Prose Over PlotWhat is Weird Fiction? What is New Weird Fiction? What is New Weird Horror? What is New Weird Lit or New Weird Science Fiction or New Weird Other and do any of these distinctions mean anything and/or is that the whole point of the genre?There are some types of weird fiction that we call weird because they truly are kind of incomprehensible (M. John Harrison) or at least wildly strange (China Miéville). But not every beautifully incomprehensible work gets called…

Many freelancers get paid per hour, or per day. Some have standard rates for typical tasks. Journalism is rarely typical. And usually, we’re paid per word. I’ve had many friends whose first thought is how easy that must be to exploit. Often they remember a story about a writer like Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo padding their books with digressions to up their pay. Those stories probably didn’t happen, and these days, that method is even less likely to work. When I pitch a piece, the editor and…

Well, OK, half sister 😉.And, before I go any further, apologies to The Hollies for the butchered lyrics I've used as the title of this post. While writing, I'm aware that the title is an important consideration in attracting readers … but I'm also easily swayed by cheap gags, poor puns, and clever wordplay. This one isn't particularly clever (or anything else), but it is appropriate, as I'm going discuss to worker flights and load-carrying.Foragers are the packhorses of the colony.They—…

Every day brings new predictions that the so-called “AI buildout” is unsustainable, a bubble, or a crisis waiting to happen. The argument is that the US economy is being held hostage by AI spending, invoking the usual metaphors of a house of cards or a Ponzi scheme that will come crashing down. A few examples from 2026: The biggest gamble in the U.S. economy is starting to look riskier — The Washington Post, July 31. AI’s Wobbly House of Cards Puts Markets and US Economy at Risk — Bloomberg,…

It does what the title says: thousands of Amazon Prime and Starbucks boxes were murdered to create this film.

For the past five years I have worked at a high-end residential interior design firm. The cost clients pay for everything from custom sofas and drapes to lighting to cabinet hardware are staggering to say the least. Over the years I have seen some incredible things and as someone who loves fabrics I got my fix regularly. When I fell madly in love with a fabric that a client had ordered I asked the designer how much it was per yard. “More than you can afford,” she told me and we both laughed…

“The Ides of March” persists in popular memory due to its association with the assassination of Julius Caesar. Every month on the Roman calendar had Ides. The Ides of October would have been October 15, 2026 on the ancient Roman calendar. I published an article on inflatable Jack-’o-lanterns I captured on the Ides of October. But my Brooklyn (tasteful) Halloween decoration photo journey continued after the Ides rested. Out were the Ides of October; in were the Eyes of October. For example, see…

You have spoken. (Thank you, Peter.) The experiment continues. Did Trans Fat Have Its Tobacco Moment? The answer is yes, although perhaps the question should be Did nutrition science ever have its tobacco moment? Jessica Fanzo charts the change, from a 1990 feeding study to the first ban, in Denmark, in 2003, and later restrictions and bans in various of the United States and around the world. The results showed up quite quickly in hospital admissions and resulted in a Federal ban in 2018.…

I've been back from Gamehole Con for a few days and am now preparing to attend another, local convention, CleriCon. I attended for the first time last year and had a great time. I'll be running a couple of games there, as well as playing in a couple. I'll give a full report of my exploits at both conventions next week, when I've had a chance to catch my breath.

23 Oct 2026 Claude Projects decoded: agents aren’t allowed to type anymore, and a brand new hearthbot MCP Anthropic recently launched Projects in Claude Code - a way to run multiple tasks on the same repo in parallel. I was trying it out on a fairly complicated repo, and at one point asked Claude: Okay so what do i do now? next steps? It came back with 4 steps. Step 1 was to merge a PR. So I merged it. About 10 seconds later, step 1 got crossed out. Same message, with “(edited)” underneath.…

There is an AI war going on, and some of it is being fought over the websites, computers and accounts we use every day. People are using AI to help find weaknesses, break into systems and demand money. Other people are using AI to find those same weaknesses and close them. The work happens quietly, until somebody loses access to their files or discovers that a stranger has control of an account. I have helped people secure their systems. In the cases I have dealt with after something went…

Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes Pretty pictures help us learn, maybe? One of the things I love using LLMs for is helping me understand systems better. In the Strands Decider post I wrote about how I often ask ask me questions to check I understand this. The other technique I’m enjoying right now, and am delighted to see folks around me using too, is building animations. Animations can help us build an intuition for how and why systems work, or how and why they…

A forlorn businessman resting his head against a wall beside a window. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, via Pexels. In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-89078 for the project Ruby, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a double free in Ruby's Onigmo regular expression parser when parsing fails after an alternation, allowing memory corruption and potential remote code execution in applications that compile…

This is the fifth of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — the remnants of the human species might be unrecognizably different from how we behave and think now. But they may be also ‘recognizably’ similar to how we know, deep down inside, we…

A miniseries about music in indigenous Taiwanese communities. Over the past week, I stumbled across a miniseries on TaiwanPlus Arts and Culture's YouTube channel. The series is called "Songs of Our Ancestors," and follows Taiwanese-American entertainer Stephen Rong on his quest to learn more about his Atayal roots. TaiwanPlus also enlisted award-winning Amis musician Chalaw Basiwali as his mentor. In each episode, the two visit indigenous communities across Taiwan, singing traditional folk…

I took this picture in 2007 in Kossuth tér at a memorial to the 1956 revolution Today, Hungarians remember the events of the 1956 revolution. This year marks the 70th anniversary of those events that started on October 23, 1956. What started as student demonstrations soon turned into a bloody conflict. Hungarians tired of the lies and false promises of the communists wanted something better. They also wanted Russia out of their country. I am rereading James Michener’s book, The Bridge at Andau,…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 105-107: The most consistent and influential opponent of Conrad and his war policy was Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, the man whose death at Sarajevo would precipitate the July Crisis of 1914. Franz Ferdinand occupied a complex but crucial position within the Habsburg leadership structure. At court, he was an isolated figure. His relations with the Emperor were not warm. His nomination…

I'm glad a doc is going to be on a surprising amount of screens, but it's really squeezing my Asian cinema this week! Scratching my head over Clayface, because didn't producer James Gunn see how well the "make antiheroes out of villains you've got the rights to when their hero is sort of off-limits" worked out for Sony? Interesting, though, as director James Watkins has horror bona fides and a

A blogger I follow – JP at moddedbear.com – recently posted about quxnet, a private social network that is all about recapturing the aesthetic and experience of the open web circa the late 1990s. I signed up for an account this morning and it's absolutely delightful. Open registration ends at 2026-10-23 20:07 UTC if you want to check it out. I think it will be by invitation only after that. I love it. It's like the internet was before what we now call “Social Media” and all of the algorithms,…

A 50/50 kind of sky this morning.

Robert Burton (1577-1640), Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. III, Subs. 10 (vol. 1, p. 274 of the Everyman edition): In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, etc., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual…

There have been some astute depictions of queer life in the 1980s in the media — It’s A Sin and Pose and The Great Believers being among the ones that resonated deeply with me, and the upcoming Elsinore being high on my list to watch — but rarely have we seen these depictions of queer life take place outside of the Americas and Europe. In Marlon James’ The Disappearers, the action is set in 1980s Jamaica, outlining the lives of a handful of gay men who navigate tragedy and trauma with…

Last Saturday, we had a garage sale at my sister's house. My sister and her husband and my parents added some of their things to it, making it a multi-household event. Danny and I had a lot of clothes, holiday decorations, trading cards, books, games, and other random knickknacks up for sale. We were worried that a garage sale in the fall might not do so well. We usually have them in the spring, which for some reason seems to be the more socially accepted season for them. Plus, there was a huge…

Yes I keep forgetting to post about these, but Brendan and I are still making Paper Labyrinths. I won't write full summaries on nine episodes because that's a lot, but I'll shout out one or two little moments from each that I think are fun and worth listening for. 10 - nbsp1618 - the pseudonymous designer of Cross-Bronx Expressway and The Archivist's Dream, who I think is a very keen and thoughtful designer. We go deep on libraries. 11 - Meredith Gran - Perfect Tides: Station to Station was…

Like many people, I’m charmed by bookstores. I’m planting this note to collect quotes and observations about them. Robin Sloan, in his Aspire Zine, Information technology should aspire to the speed and privacy of the printed page: A person visits a bookstore not primarily because they need a book, but because they are the kind of person who visits a bookstore. (The zine is a ~1,500 word creative essay & experiment on how e-books should work. It’s sold out, but email me if you’d like to borrow…

So I got the news that I've been dreading hearing for the past couple of weeks. I'm being laid off.It wasn't sustainable anymore, so I more than understand the decision. I've been with the company for a good 6 years. It's sad and frankly quite scary, but that isn't just true for me. If I could stay with the company and team and help it grow, I would. I love those folks. I've been lucky to have worked with really good and kind people for all of my employed years (10). Both proud and disheartened…

Just spotted this on Bluesky: Liliam Bronze has made a cool Sonic 3 mod called Sonic 3 Unlocked that brings the game that we all know and love with some additional features to modernise gameplay without taking away from the original experience. The mod features new characters like Amy Rose, Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel as well as an Encore Mode taken from Sonic Mania Plus, bugfixes, QoL improvements, and tons more unlockables with more on the way. And this one isn’t vibe…

The IAS has opened its application page for its membership program for the upcoming year. This by itself would be unremarkable — the program does this every year — but there is an additional statement included in the announcement: We realize that applying to positions in the current environment is stressful. To help alleviate this, the School of Mathematics offers applicants the option to submit research statement based only on already conducted research. It would be helpful if such a statement…

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about creepy books: What’s the creepiest book you’ve read that isn’t officially horror, but gave you chills? Alan Garner’s The Owl Service immediately comes to mind. It’s a children’s book (allegedly) and…