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I enjoyed Kim Curran’s debut novel, The Morrigan, so when I saw a copy of her brand new book in the local library, I snapped it up.

Like The Morrigan, Brigid is modern retelling of Irish mythology, but in a very different time period. Whereas The Morrigan was set in a mythical time of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, Brigid is set in the relatively recent past of early Christian Ireland.

I was curious to see which Brigid this book would be about: the pagan goddess or the Christian saint?

Both, it turns out. The protagonist is the saint, but the narrator is the goddess. And they interact. It’s a clever framing device and for the most part, it works.

There are cameos a-plenty from the Christian pantheon like Patrick and Brendan the navigator but this is not the hagiography we learned in school. All the usual miracles are present and accounted for, but any supernatural powers aren’t ascribed to a Christian deity.

The world of Brigid isn’t so far removed from the world of The Morrigan after all.

Brigid isn’t a ground-breaking book, and it didn’t grab me as much as The Morrigan but it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Lesbian necromancers in space. That’s the usual pitch for Gideon The Ninth and it’s not wrong. Though there’s a lot more necromancy than space or lesbianism.

The book begins in an environment fairly dripping with death, all bones and darkness. It sounds like it should be grim, but thanks to the sarcastic attitude of the protagonist, the tone is actually quite fun.

Sassy goth; that’s how I would describe the general vibe. Once I settled into it, I found that tone thoroughly enjoyable.

The bulk of the action takes place in the planetary equivalent of a haunted mansion and the various characters are assembled like the cast of an Agatha Christie mystery.

I must admit that I struggled a bit to distinguish one space necromancer from another. I should’ve payed more attention to the dramatis personae at the front of the book.

The plot kept me intrigued and invested throughout, although it did sometimes feel a bit like a video game with puzzles to be solved in order to unlock the next level.

The driving force of Gideon The Ninth is its excellent world-building. Though you’re dropped into things in media res, the foundations of the world you’re in are revealed piece by piece, and it all adds up to a fascinating premise for this book and its sequels.

I’m already looking forward to reading the next book.

After reading The Morrigan I was hungry for more retellings of Irish myths and legends. I tracked down the 1994 novel Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn.

When I was devouring modern retellings of Greek myths, I commented on an interesting difference in the tellings:

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic.

The Morrigan was dripping in magic. Finn Mac Cool is a more down-to-earth affair.

That’s not to say that magic doesn’t matter. For the characters in this book, their belief in magic is as real as their belief in the weather. But there are no supernatural powers here. If anything, Finn’s superpower is his ability to tell—and believe—tall tales involving supernatural intervention.

All the usual accounts of Finn Mac Cool’s prowess are retold as deeds that may have a basis in reality but then get exaggerated almost immediately.

It’s a framing device that works well. It’s all too easy to believe in the rise to power of a charismatic man skilled in controlling the narrative.

There’s plenty of Machievellian politics at play. There are no outright villains, or even heroes. There’s a pleasing messiness to the forces at work.

Sometimes the author’s research shows a bit too much. There are digressions into explanations of Brehon law that threaten to derail the narrative.

Overall though, this is an engaging and vivid retelling that just makes me want to spend more time in this world.

I was in the library the weekend before last when I spotted something on the shelf of recently-returned books. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

I knew the film adaptation was coming out later that week. Ideally, I’d like to read the book before seeing the film. It would be a race against time! The film would be out in days, and the book is over 450 pages long. Could this nerdy white guy rise to challenge and overcome the odds?

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that arduous. Project Hail Mary is a real page-turner, just like Andy Weir’s previous book, The Martian.

But his books are worryingly regressive. The so-called golden age of science fiction featured plenty of plucky white science guys saving the day with their brainpower in books written by white science guys. Andy Weir’s books have a similar outlook.

On the other hand, they’re undeniably fun. And who knows? Maybe his next book will feature a protaganist that isn’t an aw-shucks white guy.

(Update: multiple people have pointed out that I completely missed that Andy Weir’s other book, Artemis, features a refreshingly different kind of protaganist—phew!)

Project Hail Mary is packed with plenty of plausible-sounding science. Perhaps too much. After a while it felt like elements were being added to the story to showcase the author’s smarts rather than to propel the plot.

Over all, the book is good entertaining fun but a bit baggy and could’ve been edited down somewhat.

I was interested to see how the film would translate the science from the written page to the screen. Very commendably, as it turns out.

The film does a great job of avoiding expositional blackboard sequences or explanatory dialogue. Wherever possible, it shows rather than tells. It helps that it doesn’t underestimate what the audience can handle.

Above all, it’s entertaining. Popcorn was invented for this kind of film. Ryan Gosling does his usual entertaining shtick, though I kept thinking that Sam Rockwell would’ve really delivered the goods.

The film trims the book down to its essentials. I didn’t miss any of the elements they chose to cut. I did spot one glaring mistake, but that was continuity error rather than anything to do with the science.

Project Hail Mary the film is better than Project Hail Mary the book. Go see it. And if it leaves you wishing for more, then you can always read the book.

When I was summing up my reading habits in 2022 I said:

I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin.

I stand by that. But maybe I’d recommend some Ursula K. Le Guin books more than others.

A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea is a good collection of short stories. But it’s not a great collection of short stories. If you’re looking for a great collection of short stories, read The Unreal and the Real.

When it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin, the standard is always going to be high so even when the stories aren’t her best, they’re still better than the output of most other sci-fi writers.

My slight disappointment with A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea isn’t so much with the stories themselves but with the collection.

To begin with, there are four unconnected short stories. That’s fine. It’s a short story collection after all.

But then after that there are three interconnected short stories from the Hainish cycle. They’re the best part of this book. That just makes the preceding stories look like filler.

If those three stories had been released as little collection, it would be a miniature classic. As it stands, you get more of a mixed bag.

But still, it’s worth reading this collection for those three stories alone.

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This knocked me for six when I read it back in 2022:

It’s like a slow-building sucker punch.

Like my other favourite book of that year—A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa—it’s hard to classify. I think it’s autofiction. Not quite autobiography. Not quite fiction.

Will There Ever Be Another You is also autofiction. I think. It might also be poetry (which shouldn’t be surprising as Patricia Lockwood is a poet after all).

I can’t say that this one had the same emotional impact of No One Is Talking About This for me but then again, very little could.

The writing feels very impressionistic, with each chapter trying on a different mode. It’s kinda Joycean …if James Joyce was stuck indoors during a global pandemic.

The narrative—such as it is—revolves around The Situation from 2020 onwards. That was a surreal bizarre time so it makes sense that this is a surreal bizarre book.

I think I liked it. I can’t quite tell. I just let the language wash over me.

Every culture has its myths and legends. Greece has its gods and warriors. England has its stories of Arthur. Ireland has the Tuatha Dé Danann, The Ulster Cycle, and more.

But while the Arthurian legends and the Greek myths have been retold many times, the stories of ancient Ireland have remained largely untouched.

Kim Curran’s book The Morrigan takes on this challenge.

The blurb for the book compares it Madeline Miller’s Circe, which is a bold comparison. The writing in The Morrigan isn’t in the same league as Circe, but then again, very little is.

Structurally, the comparison makes complete sense.

Circe starts with the titular nymph in the world of the gods of Olympus before moving on to more mortal affairs, coming to a head with the events of The Odyssey, when Odysseus’s story dominates.

The Morrigan starts with the titular goddess in the world of the gods of the Túatha Dé before moving on to more mortal affairs, coming to a head with the events of The Táin, when Cú Chulainn’s story dominates.

I took me a little while to adjust to the tone, but once I did, I thoroughly enjoyed this retelling. It manages to simultaneously capture the bloody, over-the-top feeling of The Táin while also having a distinctly modern twist. By the last third, I was completely engrossed.

After finishing Circe I went on a spree of reading many, many modern retellings of Greek myths. Now that I’ve finished The Morrigan I want to do the same for the Irish legends.

But I can’t. Apart from re-reading a translation of The Táin, there’s not much else out there for me.

Kim Curran does have another book that’s just been released; Brigid (the goddess? the saint? both?). If it’s anything like The Morrigan, it’s going to be a must-read.

I hope these books are the first of many.

Jeremy Keith – beyond tellerrand Podcast

I really enjoyed this chat with Marc:

I recently sat down with Jeremy Keith for a spontaneous conversation that quickly turned into a deep dive into something we both care a lot about: events, community, and why we keep putting ourselves through the joy and pain of running conferences.

Towards the end of 2025, I wrote:

I think I might change things up in 2026. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to write all the little reviews at once, I think I should write a review as soon as I finish a book. Instead of holding onto my reckons for months, I can just set them free one at a time.

I’ll get the ball rolling with the first book I read in 2026.

I’ve mentioned before that one interesting lens to apply to modern retellings of the Greek myths is how they treat deities. Are gods and goddesses real in this story? Or is it a non-interventionist tale with a purely human cast? In her book The Shadow Of Perseus, Claire Heywood wrote about Perseus, Medusa, and Andromeda without any supernatural characters. Having been impressed by that, I figured I’d go back to investigate her debut, Daughters Of Sparta.

The framing device is one I hadn’t come across before. It follows the diverging stories of sisters Helen and Clytemnestra, flipping back and forth between the two throughout their lives. I’ve read plenty of takes on the Trojan war, and I’ve read plenty of takes on Clytemnestra’s revenge, but I think this is the first time they’ve been combined like this.

Overall, it works. There are inevitable time jumps. Some time periods are bound to get more attention than others. And at some point, the narrative just has to wrap up, even though we know there’s pleny more that follows afterwards.

All in all, a good addition to the list of modern retellings of classical Greek stories.

It’s getting towards the end of the year. That’s when I put together a post reviewing the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months.

I think I might change things up in 2026. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to write all the little reviews at once, I think I should write a review as soon as I finish a book. Instead of holding onto my reckons for months, I can just set them free one at a time.

And I think I’m done with ratings. Stars. I’m not sure why I ever started, to be honest. Probably because everyone else was doing it. But they kind of just get in the way. I spend far too long deliberating about how many stars to give a book when I should be spending that time describing the effect that the book had on me.

In any case, books, movies, music …it’s all entirely subjective. Assigning stars gives a veneer of something measurable, countable, and objective. That’s not how art works.

But that’s just my opinion.

I think I’ve also developed more of an aversion to scoring things the more it’s crept into everyday life. It feels like you can’t perform any kind of transaction without being asked later to rate the experience.

I remember the first time I was ever in an Uber. This was many years ago in San Francisco. I was with a bunch of friends at an after-party for An Event Apart in the TypeKit offices. Someone suggested that we move on to a second location and proceeded to whip out the Uber app.

I remember looking at the little icon of the car moving in real time as it approached our location. So futuristic!

We all bundled into the car and off we went. The driver was a really nice guy. But at some point he made a navigational error and took us off track. He fixed it, but I remember my friend who had summoned the Uber was kind of miffed.

When we were getting out of the car, the driver apologised profusely before driving off. My friend—who was basically showing me how this whole Uber thing worked—explained that he would now give a less than stellar review for the driver, becuase of that directional snafu.

“Ah, come on”, I said, “he was a nice guy.”

“This is how the app gets accurate data”, he responded.

“But …it’s a person”, I said.

Something about reviewing a person felt so wrong to me. Books, movies, music …I get it. But applying the same logic to a human being. That just didn’t sit right with me.

Now we’re expected to review humans all the time. It still feels wrong to me.

That’s probably why I’m done with ratings. No more stars from me.

I’m very happy to announce that the one and only Jake Jaffa-The-Cake Archibald will be speaking at Web Day Out!

Given the agenda for this event, I think you’ll agree that Jake is a perfect fit. He’s been at the forefront of championing user-centred web standards, writing specs and shipping features in browsers.

Along the way he’s also created two valuable performance tools that I use all the time: SVGOMG and Squoosh, which has a permanent place in my dock—if you need to compress images, I highly recommend adding this progressive web app to your desktop.

He’s the man behind service workers and view transitions—two of the most important features for making websites first-class citizens on any device.

So what will he talk about at Web Day Out? Image formats? Offline functionality? Smooth animations? Something else entirely?

All will be revealed soon. In the meantime, grab yourself a ticket to Web Day Out—it’s just £225+VAT—and I’ll see you in Brighton on Thursday, 12 March 2026!

Tim recently gave a talk at Smashing Conference in New York called One Step Ahead. Based on the slides, it looks like it was an excellent talk.

Towards the end, there’s a slide that could be the tagline for Web Day Out:

Betting on the browser is our best chance at long-term success.

Most of the talk focuses on two technologies that you can add to any website with just a couple of lines of code: view transitions and speculation rules.

I’m using both of them on The Session and I can testify to their superpowers—super-snappy navigations with smooth animations.

Honestly, that takes care of 95% of the reasons for building a single-page app (the other 5% would be around managing state, which most sites—e-commerce, publishing, whatever—don’t need to bother with). Instead build a good ol’-fashioned website with pages of HTML linked together, then apply view transitions and speculation rules.

I mean, why wouldn’t you do that?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely interested in the reasons why people would reject a simple declarative solution in favour of the complexity of doing everything with a big JavaScript framework.

One reason might be browser support. After all, both view transitions and speculation rules are designed to be used as progressive enhancements, regardless of how many browsers happen to support them right now. If you want to attempt to have complete control, I understand why you might reach for the single-page app model, even if it means bloating the initial payload.

But think about that mindset for a second. Rather than reward the browsers that support modern features, you would instead be punishing them. You’d be treating every browser the same. Instead of taking advantage of the amazing features that some browsers have, you’d rather act as though they’re no different to legacy browsers.

I kind of understand the thinking behind that. You assume a level playing field by treating every browser as though they’re Internet Explorer. But what a waste! You ship tons of uneccesary code to perfectly capable browsers.

That could be the tagline for React.

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

A great interview with Ted Chiang:

Predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable. Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA - Jono Alderson

SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.

Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.

A Friendly Introduction to SVG • Josh W. Comeau

A fantastic explanation of the building blocks of SVG, illustrated—as always—with Josh’s interactive examples.

P&B: Jeremy Keith – Manu

In which I answer questions about blogging.

I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.

I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.

I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.

Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).

Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.

I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.

To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!

Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.

I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.

I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.

So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.

I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.

If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.

That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.

It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.

We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:

thesession.org/donate

So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.

Cheers,
Jeremy

Building WebSites With LLMS - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).

I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.

I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.

5 Questions for Jeremy Keith · Frontend Dogma

If you like the prospect of an old man ranting at clouds, this is for you.

6 CSS Snippets Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2025 · 19 January 2025

• Springy easing with linear()
• Typed custom properties
• View transitions for page navigation
• Transition animation for dialog and popover
• Transition animation for details
• Animated adaptive gradient text