Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty

Hmm. I can't speak for others, but I don't go in for the cackling too much, as a rule.

I may be kind of an outlier in this regard, admittedly... but once you've been doing this work more or less constantly for twenty or thirty or forty years (and I'm coming up on fifty years of this, now), you'll increasingly have it borne in on you—if you're at all observant—that what pain you inflict on your characters, you yourself (if you're doing your characters and their experiences justice) are going to have to experience inside your own head. Briefly, maybe, sure. But often repeatedly. Often excruciatingly. ...And the more universes you're working in, the more pain you're going to have to "live" through in order to describe it adequately.

Got sufficient skin in this game to play the game well? Then that skin's gonna bleed in ways that sometimes subtly, but unavoidably, affect you personally. Do this for long enough, and you may find you don't have a whole lot of cackling on tap when you shove one or another much-loved (or even much-hated!) character headfirst into the grinder. (And shouting "Trust me, this is for your own good!" after them is only going to get you so far. It's way too easy to imagine a level or so of reality more central, further inwards toward the white-hot Core of things, from which someone's yelling that at you.)

What does make me snicker, though—and pretty frequently—is the thought of how one or another of my readerships is going to take one or another piece of character or plotline-event business. "Oh cripes, they're gonna want to kill me when they see this." (grin) That I absolutely do do, repeatedly.

And you know what? What I usually tell myself at such times (regarding the readership in question), if the subject comes up for reflection, is "And if they're cranky about it, well, they brought it on themselves." People who read my work at all regularly know by now that I won't shy away from the pain—for the readers or the characters—when the drama requires it. Certainly I am in service to great Thalia, on and off: but by and large, mighty Melpomene commands more of my attention. Draumaturgically speaking, joy does often come after katharsis. But the pain has to happen first, or there's no contrast to make the cathartic content do what it's meant to. And that's where my primary loyalty lies: the core of Drama, and what it was invented for.

Just visited my new favourite art space in London, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. They’ve got a lovely selection of his amazing originals, plus excellent illustration shows from Sophy Hollington and Murugiah, and a fascinating comics exhibition curated by Paul Gravett. www.qbcentre.org.uk

Everyone's talking about Artemis II, the first humans to travel to the moon in 50 years

Historic, right? BUT nobody's talking about the Deaf people who made it possible.

In the late 1950's, NASA had a problem.

They needed to understand what weightlessness did to the human body but every test subject kept getting violently motion sick

NASA needed to figure out FAST during the space race!

So, they went to Gallaudet University. They recruited 11 Deaf people.

Because a number of Deaf people had lost their hearing to spinal meningitis as children which also damaged their vestibular system.

Their inner ears couldn't be overwhelmed. They were immune to motion sickness.

NASA put them in centrifuges. Put them on zero gravity flights. A room for 12 straight days.

(All caps) It rotated the entire time.

One experiment on a ferry in choppy Nova Scotia waters, the researchers got so seasick they had to cancel it. The Gallaudet Eleven? They were playing cards.

Their bodies gave NASA the data and research it needed to send humans into space.

No Gallaudet Eleven? No Mercury. No Apollo. No Artemis II.

They stood on the shoulders of 11 Deaf people most people have never heard of.

Not getting into ending spoilers but Steven Spielberg plays a character who is pivotal to the climax of the film.

Ray Charles fires a warning shot from a pistol at a shoplifter.

They did location filming in a mall that had closed the previous year in 1978. The production fucked that mall up so bad that it remained abandoned until it was finally demolished in 2012.

the one I was looking for originally also has a summer variant. (artist is Frederick Charles Herrick: 'it is warmer below' is from 1927, 'it is cooler below' is 1926)

Because he wanted to be.

That is the simplest explanation I can give you without rampant speculation based on precisely nothing. Some say Marfan syndrome but we have his body and he doesn’t have that, and others have suggested inbreeding, but again there’s no real evidence of that because his parents weren’t related. So the simplest answer holds true: he was moving away from the established culture and creating his own so he did it because he wanted that change in art too.

You start seeing an elongation of limbs, changing of the eyes, and overall movement to a style that's reminiscent of Amarna art in the sculptures and art commissioned by Akhenaten's grandfather Thutmose IV.

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

But on the internet people describe their ideas in the most shocking and extreme way possible as a way of sifting out people who are "really" on their side

That is bad for forming a movement or sparking any kind of action

it's gotten so outrageous that people will have an idea like "we should have a strong public transportation system that is accessible to everyone" but they will express it like "FUCK CARS! WE SHOULD BAN CARS! IF YOU LIKE TO DRIVE YOU'RE A FASCIST! NO ONE NEEDS A CAR!"

This causes everyone to get into arguments about whether it is true that no one needs a car, and whether banning cars would make places inaccessible for people with certain disabilities.

The whole time we don't need to "ban cars" to have public transportation and it makes no sense why we are talking about it