Ulysses. not for the reasons you think! clearly a towering achievement of language. but they made me read the whole thing under enormous time pressure and with no meaningful room to parse it or reflect on it. go to a normal school, kids

my most helpless scientist forgot that i was going to be off work for two days and asked the head of admin if i was okay, which is sort of funny considering that he routinely doesn't answer my emails for weeks at a time and i've never doubted that he's simply out there vibing

you give me a word document full of notions and i Am going to format the shit out of it

the yoga studio across the street from us does occasional classes with "the energy of a live DJ set" (their words) and tonight's class is apparently an all-Gaga experience. i'm living, honestly. let them frolic

I refuse to laugh at the King of England but I will, grudgingly, slow clap

didn't know the people were as hungry for in-unit laundry as they have proven to be

in-unit laundry changing my life in real time. you mean i can just... have clean clothes. without risking my life carrying a huge thing of laundry down metal fire escape stairs. and then having to wait for someone to retrieve their extensive lingerie stash from the washer

bringing this one back

we've just about dismantled all the boxes we moved with. someone is coming by to remove them from the premises later this evening. the old place is cleared out and ready to be professionally cleaned. roxy has condescended to lie on the rug and let me pet her. things are looking up

Computers don’t tell you this any more because it’s no longer true

well, we did it… we moved. I’m in psychic anguish and we are still at least 50% in boxes but we are in the new place and the new place has internet. (Roxy is coping.)

someone isn’t pleased about moving

on one hand probably good for my mental health that i have barely been registering "news" lately due to moving house. on the other hand moving house is VERY bad for mental health

Auden’s Musée des Beaux Artes

have had cause to think more than usual, lately, about how my experience of higher education was one of the institution stepping on the nape of my neck and grinding my face into the wet carpet of my own irredeemable failings. not in a hot way. I realise I made that sound hot but it was Not

we are at the "facial twitch" "stress nosebleeds" "unable to retain a thought for >5 minutes" stage of moving house

more in-progress new place shots. in the long term I think we would like to redo the bathroom floor and sink cabinet but for now I lowkey think this rips

there are parts of the tenderloin in SF that have trans flag banners hanging from lampposts saying things like “we celebrate our trans history” or “trans people rule ok” (not verbatim, obviously) and you know we’re really in it because I no longer see this as useless pandering, really

Breaking: HHS’s ban on gender-affirming care is struck down. Rarely have I read a ruling this sharply worded. “This case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.” www.advocate.com/politics/nat...

if i were a scientist i would use my powers of science to study the phenomenon of internet communities imploding, seemingly unprompted, into complex interpersonal beefs that bring the communities themselves to a screeching halt

new place continues to take shape — I assembled these chairs today

The cover for my next novel, CHIMERA, is here. Skin dancers, cannibals, kinslayers, monsters. The Vargers are many things, but family always comes first. Cover illustration by Xuanwei Su Cover design by Esther S. Kim Pre-order it here: us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

on one hand reading one's old poetry sucks shit because one's old poetry is invariably not very good. on the other, i have to hand it to my younger self the tiniest bit because they did occasionally hit something, i think

maybe YOUR chickens are coming home to roost. not mine though

Still thinking about this note I found in the children’s section of the public library when I worked there back in 2018. This kid tried to warn us…

last night i watched a guy have a full conversation with the claude AI, asking it questions about a little-remembered local author. the AI kept saying "sorry, don't know, I can look it up if you'd like." and like. that's google search. at that point what you are talking to is the lazy man's google

i will be so real with you: I was absolutely confident that I would be dead by age 25. so definitionally, no, it is not

next to bear and scalzi and liu??? that's my husband

they should invent a buying a house that is not lethal on contact

YOU can't pour from an empty cup. I'm different

Happy 20 years of Neil banging out the tunes 🐀🎶🎉

i fear gretchen is going to get extremely yelled at for this but she's not wrong. fandom is, at its best, a fun hobby. i have fucked around with it, enjoyed myself, all that stuff, and can attest that the instant you treat it as Important in any other respect, the fun dies

I’m an ally, you know? not what you’d call a

my parents were not practising Christians, and yet: we were STRICTLY forbidden from blaspheming in any way. “oh my God” was off the table.

in the process of having a man paint our new place I’m learning so much about paint. for example did you know you can apply it using a staggeringly loud machine

anyway apropos of literally nothing here is a thought i had about danganronpa in 2026: it has WAY more in common with an ikuhara anime than i could parse through the LP in 2012. it's intentionally overblown and stylised in a very similar way to e.g. utena or penguindrum, with one key difference

not interested in hearing how cooked we are, sorry! if anime has taught me anything it's that defeatism is a social contagion. i am going to keep pushing until i am in the ground even and especially if i am simultaneously crying about it

i read this on the train to work and nearly missed my stop. viciously evocative, perfectly rancid, cannot recommend highly enough.

I wrote another Magic: The Gathering story! It's about a monster that feeds on grief, and the tight-knit group of college friends who must use a recent devastating loss as bait to draw it out. I loved writing this one, and Wizards were very cool about how far I wandered from the prompt.

if you know the deep waverly magic you'll understand why i've taken the objectively unhinged decision to purchase the localisation of danganronpa in the year of our lord 2026

I really loved this, on Tell The Beees / Josh Lora’s substack, about The Drama, To Catch A Predator, empathy, bad faith:

i have very grudgingly returned to facebook in order to join our new building's little group, and i am displeased to report that it's Still Bad

in any case: if you want a free isaac book mailed to you, please lighten the burden of our move by DMing him with address info

we just went over to pick up the keys, and our estate agent got us to take a photo with a large key. not going to post it because of the high doxxing risk but i need you to know that we both, in this photo, look like two people who spent the day spectating a small apocalypse

hey so. taps mic awkwardly. we have a condo now?

cool waverly/isaac news: we officially become homeowners tomorrow. inexplicably, incredibly, it has all been largely okay

fandom culture can be cool and generative and exciting. more often than that, in my experience, it is this

I know this isn’t a new or original observation but when I come into the office and make cursory small talk with the security person on the front desk about how we’re both doing fine and it Sure Is Monday I feel like I’m heaping soil into the grave of the only sane part of myself, which is screaming

kendrick_lamar_tv_off.mp3