the latest jkr story is nuts. it's the most nonstory a story gets.

if you haven't followed it from the start, what happened was:

1. one of jkr's followers tweeted at her bemoaning radcliffe and watson's ingratitude, predicting their apologies and anticipating jkr's magnanimity 2. rowling corrected the follower, insisting that - in the event of their hypothetical apology - she would in fact not extend her forgiveness

3. ???

4. viral story about jkr not accepting radcliffe's or watson's apology to her

thesean task: a big, difficult task that you'll only have a chance of succeeding at if you don't get lost in the details

I mean, this is deranged enough that I'm actually confident just calling it satire without needing to investigate. Start with the sheer insanity of the premise: how is the baby fucking skydiving? Why has the baby been given responsibility for his own chute? How is the baby talking?

So you may have seen this image, or one like it, recently - the "omg these mountain ranges on three different continents were once the same mountains" thing has been doing the rounds a few months. And it is cool.

But what's really fun is *why*. Now, some of you are absolutely looking at the screen and saying "Plate tectonics, Dave, everyone knows that," and sure, I'm not going to be introducing many people to the idea of tectonics any time soon...

one of the problems with combating conspiracy theories is that a lot of the things the conspiracy theorists are terrified of are actually fucking rad like davos - "aaaaaaah finance ministers and business leaders from around the world meet once a year to discuss coming problems and their solutions" yeah that's fucking kickass, imagine different countries actually trying to communicate and cooperate

I'm never sure how to answer this question. I applaud the sentiment, but dislike the form it takes.

To quote Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, this is a "wrong question." 🧵 The whole concept of "masculinity" is, by definition, gender essentialist; it is grounded in the idea that certain behaviours and aptitudes are inherently or categorically male.

It serves patriarchal goals in two ways:

A propos, London in the plague year is an amazing setting for a #ttrpg, especially horror

I developed a whole World of Darkness setting for it once; ran a ratkin game, but it's also perfect for vampires, mages and wraiths.

https://twitter.com/dtmooreeditor/status/1614541947066093568

You have the plague itself - and the dichotomy/juxtaposition between the mystical/religious and scientific worldviews (neither of which has reliable answers, at this point).

LRT: a not terrible précis on the FTX liquidity crisis, but I especially love OP's follow-up that the protocol is "sound," it's just prone to human errors of judgement. like, yes, m8, it's finance, it's a whole world of vibes. finance is ultimately based on the idea that you can make less money act like more money if you can persuade people to trust that, in the long run, it will become more money; the more justified that trust is, the better it works

Cropped screenshot rather than a QT because I don't want to drag this well-meaning tweeter, but my brother also asked me this the other day and it's worth briefly discussing. The answer, as with a lot of questions to do with the monarch's role in UK constitutional law, is "yes" on paper, but "emphatically no" in practice.

I'll have a go!

https://twitter.com/PaulMCollison81/status/1575049799510167552

Inflation means things are more expensive, which means less demand for goods, so there's less work, so less money, so less demand, etc. That in turn increases risk, so investment goes down, in a vicious cycle. The system needs more money.

There's a conspiracy theory doing the rounds on this site that Truss and Kwarteng have deliberate trashed the pound so their hedge fund mates could short it.

I'm not saying it's impossible they did that - they could well be that awful and foolish - but I doubt it. The smart thing about "trickle down economics" is that it's an obvious lie that the rich (and the politicians they own) tell in order to justify policies that further enrich them.

The dumb thing about it is that some of them repeat that lie so often they start to believe it.

Okay, it's traditional to tweet something like, "Welcome, new followers! I usually tweet [topics], hope you enjoy!" but I seem to have picked up - holy shit - *seven thousand* new followers, so I guess I have to deliver something... So for now, here's a thread from three years ago about the clifftop duel from The Princess Bride and what all those fencing terms mean:

https://twitter.com/dtmooreeditor/status/1174286275639226368

So there's a particular quirk of English grammar that I've always found quite endearing: the exocentric verb-noun compound agent noun.

It appears in a definite, remarkably narrow period - not more than 150, 200 years - before dying out, leaving loads of legacy words in its wake. To explain briefly! An agent noun is a noun derived from another word (usually a verb), meaning "someone who [verb]s." e.g.:

"to travel" => "traveller"
"to rule" => "ruler"
"to direct" => "director"

it's not the utter ubiquity of it - every single damn digital billboard in the country showing that damn photo with that damn legend - it's what that ubiquity indicates; to whit, that it's been centrally coordinated that is to say, that some sort of central body - almost certainly a government agency - has reached out to every entity providing digital billboards across the country and instructed them to replace all advertising with a picture of the queen, her name and birth and death dates

Time for a #writingcraft thread!
Let’s talk about analeptic passages in present tense narrative. This is inspired by an editorial letter I sent a couple weeks ago, but it’s not specifically about that – as I said to the author at the time, this is a very, very common issue. I’m confident it’s come up in 100% of present-tense manuscripts I’ve edited.

So I’ve seen a few tweets lately about the opaqueness of the publishing sector, which is completely fair. And some of them emphasised the difficulty in getting up to date sales figures, and that’s rather more… complicated.

So here’s a brief 🧵 on book sales and accounting>> I should start by saying this is about “traditional publishers,” by which is usually meant midlist and major publishers who operate at one remove from the public, by selling stock to retail chains and wholesalers via sales teams and distributors.

i love that there's a saint usually depicted holding a lamb called Saint Lamb, and a saint famous for carrying baby J over a river called Saint Christ-Carrier clearly whoever was in charge of saint naming that day wanted to knock off early and get to the pub

So I am not a political pundit, and this is not based on any sort of polling. But bear with me while I talk through what I think may be a few reasons for our current problems and you can let me know if it seems to make sense: First up: Unions.

Labour was founded by and for the trade unions. The clue's right there in the name; it's the party of labour, of the workers.

Oh, yes, I'd momentarily forgotten about this!

So the answer is one of those frustratingly ambivalent ones; it wasn't really something that happened overnight, but a general shift.

https://twitter.com/joan_of_orc/status/1389139301158592514

It's probably worth noting that this question is extremely culturally specific: in many cultures, these names never "stopped being meaningful"; in *most* cultures, "surname" means quite different things! I'll assume we're talking in England and in Anglophone cultures.

sometimes i remember that there was this one shitty copper-dealer in ancient Ur called Ea-Nasir, and we know who he is and where he lived because there was like twenty clay tablets in the house from people complaining about his shitty copper

"The problem with Labour is they keep pointing out that the Tories are corrupt (which they are) and that the media is biased against them (which it is) or that Johnson has clownish charm (which he does). The Tories win because the people want Brexit (which has already happened)."

https://twitter.com/rafaelbehr/status/1389628678213148678

luv 2 read that pointing out the government's corruption in the billions of pounds worth of backhanders and under-the-counter deals they've done in the past twelve months, their callous destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives due to austerity in the 2010s, their total