Category Archives: Things of 2026

A collection of consumed media in the year 2026.

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

A Thing I’ve Read 09/26: The Eyre Affair, 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.

Virtual Light (Bridge I), by William Gibson

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.

Continue reading

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

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

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.

Pacific Rim

A Thing I’ve Watched 03/2026: Pacific Rim

del Toro’s take on a Kaiju-vs-Jaeger-movie (read: “del Toro’s take on Evangelion”) was an absolute insane joy to watch.
It has giant monsters, giant mechas piloted by pairs of pilots, giant monsters fistfighting with giant mechas, a properly weird couple of scientists, and so much excellence in filmmaking. It has also a whole bunch of Personal Drama(tm) fitting neatly into everything else, because balance is important.

Go watch, on the biggest screen you can find.

A Poster for Pacific Rim. It shows one of the Jaegers, the Gipsy Danger, prominently in the foreground, stepping through coastal waters. In the waters behind it are two other units, and a fourth one being lifted in by helicopters. The vague outline of a city is visible in the background, a in the front an already small fishing boat is dwarfed by the towering Jaeger.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

A Thing I’ve (re-)Watched 02/2026: Repo! The Genetic Opera

This absolutly wild ride of a self-styled goth rock opera was even more wild than I had remembered.

A world where you better stay on top the payments for your replacement organs, otherwise the repo man will come to take it back, where people are addicted to both cosmetic surgery and the extracted-from-the-dead painkiller drug commonly used in it and where the worlds leading megacorp is on the verge of collapse following the imminent death of its founder, and those are only three of many beats crammed into this thing.

The visuals are peak 2000s goth, backstory gets told in graphic-novel-interludes, the songs are mostly bangers… go watch this thing.

(cn: it is very b-movie-bloody.)

A Poster for Repo! The Genetic Opera. It shows the Repo Man, a figure clad in thick rubber gear with a bucket-like hood, the eyes through the view-port illuminated in blue, and a GeneCo-logo on the arm.

Tron: Ares

A Thing I’ve Watched 01/2026: Tron: Ares

It’s been a long while since I’ve watched something this irrelevant.
There’s a skeleton of an interesting story somewhere in there, and it sure looks vaguely like Tron-movie 🤷‍♂️

A poster for Tron: Ares. It shows the titular character looking out over a bay in front of a city, over which a Recognizer and a bunch of flying thingies are looming. He holds a triangular Identity Disc, and next to him a Light Cycle is parked. Every single Tron-Element displays red markings, and a red haze colours the picture.

Burning Chrome, by William Gibson

A Thing I’ve (re-)Read 04/2026: Burning Chrome, by William Gibson

A cover for Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. The publisher stays on-theme with yet another disorienting collage of facades and roofs.

The short story collection that, well, collects Gibson’s stories that built the foundation for the Sprawl-trilogy. It contains ten stories, of which I remembered the grand total of three – re-read books, people, you’re in for surprises.

The probably most widely recognized of these stories will be Johnny Mnemonic, given the movie of the same name; the titular Burning Chrome around the Blue Lights-Run and the Gernsback Continuum about glimpses in another past’s future were the others stuck in my head.

Most of the stories fall under the cyberpunk-umbrella, with a few that are more -adjacent scifi, and without fail they are good ones.
If you want to pick up on genre history, pick this up.