All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu — Runalong The Shelves I would like to thank Head of Zeus for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review Publisher – Head of Zeus Published – Out Now Price – £20 hardback £6.02 ebook ...

Smart science fiction awaits in the thriller and more that is All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2025/10...

I can’t use my old email anymore because the iPhone doesn’t support Linear B.

New short story by two of my favorite SFF writers, Ken Liu & Caroline M. Yoachim!!!

A lot of people have been calling me the
@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social of Seattle. But where Zohran is charismatic, telegenic and stylish, I've spent my whole adult life looking pretty dumpy. To look more mayoral, I enlisted my friend Andrew Ashiofu, who took me to one of Seattle's premier boutiques.

Redefining Shock and Awe: What We Can Learn from Israel’s Opening of Operation Rising Lion Imagine if Operation Overlord in World War II began with the elimination of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German High Command; Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel...

Redefining Shock and Awe: What We Can Learn from Israel’s Opening of Operation Rising Lion
open.substack.com/pub/spencerg...

The undiscussed headline of last week: Victoria is the only state even close to achieving their housing target under the National Housing Accord.

This is huge news for housing affordability in Melbourne and state-wide.

Closeup of a cluster of purple flowers in various stages of bloom. An adorable fuzzy bee is flying towards one of the flowers that is in full bloom. Additional flowers and greenery are blurry in the background.

A photo from today's walk: scilla peruviana (aka Cuban lily) and bee 🐝

#photography #bee #flowers #FlowerReport #gardening #garden #FloralFriday #FlowersOnFriday #bloomscrolling

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding at play when things like this come up...

The wealthy/elite want their children to get an *education,* suitable for future leaders and thinkers.

They want everyone else's children to get *training* to be more efficient, cheaper cogs in their machine.

Can we just spare a thought, too, for the official end of News Corp as a political force. No one outside an aging political class pays any attention to them.

Cartel promocional de la serie de animación Pantheon.

Hace unos meses os recomendé la primera temporada de Pantheon, serie de animación basada en un relato de Ken Liu. La segunda temporada está siendo increíble también. Podéis encontrarla en Netflix, de verdad que TENÉS que verla.

Cyber image of Netflix tv show Pantheon

Netflix's Pantheon. Great show. Somehow, made cyber attack/defend interesting & cool on screen.

Never seen anything like it.

Mom also warned me about feds. 😂🥰 ("If you're part of a group and a new person shows up and wants to talk you into violence, that person is probably an agent provacateur and trying to get you into trouble.")

What was the cost per nuclear reactor for the 7 reactors Libs are proposing that Angus Taylor just gave, please? I thought I heard 170 billion but that's probably wrong. insiders #auspol

Yep
www.theguardian.com/business/gro...

RedNote: The Chinese app shaping the Australian election Australian politicians are turning to Chinese-owned app RedNote to reach diaspora voters in this election campaign – but their biggest hurdle is Chinese government censors.

New from me for The Saturday Paper:

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/2025/03...

US Pentagon hopeful confirms 3% is the floor, not the ceiling in warning to Australia Donald Trump’s choice to be under-secretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, has put Australia’s policymakers on notice, warning that this new administration expects ...

Australia is not just the largest cash buyer of US military equipment in the world (no subsidies), we are the only country that actually subsidises US military capability. Colby needs to be told to fuck himself, and that our defence budget is what we choose www.defenceconnect.com.au/geopolitics-...

French Senator Claude Malhuret:

"Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester high on ketamine... We were at war with a dictator, we are now at war with a dictator backed by a traitor."

Every time I hear about DOGE I think about this Kim Stanley Robinson line, "Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice."

90% of our collective societal problems would be solved if we abandoned the notion that being good at math is otherwise indicative of intellectual capacity for Reasoning™

“One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

I enjoyed all his books but I think TYORAS might be his best.

It's time to acknowledge the astounding triumph for Vladimir Putin in having Tulsi Gabbard installed as DNI. It is no longer merely conceivable that he has film of key GOP leadership with Russian hookers. Those hookers are likely male, underaged and dead. Or possibly, non-mammalian.

you know this would 100% have happened if they had meme coins in Ancient Rome

The left side shows cover of the May 2024 issue of lightspeed, with the silhouette of a human figure standing atop the pages of a giant open book, with a glowing starry background. The right side has the opening text of the story: "This is our story, simplified. Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration." The story then splits into columns such that the right column repeats the quote above. The left side has new verses: "The first time you get our message, you only find one thread. It mimics your language in its simplest form, a single strand of words laid end to end. You will have to work hard if you want to understand us properly. You must learn to hold more than one thread of language simultaneously in your mind. Don’t worry, we will help you develop the skills you need. We will keep one simple thread unchanged. At first you will glance back and forth between these words and those. Your attention is a strange, skittering thing, but we believe you can learn with repetition. For you, we are relearning how to teach. You can hear musical chords of multiple notes, even two strands of differing lyrics for short stretches of song. It helps to memorize the words. Your mind has a strange divide between learning and knowing. Read both columns, please. Every time. Can you commit our simplified story to memory? See just the shape of the words and know what is there? You have so little bandwidth, there might not be any other way. It is not ideal but we are desperate. We will repeat to help you understand."

Catching up on 2024 reading?

I wrote a story this year that I truly believe is something special. It is the most challenging thing I've ever attempted, and I'm proud of how it came out. I'd be honored if you consider it for your award ballots.

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/we-w...

The moment Israeli captive Arbel Yehud was transferred to the Red Cross in Khan Yunis.

What we are witnessing is the normalisation of extremism. If we allow the right to pretend that the German AFD is just another conservative party... or that Donald Trump is just another president... or that Elon Musk was just getting carried away with that salute are on a distinctly dangerous path.

YouTube video by Call me Back Podcast - with Dan Senor HOSTAGES COME HOME - with Yossi Klein Halevi & Wendy Singer

Extraordinary episode really worth listening if you want to understand the thinking of Israelis, and for that matter Jews around the world (except ultra orthodox) at the moment, this is worth watching. Dan Senor with Klein Halevi and Wendy Singer

youtu.be/KrBwELxQh0I

The Blogs: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? It doesn’t matter It is time to shift gears and recognize that the delegitimization of Israel is the greatest threat facing the Jewish people today

Yossi Klein Halevi has a must-read piece. ==> Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? It doesn’t matter

Photograph of a building in Florence. A tall thin stone section rises up, from street level several stories. About the level of the second story, a yellow section sticks out from the outside of it, awkwardly wrapping around the outside of the stone part, supported by elegant sticky-outy triangular struts. The yellow section has several small circular windows, much too small for a human to climb through, barely large enough for a chubby cat.

Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors 1/?

Take your bow leftist, your “genocide Joe” campaign worked flawlessly.👌🏾