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When the target world proves too inhospitable for colonization, colonists make a desperate bid to return to Earth on a failing starship.

Disgraced Return of The Kap’s Needle by Renan Bernardo

Tactics talk!

Jun. 16th, 2025 17:35
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[personal profile] sabotabby
Standard disclaimer: I am not involved in any of this. Discussions of protest tactics are purely speculative; this is not legal advice, and if you commit an actual crime, don't post about it.
 
Courtesy of a friend who may identify themselves if they choose (thank you!) I read this article in Mother Jones about the No Sleep For ICE movement and can't help constrasting it with the #NoKings protest. Not that I'd want to disparage the latter—I think it's awesome that people did it!—but the former is an example of the kinds of tactics that we increasingly need to see.

I have a number of issues with protest marches, especially in North America. We on the left tend towards reification of historical protest movements without ever analyzing what made them effective (or not). A good example locally is the Days of Action, a series of rolling one-day strikes against the extremist right-wing government of Mike Harris in 1996. These were a resounding failure. Mike Harris and his regime steamrolled over the labour movement in Ontario, which never recovered, and despite being directly responsible for a number of deaths, continues to enrich himself by running gulags for seniors. However, these protests were loud, colourful, and most importantly, made people feel like they were Doing Something. Again—it's important to make people feel like they are Doing Something, that is how movements get built. But when a new far-right regime was elected in Ontario, the entire strategy of the labour movement pivoted to re-enact a protest movement that had been an abject failure, and so we lost again, repeatedly and even harder. 

I had the same issue with Occupy, where what had been a successful tactic in Egypt and New York was exported around the world, without regard to local conditions. It resulted in one baffling morning spent wandering the Toronto encampment, where a lone speaker used the People's Mic to communicate with five comrades. The aesthetics of protest triumphed over the old-fashioned idea that protest ought to accomplish something.

Now we are seeing LARPing of the kind of mass demos that have been happening since the 1960s, most of them failures, as the authorities are quite competent in curtailing this kind of activism, either by assassinating political opponents, kettling demonstrators, or conducting mass surveillance to be used in future disappearances. The great success of #NoKings is the theoretical embarrassment for Trump of seeing his own sad, empty birthday parade dwarfed by crowds in nearly every American city and town. To be clear—this is a success, as Trump cares a great deal about crowd numbers. But this is a regime immune to reality and shame, and entirely capable of generating AI slop to convince the death cult members that what they saw with their own eyes wasn't true.

Which is to say: It's good, it's useful, but now the tactics need to change.

To contrast, No Sleep is very targeted in its strategy and goals. Let's be clear: Every employee of ICE is a human trafficker. They should not be allowed to return to their homes and communities after a day's work, because that day's work is Nazi shit. Targeting them where they live and sleep is critical. It reminds us that these are not normal people who are doing a job, but instruments of a police state who are conducting activities that are unreservedly evil and socially unacceptable. It is a reminder both to them and anyone who cooperates with the Trump regime that, in fact, "just following orders" is famously not a defence at the Hague. Most importantly, though, it introduces friction between the regime's aims and its outcomes, rendering it less effective in kidnapping and disappearing people.

I think we are all thinking: "I am exhausted. I can't fight everything all at once. Where are my energies best spent?" At least, I'm thinking that. This is deliberate; this is flooding the zone, making the laundry list of bad things come so fast and furious that opponents don't have time to recover from one fight before we're thrown into another. It's very tempting to get enmeshed in weekend street demos—for one thing, for those of us who work, they can be done on the weekend—but I would encourage everyone to participate in them with an eye to what they're useful for and what they're not useful for. Remember that surveillance will be gathered on you no matter how careful you are. If you or your comrades get arrested, movement resources will need to be directed towards your defence (and you will be dragged through hell because even if you did nothing wrong, the point of charges is to destroy your employment, finances, and relationships). Stay on the lookout for smaller, more agile actions that can add friction, rather than big showy events. Don't get caught up in violence vs. nonviolence discourse, or crowd numbers.

The answer to "where are my energies best spent" is always, "whatever you can do," which for me tends to be above-ground, legal actions on the weekends. This has different significance locally because our supposedly socialist mayor who used to go to protests passed a protest ban, so imo all protest energies in Toronto ought to at least focus a little on breaking this ban so that we can all get our Charter rights back. But this may not be the conditions where you are.

Also stop using the Hey Ho chant. It reminds me of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves but instead of marching over a log, they're walking headfirst into a police baton.
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Many supplements and adventures for Troika!, the acid-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Melsonian Arts Council.

Bundle of Holding: Troika Warehouse

Clarke Award Finalists 2001

Jun. 16th, 2025 09:48
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2001: Labour narrowly wins a second overwhelming victory, Simon Darcount finds his calling, and Jeffrey Archer distracts people from that time he was accused of stealing three suits.

Poll #33257 Clarke Award Finalists 2001
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58


Which 2001 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
39 (67.2%)

Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
24 (41.4%)

Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod
17 (29.3%)

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
28 (48.3%)

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
18 (31.0%)

Salt by Adam Roberts
4 (6.9%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2001 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Salt by Adam Roberts

Books Received, June 7 to June 13

Jun. 14th, 2025 09:03
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Ten books new to me: 4.5 fantasy, 1 horror, 1 mystery, 3.5 science fiction, of which only two are identified as series.

Books Received, June 7 to June 13



Poll #33251 Books Received, June 7 to June 13
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews (March 2026)
20 (37.7%)

The Swan’s Daughter: A Possibly Doomed Love Story by Roshani Chokshi (January 2026)
13 (24.5%)

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett, and Craig Laurance Gidney (June 2025)
27 (50.9%)

The Storm by Rachel Hawkins (January2026)
4 (7.5%)

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (September 2025)
30 (56.6%)

Red Empire by Jonathan Maberry (March 2026)
3 (5.7%)

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O’Keefe (June 2025)
14 (26.4%)

The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts by Vanessa Ricci-Thode (April 2024)
14 (26.4%)

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (January 2026)
6 (11.3%)

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 2025)
25 (47.2%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
34 (64.2%)

"dust in the wind" my entire ass

Jun. 13th, 2025 21:49
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Got my orthotics today. My foot still hurts. This is taking too long to sort itself out and I wish to register a complaint.

***

Lord Brock has figured out what time steroid dosing happens and has started reminding me about it because he knows he'll get treats immediately after. He still hates getting medicated, but he hates it so much less than the gabapentin (I think it tasted worse) that he will almost barely tolerate it and then happily snarffle up the treats once the dosing part is done with.

***

Roof repairs unlocked. Dude also does the kind of work needed for the stairs so he's going to give me a quote for that as well. AND he thinks he can work with his plumber to drop the sump pump into the floor properly so it takes up less space and won't leave an open water feature in the room. He send me some links with examples of what he wants to do, and honestly it would be a huge improvement.

***

Project raccoon did NOT go as originally planned. Original contractor had said that the stairs would just flip up so I could clean underneath them. No, not so much.

The problem is that the wooden stairs are basically a triangle set in a sunken concrete hole. The back/top of the stairs is supported by a piece of wood in the shape of a T. To get under them you have to pull the whole thing towards the interior door to make room behind the triangle to flip it up on it's back. Only the T isn't solid enough, when I tried it the bottom of the wood stayed in the same spot while the top cracked and splintered. I was able to climb to the top and kind of kick the T forward but not far enough to make room to flip it. So I could stand there and hold the stairs up, because they're not heavy, but I couldn't get under it at the same time.

Yesterday and today daughter came over to work on the yard, and this afternoon the ex-housemate & their wife dropped by to pick up some government forms that had been delivered to the house. So the four of us picked up the stairs bodily and moved them out of the staircase. The ex-housemate has anosmia, so they volunteered to shovel up the very very decayed raccoon. Garbage day isn't for another two weeks so we just dumped him out by the railroad tracks and covered him with dirt. And then shovelled up the accumulated mud and vermin that had collected under the stairs and dropped it in the same spot.

It was so gross, y'all. So gross. But it's out of my basement doorway now and it's in a spot where it will be unlikely to bother anybody except the occasional passing coyote.

The daughter and I spent the next three hours digging the drainage pit. I found the sand layer I was hoping for, and then underneath that (about four feet down) is a layer of a broken shist which I think will work even better. We have probably about 80% of the trench dug out - one more day should be enough to finish if off. Then I'll line it with cinderblocks and start filling it in with rocks. The trench is probably four times as big as I'll need to be in any normal year, but since 100-year storms are coming every 10 years now (and probably every 2 by the time I ever leave this house) it seems like a good investment of labour.

Entertainment was provided by a juvenile robin that realized all that turned earth was a worm goldmine and got increasingly braver about getting close enough to us to grab them as the day progressed.

Then we ate our own weight in pizza.

Needless to say, every part of me hurts after two days of digging, so I'm taking tomorrow off doing any more building/fixing things. Chores only. And I might check with the local massage clinic to see if they have a free spot because I know I'm going to feel like somebody worked me over with my own shovel.

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The embittered Martian aerialist and the nonconformist live a thousand-plus years apart, in different solar systems. What, then, connects them?

A Rebel’s History of Mars by Nadia Afifi

podcast friday

Jun. 13th, 2025 07:11
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[personal profile] sabotabby
I dunno, why not make yourself more anxious this week. It Could Happen Here has the ability to send James Stout, an experienced war journalist, to LA to cover the uprising against ICE kidnappings. There's a lot of coverage in today's episode, which I'm currently listening to, but for detailed reporting, listen to "On the Ground in LA."

The scale of the so-called riots will surprise you—they surprised me, and I've been to LA. It's a very big city and unlike during the wildfires, very little of it is actually on fire. The uprisings, which are direct responses to people's families, neighbours, and colleagues being kidnapped by an out-of-control paramilitary organization, are actually only a few thousand people. Which is not to denigrate the bravery of those people—quite the opposite!—but to poke holes in the regime's propaganda.

P.S. If you are going to a protest this weekend, please ignore that "non-violent wave" thing and other similar memes going around. It is an op. If violence erupts and you do not want to be involved, don't sit down. Get out of there. I do not want to see a generation of young protestors with traumatic brain injuries, please. Also avoid bridges (don't let yourself get kettled or arrested en masse), and if you get teargassed, use water, not milk or anything else. Stay safe, I love you.
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Very nice and punctual but they've basically learned nothing in the year they've worked at the theatre. Not where to stand, not which row is which, or the general location of a given seat. The last two really matter during reserved seating shows. Whatever side that usher is on is going to have lines, and people may end up in the wrong seats.

So I was discussing the situation with my boss and I said my current approach was that each shift would be to pick one thing that usher does not know, and do my best to ensure they know it by the end of the shift. Last shift was "where to stand", for example. My reward is, I think, that usher is now _my_ special project who I will be working with whenever I HM.

I did assure my boss I do remember a previous HM who grilled ushers on seat location and would ding them a quarter hour for minor uniform infractions and that I wasn't going to use them as a model. Well, I do, but only in the sense of asking myself if the way I want to handle something is how that person would, and if it is, I do something else.
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An artisanal cheesemaker's attempt to save her precious cheese cave lands her in the middle of an interplanetary crisis.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann LeBlanc
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Have never worked a show run by human golden retrievers...
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Tales of dissidents, dissenters, and iconoclasts taking on the status quo...

Five SFF Books About Oddballs Resisting Conformity

Reading Wednesday

Jun. 11th, 2025 07:23
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Just finished: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls, I don't have tons to say about this comic—it'll take you maybe an hour to read if that, and it's really cute and fun, and then you read the context around it and it's quite moving and beautiful as well. It's basically a language revitalization project wrapped up in a pew-pew-pew space opera story. It's cool that this exists and I want there to be more of it.

Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot. Listen, cozy horror and other cozy authors! I will make you a deal. You get one (1) scene where the asexual protagonist comes out to their appropriately diverse love interest and they talk about their sexuality and consent in a mature, healthy way, infused with Tumblr therapyspeak, and agree to just hold hands or whatever. In exchange, I want y'all to try excise or subvert toxic tropes like having your main human antagonist being a woman who is haunted by a ghost no one else can see and locked up in a mental institution for 25 years, who has no agency at all, and who at the end realizes the error of her ways and is...cut loose to just be homeless and wander forever, I guess????

Like, aesthetically, I hate cozy. I fucking hate it. I try really hard to not judge the taste of people who like it, because intellectually I get the appeal and there's nothing wrong with liking what you like, but it's very much not for me. And when I have to read and rate a cozy book, I try to keep the ideal reader in mind, not me, a grim and cynical person who likes messy characters and tension in my storytelling. I think there are some cozy, or cozy-adjacent books that are done well (Regency and Regency+magic does low-stakes, mostly good characters in ways that I enjoy, for example) and I don't want to judge the entire subgenre either.

But I do think that there's a tendency for specifically cozy fiction to use didactic storytelling (casts include one of everyone and/or a lot of twofer characters, but these identities tend to be very shallowly written except for where they reflect the author's, conflicts are easily resolved by talking things out, good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour is punished or reformed, discussions about emotion or sexuality are always direct and never in conflict). So if you are going to write a book that includes, for example, instructions for the reader on how to navigate a relationship with an ace person, or how to approach therapy for a mental illness, I'm going to also need you to examine your work for unintentional messaging in a way that I wouldn't necessarily do if you're writing, say, Gothic horror where the protagonist can't decide whether she wants the vampire to eat her or fuck her. 

Which is to say that in a world where we get to see multiple Zoom therapy sessions, I do not buy that a mental institution merely drugs a character and does not attempt to help her heal at all. I think that sets up a dichotomy between Good Mental Illness (you know, the kind that makes you pretty and kinda tragic) and Bad Mental Illness (where you get your mess all over other people/try to burn down the family house) that is not good or wholesome at all.

Also, the climactic battle at the end was a huge WTF.

If you, like me, would like to join in on Cozy Horror Discourse multiple years after it was live, here are some links I appreciated:

The Material Basis of Cozy Horror by Moreau Vazh
In Praise of Discomfort by Simon O'Neill

Currently reading: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one starts with a robot valet murdering his master and not knowing why he did it, so, promising beginning. Humanity increasingly relies on robots to do everything, and as a result, is dying out. Charles, the valet in question, doesn't know what to do without explicit orders, and so he reports to Diagnostics, only to find that robot repairs are backed up due to funding cuts that have eliminated the entire human staff. Also he may have developed a Protagonist Virus that gives him agency and self-awareness, which he very much doesn't want.

The voice in this is great—the first two chapters are basically the robots navigating their way through the murder without being able to deviate from their programming, and it's bitingly satirical and very funny. I'm rather enjoying this.
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The sudden, shocking, return of Shockwave Reader. Will the living envy the dead?

From This Day Forward by John Brunner

Pro-tip

Jun. 9th, 2025 19:40
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 They are going to beat you, and eventually kill you, regardless of whether your protest is violent or non-violent.
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The 2023 Second Edition corebook, TECHNOFANTASY, and more

Bundle of Holding: Fantasy AGE 2E
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No rules, no bureaucracy, just some randos messing around with the past, present, and future.

Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale
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