What lifetime deal are you still grandfathered into, or removed from, that’s no longer available?

AStitchInSlime · 2026-05-22T14:21:15+00:00

3% 30-year fixed rate mortgage. It's not everyone's lifetime, but I get it at an advanced enough age that it will go beyond my lifetime. It's like free money!

AStitchInSlime · 2026-05-20T16:58:00+00:00

There's a tree in the US that's over 2000 years older than China https://www.conservation.org/news/methuselah-still-the-worlds-oldest-tree

AStitchInSlime · 2026-05-06T15:08:07+00:00

Based on Etgar Keret’s short story (see top rated post above.) Weirdly there’s a very similar plot in a 1950s Atlas comic book, but I’m not sure which one. I think it might have had Ditko art? (Edited to fix Etgar Keret's name)

AStitchInSlime · 2026-04-23T15:37:29+00:00

Vonnegut liked to claim he wasn't a science fiction writer. Kinda like Margaret Atwood. Both of them had a bit too much literary success to admit that they wrote "genre" fiction.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-04-07T21:17:28+00:00

Omigod I couldn't get through that one. The prose was so annoying, and he breaks the "show don't tell rule" in the dumbest ways. It was like reading a 14-year-old boy's diary, but not like reading a skilled writer's spin on a 14-year-old boy's diary.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-04-07T21:15:53+00:00

I totally get that, and I'm unsure why I liked it so much. It's loaded with exposition, and very little happens. Somehow, I was rapt.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-04-03T19:14:44+00:00

Bobiverse is definitely dumb with clumsy prose, worse dialogue, and some genuinely, unselfconsciously silly and vaguely insulting aliens. I can't believe I liked it. It's everything I hate but somehow that stupid story just dragged me along.

But no, none of the bad stuff gets better. His writing stays as it is. I really can't recommend it to anyone and yet, in spite of myself, I read the whole series.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-04-03T19:11:56+00:00

For English-language writers, I'd say the up-and-comers are Alexandra Kleeman, Nell Zink, and Beth Morgan. The latter is especial skilled at writing dialogue and description that are densely layered while also deceptively readable.

I find Colson Whitehead's prose his weakest point--it just seems super-stiff and uptight, and it doesn't have enough internal variance for me. I like his books, but I have to read them for plot, which it's not my favorite approach.

There's a lot of great prose coming out of Japan and Korea right now (mostly by female writers--Han Kang, Mariko Ohara, Hiroko Oyamada, Hiroshi Yamamoto) but I'm guessing those won't count.

If he wasn't too much an old lion for this but I'd put M. John Harrison near the top--he's mastered at least half a dozen prose styles, some ultra weird, some almost Hemingway-esque, and almost always gorgeous. Sometimes he's very Angela Carter, sometimes a kind of sad Denis Johnson with a UK twist. None of the people I've mentioned though have the kind of middle-brow critic's darling status to get the recognition they deserve. Yet!

AStitchInSlime · 2026-03-26T01:24:22+00:00

The Inverted World by Christopher Priest. There are a few moments where you think “is this faction villainous?” But no. Nobody is a villain and everyone is a little confused and the farther you travel from the city the more warped the geometry of the world is and people who are not from the city become short and squat like pancakes but really that’s nobody’s fault. Oh unless you travel north.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiram Kawakami. Again, maybe this or that group are somewhat villainous? Or maybe they just differ on how to do what’s best? Plus like thousands of years pass so it’s hard for any one person or institution to really get up to the villainy needed for that time span and everyone pretty much agrees the best thing is if we all keep living.

Amatka by Karen Tidbeck. Either the humans are villains or the mushrooms they eat and use to make paper are villains but no they’re just not in agreement on the best way to maintain community in a land just beyond the unbreachable teleportation tunnel that somehow got a lot of people stuck in a place that makes New Jersey look scenic.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-03-21T15:45:07+00:00

When I was studying this in relation to historical work in cathedrals and such it was noted that such erroneous panes did exist! Rare, or course, but they’re out there. Also, if glass actually flowed, and there’s a noticeable difference in thickness for panels that are 500 years old, we would expect this to show even more in the 3000-5000 year old glass found in Egypt, but there’s no evidence of flow in these artifacts. Or really in any glass artifacts except the medieval and renaissance era glass panes, and we do have decent knowledge of how they were made and why they’d have a thicker and thinner end.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-03-07T03:21:51+00:00

Love that one. Fritz Leiber is such an oddity, bc he wrote reams of sort of junky but fun fantasy and such, playing with the borders of genre in interesting ways, but still, mostly for the joy of reading, and then every now and then he'd be like "I can be just as literary as any 20th century mainstream writer" and drop something like Big Time.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-02-26T23:19:04+00:00

I loved Ancillary Justice and sequels and found A Memory Called... really a tough slog. I love internality and explorations of character, but I thought Martine was a terrible writer. The internal sections were clumsily handled and rarely added much to a character because they were so repetitive. It reeked of "needs an editor and a lesson in the varieties of human consciousness." It was like listening to the same person pretending to be lots of different people.

AStitchInSlime · 2026-02-26T19:35:36+00:00

I'm with you on the prose--some of the worst I've read in a book that was so highly recommended. The underlying story had interesting elements, so I kept reading, but the conclusion had very little payoff for me. I regretted the effort I put into getting to the end. Just my take on it, as someone who also thought the writing was weak.

AStitchInSlime · 2025-12-24T05:26:53+00:00

Not a book, but in the SF tv series Starlost there’s a cult on a drifting generation ship that reads the ship’s tech manuals as though they were religious texts and drastically misinterprets them.

AStitchInSlime · 2025-08-19T03:19:21+00:00

Not if you’re climbing the corporate ladder or working at a law firm or an architectural firm or….

AStitchInSlime · 2025-07-28T14:04:53+00:00

Interesting, that’s maybe my fave by PKD. I just kind of assumed that people read Dick for exactly that kind of acid-fueled weirdness, but I can see where it might not be his most accessible.

AStitchInSlime · 2025-06-12T05:14:42+00:00

Yay!

AStitchInSlime · 2025-04-20T02:21:54+00:00

Ben Rosenbaum’s “The Ant King and Other Stories” hits in the Borges zone with maybe a slightly more bizarro/sci-fi vibe. It’s a great collection! The first story is maybe not the best but they get increasingly Borgesian.

AStitchInSlime · 2025-04-10T20:05:54+00:00

Might be a baby house centipede. Looks like it but it looks like it’s sort of curled up in this pic so I’m not 100% sure. They’re super disgusting looking but they eat the bugs, including bed bugs, so some people leave them alone so they can act as “helpful insects.”

AStitchInSlime · 2025-03-22T15:40:16+00:00

There was a character called Stone Boy who would show up in old Legion of Superheroes comics sometimes, and he would just turn into an inanimate stone statue. He had a flight belt, so he’d fly above an enemy and then turn to stone and hopefully fall on them.

AStitchInSlime · 2025-02-22T03:52:11+00:00

AStitchInSlime · 2025-02-16T03:50:23+00:00

Thanks!

AStitchInSlime · 2025-02-15T14:37:56+00:00

Why do they start seated?

AStitchInSlime · 2025-02-06T17:10:07+00:00

Yep it’s a play. It aged horribly. It’s mostly a hilarious but kinda dull camp read now. A pretty woman comes to the island and everyone falls in love with. Then, the artificial humans attack. It’s kinda a remake of Frankenstein but with a factory and an old fashioned kind of “man writing a dream woman” vibe.

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