'Scumbags'

'Flames like just in the gutter'

'I will not allow SPOG members to be used as political pawns'

'Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!'

'A post-op aneurism/bleed soon developed'

The discovery of stylized handprints dating back at least 67,800 years in a limestone cave in Indonesia has broken the country’s own record for the world’s oldest-known example of rock art. It provides direct evidence that humans have been crossing the sea intentionally for nearly 70,000 years, as Man traveled from the Asian continent across […] The post At 67,800-years-old, These Handprints Just Discovered in Indonesia Are Oldest Example of Rock Art appeared first on Good News Network.

Books reading recommendations Eight Deeply Weird Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Novels Imagining the weird, dark magic and monsters that arise after the end of the world. By Sam Reader | Published on February 2, 2026 Viscera cover art by Gabriel Shaffer Comment 0 Share New Share Viscera cover art by Gabriel Shaffer The end of the world is a perfect place for weird fantasy. Whether it’s Samuel R. Delany’s mind-bending and reality-warping Dhalgren, Jack Vance’s classic sword-and-sorcery series that begins with The Dying Earth, or Stephen King’s cockeyed take on the Book of Revelation in The Stand, setting a fantasy novel after the end is an excellent way to get even weirder with an already weird genre. After all, the end of the old world means a ton of undefined space in the new. Bigger and stranger magic fits right alongside this, too—after all, who’s to say the world didn’t end with an explosion of power and magic unleashed among the chaos? With this in mind, here’s a (by no means exhaustive) list of fantasy set in the ruins of an old world, and in the strange new reality that has taken its place… Viscera by Gabrielle Squailia Squailia’s aggressively queer, aggressively trans, aggressively weird dark fantasy deserves far more attention than it gets. After an unknown calamity, the body parts and organs of the gods litter the landscape as an unkillable doctor, two wayward disembowelers from a psychedelic bug cult, and a homicidal rag doll team up to kill a mad scientist named The Puppeteer who’s trying to take over the world via alchemy. That summary doesn’t do the book any kind of justice, as Squailia’s wild rampage across the apocalyptic landscape where synapse-trees act as communication and a trans sorceress and her undead bear tie the heroes up in a god’s (literal) nerves, but Viscera is not the kind of book you can easily describe. You come for the strange premise; you stay for the grotesquely funny commentary on all things bodily and hang on for dear life as best you can. The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson What’s a post-apocalyptic fantasy without a lot of weird horror? Hodgson’s classic work of epic fantasy sets itself far in the future where the remains of humanity live inside giant ziggurats protected by energy shields and the surrounding landscape is filled with cosmic horrors that have proliferated since the death of the sun. The narrative is a flowery (written in a kind of strange, archaic English) quest fantasy where a bold knight must rescue a damsel in distress, but Hodgson takes it far further, populating his landscape with mountain-size psychics, eldritch houses and cities that kill the unwary, and plenty of human-size horrors that have been emboldened by the fading light and the eventual end of the human race. It may be a strange place to set a romantic quest fantasy, but the juxtaposition between cosmic horror and dashing heroics certainly makes Hodgson’s tale a unique one. The Waste Lands by Stephen King The Dark Tower series might be a sprawling intertextual work weaving in and out of reality, but in its best moments, it’s King doing a dark pulp fantasy with a ragtag crew of desperate heroes led by Roland Deschain—Conan the Barbarian reimagined as Clint Eastwood. The clearest this vision gets is with The Waste Lands, a book that leans into the idea that “the world moved on” alluded to in the more fantasy-inflected Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass. Despite its unambiguous fantasy trappings, the most iconic of the seven books blends ’80s B-movies and post-nuclear crumbling cities filled with wizards, demons, literary allusions, and a very hungry sapient house. The knightly weapons may be revolvers, and the mad king might be a deranged transit AI, but magic and monsters are the same whether it’s the imagined past or the post-nuclear future. Dark Sleeper by Jeffrey E. Barlough We’ll try to keep the number of pre- to mid-industrial apocalypses on this list relatively low, but Barlough’s Western Light series is just so weird it’s hard not to recommend it to people. Following a medieval-era ice age and the Year Without a Summer, the planet is a large ball of ice except for the western United States, a place where reality has gone strange and all contact with the outside world is swallowed up. In this new age, Dickensian villains ride mammoth-drawn carriages, the spirits of the dead loom out of the mists, and animals are capable of speech. Dark Sleeper is perhaps the most fantasy-inclined of Barlough’s books, setting up this strange new world and dealing with a series of unusual supernatural events set in motion by ancient evils. It’s a lot to process, but the reward is some of the strangest Victorian era-set fantasy you’ll ever read. Wonderblood by Julia Whicker In a future ravaged by catastrophe, magic based on a twisted understanding of science has become the new religion, and people worship the astronauts who made it into space before the calamity befell Earth. Into this world is born Aurora, the daughter of a traveling medic who followed “the old ways” before everyone carried around shrunken heads and were terrified of the mutated cows in Kansas. Taken as a war trophy by the insane Mr. Capulatio, Aurora is thrust into violent political machinations as Capulatio makes his way towards Cape Canaveral with designs on ruling the world. Whicker’s world comes alive with strange customs and curious rituals drawing on the vanished past, but the real star is how gorgeous and grotesque she makes everything, finding poetry in prairie sunsets and massive head wounds alike as her tale of war, religion, and prophecy unfurls over the destroyed United States. Finch by Jeff VanderMeer The third book of VanderMeer’s excellent Ambergris trilogy sees the fungal apocalypse finally come home to roost over the wondrous city. The freshwater squid’s river is choked with mushrooms, Ambergris is ruled over by the mushroom creatures known as the Gray Caps, and human collaborators are “rewarded” by getting colonized with more and more fungal improvements. Finch, a police detective in this horrifying new situation, is tasked with solving a bizarre double homicide even as he tries to stay one step ahead of the city’s new dictatorial masters. VanderMeer’s work of bureaucratic body horror starts with his once-familiar urban landscape engulfed in fungal totalitarianism, but blends in interdimensional rifts, postwar noir, and a plot that grows more surreal by the second to create something dark, dystopian, and unnervingly prescient. Angel House by David Leo Rice You can’t get much weirder or more apocalyptic than a cycle of death and rebirth ending in a flood. Professor Squimbop pilots his titular house-ark across an empty landscape; each time he weighs anchor, a town springs up around the ark. For the next several months, he will deliver lectures, cause existential crises, and generally act as a semi-willing satanic figure for the town, harvesting the semi-real inhabitants to power Angel House and sustain himself. As he goes about his work, the inhabitants engage in bizarre rituals, try to recapture their youth and nostalgia, and escape the town. The flood will come to wash everything away again, but with the slimmest chance of escape and hope, some of the townspeople have dreams worth keeping their heads above water for. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir Far in the future, the known universe is divided into houses of necromancers who serve the Emperor. Gideon, a belligerent swordfighter and foundling under the Ninth House, is in the midst of her eighty-sixth escape attempt when the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus presses her into service as a swordswoman. The Ninth’s chief necromancer requires a cavalier to defend her as the Emperor calls the highest-ranking members of each House to his temple to be challenged and ascend to the rank of Lictor in a deadly ceremony. As Harrow’s assigned cavalier has abandoned his duty and escaped to another House’s planet, Gideon is shoved into the service at the last minute as a replacement, bound to protect the woman she utterly hates. Muir’s unusual view of a post-necromancy solar system is certainly a bold one—characters banter back and forth in mutated internet memes amid Giger-esque architecture and groaning cybernetics—but it’s certainly an unforgettable one.[end-mark] The post Eight Deeply Weird Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Novels appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Across the United States, cash is quietly disappearing from places that once took it without question. Government agencies and private businesses now route even the smallest transactions through digital networks that record who paid, when, and where. This has created a growing dependence on card processors and mobile payment companies that profit from every exchange and hold the power to deny or suspend access. That dependence has now reached federal land. The National Park Service has begun refusing cash at dozens of parks and historic sites, forcing visitors to use electronic payment systems to enter public property. A lawsuit challenging that policy argues that by excluding physical currency, the agency is violating federal law and pushing citizens into a digital system that tracks their movements and spending. Attorney Ray Flores has filed an appeal with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, seeking to overturn the dismissal of a lawsuit against the National Park Service (NPS) for refusing to accept cash at dozens of federal sites. We obtained a copy of the filing for you here. The case, backed by Children’s Health Defense, centers on whether a federal agency can legally decline the very currency the government itself issues. At issue is the NPS policy that bars visitors from paying park entrance fees with cash. The appeal argues that the agency has violated both the Administrative Procedure Act and the Legal Tender Statute, which defines US coins and bills as “legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.” Flores wrote that the district court’s earlier decision effectively “demonetized the U.S. Dollar on federal property without justification.” His brief asks the appeals court to declare the policy unlawful or send the case back for trial. “NPS’s no-cash policy begs a commonsense question – does the U.S. Government have the right to refuse to accept the currency it demands we use? The commonsense answer is, obviously not.” The case began when New York artist Toby Stover visited the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park. The filing recounts: “A man in an NPS uniform welcomed her. He asked her if she would like to take the 3:30 tour. She replied that she would. He asked for $10, which she attempted to hand to him. He affirmed ‘we don’t take cash’ and would not permit her to enter.” Stover later learned that nearly thirty other national parks and historic sites had adopted the same cashless rule. “Hyde Park’s entrance fee,” the brief notes, “is still only payable by ‘Credit/Debit only’ according to its website.” Flores argues that this denial was not symbolic or technical. “Her U.S. currency is utterly worthless at Hyde Park to this day,” he wrote, adding that “Ms. Stover’s harm not only happened, but occurs any time she sets foot on any one of NPS’s no-cash venues.” The brief invokes the Legal Tender Statute, which states that “United States coins and currency…are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.” Flores contends that no law grants the NPS power to create “a surrogate legal tender (i.e., electronic payments).” He wrote, “This Court must not permit any government agency or District Court to designate a replacement for U.S. currency.” The appeal calls the district court’s reasoning circular. “The District Court avoided deciding the substantive issues of the illegality of the NPS’s no-cash policy by blaming the victim,” the filing says. “The NPS employee’s turning her away resulted in concrete injury and actual and continuing harm as long as Hyde Park’s no-cash policy remains in place.” Flores describes the implications in stark terms: “The minute she walked onto federal property owned for the public good and was told she needed to use a private payment, her U.S. currency became worthless. Money is a unit of account, medium of exchange, and a store of value. The moment she walked on the property, it lost all its value.” The appeal frames the case as a test of governmental boundaries. “No U.S. law allows the NPS to exclusively define legal tender as electronic payment,” it states. “The District Court pretended or presumed such a law existed when it ruled that Ms. Stover brought the harm upon herself when she tendered U.S. currency at Hyde Park.” Flores warns that allowing such policies to stand would erode public trust in the dollar itself. “The U.S. Government’s demonetization and devaluation of its U.S. Dollar is a dangerous gamble,” he wrote. In his introduction, Flores framed the issue in terms of national identity and law: “Will history remember Toby Stover vs. U.S. National Park Service as the case that helped rescue the dollar’s dignity, or as the beginning of its quiet demise? In a democracy built on laws and liberty, the answer matters.” Privacy at the Core The case extends beyond monetary policy. Stover maintains that cash is a safeguard for personal privacy and accessibility. She says that denying cash limits public participation and exposes all transactions to tracking and financial data collection. For those without cards or bank accounts, cashless entry creates a barrier to public space itself. As federal agencies move toward digital-only systems, the outcome of this appeal could define whether Americans retain the practical right to use physical money in government-run settings. Flores’s filing concludes with a call for judicial correction: “The NPS replaces U.S. currency with surrogate electronic payment. The District Court’s assumption that electronic payment is the new U.S. currency is reversible error.” If the appellate court agrees, it would restore the dollar’s role on federal land and affirm that public institutions must continue to accept cash, a tangible instrument of both payment and privacy. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Lawsuit Challenges National Park Service Ban on Cash Payments appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

ABC News Aired a Soppy Love Letter to Minneapolis Man Last Night

We’ve been seriously underestimating babies.