Matt Zandstra

@inflatableink.bsky.social

508 Followers 550 Following

Writer and coder

Mabel, now 15 weeks old, is much larger than she was. She's pictured taking a break from chasing a ball on her second ever visit to a park.
The lead to a lamp, chewed through to the wires (while plugged in to the mains). We have some more puppy-proofing to do.
An ad mail from Audible that reads "the next title in Iliad & Odyssey is coming May 28"
Mabel, our new Labrador pup lies on her back in her basket and presents her belly for a rub.
Ouse valley viaduct arches
books! King Richard II, Henry IV Pt Two, Day of the Triffids (old Penguin edition)
A close up of budding leaves -- with the bundled leaf visibly already pushing out into the world
Maisy (cat) asleep with her chin resting on a ball of wall
extract from The Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken [1] 140 Don't default to the ordinary or average in fiction altogether. If either is your subject, yes: you'll...
A blackadder still: "An it be true? That I hold here, in my motal hand, a nugget of purest green?"
So Late in the Day - Claire Keegan The Promps You Need to Help You Write The Book You Want To Write - Sarah Burton and Jem Poster A Long Game- Elizabet McCracken One Day, .Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad There Is No Antimetics Division - qntm
Extract from a piece by Marie Le Conte: Somehow it doesn’t matter that no country that’s ever tried to stop the far-right by embracing its policies has succeeded in the long term, and no-one cares about the fact that these policies, aside from being cruel and vindictive against real, live humans who haven’t done anything wrong will be a disaster for the economy. Somehow it doesn’t matter that every comic book villain on the far-right is currently applauding the fact that the mainstream is coming to them. Somehow it doesn’t matter that the public isn’t even for one second buying the idea that the centre-left has suddenly decided to sound like Nick Griffin, seemingly out of nowhere.
Ooooh! A bright purple firework at Preston Park.
A leaf suspended on a fine thread. The leaf is in focus and the woodland around it is blurry.
A leaf-strewn path in Hollingbury, Brighton. Despite the reds and browns of fallen leaves there's still a lot of greenery in evidence and the ambient light is bright. Soon after this photo was taken, the torrential rain began.
Screenshot of the Green Party online leadership ballot with Zack Polanski selected
cats waiting for scraps outside a fishmongers
Page from Playing with Reality by Kelly Clancy with the blood heavy remains of a mosquito smeared across it.
Headings: Franchise/Premise Musk flavoured accelerationism MAGA Neo-reactionary Iron man: Tech-enhanced ubermensch. Enough said. AI pictures of Trump as Iron Man King / CEO archetype Red Mars: I will be a god and you will be my rock-breaking serfs. Oxygen is not free! Colonisation! Like the old West! Territory for the network state! Like Greenland on a grander scale. Suck the juice out of Earth and then fly away, leaving the lumpen masses to perish. AGI / Skynet : Replace all the sneering creatives with pliant machines. New kinds of TV? Better Google? Trump as Terminator? Will future god torture us? I, Robot: Replace all the unionising warehouse workers with pliant machines. Techno-butlers? Sexy robots?
Gollancz edition of The Coming of the Quantum Cats by Frederik Pohl 1987, The Bug Wars by Robert Asprin 1980, Analog magazine 1972 with a story by Joe Haldeman. Cat included in photograph but unrelated to book haul.
Blossom on apple tree #1
a raised veg bed, raked soil
Trays containing climbing beans: Emergo and Cerokee Trail of Tears and dwarf French beans: Borlotto and Tendergreen
Evie the cat. Books by Adam Roberts, Sappho, Ian McEwan, Grace Curtis. A notebook with scrawled words.
The bottom bed, de-cat-pooped (again), and planted on one side with perpetual spinach.
Some peas in a drill -- more or less indistinguisable from the small rocks that are also in the drill.
Seed potatoes in a recycling box, awaiting a last layer of soil
A very incomplete pile of reading relating to my WIP including GORGIAS - PLATO THE REPUBLIC - PLATO THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES - PLATO AUTOMATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK- AARON BENANAV GREEK AND ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS - MELISSA LANE SIMULACRA & SIMULATION - BAUDRILLARD TECHNOFEUDALISM- YANIS VAROUFAKIS I am not procrastinating (any longer) but I do keep finding new rabbit holes to scamper down.
But wait! The very first germination of the year! Perpetual spinach (AKA chard) for the win! Picture shows a close up of germinating seed and a burrowing root.
Evie the cat lolling around pretending to be harmless. She is, in fact, a feline threshing machine.
A pack of wild flower / grass seed I found in my seed box. Our lawn isn't, and we've been making it a tiny meadow for a while. It's unfortunate that the seeds come in a plastic container, however.
Top bed with holes dug ready for the addtion of compost and then beanpoles.
It's been a tough year already. Partly for obvious reasons and also for some more personal ones. But running helps -- especially as the season begins at last. This picture shows a treelined path in spring sunshine, with a brittle pale blue sky in the background.
Compost made from organic kitchen waste. Two years ago this was coffee grounds and potato peel.
My greenhouse tent is on its last legs - which are essentially held together by gaffer tape. But I've tidied it and it will be good for one more season.
An utterly disastrous sourdough pizza attempt. Burgers have been ordered.
Some purple flowers growing on a concrete path. The only patch of colour in our garden right now.
A grab of the Guardian's homepage with MAGA related headlines swapped out for lines of poetry
The results of a simple Firefox extension that replaces any block of text containing a certain name with the string "More Tiresome MAGA nonsense"
ON WRITING AND WORLDBUILDING Volume I Timothy Hickson THE MINISTRY OF TIME Kaliane Bradley
PHILIP & ALEXANDER: KINGS AND CONQUERORS by ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY
Venn spent half his life in The Palace. Thanks to politics few remembered, the Office of the Prime Minister had designated most government buildings part of the Palace Estate. Prisoners, school children, Process officers all languished and toiled on Palace property. As did spiral clerks, driving agency workers, traffic wardens, Ordinary Crimes plods. It was, Venn thought, like one of those plants that spread its roots beneath an entire garden, sending up structures at will. So there was The Palace... he let his gaze ascend a column -- a marble vine curling its way upward around the marble shaft, bursting into a colourless riot of marble flowers at the capital... and there was _The Palace_.
Fulsome indicated and slowed. He negotiated a roundabout and then took a sharp left turn, burrowing into West Wood, a neighbourhood that had clearly once been its own village. It boasted a Dart supermarket, a tired looking green with a Civil War memorial -- Our Glorious Mixed Up Dead as someone once said, a chip shop, the inevitable subway station -- its symbol a circle sliced by two vertical tracks. The car turned and turned again and pulled up at last at a large semi-detached house. A profusion of number-painted rubbish bins told Venn that, like most of the buildings on the street, it had been subdivided into flats. Here was another kind of street party altogether. Half a dozen Ordinary Crimes officers stood bored and resentful at various points around the property. An ambulance had been parked half up on the pavement. Its doors were open and its interior lay empty. A few residents in various states of undress watched from across the road. And there, talking to a couple of the uniforms, was Laroche, praise to every blessed god. Thank all the fucks for Laroche.
A pile of books: Obital by Samantha Harvey, Against Progress by Slavoj Zizek, Written by Bec Evans & Chris Smith, A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass, The Penguin Book of the Short Stry Ed. John Freeman
I run the hill, share its heart jump breath weight, half possible summit, wheelie binned, little libraried. Cars guard the gutters. An old idea made metal. And that possibility, an architecture of choking, entire economy of collision, hums about me. Past loft conversion prayers, a skip trade minuet. I stagger at last upon a box offering, a clockwork hecatomb. And so I remake the world.
The goddess told Violet that the war was coming long before the bronze helmets of the city's recruiters appeared on the valley road. Even before the first rumours reached the olive grove where the men gathered to drink in the evening, or whispers found the great stone by the river where the women crushed and twisted the washing, the Goddess sensed the excited hum of approaching soldiers a hundred miles away. All blood and sex and theft. A little fear too. But they were strong and better armed than anyone they expected to meet. She saw the first sparks of death. Farmers extinguished by sword or fire as the army's scavengers spread outward from the main force and stained the land.
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends. Let's establish a code if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true, if it's written in red inks, it's false. After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink. Everything is wonderful here the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing you can't get is red ink.
At a table in the corner two skeletons sat beside paper cups. The skeletons, Cal knew, had once been named Doug Flannery and Lucy Derwent. Doug loved Lucy with an unreflexive low-intensity steadiness -- like, she told him once, a porch light. If Lucy loved Doug it was a neon darting affair, occasionally incredibly bright and hot, but alive, mostly in afterglow and the promise of return. But then, she sometimes reflected, it was not about him. It was just that love for her was a firecracker thing and sooner or later you had to go home and fix supper. So Doug was supper. Supper by porch light.
The White Mountains by John Christopher
God Knows by Joseph Heller
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber
My ancient battered copy of Asterix and the Big Fight by Goscinny and Uderzo
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter, leads of the 1993 Channel 4 show Mr Don and Mr George.