"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

The Swineherd King

An evil stepmother, three princesses in danger, magical waters, and a helpful lizard with a tail that points to the truth.
I’m querying for an agent to represent my Gothic novel, and I publish an eBook for Patrons every time I get a rejection. I just got one!
And do you want to know what? This system is actually helping. The natural disappointment is quenched with the happy thought that I get to prepare something nice for you guys. I’ll keep querying, you keep on reading.

As usual, guys in the lower tier get the first portion of the book, while people in the 2nd and 3rd one get the full text with some additional notes on the theme of the three princesses. It’s another literary fairytale written by the Italian symbolist poet Guido Gozzano.

 
books and literature

Fugitive Telemetry

This is book #6 in the Murderbot series (yes, I accidentally skipped #5, I’m circling back to that), and I’m afraid I didn’t like this as much as the others. The whole investigation felt a bit rushed and, though the final twist is interesting in

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April 24, 2026 8:00 am
architecture, engineering and construction

The Discipline of Inspiration: Valéry and the Algorithmic Mind

Paul Valéry rejected inspiration as miracle, seeing creativity as the discipline of thought in motion. This week, we parallel his notion of mental “operations” with computational procedures in design: iteration, optimisation, constraint, and recombination, and challenge the dichotomy between intuition and automation. Drawing on contemporary

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April 22, 2026 9:00 am
movies and tv

The Lychee Road

On the plane to Taiwan, the entertainment selection was limited but this caught my eye: it’s a 2025 movie, labelled as historical comedy, in which a Tang Dynasty minor official is framed by his colleagues into performing an impossible task: delivering fresh lychees from a

Read More »
April 19, 2026 9:00 am
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Fugitive Telemetry

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This is book #6 in the Murderbot series (yes, I accidentally skipped #5, I’m circling back to that), and I’m afraid I didn’t like this as much as the others. The whole investigation felt a bit rushed and, though the final twist is interesting in

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Paul Valéry rejected inspiration as miracle, seeing creativity as the discipline of thought in motion. This week, we parallel his notion of mental “operations” with computational procedures in design: iteration, optimisation, constraint, and recombination, and challenge the dichotomy between intuition and automation. Drawing on contemporary

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