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This was it. This was the week that America admitted America is going fascist – which is to say has gone fascist, i.e. has had its government seized by fascists with broad fascist support for imposing fascism which it is now doing with zeal, i.e. has an acute case of fulminant fascism.

I've been watching this bear down on us for a half a century, so it's slightly dizzying to finally have everybody else come into alignment. One of the basic exigencies of my life has been moving through the world being reasonably certain of a bunch of things that I knew the vast majority of my fellows thought were insane to believe. Over the last ten years, more and more people have been noticing, "what are we doing in this handbasket and where is it going?" but – as evidenced by the behavior of the DNC over the last year – it's taken the secret police gunning Americans down in the streets (since I started writing this: and throwing flashbang grenades at or into (reports vary) passing cars carrying little kids) for the greater liberal mass to come around.

Obviously, it would have been nicer for the realization It Could Happen Here to have not required It Happening Here to be the conclusive rebuttal of their pathological skepticism. But one of my favorite sayings is, "There's three kinds. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves," (Will Rogers) and this is why. Clearly America needed to piss on the electric fence for itself. I try to be philosophical about it.

I just felt, if only for myself and posterity, I should note this long-in-coming nation-wide realization has finally been attained.

I'm not getting too carried away, though. It's hard to be too jubilant when the problem that brought us here is still very much with us, by which I don't mean the fascism itself, I mean the terrible mentality on "my" "side" that causes that pathological skepticism and other catastrophic thinking faults that brought us to this pass and lead to the fascists getting away, quite literally, with murder.

olivermoss

Watch on YouTube

Great interview, a lot of fun. Does talk one plot point on Heated Rivalry if you are trying to avoid that. I've really liked WC's interviews, and it's always great when the interview is by and for people who know the canon and not like general night show or morning show stuff.

torachan

Recently Finished

Peril at the Exposition
Second in the Captain Jim and Lady Diana mystery series. I was disappointed to see that this one doesn't take place in India, so I hadn't jumped right on it after finishing the first, but my backlog of audiobooks was going down, so I decided to give it a go. It was fine. I'll probably read more in the series at the same pace, but it's also not really what I'm wanting in a mystery (and that was the same with the first one).

Deeds and Words
Another second book in a mystery series, though it seems like this is also the final book. It was also just all right.

Riot Baby
Set in a slightly more dystopic alternate reality, this tells the story of a girl with psychic powers and her brother, who was born after the LA riots, thus being nicknamed Riot Baby, in alternating POVs. I liked this, but it felt like the two POVs weren't really well integrated.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
In the late 1800s England, a man gets a mysterious watch that saves him from a bomb exploding, and then is tasked with finding out if the watchmaker, a Japanese man who can remember the future, is the one who set the bomb. I didn't much like this at all. The first half or more was extremely boring, and then once the action seemed to finally get going, the characters got worse and worse, especially the lone female character, who seems to exist only as a plot device to make everything horrible for the men.

Little Monsters vol. 1-2
Two volume comic series about child vampires living in an empty city after an apocalypse. I liked it all right. The ending was good.

Sakura, Saku vol. 8

siderea

This is blackly hilarious and absolutely worth a read.

Leftist journalist Laura Jedeed showed up at an ICE recruiting events to do scope it out and write about what she found. What happened next is... eye widening.

2026 Jan 13: Slate: "You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof." [Paywall defeater] by Laura Jedeed:

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.

[...]

I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.

“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”

As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.

And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”

The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.

Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.

Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Click through to read the whole thing.

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/16/the-charm-such-as-it-is-of-the-charmera/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59114

Kodak did a brisk business over the holidays with their meme camera, the Charmera, which is tiny enough to fit on a key chain and takes deeply lofi photos, especially in low light. But it cost $30 and as it happens I do need a keychain, so I thought I would try one out and see what I thought.

Inasmuch as every camera must be inaugurated with a picture of a cat, here is the very first photo out of the camera:

And here is a picture of me, with said camera, in my bathroom mirror.

These pictures are pretty terrible! But admittedly they are also inside my house where the lighting is not great. What happens when we go outside?

Nope, still pretty terrible.

Which is to be expected, as this thing comes with a 1.6 megapixel sensor (1440×1080), and the sensor itself is likely the size of a pinhead. You’re not taking pictures with this camera for high fidelity. You’re taking them for glitchy lo-res fun, in as good of lighting as you can get. This also had video, at the same resolution, but you know what, I’m not even going to bother.

In addition to the primary color mode the Charmera has other “fun” modes including ones that add frame and goofy pixel art to your picture, which, you know, okay, why not. You need to bring along your own micro memory card, and it’s a real pain in the ass to get it in, so you will probably never take it out (you can connect it to your computer via USB, which is also how it’s charged), but once it’s in you can take effectively infinite number of pictures because the individual image files are so small.

The UI is not great, the little screen on the back of the camera is too tiny to be of much use, and quite honestly I’m not sure what the use case of this thing is, other than to have it, and possibly give it to an 8-year-old so they can run around taking pictures without running the risk of them damaging anything valuable, like your phone or a real camera.

But, I mean, as long as you know all that going in, yeah, it’s kind of fun. And for $30(ish) bucks, not a huge outlay for trendily pixellated photos. I’ve made worse purchases recently.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/16/the-charm-such-as-it-is-of-the-charmera/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59114

languagehat_feed

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/sarah-thomasons-online-papers/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19111

Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows:

It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana Salish) are in Festschrifts and conference preprints and other not-widely-distributed volumes. So I just revised my website for the first time since 2012 (!!) (O.K., I admit it, I’m lazy) and added (almost) all the papers, plus a few additional non-Salish papers, like the one on editing Language (2020) and the autobiographical article (2022).

Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I followed the link to her Home Page and thence to Sarah Thomason’s Online Papers; even if you’re not interested in Salishan you might enjoy “On the ?joys? of editing Language“:

My seven years as editor involved an immense amount of paper. Those were still the dark ages before submissions, referee reports, and other official journal communications were all handled electronically. All the routine correspondence went into the LSA archives long ago, but copies of most of the interesting non-routine correspondence remain in my personal files: complaints about editorial bias, correspondence with authors who tried to engage in duplicate publication, the three lawsuits threatened by disgruntled book authors who hated the published reviews of their books, correspondence with authors who wouldn’t check their data properly, and miscellaneous complaints about this and that. […]

I will report on some of the lessons I learned in my editing days, focusing on five main areas: referees and referee reports (§2); how to interact effectively with journal editors (§3); how to handle data responsibly (§4); the sin of attempted duplicate publication (§5); and book reviews, book reviewers, and threatened lawsuits (§6).

I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!

https://languagehat.com/sarah-thomasons-online-papers/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19111

cosmolinguist

I did not expect that being lucky enough to have stable housing in my 40s would mean that I would spend it helping other fortysomething neurospicy queers get out of marriages gone bad.

We have me the failed foster (successful adoption! angelofthenorth always insisted on correcting me when I call myself this, heh), then P, now her.

It's ridiculously heartwarming seeing them both flourish and become more comfortable and themselves. (I imagine I must have too, but I can't see that and I have the complication of transition too old photos of me now look weird for the same reason old photos of my dad do: no beard!).)

mrissa

P.F. Chisholm, A Suspicion of Silver. Ninth in its mystery series, set late in the reign of Elizabeth I/in the middle of when James I and VI was still just James VI. I don't recommend starting it here, because there was a moment when I wailed, "no, not [name]!" when you won't have a very strong sense of that character from just this book. Pretty satisfying for where it is in its series, though, still enjoying. Especially as they have returned to the north, which I like much better.

Joan Coggin, Who Killed the Curate?. A light British mid-century mystery, first in its series and I'm looking forward to reading more. If you were asked to predict what a book published in 1944 with this title would be like, you would have this book absolutely bang on the nose, so if you read that title and went "ooh fun," go get it, and if you read that title and thought "oh gawd not another of those," you're not wrong either. I am very much in the "ooh fun" camp.

Matt Collins with Roo Lewis, Forest: A Journey Through Wild and Magnificent Landscapes. Photos and essays about forests, not entirely aided by its printer printing it a little toward the sepia throughout. Still a relaxing book if you are a Nice Books About Nice Trees fan, which I am.

John Darnielle, This Year: A Book of Days (365 Songs Annotated). When I first saw John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats live, I recognized him. I don't mean that I knew him before, I mean that I taught a lot of people like him physics labs once upon a time: people who had seen a lot of shit and now would like to learn some nice things about quantum mechanics please. Anyway this book was fun and interesting and confirmed that Darnielle is exactly who you'd think he was from listening to the Mountain Goats all this time.

Nadia Davids, Cape Fever. A short mildly speculative novel about a servant girl in Cape Town navigating life with a controlling and unpleasant employer. Beautifully written and gentle in places you might not have thought possible. Looking forward to whatever else Davids does.

Djuna, Counterweight. Weird space elevator novella (novel? very short one if so) in a highly corporate Ruritanian world with strong Korean cultural influences (no surprise as this is in translation from Korean). I think this slipped by a lot of SFF people and maybe shouldn't have.

Margaret Frazer, This World's Eternity. Kindle. I continue to dislike the short stories that result from Frazer trying to write Shakespeare's version of historical figures rather than what she thinks they would actually have been like. Does that mean I'll stop reading these? Hmm, I think there's only one left.

Drew Harvell, The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life. If you like the subgenre There's Weird Stuff In The Ocean, which I do, this is a really good one of those. Gosh is there weird stuff in the ocean. Very satisfying.

Rupert Latimer, Murder After Christmas. Another light British murder mystery from 1944, another that is basically exactly what you think it is. What a shame he didn't have the chance to write a lot more.

Wen-Yi Lee, When They Burned the Butterfly. Gritty and compelling, small gods and teenage girl gangs in 1970s Singapore. Singular and great. Highly recommended.

Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, eds., We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. There's some really lovely stuff in here, and a wide variety of voices. Basically this is what you would want this kind of anthology to be.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. I don't pick your subtitles, authors. You and your editors are doing that. So when you claim to be a history of sex and Christianity...that is an expectation you have set. And when you don't include the Copts or the Nestorians or nearly anything about the Greek or Russian Orthodox folks and then you get to the 18th and 19th centuries and sail past the Shakers and the free love Christian communes...it is not my fault that I grumble that your book is in no way a history of sex and Christianity, you're the one that claimed it was that and then really wanted to do a history of semi-normative Western Christian sex among dominant populations. What a disappointment.

Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells and The Lost Words (reread). I accidentally got both of these instead of just one, but they're both brief and poetic about nature vocabulary, a good time without being a big commitment.

Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. This is one of those broad-concept pieces of nonfiction, with burial mounds but also mycorrhizal networks. MacFarlane's prose is always readable, and this is a good time.

David Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and At Peace, 1670-1840. And again: I did not choose your subtitle, neighbor. So when you claim that your history goes through 1840...and then everything after 1796 is packed into a really brief epilogue...and I mean, what could have happened to the Cherokees after 1796 but before 1840, surely it couldn't be [checks notes] oh, one of the major events in their history as a people, sure, no, what difference could that make. Seriously, I absolutely get not wanting to write about the Trail of Tears. But then don't tell people you're writing about the Trail of Tears. Honestly, 1670-1800, who could quibble with that. But in this compressed epilogue there are paragraphs admonishing us not to forget about...people we have not learned about in this book and will have some trouble learning about elsewhere because Cherokee histories are not thick on the ground. Not as disappointing as the MacCulloch, but still disappointing.

Tim Palmer, The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. I found this to be a comfort read, which I think a lot of people won't if they haven't already gone through things like disproving hidden variables as a source of quantum uncertainty. But it'll still be interesting--maybe more so--and the stuff he worked on about climate physics is great.

Henry Reece, The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic. If you want a general history, that's the Alice Hunt book I read last fortnight. This is a more specifically focused work about the last approximately two years, the bit between Cromwell's death and the Restoration. Also really well done, also interesting, but doing a different thing. You'll probably get more out of this if you have a solid grasp on the general shape of the period first.

Randy Ribay, The Reckoning of Roku. As regular readers can attest, I mostly don't read media tie-ins--mostly just not interested. But F.C. Yee's Avatar: the Last Airbender work was really good, so I thought, all right, why not give their next author a chance. I'm glad I did. This is a fun YA fantasy novel that would probably work even if you didn't know the Avatar universe but will be even better if you do.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxie's Penalty. Fourth in a series of mysteries, but it's written so that you could easily start here. Well-written, well-plotted, generally enjoyable. I was thinking of rereading the earlier volumes of the series, and I'm now more, not less, motivated to do so.

Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below. I feel like the cover of this was attempting to sell it as a cozy. It is not a cozy. It is a fantasy novel that is centered on books and bookshops, but it is about as cozy as, oh, say, Ink Blood Sister Scribe in that direction. And this is good, not everything with books in it is drama-free, look at our current lives for example. Sometimes it's nice to have a fantasy adventure that acknowledges the importance of story in our lives, and this is one of those times.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lives of Bitter Rain. This is not a novella. It is a set of vignettes of backstory from a particular character in this series. It does not hang together except that, sure, I'm willing to buy that these things happened in this order. I like this series--it was not unpleasant reading--but do not go in expecting more than what it is.

Iida Turpeinen, Beasts of the Sea. A slim novel in translation from Finnish, spanning several eras of attitudes toward natural history in general and the Steller's sea cow in specific. Vivid and moving.

Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. The nation in question is the US, in case you were wondering. This was a generally quite good book about the middle of the 19th century in the US, except of course that that's a pretty big and eventful topic, so all sorts of things are going to have to get left out. But she did her very best to hit the high spots culturally as well as politically, so overall it was the most satisfying bug crusher I've read so far this year.

glinda

This week I've been working on making a good start to one of my resolutions, to start a new recipe notebook. (When I first started learning to cook in an organised fashion, while I was going my post-grad, I took a nice notebook I had and wrote down all my succesful recipes in it. It's a multi-coloured decade's worth of recipes that I refer to regularly even now that I'm a vegetarian and many of the recipes aren't one's I'd ever cook now.) I've been meaning to start a new one for a few years now, but never got round to it, because, well I had my tablet and most recipes I was cooking that weren't in actual cookbooks were on the internet and it was just easier to look them up, but it's really come home to me in the last year when I've gone to look something up and it's just gone. (Not even random people's food blogs, but places I'd expect things to be like the guardian or the good food magazine page.) So I've started in on recipes from my 'cook new recipes' challenges from the past few years, and a significant percentage of them are lost to link rot and paywalls.

But the other thing I've noticed - and part of what makes me want to keep the project up - is that my handwriting is really rusty. I've had to make fairly heavy usage of my tippex mouse because I keep missing letters out of words, not even in the analogue version of typos just I'm so out of practice of writing by hand that I'm half-forgetting how to form the letters properly. I used to have a problem with missing out letters when I wrote essays because I was writing so fast to keep up with my brain - the main reason I switched to typing, as it's much easier to keep up with the speed of thought/ideas that way - but I'm just copying out recipes here. Though on the plus-side, forcing myself to slow down, to form the letters properly is making it a more meditive experience than I expected it to be.

I've always prided myself on having nice handwriting. Ever since we did a unit on the Victorians and spent that whole term perfecting copperplate script I've written a minorly adapted version of that. (I adjusted some letters to be more easily read by modern eyes, so I wouldn't get marked down for mis-spelling words because my teachers that didn't recognise my old-fashioned letters.) All through secondary and university my preferred method of studying was to make notes and the rewrite my notes and I still have piles of notebooks about the place in neat multi-coloured copperplate. So it's both weird and minorly upsetting when my handwriting isn't neat despite my best efforts. No doubt with regular practice it'll improve but at the moment I'm falling a low way short of my own high standards for my handwriting.

It's a ridiculous thing to be having feelings about, I am aware, but nonetheless, I am having them. My handwriting isn't as nice as it used to be - less smooth, more effort for less pleasing results - and it annoys me. I'm feeling a little rusty here, it's a thing.

Current Music: Radio 3 - Unclassified

violsva

In the spirit of enjoying the process more than the product, I've been picking up an old hobby this month: collecting alphabets.

I was feeling a bit nostalgic for language learning in December, and I thought that in January I might study Arabic or Mandarin, since I already have textbooks for those, and maybe I should try to keep up my French ... and then I watched Kpop Demon Hunters.

In university I taught myself Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, because it's really cool. It was invented by King Sejong in 1443 specifically so that peasants could learn to read without having to learn Chinese characters.

한글 (Hangeul) doesn't look like an alphabet if you're used to western ones, but each of the character blocks is actually made up of separable letters. So (simplification) ㅂ is b or p, and 비빔밥 is bibimbap, and you can see ㅂ in four places in that word, three times at the beginning of a syllable (upper left) and once at the end.

The thing is, my goal is not actually to learn Korean. If I wanted to be able to have a conversation or watch a movie in Korean, I would need to take a class so I could actually hear it spoken and make sure I was pronouncing the sounds correctly and practice using it with real human beings. It's awkward having both an interest in languages and social anxiety.

If I had done that in university, I might have remembered the alphabet over the intervening 15 years, instead of forgetting 90% of it because all I used it for is sounding out signs.

But I like being able to sound out words, even if I never pick up the vocabulary properly. It makes me feel like I am part of a multicultural society. So I got a Korean textbook from the library, and I'm going through it focusing on learning to read, but also finding out interesting things about Korean language and culture as I go. (Two sets of numbers!)

I thought I still had Korean flashcards I'd made in university, but it turns out they're actually from when I tried to learn Arabic. When I think I've gotten what I can from this book maybe I'll try Arabic again.

About this time last year I read a book on statistics and then one on combinatorics, making notes and doing the math exercises. They didn't stick as much as I hoped they would, but I enjoyed studying them anyway.

tinny

This set took me much longer than it should have, considering this is my fave pairing right now. But once I sat down to finish it, I had fun again! It's for round 04 at ships20in20.

Enjoy!

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