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? )
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
* SAVE OFTEN, especially in the early game when you may be very fragile and the game's auto-save is infrequent.

BUT -- don't reload from a save unless you actually die or otherwise hit a "game over."

This game is about failing, and it rewards you for playing forwards through failure. Some of the best moments in the game come from failed checks. There are always alternative routes and ways forwards. If you tried to savescum it, you would miss most of the game and all of the point. Embrace failure.

Okay there are those two specific checks where failing is so emotionally devastating I would not judge anyone for savescumming. But apart from those.

* You can just pick one of the Archetypes for a starter build, and leave messing around with custom character creation until you've seen the stats in action and understand how the system works. Don't stress about it. Or, if you want, you can throw yourself into custom character creation despite not having a clue how it works, and you will also have a fun time. Your initial build and your later choices about what you put points into will radically change your experience of the game, but you can't do it "wrong"; there are no optimal builds which are "better".

* Press tab to highlight objects you can interact with, or activate "detective mode" in the settings to do it automatically. Yes I know this is the sort of thing that is probably obvious to people who have played video games before.

* If your Health or Morale (displayed on the lower left of the screen) fall to zero, you have about 5 seconds to apply a healing item (if you have one) by clicking the cross above that stat.

This is the one timed element in the game, and also the one mechanic that some of us initially have trouble grasping.

With all the other mechanics in the game, you can not only learn them by flinging yourself in and floundering about, this is IMHO the best and most enjoyable way to learn them. No idea what the Thought Cabinet is or what Internalizing A Thought means? Try it and find out!

* Perhaps the most important tip of all:

If you feel you are flailing around and failing on most of the checks you try and you've just been informed you have acquired a Thought you can internalize in your Thought Cabinet and you have no clue what that means or maybe you just had a heart attack and died before you even got out of your hotel room or you had a nervous breakdown because a child insulted you and you have no idea what you're doing and it's been three days and you still haven't got the body down from the tree --

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME "BADLY". THIS IS IN FACT THE UNIVERSAL DISCO ELYSIUM EXPERIENCE AND MEANS YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME CORRECTLY. WELL DONE.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I didn’t have to be to mom’s until 9am this morning, so I was able to get some chores done before I left: I dried and folded yesterday’s load of laundry, washed another load and got it in the dryer, did some hand-washing of dishes, baked chicken for the dogs’ meals, paid some bills online, swept the hallway, laundry area and kitchen, returned another book to the library, and scooped kitty litter.

I had scheduled it so I would be relieved at ~3pm so I could actually make supper, so when I got home I did more dishes, emptied the dishwasher, made supper, did even more dishes, shaved, tossed a load of bath towels into the washer and remembered to also put them in the dryer.

I finished Fugitive Telemetry and started the next Duncan Kincaid book, and watched the current ep of Resident Alien.

Temps started out at 61.5(F) and reached 78.2 (that I saw at 3:30pm), but 85 according to Pip. It was cool in the morning, but sunny with a nice breeze in the afternoon.


Mom Update:

Mom was tired today. more back here )

Weekend... listening post?

30 June 2025 08:30 pm
highlyeccentric: Slightly modified sign: all unFUCKed items will be cleared by friday afternoon. FUCK you. (All unfucked items will be discarded. Fu)
[personal profile] highlyeccentric
I spent most of this past weekend hyperfocusing on little pixelated men (Age of Empires). I have also contemplated my family-ish medical-logistics. I have considered where I might fit within this. I must now contemplate my own, after seeing specialist 1 and finding out he can't do much until I've dealt with the domain of specialist 2.

I do not have solutions.

I do have this recommendation, which I have seen aggregate-classiified as both country and punk:



I saw, somewhere deep in the #proofofcat or #caturday feed on Bluesky, someone recommend this in response to a "look at my asshole cat who just waltzed back in after I've been putting up Lost Cat posters for days". The recommender was a friend of one of the band members, and apparently the song is about a prodigal cat.

I bought the whole album and am enjoying it.

'Typo' of the day

30 June 2025 03:48 pm
fred_mouse: Australian magpie on the handle of a hills hoist; text says 'swoopy chicken' (grumpy)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Today's annoyance with YouTube auto-craption:

"Current university"

Locals, who know what the tiny set of options are, can possibly identify what 'Current' is relatively easily. In my case, given that I was watching this from within Curtin University, it was even easier, once I worked out that that was what is going on.

But oh! it annoys me that people don't review the captions for even that level of obvious mistake (I'm not calling that one egregious. The ones that mess up the name(s) of Country included in an Acknowledgement of Country are egregious. I've never seen the same error for a Welcome to Country, which I assume is because the Indigenous people associated with the production of such know too well how badly it can be messed up).

sunshine challenge in a new form

29 June 2025 10:21 pm
bluedreaming: beaming illustrated sun gif (participation - sunshine challenge 2021)
[personal profile] bluedreaming
I meant to post about this months ago, but I'm still somehow not really getting a handle on this year. Sometimes it's like that! Anyway, the [community profile] sunshine_challenge was always a really fun landmark for the year on Dreamwidth, and a slightly different type of event, and I was delighted to learn that after a couple of years of dormancy (hoping all is okay!) it's being carried on by a new team as the [community profile] sunshine_revival.

I did get as far as making a few banners for it that fit my journal, but I guess I'll have to see which one I pick.

banner thumbnails )

As a side note though, maybe I'll have more success this year, since I have been writing more this last little while (cheers for [community profile] fan_flashworks!), so we'll see!

(no subject)

29 June 2025 07:05 pm
teaotter: (Default)
[personal profile] teaotter
I got TWO utterly lovely stories for [community profile] femgiftboxes! Both of them were for my original fiction prompt: Woman who reads in public/the monster who keeps men from interrupting her reading

Shared Time, by [personal profile] anagrrl

She waits, and she keeps herself to herself, tightly contained, as the time draws nearer.

And then she arrives. The Reader.


*flails* This was SO GOOD. A really very alien point of view character and just so much of what I love about books, all wrapped up together.


Ends and Beginnings, by [personal profile] kalloway

There was a wisp of shadow and a pressure around Allie's ankles as she stood at the tiny counter of her tiny kitchen, having just chopped vegetables to go with the rice in the little cooker she'd only just remembered to turn on.

*flails more* This one is cozy and mysterious and warm and still has that utter love of books and reading that draws me right in. SO GOOD.

I'm so glad my prompt resonated and got me such good stories!

Holy what the fuck

30 June 2025 11:53 am
highlyeccentric: Sign on Little Queen St - One Way both directions (Default)
[personal profile] highlyeccentric

I don’t follow Jay Hulme. But I did see something a few years back about him scaling back online due to some kind of harassment.

Well, now the BBC’s religion editor has run a long story about it.

I also did my periodic check over Jay's social media, because while I do not follow because I might be an Anglican-watcher I don't need THAT much waxing lyrical about queer-affirming church in my regular feed, I do find some of his work and/or hot takes cool or interesting.

I particularly enjoyed A post with five years of photos of Leicester Cathedral renovations in progress. As well as being cool because Jay got access to, eg, the internal scaffolding, so there's at-level photos of the clerestory and close ups of some delightful grotesques, it involves this sentence:

And so, unable to resist, I reached out my arm, and in that dusty room, hidden away above the Cathedral, I touched Sir Ian McKellen’s left nipple.

Update Time

30 June 2025 11:46 am
mergatrude: a gang gang cockatoo eating red berries. underneath is "mergatrude" in red text (merg_gang gang)
[personal profile] mergatrude
Reading: Maybe it's a winter-based desire for comfort reads, but if it's not Murderbot or Rivers of London, it's not holding my attention right now. I have read the first chapter of The iron will of Genie Lo, which is now staring mournfully at me from the corner of my desk, after having had it's loan renewed for the second time. /o\ I did start listening to Robbery Under Arms - a classic Australian novel about bushranger Captain Starlight - and while it's fascinating it's very "If I'd just done the sensible thing at this point then I wouldn't be in jail waiting to hang", which gets a little repetitive. I'm still waiting on </>Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, the second book in the Edinburgh Nights series by T.L. Huchu, which my account tells me I requested as a purchase 12 months ago. The first book in the series was very good!

Watching: Dude has been making me watch Stranger Things. It's not usually my kind of thing, but I quite enjoyed season 2 when we watched it...over a year ago? We watched the first ep of season 3 a week ago and I said, "Who are these people and why are they like that?" so we skipped to the finale, which was satisfactory. The first couple of eps of season 4 are verging on too much horror for me, despite the arrival of Eddie.

Now he is making me watch ALL the Thor movies, including the bonus material. The first one is a fun romp. The second one wasn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. The Thor/Loki moments were golden, and Stellan Skarsgård is great. I felt sorry for Christopher Eccleston, as I think they cut his best moments. The next two will be rewatches.

Gaming: I bought a copy of Rayman Origins on GOG and have been happily slogging my way through the Jibberish Jungle. I'm stalled out on my other games as I seem to keep making the same mistakes. I guess what I need is to put more of my limited time into them. :-/

Other stuff: I have five different knitting projects sitting around. I should maybe finish the baby cardigan before my grand-nephew outgrows it, which means my friend's shawl will probably be ready for next winter. I have done a tiny bit of spinning, just to test what my shoulder can handle, but it's a test project in some boring leftover fibre so I'm not strongly motivated to work on it. I'm about half way through a jigsaw of a village on Santorini, which is a lovely warm contrast to the weather.

Life stuff: Work is quieter, as exams are over and results for the semester have been approved. We can take a little bit of a breather before getting ready for next semester. At home, we're planning to replace our ducted gas heating with reverse cycle air conditioning. It also means decommissioning our evaporative cooling which I'm not really happy about, but we need to cut our gas usage and this seems to be the only option. We're hoping to get a bit of rain this week.
shadowkat: (Default)
[personal profile] shadowkat
25. It’s Global Beatles Day! What song comes into your head when you think about the Beatles?

At the moment? Here comes the sun


26. Do you love the sunshine or prefer to stay in the shade?

Shade, I'm not a sun bather. But I do need sunlight. And it does depend on how hot it is - and whether it is winter, spring, fall or summer.

27. Do you own any pairs of sandals, or do your feet remain covered in hot weather?

I own multiple pairs - but they have a slight heel and for the most part arch support? I have high arches, and can't really wear flat shoes comfortably.

28. Which is your favourite - white gold, yellow gold, rose gold, silver or platinum jewellery?

White Gold - less issues with tarnishing and skin issues. Although not into jewellery and rarely wear it. I don't like to wear things around my neck, ankles, wrists, fingers or in my ears - it gets in my way.

29. How often do you take photos?

Fairly often - depending, and usually outside of plants, flowers, trees, places. I don't of people - I hate photos of myself so am careful not to take them of others very often, or without their permission for the most part. Also not of many living things - because animals don't stay still for them - also I don't have a telescopic lens or the right camera for taking photos of animals. If I ever get up the money and courage to go to Africa on Safari - I will need to invest in a better camera, and learn how to use it. Or find someone who can - and can share the photos with me free of charge.


30. “A cold in the head in June is an immoral thing” (L M Montgomery, Canadian author, born 1874). Have you had a cold in the head so far this year?

Yes, COVID. I was out sick and miserable for a week.


***

Friday Five

apparently this week's was into nudity or being naked and our comfort with it? )

(no subject)

29 June 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!

This that and the other thing...

29 June 2025 04:16 pm
shadowkat: (Default)
[personal profile] shadowkat
1. Macs are not the best when it comes to saving files or organizing electronic files, or finding them later. PC's are better for that as is Windows Operating system. But Macs have less viruses and last longer.

I have both - Mac laptop at home, PC desktop at work. I flirt with getting another PC desktop for home, but I like the Mac virus protection better for home use and firewall. However, I need to get a new Mac and I don't want to. They are expensive.

2. Been fighting a sick headache all day long, no idea what is causing it. High blood pressure? (I took it - it's high, so took the diuretic which makes me woozy to bring it down). The weather? Blood sugar? Menopause? God knows. [ETA: It's better now - combination of headache (a generic excedrin), benedryl, and blood pressure diuretic, plus water, and a brownie. Seems to have done the trick.]

Also got off the computer and watched Poker Face on Peacock instead. Poker Face is basically Rian Johnson's take on Columbo, with Natasha Lyon playing the detective. Read more... )

I recommend for anyone who likes episodic detective stories, with a parlor room mystery style. Also Natasha Lyon. It's currently on Peacock in the US.

3. I think I figured out why I hate conflict and arguing with folks online or off - it's because it brings out the worst in me? I don't like hurting people. Or tit for tat. I don't like getting condescending. Or cursing. Or fighting. It makes me physically ill. It raises my blood pressure. It tightens my chest cavity. And it causes anxiety.

Some people get off on it, I think? But I never have. It's why I realized I couldn't be a litigator - I didn't like fighting with people. And negotiations often fell in that category as well. I don't like arguments.
I never have.

Every time it happens - my hands shake so badly, I can't type. I lose sleep. And I feel ill. I'm a writer not a debater. It's probably why I didn't become a practicing attorney. I know how to debate - but I hate doing it.

4. Meant to work on my novel this weekend - sent the info to myself and everything, but alas, I just couldn't. No bandwidth capacity - me, not the computer. Frustrating, that. At this rate - it will never be completed, or so it seems. I have all these ideas, but no physical bandwidth to get them out and in writing.

In other writing related news? I got a positive comment on a Buffy fanfic (No Regrets") that I wrote ages ago, and posted on Ao3, I didn't respond back. I learned my lesson with Ao3, don't respond to comments (positive or negative) or add any new posts - or they will find me and attack me with emails about freezing my account and taking down my stuff and how I'm not following some arcane and incredibly difficult to understand rule or other. Much better to stay quiet. But it was a nice comment.

"That was a very profound read, really interesting in depth look at what becoming human might mean for Spike into Will.
Also seeing Buffy's own thoughts on the changes in her life
I like the way that you ended it, no neat bow, but with perhaps a friendship to continue and a bit of a nostalgic laugh also."

I still get kudos from that page from time to time, which makes me think maybe I'm touching people with my writing in a good way? That I'm reaching folks that I've never met and somehow making their lives a little better, or giving them something to connect to, or making them think a little bit differently about something? I think that's all any of us want to do sometimes, is just find a way to connect with one another, and obtain a positive emotional response? To share the love? And to some degree the pain - at least to the point in which it makes us feel less alone, and connected to something bigger? To know there's someone else somewhere out there wherever they may be that feels the same way we do about this?

Life can feel very lonely at times. Read more... )

I think art and culture often connects us - in a good way. Television shows, music, concerts, live theater, movies, books, readings, dance, and sporting events. A way to come together and discuss things that bring us joy. But all of that can also divide. Humans are complicated organisms after all.

5. I watched some television shows.

Finished The Bear S4. The Bear does for restaurants what The Pitt does for the ER, except it has more family interaction and really delves into the individual characters deeply. Also has quite the cast - three to four members of it - have taken off since the series aired. And multiple members have gotten Emmys. Season 4, unlike the previous seasons, is really comforting and provides a sense of closure for multiple character arcs - each of the characters manages to resolve the main issue plaguing them since the beginning of the series. I may re-watch it from the beginning in July. It's not long. Just 10 episodes per season. First season had 8. And each episode is about 30 minutes. They aren't long episodes. But jam packed with information and character development.

Shows how much you can do in a short period of time.

Read more... )

Andor - is unfortunately not as good. And I love science fiction and Star Wars (it was my first real fandom, well next to the Monkeys at any rate, and Batman and Robin, which I'm not completely sure counts). It is a different genre. But it is, alas, far too political for its own good - and a lot of time is wasted on plot mechanics, with the characters getting a bit lost in the shuffle. Read more... )

It's on Disney + in the US, and I don't recommend if you have brain fog, are depressed by the current political situation (and seriously who isn't?) and not really a devoted Star Wars fan?

I'll stick with it, but I may wait a bit.

It has been a long week

29 June 2025 02:07 pm
unicornduke: (Default)
[personal profile] unicornduke
I'm looking forward to having tomorrow completely off work. Well, mostly. I worked Monday last week due to urgent pumpkin planting and the heat wave and I actually took a nap yesterday afternoon on the couch after lunch and didn't do all that much work after lunch. My last day off was Saturday and I spent all day at the SCA event. Sometimes the body just is done. 

My plan to wake up early, work until it got really hot and then spent some time in the creek worked extremely well. I literally just change into shorts and my rubber boots and head down. The creek is extremely cold at the best of times, it's all spring fed from the mountains and mostly shaded by trees in our neck of the woods, so it cools me off quick and makes my feet nice and cold within 20 minutes of being fully submerged and they stay cold for several hours. It's fantastic. 

I'm not actually sure what days we did what, but there was field prep of plowing and disking various fields in various states of ready, laying plastic (biodegradable plastic), my dad planting bare ground with the planter, and both of us planting into the plastic with the dorker planter (not sure why my dad and uncle call it the dorker, it's not the brand or anything), transplanting the giant pumpkins, irrigating and fertigating the vegetables and strawberries, and setting up the selling area for opening for raspberries and blueberries. I had employees working as well, although on the hot days, I sent them home at noon. The 14 year old forgot his water bottle on tuesday, so I gave him two from the cooler that we sell, told him to take at least a five minute break in the shade every hour and take another water bottle when he walked home. He was mostly weeding things. I had my other employee using the cultivating tractor, weed wacking the deer fencing. I started setting up the deer fencing in the strawberry field by the house since the deer are eating it, just need to buy handles when I go to town tomorrow and I'll have it up and electrified by Tuesday. And we opened for raspberry and blueberry picking. One of the hot days, I drank six bottles of water by 2pm, two of which had added electrolytes. Sweated most of it out. There was a breeze that day, so it wasn't fully torture. Just mostly. 

We got so much done this week holy shit. I did other stuff too. And so did my parents. They had their first event in the church this weekend, so we spent a lot of time whipping that into shape. I feel back to full normal after being sick thankfully.

The urgent stuff is all done, so I spent some time this morning doing less urgent stuff. Weeding the raspberries, primarily the new patch to help keep the perennial weed problems down. And cleaning up the elderberry planting. It's definitely in rough shape, we probably won't have much of a harvest at all. They're european elderberries and a bunch of them have died, so we'll replace them with american elderberries which seem to thrive locally anyway. They're in the rockiest part of the farm as well, so it's good to have something perennial there. My dad and I talked about expanding the planting because there's so much interest in them, so that will be on the list for next spring. Shouldn't be too hard, all the irrigation is set up already, just would need to place landscape fabric and plant them in. A lot of the small crops have suffered for lack of attention. I've been working on the kiwiberries every time I'm nearby them and I trained the first canes perpendicular across the trellis the other day. Exciting! 

I've spent some time contemplating my social life or lack of. All the things I would do to make friends, volunteer, meetup groups, etc rely on a more consistent schedule than I can manage right now. To be fair, I have social things three nights a week right now, monday crafting, tuesday video games with sibs, saturday watching baking with J but those are all online. I need to do some things in person. I've texted one person who I've met up with inconsistently the last few years who lives locally, originally one of J's friends but we've chatted a bunch now and it's been enjoyable. Last year was so chaotic that I failed to meet up with her, so I apologized for that in the text. There's a Wed afternoon knitting group at the local library, but unless it's raining, I can't make that, especially with employees working. My dad usually has computer work Tues and Wed, so I have to be supervisor to workers. I should aim to find something going on Thursday or Friday nights since I now don't have employees working that late (high school kids worked after school this spring and early summer so my evenings were busy). The SCA stuff is shaping up to be good but only if I can commit to going to things, there's another event this Saturday that I was hoping to go to, but we're open all day sat for picking and it looks like it'll be sunny. 

But I'm the most content I think I've ever felt in my whole life. It's wild how solid I feel even with all of the irritation of my parents not moving out yet. I'm not anxious. I'm not worrying. I'm enjoying the work and the days are long but they don't feel that long. Some of that might be the testosterone and the joy I'm feeling from it. Some of it might be the work. It's just nice to be out doing physical work without the driving from previous jobs. So fun! I get to move and look at the beautiful views and the neat stuff on the farm. All the lilies are blooming right now! Growing things! That other people pick and enjoy! Spending time with family! I dunno. It's nice to enjoy this even while the political situation is *gestures*. did have a good convo with someone about USDA cuts to grants that help farmers, so that was a good win. 

Also I just finished Emily Tesh's Incandescent while sitting here on register and I am SCREAMING, I got 2/3 of the way through and rolled my eyes a bit and THEN THE THING AHHH

Stories! Superheroes and ableism

29 June 2025 11:14 am
sonia: Quilted wall-hanging (Default)
[personal profile] sonia
Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything by Effie Seiberg. A fun riff on superheroes that takes a serious look at the frustrations of ableism.

Monster by Naomi Kritzer. Darker than what Naomi Kritzer usually writes and what I recommend, but very well done. Nerdy friendship gone wrong.

Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer. A more hopeful look (than what is really happening) at what AI could do for us.

All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt by Marissa Lingen, [personal profile] mrissa. The frustrations of overly pushy salespeople at industry conventions, in SPAAAAACE. Also, author spotlight.

Two weeks' worth of reading

29 June 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.)

Goal setting question(s)

29 June 2025 09:39 pm
fred_mouse: Night sky, bright star, crescent moon (goals)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Now that I've written up the six month summary of how my 2025 New Year's Resolutions have gone, I'm looking at what I want for the next six months. Which might turn out to be a 12 month set of goals; I'm kind of being flexible with whatever works.

But!

One of my intentions is that I have goals for each of the areas of my life that are important to me--there is no rating of how big that area has to be, just that I see it as an important circle. Two of these I did not manage to get a coherent goal for across the last six months. I'm not sure that it is possible to have coherent goals, but that might be me looking from the wrong perspective.

Which is where my question comes in: what suggestions do people have as to goals for 'Family' and 'Social'? I'm okay with drive by commentary from people who aren't familiar with the limitations of my life, because not knowing those details might be an important part of different perspective.

PSA

29 June 2025 01:54 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.

Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.

(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Man as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)

If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.

ETA: Okay, I will add in [personal profile] astrogirl's excellent content warning:

It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them.
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
Another long day. Hopefully the final one. Today was Ian’s graduation party. Thankfully I did not have to be to mom’s as early as I feared so sister A could leave to get set up for the party. She said I could get there between 9 – 10am, so I split the difference and got there at 9:30am. Then I took mom to the party. Sister S relieved me at 7:30pm.

I did manage to get stuff done before I left the house: two loads of laundry (one dried and folded), hand-washed some dishes and did a load in the dishwasher, scooped kitty litter, took the dogs for a short-ish walk, and dropped a book in the library return box on my way to mom’s. I did more hand-washing of dishes when I got home and tossed some laundry into the dryer.

I watched the current ep of Murderbot, finished my book and started another (Fugitive Telemetry, finally). And, of course, attended Ian’s graduation party.

Temps started out at 64.4(F) and reached 87 (according to Pip). He couldn’t have been far off because it got HOT. (It was still 79.2 when I got home after 7:30pm.) My sister had moved Ian’s party from a tent at her house to the local fire house because we were supposed to have scattered thunderstorms all day, but we didn’t get any.


Mom Update:

Mom did well yesterday. more back here )
fred_mouse: Night sky, bright star, crescent moon (goals)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Given that the last three weeks have been a completely different pace, and my expectations of my self for the rest of the year are quite different to where I was at the beginning of the year, I'm going to close out the set of goals I set myself at the beginning of the year (Note: I'm not working from that page, but from an offline edited version). The last update I did was May 20th. I contemplated writing a new set of resolutions in this post concurrently with wrapping up these, but have decided instead to create an offline document of Mid-Year Resolutions. I might get around to posting that, but chances are low.

Lots of details, possibly only interesting to me )

tl;dr: great progress for work; good progress on craft, reading, physical - exercise and health; not great on house, organisation, decluttering, writing, garden, learning, money. No goals to compare to for family or social. Having a list continues to be useful.

shadowkat: (Default)
[personal profile] shadowkat
I saw this quote on Facebook from a social activist that I've been following, which stated:

"Do less of passing on your fears to people."

And I thought, if less people did this? I wouldn't have social anxiety or a lot of other anxieties for that matter - most of which have been thrust onto me by other people. People can be scary.

This quote is also apropos for the episode of Buffy that I re-watched this week, entitled (per Hulu) Gingerbread, S3 Episode 11. I think it's 11. It's not an episode that I remember fondly, and have been known to skip it on past re-watches. Mainly because it focuses on a recurring theme in horror/supernatural fiction - which is well - the witch hunt. It's been explored in a lot science fiction series as well, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (a classic Twilight Zone Episode). And historically with the Salem Witch Trials and the Holocaust - where a group of people become scapegoats and people hunt them down and kill them as if they are demons or animals with no worth. I'm not fond of the theme - because, well, I find it frightening and incredibly frustrating, not to mention annoying, especially right now. I'd rather not think about it or watch it. Out of sight, is out of mind, right? Well unfortunately not always.

Also, I remembered Gingerbread being somewhat cliche and eye-rolling in places. (It's not. I was mistaken.)

I was surprised by how cleverly written this episode actually is, and how it manages to involve all of the main contracted cast, with the exception of Faith (who isn't a lead cast member and recurring).

It manages to take a well-known fairy tale and flips it on its head, in a way no one else has done before or since. What if the villains in the fairy tale were in reality the protagonists or victims, and they weren't what they seemed?

spoilers for well anyone who hasn't seen the show in the last 25 years and still wants to...when do spoilers expire anyhow, probably never? )

I found this episode, like all the other episodes in s3, to date rather well - and to cross-over well into the modern age, in that we've always had this problem. And it is an universal one. People get afraid of something or someone - and feel the need to tell everyone else about it - to share this anxiety or fear. Right now it's immigrants - and the fear that the immigrants will take away their jobs, their homes, and their way of life. Irrational as this fear is, they believe it is a real threat and they must fight to make sure it doesn't happen by any means necessary.

I once had a frightening debate with a poster named peasant in my journal way back in 2017. Peasant, a Brit, was convinced that the evil immigrants were coming to take away their job, home, and everything they held dear, and they had to stop them. That the evil socialists would help the evil immigrants. Fascism was better in Peasant's view than the alternative. And Capitalism was the best approach, everyone was happier under that. Peasant was terrified of socialism. Peasant's political views scared me, not just the views themselves, mind you, which were scary in of themselves, but the fact that someone actually thought that way? That they had demonized a group of people in their head to that extent. An otherwise rational and from what I saw kind person who cared about animals, gardened, etc - felt like this? That scared me. Peasant scared me, not the immigrants. I was afraid of Peasant. And I'm not an immigrant - my ancestors came to the United States in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, both my parents, grand-parents, and for the most part great grandparents and great great grandparents are US Citizens. I was afraid for the immigrants, Peasant hated, and the their view that fascism was the better choice. That scared me. So badly, that I eventually blocked them from my journal.

Fear divides people and unites people - it also starts wars, and kills millions. It causes debilitating anxiety.

Peasant in attempting to pass their fears on to me, much like Joyce does to the other adults in town including Willow's mother - caused me to block them and ended our correspondence.

Another example? JK Rowlings fear of transgender has resulted in various people distancing themselves from her, and book stores no longer selling her books and removing them from their shelves. I don't see them at all in area book stores any longer. She has been deemed a lost cause, and repeals people with her hate and fear, and her attempts to pass it on to other people. Even those who agree with her, such as Musk, have attempted to reign her in on Twitter (aka X).

Passing fear on to others - may be rewarding in the short term, but it isn't in the long term. It did Joyce no favors - at the end of the episode, it is implied not shown by Buffy that Joyce has retreated to her gallery, and (potentially her booze), appalled at her actions, and her friends have disassociated themselves from her. This is shown with wry humor in the episode, but at the same time - as a kind of twisted morality lesson? Not to take things at face value, to question fears, and to try not to instigate a lynch mob.

Tea. Lady Grey. Steaming.

28 June 2025 06:19 pm
rhi: Miss Marple is skeptical (Miss Marple)
[personal profile] rhi
Title:  Tea.  Lady Grey. Steaming.
Author:
Rhi/Gryphonrhi
Prompt: 
Miss Marple walks into a bar and meets.... Amanda!
Fandoms:
Miss Marple -- Agatha Christie novels, Highlander: the Series (TV)
Word count:
 3,119
Rating: Gen/PG-13
Contents: No warnings needed.
Summary:  
Jane Marple so rarely gets to intervene before the crime is committed
Alternately, Rosie the Riveter did not fade into Heidi the Homemaker with the snap of male fingers.

AO3 link:  https://archiveofourown.org/works/66987256

(morning writing)

28 June 2025 09:47 am
elainegrey: Inspired by Grypping/gripping beast styles from Nordic cultures (Default)
[personal profile] elainegrey

Christine is home as of Wednesday evening and broadly much better (although this instant she is recovering from a panic attack during a migraine). Antibiotics remain a miracle. Also, thanks for our capabilities to culture bacteria.  Thursday morning her doctor called to let her know that Arecoccus urinae was cultured and she'd need a different antibiotic from the one she was sent home with on Wednesday and no, the one she was sent home with on Monday wouldn't work either.

This does explain the one Monday dose having no effect.

I think she got the call while i was giving a division wide talk, that seemed reasonably received: crickets from the audience. Too basic? Too much? Always hard to tell.

Yesterday was B--'s memorial. I took the whole day as bereavement, and have scheduled much of next week off (2nd & 3rd as vacation, 4th a holiday, 5th & 6th weekend, and 7th more vacation and my sister in law's birthday)

I continued to test negative through all of this, but my cough is acting up, which annoys.

spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
This was another long day. I had to be at mom’s by 7:30am so my sister S could go to work. My sister A had to decorate for Ian’s graduation party tomorrow, and S attended the graduation of her step-grandson. (Not as long a day as yesterday, though – sister A showed up at 5:30pm to relieve me.) As I’ve said, I don’t mind BEING there, because I can be on my computer or read, but it gives me anxiety to not be home where I can get chores done, or go shopping. Thankfully, I did get some stuff done before I left the house today.

I stopped at Stewart’s for milk after dropping Grant off at the garage. I threw a load of laundry into the washer, hand-washed dishes, cooked hot dogs for Pip to heat up for supper, stirred together two cabbage salads for Ian’s graduation party (one with pineapple and one without to put on pulled pork sandwich if they want to do so) and scooped kitty litter. (I also had to cut up chicken for the dogs’ supper and pack my ‘lunch bag’.) (As you might imagine, it felt like I was running a race to get all of this done before I left to relieve my sister.) When I got home I tossed the wet clothes into the dryer, did up more dishes, and took a shower before I sat on the bed with a towel wrapped around my hair to decompress a bit.

I finished the current Amelia Peabody and started a new book, and took a short nap (which was just enough to reinvigorate me, rather than leave me lethargic).

Temps started out at 58.8(F) and reached an unknown high; it was 66.4 at 6pm when I got home. It was overcast all day, but I felt lucky we hadn’t had the forecasted rain, which then came in late afternoon. Thankfully it had finished before I needed to carry all my bags out to the car.


Mom Update:

Mom seemed tired when I arrived. I think yesterday’s activity took a lot out of her. more back here )

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