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Reading. ( Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )

I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!

Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.

More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.

Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.

Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!

Cooking. Bread? Bread.

Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)

Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.

ailbhe

I am not keeping up to date. It's partially that I'm often tired and partially that I'm still not writing about the thing that happened around Christmas that made things... more difficult... though ultimately it will turn out to have been better this way. But it's INCREDIBLY HOT and so we're running fans and using the pop-up pool in the garden and eating TONS of ice cream so it's also quite luxuriously holidayesque, while underneath is the horror of climate change. Yay?

In the last couple of weeks I may be regaining my ability to read again, which is intermittent, and I'm hoping to do monthly book posts again, I liked that the two or three times I did them.

gingicat

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beanside

Well, that was a day. That is now concluded. I'm sitting here in my comfy nightgown, relaxing before I begin going through the room like a tasmania devil, of the cleaning variety. Once I'm done that, I'll realize that I packed something I shouldn't have and will cuss and extricate it. Then, It'll be off to the rental agency to start the long trek to our gate. (We are 100% using the tram this time, now that I understand that the terminal is a big H. It's just too damn big. And last time I looked we ere at gate 74, which is kind near the end of the row. And then, we shall be flying home to the babies.

I'd like to do more of these mini trips, a quick hop up to Boston or Drive to Philly and DC, especially as it gets a bit cooler. But next up, Ghost concerts, the first of which is not this coming week, but next week on the 9th.

Yesterday was rough, y'all. 8 hour is entirely too long for a viewing/funeral thingy. IT went okay. Jess was amazing, There were a few passive aggressive look what you missed things, but never any direct bullshit. Lots of somewhat redneck stories, about this cousin's ex being a bitch, and This cousin doing this and that.

We managed, but it wasn't easy.

JEss' brother asked them to do a reading-which turned out to be their nemesis--their mother's favorite poem, "Wild geese," by Mary Olliver. Lots of cryging during their brother's speech. And then it was over and they put on some of Dale's favorite music to end the wake. And proceded to talk loudly over it, which was sensory hell.

Then, it was all over but for a nice trip to dinner with Jess' brother. It wasn't bad. We had very good bbq.

Then, it was back to the hotel for a nightcap. I am never gettign a hotel without at least a small bar or a evening reception with booze, because that was super nice. We did it noth days, and it provided a little buffer between the family and getting back to the room.

Now it's time to get myself together and start packing up what needs to be packed, and preparing for departure in just under an hour. Everyone have an excellent day!

ursamajor

hyounpark and I wrapped up our extremely concert-filled June last weekend with two shows in Wine Country, backing up Andrea Bocelli and friends. Three rehearsals in ten days with almost entirely new-to-me repertoire - it felt good to have that kind of intensity of practice again. It's different from regular rehearsal, where we have a month, two, sometimes even three to slowly, steadily polish a single piece. Harder to cram into daily life, but always worth it.

Saturday was also Hyoun's birthday, so I was highly amused when the sound check opened with La donna è mobile from Rigoletto. Because I originally learned that melody in fourth grade as a birthday song!

( Archiving the lyrics here because I know I was able to find it on the internet at some point in the past, but no longer. )

( the rest of the Bocelli concert experience )

And now, my Wednesday nights are free for a (very) few weeks! (Summersings start July 23, and then after that we're right into rehearsals for Verdi; I hope I'll be able to cram in one or two Wednesday night Friends With Bikes rides during the time off, but we'll need to see.)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: ride e canta nel sole l'infinita nostra felicita // gloria a te!

ysobel

Duolingo's increasing reliance on AI at the expense of human employees bothers me a lot. It's also, not coincidentally, gotten sloppy. I've noticed things in the English that feel off -- "He didn't die because he had the operation on time" should have been "in time"; "It's possible that I start going out with Francisco" should be "I'll start" or "I might start"; "She isn't tolerant with other ideas" should either be "of" or the object should be "people" (this may be regional? but for me it's tolerant *of* things, tolerant *with* or of people); "The travelers would buy at the market" should either have a different verb like "shop" or should have a direct object (I know "buy" can be intransitive but it still feels weird in this sentence); etc. If there are things that strike me as odd about the language I'm a native speaker of, how the fuck can I trust them to be correct in the language I'm trying to learn?

I currently have a subscription, partly so I wouldn't get ads and partly because I supported their stated mission. I no longer want to support them. My renewal, set to annual, renews next month.

On the other hand I have a streak of 3839 days, several friends streaks over 300, and a ridiculous number of friends quests in a row (can't find the info but I think it's around 85-90?). Also while practicing Duo mostly makes me better at Duo, I am still learning vocab, even if some of it doesn't want to stick.

So I'm trying to decide:

Option 1: cancel subscription and delete app. Up side: cheaper and more ethical. Down side: realistically I'm not going to find an easy Spanish-practice alternative.

Option 2a: cancel subscription but keep "playing" until I reach a pretty streak number, then quit. Up side: cheaper, though ads mean they're still profiting, and I get to leave on a pretty number. Down side: ads, plus im still planning on breaking the streak.

Option 2b: cancel subscription and keep playing indefinitely. Up side: still get Spanish practice. Down: ads, blech.

Option 3: keep subscription for another year. Up: practice, no ads. Down: I'm paying money for dubious AI.

If I take one of the streak-breaking options -- either now or in 161 days (which is, uh, 5 months and change, so December? -- and then regret it, I'll have lost the chance to make the long streak longer. OTOH it literally can't go on forever anyway, and I don't like supporting AI. OTOOH one subscription isn't noticeable really, so they won't care.

...I hate making decisions...

(Side note: my phone's predictive texting really wants to decapitalize I. If I type "i wo" it of course autocaps i to I, but then doesn't suggest "would"/"wouldn't" for the next word, but instead suggests "i would" which changes the I back to lowercase. Is this inherent to autocorrect or am I doing something wrong?)

dine

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adrian_turtle

I noticed something when I was in London a couple of months ago. For years, I've been seeing UK TERFs absolutely freak out about the possibility that a transwoman might be in a stall next to a ciswoman. So I somehow thought they were less private than the stalls here. Or at least no more private. The standard I'm accustomed to is that the doors come down to about knee height, maybe a little lower. (Plenty of space to run a mop under them.) The public toilets I used in London had doors that almost touched the tops of my shoes! And the doors closed with proper hinges, without big gaps on the hinge side.

I've always known the TERFs were outrageous bullies, but it was so weird to see this particular wrongness. It's like they've been saying they hate people because it's raining outside, and then it turns out it wasn't even raining?

nilchance

update: I have survived the funeral. nothing terrible happened aside from some guilt-trips. nobody made a scene. huzzah!

now I'm getting a drink in the hotel bar because fuck this day. XD

kaberett

There has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.

You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.

We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????

And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)

jadelennox

"Academia: Staying Afloat" by Timothy Burke from the end of January made me feel warmer. It's about everything. AI slop. Fascism. Modern employment. Greed. The broad gesture at everything. Hope. Determination.

You are the right person to do what you do, know what you know, study what you’re going to study. You do it.

You are a lifeboat.

You are not the passenger being rescued from a shipwreck. You are the rescuer. Your skills, your knowledge, your experience reside in you. You have pulled them from the cold ocean where cruel and careless captains have set them adrift.

You are a lifeboat.

Current Mood: we have no words anymore

pauraque

Concluding Pride Month media, I played Get in the Car, Loser! which is a queer road trip fantasy RPG. The lead developer Christine Love is a trans woman, and I'm not sure if everyone who worked on the game is trans but it looks like it's at least a high proportion.

combat scene where queer gen Z kids do battle with weird fantasy monsters

combat scene where queer gen Z kids do battle with weird fantasy monsters

The story primarily focuses on Sam, an anxious goth trans girl who's studying magic in college. Her classmate Grace steals a mystical sword and then recruits Sam to be her party's healer on a quest to defeat the evil Machine Devil (who, disappointingly, isn't this guy). It's going to be a bit of a drive to the Machine Devil's lair, but fortunately Grace's nonbinary partner Valentin has a car, and also serves as the party's tank. The contemporary-fantasy worldbuilding is only lightly sketched but that's all that's needed; the quest to beat the Machine Devil just provides a framework for the characters to talk to each other, build connections, and grapple with their own insecurities and inner conflicts.

( Read more... )

Get in the Car, Loser! is normally $24.99 USD on Steam, but is currently on sale for $17.49 USD, so this would be a good time to pick it up if it sounds like your thing!

nilchance

on the one hand, I'm in Michigan because my brother asked me to attend our father's memorial service. so I'm in emotional shutdown survival mode and probably will be until sometime next week when this is over.

on the other hand, I got a date for top surgery! (picture me trying to coordinate with the surgical scheduler on mychart while on moving walkways in the Detroit airport yesterday, which was an EXPERIENCE.) barring insurance and hospital fuckery, it'll be September 11. 75 days left to go. \o/

fayanora

Been thinking of creatures that live in the forest of Tirffiniol, not just from folklore but just coming up with ideas, mainly for an upcoming scene in book 7. Deer sized or smaller, magical or mundane, but preferably things that would be terrifying yet mostly harmless. The scene I have in mind is going to be a mostly safe but scary adventure in some woods at night with wards that keep out anything too dangerous to be around kids, with a preliminary scene of the same area of the woods during the daytime for them to see animals that won't scare them off from going in at night.

While some animals there are related to Earth animals by way of Earth animals occasionally falling through the Veil into Tirffiniol and using the high magic there to evolve in many interesting ways, most species there are not related to Earth animals. But they may look like Earth animals or something that could exist on Earth, via convergent evolution.

Even if you can't think of anything specific, I love hearing ideas because then the ideas mix in my brain and give me amazing ideas like some recent ones: carnivorous deer the size of cats that climb trees, something resembling a cross between a monkey and an owl, and spider-like things the size of pomelos.

Also feel free to draw from stories you know of various cryptids, small humanoid creatures, and anything spooky you can think of, especially as doing so might jog my memory of similar stories.

Oh, I also want to note this is in the part of Tirffiniol you can only get to by portalling in from Earth in the pacific northwest region, so I'm shying away from cryptids and mythological beings from places other than North America unless they resemble something we have in North America such as how a peryton is a winged deer (and also I have griffins of various sizes), and also selecting for roughly the same sort of ecosystem/climate/landscape as the Pacific Northwest, IE mostly forested, hilly and interspersed with mountains and buttes, and has a wet season; just a little bit drier and interspersed with fields of what looks like grass but only looks that way because of convergent evolution. (These "grass" fields are big enough that massive, elephant-sized unicorns graze in these fields, only going through the wooded areas to get to more grazing areas. But Fae Springs is on top of a cliff on the other side of a ravine from most of these grassy areas, and leans more towards the forested side.)

But that's more for me to worry about. Just hit me up with ideas if you feel like it.

beanside

Greetings from Brighton Michigan! Michigan is very pretty, much easier to drive in than Maryland, and I never would want to live here for all the money in the world.

The trip in was super smooth. The flight left on time and was smooth as hell. I think I will always go for first class if I can afford it. It was so much easier. On first, off first, bags first. We touched down in Detroit 25 minutes early.

The Detroit airport is tough. It's enormous and I am out of shape and have bad knees. I did a lot of walking. We finally found the airport shuttle for our rent a car, and headed off to their lot. I had requested a small SUV. There were a few to choose from, but I picked the neon green Hyundai Kona. I can't lose it in a parking lot for sure. It drives really nicely, too, I would definitely consider one as a future car.

After that, we drove the hour to Hartland (with a brief stop for coffee and Timbits from the Tim Hortons that we don't have near us) Then a stop at a brew pub for food. (Meh. The sandwich was okay, but nothing to go gaga over. Then, we pulled into our hotel, and found out that it's actually a motel with exterior doors.

I melted down a bit. Nowhere in the listing did it mention that. Personally, as a woman, I don't feel safe in those type of motels. I immediately hopped online and found a Marriot not too far away and booked that. It's not the best hotel--the ac isn't great, the bed is hard and the shower sucks, but our room is off an interior corridor. It means driving a bit further, but I'm not fucking around with our safety. This weekend is going to be difficult enough. I need to actually get a little sleep. Once we got back to the hotel room, I called the site and bitched until I got a refund on the sketch motel.

Then we visited with the BIL for a while, went on a drive and headed back to the hotel, stopping at cracker barrel for dinner.

Today, the funeral is sure to be a boatload of fun. The family viewing starts at 10, then the regular viewing at 11, and goes til 6pm. Apparently the funeral home serves food? So we don't even need to go get lunch. This is not something I've ever heard of before, and frankly, it's a little weird to me. I don't know if this is all in one room, or if the food is in another room? Are we just chowing down next to the coffin? Inquiring minds.

Then, there'll be some sort of after service dinner, I'm sure. At least, unlike when we came for Jess' mom's funeral, we've been assured that it's not going to be at a Golden Corral.

Okay, I am in desperate need of coffee, so I'm going to sign off for now. Everyone have an outstanding Saturday!

dine

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kaberett

Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")

dine

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starwatcher

This one has multiple genres.

Books for sale, mostly $1 to $3

Hit the "Genres" button at the top of the page to narrow your search.

Happy reading!

ETA: Jesse_the_k notes that "This is a meta-search engine, compiling deals from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google and Kobo." I didn't realize that was note-worthy, but yeah. Whatever platform you use to read, you're covered.

firecat

OK, who should be the next Bond? I’m impressed by the wide range of suggestions here. I especially liked the suggestion for Rege-Jean Page. No one mentioned Joseph Mawle, Edward Bluemel, Harry Lloyd, or Matthew Goode, though. Or Tobias Menzies!

What do you think?

Guardian readers make nominations for the next Bond

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May 2023

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Page Summary

kaberett - vital functions
ailbhe - Monthly updates could be worse
gingicat - another Callahanian gone...
beanside - Sending my love from the other side of the apocalypse, and I just about snapped, don't look back.
ursamajor - the squirrels are in the tree
ysobel - Duo blathering
dine - hold on, let me overthink things
adrian_turtle - Boston and London
nilchance - (no subject)
kaberett - much yelling
jadelennox - it's chopped onions all the way down
pauraque - Get in the Car, Loser! (2021)
nilchance - complicated days
fayanora - Idea fishing again.
beanside - Old heat of a raging fire come and light my eyes, summer's kiss through electric wire
dine - I am presently experiencing life at several WTFs per hour
kaberett - some good things!
dine - *spits on SCOTUS*
starwatcher - Ebook sale, today only, Friday 27th
firecat - The next Bond?

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