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Internet lore says that everyone with a cat is required to post photos regularly. So, here is Samurai deciding that my dresser drawer is exactly the right size to be a cat bed.

Join us May 15-17 in Yellow Springs for the Sun & Moon Poetry Festival, including a keynote reading/workshop by @geoffrey-landis.bsky.social, a scientist who's won the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction and Rhysling award (3x) for poetry. Register at www.ohiopoetryassn.org/sun-moon-fes...

CHRISTINA KOCH GREETING HER DOG AFTER RETURNING FROM THE MOON IM GONNA CRYYY 😭😭😭

And this is why I’m a dog person !

Image of the Earth from Artemis-II. www.nasa.gov/wp-content/u... Staring at this image, I just realized— the Earth isn’t illuminated by the sun in this image. This image was taken by moonlight! The sun is BEHIND the Earth here. You can see a tiny crescent of sunlit atmosphere on the bottom right.

*I can remember reading this as a youngster and being deeply impressed with what a dark, biting, science-fictional insight this was

Come to Cleveland ConCoction this weekend in Aurora, Ohio! You'll get to see ME, and other local cosplayers, authors, performers, and artists. https://www.clevelandconcoction.org/

Since others have been posting their nominations, I’ll announce that two of my poems made the nominations for the SFPA Rhysling Awards: “Complex Alice in the Riding Hood,” from This Exquisite Topology, and “‘Oumuamua,” from Analog.

An article by Paul Gilster that quotes some of my work on how to use the solar gravitational lens to image an exoplanet. www.centauri-dreams.org/2026/02/17/p...

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Triangulation: Bad Romance closes to submissions TOMORROW. Get your trash couples in spec fic into my grubby little hands: www.parsecink.org/submissions

This year the Hugos and the Nebulas are open to nominations for best SF and fantasy poem (also the Rhyslings). If anybody's interested, I had 3 SF/fantasy poems out in 2025: “’Oumuamua”, "Complex Alice” and “Dark (matter) Angels". Anybody who wants to see them, message me @laworldcon.bsky.social

Just went out for a nice drive through the lake-effect snow, and completed the traditional Thanksgiving listening of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” (Later maybe we’ll do “City of New Orleans.”) Hope your thanksgiving is going well, for those who celebrate.

For those interested, I just got interviewed by Ian Long about work I did (quite a shile back) about resource utilization on the moon, for the YouTube series Anthrofuturism www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1rP...

YES THIS. If you are one of the "all is lost" people please feel free not to say so in the comments of my posts, it'll save me the two seconds it takes to "hide for everyone" your comments. All is not lost. All is never lost. I prefer not to have you infecting others with your doomerism in my space.

I stand with the Pope on this one. apnews.com/article/pope...

The lie just won't stop spreading.

Google appears to have blocked AI search results for the query “does trump show signs of dementia” as well as other questions about his mental acuity, even though it will show AI results for similar searches about other presidents.

Authors: if you get an email invite from the Greater Hopewell Book Club, it's a scam: it charges an appearance fee (which it misleadingly describes as an honorarium) of $150. (If this reminds you of other AI-generated solicitations you've rec'd recently, that's not a coincidence)

But even if something lies to you "only" 15% of the time, it's not helpful, it's not saving you time, it's not making you smarter, it's just lying to you. That's more work. If your research assistant lied to you 15% of the time you would no longer work with them.

Barred owl in our tree last week.

ICE is essentially disappearing people. “The Ice official told me they are under no obligation to tell the family or the attorneys of the detainees that they have been apprehended, or that they’ve been moved to another state, to another facility, or that they’ve been deported.”

Confluence 2025 will be taking place July 25-27, 2025 with GOH @catrambo.bsky.social and Featured Music Guest Clearly Guilty! Register: www.confluence-sff.org. Discounted registration closes July 11. Don't forget to pre-order your 2025 Confluence t-shirt! confluence-sff.org/t-shirt

My understanding is SF/F venues still generally do not have submission fees, and also generally pay better than most other literary venues, so let's hear it for genre outlets always having kept their eye on the bottom line lithub.com/the-rise-of-...

RFK Jr. ordered the NIH’s Integrated Research Facility in Frederick to stop all research on serious infectious diseases yesterday at 5:00 PM. They study pathogens like Ebola there. You may be familiar with it from The Hot Zone. www.wired.com/story/hhs-ni...

Ooh! NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew by asteroid Donaldjohanson yesterday. They just released the images. Look at that cool space potato! 🔭🧪🥔 science.nasa.gov/image-articl...

A Harvard political scientist studied change movements around the world and found that 3.5 percent of a population taking to the streets can demand redress from a government and achieve political change. That’s 12 million Americans.

Mary Turzillo will be reading this Sunday as part of the Speculative Sunday Poetry Reading Series, hosted by Akua Lezli Hope. Free on Zoom -- see evenbrite for tickets: www.eventbrite.com/e/starburst-...

...and Samurai

Cat pics.