Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society” (1764), including: “How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.” Five years later Johnson told Boswell in conversation: “Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” We can safely nod our heads in agreement. In the eighteenth…
John Wyver writes: To the ICA on Saturday last for another fascinating programme in Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned series. This has been a revelatory season, shown more or less monthly, of films by Godard and others that, as Witt claims, ‘sheds light on the huge and varied phantom body of unmade and abandoned ventures that lies behind or in the intervals in his completed oeuvre.’ The screenings have been spun off from Michael Witt’s essential book Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade…
BOB McKNIGHT – Secret Sinners. Merit 355, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1960. Or, perhaps as an alternate title, The Case of Cocky Robin. No kidding. Attorney Arch Behan is hired by Cocky’s sister, to locate him after he turns up missing. Just as in The Bikini Bombshell (reviewed here), the story takes place in Florida, and involves gun-running to Castro’s rebels. And lots of naked, willing women. This is a story for red-blooded males, that is for sure. The swamp girl who wants Arch to…
My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set. Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of comedic work, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and more. He has stood down 20 years of a world gone mad and reworked it, within hours, into a performance of knowing…
Inspired by Robin Rendle’s post Sinistral Hands, I made my titles left-leaning italics. Since I use free fonts from CDNs, I did it with CSS transform: h1 { font-size: 2.1rem; transform: skewX(12deg); font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; } I don’t know how many browsers this will work in. I switched the font while I was at it. I tried Geist for a minute but ended up choosing Bitter, which is a lot like the previous one, Aleo.
Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 27th March 2026 Lurking beneath the grinding, sodden soil of Kent, England comes Iron Slug and their debut full length record ‘Deceit and Misery’. Bringing hefty sludge and doom heaviness to the scene with their previous two EPs, ‘Unrepentant Grin’ and ‘Debauched and Bored’, their debut full length is ready to take their mossy ancient riffs and cavernous atmospheres to new heights. It is out now through Road to Masochist. That cloying, classic sludge intro…
Eve Travis has always admired Jeff Kilburn and is worried that his heart is broken when her cousin Moya dumps him for a British peer. After the wedding, she impulsively offers to marry him instead so he is not alone and vulnerable when he leaves for a business trip to South America. Jeff is startled by her suggestion because he has just learned Eve’s guardian has embezzled her $2 million fortune (and imagine how far that would have gone in 1935) and was asked to break the news (why there are no…
The NOVA episode “Athens: Birthplace of Democracy,” which aired on Arizona PBS on July 1, 2026, stated: “For the ancient Greeks, true democracy only worked through the extensive use of random selection.”The candidate selection process in Isaac Asimov’s classic short story “Franchise” represents the opposite extreme, with no randomness (and perhaps no human input). Let’s look at some aspects of random selection as it relates to democracy through these examples. This post contains questions and…
It is easy to behave well when you are winning. You smile. You embrace the people around you. You shake hands. You thank those who supported you. Everything feels fair because the result went your way. Losing is the real test. When people do not get the result they expected, disappointment can quickly become anger. They blame the officials, attack the winner, insult the competition, or behave as though they were cheated out of something that belonged to them. It is the behavior of a sore loser.…
lingthusiasm:ALTALTALTALTALTWhy does “ie” turn “dog” into itty bitty “doggie”? In this Lingthusiasm zine, Leah Velleman gets enthusiastic about diminutives. Yes, this one is extra tiny, it’s a diminutive zine about diminutives! A zinelet? Or zineling?Print and fold your own copies8½ x 11 paperA4 paper How to cut and fold a minizine (for this extra special tinyzine, cut the paper into quarters first along the dotted lines, then fold and cut four tinyzines like a usual minizine) Learn moreThings…
I got some interesting answers from the askmath subreddit for the convex shapes of hexagons problem.
While I should have known, I wasn’t prepared for how much of a summer banger Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is. I may only be a fourth of the way through this opus, but it’s one of the breeziest 19th century reads I’ve wrangled, and so far, a pitch perfect swashbuckling adventure.
BookStrange Pictures by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion SynopsisSeemingly unrelated stories about drawings found on an abandoned blog, a child’s drawing in pre-school, and an art teacher who’d made a quick sketch on the day he went missing, all reveal a sinister story that stretches back decades. NotesI read the sequel, Strange Houses, first, because the original always has a long wait at the (virtual) library. There’s been a lot of buzz around the book, both as an unusual and accessible…
(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs) Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the first published under new management in a paperback-sized format ("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a lot of my pockets, and was packed with 15 stories as well as the regular columns, in full colour with fantastic layouts and illustrations. Sadly there was only one more physical issue before Interzone was forced to become a…
Finished reading: Offerdjuret by Henrik Fexeus 📚 First non-fiction book in a long time. I enjoyed the experience, even though the book is medium level.
My time at Melody Maker overlapped with the final year or so of Brian Case being on the staff. I don't think we exchanged more than a few words - he was pretty fed up by that point, barely in the office (the jazz section had been discontinued some years earlier, he was writing entirely about film by that point, I think). Soon he left to become the main writer about film - his other great passion aside from jazz - at Time Out.I didn't know then that before joining the Melody Maker he had written…
The debut issue of "Terminal," arrives in comic shops in two days. Skybound (an imprint of Image), putting out this new series, was kind enough to send digital copies out for the purpose of review more than a month before the book was set to hit stands (with the request that all reviewers wait until the Monday before its release to share their thoughts). Written by Robert Kirkman and Joe Casey, those two names have a lot of skill and a number of hits under their belt. This first issue is…
AntC sent me a link to this RNZ story by Layla Bailey-McDowell, saying “This is one of those silly gossip-magazine ‘competitions’ that I wouldn’t bother with except a word in Te Reo Māori is the winner. (Also a Welsh word came third.)” It is certainly silly, but I like the word; the story begins: A Māori word describing the responsibility to care for the natural world has been named the world’s most beautiful word by language-learning platform Babbel. The kupu, kaitiakitanga topped a list of…
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Chthonic squid monsters floating soundlessly through the Inverted Palace. Conical indigo bodies ringed with crimson eyes; dense membrane webbing chitin-barbed tentacles. In sharp contrast to their gloomy exterior, a darkmantle's underside is a riot of flaming, ghastly hues. Darkmantles hover ominously in corridors or high above spacious chambers until they detect the mental thrum of potential prey. They dart through the air with surprising speed and latch themselves to a victim, engulfing their…
We're not a sports website, so we won't pretend to be experts on Kevin Keegan's remarkable football career (although I really like him when I was a kid). Like millions of others, though, we were saddened to hear of his passing. While he will forever be remembered as one of England's greatest footballers and most charismatic managers, there's another, rather unexpected chapter in his story that many people may have forgotten - or perhaps never knew. In 1979, at the height of his fame, Keegan…
Just for the record – I recently wrote a piece on Ivy Compton-Burnett for Engelsberg Ideas.Here's a link...https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/ivy-compton-burnetts-forgotten-genius/
Summary: I've collected a curated, thematic link page of important essays and articles about video game narrative. It lives at gamenarrativereader.org. Read on for whys and hows. Right now, the games industry is undergoing catastrophic contraction; others have written extensively about what's going on, in more detail, elsewhere. I do believe that, eventually, it will start to grow again. When that happens, new people are going to come into the field and they're going to be dealing with a…
It’s been a while since we’ve played Peter Kirsch, despite this being his 16th game for this blog. (Most recently: The Dalton Gang, Alaskan Adventure, The Curse of the Pharoah). This is the 20th and last game for the SoftSide Adventure of the Month (he didn’t write all of them, but he edited all of them and wrote the majority). He kept going after this with the SoftSide Adventure Series (10 more games!); it was published on their “SoftSide Selections” which has more than just adventure games.…
C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (October 28, 1922): I am drumming ahead like anything with my Anglo-Saxon, and it is great fun. One begins it in a Reader constructed on the admirable system of having nearly all the text in one dialect and nearly all the glossary in another. You can imagine what happy hours this gives the young student—for example, you will read a word like 'WADO' in the text: in the glossary this may appear as WEDO, WAEDO, WEODO, WAEDU, or WIEDU. Clever bloke, ain't he? The…
Why read the book? Nick Needham wrote 2000 Years of Christ's Power Volume 3: The Renaissance and Reformation. It is the third book in his clear and readable church history series. This volume covers the period from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation up to the early seventeenth century. Needham explains how new ideas, the printing press, and dissatisfaction with the church led to major changes. He gives clear accounts of Martin Luther, John Calvin, the…
The always stimulating Tom Whitwell was kind enough to put up with me asking him for some recommendations...
The first time I read UBTech wanted to build robotic replicas of your dead grandmother, I laughed. Then I remembered I once cried when a Roomba got stuck under a couch, and I thought: okay, maybe I am not the objective observer this story needs.But here we are. On June 30, 2026, at a launch event in Shenzhen that felt part iPhone keynote, part séance, UBTech unveiled the UWORLD U1 series: what the company calls the world's first full-size, mass-produced ultra-bionic humanoid robot. Silicone…
It’s weird, the things you remember from when you were a teenager. For instance, I used to devour TV reviews published in newspapers, whether I watched the shows in question or not. There are so many which stuck in my head, which I’ve never been able to trace again. I recall a particularly mean-spirited review of the final episode of Cheers, where some misery guts said that they couldn’t think of anything worse than being in a pub “where everybody knows your name”. Not even I would write…
Charles Henri Ford’s avant-garde magazine has been a sporadic visitor to these pages over the past 20 years, the subject of occasional posts as well as my complaints about the difficulties of finding online sources for important magazines and journals. The difficulties are now over where View is concerned…or almost over because this cache is an incomplete run, with the last seven issues absent. That still gives us 30 complete issues to look through, however, so I’ll temper my complaints. The…
