Wesley Osam
@mwosam.bsky.social
My site is at https://www.superdoomedplanet.com .
The Humble Bundle site has had a lot of SFF novel bundles lately, and the latest is a Gene Wolfe bundle put together by Tor:
Humble Book Bundle: The Ultimate Gene Wolfe Library by Tor Books
Get a massive library of the best of sci-fi and fantasy master Gene Wolfe! Choose what you pay, and support Alzheimer’s Research UK with your purchase!
humblebundle.com
On the comics site, Awkward Granola: www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1749
Awkward Granola
Visit the post for more.
superdoomedplanet.com
Today on SOLRAD, we feature When a Comic Refuses to Explain Itself: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic -- an essay by Emre Altindag solrad.co/when-a-comic...
When a Comic Refuses to Explain Itself: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic by Emre Altindag - SOLRAD
Today on SOLRAD, we feature the essay: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic by Emre Altindag
solrad.co
Wrote some likely barmy stuff about Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and the movies The Spirit of the Beehive, Silent Hill, and Return to Silent Hill... matthewcheney.net/blog/purloin...
Purloined Spirits and Pale Silence: Notes on Submerged Narratives
1. Submersible Edgar Allan Poe was a trickster, a hoaxster; were he peering over our shoulders as we stare at pages of his words and, with the omniscience of a ghost, reading our thoughts, I have no...
matthewcheney.net
The problem here is that it actively erases the agency of the original cartoonists, because it takes for granted that they were no higher than admen, and that they had no subtext already built into the comics that Lichtenstein was simply noticing
Besides the fact that not enough people realized that he was directly tracing these things with no real creative additions, the case for Lichtenstein depended on him adding a perceived level of contempt for the source material, which was what supposedly made it 'high art'
Ste Jormur@stejormur.bsky.social · last mo.I'd never seen this Roy Lichtenstein painting before, but it's incredible how he manages unfailingly to make his copies worse than the original comics he's ripping off.
So apart from all the other problems with the ambient recording stuff tech companies are pushing... who is this *for*? How are you so checked out of your life you need a recap of your last 15 seconds multiple times a day?
Michael Tsai - Blog - Audio Intelligence
mjtsai.com
Could probably come up with many with more thought, but: I was startled at how Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death anticipated some of where the culture was headed. Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary is thoughtful about dealing with feeling directionless.
N.S. Dolkart is gathering signatures@nsdolkart.bsky.social · 2mo agoWe talk a lot about books that were formative in our childhoods and young adulthoods, but we never actually stop forming ourselves, so what are some books that were formative in your post-college adulthood?
Randomly checking the NYRB Classics website, I noticed they're going to be publishing a new translation of Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel:
Morel’s Invention
Jorge Luis Borges declared Morel's Invention a master-piece, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. When a fugitive washes up on a deserted island, he quickly disc...
nyrb.com
This is bizarre, but also an exemplary demonstration of the confusion and PR fog surrounding LLMs. The writer is incensed about LLM watermarking because he wants his LLM "to choose the very best, most precise words". But LLMs can't do that! They don't know what words mean!
Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anyth...
daringfireball.net
My problem with online SFF book discussion is that it's obsessively present-oriented: recent releases, hot new writers, this year's award shortlists. Not many conversations recalling or reevaluating work from 30, 20, even just 10 years ago. (Except maybe Omelas, every six months.)
Reactor Magazine@reactorsff.bsky.social · 2mo agoWe've talked about DNFing. And audiobooks. And "The Classics." And performative reading. @mollytempleton.com suggests we find something new:
Critiques of prize-winners & lists, a celebration of surreal pessimism, thoughts on African worldbuilding, and more: this month's Wow! Signal link roundup is live:
Wow! Signal: August 2026
Jake Casella Brookins Hello, fellow readers! Lots of exciting things happening at ARB: we just sent out our first round of contributor honoraria, which is a huge milestone for us—thanks again to ev…
ancillaryreviewofbooks.org
I find Omelas gets more interesting when you realize it's less about "what do you do when you realize your society is built on suffering," and more about "why do we resist imagining a society not built on suffering?"
I think at one point in semi-recent history there was a kind of accepted cultural canon of literature that everyone learned in school, and that allowed a kind of shared framework for discussion. We don't have that as much anymore, and so the few common touchpoints get really oversaturated.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not that interesting, but I do think it's symptomatic of something that most every take on Omelas wants to "solve" it.
Michael Jordan 'Stop It, Get Some Help' Meme
ALT: Michael Jordan 'Stop It, Get Some Help' Meme
static.klipy.com
Zachary Gillan@megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 2mo agoOmelas is not that interesting a story and the takes have got to stop
I am actually infuriated by this assumption, as writers and artists of all kinds, that if our work runs up against the audience’s ignorance (vocabulary, intertexuality, &c.) this is somehow a failing, our fault and something it is our responsibility to avoid.
Kate Watson@loreandordure.com · 2mo agoObviously. And the world is in any case full of references to unfamiliar things, if people are perplexed surely they can look it up?
Somewhere along the way, we've shifted from storytelling to elaborate descriptive narration. Like a movie is just an inefficient way of doing the plot summary of that movie.
There's been a real trend - because streaming miniseries sprawl over so many hours, I think, but perhaps it's demand driving supply - of spelling out *every* beat, saying *everything* out loud. Leaving no stone unexamined.
Bailey Poletti@baileypoletti.bsky.social · 2mo agoIf "Death of the Author" means interpreting a text need not conform to the creator's intent, this might be "Death of the Audience," where there is no interpretation to do at all. A reader is not expected (nor encouraged) to find meaning. Consumerist Non-Being, like an anti-zen breathing exercise.
Why are people laundering inoffensively anodyne political opinions through the mouths of AI-generated simulacra of beloved cartoon characters, and why is Bugs Bunny's head on the body of an eagle?
Perhaps also we've attached so much sense of personal stake and identity to individual works, and get offended by any criticism of them, because we ourselves are not sailing in a meaningful and ongoing cultural flow, but rather are clinging to our shipwreck debris in water gone swampy.
Perhaps we've fallen into the insidious Great/Terrible binary for aesthetic judgment because in a culture where real art *doesn't* matter, where each book/movie/song/whatever is a singular product separate from a meaningful and ongoing cultural flow, hyperbole is the only way to claim importance.
There also wasn't as much of the current sense of binary hyperbole: art & lit is only either Great/Terrible. From our vantage, it's weird to read serious reviews from 100 years ago, because there's less sense that something must be proclaimed either a timeless masterpiece or crime against humanity.
A tangential thought about this is that it can be interesting when DW's regeneration and the related shift in style/mythology don't sync up perfectly—sometimes Doctors feel out of their element because their era starts late, or ends early.
Wesley Osam@mwosam.bsky.social · 2mo agoMy Doctor Who take is that it works best when every regeneration is a soft reboot, every Doctor getting their own mythology. A crucial part of is that every Doctor ought to be a different kind of character who could be the lead of a series like this.
I continue to find it distressing that substack has managed to capture such a big chunk of literary discussion/energy--mainly lit fic but some genre focused folks as well We need something that's open source, easy to spin up, more communal/connected than blogs, but less messy than discord servers
My Doctor Who take is that it works best when every regeneration is a soft reboot, every Doctor getting their own mythology. A crucial part of is that every Doctor ought to be a different kind of character who could be the lead of a series like this.
I was also getting deep into music at that point, and the Crisis occupied a very similar space to punk, a year zero event which had Changed Everything by resetting the clock. But after an initial burst of creativity, the risk was that you'd just Repeat Everything trying to sneak old stuff back
Starting to come across the idea that Doctor Who might do a full reboot in the wild, and I am here to say no-one is going to do that. Reboots and regeneration solve the same TV problem: you don't need to use one if you've got the other, and reboot involves more risk than regeneration.
