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If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn't be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993)Current Music: English Teacher, "Good Grief"
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Eight books new to me. Five fantasy, one horror, two science fiction, of which two are series and six may not be.
Books Received, November 22 — November 28
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42 Which of these look interesting?
View AnswersKill All Wizards by Jedediah Berry (June 2026)
13 (31.0%) The Franchise by Thomas Elrod (May 2026)
9 (21.4%) Carry Me to My Grave by Christopher Golden (July 2026)
2 (4.8%) Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer (June 2026)
19 (45.2%) Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire (June 2026)
12 (28.6%) Cursed Ever After by Andy C. Naranjo (June 2026)
7 (16.7%) For Human Use by Sarah G. Pierce (February 2026)
2 (4.8%) The War Beyond by Andrea Stewart (November 2025)
6 (14.3%) Some other option (see comments)
1 (2.4%) Cats!
28 (66.7%)
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But this time, I managed to wake her up without help. Go me.
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ugh
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Nov. 28th, 2025 @ 10:30 am
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Well, that was more close brushes with performing CPR than I consider ideal for a commute...
( Read more... )
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Two sisters, separated during calamity, join opposing sides of a divine war.
The Gods Below (Hollow Covenant, volume 1) by Andrea Stewart
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Despite my best intentions of routine insomnia, I was awake too late because I fell into a 1990 BBC Radio 3 production of Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1984) which I had never read and barely heard of and if I had a nickel for every play by Michael Frayn which dips in and out of the fourth wall of the timestream as its characters post-mortem how it all went wrong in those complicated spaces between them so many years ago, I still wouldn't be able to afford a cup of coffee at these prices even if I could drink it, but since I've seen two productions of Copenhagen (1998) and heard a third, I still think it's funny. Benefactors is harder-edged as its Brutalist architecture, more pitilessly patterned, the structure of a double-couple farce where the doors all slam with a bleak wince: still a memory play of ideas without answers, still the lacuna of human actions radiating at its heart. "But then you look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe." If I have to be thankful for something at this miserable moment of history, the accessibility of art is a strong contender. Also cats.Current Music: Lake Street Dive, "Call Off Your Dogs"
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A pious monk is dispatched on a mission about which he has serious reservations: steal the bones of St. Nicolas.
Nicked by M. T. Anderson
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Pringle's book was referenced on Bluesky and since I couldn't read the images, I looked it up on Wikipedia.
The List
( Read more... )
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The core rules plus essentials for the 2013 Fifth Edition of Shadowrun, the cyberpunk-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Catalyst Game Labs.
Bundle of Holding: SR5 Essentials (from 2019)
Eighteen setting sourcebooks for Shadowrun 5th Edition.
Bundle of Holding: SR5 Universe Mega
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It was just pointed out to me that SF artist Stephen Fabian died age 95 back in May.
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If you can't trust a scantily-clad demon to aid you in your war with heaven, who can you trust?
7thgarden, volume 1 by Mitsu Izumi
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There was an obviously computer-printed "hand-written" letter in our letter box from someone claiming to want to buy houses in "your suburb" which emphasised multiple times that the house can be in any condition and that they're not a real estate agent.
So they're obviously targeting easily-fooled people who want to sell their run-down houses but find the process scary and are vulnerable to the promise of some random stranger just giving them a big pile of cash as quickly and easily as possible.
Now that itself could be the scam: offer unfairly low prices and know your target is unlikely to complain. But idk it feels like part of a scam scam not just a sincere if shady attempt to actually buy people's houses. I tried looking up real estate scams but it's all about scams aimed at people buying houses, which makes sense, since that's the more natural situation where you can take people's money and run.
I guess it could be one of those nigerian prince type scams: Offer a high price for the house, well above market value, make the seller think they're the one taking advantage of a dumbass woman, but oh no she needs a little deposit first to handle some unexpected fees, if you could just help out with a tiny proportion now she'll be able to pay the full amount any day now...
Either way, I reported it to consumer protection, since they might be able to do something with the phone number.
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I had just been thinking about Jack Shepherd because he was one of the founding members of the Actors' Company which had sparked off in 1972 with Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge, whose memoir I was re-reading last night. He'd left the company by the time of their adaptation of R. D. Laing's Knots (1970) and thus does not appear in the 1975 film which seems to have been their only moving picture record, leaving me once again with strictly photographic evidence of this sort of reverse supergroup experiment in democratic theater. (Shepherd at far right resembles a pre-Raphaelite pin-up in jeans, but I like to think if I had Caroline Blakiston's arm round my shoulders I wouldn't look that brooding about it.) Then again, I missed most of his film and famous television work, too: my reaction to his death is derived entirely from his astonishing Renfield in the BBC Count Dracula (1977), who holds more than a candle to the icons of Dwight Frye or Pablo Álvarez Rubio, a heartbreakingly weird and human performance of a character who may not be entirely sane in a world with vampires in it, which doesn't mean he's not to be trusted about them. I loved how much of his lucidity slides between his Victorian hysteria and his careful impersonation of a reformed lunatic which is not always and for good reason convincing. I loved his kiss of Judi Bowker's Mina, not his master's initiatory drink, but a damned soul's benison, the offering of his life. Not just because he became my default horror icon on this site, I thought about him more than any other character from that sometimes surprisingly faithful adaptation. His bare wrists, his shocked hair. His actor had such a knack in the role for the liminal, death seems on some level too definite to believe.Current Music: Jeff Tweedy, "Enough"
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...or more precisely, on one of its many, many moons!
Consider Setting Your Space Operas on Saturn
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A utopia (of sorts) is endangered by a discontented, powerful, malcontent.
Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams
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Bundle of Holding's 13th annual feast of top-quality tabletop roleplaying game ebooks.
Bundle of Holding: Cornucopia 2025
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