Today in my craft post, I'm going to talk about a straightforward skill… while referencing a book that's wonderfully un-straightforward.

H Is for Hawk is a memoir by Helen Macdonald that weaves together several threads, the three biggest of which are: her experience of training a northern goshawk; her analysis of T. H. White's memoir about training a northern goshawk; and her grief following the death of her father. In terms of balance and weaving, it's beautifully done. In terms of psychological insight, it feels searingly true. And in terms of the expression of emotion, it's stunning.

It's also an uncomfortable book at times, in ways that recommend it. And it's a fascinating memoir for a fiction writer to read while thinking about how to write character. H Is for Hawk left me with a lot of questions, for the book and for myself.

If you just want the straightforward writing lesson, which is on the topic of writing emotion, jump ahead to the *** below. If you're interested in a fiction writer's thoughts about memoir, read on.

I sat down to read H is for Hawk because a friend had described its structure and I was intrigued. I'm not a memoir writer; it's far too personal a style of writing for me. But I like to read books that differ greatly from my own writing, and I especially like to learn to write from them. After all, the more a book diverges from your own writing, the more it can stretch you into a broader perspective of what's possible. I was curious about what a memoir that weaves separate but related threads could teach me about writing a work of fiction that weaves separate but related threads; but I was also curious about what it could teach me that I didn't know about yet.

Here are some of the unexpected questions that arose for me while reading this book:

In terms of writing character (if one can use that word with a memoir, and I believe one can; more on that later), what are the differences between memoir and fiction?

For example, what advantages does the memoir writer have? Does a reader come to a memoir with a greater willingness to believe in a character than they bring to the reading of fiction? A fiction writer often has to go through a lot of contortions to keep a character believable while also fulfilling the necessities of the plot. Push the character's behavior too far outside the characterization you've so carefully established, and the behavior becomes unbelievable. The reader is left thinking, "I don't believe they would actually do that."

In contrast, in a memoir, a character is an actual person. They did what they did. The memoir writer reports what they did and we believe it, because it's a memoir. Any "unbelievable" behavior consequently brings power with it: amusement, surprise, shock value. (This is not to minimize the work it requires to make any character in any kind of book engaging. I don't mean to suggest that a memoir writer has an easy job creating character, only that they may have a believability advantage.)

Okay then, what advantages does the fiction writer have when writing character? Well, the fiction writer can make shit up; that's a pretty huge advantage. The fiction writer also generally doesn't have to worry about getting sued for defamation of character :o).

Another huge advantage: Though it's true that as a fiction writer I sometimes encounter readers who mistakenly assume I'm like my characters, for the most part, fiction readers remember that fiction is made up. This means that the fiction writer is unlikely to be accused of having done the things their characters did, or judged for that behavior. In contrast, a memoir writer writing about her own actions is opening herself to all kinds of very personal judgment. All writing requires courage and involves exposure… But this takes things to a whole other level! Fiction writers have some built-in emotional protections that I tend to take for granted, until I read a memoir and remember.

This leads me to another question that arose while reading this book: What is the place of the memoir reader when it comes to judging the people inside the memoir? For example, Helen Macdonald writes a compassionate but blistering exposé of T. H. White in this book. It's an exposé that T. H. White wrote first; anyone can learn from White's own memoir that he was heartbreakingly, sometimes sadistically abusive to the goshawk he trained. But Macdonald presents it anew, and she presents it with an analysis of White's psychology that shows us more about White than he ever meant us to know. She shows us the abuse, familial and societal, that brought White to this place. She shows us his heartbreak, failures, and shame. White feels like an integrated, complete person in this book.

But also, she shows us what she wants to show us — she shows us the parts of White that fit into her own book, about her own experiences. She's the writer, and this is her memoir. To be clear, I don't mean this as a condemnation — I'm not accusing her of leaving things out or misrepresenting White! This is a part of all book-writing. You include what matters to the rest of your book. Everything else ends up on the cutting room floor. As far as I know, Macdonald did a respectful and responsible job of incorporating T. H. White into her book, and I expect she worked very hard to do so. I believe in the T. H. White she showed us. But I think it's important to remember this part of the process when reading any memoir. Even when a writer is writing about themselves, their book has plot and themes, it has content requirements. There'll always be something specific the writer is trying to convey, about themselves or anyone else, and there'll always be stuff they leave out. No book can contain a whole person.

Personally, when I read memoir (and biography and autobiography), I consciously consider the people inside it to function as characters. It's hard to read H Is for Hawk and not come away with some pretty strong opinions about T. H. White. But I keep a permanent asterisk next to my opinions, because White was a real, living person, but I only know him as a character in this book. No matter how many books I read about him (or by him), I'll always be conscious of not knowing the whole person.

As a fiction writer, I find all of this fascinating. I think it's because I see connections between how hard it is to present a compelling character study of a real person and how hard it is to create a believable character in fiction. What are the differences between a memoir writer who's figuring out which part of the truth matters, and a fiction writer who's creating a fiction that's supposed to invoke truth? Also, I'm fascinated by how much all of this lines up with how hard it is to understand anyone in real life. How well can we ever know anyone? How much can we ever separate our own baggage from our judgments of other people? There's a third person getting in the way of my perfect understanding of T. H. White: me.

Next question: How does a writer (of memoir or fiction) make a character ring true to the reader? How does the writer make the character compelling and real?

A writer as skilled as Macdonald knows how to bring her characters, human or hawk, alive for the reader. One way she does this is by keeping her characterizations always in motion. White is many, many things — kind and cruel, sensitive and sadistic, abused and despotic. Macdonald's hawk, Mabel, is also constantly growing and changing. Mabel is a point of personal connection for Macdonald, but she's also always just out of reach. And of course, Macdonald herself is a character in the book. Macdonald lays bare her own successes, failures, oddities, cruelties, kindnesses, insights, ambivalences, and delights, and lets us decide. Personally, as I read, I felt that I was meeting a human of sensitivity and compassion; an anxious person whose need for both solitude and connection was starkly familiar to me; someone consciously composed of contradictions; a person of deep feeling who cares about what matters; a grieving daughter; a person I can relate to. Or should I say, a character I can relate to? Having read this book, I don't presume I know Helen Macdonald.

Here's something I do know about Helen Macdonald though: She's a damn good writer. In particular, as I read, I kept noticing one specific thing she does so well that it needs to be called out and shown to other writers.





All page references are to the 2014 paperback published by Grove Press.

Okay, writers. When it comes to writing a character's emotion, there's a certain skill at which Helen Macdonald excels. Namely, she conveys emotion via action.

Put differently: rather than describing an emotion in words, Macdonald shows us a behavior, one so meaningful that we readers feel the associated emotion immediately.

Here's an example. For context, Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly one March, throwing her into a deep and unexpected grief. Listen to this description of one of the things that happened next:

"In June I fell in love, predictably and devastatingly, with a man who ran a mile when he worked out how broken I was. His disappearance rendered me practically insensible. Though I can't even bring his face to mind now, and though I know not only why he ran, but know that in principle he could have been anyone, I still have a red dress that I will never wear again. That's how it goes." (17)

While there is some effective emotional description here — like when she's rendered practically insensible — the real punch in this passage is the red dress. Macdonald tells us that there's a red dress she'll never wear again, and immediately I get it. I get that the identity of the man is irrelevant; what's relevant is the passion she had for another person and how it connected to her grief, and I feel that passion and grief because there's a red dress she'll never wear again. I can see the dress, hidden away in the back of her closet. I don't have a dress like that, but I could. I get it.

Here's another moment. This one takes place at a much later point, when Macdonald has been grieving for a long time and is finally noticing that she's capable of happiness again:

"But watching television from the sofa later that evening I noticed tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps I am allergic to something. I wipe the tears away and go to make more tea in the kitchen" (125).

It's hard to write about tears in a way that doesn't feel like a cliché shorthand for sadness, grief, catharsis, whatever you're trying to get across in that moment. Macdonald succeeds here. This dispassionate report of tears conveys what Macdonald needs to convey: that grief is layered; that a person can have many feelings at once; that sometimes your body knows what's going on before the rest of you does; that when you're grieving, sometimes happiness brings with it a tidal wave of sadness. But imagine if Macdonald had listed all those things I just listed, instead of telling us about her tears dropping into her tea. Her way is so much better, and it conveys the same information!

Let me be clear, it's not bad to describe emotion. In fact, it's necessary in places. You need to give your reader an emotional baseline so that they'll know how to contextualize how plot points feel for the character. But if you can find a balance between emotional description and the thing Macdonald is doing here — using action to convey emotion — it will gives the emotion in your writing a freshness, an impact, a punch that you can't get from description alone. It will also give the reader more opportunities to engage their own feelings — to feel things all by themselves, rather than merely understanding what's being felt by the character.

It's hard to write emotion. It's especially hard to figure out non-cliché ways to explain how a character feels. Sometimes it's fine to use a known shorthand or a cliché. Sometimes it's fine to use emotional description. You want a mix of things. But Macdonald's book reminds me that whenever I can, I want to look for ways to use plot to convey feeling. Show what my character does in response to a stimulus. Let the reader glean the emotions from behavior. Your character is happy? Show us what they do with their body. How do they stand, how do they walk? Does it make them generous? Does it make them self-centered and oblivious? Remember that an "action" doesn't have to be something physically, boisterously active. If you're writing a non-demonstrative character, it's not going to ring true if they start flinging their arms around or singing while they walk down the street. But maybe instead of "feeling ecstatic," they sit still for a moment, reveling in what just happened. Maybe instead of "feeling jubilant," they listen to a song playing inside their own head. Internally or externally, show us what they do.

Here's Macdonald describing her childhood obsession with birds:

"When I was six I tried to sleep every night with my arms folded behind my back like wings. This didn't last long, because it is very hard to sleep with your arms folded behind your back like wings." (27)

I can feel the devotion to birds. She doesn't just love birds; she wants to be a bird.

Macdonald goes on to report that as a child, she learned everything she possibly could about falconry, then shared every word of it, no matter how boring, with anyone who would listen. Macdonald's mother was a writer for the local paper. Here's a description of her mother during the delivery of one of Macdonald's lectures:

"Lining up another yellow piece of copy paper, fiddling with the carbons so they didn't slip, she'd nod and agree, drag on her cigarette, and tell me how interesting it all was in tones that avoided dismissiveness with extraordinary facility." (29)

What an endearing depiction of a mother's love for her tedious child :o).

And here's a scene that takes place at a country fair, where Macdonald has agreed to display her goshawk, Mabel, to the public. Macdonald is sitting on a chair under a marquee roof. Mabel is positioned on a perch ten feet behind her. There are so many people at the fair, too many people for the likes of both Macdonald and Mabel:

"After twenty minutes Mabel raises one foot. It looks ridiculous. She is not relaxed enough to fluff out her feathers; she still resembles a wet and particoloured seal. But she makes this small concession to calmness, and she stands there like a man driving with one hand resting on the gear stick." (206)

Oh, Mabel. I get the sense that when it comes to the writer's need to convey emotion, Mabel is a challenging character. Macdonald does such a wonderful job creating a sense of the gulf between a human's reality and a hawk's reality, the differences in perception and priority. But she also gives us moments of connection with Mabel. Since Mabel is a bird, these moments of connection are almost always described through Mabel's behavior.

I wonder if Macdonald's intense connection with the non-human world, and with hawks in particular, is partly what makes her so good at noticing behaviors and gleaning their emotional significance? And then sharing it with us, the lucky readers.

That's it. That's my lesson: When you're trying to convey feelings, find places where an action or behavior will do the job.

And read H Is for Hawk if you want an admirable example of writing emotion! Also, Helen Macdonald has a new book, just released: Vesper Flights. I'm in.

Reading like a writer.

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Today’s the final day of (the final hours, at this point) of the Seventy Maxims Reprint project. Here, then is a nice origin story for you, the origin of Maxim 32.

I was signing and sketching at GenCon Indy a decade or so ago when some young men approached the table. They were what a friend of mine likes to call “baby sailors”: relatively new members of the US Navy. One of them said “we have a suggestion for a maxim.”

I smiled. “Let’s hear it.”

“Anything is amphibious if you can fit it into an AAV.”

I chuckled. “That’s pretty good, but the term ‘AAV’ is too specific for Schlock Mercenary use.” Then I went silent, stared off into the distance, and I guess this made everyone uncomfortable because our Booth Captain, Darren, spoke next.

“Shhh… don’t interrupt him. The magic is happening.”

It’s true, I’d been wondering how this US Navy aphorism could be repurposed, but I had expected to be able to mull it over all day. Now, however, Darren had turned it into the promise of performance art. Did I curse silently? Maybe. I don’t remember, because I was panicking.

Still staring into space, trying not to show fear, I dove into the “formulae” for the maxims. I knew that many of the maxims were subversions of existing aphorisms. Several of them formed thematic couplets, like Maxims 2 and 3 (“a sergeant in motion” and “an ordnance tech in motion”) are a great example of this. And Maxim 23, “Anything is air-droppable at least once,” seemed like a good candidate for pairing with what the Navy boys had suggested, especially since “Anything is air-droppable” and “Anything is amphibious” were already pretty close.

All I needed to do was break the amphibious-ness in the same way I’d broken the air-droppability… and I think it was that moment, when I contemplated “breaking” amphibious-ness, when the final text arrived in my head.

“Anything is amphibious if you can get it back out of the water.”

A quick note. The United States Navy exists to keep things DRY. Everything except the hulls, really. The very idea of dropping something into the water that is not already a boat, runs counter to Navy thinking.

So it’s no surprise that those Navy boys were visibly horrified by my subversion of their aphorism. “That’s terrible” one of them said. And then they started to laugh.

And then I wrote Maxim 32 in my notebook, because obviously it was perfect.

Sandra Tayler, whom you may know as the editor, publisher, project manager, and so much more behind Schlock Mercenary, is crowdfunding a book called STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY.

I can personally vouch for the principles and practices presented in this book, but that’s probably kind of obvious. Sandra has worked with many other people and organizations over the last decade, so this book is far, far more than just (!) the life experience of someone who wrangled a single cartoonist into profitability while managing her own career writing children’s books and short stories.

Follow the links above to read more about the project. It has funded, and just yesterday Sandra crossed the “we get to make an audiobook” stretch goal. The project closes in two days, though, so if you want to throw some momentum into it on the home stretch, now’s the time.

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Kevin Federline is a popular disk jockey, dancer, and actor, arguably best known for his first marriage to pop star Britney Spears. As a dancer, he has worked with the likes of Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and Pink. He also appeared alongside Spears on a reality TV series called Britney and Kevin: Chaotic. But, Federline […]

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Ахтям Сакаев из компании Яндекс предложил изменение для включения в Java-библиотеку Reactor, связанное с добавлением в объект Flux метода "unfold" для генерации последовательностей в стиле Scala и Haskell. Несмотря на то, что изменение содержит всего несколько строк кода, поведение которого очевидно, сопровождающие проект отказались принимать изменение по юридическим причинам. Библиотеку Reactor развивает проект Spring, контролируемый компанией VMware, которая год назад была поглощена Broadcom. Майкл Минелла (Michael Minella), занимающий в Broadcom пост директора по развитию открытого проекта Spring, пояснил, что компания Broadcom должна соблюдать экспортные ограничения США и не может принимать изменения от источников из России.

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This is too honest by far, and I wonder if it is perhaps unhelpful for me to talk openly about. Vulnerable is hard. But, I would have loved to have read this years ago, so let’s do this: I want to talk about how much I write, and my current experiment of writing 500 words […]

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We speak with former Ohio state senator and Bernie Sanders presidential campaign staffer Nina Turner about how the 2024 election has left her and many voters “frustrated” and “exhausted.” While she is not endorsing a candidate, she denounces the white supremacist rhetoric of the Trump campaign, which she notes is “as American as apple pie.” Turner pushes back on comparisons of the Trump movement to the rise of Nazi Germany, which she argues threaten to whitewash the United States’ own anti-democratic history. “The unfulfilled promises of this country, the undealt-with anti-Blackness and other types of racism and bigotry have not been dealt with sufficiently,” she explains. “It is us, and we need to deal with it and not push it off on some other nation.”

Kamala Harris is blasting Donald Trump for vowing to protect women whether they “like it or not” at the same time he is calling for Republican Liz Cheney to be shot in the face. We get response from The Nation's abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield and talk about 10 states with abortion rights on the ballot, including Arizona, Nevada, Florida, South Dakota and Missouri. Trump's remarks are a “succinct and clear definition of patriarchy,” says Littlefield. She argues the 2024 election will be decided in large part by white women and whether they will vote for abortion rights. Trump is “laying out the bargain that white patriarchy has offered for white women in this country,” says Littlefield. “He is saying, 'White women, we will protect you from Brown and Black men.'”

We speak with The Nation's John Nichols in Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending a lot of their time in the closing days of the election in a tight battle for the state's 10 Electoral College votes. Nichols also discusses the battle for the Senate, with key races in Wisconsin and Nebraska; how New York races could tip control of the House to Democrats; and why Kamala Harris needs to expand her message beyond the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism. “At the doors, people want to talk about economics,” says Nichols.

As Israel continues to block lifesaving humanitarian aid from entering northern Gaza, humanitarian organizations are describing its siege as “apocalyptic” and warning of mass Palestinian starvation and death. “The situation is absolutely desperate,” says Rachael Cummings of the aid group Save the Children International. Cummings joins us from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where aid organizations have been halted from entering the north. She responds to news of Israel’s bombing of a polio vaccination center in an area that had been marked for an official humanitarian pause, and the Knesset’s vote to ban the U.N. relief agency UNRWA.

All eyes are on Michigan as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battle over undecided voters in the crucial swing state, including many of the state’s 200,000 Arab American and Muslim voters who reject both the Republican and Democratic parties’ stance on Israel and Palestine. We speak to Dearborn, Michigan’s Lebanese American Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who is the first Arab and Muslim mayor of the city, about many of his constituents’ loss of support for the Democratic Party and how the Arab American vote could impact the presidential election. Hammoud, like many Dearborn residents, has lost extended family to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, and describes the climate in the city as “a blanket of grief.” Having called for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, he refused to meet with Trump last week, but has also declined to endorse Harris. Hammoud calls on voters to not sit out the election entirely, but to “vote their moral conscience, and says the citizens of Dearborn are “willing to put people over party, first and foremost.”

Ari Berman, the voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, details how pro-Trump forces may try to throw out the results of the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins, with a focus on the swing state of Georgia, the “epicenter” of Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. “It’s very dangerous to imagine what people who don’t believe in free and fair elections can do when given the power to oversee those very elections,” says Berman.

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As Latino voters are a key voting bloc in the 2024 presidential election in battleground states like Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania, they have been targeted by a rise in Spanish-language misinformation. Most of the false messaging disparages Kamala Harris and supports Donald Trump, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA, which investigated the phenomenon in a new episode called “The Misinformation Web.” She interviewed some of the content creators in this “blob” of online vitriol and says there is almost no effective content moderation online, nor many reliable fact-checking sources in Spanish to counter the lies.

“This is a collapse of the Democratic Party.” Consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader comments on the reelection of Donald Trump and the failures of the Democratic challenge against him. Despite attempts by left-wing segments of the Democratic base to shift the party’s messaging toward populist, anti-corporate and progressive policies, says Nader, Democrats “didn’t listen.” Under Trump, continues Nader, “We’re in for huge turmoil.”

In the Arab American-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by over six percentage points, with third-party candidate Jill Stein capturing nearly one-fifth of the vote. During the primary elections, a majority of Democratic voters in Dearborn selected “uncommitted” over then-presumptive nominee Joe Biden, citing disapproval of the president’s handling of Israel’s aggression in the Middle East. “Uncommitted” voters continued to press the Harris campaign to shift its Israel policy as the election went on, but were routinely ignored. Democrats “made a calculation that they did not need Arab American, Muslim American and Palestinian American voters,” says Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, who was in Dearborn on election night. We speak to Sarsour about the Harris campaign’s failure to secure the support of a previously key part of the Democratic base. “We are going to be in big trouble, and I blame that solely on the Democratic Party and one of the worst campaigns I have seen in my 23 years in organizing.”

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“Why is it that the issues that most of the public agrees with — healthcare, living wages, voting rights, democracy — why is it that those issues weren’t more up front?” We speak to Bishop William Barber about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s failed election campaigns, Donald Trump’s election as president and the urgent need to unite the poor and working class. Barber is the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and a co-author of the book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. He urges the Democratic Party to recenter economic security and poverty alleviation in its platform and draws on historical setbacks for U.S. progressive policies to encourage voters to “get back up” and “continue to fight.”

Top U.N. officials are again warning that the entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.” At least 1,800 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children, since October, when Israel imposed a draconian siege and began an intensified campaign of ethnic cleansing on northern Gaza. Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council recently spent several days in Gaza. He describes what he saw as “devastation beyond belief,” as Palestinians face “the most intense and most indiscriminate bombardment anywhere in the world in recent memory,” coupled with the utter depletion of aid. Egeland pleads for the United States, the largest supplier of military funding and equipment to Israel, to condition its weapons to Israel, enforce the provision of aid and commit to ending Israel’s assault. “It’s not in Israel’s interest to destroy its neighborhood in Gaza and in Lebanon. It will create new generations of hatred,” Egeland says.

The FBI is investigating a spate of racist text messages targeting Black Americans in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory last week. The texts were reported in states including Alabama, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, addressing recipients as young as 13 by name and telling them they were “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation” and other messages referencing slavery. For more, we speak with Robert Greene II, a history professor at Claflin University, South Carolina’s first and oldest historically Black university in Orangeburg, where many students were targeted. “Initially when I heard about the texts, I thought it was a bit of a hoax, but … it quickly became clear that this wasn’t just a Claflin problem, it was a national issue, as well,” says Greene. We also speak with Wisdom Cole, senior national director of advocacy for the NAACP, who says “this is only the beginning,” with a second Trump administration expected to attack civil rights and embolden hate groups.

Incoming President Trump’s vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants when he starts his term has sent private prison stocks soaring. Immigrant rights advocates, including our guest, the executive director of Detention Watch Network, Silky Shah, are preparing for the Trump administration’s threats of mass deportation, a central tenet of his presidential campaign. “The first Trump campaign was defined by the border wall, and this one is really defined by mass deportations,” says Shah. If the Biden administration wants to protect immigrants’ rights before Trump takes office, she adds, it must begin reducing detention capacity by “shutting down facilities now.”

American Coup: Wilmington 1898 premieres tonight on PBS and investigates the only successful insurrection conducted against a U.S. government, when self-described white supremacist residents stoked fears of “Negro Rule” and carried out a deadly massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina. Their aim was to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow the city’s democratically elected, Reconstruction-era multiracial government, paving the way for the implementation of Jim Crow law just two years later. We feature excerpts from the documentary and speak to co-director Yoruba Richen, who explains how the insurrection was planned and carried out, and how the filmmakers worked to track down the descendants of both perpetrators and victims, whose voices are featured in the film.

Game of Thrones star Jacob Anderson is set to make his debut on Doctor Who later this year, playing Vinder in Series 13.

Read The Only Thing They’ll Be Read Is The Riot Act

Clerk: "Okay, ma'am, do you have the required documents to complete this process?"
Customer: "What?! No one ever told me I needed anything!"

Read The Only Thing They’ll Be Read Is The Riot Act

The AAR, Tamil Nadu in the case of M/s. CMA CGM Global Business Services (India) (P.) Ltd., In Re [Order No. 15/ARA/2024 dated July 15, 2024] ruled that an Assessee is eligible to avail input services in respect of leasing/ renting/ hiring of motor vehicles of motor vehicles to provide transportatio

The Hon'ble Madras High Court in the case of Asir Automobiles (P.) Ltd. v. Assistant Commissioner (ST), Tuticorin [Writ Petition (MD) No. 3785 to 3789 of 2024 dated July 24, 2024] held that when the Assessee had reversed credit availed on the supplies that were returned for which the supplier had is

The Hon'ble Delhi High Court in the case of JV Creatives (P.) Ltd. v. Principal Additional Director General, DGGI, Gurugram Zonal Unit [W.P. (C) No. 10042 of 2024 dated July 23, 2024] dismissed the writ petition filed against the order of provisional attachment passed under Section 83 of the Central

The Hon'ble Madras High Court, in the case of M/s Sri Shanmuga Motors v. State Tax Officer [Writ Petition No. 11737 of 2024 dated June 03, 2024] had set aside the Appellate Order and directed the Department to hear the appeal on merits which has been filed beyond the condonable period for filing of

The Hon'ble Delhi High Court in the case of M/s Sanjay Sales India v. Principal Commissioner of Department of Trade and Taxes, Government of NCT, Delhi [Writ Petition (Civil) No. 10234 of 2024 dated July 26, 2024] held that the application for the cancellation of the GST registration cannot be denie

In this digital world where staying connected is like breathing, we often rely on public charging stations to keep our devices juiced up. But hold your horses! While these stations might seem like a lifesaver, especially in busy places like airports,

Amazon is developing smart eyeglasses aimed at enhancing the efficiency of its delivery drivers during the final stage of package deliveries. These glasses, still under development, will feature a small screen to provide turn-by-turn navigation. This innovation is intended to guide

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 Insider Beta Build (22635.4445) introduces a hidden universal Share button, marking the company's ongoing efforts to unify the user experience and simplify file-sharing across devices. The feature was first identified by Windows enthusiast @phantomofearth on X (formerly

A few months ago, we asked a trivia question about Steve Jackson Games titles. For this installment, we're starting with the easier version of an obvious question because, in my opinion, the other version of it is a bit trickier . . .

Our database has thousands of items running across the past, present, and future of our company. The question for this post is two-fold:

• What is the last item alphabetically that is currently available for sale, and . . .

• What is the last item alphabetically that is a complete game and currently available for sale?

For those who may want a hint, here's a clue in ROT13 format: Gur gjb vgrzf ner pybfryl eryngrq . . .

If you want to chat about your guesses, feel free to do so on the forums. Answers will come sometime in the future!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: Do More With Less?

GURPS Power-Ups 8: Limitations lets you add more flavor and power to GURPS abilities by making them less-than-ideal in some circumstances, or giving them a vulnerable point. In addition to an authoritative compilation of limitations, it also includes new options and insight to make limitations come to life . . . and perhaps provides a way to get the few extra points you need to make your ability awesome! It's just a download away from Warehouse 23!