Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?

2026-Apr-30, Thursday 00:00
[syndicated profile] anil_dash_feed

Posted by Anil Dash

https://anildash.com/2026/04/30/artemis-photos-flickr/

If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?

Here’s the TL;DR:

  • Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, which was based on users having control over their data
  • Tools at that time began giving creators the power to decide what license they wanted to release their content under, including permissions about how it could be shared, used, or remixed
  • Because the people who made platforms back then were users and creators themselves, they thought about the long term and wanted to be able to preserve people’s work
  • After lots of corporate shuffling, Flickr ended up in the hands of a family-owned company, SmugMug, and they made the Flickr Foundation to preserve public photos for the next 100 years
  • NASA’s images should only be on a service where they can be stored in full resolution, for the long term, dedicated to the public domain — which the other social media apps of today can’t do

The Photographic Record

First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.

Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)

With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.

In Focus

Flickr wasn't a social platform first — it was a photography platform first. That means it was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot. People started building communities around the then-new idea of using tags to help them find content by topics online — an idea that would directly influence the creation of hashtags on Twitter a few years later.

Another core idea of the time was a firm belief in open data: people should own and control their own work. Eventually, some experts (including a then-teenage Aaron Swartz, who we'd later talk about in the early days of Markdown) created a set of standards called Creative Commons licenses, now maintained by an organization of the same name. Flickr made it easy for users to describe what permissions people had for reusing or remixing any photos they posted. (I was helping out with a blogging platform back then, and I think we were the first tool to support this stuff. It felt like a big deal at the time!)

People's Flickr images started popping up in corporate PowerPoint presentations or commercial advertising almost immediately. A little sidebar: the incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators. That might be legal by most readings of the licenses, but if you have hundreds of billions of dollars and don't think you should at least have a conversation with the photographers whose work you're using, you're probably an asshole.

Archival Prints

Our close-knit community of people building the new era of web apps was keenly aware that our users were creating culture. This realization brought a huge amount of responsibility — not just in enabling users to express themselves, but in thinking about the long term for people's ownership of their works. Public institutions had just begun to use these platforms, which meant that the content being shared wasn't just a nice picture to look at: it might be socially or even historically significant.

What happened in the years that followed was… a lot of corporate machinations. Flickr got bought by Yahoo. Flickr's founders left Yahoo. Yahoo got bought by Verizon. You can imagine how all of that went; the details aren't all that important, except to say that by the time Instagram launched, Flickr had begun to fade into obscurity. People were focused on mobile phones instead of the desktop, on sharing square images with filters instead of full-resolution photography, and on connecting socially instead of caring about photos as art or a cultural record. Nobody would post the canonical historical photo of an event with a Valencia filter on it. Most of Flickr's users moved on, rarely checking their old accounts — until a family-owned photo service named SmugMug bought the service from Yahoo. A human-scale operation with some actual heart and a love of photography was a much better home for the platform than some random division of Verizon.

Commons Sense

In 2022, the new team at SmugMug that owned Flickr decided to focus on Flickr’s larger place in culture. Many major institutions around the world had chosen to archive their public photos on Flickr because of its superior support for high-resolution imagery, its unique ability to declare explicit legal licenses (including public domain licenses), and its long-term reputation for reliably hosting content without any of the harms or abuses that typical social networks had inflicted on users. Museums around the world had entire catalogs on the platform, and governments routinely used it to document their public events. When I had a photo taken at an official White House event with President Obama, his team sent me the final image afterward by sending me a Flickr link; when Zohran Mamdani met King Charles, the NYC Mayor’s Office shared those pictures on Flickr, too.

The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world. (You should absolutely donate to support the Flickr Foundation in their mission to preserve these vital public resources for many years in the future.)

It’s in this context that NASA has long been sharing its imagery on Flickr, for all of its missions — not just Artemis II. There’s even a special section for NASA on The Commons. And since everything is provided in incredibly high-resolution and has every single detail about the photo and how it was taken, it’s possible to combine the information about the photo with other data and create amazing resources like this beautiful timeline of the entire mission. You can see Hank Green’s wonderful narration of his inspiration and creative journey behind the timeline right here:

Why Not With Us?

Anybody who’s read my site for a while knows that I’m a huge proponent of owning your own website, and having your own content live there. Shouldn’t NASA, of all institutions, have their photos live on their own nasa.gov website? Well, yes! But.

One complication is that many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.

In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades. The SmugMug team has been very thoughtful in managing both their business and their technical infrastructure in order to sustain Flickr’s public archives for years to come. (Though, as mentioned, you should still donate to ensure they can keep doing so!)

What’s more painful is the more recent threats to public stewardship of this kind of content. The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

We’ll be glad to have archives like Flickr’s in the future, and people around the world will be glad for its place in archiving even much more mundane aspects of culture.

Taking off

I was honored to get to reflect on my long history with Flickr, and with online community, in an interview with my old friend Jessamyn West, for the Flickr Foundation’s blog. In a conversation that unspooled over a few months, I think we covered so many of the themes that resonated in what I’ve mentioned here, and what struck me most was how much I wanted a new generation of people on the internet to have their own version of the communities and experiences that we got to have when sites like Flickr were first being made. People still cherish those values!

The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades. Then, others who do some of the most ambitious and astounding things imaginable can build on that work to inspire us. And then, some more regular folks can build on top of that and help us waste a little bit of time just clicking around on something fun. That’s what the internet is supposed to be about!

This isn’t just about recounting old web lore — this is about explaining the internet we have right now. Hank’s timeline site is brand new, entertaining a whole new generation, and probably the majority of the audience who are looking at it weren’t even born when Flickr was first conceived. But the reason he can build that site is because of the values and the inventiveness of the team and community who created a platform like Flickr — and because those kinds of values are durable. They might not be as loud or flashy, but they are still everywhere, quietly enabling a lot of the things we enjoy most every day.

Public dollars helped make a fascinating community, then public dollars enabled a breathtaking journey into space, and then a public commons helped a creator make a novel way to explore that journey. Lots of people chose, over and over, to be generous with their genius. These are all gifts that a bunch of strangers gave each other, over hundreds of thousands of miles, and many years. Inspiration is all around us!

A Setting Earth

https://anildash.com/2026/04/30/artemis-photos-flickr/

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The Porch 2.0

2026-Apr-29, Wednesday 20:14
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/29/the-porch-2-0/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60425

You may remember that last month the Scalzi Compound was hit with 80mph winds and as a result part of our porch railing was blown out, which was the excuse we needed to replace it entirely with something more robust. That replacement is now here: the new post are thicker and heavier (6 inches by 6 inches, rather than the previous four by four) and reinforced above and below. The new railing (and the post cladding) is made from composites so it will last longer and look better.

Although I don’t want to tempt fate by saying this new porch railing and its support posts will laugh in the face of 80mph winds, in point of fact they should be fine in anything short of a tornado, and if we have a tornado, we will have a whole host of other problems, and the porch railing will be way down the list.

The porch railing taken care of, our back deck is next on our contactor’s list of things to renovate; stay tuned for that.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/29/the-porch-2-0/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60425

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(One) Good AI Is Here

2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 00:00
[syndicated profile] anil_dash_feed

Posted by Anil Dash

https://anildash.com/2026/04/28/one-good-ai-is-here/

The cultural battles over AI have broken down over predictable lines in the past few years, with critics rightfully calling out the big AI platforms for training on content without consent, recklessly building without considering environmental impact, and designing platforms that are unaccountable because their code and weights (the parameters that describe how an AI model works) aren’t open for third-parties to evaluate. The AI zealots have done themselves no favors, by not only dismissing all of these valid criticisms, but by also making increasingly outlandish and extreme claims about the capabilities of the Big AI platforms, while simultaneously scaremongering about the brutal effect they’ll have on people’s lives and careers. It’s no wonder the public sentiment about AI has become so negative.

But a small cohort of us who are curious about LLMs as a technology, yet deeply critical of Big AI companies for their impact on society, have been asking what would “good” AI look like? Is it possible to make versions of these technologies that provide real benefits, and actually help people, without all of the attendant harms? We’ve had prior eras of machine learning tools that were useful technologies without being massively destructive — are the negative externalities intrinsic to LLMs in general?

We might have just gotten our first glimpse at an AI that’s actually good.

This is just one small example that I saw recently, in a very unexpected place, but I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s not a tool that every person in the world is going to use, but it feels a bit like the famous William Gibson quote, “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” This might be a little tiny bit of a good AI future, and now we just need to distribute the same kind of thing to a lot more people.

What’s good? Something that checks every box I can think of for our most immediately positive goals: it’s trained entirely with data that were consensually gathered; it’s completely open source and open weights, so anybody can examine it to know exactly how it works and what biases or flaws it might have; it’s designed to run on ordinary computers that normal people have access to — including those that can run entirely on renewable and responsible energy sources. And it is controlled by creators, not extractors, people who are inarguably on the side of artists and creatives and those who make art and culture in the world, designed to support and enable and empower their expression. No billionaires or guests of Epstein’s island were involved in the creation of this technology.

Going Green

Let’s back up a little bit. Corridor Digital is a video production shop and content studio that have been popular on YouTube since the earliest days of its independent filmmaking community. They’ve stayed relevant through many changing trends and format shifts, most recently becoming wildly popular for their ongoing series of video reactions to the visual effects and stunt sequences in popular films and TV shows. Over time, the series has earned a ton of respect from many of the top practitioners in the industry from areas like VFX, stunt work, animation, and more. They even went direct to their fans with a nice subscription service, helping support their work directly.

But still, this was basically a bunch of (mostly) guys making videos. Until something interesting happened recently.

Niko Pueringer, one of the cofounders of Corridor Digital, and one of the more prominent on-screen characters in their filmed content, is not a software developer. Then, a few weeks ago, he decided he had reached a breaking point in one of the challenges that effects artists regularly have to deal with: green screen keying. (That’s the process in which an artist extracts a foreground image from the green background when they’re creating a clip that will be composited together for an effects shot.) Basically, the current tools were crude enough that it felt like an almost manual process, requiring artists to painstakingly cut out images like they were snipping out pictures from a magazine with a dull pair of scissors.

So, Niko created a set of his own videos using CGI to simulate a green screen, and began training an AI model — in this case, a neural network — to learn how to key the footage that he'd generated for this purpose. (He was able to build the tools that carried out this training by asking one of the current popular commercial AI tools to help.) After a good bit of time, trial and error, and heavy computation, the end result was a system that was extremely effective at green screen keying. He even sent an early version of the system to other professionals in the industry to compare its results to their own commercial-grade tools, and they confirmed that it often performed comparably to some of the best tools on the market.

Niko made a video explaining the project — and released the code that would enable others to run the same tool for themselves. (Do check out the clip — the team have become very gifted storytellers, and the narrative does a wonderful job of bringing you along on the journey of the highs and lows of discovering how to try to invent something new.)

Opening up

Once the new tool, now called CorridorKey was out in the wild, a community rapidly formed, and instantly adopted the software into a full-fledged open source project — even though Niko had never led an open source project before. As is typical for such an enthusiast community, they were able to teach their leader about all the arcane processes involved in accepting code improvements from strangers around the world.

Within days, the community had made the tool significantly easier to use — especially for non-expert video editors who would struggle with the complexities of configuring conventional (super-nerdy) open source software. Other community members massively reduced the hardware requirements needed to perform the advanced video processing that the tool enables, moving from needing some of the most powerful workstations available to running on ordinary consumer desktop computers that many home filmmakers might have access to. And all of this for free. Many comparable tools would cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars for video editing teams to use. As Niko said in his original video, he didn’t “want to pay rent for his paintbrush”.

In the follow-up video just two weeks later, it was clear that there had been an extraordinary response to the release of CorridorKey. And an even more extraordinary next milestone was achieved, with the announcement that Niko would be releasing all of the original training data for the creation of the tool — all of the videos and content used to create the model, so that others could replicate the work, or even create their own models if they wanted to improve upon the work itself.

For the technically-minded, CorridorKey is licensed under a modified Creative Commons license, with the intention of preventing commercial exploitation without consent. I’m sure this will prompt some hand-wringing about whether it fits everyone’s definitions of “open source”, but given that someone could certainly reimplement this approach from scratch, given all of the material that Niko and his community have shared, I think that’s a distinction without a difference. The larger point here about a turning point in the AI and LLM ecosystem is what is transformative for creators who’ve been beleaguered by the AI cheerleading for the last few years.

Importantly, using CorridorKey doesn’t impose any restrictions or obligations on people making videos. There’s no phoning home, no scraping of videos to be used for training models, not even collecting an email address for marketing purposes. It’s a stark contrast to what people are used to in the commercial software world, let alone the hyper-surveillance world of most Big AI companies.

Where does this lead?

Okay, so that’s one tool. But what if you’re not a video creator who does things with green screens? How does this help anybody else? There are a few really important breakthroughs here that start to help more people realize what’s possible.

  • The bad behaviors are a choice. The Big AI companies that take content without consent, or who refuse to let people see their code, or who insist they can’t give people control over how their models run and whether they are responsible about their environmental impact can now be definitively refuted. If this small team of creators who aren’t even a tech company can make an AI that does the right thing, how come the biggest companies in the world can’t?
  • It’s about purpose, not one-size-fits-all. There’s no risk that CorridorKey is going to tell kids to self-harm in the way that ChatGPT does. Because CorridorKey has a specific job to do. And that’s the way AI should work — solving a specific problem for a particular community, instead of trying to be all things to all people, which is when these platforms start becoming unaccountable and start harming massive numbers of people.
  • It’s under-hyped, not over-hyped. If anything, the launch of CorridorKey was buried towards the end of a longer video that was about the creative process; the launch video doesn’t even mention the name of the product! The creator doesn’t make any claims about how great it is, or say it’s better than anything else, or say it’s going to change the world. Instead, he’s humble and hopeful that it’s of use to a specific community, and they respond with enthusiasm and connection and collaboration to that sincerity. This isn’t a tool that needs to be shoved in anybody’s face.

All of these traits are things that can be replicated in many more fields, by many more passionate people who don’t have to necessarily be experts, but who care about displacing the tech tycoons’ one-size-fits-all platforms with something that is human-scale and accountable.

For years, I’ve had this conviction that a better AI is possible, and I understand why many people have felt I was being naive, or that the way tech is today makes it impossible for such a thing to survive. But I think the tide is turning, and people are so fed up with the software-brained CEOs forcing things on them that they don’t want. That doesn’t mean that people hate technology! It just means that they hate what these dudes have made technology in to.

It’s nice to be reminded of what tech can be at its best. Sometimes it’s a thing that extracts exactly what we want to see from the background we’re trying to leave behind.

https://anildash.com/2026/04/28/one-good-ai-is-here/

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The Big Idea: Marie Vibbert

2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 18:15
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/28/the-big-idea-marie-vibbert-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60417

Though humans have a strong desire to be an individual, slightly stronger is our innate need to not be alone. Humans are not solitary creatures, so why do we try so hard to act like we are all just individuals with no ties or connections to those around us? Author Marie Vibbert wonders if we wouldn’t all be better off as a hive mind in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Multitude.

MARIE VIBBERT:

Over 11,000 tons of discarded clothing lie in the Chilean desert. These are garments that never sold, from low and high brands, and almost entirely made of petroleum-based fabrics: rayon, polyester, acrylic. It’s a major environmental problem. The clothes catch fire, leak chemicals and microplastics, and just… keep coming.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, they are looking for new, industrial applications for wool because this renewable clothing resource that doesn’t spontaneously combust sits rotting in warehouses, unable to compete with the subsidized price of polyester.

Humanity has a problem. A communication problem that creates wasted effort and wasted resources. Food being thrown out while people starve. Diseases like cholera running rampant when their cures exist. I could go on and on with examples. Why can’t we put our efforts where they are needed? Why do our systems dictate so much cruel irony?

When you look at humanity as a whole, we are tearing ourselves apart, starving ourselves, killing ourselves. We don’t seem to understand that we are us? 

These were my thoughts going into a project whose first note was: The Borg, but friendly?

I thought it would be a short story. Something quick. Get in and get out. A hive mind comes to Earth, tries to communicate with humans as a hive, fails, and sees what a mess we are. Nudge the reader toward empathy, toward seeing problems between “us” and “them” as an insufficient definition of “us.” I figured it’d hit about 2,000 words long. But the more I thought about it, the bigger the problem became. How to show the perspective? How to encompass humanity and then move the camera back to show us in perspective?

How do we look, to a hive mind? What would they expect?

Humans are, in many ways, a collective creature. A single human can no more build a skyscraper than a single ant can build a mound. Even writing a novel is a collective act, when you consider that this language that I am using is a vast collection of consensuses on symbols, meaning, and parsing. English, on a certain level, is a stack of inside jokes passed down and expanded every generation.

Beyond that, every work of fiction builds on and reacts to those that came before. I am writing in a genre, science fiction, defined by all the works labelled as such, and in turn defined by the pressures and uncertainties of our society that caused the first authors to write things not of this world, the first readers to like that and want to emulate it, and on, and on. 

I was on a panel at WorldCon on Hive Minds in Science Fiction when it occurred to me that an assumption I hadn’t seen tackled yet was that collectivism automatically meant a repression of individuality. It seems an easy conclusion? If my family votes democratically on dinner, my individual desire to eat nothing but spaghetti every night is subordinated. Yet, the four of us are still individuals as we enjoy my spouse and child’s preferred chicken and rice.

Why wouldn’t a hive mind contain room for the individual? Does a Borg stop loving spaghetti once it absorbs the thoughts of thousands of chicken fans? Wouldn’t it be more of a conversation than a dictatorship? If it’s truly collective, why would there be dictators? And, come to think of it, don’t we, as large groups, change our opinions over time? Americans once ate more chipped beef on toast than chicken fingers. We thought the Edwardian S-bend corset and the mullet were a great ideas. We went from loving elephant leg jeans to skinny jeans. Collectively. Like an individual goes through phases of loving fly fishing or obsession with one particular series of books, societies go through a group fondness for orange or dark wood paneling. 

At the risk of making this blog post nothing but rhetorical questions, why do we assume innovation is a characteristic of the individual? Why do we assign conformity to the collective alone?

I tried to imagine myself a hive-member. Many advantages came immediately to mind. I wouldn’t have had to gamble on picking a college major; I’d have access to the needs of the society around me to help find work that was needed. I wouldn’t be competing for the access to share my stories, I’d just tell them, and my hive would hear them and like them or not.

Competition is not just the “healthy” activity of small businesses or inventors, of students seeking academic awards. It’s also war. All around the world, humans are killing humans so that they can avoid sharing resources. Humans are defining others, drawing lines around some of their siblings and excluding others, to limit access to resources. Yet to a non-human observer, we are one species, one sprawling community, alike in our needs and wants and behaviors.

And humans can be so kind, too.

In 2023, I had to travel to New York City because I had to get a Visa to attend my first Hugo awards as a nominee, and as I sat in Central Park waiting for my appointment, admiring the unnatural warmth of the post-climate-change day, I saw a middle-aged man patiently leading a group of elderly people. He looked so happy. I dashed off four pages in my journal about him, imagining his life taking care of elders. I wondered why my science fiction stories weren’t as easy or as fun as simple character portraits. I enjoyed the flashes of lives I’d seen in short stories by Mary Grimm or Maureen McHugh, or the prose poems of Mary Biddinger.

I used to love to climb into a character’s head and walk around, show her worries and fears and daily chores, and then I’d show my work to science fiction writers and be told I had no plot, or perhaps I was “just” a poet. Because of this critique, I chose to wall off the desire to write the way that came most naturally, eschewing character-study and stream-of-consciousness in favor of sentences that “did something.” (My own term.) I began to focus on ideas, on technology, on concrete consequences and violent action.

Eventually, I got pretty good at it, good enough to feel its limitations.  I opened up my old “plotless” stories and found them not so plotless, after all. Rather, they reflected my own sense of helplessness as a teen and early-twenties writer, and that point of view was uninteresting to the science fiction editor of the 90s and 2000s, who focused on competent characters moving the plot by choice.

At the young age of 47, I revised one of those 20-year-old “plotless” stories and sold it to a market paying the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s professional rate of eight cents a word. Not to brag. (Yes, to brag). In some ways, the genre itself has moved on from rigorously espousing action and certainty from its heroes, but also, I had learned how to structure a story through the mechanics of action, and this helped me see the similar structuring of non-action-based stories.

Part of the literary legacy my writing depends on is science fiction’s desire for logical, action-driven plots, but the origins of this project are the literary flash fiction piece, rooted in character and moment, and my desire to return to it, now that I have proven myself in the plot mines. 

Which brings us back to the beginning: How better to show the individual in the collective of humanity than through a series of very short point of view pieces? The result is an introspective novella I wrote in thousand-word chunks around other projects. More than any other book I’ve written, I feel naked in its pages, exposing my deepest, most personal self. I felt free to do this because it was something I thought would never sell: too literary, too experimental.

Well, I sent it to Apex Books and they disagreed. I hope you enjoy, and be kind to my Space Cephalopods. 

—-

Multitude: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/28/the-big-idea-marie-vibbert-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60417

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Alex Jones is Losing It Over The Onion Buying Infowars

2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 15:01
[syndicated profile] skepchick_feed

Posted by Rebecca Watson

https://skepchick.org/2026/04/alex-jones-is-losing-it-over-the-onion-buying-infowars/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133597

I talk about a LOT of depressing topics on this channel, so I think it’s important to occasionally step back and appreciate big wins when they happen. With that in mind, today I want to celebrate the fact that the satirical newspaper, The Onion, now owns Alex Jones’ website and media empire, Infowars, and that …

https://skepchick.org/2026/04/alex-jones-is-losing-it-over-the-onion-buying-infowars/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133597

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Moseying Around Cincinnati’s Asian Food Festival

2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 14:23
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/28/moseying-around-cincinnatis-asian-food-festival/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60350

I still have more posts to do over my trip to Colorado (I cannot seem to get through that dang trip!), but I wanted to post about my experience at Cincinnati’s Asian Food Festival because it just happened this past weekend and I thought some fresh content was a good way to get me into a writing mood.

I was so excited for this festival. I had it on my calendar for two whole months prior because I couldn’t wait for it. I told multiple friends about it out of excitement. I ended up going with Kayla, Brad, and Bryant, and we went on Saturday, since it’s only a two-day festival and Saturday just worked better for everyone instead of Sunday.

The Cincinnati Asian Food Festival has been going on for fifteen years, with this past year surpassing 125,000 attendees, and they have over 60 different vendors. Most of these are food and drink vendors, but there’s also some other goods for sale and even a ZYN station set up, just in case you really needed your nicotine fix.

I am sad to say I didn’t have a super positive experience at the festival, despite my initial excitement for it. As you can imagine from hearing the words “125,000 attendees,” it was very crowded. On one hand, I’m happy that something like an Asian Food Festival would be a popular event and that all these businesses are getting a ton of traffic, but on the other hand, when you cram that many people into a three block radius, it gets very difficult to walk around.

Long lines impede the flow of foot traffic (what little flow there is) because they jut right out into the street everyone is trying to walk down, every line to order is at least twenty minutes long and then you have to wait to actually receive your food. If you’re with your friends you will absolutely lose them in the crowd unless you’re literally holding hands. You will get shoulder checked by multiple people and almost kick a pug you didn’t see. There is absolutely nowhere to sit and eat or even stand and eat. There’s also almost no shade.

For what it’s worth, these issues are not limited to just the Asian Food Festival. This is pretty much all food festivals ever. And I go to a fair amount of them. I’m honestly very tired of these issues, and I feel like the Asian Food Festival just so happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. You can’t have a literal food festival and then have nowhere for people to eat. You need to figure out better line control so people can actually differentiate between the line and the sea of people, and where the end of the line is.

At one point, I ordered something and then tried to move to the “pick up” area to wait for my food, but it was so intensely packed that I couldn’t move from the ordering spot. I tried to step to the side in the other direction but was met with another wall of people. The cashier ended up telling me to move, and I got frustrated because I was actively trying to, but there was nowhere to move to! Like, yes I am well aware of the line behind me, I promise I’m not just standing at the register for fun.

I mean look at this!

A large sea of people in the middle of the street. A huge, daunting crowd that seems insurmountable to get through.

Imagine trying to get through this if you have a stroller, or are in a wheelchair? You’re gonna have to run someone over if you want through. There were so many points where literally just nobody was moving. Like a traffic jam, but just people standing completely still and there’s no way around anyone. So you just stand there and wait a few minutes until you can continue taking tiny-half-shuffle-steps and try not to step on the back of the shoes of the person in front of you.

Also, I know you’re probably thinking that I just happened to go during the busiest time. Well, it was open from 11am to 10pm on Saturday, and I got there at 11:45am and left at 7pm. So I was there for a hot minute. I’m sure 9pm might’ve been less crowded, but I’m also sure a lot of places would be sold out or closing down for the night by then to prep for Sunday.

Okay, so now that I’ve gotten my population qualms and lack of seating issues out of the way, let’s talk about the actual food and drinks I got.

Oh, I almost forgot, parking in a public lot nearby was $30. So, that fucking sucked. And, yes, there’s more financially savvy options of taking the bus or walking, but I live two full hours away from the Court Street Plaza where it was held, so yeah, I need somewhere to park my dang car.

It always takes me a couple passes of everything to figure out what I want to try first. I knew I wanted to start off with a coffee, and Lotus Street Foods had a Thai Iced Coffee for six dollars:

Bryant's hand holding out my Thai Iced Coffee.

Bryant so kindly modeled my beverage for me because I was holding the actual food item I got from Lotus. Here’s their Asian fried jerky for nine dollars:

A small container holding a few pieces of Asian jerky and a small mound of white rice.

I actually really liked the flavor of the jerky. It had a sticky, sort of sweet glaze, but it was definitely hard to bite through and chew. Wasn’t quite the same texture as jerky but wasn’t the same texture as regular meat. The rice was unfortunately cold and extremely bland. Great flavor on the meat though!

For the coffee, I would’ve liked a little more condensed milk in it. It wasn’t quite creamy enough for my taste and was just a little too plain coffee-y flavored. I like a sweeter, creamier coffee though, so I know I’m not the best judge of coffee when it actually tastes like coffee. I just think the balance was a little off. And for what it’s worth this wasn’t my first time trying this drink, so I have some sweeter ones I’ve had in the past to compare it to.

Kayla really wanted to try the elote from LALO Chino Latino, especially since it wasn’t listed on their online menu that it was going to be offered:

A cob of corn covered in a light orange sauce and some cilantro.

She said it was totes delish last year, but sadly this elote missed the mark this time around so bad that she barely ate half. She let me try a bite and yeah, it was rough. The corn itself was cold and had no flavor, and was tough and almost rubbery in texture. It felt like something you shouldn’t actually be chewing on. The sauce was lackluster, and honestly if the corn itself isn’t good then the dish isn’t going to be good no matter what you put on top. So that was unfortunate.

However, I did get the Vietnamese Birria Beef Taco from them for six dollars, and their horchata coffee, also for six dollars:

A small birria taco and a side of dipping sauce being held by Bryant. He is also holding the coffee in the other hand.

I didn’t finish the Thai coffee, so I was hoping this horchata coffee was going to be the redeeming caffeine fix of the day. While I did like the horchata coffee better than my first coffee, I can confidently say it was totally lacking in horchata flavor. There were some notes of cinnamon in there, but I would not go so far as to label this as “horchata” coffee. Kayla got one too and agreed that it’s more like if you added a little bit of cinnamon to a regular latte. So that was a little disappointing.

As for the birria taco, it was so good! I know you can’t see the inside, but there was plenty of tender birria, and the cilantro and onion on top was nice and fresh. The consommé had a lot of good flavor, the outside was golden brown, and I was wishing I had got a second one.

The next place I stopped was Evolve Bake+Shop. Though it was only about 1:30, this stand was almost completely sold out of baked goods. By the time I did another once through the street, they were sold out and had gone back home to bake more goodies for Sunday. The owner was so sweet and apologetic, but honestly I’m thrilled for them that they sold out so quick. I managed to get my hands on two of their few remaining cookies: their gluten-free ube crinkle cookie, and their strawberry matcha oatmilk cookie for four dollars each:

Two cookies, each one being held in one of Kayla's hands. They both are in plastic packaging. The ube crinkle one is purple with a white crinkle top, and the other one is green with a white drizzle and some pink chunks visible.

I actually didn’t know until I looked them up on Instagram for this post, but all their baked goods are 100% vegan/plant-based! It’s nice to know there are some vegan options at the festival.

I shared the ube cookie with everyone, and the consensus was that it was pretty good, but the gluten-free aspect of it made the mouthfeel just a little bit odd. Gluten-free stuff tends to have that sort of sandy texture sometimes. But it was dense and had good flavor.

As for the strawberry matcha cookie, I had that all to myself (as I am writing this post) and it was the bomb dot com! It’s super moist and soft, and has a great balance of sweetness and earthy matcha flavor. I think these cookies were well worth the four dollars. Evolve also won Best Desserts for the third year! I’m glad for them.

For years, it has been a dream of mine to try Tang Hu Lu. If you don’t recognize the name, I’m willing to bet you’ll recognize it when you see it. It’s hard to mistake the glassy, shiny, iconic strawberries on a stick. I got this Tang Hu Lu from Tenji Sushi for ten dollars:

A big kebab stick with four sugar covered strawberries on it and one green grape at the end.

I was a tiny bit disappointed by the presentation of this, because the pictures they had of it showed it having mandarin orange slices and more grapes, so only getting one grape and no orange slices was a bit of a letdown, but honestly I can’t be too mad because these strawberries were so good. They were juicy and sweet and perfectly firm without being that hard unripe texture. If you’ve ever had an urge to eat glass shards and not get hurt, this is the perfect food for you. The glassy sugar coating shatters apart and crunches so damn good, sort of like rock candy. I do think ten dollars was a lot for four strawberries and one grape, but at least I finally got to try the street food I’ve always wanted to.

There was no shortage of different Asian cuisines that were represented at this festival, including Indian dishes. Kayla ended up getting these chicken lollipops and cheesy naan bites from Khaao Macha, who were the Best of Yums winner last year:

Two flaming hot red colored chicken lollipops and one basket of cheesy naan.

I didn’t try the chicken, but Kayla said it was good (I did sniff it and it smelled like Taco Bell’s mild sauce packets). I did try some of the naan and it was definitely yummy. I mean, you really can’t go wrong with cheesy naan. The chicken was ten dollars and you got two of them, and the naan was seven dollars. I would say the naan was sizeable for the price, and good for sharing.

At this point, we took a little break on food and watched some of the free entertainment on the main stage:

A taiko drum performance, each of the performers wearing a matching red uniform.

I think taiko drums are cool so this was really awesome to see, and then there was a Nepali dance performance right after this. It was very neat to see different culture’s traditions and performances. I like that the entertainment is free and they have such a variety of performances.

Back to snacking, I finally got to try my most anticipated item from the online vendor menu, Chhnagnh’s Pot Ang (roasted corn with sweet coconut sauce). I also tried their lemongrass beef skewer, and Kayla got their chicken skewer. The skewers were six dollars each and the corn was seven.

Two meat skewers and one corn on the cob, roasted and covered in creamy white sauce with green onions on top.

I can honestly say I’ve never had Cambodian food before, but this looked very promising. I absolutely loved the corn, it was roasted so perfectly and had great flavor. The coconut sauce wasn’t really giving coconut, but it was sweet and creamy so at least it added some texture and flavor, and weirdly enough the green onion went really well with it all. It just added a nice fresh component without overpowering anything flavor-wise.

Kayla let me try her chicken skewer and it was pretty good but the chicken was just a little dry. The beef was so delish though. It had just the right amount of lemongrass flavor in it without being overwhelming and was very tender and warm. This was my favorite savory food I tried all day.

The last thing I ate was from Fusako, and I hate to totally bash a place, but y’all. What I was presented with was egregious.

Here’s the menu on their truck:

A menu for Fusako, detailing three items: street corn gyoza, Japanese curry Coney, and a hash brown sushi fusion sort of dish. Everything looks totes delish and decked out.

This looked so good and impressive. Everything looked filling and decked out in garnishes and sauces and I had high hopes. I got the Mexican street corn gyoza, which was supposed to be crispy fried dumplings stuffed with sweet corn, with cotija cheese, a chili-lime aioli, lime zest, and green onion. Sounded amazing. Here’s what I got for eight dollars:

Two tiny dumplings covered in sauce and corn.

Two tiny gyoza, covered in a mess of sauce and corn, with no lime zest or green onions in sight. It looked so haphazardly thrown together. It was totally cold and the gyoza were tough instead of crispy. The entire thing lacked flavor, and the wait was so long. I was really disappointed.

I hated to leave on an L, but it was getting late.

Oh, and earlier in the day I had a really terrible yuzu mule for ten dollars.

In total, I spent $88 dollars before tip (I bought Kayla’s chicken skewer and a Thai coffee for Bryant), and usually I just chose the 15% tip option but I’m not gonna do all that math. We’ll just say around a hundred bucks.

Overall, I just wasn’t really impressed with the food or drinks I had gotten throughout the day. There were some good things but my experience overall with how crowded it was and the prices and lack of seating just kind of made for a less than ideal experience. They clearly need to open up more blocks for the festival to spread out.

I always get so excited for food truck festivals, and I keep being let down by them. Is it me? Am I the problem? Am I just not cut out for the food truck lifestyle? I hate waiting in lines and I hate standing to eat. I don’t prefer fast, casual service, and I usually like my food to come on real dishes. Oh no. Maybe it is me.

Huge shout out to the Library Square public library for keeping me from having to use a Porta-Potty. Very happy to use actual toilets and wash my fucking hands. And get some AC for a second.

I am glad I got to experience something new and hang out with my friends, but I think I won’t return next year unless they implement some kind of crowd management or cap tickets.

What sounded the best to you? Have you been to any of the previous years of the festival? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/28/moseying-around-cincinnatis-asian-food-festival/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60350

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Occasional paper: Blue Angels, Devil Hands

2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 11:03
[syndicated profile] crooked_timber_feed

Posted by Doug Muir

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/04/28/occasional-paper-blue-angels-devil-hands/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55060

That’s the actual name of the paper. Isn’t that great?

Here’s a prologue: a post I wrote a while back about the Portuguese Man-o’-War.  (It’s kind of long — I was new to CT back then, and still figuring stuff out). 

To summarize: the Portuguese Man-o’-War is a large jellyfish-type creature.  And when I say “large”, I mean they can grow as big as a large cat, with stinging tentacles dangling for many meters beneath and around them.  They’re carnivores, feeding on fish and small invertebrates.  Their stings paralyze prey, which is then drawn upward into the main body, digested, and eaten.  (In that order.)   

In the post I mention that they have a parasitic fish that afflicts them, but I don’t talk about any of their other relationships.  So now I’m going to talk about an organism that interacts with the Man-o’-War in a different way:  a predator. 

Specifically Glaucus Atlanticus, the Blue Dragon Sea Slug.


[yes, they really look like this.]

Also known as the Sea Swallow, or the Blue Angel, or… man, just look at that.  Isn’t that just ridiculously gorgeous? 

Well, these guys(1) look this way for reasons.  Let’s discuss.

(1) English “guy” and “guys” are currently in an awkward blurry space between male-coded and gender-neutral.  But these guys are obligate hermaphrodites, so it’s not an issue.

So sea slugs aren’t very closely related to land slugs.  They’re marine molluscs that evolved from a shelled, snail-like ancestor way back in the Paleozoic, before the dinosaurs.  They’re formally known as nudibranchs — pronounced nooda Bronx, or just “nudies” if you’re a diver.  (If you’re being a huge nerd about it, there are some sea slugs that aren’t formally nudibranchs.  Never mind that now.)

They’re often some combination of weird and beautiful.  A few examples:

undefined
[I literally just grabbed some pictures at random]

Giving up their shell freed them of a major metabolic burden and liberated them to swim around.  But it also meant they had to evolve new defenses against being eaten.  Which they did.  Some evolved incredibly good camouflage; some used their flexible bodies to mimic more dangerous creatures; some evolved internal toxins that made them taste nasty.  And a bunch of them, including the Blue Dragon, evolved venomous stings.

But in the case of the Blue Angel / Blue Dragon, they evolved stings, but they never evolved venom.  Because the Dragons don’t make venom.  They steal it.  These slugs get their venom from eating venomous prey, particularly and preferentially Portuguese Man-o’-Wars.


blue-sea-slugs-attacking-portuguese-man-o-war
[a couple of Blue Dragons closing on a Man-o’-War, like biplanes attacking a zeppelin.
(c) imagequestmarine.com, via Fae Sapsford]

— You might wonder how a slug can bite pieces off something.  Well, strictly speaking slugs don’t have jaws.  But most molluscs have a hard chewing apparatus called a “radula”.  And in the case of the Blue Dragon, the radula has convergently evolved into something that looks and works exactly like a jaw.

Picture
[specifically, like the kind of jaw you have nightmares about]

So it has no trouble slicing pieces off the soft-bodied Man-o’-War.  And by doing so, it gains a sting powerful enough to cause severe pain, blisters, cramps, nausea and vomiting even in an adult human.

Blue Dragon: The Tiny Sea Slug That Can Sting Like a Jellyfish
[very bad idea!  please do not!]

So all this has been known for a while now — decades.  And it’s weird but not unique.  There are a number of species that do something similar.  There’s even a technical term for it:  kleptocnidy.  The Dragons eat the Man-o’-War’s stinging tentacles and gain the ability to sting.  (They eat the rest of the poor Man-o’-War, too.  In fact, despite being around 1/100 of the Man-o’-War’s size, they’re an important and dangerous predator.)

But when you get down to the cell-tissue-organ level?  The way this works is pretty crazy.  

First, somehow the Dragon’s digestive system sorts out the stinging cells.  We know where inside the slug this happens (the liver) but we still don’t know how.

Next, the Dragon has specialized cells that grab and digest the stinging cells, but that keep the stingy bits.  The part that stings is called a nematocyst, and it’s an organelle within the cell.  The Dragon has cells that use a modified form of phagocytosis to do this.  Phagocytosis is what your white blood cells do to invading bacteria — they flow around, engulf, and dissolve.  The Dragon’s cells do this, except they don’t digest (or even disturb) the delicate nematocyst.  

[How did this evolve?  Did the slugs have something like a white blood cell, which was then adapted to this new use?  Apparently this is an area of ongoing research right now.]

Okay, now comes the really insane part.  You see those long feathery “fingers” on either side of the slug?

Sea Slugs – Ecologica

[the better to hug you with, my dear]

Those are called “cerrata”.  And the slug’s digestive system has specialized ducts that connect to them.  You and I have digestive systems that are straightforward tubes, but the slug’s digestive system has branches.  And those specialized cells transport the nematocysts out to the ends of those branches, and then stuff them into special stinging organs there.

It’s a bit as if you could eat a plateful of bees, and then your intestines would wrap up the bee stings, and then special branch-intestines would reach into your arms and hands, carrying the stings there.  So that you could deliver hundreds of bee stings with the touch of a finger.

Back to the paper, then.  All of the above is old knowledge.  What wasn’t known was what the slug used the stings for.  I mean, yes defense obviously.  But do the Dragons / Angels also use the stings for offense?  In particular, do they use them to aid in predation?

Turns out: yup, they sure do. 

The authors managed to keep a number of Blue Dragons alive in captivity (this is quite difficult, because reasons) and introduced them to various living prey items.  And it turns out the slugs are active predators.  They don’t just gnaw on defenseless jellyfish.  They’ll eat anything they can catch, including other invertebrates — worms, shrimp, whatever — and small fish. 

And “anything they can catch” was a broader category than suspected.  That’s because, if the slug can get close enough, they’ll whip those long cerrata around to sting their prey.  And each one can contain enough nematocysts to instantly paralyze a small animal.  So while the slug isn’t fast, it only needs to land a single touch.  One flick, just a moment of contact, the lightest caress, and that’s the game.

The paper authors watched this play out in real time, repeatedly.  Hence their title: angels with devil hands.

undefined
[big hands, I know you’re the one]

— I mentioned that the slugs look this way for a reason.  Well, we can now guess why they have those very long cerrata: they’re weapons.  Longer cerrata give the slow-moving slug a longer reach for hitting prey.

As to the coloration, they float on the ocean surface most of the time.  Hence their pattern of blue, dark blues and whites: they reflect a lot of harmful ultraviolet, and also blend in.  From a distance, a Dragon will look like a small clump of seaweed or a streak of light on the water’s surface.

— Did I mention that they habitually float upside down?  And that they swallow air bubbles for buoyancy, to float effortlessly, but then cough them back up when they want to swim more actively?  Or that they are cheerful and energetic cannibals?  Or that they can regenerate?

Well.  Obviously I like writing these nerdy science posts!  But I do think they connect to the greater CT project: much is known, but there’s so much more yet to know.  And sometimes the moving frontier between between the known and the unknown hits something that’s just cool.

And that’s all.

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/04/28/occasional-paper-blue-angels-devil-hands/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55060

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Music For Your Monday: Tame Impala’s “Dracula”

2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 00:47
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/27/music-for-your-monday-tame-impalas-dracula/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60371

I heard an absolute banger of an earworm this past week, and have been listening to it nonstop ever since. I want to bestow upon y’all Tame Impala’s new song, “Dracula.”

If you had asked me a week ago if I liked Tame Impala, I would’ve said I was completely indifferent about him and couldn’t even name a song from him. That is still true except for “Dracula.” This song is an absolute home-run of a bop, and there’s even a remix version with JENNIE which is also very good. Here’s both versions for your listening pleasure!

And the JENNIE version:

I have been debating which version I like better, and honestly it’s so hard to decide. I listen to both an equal amount, and both are great. Can’t go wrong with the original, but I love JENNIE’s ethereal voice and the harmonizing with Tame Impala.

My favorite part of the song is how they make “Dracula” rhyme with “spectacular.” Stellar stuff, really.

I hope you enjoy this bop, and that it helps you get movin’ and groovin’ through your next week!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/27/music-for-your-monday-tame-impalas-dracula/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60371

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This Week’s Weird Sideswipe by Current Events

2026-Apr-27, Monday 20:22
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/27/this-weeks-weird-sideswipe-by-current-events/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60353

Hello to the FBI/Secret Service/NSA people now monitoring this account because apparently the attempted shooter liked a few of my posts in the last month, here's a picture of my cat to get you started

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-04-26T18:50:39.094Z

Apparently it’s true: The fellow who came to the Correspondent’s Dinner the other night with a bunch of weapons (and who, it should be noted, came nowhere near the president or anyone else in the ballroom), liked four Bluesky posts of mine in the last month. Which ones? I have no idea, although a cursory view of my last month of Bluesky posts shows nothing particularly spicy in a political sense. This does not surprise me, as I usually send all my really spicy political takes to Threads. Most of the last month of Bluesky posts for me were about JoCo Cruise, whacking on “AI,” photos of cats and Krissy, and talking about writing. Maybe this dude liked cat pictures? He’s arrested now and his Bluesky account is down in any event. We may never know.

My feeling about this is pretty much the same feeling I have about being in the Epstein Files: What the fuck, it’s not great, and also, it doesn’t actually have much to do with me, I’m mostly being sideswiped by this weird damn moment we’re in. I certainly don’t condone attempting to kill the president. Any president, and also, this one in particular. Among other things that would take away the fun of watching him one day rotting in prison along with the rest of his corrupt and horrible family and administration. Keep him alive! For justice!

I’m joking here about being on a federal watch list now, but I should be clear I’m pretty sure I already have an FBI file, and also that this FBI file is really super boring, so anything relating to this will almost certainly be funneled into that. I recently did an FOIA request for my file, so I suppose I will find out soon enough. In the meantime I’ll just have to imagine.

I’ve been informed that some of the folks associated with the Sad Puppies are trying to make hay of my tangential association to this fellow, which, I guess, they would, loud bad logic has always been their MO. My first thought is that when you’re related to an actual successful presidential assassin, a failed one liking your social media posts is weak sauce. My second thought was, huh, the right-wing chudguzzlers are whining about me again, whenever they do that something nice happens with my career, wonder what it will be this time. And indeed, today I got a foreign language offer on one of my books, which I happily accepted. It’s correlation, not causation, to be sure. But it sure does correlate a lot. So keep it up, right-wing chudguzzlers! We’re having our back deck rebuilt, I could use a few more foreign sales. Thanks in advance for your help.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/27/this-weeks-weird-sideswipe-by-current-events/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60353

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The Dream Ends

2026-Apr-26, Sunday 11:44
[syndicated profile] andrew_rilstone_feed

Posted by Unknown

http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2026/04/the-dream-ends.html

I am at the annual school camp in the Peak District. There is a sweet shop down the lane, we are allowed to go there once a day. They sell Dalek Death Rays and Kendal Mint Cake. My tent-partner is reading a copy of Doctor Who In an Exciting Adventure With The Daleks. 

I don’t think the book was actually called Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks, any more than the Beatles first album was actually called Love Me Do With Please Please Me and Twelve Other Songs. Fans refer to it as the Armada Paperback. It was a very loose adaptation of the first Dalek Story, which was still called "The Dead Planet". It was published in 1965, the year I was born, eleven years in the past. If my tent partner still has it so many years later it is probably worth an awful lot of money.

The Armada Paperback eventually became Doctor Who And The Daleks, the first of the Target Paperbacks. All the Target Paperbacks were called Doctor Who and The Something even though Doctor Who is the name of the programme and not the character. They had a small bit of text on the fly-leaf explaining why the face of Doctor Who kept changing. My tent partner had hundreds of Target Books and I had a few. Even when I became a Fan, having them was more important than actually reading them.

I suppose I had seen the Peter Cushing movie by then? I suppose I could tell that it was a similar story but not quite the same story? I suppose I didn't think it mattered all that much? 

It looked like an Enid Blyton book or one of those books about wars and jungles and Jesus. I mean that it smelt like one of those books, though not necessarily with my nose. It was already even then an artefact a tangible connection to the olden days, when Doctor Who was real. The olden-days kid who had first handled this book had been there at the beginning. Had seen the whole story. Was not playing catch up.  I read all the Doctor Doolittle books in the school library, even writing the names of the ones I had missed on a blue card with a fountain pen and putting it in a box on the librarian's desk. It came from a time before the Daleks were the Daleks: when they were just scary new robots in a children’s book with pictures and there was a description of what the creature inside the Dalek actually looked like. I tried to sketch the creature: I have never been able to draw. 
I do, in fact, think that David Whitaker’s conception, of a creature that inhabits the shell and operates it like a vehicle is superior to the later conception that conceived them as more like cyborgs, robots with an organic component. There is a sketch somewhere of a grotesque little dwarf driving a pepper-pot.

This was before Jeremy Bentham but after the Making of Doctor Who.  

Fresh eyes, is what I am trying to say. Defamiliarisation. Seeing a thing as if for the first time. A yellowed press cutting: a display of action figures alongside Jubilee mugs.

Is this the whole of the Elusive Magic? We repeat the joke, over and over: "It isn't as good as it used to be; but then it never was." They have been making the joke since the death of Queen Victoria: “Punch was never what it used to be.” The graffito "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" isn't particularly funny. If we go by linear, chronological time then school camp was no further from the Dead Planet than this essay is from Day of the Doctor. Do the eleven year olds of today hear the flapping of times chariot when they watch The Reality War? Did Michael Grade sever the cord? 

It's about time, as the fellow said. 




Don’t let’s call them Lost Stories. Let’s call them Never Having Existed In the First Place stories. Imaginary Stories is already taken.

The Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, again.

A black and white photo of a scary looking unshaven man in a military uniform. The title “The Nightmare Begins”. And the summary:

“The Doctor lands on the Planet Kemble in 4000 AD when the space security agent Brett Vyon is trying to warn that the Daleks are about to destroy the earth”.

Who was this Brett Vyon, and who was this Sara Kingdom who got killed and what was this nightmare that after twelve episodes was still only beginning?

The Nightmare Begins is in fact the title of the first episode of the Dalek Masterplan. The Radio Times Special referred to Doctor Who stories by the titles of their first episodes. This made them seem more interesting in some cases than they were: Four Hundred Dawns seems altogether more evocative than Four Hundred Dawns. I think we would tolerate the Gunfighters much better if it was still called A Holiday For the Doctor.

In 1983 they found two episodes of The Dalek Masterplan in a Mormon Church in Tooting. No-one ever explained what they were doing there, and so far as I could tell from the phone book there was no Mormon Church in the vicinity at that time. One cannot help but picture them on golden tablets. I saw one of them at a showing at the National Film Theatre; I think to mark the twentieth anniversary, which would put me in the Sixth Form. It was one of Patrick Troughton’s first appearances at a fan event. It was the one with the Monk in agent Egypt; it starts with him, the Monk, disguised as a mummy. They showed the Dead Planet on the same day, and it very nearly lived up to my expectations, even the bit where they spent a whole episode trying to jump across a ravine. For some years afterwards I insisted that the Peter Cushing Film and the Armada Paperback lacked the high seriousness of the original episodes and should be ignored. I was twenty and a fan and very annoying like all twenty year olds and all fans. 

But the orphan episode of Masterplan turned out to be nothing more than an old episode of a black and white TV show in which the Doctor and the Daleks run around some historical back drops and the Monk, the Meddling Monk, the First Time Lord Apart From The Doctor (and Possibly Susan) was somehow inadvertently played by the manager from Carry on Camping (the one with the bra) and in roughly the same style.

If my memory is correct, then one of the Great Old Ones who was acting as MC admitted as much. It’s worth watching if only for the Dalek choreography. Which is pretty faint praise.

(Memory may not be correct. I can remember the tent and the kendel mint cake much more specifically than I can remember the National Film Theatre and Tooting Bec and the Sixth Form; so I may be confusing different showings and different conventions.)

The Nightmare Begins formed in our heads on the basis of one photo of Nic Courtney and a one sentence synopsis. The Dalek Master Plan emerged from a handful of fan-relayed oral traditions. The Longest And Most Epic Doctor Who Story of All Time. We imagined a Stan Lee George Lucas Stanley Kubrick Dalek Master Plan and lost sight of the fact that it was a teatime instalment of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who isn’t as good as it used to be. And even when it was, it wasn’t.





The Nightmare Begins

That opening credit; that wobbly line in the middle of the screen; when the theme tune was a pulse and a rhythm not a fanfare. When the opening credit itself was an abstract riff on the concept of monochrome TV.

Steven is sleeping.

If we didn’t know better, we would wonder if it is his nightmare which was beginning.

Except, of course, that I sill cannot see “Steven”: I can only see Peter Purves, with his badge and his makes table and his annual scheme to make assistance dogs out of silver bottle tops. I suppose there is now a whole generation of fans who know about very olden days Doctor Who but would have no reason to remember Blue Peter. 

“The Nightmare Begins”: those words, superimposed over the picture just like in any normal TV show. 

The first time I saw Unearthly Child in the great hall of Imperial College almost the biggest pang was seeing the words “Next Episode: The Dead Planet” hovering so neutrally on the screen.

“Written by Terry Nation.” Not in his handwriting though. Dalek Annuals and Blake's Seven annuals and even I think the Survivors novelisations printed his signature above the titles. A bit, it suddenly occurs to me, like Stan Lee’s signature, appearing above all those comic-book he didn’t actually write. Did Terry’s agent realise that?

Steven is sick, poisoned. The Doctor asks the black haired girl to take care of him.

We all used to think that the hostile scary Doctor of Unearthly Child was just how the Original Doctor was, and that the affable friendly Doctor was part of a gradual fall from grace that culminated in scarves and  jelly babies. At least, that was what the Great Old Ones taught us to believe. It was truly the jelly babies and the scarf that I loved. 

But this Doctor says “my child” and “that’s a good girl” and puts his chin thoughtfully in his hand. He is much more the eccentric Eagle-reading Peter Cushing than the elderly thug who threatened Ian and Barbara in the junkyard. Not even crotchety. More: doddery. 

What does crotchety even mean? I think it means “That quality possessed by the First Doctor.”

The line between an actor fumbling his lines and a character improvising is quite a wobbly one. The girl asks if they have reached the "place of perfection", and he replies “Ah…well…. I rather doubt it. At least….that is….we shall be stopping at a lot of places before that.”

In the beginning the show had been about a child who was not quite of this earth. Her replacement was from the Far Future. This third stand-in granddaughter is a refugee from the Siege of Troy and talks fluent old fashioned. The idea that they were audience-identification figures does not quite stack up. 

Adric died in 1982, in retrospect, perhaps punishing Matthew Waterhouse for being, by all accounts, quite annoying. And the world said “It’s the first time a Doctor Who assistant has been killed off!” and the fandom replied “No, Katerina was killed in the Dalek Masterplan!” and here we are, now, looking at her, Katerina, the first companion to be killed, before she has been killed.

Is she really a companion, given that she appears only in one story and is not given co-star billing. (Also: do Balrogs have wings, and where was Watson injured, and how many children had Lady McBeth?) 

Certainly, she behaves as if she were a companion, patronised by her stand-in grandfather and menaced by bad guys. 

The Doctor and Katerina and Steven in the TARDIS is barely a prologue; barely a recap. The Story Begins with two military men in the jungle, and we are suddenly, metaphorically and literally, in a different world.

Before there was Blue Peter, there was Play School, and it would be nice to say that in three minutes The Nightmare Begins encompasses the holy BBC trinity: Peter Purves and Brian Cant and a Dalek. Play School was a show for pre-schoolers, the closest the British had at that time to Sesame Street. Nursery rhymes and stories and suspiciously long lived gold-fish and counting games. Brian Cant also provided the voice over for Camberwick Green, the BBCs stop motion evocation of rural English life. I had a vinyl recording of one of the episodes when I was a toddler: Brian Cant’s voice is literally my earliest memory. But until the credits rolled at the end of Nightmare Begins I recognised neither his face nor his voice. Putting a gun to your commanding officers head is a very different proposition from pretending that your horsey’s feet are going clippoty clop.

The unshaven man from the magazine was, of course, Nicholas Courtney. Nicholas Courtney appeared with every Doctor in the original run apart from the one he didn’t; and he was Space Agent Brett Vyon before he was ever the Brigadier. His face looks different but his voice is unmistakable.

The biggest miss-step the Revived Series took was chucking the classic TARDIS design overboard. When I see that white room and the white mushroom I know that I am watching Doctor Who. The weird wobbley coral arrangement, not so much. The Doc and Steven and Katerina in the control room is clearly ninety seconds of Doctor Who; but then suddenly the channel flips. The Brigadier and Brian Cant are (briefly) tying to send a message to earth: and then we cut back to Mission Control on Earth, where everyone is studiously ignoring a flashing red light. (I assume it is a red light. Obviously, we are still in black and white.) Then we go back to the jungle planet. 

The stylistic channel hopping makes the episode feel more expansive that it actually is. The jungle scenes feel like Blake's Seven, or Survivors, or in short something written by Terry Nation.  On earth, all the technicians are bald: there are big perspex maps and banks of equipment but someone is still using a clipboard. People sometimes draw an analogy between the Dalek Masterplan and Dan Dare: but Dan Dare was set in a 1950s retro-future, where the Masterplan gives the 41st century a Things To Come Freemasonry of Science vibe. But the two characters with speaking parts (who aren't much more than a chorus) are arguing about what to watch on TV: a sporting fixture or a political speech. Which puts us more in the realm of the Jetsons. Even two thousand years in the future, people are still just like folks. 

People sometimes talk about Padding in Old TV. Other people say that New TV is far too rushed. Roald and Lizan spend several moments talking about their favourite make of space ship. He prefers the latest Flip T4; she prefers the Spar 7-40. “Elegance, plus technology." 

If you think that we should cut out everything which Doesn’t Advance The Plot, then certainly this scene should be cut. But I think I can still feel the eleven-year-old's thrill of glancing into a world where spacecraft are as common as cars. That’s what we did when we played spacemen, isn’t it? We did not imagine that we were fighting Daleks or setting foot on an alien planet, necessarily. We just constructed our space cockpit out of chairs and bean bags and maybe tin foil and cardboard, and said “We are on a spaceship isn’t it great being on a spaceship don’t you just love being on a spaceship.”

Mavic Chen is the Guardian of the Solar System. He’s a politician. Although the episode ends on a kind of a twist--Mavic Chen has betrayed the Solar System to the Daleks!--I don’t think that first generation viewers can have been entirely surprised that he was a wrong 'un. He has a sinister name. He looks a bit foreign. I might not go so far as to say a "racist caricature", but foreign, certainly. And literally the first thing he does when he comes on screen is twirl his moustache! 

While he makes his speech about peace and prosperity everyone ignores the flashing red light warning that the Daleks are about to invade the universe. Subtle is not the word.

And then we go back to the jungle. The extended two-handed scene between Brett and Kurt is genuinely one of the best bits of B-movie space-opera schlock I've ever seen. I mean that in an entirely positive way. I think that this is what the Old Fans wanted us to believe that the Dalek Masterplan was like all the way through. Brett remains calm and soldier like, while Kurt slowly disintegrates. Nation throws every suspense trick in the book at us. “You know we can’t fight… them” says Brett “Our weapons are useless against…  those things.” Granted, if we have read the Radio Times, or know the title of the story, or, indeed saw the stand-alone prequel five weeks ago, we know perfectly well who “they” are. 

There is something very Avon and Blake about a situation where the coward points a gun at the hero and demands to be left behind. Kurt knows he is going to die and we know that he knows, but we stay with him for a full minute after Brett leaves. And then he sees….

Well I guess we know what he sees. But it is a genuinely impressive bit of sci-fi TV. He points his gun into the jungle: we see it from his point of view. And again. And again. He falls to his knees, he looks up, and there it is. Looming. Less like a BBC prop and more like the cover of an annual. And of course, the gun fires, and the screen turns negative and he falls down dead.

It recalls the endings of the first two episodes of The Dead Planet: Barbara, lost in the city, waiting for the moment when the unseen presence would make itself known; and Susan running headlong through the Skarovian forest. A feeling of desperation; waiting for a bad thing to happen. Like the beginning of a nightmare. 

And then there is another point of view shift: two Daleks, in the jungle, talking in capital letters about who they are going to exterminate. It’s an effective transition: from the looming monster Dalek to the faintly absurd matter-of-fact artefacts trundling through the foliage. Things out of bad dreams: but also unwieldy, physically present, tactile objects. 

This is what made old Doctor Who so much like old Doctor Who, and why new Doctor Who has never been able to replicate the Elusive Magic. Every monster (and every planet, and every spaceship) has been physically constructed. Every monster is present in the room with the actor, and therefore feels present in the room with the audience.

(It has been said that 1960s “adult” TV is sexy in a way that much more explicit modern stuff fails to be, for a similar reason. Modern TV can do closeups and long shots and swift intercuts and show us nipples. Older TV had to point the camera at the bed, giving the viewer the impression that he was just watching two people doing it.)

The final shot of the dead Kurt is quite unsettling. Not X-Certificate body horror, of course, but strong stuff for a Saturday tea-time. 

Brian Cant does not stand up and say "It's all right children, I was just pretending." 

Some people have never stopped saying that Doctor Who feels like a pantomime: fake horror, fake violence, fake evil, fake death. This Doctor Who is being as real as it dares. 

We are halfway through the episode before the Doctor arrives. (There was of course a prologue or prequel, Mission to the Unknown, in which he didn't arrive at all.) We might almost forget what show we are watching. A new, grim-ish and moderately gritty Terry Nation space show--Vyon's Two, perhaps--into which Old Grandfather Who has incongruously materialised. 

Uncle Who natters away inconsequentially to himself. Or perhaps he is talking through the screen to us "kiddies" at home. “A city, or perhaps a town. I wonder where we are? All I have to do is get through that jungle and perhaps then I can get some help. I must say, it's a strange place to put a city.” (Who is that? It’s Windy Miller! Let’s see what he is going to do next....") And then the scary man in the uniform puts a gun to his head and says “Give me the key or I will kill you.”

(A clunky bit of construction, if ever there was one. Katerina, who has been told to stay behind and watch over Steven, comes out of the TARDIS with the Doctor purely so he can show her, and therefore Brett, the TARDIS key.)

Was Doctor Who always like this: whimsical safe kids TV rubbing up against dark, somewhat adult science fiction? 

This is the change that has come over Doctor Who in its first three seasons, I think. It isn't just that William Hartnell, as he put it, "mellowed" the Doctor. In those first three or four stories, the nasty hostile Professor Challenger figure who has kidnapped the two gormless school teachers comes from a similar world to the Thals and the Cavemen they encounter. But this Doctor and Brett Vyon are gate-crashers in each others stories.

Which world do the Daleks come from? The world of Space James Bond or the world of Childrens' Television?Perhaps the remaining episodes explore that. 

"DALEKS!" exclaims the Doctor, in the tone of voice of a form-master who has spotted someone chewing gum. One hopes that even the first night audience responded. "Yes, we can see that you doddery old duffer."

There is an old joke about the man with polaroids of UFOs. But come now, says someone of a skeptical bent: isn’t it obvious that one of those spacecraft is a hubcap and the other one is an ashtray? Yes, says the enthusiast, and when we understand why the human race designed their hubcaps and ashtrays to resemble alien spacecraft we may understand their ultimate mission.

The Dalek city is obviously a model. Furthermore, it is obviously a model made of bottle-tops and cardboard and tin foil: the kind of model that you could probably make yourself in a craft lesson given some effort. And yet I look at it now all those years on and I think: yes, that is what a space city is suppose to look like. That is what space cities used to look like. That was what the future looked like in the past. 

It is not a huge twist that Mavic Chen is a traitor: but it is a terribly good bit of narrative architecture. So much has been crammed into the last dozen minutes that when he appears we have temporarily forgotten about him. 

Aha, we say, now we see the point of the long digression in the earth control room. Now we see how everything fits together.

But we are watching Doctor Who, not a political space opera. The final cliffhanger is not that Earth’s Guardian is a traitor, but that the Daleks have surrounded the TARDIS. 

Do the Daleks know what the TARDIS is, or who the Doctor is? They have probably not encountered each other for a millennia and a half….

And now we are back in the present, and only half the episodes are on BBC IPlayer. I suppose there will soon be cartoons. Or perhaps if after seventy years you can find two tapes then there is no reason that any day now you may find six more. Katerina in the airlock. Space Agent Sara Kingdom aging to death. A merry Christmas to all of you at home. We have seen more than we ever hoped to see. 




A particular Doctor Who fan, who you may have heard of, expressed his disappointment that the Nightmare Begins has been found because it makes his own attempted reconstructions redundant. 

Enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment. You love the idea of the thing. You are disappointed that the Thing doesn’t live up to your idea of it. But then you learn to love the thing itself.

I learned to stop worrying and love Doctor Who. Not the idea of it: the thing with its imperfections. I am not one of those who says that I do not want to watch old episodes in case they spoil my memories of them. 

I think that there are some people, including that Very Famous Fan, who are only able to love the idea. I think that there are toxic fans who are permanently angry because the actually existing episodes are different from the ideas in their heads. There are people who find it easier to love an AI reconstruction of a Flag than the nation for which that Flag used to stand. 

'Tis mad idolatry which makes the servant greater than the god. Hmmm, hmmm my child: I hope you find your place of perfection. 

http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2026/04/the-dream-ends.html

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Sunday photoblogging: l’Abbaye de Valmagne

2026-Apr-26, Sunday 07:41
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An Anecdotal Observation About Career Longevity

2026-Apr-24, Friday 17:27
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/24/an-anecdotal-observation-about-career-longevity/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60341

As most of you know I spent much of this last week in Los Angeles, taking meetings with film/TV folks and pitching things to them, both from books I’ve written and ideas I have currently not connected to something I published. The meetings generally went very well — which isn’t necessarily the same as I’m walking away with a movie deal, there’s a lot of moving parts involved with that — and I came away with a lot of interest in the things I pitched and movement as my manager sent along materials. I gave some thought on why these meeting generated as much interest as they did.

There are a number of factors for this, but the one I want to bring to the fore at the moment is this one: When I sit down with these film/TV people and run an idea or concept past them, they one hundred percent know that the idea I’m running past them is my own, not generated by or written out with, some version of “AI.” From a practical point of view this means they know there is no issue with things like copyright (“AI” generated work is not copyrightable, and rights issues are a big deal for film/TV). From a creative point of view this means they know I have actually thought about the concept I’m bringing to them — that I know it inside and out and can build it out, dig deeper into it, and can improvise with the concept rather than just go with whatever an LLM spits out from a prompt.

In other words, they know I can do actual creative work, from ideation to production, and they know when they work with me they’re not only getting an idea but they’re also getting the actual working brain behind it. That brain can efficiently work the problem, whatever the problem might be. In 2026, this is a real and actual differentiator: A functional brain, and a reliable creative partner. I rather strongly suspect the further along we go in this new era of “cognitive offloading,” the more of a differentiator this will be.

This isn’t an anti-“AI” post. It is a “the more other people claiming to be writers use ‘AI’ the more secure my gig gets” post. If you want to use “AI” to generate ideas or create your prose or whatever, by all means, be my guest. The next twenty years of my career thanks you in advance for your choices.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/24/an-anecdotal-observation-about-career-longevity/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60341

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Construction Time Again

2026-Apr-24, Friday 15:12
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/24/construction-time-again-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60335

What it feels like to wake up to house construction

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-04-24T14:26:05.759Z

Spoiler: We are not going to die. But we are going to get a new porch railing, as the much of the last one was blown out by 80 mph winds we had a few weeks ago. The porch railing was 30 years old and as our contractor told us, had support beams that were too small for the weight put on them anyway (this is additional proof that the fellow who had the house built, also its first owner, had contractors who cut occasional corners on him). This was one of the reasons the railing blew out in the first place. The railing we put up will be burly and strong.

Here’s what the porch looks like at the moment:

Those are the old support beams. Please enjoy your time with them. They are soon to go off to a farm upstate, to play with other retired porch support beams.

The same contractors who are redoing our porch are also going to be providing us a new back deck, because, again, after 30 years, the back deck is in need of repair, and also Krissy wants a cover for it, so her husband can sit out there with her and not have his pale little head turned a shocking shade of lobster red. So the whole back deck is going, replaced with one of her specification.

Needless to say, all of this is going to be loud. Fortunately I do have my office at the church to go to if I need to get work done without the sound of pneumatic hammering.

Also needless to say, all of this is going to be expensive. Please buy my books.

More pictures as construction progresses.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/24/construction-time-again-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60335

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On Reinforcing Cynicism in the Academy

2026-Apr-24, Friday 07:43
[syndicated profile] crooked_timber_feed

Posted by Eric Schliesser

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/04/24/on-reinforcing-cynicism-in-the-academy/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55146

“I admire the many federal prosecutors across the country who have chosen to resign rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. To my knowledge, no department head, dean, or other administrator at Texas A&M has taken any meaningful action to defend academic freedom.”—Martin Peterson

Today’s post was prompted by two recent news items: first, by the announcement that Martin Peterson, currently professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Southern Methodist University (SMU); second the report by the Harvard Crimson that “Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for ‘Viewpoint Diversity.’” (Wasn’t that what the visiting fellows program at the Kennedy school was for?)

First, Peterson’s comments (quoted at the top of this post) resonated with me. Of course, administrators are also people with mortgages, have parents with expensive care needs, and have kids with expensive tuition. American political economy with its go-fund-mes for urgent medical care and (say) funeral costs makes individual, principled stances incredibly fraught affairs in a job-market that is clearly imploding for mid-career academics, and that most certainly leaves fewer alternative opportunities than (the usually more lucrative options) former prosecutors have. Some of the administrators at Texas A&M may well have had tenure, and they do deserve special opprobrium for their cowardice.

Second, Peterson’s words remind us that something is very broken in the academy when the people who are charged with running it — and Texas A&M is not some idiosyncratic place; it is one of the great, earlier public land-grant research universities — can’t bring themselves to even try to defend fairly basic academic freedom. (If you inform yourself of the details you will learn that Peterson was really making a basic point.) This absence of principle exhibits cynicism and only engenders further erosion of the academy’s spiritual authority (recall this post). I don’t mean to suggest the situation is more cynical than a President who barely pretends to care about revelation and then reads 2 Chronicles 7:14 in front of the cameras. Both exhibit what Machiavelli would call ‘corruption.’

Third, and speaking of cynicism, in its fundraising, Harvard has embraced a term, ‘viewpoint diversity,’ whose (let me adopt James Burnham’s terminology) formal meaning implies a kind of openness to intellectual pluralism, but whose real meaning means ‘people that are critics of liberalism from the non-libertarian right.’ That is to say, this is affirmative action for right-wing coded intellectuals.

As an aside, I am myself not a critic of funded centers that presuppose an ideological commitment. If the institutional embedding is properly organized, these can enrich a campus and even the disciplines in which the academic housed in them publish. (I have a soft spot for the development of ‘schools’ with distinct orientation within many disciplines.) I have been a ‘visitor’ at centers where the ultimate source of funding was ‘right’ coded back in the day.

Harvard University’s official guidance for a policy on university statements (May 2024) does not embrace institutional neutrality. So, I am not suggesting that Harvard is inconsistent with its own understanding of university speech. In fact, its “policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be.” (That’s from an NYT OPED written by Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons.)

But the reason why I use ‘cynicism’ is because nobody believes that Harvard’s funding drive is designed to create intellectual pluralism at the disciplinary or methodological level where groupthink may be lurking. (I have published on the epistemic and normative risks to society of disciplinary groupthink, so this is not a merely intellectual matter.)1 The fundraising goal is not a means to advance knowledge. Rather, Harvard’s fundraising is patently a means to appease a hostile and dangerous administration and the intellectuals that are partisans of it.

This administration has demanded ‘viewpoint diversity’ from Harvard in a letter (here) of April 11, 2026. And the reason why it is legitimate to be cynical about the use of ‘viewpoint diversity’ is that this is an administration that across a range of topics and institutions seems to have no interest in ‘viewpoint diversity’ when those views contradict its own. Most strikingly this is exhibited in the way it has sought to control public media and the way it has sought to deport foreign students who express views it doesn’t like; but also in weaponizing the judiciary in attacking its enemies (and so on).

This gets me to the real point of today’s post, which is not the manifest cynicism on display. Rather, to grapple with the following point. I have remarked before that many prominent universities are exceedingly long-lasting corporations. They have endured, in part, by their willingness to exhibit context-sensitive prudence, alas. If, say, a well-entrenched, Bonapartist government wants a certain amount of conformism to its preferred viewpoints in public institutions and universities, it will usually be obtained eventually. Again not merely a hypothetical point; the forced departure by (former prime minister) Orban of CEU from Budapest is fresh in memory. Many nineteenth century European intellectuals may have been spontaneously nationalist and imperialist, but the governments also nudged the universities in appointing reliable pairs of hands.

Sometimes this process leads to an official purge at the official universities and the subsequent development of an ‘underground university’ as occurred in, say, Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. I understand Zena Hitz’s Catherine project and Justin Smith-Ruiu’s The Hinternet Foundation as the building blocks of an underground university of the future.

The more intense cases occur, in circumstances where the academics and the social forces that really support them and, say, the political and economically influential elites have drifted apart, but the law has not caught up with that divergence yet. The best known and most dramatic examples of this occur in the context of civil war or separatism/revolutionary wars. For example, in the age of the English civil war, Oxford’s politics was sometimes very far out of step with the parliamentarian party. And, after the American revolution, the University of New Brunswick and the University of King’s College were founded by loyalist exiles in what came to be known as Canada.

I have used the neutral term ‘drifted’ in the previous paragraph, but echoing the diagnosis of Michael Polanyi back in the day, strategic agents including fascists and anti-liberal movements will aim to lower the trust and authority in the professions and the academy in order to make possible and consolidate their own power. So, it would be a mistake to treat ‘drift’ as pointing to a lack of agency. But universities’ vulnerable strategic position is also due to the loss of their spiritual authority in wider society.

The university’s distinctive spiritual authority (recall this post) was rooted in two features of its intrinsic mission: witnessing truth and being the institution that engages a non-trivial part of the education of an important subset of near adults. Both tasks are serious and dedication to them commands respect. How to engage in this mission such that spiritual authority is the effect is something to figure out and decide upon by each university, conceived as a corporate entity (in the medieval sense), and to be articulated in its mission and the practices that are structured by it. A private university should have more space for autonomy in these matters than public ones. Self-consciously politicizing their mission — by seeking out ‘viewpoint diversity’ — is not a means to recover such authority.

MAGA and its allies want universities to believe that Stateside a regime change has already occurred and so that accommodation is the only prudent way forward for research-intensive universities. It is somewhat puzzling that while they maintain considerable freedom to shape events on their own campus, so few universities have found ways to make the case that an independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge is worth preserving.

 

1 Elsewhere, I have argued (in Dutch) that, for example, ideological conformism is to be expected (and not without its problems) in many professions and fields, but when it occurs it is far more politically dangerous in policing and the armed forces than it is in the academy.

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/04/24/on-reinforcing-cynicism-in-the-academy/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55146

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New Cover: “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”

2026-Apr-24, Friday 03:58
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/23/new-cover-will-you-still-love-me-tomorrow/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60332

Because the song’s been rattling around my head for the last couple of days, particularly the Bryan Ferry cover version. So when I got home I thought I would give it a whirl. I hope you like it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/23/new-cover-will-you-still-love-me-tomorrow/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60332

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Penn & Teller & the Supreme Court & BS

2026-Apr-23, Thursday 13:59
[syndicated profile] skepchick_feed

Posted by Rebecca Watson

https://skepchick.org/2026/04/penn-teller-the-supreme-court-bs/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133593

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: I’ll be honest–when I first saw this New York Times headline, I rolled my eyes: “Two Magicians Warn the Supreme Court About Junk Science.” The eye-rolling wasn’t because warning the current US Supreme Court …

https://skepchick.org/2026/04/penn-teller-the-supreme-court-bs/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133593

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Public Service Announcement

2026-Apr-23, Thursday 17:32
[syndicated profile] andrew_rilstone_feed

Posted by Unknown

http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2026/04/public-service-announcement.html

The idea of St Patrick’s day parades and parties was mostly thought up by the Irish ex-pat community in New York, who (as you’d expect) wanted to celebrate their country of origin once a year. In Ireland, historically, it was mostly a day to visit family and go to church. 

Yes, quite often, legendary figures do differ from their historical prototypes. Dick Turpin was a nasty little horse thief who somehow got remembered as an heroic outlaw. Saint George the figure in the Mummers plays and the Fairy Queen is an English knight who rescues ladies from dragons, and fights duels with Turks. He may possibly have been based on a Cappadocian Christian martyr. This is absolutely fine. 

The Church of England is historically kind of a big deal in England. The Church of England is sort of kind of mostly Protestant. Protestants mostly think that the veneration of humans, even very holy humans, borders on the idolatrous and even pagan. Some Anglicans are okay with saying “and so, with Mary, Francis and Augustine we pray…” but Saints Days haven't been that big a deal in this country since the reformation. 

Go round some older English churches and you'll see statues of saints with their heads knocked off by puritans.

My first name is Andrew. I happen to know that Saint Andrew's day is on 30th November because Scotland. But I bet if you are named James or Phillip or for that matter Polycarp or Dysmas you have no idea when your name-day falls. 

Not that St Andrew is a very big deal in Scotland: the big day for tartan and bagpipes and disgusting meat products is Burns Night. 

Wales is different again: they celebrate being Welsh with leeks because the English spent so long telling them they ought not to be. 

While we are here: the English have a King and a national church and also a national health service and a national broadcasting corporation and a famous playwright and the Archers. Which is why the Union Jack has never been such a big deal for us as the Stars and Stripes is for Americans: we have other symbols. English people who put flag poles in their own gardens are adopting an American tradition, on the same level as kids who go trick or treating instead of pennying for the guy. Not that a thing is wrong because it's foreign and new, but you shouldn't pretend its traditional. 

The thing about it only being the Union Jack if it’s flying from a boat is a myth.

Yes, indeed the Union Jack is the British flag, not the English, and God Save the Queen I Mean King is the British national anthem, not the English one and the fact that everyone including me gets confused over that is a big part of the problem.

When I was a kid I was quite churchy and went to a quite churchy school, and no-one talked about St George's Day, ever. I think it was an extra holiday celebrated by Boy Scouts, in the same way that one or two children did a thing called Bah Mitzvah which the rest of us didn't. Individual teachers had different opinions about whether they could wear their Scout uniforms to school on Baden-Powell's birthday. 

I think that in some parts of the country there were genuine traditions of Morris and May-Pole dancing and maybe daft things like Yorkshire Pudding Rolling and Pork Pie Hurling in some areas. They have died out or are kept up by revivalists because in the cold light of day they were in fact a little bit silly. 

It is fun to sing Fields of Athernry and Dublin In the Rare Old Times and drink far too much Guinness even if the closest you have been to Ireland is Staffordshire. I like the way King Street turns into a good natured festival on March 17th. Although if I were Irish, I might find some of the blarney and leprechauns a bit annoying. I mean, why aren't mobs of people sitting in pubs reading Yeats and Joyce? 

But if some landlords want to sell people too much real ale while singing the British Grenadiers....er....Rule Britannia....er....England Swings Like a Pendulum Do....then I see no problem at all. 

To summarise 

-- Literally no-one is telling you you can't celebrate St George's Day, but historically, it hasn't really been that big a thing. 

— It is irrelevant and not at all a gotcha that St George came from what is now called Turkey, probably. (And it is not a witty riposte to say "ha-ha but Turkey didn't exist back then" either.) 

— Although I do think it a shame that Alban, who was a: English and b: real never gets a look in. Or Edmund, come to that. 

— I’d go with Jerusalem if I had to make a choice. Land of Hope and Glory is too jingoistic and associated with a particular party, and Rule Britannia requires too much contextualisation, although it’s actually a good tune. I mean, I joke about Place Called England but no-one outside the folk world has heard of it. 

— But if you try to make “having a beer on April 23rd” an Act of Resistance to Forces of Oppression that only exist in your head, then I will call you a racist twat and decline.

Also: Shakespeare's birthday.


http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2026/04/public-service-announcement.html

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Getting Tatted On A Tuesday

2026-Apr-23, Thursday 03:00
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/22/getting-tatted-on-a-tuesday/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60315

My mom and I both had three tattoos. One of hers was from before my time, and she got two more while I was a kid. I got my first one at eighteen; a matching one with my two cousins who are practically like my sisters. It was all three of our firsts. My second one at twenty was not perfectly matching but very samesies with my lifelong bestie. My third was just for me, and it represents a promise to myself.

My mom and I always knew we wanted matching tattoos eventually, it just took us both four to get there. But we’re finally here, with the matching tats we’ve wanted for years. We just kept not getting them, and another year would pass. I asked her to look at artists, find some she likes, and I’d do the same and we’d pick our favorite. It never happened, and eventually I said, “mom, I booked us a consultation.” I was dragging her to get a tattoo because I knew if I didn’t, she’d never slow down on her own long enough to get one.

I follow a lot of tattoo artists on Instagram, but most are states or even whole countries away. However, there’s one in Dayton I’ve been following for about two years. After seeing his floral work time and time again and thinking how amazing it was, I finally just booked a consultation because I figured taking at least a step in that direction was a good idea. So, my mom and I headed to Truth and Triumph Tattoo in Kettering and met Kevin Rotramel.

My mom had sketched a design of a sunflower, and after talking with him about what we wanted and where we wanted it, he said he’d come up with a design that was close to the original my mom drew, but just more cleaned up and with more depth and detail. While we had always dreamed of color, we both knew yellow would look awful on our skin tones, and just went for greyscale, which our artist highly recommended anyway.

Before I show you how our tats turned out, I want to showcase some of Kevin’s work. I know I said his floral work is what made me decide to go to him, but check out this insane octopus:

Or this sick giraffe:

How about this super cool lantern?!

And this castle is incredible:

Okay, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, but seriously Kevin’s work is so cool.

My mom went first, and I was starting to get nervous, but also was so excited to finally be doing this!

Finally, it was my turn:

Me sitting in a chair with my back to the tattoo artist, with my back exposed and my head hanging down so he can get to my upper back area. He is actively tattooing me in the shot!

Honestly it barely hurt for the first like half, but in the latter half of the tat I was definitely starting to get sensitive. I always seem to be chill for about an hour, and then right at the hour mark I’m like, “ooh okay I want to be done now.” But I hung in there!

And here they are, our matching sunflowers:

My mom and I with our exposed backs to the camera, looking at each other. Our sunflowers are both in the middle of our upper backs, mine between my other two tattoos (a pineapple and purple flowers), and hers all lonesome on her back by itself.

I am so happy with these! I appreciate Kevin for putting mine up a little bit higher than my mom’s so it wasn’t just straight up in line with my other two. I do love how my mom’s looks as her only back one, though. It’s framed so nicely! They’re the perfect size and aren’t too wild, just something pretty and simple to remind us of each other.

I absolutely love how they came out, and I’m just thrilled to finally have a matching tattoo with my mom. I know it’s corny, but sunflowers have always been a symbol of our love for each other, because we are each other’s sunshine, and we make each other happy when skies are grey. I love my mom and our tattoos, and I only wish we had gotten them sooner.

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/22/getting-tatted-on-a-tuesday/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60315

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The Big Idea: Samantha Mills

2026-Apr-22, Wednesday 20:35
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/22/the-big-idea-samantha-mills-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60307

Family ties aren’t always a prettily done bow, sometimes they’re fraught with fraying ends and tricky knots, all woven together in the branches of family trees. Love ’em or hate ’em, everyone’s got parents, and everyone’s relationships with them are vastly different. Nebula Award-winning author Samantha Mills explores these varied relationships in her newest collection of short stories, Rabbit Test and Other Stories.

SAMANTHA MILLS:
Assembling a short story collection is an exercise in self-reflection. Material written over the course of years is placed side-by-side for the first time. Themes emerge. Preoccupations become clear. Where one story can be read in isolation and stand on its own terms, a collection can’t help but blare its author’s recurring fixations.
If there is one big fixation recurring throughout Rabbit Test and Other Stories, it is parenthood—specifically, the many ways that parent-child relationships buttress, cast shadows over, and intersect with so many other aspects of our lives.

Nearly every story here includes parents (usually mothers) and/or children (usually daughters). Frequently, this relationship is ruptured. Someone is missing, or dead, or dragged away by forces beyond their control. In “Strange Waters,” a fisherwoman is lost in time, struggling to get home to her children. In “Spindles,” a young fairytale princess has been separated from her mother during an alien invasion, and is struggling to make it to their rendezvous point before being captured. The settings change, the anxiety remains. What if, what if?

Parent/child separation is not something I keep writing about on purpose, but it’s a worry I can’t shake. When my first baby was born and then immediately whisked away for a 3-day stay in the NICU, I felt fear like nothing I had ever experienced before. I looked at that tiny face and felt the weight of the generations stretching behind me, the future spiraling uncertainly ahead of me, and I thought: oh no. I’m going to be scared for the rest of my life.

Weirdly, this was what leveled up my writing, though I didn’t realize it right away. About six months after giving birth, after years of fits and starts, I finally figured out how to craft a proper short story. The immensity and clarity of those new mom emotions were what tipped me over the line from knowing how to write a pretty sentence to knowing what I wanted to say.

Having kids forced me to think more deeply about my own childhood, both what I wanted to carry forward from it and what I wanted to leave behind. I was looking forward and backward at the same time—and god, I was so sleep-deprived! It was in this fevered state that I began to think about society generationally in a way I hadn’t before, reflecting on the ways that traditions or traumas (or traumatic traditions) are passed down from one generation to the next.

That tension—being caught between generations and deciding what, if anything, to do differently—surfaces in several of these stories. In “Rabbit Test,” the main character is prevented from getting an abortion by her parents; later, she has an opportunity to give her own daughter the choice she didn’t have. In “The Limits of Magic,” a repressive patriarchal state is passed down in the nursery by women who never saw a way out for themselves, and a new mother can’t bear to follow in their footsteps. In “A Shadow Is a Memory of a Ghost,” a pair of nemesis witches have to face the fact that, in trying to avoid the harms of their father, they’ve hurt their own children in entirely new ways.

There are good parents, here, too (the aforementioned fisherwoman; the fairytale queen; a tightknit family surviving in a mining colony company town in space), but even they make mistakes, because who doesn’t? What keeps drawing me back to this topic is the sheer variety of possible perspectives. I could write a thousand more stories and still not feel I’ve adequately conveyed the many facets of this experience. We do not all become parents, but we’ve all been children. We all spent our formative years utterly dependent on the adults in our lives—some up to the task, some not. It’s a bond that can be a comfort and joy for the rest of one’s life, or a fragile, fraught connection, or a disaster to be worked out in therapy for years to come, and whether we like it or not, this affects how we see ourselves and how we move through the world.

Now, don’t get me started on siblings.

Rabbit Test: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/22/the-big-idea-samantha-mills-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60307

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Ethan Klein & the Quartering: Rightwing Censors

2026-Apr-22, Wednesday 14:16
[syndicated profile] skepchick_feed

Posted by Rebecca Watson

https://skepchick.org/2026/04/ethan-klein-the-quartering-rightwing-censors/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133589

Hi everyone, today we’ll be talking about the most important news of the day: The Quartering is being accused of being a cuck by his fellow rightwing chuds in a massive drama explosion known as The Cuckening. Yep, those sure are all words I just said. English words.  Okay, don’t worry, this is online-drama-adjacent but …

https://skepchick.org/2026/04/ethan-klein-the-quartering-rightwing-censors/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133589

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