I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Marc Scott Zicree & Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Magic Time: Angelfire:( magic returns )
John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In: ( body horror )
Frances Hardinge, Island of Whispers: ( illustrated story )
Ann Leckie, Lake of Souls: ( strangers on a planet )
Seanan McGuire, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known: ( addressing consequences of abuse )
Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard: ( apples of discord )
Caroline B. Cooney, Goddess of Yesterday: A Tale of Troy: ( fascinating YA fantasy )

Sacha Lamb, When the Angels Left the Old Country: ( highly recommended, kind fantasy )

Beforeigners has disappeared from HBO! Tragedy. I guess that means no S3?

Out of the Ruins, ed. Preston Grassman: ( apocalypse stories )
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: ( everyday horrors of having a body )
Robert McGill, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life:( flattened people as methods of dying by suicide )
Tade Thompson, The Legacy of Molly Southborne: ( More mollies )
T. Kingfisher, Nettle and Bone: ( princess on a quest )

Ben Aaronovitch, Tales from the Folly:( lots of non-Peter POV )
K.D. Edwards, The Hourglass Throne: ( Glad this is finally out! )
Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections: ( trans vampire archivist romance )
Charlie Adhara, ( m/m romance where one is a shifter )

Naked City, ed. Ellen Datlow. ( urban fantasy )
Seanan McGuire, Seasonal Fears: ( followup to last year's archetypes book )
Fonda Lee, Jade City: ( new palace intrigue/magic series )
Justina Ireland, Rust in the Root: ( Depression-era magic )
Carrie Vaughn, Questland: ( island of tropes )
Holly Black, Doll Bones: ( not magical realism, more realistic magic )
Maya Deane, Wrath Goddess Sing: ( trans Achilles fights (with) gods )
Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters: ( really, they eat books )
Katherine Addison, The Grief of Stones:( not more Maia, sadly, but it will do )
Rachel Hartman, In the Serpent’s Wake: ( Tess and colonialism )
Kameron Hurley, Future Artifacts: Stories: ( grim, dark )

Seanan McGuire, Where the Drowned Girls Go: ( mermaids on land )
Barbara Hambly, The Rainbow Abyss: ( a book of setup )
Kali Wallace, ( A bunch of books, SF&F )

Genevieve Cogman, The Untold Story: ( the final chapter )
Daryl Gregory, Revelator: ( bootleggers find God )
Max Gladstone, Last Exit: ( Gladstone's version of The City We Became x The Dark Tower )
Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters: ( not for me )
John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society:( somebody had fun writing about kaiju )
Charles Stross, ( One Laundry Files, one Merchant Princes )

Just finished watching Julie and the Phantoms on Netflix, a show that has no business being as good as it ended up being. Julie is a teen who lost her mom, and also lost the ability to play the music that she used to make with her mom. When she accidentally brings three ghosts—three members of a boy band that was on the verge of breaking out when they died—back, they discover that they can be heard when they’re making music. The actors commit to roles that require extreme suspension of disbelief, and they’re very wholesome and charming. The songs are generic but the lead is a great singer, and I ended up sobbing twice in later episodes because it skillfully played on my heartstrings. Obviously, premised on death of a parent, death of a teenaged child. Mild romance, no sex.

Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves: ( war and intrigue )
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Guns of the Dawn: ( monstrous regiment? )
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Tiger and the Wolf: ( shapeshifters without fandom tropes )
Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys: ( YA fantasy )
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi: ( drowned world )
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future: ( ecohopepunk? )
Everina Maxwell, Winter’s Orbit: ( romantic SF )
Seanan McGuire, Across the Green Grass Fields:( unicorns )

Vid for me! Murdering Stravinsky, Farscape, lithiumdoll: YouTube, AO3

Look, ever since I realized that “dressing up as fascists” was perfect for this fandom, I’ve wanted this vid, and LithiumDoll does it great justice. The internal motion and even internal lighting changes are perfect for the disorientation and cruelty of the song. And there’s so many canonical references that are perfect—all the things they do that hurt others, and each other, by meaning to or by meaning to be good or both. The nuclear bomb and the beautiful, horrible wormhole equations that represent both art and death.

A very good bad review of a Netflix animated sff series, Love, Death and Robots.

Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue: ( political romance )

KJ Charles, Proper English: ( f/f in high society )

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire: ( palace intrigue with colonialism )

Seanan McGuire, Middlegame: ( it's a chess metaphor )
Laurie Marks, Earth Logic: ( winning the peace )

John Birmingham, The Cruel Stars: ( military sf, mostly )

Robert Jackson Bennett, ( mid-colonialist fantasy ) 

Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream: ( more wayward children )
Ted Chiang, Exhalation: ( the best kind of sf )

Rebecca Roanhorse, Storm of Locusts: ( monsterkiller on the road )

Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God, vol. 2 of the complete stories:( misanthropy/misogyny )

Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish: ( Aladdin! )

The Best of Subterranean, ( Read more... )
Urban Enemies, ed. Joseph Nassise: ( Read more... )
Claudia Grey, Defy the Stars: ( Read more... )
Women of Futures Past, ed. Kristine Kathryn Rusch: ( Read more... )
Leta Blake & Indra Vaughn, Vespertine: ( modern gay romance )
Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones: ( Read more... )
Cherie Priest, Chapelwood: ( Read more... )
Sarah Kuhn, Heroine Worship: ( Read more... )
Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep: ( Read more... )
Seanan McGuire, Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day: ( Read more... )Haunted Nights, ed. Ellen Datlow & Lisa Morton: ( Read more... )

1. Lucifer is very satisfying to me right now. Maze and Chloe as roommates is exactly the fanservice I desired.

2. I love gothy covers of Sarah McLachlan’s Possession, but it occurs to me that they are a bit mansplainy. She did, after all, know that she was writing about a stalker.

3. Words cannot really describe how much I want a Farscape vid to Murdering Stravinsky.  Dining on each other! Dressing up as fascists! Killing off the past to make the future last!  Dancing on the coals!

( Elliott Kay, Seanan McGuire, Sarah J. Maas )

Well, my experiment with iTunes 11 made me go back to iTunes 10.6, a more unpleasant proposition than it should have been—initially it erased 3 months of changes, and I’d added a bunch of music and am also obsessive about my play counts, so that was a couple of hours of fiddling. Ultimately I downloaded a couple of scripts that allow manual resetting of play counts, which wasn’t perfect but was a hell of a lot faster than skipping tracks one by one, which I should have done from the beginning; would have saved me a lot of time.

Unionmade, retailer of fashions that are not union made. See, it’s an homage to the time when things were well made by people with good jobs! Or a huge slap in the face to real union labor. You choose.

Aaron Bady (wow is this guy sharp; his Batman essay was genius, and now this), Questioning Clay Shirky:

Why have we stopped aspiring to provide the real thing for everyone? That’s the interesting question, I think, but if we begin from the distinction between "elite" and "non-elite" institutions, it becomes easy to take for granted that "non-elite students" receiving cheap education is something other than giving up. It is important to note that when online education boosters talk about "access," they explicitly do not mean access to "education of the best sort"; they mean that because an institution like Udacity provides teaching for free, you can’t complain about its mediocrity. It’s not an elite institution, and it’s not for elite students. It just needs to be cheap.

Talking in terms of "access" (instead of access to what?) allows people like Shirky to overlook the elephant in the room, which is the way this country used to provide inexpensive and high-quality education to all sorts of people who couldn’t afford to go to Yale -- people like me and my parents.

Randall Munroe: “It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles into hurricanes.”

( Predator Nation; Black women, civil rights, and the struggle against sexual violence )