Nicole Baugh

@eneffbee.bsky.social

71 Followers 136 Following

Desert-living inveterate rereader. Drives a spaceship. (she/her)

"This day, the day where I looked like this, continues to define that relation *because* Fern denies its relevance. I can't let it go because she can't let it be."
Vidyujjihva was a mouthy man, a mobile and expressive mouth, a mouthful of trouble. In bed it was lightning and love; at the table, it was fast wit and puns (he had once made love to their inventor, he said, and she had curse blessed him with their importunity); in the bitter dark, it was invective, a mouth full of knives.
(Their otherness is about where they are from. Fernão is a third-generation Catholic from the occupied coastal territories in the West: despite his name, he has no Portuguese ancestry. It is also about their souls. Fernão has one, which is tortured; Embi and Omiya and the others do not.)
—Your passage is paid, she says.—Your beard still sucks. I’ll see you later later. I’m gone, gone, gone to the other shore.
The Documentary is a record of the haunted world, they say, which we the dead know is not a flowing river of cause and effect, but a glacial ocean, whole and complete, past and future laid out in full, frozen and transparent. An akashic record, like Uncle would say.
You too will go into the past one day, and come back into a different future than the one you left behind. I want you to know—it’s not so bad, in the end. You lose your home and everything you fought for, but you get to love.
We decide to remember ourselves bright and innocent, untroubled by aches and pains and guilts and fears and abuses, unmarked by the things we did or the things that were done to us.
Screen shot of President Scroob from Spaceballs, Murakami-style. "Zoo Sub? I have the same password on my luggage!"
Picture of an abandoned train trestle over the Savannah River. The structure is obviously in a state of decay. There is a boat on the river, and trees on the bank.
Nutmeg would often ask herself, "Is it not just these women? Do all the women of the world carry this kind of 'something' inside them? And why are the ones who come here all middle-aged women? Do I have a 'something' inside me as well?"
The veterinarian took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was trembling--so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional trauma. A large number of animals had been "liquidated" in a moment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled. He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette and trying to sort out his feelings. He stared at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked as it always had. He could find in it no signs of change. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers and leopards and wolves had been "liquidated." those animals had existed this morning, but now, at four o'cloc in the afternoon, they had ceased to exist. They had been massacred by soldiers, and even their dead bodies were gone.
I crossed my legs, settled into the sofa, and listened to Haydn (though if pressed, I could not have sworn it was Haydn). It was fairly nice music, but the kind that seems to melt into air the moment it emerges from its source.
The report highlighted a reliance on what it called “personal heroics” by personnel at the Goldstone site, described as being “willing to do whatever it takes to keep the antenna running.” The problem with that, the report concluded, is that it led them to do tasks outside their qualifications, work extended hours that led to fatigue and skip tests they felt would have delayed returning the antenna to operations. Had the site’s personnel “acted with greater deliberation or shown more willingness to leave the antenna in a failed state at any point during the mishap,” the report concluded, “the undesired outcome likely would not have occurred.”
At the same time that I was entirely new, I was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called ‘I’—or, rather, make the things that constituted me.
She has been using me as a medium during the past five years, but it is not as if she has merely been exploiting me as some kind of tool. She has been doing it to aid in my recovery as well. She believes that by passing the minds or egos of a variety of people through me, she will make it possible for me to obtain a firm grasp on my own self. Do you see what I mean? It works for me as a kind of vicarious experience of what it feels like to have an ego.
A photo of the front cover of Behind the Attic Wall, by Sylvia Cassedy. A girl pours tea for two dolls.
To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.
Screen shot of the listing for the ebook for Mercutio, by Kate Heartfield, at the Pima County Public Library. The Holds information shows one library copy, with three people waiting.
From Martha Wells’s timeline The Witch Roads, Kate Elliot From Reactor Magazine’s timeline Cabaret in Flames, Hache Pueyo Hache Pueyo’s other books But Not Too Bold This City Will Not Kill Me, Ilona Andrews Other Bsky timeline finds (likely some or all of these belong somewhere above) Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera Author’s Bsky Timeline Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou P. Djeli Clark P. Djeli Clark’s books The Haunting of Tram Car 015 The Starving Saints, Caitlin Starling Spread Me, Sarah Gailey Psychopomp & Circumstance, Eden Royce The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher T. Kingfisher’s other books (not including works as Ursula Vernon, found another way) Snake-Eater
Cover illustration for The Fox and the Crow, told by Patricia Scatty. A crow in a red kerchief and a blue apron holds a slice of cheese in her beak as she perches in a pine tree.
"I would like to believe that this ends somewhere, that this age of extracting every last drop of profit out of a beautiful thing they’ve already bled dry will run its course. Endless crossover, remake, reskinning, whatever other form of zombified content production in spaces where art used to be—in my heart I don’t think people actually want this, no matter how far up and to the right the various lines of their choosing continue to go. But that shift, when it comes, will arrive alongside the death of things we once held dear. "
The cover of the novel Fever House, by Keith Rosson. A black and white fist with malformed fingers, showing the horns.