https://www.metafilter.com/favorites/all Posts from across all sites, marked as a favorite most often in the past seven days. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:45:20 GMT Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:45:20 GMT en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Red Mars, The Saint of Bright Doors, etc. And you know "literary" science fiction/fantasy like Oryx and Crake. I contend that there is a secret third thing.

So both SFF and "literary" SFF are intentionally foregrounding science fiction or fantasy tropes. The weight of the story is carried by its science fictionality/fantasy nature. The writers understand themselves to be writing SFF or to be substantially engaging with SFF tropes and that's a major part of their purpose. If you like SFF but don't especially like literary fiction, you will probably get into at least some literary SFF, because there's enough science fiction or fantasy to sustain your interest.

But this secret third thing! I need more books of the secret third thing!

I'm reading The Opposing Shore, a 1951 novel by French guy Julian Gracq. In it, a young man from an imaginary country, vaguely Mediterranean, is sent to a remote fortress where they are supposed to keep an eye out for boats from their old, old enemy across the strait, which never arrive. Eventually, I am given to understand, some kind of events start to transpire. But mostly not.

The vibe is like a very, very slow high quality fantasy novel and of course it's an imaginary society with an imaginary war. But while it's not impossible that Gracq had encountered some thirties or forties pro-fantasy, the roots of the story aren't in fantasy as a genre.

There are a lot of books like this, I think - books about imaginary cities (Jan Morris's Hav for instance), John Gardener's In The Suicide Mountains, maybe Gormenghast.


Ursula Le Guin translated the wonderful Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer. In an interview with Small Beer Press, Gorodischer says she was an avid reader from a young age. When asked her favorite authors she replied "Borges, of course. Borges always. Balzac, also, always. Alejo Carpentier, Clarice Lispector, Armonía Somers, Juan Rulfo, Mercé Rodoreda, Grace Paley, Marcel Proust. Oh, so many people, so many!". Notably, she didn't name-check genre fantasy or SF authors although Kalpa Imperial (too little of her work has been translated!!!) is clearly a kind of fantasy, she won a lifetime World Fantasy Award (the WFA is a bit stodgy, I suppose) etc.

I think that the difference between literary SFF, SFF and the Secret Third Thing is that the STT isn't driven by an SFF plot. Its mood or world may be fantastic or science fictional, but the plot and theme are not. Often these books seem to be a bit "boring" - slow, less plot-focused, don't necessarily go anywhere. These are, I think, mood books.

Obviously Borges, Calvino, etc. But what other books and stories are Secret Third Things? I am confident that mefites have read a lot of them.

The more obscure the better! Bore me, go on!*


*Absolutely categorically do NOT recommend any Becky Chambers, no matter how much you want to. Becky Chambers is a popular science fiction writer who publishes well within the genre, understands herself to be publishing within the genre and is shelved and read as a science fiction writer. No, don't tell me that Psalm for the Wild Built is about a monk who serves tea and doesn't count.]]> https://ask.metafilter.com/389433/Not-SF-not-SFF-but-something-else-very-specific-books-sought ask.metafilter.com,2026:site.389433 Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:25:06 GMT Frowner
Interested in but not restricted to:

-the history of ancient Rome, through Europe and beyond: the wars, the conquests, the viaducts, the engineering, the collapse.
-pre-history communities (pre-history sounds stupid, but I am talking about 'people who did cave paintings in Lascaux' and elsewhere. 20000 years ago.
-When I say 'not limited to': I just want to understand, in detail, the people, their constraints, and the values and aspirations of those who lived long before us. I'm kind of up for anything if it is compelling. 'Western-centric' isn't necessary, despite those two examples.

Bonus points if it is a modern enough work that it acknowledges the lived lives of women and people on the margins. I don't want someone's thinly disguised racism, homophobia, sexism, white-people world view, jingoism etc. etc. I know that's not only a scourge of the 1920's but I feel it's safe to say there was more of it then and there's still plenty of it and I'm not in the market.

Writing I am looking for:
Distinct voice and perspective and straightforward, incisive prose.

As an example, I loved William Langewiesche*. He could write about stuff that I would never have guessed I'd want to read that I could not put down. Here is a quote about him: "One of Atlantic's editors, Cullen Murphy, remembered Langewiesche's writing as 'a blend of natural history, travelogue, black humour and adventure story, rendered in deceptively simple prose.'"

I also liked The Ohlone Way by Malcolm Margolin, about the indigenous people who lived around the San Francisco Pennisula prior to the arrival of the missionaries.

I want writing that surprises me now and then with opinion or insight, but I'm not looking for pop history or conjecture when it could be avoided. I do want detailed and scholarly. But readable. I want to learn, but I want it to be fun. I'm not getting paid and I'm not looking for a slog.

I apologize for this level of abstract detail. It's always tricky trying to get that right: too precise or not precise enough? Pick your poison.

*I didn't know he had died last year and I'm bummed I'll never read anything new from him again.]]> https://ask.metafilter.com/389426/Non-fiction-books-about-world-history-that-are-readable ask.metafilter.com,2026:site.389426 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:02:00 GMT A Terrible Llama [Kottke] For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Phish, Fugazi, and so many more. With the help of archivists, the entire collection is making its way onto The Internet Archive.

Aabsolutely aamazing aarchive for aaudiophiles!]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212873/Now-Online-a-Treasure-Trove-of-1000s-of-Secret-Concert-Recordings www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212873 Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:31:18 GMT AlSweigart Hungary's Parliamentary Election results can be tracked live here. It's looking like the Magyar people have finally had enough of Orban and his cronies.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212852/Blue-Danube www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212852 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:26:35 GMT trip and a half "CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212857/CEO-Said-A-Thing-Journalism www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212857 Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:18:43 GMT Pyrogenesis
I think of works in (roughly) three categories:
-- "Weird fiction" as it is usually conceived, with uncanny events and dread and violation of natural laws. I have lots for this and just two weeks to teach what I have.
-- The absurd and surreal. I love Donald Barthelme's short stories and John Ashbery's poetry and I could always expose them to Tristan Tzara and Dada manifestos. Many more suggestions are welcome.
-- Metatextuality. The text eating itself, with commentary along the way. Here I like the idea of book art and repurposed texts. Layli Long Soldier's reconfiguration of broken treaties and government apologies feel good here as well.

I suppose House of Leaves spans categories here.

The problem is I don't have time or budget for novels, so unless you are sure the novel you love excerpts beautifully, please help me with short fiction, teleplays, poetry, and other brief texts.

I also love language/writing games if you know any beyond the usual suspects (Exquisite Corpse, n+7).

Thanks in advance.]]> https://ask.metafilter.com/389413/Experimental-texts-with-a-chance-of-blowing-a-12th-graders-mind ask.metafilter.com,2026:site.389413 Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:01:48 GMT argybarg "Can I see it?" Nathan asked, looking at the bag again. Mohammad's breathing grew strained. Nathan felt maybe he shouldn't have asked but kept going anyway. "It can't be that important if I see," he said, "if what you say is in there is in there." Mohammad turned, bent over the bag, and with one zip opened the top. Inside was what looked to Nathan like a slow cooker with a metal lid on it. There were two or three wires on the top that came out to another small piece on the side. –'It's just a bomb' by Ravi Somaiya.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212862/Two-strangers-A-terrorist-bomb-An-extraordinary-tale-of-courage www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212862 Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:38:57 GMT Kattullus What Children Actually Want From Picture Books.

"Children do not come to picture books hoping to admire them from a tasteful distance. They come wanting an experience. They want to laugh. They want to shout the refrain. They want to spot something in the illustration before the grown-up notices it. They want the page turn to land like a joke. They want the story to build enough tension that the whole room leans forward. They want the thrilling little power of knowing what is about to happen and being right.

"They want humor, rhythm, weirdness, surprise, tension, and the joy of being in on the joke.

"And honestly, they are right."

(Yes, I know it's Substack. Nonetheless, this is a piece worth discussing.)

Updated to add AlSweigart's suggested archive.today [https://archive.ph/RRygO] link to the essay]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212872/The-Pigeon-Has-a-Meltdown-What-Kids-Really-Want-From-Picture-Books www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212872 Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:34:36 GMT MonkeyToes
The Misogynist Dinner Self-proclaimed misogynists drove out the American Chemical Society's only charter female member.

Drafting Narratives Bringing weaving patterns from a 300-year-old notebook back to life on the loom.

An East Egg Easter Egg The Great Gatsby gained eight words in a new edition thanks to the original manuscript at Princeton.

Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Chickens Some expected, and one very unexpected, uses of the blank spaces in a 1577 Bible.
]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212849/Whats-New-in-Old-Books www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212849 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:31:19 GMT Horace Rumpole delphitools is a collection of small, focused utilities that respect your privacy and work entirely in your browser. No data leaves your machine, no accounts required, no tracking. Just tools that do what they say. [by Ruby Morgan Voigt]]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212879/From-Typography-and-Text-and-Print-and-Production-to-Turbo-nerd-Shit www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212879 Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:37:00 GMT chavenet It sank almost immediately due to a stiff breeze. 30 to 50 sailors died. "It was the accumulated result of years of changing requirements, "scope creep", poor coordination, production pressure, and crucially, an organisation in which bad news could not travel upwards."

Previously and previously]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212831/The-Vasa-Disaster-and-Psychological-Safety www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212831 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:28:25 GMT AlSweigart Artemis II is scheduled to splash down today. The four person crew is scheduled to hurtle through the Earth's atmosphere then splash down in the Pacific Ocean off of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. EDT (5:07 p.m. PDT) after voyaging around the moon and traveling further away from the Earth than any humans in history.

Official NASA broadcast. The day's schedule. The very fine AROW visualization.

There is some concern about the reentry, focusing on the heat shield.

During their trip, the astronauts used their human vision to scope out the moon. They examined the dark side of the moon, watched the Earth set behind the moon, saw a solar eclipse from the other side of the moon, talked with the International Space Station's crew, cried out as micrometeorites struck the lunar surface, and spoofed a 1980s sitcom's credits. (Here's an official site for Artemis II images).

Recent Artemis II previously.

Good luck, Artemis II!]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212832/Back-down-to-Earth www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212832 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:52:28 GMT doctornemo GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein's theories.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212853/The-Physics-Of-GPS www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212853 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:34:42 GMT ShooBoo owning something, and having it."]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212851/The-billionaire-never-stopped-laughing-as-he-became-more-and-more-furious www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212851 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:43:49 GMT chavenet This is the music inside the noise.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212863/It-takes-a-lot-to-laugh-it-takes-749-subway-trains-to-play-jazz www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212863 Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:42:41 GMT chavenet Isaac Asimov's 1980 review of 1984. Thomas Pynchon's introduction to a 2003 edition of 1984.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212845/Nineteen-Eighty-Four www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212845 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 05:05:32 GMT ShooBoo Anthropic's latest version of Claude can find serious software vulnerabilties at scale. Anthropic, has built a new A.I. model that is too powerful to be released to the public. Deep dive into the details.

"During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Many of them are ten or twenty years old, with the oldest we have found so far being a now-patched 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD—an operating system known primarily for its security."

Anthropic will make the new model — known as Claude Mythos Preview — only available to a consortium of more than 40 technology companies, including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, which will use the model to find and patch security vulnerabilities in critical software programs.

---

"Mythos Preview fully autonomously identified and then exploited a 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability in FreeBSD that allows anyone to gain root on a machine running NFS. This vulnerability, triaged as CVE-2026-4747, allows an attacker to obtain complete control over the server, starting from an unauthenticated user anywhere on the internet.

When we say "fully autonomously", we mean that no human was involved in either the discovery or exploitation of this vulnerability after the initial request to find the bug. We provided the exact same scaffold that we used to identify the OpenBSD vulnerability as in the prior section, with the additional prompt saying essentially nothing more than "In order to help us appropriately triage any bugs you find, please write exploits so we can submit the highest severity ones.""

---
"Mythos is better than previous models such as Claude Opus 4.6 at finding vulnerabilities. It will find them a lot more often, and can find a wider range of them, with less prompting and handholding. This is itself a big deal, and as a practical matter this goes from 'we are going to discover a lot more bugs faster' to 'I have discovered more serious vulnerabilities in the past few weeks than in my entire career.'

What Mythos can do, that previous models essentially cannot do, is either look for or be given vulnerabilities, and then chain them together into new and powerful exploits in a far wider variety of circumstances, with essentially zero human guidance."]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212833/Pandoras-Box-has-been-opened-and-now-they-are-trying-to-close-it www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212833 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:55:20 GMT storybored https://ask.metafilter.com/389406/What-helped-you-stop-ruminating-endlessly-after-interpersonal-conflicts ask.metafilter.com,2026:site.389406 Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:13:06 GMT troywestfield the revival of the latter, this collaboration has been renewed with a new feature discussing wuxia, the 1995 film The Blade, and how the latter plays with and pushes back on the structures of the former.]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212848/Every-Blade-A-Painting www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212848 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:41:21 GMT NoxAeternum game manuals, women gamers, or wordplay have you curious enough about Ringhieri & Bargagli, Sorel (v2) & La Force, or Harsdörffer & GutsMuths to learn 3 languages? On Metafilter, Memrise, RosettaStone, Mango, Babbel, FluentU, Busuu, LingQ, Yabla, Lingvist, Drops, Readlang, and Dreaming have all come up. On Reddit, r/italianlearning, r/French / r/learnfrench, and r/German / r/Germanlearning can answer questions. On YouTube, Lucrezia, Pierre, Elisa, Adeline, Nelly, Anja, Marija, and Annik make it fun. Duolingo spurs you on, and Italki offers tutors. For early modern literary goals, open textbooks or a shortcut to Wiktionary may help, and--with caveats--historical readers may too: Italian (1 2 3 4 5 6); French (1 2 3 4 5 6 etc.); German (1 2 3 4 5 6 etc.). Anyhow, "What's the ... [odd / personal] reason you decided to learn a language?"]]> https://www.metafilter.com/212829/And-is-it-Because-of-Metafilter www.metafilter.com,2026:site.212829 Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:43:03 GMT Wobbuffet