13 Feb 2026 Linky-Links

Ever-present on my mind lately: the shuttering of digital spaces, the silencing of voices, and the cartoonish absurdity of the big tech internet landscape of 2026. I'm reading accordingly.

Death isn't the end: Meta patented an AI that lets you keep posting from beyond the grave (Sydney Bradley, Business Insider)
Blundering Husband Asks Claude AI to “Organize” Wife’s PC, Accidentally Erases Her Life’s Work (Frank Landymore, Futurism)
News Publishers Are Now Blocking The Internet Archive, And We May All Regret It (Mike Masnick, Techdirt)
Google Says People Are Copying Its AI Without Its Permission, Much Like It Scraped Everybody’s Data Without Asking to Create Its AI in the First Place (Victor Tangermann, Futurism)
It's not you. It's me. (Taking a break from Mastodon) (vkc, Veronica Explains)
Predictably, I've returned to Mastodon (vkc, Veronica Explains)

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State of the Blog (Part 1?)

No posts since October 2024 and then four since August 24? One of these posts is a random playlist and another is review of a Conan the Barbarian eBook? What’s going on around here? What’s the point of this blog? Practice is the point. I love writing, and I never write. I love creation, and I never create. So this is an exercise in commitment. Not that I have commitment issues. Rather, what I regularly commit to rarely fulfills me. I commit to my job, but if I didn’t have to work it, I wouldn’t work it. Two hours a day on the commute circuit? Two hours a day of poisoning the atmosphere and wearing down my body? No thank you. I commit to cleaning the house. To building habits and routines. To feeling productive. But that’s all a racket. True commitment is creating. It’s loving. So here I am, in a hotel room outside of Princeton, New Jersey typing these words and learning more about myself than I knew five minutes ago. I need to commit less often to the arbitrary. I need to commit less ...

Albums of the Week (12.07.25 - 12.14.25)

Back again. Not so much a Daily Eclectoid as a When I Feel Like It Eclectoid. That's okay. I logged every album I listened this week. Kind of. Each day, I wrote down every album I listened to. If I listened to half an LP one day and finished the following day, I didn't log it. If I listened to something on separate days, I logged it twice. That didn't happen this week, but it will. I'd like to log Mondays to Sundays, but I started last Sunday, so you get a bit of everything. I'm making this up as we go. Here's Sunday 12.07 to Sunday 12.14: Sunday, December 7, 2025 In Nigeria (1985) - Yusef Lateef Ella & Louis Christmas (1960) - Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong Butterfly 3000 (2021) - King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Give Love At Christmas (1980) - The Temptations Poppy Seeds: An International Benefit for Mutual Aid in Gaza (2025) - Various Monday, December 8, 2025 Club Nostalgia (Special Edition) (2024) - Minuit Cafe Groove Memories (Japanese...

Conan: Black Starlight (Book Review)

Conan: Black Starlight (2023) - John C. Hocking Before diving into this series of e-books, which promises to capture the spirit of the original Conan tales, I'd read very little Robert E. Howard. I've since started reading the complete Conan stories, and I've found that this one really did nail it. Firstly, props to Hocking for crafting Black Starlight to be entirely accessible to any reader despite being a direct sequel to his own Conan and the Emerald Lotus . He doesn't include an exposition dump, yet he is able to clue the reader in just enough to keep them from getting lost. What you have is an extremely accessible sword-and-sorcery tale that is riveting from start to finish. In an effort to cross the River Styx undetected, Conan and friends end up in what seems to be a ghost town, but they are soon set upon by zombies and richly described demons that attempt to kill the travelers and steal the sorceress Zelandra's supply of E...

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