(no subject)

Jul. 28th, 2025 09:49 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] thedivinegoat!

Trivial life stuff (and fandom)

Jul. 27th, 2025 10:38 pm
sholio: (Fireweed blossoms)
[personal profile] sholio
1. SOMETHING IS EATING MY GARDEN. I don't know what; my guess is either a) moose (we know there's a cow-calf pair hanging around; we've caught them occasionally on the driveway game camera), or b) a porcupine. Which would never have been on my radar as something that would eat a garden if I hadn't seen it in the backyard a week or two ago, absolutely going to town munching on raspberry bushes and fireweed. I feel like the way that the garden is getting decimated is consistent with something low to the ground that's pulling down pea vines and similar, and also doesn't eat too much in one go. But after we put up loose wire fencing around one of the beds, it apparently got into it anyway and ate a bunch of my lettuce and some of the remaining pea vines. Porcupines can both climb and dig, so it's possible a motivated one could get over loose fencing pretty easily - but the damage pattern this time could also have been something leaning over and eating from the top. I CAN'T TELL, but it is really annoying because it's taken out nearly all my peas and a bunch of the salad stuff. I picked some broccoli tonight even though I didn't need to use it yet, because my broccoli heads are just about fully crowned and I'm going to be incredibly annoyed if I wake up tomorrow to find that they've been devastated as well.

2. I got to pet puppies today! One of the people in my TTRPG game group has a dog (a Great Dane) that had puppies, ELEVEN of them - the 101 Dalmation jokes write themselves - and invited us over after gaming to pet them if we wanted to. They're about 3 weeks old, eyes open and toddling, but still potato shaped and incredibly soft and pleasant to hold. Puppies. <3 (I miss having a dog, although I don't want a Great Dane for a number of reasons. Handling someone else's puppies is delightful, though.)

3. Summer of Horror authors revealed, including my very unsurprising offering. I continue to be delighted with my deliciously spooky/romantic gift!

4. The Biggles prompt fest is also going delightfully.

and it's one and two

Jul. 27th, 2025 07:28 pm
musesfool: The Reyes family, hugging (the family that kicks ass together)
[personal profile] musesfool
I keep intending to post and then forgetting to do so. Nothing much is going on. I pan-fried a steak for dinner tonight and it was delicious but it also reminded me why I do it so infrequently - the smoke condition was intense and ongoing despite 2 fans going and the smell is going to linger. But I ate it with a nice arugula salad and it was good.

Here's a couple of links I found interesting recently:

- Sydney’s Choice How The Bear cooked up season four’s best episode.

- After ‘iconic’ Rangers tenure, Chris Kreider opens up about New York departure: 1-on-1 (do not read the comments)

- Why Your Team Sucks: New York Giants - this is an annual event (for every NFL team) and remains hilarious because in the case of the Giants, it's all sad but true. On this one, the comments are great.

*
petra: A blonde woman holding an electric guitar (Corner Gas - Wanda rocks out)
[personal profile] petra
97 years isn't long enough to have someone that amazing around.

My favorite song by him, as an old erotica-peddler, is "Smut."



What's your favorite?

Culinary

Jul. 27th, 2025 07:03 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

Last week's bread held out pretty well, though unfortunately not quite long enough to extend to frittata for Friday night supper.

Instead I made the somewhat ersatz 'Thai fried rice' with saucisson sec.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50:50% wholemeal/white spelt, Rayner organic barley malt extract, and dried blueberries ('apple juice infused' WTF): turned out quite nicely.

Today's lunch: stifado of diced lamb shoulder, served with Greek spinach rice and gingery healthy-grilled baby courgettes and red bell pepper (teriyaki sauce rather than tamari).

(no subject)

Jul. 27th, 2025 12:48 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] fjm and [personal profile] wildroot!
mecurtin: 3 of GRRM's Hugo Award statues (hugos)
[personal profile] mecurtin
Who's that? #Purrcy being adorable? I was walking by and I had to ask ...
#cats #CatsOfBluesky #Caturday

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby, lying on his back with his paws in the air, turns his head to look over his shoulder and behind him. He looks vaguely embarrassed.




Under the breakfast table, up against the sunny window, keeping an eye on the human while cleaning his paws -- it's a good life if you're a cat. And you get to rest your head on a metal window crank, which is apparently choice.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby lies on his side on a broad, sunny windowsill. He's licking his front paw with maximum tongue while side-eyeing the photographer.




We've now finished the online WSFS Business Meetings, it's just a question of how much Business Meeting stuff will get down in-person at Worldcon. But at least this time, unlike Glasgow, I can plan to spend most of my Worldcon time *at Worldcon*, which should be much more fun.

One of the things the Business Meeting did was vote for a Trial Committee to decide what to do about those accused of mis- and malfeasance around the 2023 Chengdu Hugo Awards, and ... I'm on it. So I guess I'm officially a BNF now 👀! That'll be an adventure, all right.

One of the things I'm looking forward to at Worldcon is that Martha Wells is the Guest of Honor, so there will be *lots* of Murderbot content, it'll be more or less the first Murderbot con. I'm not really *in* Murderbot fandom, yet, I read some of the fic but I don't really have time/brain cells for fannish immersion right now. But it's just so nice to have something that makes both halves of my fannish life, the SFF half & the fanfic/AO3 half, so *happy*. And when we all know Wells is a good person who's worked really hard for her success, and who's had to deal with a lot of crap in the last few years and now a ship full of money has come in for her.

A few Murderbot things

Jul. 26th, 2025 01:48 pm
sholio: murderbot group from episode 10 (Murderbot-famiily1)
[personal profile] sholio
I really enjoyed this David Dastmalchian interview and also this adorable associated piece of fanart from the part of the interview in which he basically starts channeling Gurathin.

And some of my stuff on Tumblr:

Something I noticed rewatching the first episode

Random thought on bookverse!Gurathin

Oh, and I posted another fic a few days ago, Old Familiar Sting, which is pretty much all about characters working through the aftermath of Corporation Rim medical trauma.
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I read a news article today "K-pop trainee ordered to pay damages after tattoo and dorm exit led to canceled debut". In the article, the trainee was referred to as A, in an effort to protect their privacy — they even used "they/them" pronouns throughout, thinking that concealing their gender might have further helped in concealing their identity. However, they referenced the company involved by name and gave the debut date of the group that A didn't debut with, which meant that 30 seconds at the Kpop Wiki was enough for me to find A's identity. Definitely sub-optimal anonymization.

I'm also not too keen on the headline. To me "canceled debut" sounds like the group that A was to have been in didn't debut, but instead it was just that A didn't get to debut with the group.

Also, if you're curious, according to the contract, the damages in question should have been 60 million won (approx. US$43K) for 2 violations for contract terms (once for leaving the dorm without permission, once for getting a tattoo without permission). For some reason, though, the company sued A for 80 million won (approx. US$58K). The judge ruled that this amount was excessive and ordered A to pay 5 million won (approx. $US3600). The agency is appealing the ruling, though, which just has me eye-rolling. (It seems significant to me, though I don't know if a court would feel this way, that the group that A was prevented from debuting with has already disbanded.)

A birthday, and: Caligula

Jul. 26th, 2025 06:48 pm
selenak: (Livia by Pixelbee)
[personal profile] selenak
The awesome Helen Mirren turns 80 today. Long may she continue to rule and remain with us! I think the first thing I remember watching with her that made me sit up and pay attention was her as D.I. Jane Tennison, but since then she's never disappointed in any role I've seen her in, both before and after Tennison. I have a particular soft spot for her Elizabeth II and Alma Reville, I must confess. Most recently I took up someone's dare and watched "Caligula - The Ultimate Cut". Caligula, if you don't know: Became (in)famous as basically a late 1970s porn movie with famous actors (among others Peter O'Toole as Tiberius, John Guilgud as Nerva, Malcolm McDowell in the title role, Helen Mirren as Caesonia, Caligula's last wife) due to the fact that even for a 1970s movie, it had a crazy production history: first the scriptwriter - none other than Gore Vidal - and the director, Tito Brassi, fell out and Vidal withdrew his name from the script, then the director and the producer fell out, and since the producer was the then owner of Penthouse, he went back to the set with some Penthouse girls, shot some hardcore porn and inserted into the already shot footage. The example most quoted for how this worked was that where the scene had a non-explicit threesome between Caligula, his sister Drusilla and Caesonia, the released version added two other women spying on them and having very explicit hardcore f/f sex while doing so. This caused the director to withdraw his name as well and the actors making somewhat embarrassed quips for the next few decades (other than MacDowell, who was seriously pissed off about the then result, and Mirren, who was debonair about it and called it "an irresistable mixture of art and genitals"). Then in 2024, a dedicated film fan named Thomas Negovan released the result of some serious work - he'd gotten access to all the shot footage, and recut the entire movie, going back to Vidal's script and using exclusively takes not used for the late 1970s release (and none at all from the porn additions, not that the actual movie is without sex scenes, au contraire), with the result that a pleased McDowell praised him for rescueing "one of my best performances" from cinematic oblivion. Reviews I had read did concede that now there is an actual storyline and (some) character development. (A scene in question singled out and compared/contrasted: apparantly, the original cinematic release version had Caligula simply shouting crazily "crawl, crawl!" at the senators, who did it. The Ultimate Cut version, by contrast, has this scene near the end, with some overtones of Camus as Caligula has long gone from delight to disgust at how no matter what he does, people will obey and abase themselves, and the longer version of this scene has him asking for increasingly outrageous things, cultimating in the "crawl, crawl" and the declaration he hates them for being like that. (Mind you, earlier in the movie when one brave young man did stand up for himself, this resulted in Caligula interrupting the guy's wedding night to rape him and his bride both.)

In case you're wondering whether the result is worth watching: depends. Certainly as opposed to, say, I, Claudius' Caligula (and his avatar in Babylon 5, Cartagia), who are evil from the get go - in the case of Graves' Caligula literally from birth, he's already a creepy kid when his parents are stil alive - the Ultimate Cut's Caligula has some humanity in him and the introduction sequence makes a point of providing the audience with the backstory of his father Germanicus dying (in this version definitely courtesy of Tiberius), then Agrippina the Elder and Caligula's older brothers all at Tiberius' orders (unlike the death of Germanicus, this is not disputed), with Caligula and his sister Drusilla as the sole survivors (because in this movie, Caligula's other sisters don't exist, though I'm told the porn version actually identifies one of the women having the hardcore f/f as Agrippina, but as the on screen dialogue makes much of Drusilla and Caligula being the sole survivors, I assume in the porn version's Agrippina the Younger would not have been Caligula's and Drusilla's sister), and their incestuous relationship actually one of the very few human, non-abusive and tender relationships happening in the entire movie, with Caligula having the not unreasonable under the circumstances belief that he needs to be Emperor or he's toast as well, only for absolute power to bring out increasingly the absolute worst in him. Buuuuuuuut this existing personal development does not correspond with a general development, by which I mean that since the movie after the introduction with its tragic backstory for young Caligula and the introduction in which he and Drusilla are in a "we two against the world" mode as each other's sole sources of human affection goes on to present Tiberius' life in Capri as a non-stop orgy already, there's no sense that Rome itself pre Caligula is much different than Rome ruled by Caligula. (Incidentally, about the orgy there and the later orgies, which I assume were shot by the original director, since they're certainly rating M or 18, so to speak, but don't have the actors with dialogue do something more explicit than touch someone's nipples, they're the opposite of tiltillating in that no one gives the impression of actually enjoying themselves as opposed to acting on first Tiberius' and later Caligula's orders. The sole exceptions being the scenes involving Caligula, Drusilla and Caesonia.) The Capri sequence does have a moment that gets across human emotion, which is the Nerva scene they hired Guilgud for: this Nerva isn't the later Emperor; he's an old friend of Tiberius who tells his former pal he can't bear the degredation his once friend has sunk to anymore and commits suicide, and Tiberius' reaction to this is when O'Toole actually gets to do some non-hamming-it-up acting. But mostly it numbs you down in its viciousness and it pretty much sets the tone for the film.

Some of the violence is outré and camp, such as the machine decapitating people in the arena who are buried up to their necks in sand, and thus hard to take seriously; otoh the whole Caligula first menaces and then rapes the young couple sequence is violence of a very different type, and genuinely frightening. Drusilla and Caesonia are the two outstanding female roles (and the sole women with personalities); it's another interesting contrast to the I, Claudius versions, in that Drusilla there was a none-too-bright but not personally malicious ditz, whereas here she's depicted as not without her own ruthlessness (she talks Caligula into getting rid of Macro, for example), but also smart and (within this movieverse) sensible, and later the sole person with the courage to argue with Caligula; it's her death (by illness) that removes whatever restraint he has left. Caesonia, too, is depicted as a smart woman (described in dialogue as profligate, but we don't see her having sex with anyone other than Caligula, and in the one threesome scene with Drusilla); Mirren gets hardly any lines in the first half of the movie when Drusilla is still alive but conveys a lot with facial acting, and then in the second half (when she is the character he has most dialogues with) basically becomes the sole person a) aware why Caligula is actually doing all of this ("Do you have to show them your contempt so openly?" "I don't know how else to provoke them"), and b) who among the various sycophants around them still has it in them to be dangerous. As opposed to Drusilla, she doesn't argue with Caligula directly, but she is great at keeping the balance between presenting her critique in a playfull manner and challenging him but withdrawing the moment she senses it could go against her and distracting any ire to another target while returning to her subject in a different way. It's a good role for a young Helen Mirren; this Caesonia is neither a good person nor an evil overlady but a cunning survivor (right until she gets murdered directly after Caligula, that is).

Around these interesting character depictions, however, is, as mentioned above, non-stop viciousness (some sexual, some not) to a degree that it just numbs you down emotionally. In a word: Grimdark. I've said elsewhere that the reason why I, Claudius works in a way many of its imitations didn't is that I, Claudius doesn't just consist of its spectacular villains (be they Livia or Caligula, the two main antagonists, or Sejanus), but offers a sympathetic main character and some other non-evil supporting characters you actually care about, so that when bad things happen to them, you feel for them. None of the various victims and/or targets in Caligula gets enough personality to make it to memorable human being, with the arguable exceptions of Nerva (in the Tiberius sequence) and of the young couple whom Caligula rapes for no other reason that the bridegroom pissed him off by standing up for himself. Drusilla and Caesonia, as mentioned, are interesting and Caligula himself certainly is a charismatic performance by McDowell, who manages to get across Caligula's inner scared child who never grew up along with the increasingly destructive and self destructive nihilism as he figures out that "I can do whatever I want" is neither safe nor as satisfying as he'd assumed but essentially empty. It's now discernable why so many good actors actually signed on to this project (beyond the cash they got). But I wouldn't say their (good) performances are enough reason to put yourself through nearly three numbing hours of grimdark. (Sorry, Thomas Negovan.)
oursin: The Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel (Delphic sibyl)
[personal profile] oursin

This is all a bit Dept Groucho Marx here - would anyone who is not of these awful people's leanings want to live within 100 miles of them anyway, and in fact are they not a creepy cult in the making? The settlement sprawls over 160 acres and it's called Return to the Land. Its founders say it is an "intentional community based around shared ancestry". (And I think we can predict what the position of women within it is before even getting to that part of the write-up, no?)

(You can get brucellosis from 'warm fresh goats' milk', you know.)

***

Dept, have none of these issues manifested before travelling together??? You be the judge: Should my partner stop obsessively cutting costs when we travel? We discover that although they've been partners for seven years they don't live together, so possibly they really haven't come up against this sort of clash of styles:

I don’t want to share Persephone’s suitcase because she doesn’t pack properly and I find that stressful. I may put all my stuff in one backpack, but it is very well organised. Persephone’s packing style is hectic and she doesn’t have a separate laundry bag for her unclean clothes, she just throws them all in together. I don’t want dirty laundry touching my stuff, thanks very much.

And one is a foodie and one is not, and there's a real clash of priorities going on there that you'd think might have come up in 7 years....

At least last week's YBTJ contestants seem to have discovered the flashpoint of difference fairly early on: should my flatmate start using the spice rack I made: and honestly, what is the point of a poncey hand-carved spice-rack with matching jars that he hasn't got round to labelling? I am team shop-bought packaging that can actually be identified without opening it up and sticking one's nose in.

***

Dept, the Fifties were actually quite anomalous: In the longer–term context, then, it is the mid-20th century which looks unusual, and it is worth considering why:

There is no doubt that the percentage of families which are headed by a lone parent has increased since the mid-20th century, and this has often been equated with the breakdown of the nuclear family system. However, it is not clear that the nuclear family is actually in decline. Most children are still living in two parent homes, and the percentage of lone parent families in the 19th century was not very different to the percentage today – although as explained below, such families were very differently formed.

***

Dept, the annual PSC deviation into sense: This may seem radical to you, but a woman does not need a penis in order to be satisfied. Okay, it's depressing that the couple come 'from a conservative background; we believe that sex before marriage is a sin and saved ourselves until we got married in our early 30s' but don't seem to have done any due diligence on how to do ye conjugalz - there have been books on how to have a happy fulfilled Christian marriage since the 1920s at least. Sigh.

(no subject)

Jul. 26th, 2025 12:42 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] shewhostaples and [personal profile] mrissa!

Canadian immigration question

Jul. 26th, 2025 03:11 am
staranise: A star anise floating in a cup of mint tea (Default)
[personal profile] staranise
I have an American friend who would strongly prefer to move their family to Canada. 2 adults, 4 children; both adults have degrees and professional credentials that would transfer across the border. They're currently looking for work, both abroad and in bluer states than theirs.

The question they asked me was:

Is immigrating to Canada something we can do on our own or do we need an immigration lawyer? I have been looking at requirements and it all seems straightforward enough, but I don’t want to be unpleasantly surprised


Any thoughts on the process would be welcome, like if/when a lawyer is needed, or if/when agencies that promise to help with the moving process are actually worth their fees.

Thanks! Comments are screened for people who'd rather stay private, and I'll pass the messages along.
naraht: Moonrise over Earth (Default)
[personal profile] naraht
Picked this up because I kept seeing it being described as literary SF – with that classic complaint, "no plot, hated the protagonist," that often signals a novel that may interest me. It's the tale of a depressed, isolated telepath in New York City in the early 70s who's gradually losing his powers as he enters his forties.

A reviewer on Reddit dismissed the novel as a clumsy metaphor for impotence. Having read it, and read a little about Silverberg's career – he had been churning out multiple novels per year before temporarily deciding to retire from writing in 1975 – I'm now 95% convinced that it's in fact a slightly less clumsy metaphor for the retreat of literary inspiration. Which makes it somewhat more interesting. Isn't fiction really, in some ways, based on the ability to see into other people's minds?

Not a great novel, but it has its moments. Very much of its period and setting, in both the good ways and the bad ways.

Biggles prompt fest

Jul. 25th, 2025 02:42 pm
sholio: blue and yellow airplane flying (Biggles-Biplane)
[personal profile] sholio
I thought it might be fun to run a Biggles July prompting free-for-all over at [community profile] bigglesevents. Because we haven't had a prompt fest in a while! (Of course I'm posting this at a time when most of the Biggles fandom is asleep.)

Familect phrases

Jul. 25th, 2025 11:04 am
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
I love hearing about the phrases people have incorporated into their family dialect (familect) that require explanation.

Here are some examples from around my house:

A "fuzzy" is a polar fleece jacket. (source: unknown)

Cat food comes in two varieties: gooshy (wet) and crunchy (dry). (source: Two Lumps webcomic)

"Bloop bloop?" means "Would you care to engage in sexual intercourse with me?" (source: a Tumblr post from someone who heard elk mating calls, parsed them as 'bloop bloop,' and started using the noise with their partner for the purpose, which cracked us up)

"One day... when you least expect it..." means, "I am contemplating taking you to bed." We almost never say the "I WILL HAVE SEX WITH YOU!" bit. (source: the second linked George Takei PSA)

The cat, as is the way of cats, has a zillion nicknames, including "Bunny," "[The] Fur," "Miss Fuzzbutt," and "Catface." T. S. Eliot violently underestimated the number of names my cats tend to accumulate, and none of the options are effin' ineffable. (reference: not how he officially spelled it but what we all heard)

(no subject)

Jul. 25th, 2025 11:53 am
pearwaldorf: donna noble looking up at something. light falls on her face from above (Default)
[personal profile] pearwaldorf
I really do think I would have been better off stupid.

I have been out of work for about a year. Some of it was me, thrashing through a skills-job mismatch. The rest has been the shitty job market. I now have some clarity about how I intend to proceed in the medium and long term, but the current concern is getting some fucking money in.

Please understand, I do not believe there is such a thing as unskilled labor. But there are some jobs where your purpose is to be a warm body that does things occasionally and shows up on time. This is not rocket science (although the way SpaceX is going? Eyy!).

I read a long thing on the politics of humiliation and it clarified a lot of things about the current milieu. It’s very long but extremely illuminating. “Humiliation is the forced recognition of domination.”

This can be done in many ways, both exceptionally grotesque and mundane.



During the job search, I have signed up for some silly things that are not completely useless.. One of the videos mentioned “the job market of XYZ years is gone. The job market of last year is gone. And you have to accept that.” It is unfortunately true.

The solution, according to this guy, is to market yourself on LinkedIn. All that value proposition create urgency CTA bullshit. Hawk your personal brand in a systematic way.

Y’know, all the shit that makes me (and other people like me in this regard) want to die.

If I were less aware of all the stuff around me I would just fucking do it because that's the way the world works. But I see it. I see what companies are trying to do to take advantage of this employers’ market. This combination of political uncertainty leading to lack of job mobility and a sustained capital strike that started after the Great Resignation.

I’m a perfectly talented and competent worker, but I do not believe the market should be tight enough that I have to attempt to differentiate myself for a position that pays $60K a year (which is exactly median for King County).

And it feels stupid to dig in my heels so much about this. Extremely entitled and bourgie when people are out there picking strawberries while dodging ICE or sucking in auto exhaust on the sides of freeways because they have no other way to survive. I don’t like writing cover letters, but I’m good at them. I’ll spin a goddamn magical narrative about how I’ll solve a problem you have with skills I bring to the table. But I don’t want to and I don’t think I should have to. (See? Entitled and bourgie and too fucking good to do what it takes.)

I'm probably going to have to do all this regardless because I don’t want to be a mooch on my parents and the unemployment money is gone.

But I will be kicking and screaming and doing this the whole time

Gif of Korra making the "I'm watching you" face at Lin

Foundation 3.03

Jul. 25th, 2025 06:17 pm
selenak: (Empire - Foundation)
[personal profile] selenak
Foundation 3.03: Or, hang on, Selenak finally remembers something from books read three decades ago.... )

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