somewhat obsessed with the weather

No Future

Acrylic painting on wood

what I read in May 2026

Today Angela Boord reviews @oleandercraw's upcoming novel, Devouring Fortune! 🐉

"Easily the best book I’ve read this year, trad or indie … a character-driven dark science fantasy standalone that absolutely breathes its world."

I haven't talked about DEVOURING FORTUNE much here on Tumblr but the Kickstarter launches June 8th for my deeply strange salty book.

This commission was for my queer dark fantasy serial, THE WARDS WILL FALL, which is releasing a chapter a week through my newsletter.

Farseer meets Asunder in this queer dark fantasy about a melancholic seer, possessed by a spirit, who must solve the mystery of the return of ancient magic before his soul is consumed.

This one is definitely for anyone who enjoys a messed up body sharing situationship.

"What is this book?????" i hear you ask.

It is this book by @lincodega!!! PASHA THE STORM!!!!!! The year's absolute best pirate fantasy novel which will blow your tits clean off. I got to read an advance copy and i am here to tell you that it Slaps it Slaps it fully fully Slaps.

It comes out on June 30th, so you should go read it right now and tell your friends who liked Black Sails, Our Flag Means Death, or Running Close to the Wind (For fans of the latter: Imagine if Avra Helvaci was an old woman. This is the kind of horny chaos gremlin energy we're talking about. Everyone around Pasha is like "Pasha no" and Pasha is like "PASHA YES!!!!!!!!")

SUMMARY: An exiled pirate queen hunts a killer whale on the high seas, while caught between a power-hungry empress and a revolutionary conspiring to end her reign . . . Pasha the Northern Storm was once the most infamous Meridian pirate who ever sailed the sister oceans. Now, a decade into her exile, Pasha’s afterlife is being held hostage by Atle, an absurdly attractive noble who knows far too much about pirate magic—but not enough about sailing to realize how dangerous Pasha really is. Minister Atle Itaavar is duty-bound to serve the Kingdom of Garda, but as Queen Thivaldís gathers support for her ambitions of empire, Atle turns to treason to stop her. In order to destroy the Queen’s new necromantic navy, Atle plans to steal the Queen’s flagship, kidnap a washed-up pirate to sail it, and track down a legendary killer whale to bring it down.  But the hunt for the great undying whale drags Pasha, Atle, and the crew of the Dog into a cosmic reckoning as they face threats from ghosts and gods alike—and the Queen of Garda is close behind.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.