Podcasts about Central station

Fluent Fiction - Norwegian: Love Reunites: A Heartwarming Tale at Oslo Central Station Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/no/episode/2026-06-01-07-38-20-no Story Transcript:No: Lars sto på Oslo sentralstasjon med hjertet i halsen.En: Lars stood at Oslo Central Station with his heart in his throat.No: Det var fullt av mennesker rundt ham, men han følte seg alene.En: It was full of people around him, but he felt alone.No: Sommerens solstråler strømmet inn gjennom de store vinduene og skapte et spill av lys og skygge på de travle plattformene.En: The summer's sun rays streamed in through the large windows, creating a play of light and shadow on the busy platforms.No: Tog kom og gikk, men tankene hans var hos Ingrid.En: Trains came and went, but his thoughts were with Ingrid.No: Ingrid.En: Ingrid.No: Hun studerte i utlandet, og det var måneder siden de hadde vært sammen.En: She was studying abroad, and it had been months since they had been together.No: De hadde møttes på universitetet og blitt forelsket.En: They had met at university and fallen in love.No: Nå var avstanden en usynlig vegg mellom dem.En: Now the distance was an invisible wall between them.No: Lars lengtet etter henne.En: Lars longed for her.No: Men han visste ikke om hun følte det samme.En: But he didn't know if she felt the same.No: Lars hadde skrevet et brev.En: Lars had written a letter.No: I brevet la han alt ut.En: In the letter, he laid everything out.No: Hvor mye han savnet henne, hvor vanskelig det hadde vært, og at han ønsket at de skulle møtes igjen.En: How much he missed her, how difficult it had been, and that he wished they could meet again.No: Han avsluttet med en forespørsel - om hun ville møte ham på stasjonen i dag.En: He ended with a request - if she would meet him at the station today.No: Klokken hadde passert tiden han hadde foreslått, og med hvert forbigående minutt vokste usikkerheten i ham.En: The clock had passed the time he had suggested, and with each passing minute, the uncertainty within him grew.No: Kari, en felles venn, hadde sagt at Ingrid kanskje trengte tid.En: Kari, a mutual friend, had said that Ingrid might need time.No: Men Lars kunne ikke vente lenger.En: But Lars couldn't wait any longer.No: Han ønsket klarhet om deres fremtid.En: He wanted clarity about their future.No: Endelig, i det fjerne, så han en kjent skikkelse.En: Finally, in the distance, he saw a familiar figure.No: Ingrid kom til syne gjennom folkemengden.En: Ingrid came into view through the crowd.No: Hun så seg rundt, og da øynene deres møttes, lyste ansiktet hennes opp i et bredt smil.En: She looked around, and when their eyes met, her face lit up in a broad smile.No: Lars følte en bølge av lettelse og glede.En: Lars felt a wave of relief and joy.No: "Ingrid," sa han, mens hun nærmet seg.En: "Ingrid," he said, as she approached.No: "Jeg er så glad for at du kom.En: "I am so glad you came."No: ""Ingenting kunne ha hindret meg," svarte Ingrid, med et smil som beroliget ham.En: "Nothing could have stopped me," replied Ingrid, with a smile that reassured him.No: De snakket lenge, mens menneskene rundt dem hastet forbi.En: They talked for a long time, while the people around them hurried by.No: Ingrid fortalte ham hvordan hun hadde savnet ham, og hvor vanskelig det hadde vært borte fra hjemmet.En: Ingrid told him how she had missed him, and how difficult it had been being away from home.No: De bestemte seg for å gjøre det de kunne for å styrke forholdet, selv om avstanden var stor.En: They decided to do what they could to strengthen their relationship, even though the distance was great.No: Med armen rundt henne følte Lars en ny sikkerhet om fremtiden deres.En: With his arm around her, Lars felt a new certainty about their future.No: De kunne møtes utfordringene, sammen.En: They could face the challenges, together.No: Klokken tikket videre, men for Lars sto tiden stille.En: The clock kept ticking, but for Lars, time stood still.No: Oslo sentralstasjon, med all sin travelhet, hadde blitt stedet der han fant klarhet og trygghet i kjærligheten han delte med Ingrid.En: Oslo Central Station, with all its hustle and bustle, had become the place where he found clarity and security in the love he shared with Ingrid.No: De var kommet for å møtes, og nå var det ingen usynlig vegg mellom dem lenger.En: They had come to meet, and now there was no invisible wall between them anymore. Vocabulary Words:throat: halsstreamed: strømmetplatforms: plattformerabroad: utlandetfallen: blittdistance: avstandeninvisible: usynliglonged: lengtetuncertainty: usikkerhetmutual: fellesclarity: klarhetfamiliar: kjentapproached: nærmetreassured: beroligetchallenge: utfordringenecertainty: sikkerhethustle: travelhetsecurity: trygghetheart: hjertetcreated: skaptemonths: månederfuture: fremtidrelief: lettelsebroaden: bredtwish: ønsketrequest: forespørselface: ansiktetmeet: møtesticking: tikketstrengthen: styrke

Kenny's fragile ego continues to tremble on In The City as Lindsay addresses the drama he's whipped up in the group. Also, Danielle bristles at slut shaming, and Amanda moves out. To watch this recap on video, listen to our bonus episodes, and get ad free listening, go to Patreon.com/watchwhatcrappens. For livestream tickets to our NYC Cabaret on June 3 and June 5, get tickets at watchwhatcrappens.com.Find bonus episodes at patreon.com/watchwhatcrappens and follow us on Instagram @watchwhatcrappens @ronniekaram @benmandelker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.From rebuilding Railway's network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway's founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.We go deep on Railway's infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.We discuss:* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale* The economics of Railway's own-metal data centers and three-month payback* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups* Central Station, Railway's internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents* Temporal's strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company buildingRailway:* Website: https://railway.com/* X: https://x.com/RailwayJake Cooper:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/* X: https://x.com/JustJakeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake's Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway's Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway's Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don't have a business card. We're not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.Jake [00:00:32]: They're cool. They're hip. The conductor thing is good. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it's super cringe and say, “You don't need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don't have a really good one.Jake [00:00:55]: We've got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don't know, what is Railway? Let's give people a crisp definition up front.Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you're off to the races.Swyx [00:01:22]: You've got a nice animation on the landing page.Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don't let me touch the design stuff anymore.Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New CloudSwyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I'm happy to talk about, pros and cons.Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.Swyx [00:02:51]: But let's do the Railway story.Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it's walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don't care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.Jake [00:03:17]: I don't have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That's what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.Swyx [00:03:52]: That's a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It's always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we're building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it'll be useful upstream, but it's deeply useful for us internally.Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic VersioningSwyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub's original sin is that it's almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you've lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I've either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven't. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don't take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.Jake [00:05:53]: It's okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there's so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business WorkSwyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you're on a rocket ship. You say, “Don't doubt your fight and don't quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it's about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how's it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don't necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don't fit our ICP anymore.Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That's a horrible business. I don't know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We've always wanted a super lean team. We're 35 people right now. It's very small.Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We're adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it's growing fast. We don't want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It's hard to build systems during expansion because you're adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It's become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it's important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it's either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It's kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.Agents as the New Interface to DeploymentSwyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?Jake [00:11:24]: We've prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we've deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn't matter whether this is dot-com or not because we're all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we'll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You're going to need to close that loop.Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn't work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn't matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it's going.Jake [00:12:45]: That's where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you're running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don't even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.Railway's Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and MetalSwyx [00:13:19]: Let's go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about how we don't really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you're going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you're running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That's all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we're adding a second one in Q3.Swyx [00:14:58]: What's it like? I've never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here's what it's going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That's all the pieces.Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.Swyx [00:15:39]: What's the math versus clouds doing it for you?Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.Jake [00:15:51]: It's nuts. That's four years of depreciated hardware. You're going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We're working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there's a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we've raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It's nuts how valuable hardware has become.Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That's a massive infrastructure build-out. You look at that and think it's crazy that they're spending way more than the Manhattan Project. But if every person is going to run dozens or hundreds of agents in parallel, you have no conceptual idea how much compute is required to make that experience happen, even if you're deeply efficient and sharing resources. And that doesn't even count inference.Swyx [00:17:22]: How do you plan the build-out? The growth chart is so vertical. Are you usually at 100% utilization as soon as racks are live? How far ahead are you planning?Jake [00:17:33]: We still maintain cloud presence for bursting. We work with AWS, GCP, and a few other clouds. We can rent, and then the moment we get space or power, we compact those workloads off the cloud. We started on the clouds, then built a system to migrate to our own metal. There's nothing that says you can't continually do that again, and that's exactly what we do. We never want to be compute constrained.Jake [00:18:09]: At the start of the year, we actually became compute constrained because one upstream provider wasn't able to give us quota at the rate we needed, and the hardware was slower. I spent a weekend rebuilding our entire network overlay so we could straddle five clouds: Oracle, AWS, ourselves, GCP, and one other one. We can do more than that now.Jake [00:18:38]: We got into a spot where we were trying to pack instances tight because we couldn't get enough compute. That led to a few reliability issues, which are now past us. I made a tweet pointing out that it's becoming harder and harder to acquire compute at the rate these models need to acquire compute. We got bit by it.Swyx [00:19:15]: How do you think about pricing knowing you might not have your own metal available at all times? Are you pricing assuming you need extra margin if you end up going into the cloud?Jake [00:19:26]: Because we've built out our metal data centers, our margins on metal are around 70%. We can deeply subsidize the cloud business if we want to scale at a reasonable rate. We have a few levers: metal, which makes the margins; cloud burst; debt to buy servers; and venture capital. It's an interesting operational problem: how much cash do we have, how much should we raise, how quickly can we deploy it, and can we scale revenue as quickly as we scale compute?Jake [00:20:05]: If we continue making it trivially easy for people to build and deploy, then the faster we close that loop and the more operationally excellent we are with capital, the faster the business can scale. It's almost a straight linear deployment rate.Financing Infrastructure: Hardware Debt, VC, and Operational LeverageSwyx [00:20:20]: I think infra startups raising debt is a tool people don't utilize enough or know enough about. What can you tell us about that? Is it secured against your CPUs?Jake [00:20:32]: It's secured against our hardware.Swyx [00:20:37]: What rates do you get? Who are the lenders?Jake [00:20:39]: We pay prime plus a spread, and we can refinance any of the debt as rates go down. The terms are pretty good. The unfortunate thing is that Twitter has no nuance, so people say, “Venture debt bad.” But as with all things, there are specific tools and areas where you can be deliberate instead of using one tool as a hammer. Venture capital is not the hammer for everything. You have to explore and figure out what works.Swyx [00:21:12]: VC is usually the most expensive financing you can get.Jake [00:21:15]: Yeah. I also think people think about VC incorrectly from a capital-raising perspective. Most people think, “How do I raise as much money as possible from whoever is probably the best I can get at that time?” That's close to right, but what we've tried to do is figure out what unfair advantage we can buy with that equity.Jake [00:21:34]: It's the most expensive equity you're going to give away at that point in time, assuming the company keeps getting better. How do you use it to work with someone stellar who complements you? In the seed stage, I had never started a company. Ray Tonsing had good advice, and I could text him all the time. He was really fast. Awesome.Jake [00:22:01]: Then with John and Erica at Unusual, they said, “You roughly know what you're doing building a product. We'll mostly leave you alone and be available for advice.” Amazing. Then we got to Series A and the business was an operational tire fire because we didn't know how to scale a business. Work with Erica, and Jordan is over at Redpoint, so bonus.Jake [00:22:28]: Now we've raised from TQ and FPV as we're moving into enterprises. Every step of the way, we've asked: who can we partner with at this specific time to unlock the next section of the journey? I don't know enterprise sales. As an engineer, I can eyeball what features we might need, and we have wonderful people internally who can help. But you want boardroom dynamics where everyone is aligned and asking, “How do we win this?” instead of bickering about strategy.Data Centers in Space and the Physics of ComputeSwyx [00:23:31]: You had a tweet about data centers in space. Why no data centers in space?Jake [00:23:37]: It's not “no data centers in space.” My hot take is that I think it is solvable. I've just never seen anybody solve it.Swyx [00:23:49]: You said, “How are you going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum?” You're making a physics claim.Jake [00:23:55]: I haven't seen anybody prove how you're going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means nobody has brought it up yet.Swyx [00:24:05]: Astrophage.Jake [00:24:06]: I don't know what that is.Swyx [00:24:07]: The Martian thing. Okay, you're very logical.Jake [00:24:09]: It could work. A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse. They say, “We're going to put data centers in space.” Okay, but how? “We have time to figure it out.” It's like in The Martian where they ask how they're going to intercept something and say, “We'll figure it out.”Swyx [00:24:36]: Making a bet on human invention is weird because you blind trust that it can be solved. But with physics, there are first-principles bounds you can put on it. Maybe not. Maybe you're asking to travel time or break a fundamental thermodynamic law.Jake [00:24:57]: I don't know how VCs do this either. How do you know what's not possible and a grift versus what's possible but sounds completely insane? “We're going to put data centers in space.” Coin flip as to which it is, and I guess you'll know in 10 years. That's one cycle.What Agents Need: Versioning, Observability, and 1,000x ScaleSwyx [00:25:23]: Moving back to agents. The branching, fast spin-up, and orchestration you do feels like pre-work that happened to be exactly what agents want. What do agents want differently than humans?Jake [00:25:37]: They want the ability to version things. It's not that different; it materializes slightly differently. Agents want a way to test changes incrementally. Engineers have feature flags. Is there a reason agents can't use feature flags? I don't think so.Jake [00:25:54]: They want version control. Can we use Git or not Git? That one is up in the air. I think something outside Git will emerge for how we version these things over time. They need observability. You need to query what happened, when it happened, which steps failed, traces, logs, metrics, and all the rest. They need network, compute, and storage. They need to write files, save files, iterate on files, and snapshot file systems.Jake [00:26:25]: A lot of what humans needed is in line with what agents need. Branching and forking are not different; we're just moving 1,000 times quicker. It can look like you need something massively different, but what you need is something massively better than what existed. You need orchestration massively better than Kubernetes. You need networking probably better than Envoy. It goes all the way down the stack.Jake [00:26:55]: If the workload profile doesn't change so much as it gets massively compressed because you need thousands of these things, what assumptions change? etcd is going to melt. You need to replace it with something. You can go all the way down the stack and say, “That part has to change, that part has to change, and that part has to change.”Jake [00:27:19]: The interesting thing about the super-exponential curve is that you have to build systems where you can rip out those parts at any time because a new bottleneck might emerge. You get good at parallel agents, and a different part of the system breaks. So it's similar to what humans needed, but at 1,000x scale.Jake [00:27:55]: How do you do code review in the age of agents?Swyx [00:28:00]: You throw more agents at it.Jake [00:28:01]: You don't. But then who reviews for CVEs and all these other things?Swyx [00:28:07]: More agents.Jake [00:28:08]: And that's how we hit the inference wall. You can continually throw agents at the problem, but I think there's a limit to the number of agents you can throw at a problem.CLI, Agent Handles, and Closing the LoopSwyx [00:28:24]: You already had a CLI before it was cool. How is the shape of what you're exposing changing, if at all?Jake [00:28:28]: CLIs have always been cool. The CLI changes because we think about how to give Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or any model a handhold.Jake [00:28:50]: A CLI is a single command: deploy, get logs, and so on. Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not annoying to agents. They're nice. If I handed you a CLI with 40 arguments and 600 flags, you'd think, “I'm never going to use all of this.” But if you hand it to an agent, it says, “This is excellent. I have so many handles to work with.”Jake [00:29:24]: If you're going to expose things to agents that way, you want as many handles as possible where they can get information, query dynamic information, and close the loop quickly. Most problems right now are about how to close the loop as quickly as possible. Where does the agent get stuck, and how can you remove that?Jake [00:29:49]: Telemetry is important. If you can tell where the agent gets stuck from the CLI and say, “12% of people deviate from the happy path because of this, and now I add this argument and drive it down to 2%,” you massively increase the rate of loop closure.Jake [00:30:03]: That's how we think about not just the CLI, but every point in the dashboard. It's a user journey: I hear about Railway. I get something deployed. I get my first green build or aha moment. I see an endpoint, logs, whatever. Then I iterate. The iteration loop is indefinite. The user wants to deploy a new thing, a Postgres instance, change code, and keep iterating.Jake [00:30:36]: If you focus on the iteration loops and what's blocking them from closing quickly, one thing we say internally is: you never want to be waiting on compute anymore. You always want to be waiting on intelligence. If you're waiting on compute, there's a bottleneck that needs to be destroyed because eventually that bottleneck becomes so large that another workflow emerges to change it.Jake [00:31:04]: We've built a product where you push code, build it, and so on. But I fundamentally believe the push-pull loop is going away. We'll get to a point where you make a small change in production, that change is versioned across your infrastructure, you're working alongside copy-on-write versions of your database and infrastructure, and then you merge it in and it's instantaneously live. That's the holy grail of loops. The push-pull-rebuild thing is a point of friction that we're removing entirely.Canvas as Output: Dashboards, Context Anchors, and HyperstructuresSwyx [00:31:43]: It's incredibly fast. If anyone hasn't tried it, that fast feedback is great. My hot take is that Railway was famous for its canvas, which visualizes your infrastructure and lets you manipulate it visually. But that was for humans. For the next phase of growth, Railway CLI is more important than canvas.Jake [00:32:05]: The canvas is funny because it's a mechanism to show changes over time. You're right that previously we used it a lot as an input. Moving forward, its goal is more like an output. You would go to the canvas, make changes, see them, and watch your infrastructure evolve. Now agents have access to the CLI and can make those changes. So the canvas becomes an output: what information does the human need at this moment to make suitable decisions about control requests? Do I approve this or not?Jake [00:32:57]: It also has to be an anchor for your context, a port in the storm. Think of it like layers in a file system. You start with a project, then drill down into services, then into a function or code, because you want to represent the entire thing not just in your head, but in the canvas. Other people can share that representation, think on the same wavelength, and move quickly.Jake [00:33:33]: A lot of organizations get in trouble as they scale because all the context lives in someone's head. “How does this microservice work?” “I have no idea; go ask this person.” Then you have whole categories of products built around context discovery. A lot of that melts away if you have a solid hierarchy and can infinitely nest services, code, context, and everything else all the way down. That's what lets you build these structures over time.Jake [00:34:18]: It's also what lets us build what I've called hyperstructures: things that are way bigger. You look at the Golden Gate Bridge and ask, “How did we build that?” There's a meme that we lost the technology. To some extent, yes, because the coordination that built those things evolved and changed. We lost some of the art of building structure as we jammed everything into Slack.Swyx [00:34:52]: But you jam everything in Discord.Jake [00:34:53]: Same point. It doesn't matter. It's message passing and interrupts, message passing and interrupts.Swyx [00:35:00]: So you're arguing there should be something better and more structured than Slack?Jake [00:35:04]: Yeah. For sure. I think Slack is awful, and Discord is awful too.Central Station: Context Routing, Support, and Incident ClustersSwyx [00:35:09]: This is the equivalent of my mom test. What have you done that has your solution to this?Jake [00:35:15]: Internally, we've built a tool called Central Station that aggregates all the context from our users. Every piece of feedback, every customer support item, everything gets aggregated into clusters. If an incident is brewing, we can determine how many users are affected and break off a discussion based on that.Jake [00:35:40]: That is more helpful than long-running channels where you're trying to decide which channel to put something in. If you can dynamically aggregate information and dynamically route it to the right person based on context, it works better. We know internally that these four people are close to networking. If we see a networking thing, we can drill it down to those four people. If it's with this part, we can look at the commits. This is no longer a manual process internally.Jake [00:36:13]: If you go to station or help.railway.com, that's why we built it. We wanted to scale with a massive amount of leverage by aggregating feedback.Swyx [00:36:27]: This is built in-house?Jake [00:36:28]: Yep.Swyx [00:36:29]: I remember helping out on this one with Angelo in 2023. You scale a lot with a very small team.Jake [00:36:38]: Yeah. We're about 10 times bigger now.Swyx [00:36:40]: You have your full developer code here? Very cool.Jake [00:36:44]: If you go to railway.com/stats, we expose this as a pub-sub-able thing. It's all real-time metrics. There's a way to get it as JSON somewhere if you care.Jake [00:37:01]: We're big on trying to build everything in public and talk about what we're working on. We've had issues in the past, and we'll say, “Here's how we're fixing these things.” We've gotten compliments and flak for incident reports. We're always trying to make them better and talk with people.Incidents, Disclosure, and Progressive RolloutsSwyx [00:37:20]: You had a big one recently. I liked that it was scoped to 3,000. You presumably used Central Station. Talk through what happened and how you address it internally as a team.Jake [00:37:38]: Internally, this one really sucked. It had to do with an upstream provider that didn't do the behavior it said it documented, which is unfortunate given they wrote the RFC for how the behavior should work. We rolled those things out, and Central Station caught it initially when a couple users said caches weren't invalidating. We turned it off immediately.Jake [00:38:03]: When you roll out to a large user base of three million people, you get a lot of disparate behaviors. We tested in staging and had tests, but we hit an edge case. We've hardened those systems, and now we can make that better. But it was a tough one.Swyx [00:38:39]: I always wonder how private disclosure is supposed to work if people find an issue. Are they supposed to contact you first? When you run a platform, these things will happen. What channels should people pursue to quietly resolve it before it becomes a bigger incident?Jake [00:38:59]: There's responsible disclosure. We err on the side of over-disclosing and letting you know something is wrong versus having your provider gaslight you. We've erred on sharing those things more publicly, even if they impact a small subset of users. That's a decision we've made internally. We have four values. One is honor. The honorable thing is to notify people to the widest degree at which they may have been affected or there was an issue, and then confront it head-on: why did it happen, what can we do better?Swyx [00:39:45]: Not the whole user base. That's because of incremental rollouts and other things?Jake [00:39:50]: Yeah. Progressive rollouts.Swyx [00:39:54]: That should be the norm at all large platforms.Jake [00:39:58]: It should. A variety of companies do this. There's the quote that Meta runs 10,000 different versions of Meta. To our earlier point about agents, they need the same thing. They need shadow traffic and all these other things. We've built so much ceremony around production being sacred that we need to make it trivially easy to test different behaviors in a safe environment. Then you can make mistakes in a safe environment.Safe AI SRE: Customer Agents, Forked Environments, and Production ParityAlessio [00:40:30]: Do you see a world where these things get automatically caught, not necessarily by your agent, but by your customer's agent? The cache invalidation issue seems easy to check if you know to look for it.Jake [00:40:44]: It's hard because to determine it, we almost need to hook into your observability infrastructure. That's why we have the template loop on the platform: so you can roll things out progressively. You can roll out to Johnny Vibe Coder initially, or push a shard that someone consumes at their own leisure. Or you can roll it out over weeks: 0.1% of people, 1% of people, early adopters, then all the way up. That's the non-deterministic version control we talked about earlier.Jake [00:41:30]: I believe that's where most things should go, because most companies end up building staged rollout systems in-house. It's the same thing built again and again at every company. There's a massive opportunity to consolidate developer debt.Alessio [00:41:45]: You should have a free tier. Model providers give free tokens if you let them use the data. You could give free compute if someone is the number-one shard that goes out and lets you plug into their observability.Jake [00:41:55]: We do that. That's why we talked about the impact on 3,000 people. We start with lower-impact people. Larger companies on the platform are last to receive those rollouts so they have a version of the platform that's deeply stable.Alessio [00:42:16]: I have three services, so I'm sure I get the first rollout. You can nuke my thing at any time. There are all these SRE agent companies. Observability people also want agents that fix upstream problems. You have your own agent in the canvas now. How do you see that playing out?Jake [00:42:39]: It's the stacking entropy problem. If you don't have primitives to make iteration in production safe, it becomes difficult. If you're an observability provider saying, “Here's the fix to this error,” assume 80% are good and make sense. But in the last 20% long tail of complex issues, if you let somebody stamp it, you create an opportunity for an incident.Jake [00:43:08]: That's why forked environments are important. People have staging, but it always drifts from production. You need primitives, workflows, and experience built first-party on the platform so you can fork any service at any point in time.Jake [00:43:33]: I think of the canvas as a sheet of transparency paper. The agent is a little guy you push up into the canvas. It should say, “I need to copy that service and that service so I can test these two things.” It gets a read-only copy of production. Anything that's PII gets marked as a transform when we clone the database, create a copy-on-write version, or read from it. Then the agent makes changes and asks, “Does this actually work?” as close to production as possible.Jake [00:44:22]: That's how close you have to be, or you get massive drift. The system becomes unstable. You see this with massive systems built on Docker for local, Kubernetes for production, and a specific thing for something else. That complexity slows developers and becomes unstable at scale, making it hard to iterate. We want to compress that way down and say, “As close to prod as possible is where we want to be.”From AISRE Skeptic to Agent BelieverSwyx [00:45:00]: I was texting Erica for questions, and she says you were originally not a believer in AISRE. Have you come around on it?Jake [00:45:10]: I flipped, but I'm still not a believer in AISRE if you don't have the primitives to make it safe. If you unleash AISRE on production infrastructure without safe primitives for copying volumes and making sure things are fine, it's going to nuke your production database. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm a big believer in making those loops safe.Jake [00:45:33]: I was a deep AI skeptic until 2023. In 2024, I thought, “Maybe I can roughly make this thing do it.” In 2025, I thought, “Now I can hold this.” Over winter break, everybody came back saying, “It's almost impossible to hold this.”Swyx [00:46:01]: Did you see this on the Claude docs? CloudBot? OpenCloud?Jake [00:46:06]: It's gotten to a point where it's harder to hold it wrong than to hold it right. There's a scene in Avengers where Vision picks up Thor's hammer and says it's terribly well-balanced. It self-balances and works well. I'm a deep believer at this point that this will be the dominant species: assembly, C, C++, JavaScript, words.Swyx [00:46:35]: It feels like a big jump.Jake [00:46:37]: It is. But it's not like you abandon CPU-based discrete logic and move straight to fuzzy logic. You need both. Your skills should call code or applications or some static structure. You can use skills to distill what the procedure should be or how the code should act.Jake [00:47:02]: I'm coming to a thesis: you need three points. You need a clear spec defining the system, the code, and the tests. When you say it out loud, if you've been in engineering long enough, you're like, “Of course. That's an RFC, tests, and code.” But they all matter. Having them together lets them reinforce each other: the spec and tests match, but the code doesn't, so reconcile it. Or the tests and code match but the spec doesn't, so reconcile that. That's the iteration loop.Jake [00:47:41]: That's why you're seeing people talk about software factories, docs, and reconciliation. Some of that is architectural astronomy if you don't implement it, but that loop is where most things will end up.Swyx [00:48:07]: For listeners, we've been talking about this on the pod for three years: the holy trinity of specs and tests. Itamar Friedman from Qodo is the reference if people want to look it up.Self-Modifying Infrastructure and the End of Push-Pull-RebuildSwyx [00:48:18]: One thing I want to mention on the OpenCloud idea is self-modification. I don't know how Railway would support it, but I have my OpenClaw, and I just tell it it has the Railway CLI and can do whatever. In theory, whatever capabilities or new infra it needs, it can call the Railway CLI, provision it, and add it to itself. The agent can modify its own infra.Jake [00:48:45]: It's nuts. I have a loop set up where you put the Railway CLI on top of something that runs on Railway. You're authenticated as whatever the current box is, and you can make any changes to it. Then you call Railway deploy, and it deploys itself.Jake [00:49:04]: It's like: “I need to spin up this instance of this environment. I already exist in this environment. Excellent, I have access to a Postgres instance now.” That's where we want to go with agentic, self-replicating infrastructure. That's your loop: iterate in production. You continue making changes. If it works, merge it upstream. If it doesn't, throw it away.Jake [00:49:37]: How do you make throwaway copies trivial to spin up and super cheap? The era of “I have an AWS instance with four vCPU and 16 gigs of RAM” is going to get destroyed. If you do that for agents, you need a thousand of those machines. It's prohibitively expensive compared with what we've spent a ton of time figuring out: the atomic unit of deploy, whether you call it isolates, sandboxes, or something else. Only pay for what you use, spin up instantaneously, and close the loop as quickly as possible.Jake [00:50:15]: If the system can self-replicate safely and say, “This is my environment, I'm making these changes,” it can come back with, “Does this look good? This is a new state of infrastructure given this prompt. I think I've solved it.” Then you go back and say, “Actually, it looks different.” It does the loop again. Then you say, “Cool. Apply.”Swyx [00:50:38]: That's retroactively obvious, which is the most useful kind. Any other comments on agent deployment on Railway?Jake [00:50:51]: It's getting better every day. I'm on X or Twitter. You can always yell at me about the parts not working as well as they should, because plenty of things should work way better.The New Serverless: Stateful, Long-Running, Pay-for-What-You-Use LinuxSwyx [00:51:04]: At this stage, when people want massively or embarrassingly parallel compute, they usually talk serverless. I feel like there's a new serverless compared to the previous five years of serverless. You're in that new bucket. Do you have comparisons or philosophical differences you want to call out?Jake [00:51:31]: It's somewhere in between. It's the ability to run stateful, long-running workflows or executions.Swyx [00:51:42]: Vercel has Fluid Compute, Cloudflare has some container thing, Google has App Runner and others.Jake [00:51:55]: That's where everything is roughly going, and it's why we've been working on this for six years. We believe users need access to a computer: a box that speaks Linux. They need to deploy what they want. Other systems change the surface area of what you can build. For us, users need a computer and need to deploy anything they truly want. That's why we've focused on the primitives: network, compute, storage. If we give you those and expose them so you can run things indefinitely, that's where we believe it's going.Jake [00:52:43]: Twitter has no nuance, so everyone says “servers” or “serverless.” It's always somewhere in the middle: I want to run it for a long time, but I don't want to provision the resource statically or pay for things I'm not using. That's been our thesis from day one: pay only for what you use, run it indefinitely, and it is full Linux.Swyx [00:53:12]: That's why I like the naming of Fluid. It's fluid. Flexible.Heroku, Focus, and Carrying the Torch Without Becoming the PastSwyx [00:53:18]: Another milestone is the Heroku official deprecation. You're one of the presumptive new Herokus. “New Heroku” has been a category for as long as I've been in developer tooling. It's finally happening. What was that like? Any behind-the-scenes of, “This is the moment”?Jake [00:53:42]: You have people where you're like, “You were running stuff on here? You, as this company?” It's crazy that names you would know are running on it and now coming to us saying, “We want to move a lot of this off.”Swyx [00:54:00]: Any behind-the-scenes on why Salesforce let Heroku stagnate?Jake [00:54:05]: I can only guess. It's hard when it's not your business. Salesforce's business is to build a great CRM. That's their focus. Then you acquire a compute business as an offshoot. A lot of early Meta people talk about focus. Boz has a write-up about how in the early days of Meta they had no money, so they were forced to focus. Then they turned on the money tree and had no reason not to split their focus.Jake [00:54:52]: But that dilutes your product. You get offshoots where you ask, “Is this the focus of the business?” If it's not core, it languishes. A lot of companies get in trouble when they split focus because they're fighting a multi-front war, not just externally but internally for alignment. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our purpose?Jake [00:55:24]: If you're Salesforce-built and mission-driven, you want to work on Salesforce. Heroku is off to the side. It's not core to the business. Getting resources, budget, focus, and alignment internally becomes hard. It was a matter of time.Swyx [00:56:06]: Kudos for them to call it out instead of leaving it unknown.Jake [00:56:12]: Their release was a little odd. They called it out, but they didn't say they were shutting it down. Behind the scenes, I think they issued messages to people saying they should close accounts and that they were going to deprecate and remove things over time.Jake [00:56:30]: It's crazy because some of my first deployment experiences were on Heroku. You start with dragging things into an FTP server, then you try to get a deploy working, and then it's Heroku. It was the on-ramp for us. But the wheel turns. New things emerge. We're happy to carry the torch for a lot of that. But we don't want to be the new Heroku. We want to be the way people build and deploy software, and ultimately the way people monetize software over time.Swyx [00:57:19]: It's still a big crown to be the new Heroku. There are 50 companies that fought for that.Jake [00:57:23]: Everybody is holding some portion of it. We're happy to support people and companies. The platform works differently. The game loop is similar, but we've been dogmatic about where these things are going: primitives, agents, fan-out. Some things fit; some workflows need to change. We have an approximation of Heroku pipelines with the environment system. It's exciting. We've got a ton of people we can support, and it's growing a lot.Temporal, Workflow Engines, and State MachinesSwyx [00:58:12]: I have one more technical question about Temporal. I've sold my shares. You're a power user and one of our earliest customers. I met you through Temporal. You built on Temporal. You have complaints. This may be the most neutral and informed conversation anyone will hear about Temporal without someone working at the company.Jake [00:58:39]: That's fair. I've used Temporal for almost 10 years because of Cadence at Uber.Swyx [00:58:52]: Give people a sense of what Cadence was at Uber.Jake [00:58:57]: Cadence was the precursor to Temporal. It powers trip actions, rides, when you rent a Jump bike or scooter or car. You're running workflows for a period of time and saying, “This ride will run indefinitely until it finishes.” You attach information: you paused in this zone, so add this charge to the bill. When you end the trip, the workflow is done. That experience was powered by Cadence at the time.Swyx [00:59:34]: I used to say it's like programming the entire user journey top-down as one function.Jake [00:59:39]: It's a powerful idea and important. It's also important for the next phase of the agentic journey. You want an agent to do a specific task, be complete or incomplete on that task, and move on to the next thing. You need a way to manage workflows dynamically.Jake [00:59:59]: Temporal was always great in theory, and great when you got it working the way you wanted in production. But it required you to model the entire journey in your head. If you didn't, you could cause issues where replaying the state of the workflow causes non-determinism.Swyx [01:00:25]: Because it works on deterministic workflow history.Jake [01:00:28]: Exactly. I describe it as a jet engine. If you know how to operate it and run it, it's great. But you can't hand it to people trying to build complicated things if they don't have the whole state in their head.Jake [01:00:48]: We run our whole deployment pipeline on top of it. That's a reasonably complicated workflow: pre-commit hooks, signaling, queuing, and all the rest. We ran into the same thing at Uber. As you express a large workflow, it gets more complicated, with more states in the state machine that you have to map back to the workflow.Swyx [01:01:15]: It's a lot of ifs.Jake [01:01:16]: Exactly. At Uber, we built a system for doing the state machine and testing it. We've started to build some of those things here because it's grown heavily. It's not quite love-hate. When it works well, it works super well. But if someone who doesn't have full context puts something into the system that invalidates state or causes non-determinism, or spins off a ton of activities, you have to keep track of underlying SRE knobs like activity slots. Those should scale with memory, vCPU, and so on. It becomes a bear to scale.Swyx [01:02:10]: You need a capable sysadmin running things behind the scenes. If you moved off, what would you do?Jake [01:02:19]: We'd build our own workflow engine. We have a few internally that we've worked on.Swyx [01:02:27]: This is one of those classes of things you typically wouldn't vibe code, but I'm wondering if you can.Jake [01:02:33]: I still don't think you should vibe code it. You still want to run decent tests to make sure it works.Swyx [01:02:39]: Timo didn't invent that from scratch either. There are libraries you can run. On top of that, it's just a state machine that you have to map out. Ultimately, you define the instructions you want and run them through a state machine.Jake [01:03:00]: It's very doable. Workflow stuff is interesting. Restate is doing neat stuff here.Swyx [01:03:10]: You're tied into JavaScript. Are you a JavaScript maxi?Jake [01:03:13]: Internally, we have TypeScript, Rust, and Go. We don't add more languages. Actually, we have a little C because we write BPF code and hooks. But those are the languages.Swyx [01:03:28]: Is this for sidecars?Jake [01:03:32]: No. It's for the networking stack, volumes, and things like that. We use TypeScript a lot because it powers the dashboard, but we're moving a lot of workflow stuff off the dashboard stack and into the infrastructure stack.Railpack, Nixpacks, and Content-Addressable FilesystemsSwyx [01:04:00]: Cool. Any other technical infrastructure stuff? Railpacks?Jake [01:04:07]: We built an engine for determining dependencies based on source code. It's called Railpack. We built the first version, Nixpacks, on top of Nix, and then we moved.Swyx [01:04:17]: People have been trying to get me to adopt Nix and NixOS for four years. Is it ever going to be a thing?Jake [01:04:23]: I don't know. We're excited about it, but it has pain points. Think of it as a stack of versioned binaries at specific slices in time. If you want version X and version Y, you bloat the package space, which blows up image size and makes real-world workloads difficult.Swyx [01:04:53]: But you content-address it and cache it. In theory, there are optimizations.Jake [01:05:00]: In theory, yes. But with a large enough user base and disparate enough machines, you run into a problem Meta described in the XFAAS paper, their internal serverless system. It becomes difficult at scale unless you break out specific runtimes.Jake [01:05:24]: We didn't want to do that because we wanted to truly allow you to deploy anything. That was our initial thing with Nix. But we've moved toward interesting work around content-addressable file systems that can lazy-load anything from any point and page it into memory.Swyx [01:05:48]: Amazing.Jake [01:05:49]: The future is very bright. It's crazy, and it's going to be nuts.Coding Agent Spend, Roadmaps, and Token ROISwyx [01:05:54]: Founder journey stuff?Alessio [01:05:56]: Your cloud usage: you tweeted you're going to spend $300K this month?Jake [01:06:01]: I think we got to $200K.Alessio [01:06:02]: Coding agents?Jake [01:06:03]: Yeah.Swyx [01:06:04]: Across the company?Alessio [01:06:05]: You only have 35 people, so I'm sure they're not all spending $10K a month. What's the distribution?Jake [01:06:10]: I think I'm at about $25K. We have power users all the way down. We came back from winter break, and I basically said, “If you're writing code by hand, you're doing this wrong.” The tools are good enough now that you can move extremely quickly. There are issues and pain points, but you should be reviewing the code you are writing instead of writing it by hand.Jake [01:06:40]: Architectural patterns matter more now than ever, but you shouldn't spend your time generating code you would write. If you know how to write it, ask the agent to write it and reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it yourself.Jake [01:06:58]: People misconstrue my propensity to push people toward agents as connected to our growth and some reliability bumps. They're not necessarily related. The tools are good enough to move extremely quickly and build things way larger than you could before.Jake [01:07:19]: To the earlier point about cooling data centers in space: I don't know. But with software, you can ask, “How would I build block storage from scratch? How would I do these things?” I have ideas because I have history and have read papers. Let me work them out and build massive test benches with thousands of tests, because those are now free to author. If you're not using AI systems to speed-run your roadmap and reconcile your existing system onto the future, you're missing a large point of what's happening.Alessio [01:08:12]: What's the path to spending $3 million a month? Is it bound by ideas and things customers can absorb?Jake [01:08:19]: For most companies, it's bound by deployment at this point. That's why we've seen a massive boom in users and companies, from Fortune 50s down, asking how to get developers to move faster. You'll probably hit your CFO before any technical limits because they'll look at the eye-watering amount of money spent on tokens. Inference costs have to come down, but we're inference constrained now. There will be price discovery around what makes sense for an org to adopt.Jake [01:09:06]: I think you'll end up with the F1 driver concept. If someone is really adept at these things, it makes sense to put them in a $3 million car. If they're not, it probably doesn't make sense. You'll take a few people and say, “You can drive the F1 car. We need to go in this direction. Figure out if it works and prototype it.”Jake [01:09:33]: We've done some of that and vastly accelerated our roadmap. We thought we'd ship something in a few years; now we can probably ship it in a few months because we validated it and don't have to build it incrementally. We can skip steps and move toward our vision.Alessio [01:09:58]: A lot of people are realizing the roadmap doesn't always have a business impact, so they say tokens are too expensive. But if your roadmap were built to make more money by the time you built it, you'd have token pricing for it, the same way you do with sales. You'd spend a billion dollars on sales if you knew you would get $2 billion of revenue.Jake [01:10:19]: Exactly. A naive way to measure this is the percentage of tokens that end up in production. If you can measure impact because those tokens end up in production, that's awesome. But the burden of proof will rise. Internally, we have a growing number of pull requests that haven't merged. The question becomes: how do you get this into production? It's about how quickly you can build and deploy software, which is exciting because that's our whole thing.The SDLC Shift: Prompt Requests, Feature Flags, and Safe RolloutsSwyx [01:10:56]: The SDLC is changing. One thesis is that the pull request is dying. It's going to be the prompt request. Beyond that, code review is also kind of dying if you have all the other systems in place. What else is changing about the SDLC?Jake [01:11:19]: The AISRE and the tools to make it happen. AISRE is pie-in-the-sky aspirational. What does it take to get an AISRE? What tools do you need to build?Swyx [01:11:32]: You should expose your tooling to customers at some point. The Central Station command center.Jake [01:11:39]: We have it for template maintainers. Template maintainers can deploy and maintain templates, and they get feedback. We're going to expose those things incrementally.Swyx [01:11:51]: Clustering around incidents. Everyone has a version of that, but I don't think anyone has solved it.Jake [01:11:56]: I won't say we've solved it internally, but it's gotten so good that we can see incidents forming pretty quickly. At some point, those will be things either someone else builds or we build. We've always built things purpose-built for us. If it makes sense to make it useful for users, monetize it, or turn that loop into a profit center instead of a cost center, we want to do that.Jake [01:12:28]: Pull request is definitely dying.Swyx [01:12:29]: Do you do first-party feature flagging and incremental rollout stuff?Jake [01:12:34]: We have a feature-flagging engine we built internally and will eventually roll out.Swyx [01:12:38]: I don't see it as a user. How come you didn't give us what you have?Jake [01:12:43]: We have to beta test it. We care a lot about the quality of the things. There's plenty we've used internally that doesn't make it all the way through the journey because it fails. It works for one service but not multiple services. We'd have to build it for multiple services and know that if we released it, we'd rebuild it again and again. Some things are worth that, but many inform the roadmap.Jake [01:13:18]: We don't want to dilute the experience by saying, “This works, but only for this service,” unless it's a core initiative. Over the next few months, we'll roll out things that work for a single service, then multiple services, then multiple services across the environment. You have to be deliberate. Otherwise you create broken disparate experiences and support load because people ask how to use the feature.Jake [01:13:52]: It's the earlier expansion and compaction pattern. You expand the company to get features, then compact and smooth them out so the experience is stellar. You told me in the hallway, “It's gotten so much better.” Internally we're saying, “This part really sucks. We need to make it significantly better.”Swyx [01:14:11]: I can attest to that over the last three years watching you build Railway. For listeners, feature flagging is a huge part of Uber culture. So much so that they have too many feature flags and another thing to remove feature flags. Facebook has Gatekeeper. Agents are going to need this. It's fundamental to incremental rollouts. OpenAI acquired Statsig. GPT-5 is routing and flagging through different models.Jake [01:14:56]: It's super important. If the software development lifecycle is going to change because we're doing things 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more concurrently, what becomes important at scale?Jake [01:15:16]: Before I started Railway, I built a feature-flagging product and tried to sell it. It was an easier version of LaunchDarkly. I ran into a problem: anyone small enough to adopt your technology doesn't care about feature flags, and anyone large enough to need feature flags needs so much scale that you have to build out all the infrastructure. I scrapped it.Jake [01:15:42]: But what is old is new again. Companies are trying to move quickly, but you can't YOLO a vibe-coded thing straight into production. You need to say, “Here's my blast radius, my impact, and I want to shadow it for these users.” Feature flags. You're going to need the tools larger companies built to maintain their structures. Everything gets compressed by 1,000x so everybody can build those structures quickly.Jake [01:16:07]: That's exactly where we are: compressing the software development lifecycle, then expanding it and adding more new things.Cattle, Pets, and Clonable InfrastructureSwyx [01:16:15]: Another term that comes to mind for newer developers is “cattle, not pets.” People treat production like a pet. It has a name. You baby it and keep it alive. With cattle, you can mass farm, roll out, portion parts out, and kill them.Jake [01:16:37]: I think that might change. You can move toward having pets as long as you have a cloning machine for your pets.Swyx [01:16:52]: Yeah.Jake [01:16:52]: If you can snapshot every single thing at every frame, it doesn't matter if something gets obliterated because you have a snapshot of it. The things we've built right now are designed to block changes from the hermetically sealed DevOps line. You have to write a Dockerfile because you nee

Multi-award-winning novelist Lavie Tidhar is Dr Rachel Knightley's guest on the Writers' Gym Podcast. Lavie's work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama, Golgotha and Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming and World Fantasy Award winner Osama, and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom winner Central Station. His work has been translated into multiple languages. He lives in London.   https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com https://www.instagram.com/lavietidhar/?hl=en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavie_Tidhar

The Midnight Ledger of North Central StationBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/darkest-mysteries-online-the-strange-and-unusual-podcast-2026--5684156/support.Darkest Mysteries Online

The Ordinary Elite is a Scottish podcast brought to you from Glasgow by John McGovern and Mike Dailly. Both are Solicitor Advocates - John a criminal defence lawyer and Mike a civil litigation practitioner and social justice campaigner. In episode 6 of Season 5 we speak with Paul Sweeney MSP about the recent fire which destroyed 175 years of Glasgow's history and cultural heritage on Union Street and closed down Central Station for many days. How can we prevent such disasters happening again and how can we restore Union Street to its former grandeur?

New regulations state that every team in FIFA's women's football tournaments must include at least one female head coach or assistant coach. The requirements will come into effect during the under 17s and under 20s Women's World Cup and Women's Champions Cup competitions this year. Kylie Pentelow caught up on the news with Fern Buckley, sports presenter and former Talksport commentator, and Claire Buzzeo, a football coach at the Sunderland football academy.Women in Glasgow are pulling together after a fire near the city's Central Station forced several female‑run salons and small businesses to shut their doors. For nearly two weeks, nail technicians and hairdressers have been unable to trade after their businesses were destroyed by the blaze. But amid the shock and uncertainty, a powerful network of local women has stepped in—rallying support, fundraising, and even donating equipment to help these business owners get back on their feet. Anita speaks to Carolyn Currie from Women's Enterprise Scotland, a membership body for businesswomen and Carina McCreedy who runs Bonos Nail Salon and who has received some of that help.Dame Sarah Mullally, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, is on a walking pilgrimage from St Paul's Cathedral to Canterbury. She is walking the ancient Becket Camino which was once travelled by medieval pilgrims, and her office believes she is the first Archbishop of Canterbury to do this. It will be part of her spiritual preparation for her role. Rev Sally Hitchiner, who knows Dame Sarah and is the Parish Priest of North Lambeth, where she worked alongside the Archbishop when she was Bishop of London joins Nuala to talk about the pilgrimage experience. Presenter: Kylie Pentelow Producer: Dianne McGregor

**This programme has been edited since originally broadcast**This month a legal case in the High Court has shed light on an industry of so-called 'Chatters' who work with online creators. 'Chatters,' are people, often women, who chat to fans of creators or models on subscription platforms such as OnlyFans - and other platforms - where users can pay creators, often for adult content, and can message them directly for a fee. The fans think that they are speaking directly to the creator or model. The court heard that many of those messages aren't actually written by the creators themselves, but by these chatters, agency workers, whose purpose is to keep conversations going. Anita Rani is joined by Lara Bowman, a freelance journalist who has been reporting on the story.For many of us, our relationships with our siblings will be the longest of our lives, sometimes closing in on a century. Whether loving or fraught, competitive or codependent, these dynamics are integral in shaping us. Author and journalist Catherine Carr says it's time we acknowledge their significance in our lives. She joins Anita to discuss her new book Who's the Favourite? The Loving, Messy Realities of Sibling Relationships.Women in Glasgow are pulling together after a fire near the city's Central Station forced several female‑run salons and small businesses to shut their doors. For nearly two weeks, nail technicians and hairdressers have been unable to trade after their businesses were destroyed by the blaze. But amid the shock and uncertainty, a powerful network of local women has stepped in—rallying support, fundraising, and even donating equipment to help these business owners get back on their feet. Anita speaks to Carolyn Currie from Women's Enterprise Scotland, a membership body for businesswomen and Carina McCreedy who runs Bonos Nail Salon and who has received some of that help. The artist LR Vandy's new exhibition Rise has opened at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Lisa has transformed the space into an immersive environment using her trademark rope and found materials. The show explores the themes of power, cultural traditions and international trade and at its centre is a monumental maypole, celebrating communal gathering, ritual and collective dance. Lisa joins Anita to talk about what it was like to become a full-time artist later in life and how she challenges traditional representations of women's bodies with her rope work.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Rebecca Myatt

Fluent Fiction - Dutch: Lost in the Tulips: A Spring Adventure at Central Station Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/nl/episode/2026-03-19-22-34-01-nl Story Transcript:Nl: Op een zonnige lentedag glinsterde het Central Station van Amsterdam in het licht.En: On a sunny spring day, Central Station in Amsterdam glistened in the light.Nl: Mensen haastten zich in en uit, druk met alledaagse zaken.En: People hurried in and out, busy with everyday tasks.Nl: Sanne stond bij de fietsenstalling, een beetje verloren.En: Sanne stood by the bicycle parking, feeling a bit lost.Nl: Haar fiets was nergens te vinden.En: Her bike was nowhere to be found.Nl: Sanne was een jonge vrouw vol energie, maar soms vergat ze dingen.En: Sanne was a young woman full of energy, but sometimes she forgot things.Nl: Ze probeerde zich te herinneren waar ze haar fiets had achtergelaten.En: She tried to remember where she had left her bike.Nl: Ze zuchtte diep.En: She sighed deeply.Nl: Het leek alsof haar fiets gestolen was, en dat in het midden van de drukke stad.En: It seemed like her bike had been stolen, right in the middle of the bustling city.Nl: Bram, een vriendelijke medewerker van het station, zag haar staan.En: Bram, a friendly employee of the station, saw her standing there.Nl: "Kan ik je helpen?"En: "Can I help you?"Nl: vroeg hij met een warme glimlach.En: he asked with a warm smile.Nl: Sanne legde haar probleem uit.En: Sanne explained her problem.Nl: Ze was van plan een ritje door de stad te maken, de zon en de bloemen te genieten.En: She was planning to take a ride through the city, to enjoy the sun and the flowers.Nl: Maar zonder fiets ging dat niet.En: But without a bike, that wasn't going to happen.Nl: Samen begonnen ze rond te kijken.En: Together, they started to look around.Nl: Bram liep naast Sanne en wees naar verschillende plekken.En: Bram walked beside Sanne and pointed to various spots.Nl: Ze zochten achter fietsenrekken en tussen rijen glimmende stalen rossen.En: They searched behind bike racks and between rows of shiny steel steeds.Nl: Sanne bleef maar denken dat haar fiets misschien wel verdwenen was.En: Sanne kept thinking that her bike might well have disappeared.Nl: "Heb je achter de tulipendisplay gekeken?"En: "Have you checked behind the tulip display?"Nl: vroeg Bram plotseling en wees naar een hoek vol kleurrijke bloemen.En: Bram asked suddenly, pointing to a corner full of colorful flowers.Nl: Met groeiende hoop volgde Sanne zijn aanwijzing.En: With growing hope, Sanne followed his direction.Nl: En inderdaad, achter de gigantische tulpen, schitterend in al hun kleurenpracht, stond haar vertrouwde fiets.En: And indeed, behind the gigantic tulips, shining in all their splendor, stood her trusty bike.Nl: Ze moest lachen om haar eigen vergeetachtigheid.En: She had to laugh at her own forgetfulness.Nl: "Daar is-ie!"En: "There it is!"Nl: riep ze vrolijk.En: she exclaimed cheerfully.Nl: Bram lachte mee.En: Bram laughed along.Nl: "Die bloemen zijn prachtig, maar ze verbergen wel veel," zei hij met een knipoog.En: "Those flowers are beautiful, but they do hide a lot," he said with a wink.Nl: Sanne bedankte Bram uitgebreid.En: Sanne thanked Bram profusely.Nl: Met haar fiets stevig in de hand, voelde Sanne zich opgelucht.En: With her bike firmly in hand, Sanne felt relieved.Nl: De lucht was fris en vol lentelucht, ideaal voor een fietstocht.En: The air was fresh and filled with spring air, ideal for a bike ride.Nl: Ze besloot voortaan beter op te letten waar ze haar fiets parkeerde.En: She decided to pay more attention to where she parked her bike from now on.Nl: Met een glimlach op haar gezicht fietste Sanne weg, de stad in.En: With a smile on her face, Sanne cycled away into the city.Nl: Ze voelde de lente om zich heen.En: She felt the spring around her.Nl: Het was een les om niet te vergeten: soms kijken we niet goed genoeg.En: It was a lesson not to forget: sometimes we don't look carefully enough.Nl: Ze reed de stad door, genietend van de kleurrijke bloemen en de warme zonnestralen.En: She rode through the city, enjoying the colorful flowers and the warm rays of the sun.Nl: Haar avontuur begon pas.En: Her adventure was just beginning. Vocabulary Words:glistened: glinsterdebustling: drukkeforgot: vergatstolen: gestolenemployee: medewerkerexplained: legde uitsteel: stalensteeds: rossensuddenly: plotselingcorner: hoekgrowing: groeiendetrusty: vertrouwdeforgetfulness: vergeetachtigheidprofusely: uitgebreidrelieved: opgeluchtideal: ideaalpay attention: oplettencarefully: goedcolorful: kleurrijkeadventure: avontuurenjoying: genietendwarm: warmeexclaimed: riepgigantic: gigantischesplendor: kleurenprachtwink: knipoogfirmly: steviglesson: lesbeginning: begonbicycle parking: fietsenstalling

Ministers from the G7 group of leading industrialised nations have said they are ready to take "necessary measures" to support the global supply of energy after the US-Israel war with Iran led to a big increase in the international price of oil. At one point this morning, it reached nearly $120 a barrel before falling back to less than $100. Also: Investigations have begun into what caused yesterday's fire in Glasgow city centre, which destroyed a Victorian building and forced the neighbouring Central Station to close. And: King Charles has attended the annual Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey along with other senior royals.

Shownotes are AI slop as usual. It's a week late cause nobody bothered to tell me it was recorded. Apologies for lack of freshness. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jack the Insider and Hong Kong Jack are back for Episode 144, recorded on 12 February. It's Liberal Party leadership spill eve and the boys break down whether Angus Taylor has the numbers to end Susan Ley's tenure — and what sort of baggage he'll carry into the job. From there: a landmark High Court ruling on the Catholic Church's duty of care for survivors of clergy abuse; the protests surrounding Israeli President Isaac Herzog's visit to Australia; the widening Epstein-Mandelson catastrophe engulfing Keir Starmer; the slow collapse of the Washington Post; Japan's election result and its implications for China; and a packed sports segment covering the T20 World Cup, AFL State of Origin, the Rugby World Cup opener, and the Winter Olympics.Show Notes & Timestamps

Fluent Fiction - Swedish: A Valentine's Day Mix-up: Love and Music at Centralstation Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/sv/episode/2026-02-12-23-34-02-sv Story Transcript:Sv: Stockholm Centralstation var full av människor.En: Stockholm Centralstation was full of people.Sv: Resenärer skyndade sig genom hallarna med sina väskor.En: Travelers hurried through the halls with their bags.Sv: Snöfllingor föll lätt utanför de höga glasfönstren.En: Snowflakes fell lightly outside the tall glass windows.Sv: Det var alla hjärtans dag, och en känsla av förväntan och kaos svävade i luften.En: It was Valentine's Day, and a sense of anticipation and chaos hovered in the air.Sv: Erik, en man med en kärlek för punktlighet, stod nära perrongen.En: Erik, a man with a love for punctuality, stood near the platform.Sv: Han såg på klockan nervöst.En: He glanced nervously at the clock.Sv: Hans tåg mot Göteborg skulle snart avgå.En: His train to Göteborg would soon depart.Sv: Han hade en svart resväska, precis som många andra resenärer.En: He had a black suitcase, just like many other travelers.Sv: På andra sidan stationen satt Lars med sin gitarr.En: On the other side of the station sat Lars with his guitar.Sv: Han njöt av att plocka strängarna medan han väntade.En: He enjoyed strumming the strings while he waited.Sv: Hans egna ägodelar bestod av en enkel, svart väska.En: His belongings consisted of a simple, black bag.Sv: Lars gillade att resa lätt och spelade gärna lite musik för förbipasserande.En: Lars liked to travel light and happily played some music for passersby.Sv: Inte långt därifrån drömde Signe om en romantisk gest.En: Not far from there, Signe dreamed of a romantic gesture.Sv: Hon såg en väska som låg övergiven bredvid en bänk.En: She saw a bag lying abandoned next to a bench.Sv: Hon trodde kanske det var en present från en hemlig beundrare.En: She thought perhaps it was a gift from a secret admirer.Sv: Belåtet plockade hon upp väskan.En: Happily, she picked up the bag.Sv: Erik märkte plötsligt att hans väska var borta.En: Erik suddenly noticed that his bag was gone.Sv: Hjärtat slog snabbare.En: His heart beat faster.Sv: Han började fråga människor omkring honom och fick till slut syn på Signe.En: He began to ask people around him and eventually spotted Signe.Sv: Hon höll en likadan väska, fast med en ros på.En: She was holding a similar bag, but with a rose on it.Sv: Signe öppnade väskan och såg endast musikblad.En: Signe opened the bag and saw only sheet music.Sv: Ingen romantik, men en överraskning ändå!En: No romance, but a surprise nonetheless!Sv: Samtidigt hörde hon musik.En: At the same time, she heard music.Sv: En man spelade gitarr.En: A man was playing guitar.Sv: Det var Lars, tonerna ekade genom stationshallen.En: It was Lars, the tones echoing throughout the station hall.Sv: Folk stannade och lyssnade.En: People stopped and listened.Sv: Erik skyndade fram till dem.En: Erik rushed over to them.Sv: “Det där är min väska!En: "That's my bag!"Sv: ” ropade han.En: he shouted.Sv: Lars slutade spela och tittade frågande på dem.En: Lars stopped playing and looked questioningly at them.Sv: Efter några förvirrade ögonblick insåg de allt.En: After a few confused moments, they realized everything.Sv: De hade alla plockat fel väskor.En: They had all picked up the wrong bags.Sv: Lars log brett.En: Lars grinned broadly.Sv: “Oj, vilken show!En: "Wow, what a show!"Sv: ” skrattade han.En: he laughed.Sv: Erik tittade först strängt men sedan började han också le.En: Erik looked stern at first but then began to smile too.Sv: Signe satte sig ner och beundrade musiken.En: Signe sat down and admired the music.Sv: Det blev en oväntad paus från den vanliga rutinen.En: It became an unexpected break from the usual routine.Sv: De skiftade väskorna mellan sig, alla tre nu vänligt inställda.En: They exchanged the bags among themselves, all three now amicably inclined.Sv: "Tack för musiken," sa Signe till Lars och gav honom ett litet leende.En: "Thank you for the music," said Signe to Lars and gave him a small smile.Sv: Erik, som vanligtvis blev störd av kaos, kände hur spänningen släppte.En: Erik, who usually got disturbed by chaos, felt the tension release.Sv: Med en avslutande serenad avslutade Lars sin spelning.En: With a concluding serenade, Lars ended his performance.Sv: Erik tackade och sprang mot sitt tåg, med ett nytt perspektiv på att vara i tid.En: Erik thanked him and ran toward his train, with a new perspective on being on time.Sv: Signe fortsatte att dagdrömma om små, oväntade äventyr.En: Signe continued to daydream about small, unexpected adventures.Sv: De gick alla skilda vägar i den pulserande stationen, med nya minnen från en oväntad alla hjärtans dag.En: They all went separate ways in the bustling station, with new memories from an unexpected Valentine's Day.Sv: Och just där, mitt i vardagliga misstag, fann Erik en ny förståelse för att omfamna det oväntade.En: And right there, amidst everyday mistakes, Erik found a new understanding of embracing the unexpected.Sv: Det är inte alltid punktlighet som skänker lycka, ibland är det just kaoset som ger livet smak.En: It's not always punctuality that brings happiness; sometimes it's precisely the chaos that gives life its flavor. Vocabulary Words:anticipation: förväntanchaos: kaospunctuality: punktlighetdepart: avgåbelongings: ägodelarstrumming: plocka (strängarna)passersby: förbipasseranderomantic: romantiskgesture: gestabandoned: övergivensecret admirer: hemlig beundrarenervously: nervöstrealized: insågconfused: förvirradeunexpected: oväntadadmired: beundraderoutine: rutinexchange: skiftaamicably: vänligttension: spänningserenade: serenadperspective: perspektivdaydream: dagdrömmabustling: pulserandeembracing: omfamnahappiness: lyckahovered: svävadestrikingly: slåendesheet music: musikbladechoing: ekade

hr-Bigband feat. Tânia Maria, cond. by Jörg Achim Keller, Centralstation, Darmstadt, Februar 2007 | Mit den rund 20 Musikern der hr-Bigband begab sich Tânia Maria auf einen Parforce-Ritt durch ihr Fusion-Repertoire der Achtziger. Halsbrecherische Improvisationsphrasen im Verbund mit simultanem Scat. Die Bigband-Adaptionen fügten sich zu einer atemberaubenden Show, die 2007 in der Darmstädter Centralstation mitgeschnitten wurde. Und immer wieder ließen Kellers Arrangements Luft für famose Soli, etwa von Tony Lakatos' Tenorsax oder Günter Bollmanns Posaune. (Sendung vom 28.12.)

BIG STORY: Last Public Comment of the YearRemoval of attendees, Christmas tree lighting plans punctuate Fort Worth council meetingSHORT STORY 1: Star-Telegram fires their most outspoken columnistBradford Davis talks about his firing on LinkedIn.Mayor Mattie Parker should listen to her own words as she faces her criticsDon't be so quick to judge intent behind a casket left at mayor's houseFather cared for disabled son for years, until ICE took him awaySHORT STORY 2: The potential to reshape city councilCity Council pay raises, term limits among potential amendments to Fort Worth charterSHORT STORY 3: A look at who's running in 2026.Filing open for 2026 primary elections. Here are the Tarrant County candidates so far.WINS: Civilian-led police unit aims to build public trust, ensure Fort Worth's accountabilityNearly 300 seek spot on FWISD's state-appointed board following takeover / How many applicants for Fort Worth ISD's state-appointed board live in district?Trinity Metro to lease up to 40 buses daily for FIFA World CupLOSSES: Supreme Court orders Texas to use 2025 map amid legal battleBoth lawsuits accusing Tarrant County of racial gerrymandering have been dropped or dismissedSingle-family homes focus of Fort Worth's potential $5M affordable housing bondACTIONS:December 11 - Community Design Fort Worth's Transit Crawl starting at Central Station at 4:30pm.December 14 - 817 Gather's Festivus Potluck.December 17 - Support Fort Worth Art meeting at The Pool at 6pm.

Lavie Tidhar, rare auteur de science-fiction israélienne, vient nous parler de son travail sur le planet opera et de son dernier roman Neom aux éditions Mnémos. Il retrace pour nous ses inspirations ainsi que ses références sur la science-fiction. Son fix-up nouvelles Central Station avait été repéré par sa qualité et son originalité. Il proposait un vivre ensemble inter-espèce proche d'une utopie qu'il fallait mettre en miroir avec la situation compliqué en Israel. Dans Neom, l'auteur revient sur le fameux projet pharaonique de ville du futur mené en Arabie Saoudite tout en incluant les grandes problématiques de la robotique. Pour découvrir Neom : https://mnemos.com/livre/neom/Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Red safety carpets are are deployed at Central Station bike parking, the outgoing Dutch government assigns €240m for Amsterdam infrastructure, and the municipality gets stricter on visitor parking payments. A short news round-up out of Amsterdam on 12 November 2025.Audio produced by Broadcast Amsterdam for BRAM RADIO, the online radio station for Amsterdam.https://broadcastamsterdam.nlLinks to news stories and sources are shared in the News section on our website and on the Broadcast Amsterdam Pinterest feed. Credits: Cathy Leung (producer)Music bed: We Are OK

Mazón, sin conexión con la realidad; entre el barro, se nos está yendo. A plazos. Haciendo caja, arramblando. ¿Gracias a Dios? No, gracias a Vox. Sí, exactamente como Barcala. Barcala me apatrulló Central Station y todavía enfurismao se me piró a China. Maribel Mazón; Mazón, president del País Valencià -la sustracción del video, la Gestapo en el CECOPI, ¡Toni Cantó!- Mazón, orden contra orden, ¡desorden! No, Carlos Mazón no es Robert Redford ni el Pare Camps es Paul Newman. Tampoco María José Catalá, Meryl Streep ni Sofía Loren. Diana Morant ya ha vuelto del Polo Sur y del futuro y sin exigir y agradeciendo es la ministra rojeras, indígena, que fa coses alacantines. Ai mare com li cou a la dreta aborigen! Sí, la derecha, el bunker barraqueta, la derecha escriviviente…, a la que més li cou!    Para Feijóo, Netanyahu y Puigdemont la misma cosa son. El emperador Boluda, digo el emperador Juan Roig, el emperador Aznar huele sangre y dinero: el reparto inmobiliario de “la Gaza liberada”. Liberada como Madrid o Sarajevo, paraísos celestiales para la Ayuso Intermitente y para los ricos de la polla insaciable. Como Franco, el Papa León y su burrita nos exhorta a no meternos en política, pero ¿nos envía a Karol G? ¡No!: a un nuncio fascista.    Perro Sanxe —¡hijo de puta, chulo de putas!—, ¿ya estoy despedido? ¡Santa Caza de Brujas, ruega por nosotros! Pedro Sánchez huye de la foto con Mazón. Mazón se burla de Salvador Navarro, el amo de la patronal valenciana.    Diana y Mazón escuchan al Arcaya y los dos, ipso facto y por separado —juntos, pero no revueltos— deciden no acudir al show de Rovi en lo de la Uni. Lo que ha unido Radio Alicante no lo separa ni la Sacrosanta Eurovisión. Pega-li voltes al nano, xiqueta!   Ni Camilla ni Meghan ni Kate: Melania. La Sissi del Trumpoceno, como Lola Índigo, “está agotada mentalmente”. Brigitte Macron no es un hombre. Angelina Jolie, tampoco. Leonor, tras abrir en canal el algoritmo, ahora pone en orden su chimenea. El imperio británico acaba en Benidorm. USA, Estados Unidos, sino lo remedian el Boss, Taylor Swift y Dolly Parton, acabará con Donald Trump.   

雪梨中央車站（Central Station）每天人流絡繹不絕。作為重要交通樞紐，誰想到原來車站内藏著兩個秘密月台...

In this episode of the Winging It Travel Podcast, I share my real-time experience during a 4-hour layover in Hong Kong International Airport (HKG). From navigating quick immigration to sampling authentic local food, I break down how to make the most of a short stopover in one of Asia's busiest transit hubs.You'll hear tips on how to leave the airport, our experience of finding local street food, great viewpoints around Central Station and ideas on how much things cost. I also dive into a few other fantastic cities around the world for layovers, including:✈️ Singapore Changi Airport – Nature, food, and luxury in one✈️ Kuala Lumpur – Affordable and easy to get around✈️ Amsterdam Schiphol Airport – Europe's layover gem✈️ London Heathrow – Historic sites just a train ride away✈️ Reykjavik – Utilise Icelandic Air's free layover service with your airfareWhether you're a frequent flyer or planning your first big trip, these layover travel hacks will help you turn airport downtime into a mini-adventure.

Nyheter och fördjupning från Sverige och världen. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play.

Nyheter och fördjupning från Sverige och världen. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play.

This week, we follow up with last weeks episode with another Salles film. Releasing nearly three decades earlier, this film's documentary feel shows promise from the director. It is also the first Brazilian film to receive a best actor/actress Oscar nomination. Central Station (1998), directed by Walter Salles.

In this episode of LIGHT TALK, The Lumen Brothers and Sister talk about everything from Keeping your Atmospheres Beautiful, to Our New Color, "Olo".  Join Ellen, Steve, David, and Stan as they pontificate about: Girls on the Town!;  A new color no one has ever seen before;  New hope for Color Blindness; More news from Texas; Best technques for lighting an orchestra;  Lighting toilets in grand Central Station; Adding facial visibility to dark and textured atmospheres; Delivering brutal honesty with style; Light and Health; and The differences in "top-shelf" lighting consoles. Nothing is Taboo, Nothing is Sacred, and Very Little Makes Sense.

Welcome to Season 04 Episode 10 - the "Desert Spring" edition - of Notes from the Aisle Seat, the podcast featuring news and information about the arts in  northern Chautauqua County NY, sponsored by the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. Your host is Tom Loughlin, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair Emeritus of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia. Guests on this episode include: Distinguished Professor Emeritus Alberto Rey discussing Dawn of Impressionism; Dr. Eliran Avni and Ms. Meredith McIntyre on the Fredonia Young Artist Recitals; and 4 members of the production crew for Twelfth Night from the Dept. of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia - Dr. Robert Deemer, Ms. Jessica Lustig, Ms. Amelia Elman, and Ms. Aidan Heaney. Notes from the Aisle Seat is available from most of your favorite podcast sites, as well as on the Opera House YouTube Channel. If you enjoy this podcast, please spread the word through your social media feeds, give us a link on your website, and consider becoming a follower by clicking the "Follow" button in the upper right-hand corner of our home page. If you have an arts event you'd like to publicize, hit us up at operahouse@fredopera.org and let us know what you have! Please give us at least one month's notice to facilitate timely scheduling. And don't forget to enter the giveaway for a pair of free tickets to the Long Point String Band Concert on Friday April 11th, as well as a $25 gift card from Central Station in Dunkirk. Entries must be received by Friday March 28th at 12 noon! Listen to the podcast for the question and answer. Then email your answer to operahouse@fredopera.org. Make sure you put the word "Giveaway" in the subject line. Thanks for listening! Time Stamps (Approximate) 02:01 - Prof. Alberto Rey/Dawn of Impressionism 18:25 - Dr. Eliran Avni/Ms. Meredith McIntyre/Fredonia Young Artist Recital 36:33 - Arts Calendar 38:50 - Dept. Theatre and Dance/Twelfth Night Media "Desert Flower", performed by Guitarra Azul, from the album Lotus Flower, composed by Stephano, 2012 April Preludes op. 13 (3rd movement), Vitezslava Kaprálová, composer, performed by Francis Kay, pianist, January 2023 Sonata No.15 in D major, Op.28 - Pastoral (Rondo); Ludwig von Beethoven, composer, performed by Schaghajegh Nosrati, piano, February 2024 Twelfth Night, produced by ITV (UK); Joan Plowright (Viola), Adrienne Corri (Olivia), 1970. Ghost Riders in the Sky, written by Stan Jones (1948), performed by Inka Gold, from a live concert at Mesa Regal Resort, Nov. 2024 Artist Links Department of Theatre and Dance, SUNY Fredonia Dr. Eliran Avni Prof. Alberto Rey   Box Office at SUNY Fredonia Lake Shore Center for the Arts Main Street Studios Ticket Website Register Here for the 1891 Run/Walk for the Opera House BECOME AN OPERA HOUSE MEMBER!          

Gus Lanzetta returns to the podcast from São Paulo to discuss two films by the Brazilian director Walter Salles: 1998's Central Station, starring Fernanda Montenegro, and his latest, Ainda Estou Aqui (I'm Still Here) starring Montenegro's daughter Fernanda Torres, both Academy Award-nominated for their respective performances.In Central Station Fernanda Montenegro gave one of the greatest screen performances of the 20th Century as Dora, a retired schoolteacher running a scam writing letters for illiterate people at Rio's train station who winds up rescuing an orphaned boy and transporting him to the far reaches of the country to try and reunite him with his long-lost father, in a film that reaches an overwhelming emotional power.Fernanda Torres received universal acclaim in Salles' latest film as Eunice Palva, the wife of a former leftist congressman in Rio before the coup d'état. When he is disappeared by the secret police and she is also interrogated for weeks by the state, their happy domestic life is shattered and Eunice devotes the rest of her life to social justice work and getting the state to finally admit what they did to her husband, refusing to give in to the fear, in a film that Torres has described as a “national therapy session” for a country that would wish to ignore this period in their history.Gus and I talk about these two acting dynamos, the Tropicalia movement, Burt Lancaster, Bugs Bunny, MF DOOM, crying at the movies, and our hopes that Brazil finally wins the first Oscar for their cinema. Is it coming home?Over 30% of all Junk Filter episodes are only available to patrons of the podcast. To support this show directly and to receive access to the entire back catalogue, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/junkfilterFollow Gus Lanzetta on Bluesky.Listen to Gus' podcast project that is relevant to the topic of the Brazilian dictatorship, Um Espião Silenciado (A Silenced Spy, in Portuguese)“Fernanda Torres Has Already Won” by Seth Abramovitch, for The Hollywood Reporter, February 15, 2025French trailer for Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998)Brazilian trailer for Ainda Estou Aqui (Walter Salles, 2024)International trailer for I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024)“Minha Gente” (My People), Erasmo Carlos, 1972

THIS IS A PREVIEW PODCAST. NOT THE FULL REVIEW. Please check out the full podcast review on our Patreon Page by subscribing over at - https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture "I'm Still Here" had its world premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it received positive reviews and has since gone on to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for star Fernanda Torres and receive three Academy Award nominations, Best Picture (the first Brazilian-produced film ever to be nominated in that category), Best International Feature Film and Best Actress for Torres. Naturally, we here at Next Best Picture had to review Walter Salles's latest after such a pleasantly surprising awards season run. Here to join me for this Patreon exclusive review are Nadia Dalimonte, Josh Parham, and guest Miriam Spritzer. Please tune in as we discuss the real story the film is based on, Torres's performance, Salles's direction, the award-winning writing from Murilo Hauser Heitor Lorega based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva's memoir of the same name, the casting of Torres's mother Fernanda Montenegro (who previously was Oscar-nominated for her work on Salles's 1998 film "Central Station"), what this film means to Brazilians and more in our SPOILER-FILLED review. Thank you for all your support, and enjoy! Check out more on NextBestPicture.com Please subscribe on... Apple Podcasts - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/negs-best-film-podcast/id1087678387?mt=2 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7IMIzpYehTqeUa1d9EC4jT YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWA7KiotcWmHiYYy6wJqwOw And be sure to help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture and listen to this podcast ad-free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With I'm Still Here garnering praise in this year's awards race, we thought it would be a great time to talk about Walter Salles – and, well, things turned out great with a surprise Best Picture nomination for Salles and company. After earning stateside honors with films like The Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station, Salles took on an ambitious and … Continue reading "327 – On the Road"

This week we're excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with I'm Still Here director Walter Salles, lead actress Fernanda Torres, and Brazilian journalist & author Marcelo Rubens Paiva. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection, I'm Still Here is now nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Best International Feature, and Best Picture. One afternoon in 1971, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman and outspoken critic of Brazil's newly instituted military dictatorship, was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro by government officials, told nothing more than that he must give a “deposition” to authorities, and disappeared. Adapted from his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva's memoir, this overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Rubens's wife, Eunice (a shattering Fernanda Torres), whose indefatigable search for the truth about her husband would stretch out for decades. A devastating true story, I'm Still Here is exhilarating in its portrayal of human tenacity in the face of injustice. Featuring a deeply affecting appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar nominee for Salles's Central Station. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

"I'm Still Here" had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, where it received strong reviews for its true story about a mother (Fernanda Torres) and activist coping with the forced disappearance of her husband, the dissident politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Adapted from Marcelo Rubens Paiva's 2015 memoir of the same name, the script won the Best Screenplay award at Venice and has gone on to receive multiple nominations for Best International Feature Film (it is Brazil's official selection for the Oscar in this category at the 97th Academy Awards) and won Torres the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. Director Walter Salles (who previously directed Torres's mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who also stars in this film, to an Oscar-nominated performance in "Central Station" in 1998), Torres and Mello were all kind enough to spend some time talking with Ema Sasic and me about their work on the film, which you can listen to below. Please be sure to check out the film, which is now playing in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics and is up for your consideration at this year's Academy Awards in all eligible categories, including Best International Feature, Best Actress (Torres), and Best Adapted Screenplay. Thank you, and enjoy! Check out more on NextBestPicture.com Please subscribe on... Apple Podcasts - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/negs-best-film-podcast/id1087678387?mt=2 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7IMIzpYehTqeUa1d9EC4jT YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWA7KiotcWmHiYYy6wJqwOw And be sure to help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture and listen to this podcast ad-free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan Walker is CEO and Managing Partner of Central Station, an independent creative agency based in Toronto. Central Station has been at the forefront of blending experiential marketing, digital innovation, and AI-driven strategies for top global brands like Spin Master, Nike, and Dior. Ryan brings a unique perspective to the conversation around disruption in marketing. With a background in engineering and over 20 years in the creative industry, he's led Central Station in revolutionizing how brands engage with consumers through immersive, tech-forward experiences. Ryan will give us insights into how technology is transforming the way brands build relationships with consumers and how agencies like Central Station are pushing the boundaries of marketing in the digital age. Join Our Community of Canadian Entrepreneurs! Entrepreneurs are the driving force behind Canada's economy, and we're here to support them every step of the way. For exclusive insights, tips, and success stories from Canada's top business leaders, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Want to stay ahead with the latest #entrepreneur podcasts, business strategies, and news? Don't miss out—subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter for updates delivered straight to your inbox! Join thousands of Canadian entrepreneurs who rely on us for the resources they need to succeed.

Sadly, the past is gone and cannot be changed – nor can we see into the future to prepare for what's to come. We live in the here and now, and that is a constant. Or… is it? We'll look at the mystery of time slips. Darkness Syndicate members get the ad-free version. https://weirddarkness.com/syndicateInfo on the next LIVE SCREAM event. https://weirddarkness.com/LiveScreamInfo on the next WEIRDO WATCH PARTY event. https://weirddarkness.com/TVIN THIS EPISODE: Edvard Munch's painting “The Scream” from 1892 is a masterpiece of the macabre – and when you hear him describe the piece and his inspiration for it, you'll realize the painting is a lot closer to the artist's life than anyone would want. (Curing Edvard Munch) *** Have you ever wondered why ghosts in the movies are so often female? What makes female ghosts scarier than male ghosts? I mean aside from that whole “a woman scorned” thing? We'll look at some famous – and infamous female ghosts and urban legends around the world. (Infamous Female Ghosts and Urban Legends) *** Sadly, the past is gone and cannot be changed – nor can we see into the future to prepare for what's to come. We live in the here and now, and that is a constant. Or… is it? We'll look at the mystery of time slips. (On The Edge of Time) *** AND MORE!CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Disclaimer and Cold Open00:01:03.917 = Show Intro00:03:02.519 = On The Edge of Time00:23:11.068 = Curing Edvard Munch00:30:48.266 = Infamous Female Ghosts and Urban Legends00:44:14.523 = Something Above Us (From a Weird Darkness listener)00:49:23.953 = Show CloseSOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE…“On The Edge of Time” by Tim Swartz for UFO Review: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/jahhwfbf“Curing Edvard Munch” by Dr. Romeo Vitelli for Providentia: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vbp5rzsw“Infamous Female Ghosts and Urban Legends” posted at BuggedSpace.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3j2smmj3Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library. = = = = =(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)= = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46= = = = =WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2024, Weird Darkness.= = = = =Originally aired: June 23, 2021SOURCES PAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/TimeSlipCop

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.Please consider supporting ARB's Patreon!Credits:Guest: Anna McFarlaneTitle: The This by Adam RobertsHost: Jake Casella BrookinsMusic by Giselle Gabrielle GarciaArtwork by Rob PattersonOpening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John BroughReferences:Anna's books, including Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and Adam Roberts: Critical EssaysMary Butts' “Mappa Mundi”Jordan S. Carroll's Speculative WhitenessAdam Roberts' The Thing Itself, Lake of Darkness, New Model Army, and nonfictionChristopher PriestThe Thing, dir. John CarpenterKant's Critique of Pure ReasonDeleuze's concept of The FoldNabokov's Pale FireMichael Swanwick Stations of the Tide & Vacuum FlowersCory Doctorow & Greg EganNeal Stephenson's Snow CrashWilliam Gibson's NeuromancerPatricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About ThisRobert A. Heinlein's Starship TroopersJoe Haldeman's The Forever WarStar Trek's BorgE.M. Forster's “The Machine Stops”George Orwell's 1984Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit"The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel"The idea of the pharmakonThe Big Read podcast on The ThisShulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of SexOttessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and RelaxationRobot monkey/wiremother experimentsRoberts's review of The Book of ElsewhereRoberts on BlueskyBlack MirrorThomas Disch's 334 & Camp ConcentrationDavid LynchPeter Watts' Blindsight & EchopraxiaKurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, & GalapagosVonnegut thing about delivering a letterVonnegut's “Biafra: A People Betrayed”Fix-up novelsJo Walton's “On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century”Casella's essay on This Is How You Lose the Time WarLavie Tidhar's Central Station, The Circumference of the World, Osama, A Man Lies DreamingA line from Hegel to Marx to Darko SuvinThe conclusion to Walter Pater's The RenaissanceMolly Templeton's “A Modest Request for a Little More Genre Chaos”Young Frankenstein dir. Mel BrooksAnna on BlueskyThe Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.Please consider supporting ARB's Patreon!Credits:Guest: Anna McFarlaneTitle: The This by Adam RobertsHost: Jake Casella BrookinsMusic by Giselle Gabrielle GarciaArtwork by Rob PattersonOpening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John BroughReferences:Anna's books, including Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and Adam Roberts: Critical EssaysMary Butts' “Mappa Mundi”Jordan S. Carroll's Speculative WhitenessAdam Roberts' The Thing Itself, Lake of Darkness, New Model Army, and nonfictionChristopher PriestThe Thing, dir. John CarpenterKant's Critique of Pure ReasonDeleuze's concept of The FoldNabokov's Pale FireMichael Swanwick Stations of the Tide & Vacuum FlowersCory Doctorow & Greg EganNeal Stephenson's Snow CrashWilliam Gibson's NeuromancerPatricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About ThisRobert A. Heinlein's Starship TroopersJoe Haldeman's The Forever WarStar Trek's BorgE.M. Forster's “The Machine Stops”George Orwell's 1984Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit"The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel"The idea of the pharmakonThe Big Read podcast on The ThisShulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of SexOttessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and RelaxationRobot monkey/wiremother experimentsRoberts's review of The Book of ElsewhereRoberts on BlueskyBlack MirrorThomas Disch's 334 & Camp ConcentrationDavid LynchPeter Watts' Blindsight & EchopraxiaKurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, & GalapagosVonnegut thing about delivering a letterVonnegut's “Biafra: A People Betrayed”Fix-up novelsJo Walton's “On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century”Casella's essay on This Is How You Lose the Time WarLavie Tidhar's Central Station, The Circumference of the World, Osama, A Man Lies DreamingA line from Hegel to Marx to Darko SuvinThe conclusion to Walter Pater's The RenaissanceMolly Templeton's “A Modest Request for a Little More Genre Chaos”Young Frankenstein dir. Mel BrooksAnna on BlueskyThe Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

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A three-day gathering on Dunghutti country in New South Wales will mark 100 years since the opening of the notorious Kinchela Boys Home. Survivors and descendants of survivors from Sydney boarded a train from Central Station, travelling back to the site of the home.

Ross Stevenson has delivered an outstanding entry into the Rumour File this morning, which he says is 100 per cent true!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Following an extraordinary evening on Friday, I found it necessary to take the train back home. However, Transport Sydney Trains experienced a service disruption, leaving numerous passengers stranded at Central Station. To compound the situation, a discourteous train guard instructed me to leave the area. Furthermore, Transport Sydney Trains failed to arrange alternative bus services for customers seeking to return home.

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A round-up of the main headlines in Sweden on July 11th 2024. You can hear more reports on our homepage www.radiosweden.se, or in the app Sveriges Radio Play Presenter: Mitchell CordnerProducer: Kris Boswell

In this episode St. Paul City Council Member Rebecca Noecker talks to F&C reporter Dan Netter about the Central Station area and revitalization efforts in downtown St. Paul.

This week on And the Runner-Up Is, Kevin welcomes back Gold Derby senior editor Joyce Eng to discuss the 1998 Oscar race for Best Actress, where Gwyneth Paltrow won for her performance in "Shakespeare in Love," beating Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth," Fernanda Montenegro in "Central Station," Meryl Streep in "One True Thing," and Emily Watson in "Hilary and Jackie." We discuss all of these nominated performances and determine who we think was the runner-up to Paltrow. 0:00 - 8:37 - Introduction 8:38 - 29:45 - Cate Blanchett 29:46 - 47:59 - Fernanda Montenegro 48:00 - 1:09:25 - Meryl Streep 1:09:26 - 1:27:24 - Emily Watson 1:27:25 - 1:49:15 - Gwyneth Paltrow 1:49:16 - 2:54:20 - Why Gwyneth Paltrow won / Twitter questions 2:54:21 - 3:00:39 - Who was the runner-up? Buy And the Runner-Up Is merch at https://www.teepublic.com/stores/and-the-runner-up-is?ref_id=24261! Support And the Runner-Up Is on Patreon at patreon.com/andtherunnerupis! Follow Kevin Jacobsen on Twitter Follow Joyce Eng on Twitter Follow And the Runner-Up Is on Twitter and Instagram Theme/End Music: "Diamonds" by Iouri Sazonov Additional Music: "Storming Cinema Ident" by Edward Blakeley Artwork: Brian O'Meara

Fluent Fiction - Danish: Navigating Copenhagen's Bike Paths: A Tale of Lessons, Friendship, and Resilience Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.org/navigating-copenhagens-bike-paths-a-tale-of-lessons-friendship-and-resilience Story Transcript:Da: I København, en af Europas mest cykelvenlige byer, var forvirringen begyndt at sprede sig på Lars' ansigt. Han strammede grebet om sit cykelstyr, mens han stirrede på den snorlige cykelsti, der strakte sig ud foran ham. Det var Lars' første gang her, her i ræset på to hjul, og frygten for det ukendte kunne ses i hans blågrønne øjne.En: In Copenhagen, one of Europe's most bike-friendly cities, confusion had started to spread across Lars' face. He tightened his grip on his bike handlebars as he stared at the neatly laid-out bike path stretching out in front of him. It was Lars' first time here, in the two-wheeled race, and the fear of the unknown could be seen in his teal eyes.Da: Lars, en ung mand på 25 år, var flyttet til København fra en lille landsby i Jylland. Det var både underholdende og skræmmende at se så mange cykler på ét sted. Himlen var dækket af grå skyer, og vinden blæste Lars' hår tilbage, mens han så på de forbipasserende ryttere. Han stod der, ved Herlev Hospital, og havde den længste vej hjem til Hovedbanegården.En: Lars, a 25-year-old man, had moved to Copenhagen from a small village in Jutland. It was both entertaining and frightening to see so many bikes in one place. The sky was covered with grey clouds, and the wind blew back Lars' hair as he watched the passing riders. He stood there, by Herlev Hospital, facing the longest way back home to the Central Station.Da: "Lad os komme i gang, Lars," sagde Signe og smilte hjerteligt. Signe var Lars' eneste ven i København, en veninde fra gymnasietiden.En: "Let's get going, Lars," said Signe, smiling warmly. Signe was Lars' only friend in Copenhagen, a friend from their high school days.Da: Hun var vant til trafikken i København og cyklede ubesværet gennem gaderne, mens Lars gispede efter vejret i hendes hale. "Lars, du skal følge cyklisternes interne regler," råbte hun over skulderen, da de kørte over Lygten.En: She was accustomed to the traffic in Copenhagen and cycled effortlessly through the streets, while Lars struggled to catch his breath in her wake. "Lars, you need to follow the cyclists' unofficial rules," she yelled over her shoulder as they crossed Lygten.Da: Cykelstierne i København føltes som en labyrint for den unge Jyde. Råbene fra de andre cyklister kunne tit virke forvirrende, og Signe var foran ham og fjernere for hvert pedaltråd. "Hastighed, Lars," råbte hun tilbage, mens hun susede forbi en jalousiskoddedør.En: The bike paths in Copenhagen felt like a maze for the young Jutlander. The shouts from other cyclists could often be confusing, and Signe was getting farther ahead with each pedal stroke. "Speed up, Lars," she shouted back as she zoomed past a jealous green door.Da: Lars' hjerte hamrede i brystet, mens han forsøgte at navigere gennem Nørrebrogade. De måtte nu over Dronning Louises Bro og ind på Købmagergade. Men Lars kunne allerede mærke sveden på panden.En: Lars' heart pounded in his chest as he tried to navigate through Nørrebrogade. They had to cross Queen Louise's Bridge and head towards Købmagergade. But Lars could already feel the sweat on his forehead.Da: Uheldigvis tog Lars en forkert drejning og endte på H.C. Andersens Boulevard. Bilkøer, travle fodgængere og ivrige cyklister, var alt for meget for den stressede Lars. I hans panik begyndte han at cykle imod trafikken.En: Unfortunately, Lars took a wrong turn and ended up on H.C. Andersens Boulevard. Traffic jams, bustling pedestrians, and eager cyclists were all too much for the stressed Lars. In his panic, he started cycling against the traffic flow.Da: "Hun har sikkert ret," tænkte Lars. Men hans stædighed gjorde, at han fortsatte. Han ville ikke vise sin sårbarhed, selv om han følte sig tabt i byens larm og lyde.En: "She's probably right," thought Lars. But his stubbornness made him continue. He didn't want to show his vulnerability, even though he felt lost in the city's noise and sounds.Da: Men så skete det uundgåelige. En politibetjent stoppede ham og advarede ham om, at han kørte den forkerte vej. Følelsen af skam farvede hans kinder røde. Alle de andre cyklister stirrede på ham.En: But then the inevitable happened. A police officer stopped him and warned him that he was cycling in the wrong direction. The feeling of shame colored his cheeks red. All the other cyclists stared at him.Da: Da Signe endelig fandt Lars, trøstede hun ham. Hun fortalte ham, at de alle har været der. Signe, der var en sand københavner, kendte byen som sin egen bukselomme.En: When Signe finally found Lars, she comforted him. She told him that they had all been there. Signe, a true Copenhagener, knew the city like the back of her hand.Da: Da de endelig nåede Hovedbanegården, var Lars' ansigt aflastet. Hver eneste op-og-ned tur var det hele værd. Han var nu en del af Københavns cykelkultur, og det føltes godt. Han vidste, at han havde begået fejl, men det var en del af processen.En: When they finally reached the Central Station, Lars' face eased. Every up-and-down ride was worth it. He was now part of Copenhagen's bike culture, and it felt good. He knew he had made mistakes, but it was all part of the learning process.Da: Det gjorde ikke noget, at han var blevet stoppet af politi, eller han havde taget nogle forkerte drejninger. I sidste ende lærte han om byens charme, dens livlige gader og dens smukke cykelkultur. Og han havde Signe ved hans side - hans støtte og guide. Nu var det ikke længere ligeså skræmmende at ride på cykelstierne, som det var i begyndelsen. Han vidste, at han skulle falde for at lære. For i København, er det kun, når du falder, at du virkelig lærer at cykle.En: It didn't matter that he had been stopped by the police or taken a few wrong turns. In the end, he had learned about the city's charm, its lively streets, and its beautiful bike culture. And he had Signe by his side – his support and guide. Now, it wasn't as daunting to ride on the bike paths as it was in the beginning. He knew he had to fall to learn. Because in Copenhagen, it's only when you fall that you truly learn how to ride.Da: Og Lars, den stædige jyde, var parat til at falle og opstå igen, igen og igen, indtil han blev mester i kunsten at cykle i Københavns gader.En: And Lars, the stubborn Jutlander, was ready to fall and rise again, again and again, until he became a master in the art of cycling in Copenhagen's streets. Vocabulary Words:streets: gaderbike: cykelCopenhagen: KøbenhavnLars: Larscity: bysign: tegnfriend: venpath: stifear: frygtrules: reglertraffic: trafikmistakes: fejlguide: guideyoung: ungbicycle: cykelpedestrians: fodgængerecycling: cyklingvulnerability: sårbarhedcharm: charmecyclists: cyklistershame: skamlearning: læringfalls: falderjutlander: jydepolice: politimistakes: fejlstreets: gaderturn: drejningmistakes: fejlpattern: mønster

In this episode, we talk with the author of one of my favorite new novels of last year and one that will probably top my list next year. Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), Seiun nominated The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the Campbell Award, Neukom Prize and Chinese Nebula winning Central Station (2016), Prix Planete SF winner and Locus and Campbell award nominated Unholy Land (2018), British Fantasy Award nominated By Force Alone (2021), Philip K. Dick Award nominated The Escapement (2021), The Hood (2021), Maror (2022) and Locus Award nominated Neom (2022). We talk about Lavie Tidhar's Neom and The Circumference of the World two modern Science Fiction novels that have a golden age feel. In this interview,, we talk about Lavie's novels, his process and nerd out on our favorite Science Fiction.

Fluent Fiction - Dutch: Lost and Found in Amsterdam: A Day of Adventure and New Friendships Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.org/lost-and-found-in-amsterdam-a-day-of-adventure-and-new-friendships Story Transcript:Nl: Het was een heldere dag in Amsterdam toen Jeroen en Sophie op het Centraal Station aankwamen.En: It was a clear day in Amsterdam when Jeroen and Sophie arrived at Central Station.Nl: Ze waren toeristen, op zoek naar avontuur.En: They were tourists, in search of adventure.Nl: De stad, met haar kronkelende kanaaltjes en talloze bruggetjes, leek een doolhof.En: The city, with its winding canals and countless bridges, seemed like a maze.Nl: Dat bracht hen flink in de war.En: This greatly confused them.Nl: Aan de rand van een klarinet klinkend kanaal zagen ze een jongen zitten.En: On the edge of a clarinet-playing canal, they saw a boy sitting.Nl: Zijn naam was Daan.En: His name was Daan.Nl: Hij woonde zijn hele leven in Amsterdam.En: He had lived his whole life in Amsterdam.Nl: Daan kende de stad als zijn eigen broekzak.En: Daan knew the city like the back of his hand.Nl: Jeroen en Sophie vroegen Daan om hulp.En: Jeroen and Sophie asked Daan for help.Nl: Ze legden uit dat ze waren verdwaald en een beetje overweldigd door het web van kanaaltjes.En: They explained that they were lost and a bit overwhelmed by the web of canals.Nl: Daan luisterde, knikte en zei: "Ik kan helpen.En: Daan listened, nodded, and said, "I can help."Nl: "Hij nam hen mee op een tour door de stad.En: He took them on a tour of the city.Nl: Ze liepen langs de Prinsengracht, de Herengracht, en de Keizersgracht.En: They walked along the Prinsengracht, the Herengracht, and the Keizersgracht.Nl: Daan vertelde verhalen over de geschiedenis van deze grachten en de stad.En: Daan told stories about the history of these canals and the city.Nl: Jeroen en Sophie voelden zich beter.En: Jeroen and Sophie felt better.Nl: Ze waren niet meer verloren.En: They were no longer lost.Nl: Ze maakten foto's van prachtige huizen, glimlachend tegen de achtergrond van de ondergaande zon.En: They took pictures of beautiful houses, smiling against the backdrop of the setting sun.Nl: Ze aten patat bij een plaatselijke kraam en lachten om de meeuwen die om de kruimels bedelden.En: They ate fries at a local stall and laughed at the seagulls begging for crumbs.Nl: Daan wist de beste plek voor oliebollen.En: Daan knew the best place for oliebollen.Nl: Ze proefden de zoete deegwaren, warm en knapperig.En: They tasted the sweet pastries, warm and crispy.Nl: In de avond, toen de lantaarns naast de kanalen licht begonnen te verspreiden, bracht Daan hen terug naar het Centraal Station.En: In the evening, as the lanterns along the canals began to spread light, Daan brought them back to Central Station.Nl: Hij wees hun de juiste trein naar hun hotel.En: He pointed them to the right train to their hotel.Nl: "Dank je, Daan!En: "Thank you, Daan!"Nl: " zeiden ze.En: they said.Nl: Hij glimlachte, zwaaide hen uit en keek de trein na tot die uit het zicht verdween.En: He smiled, waved them goodbye, and watched the train until it disappeared from sight.Nl: Vanaf die dag waren Jeroen en Sophie niet meer bang om te verdwalen.En: From that day on, Jeroen and Sophie were no longer afraid to get lost.Nl: Want Amsterdam was geen doolhof meer voor hen, maar een stad vol avontuur en dankzij Daan wisten ze nu de weg.En: Because Amsterdam was no longer a maze for them, but a city full of adventure and thanks to Daan, they now knew the way.Nl: Ze beloofden terug te komen voor meer avontuur, dit keer als vrienden van de stad, niet als verdwaalde toeristen.En: They promised to come back for more adventure, this time as friends of the city, not as lost tourists.Nl: En zo eindigde hun eerste dag in Amsterdam, verdwaald en dan gevonden, met nieuwe vriendschap en mooie herinneringen.En: And so, their first day in Amsterdam ended, lost and then found, with new friendship and beautiful memories. Vocabulary Words:It: Hetwas: wasa: eenclear: heldereday: dagin: inAmsterdam: Amsterdamwhen: toenJeroen: Jeroenand: enSophie: Sophiearrived: aankwamenat: opCentral: CentraalStation: StationThey: Zewere: warentourists: toeristenin: opsearch: zoekof: naaradventure: avontuurThe: Decity: stadwith: metits: haarwinding: kronkelendecanals: kanaaltjesand: encountless: talloze

Fluent Fiction - Dutch: Lost in Amsterdam: A Journey of Kindness and Friendship Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.org/lost-in-amsterdam-a-journey-of-kindness-and-friendship Story Transcript:Nl: Het grote avontuur van Daan in Amsterdam was begonnen.En: Daan's great adventure in Amsterdam had begun.Nl: Beginnend bij het Centraal Station, keek Daan verwonderd om zich heen.En: Starting at the Central Station, Daan looked around in awe.Nl: Grote boten, de blauwe hemel, veel mensen.En: Big boats, the blue sky, lots of people.Nl: Alles was zo interessant.En: Everything was so interesting.Nl: Maar Daan raakte verdwaald.En: But Daan got lost.Nl: Hij liep en liep, van de ene straat naar de andere.En: He walked and walked, from one street to another.Nl: De grachten waren zo mooi, maar oh zo verwarrend.En: The canals were so beautiful, but oh so confusing.Nl: "Help, ik ben verdwaald", zei Daan tegen vreemden.En: "Help, I'm lost," Daan said to strangers.Nl: "Kan je me naar het Centraal Station brengen?En: "Can you take me to the Central Station?"Nl: " Maar de woorden van de mensen waren moeilijk.En: But the people's words were difficult.Nl: Nederlands was zo ingewikkeld!En: Dutch was so complicated!Nl: Ze spraken snel, gebruikten moeilijke woorden.En: They spoke quickly, used difficult words.Nl: Ondanks dat Daan ze had gevraagd langzamer te spreken, kon hij nog steeds niet begrijpen wat ze zeiden.En: Despite asking them to speak slower, he still couldn't understand what they were saying.Nl: Daan was bang.En: Daan was scared.Nl: Zijn hart klopte snel.En: His heart was beating fast.Nl: Hij had honger en het werd donker.En: He was hungry and it was getting dark.Nl: De lichten van de stad twinkelden, maar Daan kon de weg nog steeds niet vinden.En: The lights of the city were twinkling, but Daan still couldn't find his way.Nl: Hij miste zijn huis, zijn zachte bed.En: He missed his home, his soft bed.Nl: Terwijl verdriet hem overspoelde, zat Daan dicht bij de gracht om uit te rusten.En: As sadness overwhelmed him, Daan sat close to the canal to rest.Nl: Toen zag hij een klein meisje.En: Then he saw a little girl.Nl: Haar naam was Marie.En: Her name was Marie.Nl: Ze was lief en zag dat Daan hulp nodig had.En: She was kind and could see that Daan needed help.Nl: "Bent u verdwaald?En: "Are you lost?"Nl: " vroeg ze.En: she asked.Nl: "Ja," zei Daan.En: "Yes," said Daan.Nl: "Ik begrijp de weg niet".En: "I don't understand the way."Nl: Marie glimlachte.En: Marie smiled.Nl: "Ik zal helpen.En: "I will help."Nl: "Samen liepen ze door de straatjes.En: Together, they walked through the streets.Nl: Ze gingen over bruggetjes, door de smalle straten.En: They went over little bridges, through the narrow streets.Nl: Ze kwamen langs snoepwinkels, oude gebouwen en fietsen.En: They passed candy shops, old buildings, and bicycles.Nl: Zoveel fietsen!En: So many bicycles!Nl: Marie legde dingen eenvoudig uit, ze sprak langzaam.En: Marie explained things simply, she spoke slowly.Nl: Ze wees naar het station.En: She pointed to the station.Nl: "Daar is het Centraal Station", zei ze.En: "There is the Central Station," she said.Nl: Met een brede glimlach op zijn gezicht bedankte Daan de kleine Marie.En: With a big smile on his face, Daan thanked little Marie.Nl: Hij was zo blij, hij was niet meer bang.En: He was so happy, he was no longer scared.Nl: Hij had zijn weg teruggevonden.En: He had found his way back.Nl: Maar bovenal, hij had een nieuwe vriend gemaakt.En: But more importantly, he had made a new friend.Nl: Dit was zijn avontuur in Amsterdam.En: This was his adventure in Amsterdam.Nl: Het was eng, maar uiteindelijk ook leuk.En: It was scary, but ultimately fun.Nl: Nu kon Daan naar huis terugkeren met een geweldig verhaal te vertellen.En: Now Daan could return home with a great story to tell.Nl: Hij leerde iets belangrijks: zelfs als je verdwaald en bang bent, is er altijd wel iemand vriendelijk in de buurt om je te helpen.En: He learned something important: even if you're lost and scared, there is always someone kind nearby to help you.Nl: Eind goed, al goed voor Daan en zijn Amsterdamse avontuur.En: All's well that ends well for Daan and his Amsterdam adventure. Vocabulary Words:Daan: DaanAmsterdam: AmsterdamCentral Station: Centraal Stationboats: botenblue sky: blauwe hemellots of people: veel menseninteresting: interessantlost: verdwaaldwalked: liepstreet: straatcanals: grachtenbeautiful: mooiconfusing: verwarrendHelp: Helplost: verdwaaldspeak: sprekenquickly: sneldifficult: moeilijkDutch: Nederlandscomplicated: ingewikkeldasked: vroegunderstand: begrijpenscared: bangheart: hartbeating: kloppendhungry: hongerdark: donkercity: stadtwinkling: twinkeldenfind: vinden

  The Haunter of the Dark By H. P. Lovecraft (Dedicated to Robert Bloch) I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim— Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. —Nemesis. Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but Nature has shewn herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church on Federal Hill—the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected. For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection. Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore—averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it. Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor. Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934–5, taking the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street—on the crest of the great eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth-century workmanship. Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level. Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town's outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person. Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and paint—living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feaster from the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes. At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread west—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque. Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy facade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more. The style, so far as the glass could shew, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815. As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been. In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine—but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream. Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be trod by living human feet. Now and then a battered church facade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake saw him make a curious sign with his right hand. Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the children who shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes. At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a windswept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported—a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets—there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's new perspective, was beyond dispute. The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose gate—at the head of a flight of steps from the square—was visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister beyond his power to define. There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood. There had been a bad sect there in the ould days—an outlaw sect that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest forever in their black abyss. After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories. The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no interference. He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down, and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors in the facade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on automatically. A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace shewed that the building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times. Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strown concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great spectral building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about—finding a still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined corridor lined with worm-eaten panelling. Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion. All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hourglass pulpit, and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows. The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows seemed to shew merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt. In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known merely by reputation or not at all—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognisable to the occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe. In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—the devices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter. In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors? Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple—objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he attained the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly devoted to vastly different purposes. The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised, and wholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above. As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of a metal band around its centre, with seven queerly designed supports extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will. When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried a message to his unconscious mind. Ploughing toward it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's grey suit. There were other bits of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's badge with the name of the old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893, some cards with the name “Edwin M. Lillibridge”, and a paper covered with pencilled memoranda. This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following: “Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844—buys old Free-Will Church in July—his archaeological work & studies in occult well known.” “Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec. 29, 1844.” “Congregation 97 by end of '45.” “1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.” “7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin.” “Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds.” “Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins—says they call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.” “Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret language of their own.” “200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.” “Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance.” “Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about it.” “6 disappearances 1876—secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.” “Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes in April.” “Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr. —— and vestrymen in May.” “181 persons leave city before end of '77—mention no names.” “Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to ascertain truth of report that no human being has entered church since 1877.” “Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851.” . . . Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some bravely suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state—stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not imagine. Before he realised it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know. Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something—something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him—something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves—as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would have to be leaving soon. It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably glowing stone. At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question—the only living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college district. During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he felt sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition. Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning, and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it, he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion—and he could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across the intervening miles. It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries shew fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a bulwark which cannot be crossed. Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind. Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid longing—pervading even his dreams—to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone. Then something in the Journal on the morning of July 17 threw the diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing in the steeple had taken advantage of the street-lamps' absence and gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it fleeing. When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in time—for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow shielded with folded paper and umbrellas—a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled hideously. But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean. In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most—except for the hints of stains and charring and bad odours—was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days. Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally sliding trap-door, and shot a feeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters. From this point onward Blake's diary shews a mounting tide of insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three occasions—during thunderstorms—he telephoned the electric light company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries shew concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed that these things had been removed—whither, and by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him. The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots which would probably hold or else waken him with the labour of untying. In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above—a vague stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood. Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws. Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew—perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that encompassed him. He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door. On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil odour seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary. The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to telephone the company around 1 a.m., though by that time service had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded everything in his diary—the large, nervous, and often undecipherable hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and of entries scrawled blindly in the dark. He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases such as “The lights must not go”; “It knows where I am”; “I must destroy it”; and “It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this time”; are found scattered down two of the pages. Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m. according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication of the time. The entry is merely, “Lights out—God help me.” On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower, there could be no doubt whatever. For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's high bank wall—especially those in the square where the eastward facade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The possible causes of such an event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapours—spontaneous combustion—pressure of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch repeatedly. It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours from the church, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning easterly facade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window. Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky—something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east. That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes. The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connexion with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst evidence concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally general. These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connexion with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door. The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand. The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not been helped by the action of superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the entries—or all that can be made of them. “Lights still out—must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up! . . . Some influence seems beating through it. . . . Rain and thunder and wind deafen. . . . The thing is taking hold of my mind. . . . “Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies . . . Dark . . . The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light. . . . “It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops! “What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets. . . . “The long, winging flight through the void . . . cannot cross the universe of light . . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron . . . send it through the horrible abysses of radiance. . . . “My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . . I am on this planet. . . . “Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer flashes—horrible—I can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light is dark and dark is light . . . those people on the hill . . . guard . . . candles and charms . . . their priests. . . . “Sense of distance gone—far is near and near is far. No light—no glass—see that steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower—I am it and it is I—I want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces. . . . It knows where I am. . . . “I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour . . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way. . . . Iä . . . ngai . . . ygg. . . . “I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye. . . .”

We had the pleasure of interviewing MAY-A over Zoom video!Australian singer-songwriter, MAY-A, will recently released her new EP, ANALYSIS PARALYSIS.You probably know MAY-A from her collab with Australian electronic superstar Flume, “Say Nothing (Feat. MAY-A).” The EP features focus track, “Guilty Conscience,” and previously released singles “Sweat You Out My System,” “Your Funeral,” “LOLA” and “Something Familiar.” The 7-track project also includes the brand new “Ifyoulikeitlikethat” and “SUPERIOR LIAR,” while showing MAY-A's continued exploration and experimentation with new sounds and experiences.ABOUT MAY-AEP singles “Your Funeral” and “Sweat You Out My System” were both met by global applause upon their release this spring, with PAPER praising the latter track as “anthemic ‘90s-style rock…a heated breakup track, which likens a split to going cold turkey and captures all the anxiety and intensity that implies.” “The new pop/rock-meets-semi-rap track brilliantly recontextualizes the indie-pop stylings fans have grown accustomed to from the Australian phenom,” agreed Billboard. “MAY-A leans all the way in with punchy guitars and blown-out drums. Her lyricism remains top-shelf.” “The self-deprecating ‘Your Funeral' finds (MAY-A) leaning into more alt-pop-based sonics,” declared Ones To Watch, “as she unpacks her relationship habits with satirical lyricism flowing above a driving beat.”The ongoing series of new releases follows an incredibly successful 2022 for MAY-A, which included her ARIA Award-nominated collaboration with Australian electronic superstar Flume, “Say Nothing (Feat. MAY-A),” which reached #12 on Billboard's “Hot Dance/Electronic Songs” chart amidst a storm of high-profile media attention from Billboard, Complex and more. MAY-A joined Flume for performances of “Say Nothing” during show-stopping sets at last year's Coachella and Governors Ball as well as on his sold-out US and Australian headline tours. MAY-A also unveiled her own unique rendition, “Say Nothing (MAY-A's Version),” hailed by NME as “a total tone shift from the duo's original, stripping out the song's driving beat and Flume's electronic elements. Instead, MAY-A opts for hauntingly hazy vocals, acoustic guitar and spacious, lo-fi production, letting the vulnerability of the song's lyrics shine through.”Nominated for Rolling Stone Australia's “Best New Artist” award and hailed by Billboard as “a master class in indie pop,” MAY-A made her extraordinary debut with 2021's acclaimed Don't Kiss Ur Friends. The EP – which received a prestigious ARIA Award nomination for “Breakthrough Artist – Release” in MAY-A's home country of Australia – includes such inventive and self-assured tracks as “Swing Of Things,” “Time I Love To Waste,” “Green,” and “Central Station.“Known as a dynamic and inventive live performer, MAY-A supported 5 Seconds of Summer on their recent Australian headline tour and joined Wallows on the UK/EU leg of their landmark Tell Me That It's Over World Tour, earning praise by DORK as “an artist bringing all their anticipated hype to life.”We want to hear from you! Please email Hello@BringinitBackwards.comwww.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #MAY-A #SayNothing #ANALYSISPARALYSIS #NewMusic #ZoomListen & Subscribe to BiBhttps://www.bringinitbackwards.com/followFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpodThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4972373/advertisement

What's up, homeslices! Thank you all for locking in with us yet again! We are talking about a pretty dope location that really changed the landscape of Chicago's we know it. Chicago's Central Station in Grant Park played a major roll for the city and you should definitely know the history! Also, we had so very nice Italian food at Sapori Trattoria. We were packed in there, but the food was good. Tune in and learn with us! If you have anything you'd like us to talk about on the podcast, food or history, please email us at ⁠media@77flavorschi.com⁠  WATCH US ON YOUTUBE ⁠HERE⁠! Visit our website ⁠https://www.77flavorschi.com⁠ Shop our gear from Amazon! ⁠https://www.amazon.com/shop/77flavorschi⁠ Follow us on IG: 77 Flavors of Chicago ⁠@77flavorschi⁠ Dario ⁠@super_dario_bro⁠ Sara ⁠@TamarHindi.s --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/77-flavors-of-chicago/support

A round-up of the main headlines in Sweden on August 4th, 2023. You can hear more reports on our homepage radiosweden.se, or in the app Sveriges Radio Play. Presenter: Simon LinterProducer: Michael Walsh