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excuseoftheday_feed - The Excuse of the Day for 14 Jun 2026 is...votd_feed - Philippians 3:20merriamwebster_feed - emblazonjames_davis_nicoll - Relativity for Retired Engineers by David Garfinklestandardebooks_new_feed - Partners in Crime, by Agatha Christiejames_davis_nicoll - Books Received, June 6 — June 12excuseoftheday_feed - The Excuse of the Day for 13 Jun 2026 is...merriamwebster_feed - halevotd_feed - Luke 11:13scalziwhatever_feed - New Musical Composition: “Ingenuity”bookfusion_blog_feed - Your Books, Highlights & Progress onEvery E-Reader: BookFusion for KOReader Is Herexkcd_feed - Plate Flipjames_davis_nicoll - Interior Chinatown by Charles Yuscalziwhatever_feed - Various & Sundry, 6/12/26excuseoftheday_feed - The Excuse of the Day for 12 Jun 2026 is...merriamwebster_feed - blandishmentvotd_feed - Psalm 19:1-2james_davis_nicoll - Jane Yolen (1939 - 2026)scalziwhatever_feed - The Big Idea: Cynthia Pelayojames_davis_nicoll - Safer Driving Through Science Fictionscalziwhatever_feed - Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communicationsjames_davis_nicoll - Trace Elements by Ada Palmer & Jo Waltonexcuseoftheday_feed - The Excuse of the Day for 11 Jun 2026 is...merriamwebster_feed - saturninejames_davis_nicoll
votd_feedmerriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 14, 2026 is:
emblazon • \im-BLAY-zun\ • verb
To emblazon something is to decorate its surface, usually with a name, slogan, or picture.
// Her favorite souvenir from her trip to the Grand Canyon was a t-shirt emblazoned with a rosy sunset over the famous chasm.
Examples:
“Later that week we were boarding our flight with the painting secured in an enormous case with a toothy, bespectacled cartoon squirrel emblazoned on the back and a speech bubble that read ‘I’M JUST NUTS ABOUT PUZZLES!’” — Orlando Whitfield, All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art, 2025
Did you know?
Blazon is a less commonly used synonym of the more familiar coat of arms. Both centuries-old terms refer to heraldic designs, symbols, and other imagery (think crosses, lions, stripes, etc.) that typically appear on banners, shields, armor, and elsewhere. The verb form of blazon meaning “to depict heraldic figures or designs in drawing or engraving” and emblazon, “to inscribe or adorn with or as if with heraldic figures or designs,” came into use around the same time in the late 1500s, from the French spoken in medieval England. (The word heraldry, also ultimately from Anglo-French, came into use then too.) Emblazon still refers to marking something with an emblem of heraldry, but it is now more often used for adorning or publicizing something in any conspicuous way, whether with eye-catching decoration or colorful words of praise.
standardebooks_new_feedjames_davis_nicoll
Which of these look interesting?
When Life Gives You Corpses by Lene D. Buttner (March 2027)
10 (29.4%)
A Storm of Dragons and Sorcery by Jeaniene Frost (March 2027)
3 (8.8%)
Tribes in the Dark by Wil Hutton, Logan Rollins, et al with art by Ghislain Barbe and Juan Ochoa (June 2026)
4 (11.8%)
The Seventh Banisher by A. K. Larkwood (March 2027)
11 (32.4%)
Anji in Shadow by Evan Leikam (January 2027)
6 (17.6%)
The Playful Lem by Stanislaw Lem (July 2026)
18 (52.9%)
Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game, Gamemaster’s Guide by Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al (June 2026)
2 (5.9%)
Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game, Player’s Guide by Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al (June 2026)
2 (5.9%)
A Song of Sugar Sparrows by Seanan McGuire (January 2027)
16 (47.1%)
The Thinking Animal: What Other Minds Reveal About Our Own by Nichola Raihani (February 2027)
19 (55.9%)
Some other option (see comments)
1 (2.9%)
Cats!
22 (64.7%)
merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 13, 2026 is:
hale • \HAIL\ • adjective
Someone described as hale is in good and often exceptional health. Hale is commonly used in the phrase "hale and hearty."
// Their mother remains hale and hearty in her old age.
Examples:
"Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell star [in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes] as two vivacious all-American showgirls whose friendship is as fast as their attitudes to men are poles apart. Whereas Monroe's Lorelei Lee prizes wealth and devotion in a suitor, Russell's Dorothy Shaw is more inclined towards the hale and hunky ..." — Robbie Collin, The Telegraph (United Kingdom), 2 May 2026
Did you know?
English has two hale homographs: the adjective that is frequently paired with hearty to describe those healthy and strong, and the somewhat uncommon verb that has to do with literal or figurative hauling or pulling. (One can hale a boat onto shore, or hale a person into a courtroom with the aid of legal ramifications for resistance.) The verb comes from the Middle English halen (also the root of our word haul), but the adjective has a bifurcated origin, with two Middle English terms identified as sources: hale and hail. Both of those come from words meaning "healthy," the former from the Old English hāl, and the latter from the Old Norse heill. The Middle English hail is also the source of the three modern English words spelled as hail, the verb, interjection, and noun that have to do with greeting.
votd_feedscalziwhatever_feed
It’s been a hot minute, as the kids no longer say, since I made an original musical composition; I’ve mostly been doing cover songs recently. But this evening I felt the urge to make something noisy and original, so I did what any musician would do for inspiration: I went to NASA’s “Sounds From Beyond” page and picked a recording from there to use as the basis for my composition.
Specifically, I used the “NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight” recording. I used the original recording as is, and then I also ran it through MIDI, sliced it up, pushed it up a couple of octaves, filtered it through effects and so on. In the final composition, everything you hear is derived from the Ingenuity recording except for the drums and the 808 bass. It’s amazing what you can do with public domain recordings from another planet.
The resulting track is noisy, weird, asymmetric and in 7/8 time, because that’s pretty much how the original recording sort of laid itself out. I like it. Maybe you will too.
— JS
bookfusion_blog_feed
If you love e-readers, there’s a good chance you own more than one. Maybe you read on a Kobo at home, a Kindle when you travel, a Boox or PocketBook for PDFs and manga, and your phone when you only have a few minutes. Each device has its own strengths but ...
james_davis_nicoll
scalziwhatever_feedWhat? Friday again?
David Hockney, dead: Hockney was one of those artists who I didn’t know who they were until I was adult, and then realized I had been surrounded by his work all my life. This was in large part because Hockney, who was originally from England, was besotted with California, and as a result his work was part of the cultural landscape while I spent the first part of my life there. Even if I didn’t clock the name, he added to the vibe, so to speak. When you think of California pools, you think of David Hockney (even if the most famous pool painting was based off of one in France). His work always made me happy and maybe just a little bit wistful. That’s not a bad legacy to leave behind.
Jane Yolen, RIP: I knew Jane both socially — we were both writers of science fiction and fantasy, although her total remit was much wider than that — and also because we were colleagues, working together on SFWA committees and in other ways as well (she and I are both past presidents of SFWA as well). She was a delight in conversation, and sharp as the proverbial tack when it came to dealing with committee work, and in both of these aspects of her being I was glad to know her.
Jane does not need me to valorize her work, and with more than 400 books to her name, if I were to attempt I would be here a while. But I will note that SFWA gave her its Grand Master award, and she also received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and won a hefty shelf of awards, in genre and out of it. She deserved all of them. She will be sorely missed.
VISA is letting ChatGPT buy things for you: It’s a thing called “agentic shopping,” in which you can (presumably) tell ChatGPT something you want, and it goes off to find it for you and then makes the purchase without any further intervention from you, because, after all, you gave it your credit card and permission to use it. This is, I will tell you now, a spectacularly bad idea, and not just because “AI” follows directions less than perfectly due to the very nature of its architecture, and sooner than later it’s going to make a very expensive fuck-up that the user will be on the hook for because giving an “AI” your credit card number isn’t fraud, it’s just stupidity, and there are few legal consumer protections for that. It’s also a bad idea because it’s one more layer of obfuscation between you and the actual costs of things, which makes it that much harder to manage one’s finances.
And while I’m sure you are smart with your money, given the average credit card debt in the US is over $6k and climbing, and that most people carry card balances at extortionate rates, this is a really really bad idea for most consumers. Great for the credit card companies! But bad for actual humans.
Please do me a favor and never let an “AI” do your shopping for you. Please continue to be the person who pushes the button on purchases. This won’t necessarily save you from impulse shopping, says the man with 30 guitars, but at least you have to acknowledge what you’re doing. That’s something.
— JS
excuseoftheday_feedmerriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 12, 2026 is:
blandishment • \BLAN-dish-munt\ • noun
Blandishments are nice things that you say or do to convince someone to do something. Blandishment is usually used in the plural form.
// Despite the many blandishments of the dressing room attendant, we were resolved not to overspend at the fashion boutique.
Examples:
“… he sought to turn the attack around by saying his vast wealth—which has allowed him to richly fund his political endeavors—made him immune to the blandishments of plutocrats and corporate interests.” — Mark Z. Barabak, The Los Angeles Times, 23 Feb. 2026
Did you know?
When Star Wars audiences first meet former smuggler Lando Calrissian—played iconically by Billy Dee Williams—in The Empire Strikes Back, he is full of blandishments, offering flattery (telling Leia “You truly belong here with us among the clouds”) and gifts to our heroes in the form of food and drink (“Will you join me for a little refreshment?”) in order to entice them into what we soon discover is a trap. Notably, before the whole sordid deal goes down (and before Lando’s eventual redemption), Han Solo calls him “an old smoothie.” Lando’s verbal smoothness can be linked to blandishment too: the word was formed from the verb blandish, meaning “to coax with flattery.” Blandish ultimately comes from the Latin adjective blandus, meaning “influencing others by flattery,” source too of our adjective bland, which typically describes things boring and flavorless but which can also mean “smooth and soothing in manner or quality”—a meaning that also applies to everyone’s favorite Cloud City administrator.
votd_feedjames_davis_nicollscalziwhatever_feed
To be whisked away to Neverland was certainly the dream of many a child, but for Wendy Darling it was always a trap, rather than a paradise. Author Cynthia Pelayo discusses in her Big Idea how Wendy was a servant, not an equal to the Lost Boys, and takes us to revisit Wendy in her newest novel, It Came From Neverland.
CYNTHIA PELAYO:
Wendy Darling is the reason any of us even know about Neverland. We think this is Peter Pan’s story, but it’s not, not really. The only reason any of us even know about Neverland is because of Wendy Darling.
Let’s strip away the fairy dust and the pirates and the flying and the crocodile, and what do we have? A girl. A girl who was told that something magical was waiting for her on the other side. A girl who believed what she was being told. A girl who later learned she was lured with the promise of magic, yet found herself inside a trap instead.
J.M. Barrie introduced us to Peter Pan through The Little White Bird in 1902, and that little boy would go on to pique the public’s curiosity so much that Barrie revisited his story. Then came the play in 1904 and the novel in 1911. However, the reason the story works and the reason it continues to survive over a century later is because of Wendy. Without Wendy there would be no Neverland. No Tinkerbell. No Hook. No Lost Boys. Peter Pan without Wendy Darling is just a boy screaming into the dark. Wendy is the story, and Peter’s promise to her is the lie.
Peter tells her to come away with him, that she will never grow up, but what he means is something entirely different. What he wants is a mother, for the Lost Boys, and selfishly for himself. He wants someone to read to them, to mend their socks, to take care of them. Someone who will stay in that role, forever.
Yes, Wendy goes, because she is sweet and brave and kind and beautiful, and she is made up of stories. And perhaps it’s because of her kindness that she allows herself to trust, to trust in the possibility that maybe this is all real. Perhaps she even catches the hint that there is something wrong in this request to run away, but she overrides her own intuition for the possibility of magic and friendship. Quickly Wendy learns that the promise of eternal youth was just manipulation. It was all a story, and not a happily-ever-after kind. She was not brought to Neverland to take part in adventure, to be treated as a partner, or even as an equal. She was brought to Neverland to be a caretaker in a prison with no walls.
Wendy is every woman who has ever been told one thing and expected to be something else. That is the story that I needed to tell: The Girl Who Bravely and Beautifully Grew Up, Wendy.
I wanted to write a version of this story where we are provided with the accounts of Neverland directly from Wendy’s perspective, as an adult, after she has had time to process it all. I wanted her to be able to clearly name what happened to her, to accept that she was lied to, and then made out to be foolish and called unstable for the wounds inflicted on her by others. I wanted to tell the story where she lives with that trauma and learns that she is not defined by what happened to her.
In It Came From Neverland, Wendy is in her early 20s and she is working as a schoolteacher at an orphanage at the start of WWI in 1914. She also volunteers in the afternoon, reading to soldiers who have returned from the war. When one of her students goes missing, and a solider in a comma utters the words “Peter Pan,” she knows Peter has returned and she and her brothers must reunite to finally stop him from kidnapping more children.
This book is for every woman who was told she was special by someone who really meant that she was useful to them. For every woman who followed a beautiful story, later to learn it was only a cage.
And, for every single woman who told the truth about what happened to her, but was not believed, and she realized that no one was coming to save her, so she learned to save herself.
The only story that has ever truly mattered is Wendy’s.
It Came From Neverland: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
james_davis_nicoll
scalziwhatever_feedThe other morning I was clearing out the multiple daily emails I get from scammers who have used “AI” to praise one of my books in order to get me to use their “marketing” services and/or be on their “podcast” and/or show up for their “book club” and/or use them to become big in Hollywood, all of which is cover to grift money from me, one “Ai”-written email in particular caught my eye. This was not because it was any more authentic than the rest of them, but because the domain it came from was a specific and legit business domain, and not just Gmail or Hotmail or even (oh lord) AOL.com. In a burst of concern, I sought out the email of the company head and their management contact to let them know I suspected their domain had been hacked by scammers.
I got a reply back that, no, actually, the email, which to me had clearly been written using “AI,” was legitimate.
Folks: Don’t do this. Don’t use “AI” for your business correspondence, especially to creatives. Ever.
Let me put this in perspective: I get literally dozens of spam and scam emails every day, all of which use “AI” to fart out canned flattery about my work in an attempt to bamboozle cash out of me. I get so many of them, in fact, that I can tell at a glance not only that the text has been written with “AI,” but also, at this point, which of the “big four” LLMs was used to fart it out. Hell, I literally just now got a scam email in Spanish, and I could tell what it was going to say even before I pressed the “translate” button.
This is how predictable “AI” writing is, and how frequently it is used for fraudulent purposes. At this point, my brain immediately and directly associates “AI” text in email with “scam.” That is its only purpose.
The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates “AI”-generated text with attempted fraud.
When you, a legitimate business, use “AI” to communicate with me, I do not think “wow, that was a really well-composed email that makes me want to engage with the sender in a mutually co-operative way.” I makes me think “This is a fucking scam,” or, in the most charitable scenario, “This company has been hacked and a scammer is using their domain to fleece people.” Maybe you don’t know this, because you’re not the recipient of endless attempts at scammage via “AI.” But I know this, and it’s why I am telling you now: When you use “AI” in your professional communications, you do not look like a professional. You look like a fucking scammer.
There is a solution! Just don’t use “AI” to write your professional correspondence! Remember the day, like, just four years ago, when you pretty much wrote all your emails by hand? Do that again! It’s not difficult, you won’t look like a scammer, and your email has a better chance of being read and treated as if it came from an actual human, because it doesn’t look like every other awful scam email out there. It just makes good business sense.
Also, aside from the “you look like a scammer” angle: Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a “basic competence” issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me? I mean, I also have access to “AI,” so if that’s what you’re bringing to the table, what do I need you for? As the saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. If my first impression of you is that you’re letting “AI” do the talking for you, then my impression is that you’re not offering me anything at all.
So, yeah. “AI”? Don’t use it in your business emails. It does nothing positive for you, and does a lot that is negative. Just write the email yourself, or, if you’re a boss, pay someone to do it for you. It’s going to make a difference, and at the very least, your chances of being immediately and forever sorted into the spam folder will be a lot lower.
By the way, from the time I started writing this to right now, which is roughly a half of an hour later, I have received eight “AI”-written scam emails, including the one in Spanish mentioned above. This is what you’re up against when you send something to my email. If you’re using “AI” to write your business email, this is also what you’re sorting yourself into. Think about it, maybe.
— JS
james_davis_nicoll
merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 11, 2026 is:
saturnine • \SAT-er-nyne\ • adjective
Saturnine is a literary word that typically describes people who are glum and grumpy, or things that suggest or express gloom. It can also mean “slow to act or change.”
// A walk in the sunshine can improve your mood significantly, raising the spirits of even the most saturnine among us.
Examples:
“If he was once more cautious in interviews, coming across as a little saturnine, he’s looser now, illuminated by flashes of wry humour.” — Patrick Smith, The Independent (United Kingdom), 1 Feb. 2026
Did you know?
Saturnine is far—even astronomically far—from the cheeriest of words. It has a long history of describing the glum and grouchy among us, and comes ultimately from Sāturnus, name of the Roman god of agriculture, who was often depicted as a bent old man with a stern, sluggish, and sullen nature. Saturn, the ringed gas giant that is one of five planets visible to the naked eye, is of course the namesake of Sāturnus, and Saturn does indeed seem to dawdle; it requires over 29 of our Earth years to orbit the sun. The ancient Romans (like some astrologers today) believed those who are born when Saturn is rising in the sky tend toward being a Gloomy Gus or Debbie Downer. We don’t know A. A. Milne’s take on the influence of Saturn, but his gloomy, cynical gray donkey Eeyore is famously saturnine, a fact Eeyore himself would surely stoically accept as true if it were pointed out to him.
momijizukamorikrja
