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lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26591562-new-bujold-podcast-interview-is-up

The interview I recorded a couple of weeks ago for the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast in support of the launch of Penric's Intrigues is now up, in various places.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxObg...

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4TDK...

and doubtless other venues.

By the way, if folks want more, I have an Author Q&A slot right here on Goodreads with, by now, over 1500 answered questions:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/1609...

Which should keep anyone busy reading for a while.

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on May, 08

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26591562-new-bujold-podcast-interview-is-up

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3243/

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

https://xkcd.com/3243/

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26588779-bujold-nesfa-collection-reprint-e-print

Way back in 1996, I was writer guest of honor at Boskone, the science fiction convention associated with the New England Science Fiction Association, NESFA, one of the longest-running fan clubs out there. As was and is the custom of NESFA Press, they produce a nice book of their writer guest's unpublished or other writings for a convention souvenir. I didn't have much unpublished at the time, but we scraped up what we could, and the NESFA folks filled out the volume with interesting related matter.

On the most recent reprint, they went for an updated edition with a new intro by me, plus for the first time an e-edition. Now available here:

https://www.nesfa.org/book/dreamweave...

You can also get all their other Bujold hardcovers -- signed! -- through Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore here in Minneapolis, http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.s... Where I will be doing a book signing on May 16th at 1 PM in honor mainly of Penric's Intrigues, but I'll sign whatever of mine folks have.

My books are also available locally through Dreamhaven Books & Comics.

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on May, 07

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26588779-bujold-nesfa-collection-reprint-e-print

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3242/

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

https://xkcd.com/3242/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3241/

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

https://xkcd.com/3241/

tcpip

"Jurgen Habermas is the most influential thinker in Germany today". Thus begins Thomas McCarthy's 1975 translator's introduction to "Legitimation Crisis" ("Legitimationsprobleme in Spatkapitalismus", 1973), and he wasn't wrong. Whilst he may have fallen a little off the radar a bit in the last decades (especially after his attempted "post-secular" rapproachment with religion), fifty years as Europe's most important and serious philosopher is a fairly good innings. Habermas dies last month, aged 96, and I was fortunate enough to be offered to give a presentation to the Existentialist Society this weekend on his philosophy of universal pragmatics and communicative action, which was both well-attended and had many excellent questions. The video, alas, missed the first couple of minutes, but everything is available in the transcript.

The weekend was not only an afternoon of deep and complex emancipatory German social philosophy in the idealistic tradition, however. Marc C., joined me for dinner on Friday before we ventured to The Old Bar to see some music; opening act "Trappist Afterland" was a subtle one-man band with Indian sub-continent backing tracks and songs about dogs, Star/Time provided quasi-improvised space-funk, and headline act The Gruntled accurately describe themselves as "avant-medieval psychedelic noise combo"; it all helps when you know several of the band members. The following night, I caught up with Liza D., and we made our way to "Impossiblistic: A Night of Surreal Performances, which was poetry, theatre, music, costume, puppetry, clown shows, and more. It was less surreal than enjoyable nonsense and was just fine.

Between all this, I also managed to visit the "Creative Antarctica" exhibition at RMIT on its last day, on Australian artists and writers who visited that grand continent. Of course, my own emotional and intellectual attachment to said continent is very strong; not too many people can say that they've spent New Year's Eve there. The exhibition was quite delightful. I really like Janet Laurence's "Ice Remembers" and Sally Robertson's "Atlas Cove". But the standout image for me was Frank Hurley's photograph of 1916 of Shackleton and Worsley leaving Elephant Island on a tiny lifeboat that would somehow make it to South Georgia Island over a thousand kilometres away and would lead to the rescue of the crew of the Endurance. It is one the greatest stories of survival against all odds and, for what it's worth, Elephant Island was the last location of my own trip to Antarctica this year. As Sir Raymond Priestley, Antarctic explorer and geologist, poetically put it: "For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."

Current Mood: content
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Dystopian Soundscapes channel

stilgherrian_feed

Posted by Stilgherrian

https://stilgherrian.com/weekly-wrap/831/

https://stilgherrian.com/?p=40153

Near the end of my week of Monday 27 April to Sunday 3 May 2026 I walked past a pub, because I’d just been at one pub and was on my way to see a show. I did get some things done this week, though, including a little client work. Please pat my head.

On Sunday night I caught the final Sydney show of He Huang’s TEMU Joke Factory before she heads over to the New Zealand Comedy Festival, which is why this is being posted on Monday morning. It was brilliant. I’ve seen three of her shows before and this was both different and very personal. Five stars.

There’s still no progress in finding The Lost Module that contains a third of the stuff I had in storage, and that’s all I’ll say about moving to Campsie and its related crowdfunder this week. Oh, except that my birthday is somewhere in the next nine days, so you know what to do. Or is that too desperate? Yeah, probably.

Articles

The Weekly Cybers #115. Australia to have another go at shifting cash from big tech to news mastheads, applications open for new top-level internet domains, medical devices are still easy to hack, and more.

Videos

The Great Unboxening | 03, livestreamed on Thursday night. It was all about the vinyl records for sale, although nearly all the books are still up for grabs. Please do check out the lists and make an offer!

Podcasts, Photos, Media Appearances, Corporate Largesse

None of these. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear and when livestreams are scheduled — like the one coming up on Tuesday night.

Some Interesting Links

It’s Ukrainian propaganda, sure, but it’s also an intriguing story about a 77yo woman following a drone for eight kilometres to guide her to a waiting robot, which then drove her two hours to safety.
??? (Home) is the first track off Balming Tiger’s new album, and the video is amazing, Read about the album. That story is behind a ad-blocker blocker but I’m sure you know what to do.
You can also read an interview with Balming Tiger’s Omega Sapien.
An astoundingly British tribute to the Vickers VC10 airliner.
18 silly finalists from the Comedy Wildlife People’s Choice Awards.
Sharath from Building Beautifully has a tribute to the renewal of Parramatta.
Make a note of this one for spring: Bti honeypot traps for killing mosquito larvae.
I kinda miss CBC Radio’s news satire program This is That, but some of their sketches exist in video form. Such as Maker Series: Artisanal Firewood, and Canada rolls out a universal car horn language. Of special note is ‘Thought Leader’ gives talk that will inspire your thoughts.
This week’s suggested follow: This one will either become an addictive rabbit hole, or it’ll annoy the stuffing out of you. The Beef And Dairy Network Podcast has appeared monthly for more than a decade. “The number one podcast for those involved or just interested in the production of beef animals and dairy herds,” it says, but yeah nah, it’s a parody — and quite surreal. Some of the characters are long-running, so you may want to start at the beginning to understand all the references. At the time of writing there’s 133 episodes plus bonus content.

The Week Ahead

Monday is a day of client comms and administrivia, at least once I post this Weekly Wrap. As you probably know it’s usually a Sunday evening thing.

On Tuesday I’ll try to catch CSIRO Conversations: Quantum for Every Business. I’d like to hear what actual scientists reckon we can do with this quantum stuff.

Thursday night will see another livestream in The Great Unboxening at 8pm AEST, this time focusing on things other than books and vinyl records. Definitely DVDs and probably CDs, plus whatever I can get into a spreadsheet by then. I’ll also try to make this one more interesting than the previous episodes.

As with last week, though, the bulk of this week is about trying to find some more work, or at least some revenue, and organising the next few podcast episodes.

The Weekly Cybers newsletter will appear as usual on Friday afternoon — after which I’ll be heading to a local pub to exercise my superpower and win the meat raffle.

The coming weekend sits near my birthday, so there will be drinks somewhere on Saturday afternoon. ~~I haven’t decided where yet, so watch my socials.~~ Update 6 May 2026: I’ll be at the Mountbatten Hotel at 701 George Street in Haymarket from 3pm AEST on Saturday. It’s a small pub so we may well be able to take it over! Some of you may know it from when it was a run-down old men’s pub, but it’s now part of the JDA Collective.

Further Ahead

Takashi Wakasugi’s Wabi-Sabi Comedy, Sydney, 16 May 2026. I saw Takashi’s work-in-progress show back in December, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all comes together.

[Photo: Hotel Sweeney’s in the Sydney CBD, whose name I’ve always thought would work better as Sweeney’s Hotel, photographed on 3 May 2026. This is a curious pub, with a typical blokey front bar but a very different vibe for each of the other floors. On this occasion I did not go in.]

https://stilgherrian.com/weekly-wrap/831/

https://stilgherrian.com/?p=40153

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26577894-penric-s-intrigues-releases-this-week

Penric's Intrigues, the 4th Pen & Des collection on paper from Baen Books, should be reaching stores this week, or maybe a bit earlier -- Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore and Dreamhaven Books & Comics here in Minneapolis have theirs already, signed.

I don't know how widely distributed this one is going to be, but in any case your favorite local bricks 'n mortar bookstore should be able to order it via their usual channels on request, if it hasn't popped up on its own.

The online booksellers will start shipping it Tuesday, which means you can hit that order button most any time now.

It contains the novel-length The Assassins of Thasalon, and the novella "Knot of Shadows".

All three of the prior volumes remain available in hardcover, and can be ordered. (Some of the paperbacks are sold out.) To recap:

Penric's Progress, containing "Penric's Demon", "Penric and the Shaman", and "Penric's Fox".

Penric's Travels, containing "Penric's Mission", "Mira's Last Dance", and "The Prisoner of Limnos".

Penric's Labors, containing "Masquerade in Lodi", "The Orphans of Raspay", and "The Physicians of Vilnoc".

A week or so ago I recorded an hour-long interview for the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast in support of the new release; I'll link it here when it goes live.

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on May, 03

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26577894-penric-s-intrigues-releases-this-week

marthawells

A week ago I got back from Japan where I was a guest at HALCon, an annual SF/F convention held in the Kawasaki International Center, and it was awesome. (Though right now I am still dead from jet-lag.) The convention itself was great, I walked to so many cool people, and was treated to so much good food. The Japanese edition of System Collapse translated by Naoya Nakamura had won the Seiun Award, and they presented me with that, which was also awesome.

Afterward we went down to Kamakura, which was the seat of the first Shogunate, and saw the Great Buddha https://www.kotoku-in.jp/en/ and two other Buddhist temples, one in a bamboo grove, and a huge Shinto Shrine. It was an incredible trip and I'm so glad I went.

Tour dates for Platform Decay, the next Murderbot novel:

https://us.macmillan.com/tours/martha-wells-platform-decay/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3240/

"I know it seems impossible, but the trick is that I sailed in here when I was very young."

https://xkcd.com/3240/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3239/

It's hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee's wheel-and-axles are really good.

https://xkcd.com/3239/

tcpip

This Saturday at 2 pm I'm giving a presentation entitled "The United Colours of Jürgen Habermas: A Life's Work" (link in comments), who recently died. Habermas was, from the 1960s onwards, he was Europes's most influential social theorist and philosopher whose works combined linguistics, communication, rationality, and pragmatism. I readily admit that I have been a follower of his work for around 35 years and have been impressed by his commitment to an emancipatory modernism. I have also agreed with his criticisms of positivism, hermeneutics, systems-functionalism, and post-structuralism (c.f., my recent talk on French philosophy). Anyway, for those who enjoy listening to me go on a passionate philosophical-political rant for an hour, or who have never had the opportunity, please do come along; I promise it will be at least entertaining and sincere.

In my other, more formal scholarly activities, I've smashed through the University of Chicago's course on science and climate modelling, completing the material in about half the expected time. Mind you, it does help if one is pretty familiar with the content, though one should recognise that some of it could be updated. I will also say that the user interface of the professor's models could be improved. With these caveats, however, the content is quite excellent and what one would hope for from someone who has been a professor of geophysical sciences for almost 35 years. I admit I am intrigued by the follow-up make-your-own modelling course.

On a somewhat related manner, I have also organised multiple researcher talks at work involving a variety of researchers who have used our supercomputer and have some publications as a result; one has the charming title of "CRITTERS: Climate, Resource, and Image Tracking in Tiny, Ecologically Representative Systems". The second, "Threshold-Calibrated Word Sense Disambiguation: Semantic Broadening Without Sense Redistribution in Schizophrenia", and the third "Skuas as sentinels of high pathogenicity avian influenza H5N1 on the Antarctic Peninsula in the 2024/2025 austral summer" (my own recent trip to Antarctica in the same area witnessed more than a few of these well-travelled birds). All quite different but equally important subjects that, in their own way, needed the processing power we could offer to model and verify theories and to seek matches with empirical data; this is how real science progresses.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: U2, "The Unforgettable Fire"

captainawkward_feed

Posted by katepreach

https://captainawkward.com/2026/04/28/may-london-meetup-5/

http://captainawkward.com/?p=53203

EDIT cancelled due to low numbers

Announcement: the audience for these has changed, so I’m going to do them once every three or four months instead of monthly. So please come to this May one if you’re interested, there won’t be another until probably August.

~~9th May, 1pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX.~~

~~Please RSVP if you’re coming so I know whether or not we have enough people. If there’s no uptake I will cancel a couple of days before.~~

https://captainawkward.com/2026/04/28/may-london-meetup-5/

http://captainawkward.com/?p=53203

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3238/

Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We're putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.

https://xkcd.com/3238/

charlesnaismith

I like this thought:

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.
None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
-CS Lewis

stilgherrian_feed

Posted by Stilgherrian

https://stilgherrian.com/weekly-wrap/830/

https://stilgherrian.com/?p=40118

The week of Monday 20 to Sunday 26 April 2026 brought drama to Campsie when a car crashed into a local business and caught fire, but I was also quite tired for a lot of it.

On Tuesday afternoon I noted that I could hear a lot of sirens. I soon discovered that just a few blocks away a car had crashed into Hera Hair and caught fire, which then set fire to the whole building. Remarkably, no one suffered any serious injuries.

I should give a quick update on the crowdfunder I launched eleven weeks ago, The 9pm Stilgherrian’s Dramatic Decamp to Campsie. It has hit a plateau at 66% of the way to the third target, and I’m making a little progress on The Great Unboxening, but I do need to speed things up. More will be said on this in the coming days.

There’s still no progress in finding The Lost Module.