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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

On the comics site, Awkward Granola: www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1749

superdoomedplanet.com

Awkward Granola

Visit the post for more.

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SOLRAD Magazine @solrad.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Today on SOLRAD, we feature When a Comic Refuses to Explain Itself: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic -- an essay by Emre Altindag solrad.co/when-a-comic...

solrad.co

When a Comic Refuses to Explain Itself: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic by Emre Altindag - SOLRAD

Today on SOLRAD, we feature the essay: Slow Reading, Silence, and the Non-Industrial Comic by Emre Altindag

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Tyler @electriceden92.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The problem here is that it actively erases the agency of the original cartoonists, because it takes for granted that they were no higher than admen, and that they had no subtext already built into the comics that Lichtenstein was simply noticing

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Tyler @electriceden92.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Besides the fact that not enough people realized that he was directly tracing these things with no real creative additions, the case for Lichtenstein depended on him adding a perceived level of contempt for the source material, which was what supposedly made it 'high art'

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

There's a whole genre of new tech where it feels like the underlying idea is "please pay attention to the world for me so I can spend 24 hours a day dissociating."

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

So apart from all the other problems with the ambient recording stuff tech companies are pushing... who is this *for*? How are you so checked out of your life you need a recap of your last 15 seconds multiple times a day?

mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai - Blog - Audio Intelligence

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

And Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, although if you pick it up I recommend not getting the one advertised as a "complete edition"—it frontloads a lot of the weaker material.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet demonstrates how fantasy can be accessible while working with deeply personal mythology. Also Samuel Delany, The Jewel Hinged Jaw, and R. A. Lafferty's short stories.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Could probably come up with many with more thought, but: I was startled at how Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death anticipated some of where the culture was headed. Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary is thoughtful about dealing with feeling directionless.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

("Tending towards the conventional" is, incidentally, also why you don't want to use LLMs for research or summarizing information. They'll produce a conventional, likely, summary, and likely miss unexpected facts or ideas that could change your understanding of the situation entirely.)

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

But the linked blog post shows no understanding that choosing the *right* word is any different from choosing a *statistically likely* word.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

LLMs, instead choose *likely* words, given other words. If they seem precise, it's because LLMs tend not to produce anything very original or surprising; it's the kind of content where many words, many phrasings might feel right. LLMs tend towards the conventional.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

And the confusion here isn't so much confusion over how LLMs work, technically—this is a tech guy! He's confused about *writing*. The problem is that he does not realize choosing good, precise words involves *consciously understanding* the words, their purpose, and their context.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

This is bizarre, but also an exemplary demonstration of the confusion and PR fog surrounding LLMs. The writer is incensed about LLM watermarking because he wants his LLM "to choose the very best, most precise words". But LLMs can't do that! They don't know what words mean!

daringfireball.net

Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anyth...

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Apartment Hunting www.superdoomedplanet.com/comic/?p=1735

"Look, before I decide to rent an apartment in a building with a god-sized drinking straw sticking out the top, I want to know WHY."

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

A fun thing about discussing older work is historical perspective: from a distance it's often clearer how a book fit into its time and context, reflected & digested what went on around it. And you can see how it influenced later work, if it did. Time just gives you more to talk about.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

And I think this pushes book discussion towards the consumer guide review: What's this about? Who will like it? Enthusiastic recommendations without much digging into what makes the books worth recommending.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

My problem with online SFF book discussion is that it's obsessively present-oriented: recent releases, hot new writers, this year's award shortlists. Not many conversations recalling or reevaluating work from 30, 20, even just 10 years ago. (Except maybe Omelas, every six months.)

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

There's also the first Library of America volume of Octavia Butler, published in 2020.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Omelas is one of those stories that everybody knows but no one actually knows, basically.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I find Omelas gets more interesting when you realize it's less about "what do you do when you realize your society is built on suffering," and more about "why do we resist imagining a society not built on suffering?"

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Jeff (Mixed Metaphors) @mixedmetaphors.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I think at one point in semi-recent history there was a kind of accepted cultural canon of literature that everyone learned in school, and that allowed a kind of shared framework for discussion. We don't have that as much anymore, and so the few common touchpoints get really oversaturated.

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sean guynes @guynes.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not that interesting, but I do think it's symptomatic of something that most every take on Omelas wants to "solve" it.

static.klipy.com

Michael Jordan 'Stop It, Get Some Help' Meme

ALT: Michael Jordan 'Stop It, Get Some Help' Meme

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Kate Watson @loreandordure.com · 05/08/2026

I am actually infuriated by this assumption, as writers and artists of all kinds, that if our work runs up against the audience’s ignorance (vocabulary, intertexuality, &c.) this is somehow a failing, our fault and something it is our responsibility to avoid.

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Lance Parkin @lanceparkin.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Somewhere along the way, we've shifted from storytelling to elaborate descriptive narration. Like a movie is just an inefficient way of doing the plot summary of that movie.

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Lance Parkin @lanceparkin.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

There's been a real trend - because streaming miniseries sprawl over so many hours, I think, but perhaps it's demand driving supply - of spelling out *every* beat, saying *everything* out loud. Leaving no stone unexamined.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Why are people laundering inoffensively anodyne political opinions through the mouths of AI-generated simulacra of beloved cartoon characters, and why is Bugs Bunny's head on the body of an eagle?

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Matthew Cheney @melikhovo.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Perhaps also we've attached so much sense of personal stake and identity to individual works, and get offended by any criticism of them, because we ourselves are not sailing in a meaningful and ongoing cultural flow, but rather are clinging to our shipwreck debris in water gone swampy.

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Matthew Cheney @melikhovo.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Perhaps we've fallen into the insidious Great/Terrible binary for aesthetic judgment because in a culture where real art *doesn't* matter, where each book/movie/song/whatever is a singular product separate from a meaningful and ongoing cultural flow, hyperbole is the only way to claim importance.

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Matthew Cheney @melikhovo.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

There also wasn't as much of the current sense of binary hyperbole: art & lit is only either Great/Terrible. From our vantage, it's weird to read serious reviews from 100 years ago, because there's less sense that something must be proclaimed either a timeless masterpiece or crime against humanity.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Like, the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who makes more sense if you assume it starts in Tom Baker's last season with "Full Circle" and gradually fades out over Davison's own last season, "Warriors of the Deep" and "Resurrection of the Daleks" being effectively early Colin Baker stories.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

A tangential thought about this is that it can be interesting when DW's regeneration and the related shift in style/mythology don't sync up perfectly—sometimes Doctors feel out of their element because their era starts late, or ends early.

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Wm Henry Morris @wmhenrymorris.com · 30/07/2026

I continue to find it distressing that substack has managed to capture such a big chunk of literary discussion/energy--mainly lit fic but some genre focused folks as well We need something that's open source, easy to spin up, more communal/connected than blogs, but less messy than discord servers

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I feel like blogs could be more communal/connected than they currently are—I think they used to be, anyway—if writers responded to each other more, and if people still commented.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

What's interesting about the Fugitive Doctor is that she's a newer example of a different kind of Doctor—a Number 6 who escaped the Village, say. But you can see the current transmedia thing pulling her back towards the Median Doctor, with UNIT and all the standard villains.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The point being that, ideally, giving Doctors different motivations and different reasons for getting embroiled in stories facilitates different approaches and styles. But fan writers—and most of the writers now are fans—tend to think of the Doctor as just "the Doctor."

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

That's gotten a little lost, but it's how the original series worked—the 2nd Doctor was a meddling drifter, the 3rd an aristocratic dilettante/consultant, etc. Notably, "The Three Doctors" treats them less as the same person and more like alternate-universe versions crossing over.

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

My Doctor Who take is that it works best when every regeneration is a soft reboot, every Doctor getting their own mythology. A crucial part of is that every Doctor ought to be a different kind of character who could be the lead of a series like this.

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Tom Ewing @tomewing.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I was also getting deep into music at that point, and the Crisis occupied a very similar space to punk, a year zero event which had Changed Everything by resetting the clock. But after an initial burst of creativity, the risk was that you'd just Repeat Everything trying to sneak old stuff back

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Dale Smith @dalesmithonline.com · 29/07/2026

Starting to come across the idea that Doctor Who might do a full reboot in the wild, and I am here to say no-one is going to do that. Reboots and regeneration solve the same TV problem: you don't need to use one if you've got the other, and reboot involves more risk than regeneration.

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Rise Up (From the Grave) Comus @riseupcomus.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

"Modern vernacular fantasy ideas get read backwards into a text that is perceived as having originated them but which doesn’t really contain them" is such a good way to put that phenomenon, holy shit. I've always wanted to find the right way to articulate that point.

Thread from tom Kilian (@tomkilianart.bsky.social) about how hobbit adaptations diverge from the source material in weird ways

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Feels like there's a pattern online where people slip into thinking of a book/movie/etc. as intrinsically Good or Bad, like critical Calvinism. And if someone praises a movie we've decided is Bad, or slams one deemed Good, their motives are suspect and their actual argument tends to get lost.

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Hagai Palevsky (he/him) @dialhforhagai.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Cartoonists like Jerry Moriarty, Richard McGuire, and Yokoyama Yūichi are vital (in the sense of both “important” and “alive”) specifically because, given their painterly rather than literary backgrounds, they put lie to the conception of comics as exclusively/fundamentally stemming from literature

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Someone really needs to get the rights to reprint this and make it widely available again.

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