marginaliana: Buddy the dog carries Bobo the toy (Default)
Gummo Bergman's "Silent Strawberries" ([personal profile] marginaliana) wrote2025-09-16 07:45 pm

:dusty-stick:

Various:

--Currently reading Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, which is a silly epistolary novel told via slack messages at a PR company in which one of the characters has had his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the company's slack channels and all his coworkers think it's a bit. Also Slackbot is having an existential crisis. Also the gentlest of satires of a PR business carries on around it all. I have actually read this before but did not retain it (as discovered when I checked out the ebook and it opened to the last page) but that just means I get to enjoy it fresh. Do recommend as very light reading.

--The makers of the game Shovel Knight wanted the characters to be body and pronoun swappable - this is a great article about their process of designing the system

--The Book of Love by Kelly Link - DNF. I don't even know any teenagers but I know this is not what teenagers are like, even if they've just come back from the dead. Contains: stereotypical teen sister drama with zero nuance, mysterious authority figure knows things but doesn't reveal any of them and speaks only in the most cryptic of ways because reasons, etc. There was one interesting/creepy bit of worldbuilding but I couldn't be bothered to see if anything came of it because I was so annoyed by everything else. It doesn't seem like it was sold as YA but god it felt desperately 2004-YA. And jagged, in that way modern pop literature uses jaggedness to mean reality. Anyway, unsurprisingly this got rave reviews and I hated it violently.

--Reread Jonathan Livingston Seagull which I believe I last encountered in my teen years and the only reaction I can manage is disdain. But why? Has western society passed out of the time of fable? Am I too close-minded for metaphor? Or is the book just fundamentally not very good? Honestly, I really don't think it's very good. I'm prepared to accept it conceptually but the different sections just don't go. It's cramming five different concepts into a seagull-shaped trenchcoat, and three of those concepts are trying to bite each other's faces off.

--Everyone should tell me their yuletide nominations just so I can be delighted about things I'm probably not going to write.
oursin: Illustration from medieval manuscript of the female physician Trotula of Salerno holding up a urine flask (trotula)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-22 06:14 pm

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!

Though probably African frogs do not say that (the chorus from Aristophanes' The Frogs).

Anyway, this was of considerable interest to me having had to do with archives relating to these here amphibians (in which they were described as 'toads'):

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years

and also read the ms of a work by A Friend on the history of pregnancy testing in which they played a significant role.

They replaced the rabbit test ('did the rabbit die' - the rabbit had to die, actually, in order to examine its ovaries) as this was a non-lethal test and kept producing yet more frogs.

And there was quite an issue of what to do with the little blighters once chemical testing became the norm - as I recall attempts to dispose of them as pets.

Also

The frog is genetically surprisingly similar to humans, which means that scientists can model human disease in this amphibian and replace the use of higher sentient species.

Do we not feel that this is the beginning of some Golden Age sf/horror work? FROGMAN.

tozka: Dawn (from Buffy) reading a book with a starry background (buffy dawn with stars)
mx. tozka ([personal profile] tozka) wrote2025-09-22 08:41 am

šŸ“– reading log: a trip of one’s own

Book Info

A Trip of One’s Own: Hope, Heartbreak, and Why Traveling Solo Could Change Your Life by Kate Wills (2021)

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel

LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/28155352/

Acquired from: Little Free Library, [undisclosed location], USA

Started reading: September 19, 2025

Finished reading: TBD

Bookmark: California bookstore (came with book)

Notes

Page 0: I already travel solo extensively (in fact, full-time for years) but this seems more like a travel memoir than a how-to so I think it’ll be good to read.

She’s following the travels of one of the early travel writers, Egeria, who went on a pilgrimage which means visiting Israel and other nearby sites. In fact this author starts right off in Israel, just fyi.

Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

tozka: title character sitting with a friend (lady lovely locks & friends)
mx. tozka ([personal profile] tozka) wrote2025-08-17 12:14 pm

šŸ“– reading log: the forest unseen by david george haskell

Book Info

Cover of The Forest Unseen

Genre: Nonfiction, Natural History, Ecology

LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/11720259/t/The-Forest-Unseen-A-Years-Watch-in-Nature

Acquired from: Little Free Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA [see log]

Started reading: August 17, 2025

Finished reading: September 2 (DNF)

May come back to this later (in ebook version) but it’s not holding my attention and I don’t want to carry it around waiting for it.

Reading Updates

Title Page: This copy is signed by the author!

Page xii:

Indeed, the truth of the forest may be more clearly and vividly revealed by the contemplation of a small area than it could be by donning ten-league boots, covering a continent but uncovering little.

Page 8: Somebody did a lot of underlining in pencil but stopped after the second chapter. Guessing they DNF’d this, but I’m enjoying it so far. It reminds me of Seasons of the Wild but more satisfyingly science-y.

Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-22 09:30 am
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
petra ([personal profile] petra) wrote2025-09-21 10:24 pm
Entry tags:

Yuletide nominations

I have made my nominations:
Slow Horses (TV)
The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Galavant (TV)
Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
InCryptid - Seanan McGuire

The nomination coordination spreadsheet is here if you want to see what other people who know the spreadsheet exists have nominated.
greerwatson: (Default)
greerwatson ([personal profile] greerwatson) wrote2025-09-21 06:45 pm
Entry tags:

Yuletide Gift Exchange 2025

Once again, it's that time of year. The annual Yuletide gift exchange opened nominations last week. (See the post.) So I'm aiming this at Forever Knight fans. Yes, I know that I said last year that Forever Knight wouldn't be eligible in 2025; but there haven't been as many new stories posted as I expected. (Or maybe it's more that there weren't as many old stories cross-posted.) Anyway, at this moment, FK has 958 works in AO3 that are complete, in English, and over 1K words in length.

If there are other FK fans thinking of doing Yuletide this year, we should coordinate. When one is actually signing up for Yuletide, one is only permitted to request/offer characters in the tagset; so it's important to get in the ones you want to ask for.

This year, they've upped the number of fandoms one is permitted to request to five. Still only four characters per fandom. Obviously, FK has far more than that! However, by coordinating with one another, we can ensure that we each nominate different ones, thus getting a larger tagset. If we don't coordinate, there's a high probability of duplication.

Nominations are open until 26 September 9pm UTC. Note that local time for you will vary depending on your time zone.

To repeat: if you plan to request/offer Forever Knight for Yuletide, we should coordinate in order to get as many different characters as possible into the tag set.
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
Lanna Michaels ([personal profile] lannamichaels) wrote2025-09-21 05:14 pm

"Teach Us Something, Please." (Harry Potter) G



Title: Teach Us Something, Please.
Author: [personal profile] lannamichaels
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Merope Riddle is a disquieting little girl.


In which Tom Riddle is a girl )

musesfool: a loaf of bread (staff of life)
i did it all for the robins ([personal profile] musesfool) wrote2025-09-21 06:15 pm

tips and overthrows - gotta have it

Yesterday evening, I made a lovely pan-seared steak for dinner, and today I roasted a chicken. It was more expensive, but I bought one that came already spatchcocked, which meant it cooked in about 40 minutes. I used this recipe and the white meat was quite juicy and good. It's annoying to have to flip the whole chicken in the frying pan though, so I don't know if I will do it this way again, especially since I don't really care about crispy skin since I don't eat the skin. [obligatory quote: "any demons with high cholesterol?... You're gonna think about that later, mister, and you're gonna laugh."]

I also did the first part of this chocolate chip cookie recipe and now they're in the fridge chilling. Tomorrow I will bake 2 off and then do the same thing for the next 3 days too, since it only makes 8 extremely large cookies and they are supposedly best when freshly baked. I will report back on how they taste!

Tomorrow, I plan to make a nice herb and cheese frittata for dinner and lunch for a couple of days too, and of course, there will be leftover roast chicken to eat too.

*
tozka: title character sitting with a friend (lady lovely locks & friends)
mx. tozka ([personal profile] tozka) wrote2025-09-21 02:32 pm

šŸ“ weeknotes (sept. 14-20, 2025)

Life Updates

Well, that was a longer gap than I meant to do! From my last update to now:

  • have left my Ann Arbor catsit
  • flown to California to visit parents and sat in a SoCal heatwave for a week
  • bought new suitcase, repacked items, swapped out clothes, etc.
  • flew to new catsit in undisclosed location (in the Western part of the US, anyway)
  • settled into new catsit for about a week, then
  • became vaguely ill for a week and
  • only now picked up laptop and felt energetic using it

I’ll do a more precise (friends-only) catsit update to introduce y’all to the new kitties, but overall I’m really enjoying this new location– though I miss the garden from Ann Arbor! I do have a balcony with a view of the river with an enormous amount of ducks here, though.

Read the rest of this entry » )

Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.

oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-21 07:46 pm
Entry tags:

Culinary

Last week's bread became really, really, dry, so I made a loaf of Shipton Mill Three Malts and Sunflower Organic Brown Flour: very nice.

Friday night supper: the ersatz Thai fried rice with red bell pepper, chorizo and salsiccon salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 strong white/rye flour, turned out very well.

Today's lunch: lemon sole fillets, which I cooked more or less as for the whole soles here - slightly shorter time and lower oven temperature, also sploshed a little wine in; served with La Ratte potatoes roasted in beef dripping, spinach according to recipe in Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery, and warm green bean and fennel salad (I included a little chopped red onion as there was one left over from last week as well as the fennel, and added additional tarragon to the dressing).

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-21 01:12 pm

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] italiceyeball!
delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)
Delphi (they/them) ([personal profile] delphi) wrote2025-09-20 06:36 pm

Be the First! Flash Round IV

[community profile] bethefirst is a challenge that invites participants to create the first fic for an otherwise fic-less fandom (terms and conditions may apply), and the results of an autumn flash round just went live!

Be the First! Flash Round IV Collection

It features a whopping 30 fics based on a wide range of media, with a great spread of categories and ratings. You can also find creators'
fandom promos for introductions to some of the canons.

I'm still making my way through the collection, but everything I've read so far has been fantastic, and I'm compiling a list of new-to-me canons to check out. I definitely recommend manually browsing, if you're interested, since not all of the fandoms have been canonized as AO3 tags yet.
musesfool: head!Six (and they have a plan)
i did it all for the robins ([personal profile] musesfool) wrote2025-09-20 06:36 pm

and that might have impact in the ninth

If you are interested in checking out Dungeon Crawler Carl but don't want to buy the first book (or the wait list at your library is very long), there's a webtoon version you can check out for free to see if it's up your alley. It's making me want to start a reread of the series even though I just read it last month. *hands*

*
oursin: Fotherington-Tomas from the Molesworth books saying Hello clouds hello aky (Hello clouds hello sky)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-20 05:14 pm

Touching grass

I was intending posting a link to a really depressing article in Guardian Saturday about an awful trolling site and the people who seem to have nothing to do but troll on it: but it's not currently online, you are spared.

I was thinking about such people, who seemed to be spending hours of their lives being horrible about other people and trying to dig up dirt on them, did they not have lives? could they not be doing something else?

Like, you know, bringing ghost ponds back to life: An expert team are resurrecting ice age ponds and finding rare species returning from a ā€˜perfect time capsule’:

The two ponds returning on farmland are the 25th and 26th ice age ponds to be restored by Sayer’s team of academics, volunteers and an enthusiastic digger driver in the Brecks, a hotspot for ancient ponds and ā€œpingosā€ formed by ice-melt 10,000 years ago. Over the past two centuries, thousands of such ponds have been filled in as land was drained and ā€œimprovedā€ for crops. So far, most of the 26 ponds have been revived on land bought by Norfolk Wildlife Trust, which has supported the restoration effort with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Brecks Fen Edge and Rivers landscape partnership scheme.
But the latest two ponds have been dug out thanks to a Norfolk farmer, who is one of an increasing number of private landowners reviving ghost and ā€œzombieā€ ponds. New surveys by Sayer’s team have revealed that 22 of the ghost ponds restored since 2022 now support 136 species of wetland plant. This represents 70% of the wetland flora found in more than 400 ponds on Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Thompson Common, an internationally important nature reserve whose ponds have survived since the ice age.

Admittedly this is not quite the sort of thing that I am up for myself, but this other thing struck rather a chord:

The Hunt: Friction to feel. which is about the culture of searching for music before it was (theoretically) All Online:

The hunt is built upon friction. Friction is good. Friction is healthy. Friction develops adaptation. The hunt is also born of curiosity. The desire to seek and discover something you don’t know, and might never know. In the pursuit of knowledge and experience, you teach yourself about empathy, other perspectives, and mold a person who is resilient and grateful. We lost something along the way in pursuit of efficiency and this idea of saving time for productivity.

It certainly resonates with my own days of book-hunting, and these are not, in fact, past. Was having a discussion the other day in another venue about books (not even terribly Old Books) that we longed to see republished and available at prices less than £££/$$$.

And, of course, as I am occasionally moved to point out on The Soshul Meedjas, most archives are not digitised and online (and mutter mutter a significant % of the ones that are were digitised by proprietary bodies and paywalled), and finding them can still involve Expotitions.

selenak: (Max by Misbegotten)
selenak ([personal profile] selenak) wrote2025-09-20 02:21 pm
Entry tags:

Miss Austen (Miniseries)

Miss Austen: is a delightful four part miniseries. Now with the exception of the excellent Miss Austen Regrets, featuring Olivia Williams as an older Jane A., biographical media on Jane Austen has suffered from the usual flaw of biopics or bio series focusing on female authors, i.e. insisting on inflicting plots of their most popular work on their life. Miss Austen also avoids this, not least by the fact the titular Miss isn’t Jane, it’s her older sister Cassandra, played in middle age by a superb as usual Keeley Hawes and in flashbacks when young by SinnƘve Karlsen, who is so versatile that despite having seen her being very good as Clarice Orsini, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s wife in Medici and superb most recently as Bayta in Foundation’s third season, I didn’t recognise her until googling her. (In addition to great acting, I blame the regency outfit and hairstyle in the flashbcks. *g*) Jane Austen is played by Patsy Ferran who is also great, both when being mischievous and witty, passionate about writing and her sister, and depressed (for various reasons, not least the early lack of success). In fact, this miniseries has led me to the conclusion that Jane Austen is like Benjamin Franklin in that the best way to treat her is as a supporting character where she can shine and leave the audience asking for more, whereas when Ben or Jane get the main character treatment, the increased focus reduces their charisma and attraction.

(This is also why back in my Highlander days, I never wanted a Methos spin-off, despite being as fond of the character as any other fan. He is perhaps THE example of a character who needs to remain a recurring guest star in order to maintain what makes their charm and mystery.)

Attend the saga of sisters and a sister-in-law… ) The script manages to avoid the obvious quotes while coming up for Austenish sounding things the characters to say, and does great both with the social comedy of manners and the emotional drama. All in all really superb. Anyone either German like me or French: I watched it on ARTE, which also offers the undubbed, original version. Enjoy!
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-09-20 12:28 pm

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] sharpiefan!