It’s easy for a book to seem quaint or old-fashioned when it was written in the 1930s
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12.03.2026 16:09
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It’s easy for a book to seem quaint or old-fashioned when it was written in the 1930s
#AgathaChristie #writing
Old British splatterpunk is fascinating trash. It feels like everyone was ripping off The Rats by James Herbert, but with increasingly stupid animals.
My £0.02 is that she wasn't, but because of the nostalgia factor associated with her stories she is often read that way.
There isn't much trace of cosy in And Then There Were None or Endless Night or The ABC Murders or Curtain.
#AgathaChristie #writing
Poll for the timeline: was Agatha Christie a ‘cosy’ mystery writer? Yea or nay
#AgathaChristie #writing
GNU SIR TERRY PRATCHETT
Signal this to all towers, not logged.
‘He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind in the rigging and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”?’
Going Postal
Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now
My current writing project is deliberately as grimy as possible to wash the taste of The Thursday Murder Club out of my mouth
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After some consideration, I have decided I hate cosy mysteries. There's a difference between not caring if your writing is a bit cheesy (which is fine) and intentionally cheesing it up for nostalgia market.
Give me a grim and disturbing mystery any day.
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MrBeast competition to see who can make it through the Strait of Hormuz
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a fascinating book.
It’s about twenty percent philosophy, sixty percent boys‘ own adventure, and the remaining twenty percent is casual homoeroticism.
The good prose somehow makes it seem coherent.
‘We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind…A regular soldier might be helpless without a target, owning only what he sat on, and subjugating only what he could poke his rifle at.’
-TE Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The real question is why anyone would deploy it in a role where this could possibly happen.
We should wait for more confirmation, from a bigger newspaper, but...wow.
It looks like there's a real chance an AI hallucination caused the US to bomb a girl's school.
thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-ai...
A lot of the video is about how ADHD is linked to lack of emotional regulation, which makes me wonder if the fundamental problem is actually emotional, rather than intellectual.
This thought inspired by Sloane Stowe’s video on ADHD: youtu.be/j0GGoL7mzzM?...
I find it almost physically painful to do things I’m not interested in. The only way I can get through them is basically on autopilot, which leads to inattention, spacing out etc
Had the thought that maybe ADHD isn’t so much lacking focus as feeling boredom more intensely than other people
Most people wouldn't write a book like that nowadays, and sometimes I think there's a reason.
It's a good book but it's also, like, four different books.
Another one, from a leftist YouTuber: "Never underestimate the destructive power of stupidity."
"Fascist governments, as Eco notes, are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”
Just a quote which occurred to me today for some reason.
“Every form of violence you inflict on another human being is an act of violence against yourself…”
Good call, X is for the spammers and Nazis now.
musician Gary Numan, born March 8, 1958, aged 68
actor Gary Oldman, born March 21, 1958, aged 67
Happy Gary Retrograde everyone!
The next two weeks are the only two weeks out of the year when Gary Numan is older than Gary Oldman
I was critical here, but I still recommend the essay to basically everyone
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New blog post on Orwell's Politics and the English Language, one of my favourite essays of all time.
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chrisbarkerauthor.co.uk/2026/03/09/o...
Plenty of that across industries, there’s this pervasive belief that President Trump could never make a catastrophic mistake, or if he did, it could be reversible by the omnipresent “adults in the room”. That is, American biz genuinely believes the WH could never break something they couldn’t fix.
I feel like if I had money to invest I could have gotten a lot richer by not being dumb about whether outcomes drive causes or the other way around
My entire journalistic career, editors & owners & bosses told me again & again that my stuff was too long, too in-depth, too wonky, no one would read it.
Again & again, readers flocked to the longer, wonkier pieces, passed them around, wrote me to thank me for them, cited them years later.
![That Mitchell & Webb Look - Evil Plan [HQ]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:tmyuv6vqlsodqziygce5osvh/bafkreidit6dxdyspcxzdsdhqdfrahgpxez73afbzjlafw6sj2eiipnnagq)