In downtown San Francisco, there’s a multi-level shopping mall with an atrium and a skylight. If you stand in the dead center of the atrium and look up, it resembles an eye, looking down at you through a giant microscope.
This was taken during WonderCon 2009. Years later, I posted it for a February 2015 photo challenge on the theme “Symmetry.”
I was recently reminded of the view while reading author Annalee Newitz’ latest newsletter, Inside the Dying Malls of San Francisco. Continue reading
Reptiles! Reptiles! Reptiles! Okay, okay, we’ll let some amphibians in too. As a treat.
(Billboard spotted while walking around last week.)
Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting Literary Arts, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing…
I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I’m totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories. Plus I get another format for my Earthsea reread that’s not the giant collected hardcover tome or my old fragile paperbacks.
I’m going to have a lot of reading material next year.
*As ebooks through Kobo
Update: Unfortunately they aren’t DRM-Free. Kobo does have some of her books without DRM, but as far as I can tell, the only one in this bundle is The Unreal and the Real.
The others I’ve found just now are: Worlds of Exile and Illusion, The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest, and The Beginning Place. Tor seems to be big on requesting non-DRM formats. These may be all of them currently available without DRM: eBooks.com, where I previously bought Forest, has a filter on their search for DRM-Free, and only turns up the same four books.
It seems kind of ironic to sell The Dispossessed (of all books!) encumbered with DRM.
Okay, okay, I won’t toss this speck of neutron star material here! I guess I’ll just have to pack it out.
(Spotted at the Hermosa Beach Pier over the weekend.)
The part that kills me — and I hope that doesn’t turn out to be literal — is that Trump actually won the popular vote on a platform of hurting large segments of the population. It’s not hidden. It’s not some weird bogus claim made by the opposition. He’s been shouting it from the rooftops. And it’s not just Trump, it’s all the other Republicans riding his coattails as they push against civil rights and promise to punish people for the crime of being different.
That means large segments of the American population either:
Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it amounts to the same thing: Trump and the people around him can credibly make excuses about having a mandate to hurt people. Lots of people.
I was really hoping that if nothing else, the Trumpist scapegoat-and-punish brand of politics would be discredited. Instead it’s been rewarded.
I hope the people who voted for him eventually realize: He will turn against you too, just as he turns against everyone the moment they stop being useful to him.
You handed power to someone who’s big on retribution and revenge and just got a court ruling granting him absolute immunity from prosecution. What do you think is going to happen?
And don’t count on anything less cruel from the people around him, because they’ve seen that bullying works and they’ll keep going, tearing down everything they can, blaming some group for the problems it causes, promising to punish them, lather rinse and repeat.
Related reading: Last year A.R. Moxon wrote an insightful piece about how Republicans’ own actions have convinced him that Republicans are fascist. And a “what now?” post from Ken White at Popehat.
