ndrosen

It released Tuesday at midnight, the title is Platform Decay. One thing that's nice about buying mostly ebooks is instant access. :-) The author, Martha Wells, recently announced that the next book may be the last in the series, especially since she only has one more under contract. She said that she's happy where SecUnit is and she doesn't want the series to go on indefinitely, plus she's happily at work on a new fantasy series, of which she has two books out right now.

She also has the Murderbot Apple TV show to work with, we shall see how long that series continues.

This book is clocking in at 170-180 pages.

https://www.polygon.com/murderbot-diaries-series-finale-martha-wells-interview/

thewayne

This is pretty cool. A startup founded by a former NASA engineer has created a device for extinguishing fire with infrasound: super low frequency sound waves that literally push the oxygen away from the fire, denying the fire of one of the things that it needs for combustion!

It's safe to be around when it's in operation as it doesn't destroy or deplete the oxygen in the area, i.e. you won't asphyxiate, and being low frequency it won't damage the hearing of people or pets. In the video there's a demonstration of the device in use on a simulated oil pan kitchen fire, which it extinguishes in under 30 seconds.

There are a lot of unanswered questions, such as will it activate again if the fire reignites, what are long-term maintenance requirements, what about furniture, mattress, or electrical fires, crosswinds, etc. So far, the company hasn't released any specifics as to how its testing is being conducted, nor have any units been released for third parties to verify testing conditions or parameters.

The company also hopes that the unit could be used to fight wildfires, such as mounted on the front of bulldozers. It's working with one California wildfire agency to see if such testing can be done.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/startup-says-sound-waves-can-replace-fire-sprinklers-experts-arent-so-sure/

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26577894-penric-s-intrigues-releases-this-week

Penric's Intrigues, the 4th Pen & Des collection on paper from Baen Books, should be reaching stores this week, or maybe a bit earlier -- Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore and Dreamhaven Books & Comics here in Minneapolis have theirs already, signed.

I don't know how widely distributed this one is going to be, but in any case your favorite local bricks 'n mortar bookstore should be able to order it via their usual channels on request, if it hasn't popped up on its own.

The online booksellers will start shipping it Tuesday, which means you can hit that order button most any time now.

It contains the novel-length The Assassins of Thasalon, and the novella "Knot of Shadows".

All three of the prior volumes remain available in hardcover, and can be ordered. (Some of the paperbacks are sold out.) To recap:

Penric's Progress, containing "Penric's Demon", "Penric and the Shaman", and "Penric's Fox".

Penric's Travels, containing "Penric's Mission", "Mira's Last Dance", and "The Prisoner of Limnos".

Penric's Labors, containing "Masquerade in Lodi", "The Orphans of Raspay", and "The Physicians of Vilnoc".

A week or so ago I recorded an hour-long interview for the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast in support of the new release; I'll link it here when it goes live.

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on May, 03

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26577894-penric-s-intrigues-releases-this-week

pegkerr

As I mentioned before, I received a diagnosis several months ago for the pain in my pelvis: I have gluteal tendonopathy and bursitis. The inflammation also includes the SI (sacroiliac) joint. I have been doing physical therapy for several months, and things were a little better, but I have been plateauing for a while.

Finally, absolutely fed up with the decreased mobility and the pain, I made an appointment with a pain specialist and quickly arranged to get steroid injections in my SI joint and my gluteal trochanter last week. It was not fun, and the results will take a while to emerge (3 to 14 days).

I have been monitoring my step asymmetry with my Apple watch, and my limp had been pretty bad. It is getting a little better, and I can walk farther. The pain hasn't entirely gone away, but I am hoping things will continue to improve. Anyway, I'm glad I did it, and maybe I'll be able to exercise a bit more consistently now.

Image description: Background: Lavender flowers (representing serenity and physical healing). Center: a human skeleton with a figure eight-shaped thorny bramble over the pelvis. Behind the skeleton at the pelvis: an orange calendula blossom (representing comfort and recovery). At the right side, a hand in a surgical glove angles a syringe so that the point hovers just above the pelvis.

Pelvis

17 Pelvis

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: hopeful

pegkerr

I got my karate black belt exactly 15 years ago.

I have been decluttering, and I finally threw out my old karate bag this week, with all my old, moldering sparring equipment. I will clearly not use it again.
But I am grateful for what karate brought to my life--even if my knees and hips are not.

Current Mood: nostalgic

thewayne

Today is his birthday, Amazon and the Apple bookstores are selling the Discworld ebooks for $1.99. I don't know if this offer is only good in the USA.

thewayne

There's an online book seller, Bookshop.org, started in January 2020. They give EIGHTY PERCENT OF THEIR PROFITS BACK TO INDEPENDENT BOOK STORES! 80%! That is pretty darn cool!

And it's having an effect.

When Amazon launched in 1995, there were 5,000 members in the American Booksellers Association. In 2019, 1,889.

The ABA has now grown to over 3,200 members, and Bookshop.org has donated over $47 MILLION to independent bookshops! When you make a purchase from them, you can designate the donation part of your purchase to go to sellers in your area or into a general pool.

What's even better is people are changing Amazon Affiliate links to links going to Bookshop.org!

In my area, the only place that you can buy new books is still Walmart, used books it's thrift shops and the Friends of the Library site at the mall. 90 minutes to Las Cruces or 2+ hours to El Paso to get to B&N. I doubt that's going to change here.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91529634/independent-bookstore-day-bookshop-org-founder-on-how-small-retailers-are-taking-on-amazon

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/27/052242/america-now-has-70-more-bookstores-than-in-2020-says-bookshoporg-founder

thewayne

I have a recurring problem with my phone at work/the university. It doesn't want to maintain its registration with the campus WiFi. And this is a problem because I use it as a part of my work process. I run the Apple iCloud app on my desktop PC and copy book information into the Notes app so that when I'm working in the stacks to pull books that I need, I can just look at my phone. But since it's not connecting to the WiFi, I have to manually turn OFF the WiFi in order for Notes to sync!

So I did some querying, and aside from having to adapt it from old information (older version of IOS), I set up an automation!

Now my phone watches for geofencing, and when I arrive at school, it automatically turns off WiFi! And when I leave school, turns it back on!

It's working quite reliably. I only wish I'd thought of it a couple of years ago. Fortunately my laptop doesn't seem to have a problem maintaining its WiFi registration.

thewayne

I just got an email that my Live Journal blog is 22 years old now! Started it in ~~2002~~2004 after my friends and I did a mass exodus from Network 54 when they went weird. Then in 2017 on the 13th of January, I started my Dreamwidth side and ported everything over when LJ was not only sold to a Russian company, but the servers were relocated to Russian territory. So I'll get my 10-year anniversary with DW in the middle of the forthcoming January. Yay. ;-)

And I'll continue manually cross-posting to my LJ blog as DW will remain my primary blog. I wish the automatic cross-post would start working again, but I expect that won't happen until Russia loses the war in Ukraine once and for all and withdraws and loosens up on the information flow chokehold that it maintains on its people.

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26557075-darksight-dare-spoiler-discussion-space

As is my usual custom, this is to supply a discussion space in the comments for readers who have already read the new Pen & Des novella to talk about it with each other, without having to worry about spoilers for those not yet caught up. (Because it's hard to have a substantive discussion about a book without spoilers.)

In a nice piece of serendipity, this podcast discussion of specifically the Penric & Desdemona series surfaced this week on the podcast series The Incomparable Mothership:

https://www.theincomparable.com/thein...

Enjoy! L,

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on April, 25

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26557075-darksight-dare-spoiler-discussion-space

thewayne

The title is Darksight Dare and it dropped a couple of days ago.

HOWEVER, there may be a problem with the Kindle release. There are reports that the edition that was available as soon it released was only about half there. The Apple edition was complete.

I haven't read it yet, I'm working on a 'making of' book of Monty Python's Life of Brian! As it is one of my absolute favorite books of all time, it has a little priority. I'll read the Bujold next.

pegkerr

In a lot of ways, this is my favorite time of year. Taxes are done! Porch season has begun, so I can start eating my breakfast outside. It's not too hot, and it's not too cold. There's no need to shovel, there's no need to rake leaves, and it's a little early to start mowing.

So all you have to do is to relax and enjoy the flowers that are starting to spring up. Forsythia blooms in April, and my tulip bed is making a splendid show. Pretty soon the lilacs and apple blossoms will be blooming.

It's too early to garden (the frost date is usually assumed to be around Mother's Day), but not early to start garden dreaming. Everything is potential, and you don't have to weed yet!

Image description:Background: a chart showing high and low temperatures for April and May. The chart is bordered by orange tulips (bottom), forsythia (left side), pansies (right side) and pink bleeding hearts (top).

Spring

16 Spring

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26551792-darksight-dare-uploaded-today

The new Penric & Desdemona novella has just been uploaded on our five vendor platforms. It will take up to three days for some to show up on their vendor pages; I'll provide links as they emerge. This round, Kindle is first out of the gate:

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2TBF7L

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dark...

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/dark...

Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/darks...

Google Play books: https://play.google.com/store/books/d...

To recap the description,

"Penric takes a chance…

Two intractable problems are brought to the door of sorcerer Learned Penric of Vilnoc and his Temple demon Desdemona. Cinar Camurat, a mutilated Cedonian cavalry captain, has traveled two thousand sea miles to Penric for aid. Iva of Bita, a secret hedge sorceress, lies dying in her Orban hill village, and wants no aid at all.

Penric and Desdemona know well the hazards of medicine and magic, but their greatest puzzle may lodge in the tangle of hopes and fears in human and demonic hearts."

As always, about the only push these indie e-novellas get from me are these blog posts, so any mention or reviews of my stories out and about on the Net and elsewhere by readers are much appreciated.

I just recently reposted the updated Bujold reading-order guide, to help out those welcome new readers daunted by the wall o' books: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog... Do please pass the link along.

Onwards, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on April, 24

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/26551792-darksight-dare-uploaded-today

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

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Reading

The new Murderbot novella(?) is out!

Fight fire with.... infrasound?

Penric's Intrigues releases this week

2026 52 Card Project: Week 17: Pelvis

Black belt

Terry Pratchett's Discworld ebooks on sale!

Good news for book store lovers

I did something mildly clever with my iPhone recently

Happy Blog Bday to me!

Darksight Dare spoiler discussion space

There's a new Penric & Desdemona book out!

2026 52 Card Project: Week 16: Spring

Darksight Dare uploaded today!

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