A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A robot muses contentedly on the events that led it to its rapidly approaching doom.

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

Health update

Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:49 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

Went yesterday for my annual physical and vaccinations. I’m pleased to report that I’m in better health than I was this time last year! I got my flu and COVID vaccinations, and after drowsing off and on all afternoon and evening yesterday, I'm feeling human again. Most of my labs are within normal limits, and the ones that aren't are much closer to normal that they had been. The only issue that needs any sort of intervention is I got a referral to podiatry for hammertoes. (Sing it with me: "Think it's time to Stop! Hammertoes!")

I hope you're all doing well, and if you have the means to follow up on your healthcare, I hope you're doing it.

Fabulously Tired

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:28 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
Day one of my two days of Loop meetings is over and I am fabulously tired. This is because I not only had to get up annoyingly early to catch a train, but I slept badly for a variety of reasons.

But the meetings went well, so that makes it worthwhile.

I will keep telling myself that when I have to get up early again tomorrow.

Thursday, I am going to sleep.

And then Friday I am going to get up early so we can get to OVFF on time.

Whee!

sign of the season

Oct. 21st, 2025 11:26 am
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
[personal profile] twistedchick
I was going absolutely insane, trying to figure out which of my 50-odd tabs was playing holiday music. Nothing showed up on the tab list. Finally I hit command-option-escape, to list what was open, and discovered that the very nice holiday advent calendar a friend sent me had decided to serenade me. I shut it down; sanity restored.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:55 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The story that began the grand tradition of picking on a teenager's work.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

General Chaos

Oct. 20th, 2025 09:35 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
Sam and Bonnie came by for lunch today and to meet the new puppy. Then we went out to grab lunch and get them a spare house key that they can use while helping Julie out over the weekend during OVFF. I got new keys cut and gave one to Sam. When I got home, I looked to my left and found the missing spare key. Oh, well. More keys are still a good idea.

Gretchen urgently needs to renew her driver's license, but when she went online to try to grab an appointment at 6:30 AM, the system crashed out from under her. This may or may not have had something to do with the AWS outage today. I am getting up early tomorrow and will try to make the appointment for her, because I would like her to have her driver's license for OVFF.

And I have to get up early anyway, because I am off for two days of client meetings in the Loop. This will be my first time doing this since before COVID, so I am reacquainting myself with the current versions of the train schedule and paying for parking.

And then I will walk from Ogilvie Station to a building that I've never been to before.

This is perhaps a bit more chaos than I needed leading up to OVFF. :)

It had to be done. . .

Oct. 20th, 2025 09:13 pm
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[personal profile] brithistorian

A., L., and I are rewatching Brooklyn Nine-Nine. As we were sitting down to watch tonight, L. asked "Do you think there's Brooklyn Nine-Nine fanfic on AO3?" As A. and I assured her that there certainly was, I picked up my phone so I could tell her how many there were. As it turned out, there were 6,999 of them. So of course after we finished watching, I wrote a drabble to bring the totally up to an even 7,000. If you're interested, go check out "Dance the Night Away", in which one Sergeant Terrence Jeffords attends a TWICE concert!

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

Oct. 20th, 2025 02:04 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A bundle for Daniel James Hanley's tabletop roleplaying game of Gothic and Romantic Horror in the decadent, disastrous age of Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon, and Lord Byron.

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

In case you've not heard about yesterday's theft of some of the French Crown Jewels from the Louvre yesterday, CNN has a good article about it. There is one paragraph from the article that I have issues with:

Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International, said that if the thieves are just looking to get cash out as quickly as possible, they might melt down the precious metals or recut the stones with no regard for the piece’s integrity.

I suppose it's technically true that they might do this; I just don't think it's at all likely. I don't think the thieves will be looking to cash out quickly because, given the degree of planning that apparently went into this operation, I think the items were sold before they were even stolen. I think it likely that their new owner, who probably lives in Russia or the Middle East, has already taken possession of them. (And if I were one of the thieves, I'd be extremely worried that said owner might decide that their generous payment for the items wasn't sufficient to ensure my ongoing silence.)

QOTD: On exihibitions

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:33 am
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[personal profile] brithistorian

“Exhibitions, like dreams, are temporary phenomena — but, also like dreams, they leave indelible traces in our experiences. Through a dialectical short circuit, exhibitions draw from the material culture of the past, are situated in the present, and anticipate futures.” (Adam Szymczyk, in “Passages: Koyo Kouoh, 1967-2025,” Artforum, Sept. 2025)

This was something I really enjoyed learning about in my museum studies classes. An exhibition tells a story. Sometimes it's a simple story, like people "People like Monet and our museum needs money." (Although hopefully even an exhibition like that can still tell a deep story.) Sometimes its a more complicated story, like "Here are some interesting and/or controversial things that contemporary artists are doing. You may find some of them shocking, but you should see them anyway.". And sometimes, an exhibition tells a story that can totally change the way people things about something, such that the exhibition lives on in peoples minds long after the wall tags have been taken down and the objects have been returned to storage.

For example, I would be very surprised to find someone who'd studied art history or museum studies in the US who had never heard of the 1992 Maryland Historical Society exhibition "Mining the Museum". This exhibition was mentioned in several of my classes, to the point that as soon as we heard "1992" and "Maryland" together, we'd start nodding, knowing what was coming next. In this exhibition, conceptual artist Fred Wilson combined items from the museum's collection that would typically be found in an art exhibition with items that are tied to the state's slave-owning past and would usually be hidden when discussing the art of the era. One photograph from the exhibition has become a shorthand for the whole thing. It's of a case labeled simply "Metalwork, 1793-1880," which contains a number of elaborate silver cups and pitchers as well as a pair of iron slave shackles.

The story that the exhibit designer is trying to tell is generally summarized in the large wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, which I've observed many people to skip over in their rush to get to the "good stuff" (i.e. the objects). If you're someone who skips over the wall text at the beginning of an exhibition, I'd like to urge you to do not do that — the experience of viewing the items will be even richer if you have this story in your mind as you view them. And if you're someone who already reads the wall text (thank you!), try keeping that story further to the front of your mind as you view the exhibition. You'll come to see that not only do the individual items have meaning, but the order in which you encounter them as you move through the exhibition and they ways in which they're juxtaposed spatially will also contribute to telling the story.

Clarke Award Finalists 2019

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:54 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2019: The Tories somehow find someone worse than May to be Prime Minister, UK pleas to the EU for a Brexit negotiation do-over on the grounds “our negotiators were fucking numpties” fall on deaf ears, and Tory MPs reject multiple Tory Brexit proposals, for which UK voters rebuke the incompetent Tories with a massive majority.

Poll #33744 Clarke Award Finalists 2019
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32


Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Rosewater by Tade Thompson
7 (21.9%)

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
2 (6.2%)

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
24 (75.0%)

Semiosis by Sue Burke
10 (31.2%)

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
4 (12.5%)

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
1 (3.1%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
Semiosis by Sue Burke

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

Hazardous Pudding

Oct. 19th, 2025 10:21 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
One of the problems with K going to college is that I keep forgetting that there is no one at home who is dedicated to consuming leftover Texas Roadhouse rolls that I bring home from lunch. Now, I *have* discovered that they make an excellent vehicle for peanut butter and strawberry jam sliders, but there is only a limited number of those that fit into my diet.

Saturday, I discovered that I had managed to accumulate *nine* rolls of recent vintage. The only thing to do was to make bread pudding.

I turned up a useful recipe for cinnamon raisin bread pudding that started with stale cinnamon raisin bread. These stale rolls would make a nice substitute with sufficient cinnamon and raisins in the mix, both things that we had available. So I whomped up the recipe which (given the number of rolls involved) required four cups of milk and eight eggs among other ingredients.

The bread pudding is quite good. There is, however, *way* too much of it.

I did not bring my leftover rolls home from Texas Roadhouse today.

AKICIDW: Guitar repair

Oct. 19th, 2025 05:39 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

OK, I need help from my guitar-playing friends - hopefully one of you will have the answer for this.

Lots of detail here, because I don't know what's relevant and what's not: About 10-12 years ago, I bought one of those Walmart super-cheap guitar and amp combos, then I never got around to learning to play it, devoting my time to learning ukulele instead. Today I remembered I still had that guitar down in the basement, and I realized that if I took off the 1st and 6th strings, then tuned the middle strings to G-C-E-A (from low to high), I would have converted this guitar into an electric ukulele. So I tried it. While I was at it, I moved the peg for the guitar strap to the other side so I could play it left-handed. I also ground 2 extra slots in the nut, so that the strings stayed the same distance apart for the entire length of the neck (like I'm used to on the ukulele). I put on the strings and tuned them with a digital tuner that I know to be accurate. The open strings were all tuned correctly, but any chord I fingered sounded wrong. So I fingered an F chord and played each note, looking at the tuner. On a ukulele, this has 3 open notes: G, C, and A, and 1 fretted note, F (1st fret on the E string). The G, C, and A were right, the F was sharp. Thinking that my changing the path of the strings might have changed their length relative to the placement of the frets enough that it might be throwing the fretted notes off, I tried putting one of the strings through the original slots so that it was the proper length. The open string was fine, but each fretted note was sharp. Oddly, each fretted was sharp by a different amount.

At this point, I've put it aside in hopes that one of you sees what's going on here. I see three possibilities:

  1. There's something wrong in how I'm pressing on the strings, and if I learn the right way, everything will be right.

  2. There's something wrong with the guitar that can be adjusted to make the notes come out right.

  3. There's something wrong with the guitar that's just a side effect of "cheap guitar" and it's really not fixable. (Or at least, not fixable without massive amounts of time and effort.)

Ideas?

Dear Yuletide Writer!

Oct. 19th, 2025 11:56 am
twistedchick: Yuletide polar bears, by me (Yuletide bears)
[personal profile] twistedchick
I am so happy you're willing to write a story for me!

Here are a few notes on the universes, and DNWs: behind cut )

Thank you so much, and I hope you have a very happy Yuletide yourself.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Mars being unfit for humans, there is no alternative but to make humans--or at least a human--fit for Mars.

Man Plus (Man Plus, volume 1) by Frederik Pohl

One Step at a Time

Oct. 18th, 2025 09:34 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I'm prepping things to get ready for OVFF. I don't expect any major problems, but it's good to keep knocking off tasks, especially because work wants me down in the Loop next Tuesday and Wednesday.

One of the things that I did was to buy a new watch. My Seiko Kinetic was over 20 years old and the battery died months ago. I have missed having a watch. You'd think it would be easy enough to get that battery replaced, but it's a unique design for that watch and the entire watch has to be disassembled to get at it, because it was originally a capacitor that went many years between failures. Then Seiko "improved it" by switching to a lithium rechargeable battery. But since you don't know how long the battery has been sitting on the shelf, you don't know how long it's going to last. The second-to-last replacement lasted a year, which is ludicrous. The current replacement lasted maybe three years. And Seiko has abandoned the whole line.

So I have a new watch now. It is a Citizen Eco-Drive that looks very much like my old watch. The only problem is that I need to get a link put in the band to make it just a bit looser. The nearest watch shop that can do this repair is closed on Monday.

Did I mention that Tuesday and Wednesday I am supposed to be in the Loop?

But it's nice having a watch again. :)

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