This was a bit of a mini-saga online last year. An artist did a comic that was somewhat controversial and it resulted in other artists doing their own takes on it.
( Comics under the cut... )
Bu-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dooWAAAA-WAAA, bu-doo DADADADADADUM, DA-DUM! Okay, we'll get to the Seinfeldian part a bit later. ( In a parallel universe, teleporter Kramer can enter any space abruptly, bad dancer Elaine can shatter mountains with her movements, liar George can manipulate the perception of truth until an enemy’s mind collapses, and observational comedian Jerry…sums it all up in a pithy way that leaves you feeling smarter than everyone else. )
2. We went to the Osaka Kaiyukan aquarium today and it was amazing! I took so many photos. Highly recommend it if you are ever in Osaka. All of the material is in English as well as Japanese, too.
3. We miss the kitties so much already but they don’t as freaked out about us being gone this time at least. Alex even sent a picture tonight of Ollie snuggled on her lap.
4. I have been wanting to watch Wake Up Dead Man since it came out but I am just crap at watching movies so I haven’t gotten to it, but I knew being stuck on a plane for 12+ hours was the perfect opportunity so I made sure to download it before we left and I did watch it on the flight. It was so good! I didn’t like Glass Onion as much as Knives Out (though I did still like it a lot) but this one was definitely just as good as the first one. I hope there will be more!
If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting?
- Jury to decide whether Duke retaliated against researcher who reported sexual harassment
- BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’
- Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage
- Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’
- Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 64,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- Project reveals half of social science research “doesn’t replicate.” And “Can Science Predict When a Study Won’t Hold Up?”
- “Scientific ghosts”: Researcher finds 94% of retracted Nature Index articles continued receiving citations post-retraction.
- “Researchers retract multisensory learning paper after failed replications.”
- A “comparison of human-authored and ChatGPT-generated research article titles.”
- Researchers who requested the retraction of 2000 glyphosate paper say they were the first to ask.
- “How to be a science sleuth.”
- “Dismissed psychologist cut, pasted, and manipulated research results,” says university magazine.
- “Predatory publishing in nutrition and dietetics: Risks, impacts, and collaborative solutions.”
- “Top science prize project faces plagiarism allegations” that a student’s project is similar to associate professor’s study.
- “China’s science awards system is plagued by shadowy practices. Can reforms fix it?”
- “The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review.”
- The Conversation retracts an article about the transatlantic slave trade for affiliation issues.
- “Facts are in crisis. What are we going to do?”
- “South Africa moves to punish scientists acting ‘improperly.’”
- “The emerging submission crisis in behavioral science.”
- “The Shocking Speed of China’s Scientific Rise” includes cash rewards to scientists for publications alongside questions of quality and research influence.
- “For open research to work, research institutions and publishers need to collaborate.”
- “Restoring Trust in Science: Storytelling, AI, and Integrity in Scholarly Publishing“: A recorded webinar featuring our Ivan Oransky.
- “Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more,” from a UK cancer research charity.
- “Policies Permitting LLM Use for Polishing Peer Reviews Are Currently Not Enforceable,” say researchers.
- “Predatory university rankings jeopardise the value of Webometrics.”
- Former medical school dean earns another retraction, this one for data concerns.
- “The real threat to trust in science isn’t outright fraud, but the pervasive tweaking of research designs and models.”
- “Cite unseen: when AI hallucinates scientific articles.” And “Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?”
- “Laboratory workers can shape sustainable practices without affecting scientific quality.”
- “Anonymisation in research must be overhauled for AI era.”
- “Most research fails not because the science is poor, but because the systems surrounding it are misaligned with how scientific evidence is produced, used, and sustained.”
- “How to Lie with Statistics with your Robot Best Friend.”
- THOR, HERCULES, BATHAM and AVATAR: “The Ethics and Psychology of Oncology Trial Acronyms.”
- A retraction correction: “The first bullet point in this Retraction notice … incorrectly refers to a forest plot as a funnel plot.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam's Death Was a Homicide
On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.
In the Birthright Citizenship Hearing, a Story of Asians Fighting for Rights
"In the decades before and after the Wong lawsuit, immigrants from China, Japan and India fought an immigration system that tried to keep people like them from entering the United States and from becoming American citizens. Taken together, the cases reflect a body of case law, beyond that of Wong Kim Ark, that has shaped the American immigration system for more than a hundred years."
Birthright citizenship made me American. We can't lose it.
"Make no mistake: The birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court is not some isolated policy debate. It's part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to put an end to multiracial democracy as we know it, by making it harder for communities of color to live, work, study and build a life in the United States."
BEEF: Season 2 | Official Trailer
Netflix has debuted the first full trailer for the second installment of the Emmy-winning series BEEF. Trading the parking lot for the country club, the new season begins when a young couple witnesses an alarming fight between their boss and his wife -- setting off a high-stakes game of favors and coercion within an elitist world ruled by a Korean billionaire. Created and produced by Lee Sung Jin, season two stars Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Charles Melton, Cailee Spaeny and guest starring Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho. Beef season two premieres April 16.
2026 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
Heads up! The 2026 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival has announced its official program lineup. If you're in Southern California, you have to check out this perennial celebration and showcase of film, culture and community. (Full disclosure: I am board member of the festival's presenting organization, Visual Communications.) From narratives to documentaries, shorts and special presentations, this is a chance to see exciting cinematic works from seasoned and up-and-coming AAPI filmmakers. LAAPFF runs April 29 to May 3 at venues around the Los Angeles area. See you there.
2. I got donuts this morning on my walk before we headed to the airport so that was a nice breakfast.
3. I miss the kitties but Alex sent some pics while we were on the plane so that was nice to see when we arrived and had cell service again.
Music: local Brummies have been breaking out the vintage Black Sabbath recently for obvious reasons, especially Paranoid, 1970, their second album (and second within a year) featuring three classic "heavy metal" songs with Geezer Butler's lyrics - one supportive of mental health problems, one discouraging drug-taking (especially heroin), and their best known which is an anti-war song specifically targeting the wars that politicians inflict on the rest of us:
"Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor"
uKanDanz covers War Pigs with Asnake Gebreyes singing in Amharic (brave guy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kVYdLjoyPE
And then there's Ozzy Osbourne's anti-war Crazy Train, 1980, especially beloved in his native Birmingham. Live, 1981, with Randy Rhoades:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui79Uf817YA
"Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate"
- Location:Black Sabbath Bridge, Broad Street, Birmingham
I am a research ethicist and often get asked by my university to investigate when potential concerns are raised about our staff or students. One example involved the recent case of the alleged paper mill and self-citation activities by Hitler Louis and Innocent Benjamin. The matter raised significant questions about who within the research community has the responsibility to act when concerns like this are raised.
Regular readers of Retraction Watch know that detecting alleged research misconduct is a haphazard affair. Frequently a university will find out about concerns after being notified by research integrity sleuths writing under pseudonyms. In this case, “Cisticola Tinniens” informed us that one of our current MSc students (Benjamin) had an unusually high number of publications for his early career stage, with some highlighted on the PubPeer website as potentially problematic.
The first thing we did was to check to see whether our university was named in any of these papers, as clearly institutions do have a responsibility for research attributed to our researchers or students. We found only one of the suspect papers named us directly, and since the work definitely had not occurred at our institution, it was relatively easy to get this affiliation corrected almost immediately.
But what about all the other problematic papers with no direct link to our university? It was difficult to know what more could be done beyond telling Cisticola Tinniens to contact the journals. Although Benjamin was now one of our students, what right did we have to interfere with supposedly peer-reviewed papers published by an expert academic journal prior to the individual arriving to study with us?
We hoped this would be the end of the case, but were surprised to receive yet more correspondence about a year or so later, well after the end of the student’s course. At this point, many of the problematic papers had been investigated and retracted. Yet Cisticola Tinniens and others on PubPeer seemed to think we should take further action.
We disagreed. Researchers move frequently between institutions, so if work cannot be directly linked back to a specific institution, what right does that institution have to take further action? Realistically there is little more a university can do except maybe revoke degrees, but this would be very difficult to justify if there is no obvious link between retractions and the work required for the degree itself.
Frustratingly, the increasing sophistication of generative AI, pressures created by the academic publish-or-perish culture, and the opportunity for financial profit make it increasingly easy for individuals to undermine the reliability of the research record. This is and should concern all of us but, as in this case, the responsibility for correcting the research record is shared.
If concerns are raised about the content of research papers, the journal editors who approved such papers for publication are the people best placed (and supposedly with the specific subject matter expertise) to investigate concerns. This is especially so due to an increasing trend for legitimate academic disagreements to be turned into research misconduct complaints, especially when there are strong differences of opinion. As an institution, we can pass on concerns as we did here, but the responsibility for making the difficult judgment as to the difference between a legitimate academic disagreement and research misconduct must sit with the relevant expert community represented by the journal editor.
As an academic, I care deeply about the accuracy of the research record and am frustrated by how easily some people are able to take advantage of the system without any apparent consequences. But while universities as employers and awarders of degrees do have a certain amount of power, they cannot be expected to take on the (sometimes legal) risk and burden of sanctioning all failures across the research process.
If journals in particular want to make large profits by representing and controlling the research literature, they also need to take responsibility to stop situations like this from occurring in the first place. If they prove to be ineffective at preventing fraudulent publications or managing effective peer review, it is yet more evidence that the research publication system is broken and needs replacing with alternative ways of judging and communicating research.
Simon Kolstoe is an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Portsmouth, U.K. His research focuses on the role of ethics committees and governance processes in promoting research integrity.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.
Mamdani tells New Yorkers to stop catcalling people in new anti-street harassment campaign
Keep your thoughts to yourself! Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants construction workers and others around the Big Apple to stop catcalling and making unwanted verbal advances to passersby on NYC streets, announcing his demand through a new ad campaign launching Wednesday.
'Where Would I Go If I Am Denaturalized?'
"This executive order, if it should come to pass, it has no backward barrier. It could also look at anybody who is the child of people who are undocumented. And all of those people, no matter when or how old they are or when they were born in America, could have their citizenship removed. Where would I go? Would I be deported to an El Salvadoran prison?"
Detained by ICE, he missed multiple cancer treatments. Now he’s in hospice.
Some immigrants with chronic health problems were swept up by ICE, leading to untreated injuries, denial of life-sustaining medications and, for one man, missed chemotherapy sessions. Critics say the Department of Homeland Security is shirking federal standards that require detainees to have access to basic medicine.
Avatar: The Last Airbender: Season 2 | Date Announcement
Season two of Netflix's live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender will drop on June 25th. Here's a behind-the-scenes featurette catching up with Gordon Cormier (Aang), Kiawentiio (Katara), Ian Ousley (Sokka), Dallas Liu (Zuko), Elizabeth Yu (Azula) and Miyako (Toph), and a preview of what’s in store for fans.
In Jesa, Jeena Yi Wrote the Asian American Family Drama She Always Wanted to Be In
"As an actor, the one lament I had was there was never a show that I could be in. If it's about a family, you have to kind of look like the family. Often the families are white, so I could never be a member of the family unless it was specifically written in a certain way or somebody was doing a very specific take." So Jeena Yi wrote her own Korean American family drama.
Lawful Asian immigrants would be disproportionately affected if birthright citizenship ends.
If President Trump succeeds in eliminating universal birthright citizenship, there could be 6.4 million U.S.-born children without legal status by 2050, according to a new study. In addition to affecting undocumented immigrants in the country, the authors say, that change would have a disproportionate effect on Asians who are in the country lawfully.
ACLU’s Cecillia Wang Argues Trump Birthright Order Is Unconstitutional
Here's the audio of Cecillia Wang, National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, aguing in the Supreme Court that Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.
This Man’s Great-Grandfather Made Millions of People Americans
Norman Wong, the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, is a 76-year-old retired carpenter living outside San Francisco. His family has not only fought for the constitutional right to citizenship, they're painfully aware of what it looks like when that citizenship, once won, can be used against you.
Padma Lakshmi: The Decision That Would Create a Permanent American Underclass
"If the Supreme Court doesn't block this executive order, it would create a mess of legal and logistical consequences. Confusion would replace certainty, opening the door to discrimination and a patchwork of rules governing noncitizens' access to our society. Hundreds of thousands of children born in the United States would be thrown into legal limbo every year. And the harm would compound. Ending birthright citizenship would create a permanent underclass of people born in the country but cut off from the rights that citizenship provides."
Member of burglary ring targeting Asian business owners in Oregon pleads guilty
In Oregon, one of seven members of an alleged burglary ring that has targeted Asian American business owners across the state has pleaded guilty. 45-year-old Jhon Alexander Quintero was part of a group that burglarized Oregon and Washington residences starting in early October 2025. The group identified and watched potential victims, performed reconaissance on their homes, then ransacked the residences. Each of the victims were Asian Americans who owned businesses, and were working at the time of the burglaries.
A judge has dismissed a legal challenge aimed at forcing Elsevier to retract a long-criticized study that concluded the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens.
The 2001 paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), has faced scrutiny for more than 20 years by critics who say the study has led to unwarranted and potentially harmful prescribing of the drug to youth. As we reported last October, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper shortly after a lawsuit was filed by attorney George W. Murgatroyd III against the journal’s owner, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and Elsevier, which publishes the title.
In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Murgatroyd claimed the journal is violating the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by continuing to “publish, distribute, and sell a fraudulent scientific article that contains material facts” that mislead the public and endanger adolescent mental health and safety. AACAP and Elsevier are profiting from the article by charging readers to buy access to the paper, according to the complaint.
Attorneys for AACAP argue Murgatroyd does not have standing to bring the complaint. On Nov. 24, 2025, Elsevier filed a motion to dismiss, reiterating the standing argument and also asserting the publisher’s First Amendment rights would be violated if the court granted the relief sought by Murgatroyd, according to court documents.
In a March 24 decision, Judge Robert Okun granted Elsevier’s motion to dismiss for lack of standing. Murgatroyd can’t move forward with the suit because he failed to establish “or even plausibly” allege the journal article is a consumer good or service under the CPPA, according to Okun’s ruling. The CPPA defines a consumer good or service as anything someone would purchase or receive and normally use for personal, household or family purposes.
JAACAP and AACAP did not return messages seeking comment.
A spokesperson for Elsevier said the publisher “notes the Court’s decision to dismiss the case.”
“As this matter has been resolved by the Court, we do not have further comment,” the spokesperson said.
Murgatroyd, who previously represented families whose children died by suicide after taking Paxil, said he was disappointed with the ruling. However, he doesn’t see the decision as “the end of the story,” he told us.
Okun dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning Murgatroyd could refile the complaint under a revised legal argument. Murgatroyd told us he is currently researching the possibility.
“The good news is we got the EoC,” he told us in an email.
Murgatroyd is also awaiting the results of the journal’s investigation into the paper, which JAACAP has stated will be managed according to Committee on Publication Ethics recommendations and guidance.
The 2001 JAACCP paper described the results of a randomized, controlled trial, known as “Study 329,” evaluating the efficacy of Paxil in treating adolescent depression. The study concluded the drug was safe and effective in kids ages 12 to 18.
In 2012, Paxil maker GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $3 billion to settle civil and criminal charges that included “unlawful promotion” of the drug for adolescents, for whom the product was never approved, and allegations the company “participated in preparing, publishing and distributing a misleading medical journal article.”
A reanalysis in 2015 found the drug was “ineffective and unsafe” for the age group studied. Despite the developments and ongoing calls for retraction, the 2025 expression of concern was the paper’s first mark by the publisher. The notice states:
JAACAP is publishing this expression of concern in order to alert readers to concerns that have been raised about the article. Further review is underway, and an expression of concern will continue to be associated with the article until an outcome is reached.
Murgatroyd’s legal complaint against AACAP and Elsevier sought relief in the form of a retraction of the paper and reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.
He has also filed formal complaints with Elsevier’s Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board regarding the continued indexing of the Paxil article and JAACAP as an organization. He has filed similar complaints with the National Library of Medicine and Clarivate Web of Science, he said.
The NLM complaint requests the library initiate a formal reevaluation of JAACAP‘scontinued participation in MEDLINE and PubMed Central, based on the journal’s “documented and systemic failure to follow COPE retraction guidelines” and ensure the expression of concern on the JAACAP article is “prominently and accurately reflected” in PubMed’s citation record.
Murgatroyd has also asked JAACAP to send him the results of its investigation when it has concluded. If the review is appropriately conducted in adherence with COPE guidelines and doesn’t result in a retraction, the outcome would be “more than disappointing,” he told us.
“That would be outrageous,” he said. “The battle is not over yet, so we will see where it goes over the next several weeks.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.
Warning for animal abuse, homelessness, trans issues (sometimes handled with offensive cluelessness), and implied child sexual abuse. Not all in the same story, though, this ain’t Crossed.
“Frenzy” by Mark Waid and Rod Wigham is a tense sci-fi thriller with a dynamite elevator pitch: Which of these six trapped heroes will kill the other five?
( You might think the answer is ‘‘obviously Guy Gardner,’’ but maybe that’s just what they want you to think. )
In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.
In February, Evgenios Agathokleous, an environmental resources researcher at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology in China, asked Prime Scholars’ European Journal of Experimental Biology to retract a 2023 article that listed him as the sole author. In his email to the journal, he said he had never seen the paper and asked the journal to remove it and publish a formal retraction notice.
Two days later, a Prime Scholars representative named Nina responded, telling Agathokleous “your article has already been successfully published in our journal in accordance with the company’s publication norms and policies.” Nina then asked Agathokleous to pay 519 euros, the equivalent of roughly $600, which they said “covers the costs associated with publication handling, indexing preparation, and database maintenance.”
Agathokleous refused, and hasn’t heard from the publisher since, despite repeated attempts to get the journal to retract the article.
In 2022, Prime Scholars published articles in its British Journal of Research it claimed were written by William Faulkner, Walt Whitman and Charlotte Brontë, among other literary legends. Those articles remain online.
The journal is listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports, along with 50 other Prime Scholars publications, for violations of its criteria on peer review, among others.
The ISSN for the journal is registered in India. However, the mailing address for the publisher is the same as that for Walsh Medical Media — a publisher that recently held a paper hostage in a similar manner.
The European Journal of Experimental Biology was formerly published by Pelagia Research Library, according to the journal’s archived volumes. Pelagia Research Library has been tied to OMICS, a publisher who was asked to pay the U.S. government $50 million for “unfair and deceptive practices.” As we wrote last year, Walsh Medical Media also has ties to OMICS.
One of the listed editors is “Hugo Val, Research professor” at the State University of Amazonas in Brazil. We could not find any record of that university — although University of the State of Amazonas and Amazonas State University are both institutions in Brazil — nor could we identify a biochemist or bacteriologist named Hugo Val.
Hamed Kioumarsi, a researcher at the Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization in Iran, is also listed as an editor. Kioumarsi’s LinkedIn profile lists his editorial positions at several other journals but does not mention the European Journal of Experimental Biology. He responded to our email asking whether he was affiliated with the journal with: “Dear editor, Thank you for reaching out. I have no problem with this.” He did not respond when we clarified that we were contacting him as journalists, not as representatives from the journal.
A representative from Prime Scholars responded to our email, stating they forwarded our question to “our respective team and soon they will resolve it.” Our message to the email address listed on the European Journal of Experimental Biology’s website went unanswered.
The publication ethics statement on the journal’s website states the European Journal of Experimental Biology follows “International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) principles on the way to affect acts of misconduct thereby committing to research allegations of misconduct to make sure the integrity of research [sic].”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.
2. I timed this last puzzle just right. Actually finished it yesterday but forgot to include it in my post. This was a 500 piece one, so it went quickly. Very cute, though I'm not sure it's one that needs to be saved, so I probably will put it out in the little library.
3. The neighbors are doing some construction on their garage and I'm glad that we are going to be gone for two weeks. Hopefully they'll be all or mostly done with it by the time we get back. Bad enough having construction on each end of the street, but this is right up against us, so much noisier.
4. It rained last night. Enough to get things wet, but not enough to be a bother, and it started after my evening walk and finished up by the morning, which is really the perfect window for rain, IMO.
5. I got some super cute pics of Molly last night, poking her head out of the curtains.
Just FYI, I will be posting during the trip, but just short text posts, no pics. Cat pics will be posted daily over on bluesky, and I will do massive vacation/Universal Studios/Disney posts when we get back, like last time.
Recently Finished
If You See Me, Don't Say Hi
A collection of short stories by an Indian American author centered around romantic relationships. They were good, but felt very samey. I think I would have enjoyed them more on their own than all together.
The Coffee Shop Detectives
Heist novel featuring a group of women in their sixties who decide to steal a valuable broach from the man who killed their friend forty years ago but was never punished, in order to pay for experimental cancer treatment for one of them. I really loved this! Listened to it as an audiobook and the narrator was great, too.
Black Cats and Butlers
Middle grade mystery set in an alternative Victorian England. When the MC's beloved butler is murdered, she is determined to find out who did it. This was cute, but I didn't like it enough to want to continue the series.
Ana on the Edge
Middle grade book about an ice skater coming to terms with being non-binary. I loved this so much! I did find it a bit unrealistic that despite living in San Francisco and having gay friends (including her coach), neither Ana nor her mom seem to have heard of trans people at all (even binary trans people). I also was surprised ( spoiler ) But those are minor quibbles and overall this is a great book.
The Inugami Curse
Second in the English translation series order of the Kindaichi Kosuke mysteries. I liked this one even more than the first. Definitely looking forward to reading more.
"There's something I believe Grant Morrison came up with in Arkham Asylum with Dave McKean: that the Joker has super-sanity; he has to reinvent himself every day to try and keep up with all the stimuli the world throws at him that he can't regulate. And I have a friend who's a neurobiologist, and we were talking about stuff, and I read things about people with profound, untreatable depression issues.
"And this guy built a cap that regulates electricity. He had a patient whose entire life was depressive episodes, suicide attempts, institutionalisations, in an endless cycle, and at some point, on an MRI or a CT scan or something, he saw that some part of her brain wasn't lighting up as it should be. And he went to RadioShack and just made it; it literally just pings the dark parts of her mind. And at the time of the article, her life had changed. She had held a job for more than one year, and she was engaged to be married, like everything was different for this woman. It's just kind of playing with all this stuff like, what if that super sanity is generating like all this electrical activity beyond what people are supposed to have in your brain, and that's why he's so thin all the time, he's like just burning like a marathon's worth of calories every day, just being alive… And what happens if you stop that? That's where we meet our boy is in a tube, and because now his metabolism has stopped, he's not wraith-like and thin anymore." -- Matt Fraction
( Scans under the cut... )
I wish you all joy, this Day of Fools! And to aid in that joy, I bring gifts! I took up a dare to write smut in words of just one sound:
'Sex' is a Word of One SoundHuge thanks to
My Jet Now Air
Word Games, The Game Where Speech Must Be Kept Down to Words of One Sound, Smut
Doug and Car are both too good at the game of words of one sound. But Herc has a plan: if the two of them bonk their brains out, one of them might win the game at last…
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phoenixfalls and grrlpup — grrlpup read the whole thing out loud from back to front, one word at a time, to find the spots where I messed up!I've not read the whole fest yet, but let me rec some good tales:
- It's not all about your corazón by
Petra (Jane Who Has Not Had Sex, Ro/Xo) — a gift for meeeeeeeeee, yay!
- Hear Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me by
- Herc and Sir Sext with Words of One Sound by
- Xenk and Ed in the Yard by phoenixfalls (what it says on the tin!)
Have a great Day of Fools, and stay safe out there!
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- retraction_feed : Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’ [+0]
- scans_daily :: heartsways : Venom #256 [+31]
- scans_daily :: tcampbell1000 : I(nvidious) Q(uarantine): JUSTICE LEAGUE QUARTERLY #9 (JLI 77) [+17]
- retraction_feed : Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage [+0]
- torachan : Daily Happiness [+16]
- torachan : Weekly Reading [+0]
- scans_daily :: cyberghostface : Batman #7 [+8]
- sanguinity : [fic] Smut in Words of One Sound [+2]
- scans_daily :: heartsways : Disney Villains: Ursula #1 [+2]
chasethestars