Haunted Tape Dispenser

A large chocolate bunny sits on a mantle, still in its box. Its candy eyes stare out, as its ears and head have been mostly eaten away.

What began as appreciation for my daughter’s restraint as she ate only a small piece of the chocolate bunny she got for Easter each day has transformed into something … else.

As I've said many times before WFH was a boon to productive employees and a disaster for the type of middle manager who rises in the organization by dropping in, inserting themselves into projects and taking credit for others' work bsky.app/profile/just...

All that said, if you make it through Memories of Ice and it’s still not doing it for you, it probably won’t be. (That assumes you have the time or desire to wade three books into it!)

… explodes those expectations. It’s multiple systems of magic, countless characters, etc. all set in a scale of epochs involving myriad lands and races. (I guess it’s his anthro-archaeology background?) It also has some really inspired takes on classic fantasy tropes (race and creatures).

I found GotM very disorienting at first, but it wasn’t due to bad writing but just sheer scope. I’ve read so much fantasy I was used to getting my bearings pretty quickly—ah, this is the flavor, this is the system of magic, these are the main characters of note, etc.—but Erikson …

There are two wolves inside you, one clone with 20 dire-wolf edits and …

This is high art

We are speedrunning the Declaration of Independence, folks.

1 Year After Substack State of the newsletter 2025, a vacation, a new book, and some thoughts upon the 1-year anniversary of moving The Reframe.

"Yyyyyyitsbeen ... 1 year since I moved off of Substack. Lessons learned: 1) it was scarier than I thought it would be; 2) it was easier than I thought it would be, and I'm very glad I did it. There are probably lessons to be had here about doing scary things."

www.the-reframe.com/1-year-after...

49% of Troy was like "they tried to kill us yesterday" but 51 were chanting HORSE! HORSE! really loud

This is what the internet is for.

Grimes Slaps ‘I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy’ Sticker On Child

Grimes Slaps ‘I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy’ Sticker On Child

just a friendly reminder for those looking for good entertainment websites that The A.V. Club is free from G/O, the film section is under my care, and we don't run slop

There's talking about what "should be" and then dealing with what *is*.

The hard reality is, that the Dem Socialist party is 92% white.

That means something is deeply broken -- and/or intentionally exclusionary.

Imagine DOGE opens your mail and finds your household electric bill. To eliminate this cost, they burn your house down without warning. Then they total up the bills that, as a homeless person, you will never again pay. On its website, DOGE boasts about the money it has saved you.

A great opportunity to tell friends who haven’t read this series, “Hey, you should read this series!”

every professional writer i know is an absolute pervert for em dashes but go on

The four ages of White innocence. Too young to understand. Made a youthful mistake. Listening and learning. From a different time.

Here's a handy graphic.

Oh man. I still remember when I picked up Desert of Souls to review for BookPage years ago. Titles could be hit and miss and I had never heard of the author. I stopped just a few pages in and thought, “oh boy” b/c the prose was soooo immediately engaging. I knew I was in for a treat.

I’m a Guardrail, and I Don’t Know What the Fuck You People Want from Me Okay, so look. I’m your basic galvanized steel thrie-beam guardrail. My job is to keep vehicles from flying off the escarpment and squishing all th...

"What I’m trying to say is that if you want a safe and functional road, guardrails are only part of the solution. The rest of it is stuff like maintenance, adherence to the law, and upholding a very basic sense of human decency."

MacKenzie Scott's game-changing philanthropy still mystifies nonprofits: 'Her gifts are super generous, but unfortunately, they don’t provide long term sustainability' "What they are saying with trust-based philanthropy is to offer support beyond a check," Indiana University's Pamela Wiepking says, "and that’s typically not what she is doing.”

Ah yes, I see it's the time of year when the Philanthropy Industrial Complex (Big P for short) seeds negative stories about Mackenzie Scott because everything about the way she gives money undercuts their entire model...
fortune.com/article/mack...

College students caught between professors' AI bans and employers' growing demand for AI skills Research shows 75% of workers now use artificial intelligence on the job, yet many universities still classify its use as cheating.

No, they're not caught between anything. Stop it. The fact that AI may be used or useful in future jobs does not create a single dilemma at all for college students in how to actually complete their coursework. This is all nonsense & excuses for not doing the reading & learning how to think & write.

Got visited by only two ghosts last night because I’m not doing too badly but there’s definitely stuff I still need to work on. My personal growth goal forChristmas 2025 is to get just the pointy dude

Cover of Dark Horse deluxe edition, Vol. 1, of Tom Siddell’s Gunnerkrigg Court webcomic, featuring Kat, Antimony, Reynard, shadow and robot.

Back of volume with blurb talking about how amazing the series is by a-me, the poster of these pics.

Got the deluxe @darkhorse.com Volume 1 of Gunnerkrigg by @gunnerkrigg.bsky.social b/c, d’uh (and daughters wore out my earlier collection volumes), and looked at the blurb on the back—that me! A Christmas morning delight!! (And if you haven’t read it, please do.)

I really loved Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain—read it in 7th grade and again in high school. It’s based on welsh mythos and just a wonderful entry into high fantasy. Disney’s The Black Cauldron was (badly) derived from it but pretend that didn’t happen.

Are you looking for a young adult fantasy series to gift some kids of relevance?

A few are decent—and the first is a “cultural plug-ins” in terms of references and fantasy touchstones (and trauma for the Christians looking for another angle for their kids to GET the sacrifice o’ Jesus)—but it doesn’t really land as a series (or was intended to?).