Jonas Kyratzes, pjf

"The poetry of the earth is not eternal, but changeable, and man began to sing articulate songs only after he had placed between himself and the earth implements and instruments which were the first simple machines." - Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924)

This is really worth reading. The whole "but what do we do with nuclear waste" thing is really entirely manufactured. We safely store vast amounts of much worse stuff all the time.https://twitter.com/ReadNathaniel/status/1261232798385483776 …

His name, in case you were wondering, is a pun on the Greek word μύτη (nose). The neighbours called him Koala.

I will know there's been real progress in game engine development when all my programmer friends don't scream in agony whenever a minor update is released.

Here's my controversial take of the day: the distinction between hyphens, em dashes and en dashes is obsolete and should be abolished.

One additional thought: some people maintain that racism was somehow crucial to Lovecraft's work and/or philosophy. In fact, it is the polar opposite: his attempt to root both his worldview and his fiction in science is *undermined* by the pseudo-science he refused to let go of.

That said, yes, his racism is real and should be condemned, and in places it does real damage to his writing. But to *reduce* his work, or even his life, to his racism is foolish and unnecessary.

He was a complex man who lived an extremely hard life of abject poverty (and if you can read about his death without feeling extreme pity, you are inhuman). I think that if he had not died so young, he might have let go of his belief in racialist pseudo-science.

It's also inaccurate to reduce all of Lovecraft's thinking to one particular phase of his life, given that he went through radical changes over time. People also do this with his literary work, putting stuff he wrote when he was basically a child side by side with his later work.

I mean, the man was undoubtedly a massive racist, and Joshi goes into that in great detail. But imagining him as some simplistic nihilistic reactionary is completely inaccurate. He was very supportive of women writers in his field, for example.

I really do wish the people who are always performatively angry about Lovecraft would at least read S.T. Joshi's biography so they could be accurate about his bigotry, instead of claiming he hated everyone and everything. (He married a "self-made" Jewish businesswoman!)

Quite honestly, the hardest thing about finishing The Council of Crows is knowing that it can't live up to the magic of The Sea Will Claim Everything. It's a messier game, rougher, colder, sadder. Still plenty of warmth in there, but it's just not the same.

And by "found" she means "cunningly observed and then caught." The kind of special ability that only higher-level Greek Husbands possess. Also, is it a squid or a cuttlefish?https://twitter.com/VerenaKyratzes/status/1258726341832257536 …

I highly recommend Scrubs (all eight seasons!) and once you've watched that I also highly recommend this podcast. Also, one episode features someone wearing a Serious Sam T-shirt.