Hello everybody. My name is Ethan. I’m not new to the family but I’m new to the site so I figured I should start myself off here with an introduction. So here’s some things about myself:
I’m a millennial who grew up playing the previous generation of console to whatever was current. When I finally did catch up to what was new, I got the 360 and it red-ringed on me after a year. I started young and kept going pretty steady until adulthood. I spent plenty of time on the PC as well but mostly casual stuff and MMOs.
My favorite games are Metal Gear Solid, Dark Souls, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, Final Fantasy VII (Original), Persona 4, Ghostrunner 1&2, and Legend of Dragoon. I love many many more but those are the ones I most feel like I can always go back to and have a good time.
I mostly stick to console but play multiplayer games on PC such as: Rainbow Six Siege, League of Legends, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and whatever game of the week is taking over Twitch and YouTube. And before any of you ask, I hit Plat 4 in Siege and struggled to hit Silver in League. I like them, but I’m not especially good at them.
I’m a big time horror movie buff. I love everything from shlocky B-movies to modern misery porn like Hereditary and the Lighthouse. If it’s horror and it’s in front of me I’ll likely find something I enjoy about it.
I have relatively recently gotten into Magic the Gathering and will likely never financially recover from it. I play a lot of commander and a bit of sealed and draft. My favorite part of the hobby is deck building around fun strategies and interesting flavors.
Lastly, I’m not afraid to have an argument or conversation about the dumb shit I write. As long as you’re not getting weird and parasocial about it, I’m happy to read what you have to say. Just try to keep it civil. I know I’m new to this role here and this site means a lot to all of you regular readers. Thank you for giving me a chance.
WebAuthn is yet another
attempt to do an API for web authentication that doesn't involve
passwords but that instead allows browsers, hardware tokens, and
so on to do things more securely. "Passkeys" (also) is the marketing term for a
"WebAuthn credential", and an increasing number of websites really,
really want you to use a passkey for authentication instead of any
other form of multi-factor authentication (they may or may not still
require your password).
Most everyone that wants you to use passkeys also wants you to
specifically use highly secure ones. The theoretically most secure
are physical hardware security keys, followed by passkeys that are
stored and protected in secure enclaves in various ways by the
operating system (provided that the necessary special purpose
hardware is available). Of course the flipside of 'secure' is
'locked in', whether locked in to your specific hardware key (or
keys, generally you'd better have backups) or locked in to a
particular vendor's ecosystem because their devices are the only
ones that can possibly use your encrypted passkey vault.
(WebAuthn neither requires nor standardizes passkey export and
import operations, and obviously security keys are built to not let
anyone export the cryptographic material from them, that's the
point.)
I'm extremely not interested in the security versus availability
tradeoff that passkeys make in favour of security. I care far more
about preserving availability of access to my variety of online
accounts than about nominal high security. So if I'm going to use
passkeys at all, I have some requirements:
Linux people: is there a passkeys implementation that does not use
physical hardware tokens (software only), is open source, works with
Firefox, and allows credentials to be backed up and copied to other
devices by hand, without going through some cloud service?
I don't think I'm asking for much, but this is what I consider the
minimum for me actually using passkeys. I want to be 100% sure of
never losing them because I have multiple backups and can use them on
multiple machines.
Apparently KeePassXC more or less does what I want (when combined
with its Firefox extension), and it can even export passkeys in a
plain text format (well, JSON). However, I don't know if anything
else can ingest those plain text passkeys, and I don't know if
KeePassXC can be told to only do passkeys with the browser and not
try to take over passwords.
(But at least a plain text JSON backup of your passkeys can be
imported into another KeePassXC instance without having to try
to move, copy, or synchronize a KeePassXC database.)
Normally I would ignore passkeys entirely, but an increasing number
of websites are clearly going to require me to use some form of
multi-factor authentication, no matter how stupid this is (cf), and some of
them will probably require passkeys or at least make any non-passkey
option very painful. And it's possible that reasonably integrated
passkeys will be a better experience than TOTP MFA with my janky minimal setup.
(Of course KeePassXC also supports TOTP, and TOTP has an extremely
obvious import process that everyone supports, and I believe KeePassXC
will export TOTP secrets if you ask nicely.)
While KeePassXC is okay, what I would really like is for Firefox
to support 'memorized passkeys' right along with its memorized
passwords (and support some kind of export and import along with
it). Should people use them? Perhaps not. But it would put that
choice firmly in the hands of the people using Firefox, who could
decide on how much security they did or didn't want, not in the
hands of websites who want to force everyone to face a real risk
of losing their account so that the website can conduct security
theater.
(Firefox will never support passkeys this way for an assortment
of reasons. At most it may someday directly use passkeys through
whatever operating system services expose them, and maybe Linux
will get a generic service that works the way I want it to. Nor
is Firefox ever going to support 'memorized TOTP codes'.)
I saw Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere last night, and content warnings for discussions of mental health are applicable for the remainder of this post.
Deliver Me From Nowhere is based on the book of the same title by Warren Zanes and deals with Bruce Springsteen handling (or not as the case may be) depression during the development of the Nebraska(1982) and Born in the USA (1984) albums.
I’m not actually a huge fan of Springsteen, and certainly didn’t know prior to this that depression was (and presumably still is) an issue for him.
That said…
Deliver Me From Nowhere handles both the depression and Springsteen sensitively and with respect. Since I didn’t have the background knowledge (either of Springsteen or of the supporting cast such as the E Street Band) it took me a while to clue in to the central theme.
But…there’s no judgement here, and the film shows him getting proper, professional help, at the end of the film, along with a mention that this has been ongoing.
I think that’s good. To the best of my knowledge, depression isn’t something that can ever be cured, so showing support like this in a positive, empathetic, light might inspire someone to get the help they need.
In terms of content, the film deals with the Colts Neck recordings that formed the basis of the Nebraska album (along with several songs that later evolved into Born in the USA).
There’s also a look into Springsteen’s complicated family relationships, which would potentially require a further content warning to discuss in any more detail.
The cast is solid, and although not an easy film to watch sometimes, I do recommend Deliver Me From Nowhere as a film that is worth watching.
Last year for Christmas, I got several books as gifts. One was from a coworker who sent me a bestseller that I knew nothing about, "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir. He's the same author behind the hit movie "The Martian" starring Matt Damon. This new book turned out to be a very enjoyable read for me.
I learned yesterday that there's now a movie based on this book, expected to arrive 2026 March 20. This movie will star Ryan Gosling, a casting choice that I enthusiastically approve for the main character. The theme behind the book is not really apparent in the unnecessarily suspense-heavy official trailer video that came out a few days ago. The plot requires understanding that our civilization on Earth is in danger because the energy output from our sun is diminishing. In fact, all of the stars around us are diminishing their output... except for one nearby star. The plot takes our main character to that solar system to investigate the issue, as a last minute effort (hence the term, "Hail Mary" in the title of the book and movie) to save humanity. The movie trailer barely shows us a glimpse of the alien character, but we'll have to see a lot more of it for the movie to match the tale in the book.
What the story is really about, however, is friendship. A human and an alien find themselves in the same strange solar system, trying together to unravel the mystery of dimming stars, before each of their civilizations collapses. They have obvious cultural and biological differences, yet they have a shared imperative with little time for research. Neither of them is the perfect representative of their species to do this particular task alone. Research together, however, they do because they must. I think that the psychological trait "openness to experience" is something that we could use a lot more of from societies that seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism. I hope this movie presents an effective motivation for strangers of that perspective to try it.
There's another plot twist involving our main character that carries from the beginning to the end of the story, so I won't go into details. But besides friendship, the story is also about redemption. After reading it many months ago, I put aside the book while feeling almost Star Trek levels of hope for humanity as a species.
I am very eager to see this film. Whichever service hosts it online will definitely receive my subscription to watch it. Sorry, but I'm still not doing theaters, not even with a mask.
I can't listen to podcasts. It's the same problem as audio commentaries. They are difficult for me to extract information from. I make the occasional effort for friends or colleagues and otherwise read transcripts where available.
I have just discovered that Bill Nighy has a podcast. Apparently it launched on my birthday. It is the half-hour ill-advised by Bill Nighy. I am as we speak listening to the first episode which I selected at not very random considering there are only three so far:
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are on the planet. Welcome to ill-advised by Bill Nighy—and the clue is in the title, particularly on the first word. The risk of getting to my age is that you can not infrequently be mistaken for somebody who knows what's happening or how to carry on, and you only have to take a quick look around the world to see how that's going, and how my generation are managing the planet, for instance. I mean, you may have picked up a few things along the way which might be of use, like, I don't know, parking, or online shopping, or not taking cocaine, obviously. But other than that, in all the big important things, I remain profoundly in the dark. But I try and keep a straight face when people start acting weird.
After which he immediately begins to tell the listener about his recent eye operation. It does eventually pertain to the nature of the podcast, but frankly it was such an ideal segue for a programme that bills itself as "a podcast for people who don't get out much and can't handle it when they do . . . a refuge for the clumsy and the awkward . . . an invitation to squander time" that it won me over to treating it as an audio drama whose laconically anxious and slightly acid narrator has a very good fund of self-deprecating stories that wind their way around to some species of advice, defined by Nighy as "not actually making things worse." He sounds unsurprisingly like his interviews. The difficulty of extracting information does not improve just because I like the speaker, but apparently I will now make the occasional effort for actors, too.
Update: the parking is a lie. Nighy spends most of the introduction to the second episode explaining that he cannot and never could park successfully. "I'd drive miles to find somewhere where you didn't actually have to park, you could just leave the car." Well done, Reginald?
Music:: Desperate Journalist, "Unsympathetic Parts 1 & 2"
Guardian: 我知道我可以这样笃定🎵, I know I can be certain this way 谁能令其再次生长发芽，谁就是天选的大族长, whoever can make it grow and bud again will be the tribal leader selected by heaven 这都是他们的主意, it was all their idea
posted by qian at 11:42pm on 24/10/2025 under writing
skygiants did a very kind post about this development, which made me think perhaps I should also do a public post about it on this, the social networking site on which I am probably most active ...
Anyway, my epistolary novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is being republished by indie press Homeward Books and for the first time, it will be available in hard copy form! With a jazzy new cover featuring art by Kim Nguyen, it is SO cute and chic. Homeward Books are fundraising to put out their first two releases (Jade is the second) and you can pre-order both via the Kickstarter here.
Come back TOMORROW for a new post about something that isn't heraldic... a walk round part of London that might be where you live. Includes free heritage collateral, thatch, a hidden mausoleum, concrete stilts, suspicious pensioners, nuns, the smell of fish, a 17th century inn, pharmacy recommendations and virtual rooks. There's so much to look forward to on the diamond geezer blog TOMORROW.
Spoiler: Not really, they’re just playing around. But they sure do look fierce, don’t they. I think Smudge is actually happy to have a kitten to tussle with, since Sugar and Spice hate it when he tries to do that. Saja, on the other hand, is up for a wrassle any time.
Percy looking for some nap time. Me too, buddy, me too. And yes, he is on a blanket that is on a cat bed. What you can’t see is that cat bed is on another, different cat bed. My man sleeps in style.
I don’t have a burning topic this week, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m teaching Latin 101 and 102 this semester (and next). One of the things that’s interesting about that is of course students learning vocabulary for the first time tend to learn pretty simple 1-to-1 definitions. That’s necessary and it mostly works just fine: mater is a direct equivalent to “mother,” oculus is a direct equivalent to “eye” and so on. But it gets trickier when you run into common words that are freighted with a lot of cultural meaning, what I’ve started telling my students are major load-bearing cultural value words. Those often have a complex set of definitions and implications with a lot more texture than any Latin 102 student is going to need (or necessarily be ready for).
But I thought here it might be a fun thing to run down some of these major load-bearing cultural value words in Latin that have come up and briefly talk about what they mean and why they’re load bearing. These sorts of big words tend to actually be really common – because they’re really important to the Romans who thus talk about them a lot.1
We should start with the relationship between virtus (virtus, virtutis (m)), honos (honos/honor, honoris (m)), dignitas (dignitas, dignitatis, (f)) and auctoritas (auctoritas, auctoritatis, (f)), words that make a bit more sense understood together. Virtus literally means ‘manliness’ (from vir, viri (m), ‘man’), but by the time the Romans are writing to us its meaning has enlarged beyond that (and it has lost some of its gendered component – women can have virtus as a positive trait). Instead, its core idea is a mix of courage, vigor and strength: ambition, drive and the quality or ability to meet it. Virtus sometimes comes across as a sort of reckless thing which requires ‘constraining virtues’ to control and direct correctly.
Virtus as courage, drive, (positive) ambition compels a person towards the display of their quality in a testing or testing point (a certamen, ‘struggle, strife, testing’ or discrimen, ‘separating, turning-point, decision-point, crisis’). Success in that moment of testing, when witnessed by others (for this is an honor culture: deeds are to be witnessed!) is what produces honos (‘honor, respect,’ but also ‘[political or military] office’ or rewards for honor). Honos (also spelled honor, from where our word comes) is about recognition and acknowledgement and it was a real, visceral thing for the Romans: they describe it as bright and burning.2 A person with sufficient honos required respect from those around them, while a person who was disgraced shrunk back and withered in public (or at least, was supposed to). A sufficient amount of honos produced dignitas (‘dignity, worth, authority’), which demanded respect, almost as a kind of relational forcefield: a person of dignitas required respectful treatment from everyone (including other people of dignitas) because of their achievements. A very large amount of honos produced also auctoritas (‘authority, influence’), a cultural-social demand for deference to the point of being able to direct the actions of others through shear force of honos (the idea being that they do what the man with auctoritas says not because he might threaten them, but simply because his overwhelming achievements and prestige cause them to).3
My students have also met amicitia (amicitia, amicitiae, (f), ‘friendship’) and beneificium (beneficium, beneficii, (n), ‘a favor, service, kindness’)), munus (munus, muneris, (n), service, office, gift) and donum (donum, doni (n), ‘gift’). As you can see, beneficium, munus and donum can all be translated as ‘gift’ but they are not pure synonyms: the shades of meaning are quite different. Donum has the ‘pure’ sense of ‘gift’ in its simple form. By contrast munus derives from the some place as munia (‘duties, official functions’) and so has that sense of an official service or obligation. It can mean a gift as well, often a public gift (that is, the gift of a high official or rich person to the public, like games or public buildings, often in the plural, munera).
Meanwhile you have beneficium, literally a ‘good making’ or ‘good deed’ (bene+facio, ‘a good doing’) the word is tied up with amicitia and patrocinium. The patron-client relationship which is so prominent in Roman society, consists in the exchange of beneficia (‘favors’) and officia (sing. officium, ‘service’)4 between two reciprocal but unequal parties. The difference is that an officium is a service done to one who is owed (by position or by previous favors) while a beneficium is a service or favor done to one who is not (yet) owed, but necessary in both words is the idea that these favors are given willingly, typically as part of a continuing relationship.
Now at Rome5 while patron-client relations were everywhere, between freeborn men, it was almost never appropriate to say so out loud. That would shame the junior party and as we’ve just seen honos matters a lot in this society: a good patron wouldn’t even want to so diminish their client. So the near-universal practice was instead to refer to patronage (patrocinium, clientela) relationships in terms of amicitia, ‘friendship.’ Consequently, while amicitia could be the relationship between you and your drinking buddies, it was also the public term for patronage relationships and for political alliances (many of which were effectively patronage relationships). So it does mean ‘friendship’ but covers a wider array of unequal relationships that involve the exchange of officia and beneficia.
And then you have the age-and-gender words. At the moment, my students have something of an incomplete set: they have puer (puer, pueri (m), ‘boy’) and puella (puella, puellae (f), ‘girl’) and iuvenis (iuvenis, iuvenis (m/f but usually m), ‘young men/women’), but not yet adulescens (adulescens, adulescentis, (m), ‘youths, yutes‘). They have vir (vir, viri (m), ‘man’), homo (homo, hominis (m/f but usually m), ‘human, male’) and femina (femina, feminae (f), ‘female’) but not yet mulier (mulier, mulieris (f), ‘woman’).
And you can actually learn a fair bit about a culture by looking at their age-and-gender words, because it tells you something about their categories.
We start with puer and puella, matching words for ‘boy’ and ‘girl.’ Except, note quite matching. There is, I should note, a fair bit of ‘give’ in the system I’m about to lay out, so take these as general rules, not an iron system. A puer stops being a puer around 14 or 15 when he received from his father the toga virilis (‘toga of manhood’) and is thus recognized as coming of age, at which point he’s an adulescens, ‘a youth.’ By contrast, puella is not an age-limited category, but essentially means ‘a girl pre-marriage’ (it can also be a term of affection for a romantic partner or at least a prospective one later in life), so generally marriage is the event that marks the transition from puella to uxor and mulier. Notably, adulescens can be used of women, but is only very rarely so.
For young men, adulescens is a ‘younger adult’ category while iuvenis is the ‘young (but less so)’ category. There’s a lot of blurring here, rather than a hard age break, but typically adulescentes are in their teens or early twenties while iuvenes are young men from their twenties through their thirties (so yes, a 35 year old man, in Roman thought, is still a ‘youth’). The next category up was senex (senex, senis, ‘old man, elder’)), the plural of which seniores declined the Roman census age classes 46 and up (and thus mostly out of military age).
Meanwhile, you have homo and femina, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – Latin is absolutely a male-normative patriarchal language, so homo can mean both ‘man’ as distinct from ‘animal’ (and thus include all of humankind) but also ‘male’ as distinct from ‘female’. I tend to think of these words as more like ‘male’ and ‘female’ in that both can have a bit of a sneer to them: you don’t call someone you like a homo for the same reason that the newscaster reporting on, “three adult males were spotted leaving the scene” is not saying a nice thing about those three fellows.
Thus you have vir – man, as distinct from mere ‘male’ – a term of a bit more respect. Its nearest match for women is mulier (an adult woman, regardless of married status, though in Rome this is going to mostly mean widows and divorcees along with wives; never-marrieds are really rare in Roman culture). Mulier doesn’t quite carry the status that vir does – vir has real weight and is the root behind virtus. Instead, the weightier word here is matrona (matrona, matronae (f), matron, married woman, wife) which from a very early point has a sense of dignity and even social rank and so carries something closer to vir‘s sense of ‘gentleman’ with something like ‘lady,’ though honestly with even a bit more intensity (matrona can do the work for women that, in the republic, something like, ‘eques Romanus‘ “a Roman of the equestrian order” meaning “a Roman of wealth and status” does for men.). The fact that matrona derives from mater (‘mother’) also suggests something about Roman values and exactly what things get what sort of person status.
In any case, as a historian I often find I wished introductory Latin textbooks offered a bit more of this sort of thing here, taking the opportunity as they introduce those major load-bearing cultural value words to explain a little bit how they fit into the broader culture, but relatively few language textbooks do. I find I wish students learned a bit more Roman culture in Latin classes – at least compared to what I got – but then, of course, I am a historian, so I would.6
On to Recommendations:
The first story here is a bit of a bummer, but worth noting. I’ve been writing here about the jobs crisis in history and academia more broadly for some time, noting that it was a case of the system flooding, as it were, from the bottom up: lower ranked graduate programs became wholly non-competitive in a shrinking job market before the crisis impacted highly ranked programs (quite regardless of the quality of the historians involved, I might note). Well, the flooding has at last reached the upper-most decks: Harvard is cutting graduate programs across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by anywhere from 50 to 75%. History graduate admissions there will plunge from 13 annually to just 5, and the cuts extend into the sciences as well, with a 75% reduction in Biology, for instance.
I know a lot of folks read this blog to escape contemporary politics, but I feel the need to note that this is a policy choice: it is the immediate result of the current administration’s war on higher education, which will make college both more expensive and less available and also worse as an education. But it is also the long-term result of a steady erosion in policy support of higher education, of substituting state funding with private loans, over decades. This was not the product of impersonal economic forces but rather remains the product of intentional political choices and we could chose differently (and indeed, did so in the past).
Meanwhile, I wrote – behind a paywall, alas – my take on the recent gathering of US general officers at Quantico for The Dispatch. I won’t rehash that here, but as I suppose many of you have guessed, I found very little to like, a lot to dislike and a bit to fear about the speeches given there, both of which represented stark breaks with the most successful parts of the American military tradition. Subsequent reporting has suggested the audience probably agreed. I remain profoundly concerned that the United States is careening in remarkably dangerous directions, but then I was suggesting this was the road the president would take us on, and he has.
Meanwhile, in ancient history, we have another Pasts Imperfect! Stephanie Wong writes briefly about the tradition of pumpkin carving, which is actually a tradition of turnip carving, because it originated before the pumpkin arrived in the Old World. The post also highlights the amazing “Braille for Ancient Languages” project, topical blogs by Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell, and more! Well worth a look, as always.
Finally, for this week’s Book Recommendation, I’ want to recommend I’m going with a military history recommendation, J.A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army: 1610-1715 (1997). Giant of the Grand Siècle fits into a category of military history that take a single army – the army of a single state in a single period – and attempt to describe itas an organization and an institution. Reading such an approach is really valuable for the student of military history looking to move beyond mere biography or campaign history to begin to understand not just war and warfare in a period.7 Lynn’s time period is especially interesting because it covers the beginning of the trend towards institutionalization: the creation of regular systems of inspection, standardization of uniforms, regularization of pay, the first fumbling steps towards standard training for officers and so on.
Lynn provides here a portrait – a snapshot in many respects (although in individual sections he notes clearly change over time) – of the French army of the 1600s and early 1700s, when France was the premier military power in Europe. The picture will be in some ways somewhat familiar – there are captains and colonels, companies and regiments – but at the same time strikingly alien to someone familiar with modern, post-institutionalization militaries. Commands of companies and regiments were still purchased (for the most part), their officers mostly aristocrats with years in service but little formal military education, with the expectation that captains and especially colonels would employ a significant portion of their aristocratic wealth to raising and maintaining the units they commanded. Officers still raised entire units at their own expense, while fraud in payments (officers pocketing the wages of non-existent or dead soldiers) was still a commonplace.
Rather than proceeding chronologically (which would have been terribly confusing) Lynn proceeds topically, beginning with administration (pay, logistics, taxes, lodgings), then command (officers, their background, training and culture), then life for the rank and file soldiers, and then finally closing with a discussion on the practice of war itself.8 The focus here is on institutions and organizational structures (how are units structured, who pays for what, how are men trained, who comes from what background, what royal officials are present and what can they do, etc.), not on individual battles or units or even the experience of combat. That may seem boring – and at times the book can be very dry – but it can be fascinating to dive into such a large and complex organization and try to understand how it works.
For someone looking to move beyond the surface level understanding of military history, I think ti is essential to read these sorts of treatments widely, across as many kinds of militaries as possible, in as many time periods as possible, to begin to get a sense of how different militaries behave as institutions, because each one is different.
And that’s it for this week! Next week, a surprise because I am not allowed to tell you about it yet.
I really, really, really gotta point something out here.
This “ballroom” Trump Shitstain the First says he’s building is 90,000 square feet, and is going to cost THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.
Apparently. That’s what he says.
This is bullshit. He’s pocketing AT LEAST half of that money. Probably two-thirds, maybe 70%. I daresay probably 70%. Or who knows, all of it – but let’s say he’s actually going to build something and some part of the extorted “donations” will actually be spent doing so. It’s still bullshit, and he’s still pocketing most of the money.
How do I know this?
Because $300 million for 90,000 square feet is over $3330/square foot in construction cost. That’s absolutely batshit insane by any standard. The highest-end commercial construction in the US is under $1000/square foot. You’re telling me he’s going to spend over three times that?
I don’t fucking think so. It’s bullshit, and he’s keeping most of the money.
But if that’s not enough for you, consider this:
The most expensive commercial building EVER BUILT IN THE WORLD (according to Wikipedia’s list of most expensive buildings) is One Financial Centre in Hong Kong, which is, slightly ironically, two massive skyscrapers. It’s a combined two million square feet of floor space, mostly vertical, which adds assloads of cost. It is opulent as fuck and serves extremely high-end customers in an extremely wealthy city.
Excluding land costs (because shitstain has the land already), 1FC cost right around $3315/square foot to build.
Which is to say, slightly LESS than his fucking “ballroom.”
His ballroom will cost MORE per square foot than the most expensive luxury commercial construction project ever built.
Which is, again, bullshit.
He’s pocketing that money, and nobody should think for a moment otherwise.
Early voting in New York City's 2025 general election starts this Saturday, Oct. 25th. I'm writing two blog posts sharing my thinking and recommendations, one about the six ballot proposals (this one), one about the …
As it turns out, humans aren’t the only animals with a flair for drama. The 2025 Comedy Wildlife Awards (previously) presents another collection of angsty, surprised, and utterly terrified creatures around the globe. This year’s competition highlights several characters that would be right at home in a neighborhood yoga studio, from the elegant orangutan doing her own interpretation of tree pose to a fox crashing onto its neck after an all too relatable misstep.
Warren Price, “Headlock!”Paula Rustemeier, “Hit the dance floor! Foxes in a breakdance battle”Mark Meth-Cohn, “High Five”John Speirs, “It is tough being a duck”Michael Stavrakakis, “Paint Me Like One of Your Forest Girls”Grayson Bell, “Baptism Of The Unwilling Convert”Andrey Giljov, “Welcome to Zen Lemur Yoga Course!”Andrew Mortimer, “The Shoulders of Giants”Alison Tuck, “Now which direction is my nest?”Geoff Martin, “Hornbill In A Hurry”
Second paragraph of third story (“Acts of Defiance” by Eric Brown):
I worked all morning on my portable typewriter, and towards lunchtime replaced it beneath the floorboards of my study. Old habits died hard, even though I was no longer on the mainland where the government might swoop unannounced at any time. I had moved to Shapinsay after the death of my wife, fleeing painful memories and the Party both. None of us were free these days, though paradoxically I did feel a little less imprisoned on the island which measured just five miles by four.
The last of the books that I acquired at Novacon in 2021, this is a collection of fourteen short stories which were donated to the convention by their authors – quite a stellar list of contributors. I thought they were all good; the two best for me were “Acts of Defiance” by Eric Brown, in a future totalitarian Scotland where reading dangerous books has been forbidden, and “The Ships of Aleph” by Jaine Fenn, whose protagonist sails over the edge of a flat world and finds himself in a place both familiar and unfamiliar. You can get Burning Brightly here.
This was the top unread book that I had acquired in 2021, the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2021 and the sf book that had lingered longest on my shelves. That leaves only one book in my 2021 pile, Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer.
T. Kingfisher's latest Sworn Soldier novella, What Stalks The Deep, is enormously comforting, insofar as everyone, even the monster lurking in the depths, is trying their best under difficult circumstances and wants to do the right thing. I needed that, for so many reasons, oh my gosh.
My plan for fixing my life this weekend is going to demand levels of focus and time management and a willingness to confront gross surfaces that frankly I have never exhibited in my entire life, so obviously that's gonna go great.
I have a month to write either the next fake investigative journalism piece or finish the Roman engineer/selkie story. You'd think that the story where I roughly know what happens (emotionally) and have 1.2K words written would be the easy one, right? You would be wrong. I'll try writing the ending first and maybe that will help.
From record-breaking droughts and catastrophic flash floods to contaminated pipelines and increasingly thirsty AI farms, water is at the nexus of the climate crisis. The life-giving liquid is both scarce and too abundant, causing half the global population to lack sustained access to fresh drinking water, while much of the world is subject to hotter, wetter weather that subsumes communities with extreme conditions.
For designer, author, and activist Julia Watson, pinpointing myriad approaches to these all-consuming problems is one of the most critical and urgent tasks today. Her new book Lo-TEK Water, published by Taschen, highlights various Indigenous technologies and aquatic systems that could be utilized in adapting to a climate-changed world.
Toby Harriman, Ye-chan Floating Islands of the Intha, Myanmar
There are the two-meter-deep canals of Xochimilco, Mexico, which delineate 55,000 square meters of raised fields called chinampas. While built by the Aztecs to clean the water and irrigate crops, this system actually originated with the Nahua people. Similar are the floating islands of Intha Myanmar, which weave together roots, leaves, sediment, and other materials to create hydroponic beds.
Although Watson is keen to draw on ancient practices that could be more widely utilized today, she also highlights more modern approaches, like Pakistan’s Yasmeen Lari, an architect who’s responsible for devising the world’s largest program for creating shelters and cookware that leave no carbon footprint.
At 558 pages, Lo—TEK Water positions “water as an intelligent force that can shape resilient cities and landscapes. Aquatic infrastructure is reframed—from extractive and industrial into regenerative and evolving—designed to sustain life for generations,” a statement says.
Watson is a key voice in the broader Lo—TEK movement, and this new book is a companion to her previous volume focused on sustainable technologies. Find your copy on Bookshop.
Mark Lee, Loko i‘a Fishponds of the Native Hawaiians, Hawai’iHeritage Foundation of Pakistan, Zero-carbon Chulah Cookstove by Yasmeen LariValentina Rocco, Valli da Pesca Dikes, Ponds, and Canals of the Venetians, ItalyValentina Rocco, Valli da Pesca Dikes, Ponds, and Canals of the Venetians, ItalyFAO/Shizuoka Wasabi Association for Important Agricultural Heritage System Promotion Japan, Tatami-ishi Terracing System of the Japanese, JapanSimon Bourcier, Bouchot Mussel Trestles of the Bretons and Normans, FranceSimon Bourcier, Bouchot Mussel Trestles of the Bretons and Normans, France
Chess is a show I know entirely through the cast recordings; if I recall correctly, it was such a thoroughly Cold War project that the liner notes referred to the two chess players as only "the American" and "the Russian". The new book by Danny Strong turns it into a (even more) melodramatic period piece, with the chess matches not simply a allegory for political tensions or a way of obtaining minor diplomatic concessions but tools for averting World War III. The Arbiter is dragooned as a narrator, who exposits both the global situation and the personal interactions with the characters, partly through a series of very bad and very obvious jokes.
Freddie Trumper, American grandmaster and obnoxious wunderkind, is challenged by Anatoly Sergievesky, mordant, depressed, and engaged in a clandestine flirtation with Freddie's chess second and lover, Florence Vassy. Freddie is notoriously a weak point in the original book, so prone to anti-Communist slurs, misogyny, and temper tantrums it is impossible to extend him much sympathy. The new version mediates this by giving him bipolar disorder and medical noncompliance, and also by casting Aaron Tveit. Tveit is indeed so good and so charismatic that I was on Freddie's side way more than I expected, although not enough to take self-pity anthem "Pity the Child" seriously. (The rest of the audience seemed less skeptical.) Lea Michele as Florence is just as strong vocally, and almost as strong in terms of acting, though unfortunately without much romantic chemistry with either partner. (The closest any scene comes to an erotic charge is Freddie's sleazy half-assed attempt at persuading Anatoly to throw the game in Act II.) Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly is the weak point in Act I, where I had the same opinion as I had of his Sweeney Todd: he's got the potential to be great, but he isn't quite there yet. He really needs to work on his emoting, which is too flat even for the murderous Sweeney or the dour Anatoly. He is greatly handicapped in Chess by having to affect a Russian accent, which I really hope the production drops. But! He pulled out all stops in Act II, both for the songs and the acting, and won me over with his intensity and vocal power.
So basically: the book is still flawed and they need to cut the runtime, particularly in Act I. This was the second night of previews, so there's still time for changes before the show technically "opens". If we're lucky, they'll start by cutting the topical jokes.
But the point of Chess has never been the book; it is the score full of bangers and power ballads. The music is by ABBA's Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and the lyrics by Ulvaeus and Tim Rice. And the musical performances are GREAT. I am still guiltily fond of the kinda-no-really-very-racist "One Night in Bangkok" (which can plausibly be explained as Freddie's typical white guy take on the city) and which in this production is a camp masterpiece. I am seriously tempted to see the show again just for that.
I assert to you that my little town of Bradford, Ohio is in fact the literature capital of Darke County, the county in which I live, and also probably of Miami County, which I don’t live in, but which Bradford is also part (the county line runs right down the middle of Route 721, our main street).
A bold claim, I know! But hear me out! In this village of just 1,850 people:
1. Since the turn of the century, more than three dozen books written in Bradford, fiction and non-fiction alike, have been traditionally published and made available for sale all across this country!
2. Books written in Bradford have been translated into three dozen languages across the globe!
3. The number of New York Times bestselling books from Bradford reaches into the double digits!
4. Written works from Bradford have won prestigious literary prizes here and abroad!
5. Work written here in Bradford has been adapted into Emmy-winning television shows!
Which other cities, towns and villages in Darke County can make that claim? Greenville? Ansonia? North Star?!? I think not. Not even the bustling Miami Country metropolises of Troy and Piqua can match Bradford’s prodigious output!
And yes, there have been notable writers who have been from Darke County (Lowell Thomas comes to mind), but most of their work hasn’t been written in Darke County. And while bestselling works have been written about cities in Miami County (the Captain Underpants series, taking place in Piqua), again, they weren’t written in those cities. Once again, Bradford comes up on top. It is small but mighty!
Clearly the next step is to petition the village government of Bradford to have “Bradford: Literature Capital of Darke County” on all its official communication henceforth. I think it’s reasonable and accurate. I will get on it. I shall report back.
LEGO has officially unveiled the long-awaited 21363 The Goonies set, the final LEGO Ideas set of 2025! This massive 2,912-piece model is an epic celebration of The Goonies, one of the 80s most celebrated films and is packed with plenty of interactive details. 21363 The Goonies will be released on 1 November 2025 (for LEGO […]
High school student and semi-professional tarot card reader Danika Dizon assists her PI mother to look for a missing person... a teen who vanished after Danika gave her a tarot card reading.
Cultivated (lab-grown) meat has emerged from science fiction into a genuine commercial product. The promise of sustainable, animal-free meat has captured the interest of governments concerned with national food security in a time of rapid and unpredictable climate change. Supported by a rapidly developing $3Bn industry, cultivated meat is now available for limited public consumption.
However, public opinion on cultivated meat is strongly polarised. Since most people haven’t yet tried cultivated meat, preconceptions have instead been formed by its depictions in science fiction which may be either inspiringly utopian or more commonly, starkly dystopian. Real culture-grown products are being introduced to a consumer base with expectations based on imagined realities.
In this article I will introduce some of the technology that underpins the production of cultivated meat, and how its origins in the biopharmaceutical industry present both opportunities and challenges for manufacturing appetising food. How far does the reality of cultivated meat match the science fiction representation? Can scientists and storytellers work together towards a shared utopian vision of this Future Food?
A new era: the Post-burger
On Monday 5th August 2013, Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post unveiled the world’s first cultivated beef burger at a press conference in London, thus launching a new era in food. The burger was cooked and eaten, and whilst being described as ‘close to meat, but not as juicy’ and costing around $325,000 nevertheless inspired a boom in investment that saw the creation of over a hundred start-ups and university spin outs, plus a handful of very well-capitalized companies in the USA, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands (Mead, 2013; Gregory-Manning & Post, 2024). Since 2013 it is widely estimated that over $3.1 billion has been invested into cultivated meat enterprises, with a peak in 2021 (GFI, 2023). New consumer markets are opening up following regulatory approvals in Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Israel and the UK as governments recognise the value of a diversified ‘Alternative Proteins’ ecosystem in enhancing food security in response to growing population challenges and climate change.
Yet the concept of ‘synthetic’ meat has been in the public consciousness for generations. Since first being articulated in fiction in 1897 (as a gift from the Martians in Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz), social and technological revolutions have triggered particular bursts of literary creativity in the 1930s, 1950’s and 1960s, corresponding to increasingly mechanised intensive farming practices and the overall boom of technological progress in the 20th century, not least of which was in biomedicine and laboratory cell culture. In a 1931 essay on the future of science, Winston Churchill wrote:
‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished. That gloomy Utopia of tabloid meals need never be invaded. The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.’
Churchill’s predictions and the early optimism of fin de siècle authors in humankind’s salvation through science are admittedly taking some time to realise, yet the technology required to bring cultivated meat to fruition is being developed at pace.
Muscle formation starts with the proliferation of cells, which ultimately merge into long muscle fibres.
Whilst Post’s showcase burger in 2013 was created using this process, others have questioned the full-scale feasibility of the approach and sought to identify alternatives that might be easier to engineer. If the complex process of muscle synthesis ultimately results simply in fibres rich in animal protein, perhaps there are easier ways to simulate this. Since the product will be cooked as food, does it need to have the biological authenticity of true muscle?
One of the most common alternatives to true muscle cells for making cultivated ‘meats’ is in fact obtained from the connective tissue of muscle. When grown in culture, these connective tissue cells naturally form sheets, balls, and fibres, rich in collagen and proteins, yet without the characteristic cellular structure of muscle. As an achievable and scalable solution this has proven to be a successful approach for several companies, but does it meet the consumer expectation of cultivated meat? Since these cells are typically taken from animal skin biopsies, they could perhaps be more accurately described as cultivated scabs, rather than cultivated meat (Pasitka et al, 2023).
Another question is what animal’s cells to culture. Throughout human history, livestock agriculture has focussed on a very few species which were domesticated from wild animals over thousands of years. The choice of meat-giving animal in most cultures has therefore been limited by the availability of suitable animals and by the ability of the regional landscape and environment to support husbandry. Selective breeding over millennia has given rise to thousands of breeds of sheep, cows, pigs, and poultry suited to the needs of civilisations, and more recently to satisfy the efficiency requirements of intensive farming. This has given rise to some spectacular statistics: chickens are now one of the most populous animals in the world, with over 26 billion at any given moment (200 million are killed for food each day), and domesticated mammals (including cows, pigs, and sheep) form around 630 million tonnes of Earth’s biomass – compared to just 22 million tonnes for all wild land mammals (Roser, 2023; Greenspoon et al, 2023).
Such a limited focus on just a few species raises many concerns around environmental sustainability and the effects of pandemic diseases on livestock, but also provokes the following question: If we don’t have to farm the whole animal, why limit our choice to these core species? Perhaps other animals which are hard to farm traditionally have characteristics better suited to ‘cellular agriculture’ or cultivated meat farming, for example large carnivores such as lions, or species which take a long time to reach maturity, such as tortoises. Perhaps there are species that can provide even better food products when just their cells are cultured, leading to truly unique foods that could not be produced through traditional livestock farming (Kateman, 2022). H. Beam Piper presents this idea in the novel Four-Day Planet (1961), in which not only familiar livestock was available through carniculture, but also exotic alien species and unconventional food formats.
‘…the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we wanted was grown – Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan zhoumy meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest…. “You can get all the paté de foie gras you want here,” I said. “We have a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing in one of our vats.”
Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper
There has been a notable divergence in industry approaches to this concept. Whilst many have noted that consumer acceptance of cultivated meat relies on engaging a level of familiarity, others have sought to create a distinct boundary and develop cultivated meats which do not immediately meet preconceptions. The thinking goes that since most meat-eaters already have firmly established ideas of the ‘perfect’ steak, or even an emotive childhood memory of a beef burger, people will naturally compare novel foods to these core expectations, often unfavourably (Baum et al, 2021). In contrast, a tender cultivated crocodile medallion, for instance, doesn’t have the same high bar for comparison, and in many respects the cultivated version might generate a more palatable product than anything cut from a gristly wild animal.
With this change in mindset comes a surge in unlocked potential, opening 65,000 species of vertebrates for cellular cultivation. Are there species that have uniquely appealing properties, yet aren’t conventionally farmable? The African wild antelope kudu and the domesticated donkey have been identified as uniquely delicious, and yet for very different reasons are unlikely to make mainstream supermarket aisles as culled meats – yet cellular cultivation makes these a viable prospect (Pang, 2018). Companies such as Wild Bio in South Africa are developing a catalogued cell bank of native antelope and wildlife species, prized as rural bush meat but generally unavailable elsewhere in the world.
With improved genomic sequencing it may even be possible to resurrect (or engineer) cells from extinct species, as trialled by Australian cultivated meat company Vow with their ‘Mammoth Meatball’ in 2022 containing a short sequence of mammoth DNA (Carrington, 2023). Even some dinosaur structural proteins have been sequenced, not quite enough yet to make Jurassic Park (1993) a reality, but perhaps enough to introduce Tyrannosaurus collagen into chicken cell cultures (Asara et al, 2007).
Nurturing life in vitro
Regardless of the cell type chosen to form the cultivated meat, all cells require similar environments to grow – a warm, germ-free space with fresh nutrients and a method to remove metabolic waste. In living organisms, systems throughout the entire body provide these functions: the stomach and intestines turn food into simpler building blocks for new tissue growth, and the liver and kidneys filter out and excrete waste. Everything is connected by a vascular system of arteries, veins, and capillaries such that virtually no cell is more than a few millimetres from a source of nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood.
In lab-grown meat, each of these physiological processes must be provided artificially. This seemingly overwhelming task presents another opportunity for reflection – how can the many complex processes of biology be reduced to generate the ‘meat’ we want without re-creating a synthetic life support system as complex as a whole body? It is useful here to consider which systems we almost certainly don’t need to grow muscle. Firstly, although muscle has nerves running through it that provide a stimulus for contraction, we probably don’t need a whole nervous system or a brain. Sensory organs such as eyes and ears are also totally redundant. Basic nutrients such as glucose, vitamins and amino acids can be produced chemically (often at huge scale for our dietary food supplements) and provided directly in growth media, so a gastrointestinal system for digestion isn’t needed either. Waste can be controlled by simply discarding old growth media and replacing it with fresh solution, obviating the need for filtration by the liver and kidneys.
In fact, when reduced to the basic requirements for muscle growth, much of the body’s physiological processes can be eliminated or replaced. Essential requirements to sustain life still include an oxygen supply and an ever-refreshing nutrient fluid, but beyond that there is the potential to reinvent the artificial growth environment in any way that can be imagined.
‘He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.
It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.
Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak.
The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
The bioreactor
Artificial growth environments, or bioreactors, have existed for millennia. Since humans first determined that foods could be fermented to preserve them, improve their qualities, and generate alcohol, civilisations have experimented with vessels in which complex biological growth can be controlled. These first bioreactors were entirely for microbial cells and required fairly simple technology, but many of the fundamental principles still underpin modern bioreactor technology. Indeed, many bioreactor designs for cultivated meat are effectively identical to those used for microbial fermentation due to the simple fact that specialised ‘meat bioreactors’ have not yet been invented. Much of the bioreactor infrastructure that exists at the scale needed to produce cultivated meat has simply been taken from the biopharmaceutical industry by cultivated meat companies desperate to upscale their manufacturing process.
Inevitably, this necessitates some compromises. Biopharma doesn’t produce complex structured muscle tissue and hasn’t ever needed to develop the technology to do so. Therefore, currently only single cells or very small aggregates of tissue can be produced using these bioreactors.
Nevertheless, this ‘fermentation tank’ approach to growing cellular biomass has enabled the cultivated meat industry to unblock a series of scaling challenges that were widely considered impossible even a decade ago. The cost of cell culture media used to be eye-wateringly expensive, since all previous applications were small scale and generally for high-value biomedical research. Rationalisation has resulted in culture media costs decreasing by several orders of magnitude, from over £1,000 per litre to a few pence. A decade ago, it took $325,000 and a team of scientists to grow a 100g beef burger, whereas some modern companies are producing kilograms of biomass daily for a fraction of the cost.
However, this biomass is still harvested as a cell paste, and prompts a question that divides opinion: is this meat? Can a pâté-like product with no tissue structure, whilst entirely made from animal cells, satisfy consumer expectations for cultivated meat?
Cut and paste
‘I’m a goo man. I have factories all over the country. I have trucks right now loaded with goo that can be here within the week. The goo I speak of can be made into anything.’
Let Them Eat Goo, South Park S23E04
Many people think not. In fact, the typically pejorative term ‘ultra-processed food’ seems to perfectly describe cultivated meat in its current form – a manufactured paste. A 2019 episode of South Park (‘Let them eat goo’) satirises the concept of meat-alternatives, albeit in this example as a plant-based substitute, yet with striking similarities to the harvested cultivated meat cell paste. Other parallels within the cultural zeitgeist may be drawn, notably with the film Soylent Green (1973), infamously featuring the mass public consumption of an amorphous meat-alternative that is ultimately revealed to be produced from dead human bodies. There are many other examples in dystopian science fiction of pastes, slimes, and slurries as either a government-issued basic staple food, or as the basic nutritional option for a post-apocalyptic human race. For example, in The Matrix (1999), food in the Real World is described as ‘a single-celled protein, vitamin, mineral, and amino acid colloid’, which the characters compare to runny eggs at best and a bowl of snot or puke at worst. In the same movie, it is described how dead humans are recycled post-mortem by the machines into a liquid food that is intravenously infused into the unwitting living, whilst even the simulation of a real beef steak is considered to be worth fatally betraying your friends and humanity for. This commentary on the negative associations of untextured, formless foodstuffs for humans is almost universal throughout speculative fiction, and a significant consideration for unstructured cultivated meat entering the market.
The ’form factor’ that novel foods are presented in is therefore important. It has been found that a majority of people have varying degrees of food neophobia – an aversion to entirely new types of food. When given the choice people’s selection habits gravitate to the familiar (Bryant & Barnett, 2018). This is perhaps biologically understandable, since our evolutionary ancestors would have faced significant risks of poisoning or disease by the uninhibited consumption of foods which deviate from the established diet.
There may also be an underlying belief that non-solid foods are for infants, the elderly, or the very ill, whereas healthy adults predominantly consume solid foods that require chewing. There are notable exceptions to this general trend, such as soups, stews, and pâté such as foie gras at the luxury end of consumption. So not all pastes are unpalatable, but to change dietary habits en masse and encourage widespread uptake of cultivated meat, it seems that structured solid formats are preferred.
‘The food slot gave him flat reddish-brown bricks. Six times he dialled a brick, took a bite and dropped the brick into the intake hopper. Each brick tasted different, and they all tasted good.
At least he would not get bored with eating. Not soon, anyway.’
Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven
Tissue engineering
‘“These clumps of cells are spaced evenly — or, as we call it, seeded — throughout the culture medium. The solution is very carefully controlled; it changes from hour to hour as various enzymes, activators, charges of oxygen and so forth are added. The result is that in some six days the isolated clumps of cells grow to a solid, delicious mass, weighing many tons, of Juicimeet. And incidentally, when you leave each of you will be given a neat cellophane wrapped package of Juicibeef so that you can experience for yourselves, if you haven’t already done so, how delicious it is. We recommended it for broiling, grilling, roasting, or as kebabs.
“Juicimeet is subject to a continuous process of selection. In each batch, some cells respond better to the nutrient solution than do others. It is from these superior cells that the new batch is grown. Juicimeet — ” under the gauze mask he beamed at them — “becomes better all the time.”
Lazarus (1955) Margaret St. Clair
Cultivated meat is an industry only a decade old and has moved with surprising speed to develop food products using technology never intended for this purpose. Innovators have entered this field from a wide range of disciplines, but from a technological perspective they can be separated into two distinct camps: bioprocess scientists and tissue engineers.
Bioprocess scientists have so far led much of the initiative for cultivated meat, rapidly converting technologies from their original applications in biopharmaceutical synthesis, microbial fermentation, and ultra-processed food manufacturing into strategies for producing animal cells at unprecedented scales. None of these technologies has ever developed the need to create a meat-like tissue, however, so there is a natural limit to how far these existing bioprocess-based solutions alone can engineer a compelling meat-like tissue.
Tissue engineering began as a field within biomedicine in the mid-1980’s when scientific researchers began considering the future of human organ transplantation and tissue grafts. It was reasoned that our knowledge of cell biology and materials science was becoming sufficiently advanced that replacement body parts could be grown in the laboratory to reduce the reliance on donor tissues. Whilst the full potential of tissue engineering has yet to be realised as a widespread alternative to organ donation, substantial progress has been made in constructing simple 3D living tissues that are commonly used to study biological and pathological processes in the laboratory.
In tissue engineering, cells are cultured in a biomaterial scaffold which provides the basic structure over which cells can lay down a secreted protein matrix and form a realistic version of a natural piece of tissue. For biomedical applications this approach works well, but for cultivated meat there are significant challenges, particularly around the suitability of scaffolds, which must be edible and compatible with the end goal of providing a desirable food product (Bomkamp et al, 2022).
For many applications, these functions are served by hydrogels – gelatinous and highly hydrated substances derived from natural sources such as algae. Common hydrogels include ingredients familiar to many home cooks, such as agar and carrageenan, which are used as thickeners and to make vegan jellies. When mixed with animal cells they can be used to create three-dimensional spheres, strands, and sheets that gradually fill up with living, growing muscle tissue. Hydrogels are very versatile and can even be mixed with cells and extruded through a fine nozzle to ‘print’ complex 3D structures (Soleymani et al, 2024). Aleph Farms (Israel) have been developing this process for several years and have shown they are able to dual print beef muscle and fat into marbled steak-like products (Ianovici et al, 2022).
Very advanced bioprinting has several representational instances in science fiction, for example the restoration of Leeloo’s body from a single cell and a ‘tissue processor’ in Fifth Element (1997). Food prepared in this way has some similarities to the types of synthesised meat seen in science fiction. Before the Star Trek replicator (first seen in The Next Generation), original episodes made inferences to a ‘food synthesizer’ which, although making limited appearances in the series, appears to make food in coloured cubes and other shapes (‘The Conscience of the King’, 1966).
Above and beyond: Extraterrestrial cultivated meat
One of the greatest potential markets for cultivated meat may be in space. Several space agencies have dedicated research and funding to the challenges of growing food in flight in an effort to mitigate the problems of uploading full crew provisions. The upload mass cost and inflight storage requirements for long duration spaceflight missions and the establishment of colonies on the moon and Mars are considerable. The nutritional deterioration of food over time, the risks of spoilage, and crew psychology are additional considerations that become more severe with increasing mission duration. Substantial progress has been made in hydroponic plant agriculture in microgravity, suggesting that astronauts will in future be able to grow much of their own food in-flight, providing freshly synthesised vitamins and micronutrients to supplement their otherwise monotonous diet of freeze-dried rations (NASA). But will all astronauts become vegan?
‘”Where would they get a real steer?”
“There are some around for story props in the various entertainment media, that sort of thing. A few of the outback planets where they haven’t the technology for pseudoflesh still raise cattle for food.”’
Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert
It is highly unlikely that we will be sending livestock on any upcoming spaceflight missions. Mars will not be stocked with cows, pigs, and chickens. Aquaculture might be economically realistic off Earth, and potentially mycoculture could produce textured mushrooms and fermented mycoproteins (such as Quorn), but for freshly synthesised animal protein the only real option appears to be some form of cultivated meat.
Science fiction has identified this as a rich source of material for speculating on how spacefaring humanity will grow food. In The Expanse series of Novels (2011-21) by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing as James S. A. Corey), vat-grown meat is specifically mentioned as being consumed as a general staple, particularly in resource-poor regions of the solar system such as the (asteroid) Belt. In the novel series vat-grown meat is depicted as a supplement to basic dried food (plant-based kibble), yet inferior to authentic animal-derived meat (associated with the bourgeois inner planets). In the TV series adaptation ‘okra-infused tank-grown ribs’ (Episode S01E08 “Salvage”) are mentioned, indicating a curious level of consideration for restaurant marketing language to make the cultivated meat appealing to a consumer. In contrast to much science fiction, The Expanse is generally considered to present food of the future in relatively appealing ways, with home-style family recipes being cherished and served with eagerness.
The cultural negotiation of Alternative Meat
The term ‘cultivated meat’ was proposed in 2015 by Isha Datar and an online community consultation at US-based New Harvest. The online poll for a new umbrella term was in response to intense pushback from the livestock farming community against the use of ‘clean meat’, which was deemed derogatory to ‘dirty’ farmed animal meat. Other terms, such as cultured meat, lab-grown meat, even immaculate meat have been proposed and interchangeably used, but always with a sizeable degree of public rejection.
There has also been some regulatory rejection of these terms, particularly around the conserved use of meat in these labels. Should cultivated and farmed products both carry the same name? Several companies have sought to avoid the m-word entirely, launching products as a brand such as Qualia and Forged Gras (Vow, Australia 2024), and Chick Bites (Meatly, UK 2025), whilst others are more embracing of non-traditional labelling, for example GOOD Meat 3 (Good Meat USA, 2022). There is an opportunity for speculative writers to help with this cultural navigation and develop new terms that surmount the word meat.
ChickieNobs, presented by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake (2003) goes some way to showing how parallels in branding and marketing can be made between cultivated meat and retail strategies for processed meats by fast food companies. Chicken ‘nuggets’ were invented (but never patented) in the 1950s by Robert C. Baker as a way to maximise the untextured meat reclaimed from a carcass (Baker et al, 1966). Much like cultivated meat, consumers overlook the process (which can be off-putting) and focus instead on the taste and marketing, leading to the estimated global consumption of 34 million McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets per day.
“What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.
“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one.”
Oryx and Crake (2003) Margaret Atwood
Cultivating the appeal
Speculative fiction typically presents cultivated meat as an inferior alternative to animal meat -either as a cheaper substitute for the poorer classes, or as the only option in dystopian society (Castle, 2022).
The origin of real cultivated meat in biomedicine, tissue engineering and pharmaceuticals manufacturing has given us a technological legacy of stainless steel, chemical reagents, clean rooms, and lab-coats that is perhaps not entirely appealing as a food-producing system. Much of our relationship with food comes from heritage – relishing the foods of our childhood, proudly defending regional specialities, and embarking on gastronomic tours of foreign cultures. Our emotional responses to food are also fed by the evocative traditional methods used to create them. Cured meats, yeasted breads and cultured cheeses involve carefully controlled microbial monoculture and significant amounts of chemistry, yet the culinary storytelling around artisanal foods is markedly different to the biotechnology-produced cultivated meat.
Modern factories for cured meats, cheese, and bread are now of course mainly stainless-steel clean rooms, but this is probably not the image that consumers associate with a product, and is certainly not evident in the heritage-centred branding of most commercial producers. With a growing rejection of mass-produced, ultra-processed food and the migration of middle-class shoppers to the ‘slow food’ movement, there is an opportunity for cultivated meat to embrace shifting consumer attitudes and represent cultivated meat scientists as artisans.
Direct domestic production of cultivated meat may also be possible in the near future. Could involving the consumer as central to the production process make cultivated meat as emotionally appealing as other home-grown produce?
‘…large laboratories in every city had produced synthetic food and meats, grown in large test tubes. The method was adequate in every way to the needs of the populace, but the manner of distribution was still antiquated. Hubler perfected a small but complete production laboratory, not much larger than the electric refrigerators of the past century. His product in its preparation was entirely automatic and practically foolproof. It would generate, day by day, and year by year, a complete and attractive food supply for a family of two. It not only created the food, but there was an auxiliary machine which prepared it for the table in any form desired by the consumer. All that was necessary was the selection of one of the twenty-five menus and the pressing of the proper buttons.’
Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Kelle
Collaborative projects between scientists and designers are helping to navigate the cultural landscape of novel foods. These interdisciplinary projects provide both groups the opportunity to approach their research from a very different perspective.
For example, the ‘Acre cure’ design project explores a conceptual product set 10–15 years in the future, imagining how lab-grown meat might be introduced and accepted in our daily lives. Through design, branding, and cultural familiarity, the project aims to normalise lab-grown meat as part of everyday life (Tom Darwin, University of Northumbria). The concept has similarities with the domestic ‘meat makers’ in the Terra Ignota quartet by Ada Palmer (2016-21) which grow 3D printed meat from stored genetic patterns fed by nutrient pouches purchased by the consumer. The overall process is described as something like a bread maker appliance, requiring several hours (although more realistically days) to grow the food.
In some instances then it seems that cultivated meat can be acceptable if it is a product that can be nurtured, personalised, and perhaps even be personified. Our agrarian heritage has led us to embrace domestication and husbandry to the point that we anthropomorphise farmyard animals and name our sourdough starters. In The End of the Line by James Schmitz (1951) the three biologists in the crew tend to Albert II, ‘as close a thing to a self-restoring six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed’. Albert II is personified and carefully nurtured. ‘He’ is seemingly appreciated by the crew who recognise the nutritive value but accept the limitations as an unoriginal staple ingredient by this point in their lives, but potentially improved with local accompaniments. Despite the 1951 publication date, the depiction of cultivated meat personified as Albert II is strikingly similar to our current biomanufacturing processes.
‘Chemical balances, temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant, and nutritive currents—all had to be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without notice. If they weren’t catered to regardless, he languished and within the week perversely died. …At Cusat’s suggestion, [they] trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory rate.
“That did it, I guess,” Cusat said, pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they’d sliced off. “Might as well have a barbecue now.”’
–The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz
Conclusions: Food of the Future
The progress of cultivated meat from proof of concept in 2013 to commercial reality in 2025 has been rapid, fuelled by the desire for a sustainable global protein revolution. Adapting pre-existing biomedical technology has enabled this nascent industry to rapidly bootstrap itself to Minimal Viable Product stage, but it is clear that whole new areas of science and engineering need to be created to realise the true authentic vision of cultivated meat.
What these technologies will look like and the food formats they will produce is still unclear, yet it is evident that storytelling will be equally crucial in their gaining widespread consumer acceptance. Throughout the examples used in this article in may be observed that embedding the cultivation of meat at the centre of the story correlates with a more positive representation. The nurturing of the cultivated meat by characters in the story is reminiscent of the bond between nomadic herders and their livestock – a mutual (if imbalanced) life-sustaining partnership.
Humans are a farming species. We are often happiest when actively involved with cultivating our own food and caring for the animals that give us sustenance. This central human desire to nurture life perhaps provides a useful lens for exploring how science and fiction can come together to navigate the growing impact of cultivated meat.
References
Abmayr SM, Pavlath GK (2012) Myoblast fusion: lessons from flies and mice. Development. 139, 641-56
Asara JM, Schweitzer MH, Freimark LM, Phillips M, Cantley LC (2007) Protein sequences from mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex revealed by mass spectrometry. Science 316, 280-285
Baum CM, Bröring S, Lagerkvist CJ (2021) Information, attitudes, and consumer evaluations of cultivated meat. Food Quality and Preference 92:104226.
Baker RC, Darrah LB, Darfler JM (1966) The Use of Fowl for Convenience Items. Poultry Science. 45, 1017–1025
Bomkamp C, Skaalure SC, Fernando GF, Ben‐Arye T, Swartz EW, Specht EA. Scaffolding biomaterials for 3D cultivated meat: prospects and challenges (2022) Advanced Science. 9, 2102908.
Bryant C, Barnett J (2018) Consumer acceptance of cultured meat: A systematic review. Meat science. 143, 8-17.
Greenspoon L, Krieger E, Sender R, Rosenberg Y, Bar-On YM, Moran U, Antman T, Meiri S, Roll U, Noor E, Milo R (2023) The global biomass of wild mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2204892120
Ianovici I, Zagury Y, Redenski I, Lavon N, Levenberg S (2022) 3D-printable plant protein-enriched scaffolds for cultivated meat development. Biomaterials 284,121487.
Pang K (2018) Andrew Zimmern picks the best- and worst-tasting animals. In TheTakeOut online, available at ‘https://www.thetakeout.com/andrew-zimmern-picks-the-best-and-worst-tasting-animal-1798251700/- [Online resource]
Pasitka L, Cohen M, Ehrlich A, Gildor B, Reuveni E, Ayyash M, Wissotsky G, Herscovici A, Kaminker R, Niv A, Bitcover R. (2023) Spontaneous immortalization of chicken fibroblasts generates stable, high-yield cell lines for serum-free production of cultured meat. Nature Food. 4, 35-50
Soleymani S, Naghib SM, Mozafari MR (2024) An overview of cultured meat and stem cell bioprinting: How to make it, challenges and prospects, environmental effects, society’s culture and the influence of religions. Journal of Agriculture and Food Research 18, 101307.
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James Henstock is Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom. His research involves creating lab-grown tissues for research in regenerative medicine. Between 2021-2023 he was also senior scientist at cultivated meat company Vow in Australia. James also works with the European Space Agency to design the in-flight bioscience equipment needed to enable crewed exploration of the solar system.
I had a run-off-my-feet day, but I love the newly revealed cover for Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and shortly forthcoming from Psychopomp, in whose liminal mosaic is reprinted my queer, maritime, ice-dreaming story "Twice Every Day Returning." I am looking forward to that table of contents for myself. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of isis: British Airways' "May We Haveth One's Attention" (2024) may be the most charming safety video I have seen since the legendary "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012). My only excuse for missing it last year is that I can't remember sleeping that month.
4. I discovered the inimitably named Blackbeard's Tea Party some years ago with the furious drumbeat of their "Ford o' Kabul River" and then almost immediately lost track of them again, but as they seem to have come out since with the whaling EP Leviathan! (2018) and the nightmare siren song of "Mother Carey," we're still good. Since they closed their first album with "Chicken on a Raft," I am delighted that their recorded repertoire now also includes "Roll and Go."
5. I meant last week to link the Divine Comedy's "Invisible Thread" (2025), especially since it was my father who found it after I had sent him another song from the same album.
Her memory for a blessing, Darleane Hoffman who studied transuranic elements and still got to die at ninety-eight. She was not unstable.
What's on the shield? Barking and Dagenham: two keys on a sword; two croziers on a lily; well smack in full sail; cogwheel Barnet: paschal lamb carrying cross standard; two roses; Saxon crown Bexley: wavy stripes; oak tree, cogwheel Brent: cross-topped orb; two swords; two seaxes Bromley: cinquefoil; 15 acorns Camden: mitre; three shells City of London: sword Croydon: cross flory; two swords; two keys Ealing: three Saxon crowns; oak tree on grassy mount Enfield: enfield; wavy bars Greenwich: cannon barrel; lion's face; two hour glasses; two stars Hackney: Maltese cross; two oak trees; three bells Hammersmith and Fulham: two hammers on a horseshoe; two swords on a mitre Haringey: eight lightning rays Harrow: flaming torch; organ stop; quill pen; wooded mount Havering: ruby ring Hillingdon: four wreaths; eagle clutching fleur-de-lis and cogwheel Hounslow: two wings; sword; wavy lines; rampant lion Islington: two ringlets; crescent; open book on Maltese cross Kensington and Chelsea: three crowns; mitre Kingston upon Thames: three salmon Lambeth: cross; two stars; mitre on crozier; 15 gold roundels Lewisham: two crowned lions; sailing ship Merton: eagle; two keys on a sword; lion; Harrington knot Newham: sailing ship; crozier; two hammers Redbridge: four leopards' faces; three martlets; oak tree with acorns Richmond upon Thames: chained portcullis; eight fleurs-de-Lys Southwark: sailing ship; red rose; four cinquefoils; wellhead Sutton: two keys on two discs; two oak sprigs; biplane aeroplane in flight; rising Sun Tower Hamlets: fire tongs; mulberry sprig; weaver's shuttle; sailing boat Waltham Forest: three oak trees; crown; stag's head Wandsworth: teardrops Westminster: two roses; five martlets; cross flory; two wolves' heads; Madonna and child
22 objects in borough crests
Curfew tower of Barking Abbey, two-bladed airscrew, white horse of Kent, elephant, beech leaves, anchor, St Augustine's churchtower, Viking ship, cogwheel, domed gateway with bull's head, talbot with posthorn, water-bougets, broom, half a wheatsheaf, two dolphins, sprigs of lavender, chough, swan with a mouthful of roses, popinjay, the White Tower, dragonheaded boat, portcullis
32 mottos Service: To serve the people, We serve, We serve, We govern by serving, Through difficulties serve God in faith, United to serve, Unity accomplishes service Unity: What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity, Fellowship is life, Not for self but for all Progress: Progress with unity, In unity progress, Forward, Forward together, Progress with humanity, Let us go forward together, Progress with the people Judgement: By the grace of God let us be judged by our deeds, Justice is our tower, Let us be judged by our actions, Let us be regarded according to our conduct Strength: Boldly and rightly, By industry ever stronger, Stand fast in honour and strength Welfare: The wellbeing of the people is the highest law, The welfare of the people is the most important consideration Piety: Lord guide us, From God and the King, O Lord watch over the city Aspiration: Let us strive for perfection, From great things to greater Freedom: Liberty motto-less: Kingston-upon-Thames
LEGO Ideas has been leaning heavily into the 80s this year with 21361 Gremlins: Gizmo, and the upcoming The Goonies set, and it’s not hard to see why. The 80s are to some, the pinnacle of pop culture so it’s not surprising that LEGO is keen to mine it for sets and ideas, which has […]
And are there any circumstances where a mount can be done without a
pre-existing mount point (i.e. a mount point appears out of thin air)?
I think there is one answer for why this is a good idea in general
and otherwise complex to do, although you can argue about it, and
then a second historical answer based on how mount points were
initially implemented.
The general problem is directory listings. We obviously want and
need mount points to appear in readdir() results, but in the kernel,
directory listings are historically the responsibility of filesystems
and are generated and returned in pieces on the fly (which is clearly
necessary if you have a giant directory; the kernel doesn't read
the entire thing into memory and then start giving your program
slices out of it as you ask). If mount points never appear in the
underlying directory, then they must be inserted at some point in
this process. If mount points can sometimes exist and sometimes
not, it's worse; you need to somehow keep track of which ones
actually exist and then add the ones that don't at the end of the
directory listing. The simplest way to make sure that mount points
always exist in directory listings is to require them to have an
existence in the underlying filesystem.
The historical answer is that in early versions of Unix, filesystems
were actually mounted on top of inodes, not directories (or filesystem
objects). When you passed a (directory) path to the mount(2) system
call, all it was used for was getting the corresponding inode, which
was then flagged as '(this) inode is mounted on' and linked (sort
of) to the new mounted filesystem on top of it. All of the things
that dealt with mount points and mounted filesystem did so by inode
and inode number, with no further use of the paths and the root
inode of the mounted filesystem being quietly substituted for the
mounted-on inode. All of the mechanics of this needed the inode and
directory entry for the name to actually exist (and V7 required the
name to be a directory).
I don't think modern kernels (Linux or otherwise) still use this
approach to handling mounts, but I believe it lingered on for quite
a while. And it's a sufficiently obvious and attractive implementation
choice that early versions of Linux also used it (see the Linux
0.96c version of iget() in fs/inode.c).
Sidebar: The details of how mounts worked in V7
When you passed a path to the mount(2) system call (called 'smount()'
in sys/sys3.c), it
used the name to get the inode and then set the IMOUNT flag from
sys/h/inode.h
on it (and put the mount details in a fixed size array of mounts,
which wasn't very big). When
iget() in sys/iget.c was
fetching inodes for you and you'd asked for an IMOUNT inode, it
gave you the root inode of the filesystem instead, which worked in
cooperation with name lookup in a directory (the name lookup in the
directory would find the underlying inode number, and then iget()
would turn it into the mounted filesystem's root inode). This gave
Research Unix a simple, low code approach to finding and checking
for mount points, at the cost of pinning a few more inodes into
memory (not necessarily a small thing when even a big V7 system
only had at most 200 inodes in memory at once, but then a big V7
system was limited to 8 mounts, see h/param.h).
While some ideas get shelved entirely, some ideas are merely on the back burner for a while before becoming fully realized ideas and narratives. Such was the case for author J. R. Blanes, who kept returning to the idea that ended up becoming his newest novel, Portrait of Decay. Follow along to see how a friend inspired Blanes to have this idea in the first place.
J. R. BLANES:
A friend once asked me, “If you couldn’t create, what would you do?” Since I’ve been a creator all my life—writing stories, playing music, and any number of other creative endeavors—I’d never considered what would happen if that was taken from me. My entire identity, my life even, is intrinsically tied to my imagination. Without the ability to create, I wouldn’t be the same person. I don’t know who I would be. For all I know, I might not exist.
Now, I think what my friend was really asking was what I’d do for a career if I couldn’t create, but that first interpretation of his question stuck in my head. I was struggling with my identity as a writer at the time. I’d spent years writing literary fiction with increasingly less satisfaction and very little success. Frustrated, I returned to my roots and my first love: horror. I’d grown up reading the likes of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe before graduating to Stephen King and Clive Barker (my biggest influence). Even after I began writing horror again, I wasn’t sure what kind of horror writer I wanted to be. I wrote some short stories—a few published, many others thrown into the trunk to rot—and hoped that one day soon I’d find my voice.
Portraits of Decay started as a short story about a young woman who travels to see a swamp witch to buy a poison that will trap her cheating boyfriend under her control. As far as story plots go, it was very thin, which was why I shelved it for a while for other projects. Yet I kept coming back to it, knowing there was something there. I just didn’t know what. I really wanted to write about New Orleans and the effect the city had on me during the years it was a home away from home while I worked for a private passenger train company out of Chicago. I yearned to invoke its culture, its traditions, and its folklore through the lens of my imagination. Still, all I had was a somewhat cliché revenge tale. I knew there needed to be more.
My friend’s question sparked a conflagration: What if I explored what happened to an artist when he no longer had the ability to create—as he slowly lost his identity (or soul, if you will) while withering into nothing? I imagined what emotions I’d feel if I was trapped with the ideas, thoughts, and anxieties in my head. The dark path I might take with no outlet to express these pieces of myself. A path that would surely lead to depression, anger, and even madness. While contemplating such an existence, I endured extreme panic attacks and bouts of intense fear. It’s with these intense emotions that I painted the main character of Portraits of Decay, Jefferson Fontenot, as he suffers at the hands of his girlfriend Gemma Landry after she doses him with a concoction from swamp witch Mirlande St. Pierre.
To ground these themes of obsession and control, I turned to another form of art well-remembered from my time in New Orleans. I remembered checking out the galleries around Royal Street, the Bywater, and Faubourg Marigny: The art I witnessed captured the vibrant atmosphere, multiculturalism, and colorful landscape of NOLA. It also captured the dark lore that ran through its streets and floated along the swamps of the bayou. Writing from the artists’ point of view provided the narrative with a visual aspect to the loss of identity. My descriptions of the emotions and struggles my characters move through in the course of the novel are framed through the lens of art. To make this world as visceral and instinctive as brushstrokes on canvas, I spent many hours researching the art world—talking with artists, visiting galleries, and working with my editor who is a painter herself.
What would I do if I couldn’t create? My novel Portraits of Decay is the closest I can come to an answer. In writing this book, I found my voice as a writer amidst the terror of its loss.
Our good friends the Lowthers visited a couple of nights ago, and I wanted to make curries. I asked them ahead of time what their favourites were so I could have a stab at making them (as well as the dhansak that’s my favourite and the korma that is Fiona’s). They are not at all authentic, but they came out well enough that our friends asked for the recipes. So here they are.
Last night’s curries. From top to bottom: chicken bhuna, chicken dhansak, pilau rice, chicken korma, chicken and mushroom balti.
All these curries start from a base of onion puree. The day before, I peeled and thinly sliced six onions, fried them gently in plenty oil until they mulched down, then pureed them in a blender and returned them to cook through, reducing and intensifying. You can do this well in advance in batches, and freeze it till you need it.
All four curries used chicken. I defrosted a 1 kg bag of cheap chicken breasts from Lidl, then chopped them into pieces, and marinated them overnight in a mixture of spices (salt, freshly ground black pepper, ground ginger, cumin, coriander, paprika and turmeric), lemon juice, and a small amount of natural yoghurt. This, too, I did the day before, to allow plenty of time for the marinade to do its work.
On the night, I cooked the chicken. I started with plenty of oil in a pan. When it was good and hot, I added cumin seeds; after a minute or so, finely chopped ginger root; after another minute or two, finely chopped garlic. Then just before the garlic started to burn, I added in the chicken, turned it well to mix in the cumin/ginger/garlic, and left it to cook gently with a lid on.
Meanhwhile, I fried some onions in big chunks. I also cooked some lentils for the dhansak — green lentils simmered for a while in chicken stock with whole peppercorns, then when they’d started to soften, I added red lentils and kept simmering till they were all cooked.
Once the chicken was cooked, I removed it with a slotted spoon, keeping all the juices and oils that had come off it, and topping the liquid up with more oil. To this, I added plenty more spices (the same ones I listed above), enough to make a thick paste with the liquid, and cooked it off for a while, before adding in the onion puree from the previous night and bringing it all to a simmer. Separately, I finely chopped a tin of tomatoes.
This is the point where I split the base into the four curries. They each got a more or less equal portion of the chicken and of the base curry sauce. Then I did different things to each of the four.
The dhansak got the cooked lentils, some lemon juice, and some thinly sliced ginger rot.
The korma got a lot of natural yoghurt and some flaked almonds.
The bhuna got half the tomatoes plus some concentrated tomato puree, the cooked onions, a teaspoon of finely chopped lime pickle, and plenty of coriander leaf. (I could also have given it a kick of chili at this point, but I passed.)
The balti got the other half of the tomatoes, some sliced mushrooms, and some ground coriander. (What makes it a balti rather than a curry? The truth is, they are pretty much the same thing. Don’t @ me.)
And that’s pretty much it. From there, it’s a matter of keeping them warm as they cook through, tending to their textures (adding a bit of water when necessary), and synchronizing with the rice.
To serve, I decanted each curry into a balti dish, and garnished: the dhansak with more fine slices of ginger, the korma with more flaked almonds, and the other two with more coriander leaf.
Oh, and the rice: I washed some basmati rice three times to remove starch, added an equal volume of water, plus some salt, fennel seeds, star anise and cardomom pods. I cooked it in a rice cooker. When it had finished cooking, about 20 minutes before I wanted to serve, I sprinkled a little red and a little yellow food coloring over the surface and left it. After 20 minutes, I mixed all the rice up together, spreading the coloured grains throughout.
Ahoy there, adventure gamers! monkeyisland is a community for the beloved classic game series Monkey Island, featuring the comedic swashbuckling adventures of the improbably-named Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™. Anything about Monkey Island is fair game: your own fanworks (art, fic, videos, games, music, cosplay, memes/silliness, whatever), recs of others' fanworks, livestreams/let's-plays, discussions, news and articles, tips for messing about in the game resources or scripting, requests for hints, screenshots, all that good stuff. If Monkey Island is your jamrum rum and jam (it's an old pirate favorite, everybody knows that), then come on over and have a grog.
This is a rather unexpected article that suggests that some mRNA vaccines can potentiate the actions of some immune-checkpoint therapies used in oncology. Specifically, the authors find that the mRNA coronavirus vaccines significantly increased overall survival rates in those patients who were getting anti-PD-1 antibodies as immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy (!)
In a welcome reverse of the usual way we end up studying cancer therapies, this effect could be replicated in mice. There was a strong synergistic effect of mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccination and anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody treatment in mouse cancer models, well beyond what either could achieve on their own. And this seems to be driven through Type 1 interferon pathways (which may remind you of the cancer vaccine work that I blogged about here the other day).
It wasn’t the spike-protein mRNA that did this specifically - the authors replaced that with mRNA against a cytomegalovirus antigen and this vaccination had the same effect. So it’s the immune-potentiating effect of the mRNA dose itself that’s helping, not anything to do with the specific antigen that’s it’s aimed at. The authors went to some trouble to try to figure out the mechanism behind this. They rigorously purified out any remaining double-stranded RNA that might have been in the vaccine doses, but that had no effect. On the other hand, changing the lipid nanoparticle formulation did wipe out the benefits - coupling that with other literature reports, they hypothesize that the LNPs form higher-molecular-weight secondary RNA structures that activate some of the innate immune receptors (like MDA5) that are watching for double-stranded RNA as a sign of viral infection.
They were able to demonstrate strong immune activation in the mice after these doses through multiple interferon-driven pathways, but (interestingly) could only partially replicate it by dosing them with interferon-alpha itself. Both innate and adaptive immune responses kicked into gear. So there’s a lot going on in there, and it’s safe to assume that we don’t know the whole story yet, but what seems clear is that the RNA-LNP vaccination primes the immune system for activation, presentation, and recognition of many tumor-associated antigen proteins, and that these effects are strongly potentiated if you’re simultaneously being treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors like the anti-PD1 monoclonal antibodies.
Another interesting effect was that in human volunteers the cytokine response to the vaccines was stronger with the Moderna shot (mRNA-1273) than it was with the Pfizer-BioNTech one (BNT162b2), and this appears to be a sheer effect of the former vaccine having more total mRNA in it (!) The mRNA vaccines seem to amplify tumor PD-L1 across a wide range of tumor types, and this effect even seems to extend to immunologically “cold” tumors that would otherwise have been considered not to be responding to treatment.
This is really, really good news, and it immediately suggests that patients who are eligible for immune-checkpoint therapy (things like Keytruda, Opdivo, Tecentriq, Bavencio, Imfinzi, etc.) should be dosed with some sort of LNP-mRNA shot right along with it. And it also suggests that there are patients who might not be thought to benefit from such ICI treatment who should be given a crack at it with this protocol, since the enhancement seems so robust. There’s obviously a lot more to be worked out as far as doses of mRNA, timing, formulations, tumor types and all sorts of other factors, but the survival curves in this paper argue against waiting for patients who are being treated right now. The benefits seem to be very real, and the risks - particularly compared to the underlying cancers - seem to be very low. Go for it!
I made this point the other day, and I want to make it again, because it cannot be overemphasized: there is still so much that we don’t know about immunology. We literally don’t know when something great like this will pop up, so we have to keep banging away in these areas and discovering as we go along. And while I’m at it, there is another thing that cannot be overemphasized: if you are spreading doubts and fears about vaccines and about mRNA research, you are killing people who could benefit. Killing them by not protecting them from the diseases being vaccinated against. Killing them by making them suspicious of advances in medical science in general. Killing them by driving them away from things like this new work that could fight completely unrelated diseases like cancer.
That’s you, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That’s you, Jay Bhattacharya. That’s you, Marty Makary. And all the rest of your minions and gofers and toadies. You have chosen the side of death and human suffering, and in a better world than this one you would be disgraced and shunned for it.
From a record-breaking 60,636 submissions, the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition (previously) has selected 100 images that capture the breadth of life on Earth. The 61st annual contest, helmed by Natural History Museum, London, features a diverse array of habitats, from a brown hyena skulking through an abandoned Namibian diamond mine to an orb weaver spider illuminated by the kaleidoscopic glow of headlights. Together, the photos present a timely consideration of our impact on the environment, along with an astounding glimpse at the planet’s many gems.
As usual, you can find a fraction of the winning images below, but all are available for viewing on the museum’s website or in person through July 12, 2026. Photographers can also submit their works for the 2026 competition through December 4.
Wim van den Heever, “Ghost Town Visitor”Simone Baumeister, “Caught in the Headlights”Quentin Martinez, “Frolicking Frogs”Georgina Steytler, “Mad Hatterpillar”Chien Lee, “Deadly Allure”Luca Lorenz, “Meet the Neighbours”Alexey Kharitonov, “Autumn Icon”Andrea Dominizi, “After the Destruction”Javier Aznar González de Rueda, “Rattled”Luca Lorenz, “Dawn Watch”
The city, and indeed the planet, have a strange history and an oddly mixed economy.
A very solid and enjoyable Bernice Summerfield novel by Terrance Dicks, bringing her and Chris Cwej to a large city called, er, Megacity, where a huge corporate crime scheme called The Project is bubbling under the surface, and parts of the story are told in the first person by an intellectually enhanced Ogron who is a private eye. It’s not trying to be deep, it’s just trying to be fun, and it succeeds. You can get Mean Streets here (at a price).
That takes me to the end of the Bernice Summerfield novels that I read ten years ago and failed to blog at the time. I’ll jump now to the unblogged Eighth Doctor novels, starting with Time Zero by Justin Richards.
The August 2023 Nightmares Underneath Bundle featuring The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Chthonstone Games.
The Smith chart from electrical engineering is the image of a Cartesian grid under the function
f(z) = (z − 1)/(z + 1).
More specifically, it’s the image of a grid in the right half-plane.
This post will derive the basic mathematical properties of this graph but will not go into the applications. Said another way, I’ll explain how to make a Smith chart, not how to use one.
We will use z to denote points in the right half-plane and w to denote the image of these points under f. We will speak of lines in the z plane and the circles they correspond to in the w plane.
Möbius transformations
Our function f is a special case of a Möbius transformation. There is a theorem that says Möbius transformation map generalized circles to generalized circles. Here a generalized circle means a circle or a line; you can think of a line as a circle with infinite radius. We’re going to get a lot of mileage out of that theorem.
Image of the imaginary axis
The function f maps the imaginary axis in the z plane to the unit circle in the w plane. We can prove this using the theorem above. The imaginary axis is a line, so it’s image is either a line or a circle. We can take three points on the imaginary axis in the z plane and see where they go.
When we pick z equal to 0, i, and −i from the imaginary axis we get w values of −1, i, and −i. These three w values do not line on a line, so the image of the imaginary axis must be a circle. Furthermore, three points uniquely determine a circle, so the image of the imaginary axis is the circle containing −1, i, and −i, i.e. the unit circle.
Image of the right half-plane
The imaginary axis is the boundary of the right half-plane. Since it is mapped to the unit circle, the right half-plane is either mapped to the interior of the unit circle or the exterior of the unit circle. The point z = 1 goes to w = 0, and so the right half-plane is mapped inside the unit circle.
Images of vertical lines
Let’s think about what happens to vertical lines in the z plane, lines with constant positive real part. The images of these lines in the w plane must be either lines or circles. And since the right-half plane gets mapped inside the unit circle, these lines must get mapped to circles.
We can say a little more. All lines contain the point ∞, and f(∞) = 1, so the image of every vertical line in the z plane is a circle in the w plane, inside the unit circle and tangent to the unit circle at w = 1. (Tossing around ∞ is a bit informal, but it’s easy to make rigorous.)
The vertical lines in the z plane
map to tangent circles in the w plane.
Images of horizontal lines
Next, let’s think about horizontal lines in the z plane, lines with constant imaginary part. The image of these lines is either a line or a circle. Which is it? The image of a line is a line if it contains ∞, otherwise it’s a circle. Now f(z) = ∞ if and only if z = −1, and so the image of the real axis is a line, but the image of every other horizontal line is a circle.
Since f(∞) = 1, the image of every horizontal line passes through 1, just as the images of all the vertical lines passes through 1.
Since horizontal lines extend past the right half-plane, the image circles extend past the unit circle. The part of the line with positive real part gets mapped inside the unit circle, and the part of the line with negative real part gets mapped outside the unit circle. In particular, the image of the positive real axis is the interval [−1, 1].
Möbius transformations are conformal maps, and so they preserve angles of intersection. Since horizontal lines are perpendicular to vertical lines, the circles that are the images of the horizontal lines meet the circles that are the images of vertical lines at right angles.
The horizontal rays in the z plane
become partial circles in the w plane.
If we were to look at horizontal lines rather than rays, i.e. if we extended the lines into the left half-plane, the images in the w plane would be full circles.
Now let’s put our images together. The grid
in the z plane becomes the following in the w plane.
An evenly spaced grid in the z plane becomes a very unevenly spaced graph in the w plane. Things are crowded on the right hand side and sparse on the left. A useable Smith chart needs to be roughly evenly filled in, which means it has to be the image of an unevenly filled in grid in the z plane. For example, you’d need more vertical lines in the z plane with small real values than with large real values.
A Random Walk through the Goblin Library" by Chris Willrich [Beneath Ceaseless Skies]. Superlative fantasy + math short story. I am excited to FINALLY be able to shout about this now that it's published - I had the privilege of reading this in draft and I love it to pieces. :3
I woke up this morning wondering, "Why am I so cold?" I have the bed's heating mattress set on high, even though the temperature outside is only at freezing (well, 2C/35F anyway), but I'm still cold.
The cat demanded food, so I went downstairs to feed her. I checked the house thermostat. Ah! The batteries on the thermostat were drained, so the furnace was not running at all. I put the batteries in the recharger, but I have no AAA-sized batteries right now that are charged. It will be hours before I can get even a temporary respite from the cold.
I went back upstairs and checked the thermometer (the CO2 meter) by my bedside. It's 12C/54F in my bedroom. That's why I'm so cold this morning. Problem identified, and the fix is on the way.
P.S. The cat finished her meal, came back upstairs, and clawed her way under the sheets in my bed. I turned the heating mattress back on for her. I'm at my computer, wrapped in a thick bath robe for warmth.
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.
Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.
As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.
45 Squared 37) CLEAVER SQUARE, SE11
Borough of Lambeth, 110m×40m
London's first garden squares date back to the 17th century but it took until 1789 before the first appeared south of the river. It all kicked off when Mary Cleaver sold her field alongside the Clapham turnpike to the landlord of the Horns Tavern, who then laid out and developed the square one side at a time. The meadow had been called White Bear Field, hence The White Bear pub just round the corner which is of a similar vintage. The new development was named after two houses called Princes Place, between which lay the access point off Kennington Park Road, hence it became Princes Square. Only in 1937 was the name changed to Cleaver Square to reflect the original owner of the land. Thus we now find an oblong square within the Kennington Triangle not far from The Oval.
As squares go it's really nice, as befits a rim of Georgian terraces surrounding a central garden. I say garden but it's more a very large area of tarmac flanked by plane trees, ideal if you ever need a location for a multi-player boules tournament. The central space was originally used for grazing (17th century), then a formal garden with an outer path (18th century), then a nursery with greenhouses (19th century). Plans build to rows of garages (20th century) were thwarted by taking the plot into council control, although it soon ended up somewhat unloved and only following a lottery grant was it prettified and benched (almost 21st century). I imagine it's fairly featureless in winter, but the current carpet of orange leaves makes taking a seat well worthwhile.
A majority of the 60 houses are listed, as befits smart brick terraces with sash windows, mansard roofs and elegant arched fanlights. These are doors you could hang a wreath on and conjure up a Christmas card, as indeed I did one year. There are also just enough doors that there's always one opening or closing somewhere, like a middle class farce, although a lot of this turns out to be builders and plasterers refitting a kitchen or scoping out a basement. Watch for long enough and a mummy will emerge with a carseat while a natty couple unload groceries from the boot of their custard yellow jeep. Parking spaces have been at a premium ever since that catastrophic garages decision in 1927.
There are only two non-residential intrusions. One is the City & Guilds of London Art School which is housed in purpose-built Victorian studios and 1930s warehouse space facing Kennington Park Road. The student entrance is however up Cleaver Square, the connecting road now only passable by bike, where you may find blokes in berets vaping outside a modern atrium behind a snazzy black gate. The other non-house is The Prince of Wales, part of the same independent pub chain as the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, which has graced a corner plot since 1901. Outside it's all hanging baskets and prized tables, while inside has a provincial vibe with pouting portraits flouncing across every wall. I don't know if the landlord always angles the swiper downwards so you can't see how much you're paying but no way was the cider worth that much.
After some of the drab flatpack squares I've been to in this series it's a pleasure to visit one with a proper history and a splash of class. It's so sophisticated an award-winning author has even written a novel about it - Last Days in Cleaver Square - in which a retired poet is haunted by the ghost of a Spanish dictator. That's not the book that won the award, obviously. Best of all the square boasts a former Prime Minister amongst its former residents, and maybe not one you'd expect. It is in fact John Major who bought a house here a couple of months after losing the 1997 General Election, not just because it's peak Kennington but mainly because it's less than ten minutes walk from The Oval. He's no longer here, he majors in his big house in Huntingdon, but Cleaver Square still definitely cuts it.
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depressed
