#NoKings

Jun. 14th, 2025 06:27 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
The three of us went out to the No Kings Yaas Queens combined Pride/NoKings demonstration today, despite my worries about my various joints. Or, at least, that was the plan. It didn't work out, but my knees, hips, and ankles are OK.

We got to Park Street and the Common, and found other people who were looking for the same event, a stage where someone was introducing the next speaker?performer?, and some tables and tents, but no focus. We wound up walking to the side of the Common next to the Public Garden, where we found the parade, smaller than we'd expected but with enough of a crowd I couldn't see much. So we went home, pausing moderately often to rest my joints and watch another bit of parade, which seems to have been heading for Government Center as originally planned, not the Common as we thought.

I'm both glad I went, and disappointed that I didn't actually make it to the first protest or rally I've felt physically capable of in too long.

I will probably update this tomorrow, to note how my joints are feeling. This afternoon, they've felt good enough for some PT exercises.

Where would I even begin?

Jun. 14th, 2025 05:28 pm
oursin: Books stacked on shelves, piled up on floor, rocking chair in foreground (books)
[personal profile] oursin

(And didn't we have something similar, like, maybe 20 years ago on LiveJournal?)

Thing going round on bluesky recently-

'Ten authors you've read five books by'.

*Looks around just one room and its bookshelves*

Me: Maybe I could break this down into groups, I dunno, perhaps?

Thrillers? Sff? Litfic? (might break this down further into Obscure Victorian/Edwardian Novelists, Middlebrow Women Writers of the 20s/30s, the 60s Generation???) Bloke writers for whom I have a weakness? Beloved childhood faves?

And then I think, nah, this is too much effort.

I was a bit took aback by suggestions that people might be curating their 10 to look Cool or SRS or at least, not given to ingesting The Wrong Sort of Book, perish the thort.

Books Received, June 7 to June 13

Jun. 14th, 2025 09:03 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Ten books new to me: 4.5 fantasy, 1 horror, 1 mystery, 3.5 science fiction, of which only two are identified as series.

Books Received, June 7 to June 13



Poll #33251 Books Received, June 7 to June 13
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 45


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews (March 2026)
18 (40.0%)

The Swan’s Daughter: A Possibly Doomed Love Story by Roshani Chokshi (January 2026)
12 (26.7%)

Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett, and Craig Laurance Gidney (June 2025)
24 (53.3%)

The Storm by Rachel Hawkins (January2026)
3 (6.7%)

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (September 2025)
24 (53.3%)

Red Empire by Jonathan Maberry (March 2026)
2 (4.4%)

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O’Keefe (June 2025)
13 (28.9%)

The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts by Vanessa Ricci-Thode (April 2024)
12 (26.7%)

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (January 2026)
6 (13.3%)

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 2025)
23 (51.1%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
29 (64.4%)

Confused by Disney ineptitude

Jun. 14th, 2025 12:03 pm
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Two weeks after seeing the CGI Lilo and Stitch at the cinema I'm watching the original with the kids. And it's so much better. The direction, the writing, the acting are all just much higher quality.

The remake felt much clumsier. And I don't really understand why.

Edit: Just realised that they entirely cut the Ugly Duckling part from the remake. Why would you do that? It's key to Stitch's arc!
And all of the bits where Lilo how to be like Elvis.

In fact, nearly all of the bits where Lilo talked to Stitch and built a relationship with him.

Hey AI — hands off my em-dash

Jun. 14th, 2025 02:03 am
firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)
[personal profile] firecat
My fave is the semicolon; however, I refuse to cede em-dashes or any other punctuation marks to ChatGPT.

These attacks on the em dash — a ChatGPT hyphen? How very dare you! — have in turn blazed across social media spaces populated by the kind of folks who will tell you, unprompted, that they have a favorite punctuation mark and what it is. (It is very likely the em dash.) — https://www.salon.com/2025/06/11/ai-cant-have-my-em-dash/

In (near) Prague

Jun. 14th, 2025 08:18 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

On an ice hockey camp in Slaný, near Prague. I flew out on Thursday afternoon with two friends from Kodiaks. We arrived at the rink hotel in time to check in, have a little walk down to the nearby supermarket and get food, and settle in for the night. For reasons the three of us were all sharing a dormitory room the first night, and we decided the perfect film to watch over our picnic dinner was Inside Out 2 - also set at a 3-day hockey camp. I hadn't seen it before, though the other two had, and I enjoyed it very much.

Friday morning was pretty relaxed; a fourth Kodiak joined us after leaving home at awful-o-clock in the morning, and we were moved into the nicer ensuite twin rooms in pairs for the rest of the camp. We met in the dressing room at 1pm, were on ice at 2pm and again at 6pm, with a stickhandling session in between. Then dinner at 8 and falling into bed not long after.

It's excellent coaching, I'm being pushed well out of my comfort zone and the balance of drill and rest in each session and between sessions is just right. I hit my "cannot actually skate any more" limit about 3 minutes before the end of the last ice session.

Today will be two ice sessions at either end of the day, with video review (argh), optional swim+spa (yes!), and stickhandling again in between. My muscles this morning are making themselves known but I'm not exhausted. All is good. Time to go get changed.

strawberries

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:06 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I fear that I may have developed an allergy to strawberries.

Cattitude came home from the farmers market with two quarts of strawberries, so we sat down to eat strawberries this evening. Adrian washed a plateful of the berries, and we all started eating.

They're very good strawberries, but I realized after eating a few that my lips were starting to itch. They were tasty enough that I had four or five more before saying anything. When I did, Adrian suggested I go wash my face. I rinsed my lips with plenty of cool water, took a benadryl, complained about the situation, and got Adrian to make me herb tea. I hope I haven't developed an allergy to a fruit I like, after eating them without problems for more than fifty years.

ETA, after responding to people's comments:

It may not be just strawberries. Raw kiwi makes my mouth itch, and I think I remember having a problem with the kiwi on a mixed fruit tart. Possibly-underripe figs also made my mouth itch once, but cooked figs (fig Newton cookies) are OK, and a fig that was ripe enough to fall off the tree at my feet was fine. I think I need to do some reading.

talked to the GI doc

Jun. 13th, 2025 08:27 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I had telemedicine with the GI doctor this morning. mostly for my own reference )

Fossil Friday

Jun. 13th, 2025 06:47 pm
purplecat: Gif of running "pointy sauruses" (General:Dinosaur)
[personal profile] purplecat

A two legged, very upright, dinosaur skeleton with a long neck, smallish arms and large ribs.  About twice as tall as the man in an overall who stands looking up at it.  The background is black and the two figures are picked out with a pale light.

A Plateosaurus skeleton. Image stolen from The Great Dinosaur Discoveries by Darren Naish.

Various & misc

Jun. 13th, 2025 04:54 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

Don't think I've previously either come across this or posted it, but who knows: Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex: 'Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital'.

***

Something else suitable for Pride Month: Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love (review):

provides an original and stirring account of a non-commodifying queer love between two women and nonhuman nature—a love that was the defining relationship of Carson’s life and yet has been downplayed in heteronormative tellings of her story. So, too, is Maxwell’s work a convincing argument for this queer love’s formative role in the writing of Silent Spring, as well as an empowering message about how embracing queer feelings might function as a catalyst for “political and personal power” in contemporary environmental politics.

***

I think I have some copies of The Pioneer journal associated with this club, but they are somewhere in the maelstrom (I am gearing up to Doing Something About this, having acquired intelligence of a body that will collect books for charity): The Pioneer Club (1892-1939): A ladies' club at the forefront of late Victorian social reform, which suffered a long, slow decline in the early 20th century.

***

Peter McLagan (1823-1900): Scotland’s first Black MP:

[S]ources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent.... McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860)... enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara.

In fact there is strong evidence as mentioned in that article that he was by no means the first Black MP. Issues of class and family connections clearly played a significant role up to the mid-C19th.

***

An ancient writing system confounding myths about Africa:

'How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'"
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot.
....
The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks - and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.

***

Artist's work to restore damaged shell grotto (I put this in a short story once.) (My own theory is that it was originally A Folly. Doing things with shells was as I recall quite A Thing in the C18th and Mrs Delany and her mate the Duchess of Portland had a rather less concealed shell grotto?)

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The embittered Martian aerialist and the nonconformist live a thousand-plus years apart, in different solar systems. What, then, connects them?

A Rebel’s History of Mars by Nadia Afifi

(no subject)

Jun. 13th, 2025 10:01 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] arkessian and [personal profile] ironed_orchid!

it's been a busy day

Jun. 12th, 2025 08:45 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Cattitude and I got up at 5:45 so he could pill Kaja, preparatory to her dental surgery. Both the pilling and the medical care went well, and she is on soft food only for 10-14 days. Therefore Molly is too, and we have to give them different treats than the usual dental Greenies. (Kaja will also be getting anti-inflammatories for a couple of days, and gabapentin for five.)

I got email from my brother about Mom's estate. He has done the necessary formwork so Vanguard can give us the money from her account there, where we are co-beneficiaries. His share is already in his account existing account. I tried setting an account up online, which apparently failed at the last minute, so I called and got a helpful person to walk me through the process again, step by step. I had gotten far enough earlier to create security questions, including some that I can actually remember my answers to, and haven't used repeatedly elsewhere. Separately, I need to talk to someone at Amalgamated Bank about the account there, a joint account with both our names on it. I hope they'll let me, as co-owner, close the account and transfer the money elsewhere, rather than sending them a copy of the death certificate, getting the account just in my name, and then closing it.

Mark also said he's thinking of going to London next month to sort through Mom's belongings, photos, and paperwork. So he wants to know whether I'm going as well, and if so, what dates worth for me. (Putting this here so I'm less likely to forget to talk to Cattitude and Adrian and then write back to Mark.)

Rani Icons

Jun. 12th, 2025 08:15 pm
purplecat: The Sixth Doctor (Who:The Rani)
[personal profile] purplecat
Some icons of The Rani which have been languishing on my hard drive since there was only one of her. I guess I need to make some more...


Kate O'Mara as the Rani, dressed as Mel.  Face and lots of permed red h air. Kate O'Mara as the Rani from the hips upwards, striding forwards in her red outfit. Kate O'Mara as the Rani.  Side shot standing next to her Tardis console. Kate O'Mara as the Rani.  Waist up looking at Camera in red. Kate O'Mara as the Rani looking mildly annoyed.  The Master stands behind her.


Snaggin is free. Credit is appreciated. Comments are loved.
oursin: A cloud of words from my LJ (word cloud)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Very nice and punctual but they've basically learned nothing in the year they've worked at the theatre. Not where to stand, not which row is which, or the general location of a given seat. The last two really matter during reserved seating shows. Whatever side that usher is on is going to have lines, and people may end up in the wrong seats.

So I was discussing the situation with my boss and I said my current approach was that each shift would be to pick one thing that usher does not know, and do my best to ensure they know it by the end of the shift. Last shift was "where to stand", for example. My reward is, I think, that usher is now _my_ special project who I will be working with whenever I HM.

I did assure my boss I do remember a previous HM who grilled ushers on seat location and would ding them a quarter hour for minor uniform infractions and that I wasn't going to use them as a model. Well, I do, but only in the sense of asking myself if the way I want to handle something is how that person would, and if it is, I do something else.

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