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scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 26th, 2025 12:19 am)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 26th, 2025 12:19 am)
To some people, sitting at a table with several unfamiliar faces and being expected to make small talk is a nightmare scenario. The anxiety creeps in of what to say, which topics to discuss (or avoid), and if you’re going to be judged for ordering an appetizer and dessert.
Such was the situation I found myself in last night after I signed up for Timeleft, a company with the goal to help you make meaningful connections with peers from your city.
I had never heard of Timeleft before, but two weeks ago I got an ad for them on Instagram. I won’t lie, the idea of dining with complete strangers was immediately interesting to me, as I love meeting new people, getting to know others, and making friends. What are strangers but friends you have yet to meet? So I went to their website and checked it out.
To my surprise, Timeleft is available all over the world. Sixty different countries and three hundred cities, including Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. I was delighted to see that I really had my pick of Ohio cities, though I would love for Dayton to be on that list. Cleveland is a bit too far, but Cincinnati and Columbus are both about two hours, so I ended up picking Columbus as my city because I prefer the driving, parking, and dining scene over Cincinnati.
First, you take a personality test to determine who else should be at the table with you. Timeleft asks things like what field you work in, what kind of movies you like, if you’re married or have kids, if you like to talk about politics, if you’re a planner or more spontaneous, basically just some standard questions to see who you would, on paper, be compatible with.
After you take the test, Timeleft pairs you with five strangers to have dinner with, and the restaurant is a mystery to everyone until the day of the dinner. One thing I thought was really cool is that you can choose different levels of budgets for your dining experience. There’s $, $$, and $$$. Obviously I picked $$$, because if I’m going to drive to Columbus for dinner, I want to eat somewhere nice (also, I’m just bougie, so). You can also mention any dietary restrictions you have, as well.
Timeleft books the restaurant reservation for you all, and you just show up to the restaurant, meet your dining companions, and spend the next couple hours getting to know each other and sharing a meal together. Not sure what to say? Timeleft actually provides ice breaker games and questions to get the ball rolling.
After the dinner is done, every Timeleft group in the city is invited to an Afterparty. Timeleft chooses a bar for everyone to meet at to have a drink to close out the night. Once you’ve finished the evening, Timeleft asks you who you’d like to keep in contact with, and if you match you can message each other through the app. (Or you can just exchange contact info right then and there if you want. That’s pretty much what ended up happening for me, anyway.)
So that’s how it works! Pretty simple, and very stress-free since they pick and book everything for you! It was nice to have the reservation handled, and just have to show up.
Timeleft isn’t a dating site, it’s meant for platonic connections and people seeking friends in their city. It’s meant for screen-free conversations and connections with people you wouldn’t have normally met otherwise. I think it’s a really cool concept, and I was super excited to try it out.
So let’s talk about how it went.
The initial ad that I got for Timeleft was them rolling out their new Ladies Only dinner. This was what I tried to sign up for, as I have really been wanting more gal pals lately. Not that I am opposed to befriending men, obviously, but as I get older, I’ve started to really want more genuine female companionship. And not that I don’t already have some super close girlfriends currently, because I definitely do and I’m super grateful for them and our friendship, but who couldn’t use one or two more, right?
Anyways, I couldn’t figure out how to sign up for the Ladies Only one, despite clicking on the ad that was advertising them. I figured I might as well just sign up for a regular one.
I ended up dining at Z Cucina di Spirito in Dublin with four guys. There was supposed to be another girl, but she actually ended up no-showing.
In my group, our ages ranged from 25 to 32, and everyone except me lived in the Columbus area. There was one other person whose first time it was, but the other group members had done a couple of these before, and two of them had even dined with each other in a previous dinner. Between the five of us, our professions were all over the place, as well as our tastes in music, though we did seem to agree on some favorite colors. We talked about travel, movies, concerts, places previously lived, and some bad dates.
While this post isn’t meant to be a restaurant review of Z Cucina, I will say I did like it. The atmosphere was nice, it was a very pretty place, and the food and drinks were quite good. I was the only person to order an appetizer (I did share, because I think food is best enjoyed that way), but everyone did order dessert, so that’s a green flag in my eyes.
I got two cocktails; a Basil-Gin Smash and an Empress, and both were really nice. The bread for the table came with this super yummy red sauce that was surprisingly flavorful. My main was their Bucatini Al Nero Di Seppia, which was squid ink pasta with mussels, clams, shrimp, and scallops, and that was so good. I thought the shrimp and scallops were really excellent, and I’m happy I finally got to try squid ink pasta! I’ve wanted to for so long. Plus, the tiramisu was a huge slice, and I have no complaints about it.
I would say the thing I was the least impressed with was the appetizer. I ordered the Stuffed Risotto Fritters and they were fine but nothing amazing. I will say they were piping hot, though, and it came with four of them.
So, all in all, I really liked the dining location Timeleft picked, and I think they did a good job with my budget choice. Since it was Wednesday, the restaurant was not crowded at all. There was really only a few other people, so it was nice that it wasn’t too loud and no one in my group had to shout across the table.
We all decided to go to the second location, The Pint House in the Short North. My group only ended up finding one other Timeleft group, which was a really friendly group of older ladies and gents. One of them had thirteen grandkids! It was really cool to see that Timeleft isn’t just for young whippersnappers, it’s seriously for anyone and everyone, and proof that you can find people your age and with your interests that also want to make friends! It just felt really wholesome.
I felt really comfortable the whole time, I wasn’t worried about anyone being a weirdo, and we all exchanged numbers at the end. It was so nice to meet people that I would’ve never come across without Timeleft, and it’s honestly just awesome to see how many other people out there are looking to go and meet new people and make friends.
All in all, I really liked dining and talking with everyone I met, and I can’t wait to attend another Timeleft dinner.
Would you give Timeleft a try? Does the idea of dining with strangers scare you, or does it sound super exciting and fun? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
⌈ Secret Post #6838 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 10 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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Link: Round 17 Sign Ups | Round 17 Themes
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celebrity20in20 is a 20in20 community dedicated to making icons of actors and actresses. You have 20 days to make 20 icons about a celebrity of your choice, based on a set of themes for the round.
Schedule: Round 17 sign ups are open NOW. Icons are due October 13, 2025.
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(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 25th, 2025 06:30 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 25th, 2025 06:30 pm)
The retelling of myths is a tradition practically as old as the myths themselves. Author L. D. Colter has implemented some Greek mythology to help write her newest novel, While the Gods Sleep. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how a lifelong interest in any and all types of myths led to writing tales of her own.
L. D. COLTER:
I remember sitting on the floor of the library at my school (a junior high and high school combined and small enough that my graduating class had twenty-five seniors), pouring over a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. This would have been about the same time I asked a friend’s neighbor if I could learn some Hindi from her. I remember researching the Buddha after reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and looking up bits of translation of the Qur’an. I searched, pre-internet, for anything I could find on Asian and African myths and their ancient gods, though I found little. Same with Norse mythology—astoundingly hard for me to find until this millennium (but, ah, had I only discovered the rich fantasy worlds of the right comic books back then…).
Years before all this, as a child, a favorite book of mine was a tall, beautifully illustrated book of Russian folklore, given as a gift by my aunt. I still have that book today. Also sprinkled across those years was my fascination with old stories from the British Isles and all things fae: the Arthurian tales, Tristan and Iseult, the Ballad of Tam Lin (and the tale of Thomas the Rhymer, thought possibly to be the same character in tales told centuries apart). Lastly, of course, have been my decades of reading fantasy books of all stripes, especially ones with themes of myths or pantheons or faerie or folklore.
Standing out strongly across these years, though, has been my love of Greek mythology. I checked out copies of The Odyssey and The Iliad from the city library to read over summer break in high school and read and re-read my copy of Bulfinch’s The Age of Myth until I rubbed the gold lettering from the fabric cover. (Seriously. I still have that book as well, and the cover and spine are plain brown.) I bought tickets to myth-based movies—the good and the bad—and sought out novels with retellings and reimaginings of Greek myth.
Armed with this lifelong love of tales from around the world I wrote my first novel, an epic fantasy with my own version of the Celtic Seelie and Unseelie and—in my imagined secondary world—the gods who had abandoned them. It was rewritten many times as I learned the art of storytelling and was, at last, published as The Halfblood War in 2017. Meanwhile, my second novel, A Borrowed Hell (a portal/journey story), ended up being my debut novel in 2016. And then, finally, I tackled the set of three myth-based novels I’d long been wanting to write. Unsurprisingly, I began with Greek mythology.
My formative reading had been filled with Tolkien, Vonnegut, Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe and others, but at the time I wrote While the Gods Sleep, I was heavily influenced by China Miéville and Tim Powers. In this book, I wanted to explore my own boundaries of weird fiction, big endings, and gods as characters—in other words, my big idea. What I discovered the hard way was that leaning weird was harder than it looked from the outside: I got my main character into the underworld with some fun weirdness along the way but then had to maintain the weird while worldbuilding an entire underworld.
But the biggest hitch to my big idea came when I discovered that writing an ordinary mortal into trouble with a pantheon of gods and demigods had been the easy part. Writing him out of it was the real challenge. My “messy middle” (as every author I’ve known encounters somewhere between that inspired beginning and the ending you’re working toward) was starting to look more like quicksand. It was suddenly very clear to me why the “chosen one” trope was so popular—at least you have one card up your sleeve to help your character win.
I persisted, though, and fortunately managed to surprise myself with plot twists that I never saw coming until I got there. When all was said and done, I like to think I ended up with a dark-fantasy thriller that does indeed lean weird and keeps picking up steam right into the final pages. Best of all, I finally satisfied my years-long goal to write a book that borrows from Greek mythology while getting to tell my own unique story.
While the Gods Sleep: Amazon|Amazon UK|Barnes & Noble|Kobo
(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 25th, 2025 05:41 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 25th, 2025 05:41 pm)
And the parking lot is in the sky! Amazing.
Hello, I am in Richmond, Virginia and I will be seeing at least some of you tonight at 6pm at Fountain Books! Then tomorrow I am off to Winston-Salem, and the Bookmarks Festival of Books! Here is my schedule for that.
— JS
Betrothed to the Emperor and Emperor's Wrath
2/5. M/M fantasy romance about the royal twins raised to kill the emperor of the encroaching empire, except when they are presented, the emperor chooses the brother to marry, not the sister as planned. And then stuff happens.
I got sucked in based on the trope set, even though I knew damn well this was not going to satisfy. And I was right. There’s something extra frustrating about someone doing tropes you’re into, but with such limited skill that nothing really lands. Here, for example – the books are trying to do fake/pretend relationship but whoops it’s also real, but they’re so incoherent about it and so impatient to get to the porn that I couldn’t keep track from one scene to the next whether we were treating it as real or not. These books also do that thing where our first person narrator totally misses that the guy is into him, but it’s done so clumsily here that it just makes him look incredibly, pathologically stupid.
/cranky
2/5. M/M fantasy romance about the royal twins raised to kill the emperor of the encroaching empire, except when they are presented, the emperor chooses the brother to marry, not the sister as planned. And then stuff happens.
I got sucked in based on the trope set, even though I knew damn well this was not going to satisfy. And I was right. There’s something extra frustrating about someone doing tropes you’re into, but with such limited skill that nothing really lands. Here, for example – the books are trying to do fake/pretend relationship but whoops it’s also real, but they’re so incoherent about it and so impatient to get to the porn that I couldn’t keep track from one scene to the next whether we were treating it as real or not. These books also do that thing where our first person narrator totally misses that the guy is into him, but it’s done so clumsily here that it just makes him look incredibly, pathologically stupid.
/cranky
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I have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.
The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.
Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.
ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.
And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )
The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.
Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.
ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.
And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )
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(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 25th, 2025 12:03 am)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 25th, 2025 12:03 am)
Specifically, it’s at #9 on the Combined Print and eBook Fiction list, which, if I’m being honest, is higher than I expected, inasmuch as I expected it to be at 14 or 15 if it got onto the list at all (the competition for the NYT list is significant right about now). I am, as the kids do not say, gobsmacked. This is a very good day.
If you pre-ordered or bought the book in the first week, thank you. You’re my favorite. And if you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s not too late! Copies are still available!
And to celebrate: I’m gonna have some pizza. And then go to sleep. I’m still on tour and have to get up in the morning.
— JS
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yuletidemods posting in yuletide_admin Sep. 24th, 2025 06:54 pm)
yuletidemods posting in yuletide_admin Sep. 24th, 2025 06:54 pm)Thanks for all your nominations so far! 4,429 fandom choices have been submitted so far (note that if two people nominate the same fandom, that counts twice towards that total). You can nominate at the tag set here.
AO3 has announced maintenance downtime from Sep 26,07:30 5:30 UTC to (approximately) Sep 27, 03:30 UTC, which cuts a large chunk off the end of our planned nominations period. Because of this, we’ll extend nominations for an extra 16 hours, and instead close nominations on Saturday September 27 at 1pm UTC (What time is that for me?). However, we urge you to get your nominations in before the downtime begins, just in case AO3 doesn’t come back up in time for you to submit before we close nominations.
If your fandom requires evidence, please also submit it here on the Evidence Post by that time. We can't give a decision on all fandoms by close of nominations, but the sooner you make your case, the better your chances of a swift answer.
ETA: we have just been informed that the maintenance downtime has been rescheduled for two hours earlier, or 5:30 UTC. We won't alter the nominations schedule further, but we've updated the link above for maintenance time in your time zone to assist you.
AO3 has announced maintenance downtime from Sep 26,
If your fandom requires evidence, please also submit it here on the Evidence Post by that time. We can't give a decision on all fandoms by close of nominations, but the sooner you make your case, the better your chances of a swift answer.
ETA: we have just been informed that the maintenance downtime has been rescheduled for two hours earlier, or 5:30 UTC. We won't alter the nominations schedule further, but we've updated the link above for maintenance time in your time zone to assist you.
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⌈ Secret Post #6837 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 20 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 24th, 2025 08:04 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 24th, 2025 08:04 pm)
The parking lot isn’t for the hotel, and it isn’t even really a parking lot, it’s a car wash. Also, there’s this big damn pine in my view. West Virginia is going hard, y’all.
Tonight: Four Seasons Books at 6 pm, which is an hour earlier than I usually start. You should be on your way now!
Tomorrow: Richmond, Virginia! At Fountain Bookstore! Also at 6pm! The Virginias do things early, I suppose.
— JS
I failed the driving test in apparently one of the most common ways to do it: no major errors except that the engine died at an intersection and I got flustered and failed to restart it so many times that the test administrator had to gently coach me through even though we both knew I knew what to do. I was fully aware that I was releasing the clutch too fast, but I just could not slow down no matter how I tried. Until she gently and calmly told me when in her coaching voice, of course, and that worked right away.
We sat there three light cycles. It was like something out of a sitcom. The test administrator was very nice about it; and apart from the embarrassment, I don't feel that bad about it, and I think I'll be okay when I retake it in three weeks.
§§§
However.
It's very frustrating to be told that you just need to calm down or relax, as a person with anxiety disorders. I don't mean it's insensitive or anything, just that it's frustrating because I already knew that and have been trying very hard to, but it's not working very well, because there's nothing that does work very reliably that I can do.
I can't take a tranquilizer. I can't magically make myself extremely familiar with the entire context/place/situation/people. I can't exercise vigorously right before because it takes longer to travel to Turku than it does for endorphins to fade (and I'd have to have time to go home and shower and dress even before the hour commute). I can tell myself everything's going well and it's not an emergency and I should chill; I can tense up all my muscles and then release and do those breath patterns that help lower your heartbeat; and I can listen to music that I find comforting. That's really it. It's got limited effectiveness.
But importantly, the bus ride is already stressful enough for me to need to do those things much of the time because I have a severe perfume allergy and am hypersensitive to perfumes, and typically there is at least one (physically) irritating perfume experience in over 90% of bus rides that I take. It's not often possible to come out of one centered and relaxed and refreshed, even if I logically know that the risk of anaphylaxis was low!
Probably it would still be hard to relax without the bus trip, though.
We sat there three light cycles. It was like something out of a sitcom. The test administrator was very nice about it; and apart from the embarrassment, I don't feel that bad about it, and I think I'll be okay when I retake it in three weeks.
§§§
However.
It's very frustrating to be told that you just need to calm down or relax, as a person with anxiety disorders. I don't mean it's insensitive or anything, just that it's frustrating because I already knew that and have been trying very hard to, but it's not working very well, because there's nothing that does work very reliably that I can do.
I can't take a tranquilizer. I can't magically make myself extremely familiar with the entire context/place/situation/people. I can't exercise vigorously right before because it takes longer to travel to Turku than it does for endorphins to fade (and I'd have to have time to go home and shower and dress even before the hour commute). I can tell myself everything's going well and it's not an emergency and I should chill; I can tense up all my muscles and then release and do those breath patterns that help lower your heartbeat; and I can listen to music that I find comforting. That's really it. It's got limited effectiveness.
But importantly, the bus ride is already stressful enough for me to need to do those things much of the time because I have a severe perfume allergy and am hypersensitive to perfumes, and typically there is at least one (physically) irritating perfume experience in over 90% of bus rides that I take. It's not often possible to come out of one centered and relaxed and refreshed, even if I logically know that the risk of anaphylaxis was low!
Probably it would still be hard to relax without the bus trip, though.
(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 24th, 2025 03:05 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 24th, 2025 03:05 pm)
Reality can oftentimes be stranger than fiction. Author Cadwell Turnbull speculates on this funny thing we call reality in the Big Idea for his newest novel, A Ruin, Great and Free. Follow along to see how our reality helped shape the world for the final novel in the Convergence saga.
CADWELL TURNBULL:
Back in the early months of 2020, a lot was happening. In January, the then-Trump administration killed an Iranian general in a drone strike, an “arbitrary killing” that, according to the United Nations, violated international law. At the same time, cases of infections from a new virus were being reported across the globe.
In November 2019, I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel just as the first cases of coronavirus were being reported. Station Eleven told the story of several characters before, during, and after an influenza pandemic which kills most of the world’s population.
I promptly began talking about the coronavirus cases with my friends. Even now, I recognize that what I’d been reading was guiding much of my anxiety on the matter. I possessed no special knowledge.
But then the moment came where it was clear to everyone that this thing was indeed happening. Or it should have been clear to everyone. Instead, there was a split in our collective sense of what was happening—a fracture. As people died, I witnessed personally a very stubborn denialism take hold. As city streets lay empty and hospitals filled beyond capacity, people began protesting the need for lockdowns and other such precautions. The pandemic became a partisan issue. But even on the personal level, among friends and family with politics all across the spectrum, I witnessed a range in how the pandemic was being perceived.
I was surprised and not surprised. The effects of the pandemic were terrifying, but we all weren’t terrified by the same things. It also confirmed in a very dramatic way a speculative hunch I’d embedded into the project I was working on at the time.
Almost a full year before the pandemic I’d created a fictional fracture of my own. It was at the heart of No Gods, No Monsters, the first in what would become the Convergence Saga. In the novel, evidence of the existence of monsters from folklore and popular culture is released to the public. Almost immediately this evidence—two videos: an officer-involved shooting of a werewolf and an act of protest from said werewolf’s wolfpack—is seemingly erased from everywhere all at once.
With the loss of the evidence, the collective sense of reality splits. Some people become obsessed with the videos and their disappearance. But other people—most people, in fact—self-delete the event from their own minds. The reasons for both responses were the same. A terrifying truth can take over a person’s mind or cause a person to look away completely. In the series, I was tying this fracture idea to a bigger one, a question at the center of reality itself, a real-world counterpart to a cosmic puzzle.
As I was drafting No Gods, No Monsters, I struggled a bit with the believability of this fracture idea. Peers that workshopped early parts of the novel questioned it. I also kept questioning the idea. Right up until the pandemic forced the world into lockdown and some people still didn’t believe it was happening.
I started No Gods, No Monsters in late 2018 and it was released in 2021. The following book, We Are the Crisis, was released in 2023. And the final book, A Ruin, Great and Free, was released on September 16th. My work on this series has spanned a very interesting time in our American (and global) politics.
Sometimes basic facts of our current life feel so strange to me that I wonder if we’re all trapped in some collective nightmare. I’m constantly reminded of The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, where protagonist George Orr has dreams that can alter reality itself. This personal quirk is then amplified by use of a machine called the Augmentor, weaponised by Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist with goals of remaking the world into a utopia. Naturally that doesn’t quite work out, as Le Guin masterfully shows us the disastrous results of Haber’s hubris.
The Lathe of Heaven envisions for us what it might look like if a subjective ideal is imposed on the objective world. If one person can determine (either by accident or manipulation) what the world looks like, what is the cost?
I think we know this speculative premise has real-world counterparts. As individuals and collectives, we are constantly remaking reality according to our ideals.
In the Convergence Saga a shadowy kabal tries to manipulate the world for its own purposes. Like in The Lathe of Heaven there is a supernatural reality-warping effect at work in the story’s world, but there’s also a very natural one. Ideas have a heat to them. They can be felt, drawing us in. Ideas can make us ignore things right in front of us. They can also make us imagine things that aren’t there. And once we’re under the spell of certain ideas, it can be difficult to root them out. An idea embeds itself.
Like a lot of people right now I’ve been obsessively watching the news. I find it frustrating how much of the news is political commentary. I am even more frustrated by the reality-warping effectiveness of bad-faith commentators on our current reality. Once again I find myself catastrophizing about a future I don’t want to live in, but we seem to be slipping toward. At the same time, I see the split happening. We can’t agree on what we’re seeing.
If the Convergence Saga is about the questioning of reality, it is also about expanding empathy. Trying to find healing for a fractured world. Trying to mend what has been broken. The story does not neatly provide an answer—because I personally don’t have one—but it shows an earnest attempt by the characters to find a way out of the political upheaval they’re facing. Much of that work is in finding new communities, forming new coalitions, and building solidarity networks for economic support and mutual aid. Occasionally, these coalitions of monsters, humans, and cosmic beings have to do battle against nefarious organizations and supremacist groups.
Turns out that in our world there are more people that want a fascist, white supremacist future than we thought. And we’re already glimpsing what that future could look like.
Fortunately, reality remains a collective act. And they’re not the only ones out here. We also get a say in what the future looks like.
A Ruin, Great and Free: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky
Read an excerpt here.
Baby Miss L is super into Halloween and has two Hello Kitty dolls dressed like skeletons that dance! She might be a skeleton herself this year! Her costume has not been finalized, but there is time.
As I've mentioned, I was never big into Halloween - it was my mom's birthday, so a lot of the time I was home celebrating with her - but it's fun to see the baby into it.
Today is the 12th anniversary of my mother's death. That is a whole seventh grader! It makes me sad that my parents will never know Baby Miss L.
*
As I've mentioned, I was never big into Halloween - it was my mom's birthday, so a lot of the time I was home celebrating with her - but it's fun to see the baby into it.
Today is the 12th anniversary of my mother's death. That is a whole seventh grader! It makes me sad that my parents will never know Baby Miss L.
*
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⌈ Secret Post #6836 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 29 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 23rd, 2025 01:17 am)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 23rd, 2025 01:17 am)
Writing a book is like riding a bike: once you’ve got it down, you never have to learn how to do it again, right? Such may not be the case. In her Big Idea, author Delilah S. Dawson delves into the writing process and learning curves she faced, even after numerous novels. Follow along to see what challenges and changes came with creating her newest book, Thor & Loki: Epic Tales From Marvel Mythology.
DELILAH S. DAWSON:
The Big Idea: Sometimes Your Process Changes, and That’s Okay
I’ve written over forty books and had thirty-two of them—the good ones—published, so you’d think that I know how to write a book.
As it turns out, you would be wrong.
At least partially.
Because the thing about writing books is that just because you know how to write one book does not mean you know how to write another. Books are like fingerprints in that each one is wholly individual, unique in all the world. Books are unlike fingerprints in that they cannot be easily compared to koala bears.
Except—
Well, koala bears are notoriously single-minded and stubborn, and writers can be like that, too. Hopefully, I will convince you otherwise.
When I write a novel, I write the story straight through from the first page to the last page. I don’t jump around chapters, reread extensively, or edit as I go. I think of it like carrying hot laundry from the dryer to the bed: you wrap it in your arms and run, and if you drop a sock, you leave it behind because we all know that one hasty squat can topple the entire basket. I do multiple revisions, lest you think I am publishing the equivalent of inside-out, cat-hair covered socks, but that initial run from page one to THE END is the skeleton on which the meat of my story rests.
This method worked for thirty-one books, and then suddenly, it didn’t.
When I was invited to write Thor and Loki: Epic Tales from Marvel Mythology, I quickly realized that my Hot Laundry Process could not serve me. Instead of weaving a story from my own brain and heart, creating a new world out of the threads crafted from my creative spinnerets, I was tasked with taking an existing mythology and retelling it for a modern audience through the well-known voices of Marvel’s Thor and Loki. The Norse myths spring from an oral tradition, and there is no one, total, mutually accepted, complete source to study. Not only that, but there is no one specific Thor or Loki. Like the myths that bore them, these two ancient gods have been depicted in multiple movies, TV shows, and comics, and each individual fan has a favorite Thor or Loki, a platonic ideal of the character that they hold in their heart.
Thus, my task was to take two well-known, beloved characters that have existed simultaneously as gods and goofs for the past twelve hundred or more years, distill them into a fine mead, and then syphon that golden sauce through the sieve of collective comic memory and Icelandic poetry.
Can’t believe I’m saying this, but it might be easier to do laundry.
I don’t generally suffer from Writer’s Block, not only because I have deadlines and a mortgage, but also because I trust in my process. And yet you must believe me when I tell you that I came to a standstill on this project and began to dread it. When I invent a world, I become its god, and every decision I make solidifies the character and story. In that realm, I am always correct, and reality conforms to my whims. But in the realm of Thor, Loki, and their shared mythology, I had to instead become the bard.
In the Norse tradition, the bard is the keeper of story and memory, a vaunted figure; Odin is considered the god of poetry, and one of the myths that has lasted through the centuries tells the tale of the first bard and the mead of poetry. The bard’s job is not to spin tales from the ether, but rather to pass down the stories from one generation to the next, to remember them in a time with no written record. Each bard carried the myths and told them in a unique fashion, reminding the tavern’s occupants how to live and worship while entertaining them.
Once I realized that my job was to take up the bard’s tankard, suddenly the book actually began to flow. Instead of telling my own story, I broke the project down into chapters, and each day, my task was to look at a particular myth from several different sources and spin my own version. Or, more accurately, to channel the voices of Loki and Thor as they each compete to woo the Avengers to their side using all the bard’s techniques of enchantment and, well, propaganda. Adding in a few famous Thor and Loki tales from the Marvel comics was even more of a challenge. From The First Avenger in 1963 to Thor, Frog of Thunder and the more recent Loki for President, it was a delight to create my own poetry from famous stories never before told in prose.
For the first time, my chapters jumped around. I wasn’t carrying laundry from point A to point B; I was putting a puzzle together. Unlike all my other books, the Norse myths don’t have a specific chronology. Although there is a very distinct beginning, which involves a very large cow licking a giant, and a very distinct ending, known as Ragnarok, what happens in between is fluid. As Loki tells the Avengers, the myths exist to entertain and teach, not help you draw up an accurate timeline. Part of the bard’s art is selecting just the right story to tell.
Now, this is not the first time I’ve had to completely change my process. Writing my first novella, also known as ‘a book that is only 40% of a book’, had quite the learning curve, and I did such a bad job writing my first comic that I burst out crying at a hotel buffet during a Santa Claus convention. I’ve been writing professionally since 2012, and I’ve learned to always trust my process, and when that process stops working, to find a new process. There is no one way to write a book. A writer’s process may change over decades, years, projects, or chapters. Whatever gets the book done? That’s your process.
If you don’t have a process yet, I highly recommend the book Story Genius by Lisa Cron, which teaches you to outline by marrying character arc to plot using the third rail of emotion. And if you already have a process, maybe don’t cling to it too tightly. Don’t be that koala that will only eat eucalyptus if it’s on the branch. Writing is about fluidity and play and experimentation. As Charles De Mar says in Better Off Dead: Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.
Thor & Loki: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
(ao3_goblin_emperor_feed Sep. 23rd, 2025 05:06 am)
ao3_goblin_emperor_feed Sep. 23rd, 2025 05:06 am)by bookishfates
Assembled by M. Csevet Aisava, Imperial Secretary, & Mrm. Echelo Esaran, Alcethmeret Steward.
Words: 1070, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English
- Fandoms: The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison
- Rating: General Audiences
- Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
- Categories: Gen
- Characters: Csevet Aisava, Echelo Esaran, Maia Drazhar, (mentioned)
- Relationships: Maia Drazhar & Echelo Esaran, Csevet Aisava & Maia Drazhar, (both just implied) - Relationship
- Additional Tags: Epistolary, Canon Compliant, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, How Do I Tag This, Birthday Presents, Birthday Fluff, arguably - Freeform, inventories!! lists!!, just a little thing while i try to brainstorm on some larger ones, listen i just think maia should get to have all the nice things, egregious use of the &
To begin, a complaint.
( if I can't be petty about my book collection, what CAN I be petty about?! )
I had a good time with The Shattering Peace. ( Read more... )
( if I can't be petty about my book collection, what CAN I be petty about?! )
I had a good time with The Shattering Peace. ( Read more... )
⌈ Secret Post #6835 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 22nd, 2025 07:50 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 22nd, 2025 07:50 pm)If my last post over Zaynab Issa’s cookbook didn’t entice you to buy it, this one might just change your mind. After cooking a few things from, and loving, Third Culture Cooking, I decided I simply must have a dinner party using nothing but recipes from Issa’s book.
It probably would’ve been easier to make something I had already made before, but I decided to do entirely new recipes for the party and just have faith that they would turn out well.
I’m happy to report that everything turned out so much better than I could have even hoped for, and my dinner party was a total success! So let’s talk about what I made, what it cost me, how long it took, and how everything tasted.
I spent probably over an hour initially going through the book deciding on everything I wanted to make. I finally decided on Spiced Chickpea Soup, Calabrian Chili Chicken with Caper Raita, Coconutty Corn, Shawarma Spiced Carrots, Chocolate Cake with Chai Buttercream, Ginger Lime Spritz, and Slightly Salty Mango Lassi.
First thing first was to place a big ol’ Kroger pick up order, because searching up everything I needed on their website and adding it to my cart was way easier than wandering all over the actual store with a broken-wheel-cart and spending time searching the shelves and missing what was right in front of my face.
I would say, roughly, I spent $200 on ingredients. A big part of this was that I already had every single spice I needed on hand, like turmeric, coriander, cumin, and cardamom, so that certainly saved me a large chunk of change. Another factor was that there was very little meat I needed to buy, and the meat was just chicken thighs, which are pretty cheap. I wasn’t cooking nice cuts of steaks or salmon, so my protein cost was very low. So much of what I needed to buy was produce.
Besides produce, I had to buy things like coconut milk, whole milk plain yogurt, feta, labneh, just the kind of stuff I don’t normally have on hand. In fact, this was my first time buying labneh, and I was surprised I even found it. My local Kroger had literally one brand, and like, two tubs of it. So I got lucky.
The hardest thing to find, no joke, was the Calabrian chilis. I had to go to Meijer for them, and even then they only had one type. I was supposed to buy Calabrian chili paste for the recipe, but they only had whole Calabrian chilis, so I just made do.
So, with everything bought, it was time to get cooking. I cooked, nonstop, for seven hours. Here’s how I tackled everything.
Starting at 9am, I made the yogurt and Calabrian chili marinade for the chicken thighs, and put them in the fridge to marinate while I cooked everything else. Secondly, I made the soup, because I knew that could just be reheated on the stove top easily when it came time to serve. Next, I mixed up the cake batter and baked the two cakes so they’d have plenty of time to cool before applying the frosting. Following that, I prepped the carrots to be roasted and also mixed up the herb salad that’s meant to go on top when served.
While the carrots roasted, I prepped the sweet potatoes to bake at the same time as the chicken, and made up the caper raita and quick-pickled cucumbers that accompany it. In the chicken went after the carrots came out, and while the chicken was baking I made the corn on the stove top. Finally, I made the syrup for the ginger lime spritz, and while that was cooling I whipped up the chai cream for the buttercream, and made the frosting.
My guests arrived at 4pm, which is exactly when the chicken came out, the soup was reheated, the spritz had been mixed up, and everything was ready to serve all at once.
While everything was definitely a lot to make, let’s talk about how difficult each dish was individually.
The chicken and sweet potatoes were honestly very low effort, despite being the main dish. The chicken can marinate anywhere from 15 minutes to overnight, so even if you’re in a rush to get it in the oven you’ll be all right. It helps that the chicken thighs bake right on top of the cut up sweet potatoes, so it’s sort of like a sheet-pan dinner. The quick-pickled cucumbers are literally so easy, you just slice up some mini seedless cucumbers nice and thin and put them in a bowl with lemon juice and salt. The caper raita is pretty simple too, you just mix the capers with the feta, yogurt, and some more cucumber and you’ve got yourself a delicious, creamy accompaniment to the chicken.
For the soup, you just cut up some onion, carrot, and garlic and cook it for a little bit until it’s ready to have the spices, chickpeas, and chicken broth added. Then you blend it up with an immersion blender and it’s ready to go! Doesn’t get much easier than that! (Not counting the fact that my eyes hurt so bad from cutting the onion I had to walk away for a solid ten minutes while tears streamed out of my eyes.)
The carrots were a breeze, you just mix a ton of spices into olive oil, cut the carrots in half lengthwise, cover them in the oil and roast ’em up. The herb salad that went on top of the carrots was also simple but time consuming from the produce you have to cut up for it. Red onion, dates, jalapenos, and herbs mixed with lemon juice and olive oil. The jalapenos were definitely the biggest pain, since removing the seeds is a task that requires patience. Also my fingertips burned for so long after handling the jalapenos.
The cake seriously could not have been easier, it’s just completely standard flour, cocoa powder, sugar, eggs, etc., mix it on up in a stand mixer, pour into cake pans and bake. Now, the chai cream on the other hand quickly became a true labor of love. While making the cream itself wasn’t too much trouble (just adding a bunch of spices and vanilla to heavy cream and heating it up), the real challenge came when it was time to strain it through a fine mesh sieve. The loose black tea and fresh grated ginger proved to be a huge obstacle to getting the liquid through the straining process. It took so much time to get as much cream as I could through the fine mesh. It really was an exercise in patience.
But, after I had the cream separated from the solids, the buttercream was also very easy. Just three sticks of butter, six cups of powdered sugar, and all the chai cream to make the absolute most delicious frosting I’ve ever tasted.
The corn was another easy dish, mostly because it uses bagged frozen corn. You just add the corn to a skillet and add the coconut milk and spices and you’re ready to go once it’s heated through and thickened up just a tad. Legit the easiest thing I made all day.
For the ginger spritz, the ginger syrup is homemade, and uses an absurd amount of fresh ginger for it. This part was time-consuming because I had to peel like half a pound of ginger and dice it up to cook it in the sugar and water, but letting it cook was super easy. You just have to let the sugar dissolve and the ginger flavor infuse nice and good before letting it cool and straining it. I proceeded to put the syrup in a pitcher and add a big ol’ bottle of sparkling water and ice. I completely forgot the lime, to be honest. But it was fine, okay! It was just really good homemade ginger ale pretty much.
On that note, I know this whole time you’ve been thinking to yourself, what about the mango lassi?! Well, I’m glad you asked, because it was inevitable that I would forget ONE ingredient. And it was the whole milk for the mango lassi. So while I had the mango, the honey, and the plain whole milk yogurt, it was too little too late.
Okay, so buying all the ingredients, making everything, yada yada. How did it all taste?!
Well, I’m not usually one to toot my own horn too much (especially when it comes to food, as I often think there’s multiple things I could’ve done better), but this food was literally the bomb dot com. Everything was so flavorful and fresh and straight up delicious.
The ginger spritz was spicy and had quite a bite from the ginger, but was perfectly sweetened and bubbly.
The chicken was cooked perfectly, and the sweet potatoes were soft and nicely seasoned. The caper raita was creamy and savory, and the quick-pickled cucumbers were bright and acidic to cut through that richness.
The carrots were roasted to the perfect texture, wildly flavorful from all the different spices, and the herb salad was incredibly bright and herbaceous, which paired perfectly with the creamy labneh. Plus, I especially loved the dates in the herb salad for just a touch of sweetness. It was extremely balanced.
The corn was honestly the most subtle dish, with a very mild flavor. It mostly just tasted like sweet corn in a slightly sweet, creamy sauce. Part of this is surely due to the fact I removed the seeds from the jalapenos that cooked in the corn, so if you want more flavor and heat in this dish feel free to leave the seeds in to infuse more spicy-ness.
The chickpea soup was pretty good, too, but definitely pretty mild in flavor compared to some of the other dishes. Even though there’s no dairy in this soup, it actually turns out pretty creamy from blending everything up. The chickpeas have a lot of starch in them that thicken the soup up really nicely.
The soup was warm and comforting, but if you really want it to be the best it can be, take Issa’s advice of adding fresh lemon juice, cilantro, and chili crisp to your bowl. I had never had chili crisp before this soup, and I decided to try Fly By Jing’s chili crisp, as I had heard good things and they’re partnered with another brand I like (Fishwife). Turns out their chili crisp is seriously amazing with just the right amount of heat, and I definitely need to try their collab product with Fishwife now. If I get sick anytime soon, I’m definitely making myself a bowl of this soup loaded with lemon juice and cilantro.
Finally, the cake. I absolutely loved this cake. The olive oil and extra egg yolks make it so moist and dense, and it has a great chocolate flavor from the full cup of Dutch-process cocoa powder. The buttercream is truly decadent. So rich and buttery, sweet but wonderfully spiced from the chai mixture. I definitely recommend using a high-quality butter for your buttercream, as it’s literally in the name (I use Kerrygold). This cake is sure to be a crowd pleasure, because who doesn’t love chocolate cake and luscious buttercream?! My grandma even tried some and said it was the best cake she’s ever had, so yeah.
Everything I made was just the right amount to serve my four friends and myself. Except there was a TON of cake leftover, even though I cut them huge slices that they had to take home.
I highly recommend making everything I made, there were zero misses. I’m so glad I tried out some new recipes and was able to have my friends over to enjoy them with me. It was a nice night, even if my body was seriously sore afterwards and there was a mountain of dishes waiting for me at the end.
I didn’t take many pictures because I was so busy cooking and serving, but here’s just a couple I got.
The chicken and sweet potatoes with the caper raita:
I know it looks like the chicken thighs are burnt but they’re just uh.. extra crispy. Not burnt! Certainly just blackened, like, in the good way.
Here’s the carrots on top of the labneh with the herb salad on top:
And half the cake!
And of course, the aforementioned mountain of dishes:
Funny thing is, I did dishes constantly in between everything I made. And I still ended up with this after everything was said and done. Good thing I have a decent dishwasher!
So, there you have it! A soup, main, two sides, dessert, and beverage all from Third Culture Cooking. Even though it was a lot of cooking and a lot of cleaning up, I loved making everything and I’m so happy everything turned out great!
Which dish sounds the best to you? Would you have decked out your soup with chili crisp? Have you tried chai buttercream before? Let me know in the comments, be sure to check out Zaynab Issa on Instagram, and have a great day!
-AMS
(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 22nd, 2025 06:51 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 22nd, 2025 06:51 pm)
Kansas City near downtown is an interestingly medium-density sort of place: Lots of multi-story-but-not-too-big apartment buildings, and a lot of greenery. I like it.
Tonight! 7pm at the Unity Temple, sponsored by Rainy Day books. I think you can still get tickets!
Tomorrow! I’m back in my home state of Ohio, at the Parma branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, with the even also beginning at 7pm!
Please come see me at one (but probably realistically not both) of these events. It would be lovely to see you.
— JS
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(scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 22nd, 2025 03:06 pm)
scalziwhatever_feed Sep. 22nd, 2025 03:06 pm)
Look, up in the sky! It’s not a bird, or a plane, it’s author James Kakalios soaring in with a brand new book. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest release, The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood, to see just how scientific some of your favorite movies can get.
JAMES KAKALIOS:
My first book The Physics of Superheroes, was published in 2005 and used examples from print comic books to illustrate physics principles. Three years later, the release of the Iron Man and The Dark Knight films would light the match that ignited the superhero explosion at the multiplex. Now, not a year goes by without the release of several superhero movies and television series. There is little doubt that future historians will refer to the early part of the 21st century as the Golden Age of Geekdom!
The Big Idea for my new book came a few years ago when I saw a five-year old boy walking with his mother in Antalya, Türkiye. The boy wore a tee shirt with Captain America’s face on the front, a knapsack with the MCU Avengers on his back, and a small, plastic Captain America shield on his right wrist. Captain America. Created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two young men just trying to make a living writing and drawing comic books in New York City during the Great Depression, little dreaming that their character would continue to inspire all over the world eighty years later. I realized that the penetration of superheroes into the popular culture was so thorough that, even for those who’ve never read a print comic book, I could use these heroes (and the occasional villain) to explain the physics behind a wide range of phenomena that were left out of my first book.
In the All-New, All-Different The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood I consider concepts and situations in superhero movies and TV shows and examine the real-world physics that underlies these fictional scenarios. While I don’t go to the movies with a pad of paper and a calculator, waiting for my physics-sense to start tingling, I’m nevertheless delighted whenever the characters on the screen, big or small, get their science right. It is just such examples, admittedly cherry-picked, that I discuss in my new book.
In this new book, you, Fearless Reader, will learn the real physics underlying the multiverse (true to its name—there are different interpretations of what “multiverse” means); if there really is a Quantum Realm (yes); why someone the size of an ant can knock someone out with one punch and yet be light-weight enough to ride atop a flying ant (it involves the Higgs boson); whether Superman really could reverse time by flying rapidly about the Earth (yes, by becoming a Tipler cylinder); whether nanotechnology can fabricate and alter Iron Man’s suit (not yet, but maybe soon); whether we can create fibers as strong as Spider-Man’s webbing (actually, scientists have made threads sixty times stronger); whether physicists put the word “quantum” in front of everything (yeah, pretty much); whether we can control devices just by thinking (yes); and the connection between the Infinity Stones and one of the greatest mathematical minds of the twentieth century (hint: she’s not Albert Einstein). This book will confirm what we all have long suspected—they couldn’t put it in a movie if it weren’t true!
With illustrations by acclaimed comic book artist and five-time Eisner Award winner Gene Ha, this book will discuss topics ranging from Artificial Intelligence to quantum computers to why your footprints look dry when walking along a wet shoreline. You’ll learn how semiconductor devices work, how information is transmitted in the brain and why an average increase in the global average temperature a few degrees is such a big deal (and what we can do about it).
Prepare to get educated in the nerdiest way possible.
The Physics of Superheroes Goes Hollywood: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-A-Million|Powell’s
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I have been thinking about the ADHD struggle, and I decided I should buy the Barkley book on adult ADHD and also a copy of How To Keep House While Drowning; I added them to my cart at the online bookstore, then didn't order them because I didn't have the executive function to do that yet. I found some potential replacements for the charger of my laptop that just broke as well, but didn't manage to finish comparing them and decide.
Other stuff I need to do and have been unable to start includes:( Read more... )
I think a lot of what's blocking me from several of these things in the last month, anyway, is that they feel like projects that require planning and stamina, but so much of my bandwidth has been going to anxiety about the driving test (two days from now) that there wasn't space. This is extremely normal for me and obviously a fallacy, but I guess I've been feeling like the time until the test was mostly short enough that I should just try to minimize anxiety and worry about all the other stuff after. And I didn't want to take my adhd meds in between.
Other stuff I need to do and have been unable to start includes:( Read more... )
I think a lot of what's blocking me from several of these things in the last month, anyway, is that they feel like projects that require planning and stamina, but so much of my bandwidth has been going to anxiety about the driving test (two days from now) that there wasn't space. This is extremely normal for me and obviously a fallacy, but I guess I've been feeling like the time until the test was mostly short enough that I should just try to minimize anxiety and worry about all the other stuff after. And I didn't want to take my adhd meds in between.
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