I'd imagine this would be the least odd thing to happen at Neil Gaiman's funeral.
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In 1986, the legendary author wrote this letter about the passing of his daughter 24 years earlier. This message still resonates today as a reminder of the dangers of not taking steps against the preventable disease. It's a bit of a shame that this message from almost 40 years ago is still relevant, but here we are.
Author, Kate O'Neill used her platform on Twitter to encourage people participating in online activities like the recent, trending profile picture aging meme on Facebook, to slow down and think about it critically. O'Neill asks people to consider how willingly posting that information online for Facebook's seemingly sentient algorithm to digest, can have a ripple effect on society as a whole; how that information can be fed into worldwide databases, sold off to advertising agencies, and used to exploit the very people that upload it, without considering the impacts, in the process. She doesn't aim to inspire panic in this Twitter thread, but instead, she wants us to think critically when considering the fast-changing landscape of the world around us. Some solid advice!
You know you've crossed a line when you've got an iconically morbid author waving the white flag. We've had so many beautiful souls taken from us, and too soon at that, this year.
We just lost Carrie Fisher and Richard Adams, and George R.R. Martin finally took pen to paper to voice the rage and unrest so many of us are feeling when it comes to this damn year:
Adams was a wonderful writer. Yes, WATERSHIP DOWN was his masterpiece, but it was by no means his only great book. He wrote two terrific epic fantasies with human characters, SHARDIK and MAIA, both of which I think are criminally underrated, as well as an erotic ghost story, THE GIRL ON A SWING. His other “animal book,” THE PLAGUE DOGS, also has some wonderful sections… though it is such a dark, depressing, angry, gut-punch of a novel that I can’t say I ‘enjoyed’ it.
Adams was not ‘one of us,’ in the sense that he was never a convention-goer or part of our genre fantasy community, which may be why he was never honored with a life achievement award by the World Fantasy Convention. Nonetheless, he deserved one. I’ve been suggesting him for that honor for at least twenty years… in part because I wanted to meet him. Now I never will. That’s sad (though not as sad as PLAGUE DOGS).
Via Andy Atkins
Seriously though, how do you write so fast Stephen King? Go to 50:08 for the moment!
