Howard Mittelmark

Occupant was my father's name. Call me Current Resident.

Remember those videos five or ten years ago, showing people overcome by emotion when they put on special glasses and saw color for the first time, and their families were always there, crying with them? What would be great is if that could happen with feeling shame.

Pretty sure Mark Twain could teach Olabamiji Oluwatobilobacan a thing or two about self-promotion.

Extremely chuffed about this lovely review of Seven Stories About Tammy from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air: www.npr.org/2026/10/26/n...

This probably isn't even in the top fifty abuses of office this week, but this email from the Social Security Administration is ultimately the same as paying for those campaign ads with public money, and worth mentioning.

This might be my proudest ever day as an agent? An author who has always been an absolute dream to work with…& writes book after extraordinary book. Pip I am just thrilled for you!

This is the weirdest thing I've seen in quite a while. The world is going crazy. Claude 5.5 made a video attacking the idea of AI. It's incredibly slick, all internally generated. What the fuck? www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrV...

To just spell it out, the Kickstarter for a MIWHT calendar (plus also stickers and prints) is going live on Thursday morning. There will be special pricing for the first 24 hours, so push on the 'notify me' thing. And tell everyone you know who wants good things to happen.

Googling "chicken recipes where you don't have to touch it"

"Every child in the kingdom shall receive one of my magic beans!"

Yeah, gotta admit, that's not what we mean by the "cousin problem" in my family.

A better demonstration of the difference in scale between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars than that chart is that while a billionaire controls enough of the world's infrastructure to cut off critical communications for a domestic political group, a trillionaire did that to an entire nation.

Was thinking about this song again today. I’m pretty happy with this performance from back when I was preparing it for a recital last winter.

I'd have said it would be hard to make a movie I want to see less than a movie about a guy trapped underwater, running out of oxygen, but it turns out I just lack the cinematic imagination to think of sticking that guy inside a whale.

Trying to imagine this guy, seething with anti-Trump sentiments, now exacerbated by the overpriced Trump coins he has for some reason bought, but keeping that to himself out of respect for Amazon and a personal sense of honor, because his duty as a consumer is to keep his politics out of shopping.

I don't think so

Every night before bed, to save time in the morning, I sort all of that day's mistakes into two categories, Irrevocable and Can Be Fixed if I Wake Up in a Time Loop, just in case.

William Gaines and a young Alfred E. Neuman.

Also, earliest use of "You don't bring a rock to a spear fight." www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

BTW I know some people are not buying books on Kindle, but this is my favourite/funniest/most horriblest craft book that I wish I had had when I was starting out, it's $4 on Kindle, and it doesn't appear to be on sale at Kobo! www.amazon.ca/Write-Novel-...

Back when I spent my time making jokes about fasteners.

Interesting review of M. John Harrison's latest, a Booker finalist. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/13/b...

Must be growing jaded. I didn't get nearly as excited this time.

Didn't think I'd ever come around on Skynet, but once we were all in our pods keeping the machines running, at least there were no weasely little robots running around cooking up schemes to suck the last few pennies worth of amperage out of sorry, coppertop asses.

Got damage coverage on a laptop for the first time because I've finally learned that any fatal error that occurs is probably going to be mine.

I see you're mighty proud of that shiny new "gaming laptop" you've got there, son. But you know who else performed 50 trillion operations per second?

some scholars claim that infinite monkeys lack the education, aristocratic sensibility, or familiarity with the royal court to produce Shakespeare's plays

Okay, maybe there is a place for AI in publishing.

Australopithecus 3 million years ago:

Does anyone know how to turn off the AI enhanced search in Windows 11 File explorer? I can't use it to find anything.

I am still amazed at what passes for intelligent discourse on X. When they're not saying appalling things about women's bodies, they're having conversations like this, just saying shit with with no connection to reality, and acting as if these are deep insights that the left can't comprehend.

It was a much more contentious production than this article suggests. At one point Netflix superglued them together like this until they agreed on a script.

New irresistibly sweet, fuzzy, bouncy pop that it is unseemly for someone my age and gravitas to be bouncing around to. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0cF...

I'm impressed that @evehrlich.bsky.social, whom I've been editing and joking with for so long he's more a friend than a client (albeit a friend who pays me, so let's say a frient), got blurbs for his new novel, The Adventures of Brightthinking McCoy, from the Big Three: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Not sure why they thought it needed a sequel, but at least it has a better title than the original, TERMINAL: The Queen's Feeling a Bit Under the Weather

Really, they should call those little pouches sucking tobacco.

I first began to realize I wasn't like the other boys when I found myself drawn to Thing One while remaining completely indifferent to Thing Two.

Having the book club meet here for our Piranesi discussion.