I've Finally Finished This One! An Untidy, Yet Cosy Fantasy/sci-fi Bookshop, With A Stack Of Old Paperbacks

Peter Morwood

I am so sorry to have to tell you all about this. None of you, I suspect, will ever have any idea how sorry.

I am in utter shock and terrible pain to have to inform everyone that our friend, my dear husband and creative partner of nearly forty years, Peter Morwood, passed away suddenly early this morning after a brief illness that as late as yesterday (when his doctor saw him) had seemed to be on the mend.

I'm not in any position to say much more about this situation now, as you'll understand my current mental state is not up to the task. (I keep expecting to wake up from a bad dream, but it shows no sign of breaking.) I will let people know more about this in coming days.

There will be a postmortem shortly to determine the exact cause of his death. I'll share what details of this are appropriate as they become clear.

Meanwhile in the short term I'm very much going to need assistance with the expenses that in the days that follow will inevitably surround what's happened. For those people who want to assist, please feel free to use the Ko-Fi account here, and simply tag the associated messages, etc, "P expenses".

My love will wait for me, I know, however long it takes. He's never minded waiting. (the saddest smile) My job now is to make sure he's not forgotten while I go on.

Meanwhile, can I just say to all of of you: I thank you all ahead of time for all the support and fondness for Peter that I know so many of you will express. He'd blush over it, I know. (He always did.) Please forgive me for being unable to do much in the way of answering messages, just now, in the wake of having to get to grips with this sudden and awful change in my world.

But also let me say, so urgently: Hug your loved ones now, while you can. Eventually a day will come when, expected or not, your opportunities end.

Thanks, friends.

--DD

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

I don’t know if I’m late to the party here noticing this, but @staff what the actual hell is this. This is what I get when I click on the link to my own mantis shrimp post, shared on Twitter. I can see the first half, and then I get forced to log-in to keep reading.

I write a free blog on your free platform, and you’re using link sharing on mobile to try to force people to sign up? Not only is this absolutely not okay - this isn’t a paywalled site and my content isn’t subscription only - but it really fucks me over as a science communicator who relies on posts being shared easily to disseminate information.

This is absolutely not okay. I’ve used this site for eight years to do for science outreach and loved it. This choice leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth.

mech with “student driver” stickers slapped all over it

“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”

— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc