Bruce H. McCosar

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  • Review: Caped Crusader

    Short version: This series features a 1940s-era Batman in a film noir version of Gotham City. While it features some excellent storytelling and characterization, it’s not perfect. Some episodes are just plain silly.

    (Part of my Reviews & Recommendations series.)

    I’m not the only person trying to figure out what year Batman: Caped Crusader is set in (CBR has a fine analysis). My own estimate puts it at about 1948. Definitely post-war, but there are no computers (Batman uses file folders to store his case files), and I’ve not seen someone crank up a good Hi-Fi system (neither turntable nor reel-to-reel). Television is new enough that not many people have them in their homes; Bruce Wayne does, but this is still an era when passers-by on the street stopped to watch TV in a storefront window, and most homes only had radio.

    So. A nice period piece! Film noir was popular in the 40s and 50s, so that’s a fitting vibe.

    I wish everything about the series made sense, though.

    My Basis for Comparison

    Caped Crusader is the endproduct of the usual slew of production companies that’s common nowadays, notable among them DC, WB, and Amazon MGM. Translation: many hands on the project, which may explain some of my later issues with the series.

    Yet … one of the executive producers, Bruce Timm, was responsible for the best animated series in the entire DC universe:

    Justice League / Justice League Unlimited

    I hold Justice League up as a masterpiece of the storytelling art. Take for example the “The Savage Time (part 1)” (Season 1, episode 24; decent review on AVclub). At the beginning, the Justice League is coming back from space. Twenty or so minutes later, John Stewart is about to be run over by a giant War Wheel in a 1945 that never should have happened. There are no jarring cuts; everything makes sense, each scene following logically from the first.

    Now compare:

    Justice League had essentially one production company (two different forms of Warner Bros.) and two executive producers.

    Caped Crusader had five production companies and ten executive producers.

    You’ll see how that plays out.

    The Batman Comics

    Of course, the ultimate basis for comparison is the comics. Batman started his run in 1939. The character has also appeared in TV shows, many movies, and a few excellent video games.

    Certainly, that’s a lot of source material. And fans? Many times they have their favorite tropes. The loss of Bruce Wayne’s parents. The Joker as an agent of chaos. The distinctive dark and dangerous look of Gotham City.

    You know, pleasing all of those fans can be difficult work. I think that’s where things went wrong.

    Let’s handle the good parts first:

    There are two seasons of ten episodes each. Season 1 appeared in 2024; Season 2 just came out this year (2026).

    I do hate spoilers, and warning, once I get to the play-by-play in The Episode Minefield (below), there are plenty of them. I will just assume you’re immune at that point, so be warned. Here, though, let me j give you the gist of the BEST storylines, characters, and narrative elements.

    • In Season 1, the Harvey Dent story arc is by far the best. Note that those of you expecting him to show up wearing a half purple / half tan suit and flipping a coin are going to be disappointed. This is a reimagined version, a character we see go from a self-serving, arrogant climber to brutal criminal who barely seems to be in control of himself.
    • In Season 2, the Riddler makes an appearance, but he’s not some monomaniac obsessed with proving himself smarter than Batman. This one, in true noir style, is a criminal so violent he got his name from “riddling” his victims with bullets.
    • Finally we come to the Joker. When this character first appears, it’s throughout many other episodes—always in the final minutes, and always maximum creepy. I called him “The Joker Who Doesn’t Laugh,” and indeed, he doesn’t. Until the very end. This version is probably the apex character of the show, but … ouch, spoilers. One element in the final Season 2 storyline is so silly it took me completely out of the narrative. See below.

    And now … the rest of the story

    So, I started watching this show at the recommendation of my long time friend, Keith Martin (LaFayette, GA). We go way back—7th grade, to be technical—and I count him as one of the world’s experts on movies, television, music, and pop culture. (I’ve hinted he should write a blog, but so far … not yet.)

    I watched these episodes with my wife. Now, keep in mind: she’s not really a comic books person. Occasionally, watching these shows, I was thrilled—”Hey! Look! This is awesome!” Other times … yikes. I was a little embarrassed to have wasted her time in the evening, her free time, when she could have been doing something—anything!—better.

    Here’s my thinking on how the not-so-great episodes happened:

    Too much candy is a bad thing

    All those production companies, all those fans … how can you please them all? Everyone wants a treat. Put this in, put that in. Make mine cherry flavored. Let’s have more candy corn. How about more soda?

    You’re going to be calling Ralph after awhile, and I don’t mean Dibney.

    Simply put, Caped Crusader could have picked and chosen its treats, serving them up elegantly, savoring them as they went by—even innovating in their presentation.

    But then we get “Hey! You have to put Catwoman in!” and “What about the Spectre? The Spectre was totally noir!” and “It’s not Batman unless you put in The Penguin!”

    Better to be silent, and to be thought a fool…

    Some of the choices of characters to feature were questionable. In fact, shoehorning some of them into the series took a character with possible depth and an interesting storyline and turned them into a one-shot caricature. It would have been better to just have saved that character for a (hypothetical) later season, instead of wasting the chance on something inept.*

    * “Better to Remain Silent and Be Thought a Fool than to Speak and Remove All Doubt” was NOT a quote by Mark Twain, but you can learn more in this article on Quote Investigator.

    Reviewers like to talk about three dimensional and two dimensional characters. When Mr. Zero / Mr. Freeze shows up in Season 2, I challenge you to find any line of dialogue he has that is about anything other than “I freeze folks for money and also art and I’m really weird.” That guy could have been replaced with some animatronic pirate out of an amusement park ride and it wouldn’t have mattered.

    Tales of the Really Hard to Believe

    Remember at the beginning how I said they made a believable enough Gotham City setting that people were trying to figure out what year the series was taking place?

    Well. Stand by. Massive spoilers, but also my biggest disappointment of the entire series.

    They spent a lot of time building up the Joker storyline. His character was chilling. His actions menacing. He seemed to be in the process of developing and testing his famous Smylex gas, the stuff that makes people look like Rob Beckett* before they die.

    * Apologies to Rob Beckett, he’s a hilarious comedian, and look! He’s also on WordPress.

    And then … they made the story just ridiculous. Here’s everything that Smylex can do, apparently:

    1. The Joker can inject someone with it. They get a big horrible grin on their face, not a normal grin, but a jaw-cracker. They’re dead.
    2. Joker can somehow precision-time this drug, so that if he wants you to die at exactly midnight on a certain date, you will. How? Anyone in the medical fields knows it’s difficult to determine correct dosage in the first place, and most drug effects take place gradually, over hours.
    3. Now let’s make it worse. The victim dies. Then, later, and ALL AT THE SAME TIME, everyone who died from the injected version suddenly sits up, starts laughing, and burps out a huge cloud of green gas. This includes people who have been killed at different times throughout Season 2, even one person who was frozen solid for most of that time. Think about it: if it was difficult to time the dose that killed them in the first place, how much more impossible was it to have all the “corpse burp” effects go off at once?
    4. Everyone who breathes in the green gas suddenly gets the Huge Fatal Grin of Death, but they don’t die—instead, they turn into a hulking, out-of-control murderer and start chasing everyone else around like Night of the Living Dead.
    5. Then the final bit of idiocy: if they bite someone, that person gets the symptoms from #4 and also goes on a rampage.

    Consider what I just said. The Joker has such technical skill he can make a poison that can A) kill someone with precision timing, B) make the corpse explode with gas with precision timing, then C) release an airborne version of the poison with D) completely different effects that ‘s E) also spread by saliva.

    Some chemical, right? Worse than pop rocks and coke by a longshot.

    So, yeah. Farfetched. Ruined it for me. Then again, I’m a chemist. Bad science is practically a religion on television shows.

    (I guess the Joker couldn’t just do the “huge balloons filled with Smylex over Gotham City,” as that’s been done before.)

    Can I just ask? Why is Batgirl never a thing?

    On a personal note, I loved Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) in the 1966 series. Barbara Gordon has appeared in a lot of Batman media.

    So why is Batgirl as a character so rare?

    Navigate the Episode Minefield!

    Here’s the spoiler-rama, my episode guide, with commentary. If you choose to watch the series, and what I’ve said above makes sense, follow this guide to avoid disappointment, a migraine, or both.

    Two possible Quantum States here: [OK] or [SKIP].

    Season 1

    1. “In Treacherous Waters”—[SKIP] The Penguin as a character is completely wasted here, recast more or less as either Phyllis Diller or Cruella Deville, take your pick by how old you are. Watch her kill her own sons a few minutes into the episode to add gravitas, then later fire a piece of yacht-mounted-artillery for effect and somehow demolish a specific building in the middle of Gotham city in ONE SHOT. No ranging tables, no calculations—just looking through iron-sight type crosshairs set on the back of the gunbarrel.
    2. “…And Be a Villain”—[OK] One of the nice things about the Caped Crusader series is they don’t go out of the way to give villains the clever codenames associated with them. For example, here, the character has a face that can be molded like clay; he is never referred to as Clayface.
    3. “Kiss of the Catwoman”—[SKIP] Catwoman has always deserved better in terms of her movie portrayals. Bluntly, this version is crap, the character and situation unbelievable, the plot probably written on a deadline. This is one of those “bits of candy” elements I was talking about earlier: someone probably pressed for this character to be included as a love interest later on, only to end up with this travesty, better off forgotten.
    4. “The Night of the Hunters”—[OK] The previous episode introduced psychiatrist Harleen Quinzel, better known in popular culture as Harley Quinn. Interestingly, in this telling, she’s not just the Joker’s acolyte or girlfriend; she’s a psychiatrist with a dark secret. That said, nothing is worth going back to that Catwoman episode to see her introduced. Let’s just pretend she sprung from the brow of Dionysus. This episode really shows off the noir elements and sets up the formation of the Batman Task Force, as well as establishes the crooked cops Bullock and Flass as recurring threats.
    5. “The Stress of Her Regard”‘—[OK] Harley Quinn’s character is definitely established here. I think the weirdest bit (repeated later with the Joker) is that this is not the mad, out-of-control Harley well-known across movies and television, but … now she’s someone who talks calmly, methodically, analytically. Some parts of this one are silly, but overall, experiencing this new version of HQ is worth the watch. Special shoutout from my wife: she’s always annoyed when female characters run and fight wearing high heels. At one point Barbara Gordon has to sneak around / trespass inside someone’s mansion—and does the sensible thing, taking off her shoes so the villain isn’t clued in by “tap – tap – tap – tap.” Good thing this isn’t one of those villains that’s always throwing bottles at henchmen, though.
    6. “Night Ride”—[OK] The inclusion of Gentleman Ghost on the villains list for Caped Crusader was a bit bizarre to me at first, but this is the only solidly occult threat in the series. Especially worth your time is the dynamic between Batman and “Pennyworth” (he hasn’t gotten used to calling him Alfred … yet.)
    7. “Moving Target”—[OK] Jim Corrigan as a crooked cop? If you read comics, you might have been startled as I was. His character will return in Season 2, but warning: it’s a real crap-fest. Meanwhile, this episode about hired killers stalking Commissioner Gordon is worthwhile.
    8. “Nocturne”—[OK] There’s a main plotline going here, but the big news is the developing story with Harvey Dent, the prosecutor who’s been getting too close to the crimelord Rupert Thorne. Yes, those of you who know Harvey from the comics, this is the “acid in the face” episode. It sets off the fantastic final two episodes of Season One.
    9. “The Killer Inside Me”—[OK] Writing this, I sometimes regretted deciding on two possible states (“OK” or “SKIP”) and wished I’d incorporated something like “MUST SEE.” This episode is extremely complex, and even though I’ve given out spoilers before, I’m not this time. I’ll just leave you with discussion questions for after you watch. A) Whose fault is it that Harvey Dent ended up becoming so dangerous? B) Has this episode made a case for or against receiving a fair and impartial trial? C) Discuss the parallel between Batman and Harvey Dent’s stories.
    10. “Savage Night”—[OK] I had to admit, about the time I got to the Catwoman episode, I didn’t think I was going to make it this far. This ending is perfect. Plus, this is the first appearance of that guy who’s neither a smoker nor a midnight toker.

    Season One had its silly moments, but established its brand enough to lead us into Season 2. For the most part, that paid off. But you could tell … in the back of the car, the kids wanted candy.

    Season 2

    1. “Brute Force”—[OK] If you don’t mind the silly concept—a chemical that apparently turns one of the usual random disposable mobsters into a super-strong and invulnerable creature similar to Solomon Grundy—this one isn’t too bad. More importantly, this is the start of the Riddler’s story arc. The Joker appears again in a brief scene, hinting at a plotline I had a lot of high hopes for. (Those crashed and burned, see above.)
    2. “Rocket’s Red Glare”—[SKIP] This could easily be a standalone episode, but not necessarily of this show. More something like the Super Friends. We get a take on Roxy Rocket, who, well, seems to have borrowed a lot of ideas from The Rocketeer. The bit of pseudoscience nonsense in this episode is a new element called “Ultriam,” which is apparently an unlimited power source. You know the type of invention it is: it can somehow be manufactured on an industrial scale, up until the inventor dies and someone burns the blueprints. Then every person in the entire company who knew how to make it suddenly forgets! So I imagine there’s this great huge factory or atomic lab out there, with all this dedicated equipment. Clyde comes in to work one day, after the blueprint has been burned. He looks at the machine he’s been working for years and is like “Huh. What does this do?”
    3. “Deep Cover”—[OK] Batman goes undercover to try to figure out the identity of the new and bloody crime boss of Gotham, the Riddler. This episode has a couple of major and sudden changes in narrative, particularly when Edward Nigma meets up with the disguised Batman and … introduces himself in a rather perfunctory manner.
    4. “The Devil’s Due”—[SKIP] This one was just silly, especially the name of the putative demon. “Barbatos.” Pronounced bar – BAT – os, for people who’ve never heard of the Caribbean, I suppose. Some of you may remember when Batman was a guest on Scooby Doo. Well, here’s the return favor: a Scooby Doo type villain in Batman. Ruh roh!
    5. “The Spectral Hand”—[SKIP] Somehow this episode manages to be as bad as the Catwoman episode from Season One. Worse, actually. Let’s catalog the atrocities: 1) Our old cop-turned-criminal friend Jim Corrigan is back, sentenced to life in prison. 2) He “volunteers” for a medical experiment to reduce his sentence. HOLD ON A MOMENT: When did we decide that performing medical experiments on prisoners was a great idea? That whole concept has a very nasty history in the United States. 3) In the experiment, they’re going to stop his heart and—wait a moment. Kill him? Right in front of a bunch of witnesses? Good thing death row is right around the corner and down a hallway. 4) Oh, wait. They plan on bringing him back, using some suspicious Dr. Frankenstein type equipment that looks more suitable for building a bug zapper that could kill Mothra. 5) He’s dead, Jim! (Or, “You’re dead, Jim!”) but he comes back as a sort of vengeance-obsessed zombie to clear up a backlog of criminals who escaped punishment. I mentioned this character above as an example of too much candy, and here it is, idiocy-flavored. Finally, 6) in other news, the Gordon family lives in a suburb of Gotham with a subway stop RIGHT IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD, like where no subway system in the world is ever built. (Unless this is Earth-NZ, where no one ever invented “zoning.”)
    6. “Sudden Fear”—[OK] This one I marked as OK, but it’s on the borderline. I mean, the central idea is that the bad guy invented a kind of gas that causes lethal levels of fear (you know him in other media as the Scarecrow). My question is, how long would it take Columbo to catch this guy? Probably microseconds. A) He was working on a fear compound with a collaborator, and kept some pretty damning notes; B) he mainly waxed people in his own personal research group, so that if you marked off the victims, only he and his collaborator were left; C) his collaborator was the creepy sort who probably would have wound up on To Catch a Predator anyway, so inevitably would have been the target of an investigation.
    7. “Her Dark Reflection”—[OK] The central concept is a little hard to swallow, but the Riddler has made himself a pest all season, and in this episode, he gets the full-on Inglourious Basterds treatment. I admit, I laughed.
    8. “Zero Hour”—[OK] The one redeeming feature in this episode is Carrie Kelley. In comics, she’s one of the later incarnations of Robin. She already appeared in Season One, Episode 8 (“Nocturne”), but here? She’s the hero this city deserves. The crap part of this episode is the aforementioned Mr. Zero, certainly a waste of the character.
    9. “Dead Before Dawn”—[OK] I am putting the “OK” mark on this one with one huge caveat. I’ve written at length about the Smylex gimmick being ridiculous. Other than that, this strange, quiet version of the Joker is just sinister.
    10. “The Laughing Death”—[OK] Same thing, but in this episode, we add in the equally silly idea that Alfred (occupation: butler) managed to take a blood sample from someone who’d been killed by Smylex and develop an antidote in a manner of hours. Even better, though we only see him working with the B.S. sort of chemistry set people who’ve never done lab work think chemists use, somehow he’s able not only to aerosolize it, to produce INDUSTRIAL QUANTITIES OF THE CURE in a matter of a few hours and load it into a cropduster type plane all by himself.

    In the final analysis…

    Overall, not too bad an effort. Some of it was very worthwhile. The absolutely abysmal, skippable episodes were only five out of a total of twenty episodes—

    Wait a minute. That’s … a 25% fail rate.

    Ouch.

    Caped Crusaders, try to be better than that next time. Of course in the modern streaming environment, even two seasons was a lot to hope for, so …

    Standard operation in the DC universe: wait for the next reboot.

    That’s It! And Disclaimers

    Opinions expressed in my blog are my own, and although works were referenced here, the authors of those works played no part in this article’s construction.

    The great majority of the names mentioned in this article are trademarked, copyrighted, paywalled, gold-plated, guarded by immortal Kung-Fu warriors, whatever. Those names are mentioned here for review purposes only. However: I’m not going to stick in those stupid ® and ™ symbols all over the place, as that’s its own Form of Parody.™ (Though I’ll admit, ® is kind of appropriate for Robin.)

    I don’t take tips or collect names for an email list. Neither did I flap a “subscribe” placard in your face while you were trying to read. If you appreciate my work, try donating to one of the following charities or organizations. This short list was chosen for relevance to this particular article.

    • The ACLU—Because the corruption seen in Gotham City is actually not as scary as reading the news.
    • The Native American Rights Fund—I don’t know about you, but as member of a tribe that was forced to walk the Trail of Tears out to Oklahoma … I see a lot of history repeating itself.
    • The Nature Conservancy—Because even if you save Gotham City, it’s not going to do you any good if the whole rest of the world gets wrecked while you’re busy chasing the Riddler.
  • Why I Don’t Use AI
    Chemistry texts on my bookshelf.

    Why I Don’t Use AI

    Also, why you shouldn’t either.

    We’ve come to the point in the 21st century where argument and debate are dead. When someone has a different view, apparently it’s best to ignore their points and keep on believing the same thing as before … all to fit in with the crowd you’ve identified yourself as belonging to.

    For that reason, this article is not about you. Maybe you agree with me. Great! But if you disagree, well, nothing I say will convince you otherwise. We’ve lost the art of discourse. But that’s not the only art in danger.

    It took me years to become an expert in chemistry, a long process of learning new principles and incorporating them into what I know. Nowadays? Ask an AI. But when the wrong answer comes your way—how would you be able to tell?

    Maybe you want the prestige of being an author or an artist. (You certainly can’t be in it for the money.) Up until AI—just as with chemistry—people had to learn the art themselves. Now? Have an AI do it. Unlike in science, there are no wrong answers, so what could go wrong?

    Theft.

    LLMs don’t sprout out of the forehead of Zeus fully formed. Someone has to feed them while they grow up. Most often, that’s with someone else’s work. Something human generated.

    Oh, but there’s worse.

    AI Steals Your Birthright

    Storytelling and art are ancient pursuits (Van Pelt, 2018), predating written language. Your ancestors had the ability to create worlds with word and image; people could experience these works directly, in their own minds, just by viewing or listening.

    Now? Literacy rates are falling (Kahloon, 2025), and fewer people are reading for fun (Lee, 2025). As a former educator, I can tell you a lot of that is the fault of the U.S. education system (but that’s another article entirely).

    Editors certainly notice this. Many are drowning in a sea of wanna-be’s and fake-be’s, their submission portals clogged with what people have begun to call “AI Slop.” (One of the most notable examples is when Clarkesworld was forced to shut down submissions: Dixit, 2023.)

    Yet there’s one more victim: just as in school, copying someone’s homework doesn’t make you smarter. It just makes you a bigger fake, and a weak one at that (Daniels, 2026). Remember how I said education was already failing? AI seems to be making everyone who uses it dumber (Hogenboom, 2026)

    So. Use AI to create crappy stories → someone just reads a misleading summary → who cares anymore. Flipping through five second videos replaces everything it means to be human, in the end.

    I don’t think you’ll like living in a world without empathy or connection, but what do I know. Maybe creating dystopias has gone from literary art to performance art.

    AI Devalues Human Work

    When generative AI first came out, some people hailed it as the democratization of creativity. Well. By “some people”, I mean the tech barons who forced that idea out there (Merchant, 2024).

    For writers and artists nowadays? (The real ones, I mean. In this blog, I refer to the posers as “people who use LLMs to create text” or “people who use LLMs to create images.”) Generative AI is an existential threat. Why bother finding a cover artist for that brand new fake novel you just almost-wrote? Just mutter a few words into the Theft-O-Matic 2026 and off we go.

    Translation: there are real people on the other end of this equation who have dedicated a substantial portion of their lives to attaining some form of expertise.* Replacing them with a third-rate magic wish box devalues the entire human experience.

    * Notice I didn’t say talent. Becoming an expert merely requires work. A lot of it (Cherry, 2022). That’s what’s being devalued here, in the end.

    AI is a Toxic Industry

    Oddly, this is the one thing that people seem to agree on. Few articles really outline the erosion of the human mind that generative AI causes, but with data centers whirring away in neighborhoods (Yañez-Barnuevo, 2026), using up all the water and electricity (Berreby, 2024), causing disruptions to the electrical grid nationwide (Wilder, 2026)—people have noticed! (NEA, 2025)

    AI is an Investment Bubble

    Way back, I used to be in the stock market. About 1999, when the web really took off, people started saying insane things. Some claimed this was the “new economy” and that “stock prices will only go up, forever!”

    I got out of there as soon as I heard the nonsense.

    Yeah, it was a bubble. The Dotcom Bubble, it’s called now (International Banker, 2021).

    Fortunately, we’ve learned better since then. In fact—

    Oh, wait. This just coming in. Let’s see.

    Whoops.

    An ugly theme from the Dotcom Bubble resurfaced, a sort of circular Ponzi scheme—more of a rubber band tying two things together than a pyramid. Company A invests in company B, company B builds data centers and of course buys chips from Company A (Charoenwong et. al., 2026). Hey, free markets? Where are the consumers in all of this? Where’s the demand?

    There’s no demand. It’s all being shoved down our throat. You’ve seen it. Everyone has.

    As a teacher, I do like to give out the occasional bit of homework. Compare and contrast modern AI companies / modern chipmakers with “Flip that House” fraud (FBI, 2019). Person A sells the house to person B, who they know. Using a fake appraisal, B gets a huge loan (let’s just call these “investors” here). B takes a cut and pays out A.

    The bank (“investors”) is left only with foreclosure proceedings to get its money back.

    The bank? Well, that’s the economy in this hypothetical situation.

    Us.

    Oh, but AI can save companies so much money—by firing workers! Wait, no it can’t (Green, 2026).

    Ultimately, it’s just the same old crowd from the Dotcom years, patting themselves on the back for being brilliant, trying to corner the market on something nobody really should want. For investors, well, they’re not too big on actual math (Rogelberg, 2026).

    Conclusion

    What did I say at the beginning? You already knew my conclusion. People who disagreed just heard Charlie Brown’s teacher talking the entire time (“Waa-WAA-waaa”) if they read this far at all.

    This is my personal statement. I don’t use AI. I refuse to support the sort of fakes who use AI. And I only have one regret:

    I read a lot of independent press. I rely on editors to screen out the AI slop for me. I also don’t trust “AI detectors.”

    That means, as always, some poor human has to pay the price for the poor decisions of another.

    References

    Readers in the year 2026 should be amazed that at one point, you could go to a website without being bombarded by ads. Information once flowed freely. Why did hosting web pages suddenly get so much more expensive?

    It didn’t. The secret answer there is “greed.”

    At any rate, none of the following articles were paywalled at the time this post was written (5-Sept-2026).

    —

    Berreby, David. “As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires.” Yale E360, Yale School of the Environment, 6 Feb. 2024, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Braga, Michael. “‘Flip That House’ Fraud COST Billions.” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 19 July 2009, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Charoenwong, Ben et. al. “Are We in an AI Bubble?” INSEAD Knowledge, 23 Feb. 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Cherry, Kendra. “How Hard Is It to Become an Expert at Something?” Verywell Mind, 29 Mar. 2022, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Daniels, Lauren Elise. “An Editor on Generative AI: The Tool That Blunts the User.” Ruadán Books, 31 Aug. 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Dixit, Pranav. “A Sci-Fi Magazine Was Flooded By AI-Written Submissions.” BuzzFeed News, 23 Feb. 2023, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    FBI = “Illegal Property Flipping” Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2019, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Green, Jemma. “AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced.” Forbes, 2 July 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Hogenboom, Melissa. “AI Chatbots Could Be Making You Stupider.” Bbc.Com, BBC, 20 Apr. 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    International Banker. “The Dotcom Bubble Burst (2000).” International Banker, 29 Sept. 2021, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026. [I hate when no author is given for articles. Seems a little like theft in and of itself. On the other hand, who ever thought that I’d be citing a publication called “International Banker”?]

    Kahloon, Idrees. “America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.” The Atlantic, 14 Oct. 2025, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Lee, Benjamin. “‘Deeply Concerning’: Reading for Fun in the US Has Fallen by 40%, New Study Says.” The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2025, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026. [Support the Guardian, by the way. They’re one of the last reliable sources of news in the world.]

    Merchant, Brian. “AI Is Not ‘Democratizing Creativity.’ It’s Doing the Opposite.” Blood in the Machine, 2024, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    NEA = National Education Association. “Environmental Impact of AI | NEA.” Nea.Org, 2025, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Rogelberg, Sasha. “Top Economist Warns That the AI Math Doesn’t Make Sense: ‘Profits Are Currently Being Funded by Investors Rather than Earned from Customers.’” Fortune, 10 Aug. 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Van Pelt, Jennifer. “The History of Storytelling.” Words Alive, 5 Sept. 2018, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Wilder, Drew. “How Loudoun County Data Centers Are Linked to Power Flickering across Half the U.S..” NBC4 Washington, 24 July 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    Yañez-Barnuevo, Miguel. “Communities Are Raising Noise Pollution Concerns About Data Centers.” Eesi.Org, 2026, direct link. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.

    —

    Also, search engines, I realize you’re impacted by this sort of dumbing-down as well, but please, don’t show me Reddit. I’d rather cite the proceedings of the Salem Witch Trials or the nearest convenient Ouija board. I also won’t cite the Washington Post, which used to be better.

    That’s It! And Disclaimers

    Take any point I made in this article. We exist in a Dirac Sea of opinion. Someone, somewhere, will say the exact opposite. One difference, though: they’re wrong 😉

    Opinions expressed in my blog are my own, and although works were referenced here, the authors of those works played no part in this article’s construction. Especially important is that I did my own research. I didn’t rely on some Great Crap Machine.

    I don’t take tips or collect names for an email list. If you appreciate my work, try donating to one of the following charities or organizations. This short list was chosen for relevance to this particular article.

    • The Small Press or Independent Publisher of your choice. Here are the people on the front lines of keeping it real.
    • Your LOCAL transgender rights advocacy / support group. Long ago someone in my old church said every time you cuss, the Devil smiles. Well, billionaires funded the Anti-Trans movement. Every time you worry about who’s going into what bathroom, they’re smiling because they’ve bankrupted you, taken away the good jobs, destroyed the environment, helped annihilate civil rights, and kept you from owning a home. And you didn’t notice.
    • Join the fight against data centers. You have no hope of succeeding at the national level, that should be clear for right now. Go local.
  • Profile: Kaleidotrope
    Kaleidotrope, Summer 2026. Cover art by Brian Malachy Quinn.

    Profile: Kaleidotrope

    This article is part of my Recommended Reading profile series, originally written and posted 1-Sept-2026.

    Summary

    Kaleidotrope reads at times like a fable, a dream, a prediction. Each issue generates a consistent sense of wonder and surprise. I think if independent speculative fiction were a small town, this would be the town square.

    Find it at: Kaleidotrope.

    • Genres: Eclectic across speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, horror.
    • Content: Short fiction and poetry.
    • Publication Frequency: Quarterly.
    • Cost: Free, even including an extensive archive going back to 2012.

    If you find you like Kaleidotrope, you should become a supporter on Patreon. That’s the best way to ensure small presses and publishers will continue to exist. Period.

    Why Kaleidotrope?

    A long while back, I left social media entirely. When I came back, one of the first thing I did was try to find 1) new stuff to read and 2) places to submit my work.

    I hadn’t heard of Kaleidotrope. See, for a long time, I was a teacher. No one who hasn’t done it understands how that sort of workday can take everything from you. Once I got my life back, well, you might say I looked for places to live.

    Kaleidotrope (@kaleidotrope.bsky.social) maintains a strong presence on Bluesky, so I ran into them very quickly. After diving into the archives, I definitely put them on my list of places to watch. Flash forward and I’ve been a Patreon supporter since 13-April-2026.

    That got me a LOT of extras. The editor, Fred Coppersmith (@unrealfred.bsky.social) has the dual qualities of being a discerning editor and an observant wit. (Think Oscar Wilde in charge of Amazing Stories, but set in the 21st century.) With Patreon membership you get access to the frequent Kaleidonotes, a behind-the-scenes look at the magazine.

    And that by itself is interesting. Kaleidotrope has been a one-person-operation ever since its founding in 2006. Despite that—or possibly because of that—it’s on par with magazines with dozens of people on the editorial staff and much larger budgets.

    But hey. Enough from me. They have an archive, right? Let’s take a tour and let the magazine speak for itself.

    Selected Works

    Short Stories

    Here are a few of the best stories from recent issues.

    I have to admit my limitations here. I hate spoilers. That will make me very vague in the descriptions at times. Remember the whole idea of what I like—to be surprised. Hard to recommend something and at the same time take that option away.

    1. “A Song in a Minor Scale” by Gunnar De Winter. Had to put this one first; though it’s from the last issue, it’s easily my favorite of all of them. A tale of a girl given the name Lyra, a druid named Braze, and a dragon whose name is likely not Ormir.
    2. “A Family Forged” by Aaron Emmel. Here my spoiler-sense won’t let me say anything, other than that this is one of those stories where you have to read to see how the fictional world works, and how the narrative flows against those boundaries.
    3. “A Life in the Day: with Chris Wheeler, CEO of Tricentennial” by Matt Hornsby. In the vein of Merlin syndrome and the case of Benjamin Button, this is a tale of unusual aging.
    4. “A Tree That Can’t Be Chopped” by Timothy Mudie. Not just a fantasy story, but a self-contained thriller / mystery involving a missing friend and arcane secrets.
    5. “Full Fathom Five” by Gwendolyn Maia Hicks. Go fishing, accidentally net a merrow. (Fantasy folks might recognize this as an Irish name for the merfolk.) If I enjoy a story, a lot of times I will read it out loud, and the cadences of the dialogue perfectly match a soft Irish accent. I went to have a look at their bio, and found, just as I suspected, they’re a bit of a linguist (like me).
    6. “Water Softener People” by EC Dorgan. Yeah, this is the one I was thinking about when I said I don’t do spoilers. It’s an experience, a place you go ← (that was a hint).

    Now let me dive into the archives.

    I owe a lot of my experience with Kaleidotrope to bad traffic. I live in the DMV (District / Maryland / Virginia) area, with some of the most clogged and congested roads in the nation. (I-95, anyone?) Generally my wife and I trade out driving on long trips. During the times I’m in the passenger seat, I like to read.

    Here I have to give Kaleidotrope a LOT of credit for resisting the PDF format. Many times I’m reading on a phone (the same one running Google Maps). Reading the stories in Kaleidotrope there is the perfect web experience, the text conforming to the borders of the screen for easy reading.

    I appreciate that. Earlier this year I had cataract surgery, and there was a time I had terribly disorienting vision issues. Between surgeries, my left eye was farsighted, my right eye nearsighted, and neither could see up close. Putting on reading glasses was hot garbage, as I needed a different magnification for each eye.

    Thus, I got a lesson in the value of publications that make themselves readable to the vision impaired.

    Anyway! Here are some of my favorite stories I’ve found on the road.

    1. “Transits of Other Lands” by Marissa Lingen. As a new writer, you get bombarded with advice. Start the action quickly. Plant that hook. State the motivation immediately. This story has none of that, and that makes it great. Simply put, this is exactly what the title promises—an article on transit systems in other (fictional) lands. About the time I got down to Sorcerer Assisted Teleportation, we were stuck in traffic on I-495 near the Potomac. This story was a fantasy in more than one way at that point.
    2. “The Magician Deletes Her Feed” by Kate Lechler. Kaleidotrope distinguishes itself in being one of the SF/F/H magazines that allows and often features stories with an element of humor. I don’t know why that’s so hard to find. We live in pretty terrible times. Isn’t joy also emotional content? But the spec fic scene is awash in the grim and the apocalyptic. Here’s a nice respite: social media for mages. Delivers everything it promises, including a nice look at the academic / theoretical side of spellcasting.
    3. “Where There’s Magic” by Michelle Ann King. The first line of a story can be a promise of what’s to come. In this case it’s a lead-in to a tale that reads like a fable: “The witch had a favorite saying: where there’s life, there’s magic. There was a second part—where there’s magic, there’s death—but she usually kept that to herself.”

    Poetry

    I’m taking a different tack here. With short fiction, my journey was stochastic; here it’s deliberate. I’m a vertical reader, so I’ve chosen one particular poet to highlight.

    David Kopaska-Merkel recently passed away. According to the poetry archives he appeared in Kaleidotrope ten times. That makes it easy to assemble a top ten list!

    1. “Marbles” (October 2009) [Not Archived. This is from the print-copy version of Kaleidotrope, pre-2012]
    2. “Social Dinosaurs” (Summer 2016)—I have to admit an affinity for this one, as I like crows.
    3. “Dangerous Stuff” (Autumn 2016)
    4. “Even Their Fish” (Winter 2019)—In this and the previous, note the clever word choice and even use of coined words, e.g. effluviated / radio-frequensated. Further down this list you will meet the word Cinderellish.
    5. “Could’ve Been a Gerbil” (Spring 2019)—Read this one immediately. The last three lines were perfect. It’s clear DKM had a fantastic sense of humor.
    6. “Diplomatic Incident” (Spring 2020)
    7. “The Hungry Void” (Autumn 2020)
    8. “Post-Metazoan World” (with Kendall Evans, Summer 2021)
    9. “The Face in the Attic, the Voices in the Walls” (with Kendall Evans, Spring 2024)—I think one of the signature moves of a great poet is, as in gymnastics, “sticking the landing.” Reading through most of these, those final three lines bring the impact.
    10. “The Saucer Men” (Spring 2025)—Easily the best one in my opinion, very relevant to the world we’re living in. Maybe it resonates a bit extra with me, though, as the Saucer Men came to visit my people on three-masted ships, across the Atlantic.

    You might get the idea DKM was a heavy-hitter, and he was, if you read the bio link I provided above. Poetry, particularly in SF, is a tricky business—all the requirements of mainstream, with the additional speculative element. How many of the poems above told a complete story, just from the details in the verse? How many took you to another world, another place?

    Art

    In my opinion, the AI scourge has hit artists far worse than it has writers. I think the most telling thing I learned about the people who use LLMs to create images* is that on some sites, they hide the prompts they use from each other, so that no one will steal their ideas.

    Think about that for a moment.

    * Notice I didn’t call them artists. They’re not.

    That’s the problem, right? The theft of creative effort doesn’t hit home hard enough for them. Collectively, we need to 1) consistently support human artists and 2) consistently reject those who push the LAZY button and claim to be creative.

    Anyway. Did I mention Kaleidotrope has great art? You’ve seen the screen capture above, but check out some of these:

    An interesting bit of digital archaeology: Kaleidotrope started out as a print ‘zine, transitioning to electronic starting in 2012. It looks like the art really didn’t kick off until 2015. That makes sense. Needless to say, a webpage doesn’t require expensive color printing.

    I do miss the days of print magazines, but then I realize, after all the moving around we’ve done, I have exactly zero of them remaining. For a lot of publishers, the move to the web was problematic, but it at least enabled the possibility of building an extensive, accessible archive.

    Intelligence Files

    For Readers

    For Authors

    Time to admit I’m an obsessive stat-herder. In my own writing work, I’ve aggregated data for 77 fiction markets I’m interested in submitting to. (Sources: Duotrope, The Submission Grinder, Chill Subs.) The stats below were current as of 12-Aug-2026.

    • Favorite Factor: 488, comparable to Fusion Fragment among author follows and submissions. (Rank 29 out of 77).
    • Acceptance Rate: 3.41%, comparable to Pseudopod. (Rank 46 out of 77 in terms of difficulty, e.g. Interzone is at 2 out of 77 with a rate of 0.15%.) Caution! This stat is misleading in that it’s only gathered from writers who have the sense to track their submissions and enough professionalism to actually read the guidelines.)
    • Lag: 10.8 days, comparable to Fusion Fragment (Rank 15 out of 77 in terms of getting responses back to authors, so in the top 20%).
    • Submissions: by email during specific reading periods, posted in the Guidelines.

    That’s It! And Disclaimers

    Opinions presented here are entirely my own. Hopefully I provided proper attribution / links to everything I cited in the article; if I didn’t, please let me know and I’ll correct this post.

    I don’t take tips or collect names for an email list. If you appreciate my work, try donating to one of the following charities. Each of these has very personal meaning for me.

  • Reviews & Recommendations
    The place where the magic is made 😉

    Reviews & Recommendations

    These are the rules, and the reasons why.

    Soon I’ll have one of my first recommendations up. Later I’ll start posting reviews. What’s the point?

    I’ve been reading speculative fiction since age 6. Not first grade books, either. I came in knowing how to read, largely thanks to my mom, my grandparents, Sesame Street, and the Electric Company. Then I have to add in Star Trek, which got me interested in space.

    Tally that up and it’s 52 years of experience as a reader.

    You might think, hey, great. But it also means I’ve seen just about everything, and I seek out things that surprise and delight me. When I find them, it’s in my best interest to make sure they keep on coming.

    This is a terrible time for literature, period. The number of people who read for pleasure is down (Smithsonian, August 2026); jerks are using AI to pretend to be authors (and other kinds of creators as well), which floods submission queues with slop; and the economy is frankly the pits, with many people not being able to afford basics, not to mention extras.

    Face it. No one’s going to get rich writing short stories. People like me do it because they have something to say. Editors of small presses and independent magazines struggle just as much, year after year trying to keep afloat and keep making the magic words flow.

    This blog is for people who enjoy my work to come and learn more about it. One of the best ways would be to bring people in to the community I’m part of—the places and people that bring me joy. I think you’ll like the tour.

    So Here are the Rules

    Reviews are a touchy subject at times among authors. Again, presume good intentions. In general, my philosophy is not to point out the bad, but to highlight the good. But here are my guiding principles:

    1. Reviews and Recommendations are never solicited, but choices I make of my own free will. Something to consider: I used up precious writing time (hard to come by, some days) to write the article. Why? Because I seriously thought it was worth it.
    2. A Recommendation highlights the best parts. Think of it as if I’m an editor, assembling a list of things I like, a sort of virtual anthology. What editor goes out of the way to add in stuff they don’t like?
    3. A Review can be really harsh. I mean, it can be glowing and wonderful too, but the gloves come off. I’m a stickler for science and consistent in-world logic. In general, I will only review big projects that can take a hit or two from a minor leaguer like me. My biggest pet peeve is movies and TV shows. I can’t think of any recent show but The Expanse that didn’t get ripped a new one by me at one point or another. (The last one before that was Babylon 5.)

    So that’s it. I try to keep it simple. Hopefully you’ll find it entertaining and informative.

    Support the things you love, right?

  • You Have to Start Somewhere…
    Paris from the top of Tour Montparnasse, 2023.

    You Have to Start Somewhere…

    I resisted the idea of starting an author blog until I actually had something published. Well, now’s the time.

    On 23-Aug-2026, I got my first acceptance. My short story “The Good That Demons Do” (9200 words) is scheduled to appear in the Winter 2027 issue of The Colored Lens.

    Great news!

    So now, I really need this blog. Not merely for self-promotion, but as a place where readers can go to learn more about me and about the stories I create.

    For example:

    “The Good That Demons Do” is set on Taián. Although it’s a fantasy setting, I did a lot of world building. The planet itself orbits an F3V primary, with an orbital period of 2.6419 Earth years. The average temperature there is so high only the south polar region is inhabitable. Around 30° away from the pole, terrible storms blow in from the uninhabitable latitudes. To top it off, this is a young world, only four billion years old; plate tectonics are pretty furious there.

    Ah. Did I mention the sorcerers? And the trade fleets of Calsis? Or the treacherous waters of the Creig Mór, the Sea that Breaks Ships?

    Quite an interesting place. But a story is a story, and no one wants to stop in the middle of a sword fight or demonic invocation for a quick lesson in geography, history, or culture.

    That’s what this blog is for. The stories behind the stories.

    Also I’ll throw in some reading recommendations, the now-and-again review. And of course that promotional angle. Every time I’ve got a story coming out, I’ll post about it here. (Embracing optimism, there, since at the moment I only have one.)

    Ah. Why the photo of Paris, above? In a sense that’s where my writing journey began, the place where I turned wanting to write into actual writing. Long story, there. Stick around and you might hear it someday.

    Bienvenue dans mon monde.