Les Taylor

Read this in the melody of the old Batman theme.

Whenever I mention Discord to my students, their immediate reaction is shady/illegal stuff going on in servers. So, not having one is probably for the best.

That cover is me at Kroger when standing rib roast is on sale.

My brain told me this was the album cover of Ye.

Image of the character Dean Learner from Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place. A caption says “An eagle eyed reader can see the tropes. A pedant can see the tropes. But if you’re looking at the tropes, you’re missing the story. If you read a SciFi story and point out the tropes, you’re a freak!”

I may have modified this quote a touch.

Amazon claims to have copies. After next payday, I’ll learn if it exists or if it’ll be like in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler and every page is blank or the same page or some other creepy nonsense.

No joke, I just learned Strange Travelers exists. I thought I owned every Gene Wolfe short story collection, including Best Of, and I regularly go to WolfeWiki and the subreddit. Somehow I missed it. It just appeared in my perception today.

My wife said this is like a Gene Wolfe story.

Christopher Lee as Count Dooku saying “What if I told you that the Republican was now under the control of a dark lord of the Sith?”

Wife: Let’s keep the politics to a minimum, it’s Christmas.

Me: sure.

Also me five minutes into dinner:

No One:

Me at 6am: How do I tie a Windsor tie knot?

There is nothing anyone can tell me to make me believe the American Games thing is real and not a Poe’s Law parody of Trump AI video. No. Not allowed. Bad reality. Go in the corner and think about what you’ve done.

To be clear, I mean of these court decisions. It’s all “Check predetermined outcome, shred Constitution to get there.”

There’s no non-cynical reading of this.

A screenshot from a Texas Tribune article about the Supreme Court not hearing a book banning case from Texas. The highlighted text states, “The Monday move by the high court lets stand the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that says the First Amendment doesn’t acknowledge a right to receive information.”

No “right to receive information”? Then what is the point? What is any of this? What are we doing here?

“You can write Common Sense, Mr. Payne, but no one is allowed to read it.”

What???????

Screenshot of IMDB trivia: For the episode featuring Nicol Williamson, which was filmed in England, Perkins sent a package of drugs to his hotel, prior to arrival. Unfortunately for him, there was another Anthony Perkins already staying at the hotel and the package was delivered to him instead. The police were called and, upon his arrival, Perkins was arrested and deported.

Excuse me… what?

They’re all “based on” Patricia Highsmith stories. To what extent is a crapshoot. The first one is a difficult to follow psychosexual murder plot. One of them is all about an English family solving a murder in comically English ways. What a grand old time, we found a man’s hand!

Screenshot of two episode descriptions of the show Chillers on Amazon Prime. Episodes 10 and 11.

If you’re not watching football and are tired of MST3K and need something to watch on Thanksgiving, check out this bizarre anthology show Chillers hosted by Anthony Perkins. It’s… full of choices…

The Last Drive-In art in the style of “The Bird with Crystal Plumage”

There’s always room for Giallo - get your fill tonight at #TheLastDriveIn!

@therealjoebob123.bsky.social
@darcythemailgirl.bsky.social
@themutantfam.bsky.social
@shudder.com #MutantFam

Kelly Freas is spinning in his grave.

Tweet from Abyss & Apex Magazine saying the following: “Going forward all Abyss & Apex story illustrations will be done with either Adobe Firefly, which does not steal artists’ works, or without AI if the author so requests.

I may start something here, and I don’t have much of a platform. I also don’t have bridges to burn. This seems… bad.

Theft is one of many problems with AI. Others include: not paying an artist, destroying the environment, AI art being total ass (see the new Feast for Crows illustrated edition), etc

Ross Douthat’s podcast column for the Times. It’s titled “Why Mamdani’s Victory is Less Significant Than You Think” Below is Douthat looking like a PeePeeMan.

“Why Those Demanding We Deport Mumduni (sic) Actually Have a Point (If We Hope to Combat Anti-Semitism)” by Bret Stephens

“5 Lessons Mamdani Could Learn About Civility from Charlie Kirk” by Ross Douthat

If we took AI bro writers seriously, why would publishers like you even bother paying them? If AI writing was so great, couldn’t you just prompt it and make your own and run a magazine with one of your largest expenses gone? They really think everyone but them are dumb, but it’s the reverse.

Artist Wally Wood sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/wood_w... died on this day, so here's some examples of his early 1950's work: a couple of his covers for Weird Science and two pieces for 'The Spirit Sunday Supplement':

In all seriousness, I do think tone has a lot more to do with it, so probably not? I think what the Hell we do with the Long and Short Sun series is funnier.

Ooooohhhhh…..

My wife is actively making fun of this conversation and my distinction, lol. Planetary Romance and Space Opera are more tonally different in my opinion than there being just narrative differences.

I go off from the inciting incident. This funny distinction leads to the following being Planetary Romances: John Carter, Dune, Book of the New Sun, any of Brackett’s Stark novellas, despite each having interplanetary travel in their universe.

Leigh Brackett often self defined as Science Fantasy, which she also said was synonymous with Space Opera. I’d say Planetary Romance and Space Opera exist in a venn-diagram. I’d distinguish them by a combo of tone and whether or not the protagonist ever leaves their planet: APoM is the former.

One day I’m going to write an entirely too long essay or video about the resistance from critics to Space Opera being a serious literary genre and the demand to reclassify any example in the genre as a different thing. “It’s fantasy!” “It’s actually hard SciFi!” “It’s not really SciFi at all!”