A deliberately varied final batch, literary criticism, database tooling, marketing fundamentals, and a few shorter picks.
Matthew Claxton’s Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post-Sci-Fi? is a rich, long-form essay on genre fiction’s identity. The core argument: traditional genre-machine science fiction, the publisher-editor-convention feedback loop started by Hugo Gernsback, is slowing down, while science fictional premises and tropes are thriving in literary fiction. The Ministry of Time, Orbital, Sea of Tranquility, these books would never have been shelved in the sci-fi section, but they’re indisputably science fiction in their premises. The tension he identifies is subtle and real: post-sci-fi borrows from the genre but can’t sustain the experimental iteration that the genre machinery enables. A melancholy read for anyone who grew up in the hothouse. As someone working on a sci-fi project, I found it unsettling in the best way.
pgAdmin 4.9.13 quietly shipped an AI Assistant Panel in the query tool. You can now type natural language questions about your data and get SQL back, with context from your schema. It supports both OpenAI and generic OpenAI-compatible endpoints, which means you can point it at a local model if you don’t want your schema leaving your machine. Small thing, but genuinely useful if pgAdmin is already part of your workflow.
Moz’s Digital PR Strategy whiteboard video covers the fundamentals of earning editorial links through PR rather than buying them, finding genuinely newsworthy angles in your business, building relationships with journalists in your vertical, and creating content that gives reporters something worth citing. It’s a Whiteboard Friday so the pacing is methodical, but if you’re thinking about link building with substance behind it rather than directory submissions and guest posts, this is a solid framework.
A quick note on #23, Melvyn’s tweet linked directly is a short take that sparked a good thread. Worth clicking through for the discussion, which goes into more depth than the original post.
And for those of you running PostgreSQL-heavy applications and not yet using pgAdmin’s newer features: the 9.x releases have been quietly excellent. The AI assistant is one feature; the improved query plan visualization is another. Worth upgrading if you’re on an older version.