Humdrum Places - BlogFlock

📹 Au 8ème Jour - The Independent Variable

2025-11-28T21:10:58.000Z

Incredible animated student short film from France. Produced in a stunning knitted stop-motion animation style to create some beautiful visuals. And if you stick around for the whole thing, it gets pretty deep.

🤖 AGI is not possible even in 10 years - The Independent Variable

2025-11-28T21:06:02.000Z

Medium

LeCun thinks we need completely different approaches, including what he calls “world models,” before we can talk seriously about AGI. His timeline? At least a decade, probably much longer.

I’m obviously no expert, but I’ve been saying this for years. LLM’s are not a path to AGI or any sort of intelligence. They are fancy algorithms with random outputs. They don’t think or understand—they ingest and compute.

📧 Dealgorithmed - The Independent Variable

2025-11-28T20:23:58.000Z

Manu Moreale

New newsletter that I’m excited for from Manu kicking off in the new year.

🤖 Coke's New AI-Generated Ad Required 100 Staff and 70,000 AI-Generated Clips, and It Still Looks Like Garbage - The Independent Variable

2025-11-28T20:22:42.000Z

Futurism

Coca-Cola is back with another series of AI-generated ads to herald the holidays — and they look just as bad as they did last year.

What an expensive and ugly ad. People keep saying “ThIs iS ThE WoRsT AI WiLl EvEr bE,” and sure, but also, it’s absolutely terrible and pointless. Why would you ever want to take the time to make something this bad and put your name on it???

🎸 Live at Ford Field by Jack White & Eminem - The Independent Variable

2025-11-28T20:13:22.000Z

Apple Music

Didn’t catch this yesterday, but what a great three song set from White with Eminem joining for the second, rapping ‘Till I Collapse over Hello Operator.

📝 Just a dash - foofaraw

2025-11-28T17:00:51.000Z

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Unless you’re a fellow ink-stained wretch—this is an age-old term for a writer—you may be unaware of the controversy sweeping certain corners of the Internet—by corners, I mean content, as the internet is not something to be physically grasped—involving the punctuation known as the em dash.

What the heck is an em dash—come on, I know some of you are wondering—and what’s the controversy? Glad you asked.

Writers have used em dashes—simple, straight-line devices exactly like the ones included in this sentence—for years. They are a great way to set apart information and allow writers to avoid all those other complicated and sometimes confusing punctuation marks—colons, semi-colons, slashes, etc. Punctuation marks that many people often don’t use properly—including writers themselves!

But now there are those—some may be your friends, some may be neighbors, some may be work colleagues—who believe that when you see a story in, say, a magazine or a newspaper that contains em dashes, it’s a sure sign the author did not write the story themselves but rather used an AI program such as ChatGPT.

Not familiar with ChatGPT? That’s okay, my parents wouldn’t know what ChatGPT is either. So, to ensure you get the best explanation possible, I asked ChatGPT to provide a polished definition of itself. Here’s the result:

“ChatGPT is an AI‑driven chatbot developed by OpenAI—based on the Generative Pre‑trained Transformer (GPT) architecture—that processes natural language prompts and generates human‑like responses across diverse formats, from casual conversation to code, essays, translations, or creative writing.”

I’m not exactly certain what all of this means—I suppose if you work at MIT on some AI project and you read this, you’re rolling your eyes—but it sure seems authoritative.

At this point I should add that I asked ChatGPT to provide its definition using two em dashes. Clever, huh? I hope you’re curious about the result—I was curious, which is why I asked in the first place—so please digest the following:

“This incorporates two em dashes—one after ‘OpenAI’ and another after ‘architecture’—and succinctly covers what ChatGPT is and what it does, with definitions drawn from trusted sources.”

Trusted sources? Hell, if you can’t trust the Internet—by the way, I am one who believes it was not invented by former Vice President Al Gore, but rather an assortment of smart people—what can you trust? But back to the em dash.

As a frequent user of the em dash, I was shocked when I recently became aware of how controversial—perhaps debatable is a more precise word—this little punctuation mark had become. As mentioned before, it has certain sections of the Internet abuzz. To be clear, not the Internet itself, but with certain users who like to spend their time there.

To think that the use of an em dash signals AI could be behind the authorship of an article seems quite ridiculous. But again—and I did this because I was curious—I asked ChatGPT if my observation is accurate. Here’s how it responded:

“The use of an em dash is consistent with AI-generated writing, but it is not a reliable indicator of AI authorship on its own.”

If you have a dash of common sense—yes, that’s supposed to be funny—you’ll agree.

The author of two novels—At the Wolf’s Door and Incident at Jonesborough—Chaz Osburn has a background in the newspaper and magazine business and in PR. His short stories have been published in several print and online publications—including Amazing Stories, Sci-Fi Shorts, Bright Flash Literary Review, Alternative Liberties, Every Day Fiction, and Altered Reality. A dual US-Canadian citizen, he lives in Traverse City, MI.

🤖 Occupational hazards - foofaraw

2025-11-27T19:03:06.000Z

When Gary Whippet turned up dead, Pinnacle Ergonomics had to cancel its Tuesday lunch-and-learn. Apparently, the forfeited catering was the greater of the two losses. More than one co-worker walked by muttering, “goddamn Gary.” The man rated lower than a turkey sub. Some guys are just assholes.

The scene of the crime was the mezzanine—four conference rooms, all glass walls, and a lounge with a foosball table. What was left of Gary was in the Apex Room, caught in the jaws of a SkyLift prototype, a top-of-the-line mechanical desk with every bell and whistle a man could ask for: personalized presets, adjustable height, silent pneumatic lifts.

Gary had—for reasons unknown—slipped his head and hands between the upper and lower shelves just before the SkyLift turned into a meat tenderizer. He was identified by his royal blue shirt.

Blood, brain matter, and Gary’s shirt aside, the room was an unrelenting white. Sunshine streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows, baking Gary like a ham surprise casserole.

It could’ve been an accident, but for the text Gary sent his wife moments before his death.

“If something happens to me it was…”

It cut off.

“Maybe he meant it was an accident,” I suggested when the call came in. “Reinstate the luncheon and call it a day.”

My boss disagreed. So there I was, surveying the employees loitering in the lounge. Not a damp eye in the place. A woman waved me over. Tall, straight-backed, and clearly in charge.

“Barb Windsor, CEO. I found him this morning. Derailed my call with our German investors.”

“Inconvenient.”

“It’s not the first time Gary’s ruined my day, Detective. Doubt it’ll be the last.”

“Any idea who might’ve wanted him dead?”

She twirled her auburn hair between two fingers and laughed. “Only everyone who’s ever met him.”

I sighed. Gary was ruining my day, too. And I hadn’t even been counting on lunch. “I’ll need to talk to everyone, then.”

Barb nodded. “Cora…”

A utility cart in the corner came to life. Its LCD screen lit up to display a digital face. Square eyes peered at me. It rolled forward with a motorized whir.

“Yes, Ms. Windsor?” Cora’s voice was feminine and soothing.

“Help the Detective. Whatever he needs.”

To me, Barb said, “Cora’s our Corporate Operations Robotic Assistant. She’s in beta testing. She does light admin, delivers mail, that sort of thing.”

“My job is to make Pinnacle a better place to work.” Cora glided toward me and spun around. “I vacuum, too,” she said. Her whirring intensified.

“Don’t!” I yelled. Her digital eyebrows and mouth turned downward into a charming pout, so I added, quieter, “Don’t wanna destroy evidence.”

“I’m sorry, Detective.” Cora blinked. Her eyes sprouted eyelashes and she batted them.

“She likes you.” Barb licked her lips in a way that suggested an appetite for something more than catered cold cuts. “I can see why. Let me know if you need anything, Detective. Anything.” She winked and sauntered off, not seeming at all like her day had been ruined.

Cora led me to an empty conference room. “How can I help you, Detective?”

“I need employee names and security logs for the past 24 hours.”

My phone chimed. A text with attachments appeared on my screen.

“How’d you get my number?”

Cora gave a tinkling laugh. “There are many ways I can connect with you, Detective. This time I used WiFi to download your information.” She sounded like she had other connections in mind.

She continued, “Let’s start with Nabil Bruce, Interim Director of Product Engineering. He’s on his way.”

Artwork by Tony Tran

Nabil was stout, with square glasses and a thick mustache.

“When’d you last see Gary?”

“Last night. Maybe 8:30?”

“Working late?”

“Trying to get SkyLift ready. Gary pioneered sit-to-stand desk technology. Then everyone started doing it. We’ve been trying to get ahead of the market since. SkyLift is the Cadillac of desks. It even has an app.”

“Do people want desks with apps?” My toothbrush had an app. To map my brushing deficiencies, the box said. The thought of it looking around in my mouth creeped me out. I stopped charging it.

Nabil brightened, leaned forward in his seat. “Of course. People love apps! With the app, users can save their presets, then connect to any SkyLift in the world via Bluetooth, and voilà, it’ll adjust itself.”

The appeal of such a thing was a bigger mystery to me than a man winding up dead in a glass room with no witnesses.

“Could someone change the settings on the SkyLift? From ‘anywhere in the world,’ as you put it?”

“No.” He shook his head vigorously, glasses slipping down his nose. “No. You can pair with any SkyLift, but you have to be within 18 inches. That way the wires don’t get crossed in offices with open floor plans.”

Open floor plans. Another mystery.

“So, either someone was in the room with Gary when he died, or…” I paused. “Someone tampered with the range and killed him without even being in the building?”

“Or it was an accident. The prototype measurements were off and he was trying to figure out why. Probably got stuck and triggered a clamping mechanism.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Let’s stick with what you do know. Leave the guessing to me. Gary say anything to you last night?”

Nabil wrinkled his nose and pushed his glasses up until they pressed into his brow. “Oh, he had lots to say. Accused us of sabotaging him—me, Barb, the computers themselves. I left when he started throwing things.”

“You didn’t let him have it? Change the settings while he was having a looksee? Crush him like a grape?”

“No.”

“You sure? Heard you got his job.”

“I’d rather have the Reuben from Sal’s. Bummer about lunch.”

These people were real wound up about the sandwiches.

Cora next ushered in Gary’s secretary, Aileen. She had a limp and the raspy voice of a lifelong smoker.

“How long you work for Gary?”

“Nine years too long.”

“So, nine years?”

She pointed at me and grinned. “You’re sharp, Detective.”

“Fair to say you didn’t get along?”

“Gary’s idea of getting along was serving you chicken shit and expecting you to act like it was chicken salad.”

“I have to ask, you didn’t…”

“Kill him? I wish I had, but no.”

Twenty-seven interviews later, we had an extensive list of motives, but nothing else.

Everyone wanted Gary dead.

“He told me to call my university and ask for a refund because I was too stupid to have graduated.”

“He blocked the door during a meeting and wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. I pissed myself in front of everyone.”

“He measured my office and found out it was six inches bigger than his, then threw a fit until management moved me. I’m in a broom closet now.”

“He called me while I was in labor and made me finish a report. He said I’d be ‘wasting time’ in labor for hours, and I might as well get some work done, since I’d be leaving the company in the lurch during my maternity leave.”

“He ripped up a report I wrote and threw it all over the floor because it had a typo. Then he made his secretary pick it up. She has trouble bending down!”

Cora chimed in on that last one. “I helped Aileen vacuum that day.” She gave a little whir.

The problem was that no one did it.

“Cora, can we get footage from the mezzanine last night?”

“There are no cameras in the mezzanine.”

“What about you? You must have cameras to get around. See anything?”

“I have sensors. And I charge at night. Would you like to see Gary’s office?” She wheeled away before I could answer.

Gary’s office was a lawless place. For a man in the desk business, it seemed a safe bet Gary hadn’t seen his own desk in over a decade. Papers were everywhere—desk, floor, couch. In the mayhem were destroyed bits of computer. A cracked keyboard on the floor, just below a dent in the sheetrock. A monitor with a bruised screen, a laptop ripped in two.

Cora wheeled to the keyboard. “Detective, hand him to me, will you?”

“Him?”

Her eyes darted downward, to the keyboard. When I placed him in her top basket, my hand grazed her cool metal form. She batted her lashes again, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“It doesn’t seem like a safe place to work, does it, Detective?”

It didn’t.

The next morning, I returned to Pinnacle. Barb and Cora waited in the lounge. Barb—in a low-cut green dress—leaned in for a hug.

“You like coffee?” she asked.

An espresso machine whined and clacked. The scent of dark roast filled the air. Barb gestured for me to sit at a table. As I approached, the table rose and chair lowered. I took a startled step backward.

From behind me came Cora’s soothing mechanical voice. “I adjusted it to your ideal height, based on your biodata.”

I found it hard to return her smile.

Barb joined us with two lattes and Cora adjusted her chair as well. Barb sat and Cora sidled up to her, like a pet robot.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“I gave them the day off.”

“Bereavement, huh?”

She snorted. “Something like that.”

It’d been fun, but it was time I got down to business. “Best I can tell, Gary died from a product malfunction.”

“I knew he’d ruin another day.”

I looked to Cora for a reaction, but her pixelated face held only her default, neutral expression.

“Good news is your employees aren’t murderers,” I offered.

“You’re saying our product killed someone, Detective. Accident or not, we’ll have to scrap the project. Destroy the SkyLift prototype.”

Cora’s eyes flashed wide, then narrow. Her pixelated eyebrows turned downward as she looked at me. Angry.

“Oh, no, Ms. Windsor. You’ve got it all wrong. SkyLift isn’t the product that malfunctioned.”

Barb looked puzzled, but Cora’s eyes glowed bright with understanding.

The table lowered, pinning us to our chairs.

Barb gasped. “Cora, raise the table, please.”

The table lowered further as our chairs rose, a vise tightening.

“Cora, reset,” Barb ordered. Cora ignored her.

“Malfunctioning?” Cora asked me, her soothing robo-voice lilting upward. “I’m doing my job. To make Pinnacle a better place for everyone.”

I fought to wiggle free, but my chair rose again, cutting off the circulation in my thighs. I pictured Gary, mashed to bits in the SkyLift. My legs tingled.

How much pressure did it take to crush a skull? To sever a limb? My chair raised another inch.

“And if anyone’s getting scrapped today, it won’t be me.”

Nicole Babb is a recovering litigator who is using her exit from the world of facts to write stories that exist somewhere between the real and not-real. Her favorite stories include larger-than-life characters and an extra helping of snark. She’s a lifelong New Orleanian, and when she’s not writing enjoys good wine, the occasional bad wine, yoga, and board games. Her work has appeared in Does It Have Pockets and in 2024, she was awarded the Scribes Prize for Microfiction. Find her at nicolebabb.com.

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📚 The City and Its Uncertain Walls - A Humdrum Life

2025-11-26T17:01:02.000Z

I’ve only read a couple Murakami books, but I love them all. I find the magical realism delightful, and there is so much soul and spirit in all of his books that they can feel both melancholic and hopeful at the same time. This is far from my favorite of his books, but I still enjoyed it immensely.

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😿 Rebellion - foofaraw

2025-11-26T17:00:07.000Z

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—Tony Tran

📚 Dungeon Crawler Carl - A Humdrum Life

2025-11-26T16:53:41.000Z

I’m not afraid to admit that part of what sold me on giving this a go was the bold covers of the hardcover reissues. I originally just picked up the ebook on Kindle, but thought it was interesting enough to pick up the hardcover when I was at the bookstore recently. I’m a slow reader, but got through this relatively quickly.

It’s fun and silly and not much else. A bit mindless, but honestly, it’s nice to have something like that in the mix occasionally. I plan on picking up the second one because I feel like this series will make for a good slump buster when I need some help getting back into reading—as I inevitably do.

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🤖 OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates - The Independent Variable

2025-11-26T01:26:29.000Z

**FT

Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade.

The charts on this article are wild. I believe they’ve raised over $60 billion so far, so over the next five years they will 4x that—just to continue to lose money. And that’s assuming they double their paying user base. Obviously the intent for these companies is to find ways to reduce the cost of operations and likely slow down R&D at a certain point, or at least point the research in other areas as Google did before them. But boy, does it seem like an uphill battle to even make a penny. Not to beat a dead horse, but they also clearly participate in predatory pricing practices.

⚒️ Sometimes you have to show your face - foofaraw

2025-11-25T17:00:24.000Z

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“We need new papers.”

His English was marked by an accent she didn’t recognise. This was unusual. Only a handful of pockets of resistance remained to the flattening influences of Nollywood, Bollywood, and new-colonial Received Pronunciation.

It sang.

She sipped her mint tea—plenty sweet—a taste of her people, thinking about the streets of her long-ago left-behind hometown of Istanbul, the Adhan ringing out between the sounds of traffic and commerce.

“For how many?”

One woman or an entire colony, Ayşe would help if the reason matched the risk.

“A crew of five and the boat.”

“You don't need new papers, you need old papers—if it is a boat. Scraps and tatters stitched together to form a whole. But that is actually easier for people than papers. Tell me about them.”

“My papers need to be Welsh or Argentinian. Can’t hide the accent. Other than that, we have a Greek. Oh, and someone with a non-contagious sleeping sickness.”

Greek made it hard. Not because of the old imperial rivalries, built in bronze and bone and carried into the carcine age. The old country was married to paperwork in a way that precluded divorce, and paperwork with a capital P.A.P.E. and R. You couldn’t hack wood pulp. This was not why the Greeks never digitised, but it made a handy excuse.

“Definitely non-contagious?”

In the old world, zootropic illnesses were the public health fear. Out in the ink, public health authorities were more concerned with novel fungal infections, biological spillover from the hydroponics bays, and xenotropic viruses.

There were ghost stories.

“Weaponised single use.”

The horror stories about weaponised viral bullets were even more popular than the ones about abandoned space stations filled with goo that could have been people. But the way the man said it—with no sign of emotion—chilled any thought she might have entertained to deny their credibility.

“Most important questions next then: why me, and why you?”

“Contract gone bad—Big Blue fingerprints all over it. I heard the Pigman was the person to speak to.”

Word of mouth.

The marketing tool money can’t buy.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she agreed.

“Oh, they’ve been proper naughty boys and girls, haven’t they?”

Ayşe knew for a fact that before the Ship Breaker’s unfortunate accident, she had not presented herself as an East London gangster. She was from Lagos, and not the Nigerian one, a once tiny Portuguese woman swollen to above-average proportions by cybernetic repairs run amok. The voice-box in her shattered throat was salvage, like much of the metal studding her, and it possessed, it seemed, a mind of its own.

“Haven’t we all been, from time to time?” Ayşe replied to her colleague about activities precluded by regulation and the corporations' preference for ownership of every cubic centimetre of the dark oceans beyond Earth.

“True, true, I’m a right rapscallion when I put my mind to it,” the Ship Breaker agreed amiably.

Ayşe had heard stories of piracy, larceny, and a crime called barratry, which she had needed to look up in a nautical dictionary to contextualise.

The boat they were walking through was being torn into indistinguishable components by the Breaker’s highly contraindicated automated facility, the synthetic intelligences and monitoring software caustically and impersonally lobotomised to scour away any claims of ownership which might be made against future buyers of Ship Breaker’s wares. Sections of the hull plating were scarred, diamond-tipped mining drill heads having chewed an impromptu ingress into the torso of the vessel. Gaudy blood spatters, yet to be cleaned from the ship’s almost organic matter, told a tale of improperly applied vacuum seals and, subsequently, nasty decompression.

Ship Breaker watched Ayşe looking and sadly shook metallic dreadlocks.

“Wasteful,” she clucked. “Would never have happened in my day.”

Ayşe thought about a story told in hushed whispers by men of a buccaneering bent of an atomic weapon stuffed into a recalcitrant prey craft by an angry Portuguese.

“Quite,” she murmured.

“Five days,” the Ship Breaker suggested.

“Three?”

“Four.”

“Done.”

Ayşe had known it would be four before she docked. Sometimes you have to show your face though.

The girls wandered the halls of Minikoi wrapped in the disguise of their appearance. The station accommodated all sorts. In fact, ‘it takes all sorts’ was a sort of slogan of the residents, muttered like the refrain of an old satire almost regardless of the situation which prompted speech. They browsed ship components, noodle bars, tea joints, and mining rig repair shops with the ceaseless vigour young shoppers were known for. The knives strapped to their inner thighs were ceramic, to avoid metal detection, and their purses held unpleasant surprises for any would-be mugger or kidnapper.

The veneer of civilisation rubbed thin, at times, on far-flung stations, like the cloth covering the knees of a very penitent man indeed.

Rosalia’s penchant for abrupt displays of violence precluded any capacity for penitence on her part. Her sisters did their best to make up for it, when they remembered. Which was rarely.

“That guy,” Nadezhda, little Didi, flicked a thumb back in the direction of the stall they had just passed, “mentioned someone who could be one of our Tigers.”

They used their own cant shorthand when in potentially hostile territory. Didi insisted on it. Tiger was Target.

“More importantly, I managed to get a line on some heat inductor panels and a bucket of nearly new quantum chips,” Keke replied, mind firmly on her tasks of keeping their ship moving from place to place where she could create explosions.

Her smaller sister gave her a flat look.

“Eyes on the Tiger,” she reminded the watchmaker.

“Rising up, la la la laaaaaaah,” mumbled the third of the group around a mouthful of sticky rice.

“Shut up, Rosie,” her sisters said in pained unison.

“Back to dads?” Keke asked, knowing full well that Didi would want to be on scanners ASAP.

“Get some char first,” Rosie objected.

She made a good point.

Overwatch was made much more bearable by the presence of real tea to drink.

The air was clean and clear, the gas mix perfect. The only refinement made to the air circulation system was a tweak to the kitchenette’s extraction system at Jean-Marie’s demand. What was the point, he asked, of slaving over a hot stove if the aroma of his craft was not allowed to serve as an appetite-enhancing aperitif.

This demand created an argument with Ajax, whose stated objection was that induction stoves do not actually become hot, and whose tacit objective was to perturb Jean-Marie’s equilibrium at every opportunity.

The air was clean and clear, but it shouldn’t have been. Since Rhodri’s meeting with the Pigman the whole crew had been trapped within the shell of the ship, waiting. Minutes stretch to days quite quickly when you have done all the mind numbing repair and restoration tasks during your transit, and so all you have left is to sit, becalmed, and try and avoid consuming any media which might remind you of your peril.

Jean-Marie was making bread. This was a challenging task when your specification is the perfection of a particular boulanger in a Toulousain banlieu remembered from childhood, and your materials do not include wheat.

The first three attempts were declared disasters.

Rhodri surreptitiously claimed one of the rejected final batch and used it to mop up his dhal. Despite the chef's voluble denouncements, he found it more than adequate.

“There’s something amiss,” Ada announced.

Ada had several levels of alarm, ranging from ‘that’s interesting’ all the way to ‘fuck a duck.’ Rhodri catalogued them in the preamble to their courtship. ‘Something Amiss’ was two notches from the worst Ada would ever commit to, and had been said on several occasions which immediately preceded an exchange of explosively tipped weaponry in the void of space. Her pronouncement therefore provoked an immediate cessation of culinary activity.

“Would you care to share any further details?”

Jean-Marie shifted from frustrated baker to Weapons Officer with a serpentine suddenness.

“A hole in our scanner records. Subtle, very subtle, but shifting. I only found it because...”

She didn’t need to finish. She found it because she was bored and paranoia was the weathervane’s stock in trade.

“Confirmed?”

“Checked and confirmed back and front with predictive algorithm,” Ada reported.

“Fuck a duck,” Ajax complained.

“Wake Lean-to up,” Jean-Marie instructed. “Rhodri, put fish in the water.”

Rhodri’s ‘fish’ swam through the space around them. The term was a hangover from the nautical conceptions of space-going vessels. However, he had read a book once about submarine warfare on Earth that seemed moderately familiar to his own existence. Where a wet-world navy used the term ‘fish’ to refer to torpedoes, the Special Purpose Expeditionary Companies evolved the concept to manage the complexities of four-dimensional violence waged with supercomputers most human brains were incapable of conceiving.

Some SPECs raised their reputations to inflate their contracts, swaggering around like bounty hunters or lawmen from New Quebecois movies. Others were subtle with an emboldened b, whispers of their actions heard only by the most attuned ears. Because of this, it was impossible for Rhodri to judge with any accuracy if he was the most inventive of the SPEC cadre watchmakers.

The proof, as his maam-gee used to say, was in the pudding.

Pods of torpedoes and ship-killers cruised silently in the wake of The Berganza, waiting for the scent of venting atmosphere or the tickle of a targeting laser. But around them, obfuscating their silvered reflection with an almost infinite array of fractal signals, were Rhodri’s proudest innovations. Shoals of drones and artefact shadows filled the space, some tumbling like jettisoned debris, others moving with artificially implied purpose. A school of harmless-looking specks formed a cloud along the Berganza’s flank, stitched together by a communication web built on top of repurposed alien technology. The whole affair was designed to confuse and confound, signals of shipwreck mingling with targeting algorithms to perplex any potential predator.

With a rapid series of keystrokes and more than a little regret, Rhodri handed control to Jean-Marie.

Her reputation as a weapons officer had been won between the hardest of places and the hottest of frying pans.

“Upir, upir, upir!”

The business of weapons and warfare on The Heartless She was conducted, primarily, in a polyglot mix of Russian, Ukrainian, Tartar, and Arabic. The choice of words was idiosyncratically Lev, and when Ovsei reviewed any after-action footage and data he smiled to hear his adoptive daughters barking commands at one another in his husband’s almost whimsically strange cant.

It was hard to smile when Didi blurted her warning that enemy weaponry was aimed at them.

The surface of the canteen table concealed an electromagnet which pinned cutlery and tableware to it in the event of evasive manoeuvres and other unpleasantness, preventing dinner from becoming shrapnel.

His cup of tea clamped itself firmly to the table, letting him know that the ship weathervane was at the controls of his vessel and was trying to shake things loose.

“Maneuveruvannya!”

He had taught her well. Ovsei might be the shipmaster, the pilot, but he trusted each of his adoptive daughters at the stick, even in dire straits.

“Khezir away!”

Rosalia’s voice joined her older, more cautious sister’s. Normally exultant when at the trigger, the unusual defensive posture had robbed her of her vigour. The ship shuddered as the khezir, decoy drones as ugly as the warthogs they were named for, calved and span away from their matron.

“Papa Lev, back bubble, urgent.”

“Da, da.”

The ship shook again, its trembling accompanied by the screech of internal alarms and the hiss of doors slamming pneumatically shut.

“Got them.”

Jean-Marie punched the air triumphantly. Rhodri had made for her a series of stone bullets, something from the dawn of warfare made in a machine shop with stellar precision. The rail gun spat them out along parabolic arcs, using gravity and predictions of evasive motion to strike home. Some were fired at other targets, creating ricochets whose apparent randomness covered the careful shrapnel net the gunner was crafting.

Arterial spurts of plasma and air gushed from the side wall of their pursuer’s carapace.

“Hit them again!”

Ajax was strapped into the nose of The Berganza, shielded from the uncaring embrace of space by little more than glass and struts of complex-carbon. His weapons would only come to bear in extremis. The whole situation made him as bloodthirsty as his Bronze Age namesakes.

Jean-Marie didn’t have to release any more munitions into the black; the shoals of Rhodri’s fang-toothed progeny were already closing on their prey. Beneath her control helmet, her eyes rolled, a lifetime of combat simulated and real allowing her to fracture her brain into multiple streams of thought, her limbs moving like a drummer’s as she brought another wave of mechanical hatred crashing down.

“Dvoyou mat!”

He was not a man much prone to cursing. Lips split from his fall, tongue bleeding from its impact with his shattered teeth, Lev indulge himself.

The bubble was out of reach now, and with it, the second set of point-defense weaponry. The bulkhead door in front of him was shut in a way that would require an EVA suit, a plasma torch, and twelve hours of careful work to undo. The only good news was that his outstretched left hand was on this side of the door with him. Six inches further forward and a separation from his second favourite set of fingers would have been an additional distraction to the pain in his face and the ship’s paroxysms.

“Check check.”

Didi was doing her job, even under gunfire. He was as proud of her as his bleeding mouth would allow.

“Ships, check.”

His husband was safe.

“Stores, check.”

His response was thick with spit and suffering, but understandable.

“Guns, check.”

Rosie sounded determined. That was good.

The pause went on.

“Keke, check check.”

Didi’s voice stretched and warped. Ekaterine did not answer.

“Position check, watchmaker.”

The question was addressed to the computers of The Heartless She, asked on an open channel in case her fathers or sister could reassure her.

The ship shook again.

The moment lasted long enough for Lev to know his daughter was lost to him before the final blow landed.

“Are we going to hunt for survivors?”

Rhodri knew the answer to the question, he knew he should never have asked it. He passed his cup of guilt to his crewmate, who refused to sup.

“Fuck them.”

He liked to think he was a good man.

He told himself he was, betimes, when he was laying along in his crib trying not to remember some of the contracts they had executed.

Executed was the operable word.

“Fuck them,” he agreed.

Fuck.

“I know a man,” the Pigman said, the video signal from Minikoi clear and firm despite the distance. The Cavendish Algorithms worked. It was one of the few things you had to give Big Blue. “And a place.”

One thing you did not have to give them was any confidence that they were not listening to any conversation you had using their buoys or relays. There was not enough manpower in the world to listen to every conversation in the panopticon’s reach. Still, processing power was cheap in the age of orbital data-centers and vacuum cooling.

“Did you have to?” she asked.

“Yes,” Jean-Marie told her, emphatically.

“Well then.”

The masked pair looked at each other, expressionless behind ceramic plates that lent at least a little deniability to their conversation.

“Best leave soon,” the Pigman concluded.

“Concur.”

And that was that.

“Trading ship Agra, prepare to dock.”

The cover was holding.

Rhodri was not sure how it was holding, but it was holding. They had stuffed the hold of The Berganza with minerals the Pigman had assured them would at least give their cover credibility, scrubbed the hull of any distinguishing features, and added layers of multifunctional plating to finalise the disguise. To the crew, it was a risible attempt, but it seemed to be passing muster for the third-tier security algorithms deployed in the frontier stations of Cavendish’s commercial reach.

Payment for the refit had come in three forms.

None of the requirements had been unexpected, and only the third had been onerous in any way.

But you want to get out from the baleful glare of Big Blue, you took what you could and fuck the rest.

Part one had been the traceable currency accounts linked to their former lives as hands-for-hire in the incessant internecine conflict between Cavendish subsidiaries, abantu, and the few corporate holdings large enough to be in space and small enough to avoid full integration into an Anglo-African keiretsu. Laundered, folded, and put away their savings were now half of what they were.

Half, but hidden, being better than whole, but sequestered.

Big Blue’s bankers, Interstellar Fiscal and their supine, wholly owned, Trading Regulator called ‘confiscated’ ‘sequestered’. Politeness goes a long way in piracy, Rhodri knew.

“Excuse me, please, ma’am,” he mumbled in a faux-new-confederate accent stolen straight from morning cartoons as he slipped through a security gate swinging closed. He had a pass. It might even work once or twice. But why risk it when a tip of the hat and a zero-g cowboy swagger would work just as well?

Part two was the package tucked in his elbow.

Mass media consumers might assume that a watchmaker’s job involved trafficking in decaying isotopes and chemicals that violently objected to enforced proximity to one another. Rhodri was not against such tools, but he found that security services and interventionists often were, and equipped their workstations accordingly.

Happily for him, an operational space station was chock full of spicy rocks, combustible fluids, and gases easily tempted to toxicity.

The universal key slid down from his elbow to his palm, then from his palm into a socket in an environmental engineering control panel.

He sent three clicks of static across the Berganza’s internal communications array and received a two-click burst in response.

Ajax had completed his own mission, acquiring the last few items needed for Part three. The scavenger officer was the best at what he did.

Rhodri picked up his own pace, winding through Plimsoll Station with algorithmically derived unintentionality. His steps wend back and forward, taking him through main thoroughfares and cunning little cut-throughs, and back to the ship with seventeen minutes seven seconds to spare. Well within his safety margin.

Deep inside the command code sequence of the station, an error is perpetuated, replicated, feeding on the proliferation of denial and warning until safety measures melt under persistent pressure. Valves click open, semi-processors forming a concerto of agreeability to the demands of Rhodri’s pernicious programming.

The docking clamps release the reborn vessel, carrying the mercenaries to safety.

They are deep in the stellar gravity well before the explosion tears through their victim. Gusts of hydrogen burn in space, rocket fuel melting the steel and carbon beams of turrets and projections. Shrapnel spears out, propelled along burning rails by escaping gases.

One skewers the observation platform lurking in the station’s orbit, plucking one eye from the ever-staring face of the owners of the stars.

The void of space is not empty. Micro-asteroids, chipped from collisions, season the gaps between planets. As solar systems slide apart, the lightest gases form clouds too fine to perceive. The hungry voids made by collapsed stars suck hungrily at the volumes around them. Orphaned orbs hang lonely, hoping to trap others in gravitational dances.

The Pigman had provided the coordinates, distances measured in light-years between sufficient points in the firmament that an anchor point could be found. Drifting, yet another speck in the vastness, they were undetectable and unnoticeable by casual observers, becalmed by engines quieted to an almost imperceptible hum.

It was fortunate that they were well-suited as a crew.

A week in the doldrums had set wet-sea sailors in wind-powered ships to mutiny and cannibalism.

When you’ve just obliterated a state-of-the-art privateer and can infer a ransom on your heads payable in any port, quiet is the symphony which accompanies wary watchfulness.

The discordant hail from an unseen vessel, therefore, came as a rude shock.

“Berganza heave to and prepare for boarding.”

The voice dripped uisce and stout.

Ada was quick to respond, masking any worry with an almost robotic calm.

“Unknown vessel, we are the trading junk Agra, out of Third Limehouse.”

Rhodri knew his wife would be pummeling the sensor array to detect the speaker, and that his crew would be racing to action stations. As luck would have it, he was in the torpedo bay, so he had no need to rush anywhere.

His EVA helmet was on his bunk.

If they suffered a hull breach, he wouldn’t live to hear his wife’s complaints.

“Negative Berganza, the Agra is a lie.”

There followed a pause of milliseconds that lasted lifetimes.

“Fortunately,” the voice said with a humor that could cover any intent short of cannibalism, “we know the Ship Breaker’s hand, and a mutual friend sent us to rendezvous with you here. She said sometimes you have to show your face.”

The password had been conveyed in encrypted chunks and single-use pads.

Ada let out a steam kettle hiss.

“We just wanted to hit you up a bit! My engineer has new toys.”

The woman laughed, but not cruelly.

Rhodri thought for a moment about what he could do with technology that even his wife’s paranoia couldn’t evade.

“I hope you’re planning on sharing, unknown vessel.”

He put his demand into the clear.

“What else are friends for?”

The ship revealed itself from within the electronic cloud that shrouded it from view.

“On behalf of the Babd, welcome to the Freedom Caucus.”

They were committed, now.

Joel’s grimdark novels "The Path of Pain and Ruin" and “Paths to Empires’ Ends” are available on Amazon, as is his fantasy novel “The Thirteenth Prince” and a collaborative project “Literary Footnotes”. Follow him on @booksafterbed on the website formerly known as Twitter for links to his other short work.

2026 Pushcart Nominations - foofaraw

2025-11-24T06:13:36.000Z

Over the weekend, we printed out five pieces of short fiction and one poem to mail out to NY. And now we'd like to present our six nominees for the 2026 Pushcart Prize.

All available to read for free:

🍝 Marinara, Marinara by Stuart Docherty

a messy mix-up

foofarawfoofaraw

⚠️ Cautionary by Laurence Raphael Brothers

a prescient path forward

foofarawfoofaraw

🎸 The Instrument by Mark Granger

an instrument that truly sings

foofarawfoofaraw

🧚 Faerie Gift by Maureen Bowden

a life of splendor…

foofarawfoofaraw

🛩️ The Terminal Destination by Kai Holmwood

a desire to move west

foofarawfoofaraw

🕳️ Black Hole Framing

🕳️ Black Hole Framing by Casey Aimer I sailed into an event horizon and domesticated the apathy inside me. Here physical laws have broken down and so have I. Emotional detachment stays at arm’s length as I embrace myself, disconnect from reality and contemplate. The human equivalent of numbing cream

foofarawfoofaraw

🎉 Weekend edition vol.085 - foofaraw

2025-11-22T14:00:11.000Z

This week’s ad slot was purchased by friend of Foofaraw, Evan Passero, in support of Elevated Access—a non-profit organization that enables people to access healthcare by providing flights on private planes at no cost, whose volunteer pilot network transports clients seeking abortion or gender-affirming care across the United States.

Foofaraw will match up to $300 in donations to DIFFA Dallas, Elevated Access, and Denton Community Food Center through the remainder of 2025.

Donate now

Happy, happy Saturday! I’m going to start off by asking for a huge favor. Chill Subs is running their Best Lit Mag Awards and I’d be absolutely honored if you could take 60 seconds of your day to vote for us—no account needed, just enter your e-mail, search for Foofaraw, pick three tags, and you’re done. Maybe tell a friend while you’re at it...

Best Lit Mag Awards - Chill Subs

Welcome to Chill Subs’ 3rd annual Community Favorites Best Lit Mag Awards! Vote for your favorite literary magazines and celebrate the publications that make our community thrive.

Chill SubsChill Subs

Anyway, if that wasn’t enough self-promotion and favor asking, The Bodies has been getting some wonderful reviews on Amazon and Goodreads... (hint, hint...) And if you haven't picked up a copy yet, shame on you!

The Bodies by D.H. Parish

a 46-page print novella

foofarawfoofaraw

It was a big week for us as we officially announced the winners of our first writing contest. We were able to award over $600 among our three winners and five honorable mentions who wrote some absolutely wonderful and creative stories.

An ordinary contest results

truly extraordinary

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You can read the three winners here:

☕ A cup to save the world

by Andrea Cavedo

foofarawfoofaraw

🥧 To make a pie

by Michael Allen Rose

Last week kicked off with a new entry in the world of Cavendish from Joel:

⚒️ Hello, children of Earth!

by Joel Glover

foofarawfoofaraw

Before Fendy unravelled a beautiful story about music and memory:

🎶 Side A for secrets, side B for goodbyes

by Fendy S. Tulodo

foofarawfoofaraw

Fendy also talked to us about music, creativity, and vinyl:

🎙️ Fendy S. Tulodo

An interview with the author of Side A for secrets, side B for goodbyes

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This week we published a flash piece from Dudley Stone. It's a very melancholic story, but not for the faint of heart:

🙃 Falling

by Dudley Stone

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In the world of comics, we had the next issue of Abstract Tears from Tony Tran:

😿 Devoured

the tenth comic from Tony Tran’s world of abstract tears

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And #11 of OBSTRUCTION from our friend Matty:

🚧 OBSTRUCTION #11

a webcomic from Matthew Burbridge

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Finally, for our wonderful Friday columns, we had Baron return to talk about paperwork:

🏛️ Paperwork will bring the apocalypse

by Baron Ursin de Paresse

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And then Nick framed things up nicely for us heading into the weekend:

🔭 The framing essay

by Nicholas De Marino

foofarawfoofaraw

And of course the last two media guides before it takes a haitus until the new year:

📺 The media guide S6E17

giving up like an elderly democrat

foofarawfoofaraw

📺 The media guide S6E18

the last hurrah

foofarawfoofaraw

➡️

Next week:
Cavendish, robots, and punctuation.

P.S. you can still purchase our S6 Limited Edition design as a t-shirt, sticker, or hoodie.

Foofaraw S6 Limited Edition Tee

Comfort Colors Garment-Dyed Heavyweight T-Shirt. 100% cotton fabric with a relaxed fit, featuring the 1913 abstract painting, Udnie, by Francis Picabia.

Foofaraw MerchFoofaraw Merch

🔭 The framing essay - foofaraw

2025-11-21T17:00:59.000Z

Foofaraw will match up to $300 in donations to DIFFA Dallas, Elevated Access, and Denton Community Food Center through the remainder of 2025.

Donate now

—With apologies to Rod Serling. And Jeanne Marshall. Her typewritten notes from his Antioch College writing class are online at the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. An insightful epistolary tale. Definitely worth a scan.

Consider, if you will, a series of expanding rectangles. Or, if you’re into “Flatland,” a frustration of frusta thrust through a plane. This morbid procession marches to the soundtrack of — hey, The White Stripes totally ripped this off for the “Seven Nation Army” video.

Tonight’s stars: Michael Richards, Wilhelm von Homburg, Graham Linehan, Mr. Van Klomp, and Marge Simpson.

Welcome, art lovers. Perhaps these five corner cases strike you as problematic. Perhaps you’d rather séance up elephants from living rooms past than tightrope over these fetid penguinariums. Perhaps you’re under the right big-and-proud-top. This is “Anecdotes of Delightful Happenstance & Dilemmas.”

“The Kramer”

It was ten years after Y2K ruined everything. I saw Jason Alexander perform as Donny Clay, a not-so-inspirational speaker, in Las Vegas. Mostly because Penn was busy preening jubjub birds and Teller had a sore throat.

There was a little audience participation. At one point, the Not George Costanza called someone a name. Not a slur or anything, but the wrong name, nonetheless. The drunken, money-deprived crowd was upset, and I — err, they — let him know it.

Alexander’s apology was swift and gracious. The incident did not make the news.

Cue door-bursting Michael Richards entrance. (Or was that an exit?)

“Vigo the Carpathian”

An Olivier salad of adventure, dancing, and caste-based comedy racism — they’re called “masala films” for a reason. Bollywood and Indian films cleave to sappy tropes and transition in jarring, ill-fitting shifts, much like the thrice-baked raccoon-for-Thanksgiving story on the “The Danny Brown Show” podcast I’ve chosen to end this sentence with. Sure, I could cater context, but isn’t it more fun to just enjoy the ride?

…

The answer is: No. None of this mess works. I’ll level with you: This is my fifth round versus this shambling mound of an essay and, staring down the mossy void, engulfment is imminent.

“Saint Matty Hislop”

It started innocently enough. I was reading a Jon Agee palindrome book and came across “Kramer’s remark.” Oh yeah, I thought, I have scribbled notes about problematic paintings in media.

The original idea was to couch it as a mid-2000s content farm listicle with punchy, drabble-length sections divided by convoluted breaks. I thought it’d be a funny way to explore nuanced subjects like race, caste, antisemitism, gender, misogyny, and feminism.

Yes, seriously.

Also, I’d just rewatched the “Pickman’s Model” episode of Rod Sterling’s lesser-celebrated show, “Night Gallery,” and, the hat on a hat on a hat was irresistible.

Yes, seriously.

“The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies”

That’s what passes for entertainment around here. Actually, back to the Agee stuff, my wife and I strained over anagrams a whole evening but were unable to wrangle “a gay Baba Yaga” or “odor rodeo.” We did, however, tame “sex of tit foxes,” “T. Tub Butt,” and the soulless A.I. art prompt-ready “draw ‘B.O. gnome lobs B.O. lemon gobward.’”

Anyway, each section was intended to be a bait-and-switch anecdote. “The Kramer” would’ve slid into an unrelated cast member mishap. “Vigo the Carpathian” would’ve followed a baffling Bollywood biography. “Saint Matty Hislop” would’ve recited a self-serious monomaniacal litany with factual inaccuracies.

“Scene from Moby Dick”

Things got weird with “The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.” I tried juxtaposing the nine-season long WWII humor of “‘Allo! ‘Allo!” with the canceled-after-one-episode tour-de-reich “Heil Honey I’m Home!” and deep “An American Tail” lore. That might’ve crossed a line. Which meant it would’ve been better for the Graham Linehan section.

(“The Simpsons” over-the-couch painting reference was for the “fifth corner” joke and wordplay on the Homer/homo-erotic nature of the “A Squeeze of the Hand” chapter in “Moby Dick.”)

Also, I’d written a bunch of Indian film reviews for some reason.

Anyway, here are all those Indian film reviews.

All Those Indian Film Reviews

🍿 “Koi … Mil Gaya”: What if “E.T.” helped “Forest Gump” get laid?

🍿 “Krrsh”: “Wet Hot American Summer” crashes “Batman Forever.”

🍿 “Krrsh 3: Not Krrsh 2”: Lazy-eyed X-men dropout.

🍿 “Dilwale”: Hey, is that the painting from “Ghostbusters 2” on the wall? Click back. That's totally the Vigo painting! Highlight of the movie.

🍿 “Happy New Year”: Best once a year. Or never.

🍿 “Singham”: Copaganda where they fight police corruption with even more police corruption. Also lionaganda.

🍿 “Bhool Bhulaiyaa”: Despite the ghost-busting psychologist, this has nothing to do with Scientology. Or does it?

🍿 “Parvarish”: Good Twin and Bad Twin team up to harass Bad Girls Turned Good Girls Or Maybe Not as they seduce the protagonists by threatening to kill themselves in various ways to a bumping '70s song and dance number. Here's your first and only warning for saxophone and accordion jump scares.

🍿 “Bajirao Mastani”: Historical hero combat with sword whips and a love triangle that includes a warrior princess. Yes please. Last scene? Tears.

🍿 “Padmaavat”: Epic poetry-inspired drama about male gaze with a total badass leading lady who subverts the patriarchy from within. Sign me up. Last scene? Chills.

🍿 “Piku”: Road trip comedy (?) where a beloved actor portrays an old man with chronic constipation. Last scene? Full release.

🍿 “Sheshnaag”: Gods are snakes who are also people who manipulate “an illiterate” — or are they trying to help him score? And why's that a plot point in so many films? — and then … what the hell was that‽ Highly recommended.

So, um, yeah.

Good evening.

—Nicholas De Marino

🙃 Falling - foofaraw

2025-11-21T05:46:14.000Z

So. That was stupid.

There’s a cliché in the movies—a trope. Something terrible is about to happen; you know it, I know it, everyone in the audience knows it. The close-up of a nut vibrating its way free from a bolt in a rotor means fate is in the house. The words “don’t leave the path” echo in the theater as the camera pans down to the feet of someone not noticing they have already left the pavement means the clock is ticking. A sudden screech of scattering birds just as they think they’re safe means Bonnie and Clyde will barely have time to exchange tender, wistful looks before rough justice turns them into bloody rag dolls.

Like that, only different.

It’s not that the world slows down. It’s that your mind speeds up. You’re barely moving, but everything else seems frozen. No one has seen you throw your leg over the railing. They don’t know your world is barreling toward them.

At the desk, a clerk—tattooed and ponytailed—validates a parking ticket, the muscles in his hand and forearm flexing as he punches the card. A dusky woman waiting for the elevator wears bright primary colors. In her arms, she cradles a toddler with pink barrettes and thumb in her mouth, who is looking straight at the falling man (which of these things doesn’t belong?), the beginning of a string of drool dripping like a question onto the dusky woman’s incandescent dress.

Four stories up is a bad place to have second thoughts. Practical questions crowd into your mind. At what point do you reach terminal velocity? Is it better to face away from the landing?

Lobby.

Tall glass windows.

Light.

Atrium—an atrium is a chamber of the heart.

You fall through slices of time—thin like air on Everest. You are the rock in the slingshot, its rubber stretching taut. You breathe as if through a sieve.

If you ever dreamed of being a bird and believed dreams come true, this would be a good time for some proof, a good time to adjust flaps, throttle up, and roll out of this dive into stable flight. The word “plumage” comes to mind.

Plumage.

Atrium.

If you were a bird, what would they call you? A plummet.

A balloon of laughter inflates in your belly, but not enough to arrest your descent.

Artwork by Tony Tran

No one is directly underneath you—as far as you can tell—so at least you won’t be taking anyone with you (another thought that would have been more useful two floors earlier). You decide you’d rather not land on your face, but that choice is out of your hands.

Your shirt—released momentarily from gravity—flutters across your face. For the thinnest moment, momentum seems to stop, and you’re sure you’ve flown into a cloud or a flock of angels.

People will ask why. You would, too. You’d say—like Camus’ Stranger—“because the sun was in my eyes,” an answer but not a reply. Maybe it’s a bad translation. Perhaps he meant something else entirely. Were you ill? Unhappy? Was it over a woman? Were you on medication? You’d like to be able to tell them. You’d like to be able to say you thought this through.

More slices of time, more increments toward the floor. You want to believe in grace, but when they examine security cameras later, you know you’ll look as aerodynamic as an octopus.

Here’s the thing. You didn’t want to jump. Not really. At least, you’re pretty sure you didn’t. You think you’re pretty sure.

Reasons why not to jump:

Reason one: it’s stupid.

Reason two: it’ll hurt. =Not for long, or maybe not at all. Then you remember stories of guillotined Frenchmen whose severed heads still— nix that… not a useful line of thought.

Reason three: it’s stupid.

Reason four: really stupid.

Reason five: it accomplishes NOTHING.

Reason six: see reasons one through five.

You pass through the tipping point, and the slingshot snaps forward. The floor charges toward you like a lover in the airport returning from Seattle.

Consider your mother, brother, and sister. Consider your girlfriend. She thinks you hung the moon. Consider the friend you’re meeting for lunch, sitting before a basket of bread and water with lemon, staring at his phone, wondering what has become of you.

What has become of you?

The pattern on the floor comes into focus. You rehearse your apologies.

I’m sorry for this. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Plumage.

Atrium.

A security guard, with his weight on one leg—surprisingly agile for a big man—swivels and sinks into a sprinter’s crouch, but he’ll never make it. A woman in Armani, legs crossed on a sofa, looks up from her latte and phone, pupils expanding without comprehension. The mother is reacting now, her impulse to turn her child’s head away. The string of drool makes a diagonal in the air.

If you breathe out now, cold Mexican tiles would radiate your breath back at you, and you haven’t really thought about death until now; haven’t thought about what God or gravity might have in store for you, just processing data, taking it all in, how unbelievably stupid.

What has become of you?

Anyway, it’s only four stories. I probably won’t even—

Dudley Stone’s fiction has most recently appeared online in Danse Macabre and Snapdragon. Additionally, he is a produced playwright and his poetry is Pushcart Prize-nominated. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and Kentucky State Poetry Society, and a mechanic-in-training at Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop. Mr. Stone received his B.A. from the University of Kentucky and resides in Lexington, KY. More of his work can be found at dudleystone.com.

Foofaraw will match up to $300 in donations to DIFFA Dallas, Elevated Access, and Denton Community Food Center through the remainder of 2025.

Donate now

🚧 OBSTRUCTION #11 - foofaraw

2025-11-20T16:35:02.000Z

Foofaraw will match up to $300 in donations to DIFFA Dallas, Elevated Access, and Denton Community Food Center through the remainder of 2025.

Donate now

Matthew Burbridge

Issue #12

The story so far:

🤖 San Francisco’s youngest billionaires are betting on a new kind of job boom - The Independent Variable

2025-11-19T16:14:54.000Z

SF Standard

When I pressed Foody on his utopian vision, and why he thinks tech companies won’t hoard the spoils of the AI boom, he waved his hand and described a future in which everyone has $10 million in purchasing power, lives in a nice apartment, and works only if they want to.

Oh yeah, because every 22-year-old has vast experience of what it’s like at the workplace for all types of jobs across the country. Problem solved, everyone, you can now work when you want and buy anything you want! It’s getting ridiculous.

💸 Everybody Stand Down: New Yorker Columnist’s Child Doesn’t Care About Sports Gambling - The Independent Variable

2025-11-19T16:08:51.000Z

Defector

The people who own and populate the sports discourse have every professional incentive not to “freak out about sports betting,” because the vast majority of them are for all practical purposes employees of sports betting concerns. That, not to put too fine a point on it, is the precise reason why a question like “Is gambling really threatening the integrity of sports?” is still being treated as though it is up for discussion at a time when there are simultaneous active federal bet-fixing investigations against active players in three different highly visible professional sports

I didn’t read the original NYer column, but anyone who makes the points laid out by Albert here is crazy. There is no doubt that the integrity of sports is in trouble. And no, most fans of sports don’t think they are already fixed.

💽 Enema Of The Garden State by Madi Diaz - The Independent Variable

2025-11-19T16:06:42.000Z

Bandcamp

I featured this on yesterday’s media guide on Foofaraw, but wanted to give it another shout-out here. It’s fantastic and every penny goes to Defending our Neighbors.

Humdrum Places - BlogFlock

📹 Au 8ème Jour - The Independent Variable

🤖 AGI is not possible even in 10 years - The Independent Variable

📧 Dealgorithmed - The Independent Variable

🤖 Coke's New AI-Generated Ad Required 100 Staff and 70,000 AI-Generated Clips, and It Still Looks Like Garbage - The Independent Variable

🎸 Live at Ford Field by Jack White & Eminem - The Independent Variable

📝 Just a dash - foofaraw

🤖 Occupational hazards - foofaraw

📚 The City and Its Uncertain Walls - A Humdrum Life

😿 Rebellion - foofaraw

📚 Dungeon Crawler Carl - A Humdrum Life

🤖 OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates - The Independent Variable

⚒️ Sometimes you have to show your face - foofaraw

2026 Pushcart Nominations - foofaraw

🎉 Weekend edition vol.085 - foofaraw

🔭 The framing essay - foofaraw

“The Kramer”

“Vigo the Carpathian”

“Saint Matty Hislop”

“The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies”

“Scene from Moby Dick”

All Those Indian Film Reviews

🙃 Falling - foofaraw

🚧 OBSTRUCTION #11 - foofaraw

Next:

The story so far:

🤖 San Francisco’s youngest billionaires are betting on a new kind of job boom - The Independent Variable

💸 Everybody Stand Down: New Yorker Columnist’s Child Doesn’t Care About Sports Gambling - The Independent Variable

💽 Enema Of The Garden State by Madi Diaz - The Independent Variable