Also: design credit to Jacob Maddison, although the crappy printing job is mine.

The Spectre of Communism? Really?

Yeah, here in Canada the federal government has tightened up on the number of international student visas it offers. But we're also not kidnapping them off the street, so . . .

This is an affront to the good name of Captain Underpants.

And if your library can't or won't buy it, request it through interlibrary loan and they'll get it from another library for you!

Is she related to Fizzgig?

(Kardinall Offishall voice) It's the T-dot.

I did my undergrad in the early 2000s, which was I think the point when my university had just started creating consequences for this kind of behavior. The grad students all had stories.

I actually liked this one better than What Moves the Dead. Also the only story I've come across where PTSD becomes an advantage.

This is from the acknowledgements for T.J. Klune's Somewhere Beyond the Sea, in which he describes his ambition to be the Anti-J.K. Rowling.

I think she was also the one who shipped him off to Russia against medical advice so he could go through benzo withdrawal from the comfortable oblivion of an induced coma. (He subsequently caught covid while there.)

Writing this makes me feel like I'm recalling the plot of a weird soap opera.

No ice cream for ICE.

Getting to know someone? Chatting to pass the time? Books make excellent small talk.

The Sworn Soldier series is more on the horror side of things, but if you liked Swordheart I REALLY recommend Paladin's Grace.

Are Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel your rare exceptions there? Because it's tough to argue they don't matter right now.

As broadly popular shows that talk about the news of the day, they articulate a shared reality, which the fascists seem to see as a threat.

18 years after getting my driver's license, I had to get my driving assessed in order to use the fleet vehicles at work. Some of our thinking and language around driving has changed, but I did well (over 90% on all criteria). Mostly it renewed my judginess of other drivers.

Naomi Klein spent one of the later chapters in her book Doppelganger on how WWII started with Germany doing to its neighbours what other European imperial powers were doing overseas, and Europe has never forgiven them for it.