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azurelunatic) wrote2025-06-18 09:31 pmMore tiny excitements
* There is now Shelf in the living room. Things are going in it.
* Household tidying progresses.
* Today I filled boxes for 13 weeks of my morning and evening pills. It feels like it took less time than usual, but I think that's a trick of the light. I think I usually start later in the day, and keep going until it's dark. It took about four and a half hours; I try to allocate at least 5.
* This means that I've got pills packed until sometime in September. Go, me?
* Juneteenth is tomorrow!
* Turns out that being a director at a certain kind of non-technical organization means that you spend evenings face-down in the user interface level of a misbehaving database. I am chockablock with sympathy.
* Yellface is adorable, and likes to spend the part of the day when I'm awake but still in bed sitting on my legs.
* Had games and pizza with friends last week; they've got a young-ish teeneager placed with them right now. She wasn't up for games but she did appear to fill her water bottle. Luna-cat is very curious about new people and apparently charged her, which was off-putting. I faded early.
* I got some new bras; I'll have to add pockets but the test wear was promising!
* Nobody told me about the dragons in The Priory of the Orange Tree, everyone just mentioned the lesbians.
* There's a new serial at
the_comfortable_courtesan!!!landofnowhere) wrote2025-06-18 08:19 pmwednesday books are theological
Nathan the Wise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by William Taylor. Looking at the Goodreads reviews, it looks like everyone in Germany has to read this for school, while it's much less well-known in the US -- I only learned who Lessing was because of his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn. I knew this was Lessing's plea for toleration between the three Abrahamic religions, but a post on tumblr made me decide to actually read it. Looking at the dramatis personae and seeing that one of the characters was the adopted daughter of a Jew made me concerned about the problematic ways that plot point could go, so I went and spoiled the ending for myself to make sure it would be okay -- the final plot twists take things in a much more interesting direction than I'd been worried about from the setup. The titular character is a bit too much the voice of wisdom (as one would expect from the title) to be the most interesting, but the supporting cast is fascinating.
The Falling Tower, Meg Moseman. A theological thriller about a group of college freshmen, written by a friend of mine from college -- she conveys the college atmosphere both recognizably and warmly, and the story is very page-turn-y. It is modern feminist take on Charles Williams, the lesser-known friend of Lewis and Tolkien, whose work I have not read (The Place of the Lion, about Platonic archetypes showing up in the real world, sounds intriguing, but I also hear it is not as good as its premise), and I'm not sure if I'm more likely to now. It is doing a lot of cool and ambitious worldbuilding stuff, and lets its characters have different relationships to Christianity; the spiritual aspects of the worldbuilding certainly are compatible with Christianity without it being message-y -- this is a story in which growing up in the way that college freshman grow up is more important than finding religion. I hope more people read it so that I can discuss it!
frenzy) wrote2025-06-18 10:09 pmWhat media are you consuming Wednesday! (For the last 3 wednesdays)
Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson - An absolute return to form! I really enjoyed this and I learned a lot about the Wisconsin ginseng industry. Which is wild, I grew up here and had no clue.
Currently reading:
Moby Dick by Herman Melville - No progress in the last two weeks. I'm behind two chapters. What sucks is that the website I like to read it on sucks on mobile, so if I don't find the time to sit at my computer, I forget to get back on the whale.
Faithful Unto Death: Pet cemeteries, animal graves, and eternal devotion by Paul Koudounaris (Author) - I love hexencult on instagram although the stories he tells is sometimes absolutely heartbreaking. Sometimes the book feels like it goes from ig post to ig post, but it has great flow and great photography. And I'm learning a lot about the history of pet cemeteries.
Listening:
Some more Black metal: https://moraynoise.bandcamp.com/album/the-natural-world
Classical guitar with a modern twist. iirc pitchfork just called Hayden's new album perfect? https://haydenpedigo.bandcamp.com/album/ill-be-waving-as-you-drive-away
More black metal, this time more atmospheric. https://obsidiantongue.bandcamp.com/album/eclipsing-worlds-of-scorn
I've been listening to Elen's records, mostly Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Earth, GY!BE, etc
The skatune network person has a new album coming out! Ska!! https://jerska.bandcamp.com/album/death-of-the-heart
Watching:
Sports! Boo Panthers!! NBA Finals game 6 tomorrow
AEW has been good!
The Mortician has been a pretty interesting docuseries, even though Ask A Mortician has legit concerns. And I agree with her. But I am entertained.
A doc on hulu about the sleepwalker murder
Playing:
deltarune! Once hockey and basketball are over, Ill pour into this more for sure.
vass) wrote2025-06-19 01:01 pmThings
Started Freya Marske's A Power Unbound.
Fandom
I'm mostly reading Nine Worlds or The Goblin Emperor fanfic right now.
Recs:
A Nuisance Though Thou Art, by
Wheel and turn or bleed and burn by
fake a smile, by
Music
Listened to the Doors' song 'The End'. Did no one in the recording studio try to help that poor man? During the bridge, I mean, when he stumbled into that giant hornet nest and they all started stinging him.
Crafts
Didn't actually do a craft, but I did go to the introductory safety talk at a library's maker space, so now I can go there and use the equipment.
Things I learned there:
- The Cricut's pressing plate (operating temperature 200'C) is not an elbow rest. (The librarian giving the talk reported that it used to be located in another part of the room, but they kept on leaning their elbow near or on it. It wasn't turned on at the time, but their supervisor saw the writing on the wall and made them relocate it somewhere harder to touch accidentally.)
- The word "Cricut" is pronounced "cricket", not "cry, cut" as I'd thought.
Games
Still slaying the spire. I've now gotten every character up to at least two ascension levels, three for Clad and the Defect.
Weather
So fucking cold. So of course my hot water boiler went on the blink this week. Fortunately it just needed power cycling. Unfortunately I didn't think of this for myself. I'll know next time.
Nature
I saw a kangaroo in my backyard on Monday.
What was it doing there? Hopping.
How did it get there? Through the driveway.
What kind of roo? Eastern grey.
How big was it? Standing upright, I think about as tall as me, but it was too far for me to be sure.
Male or female? I didn't ask. There was something dangling, but I didn't get close enough to see if that was genitals or a joey. Given the height, probably a boomer?
What did you do? Stared at it, took photos, did not approach.
How did you get it out? I didn't. I watched it to make sure it wasn't hurt or sick or stuck, then went to the library for the safety talk. It hopped out again before I got home.
Pics or it didn't happen? For privacy reasons, I am not posting pictures of the kangaroo in a public Dreamwidth post. But I did take photos.
The kangaroo's privacy? Yes. I don't want to antagonise it.
pauraque) wrote2025-06-18 08:12 pmThe Autobiography of an Androgyne by Jennie June (1918)
"There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical [i.e. mental] sex?"This is a pseudonymous autobiography by an American writer sometimes known as Jennie June, and sometimes as Earl Lind, Raphael Werther, or Ralph Werther (none of which were legal names). It describes June's experiences as an AMAB person who felt like a woman, had relationships with men, and eventually had a gender-affirming orchiectomy. The book advocates for kindness towards queer and gender-nonconforming people (or at least the sorts June approved of) and the repeal of sodomy laws. It was published under the imprint of the New York Medico-Legal Journal and its sale was restricted to "members of the learned professions" as June had been unable to find a publisher who would market it to a general readership, so it's framed as a sort of self-narrated medical case study.
I haven't read a lot of queer books of this era and I probably won't make a habit of it, but this was an interesting look at what people were thinking and experiencing not all that long before modern Western conceptions of trans identity and gender transition started to take shape.
I'm going to use he/him pronouns for June because that's how he referred to himself in his writing.
( Cut for length and content (hate crimes, sexual abuse and assault, suicide, period-typical social attitudes) )
The Autobiography of an Androgyne is in the public domain, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg or on the Internet Archive if you like.
adrian_turtle) wrote2025-06-18 01:09 pmfocus
I was fine with carrying reading glasses with me, even though it meant I couldn't just go out with what fit in my pockets. But it's tricky to change glasses while wearing an N95 mask and a broad-brimmed hat, especially when I don't have a table or even a lap where I can put down the pair I'm taking off. So I spent a lot of time in the wrong glasses. Unable to read the bus schedule on my phone or unable to see the bus stop sign telling me which direction the bus is going. Unable to find my way into the supermarket, or unable to read package labels. I appreciate how labels are color-coded and otherwise designed for the convenience of people who cannot read! But it's frustrating how often I bought the wrong thing, or had to ask for help.
Adjusting is ... not great
I woke up with a migraine 5 days in a row.
I stumbled and fell on a trolley platform yesterday. I very nearly fell off the trolley platform, so it was much more upsetting than it might be. I wasn't really hurt, but it was scary. It wasn't even one of the transit stops where the footing is particularly bad.
But the bifocals are great! They're great in the ways I had thought they would be. Even better, because my old distance prescription wasn't right. I can read my phone and read the labels on groceries and also see street signs. I can even see leaves in trees!
The problem is that I don't know how to look where I'm going, literally. When I wore plain distance glasses, my eyes were often aimed at the ground I was about to walk on. Especially when I was walking on rough ground, and most of the pavement in this neighborhood counts as rough ground. The line of the bifocals hides that "3 steps away" ground, and the "next step" ground I can see through the reading window feels harder to focus on than when I just walked around in reading glasses. Is this a solved problem? I presume some of you wear bifocals and look where you're going...do you tuck your chins or something?
aflaminghalo) wrote2025-06-18 08:32 pm(no subject)
wychwood) wrote2025-06-18 08:10 pmapril booklog
( 39. The Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien ) An excellent start to an epic adventure; I enjoyed re-visiting this a lot, although I had forgotten quite how many poems there were.
( 40. The Poisoned Chocolates Case - Anthony Berkeley ) The gimmick was a fun idea but it got a bit personal for me; still, mostly this was pretty entertaining.
( 41. Encore in Death, 44. Payback in Death, and 45. Passions in Death - JD Robb ) I gobbled all of these down and thoroughly enjoyed them, as ever.
( 42. Venomous Lumpsucker - Ned Beauman ) Bleak and kind of funny and also depressingly ridiculous; this is more towards the literary end of things than I usually go, but I did rather enjoy it.
( 43. Artificial Condition - Martha Wells ) Mostly I wish novellas were longer, but I can't deny that Wells manages to pack a lot into them!
jesse_the_k) wrote2025-06-18 12:58 pmThings I Can Only See Up North
I’m up near Rhinelander staying on Flannery Lake. I’ll be reveling in 15:45 hours of daylight on the summer solstice. Today there’s zero wind, while the second-growth white, yellow, and red pine trees are pumping out their jizz with enthusiasm. The lime-yellow grains appear darker as they overlay almost every square inch of the water, with wild swirls and eddies that extend many feet off shore until eventually the black surface reflects many puffy cumulus clouds in a light blue sky.
Lovely to look at, but not so great to breathe. At least we're not bedeviled by wildfire smoke.
( click for pic )
watersword) wrote2025-06-18 11:37 am/me screams into a pillow
To recap: I spent winter break putting together a plan for a pollinator garden in the local park; I wrote & won a grant to fund said garden; I have been trying to get the parks department to tell me what they need from me for next steps since February (I contacted multiple! people! multiple! times!).
In the most Rhode Island thing ever, a coworker who knows the director of the parks department was able to get her to answer an email, in May. This prompted the landscape designer (who is the person I actually need to talk to) to also reply, mentioning he had previously heard from us, and saying he would need more (unspecified) information from us. I responded enthusiastically, asking what he needed from us and if a zoom call would be helpful, and ....silence.
This week, I attended a meeting of the local neighborhood association, and asked them for help getting the parks department to engage with me further; they said to try emailing them again, this time cc'ing the president of the neighborhood association, and lo and fucking behold, there is an answer from the designer in my inbox, with what is apparently their standard form for people who want to add plantings to public parks. They could have sent me this literally months ago!!!
I will of course fill it out this weekend and send it back ASAP, because I have all the information they're asking for already, but first I gotta scream into the void for a minute.
(I know they're overworked and underpaid, I SWEAR I am being extremely polite in all my emails, they could have sent me this form in February omg.)
oursin) wrote2025-06-18 04:00 pmWednesday had an online meeting about reviving a project they began decades ago
What I read
Finished Wide is the Gate, and while things are getting grimmer and grimmer as regards The World Situation, I am still very much there for Our Protag Lanny being a mild-mannered art dealer with a secret identity as anti-fascist activist, who gets on with everybody and is quite the antithesis of the Two-Fisted Hollywood Hero. (I was thinking who would I cast in the role and while there's a touch of the Jimmy Stewarts, the social aplomb and little moustache - William Powell?)
Lates Literary Review.
Mary Gordon, The Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known as the Ladies of Llangollen (1936), which is sort-of a classic version of their story recently republished. But o dear, it does one of my pet hates, which is blurring 'imaginative recreation' with 'biographical research' and skipping between the two modes, and then in the final chapter she encounters the ghosts of of the Ladies, I can't even, really. Plus, Gordon, who was b. 1861, obtained medical education, fought for suffrage, etc, nevertheless disses on Victorian women as 'various kinds of imbecile', unlike those robust and politically-engaged ladies of the Georgian era. WOT. TUT. Also honking class issues about how the Ladies were Ladies and always behaved accordingly.
Began Robert Rodi, What They Did to Princess Paragon (1994), which was just not doing it for me, I can be doing with viewpoint characters being Not Nice, but I was beginning to find both of them (the comic-book writer and the fanboy) tedious.
Also not doing it for me, Barbara Vine, The Child's Child (2012): sorry, the inset novel did not read to me like a real novel of the period at which it was supposed to have been writ as opposed to A Historical Novel of Those Oppressive Times of the early C20th. Also, in frame narrative, I know PhD student who is writing thesis on unwed mothers in literature is doing EngLit but I do think someone might have mentioned (given period at which she is supposed to be doing this) the historiography on The Foundling Hospital.
I then turned to Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which it is a very long time since I read.
Then I was reduced to Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), and Murder in the Mews (1937).
On the go
I happened to spot my copy of Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown (1944), which I know I was looking for a while ago, and am reading that though it looks as though I re-read it more recently than I thought.
Have also begun on Books For Review.
Up Next
Really dunno.
cimorene) wrote2025-06-18 12:41 pmI guess flowers could be contributing as well
There are also flowers now (though I don't think I'm allergic to pollen probably, or not much), although I wish there were more of them. Some of our tulips are finished, and the cowslips, and the last of the daffodils, but the daylilies are opening and forget-me-nots and veronicas are open. A foxglove came back this year - in the same corner where there was one before, so it must've been planted by the old lady who owned this house at least fifteen years ago and planted so many perennials; but apparently it's biennial, so this is a descendant of the one we last saw four years ago perhaps. Possibly we should plant some more there to give them a better chance of continuing to self-seed. Also the striped tulips from the bag of 100 bulbs we planted two years ago are just at the end of their lives, and they're so cool. There are only four of them, and we would love to have more, maybe a whole bed, but I can't figure out what variety they are. I was comparing pictures at the nursery where we bought the bulbs, but they don't look quite right. They sort of look like Tulipa "Hemisphere" based on a web search, and that's a Triumph variety. (Nursery website doesn't list those, but they might not have sold them last year?)
Kind of close shot of a striated red and white tulip in our yard
aflaminghalo) wrote2025-06-18 07:42 am(no subject)
i only took a week off (from the 30th) instead of taking the full two to align with them because all i do is stay with the dog while she starves herself in protest and now i home work it's not worth it, but i'm regretting that today - up at 4.30 to see them off and then just lay in bed waiting for a proper time to get up.