daniel.industries

Over the Rhine Record Review, 2001

2026-06-14T18:34:29-05:00

Over the Rhine
Films for Radio
Virgin/Back Porch 2001
11 Tracks/57:03

I think maybe this recording, this collection of songs is about internal worlds, about the dialogue that runs inside all of us, conversation we have with ourselves. We hope anyone who hears these songs will find some fresh language and maybe a soundtrack of sorts for the stories we’re all writing everyday with our lives, whether or not we ever pick up a pen…

– Linford Detweiler

Over the Rhine is not just a band. Over the Rhine is an ethos, an awareness, a media of consciousness on a Jungian scale. On their latest project, Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist have once again enabled that communion of ear, eye, soul, and friend. And like the Eucharist, sometimes the wine that runs across your lips is sweet, sometimes sour; but each time you walk that aisle and feel your knees against that stiff, red cushion, and your elbows against the wooden rail, you know two things: you are alive, and you are not alone.

Films for Radio, OtR’s latest, makes no exception to the rule of musical excellence and lyrical lucidity that has marked all of their work to date. Nestled in the middle of its musical journey, I Radio Heaven particularly looks life straight in the eye:

the truth is i bleed you / when these frequencies cut me / i’m a slut with a mission / a singular vision / i radio heaven / i get mixed signals / i move the antenna / i switch the channels

From the modern, loop and string ingrooved The World Can Wait, to the sparse and breathy When I Go, OtR delivers an extremely mixed musical set, while at the same time the intimate and uncautioned tones of Karin’s voice become almost a mist, an aroma…

the body / is a book / of matches / a little fire / is required / of this kindling flame / Ohio Blue Tip Strike Anywhere / strike me / anywhere

…longing to feel, longing to be felt; longing to know, longing to be known. The music is like a soundtrack to a perplexing story of a life, moving around the deep-rooted plot like smoke fills a small social hall. Musical and ethical comparisons fade, however OtR definitely belongs in the soul timeline somewhere near Joni Mitchell and Jewell.

As with any greatness, one’s strength can also become one’s weakness; and if Linford uses one more juicy simile in his writing, it will be like a…well, you get the idea. And the lack of a definable single will most likely keep this Cincinnati duo, best known for touring with the Cowboy Junkies, Americana’s best kept secret. Which is exactly how OtR’s strong, and extremely loyal, fanbase would like it to stay.

Films For Radio is indeed an apt title for this romantic medley of life, art, and music.

These days are pages, these years chapters. A plot emerges which is sometimes lost, often revised. Characters come and go, the people I have known, the limited cast of humans that one life can bear. Some I betray, some I love. Some I admire, some I pity. Some I teach, some teach me. Some I lust after, some are naked and I hope to clothe them…

Called Stranger Things, over a decade before that name would be used for a very popular streaming television show. ↩

Musical Endeavors Near and Far

2026-06-13T12:56:36-05:00

Image from stewartcopeland.net

Last night I took Milo to see Stewart Copeland entertain a sold-out Kessler with stories starting with his childhood in Beirut through his recruiting of Sting to be in The Police, to meeting Andy Summers and Summers inviting himself to join, creating the band we’ve all known and loved since 1978’s Outlandos d’Amour. I was introduced to The Police by my babysitter in the early 80s. He thought they were the best band in the world. I was skeptical. At first.

You can’t be a drummer and not like Stewart Copeland’s playing.

Even if you’re not a drummer, if you’re of a certain age, the beginning of this video is chef’s kiss

Milo was bored, despite the f-bombs thrown about, and I was in pain, so we left at intermission. He also had to be up early for his band camp performance this morning at the Meyerson.

You can see a tiny part of his blonde head sticking out above a music stand in the back

Milo made the 2nd-best band at camp, with mostly kids older than him. He complained loudly before camp and for the first two days, but we made him go. By Wednesday he stopped complaining and started talking about it after being picked up from Booker T.

Our last child to attend this band camp, which is unusual for a public school system and attracts professional musicians to teach and conduct, was Penn. I had forgotten one of the most delightful aspects of this performance: the bands get better and better, from what you might expect from a middle school band, to what you might expect from a professional or semi-professional ensemble in a relatively large city. I was proud of Milo for making the level he did, and even though he didn’t get to play snare on any of the songs, he learned timpani for the first time. He wasn’t excited about that at first, but I tried to convince him the best, coolest band percussionists play timpani.

This morning I received an email from Vanessa Peters (she sang on God from Form) announcing Rip Rowan’s latest production effort, Fabrizio Guidotti’s Musica per Organo. My dad is an organist, and used to frequently play after dinner, so organ music has a special place in my heart. Rip engineered most of my records. And if you haven’t heard his own 1974 yet, well, you’re welcome.

Last night while watching Stewart hold court, I was continuously struck by how similar he and Rip are in speech patterns and mannerisms. And of course they are both brilliant drummers who love musical adventures, especially in a recording studio. Brothers from a different mother.

When Machines Make the Incompetent More Confident

2026-05-31T08:10:52-05:00

Appearing Productive in The Workplace

A meaningful share of my current role has become sitting across from account directors and go-to-market leads who arrive with AI-generated projects and argue them. What they are proposing, in most cases, is a dashboard or website that displays the status of a process that is not ready to be automated, built to track a workflow that does not yet warrant tracking. The tool has not solved a problem; it has driven its user to identify a problem worth solving, outlined an architecture for the solution, and produced enough material — diagrams, schemas, interface mockups — that the user arrives in the room convinced the work is real. My job is to explain, carefully, why the logic is flawed: why the process they have outlined is either a non-problem or a premature one, why the architecture the model produced is a plausible shape of a system rather than a system plan, why the confidence they feel is the model’s confidence and not their own. They do not take it well. The tool has given them the experience of building something, and the experience feels like expertise…

Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive. The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about.

(I decided on just two big pull quotes this time, but seriously just read the entire thing.)

“Can I get the logo in cornflower blue?” is one of my favorite movie quotes to deploy in a work conversation. But other times, I’m in a meeting with so much ignorant bloviating that I have to subtoot:

Product management is the hardest job in software only because everyone thinks they are a f*n software expert even if they’ve never designed a single feature

Actual documentation used to be the safe-from-stupidity domain of actual professionals, people who had the expertise and humility to actually think through problems before proposing solutions. Now, “I read it on the Internet” has bled into our conference rooms and intranets. Take this hypothetical example of an AI-generated internal document at a software company:

URGENT: Platform Enhancement Requests
TO: [ Product Leader ]
FROM: [ Ops Leader ]
DATE: [ The height of the AI bubble ]
PRIORITY: 🔴 High – Immediate Roadmap Consideration Required

Executive Summary

[ Two paragraphs of slop ]

⚠️ These features must be prioritized in the next sprint cycle.

[ ~1000 more words of slop ]

There are other factors involved that would lead someone to generate such a document and immediately share it with their coworkers–their pain is real and should not be dismissed¹–but the fact that the AI became the intermediary for this communication simply intensified all the pitfalls of less experienced product thinking:

Trying to develop solutions before fully understanding the problems
Not understanding the context:
- what other work is being done
- how we prioritize work
- what other use cases are involved
- what edge cases have been discovered
- knowing that other use cases and edge cases have not yet been discovered…
- what it actually takes to get software into production
- what it actually takes to maintain software in production
- what it actually takes to support software in production
Not appreciating how much organizational psychology is involved in product development²

I use AI to generate documents at work all the time. It often helps me put things into words I hope coworkers will better understand–the same motivation of the “author” of the above example, I assume. But I’ve first used the LLM to think through the problem: I’ve given it instructions to try to make it less sycophantic and get it to challenge me³, I’ve asked it to critique my original thinking, I’ve read its massive outputs, asked it more questions, instructed it very specifically about the document I would like, read that document, asked it to make edits, then made final edits myself. This results in a draft that I then socialize with the relevant and capable coworkers, and we all leave comments and make edits. The robot is then really good at reading all of that, plus the relevant documents and comments from last year we’ve all forgotten about⁴, and we start the entire process all over again. I use the robot to not just make assumptions. I use it to try to capture all the context. I preface the sharing of these documents with a disclaimer that I used an LLM to generate it.⁵

The Internet gave everyone a voice to complain (and complain about complaining…see, I’m self-aware), best described in one of my favorite posts of all time, Paul Ford’s 2011 The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Now AI is making everyone feel and present like an expert without any expertise. Part of me wants to offer them my job. After all, Claude Code can develop their software too, can it not?

Postscript: no sooner had I posted this than I found On Humility in Product Development, another reference to Fight Club about almost the same topic.

The acute pain, and potentially a feeling of helplessness, might have led to prompts that led a sycophantic and very helpful LLM to produce such a document. We have to get through to those Product people! I can hear the robot saying. ↩
In Henry Gantt, I mention Hofstadter’s law, Goodhart’s law, and Campbell’s law. Lately I’ve been saying Conway’s law repeatedly. Conway’s law is essentially the entire point of this post, hidden in a footnote. It deserves it’s own, more thought through post. ↩
I think the jury is still out on whether this is effective, or if it’s just placebo ↩
I often have to ask the robot, “Where did you get this from?” It dutifully points me to the document in question. Well, about ⅓ of the time. Another ⅓ of the time, it admits it hallucinated the source. The final ⅓ of the time, it made a poor correlation and I have to correct it. ↩
I mostly do this to protect my pride: if the robot exposes my ignorance, I want plausible deniability. ↩

The Output of Belonging

2026-05-25T09:09:26-05:00

The Homebound Symphony: Rowan Williams on solidarity

…in what is really in many ways the heart of Rowan’s argument, the history of the term “solidarity” that links it with labor movements becomes essential. The solidarity of labor is based on the idea that if we have a common work, then we have a common cause. In a way, Rowan is reversing that: He’s saying that if we have a common problem — the failure to acknowledge the full humanity of others — and if we have all, in one way or another, undergone the discipline of suppressing our instincts for solidarity, then we need to engage in the common labor of restoring those instincts to their proper place. That is, solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense calls for work. So Rowan seeks to conceptualize and formulate the kind of work that we need to do.

Thus much what Rowan does here is the terminological and conceptual excavation that lays the groundwork for this common labor of restoring solidarity.

Naz Hamid: Craft Is Not Culture

Culture is the moat. It’s not craft and it’s not aesthetic. It’s always been culture — lived, relational, contextual. The ability to decode what’s happening right now, to encapsulate it, to communicate it through deep experience. Culture can give birth to something that hasn’t been seen, hasn’t been appropriated, hasn’t been followed to death.

LLMs can pattern-match around culture, but they cannot be inside it. They cannot live it.

The above two posts were back-to-back in my feed reader this morning and felt linked, one about “solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense” and the other about the very practical problem with allowing our work to be enclosed and captured by large language models.

This does seem to be in the zeitgeist.

I immediately thought of Good Work Lights Us Up, and searched this site for the word “work”, which returned more results than I anticipated–2176 results in 893 files, or put another way, fully 25% of posts on this site contain the term.

There is the Functional Melancholic’s Pathologizing Our Own Humanity and We Spend a Lot of Energy Pretending We Aren’t All Just Tired and Terrified to Varying Degrees, just two I’ve plucked from his regular output about how to survive in a soulless, financialized world.

Also recently was Gravity via Simone Weil, who despite physical limitations insisted in working with laborers. More of her here in the months to come, for sure…

And I’m not sure if the connection to gravity in Pull was as obvious to the reader as it was to me as I wrote it, but yeah…

AI Is the Most Hilarious Possible Continuation of What It Means to Simulate Thinking Through Language

2026-05-22T06:47:22-05:00

Aboard Newsletter: But I Love Stochastic Parrots!

For a lot of people, AI is here to take their livelihood. I get that. For others, it’s here to replace the entire economy and they plan to become billionaires. Okay. But for me, it’s the most hilarious possible continuation of many decades of continual exploration of what it means to simulate thinking through language—and I never believed things could ever go this far with mere language. I used to be a pro writer for a living, and trust me, no one thought text could ever be this valuable. So to me, the situation we’re in, where LLMs can be prompted to produce interesting, somewhat random output, and then more deterministic systems can evaluate and improve that output (this is how vibe coding works), is, while frequently terrible, perpetually entertaining

…

As a deeply digital person, I’ve got an archive of my own email and prose going back nearly 30 years. Sometimes I’ve searched through that archive to learn how my own thinking has changed and evolved. And nearly every time I’ve done that, I’ve learned that my thinking has not changed or evolved. I’ve asked other people about this and they report the same thing. We perceive ourselves as enlightened creatures, adapting to meet the times. But as I started going through prose I wrote in my early 20s…well, I was missing a lot of detail, but the broad ideas were there.

Art for Art's Sake

2026-05-20T22:17:21-05:00

This is an article written in 2002 by the late Mike Riddell for an online magazine I co-created and curated. The original can be viewed here on the wayback machine. I’ve thought about republishing it here for many years; today I am.

Early in 1997 my job as Lecturer in Practical Theology at a New Zealand Baptist theological seminary came to a nasty end. I was pressured to resign because of the impending publication of a novel which I had written. The book, The Insatiable Moon, was a work of contemporary New Zealand fiction, published by Flamingo. On March 1, my novel appeared in bookshops and my employment came to an end.

Time has now passed, and I am perhaps more able to get a reasonable perspective on the events surrounding that portentous day. With the passing of the months, my anger has, if anything, increased. It seems to me that I was forced to separate my faith from my art; that I could be either a teacher in the church, or an artist, but not both at the same time. I refuse to believe that this dualism is either necessary or helpful.

The storyline of the novel was always going to be potentially controversial for Baptists. It concerned a psychiatric patient who believed himself to be the second son of God, and consequently explored the interface between revelation and insanity. The conclusion left the question of the main character’s divine status deliberately unresolved.

I mentioned to my immediate superiors that the book was coming out, and might ruffle a few feathers in a predominantly conservative denomination. They requested a copy of the manuscript, and having read it, decided that my position would no longer be tenable. To my astonishment, however, the problem which they had was not theological, but related to a scene in the book of reasonably explicit sexual encounter.

The incident in question formed the pivot point of the book; an incarnational moment in which the protagonist seeks to fulfill his divine calling to father a child with the Queen of Heaven. I have returned often to the passage to try to understand what the fuss was about, without enlightenment. It is, I hope, tender, loving and suffused with spirituality. To my mind it is a ‘high’ view of human sexuality, and certainly far from prurient.

The issue, on reflection, was much deeper than whether Baptists have sex or not, and whether if they do, it is permissible to talk about it. At stake, I suspect, were totally different perspectives on the role of the Christian artist. There remains, especially within Evangelical circles, the expectation that Christian art will be essentially didactic or evangelistic.

Thus, as a friend of mine explained rather clumsily, the sex involved was between two people who weren’t married. Did this mean, he asked, that I had departed from traditional Christian expectations of the sanctity of marriage? I was initially bewildered by the question. I honestly didn’t understand it. I joked that the adultery was an oversight – I didn’t notice there was any in there until it was too late.

When I finally realized that he was serious, and that my writing was causing him personal offense, I had to painstakingly explain to him that what I was doing was writing a story. It was a story that I wanted to tell; one that arose from the dark vaults of my imagination where rationality and ethical thinking are at a low ebb. It was a work of art, not a theological exposition.

This expectation from well-meaning Christian spectators in the art world, that artists are some sort of covert evangelistic commandos, is a monkey on the back for creative people within the church. It is the reason why so much Christian art is simply poor art, because artists bow to the temptation to get a message across. The consumers of what results tend to be members of the Christian community, who are all too ready to trade taste for testimony.

Art is the product of singular vision. It comes, as a writer friend of mine had it, from one’s meditation. Unless one is committed to dragging that vision, wet and wild and pumping, from the creative womb, it is misleading to claim the title of ‘artist’. There is a deep and unique responsibility upon any artist to be faithful to that which rises within them. Anything else is the equivalent of ‘burying one’s talents’, or at least adulterating them.

The counter position, advanced by various teachers of the institutional church, is that the qualifier ‘Christian’ should dominate over any other term which follows it. Thus Christian artists must produce art which is specifically Christian, and an acceptable representation of the outlook of the church. There are consequently clear boundaries which a Christian artist dare not transgress.

I find it very difficult to feel much sympathy for this view. It is based on a simplistic view of human nature. Exponents of it seem to suggest that there is some foundational core of Christianity, upon which other vocational attributes float. The ability to write or paint or sculpt is seen as something which is tacked on to an existing Christian agenda.

In my experience, both Christianity and art drive to the very heart of being. The symbols, language and rituals of faith are naturally deeply formative of those who participate in them. But expressing art is not a matter of simply ‘applying’ faith to the creative endeavour. Rather one reaches into those murky depths where primal good and evil still struggle, and dredges material up to the surface.

It may not be pretty; it may not look very ‘Christian’. The only thing which in fact distinguishes such art as Christian is the allegiance of the artist. A Christian lawyer will not be expected to somehow establish forgiveness as the guiding principle of the legal system. I cannot accept that Christian artists should be required or even encouraged to merely give some artistic representation of the gospel.

Perhaps it is arrogant to insist on artistic integrity, and to set oneself as the only arbiter of what is morally acceptable in one’s own work. But to an artist, integrity is all. That cavern of imagination which is the source of all art must be guarded with care. Once violated, it is more difficult to restore than a hymen. God, of course, is the final judge, and Christian artists know the terror and excitement of living under that shadow.

The institutional church as judge is a poor substitute, and has an appalling record. It applauds the worst and excommunicates the best of Christian art. My dream would be for the church to simply concentrate on being the nurturing community for artists; a place where creativity is fostered and supported. And then, against the odds, to live with whatever is produced. If anyone is to lead the way out of the rational cage which the church has built for itself, it will be her artists.

In my own case, I have reason to be grateful for the bigotry of the Baptist community. My loss of employment led to a change of city, where cheaper housing has meant that I can pursue writing full time. So my art has prospered, and my faith has not suffered any mortal blows. I have, however, jumped the ugly ditch and become a Catholic. I find in my new home a much greater acceptance of me as I am, without the dualism which has marked my former Evangelical existence.

In the end faith and art cannot be separated or prioritized. They draw from the one spring, in which we find our human calling to be that of co-creation with God. Art does not need to be spiritualized. It is, if genuine, already a spiritual act. I suspect that betraying one’s art is every bit as apostate as renouncing one’s faith. Let us hope that the church may yet become a place where neither is necessary.

Mike Riddell is a novelist and writer on spirituality who lives in the south of New Zealand at Dunedin. He is also a teacher of theology at Otago university and an international speaker and storyteller, addressing topics from the life of prayer to the future of the church. For many years he has been a pioneer and innovator in the alternative worship movement. Author of nine books, Mike has an interesting and varied background including such episodes as time in a Moroccan prison and disrobing before the Auckland City Council to highlight housing issues. A former Baptist minister, he left his job lecturing Baptist students after publication of a controversial novel, and is now a Catholic layman. Mike’s special interest is in the radical application of Jesus’ life and teaching to the world around us.

I Love Mycelial Musical Rabbit Holes

2026-05-17T12:06:18-05:00

Visitor by Onelinedrawing

Oh I need a letter, ooh I need a letter
Oh I need a letter but not that kind
I don’t need a letter to help me remember
What is not, what was never mine
Ooh I need a letter, oh I need a letter
Oh I need a letter but not that kind

Love letter is delightfully anachronistic. Who writes letters anymore?

I do send cards. I sent one recently and the recipient’s first words to me the next time he saw me were, “You have really nice handwriting.” It was the best compliment I’ve received all month. Literally nobody has complimented me on my handwriting before.

Jonah Matranga’s song from the early 2000s started playing in my head, but only the melody and the word “letter”. I knew in which universe it came from, but I couldn’t remember Jonah or onelinedrawing. But I remembered who introduced me to Jonah’s work: Keith Michaud. He used to cover a couple of Jonah’s songs back in the day. But I couldn’t remember that band or those songs either. I scrolled my streaming service of the moment, I scrolled my Bandcamp collection and wishlist.

Finally I flipped through my guitar songbook. There it was: Lukewarm. The song I took to covering because of Keith’s inspiring renditions inside humid Palm Beach bars.

Thriller by New End Original

Keith also covered #1 Defender. That one got the punters singing along.

Thriller by New End Original

But neither of those were the letter song. Anyway, I had enough of a lead to find the onelinedrawing records on Bandcamp, and Yr Letter.

Scrolling through the aforementioned libraries and wishlists, it is truly an embarrassment of riches. I had to hold myself from playing a record and thus distracting myself from my rabbit hunt. Every record I wanted to reach for, that desire did not originate from anything the algorithm could know or predict.

Negativland, who I went to see give a talk at the University of Arizona and was immediately enthralled by. The Lost Dogs and The Throes channeling Uncle Tupelo and R.E.M. respectively for my heady christian alternative college years in the mid-1900s. Michael Knott, one of the greats, who my fellow christian outcasts in South Florida introduced me to (we watched him pour clam chowder over his head in Palm Beach and then went drinking with him, stars in our eyes). Mice Parade and Jaga Jazzist, who showed me electronic music could be more than the cage-rattling four on the floor from the discotheques in Eastern Europe. Miranda July’s audio work, discovered either before or right after falling in love via Me and You and Everyone We Know. All the Dallas bands: The New Year, friend’s side projects, Paul Slavens, far too many more to list here. Crazy good drummers making all kinds of things.

I have to stop that list at some point. I think you can go look for yourself.

Before platforms, music wove its stories into yours. Before algorithms, we were all co-creators. Yeah, I’m nostalgic. Yeah, I have no idea WTF is on the radio.

This is a love letter to sticky bars, record bins, internet rabbit holes, folks who remember what it meant to not sell out, figuring out what show to go to by talking to friends, singing along, hi-fis.

I don’t technically have a house in the ‘burbs or a bitchin’ SUV, but I’m undeniably lukewarm these days. This is a love letter to fervor.

Pathologizing Our Own Humanity

2026-05-11T18:28:10-05:00

📺️ Why toxic positivity is making us miserable

When I got cancer, people often told me that everything happens for a reason, and what they meant was that I will learn important lessons that will eventually enrich my life if it doesn’t kill me. But some things happen for no good reason. Sometimes in life we have to step up to the edge of the great mystery and in the face of mystery we can’t always say, we will know why.

If we don’t have a wider range than a toxic positivity, we threaten to stigmatize negative emotions and then eventually start to pathologize our own humanity.

📺️ Why Doing Nothing Feels Illegal Now

…the thing is you’re probably not that bad at focusing. It’s just that you’ve been psychologically waterboarded by notifications since approximately 2009…

Schopenhauer had this observation that human beings basically oscillate perpetually between desire and boredom. And that when we’re not frantically chasing something, we are miserable from the wanting.

But then when we actually finally get the thing, we’re almost immediately bored and then we start reaching for the next thing. And well, his conclusion was basically that most of human activity is just like an elaborate boredom avoidance process. Which you might see as a pretty dark perspective…but…have you been on the internet lately?

What Schopenhauer said tracks and I think about Hirayama in that context because he’s essentially doing the thing that Schopenhauer identified as the hardest thing. He stepped off the oscillation somehow and he didn’t do it because he got everything he wanted. He just stopped the chasing. And…I think the thing that makes his life look so strange to most people is his contentment…in spite of the toilet cleaning.

We don’t really have a framework for that anymore because in our culture, contentment reads as a sort of failure or delusion. And the gap, you know, the one that the algorithm depends on, contentment closes that gap. And a closed gap is bad for business.

So instead we pathologize it and we call it giving up, you know, lack of ambition and all that. And Hirayama doesn’t seem particularly impressed with any of that, which already makes him more psychologically stable than most of the internet in my opinion.

Pull

2026-05-09T10:09:34-05:00

Illustration by Resource Database

The first chamber was larger than the second. Wren heard and felt the pneumatic doors close behind them and was careful to place one foot next to the other, in a stable stance, and took hold of the handrails. They felt their boots lock onto the walkway. The loud, mechanical horn blared its single warning and clouds of thin white mist filled the room. Wren stared straight ahead but could see in the peripheral vision possible through their helmet’s visor the particles cling to their suit. In seconds they covered the visor as well.

A loud thump, and Wren gripped the handrails as the g-forces compounded in milliseconds. The sound of rushing air audible but dampened through their helmet. The visor cleared and they watched as their suit became clean, a white tornado cloud forming below and then disappearing just as quickly, another mechanical bang, their arm muscles relaxing reflexively, their boots freed.

Wren began walking as the forward doors whooshed open. Now they had to make a decision. As they entered the second, smaller chamber, the one with the red bottom suspended on a pole bolted to the walkway, they thought back across their day. Flashes of blades tearing at flesh, blood streaking across the air, faces–those faces–twisted to begin with, contorting in pain, those eyes–inhuman, lightless–still registering the darkness as it descended upon what remained of their souls.

They saw an image of a child–would you call it a child?–cowering in a shadow. Was that real? As they walked, Wren tried to recall, reconstruct the memory from a glance allowed in a single second while their autonomous movement completed its follow-through. They saw eyes, fear. Then movement further into the shadows.

It didn’t matter if it was real or not. Wren walked up to the button, removed their helmet, and slammed their hand down. A flexible tube with a small mouthpiece descended and they inhaled from it, lungs filling, brain tingling. Then, with a much gentler mechanical warning, that same gravity, this time just within her skull, something like particles being pulled down, along the sides, behind their ears, down their neck.

The next set of doors opened, and Wren walked forward, free to do the Lord’s work once again.

This is my submission for May’s IndieWeb Fiction Carnival.

Some Fiction

2026-05-03T08:15:04-05:00

I finished Accelerated Growth Environment a couple of days ago. I enjoyed it. It is a good length–sometimes a too-long story can result in a DNF for me–but the first ~third is pretty slow paced and then the rest is fast, to the point I saw the progress indicator and wondered how it was going to wrap up (what I actually thought was “This book must have almost no falling action,” which is basically true). It also didn’t wrap in any particularly clever way, which isn’t a fault, just something I’ve come to expect. (On the other hand, I’ve been accused of leaving my plots unfinished, leaving it up to the reader to imagine their own ending.) But the plot involves a religious cult, which, having been in one, always stimulates my interest.

More times than I can count, I’ve returned to fiction and realized I needed to make sure I didn’t lose the habit. I scanned my digital libraries for a new fiction book to pick up (why is that not a filter option in either of them?!), and my book collecting is heavily weighted non-fiction¹, so it takes a lot of scrolling. I haven’t picked one yet. I opened Gravity and Grace first instead, which has been on my mind to get through. It turned out to be so impactful just in the introduction that I was compelled to post a big chunk of it. This morning it feels too heavy to dive back into.

But yesterday morning these delightful pieces of short fiction crossed my desk:

📃 How to Enjoy Eternal Life

📃 A beautiful day on Colony 12

📃 Sharing is caring

The author of the last two, Ben Werdmuller (who I have read on the internet longer than I can remember), is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Fiction Carnival. I have an idea, but haven’t figured out how to start it, so I’m posting this instead.

After posting this I realized I had purchased another Shiraki book, Wine for Roses and just not uploaded it to my e-reader yet. This is probably my move.

Because said collecting is very aspirational; but then, I find non-fiction harder to finish. ↩