Kit Walker's Blog

For the past year and a half, my book “Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act” has been free on Amazon US. As of this month, that no longer appears to be the case. This is, unfortunately, completely out of my control.

KDP (the service through which I publish to Amazon) doesn’t allow me to set a book’s price to $0; the lowest I can go is $0.99. To make a book free, I’ve historically had to price it at $0 on other storefronts (Smashwords, Kobo, etc.) and then file a price-match request with Amazon.

If this whole process sounds weird and overcomplicated to you, that’s because it is.

The last couple of times I’ve tried to price-match a book to $0, it hasn’t worked; KDP support has responded to my requests by saying Amazon “retains discretion over [their] retail prices” and “cannot offer a price match in this case.” And now it looks like the form through which I used to file the requests is gone entirely.

It’s possible Amazon now feels secure enough in their monopoly over bookselling that they’re no longer maintaining their “most favoured nation” policy. Which would be fine, except that the change in policy inconveniences me in this one specific way.

Anyway, “Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act” is still $0 on Amazon in Canada and the UK. If you’re in the US and would like to read the book for free, you can do so on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website or basically any other ebook store besides Amazon.

In this episode of I Will Fight You, we revisit Love Never Dies: the terrible, terrible sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. Listen in horror as a 60-year-old man relitigates his decades-old divorce by projecting everything onto his self-insert character:

The second collected edition of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty is finally out!

According to the former workers, one employee was told after joining Rockstar “that the use of the word ‘cunt’ was an ‘apparently acceptable use of language in Scotland’ and was used by management regularly”.

Perhaps you also are overwhelmed with the desire to matter, to be seen, just like the people in this video. Unlike them, though, you hold yourself back. And in watching them, you can feel pride in your relative restraint. You reveal yourself to have the highest virtue in a purity culture (and this is an emerging, relatively irreligious purity culture): prudence.

Everywhere you look, institutions are gatekeeping public domain media and are making it difficult to access or charging for it. … I’ve solved this, for a small fraction of available footage, by making destockd.com.

The Exploits of Jay Moriarty was a featured new release on Smashwords, which means I shared a carousel with the latest issue of the official BattleTech magazine, Shrapnel:

I am unreasonably pleased about this.

-K

The Queer People Selling Queer Stuff market was a blast! I met so many people (including a bunch of local queer artists), handed out a ton of bookmarks, and sold a surprising number of books.

A little while ago, at the suggestion of my friend Susan Russell from GrendelPress, I designed some paperback copies of the individual Casefile of Jay Moriarty stories:

I mostly did this so I could order a stack of author copies and sell them for $5 each at markets (like the one this past weekend). They’ve technically been available online this whole time, but KDP’s minimum pricing pushed the list price up to $5.99 USD/$7.99 CAD. Combined with shipping costs, I assumed that was more than anyone would want to shell out.

Apparently I was wrong! You people are willing to pay a shockingly high premium for cute little rainbow books. Anyway, if you saw my photos from the market and started fiending after some minibooks of your own, you can get them on Amazon (and, so I’m told, through certain local independent bookstores).

The second collected edition of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty is finally out!

First it was a crime thing. Then it was a sex thing. Now the crime thing is also a sex thing.

Sebastian Moran is an ex-SAS security consultant. Jay Moriarty is a hacker and professional grifter. For the past few months, the two of them have been partners in crime … and shagging each other senseless.

But lives like theirs are far from simple, and as Moriarty and Moran’s relationship deepens, things only get more complicated. Soon, they find themselves under threat — not just from London’s criminal underworld, but also from Britain’s halls of power.

Together, Moriarty and Moran take on an AI-obsessed local councilor, rob a gala that’s already being robbed by someone else, run a long con on an influencer-turned-pimp, and face down both the world’s greatest consulting detective and the nightmares of Moran’s past.

Collects books 6 – 11 of Kit Walker’s Casefile of Jay Moriarty series, revised and edited, plus four bonus stories!

If you become David Attenborough, your curse is that you would fall in love with the natural world, with all of its marvelous creatures and striking plants, and then you would watch as your fellow human beings slowly destroyed it all before your eyes. And you would realize that despite your celebrity and influence, on the one issue that had come to matter most to you, stopping this rampage, you were utterly and completely powerless.

Saddle Lake Cree Nation said it hopes to eventually bring in Canadian-trained clinicians to practice gender-affirming care, primary care and specialist care on its reserved lands and territories — for Nation members and visitors.

If its plan succeeds, those clinicians, it added, would be exempted by the First Nation from any sanctions by professional bodies related to administering banned care.

As I wrote on Bluesky, this isn’t just marketing hype. These guys do believe what they are saying. They are convinced that we are on the brink of Superintelligent AI, and that the technology they are building might end all of humanity. And these guys work in the labs themselves. They are not just hustlebros or LinkedIn/X influencers.

But, also, just because they believe it doesn’t mean we should believe them.

Shopify’s chatbot assistant told my mother to go to bed after she stayed up past 1 AM working on her store, and now she’s worried about the singularity. If all you AI companies could quit freaking out my mum, that would be great.

-K

A couple of weeks ago, romance author Elizabeth Wheatley announced that she was removing all the sex scenes from her published books. Her reason for doing this boils down to, in her own words, the “vibes being off”; she cites a particular incident in a bookstore where she felt alienated by a display of penis-shaped bookmarks, and concluded her work didn’t belong among other “spicy” (i.e. explicitly sexual) romance books.

There’s been a bit of theorizing that Wheatley did this out of a sense of shame surrounding sex — either because she recently had a baby, recently converted to Catholicism, or some combination of the two. I don’t know Wheatley and I don’t think it’s productive to act like I do, so I’m going to take her stated reasoning at face value. And at face value, what we have is this: a writer of heterosexual romance, upon realizing her work was associated with an artistic movement widely considered pornographic and degenerate, took pains to distance herself from that movement as much as possible.

Wheatley’s decisions regarding her own art are hers to make and hers alone — but it’s worth noting that her escape from the ranks of the perverse was a surprisingly light effort. Her characters aren’t newly celibate; the sex they’re still definitely having is now implied by “pan to the fireplace”-style scene transitions. By Wheatley’s own admission, cutting the explicit sex altered less than 5% of any given book.

That it took so little to render her work respectable is a privilege not every author shares.

Even if I were to cut all the sex from my books, merely featuring queer and trans characters is enough to make them obscene by many definitions. If I were to take it a step further and rewrite all my characters to be straight and cis, the fact that I’m blatantly queer would still characterize my work as queer art in the eyes of, for example, the US government. Unless I become one of those ex-lesbian tradwives, I will never be considered “clean” in the way Wheatley can now claim to be.

But I’ll always be welcome among the perverts — and in a world where authoritarianism and censorship are ever-increasing threats, it’s the perverts who’ve chosen to stand and fight. Elizabeth Wheatley chose to cut and run.

As part of their Q2Q event series, Edmonton Fringe is hosting the Queer People Selling Queer Stuff market at the Arts Barns on September 12. I’ll be there selling minibooks of the Casefile of Jay Moriarty series, plus the first collected edition and advance copies of The Exploits of Jay Moriarty.

Market hours are 10 AM to 4 PM; if you’re in the neighbourhood, swing by to say hello and get a free bookmark!

(The bookmark is not penis-shaped; VistaPrint wouldn’t play ball. Maybe next time.)

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

The cancellation of gender-affirming surgeries comes after Natasha Asghar, the Welsh Conservatives’ health spokesperson at the Senedd, wrote in June to Mabon ap Gwynfor, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, asking for an independent review into the WGS.

Asghar told Gwynfor she had read an “extremely concerning news article” about the WGS.

…

The news article Asghar was referring to was apparently a blog post by gender-critical freelance journalist Nick Wallis, published on 23 May.

Most of the reports I’m receiving fall into two categories: publishers making 50% or 100% claims on rights-reverted works (where they should receive no share), and publishers making 100% claims on in-print works (where their share should be 50%).

While most media coverage and online debate right now is focused on Danielle Smith’s separation question, let’s not forget the other nine nasty questions, which were authored by the UCP government and put on the ballot well before the separatist one.

I have found no evidence that John Waters ever actually said the words “Remember, pornographers have always been on our side. Brave, ready to fight for our rights. Smut is our friend.” But I do enjoy it, as a general sentiment.

-K

Not dead yet. Current focus is on final edits and typesetting for The Exploits of Jay Moriarty; there’s another Casefile installment in the can, but that probably won’t be coming out until after Exploits is released.

Having watched the first season of Young Sherlock, I remain unmoved from my opinion that the least interesting thing about Sherlock Holmes is his backstory. Holmes’ family background should not be some grand convoluted plot; if you cram years of tragedy and high-stakes intrigue into Holmes’ youth, you kick the legs out from under his adventures as an adult (which are, by volume, a bunch of funny little low-rent mysteries).

And let’s be honest—the more boring Holmes’ parents are, the funnier his and Mycroft’s whole deal is.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, Annie and Maq successfully bully me into watching anime in the form of Summer Wars. It turns out nobody else knows what Stuxnet is, and also our editor Lucas has some arguments to make about whether the Digimon: The Movie soundtrack is actually a third-wave ska album.

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

Homeless families placed in temporary accommodation in London were told they could not use the in-built air conditioning as it had “not been offered as an amenity” for them, leading to two children being hospitalised during recent heatwaves.

After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.

Nieporte’s attorney, Matthew Press of Press Koral LLP, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but told the Journal that neglecting the return-to-office order wasn’t sufficient cause for termination, arguing that it was aimed at employees and “did not validly apply to Mr. Nieporte, who was an owner and manager of the company.”

Also, rewatching Farscape. This show is a lot gayer than I remember. And I already remembered it as being pretty gay.

-K

For those of you who haven’t heard about this: last week, small press publisher Bona Books announced that their upcoming anthology, Wrath Month, would be delayed because they were pulling three stories from the collection. They had reason to believe those three stories were machine-generated and not written by a human.

Bona Books then went on to chronicle their investigation into those stories — including this bit about a piece by Bella Chacha (probably a pen name), titled “The Machine-Breaker of Aba”:

The closer we examined that first draft, the more the story’s centre seemed absent. The protagonist was active, but lacked interiority. The worldbuilding had colourful details that somehow failed to build consistently. Certain hallmark sentences recurred over and over (“Not X, but Y…”). And the pacing was off, with important story beats given oddly little narrative weight.

Like me, you may have several questions. Questions like: if “The Machine-Breaker of Aba” had all these problems, why was it still considered to be within the best 20 of the 606 submissions the anthology received? Were the other 97% just that bad? If these problems only became apparent after close editorial scrutiny, why was this scrutiny not present before Bona Books signed a contract with the author and (presumably) paid them money?

The post goes on to explain that, following feedback from the editorial team, Chacha’s final manuscript included very few of the changes they’d requested. If the anthology was “inches away” from going to print, why had nobody checked before then whether any edits had actually been made? Why was inclusion in the anthology not contractually contingent on those edits?

The answer to all these questions appears to be that “The Machine-Breaker of Aba” was selected largely on vibes:

It hit our brief with a perfect intensity that felt difficult to resist. A queer woman, building a machine from scrap metal and rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it. The author was an emerging Nigerian writer named Bella Chacha.

So, to the editors of Wrath Month, actual writing craft took a backseat to a punchy premise and the prestige of putting a rising star in their anthology — one who fed their (admittedly well-placed) desire to elevate marginalized writers.

And to be fair, the editors at Bona Books are hardly alone in this. They were first tipped that Chacha’s story might not be authentic when they learned she’d managed to get 15 other stories published in professional markets over the previous 12 months. That’s an insane number. A lot of people had to get bamboozled in quick succession for that to happen.

If you know anything about how short fiction publishing works, though, it’s not that surprising.

In 2026, both the writing and publishing of short-form science fiction and fantasy is basically a vanity project. Gone are the days where you could crank out one pulp story a week to pay the rent. For one thing, the processing times are too long; most short fiction publications are running on a staff of one or two actual editors and a squad of volunteer slush readers. In some cases you’ll wait a year just to get a rejection, much less an acceptance and a cheque. Most of these publications don’t allow simultaneous submissions, meaning you can only submit a story to one of them at a time. A finished piece can spend years getting shopped around various markets before it’s either accepted somewhere or chucked in the trash. And even the highest-paying SFF markets pay less than $0.15 USD/word; when you consider the hours it takes to plan, write, and refine a story, this rate works out to well under minimum wage basically everywhere that has a minimum wage.

So the only way anyone can afford to write a story and get it published in one of these markets is if they’re already financially secure and can burn many, many hours on work they’re effectively not getting paid for. Which, incidentally, filters out most of the marginalized voices these publications claim they’re so desperate to hear from — unless those marginalized voices (or dishonest people claiming to be such) are churning out passable content very fast and at basically no cost.

One could argue that the economics of short SFF publishing only make sense if you’re using AI.

Bona Books has positioned themselves as one of many victims in an existential crisis facing the entire publishing sector, but what we really have here is this: a niche micro-industry that runs largely on prestige, which claims to vanguard the craft of writing but either can’t or won’t pay writers like craftspeople, and is now reaping the inevitable consequences of this business model. I’m not sure I have much sympathy for that.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we cover Starship Troopers 3: Marauder — a movie trying to say something about the role of Christian evangelism in the manufacturing of consent for the Iraq war, but doing it very badly.

Smashwords’ End of Year sale has come around once again! All my books are at least 50% off, and you can get a bunch of them for free; sale prices are valid through to July 31.

You can also get The Casefile of Jay Moriarty on Kobo for $2.99 USD until the end of the month here!

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

Sharma wants a daily playerbase that is the equivalent of 83 World of Warcrafts at their highest peak, all logged in at the same time. Counter-Strike, the most popular game on Steam, had an all-time peak of 1.8 million. She wants 555 Counter-Strikes every day.

Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”

The point is that if you put hashtag #filthykinkymonsterfucking on your promotion for a book and the actual sex scenes are identical to that of a standard human but green, a lot of readers will understandably feel like they’ve been short-changed.

If you’ve written something and your goal isn’t to get the attention of Tor Books or whoever, let me suggest that you’ll reach more people if you just post it online. You probably won’t make any money off it, but you almost certainly won’t make any money submitting it for publication.

-K

The story I’m working on right now explores law enforcement in Britain, so I picked up Iain Donnelly’s book Tango Juliet Foxtrot. I wouldn’t give it an unqualified recommendation; Donnelly has a more humanist approach to policing than some other opinion-havers in the field, but shows a lot of unexamined preconceptions and biases that lead him to recommend some really questionable policies. Overall, though, Tango Juliet Foxtrot did a lot to help me understand how police in Britain see themselves and their role in society.

But at one point in the book, Donnelly gets into his work on a project tackling the issue of child sexual exploitation. He lists off the project’s partners, which include the NHS, the Department of Education, the NSPCC, and—this one gave me pause—Barnardo’s.

Some personal context: my great-grandfather, Harry Walker, was one of the Barnardo Home Boys. Harry and his brother Syd were surrendered to Dr. Thomas Barnardo’s charity as children; they weren’t orphans, but their family just couldn’t afford to take care of them anymore. Barnardo sent Harry and Syd to Canada. They were promised they would be adopted by a loving family, and that they could stay together.

They were lied to, twice.

Harry and Syd were forcibly separated and only saw each other again by sheer chance a decade later, during the war. Harry was not adopted by a loving family; he was sold into forced servitude, exploited for cheap farm labour and frequently abused until he finally managed to run away and survive on his own.

One might argue that what happened to Harry was not the intended or desired outcome of Barnardo’s program, but his experience was far from uncommon. So, presumably, Barnardos’ role on Donnelly’s task force was to present the “for” argument in the child exploitation debate.

I don’t think a lot of people in Britain know about what happened to the Home Boys. As far as their historical record is concerned, these kids ceased to exist the moment they left the country. But Harry Walker had a whole life after Barnardo’s was done with him: he was a rum-runner, a soldier, a policeman. He married a devastated widow who’d lost her husband to the Great War and adopted her daughter—my grandmother—as his own. He was far from a perfect man, but he was a human being. And what Barnardo’s did to him, and so many other children like him, should not be ignored.

Smashwords’ End of Year sale has come around once again. All my books are at least 50% off, and you can get a bunch of them for free; sale prices are valid through to July 31.

You can also get The Casefile of Jay Moriarty on Kobo for $2.99 USD until the end of the month here!

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

We wiped out the passenger pigeon to build this, and it sucks. We forced the Cherokee Nation into reservations to make room for this, and it sucks. We sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange and kids there are still being born with missing limbs to protect this, and it sucks, and we didn’t even bother to take care of it, and it’s falling apart, and no one is having a good time.

“The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that ‘sincerely held religious belief’ under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse,” wrote Corey Quinn, a software-startup founder in San Francisco, on X.

Key to appreciating Jackass is knowing that, had your life turned out a little differently, you would be this stupid. Or you are this stupid, just in ways that are more socially acceptable, or at least more commonplace.

I finally got around to watching Project Hail Mary. You people lied to me. Markiplier isn’t in that movie at all.

-K

It feels rude to complain about rain while large parts of the world are actively on fire, but for the record: it’s been pissing down in Edmonton for the past couple of weeks. And it’s Alberta, so damp means mosquitoes. I am being eaten alive. At this rate, the government will need to start airdropping dragonflies into Edmonton like wolves into Yellowstone National Park.

And while I’m sure nobody in Europe finds it particularly funny at the moment, you do have to admire the comedic timing of datacenter lobbyists declaring that the EU must choose between AI infrastructure and climate goals right before a massive heatwave descends over most of the continent. If I wrote that, people would complain I wasn’t being subtle enough.

Sebastian was supposed to arrive round about six. He’d missed Christmas last year, which wasn’t exactly a surprise; he hadn’t been around all that much when he was stationed in Hereford, and Patience saw him even less now that he was living in London. But he’d promised he was coming to visit this year—and he was bringing Jay.

Patience wasn’t sure about Jay.

In the latest interlude of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, Sebastian celebrates Christmas in Herefordshire and Jay can’t sleep.

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

Britain’s asylum system demands intimate proof of queerness from people whose countries still have laws and social norms shaped by British colonial rule. It presents itself as offering protection while reproducing the racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies that helped create the danger from which many flee.

Judge Gregory Carro had scheduled the hearing for Tuesday but adjourned it about a half-hour after it was supposed to start when Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann told him that prosecutors had failed to send required paperwork to the jail.

“It’s on us,” Seidemann said. “We got the writ signed but we failed to serve it.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Carro replied.

“And a lot of magazines, including The Advocate, did an interview and said, ‘The most out director,’ but they never had the nerve to ask me if I was gay. They thought it was — like my parents –- it was something worse than gay. So a lot of people never asked if I was gay because they were afraid I’d say, ‘No, I’m a necrophiliac’ — which, even that, that’s just fear of performance.”

Let me assure the fanfic readers among my subscriber base that I, too, had a chuckle over the phrase “omega heat wave.” As for the rest of you: don’t worry about it.

-K

I’m camping in Beaver County this week, which involves surprisingly reliable Wi-fi and occasional polite conversation with elderly rural Albertans. These people have heard all about me from my parents, who also camp out here; my parents have proudly informed everyone that I’m a writer, which has led to a certain level of polite interest among the populace.

They do not appear to have explained what I write about.

So now I need to figure out, fairly quickly, whether I should inform a 70-year-old UCP voter named Dawn ahead of time that my books are more than a bit gay, or if I’m going to let her figure that out for herself.

First it was a crime thing. Then it was a sex thing. Now the crime thing is also a sex thing.

Sebastian Moran is an ex-SAS security consultant. Jay Moriarty is a hacker and professional grifter. For the past few months, the two of them have been partners in crime … and shagging each other senseless.

But lives like theirs are far from simple, and as Moriarty and Moran’s relationship deepens, things only get more complicated. Soon, they find themselves under threat — not just from London’s criminal underworld, but also from Britain’s halls of power.

Together, Moriarty and Moran take on an AI-obsessed local councilor, rob a gala that’s already being robbed by someone else, run a long con on an influencer-turned-pimp, and face down both the world’s greatest consulting detective and the nightmares of Moran’s past.

Collects books 6 – 11 of Kit Walker’s Casefile of Jay Moriarty series, revised and edited, plus four bonus stories!

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14! It’ll be available in print and ebook formats, and you can preorder the ebook version now:

This volume features cover art by Dany Rivera, who did a wonderful job bringing my little guys to life. Go check out the rest of her work, she’s excellent.

The cases highlight the fact that Flock can be used to track the whereabouts of individual people, that police do not get a warrant in order to use the system, and that, if they have access to the system, they have the technical ability to look up any license plate they want for any reason they want.

… Palantir UK CEO Louis Mosley has said that if Nigel Farage’s Reform comes into power, the company will follow the party’s professed directives to use NHS data to target individuals based on their immigration status.

Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA), said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community”.

That community “showed their heroism” during the miners’ strikes, he said. “They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”

I am currently sharing my campsite with a family of geese. The atmosphere is best described as “threatening.”

-K

My research for the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story has led me to try and figure out where the Metropolitan Police Service in London stores its firearms. It turns out this is information that the Metropolitan Police Service would really rather prefer I not have.

(I understand why this is the case. It’s just annoying.)

In the course of my research, though, I came across this video about the Met’s Specialist Training Centre, which provides firearms training to multiple police organizations within the UK. The video features, among other things, a member of the facility’s staff pointing to a barrel attachment on a revolver and calling it a suppressor.

My inner Ivan Chesnokov immediately started screaming. For those unaware: you generally can’t put a suppressor on a revolver and expect it to actually, you know, suppress anything. So either the barrel attachment isn’t a suppressor (gunfuckers in the YouTube comments are widely of the opinion that it’s actually a compensator), or what we are being shown in this video is a bullshit gun that doesn’t work.

I know the gunfucker is a rare breed in the UK, but I feel like the staffer in that video is the one guy in the whole country who should know what he’s talking about.

A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.

The final chapter of “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” has been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.

“All the pieces matter.”

So hey, you know that series which is widely considered the best television show of all time? Yeah, turns out it’s actually good.

I didn’t watch The Wire when it was first airing, largely due to the fact that I was 11 years old when it started. I finally got around to it this year, and it has immediately become one of my all-time favorites.

There’s a lot to like about The Wire. It knows when to shut up and let the filmmaking speak for itself. It respects the intelligence of its characters, but is attentive to the limited vocabulary they have to describe their circumstances. It’s confident in its ability to hold your attention without prolonged exposition, flashy gimmicks, or cheap shock.

Maybe what I love most about it is this: everyone involved took their jobs seriously and showed up with something to say. At the very beginning of its first episode, The Wire shows you a Black kid lying dead in the street and says, “This is America.” And then it spends the next five seasons proving itself right.

Author and LGBTQ Reads creator Dahlia Adler notes that publishers are stepping back from queer books because of the risk of bans. She’s been tracking queer book deal announcements in Publishers Weekly for many years, and they’ve been declining. Even when queer books are acquired, the language used in the announcements is often coded, obscuring the queer representation.

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.

“It’s all AI comments by fake people answered with fake replies by other fake people,” Alex said. “It’s so dead internet, like none of this is real.”

It’s reassuring to me that David Simon is as angry and vindictive a writer as I am.

-K

My dad has been using the same computer since 2014, and it’s been failing by degrees for the past couple of years now. A few weeks ago, he finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a new machine running Windows 11.

Friends and enemies: I cannot overstate the extent to which Windows 11 is a fucking nightmare, built to harass and exploit the average user at every turn. My dad’s a reasonably tech-savvy guy, but if I weren’t constantly on hand to deal with all the dark pattern button prompts and notification spam he’s been getting from his own fucking OS, this 73-year-old man would be trapped in a hell from which there is no escape.

As a solution, a few of my associates have recommended switching my dad (again, 73 years old) over to Linux. I will not be doing that.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we bring our friend Tanner Vogelgesang onboard to talk about John Waters’ Serial Mom. We then proceed to spend most of the episode gushing about Kathleen Turner and her facial acting.

“Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” is now serializing on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! The first chapter is available now, and subsequent chapters will be posted weekly on Mondays.

Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient.

But a district court in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard that Woods, 59, admitted under questioning that she was trying to save him from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers.

Crypto scammers are targeting the thousands of ships stranded near the Strait of Hormuz—and at least one ship that faced Iranian gunfire may have been tricked into believing it had paid Iran for safe passage.

Ghana has rejected a proposed $300 million US health deal, with officials telling DW the agreement raised major concerns over data privacy, sovereignty and constitutional oversight.

Writing update: I am discovering research questions so obscure that I could basically write whatever I want, since nobody would be in a position to prove me wrong.

-K