redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
([personal profile] redbird Oct. 21st, 2025 09:27 pm)
We had a roast chicken a few days ago, then [personal profile] adrian_turtle used some of the leftovers to make a salad with greens, pieces of chicken, and grapes. [personal profile] cattitude just turned the remaining leftover chicken into matzo ball soup.

There will be homemade chocolate cake later, because Adrian wanted to check whether the springform pan would hold cake batter. We eat well around here.
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([personal profile] hrj Oct. 21st, 2025 09:30 am)
One of my retirement to-do items is "learn to knit socks; knit socks." Now "learn to knit" might seem an odd part of that equation, given that I've been knitting since I was 10 years old. (I.e., for well over 50 years.) The thing is, I never learned to follow patterns. I'm like a musician who can learn tunes by listening, improvise music, and put on a great performance, but who never learned to read notation. I have, in fact, knitted a pair of socks before by sort of reverse-engineering how to make yarn look like that. But I figured it was time to actually learn "by the book" as it were.

My first step was to learn to read patterns via a book on blanket squares, making a (cotton) baby blanket for my grand-niece, where each of the 16 squares has a different pattern. That way I could learn cabling, lace knitting, and all sorts of other variants. I won't say that I can remember all the individual stitch instructions by heart, but I can do them and know how to look them up. (And I can remember them during the course of a particular project--they just don't necessarily stick permanently.)

As part of the sock goal, I've been picking up some lovely hand-dyed, fancy fiber sock yarns. But I don't want to do my beginner learning on those! So I went to my local yarn store...oops, the last LYS I went to (in Piedmont) has closed OH NOES! Search...search...search...ok there's another LYS in the Elmwood district. (These are both over on the bay side of the hills.) Explain my goals "a nice boring plain-color sock yarn that I might not mind frogging a lot." Turns out the Piedmont store closed because the proprietor wanted to retire...but she's now part-timing at the Elmwood store. So that feels like a happy story.

Now I'm swatching. Swatching! Me! Seat-of-the-pants me! I had picked up a lovely (expensive) interchangeable needle+cable set. Should be good for all my knitting needs, right? Uh...the smallest needles in the set are size 3, which is definitely too large for socks. And doing online research, not only does that brand not do smaller needle tips for the interchangeable set-up, nobody does smaller needles for interchangeable cable sets. This probably has to do with the problem of the minimum size of the little screw-in thingy connecting the cable and needle.

OK, back to the store, and not knowing what size is going to turn out to be optimal, I went ahead and got circular needles in sizes 2, 1, 0, and 00. (I have some even smaller double-points from back when I was doing some medieval silk knitting.) I wanted the circulars because I want to do the thing where you knit both socks at the same time on the same circular needle. This may possibly be over-ambitious at this point in my learning curve, but when have I not been over-ambitious?

Back to swatching. At this point I've done size 2 and size 1 and we're approaching the target stitch gauge, so I have hopes that I'll hit it before I run out of needle sizes.

ETA: The sock book I'm working from is "Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Sock Book." It has vast amounts of theory alongside the specific patterns, which warms my scientist's heart, but makes for boring reading when I'm still figuring out how all the theory fits in with the practice.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll Oct. 21st, 2025 08:55 am)


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

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis
ofmonstrouswords: (religion: manannan)
([personal profile] ofmonstrouswords Oct. 20th, 2025 04:46 pm)
I'll try to sum up in bullet points.
  •  first chunk of summer was spent unpacking, job-hunting, and recovering from my back going out, as well as falling deep into a writing/publishing burnout I have yet to recover fully from (but there is hope on the horizon)
  • July I started getting spinal decompression treatments at a local chiro. Back pain is...well, still there, but different now, and no where near as bad as it was. I can feel the results. 
  • still not done unpacking. I fear the task is eternal.
  • in August got a bite on job-hunting; landed an interview the day after my birthday.
  • the day I got the notice I was hired, my sister messaged me to let me know my dad was in palliative care and didn't have long.
  • cue: very quick trip up to see him one last time, made possible by a friend of my mom's driving me up to her home, and her driving me across the water to Dad's care home.
  • Dad was asleep the entire visit, entirely non-responsive to my presence or the presence of Sirius when I brought him up. (Sirius wagged his tail and went right up to Dad's bed, clearly saying "Hi Granddad!!") however, I think--I believe--he knew I was there, and that my presence was a benefit for him. I spoke to him. Told him about my life. Told him I forgave him. Told him it was okay to go and that we'd all be okay, and I kissed his cheek. 
  • Dad passed 2 days after I saw him, on the exact same day my Oma passed 15 years ago.
  • end of August held my annual trip with my husband to Pirates and Fairies, where I proceeded to try and ruin our marriage in my grief-driven crashout. 
  • I did not succeed; Mr. Monstrous and I just celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary this weekend and we are stronger than ever. I married a very patient man (it's the Earth sign stellium).
  • new job started in September. Training is officially over and I'm on a 4-on, 4-off schedule, which I think will be much better for me overall in terms of work-life balance and not being 100% exhausted all the time.
  • it is a relief having an income again. I hope it helps us out of the debt we are currently in (last few weeks before my first paycheque was us living on credit cards/line of credit). 
thoughts on the loss of my father:


I could probably write a novel on my complicated feelings and thoughts regarding this, but this post was brought to you by a brief break in my house-cleaning on my second day off this week. the Fortis guys are coming tomorrow and they need to access things like the fire place, so I have to move our Hades/Persephone altar and all my witchcraft shit sitting in front of it. 
 anyway, I am alive, and I think I'm going to give up on trying to reply to previous comments from months ago, and just try to be better about replying to future ones. sometimes I do wish Dreamwidth had a "like" button--as much as I hate social media, sometimes the like button (or heart, or w/e) is just great when I don't have the words to reply, or really no lengthy reply is necessary, but I want to make sure the person commenting knows I saw their comment and am acknowledging its existence/saying thank you for the response. 


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
alierak: (Default)
([personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am)
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.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll Oct. 20th, 2025 08:54 am)
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: 31


Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Rosewater by Tade Thompson
7 (22.6%)

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
2 (6.5%)

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
23 (74.2%)

Semiosis by Sue Burke
10 (32.3%)

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
4 (12.9%)

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
1 (3.2%)



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
jenett: Big and Little Dipper constellations on a blue watercolor background (Default)
([personal profile] jenett Oct. 19th, 2025 07:43 pm)
It's been two years since I signed up for Yuletide, but I'm looking forward to it this year!

Thank you so much for writing for me, and I hope you also have a fantastic Yuletide exchange, whatever that looks like for you. I've included both what I particularly like about each canon and a couple of prompt ideas, but I'm up for anything that doesn't hit my DNWs and includes the characters.

General notes, things I love, my do not wants )
All Of Us Murderers - K.J. Charles )
Greta Helsing Series - Vivian Shaw )
England Series - K. J. Charles )
The Odyssey - Homer )


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
redbird: clenched fist on an LGBT flag background (angry queer)
([personal profile] redbird Oct. 18th, 2025 07:32 pm)
[personal profile] cattitude and I went to the No Kings rally on Boston Common. It was a large crowd, large enough that we couldn't really hear the speeches, but that's OK, we were there to be part of the crowd. I saw some good signs, including "Of course he hates veritas" and "America runs on dissent", for local flavor, and "No kings [large image of the One Ring with a slash through it] to rule them all." Almost all the signs were homemade, and different.

Happily, it was warm enough for me to unzip my hoodie and show off my Boston Dyke March T-shirt, and for other people to wear t-shirts, some of them more relevant than others. I was amused by the person in a football jersey: the local NFL team is called the New England Patriots.

There were also a bunch of inflatable animal costumes, including at least three chickens, a dinosaur, axolotls, an octopus, and a pink unicorn. The unicorn was blowing bubbles. I bought a T-shirt with a drawing of a frog and the word "resist."

The above paragraph would have made no sense a month ago, but we are living in weird as well as scary times, in which the administration apparently sees the Emergency World Naked Bike Ride as a threat.
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([personal profile] hrj Oct. 18th, 2025 10:20 am)
Periodically I have enough to-do items at the U.C. Berkeley library that I organize a trip through the tunnel around that task. I alternate between driving or BART+bicycle, depending, but since I had some widely-spread add-ons yesterday, I drove.

Yesterday was a Cal home game. I should have biked.

All it meant was that I had to park in the downtown Berkeley parking garage and hike a bit more--no big deal--but circling the campus in the process of discovering this fact was annoying.

I also was able to have a chat with the Permissions Desk person to confirm what types of things my alumna library card does not get for me. Also to confirm that *everyone* hits a cut-off point past downloading a certain number of files from a library computer. I can get full JSTOR access in the library, including downloading articles to a thumb drive, but at some point (which seems to be variable) it declines to keep downloading. Changing terminals makes no difference. I should experiment with changing thumb drive *and* terminal to see if it's reading the drive ID in some way. (Permission granted for someone knowledgeable to explain the possibilities to me.)

This limit also exists when downloading files for Haithi Trust documents. Now the complicating factor for Haithi Trust is that *how* you are able to download the file depends entirely on the specific file and its permissions. Yesterday I wanted to download a copy of "A new picture of Paris, or, The stranger's guide to the French metropolis" a 1827 guidebook for the English traveler. I'd been pulling some screenshots for key information on my home computer, but don't have any download permissions on my own.

Problem is: A New Picture of Paris has slightly restricted permissions where you can only download one page at a time. And the download limit evidently is around 130 downloads. After which, not only could I not continue downloading A New Picture of Paris pages, but I couldn't download anything else. Fortunately, one of the other articles I wanted to get was available through a different online portal which allowed emailing the content as one of the options. (And without needing any extra log-on layer.)

I joked to the help desk guy that maybe I should go for a second PhD just to get the full library access. He pointed out that simply signing up for a University Extension class might do it. But I'm not sure I want to go that far. Mostly patience and workarounds will do it.

The only item on my shopping list that I hit a brick wall on was Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen (2025, by Sarah E. Maier & Rachel M. Friars). Only way to get it through UCB is inter-library loan, and that's not part of the alumni privileges. I was able to see a list of chapters with summaries and it looks like a fascinating book. But because it's criticism of modern media (about historic lesbians), it's somewhat tangential to my topic. Too tangential to shell out a hundred bucks for a hard copy. Even too tangential to shell out $35 for an ebook. (I fantasize about having both the standing and the nerve to request review copies of academic books, but I don't feel like I'm operating at that level currently.)

And now I'm deciding whether to hop on my fold-up bike and BART down to Walnut Creek for the No Kings rally (like I did last time), or park+BART then see how crowded the BART-downtown shuttle is. (Though it's a semi-reasonable walk, and I probably won't be doing other exercise today.) Last time I did the bike+BART thing and had the bad luck to get a flat. Which was awkward because I didn't take the bike bag with the tools and spare tubes (because I didn't want to lug it to the rally), so getting home involved a lot of walking the bike. No reason to expect it to happen again, but...salience effect, you know?


Seven books new to me. Well, six and one replacement. Four fantasy, one historical, one horror, one science fiction. Two appear to be part of series.

Books Received, October 11 to October 17


Poll #33737 Books Received, October 11 to October 17
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Boys With Sharp Teeth by Jenni Howell (July 2026)
6 (12.0%)

Behind Five Willows by June Hur (May 2026)
16 (32.0%)

Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher (August 2026)
33 (66.0%)

Heir of Storms by Lauryn Hamilton Murray (June 2026)
4 (8.0%)

City of Others by Jaren Poon (January 2026)
20 (40.0%)

Starry Messenger: The Best of Galileo edited by Charles C. Ryan (November 1979)
7 (14.0%)

How to Lose a Goblin in Ten Days by Jessie Sylva (January 2026)
18 (36.0%)

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

Cats!
34 (68.0%)

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
([personal profile] redbird Oct. 17th, 2025 06:50 pm)
I went to my eye doctor today, for my once-a-year eye exam.

I told the assistant, and then Dr. Lazzara, that my vision seems a bit worse in the last year, and also that I thought I needed new glasses, because the current pair have gotten scratched over the last few years.

The new glasses will have a slightly different prescription, and Dr. Lazzara thinks the new glasses will solve the problems of blurring and difficulty with small print.

He also suggested that I use the hypertonic saline twice a day, and see if that gets me more hours of reasonable vision: the Fuchs dystrophy isn't much worse than a year ago, but I was already noticing effects a few years ago. This is the main reason I go out to Arlington to see an ophthalmologist, instead of just visiting an optometrist closer to home.

Since I was going to Arlington, I stopped at Fabric Corner for iron-on patches to mend a pair of jeans, and went to Penzey's after the eye doctor, for ground cumin and high-fat cocoa.
Depth year, 20x24 project, 8 of Pentacles )

I haven't finished the font project because I needed to think about what the final form of my font collection should look like, but I have processed all fonts I acquired prior to mid-June 2025.

Taming the Fonts, once and for all )

The lessons from this are twofold. One, working out a process that works for you will make life indefinitely easier. I haven't yet worked out processes for everything in my life, but I am working out more processes, and even when they're incomplete or insufficient, they're steps in the right direction.

I am also encouraged to look FOR processes instead of feeling overwhelmed.

But the other lesson is that while some of this probably *is* a character trait – something that will come easier to some people than others – it totally can be learnt.

Even in your fifties.

(Ugh, that sounds old.)

Lessons Learnt )

It's a bit of a revelation for me that earlier charity bundles created a lot of cognitive load (all those games and I have no idea what they are, and I'll have to at least make an effort to sort them, and they take up so much space, and I spent all this money and never play them [ok, with charity bundles that guilt is very much reduced], but they were a moderately high cognitive load and I mostly dealt with them by ignoring them. (I downloaded the solo bundle, I haven't downloaded several others).

Compared to the last bundle: I checked it out, found a few things I was interested in, it's for a good cause. I have downloaded everything and presorted it (video games, multiplayer games, solo games (though there may be some movement when I find out I was wrong from a brief glance), 3rd party games, supplements. I will back up everything, and delete the things that I'm not interested in right away.

And something miraculous happened. I'm looking forward to eventually playing these games, even if I will probably dump half of them unplayed (for there are many many lots, and many games I *want* to play), but they're not taking up that uncomfortable mental space of 'this is too much I can't cope, argh'. Instead, I can look at this bundle, go 'I feel in control', back it up, and remove them from my hard drive for now; I'm currently working my way through the Solo Bundle, and when I have a bit more brain and hard drive space, I shall download and process another bundle.

Step by step, I'm reducing technical debt, and it feels GOOD.
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The tabletop science fiction roleplaying game of transhuman survival from Posthuman Studios.

Bundle of Holding: Eclipse Phase 2E (from 2022)


The American orbital transfer station offers employment to Byron McDougall, a chance for Charlie Bond to search for an alternative to MAD, and for Diana Osborne, escape from her violently abusive father.

The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury
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