Brandon O’Brien

today--nay, this entire week--has been a mess and I could really use an actual win right about now.

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You know, I still have to see that...

adding it to the list of Movies I Will Treat Myself To As A Reward For Getting More Writing Done

Oh yeah, he's confirmed. And I get why the show will be heavily Earth-centric and I don't think the story will suffer for that. But another small story-part of me feels you can't tell rookie John Stewart what he's signing up for and then never let him meet at least one alien.

I am holding out hope as a result that, like, maybe Kilowog shows up. At least in passing. One time. Surely Guy Gardner could at least open a video call with someone else from the Corps at one point in the show. But we shall see.

Literally the only part I'm curious about is why it's set in rural Nebraska. I get it, it speaks well to the tone, John is still a rookie who hasn't even met the others yet, but I hope he gets at least one truly fish-out-of-water interaction with another Lantern.

Lanterns | Official Teaser | HBO Max YouTube video by HBO Max

I dig it.

Showrunner Chris Mundy cites both True Detective and Slow Horses as inspirations, both of which I adore, & I think Chandler gives the right kind of old-man-jaded to complement Pierre's youth. Plus, Mundy remembers that John Stewart's an architect, so I'm eager to see that part onscreen.

I will not be elaborating.

(and yes, the reason why I am deferring to the wisdom of social media is because several of the pieces I did find that go up to 2025 are so clearly AI-written that one of them still has one of their overly pleasant greeting preambles in the text)

What’s the Average Advance on a Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel? from Tobias S. Buckell In 2005 and 2007 108 science fiction and fantasy authors replied to a survey I did asking what they got for an advance for a book. Basically I put up a survey on my website that people could fill o…

Question:

In the 2000s @tobiasbuckell.bsky.social published a blog post about advances in SFF publishing; my search engine magicks are not serving me well to find whether similar breakdowns have been done in the past two decades.

SFF mutuals: have advances gotten better since, or worse?

Scalding Black Coffee: Never Tell Me The Odds Polymarket, what's the over/under on the next catastrophic meteor?

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In two places, even! Whether you're still subscribed on Ghost or following my experiment with Leaflet, please read my ramblings about whether prediction markets are going to kill us all.

Awards Eligibility Post for 2025 - Jennifer Brozek Award season is upon us. The Hugo Award nominations are open. I would be pleased if you would consider my works for nomination. You must be a member of

Blog: My Awards Eligibility Post for 2025.
TL;DR Best Editor Short Form: Jennifer Brozek,
and
Best Semiprozine: Augment Magazine by Jennifer Brozek, John Helfers, and Kathleen Hardy.
jenniferbrozek.com/blog/post/20...

Now that I've rewatched the first episode of Kamen Rider Zeztz, I have even more excitement for how the setup to Episode 24 was built, and even more convoluted theories about where the story goes from here.

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Scalding Black Coffee: Never Tell Me The Odds Polymarket, what's the over/under on the next catastrophic meteor?

The latest newsletter is live!

In two places, even! Whether you're still subscribed on Ghost or following my experiment with Leaflet, please read my ramblings about whether prediction markets are going to kill us all.

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anyway

if you like it when I ramble here, I also ramble in newsletter form over at brandonobrien.xyz (and soon, afternoontea.leaflet.pub)

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Put simply, the problem isn't merely that readers are disappointed that papers run opinions they don't agree with. The problem is that when opinion is rampant with dangerous ideology with no in-print pushback, you don't get to say you aren't endorsing it--counter-commentary was possible, but absent.

Running a paper is also a position of prestige, a privilege for its staff as much as it is a responsibility to the craft itself. What you amplify matters. If you want to appear as a place where reasoned debate takes place, then you take your lumps when editorial only runs one dangerous narrative.

News is its own very fraught thing, and despite the great virtue I place in the way ethics in reportage has matured, very often simply the use of an adjective in a headline can shape narrative either by design or without even a competent editor thinking twice. Running an outlet is hard. I get it.

The solution to that problem is not defending the sophistic ideal of freedom of opinion. It is actually courting a plurality of opinion. You mean to tell me you can't approach a single scholar, activist, or immigrant with expertise who can give you 1200 words about why killing is wrong by Sunday?

So if people can barely notice any dissent to WAR CRIMES in your opinions, you are accidentally running cover for that clash: any individual writer gets to mostly assert that their perspective is common among others with the same level of voice as theirs, which in print is greater than a reader's.

News staff may forget that the sales logic of the opinion pages is that you have hired people with potential expertise to make story-cases for their beliefs about the news of the day. If the outlet majorly only makes one case, it becomes legitimised--assumed to be a well-reasoned majority opinion.

It is right--necessary, even--for readers to critique whether the majority opinion of staff writers defends warmongering not because it necessarily makes that newspaper warmongering, but because refusing to court a plurality of opinion runs cover for individual writers' warmongering.

I think it's inherently disingenuous to protect the alleged openness and freedom of being on the opinion staff of a major outlet, forgetting that being hired for editorial is a position of privilege. Letters to the editor don't get retweeted by the social media team.

Not mentioning the writer or sharing their post, but I think a lot of mainstream news editors tend to understate (sometimes with deliberate malice) the power that a newspaper has by simply being an outlet of record that regularly runs editorial that defends the worst actions of a state.

the words "The God of Spite and Violence" in gold blackletter font against a dark red background

'THE GOD OF SPITE AND VIOLENCE is a game about hyperviolence, fierce vendettas, & bisexual lighting, for fans of John Wick or Kill Bill. In it, one player—the Angel—will seek brutal vengeance against the GM—the Devil—for ruining everything they loved.'

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I'm still trying to cover some home expenses while I finish some other work! Thank you so much for your support so far!

It would be like if the opening narration of the original Kamen Rider series very paternalistically insisted that if Hongo wasn't riding that damn bike all the time, he'd still be human.

This is perhaps more baffling than when Kate decided the Evangelion girl most likely to wear red lip was *Rei*.

now that I've watched this & confirmed with someone who actually knows Japanese, I am doubly curious why the actual ad is a.) narratively coded as a young woman being kidnapped by a fake model scout and b.) judges her weirdly for wanting to be pretty but she *uses the lipstick to henshin*