Okay, it's actually a really big weekend for me, my writing, Justice Wing, and stuff like that! As in *multiple* things, so here's the breakdown! Thread. Breakdown thread. It's... thread-worthy. That's weird to type. amzn.to/33LwrcR First off, there's a TWO DAY COUNTDOWN SALE on "Justice Wing: Plan, Prototype, Produce, Perfect" -- from now until 6am tomorrow, the Kindle is available for $2.99! Tomorrow it goes up to $4.99, and then back to its regular. Or read it on Kindle Unlimited! amzn.to/2RYZirj

So. I collated the #ReedRichardsisaSociopath 2014 rant into (God help me) 3 Twitter Moments because both of the archives that had been made of them no longer existed. (And since Twitter's made improvements, this coda/update can be properly threaded to be added to the Moment.) It was... a bit personal for me, too, because one of those archives had been made by Christopher "@robotech_master" Meadows, who died a few months back... and that same morning @LinkedIn had cheerfully invited me to congratulate him for four years at his position.

We learn a lot of hard lessons in our lives. We are disillusioned, disappointed, disheartened and damaged over and over again, and one of the hardest lessons is this:

Sometimes terrible people make beautiful things.

1/ Art can inspire us. Art can strengthen us. Art can embolden us. Art can save us when nothing else can. And when that happens, we naturally gravitate towards the artist.

But it's the art that did all that. Most of the time, we don't know the artist. It just feels like we do.

2/

So, a weird thing happened. We haven’t been in a position to make k-cups of coffee since the start of the work from home period. No big — I’ve mostly gone with coffee or cold bubbly caffeine.

1/ But @wednesday got some of the single serving Maxim (Japanese) instant coffee sticks, and they were really good. So we got some more Maxim instant (the full blue bag), and as an experiment we grabbed some Taster’s Choice hazelnut, just to see how it worked out.

2/

(Spoilers for last season's Dr. Who.)

So. If the Doctor is the Timeless Child, with lives upon lives before their memories scraped away before they become the 'first' Doctor/William Hartnell... what if that means we never understood what @SawbonesHex's Sixth Doctor was?

1/ We know that thanks to the Fifth Doctor's regeneration being "different" thanks to poison and gadflys swirling around his head, the Sixth was unstable, given to fragments of earlier lives coming out now and again.

(I always thought @SawbonesHex was brilliant for the record.)

2/

In the spring of 2001, I was going to a meeting at the place where I worked then and still work now. Another of the people at the meeting was an academic dean of our school. She was perhaps the purest expression of academia *at* that school.

1/ That day she was literally wearing a tweed blazer. Before she'd become a dean she'd been an English teacher. Now, the epitome of English Teachers, in my brain, was and remains my father. That day she was a close second.

2/

Ferengi were a joke. Even when they were supposed to be the new Big Bad at the start of TNG, they were someone for Starfleet to smugly deride because they were capitalists. On Deep Space 9, those expectations were subverted. @ShimermanArmin as Quark was a revelation -- and called Starfleet's attitude what it was: *racism.*

But more than that,with Rom you got to see the Ferengi as the continuum of people and personalities they were, not as one-note.

I have complicated feelings about Harlan Ellison, because Harlan Ellison was complicated. @warrenellis described him as "great author and cautionary tale, arsehole and titan," and that's a start. Separating him from his work is nigh impossible, because they intertwined. Ellison was as much text as person, really. And it was uncompromising. And that's generally a compliment, except when it isn't.