What is The Time Traveler’s Passport?It’s an Amazon-exclusive anthology of six short stories — one written by me! — that have time travel as an integral part of their plot. Not even counting me, it’s a pretty grand line-up of authors: R.F. Kuang, Peng Shepard, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake and P. Djèlí Clark. My story “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” was released early on the Amazon “First Reads” program, but now the entire anthology is up and ready to be read.
Here’s the link to Amazon’s page for the anthology. If you have Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited, you can check out these stories at no additional cost; for everyone else you can buy the entire anthology for a nice low price, or pick and choose the individual stories. The stories also come with audio narration (mine performed by Malcolm Hillgartner), so you have options on how to take in the tale.
These are all excellent stories by fantastic authors (credit here to editor John Jacob Adams for putting it together), and well worth your time to check out. Enjoy!
There was a Costco delivery, so that means: the best kind of Purrcy box shenanigans! They're in the kitchen! They have holes! They're sturdy enough for a rumpus! Made for cat, clearly
I've been doing too much doomscrolling again, but I've also been reading a LOT of books. So I'm going to try to use my morning Happy Light Time to write up reviews of what I've been reading lately.
Days of Atonement, Walter Jon Williams: first published 1991, set in the early 2000s New Mexico. The protagonist, Loren Hawn, is the police chief of Atocha, NM, who prides himself on on never having shot one of his people. He just wants to make sure Atocha stays *nice*, you know? And if he gets really, *really* angry with people who don't support that, and uses his fists to show them the error of their ways, well, that's part of the old-school Western lawman tradition. As is his part in Atocha's tradition of civic bribery.
I gotta hand it to WJW, this is the very, VERY rare police procedural that's aware that ACAB, including the protagonist. The reason it works is, first, the antagonist is *worse*; second, there's no-one seriously trying to clean up the town. The *threat* of cleaning up the town is there, but it's an empty threat, no-one actually means it. If the old order of corruption is swept away, it will be replaced by a new, less local one.
I can see why the book didn't really "break through" as WJW hoped: the protagonist is *not* a Good Person you can root for whole-heartedly, he's not very nice and he doesn't understand himself very well, though he does grow and learn in the course of the novel. The ending isn't altogether happy and triumphant, either. It's a fascinating and complex book, I'm glad james_davis_nicoll recently reviewed it, I missed it when it was new.
Having access this evening to a tableful of newspapers, I saw the front-page article in the Globe about the climatically imminent flooding of the Seaport and it was pretty much exactly like reading that water is wet. I still have difficulty regarding that neighborhood as a real part of Boston, not merely because of its glass-shelled gentrification but because it is even more obviously on loan from the sea than the rest of this flat gravel-fill town. As soon as there was sea-rise in the future, Boston was going to be under it, long before the governments and corporations of this world blew through the 1.5C deadline. I love the harborwalk and I have seen the harbor walking over it. Urban renewal was faster cash in the moment than streets that would not flood the next minute. I do not believe in the stupidest timeline because I was exposed too early to the folktale in which it could always be worse, but it is nonsensical and nightmarish to me that this is the one we are all trapped in. It is because the universe is an unjust place that so many in power are not found in the morning blue-lipped, salt-lunged, sea-strangled on land.
On the other hand, tonight I watched Hestia trot over to spatch's new computer on which was still stuck the silver-paper bow of its early holiday present and pluck it in passing, after which she hunted it up and down the front hall with much batting and biting and singing the high, clear song to her prey which is usually reserved for socks. Decades after bouncing off all the George Eliot I tried after Silas Marner (1861), I seem to be embedded in Middlemarch (1872). It washed out my plans for the day which I then did little with, but I slept a generally assessed normal number of hours.
For when I have time and energy before the season to put up some 'gravestones' with 'how they died'.
Princess Bride themed
He Killed My Father
Started A Land War In Asia
Went Up Against A Sicilian When Death Was On The Line
Didn't Think ROAS Existed
Didn't Have Fun Storming The Castle
Since Halloween takes place on a Saturday next year, I might try to throw a Halloween Party. And maybe a Big Number Birthday, if I can be arsed. I wasn't planning a Big Number Birthday, but a friend gave me a look like I'd uttered a mortal sin when I mentioned I wasn't really big on a Big Number Birthday.
--
I sent out the 7x7 picnic party invitations, have about 15 going, 5 who can't, 5 maybes.
B1 will not be much help since she has her Christmas Party the night before. I have a Matildas game the night before. The parentals will be out of town. So it's going to be me and maybe B2.
I mean, I'm pretty sure the people I've invited are not going to be particularly fussed that the place isn't spotless. It might just be a bit chaotic in cleanup, is all. But that can be managed, too...
My entire weekend (well, the part of it that wasn't watching Game 7) was eaten by my mom finally deciding to replace her iPhone 8, which was stuck on iOS 16, because its battery was starting to overheat. She bought an iPhone 16e running iOS 26. The transfer process went about as smoothly as could be expected under the circumstances, but the inevitable Oh No Everything Is Different reactions are harder to manage when I haven't updated any of MY devices to version 26 yet. Before I do that, I feel like I should upgrade my primary laptop from Ventura to Sequoia. It just never seems like a good time to do anything that disruptive.
I have another busy week coming up with 5 health appointments in 4 days (including kids, not just me), but then I will be rewarded with another library book sale and then a return to D&D after a three-week hiatus for Beethoven and baseball.
picked out a pair of glasses I just cannot stand. Sending them back, getting a better pair. I do have another spare pair if this one gives out entirely.
I read this last week, and it's been haunting me ever since.
A new kind of bias: AI choosing itself over humans Adding another wrinkle, researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently discovered a startling trend they call “AI–AI bias.” Large language models like GPT-4 and Meta’s Llama 3.1 consistently favored content created by other AIs over human-written material across product ads, academic abstracts, and even movie reviews.
Study coauthor Jan Kulveit warned that such bias could reshape economic opportunities, with humans at risk of being systematically sidelined. “Being human in an economy populated by AI agents would suck,” he said on X, advising people to run their work through AI tools before submitting it if they suspect another AI will be evaluating it.
This creates a troubling picture: not only are AI systems struggling to deliver promised productivity gains, but they may also be reinforcing their own dominance at the expense of human contributions.
From this article in The Economic Times (India), which also covers an MIT study into AI business application ("95 percent of business attempts to integrate generative AI are failing"), the AI bubble, and AI psychosis.
4. 90 books read in 2025 so far, according to Goodreads. Most recently finished: All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie, which is great fun to listen to while stumbling around in the woods looking for trail markers. Written in a style similar to that of a saga. Less horse or Iceland content than I was expecting, though.
I'm currently reading The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses (2025 sf), The Robots of Dawn (1983 sf), and The Vicar and the Rake (2020 m/m Regency romance).
I slightly less half-assedly fixed the warp on the Clover Sakiori loom (Japanese).
I didn't bring a comb for the weft and was using a tapestry needle, but catten remains unlikely to mind imperfect weaving.
Also, further adventures in dyeing wool yarn. I'd like to test on dyeing combed top for cotton, ramie, and silk (mulberry/bombyx, eri, tussah, and maybe a small sample of my treasured stash of muga); and then try some on alpaca or mohair after I've processed some more.
Later in the season, in natural dyes, I might experiment with the traditional hoary old standby of onion skins; rose hips (several of my roses shrubs produce them); and find out if windfall figs from the no-longer-quite-so-baby fig tree do anything interested as dyes. Osage orange, common madder, true and false indigo, hibiscus, and elderberry grow in Louisiana so making a dye plant plot might be entertaining. That or I sacrifice e.g. a bunch of beets lol. For personal use, I don't care about consistency (I prefer chaos ball colors) and I'm not that fussed about reliable fastness. "Throw it in a pot and also an ~appropriate mordant" for personal experiment promises to be very entertaining.
- Baby Miss L was sick for Halloween, but I did get a lovely picture of her from the previous weekend where she, her mother, and my sister were all dressed as witches. <333
- I made another pot of garlic and bread soup this evening and it's so good and my apartment smells like garlic and olive oil (in a good way).
- However, for the first time ever, cutting scallions made my eyes tear up like cutting onions - I guess the white part is really oniony.
- Yesterday, I also made the dough for those Levain-style chocolate chip cookies and I had one this morning and they're so good. I will be baking one off each morning for breakfast this week.
- Call me crazy, but every time I see that commercial with Paul Skenes (and Questlove and Francisco Lindor), I think it's Josh Allen at first. They look alike!
- Amazon is actually listing book 8 of Dungeon Crawler Carl (Parade of Horribles) but only on audible or in hardcover. Why is there no kindle listing??? The release date is either May 26, 2026 or June 2, 2026 - I have seen both.
- Despite my difficulties with audiobooks etc. I did try the first DCC audiobook, but the narrator sounds like he's an out of shape 40-year-old, not a jacked 27-year-old, so it didn't work for me on that level as well as the various other levels, though Donut's voice was fantastic.
- Still no word that I can find on a date for Alecto the Ninth.
- I was pulling for you, Toronto! Sorry about that. *hands* Was a great series, though, even with that ending.
- and now no more baseball until March. *sadhair*
- At least the Rangers have won a couple of games? Though I don't have a lot of optimism for their season. And I really dislike Chris Drury and his way of being a GM, and unfortunately it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon. Sigh.
Athena called me yesterday with a quest, which was to go to a house about a mile away and pick up a plate. I wasn’t entirely sure what the point of the quest was until I saw the plate: A commemorative plate with our church on it, from the 70s, celebrating a century of Methodist presence here in town. Along with the plate was a program for the actual Bradford United Methodist Church centennial celebration, which happened on September 10, 1972. I would have been three at the time, and also, in California, for this particular event.
I should be clear that the building we now own, the former Methodist church (which we now formally call The Old Church, and less formally, simply “the church”), does not date back to the 1870s. The program helpfully includes a history of the Methodists here in Bradford through the 1970s, and informs us that our building had its construction commence in May of 1917, and was dedicated for worship on November 24, 1918. This means that officially our building’s 107th birthday happens in about three weeks. That’s a lot of candles.
When we first got the building, I thought it had been built in the 1930s, so the building is appreciably older than I first assumed. It’s probably not the oldest building in town, but it’s close to it — there was a major fire in town in 1920 that burned down most of the existing structures. This building survived that particular calamity.
From the centennial program I also learned the construction cost of the church: $17,000, not counting the pipe organ, which cost an additional $1,700 and was installed a year after the church was opened for worship. I put this sum into some inflation calculators to see how much it would be in 2025 dollars, and the answer was between $340,000 and $365,000, depending on which inflation calculator you used. I don’t dispute that inflation gradient, but I am also reasonably sure you couldn’t build a structure like this one, at the size it is, and with the amenities it has, for that amount; it would cost at least three times that much now, if not more. We bought the church entire for $75,000. In any era, we got a very good deal on this church.
Also apparently the church at one point had ivy growing up its sides, so the illustration on the plate would suggest, although the picture in the program itself does not show any of that. It may have been artistic license. The centennial celebration, incidentally, was pretty modest: Standard services in the morning, a “carry-in dinner” at noon, and then a 2pm program of “singspiration” and special music with comments from former ministers and friends. Then a fellowship hour at 4:30, and at 7, a special concert by the Teen Ambassadors Singers, sponsored by the Bradford Area Council of Churches. Sounds like a lovely Sunday, honestly.
I’m delighted that our neighbor gifted us this plate, and this centennial program; between the both of them I feel like I have a much better idea of the building we now own and are the custodians of. Both the plate and the program will have places of honor in the church. I’m happy that we have this building, and hope to keep adding to its history here in town.
I don’t care if it is in character, pick another word! (And while it ought to be in character, she hasn’t exactly been dropping the big words every other dialog line. Or if she has, I didn’t notice?)
Rabbit, rabbit! I got out of the house in time for the last of a clear apple-gold sunset. A skein of geese went unraveling through the smoke-blue luminous air and a very large moth tried to bang itself into my face. There were heaps of fallen leaves on the sidewalks to kick through and some crepe-orange ones still on the local notable maple. Someone's costume is my best hope for the cardboard sign in the street advertising extremely cheap sexual services.
Having run the car over for errands, I ended up spending the trick-or-treating hours of Halloween at my mother's house, which was inundated with a range of ages from toddlers to teenagers and the occasional adult who could be coaxed to take some candy for themselves. I am guessing a percentage of the colorfully wigged people were KPop Demon Hunters. I have no idea about the WWI Tommy in the company of a classical figure in gold laurels, but they looked like an entire short story in themselves. The Minuteman looked parentally hand-sewn, full marks for waistcoat and hat. The most extensive was the full-body tyrannosaur I came down the steps to hold the bowl of candy out for, explaining it was no trouble because I could see their short little arms. When the twins came by, one of them dashed into the house to hug me and all of her friends shouted at her for going across the threshold, which I understood was some kind of ground rule but sounded in the moment like the start of a fairy tale. The South Asian older relatives chaperoning their set of small children wore marigold garlands, perfectly Halloween-colored. There are a lot more kids in that neighborhood than there used to be and it's wonderful.
I remain underslept, but I really appreciate being introduced to Florence + The Machine's "Kraken" (2025).
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