James Davis Nicoll

@jdnicoll.bsky.social

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Reviewer, Essayist, Hugo, Aurora, and Darwin Award finalist.

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BREAKING NEWS: Voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which instead came in third in initial results as polling stations closed.

Projections in France's election show voters rejecting the far rightwww.npr.org Voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which ...

Keeper of the Keys (Charlie Chan, book 6) by Earl Derr Biggers Who murdered famed singer Ellen Landini? One of her many bitter ex-husbands? A jealous rival? Or perhaps the one person all agree is above suspicion: grumpy, peerless servant Ah Sing? jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/drawn...

Drawn in the Snowjamesdavisnicoll.com Earl Derr Biggers’ Keeper of the Keys is the sixth and final Charlie Chan mystery. Inspector Charlie Chan takes leave of mundane Honolulu and travels to exotic Truckee, California. There Chan hopes to...

Given the era in which the game was written, I wonder if Traveller starship cockpits are equipped with cigarette lighters.

Watching a video about the new Basic Roleplaying. Impressed by how creative the sub-titles are whenever Call of Cthulhu is mentioned. So far I've see both College Cthulhu and Color Cthulhu.

I feel like Nimona let the characters and story get in the way of explaining how the heck a city-state with no apparent external trade maintains such an advanced economy. (yeah, yeah, kid in a basement. we read that story too)

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ICYMI: I have a patreon and that you can follow me for exclusive excerpts of my work in progress, behind the scenes and recipes Here's an example of the latest one: mango mochi www.patreon.com/posts/joyful... Currently working on a wok recipe that involves broccoli 😋 Would love if you subscribed

Books Received, June 29 — July 5 Eleven works new to me. The number is high in part due to an influx of magazines. This month sees a first: one of the incoming works cites me. Guess which one? jamesdavisnicoll.com/post/books-r...

Happy birthday, Vampire the Masquerade. Wasn't my jam but it sure appealed to a demographic other games ignored.

Today has been a swimming through tar day. I'd take the evening off but actually, I can't offhand think of what I would do except read the next book.

Listening to the BBC adaptation of On the Beach. Characters are in the same pickle as they were in the book and the movie. Why do they never learn?

Huzzah! The lenses I was told would be in by June 26 will surely be in some time next week... assuming the lab remembers to make them, does not fuck up this set the way they did the first pair, and if they remember to send them.

Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel Courtesy of a vindictive sage, a divine entity is incarnated as a virtuous mortal human whose unshakable morals transform a family squabble into an apocalyptic civil war. jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/cool-...

Cool Waterjamesdavisnicoll.com Vaishnavi Patel’s 2024 Goddess of the River is a stand-alone fantasy novel that draws on the Mahābhārata. Once the goddess Ganga was free. In response to fearful human prayers, Shiva bound Ganga to th...

Well, not unexpected but depressing.

All Sunak needs to do to salvage this is win 270 of the 245 remaining seats.

All I can think of is plots for horror stories set on infernal trains. It's writer's Bloch.

I lived through the early 1960s sequel in ... 1962? 1963? London air let you know you'd inhaled. Anyone who made it their next breath earned it. Ontario air is just this bland N2/O2 mix.

It's worth googling the Great Smog of London to see how far we've come. Images like this from the 1950s. It was caused in part from burning coal

Wouldn't it be funny if due to Labour and LibDem voter overconfidence, low turnout let the Tories stay in power?

Back when I reviewed for PW, I found it worthwhile to check to see if any awards mentioned in press releases actually existed (and they did exist, if they had been awarded by the author to the author). It was funny how often, if I just kept digging, unfamiliar awards turned out to be imaginary.

The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin How America will put people on Mars by 2010! jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/so-cr...

So Crystal Clearjamesdavisnicoll.com Robert Zubrin’s 1996 The Case for Mars is an ostensibly non-fiction book in which he makes a case that not only are (comparatively) inexpensive crewed missions to Mars possible, so are much more ambit...

Ran RuneQuest. My poor scorpion men had a great plan how to deal with humans following them into a tunnel system. Let the humans wander into an intersection, hit them from four sides. In practice, half the antagonists got turned around in the unlit tunnels and arrived after the battle was lost.

During my first cognitive assessment in 2017, I discovered that the correct answer to "Have you even been hit in the head?" is not raucous laughter.

Docs ask how many concussions you had/when they happened and it's like c'mon all I know is that I got hit a lot in my memory spot

40 years ago, UW had a grad student who was utterly convinced they could safely boil... naptha, I think... in a completely sealed container. He thought this three times and then the university stopped giving him new labs. (Not me!)

As scientist, can confirm. The number of things that I did that should probably not have survived…

But why did roleplayers in the 1980s and 1990s consider Champions more complex than 1E and 2E Dungeons and Dragons?

For a second there, I thought I'd accidentally deleted my entire in box.

Doomed Boeing spacecraft's fiery death-plunge deferred indefinitely but "Donner Party IN SPACE" worries likely premature. www.houstonpress.com/news/another...

Boeing Starliner’s Return Delayed, Indefinitelywww.houstonpress.com Boeing’s Starliner space capsule has already been docked at the International Space Station for three weeks while engineers have worked to analyze its ongoing helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters...

Champions was released at Origins VII July 3rd - 5th, back in 1981. Happy (approximate) birthday, Champions, whose complex rules had surprisingly little positive effect on my ability to do math on the fly. #ttrpg #RollAllTheD6s

TIL the UK's Liberal Democrat party has a leader. Probably for the best as it seems the LibDeps have a shot of being Opposition.

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Calling all Tanith Lee influenced authors! We don't open for submissions until mid-July, but our official submissions guidelines are now available for STORYTELLER! essentialdreams.press/submissions/

Submissions Calls - Essential Dreams Pressessentialdreams.press Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology Open Submissions About: STORYTELLER: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology is a celebration of Lee’s influence in speculative fiction. Not only did Tanith Lee writ...

Oh, thank goodness. I had a sudden urge to track down and review all 54 volumes of the Nebula Awards Showcase but this does not seem to be practical. At one a month it would be an almost five year project.

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley Noisy neighbours and an unresponsive HOA force Grendel to take matters into his own hands. jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/great...

Great Balls of Firejamesdavisnicoll.com Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2020’s Beowulf: A New Translation is… a new translation of Beowulf. This is fortuitous, as it would be terribly confusing if a book titled Beowulf: A New Translation were not a...