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Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon, was one of the really big figures in the field. Another of his books, Red Harvest, was filmed as Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing and others; the original is set in a contemporary-to-Hammett small California town. His novels...

@Ryujin as a fellow diabetic, let me encourage you very strongly to get your eyes checked, and regularly. We are vulnerable to damage that can’t heal, and serious diabetic retinopathy really, really sucks. Your eyes fill up with blood from burst blood vessels in the retina (which messes a lot...

One for my fellow Tolkien nerds.

The seven levels/frequencies of timelines play well with the Fare ladder of stat levels, too. Early work by Robin D. Laws, later famous for a lot of stuff.

This reminds me of Dad’s joke about health care during his Army Air Corps basic training, in 1943: You could have trenchfoot, in which case they’d swab your feet with iodine. You could have strep throat, in which case they’d swab your throat with iodine. If neither of those cured you...

This is really good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy:_The_Relentless_Rise_of_the_East_India_Company So is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Capital:_1848%E2%80%931875 That’s actually the second of what became four books in a series. I recommend them all - Hobsbawm wrote...

The “probably” part goes away if you check the names of TSR (and other) early RPG creators and the names of early computer gam designers. They’re…not exactly the same, but close. :) It’s not at all exaggerating to say that a bunch of the folks who left the tabletop biz continued to write RPGs as...

Oh yes. It’s one of the great tips for copyediting. (Another is to start at the bottom of the page and go up line by line. You can use a sheet of paper or something to cover the lines above your current one.)

I started with The Worm And Its Kings, a novella set in 1990 New York. The main character is a young trans woman whose lover has gone missing. Her efforts to find her lead her to the original history of the world and a cult interested in undoing the world as it is now. It has two sequels, also...

My beard is almost all grey and white, but the hair on top of my head is still all brown. Runs in Mom’s family - she’s 95 and has less than 10 grey hairs.

What worse, sometimes, are the people who genuinely think they’re being helpful, who have no idea what it’s like outside the narrow tunnel of their own outlook. Many of the folks in that 1990s thread were of that sort. They just didn’t get genuinely not liking blood and gore.

I don’t remember right now whether it was RuneQuest or Traveller. Pretty sure Superhero 2044 was third.

It was in the ‘90s I saw a thread with someone asking for horror films that aren’t bloody or gory. Responses included Alien, The Thing, and Reanimator.

Caitlin Kiernan’s early novel Threshold has things to say about Georgia trilobites, drawing a their experience as a paleontologist before turning full-time to fiction. They turn out to be things that do not make the characters glad to know. Lovecraftian things. Great stuff.

I’ve been dangerously angry at political stuff today, and Hailey Piper is being, once again, good for helping me focus that feeling and discharge it via fiction. This is some great writing:

Whoops, duplicate post. I agree that Doppelgänger is a fascinating and worthwhile read.

Hailey Piper keeps getting better. The opening of All the Hearts You Eat: The story seems to focus on at least two young trans women living in a small Atlantic coastal town. But knowing Piper’s work, she’s going to let me turn the page and run into an unexpected revelation that changes the...

Whoa. Okay. That makes his role in Pacific Rim that much more delightfully odd.

It really is remarkably hard to be consistently aware of yourself as a person who exists in a historical and social context, whose views do not descend directly from absolute truth but are shaped in countless ways by different kinds of other people.