adrian_turtle | Reading

Once again, the need to rescue friends distracts Murderbot from its shows.

Platform Decay (Murderbot, volume 8) by Martha Wells

andrewducker

1. Consultation on the Proposed Edinburgh Safer Drug Consumption Facility: (tags:Edinburgh drugs Scotland safety )

oursin

Happy birthday,

nnozomi!

sabotabby

And Cocoa's, but Sabot is the one I can shower with gifts and love. Alas I had to be away from her most of the day, but I made it up after with dinner in bed, meat tubes, and a catnip crinkle pad.

In case you are wondering Alice's birthday is not for a month and a half but she also got a meat tube and a catnip mouse so she wouldn't feel left out.

oursin

What I read

Finished Honeycomb.

Read Jonathan Kellerman, Jigsaw (2026), for a change of pace. While the perp is, for a change, not a serial killer with intricate pattern of murders, still a psycho, though revenge in the mix. I yearn for Dr Delaware to get a locked room mystery at a country house party with a load of ye trad motives.

Then back to Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands (2025), which I still found fairly confusing - admittedly the plot is rooted in confused/confusing stories - on a re-read.

Something or other brought to mind a really obscure author whose 2 novels I'd managed to find (after reading the second from the library and then wanting to read it again and searching for it for years), so actually managed to retrieve these from the approximate places where they were supposed to be on actual shelves.

D. A. Nicholas Jones, Parade in Pairs (1958), first novel, some good things, thought the racial violence at the end was a bit gratuitous - chronology suggests it could not have been response to Notting Hill Race Riots. Period racial attitudes are situated in characters and there is quite a bit of ambiguity going on. Also some, fairly peripheral, characters are gay.

On the go

D. A. Nicholas Jones, Never Had It So Good (1963), which is the one I first encountered. I see I wrote about it years ago back in LJ days.

Also on the go, as I was out and about today and did not want to tote about a substantial hardback, Farah Mendlesohn, Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, published yesterday.

Up next

No idea.

james_davis_nicoll

You too can help fund James Nicoll Reviews!

April 2026 Patreon Boost

jesse_the_k

Serious

I can’t summarize my complicated feelings about Metafilter. One reason I continue reading is what I learn from discussions like

Big Mean Trans Thread
This is a thread for trans people to vent and be righteously uncharitable about transphobic bullshit on Metafilter and otherwise.

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26888/big-mean-trans-thread

“Metatalk” is where members vent about the site itself; this discussion responds to a couple of (now-banned) jerks who dropped turds in the weekly LGBTQIA+ News Post fro 27 March.

The Meta posters taught me that the terms AFAB and AMAB have been appropriated by anti-trans bigots to emphasize that “real” gender is what the doctors put on the birth certificate. I won’t be using those terms any more. I have no need to know someone’s bodily configuration; if it’s relevant, they’ll tell me.

Sublime

HTXStudio invents Rube Goldberg-level technology, then produces succinct, hilarious, open-captioned (but not described) vertical videos about how and why they did it. Towards the goal of limiting doomscrolling in general and phone use in bed, they made a bed for smartphones:

Watch on YouTube or

( stream it here )

Silly

April Fool’s delight at AO3 — be sure to check the upper left corner!

Spotlight on Omegas
Omegas are the glue that holds us all together, providing the essential social lubricant needed for our society to function—and yet they are often maligned and treated as lesser-than. This April, we are changing part of our logo to highlight omegas as part of our commitment to the inclusion and wellbeing of our omega volunteers and users.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260401173413/https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/34621

james_davis_nicoll

History can teach us the most exciting ways to destroy fictional civilizations...

Seven Plot-Friendly Ways to Spur Societal Collapse

james_davis_nicoll

Master Nankai hosts a discussion between the idealistGentleman and pragmatist Mr. Champion over the course Japan should take in the 20th century.

A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government by Nakae Chomin (Translated by Nobuko Tsukui)

andrewducker

1. The existence of trans people is not an ideology: (tags:identity lgbt transgender uk law politics )
2. Microsoft tells people that Copilot is "for entertainment purposes only": (tags:ai law microsoft )

andrewducker

In the UK most people can claim Tax-free Childcare from the government. Which tops up your childcare payments by 25%, up to a quarterly limit of £500.

The process/website for dealing with it is, frankly, rubbish. And, in a moment of frustration, I've written up why:

Current process:

I look at the amount I have to pay to the provider
I do a calculation (based on that amount, how much top-up remains, etc)
I transfer money to them (using different details per child)
I wait two hours
I come back and check to see if the money has been transferred and topped up. If not, return to (4).
I tell them to transfer it to the provider
They pay it to the provider.

Proposed process:

once only - I give them my bank details and direct debit permissions. As I do with multiple other sites.
I Tell them to pay X to the provider.
They do the maths for how much of my money to transfer, and confirm that with me.
They transfer it, top it up, and pay it to the provider, letting me know if there was a problem.

This means I have to make 1 visit to 1 website, rather than multiple trips to two websites (them and the bank), I don't have to do any maths, and I don't have to check back in after two hours to see if the transfer has happened yet.

And then multiply up my monthly frustration across all of the hundreds of thousands of people using this every month.

Oh, and yes, I sent them a shorter version of this.

oursin

Happy birthday,

ephemera and

sidherian!

sabotabby

I'll likely not have time to post tomorrow morning, so here it is a few hours in advance.

Just finished: Always On by Helena Trooperman. This was quite fun, and in particular I liked how much attention she gives to the social and economic repercussions of the invention of new technology. What starts with a phone ultimately becomes, potentially, an existential threat to fossil fuel interests, and to everyone they directly and indirectly employ, and there are complications like fewer and less well-paying jobs in a green energy future. It also ends on a cliffhanger so...there's that.

Currently reading: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. It's Nebula season so watch me mainline as many books as possible in a month. This one's up first though because I was meaning to read it anyway. It begins with the journal of a Lutheran pastor being found inside a wall, and takes us back to 1912, when said pastor encountered a Blackfeet man named Good Stab who wants to do a confession. Also he's a vampire. This is slow, bloody dread of the sort Jones is famous for and it has quite a lot of Cormac McCarthy in it, with the Montana setting and the mass murders. Really good so far; it's going to be a tough one to top except I really did love Katabasis.

oursin

I know I was born into a fortunate generation which had things like university grants and better employment opportunities and the ability to buy one's own house in one's twenties and so on -

I have also occasionally been heard to remark that, on account of the codliver oil and school milk dispensed by a caring Welfare State, Ma Generayshun probably has bones like steel girders persisting into the twilight years and that this very likely no longer pertains -

- I did not realise that life expectancy was actually going down (older article, feel I saw something much more recently but didn't keep the link).

Not to mention decline in actual expectation of healthy quality of life.

I was brought up with coal fires - the Clean Air Act was 1956 but I'm not sure how long the effects took to kick in - possibly various dietary things that might not be considered optimum these days? - various things like the foot-x-ray machines in shoe-shops that have vanished -

While maybe not the plethora of junk food there is now it was absolutely not that organic idyll that gets posited!

So there were adverse factors around, but maybe just enough counter-balancing things going on?

james_davis_nicoll

The 2015 DELUXE rulebook plus many solitaire and gamemaster adventures. First of two T&T Bundles.

Bundle of Holding: Tunnels & Trolls (from 2018)

AND

Eighteen Tunnels & Trolls solo modules plus five GM adventures. Second of two offers.

Bundle of Holding: T&T Adventures (From 2021)

rachelmanija

Camille is a tradwife influencer, living in near-total isolation from all humans but her awful and mostly absent husband Graham and her nosy neighbor Renee. She directs her own life like it's a perfect Instagram post, constantly obsessing over the perfect shade of beige and how her followers will react if she disagrees with a more successful tradwife influencer's insistence on a folic acid-free diet. The best way to get followers is to get pregnant, and she and Graham haven't managed that yet. But there's something lurking in the dark, deep well near the dark, deep woods that might be able to solve that problem for her.

The first quarter or so of this book is so repetitive and anvillicious that I might have DNF'd it if I hadn't been reading it for the horror book club. However, it picks up once Camille has sex with the creature in the well. (Camille tells herself it's an angel but can't stop calling it "the creature;" its actual nature is pleasingly ambiguous.) Her extremely weird pregnancy and increasingly desperate efforts to conceal its weirdnesses from Graham, Renee, and her online followers had me glued to the pages, and once her baby is born, I went from being entertained to actively loving the story. I don't want to give away too much about the baby, but I think it's the first time I have ever gotten deeply attached to a fictional baby. Of course, it helps that the baby isn't quite human...

The story is predictable but in a good way once you're past the interminable first quarter; you can't wait for certain things to happen. It gets increasingly batshit and darkly, gleefully funny as it goes along. It's a good female rage book, and has some quality monsterfucking scenes. Despite the rough start I really enjoyed this.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Very gory.

Incidentally, there are at least three novels called Trad Wife or Tradwife released this year. One by Sarah Langan is coming out in September.

shewhostaples posting in

girlmeetstrouble

Chapter 12 continues to explore the Castello. ( Read more... )

Lucy sleeps until noon and is wakened by Phyl at the opening of chapter 13. ( Read more... )

Chapter 14 takes Lucy, Godfrey, and us, on a tour of Corfu. ( Read more... )

Things continue to heat up! (Palm Sunday here was extremely chilly. Corfu sounds very tempting, although I think Orthodox Easter is still a few weeks away.) Chapters 15-17 for next time.

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The line between mosaic novel and themed short story collection is a very blurry one, but I spent 99% of this book fairly sure that it was in the latter category. And then I got to the end and I don't know any more. These stories are linked thematically and by their science fictional world conceit. There's not an overarching character arc for any characters told in these tales.

...unless, as I was carefully taught as a high school sophomore, the setting can be a character, in which case there absolutely is character arc here, and a very settling/satisfying one too. These science fiction stories have a consistent thread of using technology to reach out to the natural world and to heal the things that are already broken in our time. There's a wide range of characters--dolphins, robots, cats! humans I guess if you need those!--and they are generally not perfect but doing their best, which is basically my favorite kind of characters.

I am not the target audience for the type of mini-comic that appears in a few places throughout the book, but these particular examples of the form are charming and fit well with the stories around them. I feel like "now, more than ever" is one of those cliches I don't want to lean too hard on in 2026, but also now, more than ever, we really do need stories about doing the best we can with what we've got, and these are that, and I'm so glad they're all in one place to lean on.

james_davis_nicoll

22 works reviewed. 11.5 by women (52%), 10 by men (45%), 0.5 by non-binary authors (2%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 9 by POC (41%).

March 2026 in Review