Breakage by Mary Oliver

Sep. 17th, 2025 01:11 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
      full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

************


Link

We now have a washer again

Sep. 16th, 2025 06:22 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I am just brimming over with excitement.

*************************************


Read more... )

Alien: Earth 1.07

Sep. 18th, 2025 04:28 pm
selenak: (Agent Brand by Likeadeuce)
[personal profile] selenak
In which it's very useful to know the numbers of pi by heart. Or eye.

What have you done? )
silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
Let's begin here with celebrating fifty years of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and fifty years of what might be the most unique theatrical experience someone goes to when they go to see Rocky. (And the fact that while the thing on the screen stays the same when you go to see Rocky, everything else changes depending on where you are and what time it is.)

Organizations that fail to consider intersectionality in their diversity, equity, and inclusion will create things like employee resource groups that only capture a part of someone's experience and that elide the places where the intersectionality is unique and important. Which should make you unsurprised, but also horrified, that the Institute for Museum and Library Services budget is being given directly to propagandists for a project that will present a white man-centric view of history and demand that we all believe it as the sole and only truthful narrative of the United States.

James Dobson, creator of such abominations unto his God as Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance, has gone to receive judgment at 89 years of age. Our world is far better off without him, and the damage that he has done to the world would take generations to heal if he were the only one doing his kind of damage. But like so many others, he has disciples and followers, and they will continue to perpetuate his damage into the world for generations to come.

A man who believed that violence was an answer, and who aggressively sowed the wind wherever he went, has reaped the whirlwind, killed by the violence he promoted, by a gun that he believed should have more rights than the people killed by it. He is no longer able to use his organization to promote and encourage harm to others.

The fallout from such, and plenty of other things, inside )

Last out, Bohemian Rhapsody translated and performed in Zulu and with the visual and singing styles of several other African traditions. It's worth a watch and a listen, absolutely.

The concept of Queer Time, where the signifiers of "adulthood" like marriage, children, and houses are not achieved on any kind of regular time, if at all, and therefore queer adults have to find their own ways of demonstrating to the community that they are full grown-ass adults.

And the iconic Atari CX-10 joystick as a decanter for drinking, along with a couple of Atari-logo glasses.

(Materials via [personal profile] adrian_turtle, [personal profile] azurelunatic, [personal profile] boxofdelights, [personal profile] cmcmck, [personal profile] conuly, [personal profile] cosmolinguist, [personal profile] elf, [personal profile] finch, [personal profile] firecat, [personal profile] jadelennox, [personal profile] jenett, [personal profile] jjhunter, [personal profile] kaberett, [personal profile] lilysea, [personal profile] oursin, [personal profile] rydra_wong, [personal profile] snowynight, [personal profile] sonia, [personal profile] the_future_modernes, [personal profile] thewayne, [personal profile] umadoshi, [personal profile] vass, the [community profile] meta_warehouse community, [community profile] little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Good news/bad news

Sep. 17th, 2025 09:41 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Welp. Remember when you told me I shouldn't need to chair a work meeting while I'm on vacation?

The good news is, I'm not going to.

The bad news is, it's because I can't. The plan was that we'd be at our Airbnb by tonight and D and I would both work from there tomorrow while V started to recover from the journey.

And we're not at the Airbnb because our ferry to the island we're actually planning to visit, where V's son lives, was canceled. So last-minute that when we got to the port we saw vehicles driving off of it that had already boarded.

We couldn't stay anywhere in the small town where the ferry port is. It has hotels and B&Bs but not enough for an extra ferryload of people at short notice. Poor D had to drive forty minutes back the way we came just for us to get a room at all.

And our ferry crossing has been re-booked, for Saturday. No ferries until then. Allegedly; apparently this can change at short notice. But even if it does, it's hard to plan accommodation or anything else.

And in the meantime we're grateful just to have a roof over our heads (we're staying in the attic, so the slanted roof is only just over my head on this side of the room!). And we'll figure out what happens tomorrow.

But in the meantime, checkout is at 11, and so is this precious meeting. I already told my boss, when we didn't know where if anywhere we'd be tonight to explain, and he wrote back that he was sorry to hear this and to message him in the morning if he's needed to sit in. If! I'm not impressed that even I don't know where I'll sleep tonight and I won't have WiFi tomorrow lunchtime isn't enough to get him to understand that he has to chair this meeting.

Except for this massive snag and the possibility of V not being able to see their kid at all this year, which is a real "other than that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play," we've actually had a lovely day. We all were up and at 'em in good time to leave the nice place in Stirling where we broke the journey last night. We had time to visit the Highland Folk Museum on the way, which D picked up a brochure about when he was in a long queue to buy sandwiches for lunch at the café with the highland coo (Scottish for "cow") statue everyone gets their photo taken next to, including me now, and we were delighted at the serendipity. It was lovely to see an example of the blackhouses that I'd heard V talk about, and a loom shed for weaving the famous Harris tweed.

I am with my two humans and we are going to wait for more decision-making information and capacity after a night's sleep and maybe some updates from the much-cursed ferry operator.

andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Ooh, I thought, that's a really cool t-shirt! And the price is only £24, that's actually pretty reasonable!

Except no, it's £24 plus £6 tax plus £7 shipping *that takes up to 6 weeks*.

And this for an item that's print on demand. Which means, theoretically, they could print it in the UK in the first place and not have to presumably ship it to me by alpaca from Kazakhstan!

Shame, really, it's a nice t-shirt. But not £37 nice.

I have had the call

Sep. 17th, 2025 05:17 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Or rather the text message to book my covid & flu vaccinations. "For 75+ and immunosuppressed". I just double-checked and "have had a blood cancer" is still top of the NHS list of qualifying conditions, so that's my armour when the GP surgery gatekeepers are like, you're too young and you might be DEPRIVING someone of this vaccine who NEEDS it. (This has been the conversation the last three times I got invited to get vaccinated, sigh, and then they get a manager to look at my medical record, and then they grudgingly admit that maybe I can has jabs.)

Date is the Saturday when all the Cambridge undergraduates arrive, so just in time. I'll mostly be avoiding students for the first couple weeks of term to let the freshers flu play out, but I will be playing ice hockey so not entirely. Also getting in and out of the city centre that day may be entertaining, probably best done on foot.

andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
A week and a half ago I ordered a couple of K-Pop Demon Hunters hoodies for the kids from Amazon. I didn't realise quite how much of a trip they'd be making:

8th - Taken from warehouse in Shenzhen (China) and handed to massive chinese shipment company SF Express.
8th - Driven an hour up the road to Dongguan shipment centre.
11th - Transported (presumably by road) 1,100 km to Ezhou (SF Express hub airport, also China))
12th - Flown to Liège Airport (Belgium), stopping over in Almaty International Airport (Kazakhstan)
14th - Flew in to Heathrow
14th - Then arrived in Stansted for customs
15th - Then handed to Hermes in London
16th - Who got it to me in Edinburgh the next day

Total cost, including shipping: £24 (£12 per top).

I am both impressed and somewhat aghast.

tired. so tired.

Sep. 16th, 2025 10:24 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Have spent most of the day asleep.

  1. Attempt #2 at pineapple-from-trimmed-top has NEW LEAVES.
  2. I am also fairly sure that attempt #2 at lemongrass is taller than it was when we set off on our terrible adventures about ten days ago.
  3. Actual bed. Favourite mattress.
  4. I got to make someone's entire day by sending an "... I think I have your object" e-mail.
  5. Leftovers for dinner: curry from the crew party on Sunday night. Didn't have to think about food. Extremely grateful for this fact.

Photo cross-post

Sep. 16th, 2025 09:58 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


No, daddy, it's definitely not a "pointy duck"! Have you even read the sign?
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Raindrops keep falling on my head....

Sep. 16th, 2025 04:47 pm
selenak: (Ben by Idrilelendil)
[personal profile] selenak
RIP Robert Redford. A fantastic run of movies especially in the 70s as an actor, later as a director never made an uninteresting movie, founded a film festival of several decades running, and to the best of my knowledge never abused his fame and status and instead used both to help others.


Colonoscopy week.

Sep. 16th, 2025 01:10 am
azurelunatic: A metal sculpture of a walking duck with a duckling on its back, in front of the University Place Library (ducks in a row)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
I'm not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I wasn't thinking with some of the usual parts of my sense of humor when I was picking out my non-red jello for Liquid Diet Day (24 oz food service pack) and rolled the wrong citrus out of three: orange.

I could have had lemon jelly.
https://youtu.be/ioudby-xooc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Jelly

The state of our things

Sep. 15th, 2025 06:20 pm
mtbc: maze H (magenta-black)
[personal profile] mtbc
R. and I sometimes head into Edinburgh on the train for in-office work, sometimes on separate days, sometimes together. Today, R. went in, and I stayed home and helped out with pet care. I hope that I am becoming more productive as I grow more familiar with my employer's codebase. I also look forward to getting around to personal programming projects at home but not quite yet it seems, still I have to figure how and when to fit that in. A task this evening is to schedule our influenza vaccinations. COVID-19 vaccinations are becoming a distant memory, it's a pity our BUPA health insurance doesn't reimburse them.

Our expensive family visa journey continues. )

I read John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In which was gentle and engaging. Whether in science fiction or fantasy, I always enjoy insight into a fairly non-human character. Definitely a nice enough way to pass the time. (Though, R. noted that it is far more gory than I had noticed, somehow that all passed me by.) I might be running out of television to watch, though. There is a bit more Chief of War left but it is far more buttocks than smiles and R. noted arrant ahistoricity in the portrayal of Zamboanga (languages, buildings, clothing). We are giving The Mayfair Witches a try on Netflix, R. read the books long ago.

A local Tesco Express convenience store has opened quite near us so we have a very handy source of heavily discounted food that must be sold before it turns into a pumpkin, assuming it isn't already one. So, among other things, we found ourselves eating sandwiches recently. With luck, the store will soon correct their loud alarm siren that warns whenever somebody outside walked near the customer entrance.

To start the week with

Sep. 15th, 2025 11:59 am
selenak: (Music)
[personal profile] selenak
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finished its third season, and you may have deduced from the fact I didn't review the remaining episodes that for me, it did not take a turn for the better. The Ortegas episode was probably the most, in lack of a better term, Trekian, not to mention the long awaited one with a focus on Ortegas beyond "I fly the ship", but it shares with far too many ST: SNW episodes the way it is just incredibly derivative, of both other franchises and earlier ST. And the series finale chose to pick my least favourite DS9 plotline and scenario, sigh. To complete my turn to an old grouch, the feeling of this season as Star Trek: The Rom Com didn't help, either. Anyway. I'll always have Discovery and Prodigy in terms of new ST that manages to unite both affection for the past AND originality and the courage to try out new paths and characters.
*****

Given the daily horror show that is the news, it's all the more important to find joy in fannish things, so I was delighted to discover this new Sense 8 vid. Now there was a show celebrating joy and diversity:

Sense 8

Voice in my Throat

***

And on another joyful note: Yuletide nominations have started!

hello rabbitholes

Sep. 15th, 2025 08:00 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

The Kpop Demon Hunters situation has progressed past "watch a second time", through "listen to soundtrack on repeat" and is now at "find and listen to as many covers and remixes of my favourite tracks as I can".

azurelunatic: "Where's the goddamn NERF BAT when you *really* need it?" Animated cartoon tech support loses her cool.  (nerf bat)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Goodbye to bad rubbish BJ, who could make simple things like Madonna being active in the music industry longer than most people of our generation being aware of, plus she didn't look in her early 40s at the time, into some kind of sinister conspiracy theory situation.

You were an absolute jackass, and I honestly don't care if you're alive or not except that I might need to avoid you.

Thanks to Votania and Darkside, who helped me realize what a bad friend BJ was, never mind as a prospective life partner and spouse. Bleck.

This random thought brought to me by the death of Charles Entertainment Kirk, which would probably have been making BJ's circles flail in panic, and hearing a Madonna song on the Doof. (A back episode, we didn't have a SunDoof that I'm aware of.)