Blog

One of the best best-man speech stories I’ve read in a bit…

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

This story about the best man speech at a Mario-themed wedding was the funniest thing I’ve read all day:

He stayed in character the whole time. Never broke or laughed once. As I said, about 10 percent of the people at the wedding were crying-laughing. These were comedians who have gone on to run television shows and star in big Netflix stand-up specials. Up to that point, I had not seen any of them laugh as hard as they did at my brother’s speech. It was like we were all watching a rare, precious comedy moment that would never exist again.

Thinking about the nature of ‘sick days’

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Got nailed by some stomach bug last night. Miserable ride, but got a little bit of a book read that’s been on the list while suffering. Taking today easy and slow, called off work. Fluids and toast kinda day.

So it goes…

I need to log in and report my sick days into a system because, in the US, you only get a certain number of allotted days to ‘be sick’ as if it is something within your control. I used many of my days while staying home to help Emily with cancer, but as a professor I can arrange for others to teach my classes and thus use fewer hours.

In large parts of Europe, they have way more sick days (up to a month in some cases), because it happens to us all and is unpredictable. I realized there was a certain cruelty to logging in and looking at how many days I ‘could be allowed’ to be sick.

My employers have been really kind and considerate about the health journey we’ve had this year. We’re lucky, in terms of US setups, to have flexibility in our jobs.

But as someone who spent 15 years freelancing, the idea that I can’t just take a day off when I am dragging for whatever reason (sickness, burnout, whatever) and control my own body, that has been the oddest adaptation of going into the ‘normal’ working world (being a professor isn’t normal, I know, but it is in the larger employment system) for me.

People drag themselves into work when sick all the time. They get other people around them sick. They barely get anything done.

But it’s some sort of adherence to a system that demands you sacrifice yourself on the altar of productivity. Many blame capitalism, and, sure, I’ll critique it as a system as a happily as the next. But there’s nothing inherent in the concept of “an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market” that means ‘and people should be destroyed by it.’

This is not capitalism as such, it’s just a set of cultural expectations that one certain capitalist country has.

And I don’t think it does any favors. It is estimated that it costs US firms $266 billion a year.

If you’re really a capitalist, you’ll stay home when sick, and encourage your employees to do the same.

But ultimately, like a lot of business decisions that are cloaked in the supposed logic of capitalism, it has nothing to do with worker productivity. People force themselves to go to work because bosses in many work cultures are often working in an authoritarian mode (see the book Bullshit Jobs, which posits a lot of dysfunction in the US comes from this, where boss’s create positions and hire for ego, not effective business), which means they expect to see you force yourself to come in because it makes them feel powerful and feel like people are committed, and employees are terrified of being fired (particularly in the US where firing is pretty much at-will).

So there’s intense cultural pressure to go into work for many of us.

Which is why, even though I have fifteen years of personal data to match the research, even knowing that resting, getting better, will make me more productive… I still feel like I’m pulling something off when I take a sick day.

Deprogramming is hard.

30 of the 44 Patreon-supported short stories on the site are now moved over

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I’m still slowly bringing Patreon content over here as I have the time and energy. Today I did a big push to get 30 of the 44 stories moved over and linked via the member-supported projects table of contents page.

Once the stories are moved over, I’ll tackle the articles, as I’m thinking also of bringing Just a Draft in and deconstructing out just the articles about writing, adding other articles, and just creating a writing content area for member-supported projects.

After that, I’ll move over the book that Patreon readers have access to, The Island in the Sky, and then I’m thinking Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever eventually will just transition into reader-supported books that can be found on the site. They’re out of print. Indy-boosters say “just put them up for sale on Amazon” but, I’m doing my best to pull back from Amazon. There’s so much scammy, weird shit going on, so much AI generated fiction, I just want to step away from all that hustle, MLM-sounding drama and get back to basics over here.

Are rockets feeling… morally compromised these days?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

In the Apple TV series For All Mankind is an alternate history show that posits the What If? of a different space race, and past, if Russia landed on the moon first. One of the early episodes features the fall out as Wernher von Braun’s further Nazi associations are found out by newspapers. One of the characters in the show that he mentors has to deal with the full fallout of processing their emotions about it.

I rewatched the show recently, and that episode came out in 2019. This time it landed differently in 2025.

It makes sense, 2019 was when I started to truly understand how Musk had turned into the Henry Ford of 100 years later (Ford was historically famously pro-Nazi).

Just the year earlier, the whole Thailand story of a daring SCUBA rescue of young boys trapped in a cave as the waters rose was followed live by the whole world. This was the first time I saw Musk insert himself into a historical event and I began to realize Musk suffered from the assumption that success in one field meant they viewed themselves as brilliant in all.

It’s an easy mistake to make. I often point out to my students that in the US, it’s assumed wealth equates to deep intelligence. It hurts too much to think that wealth can come to less hard-working, less intelligent people than ourselves. That means we also believe competence should extend across fields.

But it doesn’t.

Each field, the more technical it is, requires years of training to understand its unique ins and outs.

There’s a funny meme that gets at the truth of this. Someone who said “When Elon talked electric cars, I wasn’t a car expert, I assumed he knew what he was doing. Same for rockets. But then he got into code and started saying things that made me realize he had no idea what he was talking about.”

I know enough about SCUBA to see that Musk was like the Silicon Valley submarine ‘experts’ that recently died underwater because they ignored every single expert that said their design would kill someone: supremely confident.

Like billionare Steve Jobs, clearly someone who you would normally think was smart, smartest man in the room, right? But when he got cancer, he wasted months and months, critical time he could have been fighting it, trying to juice the cancer away.

Until we admit rich people aren’t smart, we’ll continue making this mistake.

I made it.

I assumed someone who ran a company was smart.

But having watched enough con-man documentaries, I know the truth is, in Silicon Valley, you just need to be convincing. Hell, I’ve done enough freelance work to see it up close. Like the Silicon Valley individual that wanted to hire me to write a secret expose about how even rich Europeans were secretly poor “because they couldn’t even afford a car. They act rich, but the CEO of a company I just met in Denmark rode the bus to our big finance meeting!”

Dude was serious. We went in circles for ten minutes while I tried to explain a system of public transport for all elements of society.

Did not process.

It took me a while to see it, and 2019 was the last time I wasn’t feeling conflicted but curious to see what SpaceX would do.

It’s been years since I’ve watched a launch live. Or cheered it on.

I’ve been obsessed with rocket launches since I first saw one on a TV. The idea of space. Seeing what’s out there. Going boldly.

It’s soured for me.

And I hate that.

Another little piece of youthful optimism and joy ground out.

But, illegitimi non carborundum, right? I’ve been following some other space access fun through Ars Technica’s great coverage.

It’s just hard to avoid coverage of Space X while doing so. It’s just going to be like that for a while.

I spotted this interesting article about Space X here, saying the physics of the Starship don’t work:

The previous version of Starship had major fuel delivery issues, causing engines to fail repeatedly, and SpaceX has made the situation worse by trying to solve this problem in the long term! This is the complete opposite of iterative design, and despite what Musk says, it’s a gargantuan setback (read more here).

But why has SpaceX failed to solve this problem? Well, it’s because of the bane of any rocket scientist: physics.

Landing the Super Heavy Booster is a far, far easier task than landing the Starship from orbit.

The Super Heavy Booster weighs 160 tonnes dry, doesn’t make it to space, and its peak speed is only roughly 4,600 mph. Meanwhile, Starship has a dry mass of around 150 tonnes, makes it to space, and reaches an orbital speed of at least 17,500 mph. This means that during landing, Starship has over 13.57 times the kinetic energy of the Booster! And that doesn’t account for the fact that Starship carries significantly more propellant during landing than the Booster.

I’m not a rocket scientist, but I am curious to see if the writer here is correct.

Canada’s reaction to being threatened? Setting itself up to be an Arctic Superpower

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

From reader Rob Coberly, an article that seems like it was ripped right out of the pre-worldbuilding stage of my novel Arctic Rising: Canada Just Checked Trump’s Ego: Carney’s Super-Corridor Sets Stage for a Global Power Shift Without America.

“Carney’s masterstroke is a National Energy/Shipping/Travel/Digital Corridor, a coast-to-coast-to-Arctic strategy to unite the country like never before… This isn’t just a pipeline or a highway—it’s everything. Imagine a multimodal lifeline spanning 7,000+ km—road, rail, pipelines, power lines, fiber-optic cables—all in one corridor. That’s the vision. The concept has been called a “visionary project that could unlock extraordinary economic potential.

Now, it’s government policy.

Carney outlined a First Mile Fund to connect remote energy sites to the grid of roads and rails. There will be no more stranded resources; if we dig it up or pump it out, we’ll ship it out. A “one-window” approval process will blitz through red tape for nation-building projects while still upholding top safety and environmental standards. For once, Canada is acting with wartime urgency in peacetime—because economically, Trump declared war on us. Well, game on.

If Canada stays pro-immigration and does this, in addition to a boost in GDP, they will position themselves well. Mark Carney holding a snap election soon is smart as well.

Crossing fingers for them.

My Long Covid brain fog beater: low-dose Naltrexone

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

About a year ago a student of mine who had to take a break from studies due to Long Covid sat down with me to compare what they’d learned from a Long Covid clinic.

Let me back up. After I got Covid, while the worst of it faded, the fuzzy, logy, hard to focus mental ‘fog’ (and what a minimizing description ‘fog’ is for this, it’s like mental debilitation) that came with it (what you get with a long flu, or that slowness you feel when you have a horrible viral infection but are still working) just never went away.

It got to the point where I learned symbolic logical statements so I could use a piece of paper to reason through complicated subjects because I couldn’t process it in my head on the fly like I have for most of my life.

The first break I had was treating the brain fog like a traumatic brain injury. In fact, taking NAC and guanfacine was the first moment I stopped feeling like I was mentally drowning (see NIH article about combining NAC and guanfacine for TBI here) and got me to treading water.

It took a year to find that combo, and after months of it, I felt like I could start piecing some life back together.

In that first year walking left me gasping and winded at times. My single flight of stairs up to the bedroom some nights required me to pull myself up with the handrail when tired because my legs would feel wobbly enough I worried about being a fall risk. But as my head started to clear a bit, things slowly, slowly, improved. I started walking to work again.

But I wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, back to anything near normal. I was just able to muddle through.

My doctor and I tried a few other things after the guanfacine/NAC combo, hoping to get me out past just treading water and to thriving. Nothing worked as well as g/NAC.

Until I sat down with that student, and they ran through some of the things they’d heard about. And then they said “but what saved my life was LDN.”

“What’s LDN?”

According to a couple of Long Covid clinic program directors I’ve emailed with, a sizable number of patients are having positive results from low-dose naltrexone.

Naltrexone is a drug that is usually used for alcohol and opioid addicts. At the 50-80mg level, it interferes with the pleasure pathways. But what is also interesting about it is that it is also a really good anti-inflammatory.

At the 3-4.5mg level, people are taking it off-label to ‘lengthen life’ by reducing inflammation. It’s also being used off-label by doctors to tackle persistent inflammation. And several researchers I’ve talked to think that Long Covid is a persistent post-viral infection: ie those of us with Long Covid never really beat it, it’s still lurking down in the atomic level fucking with our chemistry and causing inflammation.

In the brain.

Which is why you can’t think.

I started LDN when I got back from Scotland in January. I very, very slowly titrated up from .5mg a day in January, to 1.5mg in early February, to 3mg in early March, and in mid March I finally hit 4.5mg.

I’ve made no other medicinal changes, and I would say about 60-70% of the brain fog is gone now. I’ve only been at 4.5mg for the last couple weeks, but I’ve done more in the last two weeks than I have in the last year or two.

I’m a little overtired today, I may have overdone it.

But people are starting to comment “you seem energetic” or “you seem more talkative” or “you seem like you’re more on top of things.”

Yes. All true.

If you are struggling with Long Covid, LDN is no guarantee. The number I have been given anecdotally was 50% of patients seem to respond at some level to it. But if you have this beast, you know that even a coin flip is worth checking into.

LDN studies and scientific sources:

Low-dose Naltrexone Improves post-COVID-19 condition Symptoms: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38267326

Low-dose naltrexone and NAD+ for the treatment of patients with persistent fatigue symptoms after COVID-19: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10862402/

New Study Supports Using Naltrexone to Treat Long Covid: https://solvecfs.org/new-study-supports-using-naltrexone-to-treat-long-covid/ (this study said 3/4!)

That should be enough to get you started to talk to doctors. I don’t think it’s a cure, if it’s post-viral, we’re still infected, and there’s probably going to have to be some sort of anti-viral combination (much like AIDs cocktails) to beat this out of us.

But LDN has given me my brain back in the last two weeks.

And I’m so grateful. It’s been a long, dark, exhausting two years since I first got sick.

Short story sale: ‘In the Halls of the Makeshift King’ to Asimov’s

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

So this is exciting for me. I signed a contract for my short story ‘In the Halls of the Makeshift King’ to Asimov’s Magazine.

If you’ve paid close attention on Bluesky, you’ll know that I’ve been struggling with what seems to be Long Covid since I got Covid in summer of 2022. After almost three weeks laid up in a dark room, eating cinnamon fire-hots to taste something besides metallic foil in my mouth, when Covid broke I couldn’t quite shake that malaise you get when down with the flu for a few days after.

That exhausted feeling never went away. And what they call ‘brain fog’ didn’t either. I struggled to think my way out of a wet paper bag.

Thankfully, I have an extensive notes system I use to generate new ideas. But the actual writing was tough. In the two years after I got Covid I struggled to keep up. With life. Chores. Writing. My job.

I wrote a few stories in that time, I created the opening of a new novel, but it would leave me exhausted. I would nap extra for days, exhausted by the work, after simple writing and brainstorming sessions.

Ever read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes? It’s a book about someone with limited intellectual capacity who gets a drug to reverse it. By the time it’s in full swing, the main character becomes not just ‘normal’ but genius smart. The back half of the book is about the slow descent of the main character, told through journal entries in his voice, from genius back to minimal intellectual capacity.

That’s what the last two years felt like for me. I wrote in my journal a lot about Flowers during this time.

The four stories I’ve written in the last two years have required everything from me in terms of energy, ability, and I’ve used every technical technique and trick I have learned in 30 years of doing this to get a story done.

In short, I’ve dragged myself across the finish line via determination.

In the Halls of the Makeshift King was originally commissioned, however due to my Long Covid, even after four extensions, I was still a thousand words short by their drop dead date. I was gutted.

But I kept pushing forward on the story, as I liked it. And I finished it, revised it, and I sent it out.

At the start of my career one of the bucket list items on my career bingo sheet was to sell stories to all the ‘big three’ magazines (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog SF, and Asimov’s). I sold a short story to Analog in 2002, right at the start. Some years back I sold a story to F&SF, getting a step closer to my bingo.

After I revised ‘In the Halls…’ I decided to take a big swing and send it out to Asimov’s in the hope I could get a career bingo.

It’s been a long road due to Covid, but there are some wins along the way.

This was one.

Over the last few months I’ve been lucky enough that we found something that helps my symptoms, and the last two months have been utterly, deeply, encouraging. I’ve gotten more done in the last couple months than in the last two years.

But this story will hold a special place for me, as it is one of the hardest projects I’ve ever dragged across the finish line, fighting brain fog, exhaustion, and despair to get it finished.

It’s nice that I’m writing more, doing more, organizing more, and feeling more like myself each week.

This story, when it comes out, will be a personal victory for me. One of the few pieces I finished during my struggle with the worst of Long Covid. And it completes a milestone I had hoped to hit one day in my career.

Testing Bluesky integration on the new site

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I’m in the process of updating the site (see the previous posts) and am testing the Bluesky integration of a plugin. I’m hoping to set it up so that Bluesky comments show up in the comments, but one thing at a time.

I still have a lot of links and content to update here as well, but, it’s feeling like home again around here.