major_clanger | Reading

Things happen over a long term.

Things that look at the time like a failure or even a disaster may be sowing seeds or releasing spores and having an impact that will go on.

Or even have a counter-intuitive impact at the time: okay, The Well of Loneliness got convicted for obscenity in 1928 but 1000s of women realised they were not alone just from reading the reports in the newspapers, and 1000s of them wrote to Radclyffe Hall.

Just because something does not endure does not endure does not mean it had no influence.

Am currently reading book by a friend which makes quite a thing of long-term impact of small obscure organisations of early C20th I worked on.

Was a piece in Guardian Saturday today which doesn't appear to be yet online which was doing the ever-recurrent WO about 'I see no feminists' and I wonder what they expect them to look like and perhaps they are supposing something flashy and dramatic, which can be appropriate at times. But the work is not necessarily drawing attention to itself.

Further thought: I was a bit irked to see this: Lifeline is both a musical following Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the first antibiotic and a warning about the threat of superbugs in the present day, because the Fleming narrative erases the immense amount of work that Florey, Chain and Heatley had to put in to make pencillin actually viable.

rmc28

(some of these have had their own posts; some probably should; do ask me to expand in comments if you want more details!)

( four busy weeks )

April has two uni Nationals weekends in Sheffield (one each with Womens Blues and Huskies), a hockey camp in Hull, three other hockey games, hopefully some more theatre trips, and a movie date next week with Tony.

nanila

What is a common ear worm that you get?

My children rickroll me pretty regularly, so That Song gets stuck in my head.
How long do they last?

Not very long. My brain is usually too preoccupied with other sources of worry and stress to spend long on an earworm.
What do you do to get rid of them?

I don't know if this will sound contradictory, but on the rare occasions when an earworm sticks, I find that playing the actual song gets rid of it.
What is the worst ear worm you've ever had?

There's this Robyn song that I dislike intensely, and it popped in and out of my head for a week. I don't like the song so was very reluctant to employ my usual remedy.
Do you get some guilty pleasure in passing the ear worm along?

Not unless it's reciprocally rickrolling my children.

tamaranth

2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculia

Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
[loc. 2810]

Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: impressed

oursin

Gosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'

No, sir, not in the least.

***

This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.

***

Church attendance report pulled after YouGov finds 'fraudulent' responses:

A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed.
The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians.
Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent".
It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.
....
But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.
Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.

Murmurs about Mammon distorting the data....

***

Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research:

Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.”
Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.

***

This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.

andrewducker

I've seen occasional confusion from people over the last few weeks "Why is it so cold, isn't it Spring now?" - and I thought I should say a bit about one of the major causes that I almost never hear people talk about - the polar vortex.

This is a swirling wind around the Arctic that exists for basically the whole arctic night. One of the things it does is keep the freezing polar winds from coming further south in to Europe. But when it finally collapses in the Spring, it finally allows those winds out, and you get a sudden burst of cold air as all of that freezing weather escapes down to us.

Normally this happens some time in late February, but this year the collapse seems to have been a month later.

The other major factor is largely down to circulating high pressure areas (imagine slow large hurricane shaped wind "objects") that constantly move around the North Atlantic. Put one of these off of the west coast of Ireland, going clockwise, and it will pull air down from the North even further/faster. See this short video I took from the NullSchool site (my favourite wind visualisation site). In it you can see cold winds pouring down from the North Pole, funneled further by the circulation. And if you click on the link there you can see that currently the wind is instead being pulled off of the Altantic, where it's a few degrees colder.

British weather tends to be more chaotic than the weather north or south of us. This is because Spain (for instance) is fairly reliably in the warm weather caused by the heating tropics. And Norway is fairly reliably cold, due to proximity to the North Pole. But Britain can be part of either weather system, as the "barrier" between them is pulled North or South by a few hundred miles depending on the movement of the high pressure areas in the eastern part of the North Atlantic, either funnelling the warm air up to us or channeling the cool air down to us.

You can see that at the moment the warm weather is being slowly blown North-East, now that the cold weather isn't pushing its way down to us:

So, next time we get a period of warm weather at the end of Winter/start of Spring followed by a sudden burst of freezing weather for a few days, that's the polar vortex collapsing. And if we suddenly go from warm weather to cold (or vice versa) it's because we've switched weather system.

If you'd like to read more, then this is quite good.

(And apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about the weather for any appalling mistakes I've made.)

redbird

I got a text this morning from Chase, asking me about a suspicious charge. I tried to log in to their website to look at it, but couldn't get them to send me a one-time code, so I went ahead and sent back "NO," telling them to cancel/replace the card in question. Now I'm going to have to update a _lot_ of recurring charges and stored payment methods.

So far I have had enough trouble finding my other credit card that I went ahead and gave Chewy a debit card for the auto ship order they're in the middle of processing. I then looked further back in the same drawer, found the other credit card, and put it in my wallet. I'm going to wait for the new card to arrive, and use it for most of the recurring charges, because I get slightly better points/cash back on purchases. But this is going to be tedious and time-consuming, and I will almost certainly forget at least one recurring charge.

I think I can make a list of the monthly charges by looking at last month's bill, at least.

Current Mood: annoyed

james_davis_nicoll

Two teens are forced to consider each other's point of view.

Flip by Ngozi Ukazu

the_comfortable_courtesan

We are pleas'd to announce the publickation today of Choices: Taking Decisions (Clorinda Cathcart's Circle, #25), in elecktronical form and as a pretty bound volume:

A Parliamentary election causes considerable upheaval to the summer plans of Society in general, and of Clorinda and her circle. But besides any choices concerning the government of the nation, several of them find that they have to make decisions touching on more personal matters.

though there is alas some delay in the production of the Google edition.

It is anticipat'd that the work will shortly be available via Overdrive for libraries.

The usual notes on Allusions and References have been provid'd.

oursin

Bit of a flurry of Misguided Spam: this one is quite funny:

[W]e're working with other archivists that are offering historical resources.‍
I’m currently working with a few archivists on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need historical resources using personalized email sequences.
If I could help you connect with potential clients like this, would that be helpful to you?‍

WOT. Unless this is some kind of operation like that BM curator who was selling off stuff from the storerooms, what kind of money do they honestly think there is in ARCHIVES??? Sales teams - No Can Haz.

Another one of the usual 'Contribute your article/join our editorial board/reviewer team' from an international journal... offering a space for the exchange of powerful ideas among academics and experts which cannot distinguish between the title of a book I reviewed and anything I actually wrote my own self.

This one is frankly cheeky, if presumably being spammed at a vast array of people?

I am sure you're quite busy, but I would appreciate if you could take a moment to my below request.
Well, our Open Access Journal of Advances in Complementary & Alternative Medicine (ACAM) is scheduled to release its Volume 9 Issue 2 by 6thApril, but we are in deficit of one article. So, is it possible for you to support us with any of your manuscript to achieve this goal?
Appreciate if you could provide your acknowledgement within 24 hrs.

Presumably they are anticipating recipients will stick prompts into ChatGP or whatever, though you'd think if it's that urgent they'd do it themselves.

Am also being followed on Bluesky by very dubious looking 'Global' conferences within my fields of interest. Suspect these are a racket.

***

However, in realm of being A Real Nexpert, gave a presentation at Institution With Which I Am Now Affiliated yesterday and I think it went quite well, insofar as there was a certain amount of discussion and people coming up and asking questions afterwards.

Also got 2 compliments from much younger persons on hair (green streaks in) though as one was outside the Scientology HQ in Tottenham Court Road I fear this may be one of their recruitment strategies.

james_davis_nicoll

Strategies range from paraterraforming to radical cybernetic transformation...

Five Stories About Surviving and Adapting on Mars

james_davis_nicoll

An all-too diligent FBI agent must be silenced... but there's no reason he cannot serve SCIENCE! as well.

The Silicon Man by Charles Platt

andrewducker

1. UK 'runs out' of warships - leaving Germany to take over key Nato mission: (tags:uk germany nato navy )
2. UK confirms ban on cryptocurrency donations and limit on foreign donors in blow for Reform: (tags:UK politics money reform regulation )
3. Final analysis of 2025 Iberian blackout: Policies left Spain at risk: (tags:regulation electricity spain )
4. UK university students are being paid to support Chinese propaganda: (tags:china uk propaganda university )
5. Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN's truck: (tags:physics antimatter viaSwampers )
6. Democrat wins Florida state seat containing Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate (over 20% change): (tags:hope elections USA politics )
7. UK car and steel firms fear being frozen out of 'Made in Europe' deals by EU: (tags:Europe UK trade manufacturing doom )
8. The Revolutionary Guards are taking over Iran (control has fragmented and there is nobody to negotiate with): (tags:Iran military USA OhForFucksSake war )

tamaranth

2026/043: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef — Cassandra Khaw

Human is very similar to pork, after all. (I know, I know. Religious pundits say that cannibalism is forbidden in the Quran anyway. The ghouls say that this isn’t quite the same.) [loc. 61]

Despite the title, there's very little (if any) actual cannibalism in this novella. True, Rupert Wong (ex-mobster with a murky and karmically unpromising past) works as a chef for a wealthy ghoul family, serving up gourmet meals concocted from the bodies of hapless tourists: but that's only one of his jobs. He's also working off that karmic debt through community management: ( Read more... )

Current Mood: amused

oursin

Happy birthday,

robling_t!

oursin

What I read

Finished High Stakes. I previously noted a pattern in Dick Francis of the conditional rather than utter win.

Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy, #1) (2025) - think I picked this up as a Kobo deal, because people were mentioning it? I realise that I am no longer in the habit of reading fat multi-volume fantasies of this ilk. I found it all a bit much, really.

Then did some nibbling (what do Tiggers eat?) and then settled into a re-read of Barbara Hambly, The Nubian's Curse, not one of the top Benjamin Januarys perhaps but still pretty good. Possibly when I am in that sort of phase I should just go Hambly/Haddam/Paretsky/Cross?

Currently Reading

Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb (Pilgrimage, #3) (1917) for online reading group.

Up next

Today's Kobo Deal was the latest Jonathan Kellerman Alex Delaware thriller, Jigsaw, so probably that.

Then possibly more Hambly.

At some point must read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) for the in-person reading group.