No experience required, apparently.

Frankly, after the last couple of days, I'm quite tempted. Surely bison can't be any harder to handle than some of the people I have to deal with on a daily basis in my current job?

I haven't done one of these in far too long...

Game of Thrones is based in history - outdated history.

STET, by Sarah Gailey. I really liked the clever structure of this story.

The Court Magician, by Sarah Pinsker; about power and the cost of power.

A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, by Alix E. Harrow; about the power of books and how libraries can change lives.

The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington, by Phenderson Djèlí Clark; a haunting mix of magic and the history of slavery.

Knitting hard facts into soft yarn - on the links between knitting and science.

The 19th century lesbian made for 21st century consumption - on Anne Lister and the queer women who came before her.

Lest We Forget, by Elizabeth Bear; on war crimes and restitution.

"You Have Only Your Trust in Me": Star Trek and the Power of Mutual Belief. There is a reason that Picard, Sisko and Janeway are among my top role models as a manager.

Two Sisters in Exile, by Aliette de Bodard; a gorgeous story set in her Xuya universe.

A little less invisible - a great post about being bi and grey-ace and married to a man but queerness still being central to your identity, which I (obviously) found 100% relatable.

The Tory leadership contest as a medieval chronicle.

The knitting and crochet website Ravelry has banned support of the Trump administration; this Guardian article has more details for non-Ravelry users who can't see the statement.

xkcd on free speech.

Enchanted forests: the women shaking up nature writing - I enjoy reading about nature and landscape but struggle to find diverse voices in the genre, so it's good to read about how the Forestry Commission's 2019 writers in residence are bringing some welcome diversity to a genre that is overwhelmingly white and male.

The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power, by Karen Osbourne - a fabulous story about entrenched inequality and having the courage to change things.

White Hart, Black Knight, by Alex Bledsoe - I clicked through to read this because of the name, but really enjoyed its noirish take on Arthurian fantasy, with better gender politics.

Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people - this is a really good article about anti-racism and why it needs to be centred on the voices and experiences of people of colour, not white allies.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died - a fascinating piece about the asteroid strike that marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene eras, and an paleontological find so extraordinary I find it hard to believe it can really be true.

Deborah Cameron on women and humour and prejudice against women who use humour in the workplace - I found this particularly interesting as humour is an absolutely integral part of how I communicate, and I find it almost impossible not to try to be funny, whether or not that makes people view me more negatively.

Opening the Edgeworth Papers - a year-long project looking at correspondence and other material from 200 years ago begins with Maria Edgeworth's attitudes to love and marriage, which may be of particular interest to admirers of the_comfortable_courtesan.

Reclaiming the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - as someone who always identified much more with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl characters than with the more traditional female love interests, I was interested in this look at how the MPDG could be reframed in a more positive light.

I am not always very attached to being alive - on living with passive suicidal ideation.

...for me, and I suspect for countless others like me, the threat of suicide isn't like being carried over a waterfall — it is like living in the ocean. Not as sea creatures do, native and equipped with feathery gills to dissolve oxygen for my bloodstream, but alone, with an expanse of water at all sides. Some days are unremarkable, floating under clear skies and smooth waters; other days are tumultuous storms you don’t know you’ll survive, but you’re always, always in the ocean.

This is the ocean I live in, too.

'Underwear dates well': how fashion forensics are helping solve crimes - I was hugely impressed with Amber Butchart's TV series A Stitch in Time last year, and loved this piece on how she is using her knowledge of fashion history to help crime scene investigators to date bodies.

'It is a religion': how the world went mad for Moomins - a lovely article about Tove Jansson's Moomin series and the forthcoming TV series (which I will definitely be watching!).

A History of the World in Admin - I am now a professional administrator, and this is spot on about both the vital importance of administration, and the reasons why privileged (mostly) white (predominantly male) people don't understand that, and why that's one of the pieces in the Brexit clusterfuck jigsaw.

(I also encountered a classic example of this in the wild recently, in the shape of a flowchart for a new process which said "HR will do X", as if HR was a magic thing that just happened and not made up of already-busy people who might not be able to find time to do X on top of all the things they already have to do.)

SFF knitting fans may like this pattern for Jedao gloves, inspired by Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire.

I was very sad to hear of Jeremy Hardy's death last week, as he was one of my very favourite comedians (and possibly the one I've seen live the most times, which is some consolation). Of all the tributes and obituaries, I did like this one by Mark Steel, though you do have to put up with the Independent's appallingly ad-heavy site to read it.

John Crace's account of living with anxiety struck a lot of chords with me.

This advice column from Autostraddle, How Do I Tell If I'm A Butch Cis Woman Or A Trans Non-Binary Person?, was really, really helpful as I continue my ongoing process of trying to work out whether I'm uncomfortable with femaleness per se or just femininity. (I was particularly struck by "dysphoria isn’t the exclusive domain of trans people — it’s entirely valid and actually quite common for a cis person to feel uncomfortable in their body", which has shifted everything into a much clearer focus.)

Ellen Kushner's short story The Duke of Riverside is part-prequel part-sequel to Swordspoint, and made me really want to read the other books in the series.

Arkady Martine's The Hydraulic Emperor is a fabulous story about collecting and sacrifice and what the far, far future of cinema could look like.

For the_comfortable_courtesan and her fans, How the Pre-Raphaelites became obsessed with the wombatt.

How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans is a good summary of the rise of the TERFs, and the links between anti-trans ideology and colonialism. (This Twitter thread on TERFism as one of many gateways to white supremacy makes a similar point. Basically, Pterry had it right; evil begins when you start to treat people as things. It doesn’t matter so much which group of people you decide are less than human because they’re different from you somehow, it’s always the first step on the same road.)

The author of this article on depictions of Queen Anne's body seems to think that Sellar and Yeatman's depiction of Queen Anne as dead all the time was their own invention, rather than being an obvious application of their "all the history you can remember" approach to the idiom "and Queen Anne's dead", but is otherwise an interesting look at the subject.

Pixar's sweet new short film Purl looks at sexism in the workplace from the point of view of Purl, an animated ball of yarn.

Meet the Feminist Academics Championing Trans Rights - a small counter to the clamouring voices of trans-exclusive "feminists" which dominate the media at the moment.

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About in 2018 - because it's good to remember that not all of the news is terrible.

The Thing About Ghost Stories, by Naomi Kritzer - slightly spooky and utterly charming.

The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society - what happens when fae men meet a woman who isn't given to pining. Great fun (and I think Nanny Ogg as a girl must have been a bit like Rose).

Twitter thread on the hidden history beneath an unremarkable field in France.

The Susan Archetype in Children's Literature (I was surprised when I went back to work this week to discover that my recent files list included files named Susan Walker, Susan Pevensie, Susan Death, Susan Foreman and Susan Calman, until I remembered that I'd been testing out the new workload model and decided to to with Susans as my sample people. I would have had Susan from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, too, but I couldn't remember her surname.)

We Rate Dogs' video of the dogs of 2018

How the World Improved in 2018, in 15 charts - more not-terrible news.

How to Make a Paper Crane, by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry - a beautiful and powerful piece about accessibility and disability rights.

The periodic table in haiku

Her Left Hand, the Darkness, by Alison Smith - a lovely piece on the writer's memory of Ursula Le Guin.