Hello Thursday!

Being a writer often means you end up knowing far more than you ever expected to about something that you never would have imagined ever needing to know. For example, based on events in a recent chapter of the fic that I’m currently working on, I now know more than anyone in the 21st century should be expected to know about the Victorian “sport” of rat-baiting. (My characters weren’t engaging in rat-baiting. They just needed to purchase a large quantity of rats because . . . well, sometimes you do, when you need to cause a great deal of chaos as a distraction from the things that you’re doing that other people would rather you didn’t.) 

Things to check out online

• Futel utilizes forgotten payphones with free calls for anyone — This article is from 2024, but Futel’s website shows them as still functioning. I think this is a great way of filling a void in the urban landscape. Payphones were a super-useful thing, and while one almost never needs one now, when you do need one, there’s really nothing else that will do. If you’re out and you’ve lost your phone or your phone has broken, you’re really at the mercy of whatever strangers you happen to find. (Unless, of course, you happen to find yourself phoneless in the neighborhood of a public library during the hours that the library is open. But what are the odds of that?)

• BTS withdraw from Grammys, a month after Asian pop prize introduced — I’m not privy to the inside scoop on all of this. I’m not even deep into the Grammy fandom. But based on what I’ve read about it (of which the article I’ve linked here seems to me to be the best summary article), the situation looks something like this: The Grammys introduced an Asian pop prize, which gave the appearance of being an effort to prevent BTS from winning the major Grammy categories, and then when the eligibility rules for the Asian pop performance prize were announced, they included a language requirement that seemed likely to exclude BTS’s big hits from this year from contention. And so this week BTS announced that they were withdrawing from the Grammys this year. I think the Grammys are going to find that they need BTS more than vice versa. To the extent that the Grammys depend on TV ratings of the broadcast for revenue, they’re likely to discover that there were a lot of ARMY who were watching the Grammys only because BTS was there. And to the extent that the Grammys have value as an award only because people believe in their legitimacy, I think a lot of people will view the final results of every award that BTS would have been eligible for this year as having an asterisk after it in the record books. Not the BTS necessarily would have won the award, but they could have, and even if they didn’t they certainly could have changed the voting.

• GURPS 4th edition, Basic Set, Revised — I haven’t played GURPS in years, but I heard about this and had to go look at it. If you had told 15-year-old me that someday the GURPS basic rulebook would be 592 pages long and cost $80, I doubt he would have believed you. (He would have been more likely to believe you if you had told him that you would be able to read it on your computer, but probably wouldn’t have believed the $50 price tag for that.) And yet I’m considering it. One thing that I noticed about it that does please me, though: On the cover it shows a human — a normal Earth human — reading RPG rulebooks. That human is female. I can remember a time when that would have been inconceivable.

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movements (Pernille Ipsen) — I would definitely recommend this book. I now know a lot more about the Danish Women’s Movements in the 1970s than I did before. (More about Denmark in the 1970s than I did before in general, for that matter.)

• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (Anne-Laure Le Cunff) — I feel like I got a lot out of reading this book, but I think the real benefit of this book will come from living with it for a while and trying the various strategies outlined in it. I’ll probably post updates on that in future Thursdays.

• Make: #97

I’ve continued reading

• Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000 (Barry Walters) — I was skeptical when I read the first couple of chapters of this, because each short chapter is devoted to one or at most two musicians or groups, but the subjects are selected and the chapters are ordered in such a way that you do get both thematic and chronologic progression and not “one thing after another.”

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 20 (Yuto Tsukuda)

• Minnesota Monthly, July/August 2026

• ArtForum, November 2026 — There was a big section in the middle of this issue about printing photographs as a physical process. I had been aware prior to this of the difficulty photographers were having with various types of film no longer being made, but until reading this I had been unaware that they are now having problems with certain kinds of photograph printers and the papers and/or chemicals necessary to use them no longer being available. Even more critical, the knowledge of how to perform some of these kinds of prints is being lost: “The person who created [these prints], Guy Strichers, passed away recently, and this was the last work he printed. With his death, the dye-transfer technique itself is on the brink of disappearing.” (Thomas Demand, p. 103)

• Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire)

• Cozy Companion, vol. 26

• Bike Minnesota 2026 (from Minnesota Monthly)

• In the Embrace of Dragons (Lyonne Riley)

and I’ve started reading

• Cells at Work: Baby!, vol.2 (Yasuhiro Fukuda)

• My Dress-up Darling, vol. 14 (Shin’ichi Fukuda)

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason