vital functions

Jul. 20th, 2025 11:24 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Wells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )

... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.

Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.

A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)

Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)

And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.

Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.

Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.

Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.

Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...

Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!

Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.

National Gallery

Jul. 20th, 2025 09:14 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We went into central London this afternoon, intending to visit the British Museum, but we made a very late start, and after our late lunch discovered they were sold out of (free) tickets for today.

So we went to the National Gallery, a few bus stops away, and looked at paintings. I wasn't up for a huge amount of walking, but bny the time I was ready to leave, so were Adrian and Cattitude. We spent a few minutes just enjoyong being in Trafalgar Square on a sunny afternoon, then walked to Charing Cross to get the Underground. Annoyingly, while it was (as whichever app Cattitude was using said) only a few minutes walk to Charing Cross, there was a lot more walking underground, and we had to go down several flights of stairs.

ETA: I was emotionally worn out to the point that I was glad it was just t he three of us yesterday, not socializing with anyone else. I hadn't realized that beforehand, only that I was tired enough that committing to anything involving other people seemed imprudent. Being around my brother for most of several consecutive days was a lot of 'there are people here,' even though, or because, much of it wasn't socializing so much as being near each other and sometimes asking whether we needed, or wanted, various items.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little my joints hurt by the time we got back to Mom's flat. I took both naproxen and acetominophen before we left, and wore my better walking shoes and a pair of smartwool socks, and the combination sdeems to have done me a lot of good.

We're flying home tomorrow. I booked a cab, which will pick us up at 2:15, and logged onto the British Airways website and changed the (acceptable) seats it had assigned us to ones we like better (I got us all aisle seats, instead of all next to each other so one person was in a middle seat).

Culinary

Jul. 20th, 2025 07:44 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.

Nifty New [community profile] fan_writers Community

Jul. 20th, 2025 12:38 pm
jesse_the_k: Scrabble triple-value badge reading "triple nerd score" (word nerd)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k

[community profile] fan_writers community -- for meta about writing

Moderated by [personal profile] china_shop and [personal profile] mific

Banner shows busy hands typing on laptop and handwritten edited page

Mission accomplished

Jul. 19th, 2025 10:36 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird

We are essentially done at Mom’s flat. I didn’t have a lot to do today, but am still tired. We will decide tomorrow what if anything we want to do.

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

We had Chinese food delivered tonight, and it was basic good Cantonese food. They included a small bag of those weird shrimp chips, which I turned out to be in the mood for.

Some v misc things

Jul. 19th, 2025 03:47 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

The Case of the Missing Romani American History:

The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.

***

A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.

A challenge to a duel was in fact by this time a common-law misdemeanour, and killing one's opponent counted as murder, though apparently there were few prosecutions in either case. It is perhaps disillusioning to the readers of romantic fiction to discover that politics seems to have figured so heavily as the casus belli.

***

Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.

***

Two entries in the People B Weird category:

Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:

Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.

(What next, Wombles porn?)

And

I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):

"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.

We wish to know whether he gets woken up by a siren in the middle of the night to go and huddle in the nearest air-raid shelter. Singing 'Roll out the Barrel'.

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Four works new to me. three novels, one TTRPG supplement. Two appear to be fantasy, one SF, and one is a mystery (by an author famous for their fantasy). Two appear to be stand-alone and two are series.

Books Received, July 12 — July 19



Poll #33375 Books Received, July 12 — July 19
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

The Bloody and the Damned by Becca Coffindaffer (April 2026)
13 (31.0%)

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Sea Wardens of Cothique by Dave Allen, Dominic McDowall, Michael Duxbury, Jude Hornborg, Naomi Hunter, Steven Lewis, Simon Wileman, et al (4th Quarter, 2025)
1 (2.4%)

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald (February 2026)
18 (42.9%)

Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin by Nancy Springer (February 2026)
12 (28.6%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
30 (71.4%)

not quite done

Jul. 19th, 2025 10:43 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We expected to finish going through Mom's papers, photos, etc. yesterday, but despite me and \mark both pushing hard, we realized in the late afternoon that we were both badly worn out, so we stopped. He left, and I got Adrian and Cattitude to tale care of me. I was worn out both mentally and physically; Adrian pointed out that \I hade worked steadily for longer that the previous couple of days. Mark will coming back to the flat a bit, but we did not set an alarm, because I needed the rest.

We reached a point yesterday that I could be satisfied just packing everyting the three f us have decided to take--photos, the gorgeous candlesticks Mom left to Adrian (officially tp me, but she had discussed them with Acrian), and a few other s,mall mementoes, but there's a stack of paper that Mark wants to take a second look at: he was lookinmg both for financial paperwork as well as photos and other mementoes. It felt like it might be 45 minutes more work today, but could take tjhree times as long if we had tried to push through last night.

I told Andy and Adrian to go out and play yesterday, so they spent the afternoon at Kew Gardens. It is raining steadily now, and foercast to do so for several hours. I#m thinking I want to do not much today, just finish the tasks here, and maybe go out and do something interesting tomorrow, before leaving for Boston on Monday.

I am very glad we saw [personal profile] liv on Tuesday, when we were still feeling energetic.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Obviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."

[personal profile] spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.

We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.
mific: (Jack -  for crying out loud)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandoms: Stargate: SG-1, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Characters/Pairings: Jack O'Neill, Teal'c, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson, Sarah Connor, Cameron, John Connor
Rating: Gen
Length: 1886
Creator Links: cofax on AO3
Themes: Working together, Action/adventure, Crossover, Time travel, Teams, Robots and Androids

Summary: SG-1 meets a very intense woman with two heavily-armed teenagers in a warehouse in Modesto.

Reccer's Notes: A short fic about Sarah Connor's team helping Jack's team while on a mission in the past, dealing with a Terminator. Gripping action - and an intriguing and worrying AU in terms of the future of this crossover Earth. As Jack says: "That's just ... great." (Need to log in to AO3 to read it)

Fanwork Links: Temporary Alliances

Speedy update

Jul. 18th, 2025 11:13 pm
sine_nomine: (Default)
[personal profile] sine_nomine
So HGB on Wednesday (after 1st iron infusion on Friday) was 11.3 so we're getting somewhere. Second infusion (it's in two parts) was Wednesday. Transfusing tomorrow. I presume they're not running labs before transfusing though it would, in fact, be pretty helpful if they did (data nerd that I am the hospital spoiled me with the daily labs).

Then Monday I go for IV insertion at my surgeon's (because it finally occurred to me that it makes zero sense to try and start an IV when I'm dehydrated, tired, stressed, etc. So day before surgery and we super tape it down and pray.

Surgery Tuesday. He's actually going for a larger area than planned originally. Which might mean one less procedure. That would be super nice, but not holding my breath.

Off work two weeks. Hope that's enough.

Okay, time for bed.

Kitty Charms and Oyster Shell Squares

Jul. 18th, 2025 08:19 pm
yourlibrarian: Inquiring Kitty (NAT-InquiringKitty-americangrl69)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] everykindofcraft


I love the brightness of oyster shell beads. Combined them with some glass squares and amazonite balls. Festive! Read more... )

Hood River

Jul. 18th, 2025 08:06 pm
yourlibrarian: TIE fighter Sunset (NAT-TIEfighterSunset-fuesch)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] common_nature


Our destination for day 2 was Hood River. We loved this spot, both because of the view and the convenience of its location, parking and our rooms over the breakfast area.

This photo was the view from one of our rooms. It was not only a pretty view but one that changed all day long, as people at the inlet end point took kayaking, paddleboard and canoeing classes. I'd never seen a motorized paddleboard before but they were in use too, along with jet skis out on the river and parasailers.

We also got to watch birds diving for food, and trains and cargo barges go by on the river. We even saw a cruise ship once!

Read more... )

Offer not valid in Lemuria

Jul. 18th, 2025 07:16 pm
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
The first weekend in May, [personal profile] spatch and I day-tripped to the Coney Island Film Festival in order to catch the short film debut of Steve Havelka and Nat Strange's Pokey the Penguin (1998–), which I described at the time as "a five-minute delight of shyster shenanigans including an accidentally combination cathedral and DMV and an international offer cautioned to be void in Lemuria. It loses nothing and in fact gains an inventive layer of detail in the translation to traditional animation from all-caps MS Paint, e.g. a beet instead of a carrot for the nose of a fast-talking snowman who could outbooze W. C. Fields. Steal a seat if it comes to a film festival near you." Fortunately, it is now necessary only to steal a seat on the internet: The Animated Adventures of Pokey the Penguin Presents: The Lawyers' Lawyers (2025) is freely streaming and still a delight. Guaranteed even on mythical continents.

some good things

Jul. 18th, 2025 11:41 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Pilates. Managed to drag myself onto the mat, at gone 9.30 p.m., and wound up smiling to myself and the ceiling.
  2. COOL SHOWER. LOW ENOUGH HUMIDITY TO AIR-DRY.
  3. Listening to the bats as I type this up. (Less active than closer to dusk, but definitely still poking their heads out intermittently!)
  4. Local supermarket has resumed stocking an apple-and-pear juice, and I do in fact prefer it to the significantly more expensive stuff from the ridiculous fancy veg box people. HURRAH for Treats For Me.
  5. Played a round of Hanabi this evening. Enjoyed discovering a Clash Of House Styles, but nonetheless pleased with how we'd done. :)

(I have also made two extremely questionable loaves of bread -- the soda bread I managed to leave out half the flour, which meant it was... not quite inedibly salty, but... definitely Really Quite; the sourdough was just too high a hydration and Wanted To Be A Puddle -- and sent a couple of e-mails I was avoiding. And ordered a Small Treat.)

sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
During one of the four discrete hours I may have managed to sleep in my own apartment, I dreamed of a trio of dark-masked, clever-clawed, civet-bodied animals tumbling across the carpet of the front hall that I recognized finally as orries, which I realized I had never known were marsupials of the real world as opposed to inventions of the 1970's children's trilogy where I had encountered them in elementary school, the companion animals of the nuclear-winter breed of human traveling in secret across a post-rain-of-fire Australia, in some places reverted to a sort of colonially reconstructed medievalism, more indigenously enduring in others. I had so wanted an orrie of my own as a child reader, not least because they were a mark of the strange: bonding with one could get an adolescent suddenly exiled from their pseudo-medieval settlement, as had of course happened to one of the protagonists; they too were creatures of the fallen-out world. In this one, they were inquisitive and quick-moving, slithered themselves into the tub as eagerly as yapoks, and Hestia hissed at them. Awake, I am even sadder about their nonexistence than the more predictable fictitiousness of the books and their famous Australian children's author. I dreamed also of Stephen Colbert, I assume because I am worrying about him. It does not feel actually out of character that he had read much of the same random science fiction I had.

Doctor Who: Shear Force by Trobadora

Jul. 18th, 2025 02:36 pm
kingstoken: (Crowley SPN)
[personal profile] kingstoken posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairings/Characters: Twelve/Missy/Jack
Rating: M
Length: 11,681 words
Creator Links: Trobadora
Theme: Working Together, time travel

Summary: This is what it takes to hold together what has been sheared apart.
Or: The Doctor, Jack Harkness and Missy encounter a weapon from the Time War.

Reccer's Notes: Jack visits the Doctor to berate him for releasing the Master from the vault. While he's there, something terrible is happening to time itself.  The Doctor and Missy have to work together with Jack's help to stabilize their timeline.  The author does such a great job showing you these little snippets of possible timelines, and giving you just enough that you want to know more.  There is a sex scene between the three of them, but it makes sense in the context of story, and is about so much more than just sex.  If you like Twelve and Missy and have always wanted to see what it would have been like to throw Jack into the mix, then please read this one.

Fanwork Links: Ao3

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Elise Matthesen

April 2025

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