So a Weird Fact that I suspect many people aren’t aware of…the passenger pigeon’s vast numbers were probably a wildly unnatural result of the loss of indigenous management of the landscape. The east coast was an extensively managed landscape when Europeans first showed up, not a massive unbroken forest. In my neck of the woods, it was called the Piedmont Prairie—a fire-controlled oak savannah with an unbelievable ecological carrying capacity.

So last night, at 2 AM, the doorbell rang. I staggered out of bed, went downstairs, and found a bedraggled Kevin, in a bathrobe, holding a dead squirrel. He looked at me and said “So I’ve had an adventure!” Just in case anyone thinks that I’m always the weird one in this relationship.

Okay, since I haven’t told this one in awhile… *ahem*
*sips water*

https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1666839238187335681

Cast your mind back, lo these many years, to the strange world immediately post 9-11, when Americans were convincing themselves that their tiny town was of desperate strategic importance and the next logical target of terrorists. I was visiting my parents in rural Pennsylvania.

It’s D&D night! The party faces off against the Serpent of Ages, an invisible mage, and an increasingly traumatized cultist. Also a trussed-up paladin sacrifice.

GM: The Serpent heaves himself out of the water and looks around with vague interest. The evil mage drops a fireball! The affected party members are, fortunately, standing in hip-deep water and only take half damage, but that’s still a lot.

WARLOCK: YOU KILL MY CHICKEN AND NOW YOU BURN OFF MY HAIR?!
BARD: I know it took you so long to grow those three hairs…

I’ll say it again—ideas are the LEAST important part of a book. The plot of HOGFATHER is that someone assassinates Santa Claus by stealing teeth from the Tooth Fairy, which looks utterly inane when typed out and is also one of the best books of the last hundred years.

https://twitter.com/blind_nycteris/status/1659088030639042560

MOBY DICK is about some guy the narrator knows being mad at a whale. JURASSIC PARK is just Frankenstein with dinosaurs. PERDIDO STREET STATION is King Kong but with scary butterflies.

Hey internet copyright lawyers, I have a question re: AI, in light of Adobe billing their Firefly AI as copyright safe for businesses.

I have heard—from people I trust!—that many companies are avoiding using AI like the plague because of copyright fears. Which, I mean, legit! Absolutely! It’s the Wild West right now but sooner or later the sheriff comes to town.

Ok, let’s peel this off from the larger thread since apparently a lot of you have questions about sleep apnea!

Are you tired all the damn time? Do you snore like a freight train? Furthermore, do you ever swear you DIDN’T sleep but other people are like “you were snoring!”?

https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1655776248713338880

Congratulations, there is a chance that you, too, have sleep apnea!

“Ok, but I’m fine, I’ve been like this my whole life, it’s obviously normal, or I would have noticed by now.”

It’s DND night and the party attempted to cross a bridge over troubled and murky waters. Whereupon the Giant Shark Skeleton lurking in the water rose and jumped onto the bridge, canting it 45 degrees into the water. Combat paused briefly as the party insists on renaming the shark “Bruce.”

I just wanna remind people that sometimes if you’re feeling like you’re not accomplishing anything worthwhile, you can do a lot worse than going outside and firing up a citizen science app on your phone.

It may seem like a small thing, but data is HUGE. There are days when I’ve been like “I accomplished nothing whatsoever, but at least I sent a checklist of every bird I spotted at the lake to eBird.” “Didn’t get much done, but logged a cool new moth.”

Hey weird fish enthusiasts! I have turned up a couple more blurry photos of fish from Hawaii! I’d love even a vague notion of what they are, beyond “fish.” This was in a very shallow pond that probably counted as a tidepool?

So apparently there’s just straight up an adenovirus that makes you fat, and we’ve kinda known this for awhile now? And studies show that quite a lot of people have it?

Did everyone know about this thing but me? Cos I sorta feel like that should have been a bigger discussion. It’s adenovirus 36, and apparently at least one study shows that if you give that sucker to a monkey, its body fat percentage goes up by 58%?

My brain is saying this can’t be real and somebody must have already debunked it because why would this not be huge news?

Everybody’s jumping to “China is faking this so people don’t realize they’re behind the weird UFOs!” but I’ll throw my nickel down that whatever it is will be way more banal.

https://twitter.com/LtTimMcMillan/status/1624747378707165184

I’m thinking banal like…Elon Musk had an idea five years ago and it finally launched but he’d forgotten about it completely by then. Or some tiny geoengineering startup was doing test flights of the balloons they planned to release particulates from and oops.

Had a great time on the Author Shelf episode of @LegendariumPod podcast, talking about one of my all-time favorite books, Tailchaser’s Song! If you have not read this fantastic book, it’s basically Watership Down meets Tolkien meets Dante’s Inferno. With cats.

Okay, so I was gonna have to tell this story sooner or later, but I might as well tell it now.

https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1615495567102050309

Some years ago, I wrote a book. It’s quite a nice little book, I think, and someday you will get to read it. Tor bought it, but the heroine is quite young, and if you’re female and write a book with a young heroine, you are considered a YA author for the rest of your life.

This is bugging me too. Like, it is totally fine to be mad or scared or anything! I get it! But also the people who made the actual dataset people are mad about being in is right there? Like, we know who it is. This isn’t a secret?

https://twitter.com/rachelmetz/status/1614796990692614147

GAHHHHH I AM HAVING A WHY ARE PEOPLE NOT BEING LOGICAL ABOUT A THING THING AND I KNOW WHY BUT ALSO I FEEL LIKE I AM STANDING NEXT TO A THING YELLING “BUT THE THING…?!” AND PEOPLE KEEP HAVING TOO MANY FEELS TO LISTEN BUT ALSO THE FEELS ARE VALID BUT ALSO **THING**

Having read the claims on the lawsuit against Stable Diffusion…um. I wish they’d gotten someone with a better tech grounding to write it. There are very interesting arguments that could be made, but this is gonna waste a lot of time on inaccurate claims. One of the claims, for example, appears to be that Stable Diffusion specifically contains copies of all the training images, which is not actually how these programs work. So, while IANAL, it feels like even if it was successful, they’d be ruling against a non-issue?

This is absolutely not naive or dumb, and believe me, I spent a lot of time going “but if I’ve sold a million copies, why am I not filthy rich?”

Allow me to break it down into math.

https://twitter.com/balinares/status/1614966914375114754

The Dragonbreath books sold for $13.99 hardcover and $8.99 paperback. Of that, industry standard rate is that the author gets between 10% and 12.5%.

Except they don’t all actually sell for that price.

There was a point in my life where, had I been sane and sensible, I would have knuckled down and really focused on my career as a kid’s book author, which was going great. Thanks probably to ADHD, I didn’t.

https://twitter.com/mattfnwallace/status/1613999338287673349

Had I been sensible, I definitely would not have started self-publishing weird, occasionally gory books, and then weird occasionally gory romance books. All the common wisdom was that doing stuff like that might even jeopardize your career in kid’s books.

Ooookay. So my mentions just stopped working completely and keeps booting me to “Get started following people you know!” with no way to get out of it. I’ve restarted the app three times. I mean, I was already losing most of my mentions into the aether anyway, but now I have none. (The All tab still works, except that it’s impossible to find anything in it.)

ME: Yay, maybe I'm finally adjusting to reading glasses! My monitor doesn't look like a rhombus anymore!
*removes glasses*
*monitor is suddenly a rhombus*

...nuts. "Put them on first thing in the morning!" people said. "It helps!" they said.

NOW MY REGULAR VISION HAS A KINK IN IT

So I was on Tumblr and saw a post go by about how TERFs keep getting worked up about, say, intersex chickens, and someone else commented not to tell them about white-throated sparrows, and being me I immediately launched into OMG LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE SPARROW WITH FOUR SEXES (They do, it’s amazing, you can read the post about it, someone also added a great section about ruffs.) at.tumblr.com/tkingfisher/th…