Socar Myles

Huh, never heard that before! Well, you learn something new every day.

Dare I ask what you thought I said?

Today's vibe:

* a sad ring of tatties
* a pile of boiled mince
* half a bottle of brown sauce
* yeah, give it here.

Or the back legs, the hips... Just ALL of those legs, and the muscles surrounding them!

Oh, same! Horses have one of the WEIRDEST body plans, which only gets weirder the harder you look.

A drawing of a skeleton riding a horse.

This is a proper drawing of a horse, sort of. As close as I could manage, with those Mr. Horsy vibes.

A catastrophically terrible drawing of a horse. (It has weird, wonky hooves, teeth like a shark and a giant head on a blobby body.)

This is Mr. Horsy.

Mr. Horsy is not just a badly-drawn horse. He's that feeling artists get when we have to draw a horse, and we're trying to remember how their parts fit together.

...I wish I could edit this post to close that quotation.

I could've fixed and reposted this in the time it's taking me to complain.

I prefer complaining.

Just saw one of those Big Ben tweets that's just like "BONG BONG BONG BONG," and my brain automatically added "SPLOOSH."

(Because of that "Tales from the Crypt" story, "For How the Bell Tolls. Spoiler: the clapper is a person. Bong, bong, bong, sploosh.)

A B&W photo of a gull yawning CAVERNOUSLY, showing its tongue.

If you see this, post your bird tongues!!!!!

#birds

I still think about that plane sometimes--well, obviously, as I'm posting about it. How cool is that, to have your own plane? Why did you have that plane, Mr. Bond? What were you doing bringing it to school? Did you LAND it in the car park? I'll never know...

...okay, definitely steal any snacks he had in there. I'm only human.

(I wasn't going to steal it, or anything. I don't have the first clue how to fly a plane. I just wanted to get in it and poke around, and MAYBE steal any snacks he had in there.)

One time in high school, I saw a teacher wheeling a light aircraft across the car park, pushing it with his shoulder.

I spent the REST OF THAT DAY searching the school. I found entire rooms I'd had no clue existed, but I never did find where he'd stashed that plane.

Oh, right! I forgot it's Valentine's Day. Apparently, they didn't. Oh, dear.

I stopped doing the NYT crossword after they paywalled it, but...wow. I never would've associated edgy little sex jokes with the NYT crossword. Sounds like it's gone downhill.

This Is How a Child Dies of Measles When your family becomes a data point in an outbreak

I can't read anymore of this without sobbing in public, but if you are considering delaying the MMR vaccine for your kid, please read it.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

OH DEAR GOD.

Hahahahahahahahaha.

(Or, now I think of it, he's not naked the first time he appears in the narrative--but he IS naked the first time the Glanton gang encounters him. Well, close enough! Dude loves to be naked.)

It was involuntary, I swear! It's just, he's SO often naked in the book. He's naked the first time you see him, the last time you see him, and plenty of times in between. You think Judge Holden, you think AGGRESSIVE nudity. (At least, I do.)

I'm now picturing him naked, festooned with strips of mystery meat, and wearing THAT facial expression.

Most of the art you see of tardigrades shows them how they look under a scanning electron microscope. Which means most of the art you see of tardigrades is really depicting gold-plated dead ones.

They're meant to be sort of translucent, not, y'know, opaque like brown paper bags.

Oh, yeah, it SUCKED.

I don't think teachers get away with that type of nonsense as much these days, but in the '80s, it wasn't considered strange.

(I probably wouldn't do very well on that cognitive test POTUS is always blithering on about: I absolutely CAN count backwards by sevens from a hundred, but if a doctor asked me to do it, I'd get that "buuuuuuuh" moment.)

I'm in my forties now, and I still get that moment of brain-locking horror when somebody asks me "what's six times twelve," or "hey, could you figure out our tip?" There's still that moment when I'm a little kid again, scared of screwing up in front of the class.

I remember that--and I wasn't even bad at maths. I just froze up when asked to do arithmetic in my head, thanks to ONE teacher who'd force you to do a question before you could go to the toilet. One kid kept getting it wrong, and eventually peed, and the fear of that happening to me was REAL.

Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to get it out there! <3

That's me, SJ Myles!

This anthology comes out in June of this year. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else wrote.

Ha, ha, ha...no. Definitely not.

I don't think there'll ever be a day when the Dragon Quest opening fanfare doesn't make me grin like a chimpanzee.