This is going to be an unpleasant post but I need to talk to y’all about heat stroke in dogs. I am an ER vet and I am seeing firsthand the death toll that this heat wave is taking on our pets. In the past two weeks, for every single weekend shift I have worked, we have had at least one DOA with a body temperature over 107 degrees. One of them had simply been on a 20 minute walk at 5pm. All of them were brachycephalic (short faced breeds like pugs and french bulldogs). Their owners were in shock that this could happen so quickly, and their grief lingers with me.
If you have a dog, and especially if you have a brachycephalic dog, you need to familiarize yourself with the signs of heat stroke. Do not take your dogs out in the heat of the day, be aware of the pavement temperature, and always have fresh water available for them. When I am outdoors with my dog I am checking on him constantly. This heat wave is extremely serious; I need you to keep yourself and your pets safe.
This is a super useful graphic I’ve been sharing everywhere possible. When in doubt, keep them indoors.
Hi Tumblr I’m an Asian fantasy author fleeing the sudden death of all my other social media sites 👋 I’ve used Tumblr for years as a fandom lurker and rarely posted but in light of all my other communities imploding I guess I’ll have to figure out how to be actually active on Tumblr and find bookish and writerly folks here 💜 say hi if that’s you 🥺
If you love diverse filipino fantasy with bipoc leads, angry bi women clawing for space in a world that’s always rejected them and soft boys who’d do anything for them, awesome elemental magic based on early Filipino shaman/ babaylan/katalonan mythologies and the Tagalog creation story, and the Bakunawa/Laho the 🇵🇭 sea dragon 🐉 and drowning colonizers then I hope you’ll keep an eye out for SAINTS OF STORM AND SORROW coming in June 2024 from Titan Books
odd, I thought stories should be centered because they’re good stories well written, but I guess claiming some identity or other is more important. Silly me.
Hey! I know I’m not supposed to feed the trolls but attitudes about how books should all just have “normal” people and by normal they mean white-cis-straight and books should only be about the story, never about who the stories are about. Or at the very least they dislike when authors talk about their “not-normal” demographics, because they’re convinced that because they’re starting to see diverse books on the shelves that there’s no space for “normal” books.
These sort of writers seem to believe they are the injured party, that publishing no longer caters to them because a few diverse books have squeezed through the gates. When really the needle has BARELY moved. Despite lots of lip service and pushes for diversity over the last few years publishing has stayed massively, hugely white.
So when you see authors pushing their identity to the forefront know that it is because we are searching for readers like us, the ones who grew up rarely to never getting to see characters like us in our stories, or seeing white authors use us as the butt end of jokes, as racist caricatures, token side kicks, or cannon fodder. By pushing our books by their target demographics I’m hoping to find the readers for whom our books are a love letter.
“Eli Jacob Crowley, the famed pioneer figure who spearheaded America’s westward expansion by blazing the Crowley Trail in 1838, was an awe-inspiring figure of a man, as stout as a four-century-old oak, as intellectually complex as the fronds of a Florida palm, as singularly focused as the trunk of a Giant Sequoia, though in all other respects, not like a tree at all.” (John Hardi)
“Talila Norpiros, heir to the elven throne and commander of her people’s armed forces, chose a slightly more risqué outfit that morning than she would normally wear to battle, theorizing that if she were presented as a sex symbol as well as a dynamic protagonist, the series might attract a few more male readers and finally make the New York Times bestseller list.” (Bridget Parmenter)
“It wasn’t fair to call Michael a scum-sucking monster from the deep, the miserable, fetid descendant of some unnamed demon who, after centuries at the very depths of the ocean, had somehow surfaced and found his way to Wall Street—it was accurate, of course, but he preferred Michael.” (Allison Bryski)
and my personal favourite:
“Once upon a time, there was a place where things happened; allow me to be more specific.” (John Wallace)
just fucking remembered contest again so nobody asked but here are some 2019 winner highlights
“It
was a dark and stormy night, and since this was Miami in July and
everyone had left their convertible tops down, the rain fell in
Cadillacs.” (Andrew Lundberg)
“When
the tall dark, handsome, buff, and wealthy cowboy moseyed into my
“Blazin’ Six-guns” novelty shop, I felt a wave of heat flood through me,
as if I had accidentally swallowed my sub-lingual nicotinic acid
lozenge, causing the niacin to be released instantaneously, rather than
in a more controlled, extended, low-potency dose, for which means the
prescription had been written.” (Randall Card)
“Zajaxian
Planetary Law required that war, if it must be fought, be fought not
with bombs, bullets and blood, as on our own primitive Earth, but with
serried banks of immensely powerful mainframe computers, even though
they were bulky to carry and unwieldy to throw.“ (Jeremy Das)
“The
High Gondonderil gazed on with horror as the Elgaborian legions marched
at a single, pitiless pace into the once peaceful streets of
Sar-Andrada, the capital city of the kingdom of Xanthil, located in a
fantasy universe which might seem extremely confusing at present but
which will doubtless make perfect sense to you, dear reader, once you
realize that, like most fantasy universes, it’s basically just Tolkien’s
Middle-earth with different names for things.” (Harrison Glaze)
would you look at that its time to talk about my favourite bad fiction contest!! here are some 2020 winner highlights
“The
first thing I noticed about the detective’s office was how much it
reminded me of the baggage claim at a nearby airport: the carpet was
half a century out of date, it reeked of cigarettes and cheap booze, and
I was moderately certain that my case had been lost.”
(Paul Kollas)
“’You
may know my true name,’ gloated Archmage-Emperor !Gfńatt’ Bdúnśṽiobfhńr
to the foolish traitor who had dared try to end his glorious
mage-empire’s reign, ‘but can you pronounce it?’”
(Gideon Gordon)
“The
sound of his raspy voice and the feel of his chilly hand on her
shoulder made her shudder, like the wooden things on the sides of
windows, but a verb rather than a noun, and with two d’s rather than two
t’s.” (Kagte Minyard)
“Jarrod,
lying in the bed next to Selina, on his side with his head in his hand,
asked, ‘What would your husband do if he saw me right now?’ and Selina,
who was watching her husband sneak up on Jarrod holding a tire iron
with two hands raised above his head, replied, ‘Probably sneak up on you
with a tire iron raised above his head, preparing to use it for
something other than its intended purpose.’” (Randy Blanton)
it’s 2021 winner time and i want to be clear this time that “bad fiction” is not a judgment on my part, it’s the whole goal of the contest. the about page says, “…the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.” i’m not insulting them. anyway here are my faves <3
“It was a dark and stormy … morning, Gotcha! – this is just the
first of innumerable twists and turns that you, dear Reader, will
struggle to keep abreast of as I unfold my tale of adventure as second
plumber aboard the hapless SS Hotdog during that fateful summer of 1974.”
(Louise Taylor)
“Our story begins in the cozy cottage of Bynnoldh-Dyr, son of
Asgwitch-Torgwyr, in the idyllic elven village of Myrthffolwrd, but our
book actually begins some two hundred pages earlier, in which you are
pummeled by irrelevant history and unpronounceable names, because my
publisher is paying me by the word.” (Neil B Harrison)
“As the dawn begin to break, Debby and Robert, their arms tightly wrapped
around each other, watched in awe as the sky turned a brilliant pinkish
red as the sun’s rays inched their way down the slopes of the craggy
peaks of the Rocky Mountains, but this was Canada so the rays were
centimetering their way down the slopes.” (Daniel Leyde)
“She had a deep, throaty laugh, like the sound a dog makes right before it throws up.” (Janie Doohan)
These are absolutely not, by any means, bad.
One of my personal faves
“Little Timmy suffered from Claustraphobia: the fear of being trapped in a closet with Santa Claus.”
Do consider submitting something; there’s no entry fee, no prize (sans bragging rights) and you can submit as many times as you want.
Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.”
He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about
which companies he founded:
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that
share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they
add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit,
but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that
pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as
though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were
installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t
a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One
of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a
mule named “Ole Bub”:
Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk
just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so,
like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to
cataloging Musk’s public lies:
REBLOGGING AGAIN BECAUSE THIS PART MADE MY JAW HIT THE FLOOR
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.
