'Massive amounts of fraud'

Books Reading the Weird Don’t Trust the Tentacles: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 9) Nobody ever suspects the octopuses… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on January 7, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 23-25 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Mar, like her coworkers, keeps her mouth shut about the Unidentified Flying Monster she saw escaping from UCC. With executives dropping like flies, predatory organizations are looting weakened businesses, and new jobs are few on the ground. But Mar’s determined to understand what she saw. An OG follower of Dr. Kaz Chats, Mar gets an alert for its first livestream. Dr. Kaz’s guest is Gabriel Takahiro, a marine molecular geneticist specializing in cephalopods. He’s an Asian man with the tan and physique of a surfer dude. He looks grim and doesn’t hesitate to explain why: His lab has “compelling evidence” that the PVG virus first spread to humans who consumed raw octopus. All the cities with early PVG cases got octopus shipments from the same northern Japan fishing grounds. This octopus was properly frozen, but whereas cooking destroys PVG, freezing does not. Avoid octopus sashimi! Octopuses have very different immune systems from humans. PVG is the first zoonotic viral disease passed from cephalopods to people. How Takahiro and colleagues caught on is a “mad story.” They were wild to get samples of the recently-discovered dodecapod. Their genetic sequencing suggested that its closest match was the giant Pacific octopus, but some sequences were unknown. Running them against every available database, they got a match to the PVG virus! Furthermore, PVG looks engineered; virologists also believe no lab on earth could have constructed something so complex. Hence, it must be extraterrestrial, perhaps seeded by a meteorite that crashed into the sea near the Japanese trench several years ago. * * * Mar spends her UCC shift surreptitiously watching social media react to Kaz’s livestream. The biology community’s divided between calling Takahiro’s claims bullshit and supporting him as a highly respected researcher. Her mind whirling, Mar stops at a grocery store on her way home. Something big crashes through the front windows. People scream, carts overturn, merchandise topples off shelves. Mar joins the crowd escaping out the back doors. Then, right in front of her, a nightmare lands. It’s seven feet tall, with gnarled limbs and widespread bat-like wings. Something “jittery and blurry” makes focusing painful. Is it giving off radiation? Is it out of phase with the physical world? For sure, it’s shrieking and drooling bloody slime. Can it really be trying to enunciate her name? Then she sees a shadow of humanity in its face, features she recognizes. “Erin?” she asks, and the creature bobs its head. Their reunion’s interrupted by a tall blonde woman spattered with gore and wielding a machete. She yells “Back off, Archivist! She’s Chosen! Don’t touch her!” Erin roars, but backs off. The woman, Savannah, has come to escort Mar to safety. Some Archivists are “overenthusiastic,” and “we” wouldn’t want Mar “harvested” by accident. What’s happening is “the first active phase of the harvesting and neutralization of the dominant technological species on this planet.” In other words, the apocalypse, doomsday, end of human civilization. Everyone’s gonna die, but not Mar. Their “eldritch lords and masters” have plans for her, though Savannah doesn’t know details. Erin barks alien sounds which Savannah apparently understands. Turns out Mar’s old coworker has harvested the owner of an off-grid mansion in the hills nearby: A perfect haven for Chosen Mar. Screw the gods’ plans; Mar makes a break for it. Erin catches her in gnarled talons while Savannah plunges a hypodermic needle into her neck. As consciousness fades, Savannah whispers things will get so much easier if Mar just learns to do as she says. * * * Mar wakes in a room more luxuriously plush than a high-end hotel. A much spruced-up Savannah escorts her to the sybaritic bathroom. After relieving herself, Mar tries to get her bearings. She’s wearing yesterday’s clothes, but a shackle’s fastened around her left ankle with a tracking device. Like a thriller heroine, Mar leaves the toilet alcove with the best available weapon: the heavy toilet tank lid. Savannah offers coffee and tells her to put down her ridiculous weapon—as if Mar could take on Savannah in her post-drugged condition! Savannah takes a rapid-PVG test to prove she’s not shedding virus, and Mar obeys. Savannah admits that she’s kidnapped Mar, but she thinks of it as a rescue and hopes they’ll get over their first meeting. Again, she doesn’t know the gods’ plan. Her job’s to keep Mar “safe and healthy and cared for.” Remembering how “Archivists” were slaughtering the people at the grocery, Mar asks to call her family. Savannah assures Mar that her people will all be dead, if not now, then shortly. Still, she lets Mar have her purse and cell phone. Mar goes into the luxurious living room, where Erin and another Archivist named Betty have stowed Mar’s belongings in talon-rent grocery store boxes. She calls her parents and gets sent to voice mail. She leaves a message: Please stay safe, call back, she loves them. At her sister Leila’s, one of her young nieces answers. Dad’s been attacked by a monster. Mom’s been gone a week. Now the monster’s coming back! Mar tells the girl to hide, but hears the rush of wings before the phone goes dead. 911 doesn’t answer, nor does her office. Strangely enough, Homeland Security agent Candy Kleypas’ card is still in her purse. Mar texts that she’s been kidnapped and has critical information. Then she watches the world “thrash and burn” on TV and weeps for everyone she’s ever known. * * * The Degenerate Dutch: From corrupt insider trading senators to fancy CEO mansions with tables “hand-carved in Russia by vegan expatriate Coptic monks,” this week’s chapters make a case for eating the rich as the only ethical consumption under capitalism. Unfortunately, it’s a bit late for that. Weirdbuilding: It’s all the fault of the octopuses. And the dodecapusses. Never trust anything with tentacles! Madness Takes Its Toll: Mar worries that she’s insane, perhaps hallucinating, and also “gonna die in in a Kroger parking lot.” Anne’s Commentary The Dynamic (or Demonic?) Trio have come together at last in Erin, Savannah and Mar. They should be the Sister, Maiden, and Monster of the novel’s title, but as to which woman falls into which category, I remain uncertain. Is it as simple as 1, 2, 3 = A, B, C, first narrator Erin is the Sister, second narrator Savannah the Maiden, and third narrator Mar the Monster? On a surface level, that doesn’t make sense to me—I’d classify Erin as the Monster and Mar as the Sister, but can far-from-virginal Savannah be the Maiden? Though she retains her human form post-PVG, she’s as much a Monster from a psychological and moral standpoint as Erin is a Monster in her grotesque physical transformation and ghoulish compulsions. Beyond virginity, the word maiden connotes purity, newness, youth, inexperience, unmarried status; given her asexuality, Mar’s the (maybe too) obvious choice for the title. The complicated relationship with her sibling Leila also “qualifies” her for Sister. Then again, Mar could be Monstrous in the genetic abnormality that makes her spawn tumors as horrifying as a womb full of primitive eyeballs. Or maybe each narrator is in herself an Unholy Trinity, Sister and Maiden and Monster somehow rolled into One? Before my mind implodes, I move on. No surprise that Chapter 23’s livestream with Dr. Kaz and hunky molecular geneticist Gabriel Takahiro filled me with biogeek glee. Hey, that discovery of a dodecapod that sparked the nascent bond between Mar and Erin? No mere conversational gambit, it’s the key to the PVG mystery, so about time I looked the word up. There are plenty of Terran decapods, or ten-legged animals: that is the Crustaceans, your crabs, lobsters, shrimp, barnacles, isopods, copepods, amphipods, and more. Then there are your Futurama Decapodians, semi-crustacean humanoids with only six or eight “limbs,” depending (I guess) on how you count their prehensile mouth appendages. But the only dodecapod I could find is the one in Magic: The Gathering, which is a giant artifact or Golem beast that looks like a cross between a long-leggity crab and a human. Actually, the MTG Dodecapod looks a lot like I imagine Archivist Erin to look, minus the batwings. Is Lucy Snyder having a laugh with the reader on this supposedly twelve-armed (dodeca) megacritter from the Japan trench? Speaking of batwings, maybe Snyder’s Archivists evolved them from Lovecraft’s Mi-Go, along with the Mi-Go’s kinda-crustacean aspect? Something I got sent to trench-like depths about, though, is Takahiro’s eagerness to get a dodecapod sample in order to “sort out which modern cephalopod species it’s most related to.” The results of his genetic analysis show some close sequence matches to the giant Pacific octopus. This didn’t bother me when I was thinking of Dodeca as a twelve-limbed cephalopod. Then I started thinking of Dodeca as more a variation on a crab rather than on an octopus, which started me wondering why Takahiro would be looking for a close evolutionary link between it and modern octopuses, decapods and cephalopods belonging as they do to different phyla (arthropods and mollusks.) Then I stumbled on the term for ten-armed cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish): Decapodiforms. So if Dodeca’s namers meant to link it to cephalopods rather than the crustacean decapods, they should have called it a dodecapodiform? Too many syllables in that name for the comfort of the media, however. Less punch. Anyhow, damn it, Takahiro’s point is that PVG is likely of EXTRATERRESTRIAL ORIGIN rather than a Terran native or even a Terran-engineered virus. Could Snyder’s elder gods have concocted a scheme similar to the one in Cherie Priest’s “Bad Sushi” in which the minions of Cthulhu pave His way to dominion over the Earth by supplying hungry humans with sushi tainted with some transformative substance or magic or… virus? Should humanity ever have preened itself over inventing biowarfare? There ain’t nothing new under the black suns that roll in outermost space, it seems. Ruthanna’s Commentary It’s such a relief to have a narrator who’s not turning into a homicidal maniac. It’s a pity about her situation. This is the worst possible world in which to be un-murderous. Because it sounds like very soon now, humanity will be down to society-razing servants of the elder gods, dead people, and Mar. Of all the homicidal abomination-servants you could spend the apocalypse with, Savannah is perhaps the most alarmingly perky. She exudes the cheer of a blood-drenched corporate lifestyle influencer. Erin, for all her bat-clawed shrieks and brain-eating, is at least practical: she’s the one with the safehouse and the willingness to help a friend move mid-apocalypse. Savannah prefers pleasure-seeking to plans, trusting that the gods will provide. But provide what? I wouldn’t personally trust that they’ll deliver to order, no matter how much fun she’s having and no matter how many buzzwords she uses. Why does the apocalypse need buzzwords? Harvesting. Neutralization. Collateral damage. Trust the process. You’ll love it. Just like you loved the last reorganization at your workplace, only on a planetary scale. On second thought, of course the apocalypse needs buzzwords. Or rather, buzzwords are a sign of the apocalypse. So the chosen one is stuck in a mansion with a homicidal maniac and a bunch of Chihuly sculptures. (Apparently my wife isn’t the only one who thinks they make excellent elder god portraits.) Plans for food unclear, since the grocery store and the farms that supply it have been Harvested. Perhaps Erin will remember to bring something back? Perhaps leftovers from her own meals? Ew. I’m going to assume the mansion doesn’t have an Aura, and try not to think about what the camera would show if it did. Erin’s creepily hard-to-see appearance must have components visible with spontaneous parametric down-conversion. But the big reveal this week is PVG’s origins: it’s an alien-engineered zoonotic virus that’s jumped from cephalopods to humans. We readers had kinda figured out the part where the elder gods did this on purpose—but why go through cephalopods? Are they supposed to take over after humans are “neutralized”? Or maybe they’ve been serving the gods all along. Perhaps it’s vengeance for all that calamari. Given that PVG passes easily from human to human, though, it does seem like the squid is out of the bag on warning people against sushi. Starting the plague is not the risk at this point. Still, every little bit helps. And Dr. Takahiro did send me down an interesting rabbit hole. It’s true that cephalopods have non-adaptive immune systems, which frankly sucks for them. What they do have, unfortunately, is beyond my ability to parse biomedical articles. It might well include desperate prayers to entities from beyond the stars—and answers in deeply alarming form. What happens when you buy the fixer-upper that has already basically collapsed into the tarn? Join us next week to find out in Hiron Ennes’ “Our Best Selves.”[end-mark] The post Don’t Trust the Tentacles: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 9) appeared first on Reactor.

Will and Adam are joined by Kevin Smith mega fans, Lee Eberhart and Kevin Decent to discuss the Wizard Kevin Smith Spectacular from 2001, exploring the View Askew cinematic universe. Hear their personal stories of CONTINUE READING... The post WIZARDS The Podcast Guide To Comics | BONUS: Kevin Smith Spectacular (2001) appeared first on The Retro Network.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The German government has discovered a clever way to expand its surveillance powers: call it “transparency.” The federal cabinet has approved a bill that would let state agents enter media offices and digital platforms without needing a judge’s permission. The official justification, ensuring honesty in political advertising, sounds harmless enough until you read the fine print and realize it’s about as transparent as a brick wall. The “Political Advertising Transparency Act” is described as an effort to align with new EU rules on political ad disclosure. What it actually does is grant the Bundesnetzagentur, a telecom regulator, search powers usually reserved for criminal investigators. More: Germany Turns Its Back on Decades‑Old Privacy Protections with Sweeping Surveillance Bill If the agency suspects a company has failed to file the right paperwork, it could send its people to “inspect” offices without a court order, provided they claim there’s an “imminent danger.” “Imminent danger” is one of those magic bureaucratic phrases that can mean anything from “credible bomb threat” to “somebody forgot to upload a PDF.” Once that phrase appears in law, the limits become a matter of interpretation. Legal experts have warned that the law tramples Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees the inviolability of the home. For journalists, the stakes are higher. Confidential sources, ongoing investigations, and protected data could all be exposed to inspection because a regulator feels “concerned” about compliance. In plain language: this opens the door to state intrusion under the banner of good governance. The government insists the outrage is misplaced. Officials say this is just Germany meeting EU obligations and point to similar inspection powers in data protection and consumer regulation. By their logic, since regulators can already check how companies handle shopping data, they should also be able to walk into a newsroom. It’s all regulation, they argue. Journalism is not retail. And “protecting democracy” by granting bureaucrats unsupervised search powers is an interpretation that would have made earlier German lawmakers choke on their coffee. If this bill passes, regulators, not judges, will decide when it’s acceptable to cross a newsroom’s threshold. Germany’s postwar press protections were built on the principle that the state should never again decide what counts as acceptable reporting. This law erases that boundary. It may begin with political ads, but it ends with regulators deciding when democracy needs an “inspection.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Germany’s “Transparency Act” Lets Regulators Search Media Offices and Platforms Without Warrants appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Walz Is Done; Now Do Keith Ellison, AG of Minnesota, and Throw in the Secretary of State Too

Dems: On Second Thought, Let's Not Go to Shutdownalot. It Is a Silly Place.

It's just plain unfair.

Sanctuary Manager Nick Stock spotted an isolated rocky outcrop from a helicopter overhead, and on a hunch laid down a single camera trap in the area. It was only a few days before the elusive animal was caught on camera.

After more than 30 years since pleading guilty to espionage that reportedly compromised several United States assets during the Cold War, an infamous Central Intelligence Agency officer has died in prison. Aldrich Ames died on Monday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve 'financial troubles, immediate and continuing.'Ames was held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving a life sentence without parole. Ames, a career CIA agent, was arrested in 1994 on espionage charges years after he began cooperating with KGB agents in 1985. The information he provided to the Soviets is thought to have directly contributed to the compromising of several CIA and FBI sources, some of whom were executed after their discovery.RELATED: Unveiling ‘Big Intel’: How the CIA and FBI became deep state villains Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty ImagesOver nearly a decade, Moscow paid him $2.5 million in exchange for betraying state secrets to the Soviets during and after the Cold War. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve "financial troubles, immediate and continuing.""Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985 were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly. As simple as that," Ames said in an interview archived by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, according to Fox News."I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution, and capital punishment, certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers who would be tried in a military court, and certainly others, that they were almost all at least potentially liable to capital punishment," he added. "There's simply no question about this."Ames' wife, Rosario, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges of assisting his espionage. Ames was 84 years old at the time of his death. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told lawmakers that the Trump administration has aspirations to purchase Greenland from Denmark, tempering rumors that officials are considering forcibly seizing the island.'The United States is eager to build lasting commercial relationships that benefit Americans and the people of Greenland.'During a closed briefing on Monday, Rubio and other administration officials briefed lawmakers about the operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and the plans for the country’s future, the Wall Street Journal reported.Citing individuals said to be familiar with the recent briefing, the WSJ stated that Rubio “played down the idea that the U.S. could seize Greenland by force.” The report claimed that administration officials refused to rule out the possibility of an invasion.However, the outlet noted that U.S. and European officials have reported no indications that the Trump administration is preparing for a military invasion of the self-governing Danish territory.President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday, “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and the European Union needs us to have it — and they know that.”RELATED: 'Very sick too': Trump sets sights on more countries after successful Venezuela operation Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images“President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated. “The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.”Trump expressed interest in purchasing Greenland during his first term. He has insisted that controlling the island is essential for protecting the Arctic from Russia and China.RELATED: JD Vance visits Greenland to make the case for annexation: 'We can't just bury our head in the sand' Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images“The United States is eager to build lasting commercial relationships that benefit Americans and the people of Greenland,” a State Department spokesperson told Blaze News. “Our common adversaries have been increasingly active in the Arctic. That is a concern that the United States, the Kingdom of Denmark, and NATO Allies share.”The spokesperson added that Trump is committed to the United States’ relationship with Greenland, underscored by his decision to designate Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry (R) as special envoy.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!