kafj | Reading

Okay. So.

Admin: the LRP has a variety of in-game resources. One of the more valuable ones is mithril, which gets used for all sorts of things, like armour and weaponry and building works, particularly military ones.

This event we are seeing the launch of The Cow Stock Market. This inevitably was a topic of discussion over this evening's pizza: discussion of the designs of the I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand One (1) Cow slips! speculation over Cow Futures! debate over the impact on the ~~gold~~ mithril standard!

It'll be fiiiiiiiiiine, says A. It'll all be TOTALLY fine. You can absolutely build fortifications out of cows!

-- and at this point, for those of you who are abruptly cackling, I need to point out that A has not read Nona the Ninth.

I also need to point out that I am in a specific groupchat, specifically set up following the event where someone managed to get their hands on some copies of Nona a few days before official release and there was consequently significant in-field bartering for who got to be next in the queue to inhale them, that is named after. well. the cows. did you know that cows have best friends.

But A had no idea why I was abruptly losing it, and I decided that rather than attempt to explain I was in fact first of all going to Depart Our Table, find my Nona dealers, and relate unto them the story of The Thing A, All Unawares, Just Said.

The reaction was extremely gratifying.

kaberett

Two things:

I keep (especially post-surgery, cotemporal with relearning how to walk) finding more small ways that how I've been doing my various physio exercises isn't quite right. This is a good thing! Isn't it fascinating to be learning more about embodiment and how my body works and how I can best deploy my various muscles!
Up until the hypermobility clinic, all the physio I was ever prescribed made me worse, not better.

It abruptly dawned on me, all at once, that the subtlety of the changes I'm making with adjusting how I'm shifting my weight around and so on and so forth? Are almost certainly not actually externally visible. Like, yes, people not understanding hypermobility and problems with it was also Definitely A Problem, but -- the part where I'm still, mm, not necessarily fixing things but certainly developing them, finding places where even with What The Hypermobility Clinic Told Me To Do I wasn't getting quite right... well, the hypermobility specialists clearly went "eh, good enough", and in terms of the effects on my ability to Things I think they were clearly demonstrably provable correct, but -- yeah, okay, sudden understanding of some of just how difficult it would have been to correct some of this stuff.

(I'm very sure that all my various epiphanies will turn out to be about things that still aren't quite right, that I can still refine further -- I'm having an extended phase of that with Pilates right now -- but this is a good thing, actually. It's really nice to have such clear evidence that I'm getting to know and understand myself better.)

hunningham

I have a cold. It's horrible. I am headachy & full of snot & my ears hurt. But there's some relief in saying "yes, a cold" and having a reason for why I was feeling so very very tired yesterday & why slept so badly. It's not just hayfever. Today I have spent rather a lot of time on the sofa & eaten many oranges & not fussed about work.

I hope himself doesn't catch it; he always gets feverish and sick for at least a week and ends up with a cough dragging on & on.

umadoshi

Cat Herding: Our beloved Jinksy!bear turned twelve on Saturday. Twelve! He's (by a margin of a good few years) the second-oldest cat I've ever had, and continues to be just the sweetest, softest boy. May he be with us in good health for years to come.

It was also Claudia's birthday, of course, and I always think of her on their birthday. Oh, my darling baby cat.

*The oldest was Jenny, the cat of my childhood who was still with my parents for years after I moved out. She made it to nineteen, most of that time in rock-solid health, and never really forgave me for moving to Toronto and thus straight-up vanishing from her life for months at a time.

Reading: I finished reading Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, which remained an interesting read right through, and read Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances, which I think is only the second thing of his I've read? (Elder Race is the other one I'm sure of.) Having finished it, I'm in a position that's annoyingly familiar, where I liked the book quite a bit and am curious about what happens next, but am not sure I cared enough that I'll ever actually get around to picking up the sequel.

(The thing where I've almost entirely been reading books I own for years now doesn't really help, where I've often picked up the first book of a trilogy of series or whatever on sale in ebook because I've heard it's good, and then am not sure I'm invested enough to pay full price on the next one when I own literally hundreds of yet-unread books. Feh.)

Watching:

scruloose and I are up to date on Murderbot and have seen the first episode of Kingdom season 2.

In the case of the former, I'm skeptical about the nqqvgvba bs n punenpgre jub qbrfa'g nccrne va gur obbxf ng nyy--juvpu V'z abg vaureragyl ntnvafg, tvira gung gur fubj vf pyrneyl vgf bja guvat, naq V'z thrffvat fur'f gurer gb pbairl fbzrguvat gung jbhyq'ir orra gevpxl gb qb gur fnzr jnl va guvf sbezng nf va gur abiryyn. Ohg fur'f naablvat, naq V'yy cebonoyl xrrc svaqvat ure naablvat jurgure fur vf va snpg freivat jung V pheeragyl guvax vf ure cebonoyr shapgvba (rarzl ntrag znfdhrenqvat nf nyyl) be fbzrguvat zber vagrerfgvat. [ROT13] Guess we'll find out soon!

Working: Thank goodness the manga I'm working right now is (as usual) a fairly easy rewrite and not a tight deadline, because scrounging the mental energy for freelance work has been frustratingly hard recently. I'm almost halfway through my draft and have about a week and a half left with it, so it's fine, but. :/

Weathering/Householding: We've had a lot of gray days and some high-ish temperatures combined with humidity (which I hate), and the air quality, while not remotely as bad as it is in a lot of places, has been fluctuating significantly...and the AC function of the heat pumps is essentially nonfunctional. >.< This is crappy timing, given how much of the time over the last several days has required having the windows closed (and the air purifiers running for good measure, although they don't address some of the nastiness from wildfire smoke). And for bonus fun, while the heat pumps are still under warranty, the company we bought them from went under a few months ago, which complicates things. (I think possibly the main person died. :/)

That said,

scruloose made a bunch of calls today and we have reason to hope that someone can come in and take a look at them soon, if that particular company has the parts in stock. And while it's been uncomfortably warm inside some of the time because of this, at least it's not full summer yet. Hopefully we can get things dealt with by the time summer heat arrives in earnest.

And on a purely pleasant note, a couple nights ago we were in a phase of "somehow the air quality is fine outside right now, so we can just open the windows and run fans" while it was pleasantly cool and raining atmospherically and the wind was doing a wonderful job of wafting the smell of the lilacs into the living room.

Current Mood: contemplative

kaberett

Reading. FINISHED:

Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson. I can see why people like her! I have also remembered why I wound up unsubscribing from her blog. Very interesting proof of concept in re audiobooks, though.
Prophet, Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché. Very enjoyable reread in which many things landed differently, in service of...
a word you've never understood, rydra_wong. EXACTLY the post-canon follow-up I wanted but would have absolutely failed to articulate. Have already tried to lure one more person into reading the book so I can then make them go read the fic. Now I just selfishly want Even More Of It.
Pain is really strange, Steve Haines. Reread for the purpose of making notes, this time. Sparked at least one useful thought. Following up references is a work in progress.
How to cook... Desserts, Leiths Cookery School. Read all the way through for the purposes of EYB indexing first pass! Go me.

STARTED:

Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. Borrowed from library on a whim for low-brain non-fiction.

Writing. First pass through indexing a cookbook on EYB!

Some Actual Notes re pain for The Book, including (and I am very proud of myself for this) actually writing down my questions alongside the bare "here's what it contained".

Watching. Murderbot S01E01. I am dubious but expecting to keep watching. If you encourage me I might say more when it is not past curfew.

Cooking. ... apparently I have not managed Much Of Note this week.

Eating. POTATOES at the ALLOTMENT courtesy of ALLOTMENT FRIENDS. Also finished my choi sum and had my first AMAZING broad beans and nibbled kohlrabi speculatively, all on Tuesday.

Today I have nibbled: a cherry; the first few redcurrants; a pod's worth of Kelvedon Wonder peas; half a tiny tomato.

Making & mending. Made some progress on A's left glove. Realised, belatedly, that I'd done the same thing with picking up stitches unevenly along the two sides of the palm. Ripped back most of the way to where I started from and Sulked. BUT HEY I've remembered the pattern and where I'd stowed all the bits for it!

Growing. See Eating for my biggest excitements. Sugar Magnolia (purple sugar-snap pea) now setting pods; my main intention with it this year (given that I planted a whole packet of seeds and have wound up with ...fewer plants than that) is just to get myself sorted with a significantly larger number of seeds for next year, but hey, maybe they'll all be super productive and I'll actually get to eat some too.

Stockings now at the plot to go onto the cherry tomorrow, hopefully.

Tomatoes planted out when tiny not doing so great (i.e. have mostly disappeared). Tomatoes planted out when larger Actually Flowering. Desperately need to stake the lot of them.

Tiny single solitary surviving oca has started to Go.

V grumpy about how poorly the squash I got started A While Ago have coped with getting put outside given that they are in biodegradable fibre pots so I'm not even disturbing their roots. Getting the rest of them in the ground AND THEN SOWING MORE very much also high on tomorrow's priority list. (And the beans, augh.)

Observing. Met a neighbour!

kaberett

goslings! (Canadian; one still very yellow and fluffy, several more rather larger.)
SNAILS. so many excellent snails. we went out on a couple of stupid little walks and saw MANY snails.
ate the last of my birthday cake, with discounted raspberries courtesy of one of said stupid little walks. <3
the post brought Several more books for me (two pain-related, ...some cookery) and I am very pleased with them. particularly looking forward to warm bread and honey cake, though given that I've still not actually read Salt Fat Acid Heat I don't rate my chances of getting to it any time soon...
current borrowed-on-a-whim-from-the-library book: Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. First chapter was paperclips; current chapter is a whistlestop tour of The History Of The Pen, including a much more loving biography of the BIC Cristal than I am normally exposed to via fountain pen fandom!

kaberett

A significant part of the problem is that we only start saying "all pain is in the brain" (or "the tissue isn't the issue" or whatever) to people with complex or chronic pain.

And there's a good reason for that! It's the same reason that I need to have a much more detailed idea of the fine detail of what an atom is and how it behaves than the vast majority of the population, for whom the Bohr model is perfectly adequate!

... and we need to explain that, we need to explain why we don't tell people with simple acute pain that All Pain Is In The Brain -- it's not because it's any less true for them, it's just that for most people most of the time they don't need to worry about that level of detail. But if you don't explain that, it sure do sound a lot like "your pain isn't real (unlike those people over there)".

Lies-to-children. That. That thing. That's a thing I need to explain.

cahn

I know I owe a bunch of comments/replies, sorry, I will get to them; I have spent all my time this week (including time I should have been working... took a nontrivial amount of vacation time this week) on the following:

- looking around at schools for A in case his school gets utterly consumed by the drama (yep, third teacher did leave, now we are screwed unless the Head can find someone really quickly, which to be fair he is working SUPER hard at), unfortunately all my friends who have kids at the local public school were like "if it were ten years ago we'd recommend it, but now we are telling you not to go there"

- talking (and TALKING) to people who are affected by the drama, or who are not directly affected but still angry about the drama, or who are in some cases causing the drama. There is some mean girl stuff going on and it is like, uh, we are all in our 40's and 50's, this is STUPID?? I have been on the phone A LOT this week, to the extent that E has to write a poem for Spanish about a member of her family and told me she was thinking about writing about her mom and how she was on the phone all the time.

- helping E with her final papers/projects in English and Media Arts; for the latter she sometimes needs someone to say things like "if you are making a commercial you probably need a script for it" and for the former she needs someone to be more like, "so... your thesis is made up of two sentences that seem unrelated, and also the way you're structuring this with all your lemma examples and then all your other lemma examples does not really flow very well, and also you begin several sentences in a row with 'This shows'" (some of these are the limits of approaching a paper like a proof, I guess)

Her teacher lets them rewrite after grading multiple times but does not give them any comments on their draft except for the ungraded rough draft, which means that E is on Rewrite #3 and counting, we have worked on drafts every night this week except last night, as her teacher has not graded #3 yet, which I am hoping is a good sign but might just mean that her teacher is tired of her turning in rewrites

(I do like that her teacher is a bit harsh on grading but lets them rewrite -- Rewrite #3 is quite a bit better than her original graded paper, and I think she's learned a LOT about writing a literary analysis paper, admittedly quite a bit more than I knew at her age. But more feedback would have been really nice, and then maybe she could have done fewer rewrites.)

She also has another final project in English with involves writing and illustrating a kid's story about racism, only using animals or objects or shapes instead of people. Of course when "shapes" were mentioned E jumped at that option. Her story is really sweet and involves tessellations of triangles, squares, and hexagons, but she is definitely a "tell not show" kid and also is having trouble with the part of the assignment that directs them to use descriptive language, which just goes to show you that she is legitimately D's and my kid.

In conclusion: ugh, drama. The only good things about all the drama:

- I may actually finish the crochet blanket for E that I've been working on for uh two years but have been making lots of progress on during all these phone calls? (Also getting lots of time to work on it during tutoring E, but at least that has other good things about it besides the blanket.)

- man I appreciate the other non-dramatic parts of my life a LOT more now! Including DW and all of my non-dramatic friends (the vast majority of them!) but I've also been thinking a lot of my church which is my other big social structure. There was one day where I just looked at my phone texts I'd gotten that day and half of them were school-related and were all drama, and the other half were from my church and things like "Hey, can you play piano for us?" and "I haven't forgotten about the D&D group we were talking about with E!" <-- dude and wife had a BABY last week -- and my favorite, this sweet older lady that we are friends with texting me that she went to her eye appointment and they said everything was great, and she was just happy about that. That totally brightened my day <3 And this morning they had the "morning seminary" party (these kids go to 7am scripture study five days a week -- E does it 3 days a week) and these people just give SO much <3

(edited bc cannot do math)

kaberett

On Tuesday, I picked a kohlrabi. The stem itself got eaten at the plot; the leaves I brought home to cook and eat subsequently rather than compost them. I stuck them in a glass of water to keep them going while I work out what exactly it is I want to do, and -- they are stunning. I am enjoying them so much every time I go past them: dark blue-tinged green leaves, pink-purple stems and veins (the cultivar is Azur; I do not currently have photos but will attempt to get my act together tomorrow.)
I have four spikes of ginger, one thoroughly unfurled into leaves, and at least one more thinking hard about it. I do not expect to wind up self-sufficient in ginger but I am very much enjoying the experiment.
a word you've never understood (Prophet, 9k words). I did not read it all in one gulp -- I paused to take notes -- and I'm now on my second read through, which could in theory be more of a gulp but mysteriously I seem to be taking more notes and also remembering that I wanted to shake the internet for more information about the experience termed "aftersensations", for Book Purposes. (Also I think I've lured another person into at least starting the book...)
Asparagus for lunch! Still in season; still delicious.
My house once again contains Large Quantities of hazelnuts and pecans. I Monch.

kaberett

Picture me: sat on the sofa, opposite the French doors, vaguely paying attention to what was going on at the bird feeder, mildly amused by the extremely ungainly magpie.

The magpie that inspected the water bowl (that someone had thrown off its stand) and the feeder (that was empty) and the me (on the sofa) and Came To A Decision.

It did a tiny hop-skip-flap over and landed, very deliberately, on the workbench just the other side of the glass. It turned its head from side to side to get a good look at me from both eyes.

And then, having glared at me, it started yelling.

And kept yelling until I was up off the sofa and clearly heading for the door, whereupon it retreated to a safe distance, i.e. the garage rooves, and Continued Observing.

I sorted out the water dish. I got the crates of Misc Birdseed out of their cupboard. I sorted out the feeder. I sorted out the other feeder.

I went back inside.

Some time elapsed.

Eventually I got sufficiently puzzled about why the magpie hadn't come back yet to actually notice that I'd left the crates of seed out, and their cupboard door open.

I heaved myself back off the sofa.

I returned the seeds to their cupboard, and shut the cupboard's door. I returned myself to the sofa, shutting the patio door behind me.

Not terribly long after that, the magpie returned, and drank, and nibbled suspiciously (I had changed which food was in which feeder position), and appeared satisfied at least to the extent of not yelling any further...

... right up until the squirrel showed up to claim a portion of the restock.

I am absolutely delighted to have made this neighbour's acquaintance.

umadoshi

It was not a productive weekend for me--awkward, because I had great intentions of getting an initial dent into my next rewrite. I did at least make it as far as reading through the translation and making some notes, but that was very much it.

The one thing I managed was a fair bit of reading:

I finished Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice (a fun read, and I'll probably move along with the series at some point--I think I may even already have the second book--but I don't feel any urgency about it) and followed it up in rapid succession with Copper Script (KJ Charles) and Titan of the Stars (E.K. Johnston), both of which only came out last week. (Two books within a week of their shared release date probably isn't actually a record, but it's certainly not my norm.) Both were great, in very different ways. I knew Johnston had two books coming out in pretty quick succession this season (Sky on Fire releases next month) and that one of them has a planned sequel, but somehow I assumed right up to the end of this one that it was the July book. But no! It's this one! (Unless they both do.) I expect it'll be a fairly different book, and will be very interested to see how things play out.

I'm also still picking my way through The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. (Kobo thinks I'm 78% done.)

Watching:

scruloose and I saw the S2 TLOU finale last weekend, and at some point I'll probably ask around for broad and specific spoilers for the game, and that may impact how I feel about it. (Bella Ramsey knocked it out of the park, though. What a fantastic cast all around.)

We're also up to date on Murderbot. My inability to remember any plot specifics at all from All Systems Red (given that it's the only book in the series I've read more than once) is both a bit funny and annoying.

Eating: The Zuni method of dry-brining and roasting a chicken was a success again. Unrelatedly, I got

scruloose to pick up an extra-dark maple syrup from a local producer, and we tried and enjoyed it last weekend. (This jug doesn't explicitly say "extra-dark" or anything like that, so it's possible it's not actually the one I heard mentioned, but it is very dark and they acquired it at the store that had been named, so I'm kinda assuming.)

Growing/Weathering: The lilacs have bloomed! It was windy enough yesterday, and rainy before that, that I was a little scared all the blossoms would blow right off, but that doesn't seem to have happened. I hope I remember to actually go outside and get some to bring inside.

The Sensation lilac [see icon, although that's not a pic of ours] is in pretty dire need of pruning, poor thing. The thought of actually making a(n approximately-)dated list of when to do specific garden things has passed through my mind, and if I'm lucky I'll actually try to assemble it. I think at least the last couple of years running we've looked up when to prune lilacs and then I've been thrown by the fact that our other one is a Bloomerang and presumably follows different rules.

Current Mood: hungry

hunningham

One of the things I did last month when I was up in Scotland was set Lorna up with her very first smartphone. I'm afraid that the main impetus for the new phone is that she wants to use Uber. She's going to have to give up her car soon and Uber is cheaper than taxis. (Also there's only one taxi-driver in the village and Lorna doesn't like her. I don't know what the poor woman has done.)

Anyhows I am now calling or whats-apping Lorna every day, and if there's a problem I call her on the landline and we see what went wrong (swipe, not press). We have installed an app for birdcalls, and the Uber app, and she's managed to send messages to the grandchildren.

Lorna has to go to the eye-hospital at the end of June and that's going to be her big Uber trip; she has it all planned out. She will catch the bus to the bus-station and from there it will be an Uber. And if she has problems, she will find a young person (someone under sixty) and show them the phone (show them the phone, not give them the phone) and ask for help. I am so very proud of her, especially the "ask a young person for help" plan. My mother does not ask for help easily, or willingly.

jjhunter

Marianne Kuzujanakis: Book Review: “Take Joy” by Jane Yolen

it is so important to understand that writing is a way of thinking and existing, and not just an act of doing

Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty

It’s easy to pass judgment on ourselves and each other for what we’re “already doing” or failing to do. But as an organizer, I’m concerned with what might motivate or allow people to act differently.

Sasha Chapin @ Sasha's Newsletter: How to like everything more: on the skill of enjoyment

In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.” I think this is a suggestion to adopt what meditators call “one-pointed focus,” a form of concentrated, narrowed attention on a small portion of conscious experience. It’s a mediocre suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, this is hard to do well, even for seasoned meditators. Second, it is far from the only enjoyment-producing mental motion.

Liz Neeley @ Liminal: Week 19: What now & what’s next in science and higher ed

Everything is terrible, but I brought you some plums.

kaberett

Reading. Finished: a comfort reread of your blue-eyed boys, which fit the bill excellently. Have only restrained myself from launching straight into (even if I could) make a deal with god (and for that matter the other two series) on the grounds that I need to reread Prophet (Helen MacDonald, Sin Blaché) so that I can properly appreciate rydra_wong's a word you've never understood.

You see, I read the first two paragraphs, had a lot of feelings, and promptly decided the way to Maximise Feelings would be to do the reread I didn't set off on immediately after first finishing it.

Thus far I am going "my goodness, I forgot a lot of the detail here". ( Spoilers... )

I have also listened to a little bit more of Furiously Happy (Jenny Lawson). There are definitely aspects I don't love (like, as someone who is taking an antipsychotic for non-psychosis reasons, and someone who can at this point go entire years plural without any significant episodes of even very mild psychosis, the way antipsychotics are discussed makes me... a bit twitchy), and I'm annoyed by how much more disruptive needing to reread sentences is in audio than in text (and how much more frequently I'm needing to do it), but also it turns out rather to my own surprise to be a thing I can listen to when I'm not doing anything else with my brain, provided I don't mind not really retaining any of it for longer than about five minutes.

Eating. I have been fed a slightly ludicrous amount of (more-or-less responsibly harvested) wild asparagus this week, which has been A Delight.

A Variety of other things, courtesy of having someone else doing meal prep all week. Still suspicious of Nutritional Yeast, mind.

FIRST STRAWBERRIES from the plot.

Growing. Swung by the plot this evening (courtesy of significant support from A) and in addition to STRAWBERRIES: ( Read more... )

hunningham

I am reading Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen by Robert Rodi (thank-you to oursin for the rec) and am taking much more pleasure from the reading than I did from Jane Austen's Bookshelf. Now I am imagining Austen's books illustrated by John Leech instead of Hugh Thomson
The bathroom is finished. The shower was fixed without demur or difficulty. The electrician came back and now we have a heated towel rail (height of luxury) and it's all very pristine & cool green tiles. My mother has given me some mr.muscle spray for cleaning tiles & I may even use it.
My newsletter got done. Or doneish enough that I could send it out to other people for review. I went out for cafe brunch to celebrate the doneness and had eggs & 2 large coffees & amazing brownie which I ate very very slowly. And then I came home and, emboldened by brownie, emailed peeps to say 'guys, running out of energy & enthusiasm here can someone else takeover this the newsletter thing'.
Himself has been away for the weekend and is now back. I had a sibling zoom and it was good. I will sleep well tonight.

silveradept

Let us begin with the people who will set you up with a sign with the phrase "In our America: All people are Equal; Love Wins; Black Lives Matter; Immigrants & Refugees are Welcome; Disabilities are Respected; Women are in Charge of their Bodies; People & Planet are Valued over Profits; Diversity is Celebrated." Or stickers. Or other such expressions of the phrase.

There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.

One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.

What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.

A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.

Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.

A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.

(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)

Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.

( Still more to be seen inside, including the usual parade of US politics behaving badly )

Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.

Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now

hunningham

Today has turned into another day spent wrestling with servers, and security reviews, and pushing code live and installing patches. Among other things, I am trying to work out what 'TCP/IP Predictable ISN (Initial Sequence Number) Generation Weakness' means and how I can fix it. And why are all the most recent bot attacks originating from Brazil?
I am being very flaky and procrastinating about a lot of things. Mostly Green Party responsibilities. I am meant to be writing a Green party email newsletter and I really do not want to do this for reasons I cannot fathom. I have been procrastinating about this all day (all week) and I am not sure why so very much reluctant. TCP/IP Predictable ISN vulnerability? I need to put this job down and see if someone else can pick it up. I also have about 8 hours of newsletter deliveries to do next week and am very meh about that. So much cannot do, and I am being flattened by whatsapp messages.
Good things have happened, are happening. Himself is away, so I am cooking. Lentil & sweet potato soup and I am roasting vegetables for tonight and also for lunches later in the week. There's asparagus with tomatoes, and broad bean pods ('tis the season), and some young beetroot with lashings of balsamic vinegar. There's some rhubarb (probably the last I'll see this year) which I have stewed with ginger and will eat with greek yoghurt. And a glass or two of some very nice wine.

kaberett

Yesterday, on the drive, we found the greater part of a small light blue eggshell. (Dunnock? Starling?)

We have also, with the rain, been seeing (and relocating) lots of gastropods, so I suggested we move the eggshell into gastropod territory.

Checked back this morning, and while the blue is mostly intact the inside surface has been very clearly significantly monched. V v pleased to have provided delicious snack and also by CREATURES in general :-)