Weekly Round-up, August 15 2026

A monarch butterfly resting on a milkweed plant.

As a fully-committed reverse-centaur, when the LLMs are starved, my stomach growls. That is all my life is any more, within the boundaries of work.

Outside of work I spend my time recovering from work. So it goes.

Reading

At random I pulled Derek Künsken‘s The Quantum Magician from the shelf a couple of weeks ago. It is quite good! Quantum Magician is an Oceans Eleven-style caper, set several hundred years in the future and starring a cast of heavily modified humans and the occasional AI. Recommended.

Writing

As mentioned last week, the River City Poetry Collective and the Grand Rapids Poet Laureate have put out a call for submissions for a time capsule project. Grand Rapids poets are invited to contribute a poem to be placed in a time capsule which will be opened fifty years from now, in the year 2076. I am playing around with some ideas. A letter to future Grand Rapids. A letter to future me. An offer to open lines of communication, because causality is bunk. The deadline is in a few weeks, which is plenty of time to procrastinate until the very last minute.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Artificial Intelligence, Cyborgs
Setting: Virtual Reality
Genre: Utopian

Interesting Links