Cassandra

A golden retriever holding an octopus in its mouth, so it looks like tentacles

The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)

Tubi is such a crazy streaming service. It’s like if the Criterion Closet was in a gas station

The Best Romance Novels of 2025

My #RomanceColumn best romances list for the NYT is live today! It’s impossible to pick just a few books from so many, but as the song says, impossible things are happening every day, so let’s get to it! (Gift link)
#Romancelandia #booksky

I've loved Sigourney Weaver ever since one of my all-time favorite movies, ALIEN. Couldn't resist going all fanboy on her yesterday & asking for a photo. She told me she's now in the cast of The Mandalorian. Talk about bad timing: she's now in that galaxy far, far away, years after I checked out! 💔

Dog and grandma

NASA, doing absolutely incredible things on a shoe-string budget for ~50 years.

Reminder that not only do library systems have physical media (& many also lend tools, electronics etc), your library card may give you access to streamers Kanopy and Hoopla. We just watched Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of The Rainmaker via a hoopla the other night. Pretty good!

This watercolour is typical Winchester with water gurgling out of the ground and the cathedral looming up in the background. I know Winchester well from art school in the '60s and for these paintings in the '90s I stayed in Southampton and drove over to paint every day. I also painted in the divine Water Meadows on an earlier visit and one or two of those found buyers.

Another on-the-spot watercolour (with pen work) from a sketching trip to Winchester in 1997. I regret parting with this one though I hope the buyer is still enjoying it. This is typical Winchester with the cathedral in the background. See Alt text for more info.
#art #watercolour #winchester

I both enjoyed and was horrified by this book. Definitely worth it! #BookSky 💙📚

‘For the Reinvention of Man’: How a Conservative Debating Society at Harvard Pushed Women From Its Ranks | News | The Harvard Crimson The John Adams Society began quietly excluding women from membership this semester, former and prospective affiliates told The Crimson. It is now effectively functioning as a single-sex organization.

Conservative Harvard debate club now excludes women; changed its motto in '24 from “Harvard’s premier undergraduate debate organization for political and moral philosophy” to the “premier organization for the reinvention of man at Harvard Square.”

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

“Rage red” for the Iliad

Submitting some 2026 colour ideas to @pantone in case it’s not too late for them to change their mind (more in thread)🏺🎨

I already have a copy but what a lovely thing to do for book people for the holidays. Fantastic story and Roman has been a favorite in the #KateDaniels series for a long time. #BookSky #Sci-FiFantasyBooks 💙📚

Coming from the Daniel Day-Lewis. Tarantino should crawl away.

Insurance coverage of hepatitis B vaccine won’t change, industry and officials say | CNN Parents will still be able to get the hepatitis B vaccine for their children at no cost even though the US Centers for Disease and Control Prevention’s vaccine advisers recommended a major change to t...

Because the vaccine prevents chronic hepatitis B for which there is no cure and the lifelong treatment costs more than a single birth dose of the vaccine. Insurance companies recognize this is a no brainer.
Brought to you by prevention beats treatment any day.
www.cnn.com/2025/12/07/h...

Timeline Cleanse ⚜️🎶⚜️💙⚜️🎶⚜️

💥Audrey Hepburn sings Moon River in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).
✨Such a lovely song. Audrey Hepburn sang it herself and when a studio executive suggested it should be cut from the film, she said 'Over my dead body!' She was right.

I found this so very sad. They seemed like sweet guys.

we need to start paying the battle poets to hone their craft.

Name a book from your childhood that had a deep and lasting impact on how you saw things.

For me: Rosemary Sutcliffe’s ‘Eagle Of The Ninth’. Latin went from being dull and boring to one of my favourite subjects, and I found a lifelong love of history and reading.

"Pluribus" and Philosophy Part Four A Philosopher Watches Sci Fi: Why not eat the dead?

My fourth installment on philosophy in the Apple TV show “Pluribus.” My take seems to be quite different than the other commentary about the show I’ve seen.

#philsky #philosophychat #scifi

open.substack.com/pub/billvand...

Leigh Brackett was born OTD in 1915. "The Queen of Space Opera," she was an accomplished screenwriter and wrote THE BIG SLEEP, RIO BRAVO, & worked on an early draft of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK but died in 1978 before the movie was completed. Only the second woman nominated for a Hugo.

Have libraries have become the new Blockbuster? Streaming is over. The magazine is back. And everyone who’s too online is apparently getting off again. The time is ripe for an analog revolution. And where better to start than the stacks? A…

Streaming? Out. Borrowing physical media from your public library? In.

Hello! I used to do this on Twitter. I am thinking of doing this again over here so am running experiment to see if putting up threaded stories on here is worth the extra step. If you want a non-threaded version, the entire story is at my Patreon account, not behind a paywall.

Most discussions about “misinformation” treat the problem as if people simply don’t have good enough critical-thinking skills. It sounds intuitive, but it’s not entirely accurate. The problem isn’t just individual ignorance, it’s the structure of the information environment people are placed into.

You are ABSOLUTELY NOT going to regret listening to this bird:

Perhaps we could let her run things?

Jane Austen’s Spotify Wrapped 2024 (part 2)

Jane Austen’s Spotify Wrapped 2024 just dropped! (Part 1)

If you've noticed that ChatGPT is improving, it's probably because I've spent so much time grading its work.

Lanfear has done nothing wrong in her life and deeply deserves this honor. #WoTSkies #TheWheelofTime

"He smells like hay, Jessica" 😹

🎥 www.instagram.com/reel/DR2_64U...