Humdrum Places - BlogFlock

Instagram and Facebook are about to be filled with affiliate content - The Independent Variable

2026-03-25T05:18:38.000Z

The new shopping features come a few weeks after a dustup in which influencers caught Instagram adding shopping links to their content without their permission. The “Shop the look” feature added links to cheap lookalike products and not the actual items, an influencer who discovered the feature said. Meta said at the time it was a limited test and that the company was “exploring various changes” to the feature.

I don’t really care about the actual meat of this. It’s already flooded with ads and affiliates and people just trying to make a buck. I think the consistent abuse, exploitation, and misleading of customers is shameful and paying $375m in New Mexico isn’t enough of a punishment.

🎙️ Tyler Lee - foofaraw

2026-03-25T01:00:11.000Z

Read Tyler's story, How to Paint a Prairie Ghost Train, now!

Given it’s a ghost train, I’m dying to know if the paint will still be there when the train returns the next week…

That’s a great question! I hope so, but even as the writer of the story, I can’t tell you that for sure. I think one of the things that’s really special about graffiti (whether ghost-infused or not) is that it’s ephemeral and unpredictable. You could throw a tag on a wall Friday night and it might be painted over by Monday afternoon, or it might still be there a decade later. I think some of this comes across in the story (I hope) but one of the things I love about graffiti is that it’s an art where so much of the value seems to be in the doing – in the process of creation itself – rather than in the outcome of that production. It’s not really about making something that you can hold in your hand forever. You know there’s a shelf-life, but you don’t often know exactly how long that will be. When you think about trains, too, even if a train comes by every week, the cars attached to that train could be totally different ones. I live a few blocks away from a train yard and sometimes I’ll see them switching cars out and I wonder where that specific car is going, where it’s been before. You never know for sure.

What’s your own experience with street art, if any?

As a teenager I would say I “dabbled” with graffiti, but I want to make it very clear that I was never even the slightest bit actually good at it. Back alley stuff either out with a friend or, more often, alone on my bike, basically. Sharpie tags mostly, or else a friend would find some cheap hardware store spray-paint in his uncle’s shed or something like that, and we’d paint dumb stuff on the back wall of the corner store or some person’s garage door. Typical bored delinquent kid stuff, really. I think I wanted to be good at it, but I’ve never had a knack for that sort of fine motor control. Even my regular handwriting is atrocious. I stopped that when I reached the level of awareness needed to be embarrassed by my output, haha.

Then, when I was more in my 20s, I started doing this thing where I’d carry around Sharpies and label paper in my backpack everywhere, and then when I was sitting on the bus or whatever, or really whenever an idea hit me, I’d take out the label paper and write short, immediate poems on them. A few lines, or a few words, or an image or idea that hit me. Every now and then, I’d cut all the ones I’d written recently out, and then wander around town sticking them up on things. I don’t think many of them survived the weather all that long, but I like to think at least a few people saw them and thought about them for a second or two.

But being part of the hip-hop community, I’m always around graffiti. I see my homies flipping through their blackbooks, see pieces they benched on their IG feeds, hear them talk about stuff. There’s an incredible festival in Saskatoon (my hometown) called Summer Fling, where artists from all over the world come into town to do pieces. I go hang out every year, listen to music, talk to people, and watch them paint. So I guess the tl-dr version of this essay is, I have a little experience, but I also feel like I have an amount of distance from it to where graff still feels like some kind of impossible magic to me. I think a lot of that comes through in the story.

How does your music, fiction, and street art for you?

Hip-hop is really a story-telling genre at its core. I’m basically baby-deer fresh to writing prose fiction, but I think some of those story-telling instincts have followed me over from the song-writing. I’d say the biggest difference between the two (in terms of my approach, personally) is that the audience for a short story arrives expecting fiction, and all that entails – some kind of narrator, some kind of point-of-view, the possibility of fantastical things happening. In a hip-hop song I think the audience’s default assumption is usually that the material will be realistic and at least semi-autobiographical, so you have to do a little bit of table-setting to create that distinction between “me” the writer of the song, and “me” the narrator of the song if you are going to do something outright fictional. Most of my prose writing is “weird” in one way or another – there’s some kind of fantastical, speculative, or surreal element, or just an absurd energy to them – whereas my instinct with song-writing is almost always to play things relatively straight and earnest. Another thing that I think connects both of these artistic practices (along with poetry/spoken word, which I also dabble in) is just the musicality of words. I love really satisfying phonetics, rhythmic, flowing sentences, alliteration, rhyme – all that good stuff – and while those sorts of devices are certainly more prominent in the music and the poetry, I try to imbue a bit of that musical energy into my prose, too. Still very much a work in progress, but a skill that I’m trying to nurture and develop right now.

You mentioned to me you originally wrote this for a class—was there a prompt or theme or device you were tasked with utilizing?

There was no particular prompt or instruction for this assignment, beyond writing a complete story. For myself, I’d set a bit of a personal goal of blending the magical with the local. I feel like Saskatchewan is not a place that most people know much about, or think about very often, but I’ve lived almost my entire life here. It can be a deceptively strange place beneath the surface. I wrote four pieces in fairly quick succession that are all sort of dream-like ruminations on the history, politics, identity, and landscape (both physical and psychological) of this place. “Good Bones” was published with Neon & Smoke recently. Another will be published in Spring Magazine (which is a publication local to Saskatchewan, run by the Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild) in April, while the last (my favourite of the four, actually) is still out on submission.

If I’m not mistaken, this will be your third published story, following Good Bones at Neon & Smoke, and Memory Revisions at Radon Journal… what has your experience been getting started in this world and what litmags were you reading that eventually led you to try your hand at writing and submitting?

To give the readers a bit of context, as I’m typing it’s just past midnight, February 5^th. My Neon & Smoke publication came out on January 21^st, while the Radon Journal issue launched on February 1^st, so this is all very very new to me. I will admit when I first started submitting things I was only really familiar with a few litmags, all of which are Canadian, aside from like The New Yorker. Grain Magazine is a journal that’s local to Saskatchewan, but is well-known in CanLit circles, and I’ve been reading it off-and-on since high school after a favourite teacher introduced me to it. Augur is another Canadian magazine that I love.Basically the story is this: I was downsized from my long-time job during the pandemic and decided to go to online school and get an undergraduate degree in English.

After a couple of semesters of introductory courses, I was able to start taking creative writing classes. I kind of figured I was a “good” writer, but I thought I was like “good” for someone who isn’t really a writer, if that makes any sense. Like, you could be cracking the hell out of the ball in the batting cages after work, and having a lot of fun doing it, but that doesn’t mean you belong at the plate against even a single-A level pitcher. I kind of figured that was what I was – pretty good for the batting cages, but please keep him off the diamond. It was one of my creative writing professors who really encouraged me to start submitting my pieces for publication, though. At first I was very hesitant and reserved – I made just a few submissions here and there, assumed nothing would come from it, but still got disheartened at the rejections anyway haha. But then I got a few almost-successes. A hold here, a personal rejection there. Enough to keep me going at least, if only at the snail’s pace I was comfortable with at the time.

The acceptances from Neon & Smoke and Radon Journal happened in very quick succession – I think there might have been less than a week pass between the two emails. Neon & Smoke hadn’t published anything yet when I submitted to them, and I think I found them through an algorithmic advertisement on Instagram. Radon I discovered because I was specifically looking for anarchist-leaning spec fic to read, and they popped up in my search. The Radon acceptance was a game-changer, though, because (as you know, but maybe the readers don’t) Radon runs an incredible Discord server. I’ve learned so much just through seeing the conversations the veterans are having – interesting markets, tools to use, submission strategies, all sorts of things.

There’s also just a level of irreverence and camaraderie that helped melt away a lot of my rejection anxiety and has made me a lot more willing to yeet stuff out and see what happens. I discovered foofaraw through the Radon Discord, too, and you’ve fast become one of my favourite outlets to read.

It feels like Jake reaches some catharsis through tagging the ghost train and going from “HERE” to “GONE” and not needing the a copy of the photos, but externally, not much has changed… Am I reading too much into this or is this cathartic feeling intentional, and if so, what do you think it is about this specific tag that achieves this?

Yes, very much intentional. I hope my explanation won’t be too scrambled here, but I’m going to do my best to share my perspective. In the Canadian national myth, trains played a massive role as a connecting-force, bridging the gap between the populous, “cultured” Eastern provinces, and the “frontier” in the West. Obviously, the real history of Western expansion is much more complicated (and much darker) than that, but this is what most of us are taught as children, and I think that idea remains part of the public imagination. But just as settlements built up quickly around these rail-lines, they died out just as fast when rail stopped being as important. In a sense, Chapel Head is an outpost whose connection to the outside world has been severed, aside from this brief, flashing moment on this one little stretch of decommissioned track.

I think one thing about Jake is that he (like a lot of kids in small towns, especially kids who don’t conform as well to the environment) feels fundamentally trapped in Chapel Head. The notion of being stuck in place is a big theme of the story, with all of the other ghosts (aside from the train) being essentially defined by the places they haunt. Jake’s also a little bit invisible – his father is usually absent, and when he’s around he’s abusive. Jake doesn’t have a large friend group or any real social circle beyond Gabe. That’s kind of what his “HERE” tags really represent – it’s almost like a prisoner scratching his name in the wall of his cell, “Jake was here” – both as an observation of the place that he’s stuck in, but also just an assertion that he’s a being who exists in the world, in this dark corner that no one is looking at.

I think maybe more than any character I’ve ever written, there’s a LOT of myself in Jake. He’s very sensitive – he feels deeply – but he’s also introverted, reserved, hesitant to take up more space in the world than he feels he deserves, yet also chafing at the discomfort of that tiny box that he’s put himself in. The feelings and thoughts inside of him wind up bleeding out through his tags, because he doesn’t give them any other avenue to be expressed. Over the course of the story, though, his perspective shifts in some small but meaningful ways. Theron is a new person in Jake’s life but he does small things that make Jake feel seen. Firstly, Jake initially thinks that painting the train is impossible, Theron doesn’t just think it’s possible, but he thinks Jake should be part of doing it. Theron sticks up for Jake when he’s being bullied in the cafeteria. Jake “slips” (in his own eyes) when he hints at his father’s abuse in front of Theron in the woods – he exposes something about himself that he prefers to keep hidden – but Theron neither pushes the issue, nor ridicules him, instead Theron offers him comfort. At the same time, Jake gets to see Chapel Head a little bit through Theron’s eyes and become reacquainted with some of the magic and the beauty of the prairies that Jake had become a little bit blind to, which influences the way he paints his GONE tag, in all the sunset colours and soft, ambiguous shapes. The other thing is that the ghost train is going to be leaving. It’s going out into the world – away from Chapel Head. The prisoner might scratch “Jake was here” into his cell wall, but that’s not the sort of message he would write on a letter that he planned to throw over the wall in the hopes someone else might find it – I don’t think that letter would say where the person is, I think they’d want to say who they are.

I guess the GONE tag is kind of like that. It’s about Jake coming to recognize something inherently beautiful (or at least valuable) inside himself that he had been blind to, doing his best to turn that beauty into shapes and colours, and then sending it out, hoping that someone sees it. He doesn’t need a picture of the finished piece, because painting it was the important part. He writes GONE because the piece is going to be gone as soon as he’s finished painting it, and he’s okay with that. But also, the story starts with Jake being asked to do a thing, and him saying that it’s impossible to do.

The story ends with Jake doing that impossible thing. I think that’s a really transformative experience for anyone, not just to do a thing that’s difficult, or even to do a thing that other people told you that you couldn’t do, but to do a thing that you told yourself you couldn’t do. I think the final moments of the story, with Jake in his bedroom listening to Aquemini and thinking about a train just starting to pick up speed from a dead stop sort of represent the first time in Jake’s life where he’s realizing that he might have been wrong about himself. That he’s not so much trapped as he is just stopped, and that if he wants to start moving forward, he can. It won’t happen immediately, it won’t happen without effort, but it will happen, so long as he chooses to.

How many times has this story been rejected?

I think this one has only been rejected once. I wrote it for a creative writing class, and I liked it a lot personally (as did my professor) but I wasn’t sure if it was really relevant to the broader public. Part of that is just my own insecurity, but I also worried that people who didn’t know much about Saskatchewan, and that people who didn’t know much about graffiti, would both find it kind of esoteric and alienating. But then, after seeing a bunch of people on the Radon Journal Discord championing the “when in doubt, yeet it out” mantra, I took the plunge and I’m glad I did.

What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?

The New Yorker released a massive anthology in 2025 commemorating a century of publishing short fiction in their magazine, and I’ve been surfing through that on my eReader periodically, picking and choosing pieces just based on either the writer or the title. The story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” by Jamil Jan Kochai absolutely melted my face off, and not just because I’m a big fan of the game. Incredibly inventive, powerful, and it touches so many different themes.

But also (and I promise I’m not pandering) “Joan’s Stone on Loan” by Lyss Buchthal, published recently in foofaraw, has a blend of comical absurdity and emotional honesty that just tickles my brain in the perfect spot. I might never look at a statue the same way again. I’ve suggested this story to I think a half-dozen people in the week or so since I read it.

What book are you reading right now?

I just finished reading The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde a few hours ago, and it gets a strong recommendation from me. Rich characters, gorgeous prose, important themes, and just a staggeringly beautiful ending.

Check out Radon Journal and Neon & Smoke, they both publish tons of great work, and it’s all easily accessible online. I also have pieces scheduled for publication in the near future with Spring Magazine, and Grain Magazine. If you’re interested in my music, you can find me on most streaming platforms under the name Skizza, or at https://skizza306.bandcamp.com. I released a new album in December called “Winter Classic” and I’ll have a few more releases between now and the end of the year. I’m pretty bad at social media, but my Instagram is @SkizzaFromSask.

Thanks to Tyler for talking with us extensively about trains, music, and street art!

Pentagon’s ‘Attempt to Cripple’ Anthropic Is Troublesome, Judge Says - The Independent Variable

2026-03-25T00:24:58.000Z

wired.com

Hamilton acknowledged that Hegseth has no legal authority to bar military contractors from using Anthropic for work unrelated to the Department of Defense. When asked by Lin why Hegseth would have posted that, Hamilton said, “I don’t know.”

It’s 100% punitive. You don’t go from using the product and negotiating a new contract to expand capabilities to declaring they are a supply chain risk and can’t be used by any government contractor. It’s ridiculous.

Netflix’s One Piece Showrunner Adapting Monstress Into Adult Animated Series - Reactor - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T23:50:49.000Z

reactormag.com

Amazon MGM Studios is adapting the comic book Monstress into an animated series, with Steven Maeda (One Piece, Lost, The X-Files) helming the project.

Monstress is one of those books I've had on my bookshelf for years that I haven't gotten around to actually sitting down to read. I need to rectify that soon. It's one of the longest running comics going on outside of the Big Two and for good reason, I imagine.

Donald Trump’s latest climbdown suggests he wants to end the war - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T23:49:44.000Z

economist.com

On Monday Mr Trump did the rounds of American business television channels, repeating his claims of “great conversations” with Iran. Iran has firmly denied the existence of such talks in public and rejected offers from America in private, according to a Gulf official. The war’s unexpectedly long duration, as well as Mr Trump’s latest climbdown, undermine the idea that Iran’s regime is fragile and that regime change is possible. Instead, it is looking more likely that the ill-judged campaign will either drag on or end messily, with an Iran that is battered but defiant, and still able to inflict considerable damage on the region and the world.

This is what happens when you have power hungry buffoons in power. Make no doubt about it, America are the bad guys. Despite how bad things might've been in Iran or Venezuela, bombing indiscriminately because they don't do things our way should sound some alarms—especially since they are basically just trying other get the Iran nuclear deal back that Trump threw out during his first term; and now he's just lying out of his ass all over the place even more than normal, which .

Sora is dead - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T23:34:12.000Z

birchtree.me

What is the Venn diagram of people who thought Clubhouse and Sora were the next big thing, and is it a perfect circle?

I think a big "feature" of the start-up age we've been in since "apps" on our phones became a thing, is people building something because they can, not because they see a practical use for it. Then rich people give them lots of money to help shove it down peoples throats. Obviously, there has been some good to come from it, but overall, we still have this move fast and break things attitude in society where we throw something out there to see what happens without thinking about consequences or downstream effects. This, of course, is partly due to capitalism, but also because people "experience" life a lot less to know how things work in the real world.
Now I'm really starting to sound like a crotchety old man...

ICE Agents Just Making Sure They’re the Only Terrorists at Airport - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T23:11:40.000Z

theneedling.com

Could you imagine how sad it would be if a foreign terrorist destroyed or ended your life instead of domestic one? Not on our watch.

Would be funny if it weren't so true.

Trump wants $200 billion for bombs. Here's what that could buy instead. - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T22:43:08.000Z

motherjones.com

7 years of free school lunches. 3 years of Medicare dental coverage. 2,000 Trump heads on Mt. Rushmore.

This is the argument I and others have been making for years. These war mongers don't blink an eye at spending billions on killing people, but when it comes to trying to help people who could use it here at home, every penny has to be scrutinized to the point they start making up "welfare queens" and "fraud and waste."

Butterfly (2026) - A Humdrum Life

2026-03-24T21:52:16.000Z

Reply by email

Apple Maps may be about to get ads - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T19:11:28.000Z

techcrunch.com

Such a shift could represent a solid revenue driver for Apple. Google has included ads in its navigation app for years, and Bing Maps also offers a similar advertising capacity to local business owners.

Apple should use all that cash to take themselves private. Seriously, come on. Y’all did it, you made a trillion dollars and won capitalism. Every decision Apple has made in the last decade has been at a detriment to the consumer experience. How badly they ruined the Apple Store and Genius Bar experience is still unforgivable in my mind.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says ‘I think we’ve achieved AGI’ - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T18:56:09.000Z

theverge.com

Fridman, the podcast’s host, defines AGI as an AI system that’s able to “essentially do your job,” as in start, grow, and run a successful tech company worth more than $1 billion.

“Essentially” is doing a whole lot of work in that definition. No matter what the definition, a real AGI would be smart enough to never hallucinate, and frankly, I don’t think the current path of LLMs will ever reach real AGI.

🚂 How To Paint a Prairie Ghost Train - foofaraw

2026-03-24T18:30:16.000Z

“Theron says we should paint the ghost train.”

The words spin out of Gabe’s crowded lungs like smoky spider-silk—faint, impossible threads hanging in the air. All but imperceptible until you walk into them. I mash the pause button on my controller and turn toward Gabe, Yoshi’s kart frozen mid-drift on the flickering TV.

“Wait, what?”

Gabe cranes his neck and exhales a web of bong smoke into the unfinished basement ceiling, wisps twisting around exposed pipes, jittery aluminum ducts, splinter-ridden crossbeams. The haze drapes itself around the bare light bulb, bending the white rays an almost gunmetal grey. Gabe hacks like a cowboy about to die in an old Western, then clears his throat with a garden shovel and work gloves.

“Theron, that new kid. The big-ass twelfth grader from Hamilton,” Gabe says, the silk-threads of his voice now wrapped in blood and sinew again. “I told him we tag. He says we should paint the ghost train. Like a big end-to-end, all three of us.”

Gabe pulls the stem from the bong, and taps it out against the ashtray like Morse code. The tape deck on the shelf clicks as it hits the end of the cassette, then spins back to life as it flips sides and reverses direction. Xzibit’s gravel voice growls through the speakers.

“What do you think?” Gabe asks.

“How the fuck are we supposed to piece the ghost train, Gabe?”

“Fucked if I know. We were skating on Main, and he brought it up. Figures we can do it, though, somehow. You going to school tomorrow? Could ask him about it.”

The Vancouver Grizzlies poster on the front wall shakes harder—too hard to be caused by the speakers—plastic frame rattling against the particleboard walls. Two spears of white light slice in through the storm windows, broad blades dancing off the aluminum ducts, softening in the lingering smoke. I bounce from the sagging, corduroy couch, dart over to the entertainment stand, and ratchet the volume dial all the way down, revealing the rumble of a semi-truck idling in the front drive.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I scoop a can of aerosol air freshener from under my bed and pin the button down so hard the tip of my index finger tingles and turns red. The can hisses copperhead tongues as my body spins and pinballs, submerging the basement in a thick blanket of Pine Barren Petrichor or Spring Sunrise Redolence or what-the-fuck-ever IGA had on special this week.

“Bro, why is your dad home?” Gabe asks. “I thought you said he was on a long-haul?”

“He is. Wasn’t supposed to be home until Monday night.”

“Uhh, Jake—it is Monday night.”

I have a math test on Monday—had, a math test—double-fuck. “Gabe, could you help out at least? I’m about to be in serious shit here.” Gabe picks the bong off the coffee table and carries it to the far corner—behind the stairwell, next to the washer and dryer—then empties the water into the rusty iron floor drain. He retrieves a shoebox from under the couch—a battered-and-creased brown-and-orange Nike box, papered with skate stickers and Sharpie tags—tucks the bong, stem, and ashtray inside, and then slides the box back under the couch.

“Jake,” Gabe says—voice like lake ice in early April—“I think I might clear out… It’s just, your dad is kind of… You get it, right?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it bro. All good. Before you go, how does it smell in here now?”

Gabe inhales a cubic kilometer of aerosol perfume and sputters out a cough. “Uhh, smells like an anti-depressant commercial threw up in our Home Ec room.”

I curl a smile. Gabe’s eyes flash like a panther sniffing splashy, iron-rich blood on the breeze. “Smells like all the world’s funeral flowers on the day disco died.”

Laughter cracks out of me like embers floating up from a dying campfire. “That doesn’t even make sense, dude.”

Gabe turns his head, closes his eyes, and breathes in again. “It smells like a summer sleepaway camp where the counsellors make the kids braid friendship bracelets at gunpoint.”

The campfire erupts—detonates, really. In between laughs, my lungs claw at the sky to regain their balance, dizzy-drunk on a cocktail of stale smoke, synthetic springtime, and domesticated basement dust. Gabe stares at me, “What? What’s so funny?” his mock-Pesci pupil-twitch vibrates his blazed-red sclerae, a micron-thick layer of laughter-tears clinging like skin to his eyeballs. It all makes me think of simmering cream of tomato soup.

Then, the cold rattle of a brass doorknob, coffin-creak of steel hinges. A chill breeze flows down the stairs, floods into the room, extinguishes our hearth. Any lingering crackle of light or laughter turns first-snowfall-silent. The quiet is only broken by my father, his voice tumbling down the staircase like shards of avalanche ice.

“Jake, upstairs. Now. I won’t ask twice.”

Gabe stares at me, eyes still wet, but now frosted over. “It’s okay,” I say, “take off through the side door after I go up. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Gabe says, “school tomorrow. Cool.”

I’m at school an hour before first bell, face down in my black book at a cafeteria table, silver Sharpie in hand. My fingers won’t follow my eyes, though. Skin tough and red from the ride to school, from holding my handlebars stiff against highway winds and truck-kicked gravel, knuckles and fingertips still tingling with the October morning cold. The marker tip doesn’t glide today, it wobbles—film-reel judders along every line edge. A rat bastard’s broken polygraph. I hear Gabe and Theron behind me, talking as they approach the table.

“Jakey, figured you were cutting again today. I heard Gabe clued you in to the idea,” Theron says, sliding a plastic chair out from under the table and sitting down. “Madman stuff, just imagine it—Jesus Christ bro, what the hell happened to you?”

Theron locks both his eyes on just my left one—deep purple and swollen half-shut. He stares at me like I’m a half-developed Polaroid. “It’s no big deal,” I say, “I just racked out on my board last night.”

Gabe looks at me, then Theron, then back at me. “Yeah, it was crazy bro,” Gabe says, “you should have seen it. Jake ollied that four-set at the post office. Almost landed it, too, but then he went face-first into the planter box.” Thank you, Gabe.

“Badass,” Theron says. “You okay?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Been through worse.” I had.

“Alright, well, try to keep all your limbs attached, you’re going to need them when we piece the ghost train.”

There’s a vacant lot a little ways out of Chapel Head—the town we live in—where the old Saskatchewan Wheat Pool elevator used to be. The rest of the train line’s been ripped out for years now, but for some reason there’s still eighty or so meters of track in the ground there, weeds and prairie grass swallowing it back into the dirt. Every Wednesday night, a ghost train moves across that stretch of track. Engine first, then freights, caboose—just flickers into existence at one end of the track, flickers out at the other. A couple cars at a time, like watching a movie through a keyhole.

I flip my sketchbook shut and bury my tender hands in the front pocket of my paint-stained bunnyhug. “How are we supposed to tag a ghost train, Theron? It’s a ghost train—it’s right there in the name.”

“I was out there last week,” Theron says, “and the thing is, I pitched a bunch of rocks at it while it rolled past, and they clanked right off the side. Chucked an empty Pil bottle at it, and it smashed. Might be all glowing and spectral-looking or whatever, but that son-bitch is solid metal. Paint’ll stick to metal.”

The cafeteria gradually fills up. Some of the hockey-hairs and wrangler-shirts eyeball my swollen face, smirking in my peripheral, laughing at the precise edge of earshot. “Alright, so the train is real, but we still can’t piece it, because it doesn’t fucking stop. How fast do you think we paint?”

Gabe pipes up. “Okay, well do you remember Michelle? Corey Henderson’s cousin from the city?”

“That goth chick who threw up Fireball and Fresca all over you at the lake back in August?”

“Bro, she’s not a ‘goth chick,’ she’s a straight-up, no-bullshit witch. She’s got potions and crystals—”

“You mean rocks?”

“Crystals, and tomes—”

“Books?”

“Dude, just shut up for like five seconds, please. I’m telling you—she knows her stuff.”

I shrug my shoulders and tilt my head down apologetically. “Sorry, I’ll stop.”

“Anyway… after I went home last night, I was thinking about the train again. I brought ‘Chelle to check it out back in the summer and she said something cool. She said ghosts usually haunt places, right? Like Katie’s great grandma at the old diner, Mr. Smith at the baseball diamond, that guy who plays banjo at the old dance hall. They’re stuck—fixed—like a tree. Rooted to the ground. They can’t leave where they’re at because something holds them there, some kind of purpose. That’s why the train is weird—a ghost that never stops moving. What’s its purpose?”

The cafeteria noise grows—broken snippets of conversation, shoes squeaking on linoleum. A flinch snaps through my body as an empty, balled-up Doritos bag—Cool Ranch, by the look of it—flies past my shoulder, skips across our table-top, and tumbles to the floor, eliciting a round of deep, clustered laughter from somewhere behind me. Theron stabs a glance in the direction of the noise, and the laughter quickly subsides.

“Holy shit,” I say, “I actually might have an idea.”

My earlobes shiver as the bell rings. I gather up my books and zip them into my bag as we talk. “Theron, do you have your truck here today?”

“Damn straight, yup.”

The Principal glares lasers at us through his horn-rimmed glasses. “Alright, let’s meet up out front after school.”

The “No Trespassing” sign is sun-faded, fence posts splintered and split, chicken-wire rusted from years of rain. I squeeze the bolt cutters, and the gate chain splits with a cracking noise, the padlocked end falling to the ground, kicking up a whirl of dust. I lead the truck up a rough, dirt path, overgrown with prairie grass, past a decaying farmhouse with boarded windows, a rusting tractor, and the footprint of a collapsed barn. After a careful descent down rough terrain—the hint of depth that passes for a valley in central Saskatchewan—I signal Theron to stop the engine at the edge of my grandfather’s jungle—a dense grove of impossibly tall, twisted trees, thick brush, mosquitoes, and shadows. Theron and Gabe climb out of the truck.

“You sure we won’t get in trouble?” Gabe asks.

“Nah,” I reply. “We’re far enough from the highway that no one will see us, and nobody in the family’s been out here since grandpa died. Eight years now, I guess.”

“Alright Jakey, what are we doing out here?” Theron asks.

I lead the group into the dimness of the woods. “Don’t laugh at me, but when I was a kid, I was scared of ghosts—like, really scared of them. There weren’t so many around back then, you know? I wasn’t used to it.”

On our right, we pass a faded blue telephone booth leaning against the trunk of a tree. A branch stretched through the booth’s windows, and a bird’s nest sits, weight balanced between the rough bark of the branch and the cold, black steel of the phone box. A steel-wrapped cord dangles from the phone, but the receiver has been chewed off by some kind of animal. The hint of a ringing sound lingers in the air.

“My dad used to bring me up here a lot when I was little. Grandpa was already circling the drain by then, but he wouldn’t move to town. I can remember them arguing about it sometimes. Grandpa was a weird guy. Didn’t like throwing things away, didn’t like anything to go to waste. Said the world was getting wasteful—disposable. Stitch the pants, scrape the plate—typical old guy stuff, I guess, but he was...” I notice Theron looking at me. “It was just a big deal for him, that’s all.”

We walk past a pile of typewriters—scuffed vinyl shrouds on some, carriages exposed and rusting on others, some keys broken off, the symbols on others erased by wind, rain, and time. A gust knocks an acorn from an overhanging tree. As the acorn skitters down, rolling across the typewriters, their keys all swing into possessed motion. For a split-second, the jungle sounds like an old-fashioned press bullpen, typing blank memorandum at machine-gun speed.

“The farm scared the shit out of me. It’s not so much the ghosts—there were a couple ghosts out here back then, but not nearly as many as you’d think—it was more like...” a half-dozen glass milk bottles dangling from twine in a nearby tree jangle in the wind, cascading rays of refracted light across the ground. “Okay, Gabe—you remember that spring a couple years back where the school gym flooded and they had to dig the floors out and replace them?”

“Do I remember it? My jump shot still hasn’t recovered.” Gabe scoops a pinecone off the dirt, jab-steps, and then launches it toward a nearby gramophone lying in the dirt. The pinecone bounces off the edge of the brass horn; a few seconds of distorted jazz piano plays. Gabe flings his arms to the sky in a fit of mock-despair.

“Well, you remember how they moved the assemblies to the choir room while they fixed the gym? And it was crowded, and stuffy, and it took forever to get everyone in through that one little door?”

“And it was hot as balls!” Gabe sings in an exaggerated falsetto, stretching the last note out like a manic Mariah Carey.

“My class was right next to the choir room, so we had to go in first every week. As bad as it was when the room was full-up—sweaty, sticky, just sitting and stewing and inhaling everyone’s exhale—I swear to god it was worse when you first got in there, and the place was still empty. Worse sitting in the back corner, watching people filter their way in. Knowing that you can’t leave—there’s no way out, nowhere to go—and there’s still more coming.”

An old ox-wagon lies on its side, two wooden wheels buried deep in moss and dirt, the other two spinning rapidly, creaking against the axle. A grey field cat sleeps in the shade of the wagon’s cargo box. “Being at the farm was kind of like that, I guess. It wasn’t so much the ghosts who were up here, it was knowing how many more were on their way. I guess that’s everywhere, but I felt it more out here.”

We walk for a while in silence. We pass totems made of old wheat scythes, bound together by rawhide, with moss climbing their handles from the forest floor. Saskatoon trees growing out of empty ammunition crates like planter boxes, berries littering the ground around them, painting the earth purple. A receiving line of wooden mannequins dressed in olive drab army surplus. The rusting frame of a ‘40s Chrysler—wheels missing—with a tattered miniature Union Jack clinging to the radio antenna.

“I tried to run away one night and got lost in the woods.”

“You tried to run away? Why?” Theron’s voice pulls me back to my body—reminds me that he’s still here. I glance at him, then back at Gabe.

“Yeah, you know...” I stammer a little. I remember my sketchbook this morning—pen won’t follow my eyes; fingers won’t follow my brain. A bird calls in the distance and a gust rustles the leaves. I breathe again.

“It’s just my dad,” I say, “sometimes he...” my head tips forward, my voice rolls up my windpipe, falls through my jaw, and lands on the ground. The moss sucks it beneath, swallows it to the pit of the earth.

Theron rests one of his enormous hands on my shoulder. “Hey, don’t sweat it, Jakey. Parents fucking suck.” Even through my bunnyhug, his palm feels warm. The corner of my left eye tickles like a butterfly wing, but I rub it away with my index finger. Theron takes his hand back and steps a few feet away.

“Right, yeah,” I gather myself and speed up my pace, “fuck parents.”

“Fuck parents!” Gabe sings at the top of his lungs.

“I got lost in the woods, and it was getting darker out—pitch-black, almost. But then I saw light through the trees. Like a glowing blue light, out of nowhere.”

“Like the train,” says Theron.

“Yeah, just like the train. I was scared as fuck. But I didn’t know where else to go. So I followed the light, and it led me to this.” We round a thicket of brush and enter a slight clearing—a gap in the canopy wide enough to let sunlight through. The clearing is littered with piles of salvage wood—planks, beams, boards—most of them the same dirty-clay-red as the hundreds of abandoned barns and farmhouses around here. A few dots of grey can be made out in the red—fragments of letters, shapes, symbols.

“Wait, is this...” Gabe trails off as he asks the question.

“Yup, and that night, it was all glowing.”

It takes us the rest of the day and four trips in Theron’s truck. Digging through the planks, finding the right pieces, lugging them down the dark, sinuous trails through the forest. We unload the boards near the train track, hiding them in a dried-out ditch. On the last trip, we stop by the school, and I pick up my bike, lofting it on top of the boards in the back of Theron’s truck. It’s past midnight when we finish unloading.

“You sure you don’t want a ride home?” Theron asks.

“Nah,” I say, “I think I need the air.”

I roll past my house slowly. My dad’s rig is still in the drive. I pedal past the house, then to the end of the block. I turn left and then right, pulling to a stop at the ball diamond. I lock my bike to the backstop and climb down into the dugout, sprawling out on the cold bench with my book-bag tucked under my head. The ghost of Mr. Smith chants “hey batter batter, swing” from behind home plate, but I drift to sleep, his voice little more than crickets.

Artwork by Tony Tran

School spins past at a chipmunk-fast-forward. After, we drive four towns out to the closest Peavey Mart for paint, and then suck back some fries and drumsticks from Chester’s on the ride home—Theron’s treat—launching our stripped-bare bones out the window like missiles aimed at the kelly-green marker signs that dot the highway ditches. By the time we pick up Theron’s ladders, pull up to the train tracks, and drop the tailgate, the sun is already groundhog-digging down into the dusty horizon, and the October sky drips with the juice of bleeding wild berries.

“God damn.” Theron somehow speaks and whistles with the same breath. “Won’t lie, when Gabe told me you boys tag, I was shocked. Way out here in the middle-of-nowhere? Like, why?”

“And now?” I ask.

“Now I’m surprised anyone lives out here without painting.”

From there, it’s just a jigsaw puzzle. We drag the planks out of the ditch and start slotting them together—rough, battered edges, faded paint, splintered, and weathered. Our hands guide the work as much as our eyes do—palms finding corresponding grains and knots, fingers returning parts to a whole. The last streaks of colour leak out of the sky, but the Hunter’s moon hangs high, raining down arrows of perfect moonlight. Theron moves the truck a few times to keep the headlights on our work and, before long, the shape materializes. Weathered red boards in a flat plane, lined up on the ground. Not nearly a building, sure, but something much more than a sketch of one, too. Near the top, a few massive lines of white-grey print. Softly sloping, rounded letters, all capitals:

SASKATCHEWAN

POOL

ELEVATORS

NO.725

CHAPEL HEAD

We retreat to the other side of the tracks, Theron moving the truck to cast the headlights on our canvas. I feel the ghost train before I hear it, and I hear it before I see it—fine gravel and packed dirt twitching under my Chuck Taylor soles, then iron scraping iron, rails flexing between wheel and earth. The train flickers into existence, a luminous blue-and-white aura wrapping black, burgundy, and rust-brown iron. A tower of light climbs from our jigsaw-slab of salvage wood—volume, shape, dimension. The train slows, then stops. To our right and left, the track edges divide a pair of freight cars—half oil-and-metal, half cold October air—but in the middle, in front of us, sits a complete tanker car.

Theron takes the front third. He tags the name “THOR,” his caps barely containing the electricity in his barbarian hands, streams arcing like lightning from his sharp lines, letters twisting back around themselves like melting circuits. In the middle third, Gabe paints “GABE” because GABE is Gabe, and could never—should never—be anything else for an instant. Gabe paints with soup cans; warm and nourishing shapes, rotund bubble letters, like a liquid that expands to fill any bowl. I paint the back third. I used to paint “HERE” like frozen links of padlock chain—precise, geometric, unyielding. Tonight, I paint “GONE” like switchgrass and sunsets. Tonight, I paint without outlines, the colours and shapes blurring and bleeding into one another, a landscape seen through squinting eyes. Cans hiss and rattle, metal scrapes metal as we shift our ladders against the train car. Then, we finish.

Theron and I load the ladders and the rest of the paint back in the truck while Gabe snaps pictures, each flash punctuated by the clicking noise of advancing film. The train starts moving and then flickers out of existence, as the tower of light fades back to midnight black. We drag the pieces of the elevator back into the ditch and Theron hides them under camouflage hunting nets.

“That was a hell of a piece, boys.” Theron says.

“I’ll make you guys copies when I get the film developed.” Gabe says.

“That’s okay,” I say, “I don’t need them.”

I haul my bike out of Theron’s truck and pedal home. My dad’s rig is gone. I walk inside and find a note on the kitchen table: Jake, got a haul for Thunder Bay. Back Saturday. Don’t fuck anything up while I’m gone.

I stumble down the stairs and toss a tape in the deck—the new Outkast album Gabe dubbed for me on a cassette that’s been written and re-written a hundred times—then collapse into my bed. Hold On Be Strong plays: strings pluck, keys echo, and a distant, faded voice sings to me like a ghost through the speakers. The cassette reels rotate, clicking just a little bit at the same spot on every orbit.

The rhythm reminds me of a train on tracks, inching forward, slow but ceaseless.

Tyler Lee is a writer, poet, and hip-hop artist. His work has been accepted for publication in Radon Journal, Neon & Smoke, and spring. Tyler lives in Saskatoon, Canada, where he owns a completely normal amount of sneakers, and definitely isn’t on a first-name basis with the staff of his neighbourhood burrito spot.

Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T18:15:04.000Z

nytimes.com

In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.

On the one hand, I love that publishers are taking a stand against AI. On the other, I’m increasingly nervous accusations are going to fly around with no regard for the truth and really hamper people’s ability to publish their writing. In this case, the author admits their editor used AI, so it’s a fine line. Did they use Grammarly to edit? Did they ask AI to help come up with alternate phrases or words? Ideally AI wouldn’t touch any creative pursuits, but if the author is telling the truth, they shouldn’t be the one coming under fire, but their self-published editor and Hachette should be bearing the blame—are they not putting the novel through their own rigorous editing process?

Flea: Thinkin Bout You | The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T17:15:01.000Z

youtube.com

Honora by Flea is my most anticipated album of the year and it comes out this Friday. He and his band absolutely kill it during this performance. I need more of this in my life and hope he gets to do a Tiny Desk concert based on this album.

Netflix Denies Claims It Forces Filmmakers to Repeat Plot Points for Viewers: “Haters Gotta Hate” — World of Reel - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T15:13:14.000Z

worldofreel.com

Netflix executives reportedly “laughed off” the idea that they require movies and TV shows to repeatedly recap their plots for audiences.

If I were a betting man, I would wager a lot of money that either a) the executives are lying or b) it’s a case of things lost in translation in a giant company because Netflix producers are absolutely giving notes to filmmakers to recap plots. It may not be a “requirement,” but the message is being heard loud and clear.

Paul Thomas Anderson Rewrote Martin Scorsese’s ‘What Happens at Night’ — World of Reel - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T15:10:25.000Z

worldofreel.com

No word on whether he will actually get credited for the rewrite, but he definitely did extensive work, and this was, according to Sneider, at the request of DiCaprio.

I didn’t love Killers of the Flower Moon and after hearing PTA did extensive rewrites on it, I felt like I could see the seam a bit. I think PTA is an amazing writer, but he writers for the way he shoots and directs and I don’t think it meshes with the way Scorsese works.

Hideo Kojima's Commitment To Acronym Jackets Remains Undefeated - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T15:08:55.000Z

aftermath.site

As does Jensen Huang's commitment to looking like a huge dork.

I can’t help but absolutely love the compare and contrast here. It does amaze me that these billionaires like Huang and Musk don’t pay someone to dress them. Although they probably think no one could possibly make a better decision than them.

Wild Horse Nine — Trailer - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T05:41:33.000Z

m.youtube.com

Martin McDonagh has been on a (slow) heater as of late and now he gets to work with a fine cast in John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey.

the html review 05 - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T05:25:04.000Z

thehtml.review

the html review is an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web

Haven’t gotten to it yet myself, but The HTML Review is always wonderful and always a huge inspiration for how we can do publishing different on this thing we call the interwebs.

Graphic Novel Review: ANIMAN is a funny, offbeat gem - The Independent Variable

2026-03-24T05:09:00.000Z

comicsbeat.com

Anouk Ricard's celebrated graphic novel, Animan, is a clever sort of anti-superhero parody that is always working toward the next joke.

It's honestly been awhile since I've read some comics given I'm behind in basically ever aspect of my life, but this is going to the top of the to-buy list for me.