"Wait, does your speedometer have kilometers or MIIIIIIIII-"

😮Wow! We hit 650 backers and then the very next minute we crossed $50,000.💪 Why...666 backers isn't that far off...🤘😈🤘 👉 www.backerkit.com/c/projects/b...

Made coffee, put Lorna Shore's heartbreaker 'Glenwood' on repeat, and clinched my first full-sized short story since August — my first Churchlands story since last February.

I would be yelling about Canadian politics, polling, and university affairs much, much more than I do in public. You know what it's like to have special interests you can't actually talk about while everyone has an opinion? That's been my whole life since I went white-collar.

As someone who was in Hexagon and On Spec before the end, can I just say how great it is to see a Canadian SFF magazine with cool covers reach its 10th issue in hard copy?

Always love that NESS does author and artist raises as stretch goals. Think I got pro rate for the issue I was in.

My appreciation of Watership Down has shifted over the last, oh, almost 30 years now. This part, right here—more and more, to me this line is the soul of it. Any number of powers and forces will destroy you out of callousness or cruelty or inevitability. What matters is not making it easy for them.

Out tonight: 'Erase the Slate,' a new Ander Carmora story, and actually the first Churchlands story to get illustrated. Also the angriest Churchlands piece to see print by a considerable margin, and will hold that honour until 'Fletcher's Flights.' www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com?p=4577

thelogic.co/news/dp-worl... "Bin Sulayem’s resignation, following a new release of Epstein’s messages and files by the U.S. Department of Justice, likely saves headaches for Canada’s leaders; with the Contrecoeur project, DP World is soon to become even more important to Canadian trade." #canada

Reminds me of the part in Finlayson's The Smart Neanderthal where he says that Paleolithic people were the greatest naturalists ever because they had to be.

Between the announced provincial cuts to student aid and the apparent reduction in federal aid back to pre-covid levels (which the feds claim they are still undecided on but come on), low-income Ontarians are looking at an aid cut (or net tuition increase if you prefer) of about $2500 next year.

"Students involved say chapel administrators dismissed their concerns and, in some cases, responded with disciplinary actions."

Flashing back to all of last year's coverage of Gilbert's...work...to root out any whiff of heterodox thought in Brigham Young University faculty/staff/prospective hires. A deliberate signal, drafting this guy to the 15 leaders-for-life of an institution worth over $300 billion (with a B) in 2025.

Applies really well to writing short stories. Put people in a situation they really care about. See how it plays out. Don't overcook. Take a look at what's best about the story and add some more of that thing. A lot more if you're feeling it. Not much more to it than that. Easy 7/10 or better.

Turns out God is real.

Bit my tongue and survived a public close encounter with the laziest bad-faith PSE policy argument I've seen yet. And I'm from Alberta.

Just changed my desktop background to plain black after years of nice pictures and I can't express how rapidly, tangibly, and unexpectedly it reduced my stress.

Writers, we must carve out an Arctic passage to Geology.

A new poem of mine went live today. wordflowerpoetry.com/2026/02/08/i...

The clickbait title aside, this piece is an essential primer for what the Canadian immigration looks like toward Americans in this scenario right now. To the point that the next few times I get the question, it'll be on the 'read this first' list alongside certain IRCC pages.

Just read Graham Thomas Wilcox's Feast of Saint Ottmer in @oldmoonquarterly.bsky.social, a stunning piece of fiction!

YES. It drives me nuts when people tell me I'm talented, they've discounted all the hard work I did to get to this point. 5% a knack and 95% having no life This quote I recently read in James Clear's newsletter sums it up: "The real talent is being obsessed with the thing."

'Negative number of dancers' is such a great line, attached to such a useful principle, that this is going to stick with me for sure.

Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I just finished the line edits on it and if I see it again I'll meltdown like a toddler whose ice cream fell off the cone.

Wild how stumbling across (or looking up) one bit of cultural context can overturn my impression of a piece of art. Found out something about the writer's context and a song I'd heard a hundred times unfolded from trite, nonsensical, and disjointed to well-considered and occasionally profound.

Did not have 'Epstein bragged that he got a meeting with Ezra Taft Benson to oppose cold fusion' on my bingo card. www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

"It is not merely the APP seeking Mr. Trump’s support for its project. It is the APP enlisting in support of Mr. Trump’s: assisting a hostile power to divide, destroy and devour the country, an aim of which the APP’s leaders cannot reasonably claim to be unaware."

More and more I've been running into unabashed full-bore iterations of 'Albertans are stupid and bad people.' I've been brushing that off for ages, but it's stark enough lately to really catch my attention. I have a lot of guesses, but no certainty, about why that might be.

"actual committed support for separation...15 to 16% of Albertans and Quebecers maintaining their support after considering possible costs...for roughly half of separatist supporters in both provinces, independence is more a political message than a plan they are prepared to endure costs to achieve"

Peroxide for the soul.

Some days I talk about my Weird Ice Age novelette, 'Under White Air,' with beautiful paintings and photos of the Kananaskis and the Rockies. Some days this kind of art is far more apt:

Apropos of nothing, certainly nothing to do with publishing, my favorite aspects of professionalism today: 'Can keep a leash on their affective polarization in public' and 'Defaults to giving the benefit of the doubt to people other than friends' ...honourable mention to 'pays the advertised rate.'

Apropos of nothing, today my favorite aspects of professionalism are 'not taking credit for other people's work' and 'being honest and clear when you don't have the answer yet.' Honourable mention to 'thinking about when you might be creating risk for other people.'

Blue wave still not beating the kalos kai agathos ableism charges anytime soon

"...media that upholds and reflects our morals, and condemning one [as] harmful, becomes its own source of self-righteous satisfaction...a reinforcing feedback loop that turns artistic expression and media consumption into an end in itself, rather than a means to engage with the world..."

A man cannot feel lonely while stacking/unstacking chairs and folding/unfolding tables in the back of a community centre. It's physically and spiritually impossible.

www.linkedin.com/posts/chris-... "This helps explain both why reconciliation beyond symbolism in Canadian universities is possible and why it remains so rare."

THAT is how I know these guys who comment have never done a single fucking thing in their local communities. Because they aren't remotely able to wrap their heads around a list, a clipboard, and twenty friends all signing up to gather up their item of choice.

I understand that this isn't a universal opinion, but for a long time now I've believed the ability to live in and value a pluralist society — as an adult, as a professional — is a muscle that's way too under-exercised. Rejecting that skillset isn't righteousness.

I've been lucky to work with people who BELIEVE in pluralism. It's never been a clearer priority. I see way too much defaulting to "factionalism -- what political scientists call affective polarization: intense in-group loyalty and out-group hostility. Opponents aren’t just wrong; they’re enemies."

Come for the horrifying Figure 5, stay for the useful cladistics of AI bias. "...bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI, rooted in historically uneven data ecologies and design choices." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Hear me out: The Big Short but for the last few years of international student policy in Canada. Gosling as some Ontario college recruiter. Bourdain and Robbie explaining competing types of NPRs, PGWPs, and the Cape Breton rental market. Busey as Tibbets, Tim Blake Nelson as Miller. Can't go wrong.

Imagine this with weird deep-time horror, Neolithic villages, delicious sheep, blood and thunder, and this is the kind of landscape I had in mind when I wrote 'Under White Air.' So help me, I will make you people love my homeland.

Contract signed — my weird Ice Age novelette 'Under White Air,' my 17th pro-rate story, has found a home at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It's the return of Twistfinger, my Neolithic raider and magic-scavenger from 'A Forcible Calm.' Welcome back to the Wide Antlers, inspired by Alberta's Kananaskis:

Have taken out the trash, barefoot, in my boxer shorts, in colder weather than this within the last 24 hours. 🍁

Introduce tinfoil hats to the narcissist in your life.

"The best of our culture tells complicated stories with shared reverence, never intent on selling the perfect idea of place, but rather sharing stories with oddball honesty about what it means to live here."