(no subject)

Jul. 1st, 2025 11:14 am
lirazel: Anya from the animated film Anastasia in her fantasy ([film] dancing bears painted wings)
[personal profile] lirazel
I am once again asking for audiobook recs! I'm looking for nonfiction, read by the author, preferably not too dense. Audiobooks are not my normal medium, so I'm picky. As for what kind of nonfiction, I like history, cultural criticism, psychology, etc.

Audiobooks I've actually enjoyed listening to:

The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur
Unruly by David Mitchell
Roctogenarians: Late in Life Debuts, Comebacks, and Triumphs by Mo Rocca



I think all of these people except Gilbert have experience on TV/podcasts, which probably contributes to them being good at reading their own stuff.

Crafting Update, May and June 2025

Jul. 1st, 2025 10:03 am
althea_valara: Icon of teal colored yarn, with the words "Stand back, I have YARN!" on top. (yarn)
[personal profile] althea_valara
I didn't post one of these last month, because I had been working on a secret project. I intended to finish that project in June, but it was not to be, partially due to busyness but mostly due to the fact that I am designing my own thing and ran into snags. Here's hoping I can finish in July!

(Some folks around Dreamwidth know what the secret project is; I'm keeping it secret HERE though so if you comment here, please don't give it away? Thanks!)

[click pics to embiggen]

A pivot table, showing I crafted for 40 hours in May and 32 hours in June on four projects.
[Image Description: A pivot table, showing I crafted for 40 hours in May and over 32 hours in June on four projects.]

I had hoped to finish several projects in June, not only the secret one. I did manage to finish the Capybara. It's pretty big! And it was for a Nerdopolis challenge. The theme was "Rodents", and of course I chose a Capybara because there is a capybara mount in Final Fantasy XIV, so perfect nerd cred tie-in.

A crocheted capybara, done in the African Flower technique.
[Image description: a stuffed crocheted capybara, done in the African Flower technique. It is made up of different shaped motifs crocheted together. It is largely a light brown in color with creamy white on its neck, belly, and rump.]

The Mosaic Cardi is still in process. I'm on the right front now. It's kinda a weird construction, not one I have encountered before, and I can't say I'm really enjoying it because long rows of HDC are (a) LONG, (b) boring. Can't wait until I get to the mosaic part.

The Sophie Scarf was supposed to be done this month for another Nerdopolis challenge. The theme was "How do the fine folks in your Nerdery travel?" and of course I chose the chocobo, so the scarf is yellow in color. I just, you know, ran out of time. I might finish it this month, we'll see.

Canada Day 2025 Tuesday...

Jul. 1st, 2025 07:10 am
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 Happy Canada Day: and TWO:
...
..
...
 and if you're much older? Happy Dominion Day!

fic: please don't bury my soul

Jul. 1st, 2025 09:46 am
lirazel: Peacock-colored butterflies ([misc] fly like a)
[personal profile] lirazel
Y'all! I finally finished my Sinners fic! Now I can write my other Sinners fic!

Thank you to [personal profile] dollsome for looking it over for me!

Title: please don't bury my soul (4646 words) by Lirazel
Fandom: Sinners (2025)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Lisa Chow & Sammie Moore, Bo Chow & Lisa Chow, Grace Chow & Lisa Chow
Characters: Lisa Chow, Sammie Moore
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, the blues as emotional articulation, warnings for references to period- and canon-typical racial violence against black people, Grief/Mourning, started having a lot of 'who's going to tell lisa what happened to her parents???' feelings
Summary:

On a street in Oakland in 1956, Lisa Chow hears the sound of the Delta.

Books read, late June

Jul. 1st, 2025 06:08 am
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Syr Hayati Beker, What a Fish Looks Like. Discussed elsewhere.

A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden. Weirdly I had read books 2-4 of this series and not this one. It worked perfectly well that way, and I think for some people I'd even recommend it, because this one is substantially about teachers attempting (and often succeeding) in sleeping with their teenage girl students and a mental health crisis not being responsibly addressed. All of it is very period-appropriate for the early 1950s, all of it is beautifully observed and written about. It still had the "I want to keep reading this" nature that her prose always does for me. And Lord knows Antonia Byatt was there and knew how it all went down in that era. It's just that if you want to do without this bit, it'll be fine, it really is about those things and it's really okay to not want to do that on a particular day.

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. This is largely How Buddhism Transformed the World and a little bit of How Hinduism Transformed the World. There is a tiny bit about math and a few references to astronomy without a lot of detail. If you're looking for how Ancient Indian religions transformed the world, that's an interesting topic and this is so far as I, a non-expert, can tell, well done on it. But I wanted more math, astronomy, and other cultural influences.

Robert Darnton, The Writer's Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Comparing the economic situations and lifestyles of several writers of the era--how they lived, how they were able to live, how they wrote. Also revisiting some of his own early-career analysis in an interesting way I'd like to see more of from other authors. Should this be your first Darnton: no probably not. Should you read some Darnton and also this: quite possibly.

J. R. Dawson, The First Bright Thing. Reread. Still gut-wrenching and bright, superpowers and magic circus and found family, what we can change and what we can't. Reread for an event I'll tell you about soon.

Reginald Hill, Arms and the Women, Death's Jest Book, Dialogues of the Dead, and Good Morning, Midnight. Rereads. Well into the meat of the series on this reread now. The middle two are basically one book in two volumes, which the rest of the series does not do, and also they feature a character I really hate, so I kept on for one more to clear the taste of that character out of my brain. Still all worth reading/rereading, of course; they also have the "I just want to keep reading this prose" quality, though in a very different way than Byatt. Really glad we've gotten to the part of the series with contrasting younger cop characters.

Vidar Hreinsson, Wakeful Nights: Stefan G. Stefansson: Icelandic-Canadian Poet. Kindle. This is the kind of biography that is more concerned with comprehensive accounts of where its subject went and what he did and who he talked to than with overarching themes, so if you're not interested in Stefansson in particular or anti-war/immigrant Canadian poets in the early 20th more generally, will be very tedious.

Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age. Recently retired assassins discover that their conglomerate is attempting to retire them. Good times, good older female friendships, not deep but fun.

Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Very straightforwardly what it says on the tin. Recognizes clearly the lack of angels involved without valorizing the people destroying other people's lives on shady evidence.

Caitlin Rozakis, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. When Vivian and Daniel's daughter Aria gets turned into a werewolf, they have to find another kindergarten to accommodate her needs. But with new schools come new problems. This is charming and fun, and I'm delighted to have it be the second recent book (I'm thinking of Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, which is very different tonally and plotwise) to remember that schools come with grown-ups, not just kids.

James C. Scott, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings. You know I love James C. Scott, friends. You know that. But if you're thinking a lot about riverine flooding in the first place, this does not bring a lot that's new to the table, and there are twee sections where I'm like, buddy, pal, neighbor, what are you doing, having the dolphin introduce other species to say what's going on with them, this is not actually a book for 8yos, what even. So I don't know. If you're not thinking a lot about watersheds and riverine ecosystems and rhythms in the first place, probably a lovely place to start modulo a few weird bits. But very 101.

Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records. You'd think she'd have had me at "Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza are two of the major characters," but instead it just didn't really come together for me. The speculative conceit was there to hang the historical references on, and in my opinion this book's reach exceeded its grasp. I mean, if you're going to have those two and Du Fu, you've set the bar for yourself pretty high, and also a cross-time sea is also a firecracker of a concept, and...it all just sort of sits together in a lump. Ah well.

Katy Watson, A Lively Midwinter Murder. Latest in the Three Dahlias series, still good fun, the Dahlias are invited to a wedding and get snowed in and also murder ensues. Not revolutionizing the genre, just giving you what you came for, which is valid too.

Christopher Wills, Why Ecosystems Matter: Preserving the Key to Our Survival. "Did the author have a better title for that and the publisher made him change it to something hooky?" asked one of my family members suspiciously, and the answer is probably yes, you have spotted exactly what kind of book this is, this is the kind of book where someone knows interesting things about a topic (population genetics and their evolution) and is nudged to try to make its presentation slightly more grabby for the normies in hopes of selling more than three copies. It's interesting in the details it has on various organisms and does not waste your time on why ecosystems matter because duh obviously. If you were the sort of person who wasn't sure that they did, you would never pick up this book anyway.

the extroverts were right

Jul. 1st, 2025 12:40 pm
cimorene: Cartoon of 80s She-Ra on her winged unicorn flying against cloudy blue sky (where are we going?)
[personal profile] cimorene
I was making smalltalk with the bus driver along with the other guy at the bus stop and he asked if I was a student, lol. (Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses took twenty years off I guess.) I said, No, but I'm going to driving school!

And he said close enough and gave me the student ticket rate.

June Reading List

Jul. 1st, 2025 12:12 am
chibifukurou: (RU Receiving ME?)
[personal profile] chibifukurou
1. People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami (Translation)

2. The Clearing by Allison Adair (Poems)

3. Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodge (nfn)

4. Hell Phone by Benji Nate (Graphic)

5. Flung Out of Space by Grace Ellis (Graphic)(Queer MC)

6. All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran (Poetry)(Queer Author)

7. Grief is for Humans by Sloane Crosley (nfn)

8. We Called them Giants by Kieron Gillen (Graphic)

9. Home of the American Circus byAllison Larkin

10. Believe The Untold Story of Ted Lasso by Jeremy Egner (nfn)

11. Checked Out by Katie Fricas

12. Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (Translation)

13. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom (Trans MC)

14. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (Translation)

15. So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis (nfn)

16. The Wild Robot Protects by Peter Brown (JR)

17. Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec (Nfn)(Indigenous)

18. Grow a Novel in Verse by Juanita Kodman (JR)(Verse)

19. A Spindle Splintered by Alix Harrow (Queer Romance)

20. Blue Light Hour by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Brazilian)

21. Paranoia Cage by Coolkyousinnjya (Graphic)

22. She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai (Translation)

23. Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Poetry)

24. The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Belc (nfn)(Queer Author)

25. It Rhymes with Takei by George Takei (Graphic)(nfn)(Queer Author)

26. Bad Badger A Love Story by Maryrose Wood (Jr)

27. Girl meets Boy by Ali Smith

28. Defekt by Nino Cipri (Queer MC)

29. Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf (Translation)

30. The Secret of Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (Graphic)(nfn)(Queer Author)

Recent reading

Jun. 30th, 2025 11:36 pm
troisoiseaux: (reading 5)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Following a conversation with [personal profile] sovay about formative mermaid media, spent the evening re-reading The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler - a 2003 middle-grade novel about a girl who discovers she can turn into a mermaid - to see how it holds up as a recommendation for a young reader 20+ years (oof) later. Emily's mermaid adventures include but are not limited to befriending another tweenage mermaid, exploring a sunken ship, and discovering that her long-lost father is a merman and sneaking into the underwater prison (!) where he's been languishing for the past 12 years (!!) for breaking the law against fraternization with humans (!!!). (Also, that her mom's memory of their relationship was wiped (!!!!) and their family friend the creepy lighthouse keeper has been an agent for the anti-human-fraternization king of the merfolk the whole time. (!!!!!)) So, yeah, the plot is kind of bananas, but it's charming and, most importantly, the descriptions of how cool it would be to swim in the ocean as a mermaid and explore kelp forests and sunken ships, etc., are great. Verdict: it holds up! I don't think I'd noticed as a kid how many of the throwaway minor (human) characters had punny or otherwise nautical names like "Sandra Castle" and "Mrs. Brig"; I definitely had never realized that the author is British and therefore the book presumably takes place in England rather than, like, Florida (as I'd pictured as a kid) or Maine (as I imagined it this time).

Made some progress in the Dune audiobook over the weekend; I'm through Book One (of three). Unfortunately, so far Book Two has mostly involved Paul being rude about his mom not being able to follow along with whatever Space Jesus logic-connections-as-revelation thing he has going on, which I'm finding less interesting than the Space Medici politics and backstabbing of the first third.
petra: Harley Quinn hugging Poison Ivy blissfully (Harley & Ivy - Femslash yay!)
[personal profile] petra
And were too afraid to ask (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala & Sabé
Characters: Padmé Amidala, Sabé (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Sex Education
Summary:

Padmé skipped health class and did double diplomacy instead.



*

Come as you are (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Yuri, Theology
Summary:

Who the Mother loves; who the Bastard loves.



*



Belated discovery (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Cyteen Series - C. J. Cherryh
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Catlin AC-7892 II/Ariane Emory II
Characters: Ariane Emory II, Catlin AC-7892 I
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

For the prompt, "What took you so long?"



*

Pasta e amore (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elaine Besbriss/Francesca Vecchio
Characters: Francesca Vecchio, Elaine Besbriss
Additional Tags: Drabble, Disney References
Summary:

"Aw, c'mon." Frannie holds out a forkful of capellini to Elaine. "We can make it work."



*

Palimpsest of self (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Michael Burnham/Mirror Philippa Georgiou
Characters: Michael Burnham, Mirror Philippa Georgiou
Additional Tags: Drabble, Yuri
Summary:

Michael and Philippa compare scars.



*

Tea, tea, and tea (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Tales of the City Series - Armistead Maupin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Anna Madrigal & Mary Ann Singleton
Characters: Mary Ann Singleton, Anna Madrigal (Tales of the City)
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

Mary Ann has tea with the landlady.



*

Her favorite curse (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan & Alys Vorpatril
Characters: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Alys Vorpatril
Additional Tags: Drabble, Sex Education
Summary:

Cordelia wants to go shopping for a different body part this time.



*

Lie down with actresses (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hornblower (TV), Slings & Arrows
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kitty Cobham/Ellen Fanshaw
Characters: Ellen Fanshaw, Kitty Cobham
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

Ellen takes a trip.



*

A union in partition (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Anna Conroy/Maria
Characters: Anna Conroy, Maria (Slings & Arrows)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Morning After
Summary:

Anna wakes up.

blueshiftofdeath: danny gonzalez saying "I don't fucking care" while fading away (idc)
[personal profile] blueshiftofdeath

Review

I briefly mentioned this in my 2024 reading roundup; I really liked it! The narrator for the audiobook also did a fantastic job-- I'm not sure how much of a difference that made, but I can at least imagine reading the book in written form and liking it less than the audiobook version, since I think the narrator really sells some of the turns of phrase. In any case, this was a pleasant listening experience for me, someone that's already a full on social media hater and has an axe to grind about it.

cut for length )

The Arguments

Before getting into the arguments, I want to share the author's note from the introduction, dated March 2018:

cut for length )

You are losing your free will.

Basically, social media is (1) designed to manipulate you and (2) addictive. You spend increasing amount of time glued to your screen, actively consuming material meant to direct your behavior (usually into buying things) and/or giving your information to the platform to help them present the material that will direct your behavior. Weird and bad.

cut for length )

Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.

cut for length )

Social media is making you into an asshole.

cut for length )

Social media is undermining truth.

cut for length )

Social media is making what you say meaningless.

cut for length )

Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.

cut for length )

Social media is making you unhappy.

cut for length )

Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity.

cut for length )

Social media is making politics impossible.

cut for length )

Social media hates your soul.

cut for length )

Final Thoughts

cut for length and tbh I think I repeat myself a fair amount )

*finally finishes this post several months after starting it*

30 June 2025 Monday

Jun. 30th, 2025 02:46 pm
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 and one:  and TWO: 

Have a good one and so might I! 

pick-n-mix

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:39 pm
jadelennox: Elephants and giraffes comic: "I'm eating a whole leprechaun" (sgnp: leprechaun)
[personal profile] jadelennox

Poll #33308 choices of varying difficulty
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38


pick one science!

View Answers

space
23 (62.2%)

dinosaurs
14 (37.8%)

pick one plastic pal who's fun to be with!

View Answers

murderbot
9 (23.7%)

lieutenant commander data
11 (28.9%)

lieutenant commander murderbot
6 (15.8%)

murderdata
12 (31.6%)

pick one cat!

View Answers

a cat who does crimes
1 (2.6%)

a cat who does naps
2 (5.3%)

trick question, they're the same cat
35 (92.1%)

pick one poll type!

View Answers

radio button
7 (18.4%)

ticky boxes
19 (50.0%)

free text answer
1 (2.6%)

scientifically constructed and balanced poll with an IRB approval and crosstabs
11 (28.9%)

pick one brassica!

View Answers

brussels sprouts
6 (15.8%)

box choy
3 (7.9%)

cauliflower
6 (15.8%)

turnip
2 (5.3%)

kohlrabi
4 (10.5%)

mustard
4 (10.5%)

sauerkraut
2 (5.3%)

candytuft
1 (2.6%)

horseradish
7 (18.4%)

purple pickled horseradish, maybe with a little charoset
3 (7.9%)

pick one way to feel better!

View Answers

petting the cat
5 (13.2%)

eating cheese
1 (2.6%)

throwing your phone into the fires of mount doom
2 (5.3%)

medication
1 (2.6%)

looking at pictures of nebulas
1 (2.6%)

throwing the technology of your choice into the fires of mount doom
0 (0.0%)

petting this other cat
7 (18.4%)

doing crimes
5 (13.2%)

reading
5 (13.2%)

writing
1 (2.6%)

'rithmetic
0 (0.0%)

digging in the dirt
1 (2.6%)

listening to music
1 (2.6%)

being in the ocean
3 (7.9%)

throwing mount doom into the fires of mount doom, just to see if you can create a singularity via recursive destruction
5 (13.2%)

paperghost: (tasty)
[personal profile] paperghost
I had a whole rant but I deleted it. I've lost a lot of interest and social energy in trying to invest in "smaller spaces" online. Not just because of work/IRL stress and general loneliness after my break up, but I've been really disgusted by my experiences in them that it really shows how it's no different than the "bad websites". I'm tired of zoomers and even young millennials to a lesser degree who have been brain poisoned by virtue signaling politics and social media polluting their interactions. My ex went offline and noted how passive and parasocial these interactions in this sphere are, I disagreed at first but now I'm starting to see a point... But this was a huge form of expression for me, I don't know what to do about it. Well, I've been on hiatus so I guess that's my answer now. I've lost interest in creating and I lose interest in new ideas frequently.

I've also just wanted to log off more after April, but don't have any opportunity to. I guess my goal in the next 5 years is to have a car, I can't afford it but it would be the first step to improving my circumstances. Being no one's priority anymore means that I'm not going to prioritize anyone else but myself and money. I've hit my limit with trying to empathize or understand people.
umadoshi: (lilacs 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
With Canada Day rudely falling on a Tuesday, [personal profile] scruloose and I both booked today off. I haven't managed a whole lot of manga work yet, but hopefully between today (as soon as I finish this post) and tomorrow I'll get a reasonable amount done. While I'm doing at-my-desk things, [personal profile] scruloose is working on the next step(s) in getting a dedicated hose set up for our individual townhouse.

Last night we finally got around to switching the desk chairs in our offices, cut for the uninterested )

It occurred to me very late in the game that I might do better at spending non-work time at my desk (where, y'know, most of my writing used to happen) if I didn't hate my chair; I've been attributing the fact that I spend 95% of my evenings down in the living room these days to the fact that Sinha's such a lapcat, and that's definitely a huge factor, but...being able to sit comfortably in here would sure help.

Another pleasing tech-related development has to do with my phone keyboard. again, cut for the uninterested )

Speaking of things that feel so much better now, Saturday also involved Ginny chopping my hair off for me. I've been leaving it alone (other than the undercut) since whenever the last time we buzz cut it was, and maybe a month ago I found that it was long enough to easily ponytail. That was pleasantly novel for about a week, even though the front bits weren't long enough to get into the ponytail and quickly started to need clips or something when it got hot. By last weekend, I was very, very done with the whole thing, and this weekend Ginny was able to deal with it. Such a relief.

My younger nibling and their spouse of eight months or so stopped by a few days ago to pick up a few years' worth of my spare comp copies from Seven Seas. Only one box, since I've technically scaled back my freelance workload (and I think there's also a backlog of comps that I should be getting sooner rather than later), but a hefty box that was bulging a bit at the seams, so it's nice to have that all sent off to a new home. It was lovely to see my nibling and meet their spouse, however briefly. (They politely rolled with the "we're going to stand in our driveway and chat while masked and overheat more than a little" element.)

A final thing before calling this a post and getting to work: last weekend [personal profile] scruloose and I gave the Sensation lilac a long-overdue aggressive pruning (and it should probably get the same amount cut out of it in a year). The poor thing was all spindly limbs and mostly-high-up blooms, so hopefully this will help it for next year.But what to do with the mutant hybrid? )
oursin: Grumpy looking hedgehog (Grumpy hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

How is it the end of June already? Where did it go?

And tomorrow I have to travel to Birmingham for a conference.

I am telling myself that I survived the Hot Summer of 76 in an un-airconditioned office where, if one opened a window in came the noise and fumes of a heavily traffic-polluted thoroughfare.

Of course, I was Much Younger in those days.

I see that it is supposed to get somewhat cooler (and wetter) on Weds.

Packing

Jun. 30th, 2025 10:03 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Regrettably, we have to go home again this afternoon. I am packing with the intention of leaving our luggage at the hotel while we do one last amble along Southsea beach.

Swag count:

  • 11 pens
  • 9 commemorative guidebooks (to the various ships, museums, and the dockyard as a whole)
  • 2 notebooks
  • 2 postcards
  • 1 travel mug
  • 1 fridge magnet
  • 1 birthday card from the Spinnaker Bar staff

Also some chocolate from the Lindt outlet store. My suitcase was fairly full when we came. I'm sure I can make it all fit ... somehow.

The seed for choosing Portsmouth for this getaway came from seeing a sign for "Explosion Museum" while driving a bunch of hockey players to Gosport rink back in May. I'm very glad I went with that impulse, it's worked out well.

conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Season finale spoiler )

During the Christmas episode we saw the firm's acapella group, which might have just been an excuse to highlight one character's amazing singing voice. Anyway, they were singing White Winter Hymnal, and I'm going to just post two quick videos, the original version and a different acapella cover:





(Those lyrics can't be entirely right - surely the pack is swaddled in their coats, not swallowed?)

Anyway, you'll notice that in the first one they weirdly pronounce "the" with a "long e" (the vowel in pee) before the words "white snow". Does that strike anybody else as a weird place to do that?

Crossover time!

Jun. 29th, 2025 07:48 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I was looking up fictional law firm names and you know how Angel has the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart? Apparently NCIS has Wolfram, Hart and Donowitz. No word on if they're evil. Are they evil?

********************


Read more... )

Bicycling Science

Jun. 29th, 2025 11:17 pm
blueshiftofdeath: (doesn't get it at all)
[personal profile] blueshiftofdeath

I got this book from the library and was not expecting how serious it would be... it's a lot of diagrams and hard math and physics explanations for how bicycles work. Seems pretty interesting but definitely not casual reading or close to a priority right now.

...Buuuut I did still skim through, particularly the section on the science of bicycle balancing, which was really the part I was most interested in. And it's interesting!! That and some of the information on relatives of the bike made me happy I got the book, even if I will return it not having read 99% of it.

Bike Relatives

There were tons of these actually but I'm just sharing the ones that tickled me most.

Sociable Monocycle

Behold:

old timey (1800s?) image of a giant wheel with one man pedaling on each side of it

Unfortunately, there was basically no information on this; the picture is shared without context, and the citation also seems to have no context. I couldn't find any information on it when I searched online either... I'm so curious if this was really a thing and if so, how many there were??

Quardacycle/Quadricycle

Apparently nowadays this is also getting applied to pseudo-cars like this, but it can refer to the equivalent of a bike but with 4 wheels. Here's one I found for sale. What the hell... I wanna ride in one!!!

Velomobile

Basically a bike or trike where the vehicle is encased so it's more car-like from the outside. Apparently this makes the vehicle more aerodynamic. Here's a top-tier video from 2011 where someone shows off his:

Bicycles: How Do They Work?

I've been repeatedly going like: "How the hell do people manage to ride bikes all the time and have it be second nature?? Shouldn't it be really hard to keep the bike balanced? But it seems everyone can do it, even tiny kids!" Obviously the human capacity to learn is amazing, but the bicycle has achieved a level of ubiquity that is unusual for vehicles.

There were three pages in the book that completely addressed this, in a section called "How Bicycles Balance." To quote a bit of it:

It was and often still is widely believed that the angular (gyroscopic) momentum of a bicycle's spinning wheels somehow supports it in the manner of a spinning top. This belief is absolutely inaccurate. [...] Locked steering on a forward-rolling bicycle does not permit any wheel reorientation, and the bicycle will fall over exactly like a bicycle at rest, no matter how fast it travels or how much mass is in the wheels.

[...] Still, there is an extremely interesting gyroscopic aspect to bicycle balance: the angular momentum of a bicycle's front wheel urges it to steer (i.e., to precess) toward the side on which the bicycle leans, as can be demonstrated by lifting a bicycle off the ground, spinning the front wheel, and briefly tilting the frame. In other words, the gyroscopic action of the front wheel is one part of a system that automatically assists the rider in balancing the bicycle. [...]

The basic means by which bicycles are balanced and controlled involves vehicle supports that travel only in the direction in which they are pointed [...] For this, at least one wheel must be steerable, usually the front one. This balancing-by-steering function can be performed not only by conventional large-diameter bicycle wheels [...] but also by small-diameter wheels, as on a foldable scooter, by skates on ice, by skis or runners on snow, and by fins or foils in water.

I ended up watching a video that goes over this, IMO extremely well and clearly:

(Honestly I think you can skip the first 4 minutes if you're impatient.)

Watching the bike ride by itself made me feel like... damn, what am I so nervous for?? Not only can 5 year olds ride bikes, bikes can ride with nobody on them at all! All I gotta do is get it going and then sit there!

Interesting to me about all this (expressed in both the book and video) is that research into bicycle physics is ongoing, and previously it seems even scientists thought gyroscopic action was "essential", only to have this be disproven in 1970. I usually think of inventions as something that you make after you come up with a very clear idea in which you know how all the pieces work... I forgot that people can just make whatever, tweak it and iterate on it, and then be surprised at how well it works. And yeah, the design of the bicycle is just incredible!!

I'll end with a paragraph from the intro to the "Steering, Balancing, and Stability" chapter that made me chuckle:

The most visible wonder in balancing a bicycle is that the bicycle can be balanced on just two points of support. Indeed, above a minimum speed, it appears impossible to fall down even if one were to try! This is of course not so; it would be easy to crash a fast-moving bicycle, but riders obey an unconscious compulsion not to do so.

(no subject)

Jun. 29th, 2025 07:51 pm
neekabe: Bucky from FatWS smiling (Default)
[personal profile] neekabe
We watched the Car-Go-Fast: The Movie today (F1 movie) and it was fun.

As a note to future self, bigger theater the front row of the back section is too far forward, and at the smaller theater the back row of the back section is too far back.

I appreciate how much they did as practical. They just had used the existing races and plugged in a fake team for a season. They worked out moments where they could get their cars on track in the inbetweens, and sometimes they had teeny little cameras on cars on the track so they could pretend that was their driver and just CGI the livery.

It was interesting to watch them blend movie with reality. Because they used existing races I had seen those races! Also because all the other drivers were real drivers it led to weird moments of wanting to cheer on the actual F1 driver I knew over this new person, or running into actual F1 driver knowledge vs Hollywood script. I kinda want to go back and watch the races to see which shots they used and who they 'took over' for some of the other shots (Pretty sure they called George Russel's car Lewis Hamilton's in the final race, for example)

It did have the annoying woman has to sleep with male lead, but was otherwise entertaining. Will probably rewatch when it comes out on streaming.

Next theater movie is going to be Superman!

hockey draw - woot!

Jun. 30th, 2025 09:12 am
tielan: (SGA - john)
[personal profile] tielan
I made foccacia. It was good.

We also drew our hockey game on Sunday! 1-1!

(We won for the first time a couple of weeks back and it was Very Good.)

hockey report )

I've spoken about how this is a tricksy year for hockey in a post earlier this year. But I am enjoying some of the games, even when we're getting beaten. And we are improving.

But it can still be frustrating to see players who aren't ready for this grade (and aren't improving) struggle in the face of it.

(no subject)

Jun. 30th, 2025 12:06 am
aflaminghalo: (Default)
[personal profile] aflaminghalo
just me in the house for the last two weeks. all i've done is write and play with my paints. my sister got me a paint pouring kit for my birthday, last winter, and the weather finally got nice enough to start playing with it in the conservatory and i got obsessed. just before everyone went away i bought a stupid amount of cheaper acrylics from hobbycraft (thank you 3 for 2 and £10 of £40 orders) and all i've done is mix paint and pour paint and get covered in paint. and i think i'm starting to figure out how to properly get the effects i like.

been working through the acrylic painting books too, learning techniques. i think that feels more like i've accomplished something, but its not as messy, so...

also been really into watching really old black and white films on youtube. turns out there's a tonne of dudes out there who want to put on a costume of some sort and introduce old films. it's nice, but i am starting to feel some kind of way about men wearing hats.

and the car got a screw in the tyre, and the door finally rotted off dads garage, so that's been fun to deal with.

the dog has pined and starved herself, and only broke her hunger strike for chicken the whole two weeks. i try not to take it personally.

vital functions

Jun. 29th, 2025 08:16 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )

I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!

Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.

More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.

Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.

Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!

Cooking. Bread? Bread.

Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)

Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.

Theater review: Dead Outlaw

Jun. 29th, 2025 03:35 pm
troisoiseaux: (colette)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
I managed to swing a last-minute day trip to NYC to see Dead Outlaw yesterday after it was suddenly announced (last weekend) that the show was closing early (this weekend), making this the second time in six months I've caught one of the last performances of an unfairly short-lived folk-rock musical at the Longacre Theater that's more or less based off of a real event involving weird things happening to a corpse. (The other was Swept Away; seriously, is the Longacre cursed or something?!) (ETA: ...apparently yes??)

Dead Outlaw is based on the weirder-than-fiction true story of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber killed in a 1911 shootout whose preserved corpse ended up being displayed as part of various carnival sideshows and movie sets throughout the 1920s-40s, until eventually rediscovered in the funhouse of a California amusement park in the 1970s. (Yes, really.) The musical spends approximately equal time on McCurdy's life - a childhood unmoored by a family revelation, a teenage descent into hooliganism and attempt to restart out west, a near-engagement to a nice girl until he self-sabotages, a short and wildly unsuccessful career as an outlaw - and afterlife, which the musical fills with sort of one-song vignettes: the Oklahoma coroner and subsequent series of carnies who displayed McCurdy's body to make a quick buck; the Cherokee runner Andy Payne, who won the 1928 Trans-America Footrace at which McCurdy was displayed as part of the sideshow (only a tenuous connection, but such a cool story I see why they included it); the daughter of a movie director who purchased McCurdy as a film prop, who treats him as a sort of confidant; the 1970s Los Angeles County coroner with a star-studded "client" list.

This show slapped unbelievably hard, as the kids say. I loved the format! It wasn't quite a full-on "concert with a plot" a la SIX, but had an on-stage band that was kind of the focal center— literally, in that the main set piece was this sort of movable, patio-style stage where the band played while the action/narrative scenes played out around and occasionally on top of it, as narrated by the band's frontman; a friend who saw the show before I did described it as "feeling like you were watching a podcast." Some - most? - of the characters' songs are staged... diegetically, as it were, but sometimes they'd join the band "on stage"(-within-a-stage) and take over the frontman's microphone, such as Elmer McCurdy's rock-star-tantrum crash-out ("Killed A Man in Maine", which the narrator informed us afterwards is probably not even true), or more poignantly, as McCurdy's girlfriend's song ("A Stranger") shifts from the in-story action/conversation - identifying his body - to imagining the future they could have had together when she steps up to the microphone alongside the band. Other than Andrew Durand as Elmer McCurdy - whose athleticism in the first half of the show and ability to remain disconcertingly corpse-still in the second half were equally impressive - everyone in the cast played a bunch of different characters; even the narrator doubled as the outlaw who recruited McCurdy, thinking that he was an explosives expert. (He... was not.) The music was actually not as consistently folk-rock as I had expected from the couple of songs I'd heard beforehand— particularly in the second half, with its rotating cast of one-off characters, the styles ranged from more typical Broadway numbers to barbershop quartet vibes (the carnival promoters who buy McCurdy off the first coroner, claiming to be his brothers) to nightclub-crooner jazz (the LA coroner). It was also SO clever and SO funny— the set-up and payoff of the humor was just brilliant. (In particular, utilizing the under-tapped comedic power of letting the audience stew for a bit: at one point, the narrator is like "and then Elmer was stuck in a closet for 20 years" and then there's a solid minute or two of just... a completely dark stage except for a spotlight on Andrew Durand's motionless face, the audience stifling giggles like elementary schoolers told to behave at an assembly.) Very glad I saw this!!

farmers market

Jun. 29th, 2025 02:12 pm
redbird: closeup photo of an apricot (food)
[personal profile] redbird
Today's trip to the farmers market was successful and satisfying.

I left the house as soon as I'd had my morning tea, and went to a market that opens at 10 on Sundays. I got there at about 10:20, before they'd sold out of anything I wanted, or might want.

What I particularly wanted was raspberries, and I bought two small boxes of those (totalling about a pint).

Busa Farms had a bin full of nice-looking shell peas, and I bought almost two pounds, because Cattitude is very fond of fresh peas. When I got home, he told me that he'd thought he had missed the local pea season this year. I also bought a bunch of red radishes, because they caught my eye while I was in line to pay for the peas. (Busa had both red and purple radishes, which somehow made them more appealing than if there'd only been one kind of radish.)

Hi-Rise Bakery was there, and I bought a small loaf of their concord bread, which is the right degree of crusty for the three of us. (They also have a thicker-crust "luce.")

The raspberries are from Kimball's, where I also bought a few diva cucumbers.

Stillman's Farm didn't have lamb sausages, but when I asked about it, the vendor said "probably next week" and asked what kind I liked. She is going to report back that they had a request for merguez sausages. I don't know whether we'll get to the same market next week, but it sounds like there will be lamb sausages at the other local farmers markets soon.

A lot of other things looked good, but I decided I didn't need lettuce (multiple varieties), cherry tomatoes, or fish.

Two weeks' worth of reading

Jun. 29th, 2025 03:16 pm
umadoshi: (books 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
A weekend post never happened last weekend, but here's what I'm been reading over the last couple of weeks. (Watching has been basically unchanged: we're up to date on Murderbot and continuing to slowly work through Leverage season 4.)

I finished reading Tchaikovsky's Service Model, which I thought was...fine? It was interesting enough, but if it had been my first exposure to his work it wouldn't have made me rush out and try more right away.

I read and liked Margaret Owen's Little Thieves in April, and Jenny Hamilton on Bluesky was recently talking about the trilogy as a whole (and this reminds me that now I can go read her "How to Break a Heart: Subverting the Hero’s Breakup Trope"), so when I decided a week or so ago to finally burn through all of my Kobo points and clear at least a bit of my wishlist, I included the second book, Painted Devils, which I enjoyed enough to want to read the third (Holy Terrors) right away. I try not to buy many ebooks at full price, though, given how many more I buy overall than I'm ever going to manage to read, and thankfully my library not only has it but had it available right away.

Consider that a recommendation, but beyond it I'm just going to quote the non-spoilery part of Jenny's essay that describes the series (and the essay then details how things stood at the end of book 2, so consider that the spoiler warning):
This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”

(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)

For a dramatic change of pace, I'm now reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi (also a with-points acquisition), which I keep wanting to file under non-fiction, although the title will clearly tell you that it's speculative fiction. (IIRC I learned about it from [personal profile] skygiants' post.) Its fictional interviews build a distressingly plausible picture of global collapse through this decade and the couple to come, but also offer glimpses into how we could come out on the other side, if we're willing to largely raze and rebuild ~human society~ in a way that actually takes care of people. (The book came out in...2022?...so it in no way accounts for the most recent and current forms of the political hellscape.)

On the non-fiction side, I read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, a book of essays and corresponding recipes that I'd previously read maybe ten years ago. Colwin died in 1992 (I think I've got that right), and this book (and the follow-up, More Home Cooking) is a food-writing classic for good reason, although also very much of its place and time--very American, very '80s.

(The rest of my using-all-my-Kobo-points haul: The Hands of the Emperor, We Are All Completely Fine, Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China, and Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Did this put a visible dent in my Kobo wishlist [which is a relatively curated list of books I keep an eye on for preorder purposes and sighting sales]? Yes. Has the dent since been filled in? Also yes.)

Culinary

Jun. 29th, 2025 06:58 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, 50:50% strong white/einkorn flour, perhaps a little lacking in the mace department.

Today's lunch: (this ran into several difficulties including oven problems and a pyrex plate going smash on the floor, but got there in the end) salmon fillets baked in foil with butter, salt, pepper and dill, served with baby Jersey Royal Potatoes boiled and tossed in butter, garlic-roasted tenderstem broccoli, and white-braised green beans with sliced baby red pepper.

29 June 2025 Sunday

Jun. 29th, 2025 10:23 am
daryl_wor: tie dye and spiky bat (Default)
[personal profile] daryl_wor
 and ONE:  
...
...
...
and TWO have a good one and thanks for UNsubscribing, whoever it was... It's true, I am uninteresting and the only vicious secrets here were invented by whatever anti fans are left (hopefully zilch soon).. have a bless one!

Spring anime, and into summer

Jun. 29th, 2025 08:01 am
petrea_mitchell: (Default)
[personal profile] petrea_mitchell
Apocalypse Hotel was great. Just great. Go watch it. It's definitely on my Hugo ballot next year.

Kowloon Generic Romance ended very well, even if the finale didn't quite have time to spell out every last detail of what was going on. Presumably the manga, which is ending soon, will be able to explain better. Recommended with some disclaimers: there are some very male-gaze camera angles at first but they stop after episode 2, and there is someone who initially appears to be a depressingly stereotypical queer villain but ultimately becomes three-dimensional and far more sympathetic.

Zatsu Tabi continued to be exactly what it appeared to be, a low-key story about travel and introduction to some of Japan's lesser-known tourist attractions.

Sword of the Demon Hunter is continuing into summer, but I have to say this: The choice to fridge someone in the first episode wound up feeling more and more out of place as the story went on. The subsequent story isn't grimdark at all; eventually it's about a guy hanging out in a soba shop with his friends and taking on jobs with an emphasis on how his work heals the community. Even the demons are mostly sympathetic at this point. So I'm not sure why the author chose to do that, other than he couldn't think of another way to get the protagonist out of his comortable village life and out into the world.

For next season, the shows I'm looking at fall into three categories:

Shows I am truly interested in checking out: Bullet/Bullet, Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, The Earthbound Mole, Onmyo Kaiten Re: Birth Verse
Show I would be checking out if it weren't on Netflix: The Summer Hikaru Died
Shows I should be excited about on paper but am not really: Cute High Earth Defense Club Haikara!, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun season 2 part 2, Ruri Rocks

dreaming in billboards, as [personal profile] kass says

Jun. 29th, 2025 09:29 am
fox: a child's soap bubble floating in the air (fragile and beautiful)
[personal profile] fox

Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.

And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.

Happy Pride!

Jun. 29th, 2025 02:19 am
gremdark: An Art Nouveau style tile of interlocking yellow flowers (Yellow tile)
[personal profile] gremdark
 Polyamory in fic has plenty of group sex and non-Euclidean cuddle arrangements, but not much representation of the frantic cat-herding energy necessary to travel anywhere with even a subset of the group. This makes sense, because cat-herding is seldom romantic. I’m often the biggest bitch in any given room, so this weekend I was chief cat-herder.


Our short, clean three hour road trip (1) to a local Pride festival ballooned as more and more people remembered friends or girlfriends or brothers of girlfriends who might like to come along. What in past years had been a 3-5 person trip became a fourteen person trip, to my slow horror. Cue groupchat avalanche!

Among the party were my fiancé, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, two additional girlfriends of hers, my best friend, his roommate, and a local college friend. Never let it be said that I am into timely or organized people. Opposites attract!


I planned many human delays into our itinerary, so everyone ended up fed, entertained, and (with one exception) non-sunburnt. Along the way we met up for meals and hugs and lake time with several old friends, including my best friend from the second grade. We spent a few hours swimming in a lake a stone’s throw from the house where I grew up. Then we showered (2), glittered up, and went to a used bookstore along the parade route to meet up with friends. 8/10 of the people I set out to bring to the Pride parade itself made it there in the end, and 80% is pretty good! (3)

After the parade, we went back into the bookstore to wait for crowds to disperse. It’s this labyrinthine little shop that seems to grow every time I visit, and I always walk away with a copious amount of new reading material. This trip’s acquisitions include The Key To Rondo (a childhood favorite), a Marianne Moore collection, and this gorgeous old book of Longfellow’s poetry bound in green fabric, with gilt lilies on the cover.


I also managed to score a few birthday treats for my best friend. I found a lovely little chest at Goodwill a few months ago, cleaned it up, and have been steadily filling it with small trinkets and presents. His birthday’s in two months, and by then the chest will be full. All it’s missing now is a Weird Sex Object of some description. (Comment-suggestions for weird sex objects under 25 USD welcome.)

All in all, it was a good, if hectic, weekend. I am excited to put the cat-herding behind me and get some rest.


(1) American style, as one of my Discord servers put it.

(2) Don’t talk to me until you’ve marshaled six people through a hotel shower in under an hour.

(3) The other two dressed very slowly, arrived an hour after the parade was over, and went for cocktails. My fiancé’s stepmom calls this “queer time” when she does it. I find it irritating, but tolerable in non-load-bearing situations.

Duo blathering

Jun. 28th, 2025 10:28 pm
ysobel: Pink bunny (bunny comics), holding a sign: "jesus save / cthulhu eats"; text: choose wisely (choose wisely!)
[personal profile] ysobel
Duolingo's increasing reliance on AI at the expense of human employees bothers me a lot. It's also, not coincidentally, gotten sloppy. I've noticed things in the English that feel off -- "He didn't die because he had the operation on time" should have been "in time"; "It's possible that I start going out with Francisco" should be "I'll start" or "I might start"; "She isn't tolerant with other ideas" should either be "of" or the object should be "people" (this may be regional? but for me it's tolerant *of* things, tolerant *with* or of people); "The travelers would buy at the market" should either have a different verb like "shop" or should have a direct object (I know "buy" can be intransitive but it still feels weird in this sentence); etc. If there are things that strike me as odd about the language I'm a native speaker of, how the fuck can I trust them to be correct in the language I'm trying to learn?

I currently have a subscription, partly so I wouldn't get ads and partly because I supported their stated mission. I no longer want to support them. My renewal, set to annual, renews next month.

On the other hand I have a streak of 3839 days, several friends streaks over 300, and a ridiculous number of friends quests in a row (can't find the info but I think it's around 85-90?). Also while practicing Duo mostly makes me better at Duo, I am still learning vocab, even if some of it doesn't want to stick.

So I'm trying to decide:

Option 1: cancel subscription and delete app. Up side: cheaper and more ethical. Down side: realistically I'm not going to find an easy Spanish-practice alternative.

Option 2a: cancel subscription but keep "playing" until I reach a pretty streak number, then quit. Up side: cheaper, though ads mean they're still profiting, and I get to leave on a pretty number. Down side: ads, plus im still planning on breaking the streak.

Option 2b: cancel subscription and keep playing indefinitely. Up side: still get Spanish practice. Down: ads, blech.

Option 3: keep subscription for another year. Up: practice, no ads. Down: I'm paying money for dubious AI.

If I take one of the streak-breaking options -- either now or in 161 days (which is, uh, 5 months and change, so December? -- and then regret it, I'll have lost the chance to make the long streak longer. OTOH it literally can't go on forever anyway, and I don't like supporting AI. OTOOH one subscription isn't noticeable really, so they won't care.

...I hate making decisions...

(Side note: my phone's predictive texting really wants to decapitalize I. If I type "i wo" it of course autocaps i to I, but then doesn't suggest "would"/"wouldn't" for the next word, but instead suggests "i would" which changes the I back to lowercase. Is this inherent to autocorrect or am I doing something wrong?)

Boston and London

Jun. 29th, 2025 12:33 am
adrian_turtle: (Default)
[personal profile] adrian_turtle
I noticed something when I used public toilets in London a couple of months ago. For years, I've been seeing UK TERFs absolutely freak out about the possibility that a transwoman might be in a stall next to a ciswoman. So I somehow thought they were less private than the stalls here. Or at least no more private. The standard I'm accustomed to is that the doors come down to about knee height, maybe a little lower. (Plenty of space to run a mop under them.) The public toilets I used in London had doors that almost touched the tops of my shoes! And the doors closed with proper hinges, without big gaps on the hinge side.

I've always known the TERFs were outrageous bullies, but it was so weird to see this particular wrongness. It's like they've been saying they hate people because it's raining outside, and then it turns out it wasn't even raining?

Been watching new Matlock with Jenn

Jun. 28th, 2025 07:49 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
The set and costume designers heard about blue-and-orange color schemes and just decided to run with it. I swear, they bought out everything blue in the store. Even the post-its are blue! And what isn't blue or teal is orange, or tan, or gold.

***************


Read more... )

ugh day

Jun. 29th, 2025 12:33 pm
tielan: (trek)
[personal profile] tielan
If I do nothing else today, I'm going to make foccacia.
neotoma: Neotoma albigula, the white-throated woodrat! [default icon] (Default)
[personal profile] neotoma
2 quarts of yellow sweet cherries, 1 quart of blue berries, 1 pint of black raspberries, 1 pint of apricots, 1 lb of black beans, 1 lb popcorn, 1 strawberry lemonade, 1 quart of chocolate milk, bacon-gruyere wheel, almond croissant, and a lemon tart.

The fruit stand that I usually buy from saved me an apricot from their limited selection today -- the benefits of being friendly, remembering everyone's pronouns, and occasionally wearing one of my ace flag pins.

much yelling

Jun. 28th, 2025 11:32 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

There has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.

You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.

We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????

And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)

it's chopped onions all the way down

Jun. 28th, 2025 05:53 pm
jadelennox: Nate Borofsky: prickles and stars  (girlyman: nate borofsky beautiful boy)
[personal profile] jadelennox

"Academia: Staying Afloat" by Timothy Burke from the end of January made me feel warmer. It's about everything. AI slop. Fascism. Modern employment. Greed. The broad gesture at everything. Hope. Determination.

You are the right person to do what you do, know what you know, study what you’re going to study. You do it.

You are a lifeboat.

You are not the passenger being rescued from a shipwreck. You are the rescuer. Your skills, your knowledge, your experience reside in you. You have pulled them from the cold ocean where cruel and careless captains have set them adrift.

You are a lifeboat.

acelightning has died

Jun. 28th, 2025 04:36 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I learned this morning that [personal profile] acelightning has died. She was one of the people I only know online, but feel like friends because we have real conversations (in her case, here on Dreamwidth and previously on LJ).

Holiday fun

Jun. 28th, 2025 09:37 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Friday:

  • Mary Rose, worth the admission fee all by itself, thoroughly absorbing exhibition of the many many objects found within the wreck, and amazing to see the preserved timbers themselves from lots of different angles.
  • lunch
  • dockyard boat tour, including a good look at the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier currently in dock (I cannot look at aircraft carriers without Danger Zone playing in my head)
  • HMS Victory, audioguide version with dramatic retelling of the battle of Trafalgar. Very absorbing, impressive amount of the ship available to visit even while restoration is ongoing, very tiring.
  • back to hotel and flop for a little
  • walk, ferry, bus to Gosport ice rink, disco skate, bus, ferry and walk back to hotel; ice is rather worse than Cambridge, but ferry+bus beats 2x Cambridge buses any time

Saturday:

  • sauna and swim for me
  • walk to the dockyard, waterbus to the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower
  • lunch
  • walk ~2 miles to Submarine Museum
  • walk through of HMS Alliance, also a look around HMS Holland 1 (the first ever Royal Navy submarine)
  • my body in full rebellion against "museum walking" by this point, we took the waterbus back to the main dockyard, got cold drinks, and got back on the dockyard boat tour - different guide, different focus, well worth it
  • little wander around Gunwharf Quays and a little shopping in the outlet stores; having forgotten to bring my ereader, I resorted to buying a newspaper and we sat quietly ignoring each other in a curry gastropub for a while. Eventually we ordered some curry, which was really rather good, and then toddled back to the hotel
  • I decided I'd had enough moving for the day, so now I'm lying on the hotel bed with Glastonbury on the TV, life is good

Tomorrow I think we'll do a couple of brief museum things at the historic dockyard, and then perhaps go for a wander through Southsea. I'm going to watch England v Jamaica tomorrow afternoon (I think R has less than zero interest in football, women's or otherwise) and we've a reservation in the Spinnaker Tower for sunset cocktails tomorrow evening.

physical issues My leg muscles, especially the ones that stabilise hips, knees and ankles, have been giving me some grief since I went clubbing after the Kodiaks won playoffs at end of May. I'm reasonably sure it's muscular fatigue and not joint/ligament damage. Rest helps, but so does gentle movement: if I sit still too long everything has seized up a bit when I stand up, but loosens up again as I start moving. Skating and hockey are fine once I'm warmed up. Yoga and general stretching seem to help, as do hot baths and sauna. Steady walking is a lot better for me than the stop-start of museum walking, as the last two days have made clear. I love museums but right now the spirit is willing and the flesh has Had Enough.

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