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Books
Finished reading Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff. I am extremely baffled by the theological worldbuilding choices she's making. What is she doing? Is it on purpose? Where's she going with this? Does she realise the implications of what she's doing? i.e. that this is a fantasy-Anglican religion which somehow managed to replace original sin with something worse?

Read Victoria Goddard's Stone Speaks To Stone, a rollicking boy's own adventure from Jemis' father's soldier days. I get that it was necessary to show the mindset of an imperial subject who "well believed in its civilising mission". I do understand that it was necessary. I just. Ugh. I'm still waiting for the ironic twist to that refrain "he was a loyal son of the Empire." One day Jack's going to learn better, right? Or else Jemis, who fancies himself a revolutionary, will have to contend with his beloved father's role in imperial expansionist wars.

Reading Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon, long after everyone else. It's time. (I still have some leftover guilt and anxiety about the roleplaying game during which

ursula conceived this setting, and it's been getting in my way.)

Tech
*whimpering*

Garden
More tomatoes!

kradeelav

picked up FFT again (had gotten slightly stuck in Yardrow, where you meet Rapha for the first time, just needed some grinding.)

and oh lord, Riovannes. that's why everyone online calls it the hardest chapter...

funny thing is i'm actually having a hard time with the exact opposite battles most people do lol.

-> first castle gate battle; reset two times because all the archers, annoyingly long!
-> 1:1 with weigraf: breezed through this the first time; easy as hell because somehow i had the absolute best build to 2OHKO him lol. (dragoon jump to chunk most of his HP + first strike to retaliate before he could kill ramza)
-> THIS THIRD PHASE IS IMPOSSIBLE..... T_T

i'll figure it out between setting the difficulty down + grinding more + looking up cheese hacks but aaauugh. SRPG's, gotta love them. XD

if you want to throw in some suggestions, my main party is:

- ramza (mostly dragoon)
- mustolido (guns+chemist+haste bot for the arithmetician)
- krad (lol) (arithmetician, with strong levels in black magic + guns + summoning. i'm trying to make her a regen/reraise tank)
- zihark (mostly ninja+monk, started training him as a samurai but i keep using him as vanish bait)
- agrias (equally dragoon + obvious holy knight. jump is too good to pass up.)

magid

Another boxed share due to the cold weather, so I was inspired to pull out the kitchen scale again.

about 9.5 pounds of carrots
about 4 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes
about 4 pounds of red daikon
two medium bags of spinach
2 4-ounce containers of salad mix sprouts from the Gill Greenery (alfalfa, China Rose radish, and crimson clover)
0.75 pounds of little shiitake mushrooms from Mycoterra Farm

First thoughts: a lovely bowl of ramen with mushroom, carrot, and spinach. Slaws with carrot and/or daikon with either Asian-ish or mustardy dressing. Carrot halwa pudding. Potato salad, possibly with sprouts. Mashed potatoes with spinach. Baked potatoes. Fried potatoes. (I like potatoes….).Pickled daikon and/or carrot, possibly with ginger and other flavors toward bahn mi-style pickles. Some kind of saute to feature the shiitakes, likely with onion, carrot, and tofu.

lauradi7dw

Someone has made an emulator (is that the right way to put it?) of Jeffrey Epstein's email account, which is searchable. I am not there, although there are four people with my surname (from CNBC stock reports and so forth). This is not what I need to do with my time, probably. Now you can do it too
https://www.jmail.world/

kradeelav

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

- aral balkan (mastodon)
(bolding mine)

gingicat posting in

davis_square

For those Davis Square folks over the Medford line:
https://www.treesmedford.org/gettree

"TreesMedford is once again providing free trees for the hottest areas of Medford, MA. If you live in South Medford, Glenwood, Wellington, or Hillside (south of Salem St or the Mystic River) click the button below to further determine eligibility for the program and request a free tree."

(Should we have a tag for South Medford since it borders Somerville?)

lauradi7dw

A civics lesson disguised as style rules

>>Do not abbreviate the names of U.S. territories. There are 16 such territories; 11 of them are small islands, reefs or atolls in the Caribbean or the Pacific, without native populations. The others — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa — are self-governing, unincorporated territories. They send nonvoting representatives to the U.S. Congress.
Residents of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Marianas are U.S. citizens; American Samoans are considered noncitizen U.S. nationals. Residents of the territories cannot vote in presidential elections, though their delegates participate in national political conventions to choose the nominees.
For datelines, use the community followed by the unabbreviated name of the territory: SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico.<<

asakiyume

I'll post about things other than reading one day, but [movie!Aragorn voice] today is not that day.

I finished Elizabeth Acevedo's Family Lore, which I continued to love right to the end. The characters were so complete and multifaceted, and I liked them all. The places--rural Dominican Republic, capital of Dominican Republic, New York City, felt real and three dimensional. And Acevedo's way of observing things, whether it's the way two birds leave a tree branch or a person rubbing the indentations glasses make on each side of their nose--wonderful. And there are moments like this:

"I know it's too soon, but I love you. I have for a long time." And the silence in her body that followed was the most peace she'd ever known. There was no disclaimer on his declaration. And in the years since, she might have heard a fib or two in his voice about nonsense, but the truth of his love always cut through with clarity.

And I just started Gary Paulsen's The Cookcamp, drawn by

osprey_archer's write-up. During World War II, a five-year-old boy goes to live with his grandmother, who's a cook for a workcamp of men building a road from Minnesota to Canada. Truly beautiful writing here, too:

[The men] sat roughly to the tables, all of them big as houses, the boy thought. They sat to the tables and his grandmother brought heaping platters of pancakes and motioned to the boy to bring the big bowls of biscuits, which he did. Then she brought the huge enamel pot of coffee from the stove and sure enough each man turned his cup over--his hands so big the cup looked like a baby cup--and blew in it and held it up for coffee ... They made [the boy] think of big, polite bears.

Really nice, and as Osprey Archer promised, it's going to be a very quick read.

Current Music: Silversun Pickups: The Royal We

lauradi7dw

I didn't watch the Grammys (I watched a little bit of the red carpet and was pleased to see that AP had ASL interpreters during the interviews). But it's always helpful in terms of finding new stuff to listen to.
The 8-bit Big Band won an award for this

Watch on YouTube

I still have a trombone. I was inspired by watching that, but the brass instrument I should be practicing now (like right now, instead of typing) is jing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing_(instrument)
I mentioned it in December
https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/1009979.html
The regular (former?) jing player of the group is unavailable for the February performances, so it has been assigned to me.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

D. E. Stevenson’s The House on the Cliff. This was Stevenson’s last novel, and although it’s technically set at the time it was written (the 1960s), it feels more like an interwar period piece. But otherwise it’s classic charming Stevenson. Young Elfrida Jane inherits a house in Cornwall from her estranged grandparents (who disinherited Elfrida’s mother after she married an actor), and the book is all about her settling into the neighborhood, reveling in the possession of her own home, learning about farming and gardening, and swimming on the delightful little beach at the base of the cliffs.

E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in London. Somehow Stevensons and Delafields often end up going together in my reading, although I think Delafield at her grimmest gets much darker than Stevenson, who doesn’t have a grim mode. In any case, the Provincial Lady books feature Delafield at her most sprightly. In this book, the Provincial Lady uses the funds from her first book (Diary of a Provincial Lady) to get a flat in London, and also meets many literary people on the strength of her newfound literary fame.

Finally, I zipped through Jane Langton’s Her Majesty, Grace Jones. After a neighbor tells Grace that she looks just like the little English princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, Grace Jones decides that she’s obviously a secret, third Windsor sister, growing up in secret in America to take the throne once she gets older! Mostly family hijinks. The kids put on a circus, which is always great fun.

What I’m Reading Now

Hilary McKay’s latest, Rosa by Starlight. Loving this book! Finally, a book that remembers fictional orphans are for Gothic Whump and Adventure and Magic. I believe we may be getting a literal magic cat and I’m so excited.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am going to give Project Hail Mary a try if it kills me. Baffling that I feel so resistant to it, because I really liked The Martian! But here we are.

troisoiseaux

Read Risk by Dick Francis, a 1977 thriller about an accountant/amateur jockey who wins a major race by sheer accident and is promptly kidnapped; once he escapes, he spends the rest of the book trying to figure out who had him kidnapped - and why - while juggling his regular line of work, riding as a jockey, technically a love triangle?? I guess??, getting kidnapped AGAIN, and having a lot of feelings about tax law. I love characters who are very good at one specific thing/passionate about something seemingly boring/etc. and so I was delighted by the main character, who is the BEST and MOST ETHICAL accountant. He has a tragic backstory for why he's an accountant. An odd, quick, fun read.

In War and Peace, one thing I noticed in the lead-up to the first big battle scene was the way the narrative shifts from exclusively third-person POV to describing the Russian army's position in the first-person possessive: "our right flank", "our infantry", etc. The narrative of the battle itself is less focused on troop movements than individual characters and incidents; orders get waylaid because the adjutant can't be bothered to ride to where there's actual fighting to deliver it, or ignored because the captains of a joint Russian and German unit(?) are too busy grappling for authority between themselves. Nikolai Rostov is surprised to discover that fighting a war actually involves the people on either side trying to kill each other: "Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?" (...which, unfortunately for the intended poignancy of the moment, I did 100% read in Miette Voice: you kick Nikolai? You kick Nikolai like the football???)

Current Music: 25 Daniels - Bombadil

minoanmiss

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

magid

I won a copy of Hinenu (David Shlachter) from LibraryThing, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. I had a bunch of library books out so it sat for a bit, until I got an email from Lehrhaus that the author was going to give a talk tonight. That got me to read it Friday night so I could be prepared for the talk.

This is a gorgeous, full-color book using profiles of 100 Israelis as representatives of the entire population of the recently achieved 10 million. He uses a variety of demographic axes: age, gender, religion, native/immigrant (including region of origin)/non-citizen resident, and region lived in. The design is beautiful, with a full-page spread for each person, approximately one page of text facing a full-page photo, plus a smaller second photo. Under the big photo there’s the demographic information, which is also color coded. The photos are incredible. I found the choices of which colors to use for which age ranges led to some photo captions in those colors that were quite difficult to read (lacking enough contrast). I appreciate the thought that went into the design; it would work better for me with just a few different particular color choices.

The profiles are organized in decade order (and oldest to youngest within the decade), oldest first. I hadn’t realized until reading this just how young Israel skews: 18 profiles were of people aged 0-9, and another 17 were aged 10-19. So a third of the population is under 20. I understood why there were so many younger profiles, though that meant a number of the later (younger) ones were from a parent’s perspective, which I found inherently less interesting than the ones in first person.

Because it mirrors the population, I got a better sense for how the country’s demographics are in general; I know my experiences there have definitely been skewed/siloed, so this helped me.

I appreciated the author’s notes on the project at the end (and agree that there were a few too many surfers!).

At the talk tonight, I heard more about how the author came up with this idea and found people to fit the needed profiles, as well as how it’s changed him. He also talked about some of the challenges (some people would’ve liked to have participated, but feared retaliation from their community, for instance). There was a short 9-min video about the book, including some of the people profiled; it was great to hear their actual voices. He’s an engaging presenter, very curious about people, so I was glad I went (plus I got my book signed).

lauradi7dw

I know ballet dancers are exercising hard, but sitting here in multiple layers, my first response to seeing the costumes was "aren't you cold?"
https://www.bostonballet.org/

kradeelav

still mulling over on this line of thought for a while, and there are parts of this i won't share, but doing this zihark doujin At This Particular Time as an extension of me creating art for the Muse as an act of worship - strikes me as quietly... necessary? urgent? to be mindful of as a north star?

thoughtline influenced by:

++ what i previously mentioned about Creating && avoiding "metrics existentialism" ages ago
+ rahaeli mentioning religion studies doing far more for T+S/moderation work than anyone thought. (likely: faith, rituals, how people craft those, instinctively or deliberately....)
+ this post about general insecurities of the new guard of selfshippers (i say 'new guard' because how all of that is worded is completely new to me even though i do recognize some of the adjacent feelings in my 20 years, even though they're not a concern to me anymore * )
+ general social media posts by art peers clearly hinting at existential angst about art not getting the views/clicks online that it used to even a few months ago (even on algorithim-less sites).
+ when a doujin circle member mentioned long ago that the people least likely to be affected by LLM existentialist fear are the ones with an internal calling for their 'outsider' art, however form that may take. (isolated selfshipping, furries and comickers creating elaborate worldbuilding for themselves offline, etc. )

mostly highlighting the 'act of worship' part since as absolutely corny as that sounds on its face, it's a protective veil in terms of ... process? that negates so much of the negative externalities of the above. - hell, maybe one of many reasons why religion/spirituality is so powerful, since it has a habit of getting in between social power structures of the day and individuals, when they choose to believe in something on a smaller scale.

( *it would have been a little mean to me to respond to that post about my personal advice of thinking of it as an active act. creating something, whether art, writing, a fanshrine, etc - as a pilgrimage of sorts. evidence for you and the fates. spirituality has a way of coming in the edges around that, when you give it a home. )

and just... it's funny.

i would be surprised at the coincidence of somehow ending up drawing this doujin precisely when existential anxiety around art was at its highest, but... there's so many of these little "coincidences" around this Muse that have happened over the decades .... nudges, if you will. where it just fell into place that clearly I was meant to do X thing at Y time that's so blindingly obvious in retrospect.

i just don't question it, not anymore.

man, i am so relieved i'm working on this. for so, so many reasons. feels like coming home.

kradeelav

i have a low opinion of short form sites like bsky/twitter, but -imo, knowing what i do about private investment circles- this is an exceptional succinct thread explaining a lot of corporate stupidity right now. bolded part for emphasis.

‪@robot-bastard.bsky.social‬

> But that's the thing, in modern capitalism the "users" are not the "customers". The professionals you mention are just the income stream, but the *customers* are the ones you've got to please or they'll shut you down, and in this case the customers are the stock traders.

> "well why do we care about them" because most of these big companies are running on loans, and every year they have to roll the loans

>So if your stock price tanks because you aren't doing what the traders want, then your valuation drops, and you might not be able to get a big enough loan to pay off your current one, and that means you immediately go out of business.

> Therefore: the stock traders are your customers. The people who actually make things with Animate, they're just *users*, and maybe they'll grump and grumble but in the end they'll just switch to After Effects, so it really doesn't matter what they think...

edit: looked at adobe's stock across their whole public existence and: lol. lmao. kek even.

osprey_archer

Next up in the Hornblower movieverse: The Wrong War (originally The Frogs and the Lobsters), featuring Horatio Hornblower’s involvement in the ill-fated attack French royalist landing at Quiberon. (“Quiberon! There was a D. K. Broster book about that!” I crowed.)

Enjoyable as usual, although the slashiness quotient was low (very little Kennedy, Bush hasn’t appeared yet). Once again the film is telling pretty much the same story as the book but changing the thematic valence: in the book, the point of Quiberon seems to be that the strict discipline of the marines saves the day (for the British retreat, anyway, the undisciplined Royalists are screwed), whereas here, Captain Pellew saves the day by disobeying his orders to stay at one beach and instead heads to the other to pick up the possible survivors.

(Basically I think the Hornblower movies were made by people who are really more sympathetic to the liberte, egalite, fraternite of the French Revolution than the ideals of the Royal Navy circa 1800: obedience, order, discipline, respect for rank, etc. etc.)

Also, the filmmakers decided that it was time for Hornblower to have a romance (with a girl), and have therefore introduced the character of Mariette, a French peasant girl who became a schoolteacher following the Revolution. This led (I imagine) to some version of the following conversation:

FILMMAKER #1: But what will we do with Mariette in the later films?

FILMMAKER #2: Don’t worry about it! We’ll kill her at the end of this one.

I did not care for this ending, so I have taken the liberty of rewriting it, starting from the scene in Mariette’s house where Hornblower begs her to run away with him while the townsfolk outside riot.

HORNBLOWER: I won’t leave without you!

MARIETTE: Climb out ze window!

HORNBLOWER climbs out the window. MARIETTE leans out the window looking after him, but does not move to climb down.

HORNBLOWER: Jump!

MARIETTE: (with tears in her eyes) Nevaire can I leave la belle France! Vive la Republique! Adieu, ‘Ornblowaire!

MARIETTE shuts the shutters. HORNBLOWER looks like he wants to climb back up and argue, but suddenly the yelling is getting much closer, and he must flee.

HORNBLOWER makes it to the bridge literally seconds before the British blow it up. The British retreat to the beach, where they are rescued by the Indefatigable.

HORNBLOWER stands by the rail, staring out at the receding coast of France. KENNEDY comes to stand beside him.

HORNBLOWER: “I could not love her, dear, so well/loved she not la belle France more.”

KENNEDY clasps Hornblower’s shoulder in manly sympathy. They gaze together at their one true mistress, the sea.

FIN

lauradi7dw

I thought of this last week when it was revealed that Kevin Warsh, nominated to be Fed chair when my celebrity boyfriend Jay Powell rotates out later this year, showed up in the Epstein documents. It wasn't that he hung out with Jeffrey or went to one of the gatherings. He may or may not be good as the chair, but he's not a child rapist, as far as we know.
Thia morning I read a post by John Scalzi, chagrined that he also showed up in a search, because he was referenced in a 2013 article that was referenced in an email.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/03/today-in-okay-what-the-actual-fk/

kradeelav

three shows i did the main logos for a few years ago are coming out on netflix \o/

don't actually care about netflix itself but getting to that level of visibility is a long way from where $org was. wild to be there to see it happen all the way.

also i had the most absurdly kind thing happen today where an unnamed euro sales agent (i work with sales a lot and get along with them fabulously) literally sent me a video recording of him saying how grateful he was that he never has to chase me down / that i treat his team well, via my boss. (an extra kind gesture, since now my boss knows too).

T_T i always do try to go above and beyond for the international folks considering they get done dirty a lot but damn. kind of thing that genuinely warms my jaded heart...

rydra_wong

Artorias is a DLC boss.

Beating the final boss of Dark Souls puts you straight into New Game Plus, so you need to do the DLC first, but yeah. I have in fact completed the base game up until you enter the last area. And there is a general consensus that the final boss is not the hardest in the game.

The DLC bosses are all substantially harder than the base game ones, and I have two more left, so it remains to be seen whether I can beat them, but at this point the odds look decent that I will at least be able to finish the base game.

I would like to remind you all that my initial goal was to see if I could beat the tutorial.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

xe's miles above the desert, xe drops Shaymins down

Things

(no subject)

Winter share, 8 of 11

But I'm not there

(no subject)

Free trees in Medford!

From the AP stylebook

Reading Wednesday

brass instruments

Wednesday Reading Meme

Reading Tuesday

A torn gobbet of flesh to offer up

Hinenu

Aren't you cold?

(no subject)

(no subject)

Hornblower, episode 4

Not everybody in the Epstein emails is a child rapist

(no subject)

I FORGOT TO MENTION

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December 2022

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