crazyscot

The kids are watching an episode of SpongeBob where he's failing to write an essay. It is, frankly, stressing me the fuck out.

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/24/the-big-idea-tiffani-angus-val-nolan-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59871

You know ’em, you love ’em, authors Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan are back again with another installment of their speculative fiction guidebooks. Hop on board the Big Idea to see how they’ve done it again in Spec Fic for Newbies Vol. 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Even More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

TIFFANI ANGUS & VAL NOLAN:

Imagine a classic scene: A car driving down a lonely rural road… a bright light overhead… an examination table aboard an alien spacecraft… and then, instead of the typical medical business, our protagonist—let’s call her Sally—finds herself sitting across from an extraterrestrial. This being communicates with a curious thought-to-text translator device it places on the table. When the entity speaks, its words appear in the air between them:

“My species has learned all we can about your physiology. Now we wish to know about your culture. Does your society… tell stories?”

Sally, who’s been studying Creative Writing, is only too happy to discuss this. “We sure do,” she says. “Lots of different kinds! Science Fiction stories, Fantasy, Horror. And they take all sorts of different forms, like written fiction, TV shows, comics books…”

The alien’s already wide eyes expand even further. “And your species just instinctively understands how to tell these stories?”

“I mean, kinda. We’ve been doing it since we sat around campfires in the Ice Age. But we benefit from practice, you know? Plus, it helps to have guidance from enthusiastic instructors. Not literary snobs who want to make everyone write the same way as them but people sympathetic to the kinds of stories you want to tell.”

“And does one need to go to a school or university for this?”

“Not necessarily. Some people who’ve taught Creative Writing at universities have written books about it.” Sally looks around, finds her backpack (which conveniently materialized beside her), and pulls out a copy of Spec Fic for Newbies Vol. 3: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Even More Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror by Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan. “This, for example, helps novice scribblers and even more seasoned writers learn how to write thirty different subgenres and major tropes. It gives deep dives into the history and development of each subgenre or trope, offers spotter’s guides to their typical manifestations, and provides writing exercises to get you started. Plus, it’s all based on real classroom experience!”

“Subgenres…” The alien’s word floats in the air. “We have heard of these. So many to keep track of.”

Sally thinks about this for a moment. She reaches for the translator. “Can I…?”

The alien nods.

Sally quickly finds the translator’s settings and alters a couple of font choices. “There,” she says, returning the device, “I’ve set it so that when I mention a subgenre that’s in Spec Fic 3, it will appear in bold. That’s what they do in the book. Like all this”—she gestures around the silver room—“is a recognizable Alien Abduction narrative. But the book covers everything from Dinosaur Tales to Swashbuckling Fantasy to Fungal Horror to Superheroes.”

“Fascinating.” The alien considers the book. “I wish I’d been able to study this.”

“They don’t teach Creative Writing at Space Academies?”

“Our universities mostly produce Mad Scientists,” the alien says. “Oh!” It points at the bolded word. “It did the thing!”

Sally smiles. “It’s fun, isn’t it? Plus, when Angus and Nolan discuss subgenres in the other volumes of the series, they underline its name so you can track it down easily.”

“Yes.” The alien turns Spec Fic for Newbies over in its spindly fingers. “I was wondering: can I just jump in with this third volume?”

“Oh absolutely! They’re all stand-alone books. Though if you want to know more about the previous ones…” She takes out her phone. “Have you got wi-fi here? Like, space wi-fi?”

The alien turns the translator upside down and shows her the password.

“Okay, cool,” Sally says, logging on. “So, Angus and Nolan have written about the previous volumes on Scalzi’s blog. You can read about Volume One here and Volume Two here.” She passes her phone to the alien, who reads the blog posts with interest.

“And people find these guides useful?” it asks.

“Useful and enjoyable,” Sally says. “The first two volumes were included on the Locus Recommended Reading List and shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards and British Fantasy Awards. Those are, like, big deals on our planet.”

“The section on Magic Schools and Dark Academia sounds interesting,” says the alien, now looking through the table of contents. “As does the section about Magical Realism.”

“I like some of the horror stuff myself,” Sally says. “I’ve lately given a go to writing about Near Death Experiences and Urban Gothic and Weird Fiction.”

“And?”

“And I’ve been trying lots of things that I never thought I’d try. The book is really encouraging that way. Angus and Nolan don’t believe in gatekeeping. The whole ethos of Spec Fic for Newbies revolves around bringing people into the realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror by giving them the tools to explore these really rich and rewarding imaginary worlds.”

“I see there’s lots of jokes, too,” the alien says, the translator registering its chuckles as a series of curious emojis. 

Sally makes an affirmative noise. “Yeah, the authors have a really snarky sense of humor. Angus and Nolan don’t take themselves too seriously, which is another thing that separates this book from the really dry, old-school academic writing guides. Though, of course, that doesn’t mean the book isn’t smart—”

The alien holds up the section on End of the Universe stories. “I can see that.”

“—but it does mean it’s approachable. Anyone can read Spec Fic for Newbies. Anyone can learn from this book. That’s their big idea!”

“Bugs!!!” the alien suddenly shouts.

“Where?!”

“Page 229!”

Sally laughs. “I haven’t got to that part yet!”

“This book tells us much about humanity,” the alien says, “as well as things about Elves and Kaiju.”

“And we’ve barely even covered half of the subgenres here!”

The alien returns the book to Sally. “Where can I get my own copy?”

“Direct from Luna Press.” She opens up the website. “Or from any of your usual retailers.”

“I think I would like to beam down and pick one up right away!”

“Great,” says Sally, “let’s go get you writing!”

Spec Fic For Newbies Vol. 3: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Amazon UK|Blackstone UK|Waterstones UK

Author socials: Tiffani’s Website|Val’s Website|Tiffani’s Bluesky|Vals’ Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/24/the-big-idea-tiffani-angus-val-nolan-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59871

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/team-mirai-and-democracy.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71775

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.

In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking.

Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents.

This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.

It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.

Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality.

In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber’s proportional representation system, that was good enough for eleven total seats—the party’s first ever representation in the Japanese House—and nearly three times what it achieved in last year’s Upper Chamber election.

Anno’s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given their rapid rise over the past year.

In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan. Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The centerpiece of the party’s policy platform is not about the traditional hot button issues, it’s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy.

Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month’s elections, and why it looked different from other parties’ in important ways. Team Mirai collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a ‘manifesto that speaks for itself.’

After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability. Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs.

Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to enhance his software tools for digital democracy.

Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ‘utility party;’ basic infrastructure for Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their Gikai (‘assembly’) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users’ questions. Like all their software, it’s open source and free for anyone, in any party, to use.

After last week’s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan’s dominant ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai’s Gikai and corruption-fighting Mirumae financial transparency tool.

AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech.

Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes. With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/team-mirai-and-democracy.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71775

A Softer World edits I made last year and early this year for the Yu-Gi-Oh manga (+ the movie Dark Side of Dimensions, which explicitly follows manga canon as opposed to the TV show). Had to put in a ton of effort cleaning up some of the panels but I'm SO pleased with how these turned out, it's such a fun manga to make edits for! And also it is very funny to me that the overwhelming majority of the notifications these sets have received on tumblr have been from people in their early 30s, lol, you can really tell that the demographic is people who were kids when YGO was airing on the only non-cable cartoon channel.

You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth far more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it. [p. 196]

Audiobook reread: I first read this as an arc in 2005, and reread in 2019. I still love this book a great deal, and had a better sense of the pacing when I listened to the familiar procession of events. Splendidly read by Simon Vance, who gives Temeraire a very slight 'foreign' accent, perhaps hinting at his mysterious origins. I'm so tempted to buy the audiobooks of the whole series...

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2026/3/24/its-new-toy-day-for-sea-otters

Via Oregon Coast Aquarium, which writes, “A special thanks to the donor who shopped our wishlist! It’s safe to say that the otters are thoroughly enjoying their new enrichment items!”

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2026/3/24/its-new-toy-day-for-sea-otters

Finally got around to doing the last torturous rounds of editing on another translation that I did the rough draft of two years ago! I’m pretty sure this one comes off too niche to actually interest anyone in the English-language tag, but continuing to sit on it after having put so much time into it felt ridiculous, so it’s out there now, I’m free, etc. I had fun figuring it out, regardless; I picked it because it’s partly porn, having wanted to try my hand at keeping things sexy in translation, and also because the author’s style is really interesting for me to work with (plus I was charmed by the emotional h/c, which has its moments). The style is quirky and very-close-third-person in that way where the prose is almost conversational, and from a translation perspective falls in the fun-to-me space where it requires a fair amount of punctuation changes / re-dividing sentences / rephrasing for fluency but doesn’t make it totally agonizing to do so. (With some authors the Russian text is so overburdened with adjectives that trying to figure out how to divide them into English sentences is just pure pain, even though it sounds just fine in Russian—happily not the case here.) And of course lots of my very favorite aspect of fic translation, rewriting the dialogue to sound like the character’s English-language speech patterns while retaining original meaning and tone…

A handful of notes on translation points of interest:

( translation notes, ft. maybe my best-ever pun substitution )

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/23/a-bacon-taste-test-because-thats-what-the-internet-is-for/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59858

Today I was ordering a panini from the local sandwich joint, when I saw behind the counter that they had individually packaged slices of bacon. Though I have tried many a cured meat throughout the years, including dubious meat sticks, I have never seen individually packaged, fully cooked, flavored bacon. Of course, I knew I had to try every flavor they had available, especially since they were only a buck a piece.

Check these bad boys out:

These bacons come to us from Riff’s Smokehouse, creator of hot sauces and bacon, apparently. Here we have four out of their five flavors, as the fifth flavor was not available to me.

Each piece is 110 calories, and has 5g of protein per slice. When selecting my pieces, I actually rifled through the shop’s selection a good bit to find some sizeable pieces, as slice sizes were not all that consistent, funny enough. There were some skinny mini pieces of bacon! So, if you find these in the wild, find yourself a thicc slice.

Thankfully, you can see through the back to the full picture of what you’re getting into:

Anyways, the package says to microwave them for 5 seconds, but I figured most people who are buying these “on-the-go” bacons will not have immediate access to a microwave, so I actually tasted each piece right out the package first, and then microwaved them and tried them all again. Science!

I started with the Sweet flavor. The bacon was sort of stiff, like a bit hard to chew through. It was a little sweet but not as sweet as I would’ve imagined the flavor “Sweet” to be. Definitely not overwhelming if you’re not the biggest fan of overly sweet meats. After microwaving it for five seconds, it didn’t seem all that warm, so I microwaved it for another five (ten total, for those counting along at home), and promptly burned my mouth on the literally sizzling piece of meat. So, don’t do ten seconds.

For the Sweet & Spicy flavor, it was actually a little bit tougher than the previous piece. Reminded me a lot more of something like a jerky. Jerky-esque, if you will. Initially, I didn’t think it was spicy at all. It just had sort of a more savory, smoky flavor, but after microwaving it it actually got more of a kick to it, leaving a touch of heat in the back of my throat.

For the Red Curry, I was sure this one would be spicier than the rest, but it was oddly sweet. The spices involved gave it a nice complexity that the regular “Sweet” didn’t have to it. This piece had a really good texture with lots of fattiness throughout (I like chewy, fattier bacon). After microwaving it, it crisped up just a little bit and tasted even better warm.

Finally, for the Raspberry Chipotle, I once again expected heat what with chipotle being in the name. No heat came, but it had an excellent raspberry flavor that wasn’t artificial tasting or too overwhelming. This piece had a nice, softer texture and was the thickest cut out of all the pieces I’d had. This was my favorite of the four.

If you go on Riff’s website, you can buy a variety pack of all five flavors, with three pieces of each, for a little less than $33. This comes out to about $2.15 a slice. If you commit to just one flavor, you get 12 pieces for $23 bucks, which comes out to $1.91 a slice. So, pick your poison! I’d go for the variety pack, because variety is the spice of life. If you get it and try the fifth flavor I didn’t get to, let me know how it is.

Are you a crispy bacon or chewy bacon person? Do you like maple syrup with your bacon? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/23/a-bacon-taste-test-because-thats-what-the-internet-is-for/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59858

I'm reading, and really enjoying, Annalee Newitz's Four Lost Cities.

I'm currently reading about Pompeii, and I was struck by the mention of about how little was recorded about that volcanic eruption and the cities that were "lost" in its aftermath.

I thought of how conspicuously absent our society's cultural response to the covid pandemic has been, even before Newitz themself drew an explicit parallel with the Spanish flu epidemic which apparently also had a similar effect.

I was struck by this because just this morning, I was in a meeting about an upcoming Mental Health Awareness Week event at work. I had to join a bit late so I don't know the context but as I joined, someone newish to my org -- which covers the whole country so we're mostly hybrid/remote -- said that starting this job was hard for me because going back to working from home was something he hadn't done "since covid." #CovidIsNotOver, of course. (I felt some kind of way listening to someone talk as if they were triggered by an event that is still ongoing if you ask me.) But he's totally right about how we haven't really addressed it in any meaningful way -- the lack of pragmatic mitigations almost requires us to participate in this cognitive dissonance of referring to the pandemic in the past tense when it's only the lockdowns, the testing, the mask mandates, the period of taking it as seriously as it warrants, which is past.

I was immediately reminded of that Audrey Watters piece I linked to the other day, about grief that isn't observed. If she's right that "it matters that GPT was released during the COVID pandemic (and ChatGPT shortly 'after')," (and how I appreciate the scare-quotes around "after" there!), this is a meaning that's lost if we don't talk about the covid pandemic.

I think covid is intimately linked to changes in transport infrastructure and the built environment that make my job harder -- hastily-enacted legislation to allow more tables and chairs on pavements means more obstacles that never had to undergo an Equality Impact Assessment; "pop-up" cycle lanes led to lasting trends in active travel infrastructure that still deprioritize pedestrians; e-scooters were seen as more useful in a world where people were discouraged to go anywhere but particularly to use public transport; I could go on -- and the further that lockdowns and other facets of pandemic mitigations get, the harder it is for me to address those things properly.

It's interesting to see what feels like such a modern ill also taking place as long ago as Pompeii, in as different a culture as that Roman one was. Is it such a fundamental human thing to just block out the bad times so thoroughly? I can't help but think we can do much better to look after ourselves, individually and as collective societies.