This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Wednesday June 03, to midnight on Thursday, June 04. (8pm Eastern Time).
I have gotten out of the habit of commenting on the news of the day here, mostly because, as I have said before, when it comes to the current governance of our country, there’s only so many times I can yell “it’s because they’re fascists, what did you expect” before I bore even myself, and also, frankly, the time I have to babysit comment threads these days is minimal. I’m not entirely sure how I managed it back in the day because it feels like I barely have time to keep up with my actual paid duties at the moment, and I keep piling additional responsibilities onto my plate.
Nevertheless, I think I want to get back to it a bit here, partly because it’s not like I don’t have thoughts on various news stories as they happen, and partly because it’s good for keeping up regular posting here. So I think at least a couple times a week I’m going to post a “Various & Sundry” post, catching up with my thoughts on events when those thoughts are longer than a post on Threads or Bluesky would allow, but not long enough for their own full-fledged post. They will usually cover three to five items, including but not necessarily limited to current events. Sometimes I’ll also plop in something I think is amusing or has otherwise caught my eye.
In the past for things like this I would try to avoid dropping in stuff I’d already commented on elsewhere, but this time around I think I’m going to be a little more lax about that, one, because I know that not everyone who visits here follows me on Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon, so that material will be new to those folks in any event, and two, because often even if I’ve commented about the story elsewhere, what I’ve done there is mostly have been quippy, and here I might have something else to say about it.
Also, three, I’m lazy, and four, inasmuch as this site acts as my own institutional memory, if I post something about it here it constitutes an official record. I mean, all the posts I ever placed on the former Twitter are now entirely lost to time, since I have gone in and purged my entire timeline there. This site, however, endures. So there it is. Welcome historians and biographers of the future! This is me, in typed form!
For these posts and as (nearly) always, I will be leaving the comments open but please do me the favor of remembering the comment policy here. Please be polite to others, especially when you disagree, and avoid making me come in and Malleting your post. There is a special subclass of commenter here who especially likes to take any point and use it as a jumping off point for some other thing they want to jam into the discussion and/or likes to use particularly elevated terms or positions just to get a reaction. I am not about that these days, folks, even if I generally agree with your positions. I’m tired, y’all, and the Mallet will have a hair trigger. Please comment accordingly. Thank you in advance for not being a pain in my ass.
With that as preamble, here are today’s various & sundry topics:
60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley fired from CBS News: This was not exactly unexpected, since in a staff meeting with his new boss Nick Bilton he expressed, shall we say, unvarnished opinions about Bilton and CBS News head Bari Weiss, and apparently declined to apologize to either them after the fact. One does not do that, especially to status-anxious posers like Bilton and Weiss, without expecting repercussions. Weiss and Bilton may in fact be incompetent (that’s obvious in the case of Weiss, and a reasonable supposition about Bilton, who has almost no relevant experience for the job he now holds), but they are still the bosses. Pelley knew he was setting his career at CBS one fire the moment he opened his mouth.
Also, he’s not wrong. His departure email came with receipts about how and when he and 60 Minutes were pressured or outright made to compromise their journalistic integrity since Weiss has been in charge, and a follow-up statement flat out called Weiss a liar regarding the manner in which his firing was handled. Weiss and Bilton have to know that in this sort of “they said. he said” situation, Pelley has integrity on his side, and they do… not. It’s also clear that whatever 60 Minutes might be after this, it will probably not be what it was, and it will probably be worse. And that, indeed, that has been the plan from the start.
“AI” use starts getting really expensive: Turns out there really is no such thing as a free lunch, as the various “AI” providers are changing how their services are metered, from “per request” to how many tokens one burns through with those requests. Tokens aren’t cheap! Users are burning through their monthly allotment of them in a day, apparently largely because coders and others were using them for somewhat frivolously. One particularly salacious (but possibly sensationalized) story had an anonymous company burning through half a billion dollars of “AI” use in a single month. I’d want to see some actual reporting on that, including the company’s name, before I lend that report full credence, but out in the real world, prices are still going up, enough so that using “AI” is now more expensive than paying the humans companies are laying off to pay for the “AI.”
And if you’re wondering why, if that’s so, companies are still apparently so avid to replace humans with “AI,” well, one answer is the corporate class of tech just fuckin’ hates workers, and would rather give their money to each other in tech circle-jerk than to actual humans who might foolishly spend that money on things like, you know, food and rent and children. Another reason is that the other corporate folks who don’t actively hate their workers were sold a bill of goods, where they were made to believe an ineffective tool could streamline their costs (mostly by firing workers), only to find out after those human workers were let go that the actual costs of that ineffective tool were hidden from them. Now they’re stuck.
No, I don’t particularly have a warm, fuzzy feeling for tech execs at the moment.
Which brings us to our third thing today, from humorist Eleanor Morton. Find the lie.
I've been nearly constantly sick and/or overwhelemed for the last two weeks, but I did read some things!
The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier, Scott McCloud, et al.— A story about a group of kids forming a cartoonists club and making comics that’s also an intro to basic comics making and concepts. I’ve been wanting to read a bit more comics theory. (I’ve read Understanding Comics, but that was a while ago) Anyways this was cute and fun, but didn’t really scratch my comics theory itch. Would probably be good to give to a kid who is interested in comics though.
Supergirl's Family Vacation written by Brandon T. Snider, art by Sarah Leuver— This is so charming! It’s one of those graphic novels that’s its own little continuity – Supergirl is 13 and lives with her cousin Superman and his family and feels overlooked as a superhero. Anyway she convinces them all to go on vacation and then adventure happens! They go on a space road trip! Natasha Irons is there (she’s Supergirl’s best friend) Lois gets to be awesome but doesn’t steal the scene. There's a short scene of Batman and Wonder Woman getting instructions to take care of the stuff while they are away!
The whole thing is just very warm. I love the manga influenced art, the expressions are great, the colors are great! At one point there are magical girl-esqe transformation scenes. It’s very cute and sweet!
Batman & Robin Eternal by James Tynion IV et al— This did a much better job than Batman Eternal at being a story about legacy, and was just more cohesive in general. Only being half as long probably helped some. I read this when I was sick and bit out of it so I feel like some bits of it went over my head.
Laid-Back Camp Vol. 15-17 by Afro— While I’m on my slice-of-life manga kick I thought it would be nice to get caught up with this series.. It’s still one of my favorites of the genre, it's got food, female friendship, and great landscapes. It does make me sad that I am too disabled to go camping though.
Lightfall books 2-4 by Tim Probert— I was going to read these a bit slower, but they were due at the library so I had to hurry up a bit. This series is really good! I love the art, it's evocative, plus there are great landscapes! Also I didn’t say last time but there is a very good cat! The story went in some unexpected directions and I want to know what happens next! Too bad it's going to be a while before the next book is out.
A new season of my beloved wacky Chinese reality show The Truth has started airing and I'm excited for it! It's been a while since I watched anything.
Finished Persuasion - but felt a bit out of sync with the online reading.
Then I went on to something Entirely Different: my interest was aroused by rydra_wong posting about Rachel Rosen's Cascade (2022) and Blight (2025) (The Sleep of Reason, #1 and #2), so I went and discovered that the ebooks could be obtained directly from the small Canadian press in question. Got stuck into Cascade and while I would not have thought I was up for grim eco/magical dystopia with festering political intrigue before everything goes to hell, I was absolutely gripped.
Pretty much the only reason I then read LM Chilton, I Think We Should Kill Other People (2026) was I had finished that and had not yet downloaded Blight. This was a not entirely happy mashup of rom-com (this part I thought worked least well), serial killer, and version of 'cut-off country-house' mystery (small airport shut down in middle of snowstorm trapping relevant characters), with added 'reality tv show that includes AI setting' and 'comic intentions'.
On the go
Have now gone on to Blight and may be some time (these are not your slender novellas).
Up next
Alexis Hall, Father Material arrived this week; also KJ Charles, How To Fake It In Society is currently a Kobo deal so have also got that on the ereader.
Still have not yet got to Slightly Foxed, and the latest Literary Review recently arrived.
June 3rd, 2026: This weekend I won some items in a Star Trek auction of Strange New Worlds items and if you're ever wondering where Lieutenant Erica Ortegas' backup beanbag chair lives now, it's in MY house :0
Title:An Expedition in Honesty by Tierfal Reader:pingistam Bingo Square(s): Dialogue-only Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist Pairing: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang Summary: Most questions have answers, whether we like them or not. Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply Link to Podfic:An Expedition in Honesty [Podfic]
Title:Music Makes The People Come Together by thegrimshapeofyoursmile Reader:pingistam Bingo Square(s): Breathplay Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist Pairing: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang Summary: The kiss he pressed on Ed‘s cheekbone was as gentle as it was mocking, and Ed could feel his cheeks flare up hotly with shame when Roy continued very softly, every single word like the lash of a whip, “I‘ll tear you open and take everything you‘ve got, and you‘ll thank me on your knees like a good slut, my love. I‘ll have you here and now, and all these perfectly nice people in their very nice evening dresses out there in the hall listening to music are only one door away from discovering how easy you are. How much you love it when I take you apart.“ Rating: Explicit Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply Link to Podfic:Music Makes The People Come Together [Podfic]
Title:This river will no longer be held back by achillesfell Reader:pingistam Bingo Square(s): Nonlinear story, Read Angrily Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist Pairing: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang Summary: Roy Mustang is a Colonel in the army and is on the trail of a dangerous alchemist reported to have committed the gravest crime of all: human transmutation. He finds instead an amputated eleven-year-old boy, Roy's soulmark on his remaining arm. Edward Elric is thirteen years old when he meets his soulmate. An intelligent and handsome state alchemist more than three decades his senior. He should feel happy, but he can't help the feeling that something doesn't feel right. A story about trauma and the ways we can heal through the people we love. Rating: Mature Content Notes: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Link to Podfic:This river will no longer be held back [Podfic]
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Tuesday, June 02, to midnight on Wednesday, June 03. (8pm Eastern Time).
This seems so weird to me. I grew up on reading books that had lingered for however long on the shelves of the children's dept of the local public library - which were all bound in that standard hard-wearing public library binding so one did not have any sense of shiny newness or otherwise - along with my mother's old books, some of which were works of a yet more previous generation which she had loved in her youth.
And that's before we get into the oddness of the Alice books and the talking animals and so forth.
Do they have no imaginations? Are they only supposed to identify with recognisable experiences?
Read somewhere about (in this case I think actually adult readers) who could not deal with subtext, foreshadowing, and other Litry Devices.
Sometimes books have their time and it is past. And sometimes they are just not the right thing at that moment.
And I also think of times in my past when I had fairly long commutes and other stretches of otherwise dead time that I could fill up with doing perhaps rather dutiful reading of those things One Ought To Read, and whether this is not only my experience. And then one's life shifts and these spaces go away.
Two paths diverge in a wood… and what happens when, in fact, you can travel both? In her debut novel Sublimation, author Isabel J. Kim looks at what happens when the road less taken is never not taken, and how a question in school set her on a new path.
ISABEL J. KIM:
I am going to tell you a story that I have never publicly told before. It is about the ignoble origins of Sublimation. And for context, Sublimation is a speculative fiction novel set in a universe where when you cross a border with the intention to leave, you split into two people. Literally.
Sublimation is about other things, too—the artificial nature of borders, the way in which human beings impose their technological will on natural processes, control and, freedom and the unhappy marriage of big tech and government and how it is hard to talk to people when you don’t know what you want—but the crux of it is: Sublimation is a story about being confronted by a life you didn’t lead.
When I was seventeen, I was taking a world history class and we were talking about immigration, because that’s what you do in a world history class in the United States of America. And the teacher asked us the question: why do people immigrate to America?
One of the other students—who was, in my teenage self’s words, “a white preppy blonde chick” and in my current self’s words, “literally just some guy”—raised her hand with perfect confidence and said “For a better life!” She spoke with such clear, myopic certainty that I was suddenly furious, because there are a lot of reasons that people go places and stay places and “a better life” is so reductive as to be meaningless, and also, some of us move because our dads get jobs, okay? You’ve lived here your entire life, and I’ve lived in four different cities in two different countries, so why are you raising your hand with such confidence?
The punchline, of course, is that I was born in New Jersey, and also had never technically immigrated anywhere. Also, it’s not like I raised my hand to talk about my experiences of being an expat in my country of ethnic origin.
Back then, I never liked talking about how I felt about being from places, because my international childhood was hard to explain. It was an experience that was fairly benign, mostly enriching, and only strange in retrospect. The only lingering weirdness was that I felt like a foreigner everywhere I went. I was an American kid in Korea, I was a Korean kid in America, and explaining how that felt would require me to make you live an entire life walking in my shoes. When you’re seventeen, that’s hard.
A few years (read: seven years) later I was back in Korea for a vacation, and I was surprised at how quickly the country had changed while I had been gone. I started thinking about how all the differences would have seemed totally organic had I lived there my entire life. This got me ruminating about the version of me that never moved back to the states, which led me to the idea of instancing—leaving a double behind when you cross a border. One person who goes, another who stays.
And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor made flesh, an idea through which I could viscerally shove the experience of being a foreigner into the reader’s brain. And I was thinking about my classmate from high school, and how I wanted to make people like her understand how it felt, to be perpetually from somewhere else.
So, I started writing a story (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self”) about how it felt to be from somewhere else, and how it felt to be a foreigner, and how you might feel if you were the one who got to leave, and conversely, how it might feel to be the one who had to stay.
Then, a strange thing happened. The more I expanded the aforementioned short story, the more I realized that the feeling of alienation was universal—everyone feels like a stranger sometimes, everyone wonders about what could have happened had they made different choices, everyone has a road not traveled.
The more I wrote, the more I saw the story I was writing as not really about my own individual experience, but as a way for the reader to sift through their own experiences through the lens of the story I was giving them. The narrative became a sort of window for the reader, or a magnifying glass.
And I felt that even more intensely when I talked with people about Sublimation across the various drafts. The more conversations I had, the stronger my feeling was that at the end of the day, we’re more similar than not. If you look far back enough, we’re all from somewhere else. And we’re all traveling into the future together.
And the future, like the past, is a foreign country, from which we can never return.
So that’s what Sublimation is about. And maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t raise my hand in world history class; if I had, I might not have written this novel.
My recent reading has either been complete fluff, or about soil management. Books with "No Till Farming", "Soil Biology" and "Bio Char" in the titles. Reading about the advances in our understanding of soil biology has been fascinating and useful. All this reading, plus watching what is going on in my own garden, is continuing to alter the way I garden. That plus the very warm spring we have had here means that I have tomatoes that have flung themselves up their trellises. Many are well over 4 feet tall with big thick stems, and have their first crop of tomatoes growing rapidly. Some have struggled to set fruit, possibly because we are still getting swings of temperature that are 40 or more degrees F. between day and night. Today it was 95F during the day, but the forecast low is 55. Chores for tomorrow are to finish unloading the fourth pickup load of wood compost, and start digging a ditch for a new faucet. While I'm putting in a faucet I want to install a underground box for valves. It is long past time to set up timers on my beds. I've got all the stuff to do it! My solar stuff was supposed to be here Friday, didn't come, was supposed to be here today, but no word. The tracking on it just says "In Transit", which isn't very helpful.
Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!
EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.
It's hard to write about an advanced reader copy of one of the most coveted science fiction releases of the quarter. I tried, multiple times, to collect some thoughts about Platform Decay, the latest release in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I failed, every time, because my love for this series is immense, but also hard to quantify. Finding the words to describe sincere emotions? Ugh. Therefore, Platform Decay is already out, and you can read it now via your library or favorite indie bookstore!
Platform Decay is the eighth entry in The Murderbot Diaries, following our hero as it stages a high stakes rescue on Corporate Ringworld. It's working apart from its usual allies, it must infiltrate and escape the station with several squishy humans, and oh right, a former enemy asks for its help, complicating the extraction. Nothing can go wrong!
(Things immediately go wrong.)
To make matters worse, it's also dealing with an emotional health module. What's more stressful than a hostage situation in corporate territory? Mobile therapy. Murderbot must protect its humans (no pressure), avoid corporate forces that would love to slurp its kidnapped humans into corporate slavery (assholes), and navigate across a hostile station where one mistake could cost it everything (business as usual!). ( Read more... )
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Monday, June 01, to midnight on Tuesday, June 02. (8pm Eastern Time).
Awww, doesn’t it look like they’re cuddling? They are not, about a tenth of a second later they were rolling about in a full-blown tussle, as they are wont to do. Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun; Smudge actually enjoys his wrestling time with Saja, and vice versa. But it does make for some fun moments:
To begin the month of June, Smudge offers up the rare but valuable TussleMlem, with an assist from Saja
Took my wonky knee to the GP this afternoon - the GP, as they are these days, appeared to be about 12 years old from my advanced perspective, but v competent, did a thorough interrogation and examination, and came to the conclusion that it looks very like a damaged meniscus -
- and guess what?
We treat that with PHYSIO! like what I am doing for other assorted bits of anatomy. They are sending letter to appropriate quarters and no doubt it will take 6 months at least to get an appointment.
An investigation into acts of self-pleasure among parrots and other birds has reached a climax, with the results providing welcome relief for vets and researchers, not to mention the birds themselves. Bird keepers are often advised to discourage and even punish birds for masturbating, but the study found the activity was more common in the wild than in captivity, with researchers concluding it is part of a bird’s natural behaviour.
I am trying to recall what novel it was in which somebody mentions that the family have a canary (or maybe a budgie?) they have christened Onan because it scatters its seed upon the ground....
'Don't forget to feed pleasure the parrot!!!' (so that nature will not turn sour in its veins.)
1) I finished the series Hacks. I was very ambivalent about the show's first season, and was not enthusiastic about the second either. But I definitely get that in order to end where we did in the last season the two characters had to start poles apart. So I felt like the final season was a huge payoff to viewers who had stuck through the show all the way through. Would definitely recommend.
I was reading a good article (about TV shows on the tech industry) that included this: "the show is uniquely skilled at depicting the complicated mix of emotions that animate creative partnerships, and makes a strong argument for the idea that your true soulmate is the person that you most love making stuff with." It was talking about a show I loved, Halt and Catch Fire, but it applies equally well to Hacks. The fact that both shows featured female partnerships is a real bonus.
2) I had wondered a while back why Disney was partnering with Max to do a bundle (whereas Hulu + Disney + ESPN was all in-house, so an obvious option). Apparently, it's because bundling is very successful in keeping people subscribed. "Two years ago, only 10 percent of every new subscription for a major streaming service was for a bundled offering…Now, bundles account for a third of all new subscriptions, and 28 percent of all subscriptions, double the share in 2024." ( Read more... )
3) I was commenting over on Pillowfort about Tumblr's latest move to make commenting more prominent on the site. As I said there "As a totally anecdotal point, I rarely follow Tumblr links anymore because so often I'm blocked from seeing the linked content. But when I do get through I'm often surprised how little response I see the posts getting." So I'm wondering if this move is because, between the repeated exodus of people and the blocking of content to visitors, that the site traffic is actually in sharp decline. One way to make it more obvious people are active and to encourage them to speak up, is to surface comments more prominently.
My mother has been looking up & memorising the number of British expats living in various different countries around the world. This is ammunition for an long-running battle about immigration with one of the neighbours. Woman at num 3 says ".. small boats crossing the channel..." My mother says " .. over 700 thousand British economic migrants in America should they all be sent home? Estimated up to a million British migrants in Spain and they don't make any effort to integrate or learn the language .. " I don't think the woman at num 3 will change her mind, but my Mum is enjoying herself. She also has strong opinions about the use of the word Expat which she will share whether or not you give her the chance.
Unfortunately she lost points on the surprisingly-progressive-old-person leaderboard when talking about British Jews & British Muslims and assimilation.
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, with an assist from Saja