Cosy TV murder mystery alert: Bookish. HBO Max. Starring Mark Gattis and cowritten by Gattis and Matthew Sweet. Set in (just) post-WW2 London, with an improbable but delightful bookseller and wallpaper seller married couple solving murders with wit and enthusiasm. Loved it. #Bookish #Murder #Cosy
Is it in my nature to ignore that I misspelled Quetzalcoatlus? It is not.
T-Rex and Spinosaurus are all very well, but it's the Quetzacoatlus for me.
Tracking map for tropical cyclone Narelle, off the coast of Western Australia.
Narelle, the cyclone threatening the east coast and North Queensland a few days ago, has now traversed the entire northern coast, turned into a low, arrived off the western coast of the continent, reformed into a cyclone, and is expected to menace the entire western coast. Australia, eh?
So, #StarTrek #StarfleetAcademy is cancelled. Online hate strangles every new thing. Academy was imperfect, everything is, but many of us enjoyed it on its own terms & found it good. The cast were flat-out terrific, but everyone involved did a great job.
Life in the age of, I don't know, whatever this is, has inclined me to believe that the sexiest human characteristic is competence.
Track map for tropical cyclone Narelle, currently crossing the Far North Queensland coast/
Tropical cyclone Narelle. This monster's crossing the coast to my north as we speak. Sustained winds of 195 kph and gusts of 270 kph, which is pretty scary. Wishing hard for the safety of everyone in its path. (Last night, its gusts reached 315 kph. I can't even.)
I may be guilty of a certain amount of clunk, but behold! I've posted my first proper article to Substack, for anyone to read who dares. Basically, applying sociology to your fiction characters. jamesmilton109935.substack.com/p/stronger-c...
It is absolutely mental that we have thousands of stars and exoplanets that are now legit places. I'll never get completely used to it (heck, I'm not used to it with Mars, and we have more photos of the Martian surface than I have of some places I've lived).
Decided to give Substack a go. Don't mind it, but it's not exactly ... intuitive. Still, if a new writer ever says to me, "Ancient One, what is a try/fail cycle?" I can just tell them, "Go and set up a Substack account and this knowledge will be yours." Maybe I just need more sleep.
Overall, #StarFleetAcademy had a good first season. No real lows, not many real highs (though, for me, The Life of the Stars was a very high indeed). It was solid, very beautiful to look at, and crammed to bursting with outstanding actors performing their socks off. Looking forward to season 2.
I enjoyed the #StarTrek #StarFleetAcademy finale. Stellar performances from all, and a feast of Tig Notaro. If I had a complaint, it would be that I just don’t get where the Doctor got his info about the omega particles. Doesn’t ruin the ep for me, but it does seem an awful lot like from nowhere?
If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!
Exactly that. I like my character wins to be kind of a reflexive process of coming to terms with the limits and costs of winning in a complicated human world embedded in an uncaring physical universe. Winning being a remission rather than a cure or anaesthetic, I guess.
For my nicer protagonists, I best like a happy ending though showing the character not there yet, instead trapped in a melancholy transitional moment of reflection on their losses & need to grow. I also love the Frodo, "I saved the Shire but not for me..." thing.
That said, I'm also a Dr Who fan, where lately finales are great 1st episodes followed by howling catastrophe conclusions, so if Academy manages to end its first season with two modestly good episodes, I'll take that as a win.
Didn't mind part one of the #StarTrek #StarfleetAcademy finale, but it didn't quite measure up to the best Trek finales. I missed a lot of characters, found the action muted (the Athena's arrival wasn't as cool as I think they thought it), but I still loved the characters/actors. Maybe high B-tier.
True that. But it's a beautiful place, too. I recollect once standing atio a hill I'd rock-climbed in Northwest QLD, and gaping at the view (reds to shame Mars), and a rock wallaby literally jumped at me and nearly kicked me off the cliff. Australia: love it, but always be situationally aware.
Mind you, I live in Australia, so wherever you live there's something.
My region has giant underground cockroaches, giant underground tarantulas (that whistle) and meliodosis in the soil ... all of which rise up to menace the living when it rains. We're nearing the end of a summer of severe storms and flooding. And I *moved* here. Kind of questioning my life choices.
I would normally claim not to be a romance reader (I'm so not). That said, circumstances drove me to read #DianaGabaldon's #Outlander and the series hooked me hard. Heck, the scene in the most recent book where Claire ... comes into her own ... is magnificent. Worth a read no matter what you like.
The doomscrolling feels particularly doomy today.
Of course they want to use Grok.
Trump Orders Government to Stop Using Anthropic After Pentagon Standoff www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/u...
Following along with the quarrel between Anthropic and the Pentagon and noting the word "warfighter". Is this new? I feel we already had a word for that. Several.
Well, IMO, #StarTrek #StarfleetAcademy S1E8 was absolutely & breathtakingly good. I'd consider it one of the best Trek episodes ever. Beautifully crafted & performed. Excellent use of the Doctor and Sam, Mary Wiseman's Tilly was pitch perfect, & it had real substance. Can't praise it enough.
Not sure how the #XFiles reboot can work in an age where the cospiracies are pretty much out in the open, the government is into UAPs, and the truth is neither out there nor anywhere else. "Crazy Mulder" is mostly going to be the sanest person in the room. Wish them well, though.
A line graph with three points of information. At left, the word "Writing." In the center: "I haven't written in too many days, it's over, it's so over, I'm never finishing this and I'll never write again." To the right of that: "Writing again" with a happy face
The Graph of Eternal Hope is cross disciplinary.
Loving in #Music right now: #Ren's "Vincent's Tale" series of songs (link to the first below, but it continues through a few more videos). Genius stuff; very much music deployed consciously as art.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ1M...
A great analysis of the meaning of AI to creatives. Ignore the combative thumbnaill--the video is pretty realistic and encouraging.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkNd...
Tentative but still really interesting... www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyac...