ARTHUR C. CLARKE “Out of the Sun.” First published in If, February 1958. Collected in The Other Side of the Sky (Harcourt, Brace & Co., hardcover, 1958). Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, edited by Mike Ashley (among several other anthologies). This is the lead story in the latter book, and it’s a good one (both the story and the anthology). It’s told by a research scientist studying the sun from the ideal vantage point of the planet Mercury. Although he is not the only person on…
Today, July 15, 2026, Toronto woke up to the worst air on Earth. Not the worst air in Toronto’s memory, not the worst air in Canada — the worst air on the planet, full stop, according to the people whose job it is to rank such things.A heat dome sat over the province like a lid, and smoke from hundreds of uncontrolled wildfires in the northwest rode a jet stream south and settled over the city like something that had decided to stay. The Air Quality Health Index climbed toward 10+, the category…
Saturday, July 18, 2026 - 07:00 lhmpodcast.jpg Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 347 - On the Shelf for June & July 2026 - Transcript (Originally aired 2026/07/18) Welcome to On the Shelf for—well, this is a catch-up episode covering both June and July 2026, after my broken arm-related vacation. I’m back to typing with both hands now, though it’s a bit slower and more painful than usual and I may continue using my computer’s speech-to-text function sometimes to help out. The schedule is…
Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestiniansby Salomé Parent-Rachdi, DeloupyGenres: Graphic Novels, Non-fiction Pages: 160 Rating: Synopsis: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict viewed through the lens of romantic relationships. A humanizing journalistic portrait of the intimate lives of ordinary people in Israel and Gaza. Love and Desire in the Promised Land collects a dozen interviews with real-life citizens of Israel and Gaza navigating messy boundaries in…
fansplaining:How Fans Make Fictional Languages RealOur latest is live! ✨ Maria Temming reports on the worlds of fictional constructed language (aka conglang) speakers. For fans gathering around Na'vi, Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki, or High Valyrian, it’s about more than a connection to canon—it’s about community.Conlang aficionados will also note that the definition of a “useful” language depends on who you want to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a friend with a different native language, or…
With music by Peter Matz and the comedy pedigree of Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold on book and lyrics, Here Comes J Full Stop Edgar Exclamation Mark is a broadly comic attempt to satirise one of the most influential figures in shaping 20th century America: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for almost 60 years, but remembered as much for his fondness for wearing drag in his private life, as for the draconian policies he enforced in his public one. In an opening that fully embraces what a hokey…
New theater company Vertigo Theater makes an impressive debut with the one-act three-hander Tape, playing a The Hive Collaborative for a short two-week run. Most of the artists involved are recent graduates of the Guthrie / U of MN BFA program, several of whom were part of the 2025 graduating class's fantastic production of Jez Butterworth's epic play The Ferryman. I'd never seen or heard of Tape (although it was adapted into a film in 2001 starring then-married Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman,…
(Continued from my previous posts on Catacombs, and in particular my last post which described how the 1981 PET version of the game was recently rescued.) The disk copies we have are for the “4040” edition of the game. This is referring to a disk drive pair by Commodore; image via the Centre for Computing History. While the predecessors (2040 and 3040) were for the US and Europe respectively, this one seems to have gone international; it gets mentioned in an Italian book, for instance.…
Look at that, it's a round chapter number for once!
This is the conclusion to my previous posts about Mudora and randomized A Link to the Past – Reverse Engineering A Link to the Past Randomizer and I Analyzed 28k+ Randomized ALttP ROMs So You Don’t Have To. Today I’ll be talking about writing a shortest-path solver for ALttPR in Mudora, similar to what you might find on the spoiler log for a game generated on alttpr.com. Where We Left Off In a previous post I talked about wanting to write a solver for A Link to the Past Randomizer. I had the…
