Jake Casella Brookins

@casella.bsky.social

2936 Followers 794 Following

Appalachian in the big city. Editor at Ancillary Review, host of A Meal of Thorns, bookseller, coffee pro, SF reviewer & scholar. He/him. https://linktr.ee/jakecasellabrookins

King of the Hill meme, Hank asks "Yall with the queer- & kink-phobic moral panic?" Ladies reply "No! We just yearn for green flags like explicit consent, mature grounded characters, and equal power dynamics." Hank: "Yeah, this is it."
One of those silver communion platters with like 40 little juice cups
A hollow in an a maple tree. A carpenter ant runs out holding a chunk of wood, which it drops off the edge. The camera pans down to show a pile of carvings.
Bladeless neck fan.
Zoom in on cover showing bizarre perspective alignment of front of house with disorienting contours/sharpness.
Coffee in a light blue-green mug.
Mr. Mole from the Fantastic Mr. Fox: I just want to see a little sunshine!
Probably a twelve-spotted skimmer, a dragonfly with transparent wings w/3 dark spots on each, and a somewhat stouter body, checking things out from the top of a red & white striped hydrant marker.
Epic handshake meme, two burly arms clasping, one is the iconic picture of a crowd on the partially torn down Berlin Wall, other is Taylor Swift's album 1989.
A white demitasse of espresso, a sparkling water, and a little chocolate on a small tray.
A canele (a small brown fluted pastry), a glass of sparkling water, and a light green demitasse of espresso on a blue plate.
Friday, July 10, 2026 14:00 100 Years of Lud-in-the-Mist Create-Collaborate Saturday, July 11, 2026 10:00 Is "Science" Fiction Just a Metaphor? Salon E 13:00 Newer Venues for Speculative Criticism Salon A-B Sunday, July 12, 2026 11:00 Tea and Colonialism Salon E 14:00 Things Everyone Likes But You Salon E
Honeybee with big pollen saddlebags on some white flowers.
A small jumping spider with white stripes on its dark brown body
A black and white dog on a green couch, with an orange ball
Cheerful Mr Incredible: New cafe has a rocker Linea. Doomed, despairing but trying not to show it: No timers anywhere.
2 sci-fi covers: Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION in moody blue with a crashed abd burning vessel, Brin's SUNDIVER with a silver orb against a brushy solar orange. Don't have artists' names to hand, sorry!
Was not expecting this complaint! really enjoyed the show, but I watched It before reading the books, so all of the characters are canonically the TV actors for me.
Movie poster mockup: Roadrunner VTOL, Gwyneth Paltrow: Costs of Engagement. When he changed the subject from black ops to black tie, she tbought he was just droning on... Un film de Kathryn Bigelow
Insta post by malindalo showing credits for Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Sir John Franklin, last captain of the Erebus, with a speech bubble
A panel from Ryan Pequist's Three Word Phrase comic, a boy holding a woman's hand says "I think that's all the kinds of cranes that there are." She says "there are a lot of kinds." They are drinking wine.
Boris Karloff's Frankenstein face crudely photoshopped into the Anchorman scene where Ron Burgundy shoots fire out of a flute.
In the updated editions, a character “watches a movie” instead of putting a tape into a VCR, or “finds a phone number” instead of looking it up in a phone book, as in this example from “Baby-Sitters’ Winter Vacation”: 1989: “If you need music for your number, just hand her your tape before you go onstage and she’ll put it in the tape deck.” 2023: “If you need music for your number, just tell her your song before you go onstage and she’ll play it.” For Levithan, this approach is central to how the books continue to resonate with readers.
disregard in a leprechaun accent Ai overview Ah, well look at this now! Sure, and I’m tellin’ ye, ye can throw all them silly notions right out the window. Just toss ‘em out with the dishwater and forget about it entirely! What’s past is past, and I wouldn’t be givin’ it a second thought.For a little extra help with your leprechaun cadence, ye can watch this tutorial:
The virgin new sheets icon -are you *blushing*? -what is lurking behind you? that's ai isn't it -minty. evokes gritty mouthfeel & inauthenticity -horizontal rectangle sez "I fell over" -lower right: weak, finished The chad old sheets icon: -solid color, solid character -upper left: where our culture begins its work -upright square of competence -not trying to distract you
Chris Farley asks Paul McCartney "Do you remember when you were in the Beatles?"
A dark blue lake under a cloudy dark blue sky at twilight, with many different shades of blue. The breakwaters out in the harbor are visible as thin black lines, and a few distant lights can be seen on the shore.
Leo pointing at the TV meme
A rolling open forest, mostly maple & beech here.
A small brown and white dog resting on the couch with her ear up like a kangaroo.
Mike Myers as Charlie Mackenzie in "So I Married An Axe Murderer" doing stand-up poetry with a jazz trio behind him, with a speech bubble as though he is delivering the quoted post.
dril drunk driving tweet edited to say "Ray Kurzweil's THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINEs may have laid some groundwork for the TESCREAL slopocalypse but it also inspired OLP's 4th album so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"
A yellow warning sign with a figure sitting on a rock, freaking out as the water rises.
Big chonky blocks of textured concrete meeting at obtuse angles ubder a bright blue sky.
A cartoon figure excitedly reaches for a yellow balloon labelled Free Popular SFF. Then, they sweat anxiously as a large pink tentacled figure embraces them, labelled Parliamentary Procedure & Electoral Data Nerds.
Robert Redford as Martin Bishop in the frequently-memed film SNEAKERS (1992) asking "Monetized influencing?" Ben Kingsley as Cosmo replies "Don't kid yourself. It's not that monetized."
A chart with Happiness Level on the vertical axis and Genre Taxonomy Worry Level on the horizontal. Starting high at Blissful Ignorance, the line falls to "Nerd Low" before briefly rising to "Nerd High", then crashes to "Cladistic Despair" before climbing up to "Taxonomist's Satori", higher than the original bliss.
Immortan Joe from Mad Max Fury Road: Do not, my friends, become addicted to EB GARAMOND. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.
An orangey-pink horizon with trees under a cloudy sky, across a steely blue river. If you zoom in you can see a cormorant chilling out there.
Jo, a small brown and white dog, on her back on a colorful blanket staring pensively at the ceiling.
Michel Houellebecq's ANNIHILATION
Epic handshake meme: stephen king's "carrie" clasping "this draft": terrified of periods.
Gareth Marenghi, a guy in a leather jacket with glasses, holding up a finger and saying "I'm one of the few people who've written more sentences than they've read."
Bart Simpson: "what an odd thing to say"
The Japanese Gardens at the park, with flowering trees and lots of people having a good time
Poster image for the rings of power season 3, with 2 blond figures holding an unclear number of weapons at each other.
Dril tweet modified to say "and another thing: i don't think troilus and cressida is good. Please don't put in the guardian that I think troilus and cressida is good"
Crop of the quoted post that appears to read "Oprah Dickolas [handshake] Bigolas"
A small brown dog with a white chest and one white paw, sleeping on her back in between two humans on a couch.
Mady Jane Watson saying "ARCs are fine...I don't need a finished copy." Map TK Mary Jane about to cry.
There are layers to unpick here around how the black hole, which seems so central in the publisher’s description, shapes the text despite being narratively marginal, the ways in which it is metaphorical and the ways in which it is a real and approaching presence. By a similar token, however, perhaps the strike against labelling Event Horizon as slipstream science fiction might be that feeling strange is not the dominant emotional response it provokes: That would be feeling angry, perhaps, or complicit (the way that living a privileged life in the rich world in the early twenty-first century can make you feel). And that response matters more than a label, after all.
Close-up of a cover for a book with a woman with an axe on her shoulder posed in front of a bigfoot. Tagline is "a bigfoot romantic urban fantasy."
Two dudes from "George of the Jungle" saying "What is it with chicks and cameras, huh?" while a row of women look at astronaut Christina Koch holding a camera with her very muscular arms.
The vegetalian combo: greebs & cheese & onions & sweet potato & like a coarse tapenade on a perfect seeded roll.
Back cover with a picture of the author William Gibson(who has a fantastic face btw, prominent chin & eyebrows), who is very clearly not the cyberpunk author I am familiar with.
William Gibson's A Mass For The Dead
A blue beauty anole, a morph of the Cuban knight anole: a sleek but sturdy lizaed with greenish blue and yellow/red markings.
Epic handshake: two burly arms clasping. One says "writing is fun, and when you do it a lot it gets easier" and the other says "writing is agony, and it never gets easier". Handshake says "you don't need ai."