fiction
Finished City of Blades and I can’t talk about it. I want to talk about it. Read it so we can talk about it.
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death — Caroline M. Yoachim in Lightspeed
I’m not entirely sure I understood this story (time travel is hard) but gosh it was wonderful. I really liked the structural things Caroline did, with rock/paper/scissors and the probabilities of survival. Following items as they appeared and disappeared was almost like watching a magic trick. I sort of want to draw out the loops of this story. I feel like it would be very pretty.
The Creeping Women — Christopher Barzak in Uncanny Magazine
Take The Yellow Wallpaper, twist it slightly, put it in another character’s head, extend. This story.
Part of me glares at this story as I am still trying to figure out how to retell The Yellow Wallpaper as interactive fiction. I’ve not gotten far.
not fiction
Inside the Eye: Nature’s Most Exquisite Creation — National Geographic
This is fascinating, and also made me remember how an anti-evolution speaker came to my youth group when I was a wee young lass and scoffed, “What good is half an eye? If evolution is true, at some point there was something less than an eye, and what good is that? That animal never could’ve survived.”
Well. Sir. I give you…actual facts.
He also had this whole thing about the exquisite planning involved in the Bombardier Beetle’s namesake move, as though there aren’t a hundred weird evolutionary mis-steps leftover in humans alone.
Is there something weird about our taste for apocalypse stories? — Frank Bures in Aeon
That feeling, that panic, comes from those moments when this fact is unavoidable. It comes from being unable to not see what we’ve become – a planet-changing superorganism. It is from the realisation that I am part of it.