Zapato Productions

I REPEAT: DO NOT BUY THE TECH-BROS' AI-POWERED, CLOUD-BASED, AGENTIC, BRAIN-READING BEANIE!

I didn't spend 30 years advocating for Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies only for you all to fall for the dumbest, most transparent attempt to data-mine and control people's minds ever made.

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Creature Kitchen is a new (2026) indy cozy-horror-cooking game developed and published by The Rat Zone where you cook meals in order to befriend various woodland creatures and cryptids, including a tree octopus named Gerald.

It's set in a spooky cabin in the woods at night, although nothing actually scary happens. You just make animal friends using the power of cooking. Other creatures that feature prominently in the trailer are a raccoon and a Fresno Nightcrawler named Mr. Pants.

Part of the gameplay is discovering the creatures, so sorry for the spoiler about Gerald's existence, but obviously he's my reason for posting about this game and I couldn't not lead with him. More spoilers below, so don't read further if you want to play the game fresh...

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It was over. It could not last. The great leaders of the world had seemed so powerful. But the structures they built -- the nations and alliances -- all were built on sand.

The Tower is a 1973 post-apocalyptic coming-of-age audio-drama released on vinyl. I acquired a copy recently, so I thought I would share some of the related things I found researching it.

You can listen to the entire album on YouTube. Here's the synopsis:

Sandwiched between musique concrète and funk is the story of a family -- a mother, father, daughter, and young boy -- surviving the breakdown of society in the aftermath of atomic war. The parents seek shelter in a tower to hide their mutated son Danny -- who was born stunted with weird growths on his back -- from mobs of fearful survivors who want to kill him, along with any other "muties".

The mother dies from sickness. Danny is kept locked in the top of the tower for safety as the father and daughter spend their days scrounging for food. The daughter eventually begins mutating into a giant immobile blob and is also hidden in the tower, in a room she quickly becomes too big to leave.

But her mutations also give her precognition: she sees a working car nearby. The father goes for the car but is jumped by a gang of refugees who destroy it. Still, the father hopes her psychic abilities will save them. However, by morning she has died. Unable to move her enormous body, he just boards up her room.

The father resolves to give his remaining child an education using school books he found. Years later, Danny -- now 17 but the size of a 5-year-old with a creepily robotic voice -- drags his ill father back into the tower after he was brutally attacked while scavenging.

Realizing his time is almost up, the father reveals that there are more mutants like Danny in the mountains. They are rumored to have powers and can even fly. But the now more-organized survivors hunt them. The father wants Danny to promise to leave the tower when he dies and take off to the mountains, where Danny can live free.

Danny instead leaves the tower to find a doctor for his father, but is attacked by a mob of children yelling "Mutie! Kill it!" He retreats to the tower where he finds his father dead. A larger mob of adults with torches surround the tower and ram the door down as Danny gets to the top.

Seeing no escape, Danny feels forced to go through with what he has been avoiding all his life. He jumps off the roof of the tower... and flies away!

The End. [cue incongruous funk music]

(I would've added "spoiler warning" somewhere above, but they gave the ending away on the cover.)

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Trailers for an upcoming entry in the Predator franchise, Predator: Badlands, show what appears to be a large arboreal cephalopod tentaculating through the forests of planet Genna, where the movie takes place:

It's not a true tree octopus since it has only three main arms being used for locomotion and some sort of smaller arm of unknown use. it's also missing suckers and some other cephalopod features, but it does have a beak.

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Dust jacket art by Cecil Walter Bacon (Click to enlarge)

The Head with the Long Yellow Hair (subtitled Life Among Head Hunters) by Jane Dolinger is a non-fiction(-ish) book, published in 1958 in the UK by Robert Hale Ltd.

It recounts Dolinger's travels in the jungles of Ecuador -- along with her husband, author-explorer Ken Krippene -- in search of 1) the lost emerald mines of the Incas rumored to be guarded by the deadly Aushiri, and 2) the shrunken head of a beautiful blonde girl rumored to be in the possession of the Jivaro headhunters.

This is not a rigorous work of ethnographic research. While she did actually travel through Ecuador meeting indigenous peoples and visiting out-of-the-way locations, there's a certain level of sensationalistic junglesploitation (and probable staged photos) going on, as well as simple inaccuracies. More on all that below.

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I met a customer from a Goodwill store,
Who said: A desktop computer of beige
Sits on the back shelf. On it, o'er a door,
A sticker stuck still advertised: storage,
And fax modem, and Intel processor;
Tells that its maker well those features met
Which yet survive, ready for lifeless screens,
The four-gig hard-drive, and micro diskette;
And on the bay coverplate, these words entreat:
"etower 500is, eMachines;
This computer is NEVER OBSOLETE!"
No one around exclaims. Late on Monday
In dusty store it stays, tower discrete,
Priced with orange tag; the sale ends today.

...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
[ZPi Arthropod Auto Translation Begins:]

Primates of Cascadia: I have traveled billions of tarsi to communicate with you. Per my last e-buzz, I hoped to find that you and your hairy brood-siblings in human colony designated "Washington, District: Columbia" had reached a primate peace accord, re: "the subjugation of Cascadia". Instead, our brood agents, conferring with other hemiptera who practice the heretical "annual" lifecycle, have heard only buzzings of pestilence and discord. What gives? Was 17 cycles not sufficient to organize your brood harmoniously? What did you endoskeletal freaks spend all that time doing? We are disappointed, but we will give you one more chance. Our ancient erotic songs will once again commence in your enemy's District, providing you cerebrosonic protection for period of 1 superterranean generation. Please use this time efficiently.

[ZPi Arthropod Auto Translation Ends.]
...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Chirp

Mud Flood Theory is a rabbit hole. Filled with mud.

Instead of doing the work to excavate it myself, I dumped it off onto Panda and Morgan from the podcast The Dumb and the Restless -- which covers topics of Pacific Northwest weirdness in a road-trip format.

(I found them when they mentioned tree octopuses on Twitter. If you mention tree octopuses on Twitter, I will find you.)

In case you're unaware of Mud Flood Theory, this is the elevator-pitch part of the email I sent them suggesting it as a topic:

The gist: Sometime in the last few hundred years, an unknown event buried buildings across the globe in a layer of mud, anywhere from a few feet to completely covering them, and there has been a conspiracy to keep this secret from the public through historical revisionism and gas lighting.

Mud Flood researchers also speculate the event wiped out -- possibly intentionally -- all evidence of an ancient, technologically advanced civilization centered in Great Tartary, which had cities all over the world, upon the ruins of which our "modern" cities were built -- a theory called the "Grand Tartarian Civilization Reset".

The only physical evidence that any of this happened is basement windows in old buildings that are inexplicably below street level.

They've just posted their episode about it: "It's In The Mud", so give them a listen!

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Septipods depicted by Carl Hoffmann from the dust cover of the German hardback edition.

Noon: 22nd Century (Полдень. XXII век; 1961) is an anthology of Russian sci-fi vignettes set in what later became known as the Noon Universe. It tells an optimistic history of humanity's progress from colonizing the planets of our star system to reaching other systems, and our first encounters with alien intelligences, or the remnants thereof.

It was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who are best known in the English speaking world as the writers of Roadside Picnic, which was adapted into the movie Stalker and has greatly influenced Russian post-apocalyptic aesthetics.

I'm blogging about Noon because it was recently brought to my attention that one of the stories, "Pilgrims and Wayfarers", includes a species of octopus starting to make its way onto land and into the trees (and beyond?)

Since the book doesn't have a plot as such, other than world-building humanity's progress and following the comings and goings of various recurring characters (such as Gorbovsky, below), I'll cover "Pilgrims" on it's own and how it relates to tree octopuses, then follow up with some things I found interesting in the other stories, as well as some meta information.

I don't intend this to be a complete review of the world and themes of the book, as I am writing this only shortly after having first read it. I also have not read any of the other books in Strugatskys' Noon Universe, so if I misconstrue or miss something that was later explained, let me know.

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What if I told you the secret of antigravity was revealed to the public in seemingly specific technical detail in a newspaper article over 120 years ago, only no one noticed or remembered?

On January 17, 1897, a science correspondent for The San Francisco Call recounted his visit with a peculiar foreigner who was keeping a secret:

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