Kit Walker's Blog

A friend of mine, while reading over a draft of the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story, said, “Love how angry you are in this one.” Which is maybe one of the highest compliments I’ve received on my writing.

As I’ve explained to a few people before, I don’t see myself as a cynic or a pessimist. You need expectations to get as pissed off as I do; I’m a perpetually disappointed optimist.

I joined Tanner and Lindsay once again on a very Canadian episode of Not If I Reboot You First! This time, we resurrect the Concerned Children’s Advertisers PSAs and update them for the TikTok era. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Lord Humungus sitting on a throne of Labubus forever.

Businesses looking to sponsor July’s Future of Tech Summit, which is coordinated by Arden Strategies and tech industry lobbying group Startup Coalition, can choose from a tiered range of packages, according to a brochure sent out to prospective sponsors this week.

The most expensive costs £30,000 and entitles the sponsor to make a speech at the reception, be introduced to key policymakers and attend a “private post-conference tech dinner” with senior advisers to Keir Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves.

… a quick update on the new Russian visa program meant to attract foreigners who want to live by so called traditional values.

So far, about 1,500 people have signed up, and most of them seem to be having an absolutely miserable time.

“They made me feel really old,” he says. “They were like, ‘What is a wolf and why is it on parade?’ And I was like, ‘I hate both of you.’ And I was like, ‘Feist? 1,2,3,4?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we watched that on Sesame Street.’ And I was like, ‘Again, I’d like to push you down a flight of stairs. Your youth enrages me.’”

Thanks to one of my previous newsletters, my dad ended up googling what a butt plug is.

-K

Heated Rivalry has pushed gay romance as a genre into the mainstream eye, which of course means we must now be subjected to an endless stream of video essays and thinkpieces about whether certain demographics (women, straight men, people who aren’t into hockey) are “allowed” to like it.

I do understand why this happens. Capitalist society in general (and USAmerican culture in particular) likes to frame consumption as a political act. This, among other things, fosters a desire for one’s consumption habits to convey the “correct” politics; if voting with your wallet is the only real vote you have, then buying the wrong thing — or even buying the right thing for the wrong reasons (voyeurism, ignorance, horniness, etc.) — makes you a bad person. Add to that the perennial audience desire for fictional characters’ experiences and values to perfectly reflect one’s own experiences and values, and you create a perfect storm of derangement in which reading about someone who isn’t like you is somehow stealing from people who aren’t like you.

This is stupid. Thought crime isn’t real. The point of fiction is to explore a point of view outside your own. If you needed me to tell you that, I’m glad I told you that. And speaking as someone who writes this stuff, I don’t particularly care who engages with my art or why — I just care that they’re doing it.

Yes, even if they’re jerking off to it. That’s their business, not mine.

Sebastian, sitting next to Jay on the sofa, reminded him, “You wanted to learn how to pick locks.”

Jay’s exact words at the time had been “How hard could it be?”

In the latest interlude of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, Jay learns a new skill and Sebastian is up to something.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper’s extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.

When openDemocracy approached Palantir to ask about its recent hires from the Ministry of Defence, it responded via a spokesperson who worked at the Ministry of Defence in 2015/16.

When police asked the woman if she’d been drinking, she responded with, “A lot.” She added she took a Jagerbomb just before driving and had been drinking Jameson and Red Bulls. A breathalyzer test came back with a blood alcohol content of 0.195, more than twice the legal limit.

Police arrested the woman, who told them they were going to “find a bunch of s**t” in her car. 

Not to be all Bluesky liberal about it, but if you’re worried about watching boys kiss and whether it makes you a bad person while all this is going on, maybe worry about something else.

-K

Last week one of my books hit #1 on Amazon’s Free Transgender Romance bestseller list, which was a great way to find out that Amazon still doesn’t distinguish between works like mine and, uh, forced-feminization fetish erotica:

I don’t have any particular moral opposition to forcefem erotica, but I do think anyone coming to this list for that kind of thing is likely to be disappointed by my book, and vice versa.

Whatever, I’ll take the win.

The first collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on March 16! You can preorder the ebook version now (from those vendors that allow them); preorders for the print version will be available closer to release.

My co-hosts and I have been doing I Will Fight You for 10 years, so we decided to revisit the first movie we ever reviewed: The Swan Princess. Have a listen to hear Annie, Maq and me discuss important questions, such as: what do bats look like?

A Lucky Box is a kind of gacha machine or lootbox, a vending machine that dispenses random prizes for cash. A person puts in money and the machine spits out a random collectible. Customers pick a “type” of collectible they want—typically either a rare Pokémon card, sports card, or sports jersey—insert money and get a random item.

“I don’t know why they’re sending me very cross letters saying, ‘Stop sending items that could cause bodily harm to this country,’” Bennett said. “This sounds like a you problem. The call was coming from inside the house.”

Rankin confirmed to The Herald that all of the acts performed in his videos are “completely consensual” and responded to the takedown of his campaign advert on X.

In a now-deleted post, he wrote, as reported by The Sun: “Tells you a lot about Police Scotland’s vetting processes if they missed all the many links directing people to my porn.”

I hope the people who subscribed to this newsletter after reading my books are prepared for all the other weird shit I write about.

-K

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the I Will Fight You podcast. In celebration, my co-hosts and I decided to revisit the first movie we ever covered: The Swan Princess.

I keep track of all the movies I own and watch via a website called Trakt, and when I looked up The Swan Princess, I noticed something unusual about the banner image attached to its Trakt listing:

I’ve seen a lot of official promo images for The Swan Princess over the years, and this didn’t look like any of them. That, plus the signature down in the corner, made me suspect this wasn’t an official image at all.

It’s sure being treated like an official image, though. It shows up in the photos section of the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes listing, its Common Sense Media listing, its TMDB listing, this listicle on Looper, and appears to be somewhere in the movie’s image library on Sky TV:

I posted this picture in the Crooked Russian Cam Discord, and eventually one of our members managed to track down the source (thanks, Zagil!). It’s a piece of fanart, drawn by an artist who goes by madam-marla on DeviantArt.

It seems that, sometime in the early 2010s, a blogger went looking for art to accompany a post about The Swan Princess and found madam-marla’s piece through Google image search. Then another blog picked up the image, and another, until inadvertent SEO pushed it near the top of the image search listings for the movie. From there, tired interns and/or automated image scrapers picked it up as an official promotional image, and now it’s everywhere.

I think madam-marla might be owed some money.

Root said she contacted a hacker who helped to exfiltrate the data. However, no hacks were required – all it took was a simple URL trick of adding “download-all-users/” to the top-level domain.

You work at a mermaid-sourcing corporation. Gamble your blood, upgrade your luck with insider deals, and sew fish tails onto human torsos. Use the profits to pay off your debts and bribe others. “Mermaids are Seafood” is a management game with choices and a branching story.

The machine, in its quest to sound authoritative, ended up sounding like a KCPE graduate who scored an ‘A’ in English Composition. It accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire.

By the way, the new Swan Princess episode is now recorded and will be out later this month. We talked about it for twice as long as the actual runtime of the movie.

-K

Last week, one of my books got a recommendation on Bluesky from KJ Charles. For those of you unfamiliar with the name: KJ Charles is a prominent author in queer romance fiction. Within a certain niche, this is like Stephen King popping up to tell everyone I’m cool.

As you might guess, sales of my books experienced a significant bump. Because I’m in such a narrow cross-section of genres, that was enough to briefly kick me to the top of two different Amazon charts:

As always, the key to being top of your field is to pick a very small field.

… I guess I’d better get back to work on that print collection.

“Was it all girls?” Sebastian asked. “Before me, I mean.”

This latest interlude in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty explores some character backstory, some vulnerability, and is also nearly 1800 words of Sebastian Moran sucking a strap-on.

(Mum and/or Dad: maybe skip this one.)

Traditionally, Kenya’s kiondos – handwoven bags – are made from sisal. But the VHS tapes that reach Gioto from decluttered homes, donation drives, and second-hand mitumba “miscellaneous” bales now supply an unlikely substitute.

Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair.

Despite the multiple — and eerily similar — discoveries, officials have continued to rule out foul play, even claiming that there is no “connection” among the cases and “no known threat to the public.”

Reps for Swift, 35, did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.

I’m not saying Taylor Swift is a serial killer, but I’m also not not saying that.

In other news, several of my old Tumblr mutuals have returned to the site thanks to Heated Rivalry. Nature is healing.

-K

If you’re a Letterkenny fan you may recognize the name Jacob Tierney; he’s a co-creator of the series and also plays the fantastically homosexual Pastor Glen. Tierney is now running a new show called Heated Rivalry, which is about two male hockey players having an affair with each other.

(The show about rival female hockey players having affairs with each other is called “the entirety of the PWHL.”)

The show is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, which themselves appear to have been based on her Captain America Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes fanfiction. Reid claims she wrote the story as an original novel first, then changed it to a fanfic, then turned it back into an original novel. I’m, uh, not entirely sure that’s true. But then again, when it comes to professionally published fanfic, I’m living in a suspiciously fragile and transparent house.

Anyway, the most important thing to know about Heated Rivalry is that it’s a Canadian production, and almost all Canadian film and television is funded by government grants. Which means my tax dollars are being spent, at least in part, on gay hockey romance.

I’ve never been more proud to be Canadian.

The latest episode of I Will Fight You is about the movie Beastly, a modern “Beauty and the Beast” retelling that tries to be about inner beauty, disregarding appearances, and body positivity, but which was unfortunately made by people from Los Angeles.

Once again, Jay Moriarty and Sebastian Moran find themselves entangled with cat burglar John Clay. A notorious drug lord has hired Clay to steal a DNA sample from genetic testing company BasePairing, and Clay needs Moriarty’s help to pull off the job. With such a dangerous client, failure isn’t an option — and if things couldn’t get any worse, the world’s greatest consulting detective has just picked up their trail …

The final chapter and epilogue of “The Illusive Consultant” have been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.

“My faith taught me that love should be real, intimacy sacred, and that deception was destructive to both the liar and the deceived,” Asia wrote. “Yet here I was, professionally deceiving vulnerable people who were genuinely looking for connection — taking their money, their trust, their hope, and giving them nothing real in return.”

… a reminder that attacks on trans people are nothing new—and that many of them are straight out of the Nazi playbook.

Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Before anyone asks: I would have to meet certain thresholds of “Canadian content” before I’d be eligible for media grant funding and/or a Crave TV deal. So if I suddenly pivot to lumberjack romance or whatever, you’ll know why.

-K

The end of November marked the beginning of the Gävle Goat Livestream. It consists of a single camera pointed at a giant goat made of straw, with the surrounding environs pixelated out. There is no audio.

The uninitiated may be confused as to why this livestream exists, so let me enlighten you: it’s to monitor any and all arson attempts against the goat.

Let’s back up. There’s a longstanding Scandinavian tradition of creating “Yule goats”: small goat figures made of straw. In 1966, the town of Gävle began the yearly practice of erecting a giant Yule goat in the town square.

1966 also marks the first year the Gävle goat was destroyed by fire.

I say “first” because the goat has since been burned many, many times. In 2001, the culprit was a tourist from the United States who believed he was taking part in a completely legal and time-honored tradition (and was wrong on at least one of those counts). Gävle has, over the years, taken escalating measures to prevent the burning of the goat.

After the goat burned in 2016, it remained unburned for the next four years. The goat finally burned again in 2021, but has remained unburned since (although in 2023 it was eaten by birds).

The years between 2016 and 2021 were extremely bad for just about everybody. The years since 2021 have also been Not Good. It is my firm conviction that the burning of the Gävle goat at midwinter is a cosmically essential act. The goat contains within its immense straw body the sins of all the world, and it must die in fire to purge that evil from the universe.

So if you’re taking a trip to Sweden this holiday season, I have a fun local activity to suggest.

It’s time once again for Smashwords’ End of Year sale! All my books are at least 50% off, and you can get a bunch of them for free. Sale prices are valid through to January 1.

Smashwords also lets you send ebooks as gifts — just select the “Give as a Gift” option on the book page and, at checkout, provide the email of whoever you’re sending the gift to.

The group, which seeks unspecified damages, argues that the public backlash prevented the company from pursuing “the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics that it would need to achieve” its earnings goals.

I’m obviously in no position to throw stones, but:

From a queer, community-based space that runs on a gift economy, certain winners are now being crowned. The stories that get lifted out of fandom—where a bad (white) man is redeemed by the love of a good (ambiguously brown) woman he’s busily oppressing—are being chosen because those are the stories capitalism always wanted to tell.

An elderly Grandad SquarePants looks back on his life under the sea- including what happened to his neighbour Patrick Starr

I feel like this newsletter is going to pop up on the customs officer’s computer in the event I ever try to visit Sweden. Quick note to said customs officer: I AM JOKING. Mostly.

-K

This week I finished reading Andrew Joseph White’s You Weren’t Meant to Be Human, which according to its one-star reviews is “traumatizing,” “soooo triggering,” “pointlessly edgy,” and “disgusting.” I found it … fine. Kind of tame, actually. You Weren’t Meant to Be Human is a book constantly flinching away from itself, desperate to sell you on the horror of all the blood and gore and bugs and body horror built into its own premise but lacking the vivid sensory detail needed to make any of it land.

(Good horror writing and good erotic writing have a lot more in common than most people are willing to admit. All of you go read some Laird Barron right now.)

I’m not sure where the blame for this lies. White’s repertoire up to this point has been mostly young adult novels, and the book is definitely written in the standard YA style (heavy on character interactions and self-reflection, light on descriptive prose). It could be that White found the conventions of YA hard to shake, or it could be either he or the publisher were worried about alienating his existing audience.

The novel manages to stick the landing, though. I only wish the rest of it were as visceral and brutal as its ending.

And I guess that makes You Weren’t Meant to Be Human the opposite experience of Fever House, which had really colourful fun disgusting prose throughout but tripped and fell on its face at the finish line for the sake of trying to sell me a second book.

“The Illusive Consultant” is now serializing on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! The first two chapters are available now, and subsequent chapters are being posted weekly on Mondays.

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Here, the floor plan of the British Museum is painted over a blue field. Pictograms of baskets, masks, woven hats, weapons, tools, and textiles reference the contested objects held in the museum’s collection, while a red line maps an escape route for these examples of Indigenous cultural production.

Oceans of ink has been spilled about what makes a good female character. No one can agree on how she should look and act.

… increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.

Normal country.

You know how audio designers are all into black metal and drone music because they’ve listened to everything else and it all bores them now? I think that happened with me and fiction.

-K

As I’ve mentioned before, a large part of writing heist fiction involves a) getting people into rooms they’re not supposed to be in and b) ensuring this process is interesting to read about.

That second bit is the absolute bastard, because real-world security—especially physical security—is often a massive joke. Case in point: a recent security audit following last month’s Louvre heist has revealed the password for the museum’s video security system was, uh, “Louvre.”

I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to write under these fucking conditions. If I tried to put that in a story, everyone who read it would call bullshit. To quote John Rogers, “there are no Moriartys because there really don’t have to be.”

Once again, Jay Moriarty and Sebastian Moran find themselves entangled with cat burglar John Clay. A notorious drug lord has hired Clay to steal a DNA sample from genetic testing company BasePairing, and Clay needs Moriarty’s help to pull off the job. With such a dangerous client, failure isn’t an option — and if things couldn’t get any worse, the world’s greatest consulting detective has just picked up their trail …

“The Illusive Consultant” is the ninth story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one features the appearance of two characters you may have been waiting to see for some time.

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At the heart of the Open Library lawsuit was publishers’ market for e-book licenses, which libraries complain provide only temporary access for a limited number of patrons and cost substantially more than the acquisition of physical books.

It’s easy and correct to condemn Fox News for increasing our grandparents’ blood pressure, keeping them in a perpetual state of fear about roving gangs of MS-13 coming to their gated communities, but we should also consider that other demographics might be susceptible to fear-stoking propaganda.

Check out this completely normal house.

I considered whether it was a bit weird to release a book on Remembrance Day, but then I remembered that I spent the entirety of November 11, 2023 watching a marathon of every single Twilight movie at Tyneside Cinema. So I guess there are weirder things to do with the day.

-K

I’m switching web hosts! Following this issue of the newsletter, I’ll be migrating the whole thing over to my redesigned website at inferiorwit.com. If you’re currently subscribed via email, you don’t need to do anything. If you’re subscribed via RSS, you’ll want to change the feed url to https://inferiorwit.com/rss.

The new website also allows me to archive more of my writing; if you’re into that, check out the fiction and nonfiction sections. Some of the longer stories are paywalled — you can sign up for a paid subscription for as little as $1 USD/month (or $10/year) to gain access.

(For those of you who enjoyed my previous, terrible website, rest assured it’s still online at inferiorwit.neocities.org.)

Once again, Jay Moriarty and Sebastian Moran find themselves entangled with cat burglar John Clay. A notorious drug lord has hired Clay to steal a DNA sample from genetic testing company BasePairing, and Clay needs Moriarty’s help to pull off the job. With such a dangerous client, failure isn’t an option — and if things couldn’t get any worse, the world’s greatest consulting detective has just picked up their trail …

The ninth story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, titled “The Illusive Consultant,” comes out on November 11!

Additionally, Ko-fi supporters who subscribe at the Early Access tier ($5 CAD/month) can download the book for free, right now.

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Now, I don’t care that Rogue Duck is iterating on [Papers, Please]. What’s hooked me here is this original take they’re so excited about. Because Declare is more than a shameless clone: it has its own identity and it does have something to say. Nothing to Declare comes on stage following Papers, turns to the audience, and what it has to say is: “man, that guy was a downer, am I right?”

The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”

He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.

Readers are asking questions, making theories, and creating the kind of chaotic brilliance only Tumblr can provide. So, instead of letting those questions float around unanswered in the void, I’ve gathered them here. Consider this the official FAQ for #DangerousCrowBoy, born out of reblogs, memes, and a deep collective obsession with dangerous crow boys.

#bookstagram update: aggregator accounts are messaging me asking for money in exchange for book promos. Can’t tell if this means I’m doing well or very badly.

-K