Manchester Council: where is your Sonic representative

3. Bit of a jarring shift in tone from the above, but Ophira Gottlieb's Mill piece about the Christmas-obsessed Councillor Pat Kearney is packed with perfect lines of writing.

manchestermill.co.uk/big-wheel-pa...

2. 'A credible opposition, fresh CCM candidates, or a more populist (and popular) economic agenda have variously compensated for failures to achieve meaningful political inclusion or...acceptable economic order. In 2025, though, all three “fixes” have failed' (Michaela Collord)

tinyurl.com/2dn72fef

I read a blog recently (below) that argued the very best reviews enhance an audience's experience of their subject. The Prisoner's Dilemma does this.

(I feel ehhhh about the full case the blog makes, but 'enhance an audience's experience' is a great description)

dododecahedron.blog/2025/10/13/r...

It is 'talk through the plot and our feelings about it' show, but one where the hosts' knowledge of the context is woven through the discussion of the plot, rather than consigned to an introduction.

To go deeper on this - there's just so many great touches that set this show apart. The theme music and cover art are thoughtful and characterful, and I particularly like how every actor is given a small potted history that situates their work in the Prisoner as part of their broader career.

I'm not wedded to it being weird fiction - it's good shit regardless - but wanted to make the case to see if the definition hung on it, and honestly, surprised myself a bit with how well YDoE looks in weird fiction costume.

I think the only way it's not weird fiction is that it is not loudly breaking genre boundaries. However, it does shift between historical litfic and SF, and does so more explicitly than Hild/Menewood (not a weird text). So it's definitely troubling generic form, if not exactly breaking it.

It is also a book focused on unsettling - both in the sensory experiences of the characters, and in its relationship to history. It is also literally a work that 'unsettles' Mexico.

I think YDoE, depending on your 'reading weird fiction' definitions, could be a fully Weird text? It's irreal, both in the sense of its ending, and in the way the text/events fluctuate between 'real', 'delusion' and 'meta', without clear boundaries between.

You Dreamed of Empires. On the outside edge of secondary, but tantalisingly so, close enough I'd want to invite it in. The Siege of Burning Grass - doesn't always feel like weird fiction, but the scene in the apartment really does. The Archive Undying...maybe not urban enough?

Blogs above are posted because there was information and/or thinking in them I found really interesting. Hoping to do a post of this kind every weekend. If you found a blog similarly interesting, let me know. I'm always looking for more pieces to read!

5. 'Bible sales are up roughly 40% since the pandemic, but church attendance is down to 30% from 42% two decades ago and 38% ten years ago.' (Kyla Scanlon)

kyla.substack.com/p/how-bible-...

4. 'Japan faces a worker shortage as its population ages, and the country has been cautious about expanding immigration. Telexistence’s bots offer a workaround, allowing physical labor to be offshored' (Michael Beltran)

tinyurl.com/yc5j2the

3. 'Stoke-on-Trent’s enormous growth in tech is unusual. It has easily overtaken other small cities in Britain such as Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Brighton, and Oxford...Thanks to Bet365, the city has a tech sector closer in size to much larger places.' (Tom Forth)

tomforth.co.uk/evilorirrele...

2. 'The value of civil society stems precisely from its capacity to (a) restrain government from tyrannical behavior, and (b) create a realm of free engagement, where people can live their lives, and freely create and dissolve bonds among each other.' (Programmable Mutter)

tinyurl.com/yse9tbrz

SF Ultra, Meal of Thorns, Shelved by Genre (books). Games Studies Study Buddies (ok, academia, but it's video games, so culture?). SF Ultra the main recc.

Have you considered getting into tabletop roleplaying game actual play podcasts? Great for a break from the internal monologue.

Ngl, did not know that's what happened in Hedwig! I really like that reading of Triton having a social trend towards self-annihilation. Makes me think Bron's failure to be a Mumbler is prefigurative of her failure to be the woman he thought she would want to be. Pesky personality keeps coming back!

I think I was already cynical about what people would (and do) do with freedom, so ahhh the sadness of that didn't really land until you mentioned it :D. But yeah it's bleak!

And also I love the vlet bit. It's so fun to find a 2010s-2020s joke about TTRPGs in a book from the 1970s :D