A Bug's Life

https://angryflower.com/1652.html

https://angryflower.com/1652.html

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260319.html

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260319.html

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20260320

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20260320

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5790

psst if you sign up for the $5/month tier on my patreon you can see the (very nsfw) thirst pic

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5790

Posted by jjn1

https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-20-march-2026/41805/

https://memex.naughtons.org/?p=41805

O Magnolia!

This tree takes me by surprise every spring. I went searching to see who else has felt ambushed by it. Claude came up with Robert Lowell, who wrote of “blossoms on our magnolia that ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white.” Odd, that: beauty as a kind of violence. Hmmm…

Quote of the Day

” The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.”

• Thorstein Veblen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

De Danann | The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (in Galway)!

Link

I wonder what Handel would have made of it. Note the virtuoso performance on the Bodhrán by Johnny McDonagh.* 

Long read of the Day

Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite

Riveting review by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books of Andrew Lownie’s book about the creep formerly known as Prince/Duke and the memoir of the girl to whom Jeffrey Epstein introduced him, and who took her own life last year.

Here is O’Hagan on Randy Andy.

In the days​ of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker, high on royal privilege but in touch with the inner life of the standard British male. ‘If he wasn’t a member of the royal family,’ the astrologer Russell Grant said, ‘his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun – with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.’ Among the prince’s early girlfriends were Koo ‘Starkers’ Stark and Vicki Hodge, an actress whose better-known works include The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.

Mummy loved Andrew, and what Mummy loved, Mummy protected. By 1984, it seemed he’d got the basic point about dropping the floozies and finding the sort of woman who would ‘understand him’. Enter ‘Chatterbox One’, the codename given to Sarah Ferguson by air traffic controllers when she was learning to fly, a woman in happy possession of two O-levels who exuded jolliness and scads of suitability. (Her father was Prince Charles’s polo manager and it was Diana who set her up with the fourth-in-line.) After a few country weekends and acres of japes, Ferguson was installed as the Duchess of York.

Along with that ‘love of fun’ admired by the tabloids, Fergie brought a few money problems and a talent for reaching beyond her grasp, though not beyond Andrew’s grasping. As a couple, they have always been too stupid to understand the vulnerability of the institution that supports them, and they began wrecking it from the inside as soon as they met. Years ago, before it was fashionable, some of the youngsters in the family were calling Andrew ‘the Nonce’, and there was general dismay at the Yorks’ reckless avarice. The British royal fantasy has a few sustaining mythologies, and one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their actions. The writing was on the wall, or on the T-shirt, when Sarah Ferguson appeared in the mid-1980s wearing one that said ‘Piste Again’. The duchess loved skiing and being on holiday and Andrew was addicted to having everything for free. What to do? Eventually, Andrew Lownie records, they were lent King Hussein of Jordan’s seven-bedroomed Castlewood House on the edge of Windsor Great Park. ‘Bored, Sarah started 1987 with three weeks at Sandringham, followed by a fortnight skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the multi-millionaire Robert Sangster.’ At this point, Sangster had been a tax exile for twelve years. Stay classy…

And here is O’Hagan on Virginia Giuffre’s memoir…

There are sadnesses in her book, he writes, “that are too deep to rehearse, but all she really wanted was to be among people who had the kinds of freedom she wanted for herself”.

In her memoir she writes that Andrew raped her three times in three different locations. He denies attacking her, but he paid her a reported £12 million to go away. Throughout the process, Giuffre was hounded by the press and eviscerated by those who live with the terrifying delusion that royalty has something to do with virtue. ‘A complete whore’ is the way the victim was described by Lady Victoria Hervey, a socialite who once dated Andrew and later appeared on Love Island.

‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Giuffre writes, ‘but I felt I had to.’ All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and ‘loyalty’ in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Maxwell took this young girl to Epstein, who abused her a number of times, then they flew her around the world to be abused by their powerful friends, who lived in a universe of deniability. People who know the former prince say that his main concern, after the Newsnight fiasco, was to ensure that his daughters would not be deposed and have to give evidence in support of his lies. (The Pizza Express in Woking will be for ever tattooed on their silent hearts.) A second reason for his ‘falling on his sword’, as they like spuriously to say, was that he wanted to make sure Giuffre didn’t spoil his mother’s platinum jubilee. After the best efforts of lawyers Harbottle & Lewis had failed, and as the plug was being pulled on her favourite son’s charities and his military affiliations and royal patronages, the queen still hoped that he might keep one or two titles, just to cheer him up. Time and Scotland Yard will tell if he can stay out of jail.

Books, etc.

This is delightful little book — a collection of 47 newspaper columns by a great Italian theoretical physicist. I like him especially because, like me, he’s never really accepted C.P. Snow’s ’two cultures’ distinction. Topics range from Aristotle and Copernicus to Mein Kampf , Black Holes and why he’s an atheist. And there’s a particularly fascinating essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s scientific work as a lepidopterist. The essays remind me of the newspaper columns of Umberto Eco, which are likewise a delight. And I’m personally grateful to Rovelli for suggesting a special fountain pen that I’d been looking for — the TWSBI Eco

It’s special because it fits neatly in a trouser pocket, never leaks and writes beautifully. So it goes everywhere with me.

Feedback

From Greg Jeffreys

It’s not that I disagree with your Gatsby observation, more that it’s a form of Venn diagram missing important elements. So we do have these people for whom the impacts upon the ‘little people’ of their actions neither register nor matter. But we’re missing the longeurs of their old money through this lens – for Trump could have been Gatsby in the novel, and the ‘nouveau’ of his ‘riches’ are disdained. And ‘the force that through the green fuse the drives the flower’ for Trump, Musk et al is a frantically energised thing: the need to be noticed at any cost – and the fact that they would be happy if the world ended when they did. Hence Iran is paying the price of the dark jewels lurking in the Epstein files…

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https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-20-march-2026/41805/

https://memex.naughtons.org/?p=41805

1. Migraine World Summit is finished for the year and they chose an extremely good closing keynote about which I am cheerful and bouncy. (Messoud Ashina, CGRP, PACAP & beyond, say if you would like me to try to write more about this).
2. Got to spend time with The Child! Was summoned Upstairs to Rest and Read Books for a bit. Some really really excellent self-management and regulation in there around Lots Of Feelings.
3. BRONZE AGE LOOM.
4. Good therapy session.
5. There is now a box of veg cassoulet (+ suspicious protein chunks) in the freezer to be Future Food, and another two portions on the hob for dinner tomorrow.
6. I know I keep mentioning the Bedtime Ritual of Lebkuchen and Milk but this is because it is very good and very soothing, okay.
7. My watch continues a viable approach to biofeedback (so all I need now is to remember to actually do it...)

Posted by Salo linkspam

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/897528/meta-rogue-ai-agent-security-incident

https://linkspam.dsalo.info/shaare/t_ozqw

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/897528/meta-rogue-ai-agent-security-incident

https://linkspam.dsalo.info/shaare/t_ozqw

The Friday Five for 20 March 2026

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?

In 2000, a lot of the UK Goth scene ended up on LiveJournal. I tried my hand at blogging by hand-writing HTML on a shell account on a nerd friend's Solaris box in the States, but quickly realised that the comments and community were an important part. Partly I moved so I could post sickeningly cute comments on my then-gf's LJ. That... didn't end well. But I started my LJ in 2001.

I was a fairly late mover to Dreamwidth after LiveJournal started its long slide downwards; I didn't hit the migrate button until 2017, and I didn't delete my LJ account until 2018 when a then-coworker linked to it on work IRC. There were a lot of very cringe public entries from decades before I didn't particularly want to be associated with.

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?

Other than thefridayfive, not many! DW never seemed to get the right critical mass for communities. I welcome suggestions!

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?

See above!

4. How did you pick your user name?

About the time I needed an LJ username, I was listening to a lot of The Velvet Underground, and the line "Different colours, made of tears" from Venus In Furs was stuck in my head. Unfortunately, that was one character too long for LJ usernames, so I had to elide a vowel. I'd never heard of the TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" before.

5. If you could change your user name, would you?

I don't think so. I have many usernames in many places, but I like this one here!

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/19/the-big-idea-lynne-m-thomas-katy-rawdon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59819

Like two peas in a time travel pod, archivist and author Katy Rawdon teamed up with Hugo-award winning editor Lynne M. Thomas to craft the perfect time travel narrative. Take a closer look at famous time travel stories from all across the globe in The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination, with a foreword from one such writer herself, Connie Willis.

KATY RAWDON (a.k.a. KATY JAMES):

Archives are made of time. Time is made of archives. Archives are where time gets mixed up, turned around, and pulled apart.

I have always been obsessed with time, frustrated with it, wanting to tear at it and see what’s behind and underneath it. No doubt that’s why I became an archivist some thirty years ago, so that I could look at the physical remnants of time and preserve them, see what’s missing, and organize and interpret time’s leftovers for people who, wisely, do not think about time all the… time.

When I was approached to submit an idea (a big idea!) for a book series jointly published by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) called Archival Futures – a series that tackles big ideas around the archival profession – there was only one possible topic for me to write about: time.

While the phrase “archives are like time travel” is thrown around a lot, I knew the relationship between historical records and time was far more complicated. Archives reinforce and challenge our very conceptions of time, of what has happened, of what will happen, of what is truth and what is unknowable. The evidence of archives can be used to demonstrate how the past is so much more faceted than the narrow stories of history we tend to tell ourselves and others. Archives can also be selectively wielded as propaganda, or erased to allow for falsehoods to sprout and flourish in the empty spaces. Time can be illustrated, illuminated, rendered invisible, or constructed in new ways using the material items created in the course of history. 

Unfortunately, all of this turned out to be so complicated that the series’ word limit of 50,000 was never going to cover it, as I painfully discovered while writing the book proposal.

I am forever grateful that the inimitable Lynne M. Thomas stepped into my creative mess and provided direction: Why not analyze the depiction of both archives and time travel in popular narratives (books, television, movies, etc.) and see what we could unearth? As a romance author (Katy James) as well as an archivist (Katy Rawdon), I was more than happy to spend time in fictional worlds in order to better understand my non-fictional archivist profession.

It turns out that we unearthed a lot – about cultural views regarding time and time travel, the popular perception of archives and archivists, and the ways current archival theory and practice intersect (or don’t) with ideas about time and time travel. 

How does time work? How is it understood by different people and cultures? How do archives help or hinder our understanding of the past (and future)? How can popular narratives about time travel and archives guide archivists to shift their methods to a more expansive, inclusive, transparent approach? How can archival workers apply current archival theory and practice to all of the above ideas to better serve their communities and increase the use of archives?

Researching this book and synthesizing all of the swirling concepts was a real mind-twister of an exercise, trying to write our expansive, big ideas while keeping it succinct and legible for archivists and general readers alike.

We hope we’ve succeeded.

LYNNE M. THOMAS:

Sometimes, if you’re very lucky, the right project turns up at exactly the right time. As a professional rare book librarian, twelve-time Hugo Award winning SFF editor and podcaster, and massive Doctor Who fan, I had a moment of “I was literally made for this” when Katy explained her concept for the book to me and asked me to join her. My initial contribution was more or less “but what if we add Doctor Who examples to make all this time stuff understandable,” and then … we got excited. Because when you have the chance to dive deep into a particular rabbit hole that looks perfect for you specifically, you lean hard into your personal weird. 

Time travel stories often feature archives to prove the narrative truth of characters’ experiences. The main character goes into a locked room full of dusty boxes, and immediately finds the one piece of documentary evidence they need to solve their problem, or make sense of their experiences. And yet archivists—the people tasked with organizing and running archives—are almost always invisible or nonexistent in these very same narratives. When we do show up…well, it feels like writers haven’t talked to an archivist lately.

That…bothered us. It turns out, when you have professional archivists and librarians who are also active writers and editors in science fiction, we have thoughts and opinions about how archivists and librarians are portrayed (or not) in fiction and nonfiction. But we thought, maybe we’re seeing a pattern that doesn’t exist, it’s just that “red car syndrome” thing where experts pay more attention to the areas of their expertise in the narratives than non-experts do. So… we checked. We looked at dozens of time travel stories across novels, comics, television series, and films. We discuss Doctor Who, of course, but also Loki, Star Wars, works by Connie Willis (who wrote our foreword), Octavia Butler, Jodi Taylor, Rivers Solomon, Deborah Harkness, and H.G. Wells, among many, many more. We also looked at a whole lot of archival literature—how archivists and librarians talk about themselves, their professions, and their work to one another. And because we are both academic librarians, we laid out our findings in a peer-reviewed book. 

What we learned is that there’s a massive divide between what pop culture thinks we do, and what we actually do, and the even greater divide between the level of resources pop culture thinks we have, and what we actually have…and we posit multiple ways to close those gaps.

The Infinite Loop is where archives and pop culture’s image of archives meet and have a long overdue chat. Our hope is that these conversations will lead to archivists being better able to explain what we do, and have that knowledge spread far and wide across popular culture. Ideally, with some time travel stories that feature archivists as main characters. It’s well past time.

The Infinite Loop: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Inkwood Books

Author socials: Katy’s Bluesky|Katy’s Instagram|Katy’s Website|Lynne’s Bluesky|Lynne’s Instagram|Lynne’s Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/19/the-big-idea-lynne-m-thomas-katy-rawdon/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59819

So I think I've pretty much got my presentation sorted for next week at around the right length and with a slightly superogatory Powerpoint, but everybody seems to do these these days, sigh.

And I have got off a review of an article which was not as bad as I thought it was going to be, not bad at all.

And I have read the thesis I was asked to read and am trying to think of some questions which are not, which novelist would you pick to depict the seething tensions within [local organisation therein discussed], because I was going, hmmm, is this Barbara Pym purlieu or not?

And although there have been some hiccups along the road a further volume in the Interminable Saga should be appearing in the not too distant future though there are some niggling things still happening.

And I may have mentioned Doing A Podcast some months ago and the same people have come back to ask me to contribute to another one in their series, for which I realise I ought to do a certain amount of prep.

Book review still hanging over me.

Various matters of life admin.

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/thursday-reading-100/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=65881

Current
The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

Last books finished 
Blood in the Bricks, ed. Neil Williamson
The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson 
Who Will You Save?, by Gareth Powell
A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (did not finish)
“The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu
Drome, by Jesse Lonergan 
When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, by Kij Johnson

Next books
From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler 
Among Others, by Jo Walton
Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai 

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/thursday-reading-100/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=65881