This is lovely. Reminds me of Kawase Hasui in the best way.

A hand holding a light grey snail shell and a dark grey fossil ammonite, nearly the same size.

Found on the same beach.

Carving my next story onto a series of potatoes as we speak.

Wow, this is possibly one of the nicest things anyone has said about my work.

Sometimes I think about how nice it would be to be a factory-fresh robot so I could be entirely encased in the shaped packing foam they use for fragile electronics. It seems like it would be really relaxing.

Done, and thank you for the continuing reminders.

No, which seems kind of weird now that I think about it, because I do have scars from scratching mosquito bites too much, so I scarred pretty easily, and I sure fell off my bike a lot.

How AI is Ruining the Electric Grid YouTube video by Wendover Productions

I have indeed, and coincidentally just watched one of Denby's videos last night where he discusses what AI is doing to the electric grid (spoiler: bad things). www.youtube.com/watch?v=3__H...

GM: Charisma check.

Mamdani: [rolls natural 20]

GM: that’s a d6 how did you

Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

Fund every minority language initiative I can find. Early education programs, bilingual street signs, book/video publishers, a bunch of linguistics grad students to go round remote villages with recording gear - every endangered language gets every possible chance to be preserved.

Reading Gary Gibson's "Final Days" and coming to the conclusion that I don't understand how closed timelike curves are supposed to work at all.

A snowy footbridge with dramatic shadows. The bay is entirely frozen all the way to the island on the horizon.

Shadows at the footbridge.

One of the exceptions is that the signs on buses telling you to move back say "A little further please" so that people don't vandalize "farther" with a sharpie in the obvious way.

You're moving?? Oh wow. I hope this is a good thing?

It was only a 35lb draw too; you wouldn't think it would be strong enough!

Caught one of my braids with the bowstring while shooting with a longbow, which yanked out enough hair to make my scalp bleed.

One of my favourite inexpensive handicraft hobbies to recommend to people is whittling; all you need is a cheap pocketknife and there are free sticks *everywhere*.

(ogles $95 chisel: okay yes there are upgrades)

Silhouette of Batman from Batman: The Animated Series

Were 90s kids clamoring for a Batman cartoon with 1930s Art Deco aesthetics? Is that what the market demanded? Or did some really smart creative people have a vision and make a genre-defining hit that sustained 20 years of TV shows? If you want success look for vision, not just metrics.

Once again I am reminded, just slightly too late, that when combining a bunch of dry ingredients plus oil, all the dry ingredients can be dumped into the sifter together but the oil really should not be.

The Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's) YouTube video by Library of Congress

The other being, of course, Professor Welton's Boxing Cats.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qre...

Today in “Dudes Rock”:

A dude playing Dire Straits’s “Sultans of Swing” guitar solo on…a recorder.

Downwards view of bare tree past photographer's leg

treeeee

View through bare branches at a stone building, from about the safe height as its roof. The photographer's other hand is gripping a branch.

This is a tiny park but very nice.

A view out through bare branches at a neighbourhood street in late autumn, from about five metres up

I feel so much more exposed climbing trees at this time of year, but honestly, people still almost never look up.

Blessed are those who catalogue minutia, for they shall know the names of the stars.

A hatching turtle about the size of a human fingertip, in the bottom half of its shell, with its head fully retracted.

When baby turtles are in their shells, their heads are fully retracted, and when they hatch the heads pop out of their bodies like *sproing*

In many countries (sadly not the US) the author gets additional payment, the Public Lending Right, for their books being in libraries. If you feel bad about it (which you shouldn't; most authors love libraries!) and are in the US, consider helping campaign for the PLR there.

Most humans (80-90%) have a vestigial wrist tendon, the palmaris longus tendon, that doesn't really do much, although in various related species (e.g. orangutans) it is still important. If a person needs a tendon graft, this is usually the one that's used if present, since it's basically a spare.

Scintillation is a small convention in Montreal in June, focused on reading and writing SF and fantasy. It is a lot of fun, and all people of goodwill who like reading and talking about books are welcome. Membership for 2026 is now open

www.scintillation.ca

I don't know if this is worse than the poutine-kebabs, but it's definitely in the same category of WHAT.