Aspen Writes Poetry

There is a quiet absurdity to modern convenience.  We have reached an era where almost every household item, from the humble kettle to the industrial fridge, comes equipped with Wi-Fi,  an app,  and an IP address. But  as recent events across Europe have starkly demonstrated,  hyper-connectivity comes with a catch. In recent months,  cyberattacks targeting industrial cooling systems and smart refrigeration controllers across France,  Belgium,  and beyond have left supermarkets and suppliers facing catastrophic food waste.  Shadowy actors didn't breach physical security or break through warehouse doors with crowbars; instead,  they accessed exposed web panels and default passwords to remotely turn off the frost.  Thousands of tonnes of produce were left to thaw,  ruin,  and rot overnight. It raises a fundamental question:   Why on earth do we need remote, internet-facing control over an appliance whose sole job is to s...

It is a little-known law of the cosmos, and one frequently ignored by animals who ought to know better, that if you invite a monster into your garden to settle a dispute with your neighbour,  the monster rarely leaves when the dispute is finished.  In fact,  it usually stays,  builds a conservatory,  and renames the garden after itself. The Horse,  who lived in an olive grove that had belonged to his family for three hundred years,  had a problem.  His neighbour,  the Stag,  kept grazing on his grass.  It was a minor,  stubborn disagreement over borders,  the sort of thing that ought to have been settled over tea,  or at least a long,  tedious meeting of the Local Meadow Board. Instead,  the Horse went looking for an ally.  He found the Man. The Man was sitting on a crate,  polishing a very shiny,  very expensive rifle,  and wearing a coat tailored in a distant,  wealthy capital acro...

It is an ancient and widely documented fact across the galaxy that bridges are fundamentally unreasonable places to host an argument. In the  The Municipal Authority’s Very Honest Pocket Dictionary of Civics  a bridge is defined as:   “A clever, engineering-based solution to getting over something damp, which is almost immediately ruined by two idiots who encounter each other in the middle.” The bridge in question was extraordinarily narrow,  spanned a chasm of terrifying proportions,  and was designed to hold exactly one medium-sized goat at a time.  It was not designed to hold two ego-driven,  aggressively opinionated mammalian heavyweights experiencing simultaneous,  acute delusions of absolute omnipotence. From the Western side of the chasm trotted the  Orange Goat . The Orange Goat had a magnificent,  sweeping tuft of golden hair that looked like it had been spun by a confused silk-moth experiencing a panic attack.  He was very...

it does not require a degree in politics to recognise a dying child stop dressing terror in diplomatic silk name the grief before the grief erases us all.

  The Guild of Builders did not,  as a rule,  admit pigs.  This was not due to speciesism, Ankh-Morpork was a progressive city where trolls ran banks and zombies were respected members of the civil service, but rather because pigs had a somewhat cavalier attitude toward load-bearing walls and building permits. Pig One (whose name was Barnaby,  though in the heavier,  noisier music venues around the Mended Drum he answered to  Swinestock ) stood back to admire his masterpiece.  It was a house made entirely of straw. It is an established fact across the universe that straw is a wonderful material for hats,  scarecrows,  and farm animals to sleep on,  but a distinctly suboptimal choice for keeping out atmospheric weather or hungry apex predators. “It’s organic, ” Barnaby grunted,  tuning his three-string bass guitar.  “It’s sustainable.  It’s got a real earthy, cosmic-folk-thrash vibe.  Plus,  I saved four hund...