
Went to urgent care this afternoon, to be greeted with more or less nothing more than a shrug; they’r calling in an antibiotic but I’ve been told to not expect much from it as, unsurprisingly, this is probably viral. My lungs are clear, at least, so it’s not pneumonia, which I pretty much already knew anyway. Adding to the fun is that my right ear is suddenly clogged as hell and I’m about to move to the “pour hydrogen peroxide directly in there” stage, which is always fun. I’ve used my ear wash thingy twice this afternoon and it hasn’t done any good.
I read the book pictured above, which did not suck, but I don’t have the energy to do a full review of it; needless to say there is very little chance that I’m not going to enjoy reading a pop-science account of why colonizing outer space is probably going to be a shitton more expensive and complicated than we think it is. I’d prefer the authors came to different conclusions, but them’s the breaks, and I think they’ve supported their opinions more than sufficiently for my expectations.
Oh, and the Pope’s gonna die, it looks like, and I’ve spent most of the day when I wasn’t coughing my larynx out or struggling to breathe contemplating political violence. Which probably isn’t super smart for me to write about but I’ve been shooting my mouth off on BlueSky anyway.
I’m gonna go to bed now, I guess, and I hope to hell I’m at least halfway human tomorrow.


Take a look at these two pictures. Those are actual photographs from the surface of Mars of some curious features, dubbed the “seven sisters” or the “skylights.”
These features were discovered in 2007. I found out about them through Warren Ellis, who posted them to his website, or maybe to his mailing list, and spent a moment musing that it would be a really cool story if someone wrote about what was inside of them.