After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest,

Looks like curry crab noodle sandwich is back on the menu, boys (I’m eating a curry crab noodle sandwich)

“Window Boy” ( @thomasha.bsky.social, 2023)

Very nice work!

Hi Friends! Our 2025 issues are both great. Please consider grabbing them. Seasonal shipping is taking up to 4 weeks. Alternatively, we have eBook versions.

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“Window Boy” ( @thomasha.bsky.social, 2023)

So I interpreted the weird as the hyperobject of climate change, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of Cthulhu on 'em. Gimme Cthulhus for a Cthulhucene, you'd say.

Ah, the ol’ backwash

Nice! What’s the PhD on?

From our friends at @undertow.bsky.social! undertowpublications.com/issue-11

ISSUE II / FALL 2025 / FICTION / OPINION / COMMENTARY WEIRD HORROR DAVID DEMCHUK ANDREW HUMPHREY CYAN KATZ JACK KLAUSNER MARY KURYLA DAVID PEAK RORY SAY JOCELYN SZCZEPANIAK-GILLECE JUNIPER WHITE A.C. WISE

Another winner. Great nonfic from Strantzas on juxtaposition and from Peak, disguised as fiction, on ontology. Killer stories by Say, Kuryla, Humphrey and excellent bookends from Demchuk and Klausner (both on identity juxtaposed with ontology, actually)

Have not been able to get this passage from @vajra.me out of my head:

Be weirder and more unsettling

the fire. When his friend sat one evening in that very chair, and told his story, Clarke had interrupted him at a point a little subsequent to this, had cut short his words in a paroxysm of horror. "My God!" he had exclaimed, "think, think what you are saying. It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world, where men and women live and die, and struggle, and conquer, or maybe fail, and fall down under sorrow, and grieve and suffer strange fortunes for many a year; but not this, Phillips, not such things as this. There must be some explanation, some way out of the terror. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare."

Happy new year from Arthur Machen

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?'

Not a bad time of year to reread Machen, imo.

Karlo Yeager Rodríguez Eligibility 2025 Short Fiction: A Line of Ink, Stretching Back Like a Shadow - Cold Signal Magazine #3 Blanquitos - Typebar Magazine #8

With "Blanquitos" being a late bloomer (pun intended), I can now make my Eligibility Post:

If you're reading for awards, please consider these two stories.

FYI even if you're not voting for awards, I'd be honored if you read these (links to follow)

Hey, folks, please consider grabbing a copy of this anthology. I hope to keep it going.

ISSUE II / FALL 2025 / FICTION / OPINION / COMMENTARY WEIRD HORROR DAVID DEMCHUK ANDREW HUMPHREY CYAN KATZ JACK KLAUSNER MARY KURYLA DAVID PEAK RORY SAY JOCELYN SZCZEPANIAK-GILLECE JUNIPER WHITE A.C. WISE

Another winner. Great nonfic from Strantzas on juxtaposition and from Peak, disguised as fiction, on ontology. Killer stories by Say, Kuryla, Humphrey and excellent bookends from Demchuk and Klausner (both on identity juxtaposed with ontology, actually)

They didn't have ontological unsettlement, because of the war. The only thing you could get was metaphors for eco-trauma

So I interpreted the weird as the hyperobject of climate change, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of Cthulhu on 'em. Gimme Cthulhus for a Cthulhucene, you'd say.

Was going to complain about an essay that rests on two of my bete noires (weird fiction=climate change; misuse of “New Weird”) but I’m sick of my own schtick

Great character work in this one

Great character work in this one

Also, to add to the fact that I'm on one about the 27,000 word Gish gallop that inspired this post, the "job of critics" is not specifically to review. It is not merely to provide qualitative assessment, we're supposed to interpret, to explain why things resonate with us.

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Speaking of Profane Illuminations III

Exactly (as with so many things)

This is the only way, I think, reading reviews to find people doing something interesting (and/or finding where they’re publishing good criticism) and then hoping they have time for more