I will be presenting a paper, 'The Experiment that is Not "Literature": The Clarke Award and Core Genre', at this year's Science Fiction Foundation Conference, which will discuss the difference between SF becoming indistinguishable from literature and SF(F) reconceptualising what "literature" is.

Put this baby in Dune Part Three because it’s sending signals and they’re all thumpers

Is there any approachable theory about the kind of comedy that really only works when referencing/remembering it later, despite being very flat/ineffective when it's actually happening? I think there's something interesting there (probably goes beyond comedy)

the algos occasionally serve me SNL content, rarely to my amusement, but I'm genuinely curious: 1.) how long has this level of extremely obvious teleprompter use been the norm? and 2.) honestly, are there any good books/articles about how bad SNL is? Has always been?

this is amazing. new (not terribly problematic) colonial appropriation just dropped

Do Androids Dream kind of held near the screenplay, like when you just waft the vermouth bottle at the martini

Yeah for sure. What's funny is I think there can be good stuff in that 2nd category, too—folks using tie-in money to bankroll their own ideas in thin disguises.

an entirely unrelated work that still tries to pin all of its big moments to the thing it doesn't care about or understand—it's kind of monumental, like a dish or a drink that's so complexly bad you think about it for years

The Coens' No Country being so on point for McCarthy's really throws a wrench into how dismissive I want to be about faithful adaptations

I'm always way more interested in good "faithless" adaptations than good faithful ones, partly because I think the latter's close to a contradiction in terms but mostly because the former's so much more interesting. Blade Runner, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc.

Checking you're reading the fine print on that graph

It is not *unrealistic*, but a thing that often bugs me in fiction is when characters have no sense of humor about old or ongoing tragedies—exes, deaths, terminal illnesses. Some actual people never joke about those; many do. When fiction makes them signposts of seriousness it reads flat to me.

I've been inverting that question because I think it's perhaps even more illuminating: what is fantasy? What distinction, what departure, are we describing by this word?

forever haunted by that bit in Adaptation where Chris Cooper says he was done with fish

Kij knows how to do it!

the noise I just made

Half-formed thought rattling around my brain in response to this about immersion being a high goal of a book and how I sometimes really enjoy (possibly prefer?) un-immersive books precisely because they make it easier to pay attention to the words on a page.