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Bungee Jumping in Ecuador

Author's note: Superstition thrives in moments of uncertainty, unpredictability, and terror. When society blooms and the people are free of worry, we find ourselves enjoying, living in the moment. But destablize the walls of comfort, remove the security of food and water and fuel, shake the grounds, introduce adversaries and setbacks and periods of uncertainty, in times of economic depression and raging war, we put our faiths to the turning of tarot cards and reading of palms. The heart is weak, and though the mind likes to believe that reason and logic defeat all mirages of irrationality, one cannot always effectively deny and suppress the in-explainable cries of the heart.  I come from a relatively religious family, and it has been my experience that the barrier breaking apart the substance of religion, and the sludge of blind superstition is all but a thin porous membrane. Sometimes, the two overlap. Watch them merge, melt, combine, mix, atoms colliding with each other like thra
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Congratulations Eli and Asha

Eli. Unpredictable. Rebel. Wildcard. Firecracker of ideas. Agent of mischief. Impulsive. Eli. Eli and I were in the same cohort during my undergrads. Our first encounter was during freshers' week, at the midnight bop. The atmosphere was not great, and there was a thick air of awkwardness in the disco room, but no amount of embarrassment was sufficient to stop us from having a good time. Just the two of us, at the centre of the dance floor and no one else in a 10m periphery, spinning our limbs and heads to the rhythm of "Come On Eileen" like there's no tomorrow. Indeed a night to remember. He studied English, but that is not what he is known for. Make no mistake though, because he is no fool when it comes to the subject. Smart one he is. The notoriously stressful tripos exams of Cambridge posed zero threat to the man. Back when the world was plagued by the virus and the nature of exams was altered from the traditional closed-book format to that of the unconventional ta
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Locked In

Locked in  Adjective (informal) Exhibiting total concentration on the task in hand
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Top 10 Reasons Why the Sun is Overrated

Top 10 Reasons Why the Sun is Overrated We have all been taught how important and glorious the Sun is, about how all life originates from this great ball of flame, and how it brings warmth and light upon this sacred land of opportunities and adventure, and how we owe all mere lives to the all-almighty orb of unspeakable holiness... Well, it is about time we wake up from this dream of lies and face the concrete-hard ice-cold facts, cause the Sun is nothing but being more overrated than Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey (seriously, I genuinely cannot physically grasp how someone could sit through that 2 hours of pure distilled ennui without falling asleep). So throw yourself onto the sofa, take a deep breath, and let me knock some sense up your intestines, cause we gonna explore the top 10 reasons why the Sun ain't as awesome as you have been brainwashed to believe. This post is sponsored by The Moon Gang. 1. It only comes out at day time I hate to state the obvious, but in case you a
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Review: The Mausoleum's Children

Story title: The Mausoleum's Children Author: Aliette de Bodard Link to story: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/  (Spoiler-free) Thuận Lộc was haunted by crushing traumas of childhood memories, memories of slaving away in dark corridors of the Mausoleum for the cold-hearted Architects. She managed to escape, young, but this fortune came with a steep, steep cost: guilt. For her friends, Dao and Nai, never escaped, and while Thuận got to taste the sweet pleasures of freedom, their endless days of toil and struggle carried on, trapped deep within a labyrinth of an inescapable prison, a prison where any hope of leaving would be futile. And when the guilt became unbearable, she made up her mind. She would return to the Mausoleum, and she would not leave the place alone... This is one of those stories where the reader is thrown into a whirlpool of new invented terms within the first five paragraphs, and that could usually lead to either one of two consequen
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Review: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub

Story title: How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub Author: Phenderson Djèlí Clark Link to story: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/  (Spoiler-free) Ambition is what drives a man to ignore sane advice and attempt the unspeakable, just so one can eventually savour the tempting promise of success that is nothing but a hollow illusion. It is exactly ambition that pushed Trevor, our protagonist who was unsatisfied with the cards life has dealt to him, to engage in a crazy idea: raising a kraken at home. It started out smooth, an innocent creature, small, harmless, breaking free from its egg and entering a new world that is Trevor's bathtub. But krakens grow quickly. And they grow to great sizes. And Trevor finds himself dealing with something much more than his ambitious can swallow... This was not the first story of Clark I have read. "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" was one explosive whirlpool of a st
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Review: Better Living Through Algorithms

Story title: Better Living Through Algorithms Author: Naomi Kritzer Link to story: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/  (Spoiler-free)  Our protagonist came across a new app whose aim is to make people happier by enabling them to achieve their dreams. Powered by some AI magic (that is in all fairness, not exactly magic with the new advancements some AI company is delivering every month), the all-knowing powerful app Abelique learns about user's daily habits and provides timely, efficient, and effective advice, sometimes even connecting users with larger communities.  The last time I read something this boring was when I was 14: no I was not a fan of the novel "Wonder" back then. If this book was a spice, it would be flour. From the beginning till the end, events in the story just unfolded the way you imagined with no build-up of tension or attempt in enriching the plot, only to leave readers scratching their heads afterwards, wondering how high were the judges
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Review: Answerless Journey

Story title: Answerless Journey (没有答案的航程) Author: Han Song (韩松) Link to story (Chinese only): https://www.99csw.com/article/9260.htm (Spoiler-free)  So a bit of context, this story was originally in Chinese. But since no one in the Hugo Award jury can read a single line of Chinese, they have to throw in a translator to do the work for them. I cannot seem to find the translated version anywhere online without having to sacrifice my hard-earned money, so oh well, I only get to read the original Chinese text.  Long story short, this story was the physical embodiment of the phrase "all fart but no shit". What this story achieved was that it constructed more questions than it provided answers, but instead of those good philosophical questions that make you sit back, ponder and question your existence, the reader only has the energy to ask, "huh? That's it?" Reading this felt more like a chore than a pleasurable activity, and the plot was advancing about as fast as a
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Review: The Sound of Children Screaming

Story title: The Sound of Children Screaming Author: Rachel K. Jones Link to story: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/  (Spoiler-free) Good stories are rare as gold. Most fiction I read daily are just a-okay. Even the one written by the great masters (you know, the ones with covers labelled "best-seller" as some other crap), rarely excite me, and even if they manage to throw a bit of a punch with a plot-twist or a gimmick, the entertainment they deliver resembles 10-second cheap fireworks: short-lived and forgettable.  But sometimes if you keep sifting long enough, you strike a dash of glimmer. With the first three paragraphs, "The Sound of Children Screaming" (TSCS) had me hooked. The prose is precise, provocative, powerful. Jones' command of the language is a surgical knife, cutting straight to your very centre of your heart without resistance, where doubt and fear lie. And Jones amplifies that discomfort to 11.  Make n
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