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One thing the odyssey has made clear to me is a large number of people have Christopher Nolan Derangement Syndrome.

I think it’s a little disingenuous to suggest negative responses to Wilson’s review mean that “people today can’t handle real criticism” or what have you. People are responding!

For all the “don’t make the torment nexus” stuff we really did make the palantir with social media and especially twitter. A seeing stone which in theory should give you an overview of all things, but which a malicious will controls, showing you only that which will drive you to despair and madness

A lot of people seem to think that a work of art being a masterful and sublime experience and also having hamfisted and goofy dialogue is a contradiction of some kind. These people have never experienced the work of Hideo Kojima

I’ve seen a few people know try to dismiss the odyssey by claiming it is “equivalent to the MCU” and I find it just baffling. The critique of the MCU was that they are sloppily filmed, authored by producers rather than artists, and undermine their own themes by refusing to take themselves seriously

I do think people from writing backgrounds often make the error of engaging with movies as though the image is noise you need to translate back into words. The image is the movie. I had to teach myself this as an adult. If you aren’t engaging with the images you aren’t engaging with the movie

Also! The Hinterlands Annual 2026 is now available digitally! Very proud of this, even though I think my writing still has a long way to go.

The Hinterlands Annual #1 by Alex JohnstonThe first Hinterlands Annual, a collection of short horror fictionthehinterlands.itch.io

New blog post! Quick thoughts on some great books and comics that I'm considering into my "canon". Kind of a mid-year overview, a companion to a youtube video I'll have coming out in a couple of weeks.

Canon Class of 2027 Previewthehinterlands.blog

I was considering whether to formally review Dungeon Crawler Carl on my blog, but thank god Alice Bell has already done a much better job of picking it apart than I could. The book sucks!

I graphed the hugo and nebula nominees by where they were originally published, which for some reason I thought would be less work than writing a normal blog post. Oops!

Fun with Graphsthehinterlands.blog

A second youtube video! Finally! Discussing some great short fiction collections I read earlier this year.

Three Great Sci-fi/Fantasy Short Story CollectionsYouTube video by The Hinterlands Blogyoutu.be

New blog! Read and then wrote about the nominees for best short story at the hugos and nebulas in 1973. Why? What do you mean, Why????

Award Nominated Short Stories of 1973thehinterlands.blog

A side effect of loving Invisible Cities is I’ve come to be lukewarm at best on anything else that riffs on or tries to capture its tone. Telling a series thematically connected fantastical short stories and your name aint Italo Calvino? Not on my watch buddy

Pyre is the best Supergiant game from a gameplay, character, narrative, and overall perspective

June

thinkin about dungeon

Dungeons: A Blog Post about Dungeonsthehinterlands.blog

Watching the beginning of ghost in the shell 2 in awe: “in the future, cyborg vision will allow us to know if someone’s had their head blown off”

If the plot of anything involves people living on the corpse of a dead god, you have my attention