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This brings back memories of working at B&N on 82nd and Broadway, for sure.

My first Guardian Books cartoon for 2024

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There's a post going around Tumblr about how if you're post-menopausal and have bleeding, you should get it checked by your doctor. I brought some minor bleeding I'd had up in a doctor visit earlier this year, prompted by that post, and this week, after a biopsy, I found out I have cancer. It's early stage and the survival odds at 5 years are 99%. I have an oncologist appointment and we may have caught it early enough that surgery alone will be sufficient treatment (no radiation/chemo).

So that post may have saved my life and it may have made my treatment a lot easier too.

If you get into menopause and then start bleeding again, really, get your reproductive innards checked out. The life you save may be your own.

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The mixed feelings when a fanfic updates after almost a year, and

1. The style is so different that it could have been written by someone else, and

2. There are no hot sex scenes.

Yes, I know we should be grateful for fanfic writers, they don't owe us anything, and #writingishard. But I really miss those sex scenes.

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Anti-voting rhetoric will be the death of the left. Literally.

Not a single fucking Republican voted to protect roe. It was fucking overturned in the first place bc trump got three Supreme Court appointments.

Every fucking thing wrong in this country is almost certainly the result of Republicans being in power. In 2020, Texas cut half of the polling places in black neighborhoods, and doubled them in white ones, regardless of population. It was Republicans bitching about mail in voting, and constantly, constantly fearmonger about voter fraud. Literally, their platform is about making civil rights harder to practice.

Would you like to know why? It’s because Republican politicians know better than anyone that higher voter participation means higher republican loss.

But what do I see from the online left, champions of the oppressed?

“Voting doesn’t do anything, the parties are the same, the system is rigged, etc, etc”

Don’t sit here and tell me you give a fuck about marginalized people if you aren’t ready to march your ass to the voting booth and vote out the party actively stripping their rights away.

Protest, donate, community build, unionize, and vote, vote, vote.

By the time direct action is the only option, it will be too fucking late.

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To all restaurants: you need an online presence OTHER THAN Facebook. Like, something people can access without any account or login at all.

Also, that online presence should just show your menu. Not a PDF download, simply your menu, directly, no need to start an online ordering process.

I remain amazed how many ways, in 2022, places can fuck this up.

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Subpar Parks by Amber Share

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Happy Mother’s Day. (via whiskersnpurrs)

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The sound of heavy rain while you are in bed.

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Aw, twu wuv…

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Dead Mountain preview chapters

So, the new novel in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Nora Kelly (and Corrie Swanson) series is out in about a week. I ordered my copy from the Poisoned Pen because I want the collectible cards. (Sorry, guys, don't really care that it's an "autographed" first edition.) I used to be a B&N bookseller, so I know people who order from there or Amazon tend to receive the book on the release date, while I'll have to wait a week or two. Fortunately, Amazon has a sample available online that I can obsess over in the meantime.

Spoilers for the new book (and previous books in the series) ahead!

Chapter 1: It's late October. Two frat guys get stuck in the snow in the New Mexico mountains. They proceed to get drunk and stoned, crawl into a cave for shelter, and find human remains.

Chapter 2: She's back! My favorite character, Special Agent Corinne/Corrine Swanson, appears. (Has Hachette fired all their proofreaders? Come on, it's kind of essential that you figure out how the first name of your co-heroine is spelled.)

It appears that Corrie has spent the past few months on boring FBI assignments after the shit-show that wrapped up Diablo Mesa. I find the mention of debriefings and lie detector tests reassuring; I wondered how much she told her superiors about what happened. Apparently, she told them everything. Unfortunately, it looks like she's gotten screwed over again with regards to commendations, promotions, etc. because of the case's classified nature. Typical. (Can't FBI agents get commendations or decorations for classified work? It seems like Pendergast has a few of those in his jacket.)

Her boss now has a case for her, and introduces her to her new mentor, Agent Sharp. (RIP, Hale Morwood.) Corrie notices that his clothes and haircut are better than typical FBI issue. He's pretty quiet, has an accent she can't quite place, and has a reputation for being somewhat of a lone wolf. Hmm, reminds me of someone ...

Anyway, her boss assigns her the human-remains-in-the-mountains case, and Corrie and Sharp leave posthaste.

Just a small rant here. This chapter states Corrie's been at the Albuquerque FO for about a year. Excuse me, it's been ALMOST TWO YEARS. She started her assignment in ABQ in January 20xx. The meat of the story in Old Bones took place in May/June. The events of Scorpion's Tail took place three months later (fall of 20xx). Diablo Mesa took place six months after that (spring of the next year). Dead Mountain explicitly starts four months later, on Halloween. That's nearly two years. Her probationary period should almost be up already. Sometimes I wonder if the authors are deliberately messing with the timeline to keep Corrie in stasis, or whether they just can't be bothered with consistency.

Chapter 3: We begin with another inconsistency. We're told that Morwood was forced into a mentoring role by an "injury," but it was actually his interstitial lung disease.

Corrie learns a little more about the Manzano Mountains region and gets snarky about the "need" for hundreds of nuclear weapons. Sharp seems to appreciate the sarcasm.

We're introduced to a deputy for Torrance County, who reminds Corrie of her "friend," Sheriff Watts of Socorro County. She wonders what Watts is up to. This is interesting ... he asked her out in Diablo Mesa, and she pretty much accepted. It's now four months later, she obviously hasn't been too busy, and they haven't gone on that date yet? In fact, it doesn't even sound like she's really kept in touch with him. Maybe later chapters will clarify this situation and explain how in the world he's surviving with only one of his Colt Peacemakers.

The deputy seems decent enough, but the big kahuna himself, Sheriff Hawley, is yet another of the male LEOs that Corrie runs into all too often. Calls her "young lady" even after she's identified herself as FBI and refuses to leave the scene (which he's stomping all over without protective gear) until the MALE FBI agent threatens him. Sigh.

Side note: I got an email from Poisoned Pen, which refers to an "evil sheriff" in this novel. Does Hawley have something to do with the "Dead Mountain" cold case that Corrie and Nora are going to investigate? On the other hand, one Goodreads review says that the plotline with Nora, Skip, and the sheriff goes nowhere. Is he just evil for evil's sake, then?

Anyway, Corrie goes into the cave and sees the human remains. And there the preview abruptly ends.

I feel like there's a lot of unpack here, and we don't even know what's going on with Nora and her billionaire boyfriend!

As much as I bitch about continuity errors in these books (I guess you never stop being a copy editor) I almost always really enjoy them. I expect I'll devour Dead Mountain as fast as I can, give it a chance to digest, and then read it again for things I missed the first time. And I'll definitely login to watch Preston and Child's appearance at the Poisoned Pen on publication day.

Anyone who reads this, feel free to speculate on what might happen in the book. I have a feeling the next few weeks are going to drag ...

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what you need to understand about recommending a show to me is that no matter how much we both know I'll like it, I can't watch it until the Neurodivergence Department in my brain approves it. I don't know when that will be, and I don't have any more control over it than you do.

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not to be a nerd but it’s so crazy how he (Bernini) really did that from cold hard stone……. truly a spectacle, truly breathtaking, an honor to behold

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Reblog if you think a woman can be complete without children

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Ladies' night