undiminished somewhere 🌕

Current display name is from Philip Larkin's "Sad Steps" www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48418/...

I was already having a lot of fun with Stalker 2 but I did the Bulba anomaly and artifact last night and holy crap that was so good. The environmental writing and design in this game is just top notch.

I thought I had serenity But I was wrong To steal it would be criminal bosskeloid.bandcamp.com/track/pedestal

Riffs that make you go AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH 20buckspin.bandcamp.com/track/hungry...

playing some STALKER 2 (which is finally great but man those shaders)

@weramamuna.bsky.social knocked it out of the park, some really good thoughts on one of the perennial (?) styles of fantasy. I especially liked the note on Lud-in-the-Mist at the end which correctly calls out that "return" in that book does more to destabilize home than return the protagonist to it.

1. D&D 3.5 2. Vampire the Masquerade 3. Legend of the Five Rings 4. Mage the Ascension 5. Dark Heresy

Every time I'm like "there's no way A Man of the People is as good as I remember it is, right?" and then I reread it and it's that good. It's just THAT good.

Come on just.....come on UKL. Stop being so good please.

There are no ordinary moments.

It's 2026 and people are still sending me Spotify/Apple Music links as promos. WHAT IF THE JOURNALIST YOU ARE CONTACTING DOESN'T SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR STREAMING APP OF CHOICE? THINK FOR ONE SECOND FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

Second big one for the day. Furious, beautiful, melancholy antifa USBM

Big day at Heavy Blog today, first up is this excellent and expansive progressive death metal single!

It's an album chock full of drums that will blow your ears off, guitar lines that will make you go "huh", and so many more instruments that I won't even try to name here. https://www.heavyblogisheavy.com/2026/10/23/n000000000-count-them-erupt-with-1/

Noisy filth

Another day of sitting through meetings while all that's going through my brain is "karate karate karate karate karate karate karate karate karate karate karate I want to do karate shut up tell me about karate go away I want to do karate"

Holy shit this rules

Caspian have reminded me that, no matter how much I change, there is still something that I fundamentally love about post-rock. It simply takes masters to unlock that place within me these days. https://www.heavyblogisheavy.com/2026/10/22/caspian-caspian/

I am going to be very normal about this book

It's been a Bent Knee sort of week and that's not changing soon www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_pZ...

If I could only play one Dragon Age game, which one should it be?

I had to fire someone for the first time in my career today. It mostly made me very regretful and self critical. I've made a lot of mistakes over the years, just like anyone, and today they feel sharper.

You would do well to read anything the UKL award tells you to but PLEASE read North Continent Ribbon

Congratulations to Pip Adam, recipient of the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for Audition!

"They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!" - Ursula Le Guin, "The Wind's Twelve Quarters"

My position about genre discourse is unironically "why can't we all just get along". It's not that genres don't matter; they do. But I don't understand the need to proselytize and crusade on their behalf. "Hey I think this works in this way and that's neat. Oh, you don't? OK".

I love the idea of "pressure points" in martial arts because the second anyone uses them you can safely disregard everything else they have to say

This is the sickest shit I've ever seen www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQmr...

Reminder

New post in this series of mine. Did I need thousands of words for this? Probably not. The bottom line is: don't believe audio hype and don't buy anything above the mid-tier of headphones and speakers. I have at least one more iteration of this column which is about a cool Python script I wrote!

Sometimes you just have to listen to Pelagial to remind yourself that yes, it IS that good.

Frank Herbert if he were on Twitter: follow my account for more WACKY ideas like "sex martial arts"

Vibing garethcoker.bandcamp.com/track/turn-t...

Trying various methods to make work feel less soul-deadening. It all essentially fails but I end up thinking funny stuff like "oh wow it feels 5% less awful to do my email Sunday noon instead of Sunday evening, interesting".

*teeth gritted against how much I hate the protag* Good work @tkendall.bsky.social!!!!!! (seriously this book is great and the main reason is because it knows that cyberpunk should be about losers failing to live but somehow staying alive)

Howard Hamlin fan cam