I'm doing what now?

#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)

Composer: Christopher Franke

Those of you who notice such things will know that in a little less than two weeks, it's going to be a year since @petermorwood departed this plane of existence.

As the date's been getting closer, I'm becoming increasingly clear (due to mood swings and sleep disturbances and other such stuff) that it would be a really good thing for me if I don't have to live through this first anniversary of his loss anywhere near the house where he breathed his last.

For that day, and ideally a couple/few days on either side of it, I really need to get away from here.

So that's my plan, if I can get all this to come together (with everybody's help). ...It's not like any brief escape will get the pain to stop, you know? That's years away... if ever. But at least this move will prevent a short-term crisis, and allow me (after the really painful day has passed) to start getting back to what around here now passes for "standard operating procedure"—meaning writing, and doing other work, and getting on with the rest of the current form of life—as quickly as possible.

What I have in mind is to spend the days on either side of May 9th—and the day itself—as far away from the cottage as physical issues will allow me to travel. Let's think of it as a long weekend, an hour or two's flight away. To manage that, though, I need to boost sales at the Ebooks Direct store over the days to come. If the necessary funds manifest themselves over the course of this week, I'll have time to make the necessary arrangements.

So can I get those of you who see this post to reblog it, and bring the Ebooks Direct store to people's notice as widely as possible? ...As numerous ebook bundles are available at discount prices. (There are more than show in the slide below: that's just a snapshot of how the front-page carousel looks.)

...And if none of these appeal (or if you've got them already and want to give them to somebody else): hey, there are gift cards! (I finally managed to get these things organized correctly...) 😅 They come in per-bundle versions, or in a number of cash values to suit your preference.

Finally: if you've already got too many ebooks, or otherwise just prefer to drop a little something into the kitty to help me escape for a few-ish days, here's my Ko-Fi.

...So let's see if this can be pulled off. And for all your past help, and assistance to come: thanks, friends. I appreciate you so much... as your voices, heard daily, are pretty much all that makes the local silence bearable.

I invited him to continue to explain whatever nightmarish facet of British culture had just occurred to him, and he was like “it was actually called Knightmare. They would put a prototype virtual reality helmet on a child, so they were blind, and a panel of their friends would have to steer them around, and all the adult actors were chewing the scenery - it was mildly stressful! and the adults did NOT want the kids to win.”

I was like, “are you sure this isn’t some mis-remembered dungeons and dragons thing?” Neither of us have played it, and in his wild youth Dr Glass was far more likely to be lying about his age in a pub, but the more elaborate he became (“you had to put food in your knapsack - the dragon puppets were frankly terrifying - the more I think about it, the more alarmingly advanced the CGI must have been”), the more I was convinced, except surely this is the sort of thing everyone would have heard of, right?

No, apparently, he wasn’t making it up.

Knightmare was a OTT, strange, weirdly elaborately costumed 1980s-1990s British medieval fantasy game show, aimed at lightly tormenting a panel of schoolchildren, like this absolute mashed-up fever dream that feels like it would have been forbidden in America for encouraging cult behaviour in children. And the 1980s British schoolchildren who play it are strangely chill about it.

What a fever dream.

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon. The Apollo 8 mission was the first crewed spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.

Via Paul Byrne at Bluesky: "Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right."

Alt text: "That's us."

(ETA: here's the image's home, with EXIF data, at the NASA image site: https://images.nasa.gov/details/art002e000192)

The view from Orion, looking “down” from high Earth orbit at just before noon Irish daylight time / 1049 UT.

Mission Control Houston will be waking the crew up in about ten minutes or so to get ready for the upcoming translunar injection burn (in about an hour and a bit, IIRC).

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

EXTREMELY BAD HOLY FUCK.

But this. This changes the data architecture. This changes the SINGLE THING that makes tumblr the "... yes and" website. This KILLS THE COLLABORATIVE POSTING THAT MAKES THIS SITE DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER MEDIA PLATFORMS.