Happy New Year! As I said yesterday, I’m definitely looking forward to kicking this year’s ass. First, though, I’ve got to make it through what is passing for winter in southwest Ohio but really feels much more like spring. The abundance of increasingly redundant year-end retrospective posts says early January, but the amount of bird shit on my car says mid-March. Regardless of the number of very confused songbirds outside my window, there’s not been an awful lot going on this last week, although that doesn’t mean I haven’t rustled up anything interesting.

The USPS announced that they will be releasing Forever stamps in 2016 with Star Trek designs. Also some very cool-looking stamps with planets on them AND some special stamps just featuring Pluto.

George R.R. Martin has a lengthy update on what’s going on with The Winds of Winter. It’s not great news–it seems very unlikely now that we’ll see it before late this year–but it’s nice to know.

Rhianna Pratchett shared some memories of her late father in The Guardian.

N.K. Jemisin has a new column in the New York Times. In her first installment, she tells us what’s good and new in sci-fi and fantasy.

The L.A. Times looks at book trends to watch for in 2016. Science fiction, paper books, and diversity are all on the menu.

Fandom Following has a great piece up on media realism.

Mythcreants examines five bad defenses of bad stories.

This year mark’s the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s death, and Tor.com kicks off the year with a great list of gender-, race-, and sexuality-bent Shakespeare.

The Daily Dot talks about why we need more diverse superheroes.

Okayafrica collects the best moments of 2015 in African sci-fi.

Taylor Swift released a new music video, for her song “Out of the Woods,” and it’s pretty excellent: