Random thing you love right now that doesn't deserve its own thread

Conversion Therapy is now a crime in Canada

Bill C-4, a ban on conversion therapy, passes in the House with unanimous consent

Conservative MP Rob Moore rose on Wednesday in the House of Commons to ask for unanimous consent to pass Bill C-4, a ban on conversion therapy. The legislation would make it a crime to cause someone to undergo conversion therapy, taking a minor out of the country in order to get conversion therapy abroad, profiting from the practice, or either advertising or promoting it.

That is amazing!!!

And if you watch the video, you see the unanimous voting allowed them to skip past a whole lot of steps in the process between 2nd reading and third reading.

So I discovered this script for the bizhawk emulator where every X to Y seconds (I've got it set to 1 to 5 minutes) it does a save state and switches to a random game in your ROMs folder. Bizhawk works with ROMs for everything from NES to N64 / PS1 era, and if it shuffles back to a ROM that you have a save state for, it loads it, so you pick up from exactly where you left off.

What a fun way to take a trip through nostalgia. So many games from back in the day front loaded all their best content anyway, and there are few of them that I really care to play more than 10 or 15 minutes of.

The short story I sold (my first ever pro sale, and the first time I’ve submitted a story in 15 years) came out in Clarkesworld Magazine yesterday! You can read it here if you fancy a bit of spooky sci-fi.

Happy Dave wrote:

The short story I sold (my first ever pro sale, and the first time I’ve submitted a story in 15 years) came out in Clarkesworld Magazine yesterday! You can read it here if you fancy a bit of spooky sci-fi.

Congratulations!

Hasn't Clarkesworld launched a bunch of award-winning new authors? That's a great venue for your first sale!

Congrats! Bookmarked for later.

misplacedbravado wrote:
Happy Dave wrote:

The short story I sold (my first ever pro sale, and the first time I’ve submitted a story in 15 years) came out in Clarkesworld Magazine yesterday! You can read it here if you fancy a bit of spooky sci-fi.

Congratulations!

Hasn't Clarkesworld launched a bunch of award-winning new authors? That's a great venue for your first sale!

It has indeed! There have even been some Netflix adaptations of shorts from there. I can dare to dream I suppose…

Congrats Dave!

My kiddo’s band has a new single out today. They play drums on it. Give it a listen.

https://open.spotify.com/track/1CIvM...

Gratz Dave. That’s amazing.

I have a two fold love. One of the two towns I’m near is a bit run down and had an old, cluttered indoor market. It’s been beautifully refurbished and now has extremely classy food stalls. There are quite a few I want to try but I went with a quality burger this week. So good.

My connecting love is that, just as a river deposits sand and gravel in slow water areas, I deposit change in the pockets of coats. About £15 worth of loose change had built up in my winter coat pocket. During the shopping trip and whilst buying lunch, I was able to off load the majority of it.

When I paid for at tea to go with my burger (from a different stall) the guy laughed at all the change (organised to make it easier to count.) I’m a lot lighter now I told him. “I’m not!” he replied.

In the days of contactless-everything, remembering I have notes and small change cash in wallet/bag/pockets feels weirdly like free money.

Happy Dave wrote:

In the days of contactless-everything, remembering I have notes and small change cash in wallet/bag/pockets feels weirdly like free money.

Well, when you're a hundredaire it's easy to lose track of a little change.

Hundredaire? So he lights his pipe with half-crowns?

I think that would be a challenge.

You're not up to a challenge? It's simple! An oven mitt, one 9v radio battery, and a few moments, and Bob's yer uncle.

Get it? Bob? I'm on a roll here, don't deny me.

*puffs on pipe*

By Jove it worked!

Loved your story, by the way.

Happy Dave wrote:

The short story I sold (my first ever pro sale, and the first time I’ve submitted a story in 15 years) came out in Clarkesworld Magazine yesterday! You can read it here if you fancy a bit of spooky sci-fi.

I wanted it to be longer! Well done.

Mixolyde wrote:

I wanted it to be longer!

Not the first time I've heard that sentence.

Thank you. I gotta say, having a story out there on the internet that people enjoy is tough to beat for a slow drip-feed of nice comments. It's been fantastic seeing how people react to it.

Honestly, this reminds me of classic Saki.

Spoiler:

Immersive background with interesting elements, verisimilitude based on characterization and situation, and a spooky situation potentially resolved but not *explained* by the events, which leaves a very memorable emotional conclusion.

I don't say that lightly. I was hooked from the first paragraph, and it felt new but also lived-in. You could write a novel about this world and how it came to be.

Happy Dave wrote:

Thank you. I gotta say, having a story out there on the internet that people enjoy is tough to beat for a slow drip-feed of nice comments. It's been fantastic seeing how people react to it.

I always appreciate a story that gets me googling down a rabbit hole of Icelandic swears

Robear wrote:

Honestly, this reminds me of classic Saki.

Spoiler:

Immersive background with interesting elements, verisimilitude based on characterization and situation, and a spooky situation potentially resolved but not *explained* by the events, which leaves a very memorable emotional conclusion.

I don't say that lightly. I was hooked from the first paragraph, and it felt new but also lived-in. You could write a novel about this world and how it came to be.

Wow, that’s possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing, thank you.

beanman101283 wrote:

I always appreciate a story that gets me googling down a rabbit hole of Icelandic swears :D

I’m not saying finding a blog post about Icelandic swear words was one of the seeds of the story, but I’m not not saying that.

Happy Dave wrote:

The short story I sold (my first ever pro sale, and the first time I’ve submitted a story in 15 years) came out in Clarkesworld Magazine yesterday! You can read it here if you fancy a bit of spooky sci-fi.

Great read! Thank you so much for sharing this with us, and congratulations again! Can't wait for you to share more of your writing!

Thank you, I sure will. I'll keep a list on my website too.

today my dad got a quilt from Quilts of Valour. A Canadian group of quilters that makes quilts that are presented to veterans of the Canadian military. My dad applied, and due to his service as part of a number of UN Peacekeeping missions in some truly hellish situations over 34 years of service, he qualified to get a quilt.

My dad is, by nature, a very stoic man. The only thing I have seen make him happier is seeing his grandkids.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/Z4QU3Ks.jpeg)

That's awesome!

Amazing!

My aunt, in Ottawa, makes quilts for that organization. I'll ask her about that one; wouldn't it be a weird coincidence if it turned out to be one that she had made.

They did an 11 quilts in 11 days in November, and that is one of the ones my dad got.

Billie Eilish on SNL in a red sequined dress looking like Marilyn Monroe. Oh my....