You Know You’re Gay When…

YOU KNOW YOU'RE GAY WHEN...
You know what color chartreuse is.
You have used chartreuse in a sentence.
You wear chartreuse.

I Mean…What?!?

Hollywood and Brine

One thing is getting to Hollywood; the other is staying here. You can’t just stay here in the hopes of becoming a celebrity and take a job at a bank or some other menial office job in the Valley. Heaven forbid.

I Mean…What?!?

1. TV-bazen over de impact van corona - DEEL 2. Davy Parmentier van VTM: “Hoe het straks verder moet, weet vandaag nog niemand”  Het Laatste Nieuws
2. 'Een vrijscène met 1,5 meter afstand, hoe doe je dat?'  De Tijd
3. TV-bazen over de impact van corona - DEEL 1. Olivier Goris van VRT: “Ik hou er rekening mee dat we de komende zes maanden geen seconde fictie draaien”  Het Laatste Nieuws
4. Zomer vol herhalingen, en herhalingen van herhalingen: coronacrisis is opdoffer voor alle tv-zenders, en vooral voor VRT  Het Laatste Nieuws
5. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Minister Muylle wil tijdelijke werkloosheid verlengen tot 1 ...  Het NieuwsbladHele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

A psychopathic hairstylist collects scalps and wears them — in an attempt to escape herself.

More than a quarter-century ago, I was driving to Pittsburgh, with my wife, Marianne Porter, and we were talking about fantasy and about steam locomotives. I made a joke about the Baldwin Steam Dragon Works and Marianne laughed. Then, another mile or so down the road, I said, "Write that down, please."

Thus was born the Iron Dragons Trilogy, a trio of stand-alone books, the third of which, The Iron Dragon's Mother, was published just last year.

Far more recently, just an hour or so ago, I got an email from my associates at Open Road Media, telling me that The Iron Dragon's Mother, first of the three, will be on sale for $1.99 this coming Monday, March 23.

That's one day only BUT this time the sale includes Canada. Which I am very grateful for because the Canadian science fiction community has always been very warm and kind to  me.

Anyway, here's the boilerplate below, cut-and-pasted from the corporate email:


We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	US	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	CA	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99

Open Road will promote the feature via social media. We hope you can share the deal with your network as well. You can subscribe to the newsletters at the links below so that you will get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears.

Newsletter	Link
Early Bird Books	Subscribe Now
The Lineup	Subscribe Now
The Portalist	Subscribe Now
Murder & Mayhem	Subscribe Now
A Love So True	Subscribe Now
The Archive	Subscribe Now
The Reader	Subscribe Now

So if you (1) read e-books, (2) don't own a copy of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and (3) would like to... well, here's your opportunity to do it on the cheap.

Just a reminder that people in Canada and the US can buy an e-book of The Iron Dragon's Mother, the first book of my stand-alone fantasy trilogy for only $1.99 today. Tomorrow will be too late:

Here's the boilerplate:

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	US	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99
9781504025669	The Iron Dragon's Daughter	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	CA	2020-03-23	2020-03-23	$1.99

Open Road will promote the feature via social media. We hope you can share the deal with your network as well. You can subscribe to the newsletters at the links below so that you will get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears.

Newsletter	Link
Early Bird Books	Subscribe Now
The Lineup	Subscribe Now
The Portalist	Subscribe Now
Murder & Mayhem	Subscribe Now
A Love So True	Subscribe Now
The Archive	Subscribe Now
The Reader	Subscribe Now

Coming soon from PS Publishing is The Mysteries of the Faceless King, the first of two volumes collecting the best of Darrell Schweitzer's short fiction. Beautifully made, with a cover by the estimable Jason Van Hollander.

Also, an introduction by (cough) me. Here's how that begins:

Once upon a time . . .None of the stories collected herein begin with those words, though some come close. But they might as well. For Darrell Schweitzer writes a very traditional sort of story. His fiction is almost always fantasy, which is a mode nested deep in the roots of Story; usually horror, a mode as old as nightmares; and very often weird fantasy, a much more recent mode but one that is dear to his heart. Most could have been written a hundred years ago—or, with equal ease, a hundred years in the future. This is not a criticism. Timelessness is precisely what he is after.

PS Publishing has posted the entirety of the introduction online, preparatory to publication of the book sometime this month. So if you're curious as to what I said, you have only two options. You can buy the book. Or you can read the intro online for free.

But if you don't buy the book, you won't get the stories. You're in a quandary.

You can find the entire introductory essay here. Or you can just go to the PS Publishing website and wander about, marveling at how many of their books you want by clicking here.


And I should remind you . . .

The ebook of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, the first of three stand-alone fantasies in the Iron Dragons Trilogy, goes on sale tomorrow (Wednesday, April 1, 2020) for the one day only for only $1.99. That's a good deal. But only tomorrow and only in Canada and the US.

Marianne Porter's nanopress imprint, Dragonstiars Press,  has just announced its latest chapbook!

The Devil's Bestiary, a dark, brooding, and occasionally scabrous piece of fun composed by your truly, will be made available for purchase tomorrow, Thursday April 9, at noon Philadelphia Time (that's 4 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time) at the Dragonstairs Press website, www.dragonstairs.com.

But not a minute before then.

Here's the official announcement:

The Devil's Bestiary is Michael Swanwick's cynical,whimsical take on twenty nine creatures of myth and fables.  It is 5 ½ inch square format, with an outer wrapper of hand-dyed kozo paper, hand-stitched, numbered, and signed by the author.  It is published in a limited edition of 45, of which 40 are available for sale.   

The signed and very limited edition chapbook will go for $12 in the USA and $14 elsewhere, postage included. (When I tell Marianne she's not charging enough, she just glares at me.)  Which means that it will sell out pretty much immediately.

It's a lovely thing and I'm proud, as the content provider, to own a copy.


And rather than buy a pig in a poke with a blind horse . . .

Here are a couple of typical entries from The Devil's Bestiary:


Today he’s the picture of affluence. Respectable people pay extremely well for his services, for he returns the remains of their loved ones to the earth in the most environmentally responsible way imaginable.


Those, at the low-rez pic above, should tell you right away whether you need a copy or not.

Over on Facebook, Samuel R. Delany, answering a question in a post, offered the best and most succinct writing advice anyone has ever codified. Here, in its entirety, it is:

Writing advice: Read and reread. Think of a story you have never read but wish you had; then write it as carefully as you can. Finish it, and send it around till it's published.

The third sentence, as Chip noted at the time, was a condensation of advice that Robert A. Heinlein offered. So what you have above is the combined wisdom of two of the greatest careers science fiction has ever seen.

I could unpack that brief paragraph at enormous length. But, honestly, there's no need. You read it and you understood it. Now you only have to live it.


Above: The photo by James Hamilton was lifted from The Nation, where it illustrated a typically thoughtful and enlightened interview with Chip. You can find it here.

Flushed with the feeling of success that comes from having cleaned my office to such a degree that the rugs are now visible, I thought today that I would take on the problem of excess books. Surely there are some I don't actually need. So I chose a shelf at near-random (it was one of those actually accessible without moving the boxes of books stacked before it to another location), and started going through both rows (the shelves are double-stacked, of course) to see what they contained.

Only to discover that the shelf was stocked with books placed there at seeming random. Mr. Evelyn's diary lies cheek-to-jowl with Gertrude Stein's Picasso. Jeff Danziger's Teed Tales abuts, appropriately enough, a history of Vermont. There is a collection of stories by T. Corgahesson Boyle, Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, a novel by Sean Stewart, and a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. These last two, by the way, are misfiled since I have a science fiction section arranged almost alphabetically by author and a designated place for stacks of SF criticism and related essays. Which is where Gwyneth Jones' Joanna Russ should be as well.

Here's T. H. White's wonderful collection of mythical animals from medieval bestiaries, The Book of Beasts. The Return of Fursey! Mosses from an Old Manse. Flann O'Brien's The Best of Myles reappears from hiding; after I've obsessively reread it a few times,  I'll have to hide it somewhere else among my books, if I'm ever to read anything else. Oh, but there's also John McPhee's The Pine Barrens, which some of us persist in thinking his best book. Though it has competition. And here is a battered but charming old hardcover of Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned. I have a biography of Fort around here somewhere, though I doubt I'll find it today. Some few of these I haven't read--Fishing from Earliest Times is one example, though I'm sure I'll get to it soon. But I've read every story in The Corrector of Destinies, Melville Davidson Post's extremely odd collection of detective fiction (sort of), and I'll have to blog about it here someday.

There are thirty shelves of books on one wall of my office and my first attack upon the one provided me with nothing to cull,  And I've put aside a short stack of books to read or reacquaint myself with. Not have I done much to organize it--but wait! Here, just one shelf below is Damon Knight's Charles Fort. Up it goes, alongside The Book of the Damned, so nobody could say the last hour was wasted. Though it came close.

Nor was I able to impose a theme upon the shelf, other than Books I Am Delighted to Possess. But maybe that's enough.

In any case, it will have to do.


Above: For technical reasons, I'm having difficulty uploading a picture of the wall of books in my office. So here's a pic of part of the wall of books in my bedroom. 

Open Road Media, my main e-book publisher, appears to be on a tear these days. Maybe because a lot of self-isolated people need books these days and aren't willing to wait for them to be delivered through the mails? I don't know and I haven't asked. I just pass along their promotions to you.

On Sunday, April 19th for one day only, my classic Grand Tour of the Solar System novel, Vacuum Flowers, will be on sale for $1.99 in Canada and the US.

Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark has a headful of stolen wetware, enemies that want her dead, and a Solar System full of colorful human and posthuman cultures that is far too small for her to hide in. She doesn't want to change everything. But she has no choice...

(Vacuum Flowers was written at the height of the Cyberpunk/Humanist wars and was meant to belong to neither camp. But I did throw in a short nod to each camp in the novel. Widely separated, of course.)

Here's their chart:

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504036504	Vacuum Flowers	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Portalist NL	US	2020-04-19	2020-04-19	$1.99
9781504036504	Vacuum Flowers	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Portalist NL	CA	2020-04-19	2020-04-19	$1.99

Immediately after, on Monday, April 20th, my short story collection, ,Tales of Old Earth, goes on sale in the US and Canada for $2.99.

Tales of Old Earth contains nineteen of my best and strangest stories, including two Hugo Award winners and I forget how many also-rans. Featuring a planet-sized grasshopper, the train to Hell, an amorous sphinx, the last elves in the world, a civilization inside an International Harvester refrigerator, and much, much more!

Here's the second chart:

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504036511	Tales of Old Earth	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	US	2020-04-20	2020-04-20	$2.99
9781504036511	Tales of Old Earth	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Early Bird Books NL	CA	2020-04-20	2020-04-20	$2.99

Enjoy!

Line 1 is over capacity—adding more stops isn't the solution.

We need to talk about this idea to extend the Yonge line up to Richmond Hill. The Yonge line is already congested. Anyone who rides the subway regularly is aware of this. The immediate plans to address it are, shall we say, unimpressive. The Yonge Relief Network Study done in 2015 for Metrolinx [PDF] focused […]

The post Extending the Yonge line will only make crowding worse appeared first on Torontoist.

For those who care about data, the City’s new Open Data Master Plan is about to change everything.

One Saturday afternoon earlier this month, more than 100 people gathered at the Toronto Public Library for an annual gathering called CodeAcross, the city’s annual open data and civic tech event. This year, the theme was the Future of Work. One of the challenges centred on the City of Toronto’s freshly approved Open Data Master […]

The post Civic Tech: Hackers! To Your Stations! appeared first on Torontoist.

Keesmaat’s Next Venture, Shitty Architecture Men, Mod Squad, Presto Problemo, Bench Press, and more in this debut edition.

Another Glass Box is a weekly roundup of urban design news in Toronto (and occasionally beyond), in bite-size pieces. It’s curated by Dan Seljak, who’s done marketing and communications work for architecture and construction companies for the last seven years—and who still loves this city enough to line up for brunch.  Content warning: some of the […]

The post Introducing: Another Glass Box, a new weekly architecture feature appeared first on Torontoist.

Food, art, even public space now seems to revolve around aesthetic value as judged by the social network.

Whether it’s a small new restaurant or a major art gallery exhibition, it seems Toronto’s cultural institutions must cater to the “like” seeking set. The price of success today is a sacrifice made at the altar of Instagram. Of course, to some, it’s not viewed as a sacrifice at all, especially when it boosts business […]

The post Has Toronto Become a City of Instagram Photo Ops? appeared first on Torontoist.

The re-imagining of the city’s main artery must look to the future, not the past.

It’s clear that Toronto is changing; it’s not so clear that our political leaders have noticed. The debate about the revitalization of Yonge St. in North York Centre, where the cityscape is now dominated by residential towers, highlights the problem. ‘RE-imagining Yonge’, a city initiative covering the area between Sheppard and Finch Avenues, goes to […]

The post Our One Chance to Fix Yonge Street appeared first on Torontoist.

Divestment is “more urgent” in Toronto than NYC

A growing list of large institutional investors around the world – state and provincial pension funds, university endowments, and most recently, New York City itself, have been aggressively divesting from fossil fuel investments so as to do their part in mitigating against climate change. Here in Toronto, it’s been a different story. Prominent institutional investors, […]

The post Habitat: Environmentalists eye city’s investment policies appeared first on Torontoist.

Why all the secrecy?

If you follow the news in Toronto or if you’re interested in technology, you’ve probably heard of Sidewalk Toronto by now. It’s a joint project of Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, and Waterfront Toronto. This is the tech giant’s first foray into urban development and infrastructure, with Toronto hosting the pilot project. In […]

The post Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement appeared first on Torontoist.

In 2008, a few friends in Vancouver recognized that a voice was missing from reporting in our country. National news was increasingly international in nature. Provincial was disappearing. And, local seemed out of touch with its audience. So, they started writing the kind of content they wanted to read. Hyperlocal stories aimed at helping people […]

The post Torontoist has been acquired by Daily Hive appeared first on Torontoist.

Mixed feelings around hockey about holding NHL draft early

WWE Money In The Bank Kickoff begins at 6 pm ET/3 pm PT on Sunday, May 10.

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020

Wisconsin officials believe a plan of reducing compensation to highest-earning employees should help save the athletic department about $2.8 million.

Becky Lynch has become the Superstar with the most total days as Raw Women’s Champion, surpassing Alexa Bliss.

Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh penned a two-page open letter advocating flexibility for college athletes looking to enter the NFL Draft.

Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model

Путешествие - это ещё и знакомства. В хостелах с незнакомцами ещё и делишь удобства, в в гестах - общее пространство. Как знакомиться, как держаться в международной англоязычной среде путешественников - интересует многих трэвел-ребят, тем более тех из них, для кого английский язык не родной.

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 This time I started earlier in the day while the little chap was watching TV,  rather than nod off, I thought I would activate and tackle those projects that have been waiting to be completed. The ECW regiments were long over due, time to get the Flock box out again.


 As I want these units to be nice and quick and not too taxing, I’m going for a few layers of flock to base them. Dark earth, light earth, 2mm static grass then a longer mix of 4/6mm static grass. Maybe some flower tufts thrown in here and there too. Nice and quick with no painting going on.

 It’s a lovely moment when you can take all your newly based stuff upstairs and combine it with your old stuff. The parliamentarian force isn’t too far off being finished now. The quick Dip Army Painter route is definitely the way forward with big armies like this.




 In my head I planned for four Foote Regiments to make up a starter force, just need to finish the red regiment and I’ll be there.

 I took these beautiful images from a Dark ages Facebook page for reference latter on with painting. Thank you Jack Sarge for posting them.

 Digging through a box of figures yesterday I found an old Grenadier Orc that I had painted back in 1986 or so. Well, I thought time to draft you into the army my son!
It was only when I brought him down stairs to the painting table I realised I had bought some orcs from EBay that matched him exactly. In fact I think the sculpt had been cut up to create the other as from the head down to the belt were identical. Well not being one to break up a family, this lot will be based together on the same base. The range is an old Grenadier box set I think.

 I will rebase him, but I did have to stop and take a trip down memory lane as I studied his base. Back then rather than painting hordes of figures, I would spend hours on just one. This one is based on a piece of cardboard cut from an art pad. Polly filler was then used for the grass and pricked with a needle to create grass, then painted. Boy, now I just wash and go with new improved ground mix from Luke’s APS.
I used to spend hours and days on just one character at a time, glad to say those days are long behind me but it was quite moving looking at the way I used to work as a teenager.

I’ve gone back over these guys and painted their helmet feathers black, they were left bronze before. I have done this so they will tie in better to the Oathmark Elves. More on this to come.

 I thought I would give myself a lock down project to see if I could get some more Union troops done. The first batch were done some months ago and just left in a draw ( getting slightly damaged). This second lot, I just thought ‘too hell with it’ and decided to Dip them all in strong tone. This made them much more fun and quicker to paint, it also meant they were a lot more tougher than the first batch. The third batch were the original figures painted up around 1998, brought up to muster with a retouch of paint.

 Rather than paint individual regiments, I’m going for the Regimental Fire and Fury approach by painting a horde of generic bases that can be used for a multitude of regiments.


 Above is the first batch, shaded with inks and just matte varnished with spray varnish.
 A horde of standards, I stuck some on unpainted figures as I couldn’t be fussed to go back and do it all again. I decided it will be easier to paint the figure around the standard than go through another night of glue and fiddly scissors.
 These photos are out of order, this shows some of the combined forces rebased at last. Although I’m going to be using Bonny Blue Flag rules from Cavalier books, I’m basing them using Regimental Fire and Fury ratios. This is so I can use their fantastic scenario books for battles. These are great for the detailed maps and accurate troop numbers of the forces involved. Although I won’t be playing their core rules these scenario books are an amazing resource.
 The idea has always been to take my old collection from the Nineties and update them with many more different poses. This regiment being revamped was one featuring mostly Dixon figures, so I used a lot of Dixon miniatures in many different loading poses to add to it.
 More rebased figures, this was great because even though I had a rough idea of how many new bases there would be, I was surprised at how many just kept coming from all the batch’s combined.
Above, are some strips of figures Dipped in strong tone. Basing them on cereal packets was great because the cardboard can be bent, allowing you to get all around the figure to paint it.
 It’s the next day now and I managed to base up some of those command bases. The eagles and spear points are from Steve Barber miniatures.

Crazy-seeming research, every now and then, leads to something really, really wonder-filled. In this case, the discovery of something long-predicted (by Einstein) but seemingly impossible to perceive: gravity waves. (HT Maggie Lettvin)

Harrisburg University proudly announces, in a press release: HU facial recognition software predicts criminality A group of Harrisburg University professors and a Ph.D. student have developed automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal. With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can […]

life’s stats and photo journal pages have been updated. Not too much interesting this time around… life has been crazy, but not due to trips, at least. It was a really weird Christmas, weather-wise. Mostly because it was super warm … Continue reading →

[h/t Stephan Hurtubise]  

Valerie Hansen has a new book just out: THE YEAR 1000: When Explorers Connected the World — and Globalization Began.  New York:  Scribner, 2020. A NYT review of Hansen's landmark volume is copied below, but let's first look at some interesting language notes concerning the background of the word for "slave" (Chapter 4 is on […]

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman neumerals" [sic] I was going to ask for your favorite (quasi-)scientific error examples, but then I realized that this just an inventory of testing-result types, so that things like p-hacking, file-drawer phenomena, confirmation bias, etc., are in a different space.

How can people be so mean to helpless animals?  While visiting my friends on Earth over Thanksgiving, I was taking a walk and Tra and I saw a dog abandoned in a box in the cold.  She had finished nursing her puppies and so the people who owned her just turned her out in the […]

I am so nervous about Valentine’s Day.  I haven’t ever done this before until I visited Earth and my friend Skeeter told me about it.  Should I give Spec a Valentine that is special and tells him how cute I think he is or should I give all my friends a Valentine that is the […]

I can’t tell you how great it is to be home.  I soo missed my family and my friends.  Thank you to my friends the Idea Seekers Spec and Tra who came to my rescue on the planet Earth.  And to think I almost got turned into a Warrior Drone by Jealousy Cloud over thinking my […]

You guys must give a lot of parties because you all have really good ideas!  I can hardly wait to see what Spec and Skeeter choose to do for the celebration party! Tra and Skeeter and I hung out on Friday with some of you.  It was so great to see everyone. I was expecting Spec would show up […]

My friends, you did it.  You worked hard and chased the Darkness away.  Special thanks to my friend Denver and Toki who wrote a really good poem/cheer.   He is right, we have to stop the hacking – no more stealing passwords. I will be calling a Celebration Party.  Everyone is welcome.  Watch the What’s New […]

Hi all my friends, I was really looking forward to Olice Hush’s party today in the Palace.  I got all changed into my new fire dress and then the Darkness hit without any warning.  I couldn’t get out of my room, on my computer screen it said server failed and all sorts of other things happened to […]

Dear Idea Seeker or Ally of the Idea Seekers, I have great news!  Greedy Cloud has been chased away and Spec and Tra discovered some new spring time house and garden items that he was hiding from everyone. Check them out in my house and garden, or go see Spec, Tra and Skeeter’s houses. Here […]

Guy 1: Cleaning gutters with a leaf blower. Guy 2: Holding him up with JUMPER CABLES.