Featuring @pennyvixen.bsky.social, @mikebrooks668.bsky.social, @julietk.bsky.social, @marinalostetter.bsky.social, @freyamarske.bsky.social, @everinamaxwell.bsky.social, @meganeokeefe.bsky.social, @cadwellturnbull.bsky.social, @czwrites.bsky.social, & a spotlight for @blueterraplane.bsky.social.

Presenting: The Queersar Not An Award for 2021! 10 (+1) examples of top-quality queer SFF. Brilliant fantasy cities, some great SFF romance, anti-Brexit Epic Fantasy, dark fantasy mystery, space opera, gonzo slipstream, a great spin-off with a particular spotlight on a throwback of the best sort.

We all like to dunk on NYT headlines but honestly please consider that this is very likely tongue wedged firmly and mockingly in cheek and actually very funny.

Book Review: Ode to the Half Broken by Suzanne Palmer. Traumatized but healing mechas and humans building community in a ‘cozy’ post-apocalyptic setting @klaxoncomms.com has the review at the NOAF blog for your Wednesday

If you're at Iridescence #Eastercon this weekend, stop by our bid table for a badge ribbon, a tiny koala, a Tim-Tam, and other great Brisbane swag including postcards, bookmarks, and stickers! Help fund our bid merch and parties by Pre-Supporting! #Brisbanein28 #Worldcon @easterconuk.bsky.social

I know there are some pen nerds in my feeds.

Delany's a genius. He's conceded less & less to the market as his career progressed, but if his work resonates w you it'll change the way you see the world. Never quite got Dhalgren, but Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Neveryon, & Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders did that for me.

Working through the second of these and it there are a couple of my selections that have prominent queer dude romance elements in them & in 2021 apparently any whiff of that requires a blurb comp to Red, White, & Royal Blue. One was "Ancillary Justice meets Red, White, & Royal Blue" I SHIT YOU NOT.

All but three (!) of the 1,651 refugees admitted into the United States in the three most recent months we have data are white South Africans. For comparison, in 2024, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees. It's an explicit white supremacist project. www.rpc.state.gov/documents/Re...

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

Our sun porch gets masses of sun so despite lots of wall space, we can't hang prints & paintings for fading reasons. So we have a collection of metal/ceramic/wooden sea creatures swimming on the big purple wall instead (not our colour choice but honestly has grown on me. Very 00s retro).

cosmic horror: does the ISS use Teams

My annual holy Easter video of a tūī filling his face with feijoas

Seems like it is a good Friday (womp womp) for Tuatara friends.

Tasks for this holiday weekend: - Read book I'm due to review - Write up 2021 not an award gay shit list. - Upgrade my age to a palindrome. - Eat chocolate.

With my law nerd hat on, pleased with Bishop to A-G. Expect he'll continue Collins' approach in that portfolio of by the book appointments and properly fulfill the law officer role. Not confident that a couple of other people who'd been mooted for the role would do so.

Toshiro Mifune driving his MG TD on the set of Yojimbo with his sword on the dash

With the start of a new fiscal year, 15 more local governments in Japan have started "partnership systems" to recognize relationships of LGBT couples in the absence of marriage equality, bringing the total count to (at least) 557 local governments, covering 93.5% of Japan's population! 🏳️‍🌈

YOU CAN'T EVEN BE "LEFT BEHIND BY AI"! If it goes the way they say it's going to go, the cost and difficulty of adoption DECREASES over time. If it doesn't go the way they say it's going to go, then you don't want to adopt anyway. THERE IS NO COST TO WAITING.

Oh hey, the PMSITAC report is out and the short version is 'let's take money from literally every other area of research in AoNZ to put into tech'. That's the plan. Underfund everything else *even more than it already is* over the next three years. 🧪

My university: "Copilot is Microsoft's AI-powered productivity service that uses large language models (LLMs) to help you create content, analyze information, summarize documents, and complete tasks more efficiently." Microsoft: LOL

Maybe Bluesky will get mad at me for saying this, but this is a bizarre headline because if you actually read the article it says the exact opposite. Please consider reading the whole article before doom-sharing the irresponsible headline.

Good blog post from my colleague Steven Price on the BSA jurisdiction thing. Steven knows the area of law and is intellectually even-handed to a fault. Well worth your time reading this if you want a fair, expert opinion on the matter. medialawjournal.co.nz/attempt-to-d...

a world without trans people has never existed and never will

I don't know if the BSA handled the comms on this as well as they could have but it's *incredibly obvious* from the statutory definition the BSA is *obliged to follow* that open access commercial livestreams probably come within the definition of "broadcast".

A slightly misleading post: This is for boosters, not primary vaccination recommendations. It's long been the case that regular boosters were not recommended for most healthy adults. There has been a further change in recommendations, but availability hasn't changed: newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/01/c...

The Supreme Court's "conversion therapy" decision today is indefensible on its own terms. A ton of medical regulations restrict speech on the basis of "viewpoint." Nobody thinks they're unconstitutional. This court just subjects pro-LGBTQ protections to special hostility. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Supreme Court did not strike down conversion therapy bans today. Not nationwide. Not in Colorado. Not anywhere. Here's what actually happened in Chiles v. Salazar—and why the coverage you're seeing serves the conservative legal movement more than it serves you.

I do want to highlight this. There's a thing where people who have takes we disagree with are painted as disinterested sealions with no person skin in the game. That's not the case here. & I don't think you'd know from 90% of the coverage of the SCOTUS case on here that cis gay men are also at risk

See also: SCOTUS decision season

One more point on the discourse du jour. MJS is a gay man, & - I RTFA to check this - Colorado's impugned statue *also protects against sexual orientation conversion practices*. So you'd have to believe he's endorsing conversion of his own younger self if you read his post as supporting conversion.

A big problem (and not just on Bluesky) is people being unwilling to admit that they misread something. It shouldn't be hard to say "My bad, I thought you meant something else" instead of doubling down.

The social media dynamic of "we are hurt and can't reach the people who hurt us so will instead aggressively attack someone who is visibly on the same side but worded a post suboptimally" very sadly remains undefeated.

I'm continually amazed at how many people on this platform still won't look at a bio, read more than one post in a thread, click an article link, or in any way seek context for what someone is saying

The Indian regime's anti-trans bill is now an Act. 'The President has signed the Trans Bill into an Act, despite thousands of letters from trans persons requesting not to grant assent to the Bill and instead send it back to the parliament.'

Excited for this panel tonight at BF. 🌈

So what I don't get about the Andy Weir blurt du jour (which actually appears to be 8 years old, resurfacing now with the advent of another blurt from him) is that it suggests really bad reading of really bad books.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” I think a lot about this Great Gatsby quote recently

Me in 2024. Today everybody on Twitter is screaming that Claude is blowing through its limits faster than ever. The subprime AI crisis begins…

Today, MSF is going public with something we've been fighting behind closed doors for months: Gilead will not sell us their new HIV drug, lenacapavir. The sticking point isn't even price, they just refuse to sell. Open letter linked + explainer 🧵1/ www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gilea...

Also too: April 1st runs for about 48 hours because time zones. Everyone else is tired of it before the USA even starts

Authors/publishers, send your 2026 fantasy debuts our way! The Crawford has an enviable record of recognising excellent work from publishers big and small.

Ah man these are so evocative. Instantly calls to mind the theme song before each episode - dramatic fantasy cello decades ahead of Game of Thrones. Wellington City Libraries had the whole thing in a battered box set of tapes & my brother & I must have got it out a half dozen times between us.

My job is planning public transport services, and every time a crisis generates free fares discourse, I think about the cost of free fares, and longingly think about what we could do if you gave us the same money and let us spend it on improving service quality

I don't think I've ever seen a government experience this much Finding Out in its first term. It's not just bad decisions plus bad luck, but a very specific kind of decisions where they trade away costs that they could blame on Labour for risks that are squarely blamed on them.

This is really cool - check it out, both SF award watchers generally and SWFA members intending to vote in particular!

One of the pieces of worldbuilding in Peter Hamilton's entertaining & also batshit implausible Night's Dawn trilogy that actually stuck with me was him postulating that if demand for power kept skyrocketing, even with clean electricity the waste heat from its use would cause climate change. Welp.

this is a lesson so many people need to learn you do not have to post about it! there are things in my life that I do not feel the need to share with the internet or justify to random strangers it’s fine! nothing exploded because I kept it to myself!

Can’t even have Spurs appoint Jermain Defoe as their interim manager. Because of Woking.