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scary nonprofit stories to tell in the dark
From Vu Le at Nonprofit AF: "it’s time for this year’s crop of spooky stories set in our sector"! (Previously.)
innovation, death, sorcery and meaning
Two short, triumphant fantasy stories about well-worn prophecies and magical customs that take a left turn. "Another End of the Empire" by Tim Pratt (audio version): "The probability witches hit an impasse." A short story by Dyce (a.k.a. Sarah Blackwell): "No, I was resigned to death. I was only angry that my death would be so meaningless."
Bear, hot spring waterfall, horse, rowan, river, alder
Three short, eerie fantasy stories about water and beasts. "Hokkaido Green" by by Aidan Doyle (2010) is bittersweet fantasy about emotions, grief, and tradeoffs. "Talisman" by Tracina Jackson-Adams (2002): Horses, a family feud, dark ceremonies in the wood, high stakes and slow-burn reveals. "Riverine" by Danielle Jorgensen Murray (March 2021): the river man, his bride, permission, respect and care.
languages, customs, avatars, and nasty safeguards
"But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful." "Immersion" is a short science fiction story by French-Vietnamese author Aliette de Bodard that won the 2012 Nebula Award and Locus Award for Best Short Story. It never explicitly uses the word "assimilation," or "immigrant."
"Your grandpa was a lot of things in the old days"
Two short speculative stories about growing up in a powerful family. "Horangi", fantasy by Thomas Ha (reminds me a little of Ursula Vernon's Grandma Harken stories): “I’m sorry to hear that,” my grandfather responded politely, and he gave a smile that I’d often seen him give to the customers in his shoe repair shop, respectful, but with a little firmness to it. “I’m not sure why you’re telling me this. My family doesn’t work for yours anymore, Mr. Yong.” "Urban Fanfare", science fiction by Jared Oliver Adams: It was a cool idea. One of Mom’s best, really. But the problem with it was the music the committee chose.
"The quiet of the aftermath pressed down on us"
Two scifi stories about people finding tendrils of human connection while confronting modern grief. "A Glut of Nothing, and Yet… Something" by Monte Lin: ""The Singularity had come, but not the one people wanted.... the Glut: a grayed-out area that evaded vision, comprehension, and perception..." "Love at the End" by Deborah Germaine Augustin: "I woke up hungover the day after Kuala Lumpur was supposed to end.... Eddie poured water from our last six-litre bottle into the kettle." Both published this year.
"the flavors you teach them to desire"
"A perfect egg is a slash of light on a gray day." "The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes" by Siobhan Carroll is a bittersweet short fantasy story about cooking, grief, beauty in the midst of war, and teaching the next generation. (Previously.) "On the Feeding Habits of Humans: A Firsthand Account" by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali and Rachael K. Jones is a short and bittersweet, but mostly hopeful, science fiction story about foodways: Feeder TikTik approaches the [human] Feeder with their haustellums extended and extrudes the greeting-scent. Also available as a one-hour audio recording.
Ecologies, empathy, parenting, robots, and unanticipated consequences
Two scifi stories about tech inventions that don't work out as their designers planned. Ken Liu's "Quality Time" (from last year) looks into "unsolved problems in home automation" and a friendship at a startup. "Nobel Prize Speech Draft of Paul Winterhoeven, with Personal Notes" by Jane Espenson (published this month) is an epistolary piece by an unreliable narrator: "My problem was the subjectivity of pain." (Yes, this is the Jane Espenson who wrote the "I Was Made to Love You" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the "Dirty Hands" episode of Battlestar Galactica.)
"it smelled good, but... in my mind it already belonged to someone else"
piratefsh wrote a short series of blog posts about allowing herself to become a perfume aficionado, starting with "Every month or so, about two weeks before my period starts, my nose gets hypersensitive." (Content note for vomiting.) Part two: "Sales assistants at department stores are terrifying." "But there I was, at the cosmetics section in the glitziest department stores of Kuala Lumpur, every other weekend with my feet and flip flops sweaty from trekking across the street from the nearest light rail train station."
"The Computronic Program-o-Mat was deeply unpopular"
"i am assuming for these purposes that wayne enterprises is a privately held conglomerate..." Kitty Unpretty (previously) lays out a plausible corporate structure for Wayne Enterprises (the fictional company owned by Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman). Highlights include the health division: "Anyone who tries to make anything brain-related gets the side-eye these days. They’ve been burned too many times before. 'And it’s definitely not supposed to be used to read or control minds?' any engineer working on a brain-related project will be asked, repeatedly, forever." and "Spite: A Valid Way To Run A Business Since 1864".
leather, gray suits, motorcycles, folding chairs, and queer history
Aphyr, a gay leatherman, writes a history of "the relationship between queer leather and the larger LGBTQ community" covering the first few decades of Pride celebrations. "I want to give fellow LGBTQ people—both kinky and vanilla—an understanding of the interplay of queer and leather communities, a grasp of how normative and radical forces interpreted and shaped the expression of Pride, and an appreciation for the people who worked to achieve the culture we have today. I hope that this history gives readers a framework for thinking about leather and Pride in a more nuanced way." Long enough that it's also available as an 89-page PDF or ePub.
sign read: "PERMANENTLY CLOSED." The lock on the door was busted.
Two short, bittersweet scifi stories about people changing their journeys. "Personal Trainer" by Meg Elison has a new way to exercise and a new kind of hammock to relax in. "Wait Calculation" by Derrick Boden has political intrigue aboard a generation ship.
"I am here on business and my accountant's a real wizard."
Alexandra Erin (previously) posts short speculative fiction stories on her Patreon, including a one-sided conversation about dead people posting status updates on Facebook, a fairy tale about a healer's price, a political horror story about scars that don't go away, and a card game in space (part of a series). (Disclaimer: a friend.)
"they were persuaded by the immediacy of suffering"
"Byzantine Empathy" is a novelette by Ken Liu about virtual reality, moral reasoning, atrocities, institutional philanthropy, geopolitics, and two very determined women at odds with each other. Content note: violence, including harm to children.
Screenwriters directory
The Writers Guild of America "Find a Writer" search is fun. IMDb has a ton of ads these days and the WGA site is, in contrast, calm and text-based. See TV and movie writing credits for writers such as Naren Shankar, Gretchen J. Berg, Glen A. Larson, Susannah Grant (the writer of Erin Brockovich), Jane Espenson, Callie Khouri (the writer of Thelma and Louise, who also evidently worked on a pilot with Steven Bochco), and Joss Whedon's father and grandfather. Or check out the season-by-season writing staff of shows such as Psych or Saturday Night Live. And if you search for "pilot" and choose the "other" tab you see a long list of intriguing TV pilots that did not make it to series.
volunteering, mistakes, & "when we get the least signaling about it"
"We have to be willing to let someone else make mistakes and do it worse sometimes." Marissa Lingen reminds us that it's important to step back from particular volunteer jobs if you've been doing them for a long time -- for your own sake, and for the health of the organization. And: "Also of concern, and very hard to bring up: sometimes A’s skills slip for one reason or another. Yes, you. Even if you’re A.....we never think it’s us. We never think, I bet I’m the problem here."
"you are asked to believe them. But I am an unreliable narrator."
"Impairment phenomenology is different from other kinds of phenomenology in that it does not assume a subject in command of their own faculties." Scholar Jonathan Sterne has written a forthcoming book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment; the introduction is now available (PDF, 54 pages, 2.5MB). The introduction briefly explains what phenomenology is, and discusses disability simulations, Sterne's own experience of thyroid cancer and an acquired impairment in his voice, the "humanities 'we'", policy implications, the interior voice, and more. It also includes excerpts from Sterne's blog posts about his disability, and a cute illustration called "Things That Are 7.5 Centimeters".
"People like him love standard procedure"
Two short scifi/fantasy stories in which customer service folks get to reward customers who treat them well, or punish those who treat them badly. Dyce writes about an isolated refueling station: "Out-of-hours fuelling requires a prior appointment." Aimee Ogden writes about a coffeeshop: "his coffee comes with a nice cantrip that'll help him send all his emails for the next week with zero typos and exactly the right number of exclamation marks."
moments of rest and ease from unexpected corners
John Wiswell has written a few short fantasy stories about domestic settings that turn eerily comfortable or appealing: "Open House on Haunted Hill" and "For Lack of a Bed".
retail, disability, zombies, etc.
A few short scifi/fantasy stories about dark situations that turn out surprisingly well. The day nearly everyone at Evil-Mart called in sick, and the sequel. One person who gets bitten by a zombie.... yet never turns. And some survivors of the robot apocalypse getting an unexpected invitation from their new overlords.
"Barbie Career of the Year as a Window on Centrist Feminism"
"I am not, nor have I never been, a Barbie collector, but I find the Career of the Year series fascinating as a metric of public attitudes toward feminism. .... Generally Mattel’s team wants to present Barbie as a feminist trendsetter but in a centrist way, a model of forward-thinking but non-controversial feminism, and it’s fascinating to watch that metric evolve." Ada Palmer (previously) discusses the decade-long history of the Career of the Year series, and notes, "Barbie’s 2020 Career of the Year is (for the first time) not a single Barbie but a team". And what happened in 2017?
unhygienic and impolite toward the athlete
"start with questions of maleness and masculinity and go on from there"
In 2015, seven men discussed navigating masculinity in a roundtable discussion for the WisCon Chronicles (WisCon is a feminist scifi/fantasy convention they attend). "For me, my own maleness feels like an axiom, a defining property that I can’t prove or justify with analysis — and yet most of the traits that I associate with masculinity are things I’m uncomfortable with, whether or not I see those traits in myself." Participants included scifi/fantasy authors Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, David Moles, Jim Hines, and Benjamin Rosenbaum (conversation facilitated by Mary Anne Mohanraj).
no single cause; 5.9% of youth & 2.5% of adults; safe & effective meds
"The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based conclusions about the disorder" is a scientific review of studies about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, published in the September 2021 issue of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. (DOI link, full PDF, 30 pages, open access article licensed as CC-BY.) "Our aim is to provide current and accurate information about ADHD supported by a substantial and rigorous body of evidence." Findings start: "The syndrome we now call ADHD has been described in the medical literature since 1775."
"this was like discovering DNA"
David Cain of Raptitude (previously, previously, previously) has blogged for over a decade about his efforts at improving his life, including several structured experiments around "A place for everything, and everything in its place", meditation, exercise, and more. This year, Cain received an ADHD diagnosis and wrote: "One of the bigger bombshells was realizing that this mystery issue is the whole reason this blog exists. Raptitude has been my response to living with ADHD and not knowing it."
Children's lit, digital humanities, Python, and a shared notebook
"Need a fun way to learn about computational text analysis for digital humanities?" Well, "we should tell you about The Data-Sitters Club, how it works, and who we are. It all started one day when Quinn Dombrowski was on vacation in Las Vegas and started getting nostalgic about Ann M. Martin’s iconic series about girlhood in the upper-middle-class American suburbs of the 1990s." Start with "Quinn's Great Idea" to read a series of colloquial narratives chronicling research using the Baby-Sitters Club corpus. For example: Curious about what we can learn from the series's formulaic "Chapter 2" duplications?
"What is the experience giving you?"
Let's assume you'd like to get better at a skill. What role does learning tacit knowledge play in growing your expertise? "Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’. A series of blog posts by Cedric Chin summarizes education research and "explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition" - including a summary of an approach for eliciting tacit knowledge from experts. Some really interesting anecdotes here about Toyota, judo, bike-riding, recognizing tennis serves, and more.
a hall of fame collecting the "most iconic" Tumblr posts
In addition to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list/data visualization (previously), there's the "world heritage post" Tumblr account which reblogs "the most iconic tumblr posts, new and old." Not yet (as far as I know) affiliated with UNESCO.
"under construction" clipart, ASCII art, & a Consciousness Chip
"Finally made myself a little personal portfolio/speaker website, with a nostalgic twist... Which Internet era are you nostalgic for?" Moriel Schottlender's new website is available in several flavors: 1989, plus 1992, 1997, 2000, 2012, today, and future. Check out the future-style credits in particular. (Disclaimer: I know Moriel and worked with her years ago.)
"None of this is going as planned."
"I hate Original Diana immediately, or at least I want to hate her." "The Failed Dianas" is a short, emotional science fiction story by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld, February 2021) in which our Asian-American protagonist struggles with whether it is possible to make her parents happy. It was P H Lee's favorite story of the month.
Chat and social media reactions, images, and poetry
"When so much of life is mediated through WeChat, stickers become a necessary mask. A way to be visible without committing. Communication without actually communicating." Chaoyang Trap (previously, cofounded by MeFi's Own beijingbrown) delves into "laziness-as-resistance" in China (discussed in a recent New York Times article), the process of making and selling these images, how they differ from reaction GIFs, copyright, woodblock prints, fandom, and more. Related: the poem "This Language That We Share" by Judith Kingston.
The Nonsense Laboratory, or Th nn-n-schn's lpbr.twry
"The Nonsense Laboratory uses machine learning to let you poke at, mangle, and play with the spelling of words." And: "The tools in the Nonsense Laboratory let you manipulate these letters and mouth movements to make strange and new words... a bit like playing a musical instrument or modeling clay." Five toys: the Mixer ("Mix together existing words to make new meanings"), Mouthfeel Tuner ("Change how text feels in your mouth"), Respeller ("Spell the sound of a text with different letters"), Sequencer ("Invent new words by sequencing mouth movements"), and Explorer ("Investigate an endless field of nonsense"). Led by MeFi's own aparrish.
Three ways to make academic writing more accessible to general readers
Joseph Reagle briefly makes three recommendations for writers of academic books "wishing to reach a wider audience and transcend common academic conventions and weaknesses": "balancing metadiscourse, pruning names, and sharpening theses".
protecting outliers
It's important for the US Census to collect and publish a lot of information. It's also important for individual respondents to retain their privacy. Re-identification techniques pose a problem, so The Markup's Julia Angwin interviews Cynthia Dwork, one of the creators of the "differential privacy" approach, about how differential privacy could help ensure the US can meet both goals.
Russian data access laws and Fastmail
Email provider Fastmail has announced that, due to losing their court case against the Russian government, "Fastmail subscriptions will no longer be available for purchase in Russia." Fastmail "concluded that it would not be possible for us to comply from a technical, business, or financial perspective" to comply with the Russian data laws, partly "because subjecting any of our customers to their data access laws could create unacceptable privacy risks". Russia's government has increased its control over local internet access and usage in recent years; Fastmail noted, "Many email and digital companies worldwide have had to deal with this situation over the past few years, with similar impacts and outcomes, such as NordVPN, ProtonMail, Tutanota, Mailfence, and StartMail."
patron records and circulation privacy in libraries
Librarian and researcher Dorothea Salo teaches an information security and privacy class that "asks students to investigate various aspects of the privacy/security situation surrounding their choice of campus-related data." Based on what they dug up, Salo requested records of her own library usage data at the University of Wisconsin, and published the dataset. It's big and detailed, goes back to 2002, and violates traditional library-patron privacy expectations. Librarian Kendra K. Levine: "The circulation data should not exist. I know it’s valuable for collection assessment but to the level of granularity tied to an individual?" Salo wrote a follow-up to "give you some idea where to go looking if you’re curious about a library’s stated practice".
"For a day or two, nothing happened. I mean, nothing."
"Milo’s habits are simple and revolting." Maria Farrell writes about her "hugely fluffy and dolphin-smiling Samoyed dog, Milo" and of the inconvenience of his bowel movements ("He has absolutely no concept of gastrointestinal cause and effect....For a while, there, Milo’s daily rhythm was primed perfectly to require a straining squat precisely as we passed the entrance to the local Tube station at the height of rush hour."). And then there's what he ate at her brother in law’s fortieth birthday party... Warning for lots of dog poop description.
Skepticism of news journalism, moral values, and framing effects
"there is a link to differences in moral instincts, which cut across demographics and ideology." "A new way of looking at trust in media: Do Americans share journalism’s core values?" by the Media Insight Project. (Answer: many do not.) "The trust crisis may be better understood through people’s moral values than their politics." Using moral foundations theory, researchers found four clusters of people linked by their journalism & moral values. Researchers were able to revise stories to -- while keeping them factually accurate -- emphasizing aspects that made them more appealing to, for instance, people who care a lot about loyalty and authority. "Might people trust these stories more, attend to them more closely, see them as accurate, and so on?"
Teacher, beautician, mom, wealth manager, student, & taxi driver
"For Indian women, rideshare apps are a lifeline: Six Indian women describe how rideshare apps have transformed their lives", in Rest of World, by Chandni Doulatramani. "The ubiquity of rideshare cabs has had a lasting impact on the urban-dwelling women of India, with ripple effects reaching stay-at-home moms, workers, and college students." (For folks who are wondering: Uber Moto gives the passenger a motorcycle ride.)
"I asked myself what I most valued about teaching mathematics"
Mathematician Ursula Whitcher is an editor for a database of mathematical research. "Branch cuts: writing, editing, and ramified complexities" (9-page PDF) discusses reevaluating career priorities (especially after the University of Wisconsin redefined tenure), reflecting on gender and sexuality, and "bridging queer and mathematical communities". Whitcher has also written for the American Mathematical Society on predictive policing, research projects that a protagonist of a Courtney Milan romance novel might be interested in, and more.
"Fitness is a journey and we all start somewhere"
If you can't do full push-ups, "just like with everything else in the world, you can build up!" Hampton from Hybrid Calisthenics shows you why and how you can progress from wall pushups to inclined push-ups to kneeling push-ups and then to full push-ups in an encouraging one-minute video. (Three-minute video with more detail, still photos.) "When we're doing these exercises, we're actually building strength. When we move on to a harder exercise, all we're doing is demonstrating and using our new strength." (found via Twitter)
"the first and only bit of stability since I became homeless"
A few stories of houseless New York City residents who have lived in hotels for the past year thanks to the #HomelessCantStayHome campaign.
Migrant workers, changes in US cannabis regulation, and conflict
"You can try," he says softly in Mandarin, "but I don't think they'd talk to you about New Mexico." The confluence of changes in local regulations around hemp and cannabis cultivation and sale in the US, disagreements among neighbors in the Navajo Nation, the pandemic, investment by foreign investors (including people from China), exploitation of migrant workers (including people from China), and anti-Asian racism has led to tense confrontations, arrests, and tensions within families.
Daycare worker, waitress, mountain guide, paramedic
A few short fantasy stories about serving other people during times of death and peril. A daycare worker at the end of the world, and a restaurant server at a different end. A mountain guide who always finds what is lost. And the funniest one: a necromancer who doesn't realize they're a necromancer, and thinks they're just a really good paramedic.
a few short happy-ending sf/f stories
Short, optimistic scifi/fantasy fiction stories: "It’s not a bad boarding house, as these things go." "If your suit watch is correct, you should have ran out of air… three weeks ago?" "The first time the humans told us they sang their way through subspace, we thought it a translation error." "A human. On Captain Diii’s ship." "'May you have a life of safety and peace', said the witch, cursing the bloodthirsty warrior." "What is the harm in one more lie?" All self-published by the authors on Tumblr.
Keith Burgun's 4 Interactive Forms
"Within 'interactive entertainment', there actually exist a number of forms – patterns of design that work in a certain way. Only by understanding these forms can we proceed with guidelines for better interactive system design." MeFi's own Keith Burgun, a game designer and game design instructor, discusses mapping, solving, evaluation, and understanding in four categories of interactive entertainment.
Nicola Griffith on her writing, genre, kittens, ableism, and more
"To me, honestly, genre is just a vehicle I use to cross the story terrain. So depending on what story I want to tell, I use the appropriate genre." Author Nicola Griffith, author of scifi, historical fiction, detective fiction, nonfiction, and more, discusses her books and writing journey in an interview from late 2020. She learned more about how her own fiction works while writing a PhD thesis a few years ago. Griffith's blog has tons of interesting musings, on topics including the phenomenon of marginalized readers feeling "momentarily flummoxed by fiction that doesn't push us down" and identity and science fiction. "Reading SF, the over-riding value of which is the new, keeps our reticular activating systems primed: we expect everything and anything."
"New alphabet dropped!"
One person reminisced about, as a child, writing capital letter Es with several redundant horizontal lines so that it looked like a ladder. Other Tumblr users yes-anded with sentiments like "All capital letters should have a leveled-up form" and "Please add your own unsettling godtier capitals!" as well as calligraphy and a font (.otf) file for an "Anxiety" font.
Two debugging puzzles (and more to come?)
Julia Evans (previously) is making interactive in-browser text puzzles to help people learn how to debug computer networking issues, and asking for feedback as she tries stuff out. "The Case of the Slow Websites" and "The Case of the Connection Timeout" are already up (source code using Twine), and she's thinking of making several more. "I'd love to know what folks think of this approach to learning debugging! One of my favourite ways to learn is by debugging weird problems, so my idea with this style of game is to sort of share the experience of past bugs I've run into so that other people can learn from them too."
teams that feel like bands
Hisham H. Muhammad writes "A love letter to bands, in music and code", reminiscing on the feeling of being in a team that is, or feels like, a band: "work done in a collective yields results of a different nature....When I’m in a collective environment — and by that I mean any setting where my work is presented to and discussed by others as it is developed — even when I’m doing work completely on my own, even before I’ve had my first piece of feedback, I feel a sort of mind game playing in my head where I 'play the part' of my peers and imagine what their feedback would be, be it consciously or subconsciously. I’m doing the work not only for myself, but for others too, whose opinions I care about."
"I haven't felt like myself for years now."
"Good ol' Charlie B" is a sad-and-sweet, talky comic by Marina Kittaka taking place years after the events of Peanuts: "half essay, half tribute to visiting old friends". A text-only version is available. "Yeah. I've been having a hard time, just. Figuring out where to go from here. Trying to piece something together that actually... feels like a life." Kittaka has also written about art and community and co-option, noting, "to practice my philosophy I must learn to be okay with people not getting it, to stop fighting to stay legible and correct-feeling in everybody's mind."