Pauline Barmby

Includes my flash fantasy story, “Warp and Weft Rising”. Excited to be part of LSQ!

Hey fellow scientists, I'm just letting you know that if you're promoting something with some junky AI image, I'm not gonna click. You've got a workshop, a conference, a new paper?

Just not gonna bother. You want a bespoke image? Hire an illustrator.

holy shit

international women's day. march 8. cover art for my book after the dragon raid.

it's international women's day, so grab this great bundle of books by women* about women! 32 books for only $32!! #booksky #InternationalWomensDay

*trans women and woman-identifying nonbinary folks included
itch.io/b/3556/inter...

This International Women's Day, please remember that trans women are women. Full stop. No qualifiers.

Cat 2 is snuggled up next to me, emitting the tiniest, squeakiest kitty snores.

He is definitely good at getting (re)-elected, but that might be about it.

Contains the absolute banger lines, “Mr. Ford has ideas. Unfortunately, they are terrible.”

45 minutes from now! Will my pupils un-dilate in time for me to read? Will I start sneezing and coughing in the middle of my story? Tune in to find out!

(All the other authors will be great, I’m sure.)

Poster for Western U “Writing 2520: Writers on Writing”: bright yellow in the style of The Iron Garden Sutra’s cover, with AD Sui’s face & bio superposed.

Look it’s @thesuiway.bsky.social in my hallway!

Ah, the approach of spring, when the parking lot glaciers begin to melt and reveal their treasures: dirt, shopping carts, previously frozen dog shit, more dirt.

Call to scrap hated group projects at Australian universities Group assignments at universities should be scrapped because students "hate" them, according to the shadow ...

In case you thought Canadian politicians spend too much time meddling with PSE: (h/t @alexusherhesa.bsky.social). I mean, maybe it’s a good sign that the Australian opposition knows PSE exists?

www.9news.com.au/national/gro...

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

Stars are disappearing before our eyes — and something in us is shifting For most of human history, the night sky has been a shared inheritance, a source of wonder. Now, more than a billion children see barely any stars in the night sky above their homes. So what does that...

'We are losing the stars. Not all at once, but quietly, one streetlight, one neon sign, one expanding suburb at a time.'

🧪 🔭

Putting your stuff out there is hard and having it rejected is also hard. But writing it in the first place is even harder, and you did that! So go you!! Go write something else.

I hear you, but for me it’s so cozy that I can’t see what’s going on. Reminds me of perl scripts: highly efficient yet completely impenetrable.

I think E notation might possibly be *too* cozy for most mortals, of which I include myself.

Are there tensors? Because that puts it in the non-cozy category for me.

Update: copy of second edition has been located! Can we find a first??

Various editions of the Halliday & Resnick “Fundamentals of Physics” textbook, from 3rd edition (1990?) to 12th (2021)

TFW the department textbook strategic reserve is cleaned out. It’s going to bug me that we missed the 11th ed somehow.

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

A gray shorthair cat at the moment of release upside down, with its tongue out looking derpy

A new paper on falling cat science came out and I just have to draw people's attention to this image

Lovely story, thanks for bringing it into the world.

Lots of amazing authors* —can’t wait to read these stories! You could read them too! In times like these, who doesn’t need a little more community.

*also me who may or may not be amazing

All books from CMU Press | booksellers.ca | Purchase print books and eBooks online A network of over 100 bookstores, more than 500,000 print books or eBooks, unparalleled expertise. It is possible to buy local on the Web!

It's been a long time coming. Canadian independent bookstores have banded together to create an online book buying source so you can avoid the behemoth in the room. (Here are the titles published by CMU Press, which I run.)
Spread the word #booksky!

www.booksellers.ca/publisher/cmu-press-18021

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui: 9781645662143 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical, locked room...

Yup! And I think you’d like the book: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804740...

Off to @thesuiway.bsky.social’s book launch at @bakkaphoenix.bsky.social! So excite!

I did this last year and I'm trying to make it an annual Thing, so here are a few short fiction writers in their first two years of publishing worth considering for Astounding Award nomination! I'm highlighting a work I loved from each of them (it's hard to keep it to just one, but c'est la vie)

We’re wasting a ridiculous amount of money on this event, and now we put our justice on hold for it too? Nonsense.