jack

( tada )

I got to see my Canadian friend Bill today! I haven't seen him in like 15 years. I hadn't even heard from him in a while (which would be fair enough, he was Andrew's friend before he was mine, but then he started emailing me again! and now he's here!).

We went around town, eating and drinking and talking, and ended up eating McTucky's in Sackville Gardens, looking over the canal at the lights of the Village as the sky went dark, and some guy all on his own walked down the street shouting "fuuuuck yooooour muuuuum!" at the top of his voice. Repeatedly.

D and I agreed it was a particularly Mancunian experience to offer our visiting friend.

andrewducker

Nice night sky tonight
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

rachelmanija

One day everyone in the world woke up with these words in front of their eyes, somehow inscribed in their inner eye: YOU ARE LIVING IN A SIMULATION. Simultaneously, a number of impossible things appeared on Earth, apparently to prove it: a frozen tornado, windows between continents, etc.

It's now seven years later. Those words still appear before everyone's eyes periodically. And tours have sprung up to take people to see the Impossibles, or at least as many as can be seen on a seven-day bus trip.

This extremely high-concept premise resembles that of The Measure in some ways: a world-spanning event, clearly real and equally clearly done by a more-than-human power, with immense existential implications, and with no one having any idea why it happened or why it happened now. But this is Daryl Gregory and he's very good with bizarre high-concept premises, and this book is excellent.

The other genre of When We Were Real is "set of random people thrown together" story. A number of the characters are, at least on the surface, straight out of a 1930s train story or a 1970s airplane story: two nuns, a rabbi, a pregnant woman, an elderly woman in a wheelchair and her devoted daughter, a set of elderly tourists, a person who's secretly dying, a person with a secret identity, a fugitive from the law. The only stock character it's missing is the cute child.

The many characters are very human and likable, with even the most frustrating of them having reasons for being the way they are; the annoying pregnant influencer's reason for being an annoying influencer turns out to be both sympathetic and heartbreaking. (Yes, it's partly to provide for her upcoming baby, but the real question is "Why an influencer rather than some other job?")

( Read more... )

The Impossibles themselves are excellent. My favorite was the time tunnel, where you can stay an infinite amount of subjective time (you get a home pulled out of your own history or desires, plus fresh-baked bread every morning) and emerge several hundred miles away, only a second having passed outside. But the flock of non-real sheep was pretty great too.

There's serious themes - existentialism, mortality, meaning, God, ethics, love - but delivered with a light touch. It's more plotty than I expected, given the quest/picaresque structure, and the story is very satisfying. You don't get answers to all the questions, but you do get a general outline as to what's going on and why. It's a very human and humane novel, of the moment but in a good way.

Content notes: Cancer. Plans for suicide due to terminal illness. Pregnancy and birthing issues. Violence.

kaberett

Reading. I am up to AUGUST 2025 in my She's A Beast back-catalogue catch-up. Will I be able to read Anything Else At All Soon? Maybe?

Among several library holds that have now turned up (... ulp) I have technically started Run Towards the Danger (Sarah Polley), another memoir about embodiment, which I... suspect was recced via SAB one way or another. By "technically" I mean "I am a couple of pages into the preface, and trying to decide whether the formatting fuckery is worth sticking through".

Writing. So. many. e-mails. about. objects. and I have barely even Started the damn Object E-mails good grief.

Progress on Book also continues (look at me not using qualifiers!). Currently I am slightly going in circles about (1) how much background I need to give on why I think "biopsychosocial" can be a useful frame at least to the extent of providing structure for the first big chunk of the book, (2) what you've got to be very careful you're doing if you want that to be the case, and (3) whether I need to engage in depth with the goddamn philosophy of it all in re e.g. "it's not a model if it doesn't have predictive power" (which I am extremely inclined to sidestep by just......... calling it a frame).

Playing. ... we have tripped and fallen and are playing Librarian: Tidy up the arcane library. Initially we were co-playing with A doing most of the driving and me going LOOK THERE'S A PATTERN-- but then it became apparent that my ideal mode of gameplay (keyboard rather than controller, Manually Shelve Each Book Individually) is not compatible with A's (controller rather than keyboard, Use All The Magic). So I got a second copy. And have been playing through it merrily and slowly. To my amusement it turns out that my specific bullshit here............ gets you the rarest of the Steam achievements. (I am about 2/3 of the way through shelving, and things are speeding up substantially in more or less the same way as they do with jigsaw puzzles. This has eaten my brain and I really really need to do Other Things that are Not This but gosh it gets quiet in here when Allow The Brain To Just Focus. Will I do any further rounds of it? Unclear.)

Cooking. Continue to appreciate braised chickpeas in all their forms (still v keen on Adding A Tin Of Artichokes to the party).

Eating. Had my second hundoburger, which I had deferred until after E1, for the purposes of having an additional day where I didn't need to think about food. Also: STRAWBERRIES; bakery brunch (feat. both the bread pudding and the cardamom bun); ... almost certainly other things but the brain it says no.

Exploring. Bakery brunch featured a detour to visit a red horse chestnut I'd spotted from the bus on my way back from yesterday's hospital appointment, and also pointing out to A the pink bits on some of the flowers on the standard horse chestnuts on the way there.

Technically Finchley Memorial hospital, but mostly I got on a bus I was familiar with and played sudoku to keep myself vaguely calm, and then I managed to NOT panic and get onto a bus going in entirely the wrong direction by dint of it pulling out of the stop sufficiently far ahead of me there was no way I was gonna catch up with it, and then got the unfamiliar bus in the correct direction and... spent significantly more of that panicking quietly. There was definitely A Point at which, it having become apparent that the bus was On Diversion and Not Following Its Usual Route and None Of The Normal Stops Were Happening, I equally quietly Gave Up and decided this was simply going to be yet another hospital service I got discharged from for being disabled, BUT in fact that service TERMINATED at the hospital (and was the only one serving it!!!) so it did get there in the end. I would still prefer to not do that journey again please and thank you, even though I did per the above spot a convenient local red horse chestnut on the return leg, and for that matter several dramatic wisteria hidden from road level but NOT from upper-deck-of-bus level.

Growing. A took me to the allotment this afternoon! The josta is setting quite a lot of fruit and the cherry is even managing some despite my utter failure to water them! I put some marigold seeds in the ground in between rows of broad beans though this is clearly futile because the red ants are already Very Definitely farming on them; the oca in the bottom half of that bed are starting to come up despite the utter lack of watering, as above; none of the seedlings at home died while we were away; ... I did some weeding?

Observing. BABY BIRDS incl. cootlets going WHEEK WHEEK WHEEK all the way up and down the river; the Egyptian goslings are now at the stage of mostly having vaguely competent adult plumage coming in but still managing to turn into balls of ungainly fluff when they sit down; a second batch of coot eggs is being Definitively Incubated. We did not see the duckle again but we did see a very small starling. It was a very pleasant brunch down by the aqueduct.

andrewducker

1. How insider trading from the White House is working: (tags:USA republicans fraud )

silveradept

The 2025 Most Banned and Challenged List for the American Library Association is out, and the most telling statistic in the report is not what books are there, or what justifications their censors gave for the censorship, but that fully 92% of challenges recorded by ALA originated in pressure and political groups, lawmakers, and administrators. Less than 3 percent of challenges were issued by individual parents. What brings all these boys to the yard? Well, think about it: Capitalists want to enclose the commons and turn it private, so they can control it and force it to their will, and the United States Public Library is a commons.

Billionaires and the wealthy who want to say that their superintelligent AIs will eventually go rogue are also trying to genetically engineer humans to be smarter than those superintelligent AIs, and just about everywhere you look that they've put their money into, it isn't into things like trying to make healthier people, it's trying to make the children of the wealthy into having all the genetic advances and traits, and the rest of us will just be left behind by their super-genius statuses.

Given that these are people who like to post manifestos about they are already the superior people in the superior culture and we all have to bow down to them and let them do whatever they want, I think this is definitely one of those situations where trust is less than the distance someone could throw.

The public bench seems humble and ubiquitous, and yet it is neither, with a long history and significant amounts of contention involved about public seating and which members of the public are allowed to be seated. When benches aren't being removed, they're often having their architecture turned hostile to try and prevent people from sitting for long or for using a bench as a place to catch a nap or to sleep off the ground for a night. Because the cause of the problem is placed in the bodies of the people who might not have a house to go home to, or whose life activities are related to crime and vice because they have no other opportunities to make a living. Those doing the placing, of course, do not believe they are doing anything wrong, or worse, callously believe that they are not obligated in any way to any other person but themselves, and therefore, they are allowed to dictate who they want to see and what they want to be reminded of in their public spaces.

The goal of liberalism is to make all bodies invisible in the eyes of the law, but the way that people are liberated from oppression and bindings often imposed by law is through mutuality. Law has a role to play in this situation, and often that role is in highlighting and making highly visible the bodies that it considers to be illiberal. Law can lay foundations for others to implement toward mutuality, but as we have seen, and as the article-writer points out, law cannot require anything by itself, and those who have been chosen to interpret and enforce law are often the ones deciding for or against mutuality.

( More of men behaving badly, and the repercussions of having let men behave badly in the past )

Last out for tonight, a reminder to put accessibility into your social media as much as possible, so please provide transcripts, describe your images, and the like, so that everyone who's on your social media or enjoying the content can access it..

And A project that is offering clinicians and others guides on thinking of seemingly disparate conditions in people as constellations because of the likelihood of their co-occurrence with autism or ADHD. And to think of them as constellations because trying to treat one of them well might exacerbate another.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

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.)

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: MEUTE - What Else Is There?

kaberett

Today I have:

successfully navigated some unfamiliar-to-me public transport with only the normal amount of panic
MADE IT TO THE GYM post-unfamiliar-public-transport (having been Indisposed this morning, when I had planned to--)
- achievement unlocked: asked to borrow a pair of dumbbells from a much-stronger-than-me human For One Set while they were resting (because warm-up); they were a delight
- achievement unlocked: politely asked the human in the next rack if I could have the yellow plates they... seemed highly unlikely to use
... tripped and fell into Computer Game instead of doing most of the afternoon/early evening things I had grand plans about...
and we UNFUCKED THE KITCHEN SOME, good job us.

(Everything is still very much a post-event disaster, but. Made food ate food made a stand against the forces of entropy. It Is Well.)

andrewducker

Sophia's 8th birthday party went very well. 12 kids, well behaved, lots of climbing, no deaths.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

cosmolinguist

Every time I step outside I am struck by how good the air smells this time of year. It smells sweet and green and makes me appreciate topsoil. I live in a city but I still am surrounded by growing things.

rachelmanija

This picks up when Danny's been Dreadnought for a while, and is getting a bit too into the violent aspects of the job. This aspect is quite well done - you understand what's going on with her, but it actually is a bit unsettling. Also, Valkyrja reappears, sort of; an evil techbro wreaks havoc; a TERF is threatening the world; and Danny works on her relationships.

I liked this more than the first book. Danny developed as a character and spent a lot less time being abused by transphobes. I'll grab the third book when it comes out.

The sequel isn't as good as the first book, unfortunately. I'd have been happy with more of Zax, Minna, and Vicky exploring the multiverse, but this book is much more plot-driven and Minna and Vicky only show up three-quarters of the way through. Half or more of the book is narrated by a new character whose identity I'll leave out as it's spoilery for the first book. She was fine as a character but her storyline was less interesting. Zax gets a new companion, and I did quite enjoy his adventures with her. I also enjoyed Minna and Vicky when they finally appeared.

But the plot-driven parts were less interesting, and the structure was really odd and not in a way that benefited the book. Instead of picking up where the first book left off, we get a retrospective summary of what happened some time after that point, then we get the entire backstory of the non-Zax narrator bringing her up to the point where she meets Zax in the first book, then it jumps forward and we get what's happening to her now, then we catch up with what Zax is doing now, and then, about three quarters of the way in, we finally get the story of what happened immediately after the first book left off. I think it would have worked better to tell the story more linearly. And also, to have much more Minna.

It's not a bad book and it does have some really good parts, but there are some baffling choices made.

wildeabandon

In today's Coptic homework I've been translating from the Constantine of Assyut's (almost certainly pseudonymous) second Encomium for Athanasius, and came across this absolute gem.

ⲡⲥⲛⲥⲓⲱⲧ ⲙⲉⲛ ⲁⲑⲁⲛⲁⲥⲓⲟⲥ ⲁϥϯ ⲛⲧⲇⲓⲕⲁⲓⲟⲥⲩⲛⲏ ϩⲓⲱⲱϥ ϩⲛ ⲟⲩϩⲃⲥⲱ ⲙⲙⲛⲧⲟⲩⲏⲏⲃ. ⲛⲉⲕⲗⲏⲣⲓⲕⲟⲥ ϩⲱⲟⲩ ⲙⲡⲉⲓⲕⲁⲓⲣⲟⲥ ϯϯ ⲥⲟ ⲉϫⲟⲟⲥ ϫⲉ ⲁⲩϯ ⲛⲧⲙⲛⲧⲣⲉϥϯϩⲉ ϩⲓⲱⲟⲩ ϩⲛ ⲟⲩϩⲃⲥⲱ ⲉⲥⲗⲁⲁⲙ ⲏ ⲛⲑⲉ ⲛϩⲉⲛⲧⲟⲉⲓⲥ ⲛϣⲣⲱ.

"Indeed, the most holy Athanasius clothed himself in righteousness with a priestly garment. As for the clerics of this age themselves, I refrain from saying that they clothed themselves in drunkenness with a filthy garment, like menstrual rags."

And my dude, my dude, that is an abject failure on your part to refrain from saying what you clearly desperately wanted to say.

rmc28

I have slept so much this week. Both Wednesday and Thursday evening I had a miraculous lack of commitments, and both evenings I thought "I could get a bunch of things done now" and instead ... went to sleep. And re-read Ocean's Echo because I needed a comfort reread, apparently.

Anyway, I had Friday off work and Monday is a bank holiday, and I spent my day off going to Woking and back to buy new ice hockey skates from the place my friend works. She's only been telling me since last July I will benefit from new skates, and I have finally reached a point of "ok FINE I will SPEND MONEY then". (In April I bought a new chestpad and a new pair of shorts, both from Bauer's women's range, both on visits to Puckstop opposite iceSheffield when I was there for Nationals, both providing this weird feeling of stuff actually fitting as opposed to simply covering the relevant body areas.) I had a lovely time picking out new skates with friend L: they are very pretty and fit amazingly, but also I am having to relearn how to skate in them and it feels very odd.

Today and Sunday I have the last two Kodiaks 2 "home" games of the season in Peterborough (we have one last game next weekend, away at Coventry). I'm going to keep using my old skates for these games because I'm not solid enough in the new ones yet. On Monday evening I have CUIHC full club formal hall, and a pretty green velvet dress to wear to it, thanks to a charity shop run at the end of January.

conuly

After this week. Because after this week, we should have paid off the gas and electric bills, yay!

But yeah, one or two weeks of crunch is one thing, a string of them is something very different.

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

( Read more... )

kaberett

Today has been. the first time in A While that I have spent mostly horizontal and mostly asleep on account of migraine, despite drugs. I am Not A Fan.

( Read more... )

rachelmanija

A modern take on La Ronde: a novel in the form of twelve short stories linked by airplane trips. Each has a main character who meets the main character of the next story. A pilot has a brief fling with a journalist in Brazil; the journalist flies to Toronto to interview a writer; the writer flies to Seattle where she meets two of her fans; one of the fans flies to Hong Kong, and so forth.

The blurb says each meeting causes a ripple effect as they change each other's lives, but that's not actually what happens in many of them. Some are minor chance encounters, some are present at a crucial moment in someone else's life but don't directly affect it, and some are important encounters but those are the ones where the people have pre-existing relationships. Most of the characters are disconnected, discontented, and lonely, despite the literal connections they have in a six degrees of separation way; the only character who seems happy and is focused on the people they love is about to get hit with a terrible tragedy that's someone else's traffic delay.

As we go from person to person, we get to see the characters from different angles, and understand things about them that others don't. The pilot, who in his story was wondering what would have happened if his younger sister hadn't died in a childhood accent, asks his one night stand how old she is. She says 33, which is the age his sister would have been. But she has no idea of any of this, and when he doesn't reply she thinks he's fallen asleep.

There's an impressively diverse set of locales and characters, sketched-in but real-feeling; I knew we were in Delhi before it was stated just from the description of the air. The emotional tenor is a bit distanced and chilly. Overall it reminded me of Raymond Carver, but with less striking prose.

Szalay won last year's Booker Prize for Flesh, a novel which sounds really unappealing.

pauamma posting in

dw_dev

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

pauamma posting in

dw_volunteers

I'm listening to thunder rumbling in the distance. (And I missed a month. No connection.)

How's everyone doing?

seekingferret

I know I said I wasn't going to blog Menachos but holy shit Chonyo/Onias IV!!

Who was the son of High Priest Shimon HaTzadik and got into a succession fight with his brother that led to him fleeing to Alexandria and establishing a rival Beis Hamikdash there roughly halfway through the Second Temple period. The Rabbis of the Mishnah on Menachos Daf 109, some 300 years later, seem flummoxed by this, they can't seem to figure out if this was avodah zarah or not.

But what really flummoxed me is apparently "Beis Chonyo" stood, per Wikipedia, until ~73 CE when the Romans destroyed it, just a couple years after destroying the Beis Hamikdash. And I am so fascinated by the counterfactual of Yochanan Ben Zakkai instead of establishing Rabbinic Judaism in Yavneh, attempting to shift the focus of the avodah to the Bama of Beis Chonyo. Apparently Vespasian was worried enough about this possibility to preemptively raze Beis Chonyo, why don't we talk about this?

Reading

tada for the week

A good day off

Photo cross-post

When We Were Real, by Daryl Gregory

vital functions

Interesting Links for 03-05-2026

The horrors do keep coming, but we also keep meeting them - Late April 02025

pootling along

Photo cross-post

Hooray for spring

A Set of Sequels: Sovereign, by April Daniels & Prison of Sleep, by Tim Pratt

Throwing shade is not a modern invention...

Long weekend

Interesting Links for 02-05-2026

Never agreeing to do totally insane hours again

[migraine] ... mrgh

Turbulence, by David Szalay

Question thread #150

Volunteer social thread #163

Menachos Daf 109