The Charm, Such As It Is, of the Charmera
Posted on January 16, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 9 Comments
Kodak did a brisk business over the holidays with their meme camera, the Charmera, which is tiny enough to fit on a key chain and takes deeply lofi photos, especially in low light. But it cost $30 and as it happens I do need a keychain, so I thought I would try one out and see what I thought.
Inasmuch as every camera must be inaugurated with a picture of a cat, here is the very first photo out of the camera:
And here is a picture of me, with said camera, in my bathroom mirror.
These pictures are pretty terrible! But admittedly they are also inside my house where the lighting is not great. What happens when we go outside?
Nope, still pretty terrible.
Which is to be expected, as this thing comes with a 1.6 megapixel sensor (1440×1080), and the sensor itself is likely the size of a pinhead. You’re not taking pictures with this camera for high fidelity. You’re taking them for glitchy lo-res fun, in as good of lighting as you can get. This also had video, at the same resolution, but you know what, I’m not even going to bother.
In addition to the primary color mode the Charmera has other “fun” modes including ones that add frame and goofy pixel art to your picture, which, you know, okay, why not. You need to bring along your own micro memory card, and it’s a real pain in the ass to get it in, so you will probably never take it out (you can connect it to your computer via USB, which is also how it’s charged), but once it’s in you can take effectively infinite number of pictures because the individual image files are so small.
The UI is not great, the little screen on the back of the camera is too tiny to be of much use, and quite honestly I’m not sure what the use case of this thing is, other than to have it, and possibly give it to an 8-year-old so they can run around taking pictures without running the risk of them damaging anything valuable, like your phone or a real camera.
But, I mean, as long as you know all that going in, yeah, it’s kind of fun. And for $30(ish) bucks, not a huge outlay for trendily pixellated photos. I’ve made worse purchases recently.
— JS
The Academy Is…: 2005
Posted on January 14, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 5 Comments
The Academy Is…, one of my favorite bands from this century (and yes, I feel old just typing that out), has recorded their first new album in eighteen years, titled Almost There, and will be putting it out in March. In the meantime, here is the first single from the album, “2005,” which is a paean both to that year and still being around more than 20 years later. Speaking as someone whose debut novel came out in 2005: Feel it.
Also if you want to preorder the album and merch, they have a shop.
— JS
A Minor Planet, a Major Thrill
Posted on January 12, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 79 Comments
Our solar system has eight major planets, nine if you believe that Pluto Was Wronged. It also has literally thousands of minor planets, which are also colloquially known as asteroids, many of which reside in the “asteroid belt” between Jupiter and Mars. I learned some time ago that the International Astronomical Union, through its Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature, will give some of these minor planets, usually designated by number, an actual name. What kinds of names? Sometimes of geographical locations, sometimes of observatories, sometimes of fictional characters like Spock or Sherlock Holmes, sometimes of scientists (or their family members), and sometimes, just sometimes, they’re named after science fiction authors.
Like minor planet 52692 (1998 FO8), henceforth to be known as “Johnscalzi”:
This little space potato is a Main Belt Asteroid whose orbit is comfortably between Jupiter and Mars, has a diameter of about 10.7 kilometers, and has a “year” of about 5 years, 8 months and 10 days. If I start the clock on a ScalziYear today, it’ll be New ScalziYear’s Day on September 22, 2031. Plan ahead! If you want to look for Johnscalzi, the link above will tell you where it is, more or less, on any given day, but at 10km across and an absolute magnitude of 12.19 (i.e., really really really dim), don’t expect to find it in your binoculars or home telescope. Just know that it there, cruising along in space, doing its little space potato-y thing.
How do I feel about this? My dudes, dudettes and dudeites, I am so unbelievably stoked about this I can’t even tell you. It’s not an exaggeration to say this was something of a life goal, but not a goal that was in my control in any significant way. I suppose it might be possible to buy one’s way into having an asteroid named for you, but I don’t know how to do that, and I wouldn’t even if I did. How much cooler to be tapped on the shoulder by the International Astronomical Union, and to be told, here is a space potato with your name. I can die happier now than I could have a day ago. To be clear, I don’t plan to die anytime soon. But when I do, if they’re shooting remains into space that point, now they will have a place to aim me at.
Also cool: The name of the asteroid that’s in the catalogue next to mine. We geeked out about it on the phone just now. We’re Space Potato Pals!
Anyway, this is how my day is going. It’s pretty great. Highlight of the year so far, for sure.
— JS
The Offline Archive
Posted on January 11, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 17 Comments
In the current iteration of Whatever, the archive here goes back to March 2002, which is a time before all but one of my books (The Rough Guide to Money Online, now out of print and deeply outdated). That is nearly 24 years of writing here on a nearly daily basis, and millions of words, to go along with the millions of words that are in my other books and novels, all but three of which are still in print (the other two out of print books: The Rough Guide to the Universe and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, both also out of date). Between this site and the books, there will be no lack of verbiage for people who are interested in me to go by; I will not die a mystery to history.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial part of my writing life which is no longer as easily accessible. Going from most recent to most distant, there are first the out of print books, the rights to which I own and which I might even put online at some point, but haven’t because doing so is a pain in the ass. I’d have to work from either old PDFs or scan everything in, and the effort required versus the value of the text is not there for me. You might find some of these on pirate sites, and inasmuch as I’m not doing anything with them at the moment, you’re welcome to them if you find them there (that said, don’t link to any of them in the comments, please).
Prior to that is the text of Whatever from between September 13, 1998 and March 26, 2002. This was an era where the Whatever was made from hand-rolled HTML rather than typed into dedicated blogging software (first Movable Type, then WordPress). Being hand-rolled meant that it was not easy to just transfer the text over; I would have had to cut and paste a couple thousand entries. Prior to the advent of Whatever there was an even earlier version of the site going back to March of 1998, which is when I secured the Scalzi.com domain and put up a static site, with columns and movie reviews from my newspaper days, new essays I wrote for the site, a couple of book proposals, and some extremely Web 1.0 site design.
None of this material is on the site proper anymore, but it’s still around after a fashion. One, I have a digital archive of it, duplicated in several places to ward off accidental deletion, and also it’s on the Internet Archive site (along with more recent iterations of this site), because I am not adverse to having the site archived in this way, and also because I personally find it convenient — if there’s something from this era I want to look at, it’s easier for me to look for it via the Internet Archive than my own archives. Among other things, the Internet Archive has maintained the architecture of the old site as well as the content of it. The Internet Archive is robust and useful but only gives the illusion of permanence; it could go away at any point. This is why I also have my own digital archive.
(The Internet Archive is also currently the only easy way to find anything I ever wrote on the former Twitter, as I permanently deleted my presence there, including all my tweets. I did, of course, download my own archive of tweets and have multiply saved it.)
Prior to this is my professional work up until I started being a full-time novelist: Work I did for AOL and other web sites, including columns at AMC, MediaOne and my own videogame review site, GameDad, and before then the columns, features and movie reviews I did for the Fresno Bee between September 1991 and March 1996. Again, I have my own digital archives of what I wrote, and the Internet Archive can help you resurrect at least some of this material if you know how to look for it. But much of it no longer available online, due to link rot, revamped web sites, or, in the case of the AOL stuff, originally having been in a walled garden that no longer exists in any event.
For a long time I suspected that the stuff I wrote for the Fresno Bee would never be available online unless I put it there myself, but as it turns out, there’s a site, Newspapers.com, which will allow you to access at least scanned (and sometimes OCR’d) versions of my reviews and columns. I found out about this, weirdly enough, because some of my Fresno Bee movie reviews started being quoted at Rotten Tomatoes. Not the full reviews, just quotes, alas. I may get a subscription to this site just to download all my movie reviews at some point. That will be a project.
We have dug down far enough that now we come to the material that is, truly, not available in any way, shape or form online: Writing from high school and college, which includes but is not limited to, music reviews and columns for the Chicago Maroon, my college newspaper, and my first attempts at short stories from high school. The picture at the head of this essay is of the actual physical archive of much of this stuff. It does not include the big-ass book I have that compiles all the copies of the Chicago Maroon for the 1989-90 academic year, when I was the editor-in-chief of the paper; that’s on a shelf on the other side of the room. Yes, if there’s ever a fire in my office, all of this writing is likely to go up in smoke.
I may at some point scan some or all of this stuff, but I’m pretty confident that almost none of it, save for what I had already put up in the previous iteration of the site, is going to be seen by the public at large. Why? Well, one, at the ages of 14 to 21, I wasn’t that good of a writer. Indeed, there is a real and serious upgrade in my writing skills that happened in 1998, because between ’96 and ’98, I spent a lot of my time being an editor, and much of that time was telling other people how to tweak their writing to make it better. It meant when I looked at my own writing previous to that point, I was very much “who told this jackass he could write” about it. The word to use for my writing in high school in particular is “precocious,” which is to say, showing talent but not a lot of discipline or control.
Two, and again particularly in my high school writing, some of it I’m ashamed of. In more than one of my short stories from the high school era, I made being gay a punchline, not because I was virulently homophobic at the time, but because I was a kid and uncritically absorbed the general 1980s societal attitudes concerning gay and lesbian folks. That explanation doesn’t excuse it, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. Also, being an ignorant kid in the 80s would not mitigate actual pain and harm posting those stories would have on people here in 2026. So they will stay on their shelf and not online.
I’ll note that wisdom and empathy did not suddenly alight upon my shoulder upon high school graduation. There’s plenty of my writing in the 90s — when I was a full grown adult — that is absolutely cringe on reflection. I’d sorted most of my homophobia by my exit from college, but hashing out my tendency to fall back on casual sexism for a laugh took well into the 21st Century to deal with. I can and do still slip into what I might call “avuncular pontificating” mode, and especially in the early days of Whatever this mode was indistinguishable from generic mansplaining. I try to do better, and I’ve been trying to do better for a while now. We are all permanently works in progress.
But that does mean that, unlike when I was younger and thought everything of mine should be read, I now understand why people curate their work, and let lots of it slip out of view. There is work from every stage of my writing life I am proud of and happy to show people. There’s a lot more I’m fine with letting it be, or, at best, it being of interest to a biographer, should one be foolhardy enough to emerge. There is a reason why, in the Site Disclaimer for Whatever, I mention that when you come across something that sounds like me being an ass, check the date and see if there’s not a more recent piece that reflects my current position on the subject. Also, this is why, if someone presents me with something I wrote a a decade or two (or three!) ago, I am perfectly happy to say, when necessary, that younger me was a jackass on many things and this happens to be one of them.
While I’m on the topic, and this is a thing which I think these days is actually important given the current state of technology, this is why you can’t just feed everything I’ve ever written into a Large Language Model and have it shit out a reasonable facsimile of me. Leaving aside any other issue with the current model of “AI” being an unthinking statistical matching machine, I am a moving target. I am not the same writer at 56 that I was at 16, 26, 36 or even 46. Is there a consistent thread between those versions of me? Absolutely; you can read something I wrote as a teenager and see the writer I am now in those words. But the differences at every age add up. You can’t statistically average the circumstances and choices I made across 40 years into something that reads like me, either as I am today or how I was at any previous stage.
And yes, you could ask an “AI” to control for these things, and it will, but it’s still not going to do a great job. I am me because of the lifetime of experiences I have had, but that’s not all of what makes me who I am in any present moment, What in my experiences contribute to that are not all equally weighted, or of equal consideration when I write… or when I’m thinking about what to write next. An LLM won’t and can’t understand that, which is why an attempt to use one to write like me (or any other author) is an exercise in the Uncanny Valley all the way down. Recently someone tried to convince me an LLM could write like me by cutting and pasting to me something he had it write “in my style.” It was only vaguely like how I would write, and also, I was mildly concerned that this person thought this was actually how I wrote.
All of which is to say that there is a lot of writing from me, and mostly what it does is give you an insight into who I was at the time it was written. Some of it good! Some of it is not. Some of it you can find, and some you cannot. And while I very much want you all to buy every single novel in my backlist, Tor and I both thank you for your efforts on that score, otherwise I’m perfectly okay with you focusing on what I’m writing now rather than what I wrote way back when. I’m related to that guy, and we’re very close. But we’re not exactly the same person anymore.
— JS
A Quick Thought On Nice Moments With Strangers
Posted on January 9, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 26 Comments
2026 has consisted of a few events that have contributed to my ever declining faith in humanity. I’m sure it’s done the same for many of you, so I thought today would be a good time to tell you about some positive interactions I had with strangers this past week, to remind us that not everyone is terrible, and we can still have nice moments in our personal life, even among strangers.
Yesterday, I drove to the next town over to get a coffee, and en route saw a man sitting on his front porch playing the banjo. On my return journey home I was stopped at the stoplight in front of his house, and I rolled down my window to listen to him. He was very talented, playing the banjo beautifully. He looked up at me and I gave him two thumbs up out my window and smiled at him. He smiled and returned to his skillful playing. The light turned green and I drove off.
A few days ago I was at Meijer, and a couple walked past me while I was looking at the bagels. The girl said “oh, bagels actually sound really good right now,” to which the guy replied, “you should grab some bagels.” She came up next to me and started looking at bagels, too.
“You should totally get bagels,” I reaffirmed.
“Well I saw you looking at them and thought they did sound good!”
“Did you see the cranberry ones? That’s what I grabbed, they sounded delish.”
“Ooh, those do sound good.”
“I’m about to go grab strawberry cream cheese to put on them.”
“Yum what a good combo!”
“Have a good one!”
“You too!”
I walked away, smiling.
So often I am completely indifferent to (or even resent) everyone else that’s at the grocery store, but sometimes it’s good to remember that the other people at the store are also just girls who want a bagel, like you. And normally I don’t strike up conversation, because who wants to be talked to while they’re grocery shopping, but something in me just sought connection with my fellow bagel shopper in that particular moment.
Just a couple days ago, a stranger came to my house to buy a microwave I had listed on Facebook Marketplace, and she said I had the most beautiful home on the block, and we had a brief conversation about moving troubles and how the house looked great. It made me smile. I’m glad she said something so nice, it really brightened my day.
Multiple times this week alone, strangers walking down the street or driving past me have waved, or nodded, or smiled, and it’s such a good recognition of, “hello, other human, I see you.”
Such small acts of acknowledgement that you exist and everyone else is a person like you. I don’t know, it just makes me feel better, and I thought maybe it would make you think of the last time a stranger smiled at you, too.
Feel free to share nice interactions in the comments, I’d love to hear them. And have a great day!
-AMS
A Monolith in Very Real Danger of Being Trampled By a Cat
Posted on January 9, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
Here is Saja giving consideration to the upcoming trade paperback version of When the Moon Hits Your Eye, which will be out February 10, just in case you had nothing to do that day. It comes with an extra, namely an alternate first chapter of the book that I wrote but did not use, because the first chapter I did use fit my overall narrative better. But it is still good! And it has a cat!
Also, this quote on the back of the book:
Which makes me absurdly happy.
— JS
The Big Idea: Lance Rubin
Posted on January 8, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 5 Comments
Many people wish they could return to a specific age in their life and live it all over again. But what if that person didn’t know they were reliving the same year over and over again? New York Times best-selling author Lance Rubin explores the idea of being a teenager seemingly indefinitely in his new novel 16 Forever. Follow along in his Big Idea to see a fresh take on the beloved time-loop trope.
LANCE RUBIN:
It’s no secret that we live in a culture that’s afraid of aging. Thousands of products exist to keep us looking as if we’re frozen in time. “Forever Young” is the name of not one, but two, classic songs. Forever 21 was a popular clothing store for decades.
But it occurred to me at some point that, if you could find a way to stay eternally young, it would actually be a complete nightmare. (Cue creepy, echo-saturated horror movie trailer version of Alphaville’s “Forever Young.”)
I said it occurred to me at some point, but I know exactly when it was.
I was five years old, watching a VHS tape of the 1960 televised Peter Pan musical starring Mary Martin. At the end, Peter comes back to the Darling home, and Wendy…has become an adult. They can’t hang out anymore. So instead, Peter flies off with Wendy’s daughter, Jane. Um, I thought, is this supposed to be a HAPPY ending? Seeing the playful bond between Peter and Wendy SHATTERED because of time? With Jane easily replacing Wendy simply because she’s YOUNG?
Around the same age, I saw the 1986 Disney film Flight of the Navigator, in which 12-year-old David falls in the woods and wakes up eight years in the future. His younger brother Jeff has become his older brother. Good god, it chilled me to the bone. The jarring role reversal. The visceral terror of time moving on without you.
And so, I decided to explore these ideas in a novel, with poor Carter Cohen stuck forever at age 16, literally unable to grow up. I’ve always loved a time-loop story, but the idea of a year-long loop, where every character knows the loop is happening except the person it’s happening to, rather than vice versa, seemed unique and intriguing.
I quickly realized that Carter’s perspective was an inherently disoriented one, seeing as his memory wipes clean every time he leaps back to the beginning of sixteen. It felt like the story wanted to be grounded in another POV too, to better understand the way Carter’s looping—which feels almost like a mysterious medical disorder—affects the people around him.
So the story is also told by Maggie Spear, the 17-year-old girl who Carter dated and fell in love with during his most recent loop. Once Maggie sees that the boy she loves now has no idea who she is, she decides it’s too painful to start over.
The experience of writing the first draft started pleasantly enough, as the premise gave me a lot to explore. It was fun to work through what a mess it would be to wake up thinking you were sixteen and then seeing your family had all aged six years without you. It was similarly compelling to think about the devastation of having your boyfriend walk right past you in the high school hallway because he has no idea who you are.
But when it came to cleaning up the mess these characters were in, I was pretty clueless.
As my editor David Linker said after reading my first draft, it “really falls apart in the second half.” The worst part about that note was that I knew he was completely correct.
I had two main struggles with this book. One was accounting for the six years of looping that happens before the novel even begins. Kind of an unwieldy amount of time to work with. I decided to write several chapters from the POV of Carter’s younger-now-older brother, Lincoln, since as a sibling he would have been there for every previous loop. That said, it was still hard to determine what had happened during that time and what was worth sharing with the reader.
The other struggle involved, well, THE LOOPING. Like, um, why was it happening? And would Carter get out of it? If so, how would he get out of it? How would that connect to the theme of growing up? Would a solution, if there was one, be clear or ambiguous? Literal or figurative?
Unlike a Groundhog Day loop of twenty-four hours, Carter had to make it through at least an entire year for the reader to see if he was going to make it out of the loop or not. Again, I’d boxed myself into a cumbersome duration of time. Which led to other questions too, like if Carter and Maggie were going to get back together, when in the year should that happen? How could I maintain the necessary tension when the ticking clock was A YEAR LONG?
So, yeah, imagine the above two paragraphs looping through my brain for months and months, as I paced around my apartment, as I walked to get groceries, as I talked through ideas with my wife Katie. I was, of course, as stuck as my protagonist—draft after draft after draft, unsure if I’d ever be able to write a version of this book I felt good about.
Ultimately, there were no quick solutions. No lightning bolt moment that solved everything. Instead, there were a series of tiny discoveries and changes that slowly made the book into something better. When my editor read the second draft, he felt it had improved, but it still fell apart in the last third. When he read the third draft, he felt like it was almost there, but not quite.
And so on and so on. There’s probably a reason writers are so attracted to the time-loop trope—in many ways, it so aptly represents the creative process: living something over and over and over again, trying to make it a little better each time.
Until finally: you stop looping. And it feels amazing, like you’ve done something impossible. I’m so happy with where the book finally landed and proud of the journey it took to get there. And, just as importantly: I have a deeper understanding of why Peter Pan and Flight of the Navigator made me feel so damn sad when I was five.
16 Forever: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Libro.fm|Community Bookstore
Construction Time Again
Posted on January 8, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 14 Comments
After a delay when the route from the manufacturer to us was literally closed by winter weather, all the components for Krissy’s new garage have arrived and the final construction has begun. One of the advantages of this type of construction is that it’s relatively quick to set up; the should have the whole thing up and insulated in a couple of days, after which time this garage will be the new home of our ride-on lawn mower and Krissy’s dad’s old pick up, which she has kept in meticulous shape and which still runs great.
Obviously I will post when the thing is completed, but I thought this early morning, snapped-when-I-took-the-dog-out shot was a pretty cool in-progress moment. I know Krissy will be happy when her new garage is done, and also, when all the construction mess is gone.
— JS
The Big Idea: Warren Tusk
Posted on January 7, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 4 Comments
Life isn’t fair. But it also isn’t unfair, it just is. As author Warren Tusk puts it in his Big Idea for The Goetist: the cosmos are indifferent. Follow along in the Big Idea for a philosophical journey through one’s sense of self and the meaning of being you.
WARREN TUSK:
The despairing man calls forth a demon, and binds it to teach him, so that he can stop feeling so empty and start finding something worthwhile in his life. And, once the formalities are done, his first question is – What is magic?
…this is weird, right? On the face of it, anyway. It’s weird because his question doesn’t obviously address his stated problem. He doesn’t lack for magic; he just summoned a demon. He lacks fulfillment and joy and meaning. He should be asking about those things.
The trick is that – at least within the goetist’s mind – it’s all the same stuff. He experiences the hollowness of his days as an absence of magic, and his own sorcerous power doesn’t change that. When he tries to fumble his way towards an escape from his unhappiness, he instinctively reaches out towards magic.
Which is not insane. At least, I hope it’s not insane, because I do the exact same thing. And so do lots of other people. When we look around at our world and find it bleak, and try to understand the nature of that bleakness, we call it disenchanted. We jump eagerly into the fake worlds of fantasy literature, not because they’re happier or more fun than the real world, not even necessarily because they’re more interesting – Lord knows they’re not always interesting – but because they’re magical, and that in itself is a thing for which we hunger.
How can magic actually help?
Hard to answer that if we don’t understand what we’re talking about, if we don’t define our terms. So let’s go back to the goetist’s question. What is magic?
The old answer, the obvious answer, is that it’s about power. Doing the impossible. Magicians can accomplish things that other people can’t.
Except that, in an age of technical wonders, the old obvious answer is no longer tenable. Doing the impossible is no longer something we associate with enchantment; people do the impossible all the time, these days, and there’s nothing remotely enchanted about it. The mighty mages of our fantasy stories use a lot of their power to replicate the effects of…cell phones, and security cameras, and airplanes, and modern medical treatments. (To say nothing of guns and bombs.) And we have all those things for real, and they’re wondrous and we wouldn’t know how to live without them, but their presence doesn’t leave us feeling like the world is filled with magic. Quite the opposite, much of the time.
The demon has a different answer. As he explains it: magic is what you call it when the world truly, deeply cares about who you are. About you-as-a-person. About the particularities of your virtues and your vices, your talents and your interests.
The magic sword is magic because only a true hero, pure of heart, can wield it. The magic sacrifice is magic because it works only when you give up something that genuinely matters to you.
Technology doesn’t care about things like that, because physical reality doesn’t care. You don’t need to be a true hero to fire a machine gun; the laws of thermodynamics don’t change based on emotional salience. And as we spend more and more of our lives integrating into large impersonal systems, it becomes increasingly true that most of the social world doesn’t care about our individual particularities either.
(I could spend a long time talking about how the intricacies of the self are stripped away by jobs, by dating apps, even by the effort to market a constructed “self” as a brand. But you can fill in all of that yourself.)
It’s easy to complain about modern anomie. The truth is, though – this modern condition is just an exaggeration, an exacerbation, of the way that things have always been. Physical reality, and social reality, have never answered to the complexities of anyone’s internal experience. The sun rises and sets, the crops grow, the village resolves its disputes, and all the elaborate patterns of your selfhood just come out in the wash.
There will be no magic unless someone cares. And the world won’t care. So you have to care. The shape of your soul has to matter to you, even if external reality will never notice. If you’re lucky, maybe you can find some other people who will also care, and you can care about the shape of their souls, and you can build some relationships in the face of the indifferent cosmos. But whether or not you’re lucky in that way – if you can believe that it matters who you are, without any feedback or validation, then you can enchant the world.
The Goetist is a wisdom book, which is to say, a book composed entirely of Big Ideas. It has crammed as many of them as possible into a short text, by jettisoning things like “plot” and “having more than two characters.” It goes through a lot of topics, and tries to pull philosophy out of all of them. But the very first Big Idea, on which all the others are built, is: Magic is the foundation of a meaningful life, and magic consists of caring about who you are. Not instrumentally, not as a means to an end, but as something irreducibly precious. The rest of the book is really just discussing a bunch of different ways to act on that principle.
It’s a principle that matters a lot to me, personally. I hold onto it tightly, because the wider world really is indifferent, and that’s a hard thing. And if you want to know why I wrote The Goetist in the first place – well, that’s why.
You can summon a demon with magic because the demon will see you for what you are, and you will see it for what it is, and you will matter to one another. Kind of like with a writer and a reader.
The Goetist: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Apocryphile Press
You can see more of the author’s work at Paracelsus Games.
My First Keeper Song of 2026
Posted on January 7, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
I understand it came out in 2025, mind you. But I’m hearing it for the first time in 2026. It’s a banger. Definitely going into my DJ setlist.
— JS
The Big Idea: Nicole Glover
Posted on January 6, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 6 Comments
When you find there to be a lack of magic in your world, make a new one. That’s exactly what author Nicole Glover set out to do when crafting the whimsical world of her newest novel, The Starseekers. Come along in her Big Idea to see how the ordinary can be made just a little more magical.
NICOLE GLOVER:
I always found it a severe disappointment when I realized as a child that I was living in a world where tea pots weren’t enchanted, ravens didn’t linger on fence posts to give me a quest, and that dragons weren’t snoring away in caves. I didn’t need unicorns or griffins as pets and I never had the urge climb a beanstalk, I just wanted a touch more wonder in the world.
So I did the only thing any reasonable person can do: I started writing fantasy.
From riffs on fairy tales, to tales of travelers seeking a library hidden in a desert oasis, to my current series, in my stories I explored what a world could look like with an abundance of magic.
And with each story I found myself most intrigued by the quieter uses of magic.
The spells in my stories warmed boots, provided a bobbing light for the overeager reader trying to read one last chapter, or put up the groceries for a weary shopper. I found joy in writing about enchantments that made tea kettles bubble with daydreams or devising cocktails that made a drinker recall their greatest regrets. The magic in my stories didn’t include epic quests and battles, and if there were curses, they probably had more in common with jinxes and weren’t nearly as difficult to untangle.
Everyday magic, is the word I like to use for it. Such magic is small spells and charms, that are simple enough for anyone to use and often have many different uses. In contrast to Grand magic which are spells that only a few can ever learn because they are dangerous, and just do one thing really well and nothing else.
Magic that’s in the background, in my opinion, is more useful than Grand spells that could remake the world. (After all what’s the use of a sword that’s only good for slaying the Undead Evil Lord, when the rest of the time it’s just there collecting dust in a corner?) Grand magic is clunky and troublesome, and can be like using a blowtorch when a pair of scissors is all that is needed. You ruin everything and don’t accomplish what you needed to do in the first place. It’s also very straight forward as the magic leaves little wiggle for variation or adjustment without catastrophe. And if a writer isn’t careful, duels involving magic can easily devolve into “wizards flinging balls of magical energy at each other.”
Magics with a smaller scale, leaves room for exploration. It can even allow you to be clever and to think hard of how it animates objects, impacts the environment, creates illusions, or even transforms an unruly apprentice into a fox. Most importantly, Everyday magic are the spells and enchantments that everyone can use, instead of magic being restricted to few learned scholars (or even forbidden).
Everyday magic allows a prankster to have fun, a child could get even on the bully, let’s an overworked city employee easily transform a park, and have new parents be assured their baby in snug in their crib.
It’s also the sort of magic perfect for solving mysteries.
The world of The Starseekers, runs on Everyday magic. I filled the pages with magic that creates staircases out of books, enchant inks and cards, brings unexpected utility to a compass, lends protection spells to bracelets, and even store up several useful spells in parasols. There is an air of whimsy to Everyday magic, giving me flexibility to have it suit my needs. Magic seeps into the surroundings, informing how characters move through the world and how they think about their acts. It allows me to consider the magical solutions to get astronauts to the Moon, how a museum may catalogue their collection of magical artifacts, or what laws on wands and broomsticks might arise and if those laws are just or not.
Embracing Everyday magic is what made The Starseekers possible, because making the everyday extraordinary is one of the many things I aim for as a writer and a lover of magic.
The Starseekers: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-a-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s
Some Of The Best Products I Bought In 2025
Posted on January 5, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 24 Comments
Things are tough out there. Money is tight, groceries are expensive, and day by day products are getting worse and worse. These days, you get far less bang for your buck.
You go on Amazon or Etsy to buy something, and everything is from a “brand” called QvorTply, and they sell the most suck-tastic dropship items. More and more often people tell me they’re buying things from Temu and Shein and that it’s all crap and a complete waste of money.
So, what is worth buying? Which brands can you trust, what products are worth buying, and which brands aren’t total bastards? Well, I don’t have all the answers, but I did buy a lot of stuff in 2025 with some mixed results. Today, I’m here to share some products and brands that I really like, and what I felt like was worth my money and a good purchase.
This will be a pretty interesting assortment of stuff, and while they’re in no particular order, I will be mostly trying to keep things of the same category together, like a big section of fabric/clothing items, then a section of food items, etc. Anyways, I hope you find something you like!
I’m going to start off with a brand I’ve actually talked about on the blog once before: Geometry. That’s right y’all, I liked it so much that I’m telling you all about it again just in case you missed it the first time!
Geometry is a home goods brand that specializes in towels, but has also recently branched out into blankets, linens, table cloths, things of that nature.
I never thought that I could love a dish towel so much, but Geometry’s Kitchen Tea Towels are the quite literally the greatest dish towels of all time. And to think, I was so hesitant to buy one of their towels because of the $18 price point, but now I can’t stop recommending them to all my friends.
So, what makes Geometry’s tea towels worth eighteen bucks a pop? Well, without even getting into the brand’s sustainability efforts and partnerships with artists, the towels themselves are huge in comparison to a regular dish towel. They are extra thin, making for quick drying time and way less musty-ness. They wash and dry so easy, and are even super wrinkle-resistant. I never knew how much I hated wrinkles in my dish towels until I saw Geometry’s come out of the dryer wrinkleless.
Whatever vibe you’ve got going for your kitchen, there’s a towel to fit it. You can filter the towels by styles such as retro, coastal, floral, abstract, or by color if you’re trying to stick to a specific color scheme. There’s so many different prints to choose from, and all of them are from real artists.
One of my favorite designers they have partnered with is Julianne Haness. They even have a little article over her and her art! I also quite like Ceyda Alasar, Rebecca Bobko, and Janna Sue Design. In a time of AI “art” and brands not wanting to pay artists for anything, it’s so nice to see a brand that respects the artists’ they partner with and provides tons of different designs from artists all over the world.
Aside from their tea towels, the only other product I’ve tried is their table runners. I bought three back in November or so, all of them in their large 16″ by 120″ size. I really like them! They’ve got a real nice heft and thickness to them that makes them feel like a quality product. I got two for the holidays, this Cedar print one, and this Doodles for the Holiday design. The third is for the summer, and is called Summer Air. I especially love this one because of the baguette.
So, I love the products of theirs that I’ve tried, and I love that Geometry partners with real artists. For my final trick, I’ll tell you about their sustainability efforts that really seal the deal on them being a cool brand. All of their products are made from recycled materials, and they say that a tea towel saves 3.5 water bottles from going into the landfill.
Geometry also has a recycling program called the Take Back Bag. Basically, you purchase this bag from them for $20 (stick with me here), you fill the bag with your old (clean) towels, linens, other textiles you no longer want, send it back to them, and you get $30 to use on Geometry products! A whole free ten bucks to spend on great tea towels just for recycling and making a positive impact on the environment.
So, yeah! Try a tea towel or two. Let me know what you think. In a perfect world, their membership program wouldn’t be full right now, and I’d be in it, but alas.
Continuing with fabric type goods, the next brand on my list is Fresh Clean Threads. How many times have you seen a shirt company advertising that their shirts are different? How many claim to be more comfortable, softer, and fit better on bigger bodies, so you take a chance on them, only to realize they’re not really as special as they claim to be? For me, the answer is a lot! There’s a lot of brands that had big claims, but only Fresh Clean Threads has delivered.
I absolutely love Fresh Clean Threads shirts, hoodies, crew sweatshirts, and joggers. To be clear moving forward, they have a women’s collection but I have only ever bought from the men’s collection. I’ve not tried any of their women’s stuff.
Anyways, a standard t-shirt is $23 and a long-sleeve is $25. The hoodies are just under $60 and the crew-neck sweatshirts are about $50. To me, this all seems pretty standard pricing, but they do have sales like, all the time. They even have a whole tab for just sale items if you’re feelin’ frisky. Like usually a pair of joggers is almost $50 but this two-pack is $30 right now?! Crazy deals to be had, I tell you what.
You can also build a bundle of five items and get a discount and it doesn’t even have to all be the same type of item. Pretty cool.
Their sizing is from S-3X for guys and XS-3X for women, and they have a “tall” option for men, too. I personally wear the 2X in men’s for all their tops and bottoms.
Fresh Clean Threads has, in my book, made the most comfortable shirts of all time. Like they actually nailed it. Even though I wear the men’s shirts and hoodies, everything fits so comfortably and no part is too tight on me. Especially the sleeves, I hate when sleeves are too tight or too short on my arms. They have perfected the sleeve game.
Plus, the hoodies are actually hefty and warm! Very soft inside. And best of all, none of their products come with scratchy tags. You don’t have to rip off any plastic tags or have anything itchy inside your shirt. I really value that in a shirt.
I swear every single shirt I own has shrunk in the dryer, but I’ve washed and dried my Fresh Clean Threads items a hundred times and they don’t shrink even a little bit and they haven’t worn out at all even through constant use. These are just really solid shirts, y’all!
You can wear them out and about as is, use them as a comfortable base for layering, and honestly the t-shirts are so comfortable I actually sleep in them on an almost nightly basis. They’re just really versatile, excellent staples, and I highly recommend them.
I’m also in their membership program, which is $19 a year and gets you 20% off every purchase, free shipping on every order, and early access to sales and new product launches. I can’t tell you how worth it it’s been for me to be a member, because I have ordered over twenty-five items from them (about half of which were gifts).
Finally, you know I have to mention their sustainability efforts. Fresh Clean Threads is partnered with the Coral Reef Alliance with a $50k minimum pledge each year, all of their factories are WRAP certified, and their packaging is 100% recyclable. Solid stuff!
For our next clothing brand we have the ever-popular Bombas. It took me far too many years to realize that the quality of your socks actually matters. I used to think that any ol’ sock was just as good as any other sock, it was of no importance to me the fabric of the sock or how thin it was. Well, now I know better! And Bombas are the best socks I’ve ever owned.
I actually didn’t buy Bombas for like, a solid year because I could not get past the price point. Between $15 and $20 for a pair of socks?! Who has that kind of money for socks? Well, after years of buying cheap packs and running holes through them and having to buy more cheap packs, turns out I do spend that kind of money on socks, so why not redirect it towards actually quality ones so I can stop buying the cheap packs?
I have been wearing the absolute heck out of my Bombas and they are literally just as intact and just as comfortable as day one of having them. I’ve not gotten any holes or threadbare spots or anything, and they feel nice and thick without being constricting or making my shoe too tight.
Personally, I really like their women’s half calf socks with this cute retro stripe design.
Bombas whole thing is that they donate an item for every item bought. Whether it’s underwear, shirts, or socks, they have given over 150 million items to 4,000 different community organizations in all fifty states. I honestly had a hard time believing they were really giving away a pair for every pair bought, but a couple months ago someone I know told me that her family member goes to a low-income dentist in Dayton, and they have a big basket of brand new Bombas free for the taking in their lobby. Turns out, Bombas was impacting my community and I didn’t even know it!
If the price point is really getting to you like it did to me, you can use code COMFORT20 for 20% off your first order, and there’s free shipping when you spend $75. Trust me, it’s a good investment long-term.
Moving on from textiles, I’d like to briefly mention AppyHour! The reason I say briefly is because I have already done three posts over AppyHour this past year (which you can see all three of here), but I just wanted to mention that I liked them enough to put them in this recommendation list.
AppyHour is a subscription based service and purveyor of fine meats, cheeses, and accoutrements that are shipped to your door so you have everything you need to make a yummy and impressive snack spread for you and your guests.
I think they’re a really nice small business with good customer service and are providing good quality products for a good price! I would say really the only thing to keep in mind is if you get the boxes long-term there do tend to be some repeats of items. Honestly this isn’t too much of an issue for me because the repeats I’ve gotten are some of my favorite items, like the Prairie Breeze Cheddar, and I’m plenty happy to put them on a board again.
And of course I’m still super grateful that when I posted about them in the past, y’all used my referral code for twenty bucks off your box, and all these months later I’m still working through the credits I got from that. I have enjoyed many a box paid for entirely by y’all signing up.
So if you’re in the market for some charcuterie goods to entertain visiting friends and family, definitely check out AppyHour! They’re pretty cool.
Branching out into jewelry, this next brand is the most new to me on this list, as I only found out about them during their Black Friday sale in November.
Nominal is a jewelry brand founded by a Palestinian Muslim Arabic-speaking woman and her husband, and each piece is inspired by the rich culture of the Middle East. Every order donates to Palestine relief aid, with over a million dollars donated so far. My favorite of all their jewelry is in their Palestine Collection.
I bought the Olive Leaf Earrings, the Palestine country map necklace, a super cute dainty watermelon bracelet, and watermelon studs.
All of their gold-plated jewelry is 18k gold with hypoallergenic stainless steel underneath. They say you can wear your pieces in the shower, sweat in them, wear them daily, and not worry about them tarnishing, fading, or causing skin irritation. I think Nominal has so many beautiful pieces for an affordable price, and has an amazing cause behind it. It’s something I feel good about purchasing and wearing on the regular.
Finally, I’d like to feature Le Creuset, as I am truly a ride or die customer for Le Creuset products.
Le Creuset is probably best known for their enameled cast iron Dutch ovens. While there are many brands that also make these types of products, Le Creuset is truly the cream of the crop. Yes, they are expensive, but if you have the money, you won’t find anything better.
Le Creusets are beautiful, come in a wide array of colors, and are going to be your new favorite pot to cook in, whether it’s on the stove-top or in the oven. Hefty, reliable, beautiful, their Dutch ovens are the best of the best.
But what about their other products? Well, aside from owning four of their Dutch ovens (one in Sea Salt, one in Marseille, a red heart shaped one, and one smaller one in White), I also have one braiser (with a glass lid (in Sea Salt)), a tea kettle (white with pink and red heart print), a set of mugs (in Shell Pink), two of these square baking dish sets (one in Sea Salt and one in Marseille), a heart shaped spoon rest (in Chiffon Pink), a baking sheet, this salt crock, two mini coquettes (one purple with a flower lid, one white and pink/red heart print one), and a pink pepper and salt mill set that I can’t find in their pepper and salt mill section so you’ll just have to use your imagination.
I love Le Creuset. So much. Their products are so wonderful and beautiful and you’ll be proud to showcase them on your stove or serving up soup to your guests at a dinner party. My wishlist of items from this brand are never ending. My self control is at a breaking point around these damn Dutch ovens. Plus, they have some crazy sales going on right now.
So, there you have it. Six brands I bought from in 2025 and think they’re worth recommending to others. Brands that supply you with actual quality products, and that are worth your money. Because there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t worth your money out there, and I am personally sick of wasting money on bad products.
I hope you found something you like amidst my recommendations! What’s a brand you’ve recently discovered that you’re a big fan of? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
Patrick Nielsen Hayden Retires
Posted on January 5, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 19 Comments
He’s announced it, so I can talk about it too: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my friend and also my editor at Tor Books, is retiring. He steps forward from a career that includes editing hundreds of books, including twenty of my own, and a ridiculous number of professional awards and achievements, including several Hugo Awards and a World Fantasy award. In addition to editing, he was (and continues to be) a notable figure in science fiction fandom, helping to run conventions, having been guest of honor for several, and got his first Hugo nomination for the fanzine Izzard back in 1984. He also teaches, including a long stint at the Viable Paradise writing workshop.
The short version of this is, he’s one of the editors most responsible for how the science fiction and fantasy field looks today. Inasmuch as it’s in really excellent shape, creatively and commercially, that’s something to be very proud of.
Also, Patrick is responsible for changing my life, when he made an offer on Old Man’s War, some twenty-three years ago (The offer was made the last week of 2002; the book came out January 1, 2005). It’s difficult for me to overstate how much my life is different now than what I had expected and planned for, prior to Patrick telling me he wanted OMW for Tor. It’s unlikely I would know (at least!) half the people I know or had the half the experiences I’ve had in my life. Certainly my bibliography would be very, very different. I occasionally wonder what my life would have been like had Patrick not offered on OMW, but not too much. I like this life, the experiences I’ve gotten to have, and the people I get to have in it, including Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
I don’t want to go on too much at this point, since as Patrick notes, he is not dead, nor will he stop being part of the science fiction community. He’ll be around! He’ll just get to other things. He plays a mean guitar, so maybe there will be more of that. Maybe he will travel. Maybe he will fight crime! We will see.
Whatever he gets up to, I hope he enjoys it and I hope he tells me about it the next time I see him, probably at some convention or another. I expect a lot of catching up and hanging out, like we’ve always done. He’s stopped being my editor. He’s not stopped being my friend.
— JS
(PS: For those of you curious, the person now editing my novels at Tor is Mal Frazier, who, as a member of Patrick’s editorial team I have already worked with on the last couple of novels, most notably The Shattering Peace, which the sharp-eyed among you will note is dedicated to them. Mal is smart as hell and doesn’t put up with any crap from me, which is exactly the sort of editor I like, need and appreciate, and I look forward to continuing to work with them. I’m not just saying that because I owe them a book, like, now.)
A Brief Note on Current Events, January 3, 2026
Posted on January 3, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 57 Comments
I don’t have a whole lot to say about what’s going on in Venezuela at the moment because like most people, I’m still finding out about it. The one thing I will say, and this rather emphatically should not be construed as a mitigation or an exculpation, is that the folks suggesting this is a line that the US has never crossed before should probably reacquaint themselves with the U.S.’ history in South and Central America. We have done this before, both overtly and covertly, lots of times.
“But this is different!” Sure, because every one of these times is different in the details, and likely to be different in its consequence. But in principle it’s much the same, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. The US believes this half of the globe is its own. Again, this is not mitigation, or exculpation, or the suggestion that individually or as a cohort, we throw up our hands and just accept it. It’s just a reminder that we’ve been here before, not all that long ago, and not all that long ago before that.
— JS
Me Writing A Post Over Intention Setting On January 2nd Instead Of January 1st Is Indicative Of Why I Want To Set Intentions
Posted on January 2, 2026 Posted by Athena Scalzi 37 Comments
Originally, I wanted to write a post on December 31st that talked about how I feel 2025 went for me personally, and how I was planning to go about growing in 2026. Then, I didn’t, and it was New Year’s Day. Of course, that’s the perfect day to post a fresh, welcome to the new year post and talk about how the last year went and speak about 2026. But I didn’t do that either!
And so, here we are on the second day of 2026, and I’m finally getting around to doing something I meant to do last year (ha, get it?).
Bad joke aside, it really does bother me that I didn’t write what I wanted to write when I wanted to write it. Procrastination is so annoying and benefits absolutely nothing and no one, and yet so many of us struggle with it to a point of detriment. It’s a lifelong issue and I definitely have no idea where it comes from.
Anyways, I’m here now, and I’d like to talk about some of my intentions moving forward.
While I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s resolutions (especially ones regarding hitting the gym, waking up at 5am, and cutting out treats), there are some things I’d like to work towards and improve upon as I go through 2026. In that same vein, I was never a fan of “setting intentions.” It sounded fake and not worthwhile just to say the things you want. Manifesting and vision boards sounded like hippie-dippie mumbo jumbo.
It took me a few years of unlearning cynicism to see that there is genuinely value in writing down and speaking about the things you want. It’s good to make it clear to yourself and to others in your sphere how you feel and what you want for yourself and your life.
It also helps to know that the words you say aren’t a prison. Your hopes and goals for a better you should be a guiding path, not a cage. You will never get better through punishing yourself and putting Current You down in hopes to get to a Better You. Better You is Current You after you give yourself time and love to get there.
Inspirational poster sayings aside, here’s my hopes for 2026.
I’d like to work on being a better friend, and deepen the friendships I have, emotionally speaking. A lot of my friends are going through big changes in life, like marriage and kids, and even though our paths don’t look the same I still love them and want to be there for them. It’s been a challenge to be supportive to my friends who have very different life situations than me, but I’m hoping to grow and mature and find ways to show up for them more.
I want to be more than just a fun hang, I want to be someone that my friends can trust and depend on for anything. Inconvenience is the cost of community, and I really want community.
I’d like to continue working on my mental health journey. Though I’ve been in therapy every week for six years, I never wanted medication because I was convinced that one day I’d just magically be better. I thought I was “strong enough” to overcome it on my own, that I could somehow beat my anxiety and depression just by hoping it went away. But I only ended up getting worse, and finally in August last year I got prescribed 10mg of Lexapro.
I was hesitant to take it and scared of side effects. It felt like my mental illnesses were winning, and that I was having to use medication as a weapon in a war that I was losing. Turns out, I feel a lot better! Wild how that works. In fact, just last month I went up to 20mg of Lexapro because I’m no longer scared of taking it and the higher dose makes me feel even better. Who knew!
While it is obviously not a 100% perfect cure and I still have my moments and episodes, boy am I doing better and looking forward to further addressing and working on my mental health. Yippee!
Part of why my mental health has been absolutely ass for so long is in no small part because of my magic little screen that fills my head with dread. My doom-scrolling has always been a bad habit, for lack of a better term, but in 2025 I’m sure I’m not the only one that was doom-scrolling at unprecedented levels. Scrolling was off the charts, and my brain was constantly drowning in negativity.
So, for 2026, I genuinely, honestly, so very badly want to reduce my screen time. Or, at the very least, my small screen time. Obviously going to the theater or watching new shows and movies doesn’t count as like, “bad” screen time.
Every day for years my phone has told me that my screen time is anywhere between five and eight hours a day, and that starts to feel like it’s adding up. I want to use my phone for things I enjoy, like calling loved ones and texting friends. Actual phone things!
Sometimes I see media in which the characters have corded phones on the wall and I start to romanticize them. My phone is not a tool in which I use to benefit myself, it is a black hole I am sucked into on a daily basis. I hate it and yet I do not know how to live less attached to it. But I cannot keep doing this whole doom-scrolling and being force-fed ads and AI shit. I don’t want any part in the way technology is “progressing.” Fuck ChatGPT and generative AI. Congrats on making a “tool” that has made me start to hate my own technology and want to be on the internet SO MUCH LESS.
Going back to what I mentioned earlier about not absolutely loving the idea of cutting out treats and becoming a gym-bro, I do finally feel like I’m at a place in my relationship with food in which I would like to work on nourishing my body better. I don’t want to restrict myself from having what I want, or guilt myself about eating something “bad.” I only seek to give my body more nutrients and vitamins and listen more to the things it needs to feel better.
While I’ve truly hated my body my entire life, I think I finally feel like if I start to love it, it might start to love me back. And I don’t mean “start to love it” as in “be happy with how I look currently,” but in the sense that if I eat nutritionally, stretch and move my body in some small ways, and stop force-feeding it fast food, sugar, and alcohol so much, it might start to respond better, be stronger, and maybe look closer to how I would prefer it to.
Additionally, I’d really like to cook and bake more in 2026. I love cooking and baking, yet so rarely do it. Mostly because it is a lot of effort, but what worthwhile thing isn’t? I’m hoping that my connection to my own food and the intentional action of cooking and baking will help me eat in a more thoughtful and nourishing way. Not that I’ll be throwing protein powder into desserts, or anything.
While I won’t list absolutely everything I’d like to improve upon or work on, I will end this list with how I would like to grow in a creative and professional capacity. For so long, creating things has felt like a chore. Even though I’m usually happy with the result of sitting down and writing, the aforementioned sitting down and actually writing part has always been hard. Aren’t I supposed to like this whole creative process and content creation thing? It’s like my whole gig, after all.
I want to enjoy the process, not just feel relieved I got it done and end up liking the result well enough. I want to feel less like everything I do has to be purely for production purposes. If it ends up as a product (like a blog post) then great! But I don’t want to feel like that’s all I do in a creative sense.
This year I’ll be doing some fiction writing. I won’t say too much on it, but I have some lofty goals in that regard and after years of writing on the blog, I finally feel ready to move into the world of fiction and write more creatively. I’m excited for this endeavor and I hope it goes well!
So, be a better friend, less screen time, eat better and move more, and write more and enjoy the creative process. Sounds pretty standard when it’s all summed up, huh? Well, even if they’re basic goals, I’m really optimistic in making progress on them this year.
How about you? Got some basic goals, too? Let me know in the comments, and have a great 2026!
-AMS
What I Have Available for Award Consideration, 2026 Edition
Posted on January 2, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
If you’re the sort of person who nominates stuff for awards, this year I have a number of works available for your consideration. For the sake of convenience I’m using the Hugo Award categories to lump them together but these classifications should work generally for the various awards my work is eligible for. All of these works were made publicly available between Jan 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025.
BEST NOVEL:
When the Moon Hits Your Eye. March 2025. Published by Tor Books, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Editor.
The Shattering Peace. September 2025. Published by Tor Books, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Editor.
BEST SERIES:
The Old Man’s War series, published by Tor Books, of which The Shattering Peace is the latest installment.
BEST NOVELETTE:
3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years. November 2025. Published by Amazon Original Stories, John Joseph Adams, Editor.
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM:
The Other Large Thing. May 2025. Episode 4, Season 4, Love Death + Robots. Written by me, directed by Patrick Osborne. Produced by Netflix and Blur Studios.
Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners. May 2025. Episode 9, Season 4, Love Death + Robots. Written by me, directed by Patrick Osborne. Produced by Netflix and Blur Studios.
In addition to me, the following people are also eligible for award consideration based on their engagement with my work: John Harris, Best Professional Artist (for The Shattering Peace); Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Best Editor, Long Form (for When the Moon Hits Your Eye and The Shattering Peace); John Joseph Adams, Best Editor, Short Form (for “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years”). Also, the anthology that “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” is part of, The Time Traveler’s Passport, is eligible for Best Anthology consideration. Finally, all of Volume 4 of Love Death + Robots is eligible for consideration for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.
(Please note that my novella Constituent Service, published in print/ebook in November 2025, is not eligible for award consideration, as it was originally published in audio in 2024. However, cover artist Tristan Elwell is eligible for Best Professional Artist, because the cover art to the print/ebook edition of the novella is original to 2025.)
I think that covers all the things I did for 2025! I mean, it’s a fair amount. If you read or watched any of it, I hope it gave you joy. And if you haven’t read or watched these things, well, that just means they’re ready for you when you’re ready to enjoy them.
— JS
A New Year’s Sky
Posted on January 1, 2026 Posted by John Scalzi 8 Comments
The first sky of 2026 was gray most of the day, but there was a small crack at the horizon where sun was able to peek through as it set, and then once it slipped under the horizon, it set the bottom of the clouds on fire. Not a bad look for the first day of the year.
Happy New Year to all of you and may 2026 be a good one.
— JS
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Thirty-One: The Shawshank Redemption
Posted on December 31, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 24 Comments
It’s strange, and possibly borderline offensive, to suggest that an at-the-time two-time Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe-winning actor had not arrived before appearing in The Shawshank Redemption. But guess what, this is precisely what I am going to do, right now. The Shawshank Redemption did a number of things: Gave Stephen King arguably his best movie adaptation. Moved Frank Darabont from a middlin’ genre screenwriter to the Hollywood A-list. Grabbed seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Became the top-rated movie of all time on IMDb. This movie did all of these things. But what it truly did, was give the world its current understanding of the phenomenon that is Morgan Freeman. Freeman came into The Shawshank Redemption appreciated, admired, awarded and accomplished. He came out of Shawshank an icon.
It’s the narration, of course. The scaffolding of the entire movie, which Freeman offers in his rich, unhurried voice, offering context and commentary low and slow. Freeman isn’t just saying the words, he’s braising them, making them tender and toothsome but with just enough wry bite to keep the audience coming back. The words Freeman is saying come from Stephen King’s novella, filtered through Darabont’s screenplay. But make no mistake. The moment he starts speaking, they are his. It’s not an exaggeration to say that more than anything else, it’s Morgan Freeman, and his voice, that have made this movie the classic it is today. Take it away, it’s just another prison drama.
Maybe that’s too dismissive. Even without the narration, it would be a very handsome, very accomplished prison drama, and one that in many ways is clearly a labor of love for Frank Darabont. Darabont spent some of the money he got for his first feature film screenplay (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors) to secure an option on “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” from its author Stephen King. He reportedly spent $5,000 on the option; King reportedly never cashed the check. Darabont wrote a script and took a meeting at Castle Rock Productions, home of another fellow who liked Stephen King, Rob Reiner. Reiner loved the script and wanted to direct it, offering Darabont a fair amount of money to let him do so. Darabont took less money for the opportunity to direct it himself.
I think this is was a good choice on Darabont’s part. The version of Shawshank that Reiner would have made would, I think, have been good — we have both Stand By Me and Misery to stand testament to that. That said, there’s a lightness to Rob Reiner’s work (yes, even when Annie Wilkes is taking a sledgehammer to Paul Sheldon’s ankles, we’re talking an overall gestalt), in the way he frames and lights and shoots his scenes, and in how he directs his actors. Reiner’s Shawshank would have looked and played very differently, even with the same script in hand.
Darabont doesn’t do “light” — not just in this film but in any of them. He tried to do light in The Majestic and while I like that film quite a lot, actually, boy, was he not the right director for that. Darabont is dark — well, “dark” makes it sound like he’s goth or something, which he’s not. Let’s say “somber.” He’s somber, and his frame is considered, and he doesn’t do a closeup when he’s got a perfectly good medium shot to go to. Shit, even his close-ups aren’t that close up.
I suppose a word that matches well with Shawshank’s pace and bearing is “stately.” Nothing fast, everything considered, all of it moving along in its own time. Which makes sense. Everyone in this movie is doing time. Twenty years, forty years, life. They don’t have to be in a rush for anything. So they’re not, and neither is this film.
(There are fight scenes, and they are violent, and things move fast there. Again, big picture, folks.)
Darabont’s sensibilities as a director are precisely right for the story he wants to tell here, one where we need to feel the whole wide expanse of the time these men have at their disposal, and how time itself disposes of them. One of the most celebrated parts of the film is an interlude where an older convict, one who has spent nearly all his life in the prison, is paroled and loosed upon the world — or more accurately the world is loosed upon him. “The world got itself in a big damn hurry,” he writes his friends, but Darabont doesn’t make the interlude hurry at all. He follows it, stately, to its inevitable conclusion.
There is a larger story here. It’s told mostly by Ellis “Red” Redding (Freeman) in narration, centering on his friend Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), who is serving two life sentences for the murder of his estranged wife and her lover. Andy doesn’t fit into prison, and not just because he was a banker in his previous life. There’s something else going on with him that makes him an odd fish. Nevertheless over time Red and his friends warm to Andy, and Andy returns the favor as the skills from his past life start to come in handy for a warden (Bob Gunton) who has big plans, not all of them on the up-and-up.
Andy is a lifer and his life is no cakewalk in prison, but he holds out hope, which is something Red doesn’t approve of. Hope of what? Hope for what? It’s never specified, and then one day an important piece of information comes to light about Andy’s crimes. Things happen not fast after that, but certainly quicker than they had before, and we discover why Red had to be the narrator after all.
In King’s novella, Red is Irish (a throwaway line in the script, played for humor, is all that remains of that), but after this movie there is no way anyone would imagine anyone else but Freeman in the role. Freeman gives the character gravitas, but not at the expense of making you forget he’s in prison, and rightfully so. Red’s a lifer, and has the perspective of a lifer. If he’s maybe a little smarter than most of the other inmates, with somewhat more perspective, it doesn’t make his position any better than theirs, and he knows it. Red has gotten to sit with his own bullshit for years and years, and Freeman’s performance reflects that fact. The character has gravitas because the world and his choices weigh on him.
That comes through, to bring everything ’round again, in the narration. Narration is almost never a very good idea in film. It usually means that you’ve come to the end of production and editing and realized, shit, some very important plot points have been left terribly unwritten in the script, quick, grab the lead and loop in some lines. Bad narration can drag a film down (see: the original version of Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford’s apparently intentional leaden line readings indicated what value he thought they brought to the film) or even make it more confusing than it was before (see: 1984’s version of Dune, which to be fair, no amount of explanatory narration could have salvaged). So why does it work here?
One, because going back all the way to King’s novella, this was always Red’s story, even as he’s telling it about Andy. The frame was always there, and always meant to be there; it wasn’t some rushed last-minute addition from the notes of a panicked studio suit. Two, because it is Morgan Freeman. That voice. That cadence. That intonation. That occasional wry remark. Freeman was nominated for Best Actor for this film, and make no mistake that the narration was a great deal of what got him the nomination. The rest of his acting is terrific, to be clear. But it’s the narration that has stayed with people over the decades. It’s arguably the most successful film narration ever.
Freeman did not win the Best Actor Oscar that year. It went to Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump. In the light of 2025, and the esteem in which Freeman’s performance is currently held, this could be seen as a puzzling choice. This is where I remind people (or, if they’re young, inform them) that The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure when it came out in 1994. It cost $25 million to make and made only $16 million in its first spin through the theaters. The film’s seven Oscar nominations actually prompted Columbia Pictures to re-release the film in February of 1995, which goosed the domestic take up to just under $25 million. Then it came out on home video and was a monster, becoming the top video rental of 1995. That and incessant showings on basic cable, brought the movie to the esteem it has today.
But in 1994? Shawshank made less in the theaters than Forrest Gump made in its first weekend; throw in the February re-release and they draw up about even. It was a minor miracle that Shawshank was nominated for seven Oscars at all. It didn’t win any because it was up against Gump and Pulp Fiction and lots of other movies seen more by the public and by Academy voters. The only major award of any note that the film won was one it from the American Society of Cinematographers, who gave Roger Deakins their award for theatrical releases. Really, that’s pretty much it.
Fear not, for the Oscar comes to Morgan Freeman a decade later, in 2005, when he wins his statuette for Million Dollar Baby. By this time, Morgan Freeman has become Morgan Freeman, The Voice of God — literally, in the case of the film Bruce Almighty — and the most recognizable voice this side of James Earl Jones, Tim Robbins, who plays Andy Dufresne in Shawshank, will also win an Oscar, his in 2004. Curiously, both Freeman and Robbins will win their Oscars being directed by Clint Eastwood.
Does Freeman owe his eventual Oscar to Shawshank? You’ll have to imagine me making a see-saw motion here, since among other things Eastwood worked with Freeman before, notably on Unforgiven, and of course Freeman had turned in Oscar-caliber performances prior to Shawshank. But there’s no doubt that Freeman’s cultural capital had been raised considerably, and much of that comes from this role and its slow ascendance into public consciousness. Freeman is responsible for Freeman winning an Oscar. Shawshank is responsible for making Freeman, America’s Quiet Yet Comforting Voice of Authority, our very own ASMR Daddy, letting us know everything will be all right.
Morgan Freeman has become such a voice icon that there is an entire genre of internet meme devoted to putting text next to a picture of him so when you read the text, you hear him saying the words in your mind, automatically giving those words credibility, no matter what the words are. You could post the words “kittens are a wholesome and natural snack” next to Freeman’s face and suddenly at least some people would be wondering if that wasn’t true. It’s not true, by the way. Please don’t eat kittens. Also Freeman never said that. Freeman probably said none of those things that those memes attribute to him. The internet lies, people.
So instead, let me leave you with words Morgan Freeman did say, in The Shawshank Redemption, near the end of the film: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” This is the choice Red has to consider for himself, and the choice he makes is informed by every other thing that has happened in the film. If you watched the film, you know his answer, and if you haven’t watched it I’m not going to spoil it for you now.
Either way, with or without Morgan Freeman saying them to you, I want you to consider those words in your own life, especially when things are difficult, as they so frequently are. The choices you make and the actions that come from them will make a difference to you and those around you. The Shawshank Redemption, in the end, is about this. You don’t need Morgan Freeman to tell you it’s important. But I have to tell you, it doesn’t hurt when he does.
Thanks for sticking with me for The December Comfort Watches this month. I hope the new year brings you joy, and comfort, and movies.
— JS
2025 In Review + Some 2026 Thoughts
Posted on December 31, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 40 Comments
Well, 2025 was an absolute shitshow for the world in general, not in the least because a vengeful felon returned to the White House, and with his cronies engaged in a spree of revenge, corruption, bigotry and incompetence, but on a personal level, my 2025 was pretty decent. At one point I thought it might be churlish to note I had a good year when the world was on fire, but then I thought, you know what, this is especially the time to celebrate the wins, so fuck it, here we go.
On the professional front, When the Moon Hits Your Eye came out in March and was a USA Today and Indie bestseller, The Shattering Peace came out in September and was a New York Times bestseller, and both ended up on a couple of “best of” lists for the year, so that’s great. My short story “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” came out in October as part of Amazon’s The Time Traveler’s Passport anthology and has done very well, getting up as high as #17 in the entire Kindle store, and still at the end of the year number one in several of Amazon’s highly specific “bestseller” categories, like “One-Hour Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Reads.” I had two(!) book tours this year and saw thousands of people on them and signed even more thousands of books. It was lovely to see each of you who came out to visit me. I’m very tired now.
Also, Love Death + Robots had a new season come out on Netflix in May, and I had two episodes in that, “The Other Large Thing” and “Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners.” I had people like John Oliver, Tiffany Haddish and Brett Goldstein speak words I wrote, and that definitely doesn’t suck. I also had some things optioned for film and TV, and am currently developing a television series that I can’t tell you anything about yet, but if it ever gets beyond the initial development phase, trust me, I’ll tell you all about it. Suffice to say, on a professional level, things were firing on all cylinders. This is a very good thing.
In the personal realm, things were also pretty good. In no particular order: Krissy and I celebrated our 30th anniversary in Venice. For Krissy’s birthday, I got her a campground. Athena got a new house. We got a new kitten. At the church, we had our first community event, a concert by our friend Jim Boggia. We attended the JoCo Cruise again, and also Worldcon, and I played DJ at both, which is fun for me, and hopefully for other people too. I went to other conventions, festivals and events as well, and was a Guest of Honor at the Writers Symposium at GenCon, which was very neat.
In terms of hobbies, I took some really nice pictures this year, including of Krissy, of which this one, of her on the Scalzi Bridge in Venice, is my favorite:
I also kept doing cover songs, and I think this is my favorite of the year:
And of course I kept writing here, which is not exactly a hobby, but melds between the personal and professional, and I’ve been very much enjoying writing the second installment of the December Comfort Watches series, which concludes later today.
2025 wasn’t all great on a “me” level, I will note. Aside from my general frustration with the political and social situation in the US at the moment, which could be a whole post of its own (actually, several; actually, if I start I will never stop), we have had friends and family members who left us this year, most notably Krissy’s Aunt Linda at the beginning of 2025, and her Uncle Ron at the end of it. I let go of some friendships this year, and some friends let go of me, and I wasn’t happy about any of that, for various and differing reasons.
I’m still more out of shape than I would like to be at the moment, an issue that has been exacerbated by some (likely) arthritis in one of my knees, which makes walking, my favored form of exercise, more of a challenge. I can still walk perfectly well, but the knee complains when I do more than about a half mile of it at a single stretch, which made the last tour fun, because airports will have you clock a mile or two of walking before you know it. Yes, I’ve talked to my medical professional about this, and we’re on it, I assure you.
Also, and I think this is important to note, 2025 has been a motherfucker on my ability to focus. On a practical level this means things like me still writing a novel I hoped I’d finish at the end of November (it’ll be done soon. I SWEAR). On a more existential level, aside from any personal focus issues, I’m aware that keeping people feeling stressed and beleaguered is an actual strategy being used right now. It’s being focused much more on other people than it is on me, and there’s an understatement for you. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel it. If you’re a creative person and you’ve been finding it more difficult to focus on your work this last year, know you’re not alone.
Also: Fuck those dudes. Keep making work, not only because it will bring you and others joy, but also because it will just plain piss them off that they couldn’t stop you.
I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions, since they feel like unneeded pressure, but I do have goals for 2026. The first is to finish the novel I’m currently writing, which, in all seriousness, will be done pretty soon now. That’s the thing that has top priority. After that: Well, all the usual things of writing new stuff, developing new projects and practicing global domination. Scalzi Enterprises (the family company!) has a couple of projects already in the pipeline, and we need to add a few more. We have a three-year plan to profitability and this is year two. Let’s see if we can get a head start on that.
Another project I have is to move my music studio from the basement up to Athena’s now-former bedroom. The basement studio was spacious, but it was literally always cold; if I spent more than a half hour down there at a time I would start to feel like an icicle, even in summer. I think moving the studio upstairs, closer to my actual office, will get me in there to make more music. I understand this is more exciting to me than it is to other folks (as I am fond of saying, my music has dozen of fans), but it is exciting for me, so there.
Also, I plan to figure out an exercise regimen that I can stick with, because that would make me happy (no suggestions, please, but thanks for thinking of me). I’m also going to try to schedule myself better. I do say that a lot, and I always sort of don’t. The fact is, though, if I want to do all the things I want to do, professionally and personally, I need to be scheduling myself better. We’ll see.
A final goal is two-fold: spend more time with friends, and spend more time with Krissy. Friends because there are folks I wish I could see more of, and mostly at this point what’s holding me back from that is me (this is another reason why better scheduling would be lovely). As for spending more time with Krissy, this might seem confusing because we live together and work together already. Sure, but one of the nice things about having taken that 30th anniversary trip was that it was time when we didn’t have anything to do other than enjoy each other’s company. When Krissy and I are at home there is always something to be done, mostly by Krissy, or errands to be run, again mostly by Krissy (I do do stuff at home; usually it’s what Krissy tells me to do). A lot of my travel is work-related; Krissy frequently joins me but I’m often busy. Going somewhere where neither of us have any obligations is key. Not always or even frequently will it be a grand adventure like Venice was; that adds up quick. But a few days someplace sunny, with a bar, would be fine.
I just read that part to Krissy. She agrees. Well, there it is, then. That’s settled!
Oh, and: You better fucking believe I’m going to be voting. That’s not the only thing I’ll be doing, politics-wise, in 2026. But it will be happening.
There you have it: 2025 in review, and some thoughts on 2026. I hope it’s a better year for all of us. We could use a better year right about now.
— JS
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Thirty: Top Secret!
Posted on December 30, 2025 Posted by John Scalzi 40 Comments
Top Secret! (the exclamation point is part of the title) makes not one single solitary goddamned bit of sense. It’s a movie from the 80s with a hero from the 50s in a geopolitical setting from the 60s featuring stock characters from the 40s, starring an actor whose biggest hits would happen in the 90s. Confused yet? Welcome. Sit down, we have a story to tell.
And that is that Top Secret! is not really the story of whatever the hell the story of Top Secret! is, it’s the story of three filmmakers — Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, known collectively as “ZAZ” — who had a phenomenal success with a movie and now had to follow it up with more of the same. The phenomenal hit was Airplane! (yes, that exclamation point is a running gag), the 1980 spoof that was made for $3.5 million and raked in $83 million at the box office, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of the year. It’s the sort of smash hit you dream about making, until the movie studio comes back to you and says, basically, “do it exactly the same, but different.”
This is hard to do! Especially when the movie in question is Airplane!, which was less a movie than it is a non-stop automated buffet of slapstick, sight gags and absurdist dialogue, sending up disaster films, one of the most reliable genres of spectacle in the 70s, and the very successful Airport series of films in particular (also a 1957 movie called Zero Hour, whose plot ZAZ borrowed from so liberally that they ended up having to get the rights for it, which technically makes Airplane! a remake). Audiences of 1980 understood the scaffolding on which all the jokes for Airplane! were hung. They were all the hits they’d seen in the theaters and drive-throughs in the years right before this one.
When it was time for a sequel, the obvious thing to do was just to make Airplane! Two!, but ZAZ chose to zig instead of zag (there was an Airplane 2: The Sequel in 1982, which ZAZ had nothing to do with; it was written and directed by a Ken Finkelstein, who would that same year write Grease 2, and what can one say about that, except, that’s an interesting filmography you got there, Mr. Finkelstein). First ZAZ made Police Squad! for TV, which lasted six episodes, and then they made Top Secret!, with the mishmash of plots and influences mentioned above.
Top Secret! didn’t exactly flop. But after raking in just $20 million in box office off a $9 million budget, it wasn’t the smash hit Airplane! was, either (Box Office Mojo has it coming in as the 43rd most successful movie of 1984, below Never Cry Wolf, but above Hot Dog… the Movie, which for the avoidance of doubt was a movie about skiing, not tubes of processed meat). What happened? My best guess is that Airplane! was parodying one thing, disaster movies, which the audience knew about. Top Secret! parodied many things, none of which the audience cared about, and then mashed them all together, making them make even less sense. Jokes are jokes but if you want to sell them in the world of 1984, you had do a little more work, apparently.
Don’t feel too bad for ZAZ. They got their mojo back in 1986 with Ruthless People, and in 1988 with The Naked Gun (written by ZAZ, directed by just one Z), which unlike Top Secret! was parodying just one thing again. Then in 1990 Jerry Zucker, by himself, had the number one box office hit of the year with Ghost. They did fine. But it does leave Top Secret! as the odd man out in their filmography. Heck, even 1977’s The Kentucky Fried Movie, which ZAZ wrote with John Landis directing, was more successful as a matter of return on investment.
It’s a shame because Top Secret! is hilarious, and in the fullness of time, in which all the cinematic antecedents of this film sort of blur into mush and don’t really matter anymore — just as they’ve done with Airplane! and The Naked Gun — the ridiculous rat-at-tat of the jokes in this film are the thing that remain and shine. They’re just as good as the ones you get in those other films (with the admission that “good” is not precisely the word for these jokes), and in some cases they might even be better.
And none of ZAZ’s other films has this film’s secret weapon, which is Val Kilmer, in his big screen debut. Kilmer plays the pop star Nick Rivers, who is so clearly based on 50s Elvis that Kilmer showed up for his audition as Elvis, or at least an Elvis impersonator, with an Elvis song prepared (and yet Nick Rivers’ “big hit” is a Beach Boys pastiche, so… go figure). Kilmer was unquestionably one of the prettiest humans on the planet when he made this movie (prettier even than his costar Lucy Gutteridge, who was plenty pretty by actual mortal human standards), and he even sings all the Nick Rivers songs in the movie. If ever there was someone meant to play a 50s rock star in the 80s going to visit an East Germany stuck in the 60s with French rebels from the 40s, it was Kilmer.
The ZAZ team have commented that the Julliard-trained Kilmer sometimes had problems understanding his character, but it doesn’t show in the final product. Also, really now, what’s there to understand? Stand there and look pretty, Val! Sing a song! Play your lines like you’re in an actual movie, not a parody! This ain’t rocket science! It is submarine science, since there’s a plot point (such as it is) that a kidnapped scientist is trying to develop mines to destroy NATO’s submarine capabilities, but never mind that now! Anyway, Kilmer is perfect in this role. I understand that it was his role as Iceman in Top Gun that launched ten million confused sexualities, but just know some of us got there early with this one. Yes, I admit it, my sexuality is “Straight with a carve-out for Nick Rivers.” Now you know.
Don’t worry about the plot. For God’s sake, don’t worry about the plot. This is one movie that is improved, in the matter of story, by having slept through any class you might have ever taken on 20th Century European history. No one under the age of 36 was even alive for the fall of the Berlin Wall; the idea of the East Germans anachronistically wearing WWII-era German uniforms will make even less sense to them than it did at the time for those of us now in the full bloom of middle age. What is the French resistance doing in East Germany? Don’t ask. Did East Germany have Bavarian-decorated malt shops where the kids wore poodle skirts? I said, don’t ask. And how does an underwater Western saloon fit into all of this? Listen, kid. I keep telling you.
I do wonder how this movie would play for anyone not alive or cognizant in the 80s, much less the several other decades referenced in this film. My feeling is that it would play well, for the reason I mention above, that the fullness of time has rendered its provenance mostly irrelevant, so the silly jokes are what last. Sure, the jokes about LeRoy Nieman paintings and the Carter Administration won’t play the same way, but there’s another joke coming up 30 seconds later anyway, it’s fine.
That said, I can’t know, short of sitting a millennial or Gen Z person down and making them watch the film. It’s possible they might just watch it and go, wow, that was certainly a thing that happened. But maybe they’ll just go with it and enjoy Top Secret! anyway. They could take comfort in knowing they wouldn’t be the first.
— JS
Whatever Everyone Else is Saying