2026 is already three days old by now, so here is my annual New Year post. As I've said before, I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Part of the reason is that New Year’s Eve happens only a week after Christmas Eve and I’m usually all holidayed out from three days of Christmas celebrations, so I don’t really feel like having yet another holiday that requires preparations.

2026 is already three days old by now, so here is my annual New Year post. As I've said before, I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Part of the reason is that New Year’s Eve happens only a week after Christmas Eve and I’m usually all holidayed out from three days of Christmas celebrations, so I don’t really feel like having yet another holiday that requires preparations. Of course, I did the party thing and the “standing around on the market square in the cold, watching fireworks” thing, when I was younger.

by Cora Buhlert A New Year As you read this, 1971 is barely two days old and it started with ice, snow and temperatures well below freezing in both East and West Germany, because the weather does not ...

A monster-filled secondary-world fantasy that takes its cues and worldbuilding inspirations from points east of the Bosporus Strait In a wor...

I never felt particularly comfortable with eligibility posts, but I posted such an overview for the first time in 2016, when someone added my name to the Hugo Nominations Wiki. Eventually, it paid …

It’s the last day of the year, so we present to you, live from the Multiversal Nexus Ballroom, the winner of the 2025 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award. While I have been awarding the Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents for 45 years now (see the 2025 winner here), the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award is a fairly new prize that I only introduced in 2020 as a companion piece to the Darth Vader Parenthood Award…

It’s almost the end of the year, so we are proud to present to you, live from the Multiversal Nexus Ballroom, the 44th Annual Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents. Let’s have a bit of background: I have been informally awarding the Darth Vader Parenthood Award since sometime in the 1980s with the earliest awards being retroactive. Over the years, the list of winners migrated from a handwritten page to various computer file formats, updated every year. Eventually, I decided to make the winners public on the Internet…

Yes, it's the obligatory Christmas post. In past years, December was generally very busy with translation work. This year was remarkably quiet, which is a tad worrying. Though I decided to make the most of the  unexpected free time I had and thus I wound up visiting a whopping four different Christmas markets (Bremen, Oldenburg, Vechta and Emden) during the advent season. They were all lovely in their own way and Vechta's Christmas market has drown a lot since I last visited it back in 2013, when it was literally just three stalls, a carousel and a beautiful nativity scene.

TO MY 5-YEAR-OLD SELF AS I APPROACH 55 today i go thru an old behind my eyes arriving back beneath that terrible roof & i pick you up ...

The tl;dr before you get into this post is this: the SFWA came out, said that some AI usage was okay enough in books for the authors of those books to not to be disqualified from winning a Nebula a…

My obsidian shadows knifed the moon, drank moonblood until my wandering mouth filled to bursting