I’m the Package You Impulse-Ordered Three Days Ago and No, I’m Not Going to Make You Feel Any Better: It’s hard being a package. Sometimes we’re out in the cold for a really long time. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in us. Sometimes someone thinks there’s a bomb in us, so 90 people in green… Continue reading Packages
Category: Uncategorized
Romulans
Star Trek: Picard season one showrunner Michael Chabon has been sharing Some Notes On Romulans and I am eating this up with a spoon: Traditional Romulan compounds — Romulans live in kinship units — are built at the center of a kind of hedge maze whose outer perimeter is often contrived to look like a “natural” grove of trees,… Continue reading Romulans
Grandmother-Starship FAQ
From Marissa Lingen’s1 So your grandmother is a starship now: a quick guide for the bewildered: What is happening, seriously, what is even happening? Your grandmother is becoming a starship! She has gone through many phases in her life already — infant, child, teenager, young adult, student, worker, in many cases spouse, parent, retiree. She… Continue reading Grandmother-Starship FAQ
Irresistible
I’m indebted to Tim Bray for the pointer to jwz’s They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo, which I must have read at the time but which I don’t think I posted about here: I’m going to draw a line through 1930s agitprop, Ronald Reagan, methane-breathing zombie space aliens, the Mozilla logo,… Continue reading Irresistible
Persevering in the Spirit of the Opportunity open to us
Call me a pessimist if you will (you will) but when I read stories with headlines like Nasa scientists hail Perseverance rover’s arrival on Mars with stunning images… The rover’s broad mission is to stay on Mars for a couple of years, gather data and harvest samples to be collected and returned to Earth on… Continue reading Persevering in the Spirit of the Opportunity open to us
Novel Gazing Redux
This series of posts by Marissa Lingen about authors of speculative fiction posted at Novel Gazing Redux under the heading of Present Writers is fascinating stuff: [On Lois McMaster Bujold…] One of the things I love about Lois’s work is that she is extremely speculative about relationship, family, and reproduction. You cannot separate out the… Continue reading Novel Gazing Redux
Skyfire
I’m indebted to the Phil and Lisa Ruin the Movies podcast for bringing Skyfire to my attention yesterday. Take a plot that amounts to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom minus the dinosaurs. Throw in a couple of known Western names – director Simon West and actor Jason Isaacs – to help it get some profile in… Continue reading Skyfire
Miss Skippit
Andrew O’Hagan on recently-retired London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, a.k.a. Miss Skippit: Some people are orderly – to the point of disorder, obsessive-compulsively – and other people are disorderly in a productive way. Mary-Kay is in the latter class, good at appointments (hair, board meetings, eye drops) but not so hot on deadlines… Continue reading Miss Skippit
Totally Eclipsed…
Folks, I give you Totally Fixed Where We Are: Cheesy? Oh yes. A work of genius? Very possibly! 1 [Via swissmiss] Perhaps you need to be of a certain age to fully appreciate this. Or perhaps not. ↩
Little Grey Bubbles
I bookmarked Little Grey Bubbles meaning to post it here months ago, then it got pushed down the queue of #ForWeblog bookmarks in Pinboard and I only came across it again today when I was reviewing my bookmarks1 checking off items that I’ve since posted. Kim and Marlon were best friends, despite the fact they… Continue reading Little Grey Bubbles