New racing stripes courtesy of Fig

Because he decided it was time for him to hop down from his fortress of solitude up on top of the bedroom bookcase, landing directly behind Nameless as she was cautiously assessing whether she could scoot by me to the bedroom window. We'll never know but sprinting claws out in terror across my arm definitely worked.

Dear authors

Don't do this.

Because My Tears Are Delicious to You 14: The Exile Waiting by Vonda N. McIntyre

When I began rereading this, I had only the vaguest of recollections about it, that it was in some way connected to the author's more famous “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” and Dreamsnake, that it was set in the last city on a barren Earth abandoned by the civilized peoples of the Sphere and that was about all. I therefore had a certain level of trepidation because while I had fond memories of having had fond memories of this, the lack of specifics meant there was no assurance the suck fairy would not have visited it. I am happy to say that I can see why I liked this so much almost forty years ago.

Mischa lives near Center, last bastion of civilization, such as it is, on an Earth that populated the stars before incinerating itself in the Last War. The vast warrens around Center, created during the preparations for the final war, are one legacy of the great conflagration, as are the mutations seen in so many of the people of Earth. Mischa, eking out a life near the bottom of the social pyramid, is lucky in that her mutation is invisible, a degree of telepathic ability, but unlucky because it ties her to her idiot sister Gemmi, and through her to her exploitative uncle by chains she has no idea how to break.

Her only hope for her and her drug-addicted, despairing brother Chris is that she can somehow talk one of the starfarers who visit Center to take Mischa and Chris away from Earth to one of the civilized worlds of the Sphere; distance may do for them what will cannot. Unfortunately, not only are the people who choose to visit Earth the dregs of civilization but when the book opens, storm season, when no sane person lands a starship at Center, has begun. Even if it wasn't storm season, thus far Mischa's efforts have yielded only savage beatings.
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This pleases me

It's squirrel footprints preserved in sidewalk concrete.

Miss Hallelujah's "Conventionally Speaking"

I mostly made this post to address this Daily Dot article that went around earlier this week (How The Growing Generation Gap Is Changing The Face Of Fandom) The basic premise was that NineWorlds = good and inclusive because it’s a young con run by young people! And WorldCon = awful on the diversity front because old white men.

Well. I attended both cons as a young queer Asian woman and I think that’s a pretty unfair assessment of what the cons were actually like.

And now I know

Ibid has a meow for "Put me down so I can run over and groom Groucho."