Making Light

This time next year, we'll bring back the Greek, Old Church Slavonic, three kinds of Swedish, Haitian, Icelandic, and Quenya....

As I said earlier today on both Twitter and Facebook, I've done just about everything I can to get this...

The door creaks softly as I push it wide. It's not complaining, really, just surprised That anyone would come. I,...

Hello! Today, Patrick surprised no one more than himself by resurrecting the Making Light front page, archives, and CSS. He...

We're working on bringing this place back. We miss the fluorosphere, and many of its regulars have emphatically said the...

Ignore it....

Someone elseweb crossed a couple of wires and mentioned Robert Frost when they meant Robert Burns. And I got that...

Well, that took a couple of hours, but I think I got all of the spam from the past few...

For Teresa and me, March 1 has long been the anniversary of the day we moved to New York City,...

Blacow* speaks of four players: the Wargamer, the Power-Gamer, the Role-Player, and the Story-Teller. The Wargamer, what does he say?...

Reading about all the people venturing that maybe it would be better to stop the social distancing and reopen the...

So now the rest of the world is discovering virtual communities. I'm feeling very hipster; we were doing it before...

I largely gave up political blogging after November 8, 2016, when it became obvious that I have no idea what...

Just posted to Slate, by Isaac Butler: The Disappearance of John M. Ford. Key takeaway to Making Light readers who...

I should be explaining what's been going on in the British Parliament, with links and explanations. Unfortunately I can't, because...

Nobody reads this blog any more. But do read Kieran Healy.A fundamental lesson of Sociology is that, in the course...

The year 222 BCE saw the Roman Emperor Elagabalus assassinated by the Praetorian Guard, to be replaced by Alexander Severus,...

It's been a long time since I've posted a new entry to this community, and I know the comments on...

Pretty sure we’ve all heard Tom Lehrer’s “Lobachevsky,” right? A song about plagiarism where all the bits of melody are...

Here’s something I put up on Facebook (originally as a reply to someone else’s thing) in March that I should...

Our buzzer goes off. About 8 PM. We're not expecting anyone. I go downstairs. "Police," announce the two guys outside...

As it says in Ecclesiastes, of the making of books there is no end. And Seneca is (dubiously) said to...

“Monster Mash,” “Crocodile Rock,” and “Jailhouse Rock” are all real songs about other, fictional songs that share the same titles...

I believe it is traditional to apologize when one hasn't been blogging for a while, and I am indeed sorry....

I’ve been asked to start up a new open thread. I don’t have anything funny or interesting queued up to...

I've realized that the reason I no longer write blog posts about politics is that events taught me that I...

It's been a time. One evening in mid-November, Teresa tried to say something to me, and it came out as...

As I best understand it, the machine we're hosted on abruptly melted down; Hosting Matters scrambled to migrate the sites...

Overheard: "You think he's cool because he's a dwarf? Or because you read about him online?" Discuss....

I have a chiming clock in the house. It was originally my maternal grandmother's, and my mother very kindly gave...

NYC primary elections are coming up next Tuesday, and there’s actually some interesting action going on in the normally dull...

From a post by Logan Rimel, parish administrator at University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley, Caifornia. I outsourced the sin of...

Liberalism can't defeat white supremacy. Only direct action can....

Iron Circus Comics (Spike Trotman’s company) has just announced its next anthology project: FTL, Y’all. Imagine what would happen if...

No, English isn't uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language....

I love the faces in Byzantine mosaics. I used to make my own Mac icons back in the 1990s, when...

Allow me to observe that bluegrass musicians will cover anything....

This is a thread I wrote on Twitter, because sometimes it's easier to write about big subjects on very small...

This is just to say that my recent essay collection, Making Conversation, is eligible for Best Related Work. Forgive me....

Long ago in Internet time, the well-known tech writer and programmer Dori Smith, a sometime reader hereabouts, did Making Light...

What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color? Wait, give me some time to think....

Hey, New Yorkers (City and State)! Want health care? There’s a bill making its way through our state legislature that...

There are many things I am not, among them an economist, a futurologist, a historian of labor, (a person who...

I'm strongly suspecting that New Year's is going to be a time of listicles and advocacy. Everyone's going to be...

As 2016 draws to a close, many of us are looking on it as a year of loss, not just...

Out of this darkness, let the unmeasured sword Rising from sleep to execute or crown Rest on our shoulders,...

Luke 2:1-14, Anglo-Saxon (via): Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod....

We know the context here. Somewhere else, the simple story is about to begin: the brave farmboy with secret gifts,...

One way of looking at freedom of speech is atomic: treating each individual act of free speech as an equal...

I keep seeing it on Twitter, but I haven't seen much in the way of heads-ups in less ephemeral fannish...