Since I got busy with 3 parades being in them, and then Christmas time chaos. I totally forgot to do reminders in them! I've not had a chance to work on my 20in20 comms. So I'm extending the round. If you guys need more time then the 8th, please let me know, I do not mind extending more.
The deadline January 17th, 2025 by 11:59 PM.. You can also still sign up and participate if you have not yet. Signups are open for the duration of this round.
I still need sets from the following people: tinny. If you need an extension, please do not hesitate to ask.
Part of this is on me: I had somehow gotten it in my head this was modern day and was looking forward to seeing how "hivemind took over the entire medical profession undetected" aspect of the premise would play out. The setting is not modern day, it's set some indeterminate amount of time (over 500 years) after some sort of apocalypse (fair, and an interesting setting itself) and people are aware to varying degrees aware that there is Something Wrong TM with the Institute.
The main part of the disappointment is that the book keeps bringing up concepts and then... Not Doing Anything with them. Spoilers from here on out. Our PoV character loses access to the hivemind fairly early on. Helen's miscarriages and/or the twins having supernatural powers never goes anywhere. The baron seems aware that he is hosting pseudomycota and even might be working with it? Let's never speak of this again! The idea that "If you’re born in Verdira, you die in Verdira" is brought up and we get told what happens is someone born there tries to leave, but that goes nowhere. /End spoilers
It is so disappointing and frustrating. It all just goes fucking nowhere!
For those who have been using FenRecs.com - Squidge.org's fanworks recommendation site where you can rec your favorite fandoms, stories, pairings and such - thank you! We've been going strong and sharing recommendations, which is what's needed in the fandom community.
Our host provider for FenRecs.com is shutting down in less than a month. As such, we will be taking down the site and importing it into a new host. It will probably take a couple of days so please if you do use the site, know that we are going to be down starting Friday January 16th, 2026, and will be down for a short period of time. We need time to move the domain name and all of the data from one provider to another.
So get your recs in now, and know that starting this coming Friday, we'll be down until service is restored. Questions? Let us know.
I think it is very funny to see how my user subscriptions number on AO3 fluctuates every time I post a story depending on what fandom it's for. I gain a subscription if it's fandom A, I lose one if it's B, but if I post A again soon afterwards then the number increases one more time, ready to drop the second I post for B (or eventually C). Sweet reader! What are you doing??
(I know there's no proving it's the same person but in my mind it is absolutely hilarious to picture this One Fan who goes :) for fandom A and :( for fandom B and so clicks the subscribe/unsubscribe button every couple of weeks.)
But if by any chance it is one person and that person is reading this, then let me tell you I'm not abandoning WN. I'll have a multichap ready for posting later this year, if all goes according to plan -- chapters 1 and 2 have already been typed up, in fact, and now there are only eight to go. However, I've definitely used up most of my steam for the fandom and it's highly unlikely I'll keep up the pace I used to have in writing for the show when I first fell into the habit of doing so. Meaning that you can probably stop subscribing every couple of days and just keep an eye out for the J/S tag, since the multichap and (most) subsequent future oneshots will feature The OTP with very rare exceptions because, if you are indeed one single individual and if you've been here a while, you know doctor superion is THE biggest ship in my little sea, lol. (Then again, it's not like anyone comes to gush about these characters with me anymore so the fact that I do have a friend to go nuts with in the other fandom is important, if not wholly decisive. Something to keep in mind... There's always a lot more joy and inspiration to go around when it's shared, in my experience!)
All from Ace Attorney 1: texture by coy-dreaner - hero 2: texture by lookslikerain - wizard 3: texture by pamkips - rogue 4: texture by raiindus - rogue
The first print edition of a baihe novel to be open for pre-order for the year is Yu Shuang's tragic contemporary romance The Guest (嘉宾), which is being brought out under the title 别时茫茫 (going to just dodge the task of translation this because my brain is currently not up to the task of translating a Ba Juyi reference). This is a mainland edition and will be in traditional Chinese and censored (I'm kind of curious to see how they're going to manage the censoring of a tragedy that fundamentally arises from institutional and societal homophobia). Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:
I FOUND IT AGAIN. I read a post on Tumblr a while back on a particularly nicely done instance of color symbolism with Londo on B5, and I finally found it. (More beneath the cut.)
The below icons are for characters20in20 Round 20 with Wanda Maximoff of MCU. Images are mostly from WandaVision, Multiverse of Madness, and Civil War.
Mosscap and Dex's adventures continue from where they left off. They visit human places, including Dex's large and confusing family. Mosscap has a brush with mortality. Dex does not return to being a tea monk, their vocation still up in the air.
I enjoyed this novella for much the same reasons I enjoyed the first one, though I missed the tea service, which was my favorite part of the first book. Mosscap does turn out to be fallible and learns from Dex as much as Dex learns from it, which was nice. My favorite part of this book was the glimpses of the world, which still seems like an extremely nice place to live in.
In the current iteration of Whatever, the archive here goes back to March 2002, which is a time before all but one of my books (The Rough Guide to Money Online, now out of print and deeply outdated). That is nearly 24 years of writing here on a nearly daily basis, and millions of words, to go along with the millions of words that are in my other books and novels, all but three of which are still in print (the other two out of print books: The Rough Guide to the Universe and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, both also out of date). Between this site and the books, there will be no lack of verbiage for people who are interested in me to go by; I will not die a mystery to history.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial part of my writing life which is no longer as easily accessible. Going from most recent to most distant, there are first the out of print books, the rights to which I own and which I might even put online at some point, but haven’t because doing so is a pain in the ass. I’d have to work from either old PDFs or scan everything in, and the effort required versus the value of the text is not there for me. You might find some of these on pirate sites, and inasmuch as I’m not doing anything with them at the moment, you’re welcome to them if you find them there (that said, don’t link to any of them in the comments, please).
Prior to that is the text of Whatever from between September 13, 1998 and March 26, 2002. This was an era where the Whatever was made from hand-rolled HTML rather than typed into dedicated blogging software (first Movable Type, then WordPress). Being hand-rolled meant that it was not easy to just transfer the text over; I would have had to cut and paste a couple thousand entries. Prior to the advent of Whatever there was an even earlier version of the site going back to March of 1998, which is when I secured the Scalzi.com domain and put up a static site, with columns and movie reviews from my newspaper days, new essays I wrote for the site, a couple of book proposals, and some extremely Web 1.0 site design.
None of this material is on the site proper anymore, but it’s still around after a fashion. One, I have a digital archive of it, duplicated in several places to ward off accidental deletion, and also it’s on the Internet Archive site (along with more recent iterations of this site), because I am not adverse to having the site archived in this way, and also because I personally find it convenient — if there’s something from this era I want to look at, it’s easier for me to look for it via the Internet Archive than my own archives. Among other things, the Internet Archive has maintained the architecture of the old site as well as the content of it. The Internet Archive is robust and useful but only gives the illusion of permanence; it could go away at any point. This is why I also have my own digital archive.
(The Internet Archive is also currently the only easy way to find anything I ever wrote on the former Twitter, as I permanently deleted my presence there, including all my tweets. I did, of course, download my own archive of tweets and have multiply saved it.)
Prior to this is my professional work up until I started being a full-time novelist: Work I did for AOL and other web sites, including columns at AMC, MediaOne and my own videogame review site, GameDad, and before then the columns, features and movie reviews I did for the Fresno Bee between September 1991 and March 1996. Again, I have my own digital archives of what I wrote, and the Internet Archive can help you resurrect at least some of this material if you know how to look for it. But much of it no longer available online, due to link rot, revamped web sites, or, in the case of the AOL stuff, originally having been in a walled garden that no longer exists in any event.
For a long time I suspected that the stuff I wrote for the Fresno Bee would never be available online unless I put it there myself, but as it turns out, there’s a site, Newspapers.com, which will allow you to access at least scanned (and sometimes OCR’d) versions of my reviews and columns. I found out about this, weirdly enough, because some of my Fresno Bee movie reviews started being quoted at Rotten Tomatoes. Not the full reviews, just quotes, alas. I may get a subscription to this site just to download all my movie reviews at some point. That will be a project.
We have dug down far enough that now we come to the material that is, truly, not available in any way, shape or form online: Writing from high school and college, which includes but is not limited to, music reviews and columns for the Chicago Maroon, my college newspaper, and my first attempts at short stories from high school. The picture at the head of this essay is of the actual physical archive of much of this stuff. It does not include the big-ass book I have that compiles all the copies of the Chicago Maroon for the 1989-90 academic year, when I was the editor-in-chief of the paper; that’s on a shelf on the other side of the room. Yes, if there’s ever a fire in my office, all of this writing is likely to go up in smoke.
I may at some point scan some or all of this stuff, but I’m pretty confident that almost none of it, save for what I had already put up in the previous iteration of the site, is going to be seen by the public at large. Why? Well, one, at the ages of 14 to 21, I wasn’t that good of a writer. Indeed, there is a real and serious upgrade in my writing skills that happened in 1998, because between ’96 and ’98, I spent a lot of my time being an editor, and much of that time was telling other people how to tweak their writing to make it better. It meant when I looked at my own writing previous to that point, I was very much “who told this jackass he could write” about it. The word to use for my writing in high school in particular is “precocious,” which is to say, showing talent but not a lot of discipline or control.
Two, and again particularly in my high school writing, some of it I’m ashamed of. In more than one of my short stories from the high school era, I made being gay a punchline, not because I was virulently homophobic at the time, but because I was a kid and uncritically absorbed the general 1980s societal attitudes concerning gay and lesbian folks. That explanation doesn’t excuse it, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. Also, being an ignorant kid in the 80s would not mitigate actual pain and harm posting those stories would have on people here in 2026. So they will stay on their shelf and not online.
I’ll note that wisdom and empathy did not suddenly alight upon my shoulder upon high school graduation. There’s plenty of my writing in the 90s — when I was a full grown adult — that is absolutely cringe on reflection. I’d sorted most of my homophobia by my exit from college, but hashing out my tendency to fall back on casual sexism for a laugh took well into the 21st Century to deal with. I can and do still slip into what I might call “avuncular pontificating” mode, and especially in the early days of Whatever this mode was indistinguishable from generic mansplaining. I try to do better, and I’ve been trying to do better for a while now. We are all permanently works in progress.
But that does mean that, unlike when I was younger and thought everything of mine should be read, I now understand why people curate their work, and let lots of it slip out of view. There is work from every stage of my writing life I am proud of and happy to show people. There’s a lot more I’m fine with letting it be, or, at best, it being of interest to a biographer, should one be foolhardy enough to emerge. There is a reason why, in the Site Disclaimer for Whatever, I mention that when you come across something that sounds like me being an ass, check the date and see if there’s not a more recent piece that reflects my current position on the subject. Also, this is why, if someone presents me with something I wrote a a decade or two (or three!) ago, I am perfectly happy to say, when necessary, that younger me was a jackass on many things and this happens to be one of them.
While I’m on the topic, and this is a thing which I think these days is actually important given the current state of technology, this is why you can’t just feed everything I’ve ever written into a Large Language Model and have it shit out a reasonable facsimile of me. Leaving aside any other issue with the current model of “AI” being an unthinking statistical matching machine, I am a moving target. I am not the same writer at 56 that I was at 16, 26, 36 or even 46. Is there a consistent thread between those versions of me? Absolutely; you can read something I wrote as a teenager and see the writer I am now in those words. But the differences at every age add up. You can’t statistically average the circumstances and choices I made across 40 years into something that reads like me, either as I am today or how I was at any previous stage.
And yes, you could ask an “AI” to control for these things, and it will, but it’s still not going to do a great job. I am me because of the lifetime of experiences I have had, but that’s not all of what makes me who I am in any present moment, What in my experiences contribute to that are not all equally weighted, or of equal consideration when I write… or when I’m thinking about what to write next. An LLM won’t and can’t understand that, which is why an attempt to use one to write like me (or any other author) is an exercise in the Uncanny Valley all the way down. Recently someone tried to convince me an LLM could write like me by cutting and pasting to me something he had it write “in my style.” It was only vaguely like how I would write, and also, I was mildly concerned that this person thought this was actually how I wrote.
All of which is to say that there is a lot of writing from me, and mostly what it does is give you an insight into who I was at the time it was written. Some of it good! Some of it is not. Some of it you can find, and some you cannot. And while I very much want you all to buy every single novel in my backlist, Tor and I both thank you for your efforts on that score, otherwise I’m perfectly okay with you focusing on what I’m writing now rather than what I wrote way back when. I’m related to that guy, and we’re very close. But we’re not exactly the same person anymore.
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