Working on Horseshoes

Hi, I'm Kino (30s, he/him/his), and this is my personal blog. I lurk a lot but I don't bite; asks and messages welcome.

[remnantglow]

LINK: tinyurl.com/oldgaySF

I'd like to share with y'all a project I've poured my heart and soul into over the last couple of years: a database cataloguing every single older queer science fiction book I've managed to track down, consisting of just over 200 titles with LGBT characters/themes & by LGBT authors, spanning over a century (1880-2000) 🚀

The database can be filtered by representation, subgenre, whether the book is currently in print, and more; additionally, it includes my own ratings & brief thoughts on the ones i have read, if anyone needs a suggestion on places to start! (or feel free to shoot me an ask for a more personalized recommendation)

[alleesaur]

the productivity creatures

[tetrafelino]

I'm noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl's translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don't have object pronouns like "it/its" and neutral neopronouns like "elu/delu" are considered more analogous to the English "they/them", so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered in the original was always going to be tricky. There's also the other difficulty that adjectives are gendered in Portuguese, so whenever Murderbot describes itself or it's emotional state or anything, necessarily it was going to gender itself grammatically in some way. What this translation does at first is that the Murderbot's internal dialogue it genders itself in the masculine which I assumed to be just sort of defaulting Murderbot to be a masculine character, but in reflection of a different detail, I think it's just defaulting to this formal almost archaic notion of the masculine as neutral. Now, the detail that made me rethink this is this line that I just came upon of Dr Mensah's:

"UniSeg, preciso que você fique parada aí até eu chegar."

[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]

The reason that Mensah is referring to Murderbot in the feminine in this case is that it's referring to it as a security unit, right, and the word Unidade, Unit, in Portuguese, is a feminine word. So I just went back now and I found one other previous instance in which characters refer to Murderbot in the third person and, Ratthi, he calls Murderbot by masculine pronouns but that's when it's being referred to as a robô, robot, which in Portuguese is a masculine word. So I guess the way that Pohl found to express Murderbot's object pronouns is by just using whatever pronouns are in agreement with the word being used to describe it. Which to be fair makes a lot of sense for treating objects in Portuguese. If you call something a cadeira, chair, you're going to refer to it with feminine pronouns, but if you call the exact same object a sofá, sofa, you will be using the masculine pronouns.

[tetrafelino]

okay I just realized the reason Murderbot refers to itself with masculine pronouns in its internal dialogue all the time is because it's referring to itself as a robô assasino, murderer robot, which is masculine okay this is kind of genius actually

[tetrafelino]

okay okay this is so cool actually literally the next page and Murderbot is talking about other SecUnits right and it says this

"Elas não eram os robôs-assassinos mais astutos, (...)"

[They (feminine plural) weren't the (masculine plural) most astute murder robots, (...)]

...feminine pronouns for Unidades de Segurança, SecUnits, and masculine pronouns for robôs-assassinos, murder robots...

so yeah it's it's literally exactly as I understood it we are simply using our own grammatical gender rules for objects... it's so cool

[onlybylaura]

hey, translator here! (: this was absolutely done on purpose. gendering Murderbot would always be a problem, so I, the copyeditors and the brazilian editors worked together to make sure that bots/constructs could be referred with both masculine/feminine pronouns, sometimes even in the same paragraph. same goes for ART in the second novella, who's also an It in english, but varies between nave (ship, femine) and transporte (transporte, masculine). it's an important detail and i'm happy it was noticed!

[allthingslinguistic]

I read this post first like a month or two ago and it absolutely rewired how I thought about gender pronouns in French so thank you for that brazilian translator/editors.

That's not what the French translation of Murderbot does though, it uses "iel" which, while the most common gender-neutral neopronoun used by nonbinary French speakers I know, is also exclusively used by people. Like, a chair, table, etc can't be "iel", it has to be "il/elle". So "iel" preserves the gender-neutrality, but it's much less dehumanizing than "it" in English, something that I think the Portuguese solution does a particularly good job at.

The Japanese one is still really good and more people need to appreciate it:

In the Japanese translation of the books, Murderbot uses the genderless neopronoun 弊機 (heiki), which means through its characters "both “bad/evil robot” and “this second-rate, humble company machine"." It's also a homophone for 兵器 (heiki), meaning "weapon." The Japanese translator is Naoya Nakahara, and her translation of the first four Murderbot novellas won a translation award in Japan in 2021. 

(From this long Reddit thread comparing Murderbot translations.)

[wheelie-sick]

link

[ayronaught]

Transcript

Everyone's talking about Artemis II, the first humans to travel to the moon in 50 years

Historic, right? BUT nobody's talking about the Deaf people who made it possible.

In the late 1950's, NASA had a problem.

They needed to understand what weightlessness did to the human body but every test subject kept getting violently motion sick

NASA needed to figure out FAST during the space race!

So, they went to Gallaudet University. They recruited 11 Deaf people.

Because a number of Deaf people had lost their hearing to spinal meningitis as children which also damaged their vestibular system.

Their inner ears couldn't be overwhelmed. They were immune to motion sickness.

NASA put them in centrifuges. Put them on zero gravity flights. A room for 12 straight days.

(All caps) It rotated the entire time.

One experiment on a ferry in choppy Nova Scotia waters, the researchers got so seasick they had to cancel it. The Gallaudet Eleven? They were playing cards.

Their bodies gave NASA the data and research it needed to send humans into space.

No Gallaudet Eleven? No Mercury. No Apollo. No Artemis II.

They stood on the shoulders of 11 Deaf people most people have never heard of.

Now you know!

[cosmictuesdays]

NASA webpage on the Gallaudet Eleven.

[plasmapop]

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!

*sonnets do not even have to have 14 lines if you are pure of heart and sonnetpilled enough

[ellakas]

[ellakas]

[knight--error]

CANNOT take credit for these, my sister in law made them. Behold.

[curiousscallop]

poem i foubd in a book at work recently that im completely obsessed with

[my-dark-happy-place]

I would like all Americans (and everyone else) who are excited for the Superbowl to know: Before the actual Superbowl there's a live tournament on TV, here in Germany, called "American Ice Football".

It is exactly what it sounds like: American Football but played on Ice, in shoes with entirely smooth soles.

It's a tournament with 4 teams and they are called Eastside Ossis, Westside Wessis, Northcoast Naughties and Southside Smoothies and it's just hilariously entertaining.

Here's a video to show you how stupid it looks:

[my-dark-happy-place]

Also the players (who are all german celebs or pro athletes from other sports) and the commentator barely know the rules, which makes it even better.

Quite a few of them have little notes taped to their arms to remember the rules or next plays.

This is high quality entertainment.

[my-dark-happy-place]

If anyone cares: The Westside Wessis won the finale haha

[lastoneout]

I think you guys might have actually proven the theory that American football has, in part, become so unsafe specifically because the helmets and armor are so advanced it makes the players think they're invincible and thus more willing to do incredibly dangerous shit. Here you know if you aren't careful you're going to eat shit on the ice, which will hurt, so you and everyone else move slower and more purposefully and thus are much less likely to end up with your skeleton crumpling like tinfoil from being hit by the 200lb walls of muscle traveling at 20mph guarding the end zone.

This is fascinating, you made it safer by making it less safe. You fixed American football. What the fuck.

[gif87a-com]

[yutyrannuss]

He’s so fucking valid I love him

[adulthoodisokay]

[digitaldiscipline]

Pigeon Status: SICK

[samael-d-h]

@takashi0 @mageknight14

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Metahuman with super healing powers whose entire job is that once a week they go to a nearby hospital and are put into a medically induced coma for 24 hours while all their organs and blood are harvested, and kept there until they've healed up again.

They get paid a small stipend by the Heroes Council for this, and they live off that.

No crime fighting, no obvious heroics, and they only took a Super Identity because it's technically hero's council policy. Nobody's ever seen them in a cape.

Every so often the Heroes council will release an official report to the public, and there'll be another bunch of news articles wondering how some unknown super calling themselves 'Meat Factory' somehow consistently holds the record for most lives saved across the city.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

It is essential to my vision that they are not at all sanctimonious about this.

Like, they regularly act like they're getting away with something. They joke about how they get to earn money in their sleep. They show up to their hospital visits in deliberately ridiculous disguises, on the excuse that they need to 'protect their identity'.

Part of their employment contract is that they get served the same post-operation vanilla ice cream that they normally hand out on the childrens' ward. Also a sticker. Their overnight bag is covered in stickers.

[waywardmartian]

Harbourmaster Hell Is Empty page 086 is up.

Start at the beginning of the arc.

Start at the beginning of the series.

I'd like to know what this series is supposed to be about before I start reading, please.

Patreon, because what else do you expect from a tourist town?

[mjalti]

[david-goldrock]

Smart woman next to an unbelievable achievement is a picture niche that will never get old

[awnerd]

Then you’re gonna love this photo of Annie Jump Canon.

Working at Harvard in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a “Computer”, Annie Jump Cannon cataloged stars using their spectra from photographic plates, in an effort to understand the mysteries and peculiarities of stellar spectra.

This was hard, detailed, nuanced work. By 1889, three years into her work, she had classified over 1,000 stars. By 1913, she could classify 200 stars an hour. She could classify three stars a minute, just by sight. Using a magnifying glass, she could classify stars down to 9th magnitude, 16 times fainter than the human eye can see. And she did this all with exceptional accuracy.

Over the course of her career, she personally classified more than 350,000 stars, accounting for a mind-boggling 98% of all contemporary stellar spectra classifications, a feat that wouldn’t be bested until the 1990’s with automated digital sky surveys.

Cannon used these classifications to develop the Harvard spectral classification system (O–B–A–F–G–K–M), organizing stars by surface temperature and physical properties.

It is hard to overstate just how foundational her work was to modern astronomy and astrophysics. Her classifications have enabled more than a century of breakthroughs in stellar structure and evolution, including the understanding of how stars change over time and how temperature, luminosity, and composition are related. The system underpins the Hertzsprung–Russell (HR) diagram, one of the most important tools in astrophysics, and remains embedded in modern research, from stellar population studies to galaxy evolution.

The immense scale of her work was itself a massive contribution to astronomy. For comparison, before Cannon, star catalogs contained between 600 and 4,000 stars. Her work single-handedly proved that large-scale stellar classification was both feasible and scientifically valuable. She helped establish systematic star catalogs as a core method of modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for astrophysical research on stellar structure, evolution, and populations that continues today.

[lensdeer]

I made a little web app to generate xkcd 2501 edits right from your browser

[morellish]

mourning dove perching on the remains of last years sunflower

[fsmilanocortina]

佐藤 駿 Shun Sato (JPN)

2026 Olympic Winter Games Team Event Free Skate (194.86, PB)

[invizigothx]

first rule of Cite Club: tell everyone where you learned about Cite Club

[bill-blake-fans-anonymous]

invizigothx. (2026, January 30). first rule of Cite Club: tell everyone where you learned about Cite Club [Text post]. Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/invizigothx/807189844216446977/first-rule-of-cite-club-tell-everyone-where-you?source=share

[sometiktoksarevalid]