I’d say for me magical realism has been 2025’s “Genre of the year” so I have a few recommendations.

If you like Murakami you might like Sayaka Murata - I particularly liked Earthlings, it’s a bit less magical realism but definitely quirky and surreal.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was another book that stood out to me this year. It’s an emotional story with a young man and an older woman which uses a very smart octopus as the main character and anchor for the story (even though I wouldn’t consider the story is about the octopus).

Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown is firmly magical realism, and also quite good.

Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson is about a young woman who gets roped into babysitting two kids that spontaneously combust from time to time. It’s lighthearted but emotional, and I was laughing out loud about once every 5 pages. I had a blast with this one.

I would also class Jandy Nelson’s books as magical realism so I would say you might enjoy that too.

Then there’s This Is How You Lose The Time War, which I didn’t like at all, but has many good reviews so I won’t discredit it. It’s… Space fantasy? There’s no “science” in the fiction, but it has time travel, and weirdness galore.

This is my list of books I’ve read in 2025, in case you find anything inspiring:

And my storygraph profile in case you want to take a look (or not, I won’t be able to know!).

For me I think it was Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. So many emotions lol.

Project Hail Mary was another one of the highlights!

Yeah, I’m not going to defend training AI with copyrighted works… But I’m not going to waste energy siding with anyone who was okay with X. If you stayed in X, you’vr made your own bed. Now don’t cry because the owner is an AI-pandering nazi, we all knew that already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bT77XP52uw&t=73

“See no path oh soo bay see no path oh SOO BEE RAAAY”

I did not speak french when I was six. I do now, but apparently that doesn’t automatically translate memories from thirty years ago. It took me about 5 years of actively looking for this to find it. I found it by asking in a big forum (not reddit but that sort of thing) for something like “people driving cars deforesting space with lasers”.

Capitalism loves using supply and demand to justify anything… up until it’s time to lower the price to adapt to low demand.

This is ridiculous. If it goes into effect, the same women will complain when they see a big trans man full of tattoos in the women’s bathroom because the law has forced them to go there.

Purely and simply transphobia.

Still debatable, the weights are the code. That’s a bit like saying “X software is not open source because it has equations but it doesn’t include the proofs that they’re derived from”.

I have a Xiaomi, which typically is on the bad list of “dontkillmyapp” but with a bit of knowledge and care I’ve had zero issues.

You just have to know not to let the phone kill apps if you don’t want them killed 🤷‍♂️ but I guess many users can’t understand that.

I get that vivo phones aren’t supported, but the energy and messaging is very off here. “Vivo - no, lol” “open an issue or buy pixel”.

There’s no need to be a condescending dick to your users, you can just write “phones with aggressive task managers might kill the app and break updates”.

Plus I don’t think anybody sane is “buying pixel” just to access a widget app. 🙄

Oh, I guess I’m out of the loop, I thought this project was dead!

I switched from Goodreads to Storygraph and I love it. It doesn’t have ties to amazon and it’s a bit like goodreads minus the pointless fluff.

In 2025? Is that even a thing?

Yeah the article is quite clear but the headline isn’t. I struggle to consider “left-wing” a party that is clearly right-wing on many social issues.

Specific example from this very budget: increasing taxes on electric cars might be economically more taxing on more affluent people, but the implied message is “buy a petrol car instead” which isn’t a left-wing idea at all. Why are petrol cars not taxed per mile (but more aggressively)? Why are cars not taxed relative to cost - how is a 2.5 ton Hybrid Range Rover cheaper to tax than an electric Renault 5 (for say, 10000 miles a year), and how is that left wing???

When flagships cost $500 I would keep them for 2 years. Now they cost $1000 I expect them to last twice as long. 🤷‍♂️ “The market” isn’t only dictated by supply, it’s supply and demand. It cuts both ways.

My health insurance (Axa in the UK, through my employer) has a neurodivergent diagnosis/support service.

After doing a self assessment, I booked an appointment with a regular doctor and said I suspect I might have ADHD because of [assessment] and [list of symptoms].

They said something along the lines of “that’s enough evidence to at least suspect it”, then referred me onwards to the other service (ProblemShared) which did first a preliminary assessment and then a formal diagnosis.

Do some (reliable) self tests (there are some official ones, I’m sure someone can advise). It’s very quick and you’ll learn more about yourself.

I’m diagnosed now, but before that, the way I saw this was: even if I don’t actually have ADHD, if I know I have ADHD-like symptoms/behaviours, I can learn and use the coping strategies of ADHD individuals to make my life easier. (Which was right except for the fact that I, indeed, turned out to have not only the symptoms but actual ADHD).

Unfortunately I’ve seen this happen before, in Spain.

The national flag of Spain, when used by an individual, rarely ever represents “I love Spain and all that it entails” but rather “I have right-wing views, I only accept the catholic religion, gays aren’t natural, and immigrants should go back to their own countries”.

I don’t know if it can be taken back to just be the national flag, but if it can, Spain hasn’t managed to achieve it in the 20 years since it devolved into a narrow political symbol.

Maybe he’d feel more at ease if he wore clothes.

I’ve seen this posted before, in fact so long ago that if it was an LLM it would have been GPT-1 at most.

I’m pretty sure this is human-flavoured stupidity, rather than LLM garbage.

…and this is what happens when you write bullshit without effort.

Seriously, an LLM could have done a better job than whoever wrote this.