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Nanao must chose between staying with her abusive family or accepting the offer of marriage from handsome, wealthy, sincerely considerate Yako. A dilemma for the ages!

The Ayakashi Hunter’s Tainted Bride, volume 1 by Midori Yuma & Mamenosuke Fujimaru

son of Smith post

Jan. 20th, 2026 01:37 pm
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[personal profile] calimac
So I wrote about the conference on Clark Ashton Smith that I attended. I've now had the chance to follow a link that I took note of during the panels. It's a (virtually?) complete file of Smith's writings online. If you've never tried his writings, here's your chance. One story of his that I found searingly memorable will make a bracing introduction to whether Smith is an author for you. Unusually for Smith, the main character of this one is the hero, not the villain, but nothing goes well for anybody in this story. I'm reminded as much of Tiptree's "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" as of anything else by this story.

Mistakes were made

Jan. 20th, 2026 09:02 am
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One of Canada's great missteps was not mining the border. The other was not building intermediate range nuclear-armed missiles.


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November 25, 2026 would have been Poul Anderson’s 100th birthday. As there is no guarantee any of us will see November 25, 2026, I’ll borrow an idea from Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Year That Was and start writing something appropriately celebratory now.

Homeward By Starlight



Improve your sword and sorcery through inspirational verisimilitude!


On Thud and Blunder by Poul Anderson

Bundle of Holding: Sleepy Hollow

Jan. 19th, 2026 02:08 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of early 19th-Century folk horror.

Bundle of Holding: Sleepy Hollow

bookends

Jan. 19th, 2026 11:10 am
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[personal profile] adrian_turtle
I know this seems like a petty thing, in these parlous times, but I am having a hard time finding bookends. We are finally, finally getting all the books out of storage and sorted and on shelves and they might almost fit if we have enough bookends. (If you're going to do part of a shelf as 2 rows of paperbacks, that needs at least 1 bookend to keep the last ones from falling into the larger books that are going as single rows.)

Where can I find plain metal bookends, like the kind they use in libraries? I do NOT want to get them from Amazon, for political reasons. Neither do I want to get them from Target. Once, I might have tried Home Depot, but it turns out that they are cooperating with ICE in deeply distressing ways so I don't want to do business with them either. Etsy is generally recommended as an alternative to Amazon, but they just have decorative standalone bookends. Some of them are really pretty but they are too bulky for this purpose.

concert review: Saratoga Symphony

Jan. 18th, 2026 09:15 pm
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[personal profile] calimac
Once the bargain basement of local community orchestras, the Saratoga Symphony has improved tremendously in recent years. They did a pretty good job with the obscure but enormous Busoni Piano Concerto a couple years ago, and brought back the same pianist, local star Tamami Honma, in the very famous and also very large Rachmaninoff Second Concerto for a concert in a nearby church which, contrary to Saratoga's tradition of wreathing their programs in complete obscurity, they advertised heavily.

Honma played in a clotted but compelling manner, and the orchestra surged effectively. Music director Jason Klein craftily put the concerto after intermission, so as to force the audience that had come for it to also hear the other major piece, Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. This is by all odds the most inscrutable of all Sibelius symphonies, and a real challenge for the orchestra: not that it's particularly hard to play, but that it's very hard to interpret coherently. But this worked pretty well, especially keeping the drive up in the finale, and technically it did quite well for the community orchestra level.
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A deranged President sets his eyes on Canada and Scandinavia, forcing one senator to consider the prospect of contemplating the preliminaries to action.

Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

Today I Learned

Jan. 17th, 2026 10:37 am
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Orson Scott Card has a substack.
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Three works new to me, all from various TTRPG Kickstarters. 2026 feels kind of light on upcoming books.

Books Received, January 10 to January 16

Poll #34090 Books Received, January 10 to January 16
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying (Alpha) by Adam Bradford & Tomas Härenstam (July 2026)
9 (33.3%)

Fabula Ultima Bestiary by Emanuele Galletto (May 2026)
4 (14.8%)

Arkand: City of Wave and Flames by Johan Sjöberg (April 2026)
4 (14.8%)

Some other option (see comments)
2 (7.4%)

Cats!
23 (85.2%)

Arisia

Jan. 16th, 2026 02:41 pm
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[personal profile] adrian_turtle
Is anyone I know going to Arisia this weekend? I'm thinking of going for a day but haven't decided which day. Masking is the only way I feel safe going to this kind of event, but masking also makes it harder to make a long relaxed day of it because I can't go out to a restaurant with half a dozen friends for 90 minutes in the middle of the day. Even so, I'd like to see people if that's possible.

Mommy, what's abolition?

Jan. 16th, 2026 02:25 pm
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[personal profile] adrian_turtle
We went to the Boston rally against ICE last Saturday. One of my study partners asked afterwards if it made me fired up with solidarity, and inspired to resist more strongly? Not really. Not this time. But my presence made the crowd a bit bigger, and I hope a bigger crowd inspired others incrementally more.

I saw a kid near the T station, on the edge of the crowd, and heard her ask, "Mommy, what's ab abol abolish?" She was of an age to be fairly new to reading, so she had to sound out the word on the "Abolish ICE" signs. Her mother said abolishing was when you got rid of something completely by making a law against it, like the abolition of slavery. It made me wonder about little kids tagging along when when Bostonians marched for abolition in the 19th century.

concert revew: San Francisco Symphony

Jan. 16th, 2026 10:27 am
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[personal profile] calimac
My first concert of the calendar year, and almost a month since the last one.

The first time I heard Edward Gardner guest conduct SFS, I thought he led hot and sizzling performances. Half of that Edward Gardner showed up this time.

The half that didn't led the Bruch G-minor Violin Concerto. Soloist Randall Goosby had a remarkably light and smooth tone, and drove his part forward pretty well, but as an orchestral piece this was bland and dull. I wasn't too excited by the rendition of Vaughan Williams's Overture to The Wasps either, though the sound of the orchestra was unusually broad and shiny, especially in the winds.

This sound quality reappeared in places like the flute choir passages of Holst's "Saturn," and yes, The Planets was the good half of the concert. Hot and sizzling it was when the score called for it, but the most remarkable movement was the quietest, "Neptune," a most crisp and clear but delicate performance of an often-fuzzy piece. I left stripped of the forebodings I'd felt during intermission.

six things make a post

Jan. 15th, 2026 09:14 pm
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[personal profile] redbird

In no particular order:

*Last night, I talked with [personal profile] cattitude and [personal profile] adrian_turtle about possible text for my mother's gravestone. I emailed this to my brother today, with a note that these were what I was thinking of.

*I went to TJ Maxx to look for slippers. Disappointingly, there were none that came close to fitting: the ones that might have been in my size were all significantly too tight across the top of my foot. I was wearing thin socks (specifically, lightweight compression socks). It continues to be annoying that not buying slippers (for example) is as tiring as buying some.

*Also, my hips started hurting while I was in the store, so I decided not to look for other things, but headed home with only a quick stop at CVS, and not a grocery store.

*Today was definitely a good day to be outside; yesterday wasn't particularly, and tomorrow is likely to be a lot colder than today (with an afternoon high a little below freezing, so not horrible for January in Boston).

*I got email today from state senator Pat Jehlen, about a bill to ban the use of masks by law enforcement. This is noteworthy because I haven't lived in her district since 2019, and didn't think I was still on her mailing list.

*The skin on my fingertips, and on the rest of my hands, is doing a lot better. I will need to remember to keep applying the serious lotion, so it doesn't start splitting again. However, my shoulder is bothering me, which may be from doing a lot of mousing when I was avoiding using the keyboard.

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[personal profile] redbird
As is sometimes the case, I only heard about Christie and his part in the anti-apartheid fight after he died.

Renfrew Christie was a white South African scientist and member of the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress. He went to Oxford University and studied South Africa's history of electrification "so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium," he told the BBC. That in turn let them figure out how much enriched uranium South Africa had, and many bombs it could build.

When he returned to South Africa, he was arrested and, after 48 hours of torture, wrote a forced confession, which he told the BBC was the best thing he ever wrote

noting that he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage Koeberg and other facilities.

“And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth” straight to the A.N.C.


Christie died of pneumonia last month, at the age of 76.

I'm linking to [personal profile] siderea's post, which includes the text of the (paywalled) NY Times obituary.
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Murderbot and allies struggle to establish friendly relations with a rediscovered lost colony in time to protect them from a predatory company.


System Collapse (Murderbot, volume 7) by Martha Wells
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