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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Eight books new to me. Five fantasy, one horror, two science fiction, of which two are series and six may not be.

Books Received, November 22 — November 28



Poll #33890 Books Received, November 22 — November 28
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Kill All Wizards by Jedediah Berry (June 2026)
3 (75.0%)

The Franchise by Thomas Elrod (May 2026)
1 (25.0%)

Carry Me to My Grave by Christopher Golden (July 2026)
0 (0.0%)

Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer (June 2026)
2 (50.0%)

Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire (June 2026)
2 (50.0%)

Cursed Ever After by Andy C. Naranjo (June 2026)
1 (25.0%)

For Human Use by Sarah G. Pierce (February 2026)
0 (0.0%)

The War Beyond by Andrea Stewart (November 2025)
2 (50.0%)

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

Cats!
2 (50.0%)

The Day in Spikedluv (Friday, Nov 28)

Nov. 29th, 2025 08:53 am
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
I hit Price Chopper and the Bakery while I was downtown. Later I dropped a book off at the library.

I did two loads of laundry, hand-washed dishes, did some house cleaning (swept kitchen and dining room, further swiffered and mopped dining room, and also dusted some of the furniture in the dining room (still have two items to clear off and dust), went for a couple walks with Pip and the dogs, shoveled the sidewalk, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, placed a couple of online orders, including Chewy, scooped kitty litter, and showered.

We had leftover turkey and sides for supper. I love Thanksgiving leftovers. I read fanfic. Dr. Pol was my evening background tv.

Temps started out at 30.9(F) and reached 34.5. The forecast called for 1-3 inches of snow during the day and an additional ‘less than an inch’ overnight, but we ended up getting much more than that. Pip shoveled off the deck after we ate (and made sure there was a path to the basement for the garage cats, lol!), and then he blew out the short walking trail. So we all went for a walk in the dark, which is kind of nice when there’s snow on the ground.


Mom Update:

Mom sounded okay when I called her, more back here )

Just One Thing (29 November 2025)

Nov. 29th, 2025 01:37 pm
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[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Weekly Chat

Nov. 29th, 2025 01:56 pm
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[personal profile] dancing_serpent posting in [community profile] c_ent
The weekly chat posts are intended for just that, chatting among each other. What are you currently watching? Reading? What actor/idol are you currently following? What are you looking forward to? Are you busy writing, creating art? Or did you have no time at all for anything, and are bemoaning that fact?

Whatever it is, talk to us about it here. Tell us what you liked or didn't like, and if you want to talk about spoilery things, please hide them under either of these codes:
or

(no subject)

Nov. 29th, 2025 12:28 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] ethelmay!

(no subject)

Nov. 29th, 2025 11:43 am
beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
[personal profile] beccaelizabeth
I started trying to reread The Dresden Files and Harry's point of view is making me feel slimed.
I am up to page 60 and it has taken me a while, I keep finding out I've decided staring into space is more fun.
In the first few pages he tells on himself so hard. He thinks he's being cute and funny when he's actually telling us that he ignores a woman's No Don't because he enjoys treating them his way. Every woman is assumed to be doing things for the sole reason of manipulating him personally, like they don't have inside feelings, just toolkits. The extent to which he is mixing up violent and erotic imagery is kind of a genre thing but also ew.

Plus, he just walked into and out of a crime scene before forensics got there, described how the carpet squelched under his shoes, then just... left. No protection before he went in, logically a trail of blood footprints when he walked out. That's the kind of incompetence indistinguishable from malice.

Yet I have all these books up until Cold Days.

... how?


... I am unsure if I will be finishing this one.


Maybe I can keep reading to get some idea if the author knows he did that...

Courses - November 2025

Nov. 29th, 2025 10:28 am
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[personal profile] smallhobbit
FutureLearn

Discover Contemporary Chinese: A Taster Course (Chinese Plus)

Following on from the OpenLearn basic Chinese course, I thought I'd look at this one.  I had hoped it would be a good introduction, but it was well over my head, concentrating on the main courses which the taster was promoting, without providing any assistance.  Even if I'd had some basic Chinese I doubt this would have persuaded me to take a further, paid, course with them.


OpenLearn

Getting Started with German 2 and Getting Started with German 3
Continuing with my aim to at least understand something of German when we're there.  Some of the sections were interesting and helpful, others were not within my general interests, so probably irrelevant, since I'm unlikely to want to know the German for something I don't talk about in English.

Introduction to Planetary Protection
I found this very interesting, although why astronomy appeals to me I have no idea.  It covered all sorts of areas: avoiding bringing potential contamination back from other planets and similar bodies, together with not contaminating planets our spacecraft visit.  In addition there was the clear thought that what we learn from these planets etc should be knowledge available for all and not simply exploited by the powerful.

The Gut Microbiome: Balancing the Body
The importance of what we consume and how it's important to maintain a good balance in our gut microbiome.  Apart from the general biology (which begins to go over my head), there's the effect that other areas can have, including genetics and ageing.  I need to tweak my diet, I think.
[syndicated profile] talks_cl_cam_feed

Building and Understanding Human-scale Language Models

Abstract: Humans learn language from less than 100 million words. Today’s state-of-the-art language models are exposed to trillions of words. What do today’s human-scale language models learn—and what don’t they? How can we close this gap in data efficiency? In this talk, I will start by presenting insights from 3 years of the BabyLM Challenge. The purpose of BabyLM is to encourage researchers to train language models using only as much data as a human would need when first learning language, and to democratize access to language modeling research. Participants have submitted a wide variety of systems; the most highly performing systems tend to come from innovations to the architecture of training objective. Then, I will present recent work on the training dynamics of both human-scale and large-scale language models. I will present a method for understanding what concepts a model is learning at specific points in training. Using subject-verb agreement as a case study, I will show that simpler word-matching features are learned early in training, while more abstract grammatical number detectors—including more abstract cross-linguistic number features—are learned far later in training. I will conclude by discussing the future of BabyLM, and the future of interpretability as a tool for understanding—and improving—language model training.

Bio: Aaron Mueller is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) of Computer Science (Informatics) and, by courtesy, of Data Science at Boston University. His research centers on developing language modeling methods and evaluations inspired by causal and linguistic principles, and applying these to precisely control and improve the generalization of computational models of language. He completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been published in ML and NLP venues (such as ICML , ACL, and EMNLP ) and has won awards at TMLR and ACL . He is a recurring organizer of the BlackboxNLP and BabyLM workshops.

Add to your calendar or Include in your list

Just Create - Guitar Edition

Nov. 29th, 2025 01:40 am
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[personal profile] silvercat17 posting in [community profile] justcreate
 What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?
 
Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?
 
What do you just want to talk about?
 
What have you been watching or reading?
 
Chores and other not-fun things count!
 
Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky.

Open House

Nov. 29th, 2025 07:53 am
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[personal profile] poliphilo
 A bunch of creatives got together in 2008 to celebrate the opening of the Towner Gallery by forming an organisation called Eastbourne Artists. It's still going strong- and promotes (among other things) a twice yearly Open House event- with artists throwing open their houses, galleries, workshops etc to visitors. Earlier this year we discovered in informal conversation that a whole lot of us Quakers were practising arts and crafts on the sly and decided to join in and fill the Meeting House with our stuff and open it on the day. 

And the day has come. We were down at the Meeting House yesterday afternoon, making it look as much like an art gallery as we could- and today I- and several others- will be curating the result.

One thing we really want to show off is the wall hanging we commissioned from the women's art collective- Studio 11 +. We gave them the room to work in for free and they gave us the completed work- a sweet deal. I love it when there's mutual gifting and no money changes hands. The work- called Into the Light: The Quaker Way- was completed and installed a week or two back. 

IMG_8636.jpeg

I'm showing five of my watercolours. I'd like to have shown some of my AI work- if only because it's more recent- but I'd rather not get into the debate about whether it's art or not.....

Daily Happiness

Nov. 28th, 2025 09:32 pm
torachan: a cartoon bear eating a large sausage (magical talking bear prostitute)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I had a nice morning at Disneyland today, but I am definitely glad I have two more days off to rest up! Tomorrow I am not going anywhere further than the farmers market.

2. Chloe!

2025 Disneyland Trip #74 (11/28/25)

Nov. 28th, 2025 09:22 pm
torachan: a kitten looking out the window (chloe in window)
[personal profile] torachan
Despite having spent all day yesterday at Universal Studios, I was up bright and early this morning to go to Disneyland.

Read more... )

Buckwheat granola

Nov. 28th, 2025 09:01 pm
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[personal profile] sonia posting in [community profile] gluten_free
I bought a bag of Bob's Red Mill buckwheat groats on impulse, and they've been sitting in the cabinet for a while. Today I looked at the back, and found this Buckwheat Granola recipe. I had enough ingredients on hand (without the nuts and seeds), and gave it a try.

Ingredients:
2 cups Gluten Free Old Fashioned Rolled Oats or Gluten Free Organic Rolled Oats
1 cup Buckwheat Groats
1 cup Sliced Almonds
1/4 cup Shelled Sunflower Seeds
1/4 cup Organic Pumpkin Seeds
2 Tbsp White Hulled Sesame Seeds
1/2 cup Coconut Flakes
1/2 cup Honey
1/2 cup Maple Syrup
1/4 cup Coconut Oil
1/2 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1/2 tsp Sea Salt
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1/4 tsp Almond Extract
1 cup Dried Cranberries

recipe )

Notes:
- I had the buckwheat, quick oats, shredded coconut, dried cranberries, and sweeteners. Turned out fine.
- I didn't have almond extract, but accidentally put in an extra slosh of vanilla extract. No problem.
- It is very very sweet, like making candy. For the future, I found this recipe from Katie Morford where the proportions look a little more like what I would want.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
But this time, I managed to wake her up without help. Go me.
shadowkat: (Default)
[personal profile] shadowkat
Somewhat accomplished? I managed to get laundry done, switched out my torn padded bed pad, for the new less padded but not torn one. The torn had to be thrown out - it's not salvageable, unfortunately. I loved it - but can't find a similar one. Took out the recyclables. Washed the linens - it was mainly just the linens. Only two loads. So not that expensive.

Played more Mahjong. I lied when I said I don't like games? I do, but it depends on the game, and who I'm playing with. I can play that one for hours. Except it lies when it says it doesn't have ads - it does. Worse, to get out of the ad, I often have to offload and reload the game.

I also managed to schedule my flu shot for tomorrow. (I don't get the side-effects outside of a sore arm - I think I have a VERY strong immune system? But I'm doing it on Saturday morning, just in case.) Other goal is to clean out foyer closet and put up my Xmas lights in the window (if I can find them, I may need to get new ones), and the little Xmas tree with its lights, and take away the Thanksgiving decorations. Sent off Xmas list to family members, waiting on theirs.

Apparently sisterinlaw and niece's Thanksgivings included a Nantucket Pie. It's basically a fruit upside down cake with cranberries. I don't like cake and I like it even less now that I require substitutions, so I'm glad I had my pecan and pumpkin choices.

Watching Dancing with the Stars - which has some excellent dancing this season. Read more... )

Dinner was left-overs. Breakfast was fried eggs over spinach leaves, lemon, and grits. I combined Breakfast and Lunch.

Angel S1 Re-Watch - Episode 2 - Are You Now or Have You Ever Been

I remember being less than thrilled with this episode the first two times I saw it. But now, I see a lot of interesting things in it that I'd not seen before. Weirdly, I find I appreciate it more without the echo of others in the background or my desire to compare it against Buffy. The two shows are very different series, with different goals and aims. Distance helps, I think?

cut for length )

Question a Day Mememage - November

Catching up on the Mememage - I'm dreadfully behind.

24. Do you have throw pillows/cushions around the house?

Yes. Although apartment.

25. Is lunch a snack, a light meal, or your main meal of the day?

Snack or light meal - I'm not a lunch person. I even skip it sometimes on weekends.

26. On National Cake Day – what is your favourite cake?

Flourless Chocolate Cake - which is technically the only cake I have any longer.

Or

Angel food, but I haven't found much in the Gluten Free versions. It's hard to find. I like it because it is light, and can serve it without icing. Also butter mochi cake, which is kind of similar.

27. Have you ever slept in socks at night?

Yes, and I always end up kicking them off in the middle of the night. So I don't.

28. November is part of World Vegan Month – have you tried any vegan food this month?

Yes. My chocolate chip cookies that I get from Insominac Cookies are vegan.