Reading Set Piece, my second Doctor Who novel, for the first time in decades. I don't know what to make of it. It's hard to connect to that younger self. I can see her improvising furiously, though. (Left-Handed Hummingbird took 9 months to plan and polish; Set Piece had 3.)

Nothing I'm writing is working. I've put down my current projects for now and I'm groping around the vast, vague shadow of a new novel idea.

Picture Sutekh's spacesuit helmet

Musk in orbit with a billion tonnes of anything. 🙀

Oh help, I mean, oh hooray, I just found my teenage poetry. (And all those BASICA programs I wrote.)

What you must know about Fawlty Towers: the joke is not that Manuel can't understand English. The joke is that Basil can't speak Spanish. (Polly can, and she and Manuel readily converse.) (I assume Basil hired Manuel as cheap foreign labour, but it never occurred to Basil to pick a phrasebook!)

Dad-ta hild, build, pakina-taw Dad-ta hild, build, pakina-taw

The first moments of All the President's Men. The loudest sound in the world! *sigh*

This is fun -- and a chance for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to comment at length on the crisis, quoting many of the complaints!

Setting up Firefox on the new laptop and discovering I have not one flicker of conscious knowledge of how I had it set it up before. eg I must have opened the Bookmarks hundreds of thousands of times. How? Not a clue. Clicking that little star on the left had become an unconscious, automatic action.

Trying to uproot Microsoft CoPilot -- I've deleted the thing, but it's still popping up in menus. Found what looked like solid instructions for editing my Registry... which turned out to have been written by ChatGPT! The fuckers are conspiring! No AI touches my registry; I'll fuck it up myself!

SSD officially dead. Losing a week's stuff -- writing, emails tidied into folders, bookmarks, saved bits and pieces, whatever... I feel disoriented, even a little grief-stricken. It's the confusion you feel when the power goes out, or something is lost, or stolen -- you took it for granted.

The character of Sutekh was so denigrated in recent Doctor Who that I feel the urge to reclaim him, bringing in the actual mythology. The problem is that Sutekh is clearly evilly intelligent, while the god Set is as thick as a brick.

The primary diff between writing fiction and nonfiction is when you write nonfic, you research a topic for 2 weeks and then write 1000 words on it and when you write fiction you research a topic for 2 weeks and get one sentence out of it.

Onya Sylv

So that's something. That's really something!

Had a wobble this morning about whether I am equipped to handle the coming years of history. How dare I? I'm not even there!

OneDrive came forth from the foetid loins of Satan

Still holding out hope for the fizzled laptop, but setting up a new one anyway, at least in part. Making many unhappy discoveries about my backups, exemplified by iTunes. Playlists aren't saved in the iTunes Media folder. The iTunes store doesn't keep a complete list of everything you've bought.

For some reason I've just watched The Cannonball Run (1981) and had the disconcerting experience of the Japanese racing team speaking in Cantonese throughout. (I think the TV host near the start does speak in Japanese, while Jackie Chan replies in Cantonese?!)

This (a) is often true but (b) puts me in an awkward position

Spending the entire day dealing with hard drive crash. (Fortunately everything's got multiple backups.)

Oh no! This is actually devastating. He was such a sweet baby and instrumental in creating the cat-based internet we love today. He lived a very long a full life.

Saw a cool clip from The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) so I thought I'd give it a whirl. It opens with such a stupid premise (fossil fuels are running out and the only alternative is an orbiting particle accelerator) that I don't know how long I'll last.

Watched a short SF movie on YouTube. It was well-made, well-acted, looked great, had a funny robot. My internal editor was nit-picking everything the whole way through. Argh!

What the hell, let's have Sylvia Plath as well. These poems brought to you by my stumbling across some of Eric Schwab's photos taken at Dachau this morning.

Haven't read this in forever. Still don't understand every line. Nonetheless it just knocked the breath out of me.

Isn't it gorgeous? btw 😁 www.penguin.co.uk/books/395547...

We're gonna take you and the Queen Down to the guillotine It's somewhere in the heart of town And when that fella's through With what he's gonna do You'll have no place to wear your crown

hey ma return return return, hakeron, da!

Writing science fiction is a strange business. One part of me is trying work out a satisfying obstacle for the characters to overcome, while another part is researching helium mining.

Rally to #SaveNASA next Monday! 🌏🌙🔭📡 While the full event will last 5 hours, the best time to come will likely be between 11 and 1. We'll keep you posted on timing. Follow @nasa-needs-help.bsky.social

This was amazing. The heroine lives under an unending barrage of sexual threat -- the office wolf, her sleazy boss, and worst of all, her mystery stalker. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2L...

1. Monica Helms, the creator of the transgender flag and Navy Veteran, is leaving the US due to anti-LGBTQ+ persecution. “We are worried there’s a possibility something could happen where we end up getting arrested just for being who we are,” Helms said. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Saw someone saying that you know an animal is potentially dangerous if it can see you and it doesn't care. What must we look like to the street cats?

Identified a frequent error in my writing. Me: Hmm... the characters need a spectrograph. Character: Look everyone! I've got a spectrograph! Me: STOP GIVING THE CHARACTERS STUFF THEY NEED! Make the buggers work for it!

More power to you, Mrs Vetter! ✊

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_a... I visited this page to quickly check something, and stayed to read the whole thing, which is very rare for me. Wikipedia pages are not usually so lucid. I suspect the polish of thousands of hands.

There are three problems with recording the continuous flow of nonsense jingles in my head. One, most are dull, with a lot of "dee dee dum" etc. Two, they rapidly mutate, so I forget them by the time I've found my phone. Three: autocorrect.

doorup vindicule doorup doorup vindicule doorup

I have signed this. I mean, what’s next? A law to ‘protect’ racist beliefs? Sexist beliefs? Ableism? Homophobia? Religious bigotry? Given the current state of politics, do you want to be on this slope greased with pettiness and bad faith and profiteering grifters?

Oolon condeffery Oolon condeffery

The opposite of the frightening moment we learn Autons can sprint.

First time in half a century that Queen has countenanced one of their songs being published in a language other than English. And it is beautiful. youtu.be/gbljPQbxtTQ?....

The day I started using my first word processing program (EZWriter) Dad showed me how use a double dash -- to distinguish dashes from hyphens. Apparently that double dash is an em dash, supposedly a giveaway you're an AI. Alas, more than 40 years later, I just can't change my double dashing ways.

Thought I'd deleted all the files that Microsoft OneDrive snatched before I rid my laptop of it, but of course they were also stored online, and so bizarrely turned up in a VM I'm using for work. Heaven knows what other machines might have downloaded them by now. Bloody thing!

What was the British show I watched some of, maybe in the naughties, with four unpleasant men (businesspeople?) jammed in a car together, and it breaks down on the motorway, and one of them gets his arm broken by a passing car? IIRC correctly, their situation just kept getting worse and worse.

The small icy moon Mimas, floating in space above the giant planet itself, crossed by shadows of Saturn's vast ring system. NASA Photojournal image PIA06176, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 18 January 2005. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute