2026: Personal Messages of a Self-Congratulatory Nature

Put together my roster of favorite books and movies for 2025.

The waiting and anticipation is over, here they are:

https://cinemaarete.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/best-films-watched-in-2025/

and

https://cliffjburns.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/best-books-read-in-2025/

My best books list is here - https://medium.com/@ian-93054/best-books-of-2025-49fcd119344d

And here are some stats on my reading in 2025 - https://iansales.com/2026/01/02/2025-in-books/

Moanings about AI and social media:

https://robertday154.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/artificial-stupidity/

>3 RobertDay: Cheers from a fellow fan of Ludd.

My attempts to maintain a presence on a popular social media platform have all come to naught. My last new account permitted me to post seven words before I was declared persona non grata.

Naturally, I have written a blog post on the subject:

https://robertday154.wordpress.com/2026/02/24/the-last-seven-words-from-the-face...

I've considered substituting BlueSky, but every time I look at it, part of me thinks "Why do I want a new way of doing more doom scrolling?".

>5 RobertDay: I have a kind of sub-account on Facebook, tied to my wife's.

I've been phasing out my time on Twitter and Facebook because I loathe both Zuckerberg and Musk.

I did join BlueSky, just because I'd heard it was a bit more sane as a platform. Not much of a presence there. Just a few posts and updates.

Don't use social media for socializing--merely for the purposes of promulgating my Marxist views and the opportunity to post about writing/arts.

Being booted from Facebook seems like a badge of honor, my friend. Wear it well.

>6 CliffBurns: Thank you for those warm words, Cliff. The only thing is that they make me feel a bit of a fraud: it's not as though I've been booted from Facebook because of anything I've actually done. The idea that Facebook might have any obligation to show you the evidence of your assumed 'crime' doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.

Still, it might give me some cachet with the "freeze peach" warriors.

>6 CliffBurns: >7 RobertDay: I gave up on Twitter/X a couple of years ago. I tried Bluesky, but it was either politics doom-scrolling or desperate writers plugging their books. FB now is mostly the ongoing binfire that is the US, reels that are just moustaches for spam, and the occasional conversation with an actual friend. If it were not for the latter, I'd drop it entirely. Some friends of mine have already done so.

I have my two blogs, and I post book reviews on them, but nothing else. And even then, I get these huge visitor spikes on my main blog as AI bots scrape my content for their hallucination machines.

What a time to live. We've seen the creation of the internet, its growth into the Web, the amazing things it provided us with and... then watched it all turn into a steaming pile of dogshit as the big tech companies enshittified everything.

Just tossing it out there, but my wife and I will be spending five (5) days in Berlin in April and wonder if anyone here has spent time in that city and can suggest a few out-of-the way or obscure sites/experiences that might be of interest to an artsy-fartsy, bookish couple.

Rosa Luxemburg is one of my heroes. so we'll definitely be making pilgrimages to places associated with her. Not much interested in Cold War "attractions", like Checkpoint Charlie and Brandenburg Gate and alleged pieces of the Wall.

Any cafes or nightspots that come to mind? Cool, little boutiques or galleries? Hidden treasures?

Lemme know--message me if you like.

>9 CliffBurns: there's this place: https://www.kaethe-kollwitz.berlin/en/

>9 CliffBurns: And this place if you like technical museums: https://technikmuseum.berlin/en/

Both are excellent suggestions, Ian.

Right up our alley.

We've got a fantastic book on Kollwitz's art in our collection...and are both museum kinda people.

Much appreciated.

>12 CliffBurns: I was there about ten years ago. I liked the city, and I don't generally like big cities. The Eurocon this year is in Berlin in July, and I've been tempted to go but Northern European and Nordic cons all seem to take place in May, June and July. Last year, I did three Nordic cons in a month and I wanted to spread things out a bit this year...

I have a brand new collection of poetry coming out in a couple of weeks and here's the cover:

https://cliffjburns.wordpress.com/2026/03/13/a-proliferation-of-shadows-cover-re...

>14 CliffBurns: Congratulations! Looks great!

>15 KatrinkaV: Marketing a collection of poetry these days is like trying to sell life insurance in an abattoir.

But we press on, boats against the current and all that.

>16 CliffBurns: Hear, hear!

Anyone interested in dropping a few bucks to support a science fiction anthology?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/on-spec-2026-new-canadian-lit...

Gonna be taking some time away from LibraryThing for awhile as I work on promoting my new poetry collection, as well as do a bit of traveling.

I'll return later in April and catch up with everyone then.

Take care.

I went to the UK Easter Science Fiction Convention, held in distant Birmingham. My blog post is here: https://robertday154.wordpress.com/2026/04/14/houston-houston-do-you-read/

>20 RobertDay: I was there as well. Both Al Reynolds and Pete Hamilton were there on the Friday and Saturday. I spoke with Pete but didn't get a chance to speak to Al.

>22 iansales: Which just goes to show my point about attendances, and also highlights something else: the lack of traditional con ephemera, such as a printed programme book and membership lists. Certainly when I registered, I was a bit nonplussed to get the traditional brown envelope which only contained my name badge.

>22 iansales: I've now updated the blog post to reflect your feedback. Many thanks.

>24 RobertDay: It was my first Eastercon since 2018. I spent some time with some friends I'd not seen for a long time, but ended up hanging round mostly with the same people I hang around with at Nordic cons. The dealers' room was disappointing - I'd sooner see a selection of hard-to-find paperbacks than endless over-priced over-produced anthologies by nobodies. It'll be a few more years before I attend an Eastercon again, I think.

>25 iansales: What struck us was how, every time we went to a panel, the participants - very few of whom we had ever heard of - all seemed to produce copies of their latest book, "on sale now in the Dealers' Room".

As i said, I managed to find things I wanted in the book room; but as with everything, Sturgeon's Law applies...

>26 RobertDay: Eastercons started being overrun by wannabe writers trying to network about ten years ago - which is one reason why I started going to Nordic cons. But from what I saw in Birmingham, editors from the big imprints no longer turn up so it's mostly small press authors and publishers.

My box of books shipped from Berlin finally arrived this morning:

THE CYBERIAD Stanislaw Lem
THE ULTIMATE HIDDEN TRUTH OF THE WORLD David Graeber
THE FACES Tove Ditlevsen
THE STORYTELLER: Tales Out of Loneliness by Walter Benjamin
BRIGHT DEAD THINGS Ada Limon

...plus a couple of Glenn Gould CDs, some cigars, a variety of postcards, all of it bringing back very fond memories of our German sojourn.

Two of my poems have been included in the latest issue of THE AFRICAN WRITER magazine:

https://www.africanwriter.com/cliff-burns-deathless/

Congratulations!! I’m now remembering what a shock it was to see the not-usually-displayed side of Nefertiti...

A new poem on an old obsession:

https://cliffjburns.wordpress.com/2026/06/05/meanwhile-in-the-not-so-distant-fut...

>31 CliffBurns: I’d like to post this on the door of my local industrial polluter.