Did I mention I have a book for sale? And that it's a fantasy detective adventure story that makes a valentines-day-appropriate hard pivot to romance in the last third?

It also has plenty of content for the mule fans out there, making it the ideal read for anyone who likes mules, romance, or both:

I know what you're thinking: "I do like mules and romance, but I also want to believe that a better world is possible. Is there a book like that which replaces traditional fantasy feudalism with utopian politics?"

Friend, this is your lucky day...

Some will say: "I do like mules, romance and utopian politics, but these are heavy topics and I want something easy to read. More of a fast-moving adventure story, perhaps with a kick-ass narrator who makes plenty of jokes along the way." I don't know what to tell you, it's like I've thought of everything. You can read the first chapter right here - why not give it a shot?

think there should be an inverse version of htat annoying 'miku made minecraft' bit where you pretend that some extremely evil person made a piece of media you find mildly annoying instead of its by all appearances normal and inoffensive creator

genghis khan made hades 2

epstein funded big mouth

Bush did 6 7

Thought I could do s cinematic twist on this with "Harvey Weinstein produced..." but it turns out he did.

God I love Apothecary Diaries. Maomao is like a dog with a mouth full of Lego bricks to me. Babygirl don’t eat that

So imagine you go to a brothel and when you get there it’s full of beautiful women but then also there’s this dog. And when you ask “hey what’s with the dog” they’re like oh the dog, we love the dog, everybody loves the dog, the dog collects rocks from the yard. And you’re like “okay” but later you find the dog gathering piles of rocks and cementing them into a beautiful river-stone wall to protect the building. And you’re like “I didn’t even know dogs could do that”. And they’re like “that’s nothing, check this out” and then the dog starts doing multiplication with the rocks. You’re like “what the fuck” and they go “nahh she’s just getting started”. And they start giving the dog complex mathematical formulas that the dog answers by laying out the rocks. And you go “holy shit that’s the smartest dog I’ve ever seen”. And they go “it’s the smartest dog in the world” and you’re like “wow that’s amazing”. And then you look outside and the dog is eating the rocks. And you’re like “can the dog eat rocks?”. And they’re like “no”

One day you find out the dog went missing. “We don’t know where the dog went but we miss the dog”, the beautiful women tell you. A year later the dog comes back. The dog is accompanied by the Duke of wales. “My gardener stole this dog but now I would like to buy it”, he says. “The dog has built me a beautiful castle and solved the viscount’s mysterious murder.” You aren’t sure how the dog did that by stacking rocks but you’re still incredibly impressed. The beautiful women are so happy to see the dog again. “Did you know that the dog can ride a bike?” The Duke asks. You look at the dog. The dog is obviously concealing a mouth full of gravel

This is the post that enticed me to watch apothecary diaries and now that I am watching apothecary diaries I am constantly pointing at the very deliberately cat-coded character, whose name is 'cat-cat', and shouting 'this dog can EAT ROCKS?'.

I’ve gotten so many messages about this post because Maomao is EXPLICITLY cat-coded with cat motifs and cat associations with cat jokes but the truth is there was no energy I could think of that captured her baffling aura like a large old farm dog dog eating a rock. Cat eating plastic? Cat opening doors? Cat eating legos? No, she is my grandpa’s very clever old sheepdog who would roll his eyes at you and tiredly and patiently perform very human tasks as you asked him to like a 56 year old underpaid chain-smoking senior retail colleague and then turn around and try and eat a rock. In a world of elegant show-breed cats she is a cat yes but also The Most Dog cat there ever was. And she’s eating rocks

Yeah actually, one day you give the dog a bath and it’s the most majestic giant Norwegian forest cat you’ve ever seen in your entire life. But☝️it’s still an absolute FIEND for eating rocks

Standard sword and sorcery fantasy film periodically interrupted by cutaways to an in-universe historian from a notional period hundreds of years after the depicted events explaining the film's various historical inaccuracies. There's a recurring tangent about how the film's protagonist is a conflation of three different guys, all of them much weirder than the end product of that conflation.

At one point the historian remarks that the film's principal villain probably never existed, but you can tell from their thousand-yard stare that there's some Poe's Orangutan level discourse about that topic.

Honestly would love to see a King Arthur movie with this framework.

Still thinking about this.

Except now I’m envisioning:

Standard King Arthur movie with the usual ‘back in the 6th century…’ establishing blub, which looks a little odd because it started with a specific year, which was crossed off and replaced by another, which was also crossed off and replaced by ‘~6th century, give or take’ along with a few other editorial addendums.

Opens with Uther and Merlin discussing the siege of Tintagel. Things go smoothly until Uther’s name is used, cue the first interruption to explain that Uther was probably an ‘invention’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but then that academic is interrupted by a Geoffrey apologist (possibly yours truly) to defend his work with a complicated spiel that gets interrupted by the actor who plays Merlin insisting ‘we should get back to the story’

What follows slowly unravels into a poorly disguised academic debate mediated by the Merlin actor as the voice of ‘well I was actually There!’ And it slowly becomes clear that not only does he genuinely believe he’s Merlin, but his version of the story is absolutely the most unhinged and least academically supported version and relies largely on the French Romances for some reason*.

*the reason being that this is an accurate representation of many fans, who hold the Romance era as the ‘Cannon’ for King Arthur even knowing it is not the ‘Historical’ or even ‘Original’ narrative.

"The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart."

i love you realis youre so strange

it's fun to draw the realis pcs because i haven't looked for other people's designs and gone 'that's perfectly what they look like in my head now' yet (but i hope i will, i love to see them)

90% of being good at computers is having the ability to read and follow a list of basic instructions.

Curiously this is also 90% of being a computer.

Yeah!

You know how Horse People are a little weird because they have to Think Like Horse to effectively work with them?

Computer Touchers are the same, just with a different animal.

As a Computer Toucher and Horse Person I can confirm. Typically with a computer you have to figure out how the seemingly bizarre behaviour is following an underlying logic, with horses it's a question of how to work through a million years of survival instinct and emotion to teach them how to work logically. Both are fundamentally about understanding and problem solving, but horses will always be closer to my heart.

Code is a liability (not an asset)

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn't even wear down.

This is the thesis of Paul Mason's 2015 book Postcapitalism, a book that has aged remarkably poorly (though not, perhaps, as poorly as Mason's own political credibility): code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does "wear out" (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).

To understand why code is a liability, you have to understand the difference between "writing code" and "software engineering."

"Writing code" is an incredibly useful, fun, and engrossing pastime. It involves breaking down complex tasks into discrete steps that are so precisely described that a computer can reliably perform them, and optimising that performance by finding clever ways of minimizing the demands the code puts on the computer's resources, such as RAM and processor cycles.

Meanwhile, "software engineering" is a discipline that subsumes "writing code," but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of. Software engineering concerns itself with the upstream processes that generate the data the system receives. It concerns itself with the downstream processes that the system emits processed information to. It concerns itself with the adjacent systems that are receiving data from the same upstream processes and/or emitting data to the same downstream processes the system is emitting to.

"Writing code" is about making code that runs well. "Software engineering" is about making code that fails well. It's about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It's about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/hpux_end_of_life/

Because that's the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn't static, it's dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed. Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – not because the code changed, but because time marched on.

A big reason why some people think chatbots are great at writing code is because it's like gambling. Entering a prompt and having a chatbot return in seconds workable code that would have taken you hours to write is like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, it's an incredible rush. Gamblers remember the times they hit a jackpot but ignore the fact that they lost money overall.

This is how you can end up with coders insisting that AI tools benefited them in a study proving that AI tools made them less productive.

Even worse, Im in a lot of open source code related spaces and if you don't ask a chatbot for help before asking people, no one helps you nowadays like 60% of the time.

Its like going to a doctor and being like "Im coughing up blood" and they respond with "well have you tried the slot machine yet? You should try the slot machine before you ever speak to a doctor".

I got laid off recently. I'm a data engineer by day, one that is exceedingly vocal about how unfathomably dangerous AI can be, will be, already is, and has been for several years. We're all beginning to feel it--I'd argue we've been living it since 2015, but that's an adjacent albeit highly related topic--and now AI is not only the reason but the scapegoat for so much heinous corporate behavior.

I was forced to use Copilot--Microsoft's built-in AI--in my day-to-day work last year. Without diving into too much of my history at this employer (lots of reorgs and different managers because the company had 0 clue how to support a data warehousing team that was solely responsible for internal employee data), I got a new manager in January of 2025 and shit went south fast.

I couldn't just not use Copilot either. Microsoft has it's grubby little fingers all over the usage of your computer, as mentioned in Corey's essay above. Managers are provided with usage metrics, down to keystrokes and mouse clicks, of their direct reports. Microsoft uses this as a selling point to corporations. And they love it.

So I couldn't lie. I had to use it. And every time I did, I wasted so much time arguing with it, prompting it, finding ridiculous uses for it, vetting that it did what I wanted it to do, redoing all the work it half-accomplished or hardly-at-all accomplished. I gave this information to my manager regularly. My ex co-workers rarely helped me when I asked them how they were leveraging it so well; I'm convinced they were over-hyping it to protect themselves.

By the summer, my new manager was getting on my case about it. Not using as much as my peers, there has to be ways I can leverage it. I tried. I threw all of my work at it, but it was never as useful or accurate as I was. Sure, I was slower. But my work, my code or workflow or ETL or whatever it was, was correct. Accurate. Copilot regularly spit out garbage. And my manager didn't care. By November, I was out. I later found out my team was shocked. My previous manager was baffled. All of the people I'd worked with outside my team were stunned.

It's not because I didn't use AI well. Corporations like to do end-of-year layoffs to reduce headcount so their bottom line looks better. Less liability. That's the core of it. Economy sucks, bottom line looked bad, everything costs way too fucking much, and to keep people even remotely interested in barely working, their salaries have to barely make ends meet. So layoffs are inevitable. But the messaging that the company put out was that AI had made IT more efficient so they could do more with less. And that's the story the tech sector has been bandying about since 2024, laying off hundreds of thousand of highly educated, experienced developers in just two years. And we're being told to learn AI because it's going to fix everything.

It cannot. It will not. Code is not an asset. It is a liability. And AI is only going to make it lethal.

Time to invest in an asbestos hazmat suit.

I have a simple theory about why some people think AI is amazing for programming and others hate it: By definition what an LLM stores in its training data is the average of what it found on the internet. That means if you're a worse than average programmer it will feel like a big improvement. If you're better than average it will feel like a drag.

the name "theresa" is so funny like. theres a what

de naam 'eris' is zo grappig. er is wat?

Navnet "erik" er så spøgst. Han er ik hvad?

الإسم فيفي مهضوم كتير. في في شو؟

Göran är också kul. Gör han vadå?

tuomas tapani karhu on hassu nimi. tuomasta pani siis mikä?

mae'r enw 'beth' mor ddoniol. beth sy'n bod?

I always have to start the New Years with this picture.

I don't often share real life things here, but here's a Mari Lwyd to wish you a happy new year (and for good luck). Maybe 2026 will be the year I learn to mesh and finally make myself a Mari in game, because what do you mean we don't have one yet 🥲🥲

Obviously I don't actually know the demographics of the ppl who read my books but I appear to be accruing a large number of straight guys. I am totally fine with this and everyone has been super nice it was just really unexpected.

I've been thinking about this lately - why are there so many fujoshis (women enjoying mlm stories) and relatively few himedanshis (men enjoying wlw stories)? Logically if we assume people are made more or less the same way you'd think there would be roughly equal numbers, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

My theory is that the first cause here is just that men are told not to enjoy romance media. We're directly in the firing line for "it's feminine and therefore lesser" and also "it's feminine and therefore you will be less masculine for reading it." When framed this way it's obviously bullshit, but we hear it so much that I doubt most of us really consciously examine why we ignore the genre.

If you're a straight man and you don't read romance, have a look at why that might be, and then maybe give it a shot! It's fun, and maybe it will give you that feeling of heart-lifting happiness that very little media gets to offer.

It took me until my forties to realise I enjoy reading romance at all and it wasn't until She-Ra hit like a tonne of bricks that I realised when I did lose interest it was because of who the romance was between. A straight romance has to be top tier for me to enjoy it but my heart is wide open for a lot of wlw stories. I am a weirdo, of course, but I think there'd be more weirdos like me if more men allowed ourselves to read things we enjoy.

Please vote for me in the Indie Ink Awards!

The Redstone Rescue came out a year ago. I'm still very proud of it and would love for more people to read it but he biggest barrier to that is that pretty much nobody has heard of it. However I have been nominated in the Indie Ink Awards 2025, which is pretty great - a big thank you to whoever nominated me - and if I can hit the shortlist it would be a great way of showing more people that my book exists. This is where you, beloved reader, can help me. Reaching the shortlist is purely a case of votes - if you were willing to vote for me, it would be very helpful. If this is the first you're hearing about my utopian fantasy detective adventure, you can find out more and buy it here. The Ebook is also available on Kobo and the audiobook should be pretty much everywhere. I think my chances are best in: Best Audio Narration: https://indiestorygeek.com/a/indie-ink-awards-2025/100 This is a smaller category and Ali did a great job as narrator for the audiobook so I would love to make the shortlist here. Best Light Read: https://indiestorygeek.com/a/indie-ink-awards-2025/103 I think this is a fitting because it is deliberately a fun, fast-moving story. There is danger, there is peril, there are casualties, but there is also hope and laughter. Several readers have called it "borderline cosy" and I can see why - it is a story full of dangerous situations, but it also has faith in humanity's willingness to help one another. Wittiest Character: https://indiestorygeek.com/a/indie-ink-awards-2025/111 The competition is fierce here but The Redstone Rescue does have some pretty good jokes and I would be very pleased to make the list here. You can get a sense of the main character's voice from the first chapter, which you can read for free here. I'm also nominated in: Best setting: https://indiestorygeek.com/a/indie-ink-awards-2025/106 I'm pleased about this one because I think Sataminva's mildly-Persian-inspired utopian realm is a pretty cool setting and I hope the story does a good job of making it feel solid. Best cover/artist: https://indiestorygeek.com/a/indie-ink-awards-2025/101 I'm not certain about this one because I painted my own cover and I don't really think of myself as an artist yet. I would have loved to pay one of my brilliant artist friends to do it for me but I spent all my book budget on my editor, and I have no regrets about that! If you want to force me to love my own art, a vote here will help. Writing The Future We Need: Gay or Lesbian Representation: https://indiestorygeek.com/a/indie-ink-awards-2025/117

This is a good category because although it starts as a detective story, Rescue is ultimately a sapphic romance, albeit one with a certain amount of adventure along the way.

With three movies to compare between, I really appreciate how each Knives Out movie explores justice from a different thematic angle, not based on the murder that was committed but based on the cruelty that led to that murder.

In Knives Out, a compassionate, ethical young woman treats everyone around her with generosity, and the people around her repeatedly try to take advantage of her kindness to force her into losing the fortune that was gifted to her by a dear friend. There, justice means that she keeps the fortune and decides that actually, she doesn't have to be kind and giving to people who've proven themselves assholes.

In Glass Onion, a woman loses her sister to a gang of wealthy, successful people who've sacrificed their principles for the sake of ambition and ego. There, justice means that everyone involved will be made notorious: whatever their other accomplishments, they will forever be known for being complicit in the burning of the most famous painting in history.

In Wake Up Dead Man, the church takes advantage of a young girl's loyalty and faith to place her under a lifelong burden and fill her with guilt, shame, and hatred. Justice means helping her understand what was done to her and the women around her, and giving her compassion so she can find peace.

This is cool because it means the movies contradict each other! The compassionate justice of Wake Up Dead Man would be totally misplaced in Knives Out, and so would the toppling-monuments justice of Glass Onion. And because each movie has something different to say, they all stand on their own and feel fresh.

This is also why Benoit Blanc is the uniting figure but never the protagonist of these movies. He's an agent of legal justice in that he's the detective and it's his job to figure out whodunnit, but the protagonist -- Marta, Helen, and now Jud -- is always the character who delivers thematic justice.

"The detective is not the protagonist" is very precisely the thing that Steven Moffat could not grasp and it's how Sherlock and Doctor Who went wrong with him in the driving seat. You don't need an arc for Poirot, you want to see him do his detective thing. These characters are catalysts for the story not the focal point. Rian Johnson understands this perfectly and his films are a great example of how it can work.

you need so much brain power to read dunnett in part because you're constantly trying to figure out why characters are doing whatever the fuck they're doing. this information will not be presented to you in a clear and concise way. sometimes the characters themselves don't even know the reason they're doing those things, so you have to figure out things that are hidden from you by the author, and from the character because repression/self-denial/trauma/etc. sometimes they know exactly why they're doing all of that, but they have so much more information than you do, so you're at a disadvantage still. if you're lucky you'll be following a character who is honest and open about their feelings... but this is a dorothy dunnett novel so those characters are 1 out of a 100.

and i wouldn't have it any other way!! i can imagine how these books would be written by someone who didn't love subtlety as much, or someone who didn't trust their readers enough. they'd be so, so much worse, that's for sure

Highway Blossoms is 50% off on the Steam Winter Sale!

Join Amber and Marina on the road trip of a lifetime in search for lost gold—and finding so much more 💕 It's fully voice acted with a sequel side story on sale as well!

I was surprised how charming I found Highway Blossoms - a well written and performed story.

tbh when I ran into the “horses are for rich people” bullshit I was so confused because they’re cheaper than a motorcycle? cheaper than an iPhone? then I realized most people weren’t dealing with the $900-$3k auction slaughterhouse bound pasture ornaments I grew up riding. I get that they’re extraordinarily cost prohibitive pets, especially if you don’t live in an area where land is as cheap as the dirt but you say ‘horse’ and I’m like. oh yeah.

horse.

I was given my current riding horse for free by a builder who was entirely failing to fit a new roof. He did a terrible job, the kitchen still leaks after multiple attempts to make it good, but the horse is great. He's not well put together or beautiful and he didn't steer or stop or really go for the first few months but now he's a lovely, enormously safe, riding horse.

Just a very good little hairy man.