(1) RINGBEARERS. Abigail Nussbaum continues her deeply thoughtful series in “The Great Tolkien Reread: Many Meetings” at Asking the Wrong Questions.

…Frodo does not expect to find Bilbo at Rivendell. This might seem strange to us, either because we’re familiar with this particular story or with the conventions of its type. Bilbo is the parent figure; obviously he will show up to offer advice and approval, and send the actual hero on his way. But to Frodo, Bilbo is still the hero. The adventurer, who set out from the Shire to see mountains and other strange places (as it turns out, Bilbo made it as far as Dale, came back, and has no intention of leaving again). He will continue to loom over all the hobbits, their model for journeying and adventuring, for the rest of the novel. Even having experienced things he could never dream of, they will find themselves thinking of him, comparing themselves to him, and wondering what part, if any, they will have in the story he’s writing….

(2) HOOFING IT. Liz J. Bradley recommends “Walking and Dictating: A New Strategy to Mix Up Your Writing Routine” at SFWA’s Planetside.

Until this summer, I thought I had my writing process down to a science—my perfect desk setup, music playlist, iced coffee, phone away and on Do Not Disturb. However, when I sat down to work on a novel I’d taken a break from, I found myself stuck, hit by writer’s block. When none of my usual tools and strategies worked, I decided to ditch my perfectly curated setup and try something new. I hopped on my treadmill and started dictating my novel into my phone instead. And, remarkably, this was just what I needed. At the time, I thought of this as a last-ditch strategy to overcome writer’s block. Now, however, writing while walking has become a core part of my writing practice and has had a tremendous impact on my writing craft and process.

When I’m in the brainstorming phase of a project, I get my best ideas while walking. If I get stuck on a scene, chapter, or section of my manuscript, everything always seems clearer when I get back to my desk after a run. While I’ve observed this anecdotally, a 2014 Stanford University study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition has shown similar findings in the lab. In their study, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,” researchers Opezzo and Schwartz found that participants who walked on treadmills, walked outdoors, or were pushed in wheelchairs scored higher on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test (which assesses creative and divergent thinking) afterwards. These results—though not found in relation to writing specifically—suggest that writing while walking might help us come up with creative solutions to narrative problems and figure out what comes next….

(3) ANY PRIORS? Charlie Jane Anders explores the illusion and truth of impermanence in “Make Temporary Disposable Art! It’s Fun!” at Happy Dancing.

…To some extent, everything is ephemeral. I recently reread one of my favorite novels for the fourth or fifth time, and I was shocked to be reading a very different book than I’d remembered. I was approaching it from a new perspective, and my form of reference had shifted since the last time I had picked it up, so the words appeared completely different on the page. If your brain is the hardware and the book is the software, then it runs differently every time you load it because your configuration is new.

The internet enforces a certain amount of impermanence by its very nature, especially nowadays. I frequently have the experience of Googling for something specific that I was able to find a few years ago, but which now does not exist as far as Google is concerned. The other day, I was talking to a friend about something she did which made the whole internet extremely angry with her twenty years ago, and neither she nor the internet remembered it. Which feels like a form of healing, honestly. I’ve talked before about how I wrote and published things back in the day that I’m ashamed of now, and I’m glad they’re buried and thus unable to cause more harm in the present — like nuclear waste, kind of. 

Recently I went to a launch event at the Internet Archive — a wonderful organization that you should support! — for a book about “the erosion of our collective memory” called Vanishing Culture. I’ve only read a bit of it so far, but it looks fantastic. Anyway, at the event, people talked about the old maxim that “the internet never forgets,” and how untrue it is. They spoke about the importance of preserving internet culture for the future. The internet archive is the only reason you can still read God Hates Figs, the website I ran from 1999 to 2005, for example…. 

(4) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has released Simultaneous Times Episode #99 at Bandcamp. This is the next-to-last episode on their monthly schedule.

Stories featured in this episode:

• “The Fun They Hadn’t” by James Machell; with music by TSG; Read by Jean-Paul Garnier
• “Ephemera” by Tonya R. Moore; with music by Phog Masheeen; Read by Jenna Hanchey

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(5) THE ORWELL PRIZES. The 2026 Orwell Prizes finalists have been announced. Complete list at the link.

Among the eight books in the Political Fiction category is one of genre interest – “The Comfort of Distant Stars” by I.O. Echeruo.

 Winners will be announced at the Prize Ceremony on June 25. 

(6) FICTIONAL ASSIST. “The best-selling author Vaishnavi Patel recommends speculative fiction by N.K. Jemisin, Olivie Blake and more that speaks to our world today.” “Speculative Fiction Books Full of Real Horrors” in the New York Times. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.) Short reviews at the link.

In most cases, truth is stranger than fiction. But sometimes we need strange fiction to show us the truth. My favorite works of science fiction and fantasy take place in a world that largely resembles our own, and shine a spotlight on the issues of today by blending fantastical imagination with real-world commentary.

Take “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” High school is hell (literally). Coming out (as a Slayer) is hard. The man you love could transform after sex into someone you no longer recognize (say, a vampire). Allusions to the speculative are common in everyday speech: The untested drug is a “magic pill,” the horrible boss is the “devil himself,” or the female politician is “possessed by a Jezebel spirit.” Taking these propositions seriously can shine a light on what ails us (corporate greed, worker exploitation, good old-fashioned misogyny — take your pick)….

(7) DAVID BURKE (1934-2026). The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast pays tribute to “David Burke – Our Dr Watson (1934-2026)” in a public post on Patreon.

All of us here are devastated to hear the news that David Burke passed away a few days ago. The man who we first saw as Watson and the man we still think of as “our” Watson. His subtly comic portrayal lit up Baker Street. Whether it was the glint in his eye of something mischievious, or the little things he would do when Holmes wasn’t looking – like secretly reading Holmes’ monographs. His performance and transformation of the character from a bumbling fool to a humble and intelligent man of action, loyal to the end and the best friend anyone could ask for, is one of the main reasons this show is the success it was, is, and will always be. To answer a well remembered line of Watson’s from the show…

“Did I really do remarkably badly?”

No, David, you were remarkably perfect.

His renowned sense of humour and timeless pranks will live long in the memory of those who knew him and will always bring a smile to their faces. He was also a man who loved his family dearly. His wife Annie, and son Tom, both of whom he was immensely proud, were his world, and David was theirs. Our heart breaks for both of them and we send them all our love.

This one hits hard on us. It was our honour and privilege to spend some time with him a few years ago, and to keep in touch with him since – memories that will live with us forever. We say thank you a lot here, but in this case we couldn’t mean it anymore when we say: Dear David, thank you. Thank you for all you gave us.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 15, 2006 — Liō series

Twenty years ago on this date, one of the most unusual strips to come into existence did so in the form of Mark Tatulli’s Liō. It was very easy to market globally as it had almost no dialogue except that spoken by other people in the parodies that I’ll mention in a minute as Liō and the other characters don’t speak at all, and there were no balloons or captions at all giving it a global appeal. 

Liō, who lives with his father and various monsters, i.e. Ishmael a giant squid and Fido a spider, various animals like Cybil a white cat (of course there’s a cat here, a very pushy feline indeed), aliens, lab creations, and even Liō’s hunchbacked assistant. Why there’s even Archie, Liō’s psychopathic ventriloquist’s dummy. Liō’s mother is deceased. Though why she’s deceased is never stated. Definitely not your nuclear family here.

An important aspect of the strip is that it will riff off other strips, and lots of them: Blondie, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes (my favorite strip ever), Cathy, Garfield, Opus, Peanuts, even Pearls Before Swine (definitely not one of my favorite strips I will readily admit) will become fodder for parody by this strip. That’s where the only dialogue is spoken. 

Tatulli on the Mr. Media podcast back a decade or so said “It’s really a basic concept. It’s just Liō who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen.” 

There a transcript of that podcast here as the audio quality of that interview is, as the interviewer admits, rather awful. He says that he got better after that first interview by him. 

In multiple interviews, Tatulli has said the two major contemporary influences on his style are Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.

Currently, the strip runs daily globally in more than two hundred and fifty papers. Lio is also available in collections, many of them, found in paperback and digital formats. They display rather well on an iPad. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Liō needs to reread the instructions.
• BirdBrains absolutely deserves a ticket.
• Carpe Diem pranks the world about which came first.
• Frank and Ernest inspired a pop song.

(10) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. [Item by John King Tarpinian.] Porky Pig’s full name is: Porky Cornelius Washington Otis Lincoln Abner Aloysuis Casper Jefferson Philbert Horatius Narcissus Pig.  Disclosed in the cartoon Plane Dippy, 1936.

(11) IF COSMOLOGY WAS A DEMOCRACY… “Someone Asked Physicists What They Really Believe About the Universe and… Yikes” says Futurism.

…Published by the American Physical Society, the survey queried over 1,600 experts from disciplines ranging from astrophysics to particle physics, along with a chunk of respondents who identified as “science enthusiasts.” The results showed that there’re still quite a few strikingly differing opinions on the standard model of cosmology, the scientific culmination of our understanding of our physical world which describes the origins of our universe and how it functions on a grand scale today.

“I think the most surprising finding was the gap between the public perception of scientific consensus and what scientists actually said when asked,” coauthor of the survey Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada and the Perimeter Institute told Gizmodo. “Ideas often presented as the standard view, such as inflation, string theory, particle dark matter, or a constant dark energy, did not command overwhelming support.”

The closest thing to a consensus came from the question “What is the Big Bang?” to which 68 percent said it was a “hot dense state — which may or may not correspond to a beginning of time.” But the flip side of that was revealing: just 20 percent answered that it was the “absolute beginning of time with a singularity at its start.”

There was even more disagreement over dark matter, a hypothetical substance that we can see the gravitational fingerprints of everywhere and which appears to make up 80 percent of the mass in the universe, but which we are yet to prove exists because it’s invisible to all forms of direct detection. It’s an essential part of the standard model, but it doesn’t elucidate what dark matter is. Naturally, opinions differ, with only 10 percent holding the traditional view that it’s made of massive particles called WIMPs, and 21 percent answering that it’s a hybrid of some of the other popular ideas, like it being trapped in primordial black holes.

Dark energy’s responses reflect recent developments in the field. The traditional view of it as a cosmological “constant” was just 24 percent, which was less than the view that dark energy changes over time, at 26 percent, after observations from a recent DESI survey indicated that it may be weakening.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Anne Marble, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]