Arthur B.

Yeah, "Does David Icke mean 'Jewish people' when he says 'lizard people'?" is a red herring because if you want evidence of him being antisemitic there's plenty of examples of him just being directly antisemitic.

I cite only the tenor of the gossip, not the accuracy.

2024 was "look at these war crimes the Empire is fine with", 2025 was "look at this war crime someone did on a whim", 2026's player event season gossip seems to be "look at this player event that happened". People will come up with their own Barrens atrocity if the mainline game doesn't yield it.

"Pornhub, owned by a Canadian private equity firm" - what's the point of the phrasing here? If ownership is not pertinent, why mention it at all? If ownership is pertinent and known, why not be exact and name the firm? If ownership is pertinent and unknown, why isn't that the story?

Quite fond of OK and their classic album Sensible Distance From the Precipice.

...are we talking stuffed as in cuddly toy, or stuffed as in taxidermy?

Days of Bricks and Broken Hearts Last year I reviewed A Mirror of Dreams, Andrew Wild’s account of the early days of the 1980s neo-prog movement as seen through the careers of the bands he identifies as the “Big Six&#8…

Great followup, loved the section on the lesser-known bands of the era and the analysis of why the revival petered out at the time is great. fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2025/07/10/d...

They did that when I saw them at the Albert Hall a while back! It's a nice touch.

Pop stars doing their bit.

Damage Report, Dr. Kotsko! Star Trek, as a franchise, has been in a state of stop-start ever since it began. It took a letter-writing campaign to keep The Original Series going for as long as it did, the project that became …

Did a little book review. I was drawn to this book by @adamkotsko.bsky.social because I heard it was utterly savage about ST: Picard, and it is, but it's a grand read beyond that. fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2025/05/18/d...

"OK so his head *did* messily burst during that motorcade but he'd really been doing a number on his blood pressure..."

The funny thing about rfk is that when he dies it will probably be impossible to tell whether it was murder, given how much weird shit the guy is up to.

They'll be like "we found an absolute ton of arsenic in his blood, but also he was taking arsenic pills"

Leafing Through the Depthcrawls: A Conversation With Emmy Allen The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of scenarios for old-school D&D and its close relatives, designed by Emmy Allen, who I previously interviewed to showcase her Esoteric Ente…

Me and @cavegirl.bsky.social talk eldritch OSR modules, the state of D&D, the necessity of discomfort.

NEW: Senator Marshall (R-KS) RUNS AWAY, fleeing his own town hall after being asked about DOGE firing Veterans. MAKE HIM GO VIRAL.

Cocaine and milk (full fat)

Quote from Daniel regarding HarperCollins partnership with AI firm: “The fear of robots replacing authors is a false binary. I see it as the beginning of two diverging markets, readers who want to connect with other humans across time and space, or readers who are satisfied with a customized on-demand content pellet fed to them by the big computer so they never have to be challenged again.”

tell ‘em @kibblesmith.com

A Mirror of Dreams – A Mirage of a Movement? In the UK, progressive rock's moment of greatest critical acclaim and commercial success had come and gone by the time the 1980s dawned. Where you put the end of prog's golden age is debatable - some ...

I reviewed it! It's quite good.

Solemn Vale, Densely Detailed Solemn Vale is an RPG from Dirty Vortex; according to the back cover it's "a roleplaying game within The Neon Dream", but the Neon Dream concept isn't mentioned at all within the book so what exactly ...

I reviewed Solemn Vale, a folk horror RPG that I'm left feeling kind of ambivalent about.

Ah yes, the star of Do't Lok Bak

Cover to a brand-new Kindle biography of Donald Sutherland...or SUTHELAND, as the incredibly sloppy cover, which looks to be a crudely manipulated photo of some other book, with a new title slapped on in what looks a little like fingerpaint, puts it.

Just published today.

I'm sure it's a thoroughly-researched, in-depth work produced with all the rigorous care and attention to detail that went into the cover.

Footprints from baby shoes, never worn.

In D&B every Finetime survivor is fully aware of the slugs, but Space 4Chan rejects 15 anyway. Which to me makes him washing his hands of the situation palatable: there's no way to help them with their consent, and if he forcibly saves them, well, then he just helped set up a Nazi space colony.

Critical differences being a) prejudice against 2nd Doctor arises from "he's a bit scruffy" (and implicit classism there) and "he's somewhere he's not meant to be", and b) the mistrust generally happens before the monsters are prevalent.

Interesting to compare to how many Second Doctor Base Under Siege stories play out (especially Macra Terror, which D&B reminds me of). There he shows up and tends to be mistrusted at first, but people generally come around once they become aware that there really are monsters and he really can help.

do holodeck safeties prevent spanking

(Indeed, the attraction of my theory isn't that I'm saying "He's not incompetent, he's evil" - I'm saying "he's evil AND he's incompetent".)

Attractive though Hanlon's Razor often is, I am reluctant to apply it to Tories due to the sheer number of them who rely on "Bloo hoo hoo, I am but a poor feckless bumbler" to skate by (see: Johnson).

Arthur's razor: never take the high road when there's a chance to kick the Tory front bench.

It's equally possible that he really is this pathetic and incapable and clumsy and accident-prone. But I also think he's a petty and spiteful man and the sort of person who *would* deliberately tank an election because he hates his colleagues and wants them to suffer too.