Saturday, December 13th, 2025 09:39 am
So, I asked on Bluesky:

Aside from Larry Correia, are there any big name Baen authors who debuted at Baen, after Jim Baen's death?

(So, Tim Powers wouldn't count because he debuted not at Baen and also long before JB died)


I got three names: Chuck Gannon, Jason Cordova and Mike Kupari. Gannon actually debuted at Baen in 1994 but only two (I think) short pieces, after which there was a long delay until his novels began appearing. I don't know the other two but SF is huge and it's perfectly possible for me to overlook BNAs. Still, granting all three, with LC that makes four... and in 2028, Toni Weisskopf will have been running Baen for as long as Jim Baen did.

This could, of course, be the natural consequence of the Del Monte approach.
Friday, December 12th, 2025 06:03 pm
tl;dr still waiting for things

The latest on that inherited IRA is that I got two email messages from Fidelity today, one saying that I needed to do something [unspecified] to transfer the money from BNY, and one saying specifically that BNY had told Fidelity that they, BNY, needed to talk to me.

So, I called BNY, and after various annoyances with their phone tree, talked to someone. He told me that they had no record yet of receiving the form I sent by next-day mail, but that if the form had arrived late Wednesday they might not be scanned until late today or even Monday. Also that once the form is scanned into the BNY system, it may take a few days before they actually transfer the money into my name, which would be necessary in order to move it to Fidelity.

So, I can (and probably will) call Monday to check that the form was in fact been received, but he thinks I should call later in the week, maybe Wednesday, maybe as late as Friday, and ask for my brand-new account number. Once I have that number, I have to fill out appropriate paperwork with Fidelity. *sigh*

I am both annoyed that even paying for next-day delivery, this is taking several days, and thinking that if I hadn’t paid for faster delivery I would be a few days further behind.

The man also said that once the funds are transferred, they will send me an acknowledgement by mail, including the new account number. However, waiting for that to arrive (rather than getting the information by phone) does not seem prudent, given the IRS deadline for the 2025 required minimum distribution.
Friday, December 12th, 2025 01:26 pm
I got much better at spelling his name once I realized it contains "lie".

Embattled CPC leader's Christmas card list gets one name shorter.
Friday, December 12th, 2025 12:12 pm


Where to start reading — or rereading — Varley's many series and stories.

Looking Back at the Work of John Varley, 1947-2025
Friday, December 12th, 2025 09:03 am


The visitors might be Bird Island's salvation or simply the next step in its doom.


The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson
Thursday, December 11th, 2025 12:51 pm
Multiple sources report the death of SF author John Varley.
Thursday, December 11th, 2025 08:28 am


A 2567 blueblood travels back to the Summer of Love to save one very special 16-year-old.

Summer of Love (Zhu Wong, volume 1) by Lisa Mason
Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 09:09 pm
A week ago, I was visiting an old friend on the edge of the Berkshires, at her central-chimneyed, chestnut-framed, wide-boarded house, coeval with the Boston Tea Party. It was just after the first of December and there was deepish snow, so I had “Sweet Baby James” running through my head. Sadly, we couldn’t go play in it or even slip out to look at the Milky Way on a crystal-clear night, as the temperature was about 0F, with a fierce wind banging in the chimneystack. We would have been slashed to stiff ribbons in an instant.

So we stayed in and looked at her cabinet of curiosities. She’s always had one: leaves and pinecones; playing cards and antique marbles; Qing china. Now her passion is for pocket stones. They are jade, lapis, jasper, malachite, pyrite, hematite, and quartz—oh, and hundreds more I couldn’t name, though she can. They are striped, starred, clouded, marbled; they are tabbied, tessellated, blackworked, eyed and islanded and archipelagoed like antique globes of exoplanets; they’re like phoenix eggs. She has Archaean banded rocks three billion years old, and a little heap of unset opals, flickering with inward fire. It’s all about the pattern and the play of light. She kindly gave me two Nine-colored opals for my birthday. They are tiny—pinky-nail and pomegranate-seed—but they flash with momentary Pleiades.

Nine
Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 10:30 pm
This is a new bundle of role-playing material for the introductory RPG / Story telling game Magical Kitties Save The Day from Atlas Games:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/MagicalKitties

  

Atlas Games have published some very good introductory RPGs and story telling games - this one is very much in that genre, with some fun supplements for different settings and styles of play, from film noir to alien invasions. It's never been offered in these bundles before, it's cheap, and it's being run to promote a forthcoming kickstarter for a superhero rules supplement. Better buy it, or Streaky the super-cat will spit hair-balls at you at mach 5...
Tags:
Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 02:13 pm


Magical Kitties Save the Day, the all-ages introductory storytelling game from Atlas Games.

Bundle of Holding: Magical Kitties
Wednesday, December 10th, 2025 08:54 am


Could safety from the global pandemic be found in desperate flight towards a land of banditry and violence?

To The Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-Young (Translated by Soje)
Tuesday, December 9th, 2025 06:35 am


A depowered witch discovers she is just one zany scheme away from regaining her power... provided her estranged mentor does not intervene. Which of course he will.

A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna
Tags:
Monday, December 8th, 2025 05:45 pm
I went out in the cold today, took a shuttle buses that was replacing the central part of the green line, and walked into a Fidelity office to get the medallion signature I need on the BNY form.

They provided the medallion for my signature, but the woman who handled that told me she thought I would need to redo the _Fidelity_ forms once BNY had transferred the funds, because the inherited IRA would need a brand-new account, not the one I created for the purpose a few weeks ago. Having printed and signed those forms, I asked her to keep them, in case they are usable. (She may have been thinking I'm trying to move the money into an account that already has money in it.)

She also said I do need to put the form with the medallion signature in the mail to BNY, Fidelity can't send it to them electronically. I brought the medallion-ized form home with me, but before I put it in the mail I'm going to scan it and upload the scan to the Fidelity website, in case the previous advisor is right and they can do this electronically.

So that will be another outing in the cold, to a post office, in the hope the letter gets to BNY in good season despite both Christmas packages and the Republican effort to destroy the postal service. Fortunately, there are post office branches at this end of the green line, the part that's still running trolleys.

ETA: I scanned the document, and just uploaded it to the Fidelity website, with a message explaining that I will be mailing the hardcopy to BNY tomorrow.
Monday, December 8th, 2025 08:41 pm
This is a new bundle of independently-produced material for the popular Forged in the Dark rules-set, also including Blades in the Dark, the game that originated the system. Blades... has been in several previous bundles, the others are new.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Forge3rd

  

The mood of these ranges from zany comic-book comedy to gritty crime realism, heroic and not so heroic fantasy, and far-futures cyberpunks and transhumans. If you like more than one of the genres it's worth buying the whole bundle, you'll save money.

Tags:
Monday, December 8th, 2025 02:53 pm


The third array of recent standalone tabletop roleplaying games using the Forged in the Dark rules system based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark from One Seven Design Studio.

Bundle of Holding: Forged 3
Monday, December 8th, 2025 10:20 am


Six works new to me: four fantasy, one horror, and one SF (also ttrpg). Four are arguably series.

Books Received, November 29 — December 5



Poll #33929 Books Received, November 29 — December 5
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 5 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
3 (11.5%)

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 6 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
3 (11.5%)

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 7 edited by Oliver Brackenbury (December 2025)
2 (7.7%)

Black River Ruby by Jean Cottle (January 2026)
7 (26.9%)

The Flowers of Algorab by Nils Karlén, Kosta Kostulas, and Martin Grip (January 2026)
8 (30.8%)

Headlights by C J Leede (June 2026)
4 (15.4%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
21 (80.8%)

Sunday, December 7th, 2025 10:34 pm
Dramatis Personae

Viepuck, quiet due to player absence
Izgil, unfortunately the only one who can see in the dark
Celyn, who did a lot of rogueing
Robin, prepared to do a great deal of dragon-thumping

When we concluded last session, we were about to be attacked by a dragon.

So we set up for that. )


(Combat sessions are easy to summarize.)