Bruce H. McCosar

@bmccosar.bsky.social

89 Followers 126 Following

Everything Specialist🧐Sole Survivor☹️Indigenous👍🏽Fedora 44 KDE💻Mint 22☘️Fan of acid jazz🎷epic metal🤘and latin folk🎸Former chemist⚛️teacher🎓and musician🎼Writes using LAMY🖋️Kate📕Markdown✅and pandoc🪄Todavía aprendo español🇪🇸Over 9000💥WNBA fan🏀

First edition hardback of a Imagica, by Clive Barker. You should read it. I can’t describe the cover illustration, because it’s kind of a spoiler. Well, not really. You still have to read the book.

Kindle library, featuring Tim Waggoner‘s Lord of the Feast (new), Charles Grant‘s “a glow of candles”, and “gods of Jade and shadow” by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. I actually finished the Charlie Grant book while I was doing jury duty. Thank goodness PG County doesn’t confiscate your phone, unlike when I lived in Virginia.

An absolutely amazing illustration to accompany “song in a minor scale” by Gunner de Winter in the latest issue of Kaleidotrope. Really, alt text can’t do it justice. My recommendation is to go read the story itself.

A snapshot of weather radar showing the DMV area with a huge line of thunderstorms extending from Virginia through the Annapolis Baltimore area.

From Duotrope --

56 submissions sent.

Acceptance percentage: 0.0%
Rejection percentage: 100.0%
Non-response percentage: 0.0%
Acceptance-to-rejection ratio: 0.0%

Air quality in the DC Metro area, specifically the Maryland side, is 240 this morning.

Yes, equal exchange organic bananas from Peru. The snack food of choice when you’re diabetic and have to fend off the dreaded hypoglycemia. I made a special trip to the store last night because I’d run out. In 38°C heat. That’s some dedication, right there.

Photo of a park near my house, showing not just the sun through nearby trees, but also the all-pervasive mist.

The creepy alien head guy from the Star Trek episode “the Corbomite Maneuver.” Looks a heck of a lot like Mitch McConnell, when you think of it.

2040 points on Tightrope from Encyclopedia Brittanica. Apparently I got 800 for correct answers (8 out of 9), 980 for time bonus, and 260 for difficulty. First time I've played. At least they didn't pull a Jeopardy and ask about French Literature or Potent Potables.

Opening credits for "The Fantastic Journey" (1977, NBC) showing a small tour boat sailing the waters of ... the Bermuda Triangle. Yes, it's that sort of show. Only the finest in disembodied brains, tuning fork weapons, and space girls who can telepathically communicate with cats.

My Merriam-Webster word for 2026 was "compassionate" as in ... Bluesky wasn't very compassionate toward people who in good faith took a screen shot of this word in order to post it, because, like Procrustes, they have mauled the irregularly-sized image into an ill-fitting box.

There’s a small closet full of luggage of various sizes, mainly the dinky things that fit under a seat in a plane – or at least used to, until they made those sizes even smaller. There’s also one of the quilts we hang up occasionally. Somewhere hidden within these depths, an Apex predator waits.

Well, the cat we’re pet sitting, anyway.

Plague Birds
The Red Day Edition
by Jason Stanford

Signed copy, 5 of 30

Title card for the hypothetical ST:TOS episode “Fractal Planet”

Our cat "Skunk" in 2015. She was named by my parents. Personally I think Penelope or Penny might have been better but ... Skunk knew who Skunk was. Anyway, she's at the height of relaxation, rolled over onto her back, paws tucked. Although she's a black tuxedo cat, she only has a white nebula on her chest and four little white paws.

A sports card featuring Teresa Weatherspoon of the NY Liberty, #11, heart and soul of the team.

Close-up of three red rose blooms that just opened up today. I have no idea what kind of rose this is; it was a volunteer.

A close-up view of the plant blue false indigo. Despite the word “blue“, it’s really more of a bluish purple. Then again, that’s the way it is with most plants, right? More importantly, I want the bees to see it as “welcome“

Screenshot of Amazon telling me the game I was watching, that suddenly ended without warning, is unavailable due to regional restrictions, I had been watching it for two hours.

Commander Koenig (space: 1999) sees what you did there.

Swims in French cursive ... Swims in upside down French cursive.

Not every C_2 axis gives E. XD

Black-and-white photo of myself holding the famous dead man’s hand, aces and eights. Threw in the Joker, because… Clowns, right?😆🤣💀

A Fonzie doll from the 1970s. That’s right, Ayyyy it’s the Fonz.

Honeybee against a huge cloud of white azalea blooms.

The Tholian Web, from Star Trek: the original series. The trap just keeps on getting worse.

Close-up of white azaleas in full bloom, but no bees.

Sunrise in my neighborhood. We can’t see the sun, but the clouds have a nice glow going. Several different shades, from a brilliant salmon to a pale yellow to a dark violet to a washed out sky, to a corona of dawn on the horizon.

The Starman omnibus – The first book of the collected James Robinson run. This was a radical redesign of the character, featuring Jack Knight, son of the original Starman.

The Starflight Handbook by Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matlock.

Simple diagram I made, pen on paper, showing that the star Polaris is 432 light years away. It’s a triple star system. One of its companion stars orbit very close, at about 13 AU; in our solar system, that would be just outside the orbit of Saturn. The other is 2400 AU away. Roughly, one light year is about 60,000 AU.

Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian — the first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series.

Earth seen through the scanner of Ming the Merciless, from Flash Gordon (1980). Honestly, Ming doesn't have to do too much work to wreck Earth. Time to knock off early.

The Black Company by Glen Cook.

The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk.

It was the strawberries.

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.

The Riddler (Frank Gorshin, from Batman ‘66) sees what you did there.

Programming Perl by Larry Wall, 1st Edition of “the camel book”

Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. Artwork from the very same paperback series that I read.

The Hardy Boys in "The Mystery of -- Oh Crap, We're in Deep $#!% Now" showcases a climactic scene in which the boys go out on the ocean wearing suspiciously Star-Trekky colored cardigans, headed toward a Strange High House in the Mist, only to discover the Stars are Right and the Ancient Ones have returned. (Guest starring: the Mighty Cthulhu, who is peering from behind the cliffs.)

Last Stop: a Supertrain novel, from the master of terror Clive Barker.

EZ reader says “this book is easy to read”

Khan Singh from Star Trek: the original series

The cover of my gigantic book of tips. The symbol is a reference to the Greatest American Hero TV show, with the title “super suit manual“.

Believe it or not (ha!), this is the era when I was dual booting Debian and Linux from Scratch.

Vista de cerca de una flor de ciruelo.

Issue number 27 of the magazine Fusion Fragment, shown in two formats: one in LCD black-and-white on the screen of a Kindle paperwhite, the other on a laptop screen in full color. The color artwork is a very lush, green plant with vines growing out of a skull. The trick is, the buds on the plants are actually little pink pills. This is in reference to the story “a prescription for suicide“ by Anya Lee Josephs, appearing in this issue.

The art of making things work. Lenovo ideapad running Fedora 44/KDE, plugged into an HDMI cable that runs across my couch to the television about 3 m away.

V was a 1983 TV series about first contact. Hypothetically, the aliens looked just like us, except had to wear dark glasses to protect their eyes from the higher light levels on Earth. Bad science all around, so it wasn’t exactly the Expanse. Anyway, this is a photo of me superimposed on a shot of one of the alien ships the old-fashioned way, using GIMP, not some AI crap. PS trek fans, I know that’s s Vulcan hand gesture. Maybe this Visitor is multilingual 🤣

Hypothetically, this is a gif of Captain Kirk beaming down somewhere. In all likelihood it’s just a static screenshot preview. Such are the realities of trying to get to the content water hole.

Park at own risk sign. Hotel is not responsible for … anything, anywhere