How to Build a Planet by Poul Anderson & Stephen L. Gillett
Mar. 24th, 2026 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
A brief guide to creating plausible planets.
How to Build a Planet by Poul Anderson & Stephen L. Gillett
james_davis_nicollA brief guide to creating plausible planets.
How to Build a Planet by Poul Anderson & Stephen L. Gillett
Mod Post: Off-Topic Tuesday
Mar. 24th, 2026 09:56 amicon_uk posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
scans_dailyIn the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.
Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.
The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.
Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.
It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.
The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.
This week we lost the original Miss Teschmacher, Valerie Perrine (Who was, as an actress, so much more than that role, but what a role she made it), at the age of 82. When your acting debut is in the film version of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" and you get good reviews,
Also, Nicholas Brendon, Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, died. This is a complicated one; I genuinely liked Xander as a funny, flawed, messed up, and committed character (I always liked the description: "You'd trust Xander with your life, but maybe not your new car"), even though I know the fanbase has reviewed the character in a mostly negative light. I have friends who met Brendon at conventions and spoke highly of him. But I also have to acknowledge his troubled life following that series which harmed others too. So I think I will echo Charisma Carpenter's elegant tribute that "I will miss the version of the man I once knew"
Variety has reported that Star Fleet Academy will not go beyond it's two, already filmed, seasons, which seems a shame, given that if the same logic had been applied to even TNG, we'd likely have no franchise at all now. (They've been screened early seasons over here, and BOY are there a lot of rough episodes in those. Some great performances, and there's a gem or two of an episode yes, but mostly a serious slog). Though admittedly, if I had to pick between seeing Prodigy get a third season or SFA, I'd be team Protostar all the way.
The live action version of "Moana" got a trailer, though all it does is add another of my list of "What is gained by making this movie (as opposed to something new), beyond cash?"
Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.
The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.
Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.
It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.
The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.
This week we lost the original Miss Teschmacher, Valerie Perrine (Who was, as an actress, so much more than that role, but what a role she made it), at the age of 82. When your acting debut is in the film version of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" and you get good reviews,
Also, Nicholas Brendon, Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, died. This is a complicated one; I genuinely liked Xander as a funny, flawed, messed up, and committed character (I always liked the description: "You'd trust Xander with your life, but maybe not your new car"), even though I know the fanbase has reviewed the character in a mostly negative light. I have friends who met Brendon at conventions and spoke highly of him. But I also have to acknowledge his troubled life following that series which harmed others too. So I think I will echo Charisma Carpenter's elegant tribute that "I will miss the version of the man I once knew"
Variety has reported that Star Fleet Academy will not go beyond it's two, already filmed, seasons, which seems a shame, given that if the same logic had been applied to even TNG, we'd likely have no franchise at all now. (They've been screened early seasons over here, and BOY are there a lot of rough episodes in those. Some great performances, and there's a gem or two of an episode yes, but mostly a serious slog). Though admittedly, if I had to pick between seeing Prodigy get a third season or SFA, I'd be team Protostar all the way.
The live action version of "Moana" got a trailer, though all it does is add another of my list of "What is gained by making this movie (as opposed to something new), beyond cash?"
It's New Toy Day for Sea Otters
Mar. 24th, 2026 09:26 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
daily_otter_feed
Via Oregon Coast Aquarium, which writes, “A special thanks to the donor who shopped our wishlist! It’s safe to say that the otters are thoroughly enjoying their new enrichment items!”
cadence
Mar. 24th, 2026 01:00 ammerriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 24, 2026 is:
cadence • \KAY-dunss\ • noun
Cadence is used to refer to various rhythmic or repeated motions, activities, or patterns of sound, or to the way a person's voice changes by gently rising and falling while they are speaking.
// Ivy relaxed at the beach, listening to the cadence of the surf.
// He speaks with a soft Southern cadence.
Examples:
“Urged by a fast-talking auctioneer and his familiar cadence, paddles shot up as bids climbed into the four- and five-figure range.” — Lily Moayeri, Rolling Stone, 29 Jan. 2026
Did you know?
A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken, cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as birdsong) to be sure. Cadence comes from Middle English borrowed from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means “rhythm in verse.” (You may also recognize a cadence cousin, sweet cadenza, as a word that is familiar in the opera universe.) And from there our cadence traces just a little further backward to the Latin verb cadere “to sound rhythmically, to fall.” Praise the rising and the falling of the lilting in our language, whether singing songs or rhyming or opining on it all.
Just took time to say, I'll drop you a line
Mar. 23rd, 2026 11:26 pmsovayselkie's birthday was duly observed with my parents and my husbands, a meal of much carnivory, and an apricot marmalade cake doused in whipped cream, strawberry sugar, and candles that burned like driftwood salts. Many deeply goofy photos were taken of various combinations of us. So much is wrong with the world and it is still true that my family for an evening is happy. A photogenic snow began to drift the streets as I drove everyone home.
“Heart”: JUSTICE LEAGUE QUARTERLY #5 (JLI 73)
Mar. 23rd, 2026 08:03 pmtcampbell1000 posting in scans_daily
As should be obvious, I love the JLI work of Keith Giffen and his scripting collaborators like J.M. DeMatteis, so I feel a little treasonous saying this about a story by neither Giffen nor DeMatteis. But I have to speak truth. The lead story here, by Mark Waid and Mike McKone, is my favorite JLI story. Full stop.
( If only the JLU cartoon had adapted this one. )
Bundle of Holding: Scion Origin
Mar. 23rd, 2026 03:02 pmjames_davis_nicoll
The 2024 Second Edition of Onyx Path Publishing's Scion, the tabletop roleplaying game about the children of gods discovering their birthright in the modern world.
Bundle of Holding: Scion Origin
To Be Read By Rod Serling
Mar. 23rd, 2026 01:00 pmcakewrecks_feedDeedeedeedeeedeedeedeedee
You unlock this bakery with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension.
A dimension of icing.
A dimension of piping bags.
A dimension of wreckitude.
You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of bad taste and even worse skill. You just crossed over into...
The Twilight Zone.
BUM BUM BAAAAAHHHH...
Picture, if you will... a monkey. This monkey:
I know, creepy right? [shivering] Brrrrrr. Totally.
[resuming serious announcer voice] Ahem. Now picture, if you will, five ravenous-yet-dim-witted Shih Tzu dogs:
[sternly] Let's call them Muffy, Boopsie, Precious, Buttercup and Mr. Snuggles.
Now picture, if you will, a face of terror that watches in malignant silence far beyond your present capacity to understand. A face enigmatically bizarre in terms of time and space. A face...
...of a tweety bird.
Now picture, if you will, Meerkat Zombies...raising the roof.
"What up, playah?"
This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination, the ingredients... of the Twilight Zone.
BUM BUM BAAAAAHHHHH...
SQUEEDLEDEEEE!!!
Jennifer P., Matt N., Christine S., and Melanie L., picture, if you will... a dolphin eating a Snickers bar in flip-flops and a cardigan. Then tell me what that looks like. I've always wondered.
UPDATE! LeAnna and Woobie took up the dolphin challenge and sent in their ideas.
First LeAnna's:
AWESOME! Check out the flip flop thongs on his flippers.
And next we have Woobie's
See, the snickers bar is wearing the cardigan and flip flops because I apparently have no grasp of sentence structure. ?thought Who would have
Touché!
One more!
This one's from Vanilla Smoke. Awesome!
*****
P.S. Here's one more read for you Rod Serling fans:
The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television
It's a graphic novel - so basically a long-form comic book - about Serling's career and "descent into his own personal Twilight Zone." OooOOOooh. Looks awesome, and it has great reviews!
*****
And from my other blog, Epbot:
Why Is the Fur of Sea Otter Pups So Different?
Mar. 23rd, 2026 09:42 amdaily_otter_feed
Via Alaska SeaLife Center, which writes:
Look closely. Can you see the differences between the pup coat and adult coat of a northern sea otter?
Sea otters have a different coat for the first three months of their life, with a longer loft and longer guard hairs than an adult coat. The pup coat keeps pups afloat on top of the water, just like a lifejacket.
Our rehab team has described it like “a cotton ball in water.”
Here’s a close-up look at Un’a’s coat when she was first admitted at about 2 months old, and at her coat again 6 weeks later after she molted. Notice the reduction of the lighter colored guard hairs.
frenetic
Mar. 23rd, 2026 01:00 ammerriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 23, 2026 is:
frenetic • \frih-NET-ik\ • adjective
Something described as frenetic is filled with excitement, activity, or confusion. The word is a synonym of frantic.
// The event was noisy and frenetic, which prompted us to leave early.
Examples:
“As Marty Mauser, a wannabe table tennis champion who dreams and deceives his way through his shamble of a life ... [Timothée Chalamet] injects his scenes with enough nervous energy to fuel a plane. Nowhere will you see a performance more frenetic or impressive.” — Ralph Jones, Vanity Fair, 9 Feb. 2026
Did you know?
In modern use, frenetic can describe a focused and intense effort to meet a deadline, or dancing among a hyped-up crowd, but the word’s Middle English predecessor, frenetik, had a narrower use: it was used to describe those exhibiting a severely disordered state of mind. If you trace frenetic back far enough, you’ll find that it comes from Greek phrenîtis, a term referring to an inflammation of the brain. As for frenzied and frantic, they’re not only synonyms of frenetic but relatives as well. Frantic comes from frenetik, and frenzied traces back to phrenîtis.
Super Creepshow #1 - "Creeping"
Mar. 22nd, 2026 09:29 pmlaughing_tree posting in scans_daily
Really, it came from something I think when reading those early Ditko issues – how people talk about how horrible Spider-Man is. Now, we see Spider-Man… but they clearly don"t. Doing a story about the horror of that kind of archetype, right? -- Kieron Gillen
I thought “What would Adrian Tchaikovsky do?” and then I add “If he was very drunk and in a bad mood?” -- Kieron Gillen
( Read more... )
Shadow Update: Hosting & Bedding
Mar. 22nd, 2026 06:40 pmjesse_the_kWe were delighted by Shadow’s response to his first visitors last night. We kept him crated until they’d seated themselves ready to watch the first two eps of Slings & Arrows. He made not a peep when they arrived nor during our typically uproarious dinner. Once we let him out of the crate, he observed them closely. One guest had recently enjoyed a hot-and-sour sauce on her egg roll. She invited him closer and he licked her hands! He permitted the other to pet his back. He curled up in his bed (immediately below the TV) and peacefully admired the assembled multitude.
Early this AM MyGuy placed one of Shadow’s beds on my side of our bed. Around 6AM he tip tip tap tipped into the bedroom and curled up in it, keeping me company for 45 minutes.
He was in the breezeway with MyGuy 20 minutes ago, having just come back from his evening constitutional. Just as his lead was unhooked, the leonine March wind blew open the door to the backyard. Shadow was out like a shot. MyGuy called him back, but he kept backing up. At last, MyGuy leaned on the garage holding the door open, and Shadow scooted right back in to the breezeway.
The wisdom around rescues is a rule of 3: 3 days to decompress, 3 weeks to learn routines, and 3 months to feel fully at home. We’re on track.
(Got to get some Shadow icons!)
Re-reading our texts from the strawberry days
Mar. 22nd, 2026 03:21 pmsovayI must have slept ten hours. Hestia appears to be watching the rain with almost as much interest as the birds sheltering from it. May it and the recent snowmelt amend the drought. Tomorrow, of course, it is forecast to snow again.
selkie was safely collected from the Penn Station-alike that South Station has done its best to inhume itself into since her last visit, provided with an appropriate quantity of local barbecue for an obligate carnivore, and even successfully checked in to her hotel despite the mishegos attending every stage of her conference even before it started. At no point in this process did we apparently remember to take any pictures of ourselves.
My dreams seem to be branching out in terms of media, since last night's featured a youngish Alec McCowen starring in the radio version of a Tey-like crime novel as the ambiguously poor relation of an upper-class family who is not actually Kind Hearts and Coronets-ing his way through them, but needs to figure out who is before he's so handily scapegoated for the accidents escalating to murder ever since his arrival; he is, naturally, keeping a secret from the family, the authorities, and even the inattentive reader, but it isn't that. I was very pleased to find that a recording had survived, because the original novel had just been reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics. There were images mixed up in it in the way of dreams, but it was definitely on the Internet Archive.
Outside my head, I have been recently listening to Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn (2020), Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin's symbiont (2024), and Huw Marc Bennett's Heol Las (2026), which I found through its ghost-boxish "Cân Gwasael (Wassail Song)." I like that I do not have to dream their remixes of folk and futurism and time.
selkie was safely collected from the Penn Station-alike that South Station has done its best to inhume itself into since her last visit, provided with an appropriate quantity of local barbecue for an obligate carnivore, and even successfully checked in to her hotel despite the mishegos attending every stage of her conference even before it started. At no point in this process did we apparently remember to take any pictures of ourselves.My dreams seem to be branching out in terms of media, since last night's featured a youngish Alec McCowen starring in the radio version of a Tey-like crime novel as the ambiguously poor relation of an upper-class family who is not actually Kind Hearts and Coronets-ing his way through them, but needs to figure out who is before he's so handily scapegoated for the accidents escalating to murder ever since his arrival; he is, naturally, keeping a secret from the family, the authorities, and even the inattentive reader, but it isn't that. I was very pleased to find that a recording had survived, because the original novel had just been reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics. There were images mixed up in it in the way of dreams, but it was definitely on the Internet Archive.
Outside my head, I have been recently listening to Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn (2020), Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin's symbiont (2024), and Huw Marc Bennett's Heol Las (2026), which I found through its ghost-boxish "Cân Gwasael (Wassail Song)." I like that I do not have to dream their remixes of folk and futurism and time.
