Babylon 5 fic: Green Growing Things
Mar. 17th, 2026 10:38 pmGreen Growing Things (Londo & G'Kar, 2800 wds)
It is post-canon, and there are gardens.
( Fic also posted under the cut )
( Bonus extras from Tumblr )
Ever get super distracted by writing software (scrivener, obsidian) that's supposed to make your life easier and you just want to scream because you can't focus? AAAAAA At this point I'm resorting to using plain text in focus writer, because at least that way I can have a pretty background image and my text full screen with literally NOTHING else distracting me.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.
This morning I wrote to another friend, "I've finished reading Amal's new collection, and now the only problem is how to write a review that's laudatory enough." "A good problem to have," my friend correctly noted.
Seriously, though. I've read most of these stories before, but when I came to each one, it was a matter of, "Oh, I loved this one!" rather than "Oh yeah, this one." There is a stylistic and thematic inclination to the stories that never rises to sameness. It's such a distillation of why I have been consistently happy to see these stories (and a few poems!) in the venues where they've appeared, for the years they've been appearing.
If you were hoping that this would be a source of new Amal stories, you'll have to keep waiting, this is the kind of collection that's a culmination of previous work rather than a revelation of new. But it's a beautiful slim volume, I'm thrilled to have it, I will press it upon my friends and relations, hurrah. Hurrah.
Am still being harried by spam from those dodgy-sounding conferences of very little relevance to my actual interests, happening in v attractive places:
International Conference on Time Series and Forecasting (ITISE 2026) (wot is this even), Gran Canaria (Spain).
6th Current Issues in Business and Economic Studies (CIBES) Conference at the University of Valencia.
13th International Congress of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (okay, is brushing somewhere in the region of Stuff I Have Worked On?) in Kyoto.
But really, YOY?
A new twist on this has appeared via my shiny new academic email address: really weird journals giving themselves out as academic that sound totally synthetic -
Journal of High Speed Networks (not as far as I can see associated with even one of the less esteemed academic journal publishers):
a forum in which researchers from academia and industry can address a wide range of topics related to high performance networking and communication and report findings on concepts; state of the art, emerging standards and technologies; implementations; running experiments; applications; and industrial case studies. Coverage can range from design to practical experiences with operational high performance/speed networks including communication network architectures; evolutionary networking protocols, services, and architectures; and network security.
As, I suspect, is this one:
Invitation to Join Mesopotamian Journal of AI in Healthcare (MJAIH) Editorial Board. - there is in fact a website for the Mesopotamian Academic Press (I see they also publish Babylonian Journals of this and that.
Even without the complete mismatch to my actual realms of expertise here I am sceptical about this enterprise.