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I enjoyed the sunset function last night -- after some faffing I managed to get the right amount of light to start from (fairly bright?) and a sound I like (crickets! I really miss crickets, they sound like summer to me and remind me of being a kid).

I fell asleep before the thing went totally dark, which to be fair could be because of the melatonin I treated myself to last night...but I haven't had great success with them lately.

Maybe it was just how tired I was, after a busy day at work, straight in to counseling, then eating dinner, then off to the local queer club where I'd agreed to turn up early and help set up, and by the time we left, about half past 9, I was so tired that I was yawning uncontrollably on the short ride home (and very glad that D had driven me, so that I didn't have to walk or try to get the bus home.

Today felt similarly intense: work, then an important and positive but also exhausting and anxiety-inducing conversation about U.S. politics, then I made dinner, and by the time I'd eaten my parents were ready to talk. I've missed them like three Sundays in a row so couldn't dodge it too much longer.

And that was a mental and emotional marathon of a conversation too: my grandma's house will be sold in two weeks, the upshot of which is my mom's horrible sister was saying horrible things about my mom at an extended-family event and when my mom asked if I wanted my share of the money from the house sale I said "Absolutely not," and she said "I knew you'd say that, but you're going to have some anyway, and I want you to use some of it to get yourself something nice..." Well okay then, I'll be a tax haven or whatever for my parents this one time.

And they talked about politics at me a bit (which again we don't disagree on but I'm so spoiled by my little bubble where people seek consent and check in during these heavy conversations that this drives me up a wall now).

And then we got on to their computer needing to be replaced because support for Windows 10 is ending and they thought they could just take their PC to Best Buy and get the Quicken transferred to a new laptop... I was trying to disabuse them of this notion gently when their iPad battery died because they believe you must always let it discharge completely and they never use the iPad while it's plugged in.

I'd wanted to go to the gym this evening, and suddenly it was bedtime. And my head was too full of things.

And actually I had to rearrange my bedroom a little for the alarm clock. I don't have a bedside table next to the bed; my room has a lot of fitted closets and drawers so there's only really one place for the bed to go and it means the door -- which is at a weird angle to the rest of the room because of the way the whole upstairs is, and the fact that almost every door up here opens the opposite way to the way that'd make the best use of space -- leaves no room on this side of the bed.

Mostly I've gotten around this by using a floor lamp as a bedside lamp, and shoving a piece of wood between the mattress and the bed frame which I use for bedside stuff: glasses, water, phone. But the piece-of-wood shelf is too low for the alarm clock: not much of the light would actually end up in my line of sight which would defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Also it wasn't easy to get plugged in.

Last night I balanced the clock on some good thick books, and I don't know if the light would have woken me up so I set it to make a normal sound. Then I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm went off this morning and leaned over to look at the clock to see when it would start lighting up, like a little kid. So I don't know any more yet about how or if that will work.

So tonight I've bodged a slightly better solution for clock placement next to my bed (and just as I'm writing this do I realize there's a better way to rearrange the things that need to be plugged in because the lamp has a long cord...always so much to think about!). And I hope the nice cricket sounds and dimming orange light do their magic!

I do wonder how well this supplementary daylight works on someone whose eyes are as bad as mine.

But I really should put my phone down now.

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I was trying to find out where the Minnesota Vikings are training in England, because my dad wanted to tell me where but forgot the name. I was trying to speed up an excruciatingly low-information conversation with my parents.

I didn't find the name, but I did read this and laugh.

Ranch dressing, barbecue sauce and certain types of cereals were among the pallets of foods shipped early, along with Gatorade for days.

I miss ranch dressing too. Probably some of the cereals. Do they get Peanut Butter Captain Crunch?! Maybe I need to find out where they're training after all... I don't care about football but if they have any leftover ranch...!

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The complete tabletop RPG about the heroic rats of Fortitude

Bundle of Holding: The Far Roofs

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bundle of holding

It's October at last! Sadly my calendar is not actually much better, although I am at least only having to go into the office a normal amount at the moment. We also held the annual new altar server training at church and I have either done or fobbed off onto an appropriate person all the follow-up tasks, except for a one-off training for someone who couldn't make the session and getting my DBS paperwork filled out again. Apparently they expire every three years but no one actually tells you when it happens so it's just, like, up to you to know this and remember to do something about it?? But now I know, and have forms to collect at the weekend.

Apparently I also have to provide three forms of ID, which sounds pretty intense, especially since a) I've been DBSed before (admittedly in 2018) and b) I've been serving here for over thirty years, but hopefully I do actually have enough documents for the purpose. It's easier now that I'm the one paying the bills and council tax on my residence (living with my parents, I really didn't have much!), but most of that's email these days, not paper, so it starts getting complicated again.

Yesterday was a dead loss, and today wasn't much better, but I did eventually get the initial monthly reports out to all the teams, which is something even if a good day would normally see them sent out before noon rather than after my official finishing time for the day. And yesterday I went out after work for my eye screening, except the bus didn't show up (or was at least 4 minutes early) and the next one was twenty minutes later and meant I'd be at least fifteen minutes late, so I had to cancel the appointment and rebook for later in the month (in a week when I was already out four week-nights, to make a full set of five!!). Tonight is choir, which I'm hoping will be less of a wash out; my lift made it back home in time to collect me, after saying this morning that I'd have to take the train, so I'm taking that as a good sign.

I'm feeling very burned out at the moment, but also I can't take any annual leave this month because there's urgent testing for the next three weeks, so I'm back to turning down everything I can and trying to go to bed on time instead of revenge procrastinating to make myself feel like I'm in control of something...

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wychwood: fails at life

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October 2025 Patreon Boost

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patreon

If anyone’s wondering whether US farmers exporting to China just need a little “temporary help” to get over Trump’s trade war, read this thread from farmer Sarah Taber on Mastodon. She’s a farmer from North Carolina and deeply involved in farming issues. Read all of the thread.

If you won’t, though – if know your US Civil War history, you might know about how the Confederacy self-embargoed cotton exports, withholding “King Cotton” from the market.

They thought it would grind textiles production in the UK to a halt and force the UK to come in on their side of the war.

What happened instead was Egyptian cotton.

Trump pulled his bullshit thinking China would bow to him over soybeans; what happened instead was Brazil and Argentina. They haven’t bought a single goddamn US soybean since last spring, as South America ramped production right the fuck up.

Soybeans were the US’s largest agricultural export.

Emphasis on were.

And arguably, it gets worse from there.

So seriously, go read the thread. It’s good, knowledgable shit.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

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Just in terms of the premise, this is The Secret History meets Shadow Divers: a poor girl scuba diver falls in with a group of rich kid scuba divers, and they end up bound together by a shared deadly secret. There's other works it also reminded of, again just in terms of the premise, which are more spoilery: ( Read more... )

In the present timeline, Phoebe aka "Phibs," a poor aspiring underwater photographer, discovers a hidden underwater cave while on a diving trip with her four rich best friends, Gabriel (hot boy she likes), Will (Gabriel's fraternal twin, a joker), Lani (lost three fingers in past timeline, now afraid to dive), and Isabel (Lani's girlfriend). That is all the characterization Phibs's friends get, though Phibs herself gets a little bit more, or at least more backstory: she's the sole caretaker of her grandmother with dementia, and the women in her family have a possibly uncanny knack for finding things.

In the past timeline, Phibs finds five gold coins via the family knack, and something happens that led to Lani losing fingers and someone dying. In the present, Phibs finds a beautiful underwater cave with an air pocket. She and Gabriel rest and kiss in the air pocket... and then learn that there's a legend saying bad things happen to people who breathe the air in the cave. It seems to be true, as deeply creepy things begin happening to their bodies...

The plot and premise are great, and the diving and body horror/transformation scenes are really well-done. Reiss is a professional scuba diver, and you can tell. But the pacing feels a bit abrupt and choppy, which is not helped by the dual timelines cutting between the past and present, so that events that actually are set up still sometimes feel like they come out of the blue. I had a hard time figuring out the geography of anywhere that wasn't underwater, which is not a common complaint I have about books - for instance, I wasn't sure for most of the book whether the island base in the present storyline was a tiny island with only one house on it, or a large one with a town. And of course there's the mostly-nonexistent characterization, which is really the biggest problem with the book. If this had actual characters rather than "hot boy" and "Lani's girlfriend," it would have been so good.

I didn't mind that nothing is explained about what's actually up with the cave and Phibs's family knack, but in case you would mind: nothing is explained. I did enjoy reading the book but more attention to character and taking things slower could have made it excellent rather than just an enjoyable read with some standout elements.

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Akiko's plan to become Japan's foremost manga artist is manifestly reasonable, so why will reality not cooperate?

Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey„ volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura

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Well, the government shutdown happened. What resources are out there for those dependent on the services that just disappeared?

Current Mood: angry

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1. Law firm that dropped trans man agrees to pay damages and costs: (tags:transgender bigotry law uk )
2. Do Trigger Warnings Work?: (tags:mentalhealth psychology triggerwarnings viaPatrickHadfield )
3. What effects does rent control actually have?: (tags:regulation rent doom housing )
4. The dawn of the post-literate society: (tags:society literacy doom )

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Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1884180.html

0.

The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

    Somebody, oh, Johnny! Somebody, oh!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

– Sea shanty, presumed Guyanese

Let us appreciate that the only reason – the only reason – I know about what I am about to share with you is because of that whole music history thing of mine. It's not even my history. My main beat is 16th century dance music (± half a century). But dance music is working music, and as such I consider all the forms of work music to be its counsin, and so I have, of an occasion, wandered into the New England Folk Festival's sea-shanty sing. Many people go through life understanding the world around them through the perspective of a philosophical stance, a religious conviction, a grand explanatory theory, fitting the things they encounter into these frameworks; I do not know if I should be embarrased or not, but for me, so often it's just song cues.

So when I saw the word "Essequibo" go by in the web-equivalent of page six of the international news, I was all like, "Oh! I know that word!" recognizing a song cue when I see one. "It's a river. I wonder where it is?"

And I clicked the link.

That was twenty-one months ago.

Ever since, I have been on a different and ever-increasingly diverging timeline from the one just about everyone else is on.

In December of 2023, Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, tried to kick off World War Three.

He hasn't stopped trying. He's had to take breaks to steal elections and deal with some climate catastrophe and things like that. But mostly ever since – arguably since September of 2023 – Maduro has been escalating.

You wouldn't know it from recent media coverage of what the US is doing off the coast of Venezuela. At no point has any news coverage of the US military deployment to that part of the world mentioned anything about the explosive geopolitical context there. A geopolitical context, that when it has been reported on is referred to in term like "a pressure cooker" and "spiraling".

The US government itself has said nothing that alludes to it in any way. The US government has its story and it's sticking to it: this is about drugs.

As you may be aware, the US government is claiming to have sunk three Venezuelan boats using the US military. The first of these sinkings was on September 1st.

To hear the media tell it, the US just up and decided to start summarily executing people on boats in the Caribbean that it feels were drug-runners on Sep 1st.

No mention is made of what happened on Aug 31st.

On August 31, the day before the first US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel, at around 14:00 local time, somebody opened fire on election officials delivering ballot and ballot boxes in the country Venezuela is threatening to invade.

And they did it from the Venezuelan side of the river that is the border between the two countries.

That country is an American ally. And extremely close American ally. An ally that is of enormous importance to the US.

And which is a thirtieth the size of Venezuela by population, and which has an army less than one twentieth as large.

You would be forgiven for not knowing that Venezuela has been threatening to and apparently also materially preparing to invade another country, because while it's a fact that gets reported in the news, it is never reported in the same news as American actions involving or mentioning Venezuela.

Venezuela, which is a close ally of Russia.

You may have heard about how twenty-one months ago, in December of 2023, there was an election in Venezuela which Maduro claimed was a landslide win for him. There was a lot of coverage in English-speaking news about that election and how it was an obvious fraud, and the candidate who won the opposition party's primary wasn't on the ballot, and so on and so forth.

You probably didn't hear that in that very same election, there was a referendum. If you did hear it reported, you might have encountered it being dismissed in the media as a kind of political stunt of Maduro's, to get people to show up to the polls or to energize his base. It couldn't possibly be (the reasoning went) that he meant it. Surely it was just political theater.

The referendum questions put, on Dec 3, 2023, to the voters of Venezuela were about whether or not they supported establishing a new Venezuelan state.

Inside the borders of the country of Guyana.

2023 Dec 4: The Guardian: "Venezuela referendum result: voters back bid to claim sovereignty over large swath of Guyana".

Why?

Eleven billion gallons of light, sweet crude: the highest quality of oil that commands the highest price.

(I can hear all of Gen X breathe, "Oh of course.")

It is under the floor of the Caribbean in an area known as the Stabroek Block.

The Stabroek Block is off the coast of an area known as the Essequibo.

It takes its name from the Essequibo River, which borders it on one side, and it constitutes approximately two-thirds of the land area of the country of Guyana.

Whoever owns the Essequibo owns the Stabroek Block and whoever owns the Stabroek owns those 11B gallons of easily-accessed, high-value oil.

Image from BBC, originally in "Essequibo: Venezuela moves to claim Guyana-controlled region", 2023 Dec 6

As far as almost everyone outside of Venezuela has been concerned, for the last hundred years Guyana has owned the Essequibo.

Venezuela disagrees. ( Read more [5,760 words] )

This post brought to you by the 219 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

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https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250930.html

Comet Lemmon is brightening and moving into morning northern skies.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250930.html

I made landfall chez

selkie around three o'clock in the afternoon and my godchild almost instantly wanted to show me the reorganization of his bedroom and take me for a walk as he biked with his familiar in his backpack and for the first time reciprocate in our time-honored ritual of my weightlifting him which I have been doing since he was a lankily small child and it took no effort at all.

( Well, no one except you and me. )

My early birthday present from Selkie is a rare copy of Leib Spizman's Women in the Ghettos (פרויען אין די געטאס ,1946) in timeworn but otherwise astonishingly sound condition plus a Gol/Them sticker which I am using as a bookmark. I have been fed chopped liver and lime-yuzu soda and a variety of proteinaceous snacks. I even managed to doze a little on the train once my seatmate disembarked at New York and left me room to stretch my legs out in. I could have done without lightly hitting my head on a chair likely out of sheer exhaustion, but I plan to get as much sleep out of the windowless pit as I can. As a last grace note of the night, I did not expect to find my flash fiction "Teinds" (2007) listed among Maria Haskins' "A Short Fiction Treasures Special: 2 x 25 Gems from Strange Horizons' Archives." May all of it be some kind of template for the year to come.

Current Music: My Morning Jacket, "Time Waited"

So the news, as of the close of business, is the good one that I have a job tomorrow. That is, the state legislature and governor are confident they have a budget deal in place and while they might technically be missing the constitutional deadline to have it finalized, they expect to have it by the time any checks need to be paid. So we don't get to officially see what the exact contingency plans were for a furlough.

Most likely, at least, since (a) nothing is finished until it's actually signed and (b) some of my work group's funding is federal and the federal government is right now a pile of grifters and scammers and cynics who think they can outwit the nuts. And a Democratic party that is almost ready to write a firmly-worded open letter, if that wouldn't be too divisive.

I'm glad, in the main, to be locally stable at least and to have income and all that. Part of me did think it would be nice to have a vacation forced on me. I could take time off whenever I wanted but it's hard to think to do that, especially if it's not in connection to an event like an amusement park trip. If I understood the plans correctly I wouldn't actually be off, as I'd be needed to maintain a particular essential project, but that essential project has almost no work to do on it so if I wanted to spend the day reading FurAffinity nobody would know or care.

And as long as I'm talking about today's developments instead of the pinball tournament last Saturday, let me share another bit of news. After the majority of a year without, we again have a coffee table in the living room. We never did find a suitable one in the thrift stores. This one was a piece of furniture being discarded by some folks down the street moving out. It's a simple wood table, its most decorative flourish being that its legs arch outward just enough that it suggests a pyramid without being one. It needs a little care, that I'm sure we will get around to providing, but it's just about the right bit of what we needed.

In pictures, let's go back to not quite eleven months ago as we made a trip to Cedar Point just the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel was being sold and we'd never see it again. (It has not sold, and we saw it plenty in 2025, and know of no particular reason to expect not to see it in 2026 as well.)

Another picture from the middle of the Kiddie Kingdom Carousel platform. They were generous about letting us dither around taking photos. Relatively small crowd day, after all.

More from the inner row, with a view of the other two rabbits, coming up just in the sunlight there.

I think I took this one by accident but I like the hint of movement you get with it. That shadow is not me holding my arm at an unearthly angle; it's the horse's leg.

Some lawn and planted areas near ValRavn, and the grease trucks located around where the Siren's Curse has grown up.

You look at a spot like this and you could almost imagine Cedar Point's this tranquil backwater. Note that the shadow is not some carousel horse's leg but just me holding my arm up.

And here's people walking into the sunlight. The foreground roller coaster on the left is ValRavn and on the right, Corkscrew.

Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Tuesday' was 'Bhaumavasara', meaning 'of Mangala'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Some comic books.

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Watch on YouTube

I took some liberties with the dates in this 1SE video so I could put in more footage from Maui. There are also a lot of cats. Not all of them are our cats. No one tell Astro and Comet.

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It occurred to me the other day that since the SAD-fighting daylight lamp I have is pretty old now, it still has a big light bulb in it that gets really hot even in the short amounts of time it's supposed to be used. And I'm not as poor as I used to be so I could get a new one.

As always when I need to purchase anything, I asked V for help because they're very good at this. They suggested I might want to try one of those sunrise alarm clocks too. Which I'd never thought about because I'm not really an alarm kind of person a lot of the time, thanks to sleep-maintenance insomnia. But when they sent me a link to what they found and I saw it does a "sunset" thing where you can have gradually-diminishing light and sounds to put on at bedtime, I thought that might be worth a try. I've had increasing trouble settling down to sleep in recent months, and I don't love the workarounds I've resorted to.

Both arrived today, so I write this with orangey light and nature sounds next to me, and the daylight lamp set up by my desk downstairs waiting for me in the morning. We'll see how they work.

Three timelines intertwine, connected by witches and women. A grad student in Massachusetts in the 1990s, whose grandmother had a run-in with a witch in the early 1900s in Mexico, researches the mysterious disappearance of a promising woman horror writer in the 1930s.

It's a very nicely constructed, gripping, enjoyable novel of good and evil magic, and women's persistence in the face of what seem to be impossible odds.

Content notes: Cat death.

What it says on the tin: a very gothic-y gothic, set in Mexico. Noemi is a bit of a shallow, selfish debutante in 1950s Mexico. But when she realizes that her cousin who married a wealthy older man may be in trouble in their lavish home in rural Mexico, Noemi sets out to rescue her. She promptly encounters every gothic trope ever, plus a really fun twist on the haunted house/ghost story.

It turns out that being a mean girl debutante used to getting her own way is exactly what's needed to survive this story. I had no end of fun with Noemi bluntly calling out the rule about no talking at dinner, demanding to know exactly what medical treatment her cousin was getting, and generally running roughshod over the creepy atmosphere. A very enjoyable book that I read in a single sitting.

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We have uploaded a chapter of Madgic entitled "the Fall of Rawlin" after discovering to our horror that the first print run of the omnibus had a printer error (entirely our fault) which made a very important part of the comic completely unreadable. It's now up (and fully alt-texted) on healthymultiplicity.com!

We are so sorry about this. The ebook has been updated with corrections, and the second print run also has it corrected, but if you bought the first run of the omnibus and wondered what the hell was wrong with page 146 or so, here's your answer.

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lb makes:comics

Just a one-pager, which means we're popping it up straight here! These are what all our pencils look like before inking; eventually all these Mori and Rawlin comics are going to end up in a book called (for now) Xenogals in Love.

Beneath the image is only the textual transcript, no commentary. Rawlin was going by male terms at the time, thus why Mori asked Biff first.

( A very stupid comic behind the cut where everyone 'helps' Rawlin. )

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LB Economics
Series: Essay
Summary: How the sausage gets made. I hope y’all like color-coded numerical tables!
Word Count: 3634
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month. Also, since it’s not covered in the essay itself, if you’re a generous sort and wondering, “LB, what’s the best way to give you money?” the answer is: LiberaPay or a recurring check through the mail (yes, people do this), followed by Patreon, followed by buying an Ebook Megapack. Regarding buying individual books… paper books require more printing and shipping, but ebooks deal with more robo-bans and crackdowns, so we consider them about equal on our end.

Money is considered one of the forbidden public subjects, along with sex and religion. It’s one thing to say what you do, another to admit how much you make at it. However, we’re one of the only people doing what we do, and we want people to know the financial aspects of our job, so as to puncture some rosy illusions and defuse envy. So let’s talk about money.

( No one really knows how the game is played / the art of the trade / How the sausage gets made / We just assume that it happens! )

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First, is my cat not the most beautiful cat you've seen in the past few minutes?

( Cut for size )

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( Read more... )

21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).

The chart is breaking formatting. Need to fix or remove it. I do like charts, though.

September 2025 in Review

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in review

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Silver and Lead, the newest October Daye book (and the first one published by Tor) is out today!

The ebook came to about $25, and I just bought it, but OUCH. Just. Ouch. Since the Toby books started getting initially published as hardcovers, I've been buying the ebooks initially and then getting paperbacks later, but this might keep me from rebuying in hard copy going forward. >.< We'll see.

I expect I'll start reading Toby today (it's a day off), but up to this point, for the last week or so I haven't been trying to get my brain to engage with a new story of any kind, what with the work crunch. I've mostly stuck to watching things with

scruloose when there's been a chance. We're caught up on The Summer Hikaru Died (and I think the most recent episode might've been the season finale? Anyone know offhand?) and made more of a dent into season 1 of Silo.

Other than that, I watched a couple episodes of Leverage on Friday (late season 4, and finally into the chunk of episodes I know I haven't seen; I think from here on the only ep. of the original show I've previously seen is the series finale) and I've been sifting through cookbooks.

C&Ped from elsenet, posted yesterday:

After months of not getting around to it, I just ordered a heap of danmei (and one manga volume) from the Beguiling in Toronto (a fantastic comic store to begin with, and I appreciate them enough now for maintaining a masking policy that I'd rather order from them even though free shipping requires a $300+ order).

I always enjoy seeing (and envy) people's danmei shelves, but nearly all of my danmei is in ebooks a) to save both money and shelf space and b) because I'm much better at actually reading things that way. But the Rosmei danmei doesn't have that option, and they licensed some priest titles, so hard copies it is!

[Yesterday's] order: Coins of Destiny 1, The Defectives 1, Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire 1-2, Global Examination 1, Kaleidoscope of Death 1-2, Silent Reading (Mo Du) 1 special edition (one of my hard copy exceptions from 7S), and Kaze Hikaru 33.

Current Mood: tired

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let there be books (& there were books)

Two stories about beautiful people partying their way through time.

Elegy for Angels and Dogs /The Graveyard Heart (Tor SF Double, volume 24) By Walter Jon Williams & Roger Zelazny

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For so very few people will I haul myself out of bed before the mourning doves have even woken up, but since some of them live in the D.C. metro area, I am once again watching the world in dawn-flashed geometries of catenaries and crossties slide past me from a rear-facing seat of the Northeast Corridor. There were some excellent mussel-streaks over the Mystic and the brick-boxed windows are gilt-glinting even now. A milk of mist is actually hovering over the green spaces. I still feel a teleporter would be healthier on my sleep schedule.

Current Music: Mal Blum, "Gabriel"

1. Labour to make life harder for immigrants: (tags:labour migration OhForFucksSake )
2. List of wars involving the United Kingdom (Guess how many!): (tags:war uk history )
3. Draft of Tony Blair's Gaza plan outlines a regime run by affluent foreigners with Palestinian executives at the bottom: (tags:Gaza tonyblair OhForFucksSake )

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https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250929.html

It may look like these comets are racing, but they are not.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250929.html

MJS, with the pole barn full of pinball machines, scheduled one of his occasional tournaments for last Saturday. When bunnyhugger told me of the possibility I leapt at the chance; that's the sort of thing I'd love doing for my birthday, sure. MJS had capped attendance for the event at forty people, although it seems that he took even more than that. And yet some of those people didn't attend; in the end there were 37 or something folks attending. We know of at least two of the people who missed it, including MWS who texted later in the day his humiliation that he forgot about the tournament and overslept.

I know MJS accepted more than the nominal forty because one of the women who's gotten really into pinball thanks to bunnyhugger's tournaments in Lansing, chatted with me during league on Tuesday to ask what to expect. I didn't know what the tournament format was and so offered --- correctly --- that it was probably going to be like the matchplay tournaments done for Lansing women's tournaments much of the time. That is, random pairs drawn on randomly drawn games with people who win enough games going on to finals. She was glad to know that but was more interested in, you know, what are the people like?

I'm extremely flattered to be trusted as someone who can offer advice on whether a setting is safe. But --- as I pointed out to her --- my experience is as a tall white guy who looks like he belongs by default in any pinball setting. I've found MJS's tournaments good, pleasant things fun to be at, and that I haven't encountered things that seemed obviously unwelcome. But, I mean, I thought it was a kind reassurance when our local barcade put up signs saying if you thought your drink was tampered with get a bartender's attention, and it took me hours to realize you don't put up a sign like that unless you have non-ignorable reports of someone tampering with women's drinks.

Well, I offered my opinion and all the qualifications I could, and I guess she was satisfied with it. But, like, one of the people there --- and whom I played twice (there's a story to that too) --- is a guy with a T-shirt saying his politics are that he supports (reconstructing this from memory) climate's right to choose, gay warming, and bans on assault marriage. It's the kind of thing that's funny if you don't think deeply about the joke structure, which is built on this ``oh those politics they so stoopit'' premise overlooking that politics is how society chooses how to treat the vulnerable. And I've seen him wearing it multiple times. Maybe it's just a lucky shirt, maybe it reflects nothing more than yeah, it's funny in the way ``Pangean Reunification Movement'' bumper stickers are funny. But you can see why if you were suspicious of the guy, this would not put you at ease.

She attended the tournament, though, and did no worse than bunnyhugger and I did, and she seemed to be enjoying the experience. I haven't heard that she's stopped talking to me although how would I? Seriously as we have no means of contact except through bunnyhugger or at pinball events and we haven't been to another since then. A bad enough experience would get news through, of course, unless there were focus-pulling drama in the final rounds of the tournament. But how would that happen?

On that cliffhanger I leave you with more from our final visit to Cedar Point last November, here. Hope you like carousels!

National Carousel Association plaque from 1978 commemorating what was then the Kiddieland Carousel. I note the National Carousel Association Census now gives the carousel's creation date as circa 1921, although it doesn't know where the original location was. Just that it seems to have been in Memphis to about 1925, and at some point got to Hunting Park in Germantown, Philadelphia, until 1968 when Cedar Point got it.

Detail of one of the wooden boards lining the roof of the carousel. I must have noticed they're all numbered before but if I wasn't going to see the ride again I'd have to get a snap of unimportant details like this.

And here's two of the rabbits, the black one being the inspiration (in inverse) for bunnyhugger's main character.

Here she is getting the first of her possibly-last rides on it.

And here's a photo of the two rabbits from the inside, the traditionally less-decorated and less-interesting side.

The bunnyhugger rabbit from the non-romance side.

Trivia: The earliest versions of the game that became Q*Bert had the protagonist shooting the enemies with his nose-gun. Warren Davis, a programmer actually assigned to the game Protector, made the critical suggestion to change it from killing-enemies to saving-the-main-character, and passed along Ron Waxman's suggestion that the pyramid blocks change color, which gave the game a clear objective. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 73: Loch Mess, Clotland, or, Messy Business in the Loch! Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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(Getting better at anticipating which things Voice Access will flub means interspersing direct keyboard entry with what it'll probably handle. Using Backspace and cursor keys a lot isn't great, either.)

I've known for a while that Kate Davies' garment designs and I are never to be, but now I understand why. Importing the decorative aspect(s) to a completely different garment framing would be feasible, though I'd lose her designs' thoughtful details---which are meant for bodies of many sizes and shapes with no shoulders.

Please consider this side view of Davies wearing her Powdermill cardigan (img src: her newsletter). Neatly depicted in the first link's photo: no fabric added to raise the back neckline (usually done via short rows). It means that her default expectation for how many rows one'd need from the front of the shoulder to its back---let's say from the blue-red-yellow rows fore and aft of the topmost pair of star-motif rows---is tiny compared to the expectations of some other designers. Even at larger torso circumferences, Powdermill has no shoulder-breadth accommodation.

Never mind the width left to right of my shoulders. Changing a garment's breadth front to back would require redesigning almost everything about it; lengthening the armhole, as I used to do, doesn't solve the garment-breadth issue and risks adding other issues. Having that thought has helped me figure out which patterns have provided more breadth front to back than I need, in setting up for a round torso.

Hurray for Davies' partner's excellent photography, I guess, as well as the clarity of Davies' knitting and design work. I've wanted since its pattern release to knit her Serkinet, and now I know that the best way forward is to find---or devise---a different loose cardigan pattern and apply the cables to it by stitch count, not to try rewriting Serkinet itself.
( current knitting benefits from hindsight )

Almost unrelatedly, at some point I intend to knit Sundial to consume the Hairst kit that has waited for me to have no shoulders. (Part of the kit began being Yvonne MT, but I realized I would never wear it.)

Tags:

stitchery

https://xkcd.com/3148/

I forgot to bring my camera when I left the house to walk around the block this evening, but I saw a white hibiscus growing through a hedge and bees clustered around some brilliantly Halloweenish orange flowers. I have not had my head in the sand despite being under quite a lot of rocks this month, but I am still demoralized that an international friend's postcard could not reach me because of the intimidation theater of the tariffs. Nor am I thrilled that last week I had an unexpectedly bizarre interaction with a medical professional about Tylenol. I am much more cheered by the existence of ghost ponds and the renascent fern, not to mention the eleven-million-year-old asteroid no one knows yet where it hit. The Draconids peak on the eve of my birthday this year. Last week was still too many doctors, but I have hopes of fewer in the week to come. At least I managed for the first time on this new regimen to write about a film.

Current Music: Mal Blum, "Truth Is Out There"

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Current Mood: exhausted

A magical hoard for Fifth Edition roleplaying

Bundle of Holding: 5E Treasures

Tags:

bundle of holding

Mori: that weeklong headache, the worst part of it was, it tended to hit (or get worse) at night. Nothing worked, not ibuprofen, not ice packs, nothing. It was the PITS.

( My girlfriend took pity on me and helped fix it with touch! )

Current Mood: good

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2016: The Chilcot Inquiry illustrates the meticulous process by which the UK went to war in Iraq, Lord Lucan is declared dead, and the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU is at worst the second stupidest collective decision made by a Western democracy in 2016.

Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"

Poll #33672 Clarke Award Finalists 2016

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
22 (44.0%)

Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (4.0%)

Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
7 (14.0%)

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
12 (24.0%)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
42 (84.0%)

Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)

Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Way Down Dark by James Smythe

Tags:

clarke award

- The State of the Me: v. tired. Nothing dreadful, merely too "geriatric" to support regular heavy menstruation. My family: dragging the average age of menopause waaay up since forever, lmao.

- Futuristic lolibobs: an attempt will soon be made on at least four islands in a week. Might be awol for a while. I haven't sent you to Coventry, and aten't ded (probably).

- Ghosts of lolibobs past: I can't stop thinking about these three wholly unrelated things...

1. Those British seaside food kiosks that hedge their weather-related bets with cheery signs for "ice cream" on one side of the window and "hot food" on the other. I'm now imagining a typical British holidaymaker emerging from the front of the queue with a whippy cone in one hand and boiling tea in the other, lol.

2. While changing trains in Cardiff with time to spare I wandered out of the station to see what I miss when I'm in a hurry and there's a wonderful statue of headmistress Betty Campbell, the first Black headteacher in Wales, which has been there since 2021. It's a realistic depiction, by sculptor Eve Shepherd, of Campbell literally larger than life, at 4m (13ft), and surrounded by equally well-sculpted local children, mostly reading. The inscription on the back quotes Campbell: "We were a good example to the rest of the world, how you can live together regardless of where you come from or the colour of your skin." - "Roedden ni'n esiampl dda i weddill y byd o sut y gallwn gyd-fyw beth bynnag yw eich gwreiddiau neu liw eich croen.". Campbell was chosen as the subject in a public vote, ahead of other women such as poet Cranogwen, suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas, Labour Party organiser Elizabeth Andrews, and anthropologist Elaine Morgan, so it was a significant sign of widespread respect in addition to the honour of a public statue in Central Square, next to one of the busiest pedestrian street crossings in Cardiff.

Images of the Betty Campbell statue (wikimedia).

3. There's gNo place like gnHome. Still thinking about the bare grass expanse hosting Llarge Llandudno LLandudgnomes around the base of supports for a street name sign rooted in the lawn of a suburban garden, and the way the gnomes weren't blocking the sign but enhancing it: displayed like a collection in an open air museum; prompting viewers to acknowledge the gnomes in a commentary on suburban culture, subverting passing glances like a Banksy, or like being Rick-rolled by traditional genii loci ("never gonna give you up"); or an accumulation of gifts after one or two were initially placed by the gnHome-owner.

Llarge Llandudno Gnomes

Surrounding a street sign on a suburban lawn,
huddled like a team playing capture the flag,
arrayed like an army of watchful guards,
clotted like antibodies against invasion,
aggregated like pebbles set in concrete,
clumped in a clod like earth elementals,
clustered like petals round the disc of a daisy,
a constellation of gnomic gods.

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Hey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.

Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 112

What country do you currently live in?

What is your age?

12-19
1 (0.9%)

20-29
5 (4.5%)

30-39
17 (15.3%)

40-49
29 (26.1%)

50-59
38 (34.2%)

60-69
14 (12.6%)

70-79
7 (6.3%)

80+
0 (0.0%)

To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?

Tags:

pols,
us,
war

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https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250928.html

What is creating these unusual spots?

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250928.html

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Current Mood: amused

When we called off the beach trip last weekend we thought, okay but this weekend we should be able to. Not on Saturday, because that was to be a big pinball tournament at MJS's pole barn out near Kalamazoo and those are rare and special events. But Sunday, weather holding up.

The weather did hold up, but our energy didn't. Between the early rising we had to do for the tournament, and the full day spent going around playing sixteen qualifying rounds of pinball plus side stuff, and eating way too much of the potluck dinners, and sticking around to see if JTK would ever lose, we got home late and with not enough stuff done. So with understanding reluctance we called it off again. Maybe next Sunday, which the long range forecast says will be an even warmer day somehow. But we needed today to recover and to do miscellaneous work around the home.

Among those bits: finally getting to the pet store and remembering to find a replacement vegetable bowl for our rabbit. The plastic bowl we'd been using had a plastic frame to hold it onto the cages of her pen --- giving her something to stand up and grab stuff for --- and we kept forgetting to look for replacements. (And, at the risk of sounding defensive, the pet store keeps food dishes in a weird place well away from all the other small animal stuff.) This new one is a ceramic bowl, held in place by metal wires, so it's less likely to break off and even if it does break off, the ceramic bowl has a flat base so it can be used by itself. The plastic bowl had this little hinge that was meant to secure it in the holder and that makes it rest off-level on the floor.

And then yes, there is that whole ``pinball tournament'' thing I let go with just a passing mention. Don't worry. You're going to hear all about that too.

Next in pictures ... we went to Cedar Point on Saturday, the 2nd of November last year. The final day of their operating season which means --- since we also went to Eclipse Day in April --- we got to Cedar Point as early and as late in the year as was possible for 2024. We had a couple reasons to do this and catching the latest possible day was only one of them. Getting an amusement park ride as close as we could to bunnyhugger's birthday was another. But finally ... you'll see.

Establishing shot. The park was tolerably busy which is going to happen for a Saturday with good weather even if it was finally chilly.

Also Sandusky might have been on fire? Not sure. It didn't seem to be a problem later on at least.

Frankenstein outside the Kiddie Kingdom, looking good and grabby.

And here's what we were really there for. The ride operator on the Kiddie Kingdom carousel had told us the week before that they had sold the ride to the Ohio State Fair and the ride would be gone next year. So we had to get back for a last ride just in case it turned out to be true.

The rumor was false; the carousel was still in Kiddie Kingdom this year, and apparently the Ohio State Fair has bought a carousel on its own so Cedar Point won't be losing this to there, at least. Since that knowledge lay in our future we wanted to get last rides on the rabbits particularly.

A warning. The ride will close at 10 pm ... forever? No, turns out.

Trivia: Lake Erie's sea level is only about 541 feet above the Hudson River's, but the (original) path of the Erie Canal required locks to raise and lower boats a total of 661 feet. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 73: Loch Mess, Clotland, or, Messy Business in the Loch! Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

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and now Callie is angry at me.

**********

( Read more... )

The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:

Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?

Fascist Trump’s allies are out today repeating the “cities are war zones” lie, so anybody in Chicago needs to get out there and starting posting pictures of their “war zone” just like Portland.

“Chicago’s a nightmare, it is literally a war zone” — Rand Paul

People you expect to know better will not, in fact know better. I’ve run into this too damn many times. People who you’d think wouldn’t bite on this bullshit absolutely will bite on this bullshit. So you need to reveal the lie through a massive flood of photographic evidence you vouch for personally, yourself.

Post your reality, Chicago. Everywhere. Starting right now.

(video with relevant quote via Aaron Rupar)

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

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Birds who've flown the old coop

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