rax | Network

I've been living at my childhood home, a hobby farm in Minnesota, taking care of my dad. Soon my dad will be moving to assisted living, along with my mom who is moving there from the nursing home.

I'll be staying at the farm and looking after the animals. I'd rather live here with other people, as it's safer and more fun. I have multiple disabilities which make managing a whole farm rather difficult on my own. I've had a couple of seizures which make it safer for me to have people around me. Minnesota is one of the better places to live right now in the US and this could be a good opportunity for someone to live here.

So, if you know of anyone that would like a nice place to live, please direct them my way, especially queer and trans people looking for a relatively safe place. There is a lot of space in the house (3 full bathrooms, 4 bedrooms), and plenty of outdoor space.

I have one cat and one dog in the house, and outside there are a few sheep, one aging horse that is strictly a pasture pet, and some guinea fowl. Amenities include a dishwasher, laundry, wifi, some streaming services, 2 gas fireplaces. This is a wonderful place for hobbies such as gardening, woodworking, fiber arts, baking, etc. In addition to the house there are some outbuildings and a nice garden shed. Opportunities for fishing, golf, biking abound in the region.

Couples (+) are welcome as are kids. There is a good elementary school just a few miles away.

The house needs a bit of work, but overall it's very nice and peaceful. One thing I do contend with here is bugs. There is no central AC but we can do window AC units when needed. Sometimes the dog barks in an annoying manner (we are working on it). I could use help with mowing, weeding, cutting brush.

You could live here for cheap as I mostly am looking for company and help. I can't live with smokers due to my disabilities. I have lived with roommates for most of my life and can provide references.

The house is rural but only a few miles from the nearest shopping area, and close to a small city. You would probably need to have a car, though we can get grocery delivery here.

My interests include watching TV shows and movies, gardening, science fiction, jigsaw puzzles, thrifting. I'm a queer woman in my 40s. I'm a rather extreme night owl.

If interested you can comment here or email me, sandphin at gmail dot com. Share this link with people you think might be interested!

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3092/

https://xkcd.com/3092/

sabotabby

The finale was...good, actually? Again, grading on a curve. It is still a bad show. But it's one of those bad shows where you get the sense that there is someone in the writers' room doing their best and sneaking all kinds of fun content in (see also: Archie singing IWW songs in Riverdale).

I had to check Reddit to see which case this was based on—it takes most of the episode to get to it. A seemingly unremarkable middle-aged travel agent drops dead in his driveway while his wife is out for a jog. It looks like a heart attack, but a cop in 44 Division suggests to Holness that she might want to get "her best" on it. Unfortunately the best that Toronto Police Services—sorry, TPD on the show for some reason—have are Graff and Bateman.

( spoilers )

And that's a wrap. I guess I'll have to find some good show to watch now.

minoanmiss

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

isis

What I recently finished watching:

S3 of Dark Winds, which GRRM (who is an executive producer of the show) makes a cameo in, hee. Also Jenna Elfman guest stars as an FBI investigator in from DC. This one goes hard on the "dark" part of the title, with some fairly gruesome crimes going on, as well as the emotional darkness from the fallout of the events of the previous season.

As usual I really enjoyed seeing my local landscapes, and the general Indian-country vibe of the show. (As I've mentioned before, I live not far from Navajo, though the local tribe is actually the Southern Ute; also, the college down the road is free for enrolled tribal members of any US tribe.) I was less a fan of how the season really consisted of very separate storylines, Bernie in the Border Patrol and Joe and Jim on the rez, however, the Navajo police investigation was well integrated with Joe's personal story, which made it all that more interesting. (Also here I have to admit that although I like Jim Chee as a character, I don't find him very attractive - a combination of Kiowa Gordon's chubby face and his truly dreadful 1970's costuming - so the romantic storyline was a little flat for me.)

However, damn do I love Bernie! However, her storyline confused me a bit, because it started out being about human trafficking but ended up being about drugs? But there was also a frightened Mexican family involved? Not sure what was going on there. I did figure out before the reveal who the bad guys and the complicit guys were (and heh, I bet the Republicans are none too pleased at the show painting the Border Patrol as a den of corruption) and wow, the ending of that bit was very kickass.

What I'm watching now:

S2 of Andor, which I only remember certain points from S1 so I was pretty confused during the first episode. Hopefully it will become clear(er) after the second episode, tonight.

sorcyress

Content Warning: non-detailed allusions to my shitty abusive ex and the shitty relationship we had

I have been working on the Inbox0 project, which sorta has two modalities:

First, the banality of daily life. Unsubscribing from things I don't care about, and mass deleting the bulks they have sent in the past. Meeting notes and invitations and preperatory emails that can safely be labeled ("highland ball" got a workout today, from when I ran it in 2017) and archived. Going through the 50 most recent emails in the inbox and trying to at least first pass all of what's happened lately.

Second, the weight of history. I have had the same email address since 2005, so that sure is, uh, twenty years since January 15th. It's not everything I've ever gotten (see above about bulk-deleting bullshit) and I do have like, a more professionally wallet-named account, but even that sends its email into the main box.

And the weight of history can be _exhausting_. That's part of what makes this game difficult, trying to motivate myself to be exposed fully to some of my worst ADHD sins, or the parts of my personal history where the Big D went on the word depression. Have I mentioned lately I went through an abusive relationship for most of the year 2007? Yeah, uh. That still has bits and pieces lying around it sure does.

But mannnnn one of the benefits of hindsight and being an actual friggin' grown-up and stuff is the ability to look at some of those bits and pieces and see just how much I have grown and improved and gotten better. I can have a lot of grace for myself (I do genuinely like myself, regardless of how much I whine I am a really spectacularly awesome person) and part of the reason is that recognition of the work I have done to reach better and better heights as time goes on.

Or, like, to read an email in which this guy I was totally into was basically breaking up with me, in part because he was not interested in being in a polycule with my shitty boyfriend. Boo hiss, this should be real sad. But it's _not_ because it's been twenty freaking years, that guy I was totally into has developed a lovely sounding life for himself on the other side of the world and I've made a polycule that has an absolute dearth of shitty boyfriends anywhere in it. And so I can read stuff like this...

However, I talked to ksatyr....he is *way* over-reacting. You think you're not ready for a relationship? I'm sorry, but this is a demonstration of not being ready for a relationship.

...and scream lovely modern "YASS QUEEN SLAY¹" because BOY HOWDY it is good to remember that there were people who were willing to say to my face "yeah, your boyfriend ain't shit because shit at least provides fertilizer and causes growth²". I mean, I didn't listen sufficiently at the time, but it turns out it never gets old to listen to folks drag my shitty partners, even if I didn't necessarily realize it at the time.

So yeah. The history is rough but it's also nice to see the growth that goes alongside it. And it's nice to get reminders that however fucked up current-right-now Kat is, they're not (correctly) getting dragged by a twenty year old for acting like a sixteen year old³.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: This is almost certainly ironic as it's not language that has actually gotten into my lexicon yet.

2: Okay sure, I suppose you could argue that kSatyr caused growth _in me_. As a different shitty ex once said "-99 points for everything, +1 for making a better Kat for the rest of us". But just because it causes growth doesn't mean I particularly want to be covered in shit. :P

3: September party! I will finally be the age my abusive ex was when he dated me! WOOO!

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/05/21/the-big-idea-adam-oyebanji-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55728

Inspiration can come from anywhere, even from a nautical legal case from the 1700s. Author Adam Oyebanji lets us glimpse into some marines’ tragic pasts in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Esperance. Dive in and see where the waves take you.

ADAM OYEBANJI:

If I were ever reckless enough to confess my faults, I’d admit to being nosy, easily distracted and addicted to tea. To my mind, at least, these are forgivable foibles. People in glass houses and all that. However, I’m also a lawyer and pretty freaking unrepentant about it. A wig and gown in England, charcoal suits in Illinois, juries in both places. Feel free to judge, but if you do, remember that judges are lawyers too. I’m just saying.

Before I was a lawyer, though, I was a law student. In England. Which is important, because law in England is an undergraduate program in a country where the legal drinking age is eighteen. Torts in the afternoon, tequilas in the evening, and who has time for mornings? The high-pressure seriousness of a US law school is mostly missing. I say “mostly” because some people are incapable of a good time at any age. So, let’s acknowledge them in passing and move on. Law school English style is one part learning, one part good times with a dash of heartache. Oh, and get this. In my day it was ABSOLUTELY FREE. We got paid to go there. Hand to God.

Admittedly, this was a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that we cracked open actual books instead of laptops. Books that, in addition to the assigned reading, contained hundreds of cases that were of absolutely no interest to my professors.

But if one happened to be a hungover law student who was both nosy and easily distracted, the assigned reading could rapidly lose its allure. Who cares about the rule against perpetuities anyway?

Now that I come to think about it, and having practiced law for more years than I’m going to admit to, I still don’t care about the rule against perpetuities. But I digress.

The point about a nosy, easily distracted law student poking about in a book is that it’s a book. Books, unlike a computerized law report, are completely non-linear. You can riffle the pages and land on something completely different almost without conscious effort. Forward, backward, upside-down if you like, it’s all too easy to get lost in other people’s long-ago legal troubles, because those, let me tell you, are way more interesting than whether X has created a future interest in property that vests more than twenty-one years after the lifetimes of persons living at the time of the creation of the interest. (You cannot make this stuff up).

Rather than deal with the assigned boredom, I spent a chunk of this particular afternoon in the Eighteenth century: duels, infidelity, murder and, of course, marine insurance.

Now, when it comes to boredom, the law of marine insurance is hard to beat. Except for this. If a marine insurance case makes it into a law report, the underlying disaster, the thing that triggers the insurance claim, can be kind of interesting. In this particular case, from 1783, the claim arose out of a voyage of such incompetence and cruelty that just reading about it took my breath away. People died. A lot of people. And all anyone seemed to care about afterward was the value of the claim. I had nightmares about it. Even now, I sometimes have dreams so vivid I can hear the waves slapping against that ancient, wooden hull, the screaming of lost souls as things go horribly, irretrievably sideways.

And that might have been it, had it not been for my addiction to the stuff that made Boston Harbor famous. I’m standing on my front porch, well into my sixth cup of tea when it hits me: the big idea. Why not use the facts of this nightmarish shipping claim as the inciting incident of a novel? And not a historical novel, but a sci-fi one, where the consequences carry forward to the present? A story about a Chicago cop who’s in way over his head, chasing a seemingly invincible criminal dead-set on writing an old wrong. A story about a woman out of her own time and place prepared to do drastic things in expiation of sins that are not her own. A story where human justice clashes with inhuman crimes in a deadly conflict of values. Why not, once I’ve finished my beverage, go back inside and write that story?

So I did. I called it Esperance.

Esperance: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/05/21/the-big-idea-adam-oyebanji-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55728

osprey_archer

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.

lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/25774392-penric-and-the-bandit-now-shipping

Updating myself further, I see this morning that "Penric and the Bandit" is now in-stock and shipping from Subterranean Press.

https://subterraneanpress.com/bujold-...

Uncle Hugo's and Dreamhaven here in Minneapolis should get their copies pretty soon.

Ta, L.

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on May, 21

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/25774392-penric-and-the-bandit-now-shipping

bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/more-ais-are-taking-polls-and-surveys.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70280

I already knew about the declining response rate for polls and surveys. The percentage of AI bots that respond to surveys is also increasing.

Solutions are hard:

1. Make surveys less boring.
We need to move past bland, grid-filled surveys and start designing experiences people actually want to complete. That means mobile-first layouts, shorter runtimes, and maybe even a dash of storytelling. TikTok or dating app style surveys wouldn’t be a bad idea or is that just me being too much Gen Z?

2. Bot detection.
There’s a growing toolkit of ways to spot AI-generated responses—using things like response entropy, writing style patterns or even metadata like keystroke timing. Platforms should start integrating these detection tools more widely. Ideally, you introduce an element that only humans can do, e.g., you have to pick up your price somewhere in-person. Btw, note that these bots can easily be designed to find ways around the most common detection tactics such as Captcha’s, timed responses and postcode and IP recognition. Believe me, way less code than you suspect is needed to do this.

3. Pay people more.
If you’re only offering 50 cents for 10 minutes of mental effort, don’t be surprised when your respondent pool consists of AI agents and sleep-deprived gig workers. Smarter, dynamic incentives—especially for underrepresented groups—can make a big difference. Perhaps pay-differentiation (based on simple demand/supply) makes sense?

4. Rethink the whole model.
Surveys aren’t the only way to understand people. We can also learn from digital traces, behavioral data, or administrative records. Think of it as moving from a single snapshot to a fuller, blended picture. Yes, it’s messier—but it’s also more real.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/more-ais-are-taking-polls-and-surveys.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70280

sabotabby

Just finished: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I don't know what to make of this, and will definitely be checking out the Wizards vs. Lesbians episode on it (not that I always agree with them, but they do raise perspectives that are interesting). I would say overall the prose and characters carried it. I got to know these people, I fell in love with them in the same way that the narrator did. It was compelling, as the kids say.

But I don't think the ended quite landed and I'm struggling to think of why. In part (and this is confirmed a little in an interview that follows the book), it's hurt a bit by the first-person narration. Bradley is telling a much bigger story than the narrator sees, and while that thankfully rescues it from being a didactic Message Book, it might have swung too far towards the other direction where I'm not exactly sure what it was trying to say. It's one of those books that straddles the literary and genre, and I tend to prefer genre in a literary style than literary fiction exploring genre.

That said, it was so relentlessly well-written that I feel like my ill-defined issues with it are kind of irrelevant because I highly enjoyed it.

Currently reading: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. I'm almost done this one. It's almost the reverse—protagonists figuring out genre solutions to literary fiction problems. I was given a warning about this book and I'm yet to figure out why.

What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher. I didn't read the first novella in this series (What Moves the Dead) despite it having my favourite cover the year it came out. So it's taking some getting used to. On the plus side, the opening is suffused with so much gothic horror that I find myself turning into a young woman fleeing in a white gown across the moors, holding a candlestick.

cmcmck

They are late 13th and early 14th century.

Large parts of the walls are walkable as there is a guard walk.

So many great views up there!

Looking towards a higher stretch of the wall from a stretch near the castle.

( More pics )

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: 'ereabouts

nanila posting in

awesomeers

muccamukk

Watch on YouTube

The CBC keeps playing this at me for some reason, and it's really pretty.

BUT ALSO: what is that piano intro reminding me of? I'm thinking late'90s with a female singer, but it might just have been... something I listened to a lot in the '90s.

sorcyress

Progress is being made.

I want to be very clear (and whiny) that I'm still burnt out. That hasn't gone away. Roundabouts July 15, is when I stop having Immediate Plans, and go back to comforting vagueness. I am probably going to book the entire week after Pinewoods on my calendar as "do not schedule, do not interact, this is entirely mine and I will maybe do things on an hours notice or less, but definitely not otherwise).

But progress is being made. Having Tuesday come over this past weekend and body double me while I worked on my room was a truly wonderful help. My room still has an infinite of little projects and organizations and puttings-aways, but it is SO MUCH BETTER and because it is not a series of fucking huge piles of undifferentiated stuff shutting my brain down the moment I look at it, I have actually been able to do maintenance level cleaning on a regular basis. Like, just take five minutes to put away several things where they belong instead of dropping them back into The Pile. It feels very good.

I've also returned to the Inbox0 project after basically 11 months of not touching it. I'm not yet at my lowest-ever¹, but I have archived or deleted about 2000 emails in the last two days, and most of those were unread. GOOD PROGRESS.

I didn't really do any work progress, which was partly because I had a series of Good Individual Conversations instead. One of my favourite students came for 2.5 hours in the morning (it's a testing day, so weird schedule) and I helped drag him through most of the last six weeks, getting his grade this quarter to jump from about a 20% to an 84%. It's amazing how much quizzes are weighted if you _haven't done any of them_. I also had decent planning conversation with Clayton, and saw a couple other students for brief periods. Tomorrow, I teach one class, and have to proctor the test for ninety minutes, but it should be otherwise pretty mellow.

I should probably medialog sometime soon, especially because I have actually been reading --I've actually read a fair amount, although most of that was my recent murderbot reread. It's still good! It still hits hard! I was pretty vehement that I didn't want to see the tv show (I don't want to rewire my brain in how it visualizes or thinks about different characters, this happened with That Fucking TERF's books when I watched the movies and I didn't like it) but I've seen some pretty excited reviews, so hmmmmmmmmmaybe.

Also I earned a die yesterday, and I'm on track to earn one today. I'm happy to have this ADHD-brain-game maybe working for me again? Especially because it looks the like previous reset was _November_ meaning it took nearly six months to get 31 full-score days on my daily chart. Auuuguh. Yipes.

(gee Kat, what possible reason could your brain have for going all sideways and fukt-up since November of 2024?)

So yeah, it'd be cool if I can get through this batch, uh, a little faster. I liked the version of the game where I was going through about four rounds a year, it feels reasonable to say "I will get full points on a third of the days". Heck, it's still possible for this year if ~I only believe~.

(we build habits as best we can to support ourselves when the things fall apart)

Anyways, nice to have projects in my life that are seeing progress, even if it's just small and silly number-goes-down. I hope your life is also seeing progress.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: Technically my lowest ever was the long span of time through 2019 and 2020 where I actually maintained inbox zero pretty consistently. This is possible to do! It's just hard to get back to.

cosmolinguist

At the gym, I spotted someone holding what looked like a guide cane. (There are different kinds of white canes.)

He was just standing around, looking kinda vague. So when I finished the exercise I was doing, I went over and asked him if he would like any help.

We didn't share much language, but I got the impression he didn't want to be bothered, so I cheerfully went on my way.

But when I was doing my next exercise, he came over and said something about "check weights."

I hopped up with a confidence I soon realized was unearned. I was at that time actually using the only machine I can read the weight numbers on...because they've been repainted by hand. I rarely use the free weights because I can't find the dumbbells I need most of the time -- everything is labeled black-on-black! Why?!

Anyway, he didn't actually want help setting the weights for a machine or finding free weights. He wanted me to read his weight, from a scale that I hadn't even known was in the gym.

The numbers on the scale were so tiny.

Oops: I quickly realized I'm the worst person in the gym for him to ask!

Luckily I had my phone on me, so I could do what I usually do when I'm out and about and something is too small for me to read: took a photo on my phone and zoomed in.

I read out the number to him, and he seemed dismayed. He actually handed me his cane and asked me to read his weight again.

Guide canes are only a meter long, they're hollow, and they're very light. White canes working properly depends on them being very light! Sorry my friend: the number was the same the second time.

Anyway, moral of the story is: sighted people should offer help to a blind person, because if you don't another blind person is gonna recognize their cane and be excited about it and offer help that it turns out I'm shit at actually providing.

swan_tower

How the hell do you use a shimmer ink in a fountain pen without it clogging up the moment you look away?

I have tried this precisely once, and the results were so bad that for the first time in my life, I purged the ink out of a pen rather than using it up. I don't know if the answer is "the pen you used is clog-prone" (Pilot Vanishing Point; I haven't had issues with non-shimmer inks) or "only ink with shimmer if you're intending to write a bunch immediately, because six hours later it will be causing problems" or "use a dip pen" or what, but it seems like other people are able to use shimmer inks more successfully. Is there something I'm missing?

swan_tower

Fountain pen users! Please speak to me of your favorite red inks. I have a few Pilot samples, but they're all more in a magenta or orange-red direction; none of them feel quite like a true, vivid red to me. It seems like a basic color I ought to have (especially when editing a novel, where I'm marking up a print manuscript), but rather than buying a bunch of samples, I'd like to hear what other people prefer.

minoanmiss

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