And Shall Machines Surrender (Mandate I), by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

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A Thing I’ve (re-)Read 10/2026: And Shall Machines Surrender (Mandate I) by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

The cover of And Shall Machines Surrender by Benjanun Sriduangkaew. It shows under a bright, starry sky and in front of blurred city lights a dark-skinned, black-haired woman in pants and a jacket that is open in the back and held closed with straps, leaving a window open on the back. She wears several pieces of blue-ish glowing jewelery. Around her head floats a stylized solar system, viewed from above.

A fugitive, deserter and war criminal travels to Shenzen Sphere, a place created by and ruled over by AIs who left their humans, to get away from her previous life – and is promptly greeted by a former “acquaintance”, together with whome she is now tasked to figure out several high profile suicides among Haruxpexes, the human/machine-hybrides used by Shenzen to… breed? incubate? create? to do things with new AIs.
Of course there’s more to it, and large-scale political intrigue follows.

It’s a novella, so it’s a rather quick read.
There’s also more of them, which I plan on getting into now that I refreshed on the first one.1

It is also *very* horny, going into S/M and CNC. You have been informed.

  1. Spoiler: it’s not going well. There’s just too many books. ↩︎

The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next I), by Jasper Fforde

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A Thing I’ve Read 09/26: The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next I), by Jasper Fforde

I have no idea how to properly talk about this one.

It sure is a Jasper Fforde-book.
Okay. It is set in an alternative (and somewhat phantastical) Britain, and it follows the Literary Detective Thursday Next on her quest to secure both the Prose Portal, an invention that lets people enter books and other works of literature, and the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, which is in danger of being changed, and with it all subsequent prints, due to meddling by one Archeron Hades, the books antagonist. This sentence does not do any justice to what’s going on in this book.

One day I’d like to spend a day in Fforde’s brain, just to see how it looks in there, given the absolute phantastical stuff he puts to paper.

The cover of The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. It shows a stylized hilly landscape with a lake in the background, several trees on the side, and yellow flowers. Through the middle of it bursts a sports car, painted in red, green and blue psychodelic stripes, around it white tears like the backside of a torn canvas. The author's name is written in white block letters on the top, beneath that is the title in black-and-red-rimmed yellow letters, the words wedge-shaped in two blocks forming most of a rectangle.

Adventures in portable computing

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In which I will muse about the laptops of days present and past. Mostly to try and do this “collecting thoughts in a somewhat coordinated manner”, and to see if this works out to be a post of a length I had in my mind when making this plan or if this will be a three-sentence fluke.

I’ll not talk about the several work laptops I had over the years, those usually were Dell work-horses doing exactly what they were meant to do while running company-administrated Windows installations that usually also were doing what they were meant to, and usually saw use plugged into their respective docking stations anyway. Used on the road, or the rail, or other people’s living rooms, they also… just worked. I’d still not get one for myself, because I adore the tiny-ness of my current device, but more on that later.

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Virtual Light (Bridge I), by William Gibson

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A Thing I’ve Read 07/26: Virtual Light (Bridge I), by William Gibson

A Cover for Virtual Light, by William Gibson. Is shows in what looks to me like a photo-negative a small bike tire with a brake disc nearly as big as itself in the upper part. In the lower part the author, the title and a quote from Wired magazine about the book are printed in blocky letters, each of them pointed at by the words "author", "title", and "quote" followed by a ">>".

A Thing I’ve Read 07/26: Virtual Light (Bridge I), by William Gibson

This is not a Sprawl-tale. I am both happy and sad about that.
This is, as per the cover-quote, a tech-thriller, and it is very much set in a cyberpunk-ian dystopia, where it plays out very much on the punk-side and very little on the cyber-side.
The book follows an ex-cop and a bike courier, who stumble into a plot to [redacted] San Francisco, and who are mostly trying to stay alive through the whole ordeal.

It was a good read, and I am very curious what other shenanigans the Bridge-Trilogy will hold.

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FreshRSS

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So, mostly for historical reasons I follow quite a lot of blogs and webcomics, with wildly varying update schedules, and the times where I am willing to just middle-click on a folder and check everything by hand are long gone.
Dedicated rss-readers, as in “programs you run on your computer”, have the inherent disadvantage of being device-bound, which sucks between two computers, a smartphone, and a work laptop.
For a long time, my preferred solution to that was feedly, where you can make an account and collect your feeds and then access them from whereever. feedly is free with paid options (that I never used) and has been offering hallucination machine “support” lately, which (next to “you are probably the product”) was the main reason to look for alternatives.

Enter FreshRSS.

Yes, during setup the feed display is rather wonky as the feeds are displayed in order of loading them. This will even out with some regular use, and the new posts will flush out the blocks during the iniital loading process.
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Okay wait what is going on now?

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Hello.

It’s been A While.

In a random slump of procrastination I have looked into The Old Blog, noticed that the whole setup was horrendously outdated, and reinstalled everything again from scratch and imported the old content.
I have also imported a bunch of Even Older Content.
You see nothing of anything, because everything is set to private as of now. There’s a lot of “apologizing for not posting” in there, and a bunch of things in dire need of review before putting them public again.

So, what now? My main reasoning to get this page back up is to have a Third Place under my own control to properly archive all my “Things of $YEAR”-stuff from the not-tweeing sites, and maybe also the n-th-book-of-the-year-things from the book of faces. This will of course mean a whole lot of manual backpacing, but OH WELL. Newer Stuff will be easier, by just posting it here too.
Maybe I’ll even post more/other personal stuff, to have it at a place that’s not The Usual Places, or import back Random Acts of Tourism.

It’s gonna be a total trainwreck an adventure either way.

So yea. Hi. I’m SpaceSjut these days, and welcome to jackass my blog.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

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A Thing I’ve (re-)Read 04/2026: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Okay, bear with me, this is a WILD one.
Snow Crash begins with the story of how our hero and protagonist Hiroaki Protagonist loses his job as a deliverator for the Nova Sicilia franchulate when he misjudges a shortcut through another franchulate (a franchised nation-state within the now-gone US) and only does not have to Very Finally Answer to Uncle Enzo, head of the Mafia franchising both Nova Silicia and the pizza delivery service in the country, because the other protagonist, a teenaged skateboard kourier by the nom-de-guerre of Y.T., takes over the last leg of the delivery, earning her A Certain Standing within the Mafia.

The worldbuilding only goes harder from thereon in, including a full-blown goggle-accessible Metaverse and a plot that moves into literally infectious thoughts and (presumably) heavily fictionalized Sumerian Cosmology.

A cover for Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. It shows on a beige background red abstract shapes, not quite but somewhat fractal-ish, and some very small icons and textpieces as if on microfinche.

It certainly is one of the Most novels I’ve ever read.

KPop Demon Hunters

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A Thing I’ve Watched 04/2026: KPop Demon Hunters

A poster for KPop Demon Hunters. It shows the three protagonists in their demon hunting gear with weapons drawn in front of a promotional poster of their band, Huntrix, showing closeups of the three in their stage-outfits.

A well animated movie with almost disturbingly catchy songs, and despite some moments of “wait what” a pretty decent story about, well, a group of demon hunters who in this day and age work their magic as k-pop band needing to face their opponents on their own turf.

Unless the virability of Golden completely put you off of this one forever, consider giving it a go. It’s enjoyable cinema.