Daily Happiness

Jul. 10th, 2025 12:13 am
torachan: a cartoon owl with the text "everyone is fond of owls" (everyone is fond of owls)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I took one car to the car wash yesterday and the other today and now they both look much better. I will be very glad when they are finally done with the huge construction at the end of our street (should be done by this fall) because it really kicks up a lot of dust. (Even the car I got washed yesterday already has a visible layer of dust coating it by today.)

2. Since I got these new shoes several months back I have noticed them being really squeaky, especially on certain types of flooring. They're so squeaky that I often felt self-conscious about them. After trying a few things, I noticed that the insoles I have for them are slightly too large, even though they are the correct size range for the shoes, and it seems like the part of the insoles in the toe area are where the worst of the squeaking is coming from. So I ordered one size smaller of insoles and have been wearing those for the past week and the squeaking is almost totally gone! They still make a little noise once in a while, but it's like 99.9% reduced. The restroom at work was one of the worst offenders, so the first time I was able to test them in there and they weren't squeaking up a storm, I knew they'd be okay everywhere.

3. We went down to Disneyland tonight for dinner. It's been hot during the day this week but was much nicer by the time we got down there (and the sun was going down by then).

4. I finished another puzzle this morning. This is my first time doing a puzzle that wasn't square, so that was an interesting twist. I usually do the edges of a puzzle first, but I couldn't do that with this one because most of the edge pieces were tiny and didn't even interlock with each other, just with the next layer of pieces in from them.



5. Gemma looks very disturbed to realize that I've seen her.

Couple of nice things

Jul. 10th, 2025 07:54 am
hunningham: Beautiful colourful pears (Default)
[personal profile] hunningham

Himself had lost his favourite tote bag - it was buffy-themed, not just your random thank-you-for-over-spending-in-our-shop bag. We turned the house upside down, and then I found it yesterday. It was in the car and has probably been there for weeks. Man reunited with buffy tote bag, all is well.

Cat is doing okay. Something happened to him Sunday night (chased by a dog, got lost IDK), and he spent Monday being a very tired old sad cat. I was that worried, I phoned the vet. Got told to let sleeping cats sleep, bring him in if condition persisted. Anyhows, he cheered up and Tuesday he had energy enough to eat an entire can of tuna, complain loudly and wash himself fluffy. All is well.

A bunch of books I've read lately

Jul. 9th, 2025 10:27 pm
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)
[personal profile] aurumcalendula
A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft:

Read more... )

A Treachery of Swans by A.B. Poranek:

Read more... )


I'd heard of Melissa Scott's Astreiant novels, but hadn't gotten to them until recently. I like the combination of plotty mysteries and slowburn romance. It reminded me of Swordspoint at times, although with more magic and a matriarchal-ish society (it was interesting to notice 'she' being used as default pronoun for an unknown person the way 'he' sometimes used to be, iirc). I'm very fond of the main characters, but I would really like to read something like this with a f/f main couple. More on specific books (I have two more left in the series to read) below.


Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett:

Read more... )

Point of Knives by Melissa Scott:

Read more... )

Point of Dreams by Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett:

Read more... )

Fairs' Point by Melissa Scott:

Read more... )

Dept. of Birthdays

Jul. 9th, 2025 08:06 pm
kaffy_r: (Big Barakomon grin)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Hey, [personal profile] masakochan !

I hope you've had a Happy Birthday, and may the coming year be good for you. I'm glad I know you!

Dept. of Stupid

Jul. 9th, 2025 07:10 pm
kaffy_r: Animated Canadian flag (Canada!)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Just When You Think It Couldn't be More Stupid 

Now come six proofs that you can have the IQ of a broken toaster and still make it to Washington D.C.

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; four U.S. House Representatives from Minnesota, and two from Wisconsin, sent a letter to the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. 

Their subject? The smoke from Canadian wildfires that were coming south and preventing people in their states from enjoying outdoor summer activities. 

Seriously. 

Since I would not be surprised in the least if you've already started snickering, sure that I'm having you on, here's the story.  It's not behind a paywall, I swear. And it notes with a perfectly straight face, the smoke from U.S. wildfires heading northward. The "Are you actually humans, or malfunctioning Chat GPT programs?" is unspoken.  

These six examples of Darwin's Law are either fully aware of the fatuous asininity exhibited in this letter and are doing it to ingratiate themselves with Dear Leader or to their own MAGA constituents ...

... or they're really that stupid. 

JFC. Once I would have laughed merrily at this. Today I'm perilously close to weeping. 

(no subject)

Jul. 9th, 2025 07:20 pm
skygiants: Enjolras from Les Mis shouting revolution-tastically (la resistance lives on)
[personal profile] skygiants
When [personal profile] kate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!

Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?

We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.

By a few chapters in, I was describing it to [personal profile] genarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time.

Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. mid-book spoilers )

Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.

Now even as I write this, I know that [personal profile] genarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak.

And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.

On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
[personal profile] sovay
Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.

Sayings

Jul. 9th, 2025 10:16 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

The first thing I heard anyone say when I got to Exeter -- anyone who wasn't a staff member of either the train station I wad coming from or the hotel I was going to -- was "all right my lover!" In exactly the accent that I've always heard in parodies of that.

It could not have been more stereotypical. I love it when these things happen. It's like that one time when I actually heard someone from Yorkshire say "there's nowt as queer as folk."

Sunshine Revival: Challenges 2 and 3

Jul. 9th, 2025 03:27 pm
used_songs: (This ipod sucks)
[personal profile] used_songs
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-2.png

#2
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.


I love that still, quiet moment after you turn off the car or the TV or whatever and you just sit for a moment. It's like a peaceful reset or transition from driving home or finishing dinner (which is when we mostly watch TV). I always like to just sit in that moment. 

I love Glassworks: I. Opening by Philip Glass. It gives me that same feeling of peace that those moments of quiet do, an opportunity to center myself.

I love our backyard, even now that we are surrounded by houses. I love the trees, the deck, the garden, the birds, all of the bugs (except the mosquitos), the lizards, the sunflowers that sprang up of their own volition, the pergola ... just all of it. I love having an outdoor space. 

#3
Journaling prompt: What are your favorite summer-associated foods?


Raspas. When I was a kid we would always get raspas and I loved them. They are a bit too sweet for me now, but I love the idea of them and the memory.

Mangonadas. Seriously. They are the best, especially when it's hot out.Those are some of my favorite flavors.Chamoy is delicious!

Watermelon. Once when I was small, my parents borrowed our grandparents' camper and we went to a park in Arkansas. My dad bought a watermelon and he tethered it in a net in the river which was ice cold. That night we cut it up and ate it. The platonic ideal of watermelon! I think about it a lot.You can put one in an ice chest in icy water and it comes close.



runpunkrun: Dana Scully reading Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' in the style of a poster you'd find in your school library, text: Read. (reading)
[personal profile] runpunkrun
In paperback, this makes a thick graphic novel worthy of the name. The greyscale art is simple but expressive, and you quickly get a feel for Mags and her Abuela and their small desert town near Joshua Tree. Mag's childhood friend is back in town with her cowboy boots and pinhole camera and stirring up feelings that Mags can't let herself have because she's tied to her home and the secret in the basement that's bleeding her dry.

A tender story about learning to love yourself so you can accept the love others have for you. The art's limited use of color highlights childhood memories and photographs, but comes out in full force for the happy ending.

Contains: butch/transfem romance; death of a grandparent; and, separate from the romance: infidelity, stalking, emotional manipulation, threats of suicide, gun violence.

Challenge 196: Yellow

Jul. 9th, 2025 05:20 pm
skysedge: (Default)
[personal profile] skysedge posting in [community profile] iconthat
Cardcaptor Sakura



https://i.imgur.com/wjLV1Af.png

Next color: Green!


My feed updated late, sorry! I've fixed it :)

Cardcaptor Sakura



https://i.imgur.com/q4qjeXe.png

Next color: Cyan

In which I read Martha Wells

Jul. 9th, 2025 10:05 am
glaurung: (Default)
[personal profile] glaurung
Huh, I totally forgot to repost my first review of Martha Wells's fantasy books here back in March, so have two posts in one. First post: Witch King and the first three Raksura books. Read more... )

The Emilie Adventures, and the rest of the Raksura series: Read more... )
summerofhorrorexchange: silhouette of killer (Default)
[personal profile] summerofhorrorexchange posting in [community profile] yuletide
Summer of Horror could use your help! We have one pinch hit left, due July 11 at 11:59 PM EDT or negotiable. Minimums are 500 words or a piece of original art (no manips), either digital or on unlined paper. For claiming and more details, go here.

PH 3 - FIC, ART - Psychonauts (Video Games), Higurashi no Naku Koro ni | Higurashi When They Cry, Umineko no Naku Koro ni | When the Seagulls Cry, Mortal Kombat (Video Games 1992-2020)

Thank you!
emperor: (Default)
[personal profile] emperor
It's time to vote for the next Chancellor (previously); I've looked at the candidates and their statements, but still don't have an obvious-to-me choice of who to vote for.

When I asked on mastodon, I got two responses (one for Sandi Toksvig, one for her or Gina Miller); FB has shown me one friend saying that Chris Smith is "a nice bloke, but also the only candidate worth of the role"; and I've been sent this from someone who evidently doesn't share my general political view (though I'm inclined to agree that being the author of tuition fees probably rules John Browne out).

I can see why people might think Wyn Evans is a good option, but his proposals seem to me more the sort of thing you'd expect the vice-chancellor to do, rather than the chancellor who is not really involved in the running of the university directly.

I'm currently inclined to put Sandi Toksvig first; I'm sure she'd be great at the schmoozing-major-donors thing, but also at engaging with staff & students and advocating for the University.

I'm planning to vote in person on Saturday...

[this post is public, I am screening comments by anyone not already on my DW access list, will unscreen if I think they're making a useful contribution]

Focusmate

Jul. 9th, 2025 07:27 am
hunningham: Beautiful colourful pears (Default)
[personal profile] hunningham

Using focusmate is good for me, not just at the getting started but having 50min sessions with a begin and an end means that I have little breaks, I stretch and I drink water. Also I work better, and I'm less likely to disappear down that rabbit hole and emerge later into daylight, blinking and going "what do you mean 100 years have passed?"

Nice things on focusmate

  • Seeing the same people pop up again & again and realising that they have added me as a favourite.
  • Someone told me that my room looked like a prose. English was not their first language, and I was delighted with the compliment. Someone else asked me if my room was a fake background. I said 'no, real' and they looked very suspicious.
  • Yesterday I spent half-an-hour watching a guy mediate on screen. He draped a towel over his head.

Daily Happiness

Jul. 8th, 2025 09:18 pm
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I had a dentist appointment this morning and got that new cavity taken care of. Thankfully it was a small one and didn't take them long to fix. (Also because it was just a small one, with my insurance it was only $29! The cleaning was way more than that!)

2. Look at that blep!

Tiring day but I survived

Jul. 8th, 2025 05:29 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I had to present on my work for my team and some other people this morning, and it felt impossible to pitch it at a level that would reach both the people who know next to nothing about the work I lead on and the people who have been most intimately involved in doing it with me.

I missed a section, even with notes, which I think could've made it make a lot more sense. But also my line manager sent me a message immediately to say I spoke very well? I don't get it but I hope she's right!

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brightlywoven

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