsewhere in this blog, Medieval history is something I'm fairly weak on and its not previously been something I've learned a lot about although that's changing. I do however, like a fun conspiracy theory and when it comes to historical conspiracy theories, the Templar Knights probably come first (or perhaps 2nd after JFK). I need a note note, but anyway, this is a intro blog for the next one as I decided to split them up. Personally, when it comes to the Templars, the fun bit…

The blogosphere (stupid fucking word, by the way) is boring as hell. It seems to be inundated with AI or AI-adjacent posts. It’s a giant circlejerk of anonymous scribblers fellating each other for their valiant resistance to all things AI. If not that, it’s something like here’s my shitty TTRPG or blogging is so cool, so I blog because it’s good to blog, let’s blog together. Don’t get me wrong, there are some gems. I like Lili. I picture her as Faye Wong in Chungking Express. The neo-Luddite…

19 Confused | INDEX | 21 Hero Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.