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austin_dern

January 2026

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Linguistics question

Jan. 23rd, 2026 07:26 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6


After the snow has fallen, sometimes it looks like more snow is falling when the wind blows it off of trees and roofs. Do you have a word or specific phrase for this?

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Yes, and I'll tell you in the comments
2 (40.0%)

No, but I've heard some people use a term which I'll tell you in the comments
0 (0.0%)

No
2 (40.0%)

No - I don't live where it snows and am unfamiliar with this phenomenon
1 (20.0%)

Clicky?

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CLICKY
5 (100.0%)



Read more... )
From Rod Serling’s next-episode preview I understood “People Are Alike All Over” would be “science fiction” through the familiar expedient of involving space travel. Remembering “Mars” being mentioned at least had me hoping this would be a change from “asteroids” with atmospheres and Earth-normal gravity. It also, though, had me thinking of the Ray Bradbury story “Mars is Heaven!” and what its own take on the episode title might be taken as.
Mars is... )

Mistakes were made

Jan. 20th, 2026 09:02 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
One of Canada's great missteps was not mining the border. The other was not building intermediate range nuclear-armed missiles.




November 25, 2026 would have been Poul Anderson’s 100th birthday. As there is no guarantee any of us will see November 25, 2026, I’ll borrow an idea from Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Year That Was and start writing something appropriately celebratory now.

Homeward By Starlight



Improve your sword and sorcery through inspirational verisimilitude!


On Thud and Blunder by Poul Anderson
I held the bannister and I got it

I sat down to look for it

I took it with me because I could not find it

Damn splinter!

Posted by Joseph Nebus

Just one of those strange reminiscences. Scott Adams’s death got me to remembering this time in the mid-90s that Dilbert fans whined online that Drew Carey had stolen Dilbert’s look for his character on The Drew Carey Show. Somehow anyone got interested in this and so, apparently, the show had Carey’s character put a Dilbert … Continue reading "Please Do Not Use the Information in Here to Do Mean Things"


The tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of early 19th-Century folk horror.

Bundle of Holding: Sleepy Hollow

Job has a coffee maker

Jan. 21st, 2026 02:28 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Now, we don't have a coffee maker. We have a french press, and we have a pourover thinger, and no coffee maker. Electric coffee makers are roach magnets, and I will stand by that statement.

But the job has a coffee maker, a nice new model after the pot on the old one broke, and the lid on top opens to the left, which means you have to hold the coffee pot in your right hand if you want to pour the coffee into the machine. Also, all the measurement numbers on the coffee pot are only visible if you're holding the handle in your right hand.

And you may say this is petty, and it is - well, it's petty for me because I have two hands, I might well be more annoyed, and justifiably, if I was missing one! - but somebody made a choice to hinge the lid on the left instead of on the back, and somebody, maybe that same somebody, made a choice to only put numbers on one side of the handle instead of both. And they didn't have to make those choices, they could've made different choices that didn't screw me over personally, me and all the other lefties as well as approximately half of all people who don't have mobility in their right hand or don't have that hand at all*, and they chose poorly. Probably didn't even think it through even a tiny little bit.

* Wait, is this a valid assumption? Or are people more likely to be disabled on this side or that side?

************************


Read more... )

Youth by Frank Horne

Jan. 19th, 2026 02:01 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I am a knotted nebula—
a whirling flame
Shrieking aftire the endless darkness ...
I am the eternal center of gravity
and about me swing the crazy moons—
I am the thunder of rising suns,
the blaze of the zenith—
... the tremble of women’s bodies
in the arms of lovers ...
I sit on top of the Pole
Drunk with starry splendor
Shouting hozzanas at the Pleiades
... booting footballs at the moon—
I shall outlast the sun
and the moon
and the stars.…


*****


Link

Posted by Joseph Nebus

One of my favorite comic modes has always been the fake fact, nonsense presented with the form of the truth. I blame this for making me into a mathematics and physics major. But where this intersects happily with excerpts from Robert Benchley’s My Ten Years In A Quandary And How They Grew is this week’s … Continue reading "Robert Benchley: Did You Know That —"


A deranged President sets his eyes on Canada and Scandinavia, forcing one senator to consider the prospect of contemplating the preliminaries to action.

Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel