It's Hard to Write a Book

This is the Veil Nebula, which Hubble saw on July 1, 2020.

Have you ever looked up what our Hubble Space Telescope saw on your birthday? (Or your anniversary, or your pet's adoption day, or...)

We've given our popular interactive page a new look — and, just as importantly, it now shows you five different cosmic sights Hubble was checking out on the day that you picked.

This is “Kindled” by Laura K. Cannon, which is part of her portfolio that can be found here: http://navate.com/2wk6im1sartc92iwza7il07bxq2mk5

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

I'm SO excited to finally share these pieces I created for D&D's Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

You would expect world-saving acts to be remembered, but with nobody knowing that anything was ever amiss, the story would probably fade with those who were involved. If anything, despite their good intentions, the guild would probably be remembered more for the dozens of escapades that ended in them being chased out of towns

Imagine decades down the line, the guild trying to prove what they did to show the world that their actions mattered. Corazon and his Penny Dreadfuls wanting to be remembered for his good deeds rather than for being his Father's disappointment. Egbert writing his changed morals and expanded worldview as the basis of his religion. Prudence searing her face into the minds of others as she torches them. Dob writing songs about his adventurers in the hopes that somebody will remember them. All of them wanting their sacrifices to matter.

Merilwen outliving all of the guild, discovering out how temporary everything she worked for truly is but still spending her extra centuries telling the people she meets about the times she spent travelling the world with her best friends.

But despite her best efforts, the universe still forgets. Because there will always be bigger threats to the world, and more heroic folks to save it.

Or so she thinks.

Millenia in the future, when magic has left the world and ghosts have come flooding in, a man would make his wealth on a whaling ship that he named in honour of the stories of his childhood, the dread pirate De Ballena

One day, an artist would be hired to write the next big opera. They would adapt their favourite childhood lullably. The tale had been corrupted by time, but the sentiment remained - one of hope and misadventure, starring a high-voiced page and steel wheels.

In time, magic would be lost to the world, but some power remained if you knew where to look for it. It still lingered in the pages of old religious tomes, holding enough power to banish a banshee despite how ridiculous the deity itself would seem to those who hadn't met them

When the ghost apocolypse first swept through G'eth, academics would pour over ancient texts looking for answers, and common folk were willing to turn to any source of authority for answers and salvation. I'd be willing to bet a decent number of people found comfort in the idea of being eaten last

I genuinely can't stop thinking about these two. Help

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

Happy 100th birthday David Attenborough, you absolute bloody legend 💖💖💖💖💖