1crowdedhour

Exercises in Futility Number Five Thousand Four Hundred Thirty-Three.

Google Home Assistant: And! I can do more things now. You can ask me complex questions and I'll be able to answer with help from Gemini!

Me: Hey Google. Why did the AI companies steal my life's work?

Google Home Assistant: . . .I'm sorry. I don't understand.

Yeah, me, too, Google. Me, too.

Well.

The WIP currently stands at 129,943 words. I'm still fixing the baby fixes. Once that's done, I need to write some scenes and put them where they belong. Deadline is April 15.

I have Remarks for my event on Saturday. I have also a Reading.

It is not supposed to snow on Saturday, but it will snow on Friday night.

In the meanwhile, and as much as I haven't been around this week -- tomorrow, February 20, the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory will be closed. Thank you for your understanding.

Everybody stay safe.

Tali and Rook, birdwatching

flemmings

Terminal hubris yet again took me out to the nearer supermarket, yes on a garbage day, yes after that 10 cm dump. Possibly the Whatever that flattened the sidewalk by me yesterday also did down the block and the snow/ ice piles were from people cleaning off their cars. But possibly the Whatever couldn't touch the ice because people put salt down before the sleet stopped falling which naturally led to an unmoving ice sheet. A common mistake in these parts. But I needed milk onaccounta indulging in daily hot cocoa, and tomorrow will be 5C ie melt, plus rain, which means even more slop, so out I went. Really must get an all-terrain walker, though no guarantee that would handle slush any better.

This is also the reason why, after going to bed last night, I got up and cancelled tomorrow's physio. If the sidewalks are passable I'll see if the spot is still open but I strongly suspect they won't be.

However having prudently put one of the Thermacare disposable heating packs on my grumpy back, I was able to clear the rest of my frontage of the ice layer. Wasn't enough to do NND's but at least it's a start. Only because I did this after coming back from the super I was getting light-headed from all the exertion and needed to rest and do deep breathing from time to time.

A come by chance setting on my tablet which I can no longer find allows you to switch up the wallpaper of one's login. I selected landscapes so now, in the brief interlude before inputting my PIN, I have vistas of forests and meadows and deserts and rivers and mountains. My sadness is that they don't tell you where these places are, and that I only get three seconds to view them before the screen goes black again. But they're a nice little pleasure to offset the annoying FUBARs of this new update.

notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/training-to-be-a-cart-ographer/405170/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=405170

Read Training To Be A Cart-ographer

Me: "I'll need you to collect stray carts after your break."
New Hire: "...I'm not trained for that."
Me: "Trained… for gathering carts from the parking lot?"

Read Training To Be A Cart-ographer

https://notalwaysright.com/training-to-be-a-cart-ographer/405170/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=405170

slashmarks posting in

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mtbc

On the way east into Edinburgh, one can catch sight of the tall red-brick warehouse building marked Jenners Depository. This reminds me of a different tall red-brick warehouse building that my memory places on the way east into Truro along the A39. However, some looking online fails so badly to find anything of the kind that I have probably somewhat misplaced it. It's some consolation that some further poking around online reveals that what I saw on the train into work recently was Niddry Castle.

ysabetwordsmith

New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater

A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.

This is super exciting because of its double benefit: battery materials and drinking water. Also awesome, unlike rare minerals used in many batteries, sodium is something Earth has in great abundance. \o/

Current Mood: busy

notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/click-bait/405587/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=405587

Read Click Bait

I got a new phone, and it blew up with calls from debt collectors. Most people can just send unknown callers to voicemail. I, unfortunately, worked tech support for a large company at the time, so I had to answer every call.

Read Click Bait

https://notalwaysright.com/click-bait/405587/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=405587

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy and cooler, but still unseasonably warm.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and a male house finch.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I saw a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I refilled the hopper feeder.

I raked off the leaves from the goddess garden. There I found one lavender crocus in bloom along with many more sprouts.

Oddly the honeybees are not visiting the crocuses as usual. Instead they are nosing around the seeds in the hopper feeder. Go figure.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I started raking leaves off the daffodil bed on the east side. So many shoots now!

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I finished raking leaves off the daffodil bed on the west side. Just as I wrapped up that activity, it started drizzling rain. *sigh* I was hoping to gather up leaves later and put them somewhere, possibly behind the log garden.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

My seed starting kit arrived! :D What makes this awesome is that it comes with its own light system. That means it's not restricted to window use; it can go anywhere -- within reach of an outlet if we use a USB wall wart, or wherever else with some sort of battery pack. It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out.

While I was heading to the mailbox to fetch that package, it started raining again. There are puddles in the street. But then the sun came out, so I looked around -- and glimpsed part of a rainbow to the northeast. Naturally I trotted up the road in pursuit of a better view. It was a bright, full rainbow with a partial double on the outside. :D 3q3q3q!!! Definitely one of the better ones I've seen. I got a lot wetter than was strictly necessary, but I so don't care.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- The rain let up.

I did more work around the patio.

I raked up the leaves left from the rain garden and dumped them behind the log garden.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I raked up the leaves left from the daffodil bed, filling the trolley twice, and dumped them behind the log garden. Then I raked the leaves away from the front of the log garden and dumped them behind. This revealed a lot of shoots, mostly grape hyacinths with some crocuses mixed in.

I heard honking overhead and saw a skein of geese flying north. :D

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: calm

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/the-big-idea-gideon-marcus-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59533

On occasion, you know the ending of your story before you start writing. Most other times, you find the path as you go, each twisting turn appearing before you as you continue on your merry way. The latter seems to be the case for author Gideon Marcus, who says in his Big Idea that he wasn’t always sure how to wrap up his newest novel, Majera.

GIDEON MARCUS:

What’s the big idea with Majera? That’s a hard one, because there are lots of threads: the unstated, obvious, valued diversity of the future, which helps define the setting as the future. That’s a familiar technique—Tom Purdom pioneered it, and Star Trek popularized it. There’s a focus on relationships: found family, love in myriad combinations. There’s the foundation of science, a real universe underpinning everything.

But I guess what I associate with Majera most strongly is conclusion.

Starting an exciting adventure is easy. Finishing stories is hard. George R. R. Martin, Pat Rothfuss. Hideaki Anno all have famously struggled with it. When Kitra and her friends first got catapulted ten light years from home in Kitra, I started them on a journey whose ending I only had the vaguest outline of. I had adventure seeds: the failing colony sleeper ship in Sirena, the insurrection in Hyvilma, and the dead planet in Majera, but the personal journeys of the characters I left up to them.

I know a lot of people don’t write the way I do. I think writers mirror the opposing schools of acting: on one end, the Method of sliding deep into character; on the other, George C. Scott’s completely external creation of an alternate personality. In the Scott school of writing, characters are puppets acting out an intricate dance created by the author. In the Method school of writing, of which I am a member, the characters have independent lives. I know that seems contradictory—how can fictional agglomerations of words achieve sentience?

And yet, they do! I didn’t plan Kitra and Marta’s rekindling of their relationship. Pinky’s jokes come out of the ether. Heck, I didn’t even come up with the solution that saved the ship in Kitra—Fareedh and Pinky did (people often congratulate me on how well I set up that solution from the beginning; news to me! I just write what the characters tell me to…)

All this is to say, I didn’t know how this arc of The Kitra Saga was going to end. But I knew it had to end well, it had to end satisfyingly, for the reader and for the characters. There had to be a reason the Majera crew would stop and take a breather from their string of increasingly exotic adventures. The worldbuilding! All of the little tidbits I’d developed had to be kept consistent: historical, scientific, character-related. There had to be a plausible resolution to the love pentangle that the Majera crew found themselves in, one that was respectful to all the characters and, more importantly, the reader’s sensitivies and credulity.

That’s why this book took longer to put to bed than all the others. It’s not the longest, but it was the hardest. Frankly, I don’t think I could even have written this book five years ago. I needed the life experience to fundamentally grok everyone’s internal workings, from Pinky’s wrestling with being an alien in a human world, to Peter’s coming to grips with his fears, to Kitra’s understanding of her role vis. a vis. her friends, her crew, her partners. In other words, I had to be 51 to authentically write a gaggle of 20-year-olds!

Beyond that, I had to, even in the conclusion, lay seeds for the rest of the saga, for there is a central mystery to the galaxy that has only been hinted at (not to mention a lot more tropes to subvert…)

Conclusions are hard. I think I’ve succeeded. I hope I’ve succeeded. I guess it’s for you to judge!

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/the-big-idea-gideon-marcus-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59533

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/cover-reveal-monsters-of-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59522

Just look at this cover for Monsters of Ohio. Look at it! It is amazing. I am so happy with it. It’s the work of artist Michael Koelsch (whose art has graced my work before, notably the Subterranean Press editions of the Dispatcher sequels Murder by Other Means and Travel by Bullet) , and he’s knocked it out of the park. I am, in a word, delighted.

And what is Monsters of Ohio about? Here’s the current jacket copy for it:

In many ways Richland, Ohio is the same tiny, sleepy rural village it has been for the last 150 years: The same families, the same farms, the same heartland beliefs and traditions that have sustained it for generations. But right now times are especially hard, as social and economic forces inside and outside the community roil the surface of the once-placid town.

Richland, in other words, is primed to explode… just not the way that anyone anywhere could ever have expected. And when things do explode, well, that’s when things start getting really weird.

Mike Boyd left Richland decades back, to find his own way in the world. But when he is called back to his hometown to tie up some loose ends, he finds more going on than he bargained for, and is caught up in a sequence of events that will bring this tiny farm village to the attention of the entire world… and, perhaps, spell its doom.

Ooooooooooh! Doooooom! Perhaaaaaaaps!

If that was too much text for you, here is the two-word version: Cozy Cronenberg.

Yeah, it’s gonna be fun.

When can you get it? November 3rd in North America and November 5 in the UK and most of the rest of the world. But of course you can pre-order this very minute at your favorite bookseller, whether that be your local indie, your nearby bookstore chain, or online retailer of your choice. Why wait! Put your money down! The book’s already written, after all. It’s guaranteed to ship!

Oh, and, for extra fun, here’s the author photo for the novel:

Yup, that pretty much sets the tone.

I hope you like Monsters of Ohio when you get a chance to read it. In November!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/19/cover-reveal-monsters-of-ohio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59522

dreamshark

The AirPod charging case is the usual elegant Apple design, gleaming and smooth with a nice heft and rounded edges everywhere. It looks great and feels good in your hand. But a flat bottom would have been more practical, so it could sit upright for ease of use. So I rummaged around in my Box of Tiny Boxes and found one that fit perfectly. Cut some cardboard off the flap of a middle-sized box to add a supportive infrastructure, and... voila! Now I can easily plunk the AirPods in and out without having to pick up the case and open the top.

The moral? Don't ever throw anything away.

notalwaysworking_feed

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/those-annoying-facts-again/405168/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=405168

Read Those Annoying Facts Again!

Coworker: "Why can't I just install it on the desktop?"
Tech Support: "That's not company policy. Also, if you don't install it correctly, it can't access the network."
Coworker: "Don't confuse me with the facts."

Read Those Annoying Facts Again!

https://notalwaysright.com/those-annoying-facts-again/405168/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=405168

james_davis_nicoll

TTRPG campaign idea.

PCs are field agents in charge of finding and dealing with arcane occupational safety violations. That six-sided summoning pentagram? Flagged. That storeroom where the universal solvent is next to the lemonade? Flagged.

That deadly-trap-filled dungeon abandoned by its creator when the maintenance fees got too high? Red tagged.

This isn't the same as my recent FabUlt campaign. That was about discouraging the worst excesses in a world run by oligarch mages and there weren't really regulations. This would be set in a regulatory state, and would be more an exploration of normalization of deviance.

conuly

and then read the books, and I gotta say, I think the author and I fundamentally disagree on a key principle of storywriting.

I believe, strongly, that if you have two viewpoint characters, or two love interests, or two viewpoint characters who are also love interests, then they need to have balanced problems - and, ideally, the interaction of those two characters should affect those problems in some way - by making them realize that they have problems, by making them realize that those problems aren't so bad, by solving or exacerbating those problems - who knows? But they need to start off with the same level of problems, and then by the end of the plot those problems need to have been changed in some way.

And pretty much that never happens in these books. Just look at the two that make up the TV show. We have two couples.

( Read more... )

This opinion on problems was brought to you by: The Overnight Shift! I have so much time on my hands, guys!

oracne

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is gory historical horror set in 1912 Montana that's in conversation with Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. More importantly, it's both narrative and meta-narrative about settler colonialism and the genocide Americans perpetrated against the indigenous inhabitants of the American West, viewed through a lens of revenge, survival, and atonement. Finally, it shows a long, difficult attempt at justice, requiring sacrifice and suffering along the way.

This review contains spoilers.

( Read more... )

For those not well-versed in American history, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz would be good preparation for this novel, or as a readalong.

conuly

Why am I better than all other men?
I do not have to prove it. I admit it.
Here is the nail, and I am here to hit it.
A blow that glances somewhat now and then.
With pure intention I take up the pen
That writes the truth, if any ever writ it.
Venom is vulgar. I decline to spit it.
Still if I must—Well, nine times out of ten

I do. I am tired. That book must be a bore.
Jones wrote it. He was rude to me at lunch,
And nobody quite likes him in our bunch.
Smith said he liked my novel. In my bones
I feel that I like Smith. But more and more
My conscience tells me to eviscerate Jones.

********************

Link

puddleshark

A grey day, and the wind is in the north again, very cold. But at least the rain is holding off. And the days are lengthening noticeably. A few days ago, when the cloud cleared briefly, I set off on my morning walk around the forest in the dark. By the time I turned for home, the stars were fading and the sky lightening in the east, and the Woodlarks were starting to sing.

Despite the almost complete lack of sunshine, the first daffodils are starting to flower in one corner of the garden. (No spring crocuses this year. They came up a few weeks ago, but the rain flattened them before the flowers ever got to open...)

prettygoodword

pseudonymuncle (soo-duh-NIM-uhnk-uhl) - (obs., rare) n., an insignificant person writing under a pseudonym.

A coinage from 1875 and only occasionally used since, from pseudonym, false + name + -uncle, diminutive suffix adapted from Latin -culus.

---L.

brithistorian

I finished the third book in the trilogy just before going to sleep last night. It was a good read, but when all is said and done, I feel like there are a number of loose ends that, when tugged at, cause the whole thing to threaten to fall apart, if not to actually do so.

My main objection is the rest of the world. The events in the trilogy happen in the US, and we're told in mentions here and there that the rest of the world is different, likely doing better. But, except for a couple of very specific events — which are instigated by Americans — the rest of the world just stays out. The closest analogy I can think of is North Korea. Except that North Korea invests a lot in its military to keep the rest of the world out, whereas Kress's America seems to have no functioning military, or at least none that ever gets mentioned. It's like the rest of the world just goes "Oh, they're crazy. Let's stay out of there." Which doesn't seem likely, because people have time and time again demonstrated a complete inability to leave people alone.

And while the ending of the final volume is somewhat more satisfying than the ends of volumes 1 and 2, it also very much sets it up for Kress to potentially write a fourth book. And not a small opening. Imagine if Lord of the Rings had ended with a bookseller unpacking a crate of old books they'd just bought, finding a copy of How to Make Rings of Power: Complete and Unabridged by Sauron and trying to decide whether or not to put it on the shelf.

So more or less a mixed reaction. Some parts I though were good, some parts not so good. Thought-provoking, though not necessarily in the ways the author intended.

Also, I've got one comment on the physical book (and so nothing Kress could have done anything about): Maybe publicity works different in publishing, or maybe the publicity department at Tor in the mid-'90s had never heard of "underpromise then overdeliver," but I found the front cover text on this book kind of hilarious:

First Wells's The Time Machine,

then Clarke's Childhood's End, now...

BEGGARS RIDE

NANCY KRESS

james_davis_nicoll

Against the gleefully hypocritical, exploitative Shine, the very gods themselves contend in vain.

Slow Gods by Claire North

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1crowdedhour

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Network

Office Closed Tomorrow

(no subject)

Training To Be A Cart-ographer

Multifandom: Goreswap 2026 Sign Ups Open!

Tall brick buildings

Energy

Click Bait

Birdfeeding

The Big Idea: Gideon Marcus

Cover Reveal: Monsters of Ohio

And the moral is... [unfortunately]

Those Annoying Facts Again!

All Regulations Are Written in Blood

I watched Heated Rivalry

Reading Wednesday, Yes I Know It Is Thursday

Critic by Leonard Bacon

Daff

pseudonymuncle

Book reaction: Beggars Ride (Nancy Kress)

Slow Gods by Claire North

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February 2026

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