liv | Reading

Spring takes its time arriving in this part of the world, but when it's time, it happens quite suddenly. Almost overnight, trees change from bare and grey to covered in blossom or leafy and green. After the first gradual appearance of bulbs here and there (crocuses followed by a few daffodils), now there is a profusion of daffodils plus tulips also appearing. Even on a grey drizzly day like today, it's beautiful outside with all the spring colour.

I keep hearing about hot days in the DC area already, and I'm glad to be here, slightly further north, where the heat hasn't arrived yet. We had a slight taste of it, with some warm days in the middle of April, but it wasn't really hot, although the girls were outside in their bathers playing under the sprinkler.

I woke up to rain this morning; it continued until around lunch time, so I had a lazy morning and then went for a walk after lunch. I almost didn't go, but staying inside being sedentary all day didn't appeal.

oursin

More about the LCC and the Arts: The LCC and the Arts II: the ‘Patronage of the Arts’ Scheme

‘Protecting what matters’: a statement from the Royal Historical Society, Institute of Historical Research, History UK and Historical Association:

If the government is serious in its stated aim of strengthening the social contract, it needs to act now to support and sustain the study and practice of history across all sectors of education, in communities and in public discourse. If we are to collectively ‘protect what matters’, we challenge educational leaders, policy makers and politicians to protect and defend history.

The Government's vision for archives

and

New strategic vision for archives highlights how BBC Written Archives Centre falls short:

{W]e profoundly regret the decision to stop responding to enquiries from members of the public. Also, it is entirely unsatisfactory that physical access for researchers via the Caversham reading room has been reduced from three to just two days each week.
Moreover, we disagree with WAC limiting use of its facilities to just ‘writers who have been commissioned to write a book or article; those undertaking research for a commercial project, [and] academics in higher education undertaking accredited research.’ The restrictions are detailed here, and are more tightly focussed than has been the case in the past.

Yeah, that's not sinister at all.... talk about controlling the narrative.

This is a fascinating piece on how people engage with 'dark tourism experiences': visits shaped less by exhibits, explanation panels and audio guides, and more by interactions with other visitors

This, however, is grim reading: What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center: 'I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows'.

goodbyebird

I joined in on lowering the urn for my grandmother yesterday. Unbeknownst to me, I had signed up for a full day of eating and talking at my aunt's. So now my brain is proper parboiled and I've reverted to couch potato. Making this the perfect time for: a real mishmash of links to clear out my tabs.
eta wipe-out and my period got together on crushing me and here I am, 2 days running, glued to said couch. (the weather is so nice outside, ugh *glares balefully at state of self*)

+

renay posted her 50th Intergalactic Mixtape 🥳 So many great links to find within, highly recommend. There's a reason it got nominated for the Hugos.

+ Why Angine de Poitrine's viral microtonal math rock KEXP session, Ireland's permanent basic income for artists, and Albert Einstein are three sides of the same human triangle.

+ Massive Attack / Tom Waits - Boots on the Ground. Really powerful music video.
Film created by Massive Attack (working with US photo artist thefinaleye). This montage work portrays a momentous American epoch that is yet to be named, and comes in the aftermath of the largest public protests in American history - focused on opposition to ICE raids, the militarisation of domestic forces, and state authoritarianism.

And Bette Midler did ALL YOU FASCISTS (Bound to Lose) <3

+ The passive income trap that ate a generation.
Where it went wrong is that the whole movement confused "build a good product that scales" with "build any mechanism that extracts money without you being involved." I don't think that confusion was accidental. I think the confusion was the point. Because if you're teaching people to build real businesses, you have to sit with hard, boring questions about whether anyone actually wants what you're selling. But if you're teaching people to build "passive income streams" you can skip all of that and go straight to the fun tactical shit. How to run Facebook ads, how to set up a Shopify store in a weekend, how to write email sequences that manipulate people into buying things they don't need.

+ What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos' private retreat.

+ Italy Suspends Defense Agreement With Israel Amid Mounting Public Pressure to Cut Ties.

+ A French city cut its marine pollution — and its seagrass bounced back.

+ NASA has an official Artemis II gallery. Go look at the pretty pretty spaaaace.

+ Japan’s Zine Boom: Self-Made Magazines Take Off in the AI Era.
Japan’s current zine boom is a bit of a divergence from these subcultural scenes of the past. Rather than zines being the extension of some other cultural practice, zines themselves are the focal point of the new movement. Zine content spans all manner of genres and interests: a kid’s self-published children’s books, a young mother’s child-rearing tips, an old couple’s poetry chapbook.

Giving up on the rest of the tabs to see if I can make it into the bath 🤞

Tuuuuuune Dominique Fils-Aimé - Sea of Clouds

oursin

Happy birthday,

landofnowhere!

wildeabandon

I am resisting the temptation to get into an argument on the book of face, and instead coming here to observe that it irks me when people say things like, "You shouldn't blame violent behaviour on people's mental illness. Mentally ill people are more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator." As though it's not possible for the same factor to increase both vulnerability to and propensity to commit violence. The overwhelming majority of the violence that I've been on the receiving end of occurred whilst I was in psychiatric hospitals, surrounded by other mentally ill people.

Of course there's nuance to the conversation. Some varieties of mental illness, particularly the most prevalent ones of depression and anxiety, probably have little to no effect on violent tendencies, whereas others like addiction which have a major effect on impulse control almost certainly do, and still others literally have aggression and violence as part of the diagnostic criteria. It's also important to think carefully about how we assign culpability for violence committed by mentally ill people, and about the impact of speech which uncritically conflates all mental illness with violence. But the idea that violence committed against mentally ill people means we shouldn't speak about the link between mental illness and that which they commit, or even that no such links exists has absolutely none of that nuance. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk :)

goodbyebird

Tomorrow is BandCamp Friday, meaning the artist gets a lot more of the money when you purchase their music. So I figured I'd recommend some recent-ish albums for y'all to check out.

War Child Records - Help 2.
Insupport of War Child's vital work delivering immediate aid, education, specialist mental health support, and protection to children affected by conflict around the world.

HELP(2) features an incredible line-up of contributors including Anna Calvi, Arctic Monkeys, Arlo Parks, Arooj Aftab, Bat For Lashes, Beabadoobee, Beck, Beth Gibbons, Big Thief, Black Country, New Road, Cameron Winter, Damon Albarn, Depeche Mode, Dove Ellis, Ellie Rowsell, English Teacher, Ezra Collective, Foals, Fontaines D.C., Graham Coxon, Greentea Peng, Grian Chatten, Kae Tempest, King Krule, Nilüfer Yanya, Olivia Rodrigo, Pulp, Sampha, The Last Dinner Party, Wet Leg and Young Fathers.

My World Is The Sun - Dominique Fils-Aimé
I've been listening to this a bunch the last couple of days. Soothing and emotional. Most likely my purchase tomorrow.

Anjimile - You're Free To Go
A songwriter that's new to me. Introspective, queer, aching, joyful. Reminds me it's been way too long since I've listened to Tracy Chapman.

Fantasy Life - Begonia
A voice I fell in love with the second I heard it. Soft, playful, great lyrics.

Altogether Stranger - Lael Neale
Indie pop tinged with strangeness in the best way.

The Former Site of - The New Pornographers
Complex arrangements and playfulness, but with a somber backbone.

And while I have you here I'm going to be a big sneaky cheeky and solicit your help in choosing my song for April. I have three I just can't decide between. Be my tie breakers? 🙏

trying times
make something up
wish you could see me i'm killing it

Poll #34538 Song of the Month

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

View Respondents

GBBs April Banger

View Answers

James Blake - Trying Times
0 (0.0%)

James Blake - Make Something Up
0 (0.0%)

The New Pornographers - Wish You Could See Me I'm Killing It
4 (100.0%)

Tuuuuuune Nemahsis - fine print

crystalpyramid

I'm not a member of

thefridayfive, and it is not Friday, but these questions seemed kind of fun.

These questions were written by

nondenomifan.

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?

the one with Y2K in the middle of it

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?

ofearthandstars is totally correct about babydoll dresses, although gigantic white button-down shirts are a close second. I have an American Girl doll in a gigantic white button-down shirt, worn open with leggings.

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?

I do not regularly listen to music of my own choosing, but if I remembered, I probably would. The best college music was the 80s music that was played at parties/dances.

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?

My long wavy hair either down, in a braid, or in a ponytail. No styling products except conditioner because I didn't really understand that those were allowed until I was working full-time. In college I experimented with dying a streak blue and then dying it black when that faded to uncomfortable blonde. I liked how shiny the black dye made my hair but otherwise I'm pretty attached to my natural hair.

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?

I learned at a high school reunion after we'd all finished college that the "cool thing to do" in high school had been wild parties at the apartment of the kid whose parents had moved back to Florida and left her all by herself. However, when I was in high school, I was completely oblivious to this and thought the cool things to do were stick paper googly eyes on the history teacher's faux marble pillars, write my younger sibling's silly short stories on all the blackboards in the school, and fold the glossy college flyers into unit origami that I returned to the college counselor. Fortunately he was enough of a math nerd to appreciate the transformation.

china_shop

polyamships' questions for

3weeks4dreamwidth:

29 April: Self rec time! what poly fanwork of yours are you most proud of? share it here! Not a creator? Then who's your favorite fandom creator? Time to share!!!

I have too many fics, and I'm really bad at favourites or "most proud of"s, so I'm choosing one per fandom, and even that is pretty random/hard. ;-p

Due South

This one is about 2/3rds relationship negotiation and 1/3rd porn. I'd written a bunch of Ray/Ray bringing Fraser into the relationship at this point, and I wanted to try Fraser/Vecchio bringing Kowalski in. Which took more words than you'd think!

Title: The Invitation (8824 words) [Explicit]
Fandom: due South
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Vecchio/Ray Kowalski
Additional Tags: First Time, Post-Canon, Threesome - M/M/M
Summary:

But Ray had already turned on Fraser again. "You don't want me yourself, but I'm the go-to guy when your boyfriend has an itch you can't scratch?"

White Collar

My first fic in White Collar fandom. It starts off a little bitsy (I posted it as I went, in parts on LiveJournal), but hits its stride after a while, and I really like some of the exploration of feelings in here, as well the boundless trust issues that come with integrating a con artist parolee into one's respectable suburban married life.

Title: The Reasonable Doubt 'verse (45916 words) [Explicit]
Fandom: White Collar
Relationships: Elizabeth Burke/Peter Burke/Neal Caffrey
Characters: Elizabeth Burke, Peter Burke, Neal Caffrey, June, Mozzie, Satchmo
Additional Tags: First Time, Episode Related, Threesome - F/M/M, Con Artists, Married Couple, Work Relationships, Trust Issues, Podfic Available
Summary:

Peter's changing, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why. He gets a light in his eye when he talks about work. He's relaxed, happier, more willing to indulge in romantic moments. He sings in the shower, kisses her in the kitchen. When they make love, he looks into her eyes, and she can feel it—all that attention she used to crave. It's giddying.

Neal isn't taking anything away from Elizabeth. He's giving her back the man she married.

While You Were Sleeping (2017 Kdrama)

One of my first WYWS fics, and aside from anything else, I think I really nailed Jae Chan's dorkiness. Hee! And also Woo Tak's yearning, and Hong Joo's cheerful bulldozing.

Title: The end of lonely (2480 words) [General Audiences]
Fandom: 당신이 잠든 사이에 | While You Were Sleeping (TV)
Relationships: Han Woo Tak/Jung Jae Chan/Nam Hong Joo
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Threesome - F/M/M, First Dates, First Kiss, First Aid, Driving all night, That Kdrama trope where the sunrise is always conveniently timed
Summary:

Woo Tak thinks even if tonight isn’t a date, he’ll come out to his friends. (Sequel to "I see you when I close my eyes".)

Guardian

This has Ye Huo working through his feelings for the others, in particular, going from seeing Guo Changcheng as a klutzy kid to someone who has matured and is desirable. And then there is a LOT of sex. This may actually be the porniest of my Guardian fic.

Title: Every Shimmer Is A Searchlight (15909 words) [Explicit]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Relationships: Chu Shuzhi/Guo Changcheng/Ye Huo
Characters: Ye Huo, Chu Shuzhi, Guo Changcheng
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Threesome - M/M/M, Pining, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Polyamory, Consent, Talking During Sex, negotiating sex, First Time, everyone's a switch, Let's say Dixingren can't catch or pass on STDs, AKA I couldn't be bothered with condoms, Traces of angst, Belonging
Series: Part 1 of This Sunsettled Life (Chu Shuzhi/Guo Changcheng/Ye Huo)
Summary:

“We’re asking you out,” says Guo Changcheng. “Or—well, asking you in. If you want to.”

kaberett

DID make it to the post office and get A Parcel into the post!
DID make it to THE GYM, and was Charmed to notice that one of the other regulars was wearing unexpected-by-me nail varnish.
We brought home many Field Treets and I am continuing to merrily vacuum them up with my horrid little mouth!
Saw the bat! Hello bat. What a good bat you are.
Very much enjoyed the Graun on a photographer who spent a year following the ZSL veterinary team (NB multiple images of post mortems in there).
Negative electricity prices for a while in there today meant: Much More Laundry (most of which is dry), surprise and delight at A running the underfloor heating in the bathroom (WOM FEET); b r e a d; experimental autopyrolitic oven cleaning.

raven

I wrote a fic for The Pitt! Not the one I had originally been meaning to write, which I do still plan to. This one was supposed to be one I knocked out over the weekend, but it got quite a bit longer. Here it is.

a woman can't survive by her own breath alone (7491 words) by raven
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Relationships: Melissa "Mel" King/Trinity Santos, Trinity Santos & Dennis Whitaker, Michael "Robby" Robinavitch & Trinity Santos
Characters: Melissa "Mel" King, Trinity Santos, Dennis Whitaker, Michael "Robby" Robinavitch
Additional Tags: Trinity Santos and Dennis Whitaker are Roommates, Trinity Santos is Bad at Feelings, Canon Lesbian Character, references to past sexual abuse
:

“I don’t need a fucking script, Huckleberry!” Trinity says, furious. “I can ask a girl out, jesus.”

“I mean, that’s weird,” Whitaker says. “Because you haven’t. Like, that’s what this entire conversation is about.”

andrewducker

Can you guess how old she is?
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

tig_b

Or rather the lack of it.

Attempts to get back into posting more often were detailed this year by eye issues.

Background - I only have enough vision to read ordinary text in one eye due to untreated refractive amblyopia in the other.

So of course when I developed a retinal tear in Feb it was in the working eye.
Two lots of laser treatment later and I had 'just' lost a little side vision.
Eight days after being given the all clear and discharged from the clinic I have retinal detachment, followed by emergency surgery to try to save my sight.

It was successful but ...
I was discharged home from hospital with no sight left for reading for a few weeks. I could not see anything on my phone screen even with the huge magnifying lens I bought.
I could just make out, although fuzzy, size 18pt font with the 'bad' eye.
I couldn't even call my lift to take me home, I couldn't read the labels on the 4 lots of eye drops (later 5, that I needed to take on 4 different schedules).
It was very scary.
I do now have almost full sight back it the working eye, but those first weeks with no sight in my eye, then just a little sight, terrified me. I couldn't see where my feet were for weeks, I couldn't see well enough to use a knife to prep food.

And of course I couldn't read.
I could just zoom in on my laptop enough to read part of a line of text, but that was exhausting so I missed a lot of posts and I did few updates anywhere.
I am grateful to get me sight back, but where before losing effective sight was a possibility now the threat is too real.

Moooooood grateful

oursin

What I read

Finished The Tunnel (Pilgrimage #4).

Finished Tehanu.

Both of these were put aside to gulp down two of the honestly least memorable of Robert B Parker's Spenser thrillers, Double Deuce (#19) (1992) and Thin Air (#22) (1995) (I even skipped the inset passages from kidnapping victim's viewpoint) which was basically the equivalent of needing a stiff drink after wrestling with the 'prove you are a real person with verified identity' app last week.

Also read classic noir by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946), as having been wanting to do so since we watched a movie version some while ago. Very bleak - and the central character is profoundly unsympathetic even by noir standards.

Also another Parker, Back Story (#30) (2003), a bit less dire - part of that subgenre that was going around at the time in mysteries/thrillers, whereby something that happened in the heated days of the 60s/70s has repercussions or case is reopened or whatever.

On the go

Back to Ursula and Tales from Earthsea.

Up next

Maybe continue with Earthsea, maybe not.

rachelmanija

I'm still going through books and discarding ones that don't grab me after a chapter or so. (Lots grab me within one paragraph).

Stir it Up! Ramin Ganeshram

A Trinidadian-American girl wants to be a celebrity chef. It begins with a recipe for "two cups of love, a pinch of sharing," etc. BARF.

Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley

Hawley is a TV writer/creator who did a show I loved (Legion) and a show I liked (Fargo). The premise of this book - a man who, along with the young boy he saves, is the sole survivor of a plane wreck and starts investigating the victims to find out if it wasn't an accident - really appeals to me. Unfortunately, it's written in a style I can only describe as "Middle-aged white dude writes New Yorker fiction." Not for me.

Guns in the Heather, by Lockhart Amerman

In a fast-moving tale of international espionage, Jonathan Flower is lured by a false telegram from the school he is attending in Edinburgh. With his father, he is involved in a grim hunt in which they are stalked by a ruthless band of foreign agents.

The plot sounded fun but was actually kind of tedious. The best part was the author amusing himself with the dialogue. I am recording some for posterity:

Tommy is a fat, jolly sort of character who likes to talk jive with a Glasgow accent. This is purely so he can say stuff like "We dig it, mon, but good."

Her voice and her person both reminded me of the Scots adjective "soncy." This is purely so she can say stuff like "There's a bit sandwich forby - under yon cover."

"Wullie's awee the dee?" (His accent was what we call in school "pure Morningsayde.")

"We're teddibly soddy, of course. It's so fearfully dismal to be doodly with a gun."

My new band name is Doodly With A Gun.

maju

I keep slightly annoyingly waking up at or just before 4:30 am. In general I don't feel particularly tired when I wake up at that time, so maybe I'll start setting my alarm earlier. I like the fact that when I get up that early it's easy to go for a walk or a run around 6, around sunrise when it's getting quite light outside. I'm enjoying these early morning excursions now that it's not so cold, because it's so quiet and peaceful. The past few mornings have been in the low 40s/6 - 7C. I come back with my fingers and toes feeling cold but the rest of me comfortably warm.

I remember writing, on one of my very early visits to this house and neighbourhood in 2023, that when I went out walking I didn't see any other walkers. I don't know what was going on back then, but these days I see plenty of other people, some walking dogs, some just running or walking alone or occasionally in pairs, and I exchange greetings or just waves with almost all of them. It's not like there are crowds of people, but it's rare for me to go out and not see anyone. I wish I could recognise them if I see them again though. (I'm starting to recognise a couple of the dogs though.)

This morning I ran past the Gulf petrol station and saw that petrol was $4.17 per gallon. Last week it was $3.95, so I decided I'd fill my car today before it goes up again. Therefore I was somewhat annoyed to find that between 6:30 am (when I ran past) and 10 am (when I went back in my car) it had risen to $4.23. And then I discovered that $4.23 was the cash price; because I was paying by card it was actually $4.29. Grrr. Oh well, in Australia people are paying an average of something over $7 per gallon. And I'm not using my car much so this tank full should last quite a while.

ofearthandstars

Getting to

thefridayfive late this week:

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?
Mid-90s through early 2000s.

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?
Babydoll dresses. Every once in a great while I miss grunge before remembering that some folks just showed up dirty. Also there are far fewer folks wearing black lipstick these days.

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?
Sometimes I spool up 90s songs at the gym or in the car, but mostly I find it playing in public spaces. Hearing "Sex and Candy" at the grocery store (the original or as a Muzak version) or NIN's "Closer" while at physical therapy have been a little disconcerting.

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?
In high school I pretty much wore my natural hair color, probably fried a little with Sun-In because we were not a family that could afford salon highlights. In college, I probably went through 20 different hairstyles, from long to bob to pixie. I tried the Rachel but on me it just looked like bad layering. Also my hair color went from bright blonde to deep auburn to dark black. An old acquaintance once joked that I would change my hair after every major life decision, and she wasn't wrong. It may have been my way of trying to combat the depression I was in.

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?
Gods, I have no clue what this would be, I was a social outcast. I came of age in a podunk area and being an outsider to them, wasn't able to fit in anywhere. I spent a lot of high school lunches hiding in my teachers' rooms as the cafeteria was brutal. I had my first child early in college/at age 19, which is an entirely different story unto itself, so I didn't have a typical experience there, either. That said, that is the age in which I discovered Livejournal, and met several lifelong friends. ♥

mrissa

Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it's time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.

K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it's doing.

Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I've read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all "new histories of the world." I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don't have to.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it's rare that a collection is.

Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write "the thrilling conclusion." I really do. Don't start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won't know how nicely if you don't read the whole thing.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say...Agatha Christie.

Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you'll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She's part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.

David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw's, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)

Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don't remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.

Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it's a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.

Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that's the case here. And...good? that many people should have seen the best of what's in this? I guess?

D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn't have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don't all have to be.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author's interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope's own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. "She was tired of the Eustace diamonds." "He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds." Shh, it's okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that's only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that's fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It's just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.

Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it's the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it's the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others--so if you're reading this series in order and wonder if it's going downhill, no, it's just that it's quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.

wychwood

Meme via various people including

rmc28

Film I watched: in the cinema I think it was The Choral; otherwise, Miss H and I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy between finishing M*A*S*H and starting B5, which I hadn't seen for 20 years and enjoyed revisiting.
Series I finished: M*A*S*H season 11!
Book I finished: Choices, by LA Hall, which was the "fun" book in my "currently reading" collection.
Book I bought: I bought half-a-dozen Terry Pratchett ebooks on 99p sale yesterday; paper would have been An Immense World by Ed Yong, which I'm halfway through and enjoying a lot.
Book I received as a gift: I asked for tokens in the last rounds of present-giving, so it's been a little while... according to my journal, I got some for my birthday last year but the only one I mentioned specifically was House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones, from my singing lesson buddies.
Food I ate: I had porridge for breakfast, but have eaten some bacon-flavour Wheat Crunchies and four Lindor truffles since then (white, milk, salted caramel, coconut).
Meal I cooked: Porridge, if "pouring boiling water on it" counts as cooking! If not, uh... I've had mostly cold food, couple of boiled eggs, uhhhh, pasta with pesto and cheese for lunch on Monday is the last actual cooking, I think.
Drink I had: Water! I did have some deeply mediocre fizzy lemonade as part of a sandwich meal deal a couple of weeks back if you don't want to count that, which is useful because otherwise I'd have been going back a year or two...
Song I listened to: If that means "track", I'm just listening to the end of Bach's variation 12a in the Art of Fugue! If actual singing, apparently "You Got the Car" by Kasey Chambers, according to my mp3 player, which lives on shuffle.
Album I listened to: I bought a couple of organ CDs at the concert I went to on Monday, so those.
Playlist I listened to: I think I listened to one of my playlists at work the other day, maybe the Space Songs one?
Concert I went to: For once I have a recent answer! I went to a lunchtime organ recital on Monday, performed by a friend from youth chorus who I hadn't seen in 25 years; it was lovely to see her, and the music was fun.
Game I played: Another level of Terra Nil on Monday
Person I talked to: I said good morning to a couple of people in the sprint review this morning before muting; with my actual face, the supermarket delivery person who brought my groceries on Monday night and had just seen a fox running down the site drive.
Person I texted:

toft, if WhatsApp counts; Miss H, if I count Teams; literal text message goes back a couple of weeks - I got a scam email from someone at church, and messaged her to let her know.

rmc28

The Last...

Movie I watched:
in the cinema: Project Hail Mary (2026)
on (my friend's) TV: Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)
Series I finished: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Season 2 (2026)
Book I finished: Daughter of the Deep, by Rick Riordan (2021)
Book I bought:
bought outright: Warhorse, by Timothy Zahn (1990)
pre-ordered: Call Me Traitor, by Everina Maxwell (1 Dec 2026)
Book I received as a gift: Amsterdam, by Russell Shorto (2013) - given for Christmas 2023 according to my booklog, still languishing on the TBR
Food I ate: pressed nut+fruit snack bar to finish off my post-hockey-practice meal in the small hours this morning
Meal I cooked: porridge for Nico's breakfast this morning
Drink I had: pepsi max
Song I listened to: "Castle of Glass" by Linkin Park
Album I listened to: Hadestown OBCR
Playlist I listened to: "three-plus years in love (with hockey)" - which reminds me I need to figure out where Living on a Prayer fits into it, as we ended up belting it out as a team on the bench on Saturday, and yes it needs to go in (unless I start a new playlist for my fourth season ...)
Concert I went to: my friend and teammate's gig in Jesus College bar last month
Game I played: does ice hockey count? does Duolingo count? (though I gave up on it last year for being too gamified and no longer teaching me). I literally can't remember when I last played a board game and I don't really do computer games.
Person I talked to: Nico
Person I texted:
Individual: Charles
Groupchat: Kodiaks 2 leadership

pensnest

I spent the weekend at Nottingham University, doing Harmony College with my fellow female barbershoppers. It was good. It was informative, interesting, and fun. And I won't bore you all with the details unless anyone is fascinated to find out more. Barbershoppers are really good at sharing knowledge and educating one another.

Alas that I now have clusters of red bumps on my person, where tiny, unseen creatures have feasted on my flesh.

*

I read a probably unhealthy amount of 'other people's problems', and I have concluded that if one could only be brief in reply, these are four answers that would cover perhaps 90% of the problems:

1. Get over yourself.

2. Run away. Terribly fast.

3. A small water pistol.

4. Have you considered a paid assassin?

kaberett

Last week I:

finished weaving in the ends on A's gloves (before we hit site for the first event of the year)
read more She's A Beast
ate a bunch of food I didn't have to cook (current experiment: do Lichfield brownie bars only taste That Good in a field?)
explored Steeplechase LRP Centre when it had PEOPLE on it (and also when it didn't)
including seeing a green woodpecker!
and SO many birds of prey
made a bunch of unilateral decisions about where tents would go directly affecting two other departments in response to external constraints, and redesigned internal tent layout on the fly in response to different external constraints, and... it all worked???
rethought several steps in the lost property process and goodness that works way better and is much less stressful

and then today has been about half and half "sleep" and "endless lost property paperwork". And Now: To Bed.

oursin

Though I went and looked up that Love Among the Butterflies Victorian lady who had a very close relationship with her dragoman and that was based on diaries discovered in the 1970s, so very much an outlier.

And possibly Jane Digby does not qualify as a lady explorer? though she covered a lot of ground as well having a really spectacular love-life.

Female explorers of the 19th century demolished Victorian notions of stay-at-home women. But why were they so vehemently anti-feminist?

(And do we in fact have to invoke Wollstoncraft even if she did publish a travel journal???)

Article tends to argue that it was partly in the cause of maintaining an aura of the feminine in spite of their masculine pursuit and partly in order to dissociate from the shadow of Wollstonecraft (which also loomed among suffragists, do admit).

Maybe.

And maybe they were invested in being Not Like Other Gurlzz and therefore not identifying with the Struggles of Their Sex.

Or maybe they were doing that thing whereby if a lady-person does something notable in one sphere, she had to balance that out in some way by not being an all-rounder, or doing careful respectability-maintenance, or whatever. (Translating Greek and being able to cook....)

Also, surely C19th British women explorers (wot no Isabelle Eberhardt?) were a very small group - not enough for a subset to be designated 'many'? Do they include e.g. missionaries or those women like Isabel Burton who followed their husbands?

rachelmanija

This was Robinson's first novel, one of a set of three set in future Orange County, Californias, exploring three different futures for America. The second one is about a future much like the present day, hyper-capitalist and dystopian. The third is set in an ecotopia which apparently involves lots of softball. (I've only read The Wild Shore, and gleaned this information from reviews of the others.) After reading The Ministry of the Future, I thought I'd give Robinson another try, and this book sounded most relevant to my personal interests. (I've attempted Years of Rice and Salt multiple times and never gotten very far in. It sounds so interesting!)

The Wild Shore is set about sixty years after the US was shattered by multiple neutron bombs, then quarantined by the rest of the world. It's now a bunch of extremely small, struggling towns which are kept separated from each other as the rest of the world uses satellite imagery to bomb them any time they attempt to do something like build railroad tracks. The California coast is patrolled by Japanese vessels who prevent them from sailing too far out. No one in the book has any idea who bombed the US or why, but given the quarantine I assume the US started the war and someone else finished it.

The book is narrated by Henry, who is 17 and lives in a village of 60. He hangs out with a bunch of mostly-indistinguishable other teenage boys. (I spent three-quarters of the book thinking Steve and Nicolin were two different boys. They are not. I wish writers wouldn't randomly call characters by their first or last name.) They fish and farm and trade with scavengers. Henry is the prize student of Tom, one of four elders who recall the pre-catastrophe days. It is immediately obvious that Tom's teachings are a mix of real and complete bullshit, but as the younger generation has no context or means of fact-checking, they tend to think it's either all true or all bullshit.

The village gets contacted by the remnants of San Diego, which wants to build a rail line and fight back against the quarantine. Henry gets sucked into this, with disastrous results.

This book is SLOW. I often like books that are mostly about daily life, but Henry's daily life was not that interesting - he spends a lot of time hanging out with boys and talking and thinking about girls and daddy issues, and you can get that in any contemporary novel about teenage boys. The only real character is Tom - everyone else is lightly sketched in at best. Girls and women are only present as girlfriends, potential girlfriends, and moms. (There's one girl who's the leader of the farmers, who are mostly women - the men are mostly fishers - but she doesn't get much to do.) The book was just barely interesting enough that I finished it, but it didn't end anywhere more interesting than the rest of it.

( Read more... )

Content note: Characters use racial slurs for Japanese people.

andrewducker

Shortcut home through the cherry blossom
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

maju

My leg was acting up again in the early hours this morning. It seems to be because I can't lie on my right side with my right leg stretched out and my left leg drawn right up because if I lie like that I get a bad back ache. So it's a choice between a back ache (which can be fairly debilitating) or an uncomfortable leg (which doesn't last long once I wake up and move around). It's annoying but I can deal.

My daughter and I have just discovered phlox. They're in full bloom everywhere here right now, flowing over rocks, along the tops of rock walls, and along the edges of paths. We didn't know what they were, but my daughter was talking about this particular plant she wants to have growing in her yard, and as she talked I realised this plant sounded like the ones on a rock wall near here I'd walked past a few times. So yesterday evening we went for a short walk with Eden and Aria to have a look at these plants; when we came to the place where I'd seen them my daughter took photos and using an image search, was able to identify them. My daughter is a keen gardener (inherited from her father, not from me) and has been remodelling their yard since they moved in here at the end of 2022. She's been growing herbs and a few vegetables in the side yard for a couple of seasons, and now is working on the other side of the yard towards the back of the lot.

oursin

Happy birthday,

felinejumper!

adrian_turtle

The inpatient epilepsy monitoring is boring and uncomfortable. I had realized I'd be stuck in a hospital room, but underestimated the extent of being stuck in bed. I need to ask for help to get out of bed for the bathroom, and use those excursions to charge my phone or get a different book from my suitcase. After the first couple of days, they moved the pulse oximiter from my fingertip to my toe, making it easier to crochet as well as to wash my hands. I'm 5 days in, currently trying to see what fatigue will trigger.

[Insert image: A couple of blanket-covered feet sticking up in a hospital bed with padded side bumpers. Nearby clutter includes The Bride of the Rat God,, a tangle of very bright blue yarn, a juice box of soymilk, A red light glows through sock and blanket at the apex of one foot.]

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of a time before videogames:

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I'd watch my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills.

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets
Or brought my trees and houses out
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant, great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of Counterpane.

china_shop

For the

polyamships comm's

3weeks4dreamwidth:

27 April: How did you discover poly ships? What makes you write/read/draw them?

Overlooking a few dabblings, I arrived in online/LJ fandom in mid-2004, in Due South. It was after the Ray Wars had mostly settled, in the time of Pax Speranza, which is to say that Ray Kowalski had mostly won, but it was outre to bash Ray Vecchio or be rude to Fraser/Vecchio fans. By and large, we shared the same comms and fannish events, etc. To start with, I fell in with the majority and was exclusively Fraser/Kowalski. But within a year, I was dabbling in other sides of the Fraser-Kowalski-Vecchio triangle, particularly keen on Kowalsi/Vecchio AKA Ray/Ray. And then

pearl_o prompted "strange and uncomfortable threesomes", and because my brain was a petri dish, I wrote it: Canoes and Taxidermy (F/K, K/V, F/K/V, angst).

But that wasn't really poly so much as cheating/failing to communicate, and an ill-advised falling into bed that ended badly.

Four months later, I wrote my first real threesome get-together: Soft Arithmetic (F/K/V). And from there, all bets were off. The OT3 fic flowed thick and fast. *ahem*

So when I transitioned into White Collar fandom, it felt only natural for Peter/Elizabeth/Neal to be my primary ship. I'm a slasher at heart, but I loved Elizabeth, and they all clearly cared about each other. I found El's inclusion in the ship made it more stable, that the guys would be careful of her when they might not commit as fully to just each other (given all the trust issues, etc). Peter/Elizabeth/Neal was my main focus for the five years I was in that fandom.

I also started watching Kdramas, and I found that in love triangles where they all care deeply about each other, my preferred solution was to smoosh them all together. I acquired some tiny fandom loves: a vee-shaped threesome for Love in the Moonlight (the crown prince/his trusted head guard & the crown prince/the female lead) and a more equilateral threesome for While You Were Sleeping (Han Woo Tak/Jung Jae Chan/Nam Hong Joo).

My current fandom, Guardian, is a drama based on a Chinese m/m novel, so it's super super slashy for the main pairing. But I'm a poly-shipper now, as well as a slasher, so after a while I inevitably started looking for threesome possibilities and exploring those (usually inspired by others' exchange/fest prompts): Chu Shuzhi/Guo Changcheng/Ye Huo, and Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan.

Things I love about threesomes:

when it comes to love triangles, no one gets left out
interesting/complicated dynamics
they force characters to communicate
so many different kinds of first times!
the "obstacle" of assumed monogamy making someone believe the already paired-off objects of their affections aren't available/don't return their feelings
*smooooosh*

(Wow, this took me ages to write; I got lost in the forest of old Due South posts and debates about characterisation for which there would be much more useful language these days. :-)

diffrentcolours

Last weekend was rather busy. After work on Friday, me and cosmolinguist cycled to Station South for a pint. It's the first time I've been on a bike since my hernia operation six weeks ago, but it didn't seem to cause any problems. Of course, I took it gently. And it was lovely to sit outside in the sun and drink and chat.

On Saturday morning, we met up with some Internet friends to walk around Sale Water Park with some doggos. It was nice being sociable, and the slow sniffy labrador meant we didn't go very fast. We chatted to a lot of people, and ended up having a nice pub lunch, again sat outdoors in the shade. We headed home briefly, to recharge my phone (and myself), before heading into the city centre for a friend's birthday, drinking in the sunshine at North Beer. It was fun to meet some new people, and have some good conversations about Manchester's history, culture and attitude. We ended up in the beer garden at The Salisbury, my old haunt from the 90s which is now much closer to its old rock pub self than its weird mid-noughties wine bar incarnation, but it was too noisy and smoke-filled so me and E headed home after a token pint of Old Perculier.

On Sunday, we went to visit Bud Garden Centre for their birthday party! We pottered round and looked at plants, but this was the point where my abdomen had had enough and started twingeing, so I went to sit in the car while E and V did the shopping, and took part in the raffle and other fun things. When we got home I had a nap, and in the evening we watched an MR James livecast.

My standard metric for a good weekend is "does last week feel like a long time ago", and with all these things it definitely does! I'm glad that I could do the exercise I did, and that I rested as soon as my tummy started hurting so it didn't get any worse. And it was great to get so much sunshine.

china_shop

Pandemic/oil crisis life
My car battery is flat again. *facepalm* I've bought a solar trickle charger, but I need to top up my battery before I install it, so I guess that's one task for this week. Sigh. I've considered ditching the car altogether, and relying on taxis and my bike, but there are certain circumstances (which hopefully won't recur *knock on wood*) under which I need to be able to drive. I chose my car for its exceptionally light power-steering (my arms), so unfortunately it's not interchangeable like snowmobile parts. /Due South reference

Previous poll review
In the Fanfic vs Profic poll, 20% of respondents said they're pretty relaxed about prose quality if other aspects of the story capture them, 40% said they're more picky about profic, and 38% said they're picky across the board.

In ticky-boxes, Bob Dylan/Hitchhiker's Guide otters came second to hugs, 58% to 66%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Still making my way through Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. It's good to dip into (I'm mostly reading it during my post-exercise stretches). I'll probably go through it again at some point and make notes.

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Grover Gardner. Miles is a great character; I'm enjoying his POV, even if details of the interplanetary politics don't quite stick in my memory.

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo, read by Natalie Naudus. I have 5 hours left in this, but I got distracted. It was a bit "in one ear, out the other", which likely says more about me than the book.

Good old-fashioned Korean spirit by Kim Hyun Sook. Graphic novel sequel to Banned Book Club, etc. A lovely read about a university students' traditional music club taking a field trip, set in 1980s Korea under the military regime. (I actually read this a couple of weeks ago when it was due back at the library.)

Kdramas
You're Beautiful - finished my rewatch! I love this show so much. It has a bunch of tropes that have fallen out of fashion, most for very good reason(!), and the leads are absurdly bad at self-awareness and communication, and I still ahhhhhhhhhhh! SO SWEET!! SO RIDICULOUS!!

Phantom Lawyer - yayayayayayay, [SPOILER]!! I'm so happy! :D Only two episodes to go now, and it's pretty obvious how it's going to turn out, but I'll enjoy the ride. The only thing that's up in the air is whether the villain's terrible son will double down on being terrible or make a bid for redemption.

Absolute Value of Romance - someone on

tv_talk mentioned this, so I gave it a try, and it's ADORABLE. It's about a teenage BL web novelist desperate for success; four hot new male teachers arrive at her high school, and she starts using them as inspiration. Naturally, her stories are acted out in her imagination... I'm so curious to see how it's going to end. (I really hope at least one of the teachers is legit gay! No spoilers, please -- I've only seen the first two episodes!)

The Red Sleeve - I don't watch a lot of historical Kdramas, but this has Junho and Lee Se-young, and a friend watched it recently, so I thought why not? I've seen an episode and a half, and it's reminding me of Love in the Moonlight, which is by no means a bad thing, though this one doesn't have the cross-dressing. Oh hey, it's from the same director as Jeongnyeon -- nice!

Lovely Runner - I lost patience with this around the end of episode 6 on the grounds that if someone is going to time-travel back into their high school body, they should retain their adult emotional intelligence. Like, shouldn't the 15-year age gap be more of an issue? And also why is she giving the male lead obviously bad (but genre-typical) life advice like "only think about yourself so you'll be happy"?! The male lead is very teenage boy (hiding his feelings, pretending to be disaffected and cool), but I quite like him. He doesn't know about the time travel, or why the girl next door is suddenly acting so weird.

The Gentlemen of Wolgyesu Tailor Shop - this is a 50-episode soap opera which I started in 2020. At the time, I wrote, "I finished episode 14 and mentally collapsed into a pile of HOW ARE THERE FORTY MORE EPISODES?!" But back then, I had no opinion about Choi Won-Young (Family by Choice, Mystic Pop-Up Bar). Now I'm skimming through the episodes (I never skim!) looking for the minor-subplot scenes of him being a ne-er-do-well, washed-up one-hit-wonder rockstar, with flowing locks and facial hair, reduced to demeaning-in-his-eyes jobs like wedding singing and supermarket promotions. His wounded dignity is my happy place.

Choi Won-Young in The Gentlemen of Wolgyesu Tailor Shop, wearing a sequined blue suit jacket.

Choi Won-Young in The Gentlemen of Wolgyesu Tailor Shop, wearing a sequined blue suit jacket.

Other TV
Finished The Pitt. The pacing of this season felt a little awkward, but I think it's just because we were watching it week by week, rather than in a continuous rush. We're going to rewatch at some point, so I'll see how I feel about it then.

The latest Trevor Noah Netflix stand-up special.

Still watching Rooster, Fringe, Bluey and Scrubs. With Ed, we've started Deadloch season 2 (no spoilers, please!) and a rewatch of People of Earth (starring Wyatt Cenac). And we've begun season 4 of Dark Winds, the cop (tribal police) show set on a Navajo reservation in the 1970s.

Audio entertainment
Deep Questions, Better Offline, Dreaming Against the Machine (the Trek episode kind of lost me), Cross Party Lines (local politics), You Can Learn Chinese (random episode), Bill and Frank's Guilt-free Pleasures, and an excellent episode of Writing Excuses about tension and release. (Several of the recent Writing Excuses have been great, actually. I love it when they get into tips and techniques.)

Writing/making things
My writing plan for last week was to finish my 520 Day fic by Friday, then go to the London Writers' Salon 24-hour sprint for most of Saturday to work on my abandoned Yuletide fic, write this update post, and write a comment for this week's Guardian rewatch post.

What actually happened was that I typed "The End" on my 520 Day fic on Friday, then spent 8 hours of the 24-hour sprint revising it. It took two and a half hours to fix the first 500 words alone! I AM SO SLOW RIGHT NOW!! But anyway, the fic is at beta. I'm happy with how the revision went and reserving judgement on the fic draft overall until I see what my beta says.

Revision techniques I experimented with:

Chopping the fic into small chunks/scenes (as per Refuse to Be Done).

Considering the scenes in terms of tension (types: anticipation, conflict, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, microtension) and release (as per Writing Excuses). (I would add 'UST' to the list of tension types.)

I don't know how thoroughly I did the latter, but identifying the tension in a scene did help me amp it up in a few places -- possibly I could have taken it further.

Another thing to consider from the latest Writing Excuses episode: in terms of "Character tries something: do they succeed? Yes, BUT (something goes wrong as a consequence) or No, AND (things get worse)" -- it's the yeses and nos that control momentum. For example, if your character is constantly coming up against insurmountable obstacles, the story might feel stuck and frustrating. (This made me think of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, in which Will kept failing to achieve and being sent on side-quests, and side-quests to side-quests, to the point where his plotline felt (to me) completely directionless.)

I'm really hoping this revision approach is going to work for the Yuletide fic, too. Overall, my writing is incredibly slow this year, but I'm learning a lot and experimenting with process, especially in rewriting, and that makes me happy.

I also spent a fair chunk of the week betaing an excellent exchange fic, which I'll rec after author reveals.

Life/health/mental state things
The first half of the week, we were in a state of emergency due to a pretty bad storm; I hunkered at home (I live on a hillside) and occasionally checked the news for dramatic flood photos. The bank above the path didn't fall down, woohoo! And now it's sunny and relatively still, though the temperatures have dropped an average of about five degrees, it feels like.

Grocery prices keep climbing. I am sleeping badly and failing so hard at my to-do list (and at making a to-do list, for that matter). Meanwhile, the gutpunch of Schrodinger's oil crisis approaches at speed (or not, depending on who you talk to; our government is bafflingly, alarmingly sanguine /o\).

House
Conveniently, the storm only came from the north for the first day -- just long enough to identify that the window still had a slow leak -- useful information! After that, the storm turned southerly, and the house proved weatherproof. The leak turns out to be an easy fix (so, of course, now I'm questioning whether my windows needed reputtying at all -- maybe I just needed this leak fixed? Hindsight!).

In the meantime, my house is partially packed up and pretty dusty. I'm expecting the builders back every day for the next few days.

Link dump
Fire and Emergency New Zealand's recipes to cook if you're drunk or high (my favourite is Forbidden Lasagne) | Nathan Surendran's substack, Energy and Resilience (Aotearoa NZ focus, panic-inducing) | Oil is easily substituted, and ultimately not important (Bountiful Energy blog, April 2023; no quick/short-term solutions, natch).

Good things
Sunshine, washing, clean sheets, Halle, Andrew, biking, arms surviving the writing sprint, fic at beta. A freezer full of chicken dumplings (thanks, yesterday!me!). My sister is into op-shopping (clothes, books, jigsaws), and she comes over once a week; I just realised I can get her to take things and drop them off for me: de-junking made easy!

Poll #34526 Search engine recs

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

What search engine(s) do you use most often?

View Answers

DuckDuckGo
21 (45.7%)

StartPage
5 (10.9%)

Google
22 (47.8%)

Bing
1 (2.2%)

Ecosia
2 (4.3%)

Qwant
1 (2.2%)

other (rec me your superior search engine)
3 (6.5%)

ticky-box full of apocalypse fatigue
24 (52.2%)

ticky-box full of parrots doing clumsy acrobatics in the very tops of trees
21 (45.7%)

ticky-box of having a fic at beta
6 (13.0%)

ticky-box full of construction disruption
11 (23.9%)

ticky-box full of hugs and more hugs
32 (69.6%)

kaberett

Headline: hooooooome.

lannamichaels

Title: To Gather Paradise.
Author:

lannamichaels
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Series: Part 3 of I Dwell In Possibility
Pairing: Piotr Vorkosigan/Gregor Vorbarra, Piotr Vorkosigan/Ezar Vorbarra
Rating: R
A/N: When I wrote I Dwell In Possibility, I tried really really hard to make it Gregor/Piotr. And so I have kept at this fic since 2018, on and off, trying to make it work, so that I could announce BINGO on the fifth Vorbarra who I've had fuck Piotr. I am so proud of this bingo, I cannot even describe. The title is from I Dwell In Possibility (Poem 657) by Emily Dickinson.
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: In a world filled with Cetagandans, Piotr supposes he can't allow himself to be perturbed by a time traveler.

( Look I once saw someone write Vorkosigan/Vorbarra and I said that's not a pairing that's a challenge )

rachelmanija

An incredibly beautiful book and a very faithful adaptation. Much of the language is word-for-word from the book. I would happily hang most panels on my wall.

A number of sequences are completely wordless, and while very beautiful I don't think I would have understood what was going on in all of them if I hadn't already read the book. There's also a lot of panels which are extremely dark, so much so that it's hard to tell what's happening. Most of these are indoors. I know there's no electricity but in most of these there is magelight!

Also, the otak is the size of a mouse and looks very much like a mouse. That is too small - in the book it catches a mouse and brings it to Ged, and other people tease Ged that it's a rat or a dog. I pictured it the size of a kitten or squirrel, and looking somewhat like a stockier weasel, or a small wolverine or marten. Definitely not a mouse!

It's always interesting to see other people's visualizations of books. The dragon of Pendor is seen mostly through a thick fog, all glowing eyes and fiery breath and insinuation. The flying creatures that pursue Ged and Serret from the Court of the Terrenon are not monstrous pterodactyls, as I always imagined them, but hideous living gargoyles.

I highly recommend this to anyone who's already read the novel, but I don't suggest reading it instead of or before the novel.

width="500">

oursin

Today partner and I went to see solicitors about our testamentary dispositions, their offices are behind the Screen on the Green cinema opposite Islington Green (an in-joke that seems apropos for a certain lady's official birthday*).

Solicitors, like GPs, these days are very young, bless their little faces, awwwww.

But we had useful discussion and they seemed moderately impressed that we were fairly organised and knowledgeable and had stuff sorted out.

Though I have a whole swathe of Information to collate which I should perhaps have been doing in a more regular fashion heretofore. (General helpful hint, along with any requirements re funeral.)

And apparently - this is news to us that get our information from Victorian novels and murder mysteries - you do not actually have to sign the will/s after the ceremony if you are getting wed/civil partnered, just incorporate into the text that it is in expectation of that occurence - so we will not, as I had rather envisaged, have to dash down from the Town Hall to the solicitors to append our signatures.

***

*No, I am not doing 3 Weeks For Dreamwidth after what happened last time I did that thing.

seekingferret

Previously, I've had the theory that if I blogged every day of Daf Yomi I would put more pressure on myself to be consistent, and the exercise would be good for my retention. The latter is probably true, but recently the blogging hasn't seemed to help with consistency, so I didn't try to do any blogging as I studied Masechtos Zevachim and Menachos, the latter of which I am on pace to complete on Thursday. This not blogging approach seems to be working, I've been consistent with my learning since October.

Coming up next, oddly enough, is Chullin, which is placed ironically in Seder Kodashim because it covers the laws of shechittah that more or less apply equally to Kodashim and Chullin.

I learned Chullin last cycle and kept up with my blogging all the way through! So if anyone wants to refer back to all my old nonsense, they can do so. I'm fairly proud of this writing, I think it is funny and curious and smart and approaches the text with appropriate humility.

https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/tag/bt:+chullin

maju

I've been feeling really stressed about the upcoming signing appointment for the sale of my old house, mainly because the first step, before I could join the signing appointment, was verification of my identity. This turned out to be painless, but I couldn't help remembering how much of a process it was trying to verify my identity for the IRS and worrying that this would be more of the same. I had managed to take a good selfie plus acceptable photos of both sides of my driver's licence, and after I'd uploaded those I had to answer half a dozen questions along the lines of "have you ever rented one of the following vehicles?", or "have you ever lived at one of the following addresses?" I got this step out of the way very early in the morning (for a midday appointment) because I didn't know how long it would take. Then I spent the morning unable to settle to anything because I was still stressed about the actual appointment. However, everything went quickly (after I'd turned on my sound and could hear the notary!) and now I don't have to do anything else except wait for the money to land in my bank account. Oh, and I believe someone is going to email me copies of all the documentation after the buyers have signed on Friday.

I did manage to go for a walk before breakfast this morning. It was enjoyable (it was a perfectly clear mild sunny morning) but didn't help with the stress levels.

Violet was also feeling very stressed this morning. She has been playing the glockenspiel (a heavy instrument) for a couple of years and having to lug it to and from school has sometimes been a problem. For Christmas her parents gave her a small luggage trolley (hand dolly?) to carry it on, which helped with the weight, but the soft carry bag for the instrument wasn't very durable, especially for such a heavy instrument, and eventually came to be full of holes. So her parents bought her a hard sided wheeled carry case which is perfect and should last a lot longer than the soft case she had before, but she was very worried that she wouldn't be able to get it onto the school bus because it would be too big to fit in the aisle. When she's stressed she tends to pick on her sisters, so nobody was having a fun morning. She actually wanted to just walk to school to save trying to get the glockenspiel onto the bus, but her mother said she couldn't walk until/unless she had tried and failed to get it onto the bus. Of course in the event, the glockenspiel fitted easily onto the bus and all that worry was for nothing.

cosmolinguist

Edit: My phone has been resuscitated. It still probably needs replacing soon, but it's nice that I can have a chance at making sure the stuff that should get backed up is actually backed up, etc. There is a plan for this to happen, but I am so relieved that it isn't urgent.

So here is my account of the annoying 24 hours I just had.

stuff to read before bed
audiobooks/podcasts to fall asleep to/keep me company when I wake up in the middle of the night
the weather app
checking how badly the Twins lost last night
going to the gym (needs an app) (not that I've had time to go to the gym yet, but knowing that I couldn't -- without trying to get the silent young people behind the desk to help me anyway -- still made me sad)
reading my DW circle! it's so busy lately with 3weeks4dreamwidth hooray, but I feel so out of touch!
podcasts to keep me company while I brush my teeth, empty the dishwasher, make tea
very easy game to play as a like a fidget toy
messaging the group chat that provides most of my social life these days
checking my e-mail
looking up a thing
taking a picture of a silly thing for social media
social media
looking up another thing
podcasts to keep me company
messaging the people in my house about tea etc.
telling the time
reading that tab I had open
adding something to the shopping list
planning when to leave the house to get the bus to transgym
checking I had booked for transgym
writing an e-mail
social media
texting the neighbor about walking Teddy
podcasts
reading my library (audio)book, via the Libby app
calling the doctor to make an appointment
trying the terrible NHS App to see if I can get an appointment (it's not urgent I just keep forgetting to make it)
two-factor authentication (luckily I could opt for an e-mail to be sent to me instead)
using the camera to zoom in on stuff that I can't see properly (like what signs say)

I'm so tired.

Liv's pals

Soundbite

Page Summary

Links

Expand Cut Tags

Subscription Filters