Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/12/new-musical-composition-ingenuity/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61094

It’s been a hot minute, as the kids no longer say, since I made an original musical composition; I’ve mostly been doing cover songs recently. But this evening I felt the urge to make something noisy and original, so I did what any musician would do for inspiration: I went to NASA’s “Sounds From Beyond” page and picked a recording from there to use as the basis for my composition.

Specifically, I used the “NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight” recording. I used the original recording as is, and then I also ran it through MIDI, sliced it up, pushed it up a couple of octaves, filtered it through effects and so on. In the final composition, everything you hear is derived from the Ingenuity recording except for the drums and the 808 bass. It’s amazing what you can do with public domain recordings from another planet.

The resulting track is noisy, weird, asymmetric and in 7/8 time, because that’s pretty much how the original recording sort of laid itself out. I like it. Maybe you will too.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/12/new-musical-composition-ingenuity/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61094

https://xkcd.com/3258/

https://xkcd.com/3258/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/12/various-sundry-6-12-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61084

What? Friday again?

David Hockney, dead: Hockney was one of those artists who I didn’t know who they were until I was adult, and then realized I had been surrounded by his work all my life. This was in large part because Hockney, who was originally from England, was besotted with California, and as a result his work was part of the cultural landscape while I spent the first part of my life there. Even if I didn’t clock the name, he added to the vibe, so to speak. When you think of California pools, you think of David Hockney (even if the most famous pool painting was based off of one in France). His work always made me happy and maybe just a little bit wistful. That’s not a bad legacy to leave behind.

Jane Yolen, RIP: I knew Jane both socially — we were both writers of science fiction and fantasy, although her total remit was much wider than that — and also because we were colleagues, working together on SFWA committees and in other ways as well (she and I are both past presidents of SFWA as well). She was a delight in conversation, and sharp as the proverbial tack when it came to dealing with committee work, and in both of these aspects of her being I was glad to know her.

Jane does not need me to valorize her work, and with more than 400 books to her name, if I were to attempt I would be here a while. But I will note that SFWA gave her its Grand Master award, and she also received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and won a hefty shelf of awards, in genre and out of it. She deserved all of them. She will be sorely missed.

VISA is letting ChatGPT buy things for you: It’s a thing called “agentic shopping,” in which you can (presumably) tell ChatGPT something you want, and it goes off to find it for you and then makes the purchase without any further intervention from you, because, after all, you gave it your credit card and permission to use it. This is, I will tell you now, a spectacularly bad idea, and not just because “AI” follows directions less than perfectly due to the very nature of its architecture, and sooner than later it’s going to make a very expensive fuck-up that the user will be on the hook for because giving an “AI” your credit card number isn’t fraud, it’s just stupidity, and there are few legal consumer protections for that. It’s also a bad idea because it’s one more layer of obfuscation between you and the actual costs of things, which makes it that much harder to manage one’s finances.

And while I’m sure you are smart with your money, given the average credit card debt in the US is over $6k and climbing, and that most people carry card balances at extortionate rates, this is a really really bad idea for most consumers. Great for the credit card companies! But bad for actual humans.

Please do me a favor and never let an “AI” do your shopping for you. Please continue to be the person who pushes the button on purchases. This won’t necessarily save you from impulse shopping, says the man with 30 guitars, but at least you have to acknowledge what you’re doing. That’s something.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/12/various-sundry-6-12-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61084

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/11/the-big-idea-cynthia-pelayo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61078

To be whisked away to Neverland was certainly the dream of many a child, but for Wendy Darling it was always a trap, rather than a paradise. Author Cynthia Pelayo discusses in her Big Idea how Wendy was a servant, not an equal to the Lost Boys, and takes us to revisit Wendy in her newest novel, It Came From Neverland.

CYNTHIA PELAYO:

Wendy Darling is the reason any of us even know about Neverland. We think this is Peter Pan’s story, but it’s not, not really. The only reason any of us even know about Neverland is because of Wendy Darling. 

Let’s strip away the fairy dust and the pirates and the flying and the crocodile, and what do we have? A girl. A girl who was told that something magical was waiting for her on the other side. A girl who believed what she was being told. A girl who later learned she was lured with the promise of magic, yet found herself inside a trap instead. 

J.M. Barrie introduced us to Peter Pan through The Little White Bird in 1902, and that little boy would go on to pique the public’s curiosity so much that Barrie revisited his story. Then came the play in 1904 and the novel in 1911. However, the reason the story works and the reason it continues to survive over a century later is because of Wendy. Without Wendy there would be no Neverland. No Tinkerbell. No Hook. No Lost Boys. Peter Pan without Wendy Darling is just a boy screaming into the dark. Wendy is the story, and Peter’s promise to her is the lie. 

Peter tells her to come away with him, that she will never grow up, but what he means is something entirely different. What he wants is a mother, for the Lost Boys, and selfishly for himself. He wants someone to read to them, to mend their socks, to take care of them. Someone who will stay in that role, forever. 

Yes, Wendy goes, because she is sweet and brave and kind and beautiful, and she is made up of stories. And perhaps it’s because of her kindness that she allows herself to trust, to trust in the possibility that maybe this is all real. Perhaps she even catches the hint that there is something wrong in this request to run away, but she overrides her own intuition for the possibility of magic and friendship. Quickly Wendy learns that the promise of eternal youth was just manipulation. It was all a story, and not a happily-ever-after kind. She was not brought to Neverland to take part in adventure, to be treated as a partner, or even as an equal. She was brought to Neverland to be a caretaker in a prison with no walls. 

Wendy is every woman who has ever been told one thing and expected to be something else. That is the story that I needed to tell: The Girl Who Bravely and Beautifully Grew Up, Wendy. 

I wanted to write a version of this story where we are provided with the accounts of Neverland directly from Wendy’s perspective, as an adult, after she has had time to process it all. I wanted her to be able to clearly name what happened to her, to accept that she was lied to, and then made out to be foolish and called unstable for the wounds inflicted on her by others. I wanted to tell the story where she lives with that trauma and learns that she is not defined by what happened to her. 

In It Came From Neverland, Wendy is in her early 20s and she is working as a schoolteacher at an orphanage at the start of WWI in 1914. She also volunteers in the afternoon, reading to soldiers who have returned from the war. When one of her students goes missing, and a solider in a comma utters the words “Peter Pan,” she knows Peter has returned and she and her brothers must reunite to finally stop him from kidnapping more children. 

This book is for every woman who was told she was special by someone who really meant that she was useful to them. For every woman who followed a beautiful story, later to learn it was only a cage. 

And, for every single woman who told the truth about what happened to her, but was not believed, and she realized that no one was coming to save her, so she learned to save herself. 

The only story that has ever truly mattered is Wendy’s. 

It Came From Neverland: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/11/the-big-idea-cynthia-pelayo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61078

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/11/please-i-beg-of-you-do-not-use-ai-in-your-business-communications/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61067

The other morning I was clearing out the multiple daily emails I get from scammers who have used “AI” to praise one of my books in order to get me to use their “marketing” services and/or be on their “podcast” and/or show up for their “book club” and/or use them to become big in Hollywood, all of which is cover to grift money from me, one “Ai”-written email in particular caught my eye. This was not because it was any more authentic than the rest of them, but because the domain it came from was a specific and legit business domain, and not just Gmail or Hotmail or even (oh lord) AOL.com. In a burst of concern, I sought out the email of the company head and their management contact to let them know I suspected their domain had been hacked by scammers.

I got a reply back that, no, actually, the email, which to me had clearly been written using “AI,” was legitimate.

Folks: Don’t do this. Don’t use “AI” for your business correspondence, especially to creatives. Ever.

Let me put this in perspective: I get literally dozens of spam and scam emails every day, all of which use “AI” to fart out canned flattery about my work in an attempt to bamboozle cash out of me. I get so many of them, in fact, that I can tell at a glance not only that the text has been written with “AI,” but also, at this point, which of the “big four” LLMs was used to fart it out. Hell, I literally just now got a scam email in Spanish, and I could tell what it was going to say even before I pressed the “translate” button.

This is how predictable “AI” writing is, and how frequently it is used for fraudulent purposes. At this point, my brain immediately and directly associates “AI” text in email with “scam.” That is its only purpose.

The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates “AI”-generated text with attempted fraud.

When you, a legitimate business, use “AI” to communicate with me, I do not think “wow, that was a really well-composed email that makes me want to engage with the sender in a mutually co-operative way.” I makes me think “This is a fucking scam,” or, in the most charitable scenario, “This company has been hacked and a scammer is using their domain to fleece people.” Maybe you don’t know this, because you’re not the recipient of endless attempts at scammage via “AI.” But I know this, and it’s why I am telling you now: When you use “AI” in your professional communications, you do not look like a professional. You look like a fucking scammer.

There is a solution! Just don’t use “AI” to write your professional correspondence! Remember the day, like, just four years ago, when you pretty much wrote all your emails by hand? Do that again! It’s not difficult, you won’t look like a scammer, and your email has a better chance of being read and treated as if it came from an actual human, because it doesn’t look like every other awful scam email out there. It just makes good business sense.

Also, aside from the “you look like a scammer” angle: Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a “basic competence” issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me? I mean, I also have access to “AI,” so if that’s what you’re bringing to the table, what do I need you for? As the saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. If my first impression of you is that you’re letting “AI” do the talking for you, then my impression is that you’re not offering me anything at all.

So, yeah. “AI”? Don’t use it in your business emails. It does nothing positive for you, and does a lot that is negative. Just write the email yourself, or, if you’re a boss, pay someone to do it for you. It’s going to make a difference, and at the very least, your chances of being immediately and forever sorted into the spam folder will be a lot lower.

By the way, from the time I started writing this to right now, which is roughly a half of an hour later, I have received eight “AI”-written scam emails, including the one in Spanish mentioned above. This is what you’re up against when you send something to my email. If you’re using “AI” to write your business email, this is also what you’re sorting yourself into. Think about it, maybe.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/11/please-i-beg-of-you-do-not-use-ai-in-your-business-communications/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61067

https://xkcd.com/3257/

https://xkcd.com/3257/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/10/trying-my-hand-at-some-floral-arrangements/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61056

This past weekend, my friend hosted a bridal shower for our friend who’s getting married soon, and I offered to make up some decorative bouquets for the party. I think I did an okay job, so I wanted to show y’all what I made up! She was hosting the party at her home, so thankfully I was just able to use some vases she had on hand.

For the flowers, I knew I wanted to do something springy and full of pinks and yellows because the theme was “garden party.” I also wanted to include white flowers because, well, it’s for the bride to be!

I went to my local Kroger for all my flowers, and just ended up buying a ton of discounted grower bunches. If you haven’t heard of grower bunches before, think of bouquets as a cake, and the grower bunches are the ingredients. You can buy the cake itself from the store already made, or you can buy all the ingredients for the cake and make it yourself.

So, I bought bunches of roses, lilies, anemone, bells of Ireland, baby’s breath, and some tulips. It took me about 45 minutes to de-leaf, de-thorn, trim and arrange the flowers. I mainly just did a couple small bouquets and then little bud vase arrangements to enhance the main focus bouquets.

This first one is my favorite out of all of them!

I never knew the name for the anemone before now, but I think they are so unique and pretty. I wish for this one I had trimmed the green thingy (someone please tell me the name of it) to be shorter than the anemone.

I tried to keep the bells of Ireland taller than everything in order to bring some dimension to my bouquets, which is definitely an aspect of floral arranging I struggle with.

This stunning white rose was one I decided to let speak for itself in a simple bud vase.

Same for this anemone! It was so big and beautiful.

Since I had a dozen yellow tulips, I decided to just do four little bud vases each with three in them. I think they accented the tables well!

Here they all are on the tables!

And my friend had the amazing idea to put all the flowers I didn’t use in bouquets in a lovely basket she has, and they ended up being a great decoration for the patio just chilling in the corner all ornately:

These were all untrimmed and not de-leafed so it has much more of a wild look to it, but I really love how it turned out. That pink lily is totes gorg.

Anyways, this was my first time doing floral arrangements for a party, and it only cost me seventy dollars for all the flowers, which I think was such a steal. I think they turned out pretty okay, but definitely practice will hopefully make perfect eventually. I am considering buying a floral arrangement book to really up my game.

Let me know your thoughts or tell me some of your favorite flowers in the comments. And have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/10/trying-my-hand-at-some-floral-arrangements/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61056

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/10/the-big-idea-donna-barba-higuera/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61045

Keep science fiction weird! New York Times Bestselling and Newbery Medalist author Donna Barba Higuera is a big believer in letting literature be weird and out there and most of all, inspiring to those whose hands her books happen to fall into. Come along in the Big Idea for her newest book, Firesnake and see how a little sticker can have a big impact.

DONNA BARBA HIGUERA:

So, what influence has the Newbery Medal had on contemporary Sci-Fi?

If you ask adults which book was that “magical” book for them, the one that sent them on a quest for more of that feeling, turned them into a reader, most will answer with something they read as a child. Often, it’s a book with that gold sticker on it. Not necessarily because it’s absolutely the best book, but because it was the one someone put in their hands. Still, odds are, it’s gonna click for someone out there.

It’s no secret that Sci-fi books don’t often get on the radar of the Newbery Committee. 

So what a bizarre close-the-loop moment for me when that “magic” book that launched me into a lifelong love of Sci-Fi, A Wrinkle in Time, was a Newbery Medalist over fifty years ago. A gap-toothed, freckly kid, bored out of her mind in a dusty Central California town traveled with Meg Murray to another universe. And that book lured me into becoming a contemporary Sci-Fi reader, and later, writer.

What else did that magic book do? It let that bored kid from a small agricultural town dare to imagine she could write herself across the universe too. Mexican tales can be weird. I could make it weirder! In The Last Cuentista, I blended those magical stories my grandmother told with my love of science fiction. I never dreamed this peculiar and very personal book would be published, let alone win an award like the Newbery Medal. (further proof I’m in a simulation)

People mention all the time how The Last Cuentista was the first Sci-Fi to win the Newbery Medal since Madeline L’Engle’s book over fifty years ago. Wrooong! The thing is, most unfamiliar with Sci-Fi think if a book doesn’t have a spaceship or involve space travel, it’s not Sci-Fi. Other Newbery Medal winners fall into the Sci-Fi category. At Last She Stood (2025 Newbery Medal) by Erin Entrada Kelly was inspired by Erin’s love of the 2010 Newbery winner, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (both books involve time travel). The Giver by Lois Lowry (1994 Newbery Medalist). Turns out, there are a few of us weirdos reeling young readers in to Sci-Fi. 

And that’s just sci fi! What about Newbery Medal fantasy writers like:  Lloyd Alexander and The High King, Susan Cooper and The Grey King, Robin McKinley and The Hero and the Crown, Kelly Barnhill and The Girl Who Drank the Moon; Ursula K. LeGuin also received a Newbery Honor for The Tombs of Atuan.

Most of us have a specific book that turned us into a mainstream Sci-Fi reader or writer. Maybe it’s a book that didn’t get it right, and we are on the search for the book to repair that wrong. Or maybe it was a book that did get it right, and we need to write a love letter to that book like Erin Entrada Kelly did. 

The Last Cuentista was based off a short story writing prompt. “Take a traditional fairy tale and make it sci-fi.” I chose a story that as a kid, I thought was the stupidest tale ever told. The Princess and the Pea. Hear me out. Why would you want some delicate princess to marry your son? Perhaps instead, someone of strong mind and body?

So, as an adult I addressed my repressed childhood fury in a short story about a badass girl who was implanted with the “P.E.A.” (Pellet of Extended Animation. I know…I know…) for a four hundred-year-journey across space. But her “P.E.A.” fails due to her strong mind. She never sleeps and when removed from her pod is beyond bonkers. Society has changed along with what humans value. Well, that revenge-write idea haunted me. Year slater, I started writing The Last Cuentista. 

But to write for adults or children? I found adult Sci-Fi was often too “sciency” for me. I mean, I was a biochem major. I love science. But I have my limits. Physics can kiss my— (and that was how Higuera’s essay in Scalzi’s The Big Idea got her children’s books banned.)

So, back to the topic: What influence has the Newbery Medal had on contemporary Sci-Fi?

Well, first you have to consider how those of us who write for children ended up here.

Long ago, I attended Norwescon in Seattle, and sat in a lecture by Fonda Lee who writes for both adults and children. Fonda said (more or less), “In adult sci-fi fiction, I need to research and include how a ship travels. Kids just need to know the ship got from A to B.”

I might have gasped in that room. That was it! Quite frankly, (oh, I’m gonna get some hate on this) I still don’t care how the ship got from one planet to another. I just want to know about the people and what kind of mess they were in. I’d found where I belonged. I could write for kids, and introduce them to sci-fi without having a doctorate in astronautics!

I was off and running. The first book led to a second. Darker and grittier, Alebrijes is set four hundred years after the comet strike, about what happened to those who survived on Earth. You know, just a little hopeful apocalypse for the kids. The third and final book in the series, Firesnake, is about a girl born and raised on the terraformed planet, Sagan, who is now returning to a very changed planet Earth.

Maybe my books are a bit of a soft launch, (depends on who’s reading them) but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “I don’t read sci-fi, but I read your book and it wasn’t horrible.”

I smile and say, “Welcome to weird with the rest of us.” I then tell those people of some of the contemporary Sci-Fi I think they may like. That’s how it begins.

Just to be clear, writing for kids is hard! I double dog dare you to try it. Children have the ability to suspend disbelief and imagine the impossible. But they will also call BS and proclaim you the worst author on Earth if you don’t get something right. 

My hope is that there’s a young reader out there who’ll read my books and imagine themselves as a writer. Great! Or maybe, they’ll think my books are the stupidest books ever written. Well, not good, but okay. Whatever you need to rage-write, imagine, wonder and create.

It’s a cycle that should repeat. Not every book is for every reader. Writers shouldn’t take it personally if a reader doesn’t like our books. 

But with that gold sticker that somehow found its way to the cover of my book, I’m now in the lucky position to get to speak to kids all over the world. I get to encourage young readers and writers to embrace the “weird” parts of themselves; the parts that make your palms sweat and heart race when you think of sharing them with others. 

Maybe if a kid picks up The Last Cuentista and reads it because they see that gold medal (or heaven forbid they are forced to read it in school) for either love or hate, it may turn them on to reading more contemporary Sci-Fi. Don’t mind me. I’m just going to be over here writing the strange and weird, hoping that a book I write might be that magical one; that gives them a lifelong love of contemporary Sci-Fi; like a Newbery book by Madeleine L’Engle gave me a half century ago.

Firesnake: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/10/the-big-idea-donna-barba-higuera/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61045

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/10/today-in-words-mean-things/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61034

An interesting jurisprudential development someplace not in the US:

A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn’t apply to AI overviews.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.

The crux of the issue is whether the “AI Overview” Google now provides — and which is often erroneous because LLMs can’t read or exercise judgement, they can only spit out statistically likely words — counts as a presentation of information provided elsewhere, as a normal search query might be, or is a new creation with its own set of liabilities. The court, for various reasons, decided it is the latter (go ahead and click through to see a fuller explanation of the court’s decision).

I’m not well enough versed with the German legal system to determine whether this sort of ruling is going to succeed on appeal (and it is absolutely going to be appealed) but as a matter of personal understanding, this ruling seems pretty legit to me. The “AI Overview” isn’t a search listing — Google has gone through the trouble of passing it through its LLM and letting the thing make a document about it, and these documents, both by tone and by their position at the top of a Google search page, sound authoritative and present as factual. These documents may not be copyrightable, but that doesn’t mean Google didn’t create them and are thus responsible for them.

This isn’t the first time Google has found itself in legal hot water over its “AI Overview” function — a musician in Canada is currently suing the company after its overview identified him as a sex offender and he lost work because of it. But as far as I know this is the first court ruling that says Google is liable for what its “overviews” say. I suspect it will be very closely scrutinized by others in other places who have, ahem, run into similar issues with the overview.

I’m curious whether such a legal ruling would be possible in the United States, which has famously liberal (in the classical sense) free speech laws and has an extremely high bar for defamation, especially for public individuals, under the NYT v Sullivan Supreme Court ruling. Perhaps in the US the best avenue to pursue this would not be on the grounds of free speech but of product liability: A product that fails a significant amount of the time but is still presented to consumers as reliable feels like a class action suit waiting to happen.

No matter what, however, this is a big moment for “AI” and the information that it presents. Whether this spurs tech companies to make better products, or just spend more money on legal, will be the open question. One is, admittedly, easier than the other.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/10/today-in-words-mean-things/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61034

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/09/some-thoughts-on-masters-of-the-universe/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61011

There are a lot of bad movies in the world. There are, of course, good movies and bad movies, but there’s also a special third category of “good bad” movies. I had a feeling going into the theater to see Masters of the Universe which category it would fall into.

Despite never having actually watched any He-Man content before, I was surprisingly really excited for this movie. Not because I thought it would be absolutely amazing, but because I thought it would be fun. And boy oh boy, I was right.

Masters of the Universe is wildly entertaining, extremely colorful, and certainly not the worst way I’ve spent two hours and seven bucks (matinee shows rock). I know it’s not very good, but I still think you should go see it on the big screen if you can. Besides the film being an excuse to eat popcorn and have an Icee, what makes it worth watching?

(SPOILER WARNING MOVING FORWARD!)

For starters, I love the fact that Adam holds firm on the existence of Eternia, and never stops believing in the world he comes from. I love that he tells everyone his truth, even if it costs him his social life and dating prospects. He doesn’t hide his truth even if it makes him sound crazy, and I really like that he’s not willing to deny Eternia’s existence just to fit in or seem more normal. He knows it’s real, and that’s all that matters. He never gives up hope on finding the sword and returning to a home he knows exists and is waiting for him to come back. (I am glad he at least got to prove everything to his roommate, who definitely thought he was delusional, but finding good roommates is hard.)

I love that Teela just wants to be friends, and that’s actually completely respected and not questioned at all! He-Man is a real man and knows there is no such thing as the friendzone and that he is lucky to have Teela as his good friend and comrade in battle. And that’s enough. He took the rejection of his kiss well and moved on from it quickly instead of being a huge baby about it. And they didn’t end up together in the end! They really are just friends, and I love that for them. Not that I don’t love a good “childhood friends reunited” love story, but He-Man should focus on saving the universe or whatever, not smooching.

I love Skeletor’s goofy ass evil witch. I mean her name is literally Evil-Lyn. How excellently corny. It just one of the many ways this movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. They know He-Man is a silly concept and heavily memed franchise, and they lean into the silliness in a delightful way. Alison Brie was amazing to watch as the dark sorceress, her facial expressions really made the performance.

Speaking of Skeletor, oh my lord did I love Skeletor. I love a villain that is bad for badness sake, a villain that relishes being evil and has no tragic backstory to inspire such dastardly deeds, he just is the villain. And he loves it. Skeletor’s incredibly homoerotic comments about He-Man might have genuinely been the hardest I laughed at the movie. Yes, Skeletor, tell me more about He-Man’s giant sword and glorious thighs. I did think Skeletor’s body looked kind of goofy, like he was too shredded and looked too much like an anatomical model in a science textbook, and I wish they had kept his supremely iconic voice instead of the generic “bad guy deep voice,” but all in all I liked Skeletor.

(I also did not know until the moment the credits rolled that Jared Leto plays him, so that was unfortunate to find out. I’m trying not to let it impact my view of Skeletor’s character but dang I really wish they had cast someone else.)

As Orko says at the end, muscles don’t make the man. In this house, we LOVE an empathetic, kind, slightly ditzy He-Man. Portrayals of positive masculinity will always be a win in my book, and Masters of the Universe makes it very well known throughout the movie that brute strength and violence do not make a hero by themselves. How you use your strength and what you use it for are the real questions I wish people with power in real life would reflect on. Knowing when and how to implement your strength is the real power.

Masters of the Universe is good bad, just as I knew it would be. I thoroughly enjoyed my time watching it, and honestly the “I have the powerrrr!” scenes were pretty damn awesome. I really don’t have many complaints about the movie, as this is one of the few goofy, shut-up-and-eat-your-popcorn movies that I actually had fun with. Usually I’m a hater of movies that are just Mid-Tier Nothing Burgers, but Masters of the Universe really feels like it has a lot of heart in it, and I like it.

Have you seen Masters of the Universe yet? Did you watch He-Man when you were younger? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/09/some-thoughts-on-masters-of-the-universe/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61011

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/09/the-big-idea-laura-lekkos/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61005

The value of a good friendship cannot be overstated. But friendships aren’t always smooth sailing, they can be just as challenging as romantic relationship, and just as fulfilling. In today’s Big Idea, author Laura Lekkos takes a deep dive into the beautiful world of female friendships, the very thing that was the base for her newest novel, All the Little Ways.

LAURA LEKKOS:

As a screenwriter, I traffic in big ideas, sometimes insufferably so. The high-concept hook. The four-quadrant crowd-pleaser. The event-driven film that a studio exec can’t say no to. For every writer in Hollywood adding a space element or time travel trope to elevate an idea in the hopes of securing a sale, you will hear another bemoaning the lack of original ideas and quieter, character-driven stories.

It was in the latter headspace that I set out to write my first novel. The big idea was that…it would be small. How edgy! How daring! How subversive!

I wanted to write a novel centered around a deep, meaningful friendship. 

On earth. 

No body swapping. No murders. No vampires in sight.

I have often been struck by the layered quality and impact of my female friendships. The women in my world have inspired me, filled my cup, guided me, and in some instances, quite literally changed the trajectory of my life. Romance often steals the spotlight, for obvious reasons, but the enduring effect of a platonic bond can be equally powerful.

This is the kind of relationship that the main characters, Victoria and Liz, find in each other. As I outlined their story, I worked backwards and found that the beats weren’t dissimilar from a rom com. In order to end up together, in a matter of speaking, they would need a meet cute. Then, a first date gone awry, a second chance, a coming together, a shocking revelation, an estrangement and lastly, a reconciliation. 

While their characters began to find form on the page, I thought about all the friendship moments – both the small and the milestone – that have defined my life. Several years before I decided to take a stab at writing a book – a lifelong dream, given my early and persistent love of reading – I realized another one: becoming a mother. It was everything I imagined and nothing like I expected. It was heady, challenging, invigorating, mind-bending and often, surreal.

My journey was bathed in luck for many reasons. I had close friends who had taken on the mantle of motherhood in the years before me who dished out advice and hand-me-downs. I had friends who were pregnant at the same time who I traded notes with. We breathlessly spoke of our hopes and expectations; the group chat was full of jokes, memes, and recommendations. I had a loving, supportive husband and parents who were overjoyed, nearly to the point of fainting, about becoming grandparents. I have always been close with my mom and as I anticipated this great leap into the unknown, I looked to her as an example in how to mother.

But what if a woman was expecting a child without such a scaffolding? What if she didn’t have a village, a support system, a mom of her own to turn to, or even a friend to confide in and lean on? All the uncertainty of impending motherhood would be exponentially multiplied. She would be adrift and in need of the kind of female connection I have been fortunate to enjoy and have always held so dear.

Both the cast of characters and the story itself had been rattling around in my brain for some time before I put pen to page and while it unfurled without too much difficulty, it was the end of writing that gave me pause. I worried that the conceit wasn’t big enough and was concerned whether the marketplace would have an appetite for my book.  

I toyed with adding more mystery, considered a pirate’s trove of secrets to complicate things, and even wrote in a nefarious sublot before re-centering myself. I deleted the storyline. I stuck with my original vision of a character-driven narrative. I remembered early advice I had received about not trying to write to a marketplace with an ever-changing goalpost but rather, with passion and conviction about a story that spoke to me. Sound wisdom for screenwriters, novelists, or any creatives.

All the Little Ways is an ode to female friendship. It shines a light on the ways we care for each other and show our love, the declarations that are often found not in a grand gesture or a splashy movie moment, but in the little kindnesses that become woven into the fabric of our lives. 

I set out to write a book about a small idea, but along the way, I discovered that it was actually pretty substantial. Because what’s bigger than the transformative power of love?

All The Little Ways: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|TikTok

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/09/the-big-idea-laura-lekkos/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61005

https://xkcd.com/3256/

https://xkcd.com/3256/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/08/various-sundry-6-8-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60979

Hello, it’s Monday, let’s see what’s been going on over the weekend:

Spencer Pratt misses LA Mayoral runoff: I’ve not lived in California for decades now, and even when I did never lived in the city of Los Angeles proper. Nevertheless as a native son of Southern California, I’ve been keeping up with LA’s mayoral race, mostly because people I know were exasperated by the presence of Pratt, a fellow who as I understand it was best known for dating someone more famous than he and then extending that into an indifferent career in the reality TV genre, the sort where he and his spouse at one point announced an impending divorce for the publicity boost. Pratt is a Republican, and so perhaps unsurprisingly his entire platform seems to have been based on “backing the blue” and harassing homeless people.

The California primary election was nearly a week ago, and the vote tallying has been slow and for most of it Pratt was in second place behind the current, somewhat embattled, LA mayor Karen Bass. But as the mail-in votes have been counted over the last week, Pratt slipped into third behind Nithya Raman, and seems likely to stay there. Naturally, this has started the absolutely predictable GOP whining and foot-stomping about “election integrity,” to which the only rational response is, shut the fuck up, you reprehensible children, and take the “L” like grown-ups. They won’t, of course. But one can dream.

Earlier in the campaign Pratt said that if he lost the election he would leave Los Angeles; I understand there may be a GoFundMe to hire him a U-Haul. I will believe that he’s going to leave LA when I see it. He has not other real skills than being a celebrity of a certain low-wattage sort. He needs to be where the work is. And of course, this was all this doomed mayoral run was — an attempt to keep his name in the spotlight a little longer, to keep the work flowing. I hope it does this task… poorly.

Rush comes back: In rather more exciting news from Los Angeles, Rush opened up their new tour there last night, their first in a decade and since drummer/lyricist Neil Peart passed away in 2020. Apparently things went extremely well, with tour drummer Anika Nilles getting her critical flowers for her work on the throne. For me the moment of particular interest is that Aimee Mann (who I am friendly with thanks to our mutual participation on the JoCo Cruise) popped up for a cameo on “Time Stand Still,” which is arguably my own favorite Rush tune:

I have friends who are over the moon that Rush is back on tour, especially since it seemed unlikely, with the passing of Peart, that they would ever do so again; he was (and is) absolutely the beating heart of that band. No one could or did fault the Geddy Lee or Alex Lifeson, the other two members of Rush, for choosing to call it a career. But the way Rush are doing this particular tour, with a drummer with her own considerable skills, not designed to replace Peart but to support his friends as they take a sweet, valedictory lap, seems to be something everyone is getting behind. I hope they have a good tour, and I hope all my friends who love Rush get a chance to see them.

House-sized American flag causes a power failure: Sometimes the real-world metaphors are just a little on the nose, aren’t they? But wait, the metaphor gets even nose-ier: The New York Times reporting on the event seems to suggest the massive, 3,000 square foot flag that cut off power to 40,000 may have been the property of the WWE wrestling organization, based in Stamford, where the outage happened. A preview, possibly, of the event (UFC, not WWE) scheduled for the White House lawn this weekend? We shall see.

I am, for the record, somewhat less outraged than some other people of my political leanings about the MMA event at the White House. I think it’s tacky as fuck, but that’s Trump for you. I don’t support it and am sure it’s going to be corrupt people doing corrupt things, corruptly, but on my list of things to seethe about regarding this administration, it’s low-ish on the list. Other people are taking up my slack, to be sure. I wish them joy in the work.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/08/various-sundry-6-8-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60979

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/06/various-sundry-6-6-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60967

It’s a bit of a stormy day here. Let’s see what’s going on elsewhere.

The “K”-shaped economy comes for laptops: There’s been a trade show this week called Computex (there seems to be a big event in the tech field every other week or so), and Michael Crider of PC Week notes that at the show, the new laptops come in two flavors: The really cheap ones, designed to compete with MacBook Neo, which has completely swamped the low-end of the laptop market, and the really expensive ones, which most people will have to think twice about buying. The middle ground laptop for the middle-class buyer? It’s just not there anymore. This is evidence, Crider argues, of a the “K-shaped” economy at work, the economy where the upper 20% of consumers are doing just fine, and the bottom 80% of consumers are… not.

A couple of things about this: One, you can still get middle-ground laptops in the real world (here’s an Acer laptop with a 14-inch screen, 32GB of memory and 1 TB of storage, plus a couple of goodies, for under $900), although they mostly have to have been made before the RAM crunch brought on by “AI” companies buying all the memory in the world. Two, that self-same RAM crunch is wreaking havoc on manufacturers at the moment, precisely in that middle ground. It makes sense for them to focus on the lower end (where they don’t have to spend too much for RAM) and the higher end (where the consumer is less price-sensitive), then in the middle, where they watch their margins shrink to nothing.

I’m not disagreeing with Crider’s thought about the “K-shaped” economy, because I think it’s real: it’s pretty evident to me that the economy sucks for everyone but the people who don’t have to worry about prices. I also think, in computing spaces, the hollowing out of the middle ground is exacerbated by other factors, particularly the “AI” RAM crunch, which is not (directly) about that K-shape. It still sucks if you’re in the market for a computer.

Predictions on the World Cup thingy I think is about to start: On one hand I’m being a little obnoxious, I know what the World Cup is and what’s going on with it, on the other hand I am also not super-engaged with it, partly because I don’t tend to follow sports in general, partly because I think FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, which lessens my interest in the World Cup considerably, and partly because this year is the wrong year to have the US co-hosting, for several reasons.

Nevertheless if you have an interest in the World Cup, I hope you enjoy it. Also I have no idea who is going to win it, but I don’t imagine it will be the US. I’m okay with this.

Screwworm back in the US after 60 years, which means your beef, which is already expensive, is about to become even more so. Does this have anything to do with the absolutely idiotic decision from DOGE to cut screwworm monitoring and prevention out of the budget? Well, at the very least, it certainly didn’t help. Is this all hurting Americans while benefiting others? Oh, probably. And while I’m sure there are some people who might be gleeful that the point of pain is that the moment most centered on those who likely brought Trump back into power, anyone who eats beef is next, so don’t get too smug about it, if you are of a mind to. Also, if you were ever planning to reduce the amount of red meat in your diet, here’s a good reason to get on it.

The new Taylor Swift song for Toy Story 5: It’s perfectly good! There have been better songs associated with the Toy Story movies, but there’s nothing at all wrong with this one, and I’m sure it will work perfectly well in the movie. The going line with this one is that this is Swift’s return to country, which, okay, sure, let’s go with that. I’m already laying good odds that this gets Swift an Oscar early next year, and I don’t imagine that will be the worst thing in the world. There are a lot worse songs to have garnered that particular bauble. Enjoy.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/06/various-sundry-6-6-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60967

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/me-and-brandon-sanderson-in-conversation/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60961

In April I went town to the Atlanta area to chat with Brandon Sanderson, and we talked about writing, of course, but also about kids, about our early days in the industry and how it was I became Brandon’s official nemesis. It’s an hour-long chat including Q&A from the audience, and it’s now up on YouTube, which means I can embed it here for you. I think it’s pretty clear we were having a lot of fun chatting. I hope you’ll have fun watching us do our thing.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/me-and-brandon-sanderson-in-conversation/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60961

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/various-and-sundry-6-5-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60950

What interesting tidbits of thought do I have for you today? Let’s find out together!

Bots now make up more than half of Internet traffic: Internet provider Cloudflare says more than 57% of the traffic to the sites it hosts are bots (i.e., automated computer requests) rather than actual humans, who make up the other 43%. My feeling about this is less surprise than wonder that it’s taken this long; bot traffic was already a scourge more than a decade ago. That percentage is unlikely to go down, ever, as “agentic AI” is being pushed by tech companies, so a bot can go out onto the Internet and find information and bring it back so that you don’t ever have to leave the cozy bosom, of, say, Google.

How will this sort of thing work about for people who actually have sites (waves) when the vast majority of traffic is comprised of bots, who don’t read ads and don’t want things? The article rather optimistically suggests that a change might happen where bots are charged for access to web sites and information, whilst humans get to wander the Internet for free, which, of course, runs counter to the tech company ethos of making someone else pay for the stuff it wants to take without paying. So I’m going to just say I’m not convinced this will be the wave of the future.

Regardless, this site is subsidized by me making money doing other stuff and has been for 28 years now, with no plans to change at any point in the future. Please enjoy your free information! Also, buy my books, thanks.

Freedom 250 concerts cancelled, to be replaced with a Trump rally: Sad news for Vanilla Ice, who was the last performer of note still planning to perform; as I said on Threads, he “really needed that gig, now his frosted tips are gonna get repossessed.” In fact I don’t know if he still has frosted tips, or even hair. The 90s were a very long time ago now.

Trump is now having a rally on June 26th, where his aimless meandering mouth pooping will be occasionally interrupted by Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA,” or some such. If you attend, you deserve what you’re going to get, and that’s all I have to say about that. Greenwood’s own reputation as a musician will not be notably dinged for his appearance; being hauled out for a single moment of performative patriotism for politicians who actively hate the majority of Americans is what he’s been known for this entire century. I hope it pays well.

Let’s end on a music high note: A countrified cover of “You’re the One that I Want” from Grey DeLisle and Les Greene. Voice acting nerds will know DeLisle as the voice of numerous characters in shows and video games, my own particularly favorite being Mandy in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, but she also has a nice side gig singing Country & Western stuff. Enjoy!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/05/various-and-sundry-6-5-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60950

https://xkcd.com/3255/

https://xkcd.com/3255/

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/a-very-fond-farewell-to-misaky-tokyo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60873

All the way back in 2022, I posted about a candy company I had recently discovered called Misaky Tokyo. They specialized in kohakutou, a traditional Japanese candy that looks like gems and geodes. Basically fancy rock candy. And I was enamored with them. I loved the lux branding, the idea of beautiful treats meant for special occasions that were more than just candy. Not only did the candy feel special, but the brand felt special since it was a minority, LGBTQIA+, woman-owned business that was constantly making a difference by donating to charities such as the LA LGBTQ Center and the AAPI community.

Misaky Tokyo was classy, cool, fun, and authentic. And they were generous! They gifted me two of their delicious boxes after my first review of them. I ended up buying more boxes from them shortly after, but that gesture of kindness really stuck with me.

I was sad when they took a break for a while, but I always hoped they’d come back after a well deserved rest. In an unexpected turn of events, Misaky Tokyo is closing the door on this chapter, after the owner’s battle with cancer.

View this post on Instagram

As said in the video, they had a final sale to close out Misaky Tokyo for good. Of course, I had to get in on this, and bought their Complete Farewell Set, which came with one 5-gem box and two 3-gem boxes, so eleven gems total. I am so glad I get to experience them one last time, as they sold out of these very quickly, and I have never found kohakutou that is as stunning and delicious as Misaky’s.

So let’s take one last look at Misaky Tokyo’s lovely candy together, and wish them well in their new chapter.

The two 3-piece boxes had the exact same gems in it, so I ended up gifting one to my cousin and she thought it was so cute!

The 5-piece set ended up having those same pieces in it, plus two other flavors:

So, not a ton of diversity in this set, but it makes sense since it was their last run and they were probably just trying to focus their efforts on giving people their last hurrah and not focusing on broadening their flavor horizons. Regardless, I’m so glad I got to enjoy Misaky Tokyo and even share them one last time! I truly wish them the best moving forward and will really miss their lovely kohakutou.

Did you ever get the chance to try them? Do you have any other kohakutou businesses you recommend? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/a-very-fond-farewell-to-misaky-tokyo/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60873

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/the-big-idea-james-l-cambias-6/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60939

Math can sometimes get in the way of a good story, but author James L. Cambias didn’t let pesky physics stop him from majorly transforming Venus. Blast off in his Big Idea to see how he managed to make Venus habitable, albeit not for humans, in his new novel, The Ishtar Deception.

JAMES L. CAMBIAS:

For this guest post, I thought I’d walk readers through the mental process of one of my own Big Ideas from my new book. The Ishtar Deception is the latest in my “Billion Worlds” series of books and stories set at the end of the Tenth Millennium. In that era, the Solar System is a vast “Dyson Swarm” of space habitats and solar collectors, soaking up most of the energy emitted by the Sun. On the scale devised by the Russian SETI researcher Nikolai Kardashev, the civilization of the Billion Worlds is a Type II. About a quadrillion biological beings live in the Solar System, and a larger number of intelligent machines.

It’s a big setting, and it means I can tell a wide variety of stories. The first Billion Worlds book, The Godel Operation, was a picaresque adventure bouncing around from the ring around Uranus to a space habitat near Jupiter and finally to Mars. The Scarab Mission was a kind of “haunted house in space” set aboard a space habitat depopulated by some mysterious disaster. The third, The Miranda Conspiracy, was a political thriller inside the Uranian moon Miranda.

For The Ishtar Deception I decided to take readers into the inner Solar System. I’ve made references in past works to the fact that Mercury doesn’t exist any more in the year 10,000, so I couldn’t send my characters there. Instead, I decided on Venus. My super-spy character Sabbath Okada would be assigned to a mission on Venus, and that in turn gave me my title, since Ishtar is a prominent surface feature on that world.

I had made vague references to Venus being terraformed in the distant future, but when I finally looked at the effort involved I realized there’d be no way to get the job done in a mere eight thousand years. Transforming Venus would take too long. 

And that made me wonder why anybody would bother to do it at all. If you live in, say, the year 6000, and have some unimaginable amount of energy (by our primitive standards) to play with, what’s the most useful thing you can do? If you apply it to trying to make Venus into a habitable world like Earth you’ll use all of it up to make some tiny incremental change. 

To reduce Venus’s atmosphere to something bearable you would have to physically remove something like fifty billion megatons of carbon dioxide from Venus. If you could somehow lift a hundred tons a second (never mind where you’re putting it) that would take fifteen thousand years of constant effort. Meanwhile you’re going to need to move a hundred times as much hydrogen to Venus if you want to support a biosphere. And let’s not even talk about the nine-month rotation. I have no idea how to fix that.

Or you can use the same amount of effort to build a few million more cozy space habitats to add to the Billion Worlds circling the Sun. Much more efficient. It’s a no-brainer, really.

But . . . that would leave my novel with Venus as it really is. An incredibly massive atmosphere of carbon dioxide, with a surface pressure equivalent to the ocean bottom a kilometer down on Earth, a temperature of 470 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead and tin), winds blowing 300 kilometers per hour, and oh by the way there’s a significant amount of sulfuric acid in that dense atmosphere. Humans would only survive such conditions in massive submarine-like vehicles and structures, and even machines would have trouble with heat and corrosion.

Sure, you can maybe live in balloons floating in Venus’s upper atmosphere, where the temperature and pressure are not too different from what it’s like on Earth, so all you need to do is make some oxygen to breathe. But, again, it’s hard to see how a balloon city on Venus would be better than a space habitat. And all the while, there’s a whole planet’s worth of matter — metals, silicon, sulfur, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, and other treasures — just out of reach down there under that hellish atmosphere.

You can’t “bio-terraform” it, as Carl Sagan once suggested, by introducing blue-green algae and letting the plants do for Venus what they did for Earth. There’s just too damned much atmosphere! If your plants were perfectly efficient and broke down all of Venus’s carbon dioxide to oxygen, well then you’ve got a planet with an atmosphere of nearly pure oxygen at about 60 times Earth’s surface pressure. As one of the characters in my book notes, it’s hard to think of anything that wouldn’t burn under those conditions. 

So I decided that my future civilization would just take a simpler, cheaper, faster approach. Forget about turning Venus into a world with oceans and forests, let’s just make it something that isn’t instantly lethal to both biological and electronic intelligences.

The result: “cryoforming.” All you do is build a big sunshade and park it at the L1 point between Venus and the Sun, blocking all the sunlight from reaching the planet entirely. The sunshade will, naturally, harvest all that energy so whatever else you’re doing on or around Venus will have plenty of power. And then you wait a few centuries for Venus to radiate away all the heat contained in that massive atmosphere and the upper part of the crust. 

First the sulfuric acid rains out, puddling on the ground and collecting in little lakes. As Venus gets cooler the acid becomes a waxy solid. Then the carbon dioxide starts to crystallize, falling as dry ice snow. At first it melts on hitting the warm ground, of course, but eventually it sticks, and then accumulates. Without an energy differential the winds calm down, from hundreds of kilometers per hour to something more like what we see on Earth.

And overhead, an observer on the surface can see something that hasn’t happened on Venus in billions of years: the stars come out. 

I figure my future civilization would stabilize the temperature a few degrees below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. Say, 50 or 60 degrees Celsius below zero. That gives you a planet with an atmosphere of pretty much pure nitrogen (with a few trace noble gases), and a surface pressure of roughly four times Earth sea level pressure. 

Nice? It depends on what you are. If you’re a human, or some other biological being, you still need breathing gear and heated clothing to go outside. You probably want to live at a lower pressure so all your cities will be built of diamond blocks and graphene like high-tech sea bases, and it’s still dark all the time. 

But if you’re a machine intelligence the new Venus has gone from hellish to something close to paradise! The air is dry and has no corrosive oxygen in it, yet it’s still dense and can provide superb cooling for your various energy-using systems. You and tens of billions of other machines can get to work digging up that crust with no pesky biosphere to worry about. 

So my far-future Venus becomes one of the resource treasure-houses of the Solar System. And as any cursory glance at history will reveal, that’s going to create plenty of opportunities for conflict. The Great Powers of the Tenth Millennium — the Lunar Republic, the Trojan Empire, and my main character’s bosses in Deimos — will fight each other for a piece of the Venusian pie.

I don’t really have space to go into some of the other details — like the giant wheels in orbit that serve as space elevators, or the culture and sports and politics of Ishtar. And I’m certainly not going to spill any secrets about the plot. To get clearance for that you have to buy the book.

Just a warning: in a novel called The Ishtar Deception, it’s a good idea not to trust anyone.

The Ishtar Deception: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/the-big-idea-james-l-cambias-6/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60939

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/quite-possibly-the-worst-view-from-a-hotel-room-5-31-2026-chula-vista/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60931

I am not currently in California anymore, but I felt rather inclined to share this photo I took from the second story of the oh-so-lovely hotel my grandma, mom, and I were in. Our first two nights in Cali were spent in the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, and the second two nights were at a much more modest location in Chula Vista.

I have much to say about my splendid time in California, but I cannot even begin to tell y’all how behind I am on content. Remember how it took me roughly two months to get around to covering my Denver trip? Well, I’ve done a lot of stuff since then, and boy oh boy do I have quite the backlog right now. I’m honestly not sure if I should even bother going in chronological order anymore, though it might irk me too much not to.

Please hang in there while I slowly work my way through all my exciting endeavors and even some more miscellaneous things, and enjoy the view in the meantime.

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/04/quite-possibly-the-worst-view-from-a-hotel-room-5-31-2026-chula-vista/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60931

https://xkcd.com/3254/

https://xkcd.com/3254/

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/03/various-sundry-6-3-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60917

I have gotten out of the habit of commenting on the news of the day here, mostly because, as I have said before, when it comes to the current governance of our country, there’s only so many times I can yell “it’s because they’re fascists, what did you expect” before I bore even myself, and also, frankly, the time I have to babysit comment threads these days is minimal. I’m not entirely sure how I managed it back in the day because it feels like I barely have time to keep up with my actual paid duties at the moment, and I keep piling additional responsibilities onto my plate.

Nevertheless, I think I want to get back to it a bit here, partly because it’s not like I don’t have thoughts on various news stories as they happen, and partly because it’s good for keeping up regular posting here. So I think at least a couple times a week I’m going to post a “Various & Sundry” post, catching up with my thoughts on events when those thoughts are longer than a post on Threads or Bluesky would allow, but not long enough for their own full-fledged post. They will usually cover three to five items, including but not necessarily limited to current events. Sometimes I’ll also plop in something I think is amusing or has otherwise caught my eye.

In the past for things like this I would try to avoid dropping in stuff I’d already commented on elsewhere, but this time around I think I’m going to be a little more lax about that, one, because I know that not everyone who visits here follows me on Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon, so that material will be new to those folks in any event, and two, because often even if I’ve commented about the story elsewhere, what I’ve done there is mostly have been quippy, and here I might have something else to say about it.

Also, three, I’m lazy, and four, inasmuch as this site acts as my own institutional memory, if I post something about it here it constitutes an official record. I mean, all the posts I ever placed on the former Twitter are now entirely lost to time, since I have gone in and purged my entire timeline there. This site, however, endures. So there it is. Welcome historians and biographers of the future! This is me, in typed form!

For these posts and as (nearly) always, I will be leaving the comments open but please do me the favor of remembering the comment policy here. Please be polite to others, especially when you disagree, and avoid making me come in and Malleting your post. There is a special subclass of commenter here who especially likes to take any point and use it as a jumping off point for some other thing they want to jam into the discussion and/or likes to use particularly elevated terms or positions just to get a reaction. I am not about that these days, folks, even if I generally agree with your positions. I’m tired, y’all, and the Mallet will have a hair trigger. Please comment accordingly. Thank you in advance for not being a pain in my ass.

With that as preamble, here are today’s various & sundry topics:

60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley fired from CBS News: This was not exactly unexpected, since in a staff meeting with his new boss Nick Bilton he expressed, shall we say, unvarnished opinions about Bilton and CBS News head Bari Weiss, and apparently declined to apologize to either them after the fact. One does not do that, especially to status-anxious posers like Bilton and Weiss, without expecting repercussions. Weiss and Bilton may in fact be incompetent (that’s obvious in the case of Weiss, and a reasonable supposition about Bilton, who has almost no relevant experience for the job he now holds), but they are still the bosses. Pelley knew he was setting his career at CBS one fire the moment he opened his mouth.

Also, he’s not wrong. His departure email came with receipts about how and when he and 60 Minutes were pressured or outright made to compromise their journalistic integrity since Weiss has been in charge, and a follow-up statement flat out called Weiss a liar regarding the manner in which his firing was handled. Weiss and Bilton have to know that in this sort of “they said. he said” situation, Pelley has integrity on his side, and they do… not. It’s also clear that whatever 60 Minutes might be after this, it will probably not be what it was, and it will probably be worse. And that, indeed, that has been the plan from the start.

“AI” use starts getting really expensive: Turns out there really is no such thing as a free lunch, as the various “AI” providers are changing how their services are metered, from “per request” to how many tokens one burns through with those requests. Tokens aren’t cheap! Users are burning through their monthly allotment of them in a day, apparently largely because coders and others were using them for somewhat frivolously. One particularly salacious (but possibly sensationalized) story had an anonymous company burning through half a billion dollars of “AI” use in a single month. I’d want to see some actual reporting on that, including the company’s name, before I lend that report full credence, but out in the real world, prices are still going up, enough so that using “AI” is now more expensive than paying the humans companies are laying off to pay for the “AI.”

And if you’re wondering why, if that’s so, companies are still apparently so avid to replace humans with “AI,” well, one answer is the corporate class of tech just fuckin’ hates workers, and would rather give their money to each other in tech circle-jerk than to actual humans who might foolishly spend that money on things like, you know, food and rent and children. Another reason is that the other corporate folks who don’t actively hate their workers were sold a bill of goods, where they were made to believe an ineffective tool could streamline their costs (mostly by firing workers), only to find out after those human workers were let go that the actual costs of that ineffective tool were hidden from them. Now they’re stuck.

No, I don’t particularly have a warm, fuzzy feeling for tech execs at the moment.

Which brings us to our third thing today, from humorist Eleanor Morton. Find the lie.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/03/various-sundry-6-3-26/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60917

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/02/the-big-idea-isabel-j-kim/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60910

Two paths diverge in a wood… and what happens when, in fact, you can travel both? In her debut novel Sublimation, author Isabel J. Kim looks at what happens when the road less taken is never not taken, and how a question in school set her on a new path.

ISABEL J. KIM:

I am going to tell you a story that I have never publicly told before. It is about the ignoble origins of Sublimation. And for context, Sublimation is a speculative fiction novel set in a universe where when you cross a border with the intention to leave, you split into two people. Literally.

Sublimation is about other things, too—the artificial nature of borders, the way in which human beings impose their technological will on natural processes, control and, freedom and the unhappy marriage of big tech and government and how it is hard to talk to people when you don’t know what you want—but the crux of it is: Sublimation is a story about being confronted by a life you didn’t lead.

When I was seventeen, I was taking a world history class and we were talking about immigration, because that’s what you do in a world history class in the United States of America. And the teacher asked us the question: why do people immigrate to America?

One of the other students—who was, in my teenage self’s words, “a white preppy blonde chick” and in my current self’s words, “literally just some guy”—raised her hand with perfect confidence and said “For a better life!” She spoke with such clear, myopic certainty that I was suddenly furious, because there are a lot of reasons that people go places and stay places and “a better life” is so reductive as to be meaningless, and also, some of us move because our dads get jobs, okay? You’ve lived here your entire life, and I’ve lived in four different cities in two different countries, so why are you raising your hand with such confidence?

The punchline, of course, is that I was born in New Jersey, and also had never technically immigrated anywhere. Also, it’s not like I raised my hand to talk about my experiences of being an expat in my country of ethnic origin.

Back then, I never liked talking about how I felt about being from places, because my international childhood was hard to explain. It was an experience that was fairly benign, mostly enriching, and only strange in retrospect. The only lingering weirdness was that I felt like a foreigner everywhere I went. I was an American kid in Korea, I was a Korean kid in America, and explaining how that felt would require me to make you live an entire life walking in my shoes. When you’re seventeen, that’s hard.

A few years (read: seven years) later I was back in Korea for a vacation, and I was surprised at how quickly the country had changed while I had been gone. I started thinking about how all the differences would have seemed totally organic had I lived there my entire life. This got me ruminating about the version of me that never moved back to the states, which led me to the idea of instancing—leaving a double behind when you cross a border. One person who goes, another who stays.

And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor made flesh, an idea through which I could viscerally shove the experience of being a foreigner into the reader’s brain. And I was thinking about my classmate from high school, and how I wanted to make people like her understand how it felt, to be perpetually from somewhere else.

So, I started writing a story (“Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self”) about how it felt to be from somewhere else, and how it felt to be a foreigner, and how you might feel if you were the one who got to leave, and conversely, how it might feel to be the one who had to stay.

Then, a strange thing happened. The more I expanded the aforementioned short story, the more I realized that the feeling of alienation was universal—everyone feels like a stranger sometimes, everyone wonders about what could have happened had they made different choices, everyone has a road not traveled.

The more I wrote, the more I saw the story I was writing as not really about my own individual experience, but as a way for the reader to sift through their own experiences through the lens of the story I was giving them. The narrative became a sort of window for the reader, or a magnifying glass.

And I felt that even more intensely when I talked with people about Sublimation across the various drafts. The more conversations I had, the stronger my feeling was that at the end of the day, we’re more similar than not. If you look far back enough, we’re all from somewhere else. And we’re all traveling into the future together.

And the future, like the past, is a foreign country, from which we can never return.

So that’s what Sublimation is about. And maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t raise my hand in world history class; if I had, I might not have written this novel.

Sublimation: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Bookshop.org

Author Socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/02/the-big-idea-isabel-j-kim/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60910

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/01/a-deceptively-sweet-moment-between-smudge-and-saja/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60902

Awww, doesn’t it look like they’re cuddling? They are not, about a tenth of a second later they were rolling about in a full-blown tussle, as they are wont to do. Don’t worry, it’s all in good fun; Smudge actually enjoys his wrestling time with Saja, and vice versa. But it does make for some fun moments:

Sugar and Spice, I will note again, want none of this sort of nonsense. It is far below either of their dignities. Which is, perhaps, their loss.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/06/01/a-deceptively-sweet-moment-between-smudge-and-saja/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60902

https://xkcd.com/3253/

https://xkcd.com/3253/

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.