Tumblr poll

Jun. 14th, 2025 06:11 pm
fred_mouse: drawing of a crow holding a non-binary flag in their beak (non-binary)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Over on tumblr, there is a new gimmick poll blog, for the sexiest (male; sorta) 80s rock star. They took submissions from wherever, but that was before I saw the blog, so I don't know the details, but I've seen Australia, NZ, USA, (possibly) Canada, UK, and at least two European countries represented (I'm reasonably sure Sweden and Germany, but ah, memory like a thingy).

Anyway, there is a Lot of nostalgia happening.

Each poll has two people, I have to pick the 'sexiest'. Some of them I recognise, sometimes I recognise the name or the band but couldn't have picked the photo out of a line up. Some I'm entirely voting for either the hair (so many fabulous hair styles), the make up, or because they were in a band that I remember a friend being absolutely gaga over. Occasionally I'm picking someone because I look at the alternative and say 'oh hell no'. Very few of these people do I consider to be 'sexy'. But I'm going to be Pissed if Prince doesn't make it to at least the last round, because I'm not sure I've seen any better options.

But I'd like to reiterate: the hair! Such a loss that such fabulous hair styles have been abandoned.

No kings no fascists

Jun. 13th, 2025 07:48 pm
fayanora: qrcode (Default)
[personal profile] fayanora
I will be attending the No Kings protest in Portland at Westmoreland Park tomorrow. Lets give Trumpsterfire a very unhappy birthday!

If the person I talked to today was right, this one is a gathering point and then they go to the one downtown. I think that's a bit dumb; a protest like this should be broken into smaller cells around town to make it more difficult for the pigs to crack down on them. But nobody asked my opinion about it.

podcast friday

Jun. 13th, 2025 07:11 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
I dunno, why not make yourself more anxious this week. It Could Happen Here has the ability to send James Stout, an experienced war journalist, to LA to cover the uprising against ICE kidnappings. There's a lot of coverage in today's episode, which I'm currently listening to, but for detailed reporting, listen to "On the Ground in LA."

The scale of the so-called riots will surprise you—they surprised me, and I've been to LA. It's a very big city and unlike during the wildfires, very little of it is actually on fire. The uprisings, which are direct responses to people's families, neighbours, and colleagues being kidnapped by an out-of-control paramilitary organization, are actually only a few thousand people. Which is not to denigrate the bravery of those people—quite the opposite!—but to poke holes in the regime's propaganda.

P.S. If you are going to a protest this weekend, please ignore that "non-violent wave" thing and other similar memes going around. It is an op. If violence erupts and you do not want to be involved, don't sit down. Get out of there. I do not want to see a generation of young protestors with traumatic brain injuries, please. Also avoid bridges (don't let yourself get kettled or arrested en masse), and if you get teargassed, use water, not milk or anything else. Stay safe, I love you.

OMG

Jun. 12th, 2025 07:40 pm
fayanora: Steph Sleepy (Steph Sleepy)
[personal profile] fayanora
I don't have the energy to go through the whole thing, so I'll just say I went can-boxing in the reverse of my usual route. Found so many that though I started with an empty green bag in the cart, by the time I got to New Season's Market, the entire cart was so full -- including ones I had shoved into my Gaia bag, a basket I found the other day, inside the netting used to contain the mass of returnables, AND down the sides between the box and the cart's liner -- that I had to take all the ones out of the netting, set them aside, and take the green bag out of the box in the cart and put everything into the now free bag... which filled the entire bag! It was completely full, from ONE trip, so I tied it up, slapped a Green Bag sticker on it, and dropped it off at New Seasons Market. I didn't even get a chance to count them all, there was no way to do it without the wind blowing them all into the street. But those bags usually contain between $5 and $8 worth of returnables, depending on size. Given I had nothing larger than a 16 ounce bottle in there except maybe some of the longer beer cans, and given that in one spot I had found like 15 little water bottles of the same brand, I would estimate I must have found at least $7 worth of returnables at that point.

And the craziest thing was that after all that, I found a bunch more. Only like 7 or 8 more, but still. One hell of a haul for only about two or three hours.

Oh, and I still had half a green bag at home. I was just looking to top that one off to take it to New Seasons later. But a whole bag full in ONE trip!!!

The So-called "Big, Beautiful Bill"

Jun. 12th, 2025 02:51 pm
fabrisse: (Default)
[personal profile] fabrisse posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
Today, my representative in Georgia, Buddy Carter - Republican, District 1, wrote an Op-Ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution urging our senators to vote for the Frankenstein abomination known as the "Big, Beautiful Bill."

(The Op-Ed is behind a paywall, but can be found here: https://www.ajc.com/opinion/2025/06/buddy-carter-sens-ossoff-warnock-should-support-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/ )

I wrote an email to Carter explaining why I thought he was wrong, and then adapted the language to send to my senators asking them to stay strong against it.

Because this bill is such a Frankenstein's Monster, I chose to limit my comments to the environmental issues which would have both direct and indirect impacts on Buddy Carter's district. I urge all of you who have Republican Senators to find sections of the bill to read which will have direct negative impacts on your state. If your representative voted for it, send them an email censuring them for those same negative impacts. Then write to both senators using the first email as a template.

My email addressed sections:
80152. Rescission relating to environmental and climate data collection.
80201. Rescission of funds for investing in coastal communities and climate resilience.
80202. Rescission of funds for facilities of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and national marine sanctuaries. [nb: this is especially important for hurricane regions and areas with a fishing industry, though I also pointed out the pods of dolphins off of our local Jeckyll Island State Park would be affected.]
80308. Timber production for the Forest Service.
80309. Timber Production for the Bureau of Land Management.

[The latter two will have adverse effects on air pollution levels, but there are whole sections on coal production and offshore drilling for oil and natural gas which will contribute to air pollution directly.]

80202 will also adversely impact tornado zones.

Let's work to defeat this bill.
pilottttt: (Default)
[personal profile] pilottttt

Я тут на днях выглянул в окно – и внезапно увидел на ближайшем дереве птенцов малой горлицы, только что вылетевших из гнезда. Я и раньше подозревал, что их гнездо где-то совсем рядом с нашим окном (одни и те же птицы регулярно тусили на ближайших к нам ветках и подбирали хлебные крошки, которые мы сыпали на подоконник), но вот теперь мы впервые увидели обитателей этого гнезда.

Смотреть ещё )

Reading Wednesday

Jun. 11th, 2025 07:23 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Just finished: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls, I don't have tons to say about this comic—it'll take you maybe an hour to read if that, and it's really cute and fun, and then you read the context around it and it's quite moving and beautiful as well. It's basically a language revitalization project wrapped up in a pew-pew-pew space opera story. It's cool that this exists and I want there to be more of it.

Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot. Listen, cozy horror and other cozy authors! I will make you a deal. You get one (1) scene where the asexual protagonist comes out to their appropriately diverse love interest and they talk about their sexuality and consent in a mature, healthy way, infused with Tumblr therapyspeak, and agree to just hold hands or whatever. In exchange, I want y'all to try excise or subvert toxic tropes like having your main human antagonist being a woman who is haunted by a ghost no one else can see and locked up in a mental institution for 25 years, who has no agency at all, and who at the end realizes the error of her ways and is...cut loose to just be homeless and wander forever, I guess????

Like, aesthetically, I hate cozy. I fucking hate it. I try really hard to not judge the taste of people who like it, because intellectually I get the appeal and there's nothing wrong with liking what you like, but it's very much not for me. And when I have to read and rate a cozy book, I try to keep the ideal reader in mind, not me, a grim and cynical person who likes messy characters and tension in my storytelling. I think there are some cozy, or cozy-adjacent books that are done well (Regency and Regency+magic does low-stakes, mostly good characters in ways that I enjoy, for example) and I don't want to judge the entire subgenre either.

But I do think that there's a tendency for specifically cozy fiction to use didactic storytelling (casts include one of everyone and/or a lot of twofer characters, but these identities tend to be very shallowly written except for where they reflect the author's, conflicts are easily resolved by talking things out, good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour is punished or reformed, discussions about emotion or sexuality are always direct and never in conflict). So if you are going to write a book that includes, for example, instructions for the reader on how to navigate a relationship with an ace person, or how to approach therapy for a mental illness, I'm going to also need you to examine your work for unintentional messaging in a way that I wouldn't necessarily do if you're writing, say, Gothic horror where the protagonist can't decide whether she wants the vampire to eat her or fuck her. 

Which is to say that in a world where we get to see multiple Zoom therapy sessions, I do not buy that a mental institution merely drugs a character and does not attempt to help her heal at all. I think that sets up a dichotomy between Good Mental Illness (you know, the kind that makes you pretty and kinda tragic) and Bad Mental Illness (where you get your mess all over other people/try to burn down the family house) that is not good or wholesome at all.

Also, the climactic battle at the end was a huge WTF.

If you, like me, would like to join in on Cozy Horror Discourse multiple years after it was live, here are some links I appreciated:

The Material Basis of Cozy Horror by Moreau Vazh
In Praise of Discomfort by Simon O'Neill

Currently reading: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one starts with a robot valet murdering his master and not knowing why he did it, so, promising beginning. Humanity increasingly relies on robots to do everything, and as a result, is dying out. Charles, the valet in question, doesn't know what to do without explicit orders, and so he reports to Diagnostics, only to find that robot repairs are backed up due to funding cuts that have eliminated the entire human staff. Also he may have developed a Protagonist Virus that gives him agency and self-awareness, which he very much doesn't want.

The voice in this is great—the first two chapters are basically the robots navigating their way through the murder without being able to deviate from their programming, and it's bitingly satirical and very funny. I'm rather enjoying this.
fayanora: WWYDT? (WWYDT?)
[personal profile] fayanora
Video: There are people using AI chatbots as therapists now.

Jesus fucking Christ. This is beyond fucking stupid. There have been cases of AI chatbots telling people to kill themselves, telling them how to do it, and in general giving people bad advice and fake information. AIs also share everything you tell them with their corporate overlords because they're not beholden by patient/client confidentiality. Oh yeah, and AIs are idiots, glorified autocorrects; a talking parrot is more qualified to be a therapist than an AI is. Trusting an AI as a therapist has got to be the single stupidest thing a person can possibly do on the Internet. Then again, trusting AIs with anything at all is also extremely fucking stupid.

I hate this timeline. I hate AI. I hope someone bombs the AI server farms. Won't be me, I'm too poor and don't own a vehicle and don't know shit about bombs. But hopefully somebody will firebomb the AI server farms and save us from an epidemic of asinine stupidity.

Daily notes

Jun. 10th, 2025 10:33 pm
fred_mouse: a small white animal of indeterminate species, the familiar of the Danger Mouse Evil Toad (startled)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

Today (Tuesday)

  • second day of uni - more focused. Met two other PhD students, and a said hello to another who didn't actually talk to me, so I'm not sure if they are staff or student (we are in a locked office space, because of research reasons, which is quite nostalgic. The card scanner makes the same beep as the ones at the Telethon Institute did)
  • I'm kind of keeping up with other parts of my life, but not in any way that makes it look like I have my shit together. The lounge has a teetering mound of clean washing, there is a pile of stuff on the bed I need to sort before I can go to sleep (by which I think I mean 'dump back on the floor'). I've taken some of the necessities in to the new office, and tomorrow I'll organise a locked cubby for keeping things in, which means I can bring any books in that make sense.

Yesterday

  • Didn't quite make it to bed before 11pm last night, but it was close. Awoke naturally at 6:50am, which meant that I could relax for a little bit and laze about until the alarm went off. I didn't, in the end, getting up after about 2 minutes, and getting in the shower.
  • Past me had a work day morning packing checklist, which was greatly appreciated this morning, as there were a couple of things that I would otherwise have forgotten. There are a couple of items that I've managed to misplace, and maybe I'll have time to sort them tonight, but I'm not optimistic about that. I was enough slow getting ready that I missed the 7:45am bus, so [personal profile] artisanat dropped me at the train station. Youngest gave me two options for public transport from there--either the circle route (longer, relies on Leach Hwy not being clogged), or train to Canning Bridge and either the 100 or 101 bus. I did the latter, and once I found the right stand at the interchange, got the first bus that came past.
  • Good meeting with supervisors, I have ideas of what is to come. I spent more time sorting out logging in to things than I had allowed for, including a trek to the library IT help desk, where it turned out that what I was assuming was one problem turned out to be four separate issues, one of which was solved by changing my password in Outlook. I also went and asked questions of the Library Helpdesk person, who gave me a personalised tour of all the things on the Library Webpage that might be of use to me, and pointed at things to follow up.

Sunday

  • Went boating on the river with [profile] buggs_jenny, their partner P, and their parents (G, K). This was a somewhat last minute invite, they organised for there to be a kayak for me to use, and I had a lot of fun. I hadn't allowed for the timing of how it would all fit together with the fact that it was a recorder group Sunday so it was a bit of a rush to head off and I didn't help with the clean up. I now have to work out how to get involved and go more often (this is not an every weekend thing; I could at best do the off weeks from recorder) given that the car we are looking to sell is the one with the roof racks, but I can't get our kayak on to it on my own. Although, having said that, it is some years since I've moved that kayak and I have no idea how heavy it is relative to my current strength--it is possible that all the shoulder work that I've been doing would be enough.
  • Recorder with G and [personal profile] ariaflame; L has injured their shoulder and P isn't yet back from visiting their sibling in the eastern states. G is now calling us the A minors; I gather this is a joke that is related to the name of another group they are in. We worked through several trios that I'm not sure that aria has seen before, with some swapping around of parts so that they were sight-reading the easier of the C recorder parts (ie. soprano or tenor).
  • Dinner with [personal profile] chaosmanor. One of those weeks where it turns out that we have gone through the veggie stash much faster than usual, and I under measured the amount of cabbage to cut to fill the gap for the stir fry. Fortunately, chaosmanor wasn't all that hungry, artisanat was out dancing and got dinner there, and Youngest and Eldest are able to raid the fridge if they are still hungry. And I had had one serve of each of the options at afternoon tea at recorder - G had made two things, and aria had brought one, and I have no ability to resist that kind of temptation. Particularly when G had made a serving specifically for me, because they had made a Bakewell tart (which is similar to the version I make but didn't have coconut in, which might mean that I've conflated two recipes) but had realised at the last minute that their pastry wasn't GF, and had cooked a generous serve in a ramekin.
chestnut_pod: A close-up photograph of my auburn hair in a French braid (Default)
[personal profile] chestnut_pod posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
I am aware of both these community orgs through their ties to the MALDEF and Raices. Happy to discuss more via DW message if you want more vouching.

Short-term/immediate bail and jail assistance for protesters: Jail Support LA

Jail support campaign of a long-running SGV mutual aid network: Operation Healthy Hearts

Pro-tip

Jun. 9th, 2025 07:40 pm
sabotabby: (molotov)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 They are going to beat you, and eventually kill you, regardless of whether your protest is violent or non-violent.

Years when decades happen

Jun. 9th, 2025 07:23 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 I dunno, what do you guys want me to rant about? The Freedom Flotilla? LA vs. ICE? The fact that my government is planning more pipelines while sending in the army to deal with out-of-control wildfires? Or, closer to home, Bill 5 or the Toronto bubble zone law, or...?

This is why people curl up and retreat into fiction.

The Hollow Places

Jun. 7th, 2025 01:10 pm
fayanora: qrcode (Default)
[personal profile] fayanora
I am currently reading the audiobook version of "The Hollow Places" by T. Kingfisher. It is horror; cosmic horror and body horror, but mostly a quiet, creeping dread. The main character of the book finds a hole in the wall of her uncle's house, a hole that leads to another world reminiscent of the Wood Between The Worlds from the Narnia series. Only, this place is far scarier. She and a friend of hers go inside it to explore. It looks calm and beautiful at first, and there's evidence that the various entryways lead to other universes, though they don't go all the way into these other doorways (yet; I'm not done yet), and as beautiful as the main world they're wandering through is, things keep moving around when they aren't looking. Mostly the willows. They get lost in there, trying to find their entry point, running out of food as they keep looking for their way back. They have to take refuge in openings leading to other worlds when sleeping, because the willows that are everywhere can move. The willows are servants of something so horrifying that one of the entryways has the words "PRAY THEY ARE HUNGRY" because you do not want to know what they'll do to you if they're not hungry. Along the way, the two of them find some of the evidence of the kinds of things "They" can do to people they catch.

The scariest part? These two characters aren't stupid, like you find in a lot of horror stuff. They are both pretty smart, and both are well aware of the impossible geometry of the place they initially find, the bunker that leads to this creepy land of fog and grassy islands with wandering willows. Their conversation shows they're aware of horror movie tropes, but also at first they're unsure if they're in a horror situation or if this is just some harmless Narnia situation. So they keep resisting urges like the urge to scream or make other noise. They're also reluctant to eat the food there, aware of the stories about Faery. But the place was beautiful and there weren't any clear signs of danger at first, so they got drawn in by curiosity. Then they got lost, and now they're just trying to survive and avoid "Them" long enough to find the door back to their world.

If it sweetens the deal for any of you, her friend is a gay man who was clearly written by someone who knows actual gay people, so it's not apparent at first he's gay, just a little odd -- but then again, her uncle is an eccentric fellow too. So it's only from bits of their conversations and her narration that reveals he's gay. Oh and this man is a friend of her uncle as well.

Anyway, so far it is an amazing, creepy, scary story. Even knowing it's a horror, I still got swept up in the beauty of the place and in the adventure of it along with our two main characters.

Oh, also, the blurb for the story, at least the one on Goodreads, is misleading. The blurb makes it sound like they found the scary writing on the wall and went in anyway. Nope, not what happened. They don't find the words "PRAY THEY ARE HUNGRY" until after they've been lost for about half a day. Their initial entry point had some minor warning signs, but nothing you'd clock as an obvious red flag if you were in the situation yourself, apart from the impossible geometry involved. I saw the signs because I knew it was a horror story, but I could easily see myself getting into the same situation if I had been in their place. I mean, it's kind of obvious if you know how I treat the multiverse in my Ravenstone series: some of the places you can go in it can be scary or extremely creepy, and one character is trapped in the Ravenstones' universe from a different universe, but on the whole, traveling the multiverse is depicted as a wondrous adventure one can have if one knows how to do it. That in mind, even with me knowing "The Hollow Places" is a horror story, I naturally got drawn in by the initial charm and weirdness of the place, so I would totally have gone into that hole and explored that backrooms/Wood Between The Worlds type place. Unlike them, I would probably very quickly die there.

EDIT: I would also like to add that I'm 84% through the book, and so far neither of them have clocked the Obvious Horror McGuffin that's likely causing all this, despite the fact I clocked it right away as Capital-T Trouble the instant it appeared. Then again, I suppose with all the weird stuff in the building the main protagonist lives in, the Obvious Horror McGuffin was not so obvious to her; to her, it's just another bit of weird junk in a whole building full of weird junk. Though the fact that the Obvious Horror McGuffin keeps showing up in weird places should have been a whole parade of red flags with blaring sirens to them, even if half of these instances occurred prior to their initial trip into the other world.

EDIT 2: FINALLY! She FINALLY clocked the McGuffin!

[backdated] daily notes

Jun. 4th, 2025 10:46 pm
fred_mouse: Doctor Who: close up of a smiling seventh doctor showing off iconic question mark umbrella handle (seventh doctor)
[personal profile] fred_mouse
  • working on Eldest's 21st quilt (yes, it is very overdue). Worked out what is needed, what I have, how the colours are going to be picked for the sections that I'm adding (because the original had a large square of white in the top left corner, so I've started the pattern at the third row, and have to add two rows at the bottom).
  • today's goal was to identify pieces for four blocks (of the remaining 24), stretch goal to sew them, extra stretch goal to finish assembling that strip (combining rows 5/6 into a single piece). I stalled out at identifying what fabric was suitable for the current set of blocks -- there are so many pieces!
  • Old Shanghai for the traditional post-con Wednesday gathering. There was some lamentation at the lack of pancakes, and conclusion that the last Pancake place had closed a decade ago.
pilottttt: (Default)
[personal profile] pilottttt

Пока готовится к публикации серия постов про Таджикистан – вот вам свежие краудфандинговые новости.

Итак, на текущий момент частично выстрелил ещё один проект с Планеты.Ру: Книга о фильме Дзиги Вертова «Человек с киноаппаратом» от кинокритика Кирилла Горячка (ну вы помните: Дзига Вертов – это человек, с которого по сути началось всё документальное кино). Точнее, книга эта всё ещё находится в процессе издания, а вот кое-что из мерча уже готово. Так в рамках данного проекта совсем недавно к нам по почте пришли эти рисунки из раскадровки к знаменитому мультфильму Юрия Норштейна «Ёжик в тумане» с автографами самого Норштейна. Уверен, что все вы не раз смотрели этот мульт в детстве. Ну а если смотрели и во взрослом возрасте – наверняка оценили, насколько многогранен и многослоен этот мультфильм. На Международном анимационном фестивале «Лапута» в Японии в 2003 году «Ёжик в тумане» был признан лучшим мультфильмом всех времён. Если давно не смотрели – пересмотрите, он стоит того.

Смотреть ещё один рисунок )

Далее. Если помните, я обещал информационную поддержку по проекту «Сквозь Россию на колёсах (велопутешествие Москва – Владивосток)». Ну так вот, Артур (автор проекта) сейчас проходит последние тренировки, докупает необходимое в дороге и готовит свой велосипед к долгому пути через всю Россию. Старт намечен на середину июня. Пожелаем ему удачи.

Сейчас у меня висит незавершённым ещё один проект: «Артбук Corona Astralis» (иллюстрации к венку сонетов Макса Волошина от художника Михаила Садыкова), но, судя по текущим тенденциям, этот проект не соберёт требуемую сумму.

Вот такие новости.

Habitica

Jun. 7th, 2025 08:44 pm
fred_mouse: A hazard sign that says "WARNING! The Floor is Lava" in a pool of lava with the text "The Floor Is Lava!" (beware)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

With the dramatic change in how I spend my weeks upon me, I'm revisiting Habitica to see what needs doing. I did a bit of a tweak last week, working through my habits list and deciding what was good. I haven't posted that here, because it needed editing, and at this point it is unlikely that I will. However, what do I have in dailies, and how am I going to change it?

  • Daily journal - this is going just fine, and it is important to my daily process for getting things done; keep
  • progress at least one to-do - I haven't been making good use of the to-do list, so this has been an issue. Making it optional, possibly to delete.
  • Tuesdays: weekly update on annual goals - I miss this as often as I achieve it, but it is a useful reminder; keep
  • read things 'today' list - I haven't been doing this consistently, but it is useful when I do; keep
  • update the 100 days document with today's small tasks - useful reminder; making it optional
  • Minimum progress on current project; list of craft projects - delete; make a habit* for 'craft'. I want to keep it, I have a 67 day streak, but I just can't guarantee that I'll be doing it daily, and having it as an intermittent habit is better than beating myself up.
  • read a book (physical, ebook, doesn't matter) - another one with a good streak, although only 36 days, but can't continue to commit, so moving it to habits.
  • check notes files for anything I can progress - this is a valuable reminder; I don't want to move it to a habit, making it optional. This is because I have a long term goal of getting everything out of notes and into more sensible locations -- I use the notes app for whatever I need to record Right Now.
  • Delete anything out of DW inboxes -- useful reminder, but I now at least look at the inbox every day, so deleting
  • read three emails - useful reminder, does help a little. 53 day streak. Keeping for now, might make optional or delete if it is still too much
  • update email and safari tabs spreadsheet - the spreadsheet was working as a motivation for while, but now it isn't. I still have it open, and maybe I'll update, but this isn't important. Delete
  • read at least one page of a drawing book (optional) - I've kind of abandoned this at the moment. I might take the drawing journal to uni with me, and take it places on my lunch break, but I want that to be more relaxed. Delete.
  • blog post (optional) -- I don't think that aiming to post daily is a good idea going forward. While I wasn't working/studying, it kept me focused on what I was doing, but I'll have other things for that. Delete.

That leaves 7 daily activities, of which journal, reading the to do list and checking emails are required. My notes suggested adding a zotero related task, but I think I'm going to put that in habits instead.

* The advantage of moving things to habits is that on days that I do a lot of whatever, I can tick them off multiple times.

[100 days] Craft project update

Jun. 7th, 2025 02:55 pm
fred_mouse: text icon reading '100 day project' (100-day-project)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

I really haven't been putting much effort into tracking things here; my last post about it was 10th of May. At that point I had finished 2 projects of the 10 I'm hoping for, and made good progress on three. I've not finished anything else since, but I have made good progress on some

Previous good progress

  1. towel rail - has not been progressed. I need a day a) without rain and b) that I have multiple hours available and c) (most importantly) that I remember this needs doing
  2. door mat(s) - I've used up all the existing 'yarn' and I have half a rag rug. Every time I am surprised by how much 'yarn' it takes. I need to work out where I stashed the rest of the strips while we had a houseguest, and assemble more.
  3. Teach myself to draw - this has stalled. I keep misplacing my drawing book or the sketch book I'm using, or the pencil. I need to get a better process.

Progressed since

  1. pink / white / brown crochet blanket -- crochet finished, sewing in the ends. I think I'm half done on the ends?
  2. brown / green knit -- this gets 4-6 rows roughly every second Thursday (when we game online) plus I've sat and worked on it while listening to podcasts.
  3. T's jumper - a handful of rows. I need to make sure to do this every second day at least
  4. blue / white virus blanket - I've finished the first of the two balls I had left, now on to the last one. It is just shy of 70cm square, and I'm on the 13th repeat of the pattern. I suspect this is the last repeat, based on available yarn. Hopefully I have enough to finish.
  5. Eldest's quilt - I have laid it out, I have worked out what is needed to finish it. I have made and joined four blocks and worked out that I was doing something different from the book, and now those are going to be the front of a cushion, just as soon as they aren't attached to the quilt any more (basically, I'm adding 1/2" to each so the finished size is 9.5" rather than 9", but hadn't noted that down anywhere).
  6. Knitting for Kitties - using up a couple of balls of yarn; the green one is done, and we have handed three squares over to [personal profile] purrdence

I'm reasonably happy with this progress. It is possible that either the knitting for kitties or the virus blanket will be finished next, because those are relatively portable. The former lives in my handbag; the latter is going to go in my uni bag (it is possible I will mostly stop carrying the handbag, because it doesn't fit a lunch or a laptop)

defrog: (books)
[personal profile] defrog

That’s more like it!

The Night MayorThe Night Mayor by Kim Newman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading Kim Newman outside of his articles for Empire. I’d been meaning to try out his Anno Dracula novels, but this was the first of his books I managed to come across – and it also happens to be his first novel, so I guess it’s kind of an appropriate place to start. And based on this evidence, Newman decided to start off with a fully weird take on virtual-reality cyberpunk based entirely on noir films, where everything is black-and-white and it’s always 2:30 in the morning and raining.

In this alternate future, VR (a.k.a. “dreaming”) has replaced films as entertainment and runs on Yggdrasil, a sentient AI that runs a global computer. Professional Dreamers create VR narratives in Yggdrasil, but master criminal Truro Daine has used this to “escape” from prison into his own virtual world based on 50s noir films and established himself there as The Night Mayor – which might not be an issue except he’s expanding his world with the aim of taking over Yggdrasil completely. The govt sends in pro Dreamer Tom Tunney (a.k.a. Richie Quick, 50s noir private eye) to kill Daine inside his VR world, but when Tunney loses his grip on reality, it’s up to pro romance Dreamer Susan Bishopric to save the day.

Like I say, it’s an unusual take on cyberpunk, with Newman making the most of his encyclopaedic knowledge of noir films to the point that all of the supporting characters are named as the actors typecast in those roles (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Mike Mazurki, Otto Kruger, John Carradine, etc), which if nothing else is a treat for film nerds like me. And while Newman avoids the technological specifics (wisely or otherwise), he does have some fun with the possibilities of tracking down an omnipotent criminal in a malleable virtual world where you can, say, throw Godzilla in there if you really want to. His Chandler-esque patter ain’t bad, either.


The Compass RoseThe Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing my dive into the works of Ursula K Le Guin, here’s another anthology, this one from 1982, ostensibly organised as points on a compass, although Le Guin herself notes in her introduction that her reasons for placing a particular story on a particular point aren’t always serious. But it’s fair to say the stories are all over the map in terms of both genre and approach.

Indeed, this collection kicks off with fictional extracts of therolinguistic studies on the language of ants, penguins and plants, and ends with a secret all-women expedition to the South Pole. In between are stories of memory-erasure, Atlantis, grief, Schrödinger's Cat, time shortages, mental-health dystopias, and a lab experiment from the POV of the mouse, among others.

Nothing here is particularly dull, but not much sticks in the memory either – at least not for me, which seems to be especially true of the more “literary” pieces that get a bit surreal with the prose. On the other hand, the ones that do stick are engaging, moving and brilliant, or at least fun, and those at least are worth the price of admission.


The Cross and the Lynching TreeThe Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading James Cone, though I’d heard of him and his works on black theology. This was a class reading assignment, and thus a good opportunity to try him out. As you might guess from the title, the thesis of the book aims to draw the connection between the cross and Jesus’ crucifixion with the practice of lynching black people in America – the idea being that both involve torturous suffering and injustice – and point out the horrible irony that many white Christian churches in America who didn’t make the connection either actively condoned lynching or at best stayed silent about it.

Cone – who grew up at a time when white supremacy was mainstream and lynching was still a thing – argues that of all the elements of the Gospels, the cross was the symbol that resonated the most with African-Americans precisely because the crucifixion was, in essence, an extralegal lynching that mirrored the brutality of lynchings in America. Cone traces the influence of the blues and African-American spirituals on black activism and the civil rights movement, and how it was mostly artists, musicians, writers and poets like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright – rather than while American church leaders and theologians, especially Rheinhold Niebuhr – who had the imagination necessary to connect the two, theologically or otherwise.

To be clear, Cone isn’t equating black lynching victims with Jesus as the Son of God. His argument is that the parallels matter partly because it embeds Christ’s suffering in the meaning of the cross, making it more than a sterile icon of God’s love, and partly because it holds white American Christianity accountable for its failure to oppose white supremacy and defend its victims. What you make of that will obviously depend on your religious and sociopolitical worldview. There’s a lot to appreciate here and a lot to argue with (personally I think he’s a little unfair to Niebuhr), but I found the pop-culture connections fascinating, and I also found the overall book valuable as a dire account of just how horrifyingly evil lynching was, and a warning that America ignores and erases its racist history at its own peril – especially given the current actions by the Trump admin to strike DEI, CRT, the 1619 Project etc from the public record.

View all my reviews

History repeating,

This is dF

podcast friday

Jun. 6th, 2025 07:10 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
I remain once again mostly behind on podcasts, but maybe have a listen to It Could Happen Here's "Governing Fertility: How Pronatalist Policies Kill." (Trigger warning: It contains fairly graphic descriptions of what happened in Romania under Ceaușescu, which legit gave me nightmares as a kid. 

One of the particular hallmarks of both Trump 2.0, his ex-BFF Elon (who is responsible for approximately 30,000 child deaths in his short tenure as Grima Wormtongue), and far-right populist/techbro movements around the world, is an obsession with forced pregnancy, insemination, and reproduction. Obviously this is viscerally upsetting to everyone who's read or seen Handmaid's Tale, and given that the actual supposed problems with a declining birth date are mostly solved by immigration, which they want to decrease, bears some further examination. They don't just want to ban abortion, but pursue incentives for large families headed by heterosexual married couples, punish the childless, and create eugenics programs. The one thing that they don't want to do is care for whatever children are born, or create social conditions where families can live in financial and physical stability, because then the money would be sad.

The gang looks at a number of movements, including Spain and Japan, but Romania is actually the closest parallel to Trump's plans, and it's important to confront that horror straight in the face so they you know exactly what they want for American families and children. Although, you know, eventually the Ceaușescus got shot in a basement and dragged through the streets so at least there's that to look forward to.

Stuck

Jun. 5th, 2025 03:08 pm
fayanora: qrcode (Default)
[personal profile] fayanora
Been kinda stuck in a weird way concerning my latest book, book 7. The Dalia arc part needs more planning out, same with the other arcs in the story. Struggling with planning, emotionally I want to write, not plan. Usually if I get stuck on one arc, I skip to another. But none of the other arcs are in the "writing" stage, they're all in the "needs planning" stage.

Because of the emotional side of this issue, attempts to plan go by very slowly and with difficulty. So it's basically me being stuck.

Maybe a long walk where I can think and plan would help. Problem is first the heat, then even when the heat isn't an issue, I tend lately to do "can-boxing" walks, IE checking these boxes on garbage cans that returnables are supposed to go in, and raiding them for more money.

I hate being stuck on writing.

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