2) Her work is all really awesome! And she’s got a ton of short stories available for free online. Some of my favorites:
“Bluebeard’s Wife” – what would happen if a woman Bluebeard married just didn’t look in the room?
“The Dryad’s Shoe” – an aroace Cinderella who has zero interest in the ball or the prince but does love gardening
“Jackalope Wives” – takes the skinshifting conceit of selkies and applies it to jackalopes (folkloric horned rabbits) in the American Southwest. Also stars the absolutely iconic Grandma Harken, whose left to clean up the mess when her grandson tries to catch himself a jackalope wife. This one won a bunch of awards and there’s an audio version read by LeVar Burton.
“Sun Moon Dust” – a young farmer inherits a sword bound to the souls of three warriors, all ready to teach him to be a hero… but he has no desire to be anything but a farmer. A very sweet M/M story!
She also did a fantastic short form, since completed podcast (voiced by her husband and her) called The Hidden Almanac. Its like a local radio show set in an alternate universe, run by a charmingly monotone plague doctor named Reverend Mord that covers saints, history, the garden, the standing stone in the frog garden, the disastrous leyline building project, his overly chipper friend Pastor Draum (miracle worker) and occasionally grows a plot. It also has George the Crow (who shows up in abooout 2014). George is an EXCELLENT crow.
If I recall correctly, it started because she got annoyed by people calling Welcome to Nightvale ‘eldritch NPR’ because she LIKED Nightvale but it WASN’T Eldritch NPR, so then she just… kinda wrote eldritch NPR. It’s wonderful, I recommend it to people constantly. It’s also finished, and each episode is only like. 4 minutes long, including the Brought To You By Red Wombat Teas and Other Dubious Fictional Sponsors bit.
Also when it comes to novels I have to highly recommend her outright horror, The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places, but tbh everything she writes is a LITTLE horror, contains at least one corpse, and is wickedly funny and human in places.
Also if you have any morbid 10-14 year olds about get a copy of A Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking in their hands, and if you were one yourself, pick it up too. Its got death and a living sourdough starter familiar, and is a thing of glory.
“Castle Hangnail” is one of the best fantasy stories aimed at pre-teens I’ve ever read.
“The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain,” the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it “wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis.”
…
“The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there could be 17.5 billion undiscovered barrels of oil and 148 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off Greenland, although the island’s remote location and harsh weather have limited exploration.
When the current government, led by the Inuit Ataqatigiit party since an April’s parliamentary election, it immediately began to deliver on election promises and stopped plans for uranium mining in southern Greenland.“
Had a decent burrito today for the first time since last March, and I wish to mark the occasion
Super burrito with carnitas
It was delicious
I’m having the other half for lunch tomorrow
.
in other news, my sister is back to work at the fabric store. They’re prepping to convert back to having customers in the store. They have 16 months of remnants stacked up loose in the office. My sister is going to be measuring and folding them for sale, and soon many quilters will be made glad.
In Alhaurín de la Torre, (Spain), residents have used recycled textile material creating this beautiful coating on the streets of the city to create shade.
The art history version of “you’d look prettier if you smiled more”
Didn’t just make her smile. They also made her eyes bigger, changed the shape of her nose, and softened her chin and jaw. It also looks like they made her boobs bigger and unnaturally high.
“We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”
James Connolly, on the visit of King Edward to Ireland, 1910
This school, The Marieval Indian Residential School, operated from 1899 to 1997.
It was one of the last residential schools to close in Canada. One of more than 130.
In case you didn’t know, residential schools were created to “cleanse” the people of Canada. These schools operated from 1831, when the Mohawk Institute Residential School opened, to 1996, when residential schools were finally outlawed.
I am not Indigenous. I cannot pretend to know how painful this may be. But what I can do is speak out. This inhumane treatment of citizens of Canada must be condemned.
The government of Canada, and The Catholic Church, must. make. reparations.
Another thing about the importance of parasites and other “pesky” organisms is that they are a non-stop irritation to almost all other animals on the planet…..and the impact of that cannot possibly be overstated. It affects EVERYTHING those animals do. It even affects what they look like and how they’re shaped.
The clouds of biting midges breeding in a marsh are going to affect how long an animal stops to graze on wetland greenery and how much of that greenery it takes.
Explosions of mosquitoes that follow a wet season are what drive larger herd animals to seek drier prairies and meadows, allowing a completely different set of animals and plants to surge.
Population booms of ticks and lice drive animals to practice mud-wallowing, social grooming, population splits and even mass migrations.
Flies are the entire reason zebras have stripes.
These are just a couple of examples, but basically the whole face of our planet looks the way it does because some of the tiniest animals are constantly pissing off the largest.
