incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

I have upgraded my computer to Windows 10, finally, and my new clock widget is MUCH BIGGER than the old one, so in theory it will be easier to keep to time? Ten minutes, let's go.

• I put BuzzFeed News in my RSS reader partly because I realized that Anne Helen Petersen reports for them; here's two articles of hers I particularly liked, 12 People Talk Honestly About How They Paid Off Their Debt and “Knives Out” And The Revenge Of The Pretty Good Movie.

• Two from Tor.com:

  • The Witches Are Coming: The Unexpected Magic of Gretel & Hansel, a movie I didn't know existed: "I walked out of Gretel & Hansel and immediately googled the following: “chaos magick” and “third eye illuminati” and “immortality and cannibalism” and “triangle nature symbolism” and, finally, “menstruation witches lore.”"

  • Falling in Love Is Magic: A Conversation With C.L. Polk and Alyssa Cole.

• At Slate, What It’s Like to Describe Porn for a Blind Audience.

• Northern lights livestream.

• Via Needle 'n Thread, Stitch Palettes, "A daily source of thread matching inspiration for embroidery lovers and pattern designers."

• At the Guardian, 'No Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition or Mumbo Jumbo': Dorothy L Sayers and the Detection Club. "These archives show Sayers at her dynamic best, and reveal just how much energy she expended, over several decades, to keep the club afloat." Via Clever Manka.

There, two minutes over, but I definitely knew it the whole time.

I have eight bazillion links built up and it's getting ridiculous, so here are as many as I can post in the next . . . twenty minutes, say.

• If you are in a position to donate (one-time or recurring), consider your local food bank, which can make a dollar stretch much further than any individual can.

• At the Washington Post:

  • Playmobil’s Plan to Infiltrate Your Workplace: also about the (existing) use of Lego in business contexts. (The kids have a substantial set of Playmobil toys that for several years was a big hit with visiting friends, so I was a little surprised that they're somewhat of the underdog in the space.)

  • As a cookbook writer, I just knew my children would be good eaters. Then they were born. This made me feel better, because I often regret that we didn't take different approaches to feeding the kids when they were very young, and then I remember that there's no guarantees regardless.

• Two stories at Tor.com that I randomly clicked on and liked:

  • How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson. Summary: "A dark, fast-moving novelette about a high-tech heist in future Spain, planned by a professional thief interested in revenge more than money. The object in question is in the hands of a dangerous crime lord." ( content notes )

  • For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll. Summary: "A dark fantasy about Jeoffry, a cat who fights demons, a poet, who is Jeoffry’s human confined to an insane asylum, and Satan, who schemes to end the world."

• At the Guardian, The man behind the great Dickens and Dostoevsky hoax. "When writer AD Harvey invented an 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, it was for years accepted as fact. So why did he do it – and why did he also create a series of fake academic identities?"

• At the New York Times:

  • At the Bottom of the Sea, They Wait to Feast on Alligators. You've heard about whale fall, now learn about alligator fall!

  • One Pot/Pan Meals.

  • Alone on a Mountaintop, Awaiting a Very Hard Rain. "Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists — a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew."

• In a similar vein, Why I Went Birdwatching at a Particle Physics Lab at Gizmodo.

• In the category of "Now old news, but I'll probably want these links some day":

  • Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That May Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters, at Buzzfeed News, and a followup on Twitter from the author.

  • An Interview With the Woman Who Wrote the Viral 1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny” at Slate.

• Great profile of N.K. Jemisin at the New Yorker.

• uzbadyubi watches The Princess Bride for the first time and is delighted and delightful.

• At Vox, The hottest new thing in sustainable building is, uh, wood. On "The many, many benefits of using wood in place of concrete and steel."

• I somehow missed that mountain_goats does a yearly benediction in honor of the people who stream "This Year" on New Year's Eve. Here's a catchup:

  • 2016
  • 2017
  • 2018
  • 2019

And finding all those put me ten minutes over my time, oh well. I thought it was a good note to go out on.

I have accumulated many fewer links than I usually bother to post, but:

John M. Ford's entire backlist will be coming back into print, starting next year! (Except the licensed IPs, of course.) And a collection of miscellany and the unfinished epic Aspects, too.

I am so, so happy about this.

The linked article has some information on how this happened, which is fascinating—basically Isaac Butler, who co-wrote that epic oral history of Angels in America, read The Dragon Waiting at a friend's urging and went on A Quest to find out why Ford was so out-of-print. He ended up contacting Ford's family and agent, both of whom had been out-of-touch with everyone in publishing, and after a year-long negotiation, Tor reached this agreement with the family. The article disclaims any attempt to determine What Really Happened, and I'm not interested in vilifying or vindicating anyone—I do think there are some lines that can be read between, but we don't need to do that here.

I had genuinely resigned myself to this never happening.

A few links:

• A story at Tor.com by Brenda Peynado called "The Touches". I am not sure the ending fully works for me, but I read it avidly all the way through.

  I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad. My father caught me, and his hands, covered in everything that lives on our skins, made contact then, the bacteria, yeast, shed viruses, and anything else from under his fingernails spreading to my newborn epidermis. That was the second touch.

  I must have been gooey and crying, and they both held me for a moment before the robot assigned to me snipped my cord, took me up in its basket, and delivered me to the cubicle where I would live the rest of my life.

• The Speculative Literature Foundation is running a membership drive; over on Facebook, its director Mary Anne Mohanraj explains the very cool projects the SLF is hoping to pursue. They do good work, check them out.

• At Vulture, The Story of the 1991 Beauty and the Beast Screening That Changed Everything: it was a work-in-progress cut, which "incorporated four different stages from the movie’s long, arduous creation: storyboards, rough pencil-sketch animation, cleaned-up black-and-white animation, and final color footage." There's an embed of the song "Belle" in the article, or you can go directly to YouTube; it's weirdly interesting to watch, and it's also a nice reminder of how great the music is.

• At Vanity Fair, an article whose headline answers its own question: "You're Essentially a Prisoner": Why Do Dubai's Princesses Keep Trying to Escape? I remember hearing last year about the princess who was caught and was eventually visited by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland; I hadn't heard about additional developments until now.

• For some reason the font on this article is GIANT, but the NYT has a meaty article on China's Internet, more specifically on WeChat's dominance and how it is "an alternative vision of the mobile internet, one that is integrated across multiple dimensions and that is in essence a single large market."

But the kids don't have school, so it's not a day off.

• Time sensitive: The Tiptree Award is renaming itself; the Motherboard proposes the new name the Otherwise Award; and it requests feedback on the word Otherwise, specifically, within the next two weeks. Lots of details.

• Fascinating, at the AV Club: No-budget African action studio Wakaliwood is ready to take over the mainstream.

• The next and last season of Steven Universe will be called Steven Universe Future; here's the new opening. I . . . don't really know what to think about this.

• Time for a logistics story, because I'm me: The California Sunday Magazine on how to dispose of unwanted guns, and specifically on the National Center for Unwanted Firearms. (I could only find an Amazon Smile link on their website, and not a direct donate link.) Via Go Fug Yourself.

• The Cut, At the Russian Baths With the Big Boys of Brawn: Welcome to the new frontier of plus-size male modeling.. It's a small frontier, but an interesting one. Via Tom & Lorenzo.

• I have a card for the New York Public Library (you can too, if you live, work, attend school, or pay property taxes in New York State). The library tends to get ebooks in giant batches, tens or hundreds at a time, so scanning through their new acquisitions on grid mode is a really good lesson in how important covers are in signaling genre.

  All that is a leadup to say that I've always been interested in book covers, which the age of ebooks has only reinforced. And there are occasions where I see a book cover somewhere (not usually on the NYPL) and say to myself, "oh, that's unprofessional," but without knowing why exactly. Freelance cover designer Augusta Scarlett has a blog post on 7 Mistakes of Amateur Book Cover Designs that clearly lays out the things I'd been subconsciously noting, with lots of great examples.

• Two on theater: Slate on Lauren Gunderson, the most-produced playwright in America—solely because of regional theaters. This is a thoughtful, balanced look at why and the prospects of The Half-Life of Marie Curie, her first New York City premiere.

• And at the NYT, Aisha Harris describes What It’s Like to See ‘Slave Play’ as a Black Person:

  The provocative premise: Three interracial couples attend a multiday retreat during which they attempt to address their issues in the bedroom through “antebellum sexual performance therapy” — a sort of B.D.S.M. through the lens of American slavery that is followed by a heavy dose of psychoanalysis.

• Tor.com reports a bunch of insightful comments from the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy panel at New York Comic-Con, but stick to the end for the ash ice cream.

• The John Wick movies are not my thing, and neither is the game, but I was still interested in reading about the adaptation, as an adaptation, and the mechanics, which sound very cool.

• Finally, an appreciation of Jason Mendoza from The Good Place; no detectable season 4 spoilers. I haven't watched any of that yet, and really need to. Via Go Fug Yourself.

What with the leadup to taking a week off work, the cruise with limited Internet, and the kids going back to school, I have quite the backlog.

• I lost hours watching videos of Simone Biles doing a triple double on the floor exercise and a double-double beam dismount, because the human body is capable of amazing things. Here's a Slate article and a Twitter thread.

• Something I did not know: The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants, its new museum recounts, at the Washington Post.

• At Atlas Obscura, What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway?, subtitled "How a fusion of at least four cuisines created a beloved and misunderstood dish."

• Jan Hakon Erichsen (janerichsen) is a "visual artist and balloon destroyer"; he has compilations at his YouTube channel, such as this two-minute one that I find just very satisfying.

• Via Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Hollywood Reporter article criticizing Bruce Lee's portrayal in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I discovered that the two of them were in a movie together called Game of Death, and their ten-minute fight scene is available on YouTube. It is truly something to behold.

• I'm posting this just in time for the season finale tomorrow night, but Discovery has a documentary show called Serengeti that is narrated by Lupita Nyong'o.

• Vox on the history and appeal of escape rooms.

• Good Eats is back; here's an interview about the filmmaking behind the show, then and now.

• Scathing farewell article from Deadspin's editor-in-chief on how

  A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.

• A positive review of the styling service Stitch Fix by a wheelchair user.

• A quite interesting article at Strange Horizons by Victoria Chen, age 18, called “A lag is happening” : A disconnect between YA writers and the readers the books are written for.

• The AV Club's Home Video Hell series asks, How can you not check out a movie called The VelociPastor?

• The Tiptree Motherboard on Alice Sheldon and the name of the Tiptree Award (as the post says: content notes for discussion of suicide, mental illness, caregiver murder). Quick edit: valuable perspective from beatrice_otter, found via jesse_the_k.

• I was bummed to hear that Alexis Kennedy, who founded Failbetter Games, has acted abusively toward women in the industry. I am glad that he hasn't been with FBG for years, since though I haven't played Fallen London much for a while, it still means a lot to me. Andrew Plotkin has some links, and Vice has a bit more detail (nb. the rest of that article discusses allegations of sexual assault and suicide).

• A long tribute to Car Talk, including an interview with Ray; its humor wasn't aging well even when it was still airing live, but I have a lot of fond memories of lazing around on Sundays listening to it all the same.

• Slate on What’s Missing From “White Fragility”: "Robin DiAngelo’s idea changed how white progressives talk about themselves—and little else."

• Moving article from film critic A.A. Dowd on Re-reading Stephen King’s It and confronting my own personal Derry. Spoilers, naturally, and also descriptions of childhood abuse.

• A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man to investigate urban planning, over at the NYT.

• Also at the NYT, 82-Year-Old Slipped by Doormen to Steal $400,000 in Jewelry, Police Say: people skills will always count when it comes to theft.

• Last one, and again from the NYT: I never watched Friends, but I liked Wesley Morris' tribute.

• Following up on The Westing Game, lannamichaels has extremely interesting thoughts about it and labor.

• Per the Corning Museum of Glass, Netflix is going to air a competition show about glassblowing called Blown Away, which sounds very neat.

• Shannon Keating at BuzzFeed on The Time I Went On A Lesbian Cruise And It Blew Up My Entire Life. Starts with thoughtful discussion of the experience overall and, as is necessary, how does a self-identified lesbian space relate to trans women; then turns personal.

• At Money, There's a Treasure Chest Worth Millions Hidden Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. These Searchers Are Dedicating Their Lives and Savings to Finding It. My takeaway is that fandom is a universal impulse.

• Novelist Laura Lippman on the lessons she learned as a white author writing black characters.

• This is old but I enjoyed rereading it recently: at Gawker, My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers.

• Nicole Cliffe profiles Alanis Morissette at Self: Alanis Morissette on Pregnancy at 45, Childbirth, Postpartum Depression, and #MeToo. I really love this quote: “I talk about this with my kids a lot, the four boundaries being: You can't tell me what I'm thinking, you can't tell me what I'm feeling, you can't fucking touch my body/you can't do anything with my body, and don't touch my stuff," though I admit that the editor in me wants to turn those into parallel formulations.

• I had no idea that beta blockers for anxiety were a thing; here's Slate on why that's not a good idea, despite the companies prescribing them online.

• maxgladstone gives us an "annual reminder that any given Disney lyric works as a Culture ship name." Which, yeah.

• I don't know if the above was prompted the Culture ship names generated by neural networks, but obviously these links belong together anyway. Tag yourself, I'm Third Letter of The Week.

• I'd never heard of pedestrianism until this long, fascinating Deadspin article on George Wilson.

• shittydinosaurdrawings with a great comic about making tea.

• This Captain Awkward guest post on Breaking The Low Mood Cycle is five years old but I missed it the first time around; a lot of stuff I've determined that works for me through trial and error, that it's good to be reminded of.

• Sue Bird, three-time WNBA champion, on Megan Rapinoe: So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend (and 10 Other Things I Want You to Know Before the World Cup Semifinals). Final Sunday at 11 a.m. Eastern!

• yourbirlfriend wrote a cross-stitching cellular automata that uses the minimum amount of thread; here's the hypnotic gif. I could totally not stitch like that but it's cool that this exists.

Because they've been spending all free time mainlining Friends at the Table. Anyway!

• If you, like me, didn't know what a Juul was, here is a thorough and thoughtful New Yorker article explaining (tl;dr: pure nicotine).

• And here is a thorough piece on lab-grown diamonds.

• Amazing pictures at the Atlantic of ice formations on Lake Baikal.

• The Washington Post on how Fisher-Price invented a popular baby sleeper without medical safety tests and kept selling it, even as babies died.

• Strange Horizons's book club on The Kingdoms of Elfin, which I never did finish reading after getting through most of it for the JS&MN reread.

• And also at Strange Horizons, a thoughtful review of the themed anthology Strange Economics, including general suggestions for anthology editors.

• Caroline Stevermer has a new book coming out!!!! The Glass Magician, April next year. Here's the cover reveal.

• The Good Place's upcoming fourth season will be its last; Mike Schur has a spoiler-free interview at The Hollywood Reporter. Personally I think this is very good news and hope they stick the landing.

Last night I hand-rolled a Google spreadsheet to track my embroidery floss, including columns for floss assigned to specific projects and an auto-generated to-buy column. Then I went through all my supplies, entering floss and tidying up my patterns and so forth, and it was extremely satisfying. Also, I am not allowed to buy any new projects, except for the one I bought yesterday that was the final straw prompting this reorganization.

Of course I finished that slightly late, and then the Pip needed me for an hour in the middle of the night, which hasn't happened in ages, so sleep deficit, back again so soon.

Today SteelyKid declared a desire to learn D&D, which made me think ruefully of my statement, less than a week ago, that I could never do tabletop roleplaying! Anyway we bought a starter kit today and Chad was the DM, since he played some in the past. The level we're playing on is not very taxing, of course, and we made it through one combat session and it was fun, the kids were really creative and into it. But it was very time-consuming, and softball and baseball start this week, so I'm not sure how much we'll pursue it in the near future.

Links:

• It appears that muting various Twitter meta-keywords will keep stuff off your timeline that isn't, you know, tweets from people you follow. (You may need to clear cache to see the effects.)

  Since the link is an image, go to Twitter's muted keywords settings and add these:

  • suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet
  • suggest_pyle_tweet
  • suggest_activity_tweet
  • suggest_recycled_tweet
  • suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
  • suggest_recap
  • suggest_who_to_follow

  For desktop, this is an improvement over my prior method of using CSS to hide things—plus AdBlock, you still need an ad blocker—because it follows you wherever. For Android, I'm sticking with a third-party client (Twidere), because it doesn't include Twitter's ads and I don't have to keep telling it which order to read things in. (You could also run a Twitter instance in Hermit, which has a native adblocker.)

• Please enjoy this story seed: "The ultimate power move in a vampire/fairy rivalry would be the fairy inviting the vampire over for tea."

• The subreddit for The Magicians is r/brakebills, and an innocent person mistakenly posted about . . . the bill for their brake pads, which ended up being a much-needed bit of levity for the fandom post-season finale, as mistaken person was very sweet and gracious about it.

( Avengers: Endgame spoiler fics, extremely minimal descriptions )

I wanted a piece of jewelry to commemorate handing off Con or Bust, among other things, but nothing was really grabbing me, so I outsourced creativity and asked Elise Matthesen to make me a surprise pendant. I prompted soft green (after a necklace I bought last Readercon and broke a while ago) and/or freedom. The result is called "Breathing Room" and it's glorious; it makes me feel like I'm wearing a protective amulet or armor. I posted pictures on Twitter.

(Elise is having a big sale now and has promised to do something with the makes-a-surprise later this weekend, so check the shop out!)

Links:

• Baby sloth!

• At Tor.com, The Gothic and Game of Thrones, Part I: The Burial of Sansa Stark.

• I don't watch The Magicians, but I'd seen a surprising amount of positive discussion of this season (I'd gotten the vague impression that many were unimpressed with the books' handling of key issues). The season finale seems to have burned that all down; here's an impassioned essay with, naturally, all the spoilers. ( content notes )

• So many things I did not know about Emily Dickinson!

• A very thorough look at the production and economics of premium ice cream.

Wednesday morning links are sitting in a newly-renovated car dealership waiting room that is extremely spacious and comfy. If only I'd known that they had free pastries too (though, admittedly, odds are against them being good).

• If you've seen mention of racism and RWA's awards, the Ritas, the Guardian has a really good long look at the context and current issues.

• The Guardian also has an interesting article on using the era of clothing for forensic purposes.

• Atlas Obscura has two good articles on food and structural power dynamics: The Promise and Perils of Resurrecting Native Americans’ Lost Crops and The Subversive, Surprising History of Curry Powder. (I had no idea that curry used to be a widespread Thing in white American cooking!)

• Over at the AV Club, lots of great crunchy detail about getting cats to act in movies.

• Attention yhlee: surprise drop of a new Angel comic.

( notes on more Avengers: Endgame clips )