Matt Zandstra

Statement on ICE Operations in the USA Strange Horizons stands with immigrants in the US facing these conditions.

Strange Horizons stands with immigrants in the US as they experience intensified anti-immigrant operations.

We have the opportunity to lend our strength as a global community.

Read our full statement:
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

every epstein file drop underscores how elite power operates through shared socio-economic networks, regardless of people's ideological differences, populist posturing, or public feuds

A View from the Slush

I wrote a thing about short stories, why they get rejected, and what you can apply to your own work.

clhellisen.beehiiv.com/p/a-view-fro...

Got told, again, to keep politics out of my posting here as it will affect my book sales. Fuck that. My readership mostly knows my politics and doesn't give a fuck. And if you're a nazi cunt, or want to appease nazi cunts, you're not going to like my books anyway.

*Exactly*. Despite feeling like a bit of an idiot when someone pointed it out to me, I still found it quite thrilling to re-live the entire book in the light of the revelation.

I was about to admit my own horrendous misreading of The City and the City! I wonder how many others get turned around that way.

extract from The Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken [1] 140 Don't default to the ordinary or average in fiction altogether. If either is your subject, yes: you'll...

extract from The Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken [2] ... find meaning in the ordinary and average, and strangeness there, too, because even the seemingly ordinary are very strange indeed, and no human being is ever truly average, average being a mathematical term, not a human one. No default average plot is interesting, no average language (which can too easily mean clichés that you don't notice are clichés, like blood-curdling). If you're tempted to think of yourself as ordinary- think of the things you d be hor- rified for other people to know about you, your genuine hidden freakishness, the most inexplicable thing you did as a teenager. Something you've never told anyone, or nearly nobody. Then give that kink or shameful secret to a char- acter. Who'll know? Only you. That's what fiction is for.

I read this in Elizabeth McCracken's A Long Game today. It's a little scary, but that's part of the point, I guess.

Immigration is a fake problem. We have politicians on the one hand who want to use immigrants as scapegoats for our real ones and politicians on the other who are too cowardly to stand against them and tell the truth. That is the entire situation. Until that changes, people will continue to die.

LABOUR: "We must defeat Reform by stealing all their anti-immigration policies."

LABOUR: "We must defeat the Green Party by ignoring all their pro-immigration policies and calling their leader weird."

A blackadder still: "An it be true? That I hold here, in my motal hand, a nugget of purest green?"

If you see this, post your green.

The amount of time I spend fretting and hesitating, "Oh, I don't know if I can make that change to the story. I should ask someone." before remembering that it's my freaking story and I can change whatever I want, is frightening.
#writersky #writercommunity

This should be the first line of a poem.

We have our next editor's meeting coming up shortly. We'd love to hear from you if there's anything you would like for us to discuss or if there's something you'd like to see more of on the pages of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine!

a photograph of Matt Gaetz that notes he is an example of Mar-a-Lago face in a male

man I spent decades going "evil is ordinary, that's part of why it's terrifying, who knows which one of your neighbours would be willing to sign your death warrant?" then these chucklefucks showed up like HI WERE PAEODPHILES AND WE HATE RIGHTS CHECK OUT MY OGRE-AFFIRMING SURGERY

A Robin perches on the pointed end of a garden fence post. It is pictured in profile with its buff belly and orange-red chest and throat and brown back picked out in portrait mode against a background of another paling fence and a neighbour’s blue car. The Robin, which we named Roberto, has its beak wide as it sings the familiar song that is heard in gardens all year round. Camera: iPhone 15 Pro

Bluesky proves today what a force for good it can be in a darkening world. Our friend Alan @alan678.bsky.social is posting a daily #WinterRobin #ForJanet after my lovely wife left this world last week. He also invited others to join in. Here is our Roberto who Janet loved. #birds #EastCoastKin

adventure-751 – Renga in Blue Posts about adventure-751 written by Jason Dyer

BTW, I did finish writing about the whole game (6 posts) if you want to read it

bluerenga.blog/tag/adventur...

I do! Thanks!

Inflatable Ink: Undernotes: Plain text A few text-based links and, inevitably, some murder and politics

I suppose I should link to the actual post too. Though, be warned, I couldn't help but throw in some politics -- because *waves hand helplessly*

4/4

www.inflatableink.com/undernotes-p...

Adventure 751 (1980) COME WITH ME TO COLOSSAL CAVE. WHERE MAGIC ABOUNDS AND TREASURES ARE FOUND. BID YOUR FINGERS FOLLOW YOUR COMMANDS AND I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. YET BEWARE THE FIERY DRAGON, FOR HE KNOWS NOT WH…

To go back even further, Hacker News also featured a post by Jason Dyer from the blog Renga in Blue about a text adventure that was hosted on Compuserve in 1980 dubbed Adventure 751. The name, apparently, refers to 751 points -- the game's perfect score.

3/

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/01/a...

Then Hacker News featured the homepage of the venerable Aardwolf MUD.

2/

www.aardwolf.com

Brow6el is a full-featured browser that runs in a terminal : A full-featured, Sixel-capable terminal browser for those who’d rather skip AI assistants

Funny how themes clump randomly. Putting together links for a random reading blog post, I was hijacked by plain text . For example, The Register featured a command line browser.

1/

www.theregister.com/2026/01/02/b...

He's demanding control over a sovereign nation because they didn't give him THE NOBEL PRIZE. Why the actual fuck do we have a 25th Amendment?

If you think this technology isn’t eventually being used on you, you’re kidding yourself. Either we smash it or destroys us.

This hits on something that a friend said to me that I think is absolutely right: people who are not grasping the gravity of the situation & meeting the moment, where politicians have utterly abandoned us, are doing it because of the fear of confronting that there are no guardrails anymore.

I'm fully confident literary magazines will survive the AI apocalypse. There is no better time to become a creative writer. You already have an inside track because most people have never even heard of these things that can never die. We will be here with the cockroaches and Taco Bell

From a discussion today about tech bros and SFF:

"they always read these dystopian visions and think YEAH! THAT WILL BE A GOOD THING! or they read Lord of the Rings and think Yep! I'm going to call my company Sauron's Arsehole -- that's cool"

In April 2024, Spotify implemented a new scheme: songs with less than 1k streams per year would no longer receive royalties.

The data for 2025 was just released via Luminate, and 88% of songs have been demonetized.

Read it again: 88% of songs on Spotify have been demonetized.

kemi badenoch has just discovered [checks notes] population density

Rubenerd: Xfce is great A post from David Gerard reminded me why I still use Xfce almost everywhere.

I have to agree with @rubenerd.bsky.social: Xfce IS great! A nice clean linux desktop environment that is not intent on 'innovating' its way to a confusing over-featured mess.

rubenerd.com/xfce-is-great/