About



The Mumpsimus is a personal blog created by me, Matthew Cheney, in 2003. This site serves as the archives from that time until its 20th anniversary in 2023.

In the autumn of 2022, I began to convert the blog to a Patreon newsletter. I stopped cross-posting between the Patreon and The Mumpsimus on August 18, 2023. The Patreon is now its own thing and The Mumpsimus is a historical artifact.

The Mumpsimus will not be updated, so you can expect dead links, broken images, weird digital artifacts, clunky formatting, and general ruin. To try to prevent some of this, I have changed the template to the simplest one Blogger offers, but everything is impermanent.

The site is also archived at the Web Archive here, which allows you to see the various forms The Mumpsimus has taken over the years.

For a full history of the blog and a guide to its contents, see the final (20th anniversary) post on this site, the Archive Dive posts on Patreon, and the series of 10th anniversary posts here.

I hope if you are interested in the kinds of things The Mumpsimus has been about that you will check out the Patreon.

For more about me, see my personal website, matthewcheney.net.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

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The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

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Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

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The Snowtown Murders

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