A Duolingo panel with both French and English for “They all wanted to be the king of the seven kingdoms.”

I guess I’ll be ready to talk about George R.R. Martin in time for #WorldCon in Montreal.

As Colbert used to say, the facts have a well-known liberal bias.

This essay felt, to me, like the most illuminating thing I'd seen on the accusations against Gaiman. I highly recommend reading it, though it is the length of a small book.

This would be horrific no matter what it was referring to. But "cleaning up the risk pool" by eliminating vaccines just means you kill a bunch of people WHILE ALSO creating a whole new "risk pool" of people with post-viral issues.

I want to see a road-trip buddy movie about Hildegard of Bingen and Margery Kempe, played by Beavis and Butthead. A grad school classmate proposed it a quarter century ago, and it still makes me bust out laughing any time I hear any of them mentioned.

"particularly" is a funny way to spell "exclusively"

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

I’ve known his name a long time, but not read him. How did I never hear he’d written a book on H.D.? I wrote my dissertation on her. He’d fallen out of that conversation by the time I started to read my way into it in the mid 1990s. I’ll have to track it down, and Lady of the Bees, too. Thanks!

So many times when my kids were little, random strangers would hold the door open for my double stroller or whatever, saying, “I remember when mine were that age.” And now that my boys are taller than me, I get to be one of those random strangers for new parents.

Always worth waiting for the punch line with you!

It’s not that bad, really. The bureaucracy required to get a university to change my status from out-of-state to in-state was harder on my dignity and took way longer, and that didn’t even protect me from cancer. Just go do it!

Not that you were asking for advice, but I got a good laugh when I saw that suggestion. I wish I could remember whose it was.

One of the most useful-to-me tips I’ve seen about dealing with a toxic inner voice is to play back what it says in the voice of Donald Trump. This works because you know that guy’s always lying, and if the toxic inner voice is saying something he would say, I can throw it off more easily.

Sanitation Engineer to the Rescue! (My Rescue, Specifically; My Characters Are Still in Peril.) | Sarah Avery Get more from Sarah Avery on Patreon

Wrote a blog post for Patreon backers about research for the heroic garbage men book, and the indispensable help my friendly neighborhood sanitation engineer.
#SFF #Fantasy #Fiction #AmWriting #AmResearching
www.patreon.com/posts/155877...

a group of people standing on stairs with a r2d2 robot in the background Alt: The final shot from Star Wars: A New Hope, at the end of the award ceremony, with Luke and Han wearing medals around their necks, with Princess Leia behind them in her royal finery, their robots shiny-clean beside them, and Chewbacca roaring in celebration.

My kid's patrol of 9 all reached Eagle Scout this year. The ones who finished early waited for their Court of Honor ceremony until they'd all made it, so they could be awarded together. It looked like any other suburban Scout potluck in a school's cinderblock gym, but this is what it felt like:

A film adaptation that launches the careers of at least two young actors, such that in 40 years when people watch it (because it’s a classic), they say, “Oh my god, look at those two! They were so young when they were in this!”

When people are about to make some reflexive joke at New Jersey’s expense, I want them to stop themselves because they’re momentarily afraid of giving their power over to the villainous egregore in my novel.

the basic theory of DOGE was that if powerful people said it was fine it didn’t matter what the law said.

I think proving that theory wrong is worth significant effort

Despite my former agent using Zelazny as one of a whole lot of comps for my trunked epic fantasy novel.

To my great embarrassment, I have never read Roger Zelazny.

Earthsea is so good! You’ve got a treat ahead of you. I started reading Sanderson when I got a free copy of Way of Kings at a con where he was GOH. Maybe I’d have liked Mistborn if I’d started there, maybe not. I see why other people like it, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

How to fix a cat YouTube video by WVW

I also quite liked their "How to Fix a Cat" video, which is every official troubleshooting tutorial ever:
youtu.be/3e6motL4QMc?...

How a Garbage Truck works YouTube video by WVW

For my #fantasy novel about sanitation workers fighting supernatural villainy in New Jersey, I needed to double-check how my heroes' truck would empty at the landfill. YouTube offered me this charmingly hallucinatory animation, which I commend to you all. #ResearchGoneAwry
youtu.be/JHuv75-gsCA?...

The novel I thought I was embarking on and described in my grant application drifted quite a ways once it really got rolling.

BALINT: Are you trying to get revenge on states that did not vote for your boss?

VOUGHT: What's interesting about your question is Joe Biden--

BALINT: Oh, for goodness' sake!

Image of the proposed 466 mile citywide bike network in Milan being built for $285M.

This is more than 11x the amount that Minneapolis has spent on bike infrastructure in the past decade.

Milan GDP: $250B
Mpls GDP: $350B

For comparison, the 494 expansion from Edina to Richfield will cost $377M. 494/35W interchange: $255 million.

We can have nice things. We just choose not to.

NYT article on Mrs. Bezos and this in screenshot: ‪More Perfect Union‬ ‪@moreperfectunion.bsky.social‬ · 21m A worker died at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon last week. For more than an hour, workers were instructed to continue working as the man lay dead. One worker wanted to help, but a manager told them to “Just turn around and not look. Let’s get back to work," according to @thewesternedge.bsky.social .

Your post about the World's Longest Press Release appeared like this in my feed.

It’s hard to really explain how much hospital distances affect whether people live or die but a 10 km (~6 mi) increase in distance to the hospital increases the death rate for *everyone* in the community by ~1%, and as high as +10% per 10 km for certain conditions, and gets worse the farther it is

Boosting the signal for the Locus fundraiser -- as Charlie Jane says, there are 2 days left for them to reach their $ goal and they have a long way to go. If folks can help them get there, Locus does so many amazing things consistently for genre fiction writers around the world 🙏🏻

I especially love the line she renders as “Fate will fuck you up.”