One of my favorite aspects of Yuletide has become making a list of stuff from the tagset that I'm interested in checking out and then orienting my fall reading/watching around it. I'm generally bad at reading on a theme, but it turns out "maybe I can write this for Yuletide" is a theme that does work.
I thought this year I'd record for posterity what all I tried:
The hits: Moby Dick reread Red Rooms (2023) The Shadow of the Leviathan The Secret of Chimneys Short films My Sister and the Prince, Corvidae, Serpentine, Possibly in Michigan, and The Vampire Gastelbrau
The misses: Strangers on a Train - did not enjoy this! DNFed with 60 pages to go! Pern reread - wooof the misogyny Crooked House (2017) - a deeply mediocre Christie adaptation Battle Royale (2000) - idk man, it was fine? The Starving Saints The Incandescent Rotherweird The Ascent of Rum Doodle - this was Too Silly
The... other? Crash (1996) - I can't tell if I liked it, but I wrote a fic for it, so!
Weather is great today, a little cool but clear and sunny, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time this morning just moving things back into places. Still have to put my Christmas jewelry away and one Christmas box into the garage. But I have counter space again, yay! Organizing is not exciting but so satisfying to have done. I hope everyone is having a good morning.
I'm a little sad that a protest song from 1966 still feels so relevant. (YouTube recommended this just after I watched a modern protest song about ICE.)
Also, it's always weird to see John Denver without glasses. His glasses were so iconic, I think of them as a part of him.
A total cheat. This is not my love letter, but New York Times reporter Taffy Brodesser-Akner's. The entire article (sans photos) is behind the cut. It’s also HERE, hopefully as a gift link.
Mosscap and Dex's adventures continue from where they left off. They visit human places, including Dex's large and confusing family. Mosscap has a brush with mortality. Dex does not return to being a tea monk, their vocation still up in the air.
I enjoyed this novella for much the same reasons I enjoyed the first one, though I missed the tea service, which was my favorite part of the first book. Mosscap does turn out to be fallible and learns from Dex as much as Dex learns from it, which was nice. My favorite part of this book was the glimpses of the world, which still seems like an extremely nice place to live in.
Scientists have unveiled a new way to capture ultra-sharp optical images without lenses or painstaking alignment. The approach uses multiple sensors to collect raw light patterns independently, then synchronizes them later using computation. This sidesteps long-standing physical limits that have held optical imaging back for decades. The result is wide-field, sub-micron resolution from distances that were previously impossible.
I immediately thought of how many species have multiple eyes. Vertebrates favor two, but invertebrates often have more. Spiders run to 8. Scallops can have hundreds. Since eyes are delicate and expensive tissue, there must be a compelling advantage, specially for more than 1-2 of them. I would suspect that greater detail is among the advantages.
Author: Himring Title: Hild's Song Characters: Hild (Helm's sister) Pairing: n/a Text type / Format: Poem (a lanterne, but repeated) Source / Fandom: Lord of the Rings (Appendices) Rating: Teens Warnings: Angst Word Count: 19 Summary: Hild's spinning song, during the winter while she was besieged with some of her people in Dunharrow. For the January challenge, to go with an earlier post about Hild and Frealaf. Also, because I was just listening to a radio programme about Distaff Day (apparently on 7 January) that featured a number of spinning and waulking songs.
Friday morning we had about 8-10cm of snow and public transport wasn't running, so I worked from home. All the main roads around me were clear pretty much throughout, but side roads etc didn't get clear - and then everything half-melted and refroze so anywhere that still had snow got pretty miserable. The pavements on my way to church yesterday had about 3-4cm of lumpy ice, and it was not a fun time, although it also didn't feel particularly dangerous as long as I walked carefully.
At ten minutes before Mass we had six people in the building including me, the priest, and one other altar server. As we went in we'd hit about twenty, and by the end of the homily we were up to 45, which is a bit under half the usual number (although there were a lot of unfamiliar faces, possibly coming to a closer church than they would usually attend?). I was very surprised by the number of latecomers; I left home half an hour earlier than usual, to be sure of getting there OK, and it's not like anyone didn't know there was ice everywhere. I can understand not coming in those conditions, but just, idk, leaving at the usual time? that seems weird to me!
Anyway, it's warmed up a lot today and has been raining for a couple of hours; remnants of the packed ice will no doubt hang around for a while, but hopefully most of the pavements will be more-or-less clear tomorrow morning when I leave for work.
Dad's off to France again this week, so I'm back over there next Monday for the week. My chances of ever catching up with the laundry are receding into the distance and I'm starting to feel stressed about the weekend after, since I'll be there until Sunday morning, then into a double choir rehearsal, then back in the office on the Monday. Probably it will be fine but I need to do a lot of thinking about food planning etc at some point this week. I was having such a nice relaxing time too!!!
In the current iteration of Whatever, the archive here goes back to March 2002, which is a time before all but one of my books (The Rough Guide to Money Online, now out of print and deeply outdated). That is nearly 24 years of writing here on a nearly daily basis, and millions of words, to go along with the millions of words that are in my other books and novels, all but three of which are still in print (the other two out of print books: The Rough Guide to the Universe and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, both also out of date). Between this site and the books, there will be no lack of verbiage for people who are interested in me to go by; I will not die a mystery to history.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial part of my writing life which is no longer as easily accessible. Going from most recent to most distant, there are first the out of print books, the rights to which I own and which I might even put online at some point, but haven’t because doing so is a pain in the ass. I’d have to work from either old PDFs or scan everything in, and the effort required versus the value of the text is not there for me. You might find some of these on pirate sites, and inasmuch as I’m not doing anything with them at the moment, you’re welcome to them if you find them there (that said, don’t link to any of them in the comments, please).
Prior to that is the text of Whatever from between September 13, 1998 and March 26, 2002. This was an era where the Whatever was made from hand-rolled HTML rather than typed into dedicated blogging software (first Movable Type, then WordPress). Being hand-rolled meant that it was not easy to just transfer the text over; I would have had to cut and paste a couple thousand entries. Prior to the advent of Whatever there was an even earlier version of the site going back to March of 1998, which is when I secured the Scalzi.com domain and put up a static site, with columns and movie reviews from my newspaper days, new essays I wrote for the site, a couple of book proposals, and some extremely Web 1.0 site design.
None of this material is on the site proper anymore, but it’s still around after a fashion. One, I have a digital archive of it, duplicated in several places to ward off accidental deletion, and also it’s on the Internet Archive site (along with more recent iterations of this site), because I am not adverse to having the site archived in this way, and also because I personally find it convenient — if there’s something from this era I want to look at, it’s easier for me to look for it via the Internet Archive than my own archives. Among other things, the Internet Archive has maintained the architecture of the old site as well as the content of it. The Internet Archive is robust and useful but only gives the illusion of permanence; it could go away at any point. This is why I also have my own digital archive.
(The Internet Archive is also currently the only easy way to find anything I ever wrote on the former Twitter, as I permanently deleted my presence there, including all my tweets. I did, of course, download my own archive of tweets and have multiply saved it.)
Prior to this is my professional work up until I started being a full-time novelist: Work I did for AOL and other web sites, including columns at AMC, MediaOne and my own videogame review site, GameDad, and before then the columns, features and movie reviews I did for the Fresno Bee between September 1991 and March 1996. Again, I have my own digital archives of what I wrote, and the Internet Archive can help you resurrect at least some of this material if you know how to look for it. But much of it no longer available online, due to link rot, revamped web sites, or, in the case of the AOL stuff, originally having been in a walled garden that no longer exists in any event.
For a long time I suspected that the stuff I wrote for the Fresno Bee would never be available online unless I put it there myself, but as it turns out, there’s a site, Newspapers.com, which will allow you to access at least scanned (and sometimes OCR’d) versions of my reviews and columns. I found out about this, weirdly enough, because some of my Fresno Bee movie reviews started being quoted at Rotten Tomatoes. Not the full reviews, just quotes, alas. I may get a subscription to this site just to download all my movie reviews at some point. That will be a project.
We have dug down far enough that now we come to the material that is, truly, not available in any way, shape or form online: Writing from high school and college, which includes but is not limited to, music reviews and columns for the Chicago Maroon, my college newspaper, and my first attempts at short stories from high school. The picture at the head of this essay is of the actual physical archive of much of this stuff. It does not include the big-ass book I have that compiles all the copies of the Chicago Maroon for the 1989-90 academic year, when I was the editor-in-chief of the paper; that’s on a shelf on the other side of the room. Yes, if there’s ever a fire in my office, all of this writing is likely to go up in smoke.
I may at some point scan some or all of this stuff, but I’m pretty confident that almost none of it, save for what I had already put up in the previous iteration of the site, is going to be seen by the public at large. Why? Well, one, at the ages of 14 to 21, I wasn’t that good of a writer. Indeed, there is a real and serious upgrade in my writing skills that happened in 1998, because between ’96 and ’98, I spent a lot of my time being an editor, and much of that time was telling other people how to tweak their writing to make it better. It meant when I looked at my own writing previous to that point, I was very much “who told this jackass he could write” about it. The word to use for my writing in high school in particular is “precocious,” which is to say, showing talent but not a lot of discipline or control.
Two, and again particularly in my high school writing, some of it I’m ashamed of. In more than one of my short stories from the high school era, I made being gay a punchline, not because I was virulently homophobic at the time, but because I was a kid and uncritically absorbed the general 1980s societal attitudes concerning gay and lesbian folks. That explanation doesn’t excuse it, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. Also, being an ignorant kid in the 80s would not mitigate actual pain and harm posting those stories would have on people here in 2026. So they will stay on their shelf and not online.
I’ll note that wisdom and empathy did not suddenly alight upon my shoulder upon high school graduation. There’s plenty of my writing in the 90s — when I was a full grown adult — that is absolutely cringe on reflection. I’d sorted most of my homophobia by my exit from college, but hashing out my tendency to fall back on casual sexism for a laugh took well into the 21st Century to deal with. I can and do still slip into what I might call “avuncular pontificating” mode, and especially in the early days of Whatever this mode was indistinguishable from generic mansplaining. I try to do better, and I’ve been trying to do better for a while now. We are all permanently works in progress.
But that does mean that, unlike when I was younger and thought everything of mine should be read, I now understand why people curate their work, and let lots of it slip out of view. There is work from every stage of my writing life I am proud of and happy to show people. There’s a lot more I’m fine with letting it be, or, at best, it being of interest to a biographer, should one be foolhardy enough to emerge. There is a reason why, in the Site Disclaimer for Whatever, I mention that when you come across something that sounds like me being an ass, check the date and see if there’s not a more recent piece that reflects my current position on the subject. Also, this is why, if someone presents me with something I wrote a a decade or two (or three!) ago, I am perfectly happy to say, when necessary, that younger me was a jackass on many things and this happens to be one of them.
While I’m on the topic, and this is a thing which I think these days is actually important given the current state of technology, this is why you can’t just feed everything I’ve ever written into a Large Language Model and have it shit out a reasonable facsimile of me. Leaving aside any other issue with the current model of “AI” being an unthinking statistical matching machine, I am a moving target. I am not the same writer at 56 that I was at 16, 26, 36 or even 46. Is there a consistent thread between those versions of me? Absolutely; you can read something I wrote as a teenager and see the writer I am now in those words. But the differences at every age add up. You can’t statistically average the circumstances and choices I made across 40 years into something that reads like me, either as I am today or how I was at any previous stage.
And yes, you could ask an “AI” to control for these things, and it will, but it’s still not going to do a great job. I am me because of the lifetime of experiences I have had, but that’s not all of what makes me who I am in any present moment, What in my experiences contribute to that are not all equally weighted, or of equal consideration when I write… or when I’m thinking about what to write next. An LLM won’t and can’t understand that, which is why an attempt to use one to write like me (or any other author) is an exercise in the Uncanny Valley all the way down. Recently someone tried to convince me an LLM could write like me by cutting and pasting to me something he had it write “in my style.” It was only vaguely like how I would write, and also, I was mildly concerned that this person thought this was actually how I wrote.
All of which is to say that there is a lot of writing from me, and mostly what it does is give you an insight into who I was at the time it was written. Some of it good! Some of it is not. Some of it you can find, and some you cannot. And while I very much want you all to buy every single novel in my backlist, Tor and I both thank you for your efforts on that score, otherwise I’m perfectly okay with you focusing on what I’m writing now rather than what I wrote way back when. I’m related to that guy, and we’re very close. But we’re not exactly the same person anymore.
My front yard came covered in a thick layer of pea gravel over three different types of weed fabric, two of them such thick plastic that water probably can't get through anywhere but under the seams. This did absolutely nothing to prevent weeds, but did make it harder to plant anything I wanted in the ground. It also got baking hot in the sun, especially since it's a south-facing slope. I'd made a start shoveling patches several feet square and dumping them on a tarp in my side yard, removing the weed fabric and covering the cleared patches with bark, and planting native plants which should only need watering about every three weeks once they're established. But what do you do with literal tons of rocks?
Well. It turns out my parents' friends have a long, muddy driveway in need of free rocks! After several weeks of drizzle, cars were getting stuck in the mud. Winters here usually do see long stretches of drizzle, so it couldn't go on like that. How fortunate that we had complementary problems!
Between five people over two days (except I was working the first day and couldn't join the retirees), we have shifted about 2.5 tons of pea gravel. One more trailer load ought to finish it off. Or well enough, anyway; there are handfuls of scattered rocks still, but that's fine--native plants here like a bit of gravel well enough. Soon I'll be able to bring in bark for a softer covering which will gradually improve the soil and won't roast us or the roots of plants I like in the sun. Wheelbarrows full of bark are also much lighter than gravel, needless to say, so that job should feel easy by comparison!
Then it will be time for the springtime native plant sales--the fun part! This season's handful of plants will probably go toward filling in around the new little western redbud tree I planted in fall. This will provide a few more big cobbles, since the entire neighborhood is built over a layer of river cobbles from old mine dredgings, and I can add a few more feet to the path borders in progress.
All in all, a good start to the new year!
Now there's just the equally-large amount of rock in the back yard...the slightly larger, more angular rock that locks together, making it vastly harder to shovel up...
The spousal unit and I spent 5 days in Normandy, France last year touring D-Day sites as well as Mont Saint Michel and a bit of Paris. We stayed in Bayeux (Tapestry!) and spent two days touring the British and Canadian becahes and sites, and then the American sites. We were able to go back and spend a full day at Pegasus Bridge and the Merville Gun Battery.
We had lunch at the Ham and Jam creperie right across the street from the sadly closed Gondree Cafe. It's so sad now to think of the US going to war with its French and British allies because Drump psychologically needs to invade Greenland.
NGL it was awesome to see the inspiration for my stories in real life and to realized that yeah, I got pretty damned close. I cried a few times, thinking of how much I wrote, how hard I worked at it, and wondering if I would ever get that again. Wonderful. And so personally devastating too.
Major John Howard Avenue, Pegasus Bridge Sign, and Marker where Horsas crashed
Wally Parr's Number 1 gun "I didn't know it was going to be a quiet war."
Ultra report on Operation Tonga
And last, the gravesite of Lt. Den Brotheridge (maybe not the first casualty of D-Day). As it turns out, there's a very different tradition between American vs Canadian/British fallen. Americans are collected in single, solemn, uniform sites; Canadian and Britsh are interred where they fell. So Normandy is dotted with scores of tiny church graveyards with Canadians and British who died there.
The stained glass windows throughout Normandy churches, including the cathedral in Bayeux, are a mix of traditional Catholic iconography and signs and insignias of the D-Day operations, including parachutes, flying horses, St George and the Dragon, eagles, and service insignia, all in stained glass.
A friend mentioned Belgian symbolism in art, and when I asked about that, recommended the work of Jean Delville. Fascinating. :D I'd never seen it before, and it really does have a lot of symbolic imagery.
Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: What are your crafting goals for 2026?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
So I attended the one-day Clark Ashton Smith conference yesterday, held in the old Carnegie Library - now just a historical site, devoid of books or historical displays - in Smith's hometown of Auburn, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. In Smith's day this was still the city library, and the self-educated author probably got most of his education from books here.
But despite the local boosterism, accentuated by a panel discussing Smith's life here, neither Smith nor any of the panelists hailing from Auburn liked the place much. They thought it a tiresome backwater of a town. I found it charming as a one-day visitor. And my sandwich from a local deli (the con offered to fetch lunch for us if we'd order and pay in advance) was delicious.
The programming was held in the library's one large room. The organizers said the attendance was 80-90; I counted closer to 50. The attendance was largely but not entirely male. And almost all white. And largely but not overwhelmingly old.
Besides writing ornate fantasy stories, Smith also wrote SF, and he began as a once-promising poet, and he also was an artist (drawing and sculpture). The day was occupied with panels discussing all these things, and full of enlightenment on Smith's style, artistic goals, and ethos. Despite his obscurity, a case was made that he was a substantial artist worth studying.
Two panelists were particularly interesting to hear. S.T. Joshi, the well-known weird fiction scholar, is - as you'd guess from his writing - lucidly voluble and erudite. He regaled us with tales of Smith's amorous adventures, and challenged the otherwise universally-held belief that the reason Smith stopped writing weird fiction in the late 1930s was as a reaction to the deaths in short order of both his parents and his colleague/friends H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I guess we'll find out when Joshi's biography of Smith is published later this year. I got a glimpse at a proof copy; it is not as overwhelmingly large as Joshi's Lovecraft biography.
The other liveliest panelist was the fiction author Cody Goodfellow, who read aloud the opening paragraph of Smith's "The Abominations of Yondo" in a voice so sepulchral that I'd buy a full-length recording of him reading Smith stories.
Downstairs in the basement were book dealers, but the two books I wanted to buy were only in one copy and sold to someone else before I could get them.
There wasn't a single person there I already knew, but the attendees were friendly, and I didn't feel downgraded for not being a real connoisseur or expert; there were others there who clearly had only just begun reading Smith. This was fun, the panels were all interesting throughout (including the other participants) and since this was not a far drive from home, I'm glad I took the trouble to come.
So the rich cousin's wedding party happened. We were told it was casual, but I know the venue so I work an outfit that I wore on job interviews. Comfortable, warm and still dressy. I was still underdressed as a lot of women were wearing evening gowns. Oh boy. It was a nice time and the band was good.
The party started at 7:30 and ended at 11:30. Oh boy. I haven't been out to a party like that in ages. Today is a slow day.
Today my goal is to set up the work computer at the small antique sewing table I finally got from DQ. This desk can easily be set up in my bedroom if my sister and company come and stay here.
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snickfic
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