Whoa. That’s deep.
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Nice one.
And who knew a T-rex could play tennis without a net!
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I might indulge a bit in my personal tastes and guilty pleasure for reading manhwa. I particularly enjoy murim (martial arts) manhwa, and most that i read are cliche and kinda crappy but it gives me a good distraction. Yesterday i found what i think is a decent one, really enjoying the art and the story and while i can’t presume people here will read it i wanted to at least give a recommendation for it
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If you are a Diane Duane fan, you could buy an ebook bundle and help her and her family out…
https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/777948764103196672/just-bumping-this-as-were-coming-down-to-the
[ETA]
i can’t believe terry pratchett created the Community pizza gag back in 1989
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I just finished up One Long Night, which is an excellent book and well worth the time to read.
Now I’m reading Mickey 7 and, OMG, Mickey is a self-described historian, although in this future there is not profession of historian, since everyone has access to all info at all times… ! I’m wondering if this little tidbit dropped in an early chapter is going to bear some fruit later in the book…
Anyway, so far, so great!
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This wasn’t what I expected. Great story though. CW body horror and various kinds of abuse (not from parent/family members). A high school competitive swimmer with a thing for mermaids gets pushed WAY too hard to succeed.
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Will pick up a copy this week! Looking forward to this!
He’s making the rounds…
[ETA] I think the first link to the CBS evening news cut off, so here is the extended interview…
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I read Say Uncle, a book of poems by Kay Ryan.
My two favorites, maybe because they seem so suited to this season, and to our times.
Winter Fear
Survival Skills
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Just finished The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu. Good book on the early days of the comic book industry, hysteria over comics, and censorship in general. It stops abruptly, I wish it had continued a few years more. Recommend for those interested in the topics.
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I read it a while back. It’s a very good history of one of the many moral panics in modern America.
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Happy birthday, Flannery O’connor!
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Bits of her wit and wisdom.
[quote]There is another reason in the Southern situation that makes for a tendency toward the grotesque and this is the prevalence of good Southern writers. I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn’t just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.
The Southern writer is forced from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets. . . .
For the kind of writer I have been describing, a literature which mirrors society would be no fit guide for it, and one which did manage, by sheer art, to do both these things would have to have recourse to more violent means than middlebrow subject matter and mere technical expertness.[/quote]
ETA:
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Life Hacks For a Little Alien, Alice Franklin, (riverrun press 2025).
It’s a novel, describing the life of an (obviously, but never once explicitly stated) autistic girl, in England, around 2000. She almost accidentally discovers the Voynich Manuscript, and fixates on it.
She is never named.
It is written entirely in the second person, addressed to her.
It goes like this. You won’t be normal. Aliens can’t be normal. You’ll be normal enough, though. And by this, I mean you’ll have just enough normal to seem normal without actually being normal.
Let me explain. Like normal human children, you’ll disregard every grammatical irregularity that comes your way. You’ll say things like ‘I goed to school with my mum’, ‘I eated the orange’, and ‘Colouring in is funner than skipping’.
If I were a prescriptivist, I would lambast you for these flagrant over-regularisations.* But, as it happens, I am not a prescriptivist, I am a descriptivist.† And as a descriptivist, I applaud you. ‘Goed’ is more logical that ‘went’. ‘Eated’ is more logical than ‘ate’. ‘Funner’ is more logical than ‘more fun’, and it’s a funner expression to boot.
These assertions would chime with the internal grammars of many small humans. You’re blending in. Well done.
But you’re still wrong. ‘Goed’ and ‘eated’ and ‘funner’ aren’t words. You won’t find them in reputable dictionaries or even disreputable dictionaries. They’re wrong. You’re wrong. You’re wrong all the time and you can’t help it.* Prescriptivists are people who think there are right and wrong ways to use language. They wince at aspirated aitches and moan about unsightly neologisms. They can be a bit annoying.
† Descriptivists are people who study how language is actually used. They embrace the unrelenting sea of language change as neither a sign of progress nor a sign of decay. They can also be a bit annoying.
The Little Alien goes to school. She meets people who she does not understand, and who don’t understand her. Some of them are friendly. Some of them are not friendly. Many of them have power over her. None of them understand why the Voynich Manuscript is so important. It is important because it might be written in the language of her home planet.
It ends on a note of hope, but as an autist (and an autodidactic language geek), I understood the Little Alien as if I were her. Every experience she had I felt viscerally, because it or something very much like it had happened to me at some point.
If you are neurodivergent, this book might make you feel less alone in being an alien. If you are not, it might give you an idea what being an alien is like.
I found this book in the local Little Free Library. I go now to give it to my children to read.
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Are there any guillotine plans? Asking for me.
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Unsure… haven’t gotten around to reading it quite yet… But thought it might be useful for all of us… OH! I should crosspost to the survival thread…
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