So, I was elsewhere and people were incidentally bitching about the election

and I super get it, and not mentioning Musk, which yeah, what did we expect from that asshole, but one of the things somebody said was that people overwhelmingly voted for Trump and of all the bullshit propaganda not to fall for this is absolutely the bullshittiest.

Trump got 49.8% of the popular vote. Harris got 48.3%. Even if we're going to round to the nearest whole number, this is not an overwhelming mandate by any stretch of the imagination. And if we go around acting like it is, like the word "overwhelming" can reasonably be applied to these percentages, then we may as well roll over and die already, it'll be faster.

If we do nothing else in the next few years can we at least remember to check our numbers?

Today's literary nitpick

As we all know, the names Patience and Fortitude refer to the lions in front of the main branch of the NYPL. (Which is not really called the main branch, but whatever.) And if you didn't know that, you now understand a little something about the Scholomance books which wasn't really all that funny, but that's not the point of this nitpick.

The names are attributed to LaGuardia sometime during the Depression, and if you can get a year more precise than the 1930s then I'd be glad to see it, but the point of this nitpick is that if your book is set in the 1920s, firmly before the stock market crash, then the lions should not have those names.

But hey! At least our protagonist has yet to loiter in a random midtown alley!

Edit: Oh, ffs. Nobody is being read their Miranda rights in the 1920s. And this, unlike the thing with the lions, really is common knowledge. Can we do a bare minimum of research when writing historical fiction? Neither of those details had to be there, and if they did have to be there then that's okay too - the book could just as easily have been set in the 1970s as the 1920s!

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