TrishEM

Woodland Songs - YouTube

Just listened to a delightful album: Woodland Songs, performed by the Dover Quartet, with music by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate (finishing with Antonín Dvořák's American quartet) after hearing an interview on NPR about it.
youtube.com/playlist?lis...

A heads up for any bloggers pulling links from Archive.org's wayback machine:

Be aware that some of those old websites may get your site flagged with malware. This is the second time one of these links has got our site blacklisted. We're no longer linking to them going forward.

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

Begging editors to stop accepting "I asked ChatGPT to do [x]" pitches. It's truly bizarre to see writers do these posts which are the equivalent of a movie lingering on a company logo for brand placement. They serve no journalistic merit and offer nothing to the reader but clickbait.

Newsmax to pay $67M to settle defamation lawsuit from voting machine company The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.

Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the voting machine company Dominion over baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to a new regulatory filing.

You ‘run the gamut’ and ‘run the gauntlet.’

You don’t ‘run the gambit.’

gamut = entire range or series

gauntlet = severe trial

Gambit = Alpha-level mutant who can convert potential energy to kinetic energy

The best preemptive introduction to a questions section I've heard was, "To clarify, a question means you want information."

At the risk of being provocative, people fetishizing the idea of Brandon Sanderson taking over ASOIAF fundamentally don’t understand the value of literature.

They don’t care whether a book comes from an author or a “magic box that gives us story time.”

It could be AI generated for all they care.

Shaggy blonde dog upside down and smiling, his eyes not visible due to his excessive fluff.

anyway good night

Congrats to the Sidewise Awards winners!

The caption says it's Willow Creek Jasper, but it looks like meat and pickles and onions and sauce on a flatbread

I'm sorry, but I need you to see this rock that looks like a sandwich that I just found on Instagram.

This collection of mine is now five months old and still going wolfy strong.

Daily ’Zine This is the home for the official daily 'zine of Seattle Worldcon! Download your own copy of the 'zine, and scroll down for each day's 'overflow' -- all the stuff that just didn't quite fit in the pri...

Did you miss my Opening Ceremonies or Best Poem Hugo presentation poems at @seattlein2025.org?

Fret not!

You can still watch the recordings here: www.youtube.com/live/G0GGYLV... | www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV3...

And you can read the text here: seattlein2025.org/program-and-...

as our shuttles
next find homeward paths, perhaps
whisper some soft spell

that we may cast future-light
wherever we may land still.

Thank you all so much, @seattlein2025.org—it’s been an honour to be your Poet Laureate this year, and I hope you have been thoroughly enamored of my company.

Darcie stands on a stage and holds a little silver robot statue

Darcie stands on a stage and holds a little silver robot statue

Sheine Lende, a book inspired by my family’s history in Texas, just won THE LODESTAR award at the Hugos, and I am so immensely grateful to everyone who supported my story 😭❤️ I walked the stage in a Lipan camp dress that was hand-sewn by my mother.

Root beer float (house ice cream with Boylan'sl and a Big Eddie sundae at Shug's in Seattle after the end of #WorldCon2025.

DH talks about Agent of Vega as Schmitz's first great work, Arthur C. Clarke's The Lion of Comarre,
Doomsday Deferred by Murray Leinster, Our Fair City short story by Heinlein ... Earlier mention of The Martian, aka Impossible, by Ray Bradbury.
At 1949: Stories Worth Remembering #WorldCon2025
8/x

Q on 1984, weaponized today by people who haven't read it: What would Orwell's reax be today?
TW: He'd be horrified by how his book is being used as inspiration rather than caution. He was antifascist.
Panelists agree.
MM talks about Animal Farm, colonialism, imperialism, dangers of communism.

Discussion of Silverlock by John Myers Myers as a romp through literary history, with tons of Easter Egg references, that had a lot of influence on later writers, filking, etc.
1949: Stories Worth Remembering panel, #WorldCon2025
(Disclaimers for dated sexism, etc.)
6/x

Dave Hook says Fredric Brown was probably the best writer of short-short science fiction, telling a good story in just a page or two.
1949: Stories Worth Remembering panel, #WorldCon2025
5/x

They're talking about SFF artists now, including Chesley Bonestell and the young, not yet great, Frank Frazetta.
For short stories, lots of love for Heinlein's The Long Watch.
Speculation: Heinlein books would have split the vote and so Orwell's 1984 would have won Best Hugo, if there'd been Hugos.

Several panelists talking about big changes in writers' lives, recovering from war etc., and in industry (paper shortage over so more books etc.). 1949 panel at #WorldCon2025
MM: Explosion in industry, building, etc. Writing about political intrigue and tech (beyond mere wonder).

The Best 1949 Speculative Fiction Novels, and Some Less Good The Short: I read, or considered reading, 19 novels published in 1949. My favorites were the two classics, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Secker & Warburg/Harcourt, Brace & Company,…

Not sure I can share that doc, but here are links to Dave Hook's blog:
1949 books: adeeplookbydavehook.wordpress.com/2025/06/26/t...
1949 short fiction: adeeplookbydavehook.wordpress.com/2025/07/26/m...
1949 anthologies: adeeplookbydavehook.wordpress.com/2025/06/28/t...

At the 1949: Stories Worth Remembering panel, with Marie Guthrie, Tom Whitmore, Dave Hook, and Manjula Menon, at #WorldCon2025. There's no Retro Hugo this year, and indeed Retro Hugos are being eliminated, so this is as close as we'll get to Retros at this con. Dave Hook has a useful writeup. 1/x

We love your stories and we're here to help. Please argue with us if it's not going where you want it. -- approximate quote from Josh Wilson at Editing as an Art Form, #Worldcon2025.

Rachel Rosen and others: Make sure you and the author agree beforehand on what *kind* of editing you're going to be doing on their manuscript.

I think maybe the art of editing is the art of noticing. -- approximate quote from Rachel Sobel in the Editing as an Art Form panel at #WorldCon2025 -- not just noticing problems but also noticing what's good!

Starts off with discussion of distinctions between types of editing: substantive/structural, copy editing to polish style (need style sheets for individual authors, to preserve voice, check timeline etc., along with CMoS or whatever), and proofreading spelling, grammar etc. (again, preserve voice).

A 4,400-year-old Sumerian tablet, which had been tucked away in the archives for more than a hundred years, has recently been translated in full, and it revealed a myth we had not known before, featuring the gods Enlil, Ishkur, and Fox. buff.ly/QYxSJLZ

There's proof of Alon's concept in Britain. Fast trains (what the Brits call their expresses) on the East Coast and West Coast main lines average ~90mph-plus.

That's ~20% faster than the Acela between NYC-DC, despite having a equal/lower top speeds. Average speed matters as much as top speed.