A Snarky Widow

The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) - absolutely BUCKWILD romance with a dash of telekinesis; nonstop high society drama and misunderstanding from start to finish, happy ending guaranteed. STRONGLY recommend if you, like me, are a basic bitch who enjoys a bit of Pride and Prejudice. 

Binti (Nnedi Okorafor) - a math prodigy runs away from Earth to become the first of her people to attend a prestigious university in space, but shit gets real when a crew of hostile jellyfish aliens attack her ship. 

Chilling Effect (Valerie Valdes) - a spaceship captain and her crew take on a series of convoluted missions in order to rescue the captain’s sister, who’s been frozen and held for ransom. 

The City of Brass (S.A. Chakraborty) - an 18th century conwoman and a mysterious djinn team up to go looking for a legendary hidden city.

The City We Became (N.K. Jemisin) - a scrappy bunch of Chosen Ones have to band together to defend New York City (which is very much alive) from a huge ass monster. 

The Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone) - a lady supervillain gets blasted into space and meets an even bigger, planet-destroying evil space empress. literally WHAT is not to like?

The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - high fantasy royal drama about a woman making her way to power in the wake of a political marriage that left without friends or allies. 

Escaping Exodus (Nicky Drayden) - a space-faring clan are creating their latest spaceship from the insides of a giant monster when absolutely everything goes to shit (as things are wont to do in science fiction stories). 

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (Kai Cheng Thom) - a trans girl runs away to the big city, where she uses her martial arts skills to team up with other trans woman and form a vigilante gang to defend their own when police look the other way. a fascinating blend of poetry and prose and magical realism. 

Finna (Nino Cipri) - two exes working at an IKEA have to team up to save a customer who disappeared through one of those interdimensional portals that all IKEAs have laying around. you know how it is.

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) - come on, you’ve heard about this one. it’s the one with the lesbian space necromancers? yeah, that’s the one. you got it.

In the Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard) - a Beauty and the Beast retelling based in science fiction and Vietnamese fantasy, featuring a young woman falling in love with a “beast” who’s actually a motherly dragon after becoming a tutor to the dragon’s two powerful children. 

Jade City (Fonda Lee) - urban fantasy gang wars, pitting one magically enhanced family against rivals and a new drug that lets anyone mimic their abilities. 

The Library of the Unwritten (A.J. Hackwith) - hell’s librarian gets sent on a quest to find a runaway soul. 

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Becky Chambers) - aka one of my favorite books ever, essentially slice of life science fiction following an interspecies crew of deep space truckers making the longest and most complicated delivery of their lives. very warm and fuzzy. 

Mort (Terry Pratchett) - one of many MANY Discworld books, but a very good one to start with, following the adventures of a boy named Mort after he’s taken on as Death’s apprentice. you know, like the Grim Reaper? that Death. 

River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey) - historical AU in which the United States imported and domesticated hippos in the Mississippi River; follows a crew of hippo-riding crooks and hooligans as they plan one heck of a caper. 

Space Opera (Catherynne Valente) - a washed up rock star and his old bandmate get roped into performing in an intergalactic singing competition that will determine the fate of the entire planet Earth. full of aliens, attempted assassination, art, and emotional turmoil. 

This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) - time-travelling assassins from rival factions fall in love in a poetic and breathless story that spans centuries and reality. 

Under the Pendulum Sun (Jeannette Ng) - fairyland is real, and Victorian England is sending missionaries. a woman and her brother attempt to bring the good word to the fair folk, but start to suspect the queen might just be screwing with their heads. PEAK gothic horror with a creepy fairy twist. 

-2/3 of Senators (60)

-2/3 of the House of Representatives (290)

-3/4 of the states (38)

In 2026, 33 senate seats will be up for grabs, and we’ll be able to vote for people who are against Trump and his ideals.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

some of you may recall Neil Clarke's blog post on the deluge of AI-generated spam that has hit Clarkesworld Magazine's submissions queue.

well, Clarkesworld and other short fiction magazines like it are about to get another swift kick in the dick: Amazon is discontinuing their magazine subscription service (and replacing it with a new service that pays creators much, much less). of the very little money made in the short fiction market, most of it was coming from Amazon.

as Clarke points out in his editorial on the subject, "While there are plenty of people happily reading, listening to, and writing short fiction, a very disappointingly small percentage of those same people are actively paying for it."

short fiction is not dead. the existence of subreddits like r/NoSleep and blogs like @writing-prompt-s proves that. if you value these stories and you want to help writers get paid for their work, please consider checking out (and subscribing to) some of the following publications:

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Apex Magazine

Asimov's Science Fiction

Clarkesworld Magazine

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Fantasy & Science Fiction

Fantasy Magazine

Nightmare Magazine

many of these publications charge less than $5 USD per month for subscriptions, so if you've just dropped Netflix and have an extra $10/month lying around, you can instead support two fiction magazines full of interesting, original, well-written stories.

I relate deeply to being isolated and smear campaigned into traumatic fear of people, and I’m enraged that a mob of males managed to do it to her, just because she was a woman with a public voice. Lindsay Ellis was the absolute ideal of liberalism; she was sensitive to every minority, supportive of every pro-liberal propaganda, great supporter of every woke category, contributed greatly with her opinions to every issue liberals fought for. I watched her video ‘Mask Off’ with bated breath, completely in shock that she had the courage to make it, because it was raw and powerful and brilliant. She apologized for miniscule missteps, and it kept going thru my head, that had she been a male, she would have been considered an absolute icon of progressiveness. She’d be praised as the absolute best, most precious, nuanced and important ideal, proof that males are 'becoming perfect’ and 'can do no wrong’. Instead, she was berated over tiny shit males have never been called out in their lives. It made me sick.

She got mobbed because she was a woman with a voice online. Males decided it was not okay for women to get as far as she went in the society, and suffocated her as a threat to any woman who’d dare to try. I looked up the videos of people sharing their thoughts of her leaving, and they were all made by males. Every single one. Not only they did this, but they get to shape the public opinion of it. Disgusting.

It was only in the comments I was able to find people acknowledging how much she has done for the youtube community. She entered the stage of youtube filled with angry male videos, and she provided brilliance, humor, nuance, intellectual analysis, she created a genre of media essays that didn’t exist beforehand, and paved the way for many other women to speak and gain public voices. She was the number one in how popular, funny and well-received her videos were. I remember being completely obsessed the first time I found them, I’ve never seen interesting and educational content like that before. I’ve learned so much about the ways movies are written, shaped and put together, I’ve learned more about creating stories than I did anywhere else. I’ve appreciated and loved her content. I didn’t agree with all of it, but I didn’t need to, I’ve benefited from it all the same.

My heart hurts that I couldn’t do anything for her in return, that I’ve done next to nothing to support her when she was getting torn into pieces by the mob. It confirms her horror and pain about how people turn their back on you as soon as you lose popularity.

https://www.youtube.com/user/billvicars

and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:

Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.

He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms

His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.

Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore

Plan B is currently available over the counter, and you can find coupons for it online for various retailers; some of those coupons require a prescription so check the coupon details carefully. Both of these medications can be ordered online.

Plan B and Afterpill in the 1.5mg tablets are less effective for people over 176 pounds, however it is safe to double the dose, so if you are heavier order two doses. Ella is also effective for heavier people, but requires a prescription.

Emergency contraception is effective for a short period after sex. You need to take Plan B or Afterpill within 72 hours of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy.

IUDs and birth control implants are effective long-term birth control that does not require your partner to participate in using the birth control or even be aware of it. IUDs are 99% effective and are effective for 3-12 years depending on type. Planned Parenthood can place an IUD for you, and so can many gynecologist's offices, and IUDs are covered under most health insurance plans. Talk to your doctor or gynecologist about how to get an IUD. Birth control implants are 99% effective and are effective for up to 5 years. Like IUDs, you can talk to your doctor or gynecologist, or visit Planned Parenthood, to get an IUD.

The birth control methods listed here are not effective for preventing STIs, they are for pregnancy prevention only.

Scarleteen also has a guide to self-managed medical abortions.

Here is a guide on how to get Mifepristone online.

Amazon and Audible made it into their policy that you can return ebooks and audiobooks and get a full refund.

They actively promote this, making their book shop into a book lending service, de facto a library you subscribe to. That’s their business plan to encourage subscribtions.

The dirty thing, however, is that Amazon and Audible are making the authors pay for each refunded item. They will detract money, income, royalties, from the authors’ account. They’re not hurting from the refund, the author is.

Look, no-one is saying you’re not allowed to return an item if you’ve read the first 50 pages or listened to the first 45 minutes. Maybe the style is not your thing. Maybe you don’t like the narrator’s voice. Maybe the quality of the writing drops severely after chapter three. Go ahead, if the product is bad, return it.

What I’m talking about is that no one should be able to listen to a ten-hour audiobook or read through nearly an entire novel and still get a refund.

Most of the readers don’t know who’s paying for this business plan. It’s not Amazon and Audible, they’re still keeping your subscription money. It’s the authors.

I had someone read and then return the entirety of one of my series last month, and I don’t make enough from my books for that sudden loss of income to not be noticeable. So, I was going ahead going “oh, okay, when Amazon pays out for this month, I will make X amount, which means I can afford Y”, and then in one day, there was a significant drop from someone returning an entire series.

He continued, “[Producer] Rick Berman wrote a three page memo listing all the different issue stories we could tell. And the third one on his list was AIDS. I've been big on blood donations because of my friendship with Robert A. Heinlein, and so I said I wanted to do a story about how the fear of AIDS has cut back blood donations. So the story was about a disease, some of the crew members were infected, and the only way to save their lives, was to donate blood because they had run out of artificial blood. The show could put a card at the end of the episode saying ‘You can be a hero, too. Go and donate blood.’ I thought that if we did that then the next day, the next week, blood donor-ship would go up 100% because all of the Trekkies would run out [to donate blood]. And Star Trek would get credit for it. It would have been good publicity for the show, but it would also save human lives. I thought it was perfect. That's Gene Roddenberry's universe.

So by the time I got to the script, they approved the outline and I said ‘Oh, you know what? These two characters, they're boyfriends! Or married! Or whatever!’ And so there's four lines of dialogue in the script. — ‘How long have you two been together?’ ‘Since the academy.’ — That's it! Now, if you're under 12 — ‘Oh, they're good friends!’” And if you're older than that, you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, they just put gay crew members on this.’ So you might say ‘hooray!’ but it created an uproar of biblical proportions. As you would say, in Ghostbusters — ‘dogs living with cats’.”

Gerrold went on to tell me about a follow up memo that he had received, saying that he had to take the gay characters out of the show due to the threats and angry letters from mothers that they were bound to receive, to which Gerrold responded in the best way: ”Let them write letters then! The Streisand Effect is free publicity!”

“We went through two or three different rewrites and the script didn’t get any better. [Producer] Bob Justman finally realized that we needed to go back to my original draft, but by then it was too late,” he remembered. “That made me realize that if we didn’t do that script then not only is Gene a hypocrite, but I’m also a hypocrite for staying aboard this show when we’ve broken a promise and I let them straight-wash my script. If I do that, then I’m not doing what Star Trek is supposed to do.”