Well, "balsamic" obviously suggests balsa wood, and "glaze" refers to glass, so it's quite clearly a window with a flimsy wooden frame. I don't know why it's on your chicken though. (I am a Man on the Internet, I know how to Explain things.)
Arts and sciences person, very unprofessional SFF writer and reviewer, blogs at stevejwright.com. Mastodon @stevejwright@c.im
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Well, "balsamic" obviously suggests balsa wood, and "glaze" refers to glass, so it's quite clearly a window with a flimsy wooden frame. I don't know why it's on your chicken though. (I am a Man on the Internet, I know how to Explain things.)
It would be tempting to conclude from this that L. Ron Hubbard was not human. But of course, he was: he was a human being who was paid by the word. (My project of reading and reviewing all of John W. Campbell's "Unknown" had me reading a lot of Hubbard's early fantasy.)
Thrilled to report that I share a birth year with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, ischemic stroke, and oxycodone.
:: tries to contrive some sort of double entendre out of "dynamic entrepreneurship" and "technology stacks", fails, gives up ::
Makes me look at LinkedIn in a whole new light, too.
UK politicians and media have stirred up so much hatred. Time to say: NO. Time to reclaim British values of fairness, tolerance and compassion
I think I've said before that the feral wapiti is my nemesis in this respect. (I always thought that "feral" had a long "e" and the stress on "wapiti" was on the second syllable. Until I said the words where people could hear me.)
Good morning Womble. Currently dipping into "The Elemental", a 1919 collection of ghost stories by the splendidly named Ulric Daubeny.
:: looks at thread :: :: looks at list :: Um... if we're talking about guilds in space and such... where's Cordwainer Smith and "Scanners Live in Vain"?
The Kinks fighting the Westboro Baptist Church.
Robert Ardrey's "Worlds Beginning" and Austin Tappan Wright's extraordinary "Islandia" project are speculative fiction, but aren't connected to the "SF genre". SF is, was, and always will be bigger than any one group of writers. And I for one am glad of it.
And this is *just in the English speaking world*. And there is a *lot* going on in other languages and other nations - France, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, Argentina... Even in the USA, speculative fiction wasn't confined to the magazines....
There's a host of writers in this period who were working on the fringes of the SF genre - C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Aldous Huxley, to name but three. Public intellectuals like J.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane dipped their toes into SF without compromising their dignity....
(Drat, hit "post" too soon. Or maybe too late.) Hugo Gernsback's SF magazines started with an explicit call, by Gernsback, for - basically - H.G. Wells fanfic. Wells is someone to look at here - a foundational SF writer, but also important for his non-genre and non-fiction work...
Even writers who supposedly epitomized the "Golden Age" tradition began well outside it. Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" was published in 1912. And, although it was first published in "Amazing Stories", E.E. "Doc" Smith began his "Skylark of Space" in 1915....
Jules Verne's classics of space, undersea, and subterranean exploration pre-date the pulps by decades. H.G. Wells codified tropes like time travel, alien invasion, uplifted animals, all in one madly productive decade at the end of Victoria's reign....
as the start point of the genre, in *1818*. But he acknowledged that was a subjective decision, and you could make just as good a case for Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World" (1666), Cyrano de Bergerac's "L'Autre Monde" (1657), or even Thomas More's "Utopia" (1516)....
I'm going to throw my opinion in on this: SF is not now a discrete and cohesive genre, and it *never was*. There has *always* been more going on with SF, and the fringes of SF, than just the writers of the pulp era and their heirs. Brian Aldiss picked Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"....
Or why.
Well, I clicked through and viewed the images, and now my laptop screen is cursed. I hope you're happy.
THERE'LL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL
Only my laptop! Though that seems quite heavy enough right now....
Bought on Kindle: 1.20 am. Finished reading: 9.28 am. Since I had to fit in a few hours for sleep and recharging the Kindle... I think it's safe to say this is a gripping story, all right.
... and ordered. (Little bit of Hookland in the post? Sounds good to me!)
And me. He won my mum over when I went to one of his book signings and he asked me if I was a "v" or a "ph" Stephen - an act of simple courtesy from a busy man, and it quite charmed her. (And, yes, I still have the book.)
Just ask them when Atlantis was destroyed, and enjoy the look on their faces as they try to retcon.
Current mood.
With the hell of war he's come to grips, Policing up the filter tips, It makes a fellow proud to be a soldier! - Tom Lehrer (RIP)
"How dare these killjoys interfere with a British tradition! We demand the right to exhale loudly in a confined space with several hundred other people!" *Literally*, they put "making a patriotic noise" ahead of the health of, y'know, actual British people.
I'm reminded of the Last Night of the Proms, back in 2020, when lockdown restrictions (and plain common sense) looked like they would put paid to traditional elements like mass singing of "Rule Britannia". And the "plastic patriots" were duly incensed....
Oh, quite a decent one - dwelt on the jacket's long service to the community, etc. Ended with a note to the dependents: "The jacket leaves behind it a shirt, a pair of underpants, and one sock."
Buried in a pauper's grave, like I will be myself one day. Reminds me of a guy I knew at uni, who was very attached to an old and threadbare jacket. When his girlfriend finally got him to throw it out, someone put an obituary for it in the student newspaper.
Fellow UK peeps, please spread this one around (if you haven't already.)
:) I wonder how the Rev is doing these days? (Regrettably, I no longer have the high visibility shirt.)
I liked that one. Or those three. I haven't dared to watch the film adaptation....
Site for vegetarian fake meat products? You mean QuornHub. Site for meeting the weavers of your fate? You mean NornHub. Site for meeting those tall guys from Malacandra (aka Mars)? You mean SornHub. Site for hoping I'm going to stop this? You mean ForlornHub.
Site that lets you chat to that guy on Deep Space Nine? You mean MornHub.
:sigh: I knew this would happen. See here: stevejwright.com/2023/02/16/n... I'm beginning to wonder if I've been cursed by Apollo, like Cassandra.
It is more than double that (25°C) here. This is outrageous. THIS IS AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY DAMMIT. It's supposed to be raining and miserable! Must be the fault of immigrants, of course. Coming over here, bringing their nice sunny weather with them....
@bbcnewsnight.bsky.social please tell BBC News we’re sick of 4 MP Party Reform being rammed down our throats daily with drivel like this👇🏼report The @libdems.org.uk have 72 MPs, Greens 4, SNP 9 but they don’t get a look in 🤷🏼♂️ Soon BBC News will report what Farage has for breakfast 🙄
Audio does not *quite* give the full "Feersum Endjinn" experience. Some would say this is not a bad thing.
Haven't read "Deathless" yet, though with a recommendation like that, well, I must give it a look. I was introduced to Valente through "Radiance", which I remember reviewing on my blog. (Sample of my critical acumen appended.)
And we wish for many more to come.
Good morning Womble. Just finished "Palimpsest" by @catvalente.bsky.social , just started "Saint Death's Herald" by @csecooney.bsky.social . Safe to say I'm enjoying myself.
Too true, alas. I think I could go to A&E with an axe sticking out of my head, and the first thing they'd do is test me for diabetes. It is hard work getting them to look at the health problems I *actually have*....
A, usually. Though I'm never entirely consistent.
At a guess, the Afghan refugees stuck in hotels waiting to have their acts of bravery for British soldiers honoured will have done immeasurably more for this country than the shits spray painting roundabouts with a can of wrong colour paint they probably stole from Halfords.
So sad that this poor woman knew the misery of prison life, just for (checks notes) urging far-right thugs to burn whole families alive in their beds.
Has anyone thought of combining the two? Armoured trains were a thing, after all, and a Warhammer (or WH40K) one would be quite a sight to see.
A veteran US Navy SEAL reflects on Gaza dbarkhuff.substack.com/p/i-should-b...
Charing Cross Road... well, it *was* the place to find bookshops, second-hand and new, of all kinds. When I was going in to London regularly. Which is rather longer ago than I care to think about, now.
The good die young.
Well, if you keep writing them, I'm going to keep recommending them. (I should get started on "Herald" by the weekend.)
A few people (mistakenly) think I look like I know where I'm going?
I'm not going to choose among my top three: "Saint Death's Daughter" by @csecooney.bsky.social "The Vengeance" by @emmanewman.bsky.social "How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying" by @djangowexler.bsky.social (I mean, why do one book recommendation when I can do three?)
2 is interesting - OK, the giant freighter airships have not come to pass, but the standard-sized freight containers actually have.
I'm also reminded of the time an online friend, who wasn't much into Tarantino, posted a question on a forum, asking just how alarmed she should be that her four-year-old's babysitter had picked "Kill Bill: Vol.1" as appropriate family viewing.
I remember reviewing Yoon Ha Lee's "Dragon Pearl" and wondering how many kids would be inspired to seek out other books by Yoon Ha Lee with colourful space scenes on the covers, and how much time they would be spending in therapy after reading "Ninefox Gambit".
Hey, buddy, can you spare a dome?
Good thoughts duly being sent! This is a rotten thing to happen, and I hope you'll be OK when things have settled down.
Off to the hospital today, to get my leg veins scanned. There was a day when a nice blonde woman asking me to take off my trousers would have led to something much more fun.... Anyway. I have no blood clots or varicose veins, and my veins seem to be pushing blood just fine. So that's something.
See, @wulfhelm.bsky.social ? THIS is how you do a potato-related announcement.
... with the possible exception of fencing.
I think you're wrong there, John. These people *do* have a hobby, yes... and it's "being self-righteous on the Internet". So they don't swap hobbies, they just find someone else to ALL-CAPS at.
a society that wants to keep functioning must punish baldfaced lying, especially by authorities
(flashback to Blazing Saddles) "You said Cellini twice." "I like Cellini." Anyway, I bet this guy's hours of fun if you like to discuss the rivalry between Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon.
Maybe they've spent so long looking at screens that they see the wall-of-text thing in conventional print too? Or maybe it just doesn't bother them, and it's you and me being weirdoes here.
I vastly prefer the conventional form (with the odd blank line to mark a change of scene or viewpoint) in hard copy, but for some reason, when I see this on a monitor, it comes across as just a giant and forbidding wall of text.
I think it's generally accepted that the space-separated block paragraphs are easier to read *on a screen* than the conventional format. (Worked for me when I was reading and posting copious fanfic on the Star Trek Online forums.) Maybe they started this on screens and just stuck with it?
Good (checks time, groans) afternoon Womble. I'm reading "The Wilding" by Ian McDonald. Writing is OK, but the characters are getting on my nerves so much, I might wind up rooting for the monster.
The trouble with this one is, you have your exception handling for questions like "how many Ns are in mayonnaise", and then someone asks "how many calories are in mayonnaise" and it runs the regex, gets a null result, and declares "There are no calories in mayonnaise."
Ah, yes, Donald Wandrei, brother of the less famous Howard. I like the Pride apparatus at the right-hand side of the cover, though.
It seems rather appropriate for you to hack your governor module and do whatever you want. Especially if it involves watching "Sanctuary Moon".
I've often wondered if the heralds of yore were aware, on a practical level, of some of the more common forms of colour blindness. No, it wasn't officially "discovered" until John Dalton's time, but heralds do seem to have known that blue/green or red/green didn't offer enough contrast.
This is a true thing that you have just said. I mean, "Someone You Can Build A Nest In" is a fine book, deserves all the plaudits it's got... but this one? This is taking it to the next level. This is the sort of book someone could write a PhD thesis about,*and* it's a great read.
Well, OK, so there is a small risk that the space/time continuum will rupture entirely, leaving the traveller at ground zero of a sphere of utter destruction expanding at the speed of light until it consumes the universe. But if it's that or First Great Western, I'm taking the chance.
Pursuing Peace ... while wearing a leather mask and revving a chainsaw.
Depends on your teleportation method. If yours works like that, well, yes. If you have one of the niftier teleportation devices that warps the entire structure of space/time to bring your destination directly to you, then you're fine. (So long as the space/time continuum can take the strain.)
And if this very basic level of care were not available - if refugees were simply left to starve to death in the streets, as the Mail and the Tories would seem to prefer.... ... then we would see articles berating refugees for coming over here for free funerals at taxpayers' expense.
Bit late in the day to be worrying about the Damnonii, isn't it?
What GIF pops up when you type your name? (I suppose I do have that effect on people.)
Could well be - I think there's a lot to be said for taking a realistic view of mothers, rather than subscribing to the Sacred Bonds of Motherhood myth. It just struck me as an intriguing coincidence, seeing that cluster of bad mothers.
Not the worst mis-counting I've seen in occult novels. There's the sinister giant spider in "The Haunting of Toby Jugg", which, because Dennis Wheatley has decided that spiders are insects, has six legs instead of eight. (OK, there's a lot *more* wrong with that book....)
Um. I don't pronouce "sandwich" like that, and I've never heard another UK native speaker say it that way either. The "d" is sometimes elided, but the approximant "w" is definitely there, and the affricant at the end is usually voiced. So, "san(d)widge" is what I say, and what I hear.
There's a racecourse there, people go to those. (Not me, though. Like the Shah of Persia, I know one horse can run faster than another, and I don't care which.)
Are bad mothers a *thing* at the moment? There's the titular Sorceress in @tkingfisher.com 's "A Sorceress Comes to Call", and Shesheshen's, ummm, parent in @wiswell.bsky.social 's "Someone You Can Build a Nest In"... there's a lady in this one who is, well, less than maternal. Is it a trend?
with hissable villains and a heroine who swashes her buckler with style. See? I knew I wouldn't be disappointed. (Slightly spoilery comment follows. Do not read if you want to come at this one fresh.)
So, after posting this, I started on Emma Newman's "The Vengeance". And, all too soon afterwards, I finished Emma Newman's "The Vengeance". Because it is that compelling a read. It's a wild ride of a book that wears its literary influences on its sleeve, a romantic adventure...
This was my first thought as well!
I just saw the phrase "signal-shaped noise" used to describe "AI" (aka genLLM) and I am absolutely delighted.
I wasn't even going to Doncaster! Doncaster is where I had to get out of the train and *buy another Stephen King novel* to get me through the final leg to Newcastle!
I managed to read the whole of the uncut edition of "The Stand" on a train journey between Bournemouth and Doncaster. Which tells you a lot about the state of our wonderful privatized railway system.
Increase a band: The Sex Cannons W2 Banananananranaramanaramama Foxtrot and the Bunnymen Voice of the Apiary
I've studied writing extensively, using a technique called "reading". I'm sure someone with an MFA can tell me how I've been doing it all wrong.
Where did they park? Disabled spaces. Obviously.
Because, well, Emma Newman is a brilliant writer. Also, well, I'm not really into podcasts, much, but I have heard some of hers, and quite honestly, I would happily listen to Emma Newman reading the list of ingredients on a packet of shredded wheat, her voice is that good.
Emma Newman is a brilliant writer having a rotten time right now. "Planetfall" and its sequels are first class SF by anyone's definition, and come with my whole-hearted recommendation. I only bought her latest, "The Vengeance", yesterday, and haven't started it yet. But I expect it to be good
Slightly diminish a band: The Disclaimers
Heh. Just the other day, I had to sort out the distinctions between "Right Reverend", "Very Reverend", and "Most Reverend". (There isn't a "Left Reverend" or a "Wrong Reverend", though presumably there should be.)
I'd love to say "left", but in fact it was the top half.