• One of the many tasks I had at a previous job was to look up references for furniture. The one I hated the most? Trees. There are only so many trees you can look up before they all start to resemble how trees used to appear before I got my glasses. But alas, each asset needed its own reference, and the trees had to be thematic, stylish, and match the rest of the room. They couldn’t all be green, or straight-limbed, or bushy. They had to vary.

    It was during my never-ending search for a specific tree that I stumbled on a picture I thought had slipped past my AI blockers (aka setting search results to only show images from before 2018).

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  • Definitions in the Marginalia: “Gideon the Ninth”

    I’m always pleasantly delighted when I discover new words. I test them on my tongue like a new spice and sprinkling them into drafts to solidify them in my memory. In the past, I only made a mental note of them before moving on with the story. Then I picked up Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and forever doomed my marginalia.

    It was the first time in a long time I really had to sit down with a pen scribbling in the margins and my phone open the least ad-infested dictionary website. My copy of Gideon is now covered in notes about everything from theories and reactions to brief explanations to Biblical and extremely specific medical references. It’s a gorgeously massacred paperback decorated with tabs and topped off with a broken spine.

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