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[personal profile] lightreads
At the Back of the North Wind

1/5. 1870’s children’s christian fiction about the son of a coachman who makes friends with the north wind.

It would be reasonable to ask why I read 1870’s children’s christian fiction. The answer is that I read this as a child, but remembered nothing about it other than the title and the sound of the narrator’s voice saying it. I recently found the digitized version of that old cassette audiobook (thank you, National Library Service – in general, I mean, not for this in particular) and I got curious.

Woof, I am allergic to this book. Its preaching, its sanctimony, its moralism. On the one hand, it could be worse. The author was a christian-socialist who was definitely not wrong that, say, drinking and smacking your wife around is bad. His opinions were apparently very unpopular at the time. But it doesn’t ultimately matter what stripe of preaching this is when you are allergic to the whole project. Philosophically, I mean. The thematic statement of this book is, as one character says, “kindness is but justice,” and bleh, fuck right off with that. It’s a view of the world and who gets what and who deserves what that I violently disagree with.

Also, not for nothing, I said “are you fucking joking” out loud when I realized where this book was going. I’m pretty sure I don’t remember this book well because I didn’t understand or like it as a child. I do remember his Princess and the Goblin, which I think I reread quite a bit, but I think I’m good now. The offensive ending, by the way, is literally spoilers I guess? ).

I think I would be less annoyed by this if it didn’t have these flickers of good fantasy in it. Something wild and creative and extremely weird. But whenever he started down that road he would pull abruptly back and suddenly re-christian everything.

Content notes: *gestures upward*

Sabine Cafe[coffeeneuring, bicycling]

Dec. 30th, 2025 12:15 pm
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
On Sunday, I went on a wonderful Coffeeneuring adventure with [personal profile] annikusrex and her son F. One of the most exciting things about the adventure is that F is now old enough to do these things with us! He was a trooper and rode all of 19.7 miles.

cut for photos and videos )

This icon is doubly appropriate

Dec. 30th, 2025 03:14 pm
oursin: image of hedgehogs having sex (bonking hedgehogs)
[personal profile] oursin

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to [personal profile] oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

There is a waterspout off Portland Bill (where Marie Stopes' ashes were scattered). Volumes of the Kinsey Report on the Human Female are spontaneously falling off library shelves. The shade of Shere Hite is gibbering and wailing.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

***

Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

Mellandagarna

Dec. 30th, 2025 02:45 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

I managed to get out for my yoga classes Saturday and Sunday mornings. Saturday afternoon I spent a lot of time faffing and failing to go to the public skates I'd tentatively pencilled in; eventually I dragged myself out for the last one and unsurprisingly I felt much better for having done so. It was much easier to drag myself there on Sunday, and I had a bonus surprise meeting with a work colleague, and a lovely long chat while we skated.

Then it turned out Charles's usual lift to hockey practice (alternate Sunday evenings) had fallen through, so I said I'd take him. I had the bright idea of asking the coach if there was room for me to hop on too as a one-off addition to the class, and so I got a bonus 2-hour ice hockey practice. Oh, that felt so good.

Yesterday I switched things up and took Nico swimming in the early afternoon, which I found surprisingly tiring, and went to yoga in the evening. I got chatting to a fellow student afterward, and it turns out she also works for the university on the same site as me, and knows some of my colleagues, because Cambridge is Like That. We swapped some class recommendations and may stay in touch.

I'm really glad I picked up the hot yoga pass, it's been fun to do regularly and if nothing else it's ensured I left the house pretty much every day. If money were no object I might consider a more regular membership, but it's pretty expensive when not on a promotional pass. Plus between my hockey commitments and the additional gym sessions I want to add in January, I'm really not sure I have the time. Maybe I'll think about it again after the university season is over.

Tomorrow I'll see out the old year with one last yoga class, and then go to the last public skate of the year at the rink in the early afternoon. I'm vaguely planning a movie night with Tony and the offspring, watch the fireworks broadcast from London, and then probably zonk.

Aside from exercise I've mostly been reading, with a side of listening to hockey podcasts fall in love with Heated Rivalry.

Object permanence issues

Dec. 30th, 2025 02:31 pm
cimorene: SGA's Sheppard and McKay, two men standing in an overgrown sunlit field (sga)
[personal profile] cimorene
People really watch Benoit Blanc movies without having ever encountered any detective fiction other than Sherlock Holmes and feel fully qualified to comment on the connections that they think they've made.

Remember the terrible articles in the late 90s that repetitively and confidently asserted that Rowling had invented YA fantasy, or low fantasy, because they didn't bother to check a single library or bookstore?
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
Some time ago I jumped on the trend of watching cleaning videos on the internet, but in my case particularly videos by a neurodivergent person who runs a cleaning business and who donates time and effort to helping out people with hoarding disorders where he can. What I appreciate most about the work is that it involves a sympathetic/empathetic approach, where the goal is to try and develop methods to help people that don't involve forcing things in ways that can potentiate trauma.

Anyway, one of the videos in particular is stuck in my mind, because as the cleaning person works he describes in voiceover some of the patterns he's observed when helping people with ADHD-related hoarding clear out the excess stuff they've accumulated. Specifically, the types of things he finds, over and over again, and what he thinks might be going on with them, such as:

-Jars full of sand or rocks or seashells: collected with the idea that the jar will help the person remember some special place or trip. These are usually unlabeled, and if they're being cleared out that means they didn't actually make it all the way to being put on display somehow.

-Ink pens, so many pens. This might be a "just in case" thing? Yes, much is centered around the possibility of an item, so if there's any possible way a thing might be useful, it is kept.

-Notebooks or journals, usually either blank or with 1-2 pages written on, the rest blank. Related to the excitement around resolving to do something new, to possibility. But then, a lack of follow-through, probably as possibility turns into overwhelm.

-Important stuff intermingled with random stuff - e.g. needed paperwork mixed in with junk mail - which happens with the idea that "I'll just go through this later," except "later" almost never arrives. And the unsorted paperwork tends to accumulate. Manuals, old bills, old programs, birthday cards, and more. I'm personally grateful to a DW blogger for help with how to set up a low-spoons filing system for the actually important paperwork.

-Baskets of loose change.

-Collections - except, they aren't displayed in any way, items are just stashed away in bags and boxes.

Anyway, I think about this video often when trying to organize my own stuff, when out shopping or somewhere where there might be an impulse to acquire a thing, and when visiting the family members and friends I know well enough that I can poke and prod their stuff. This trip, for instance, I've gone through and tested all of the markers, Sharpies, and pencils sitting organized at this desk in the basement, and thinned out the ones that no longer work. (I should note, my mom has been working on conscientiously paring down stuff in this house for very a long time now; she's not a hoarder but generally wants things that can be reused to get reused, and much of the stuff I go through is stuff my siblings and I abandoned at home when we moved away).

In 2026 in New York, I'll continue working on stuff and things in 3 different places: at home, at work, and at the boathouse. Work is probably the space with the most junk at the moment, but I swear there's a reason I have that bowl full of seashells in there.

Death's End by Liu Cixin (2010)

Dec. 29th, 2025 04:43 pm
pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
[personal profile] pauraque
After the events of The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, this conclusion to the trilogy expands the perspective on the Earth-Trisolaran conflict beyond our two petty solar systems to a galactic, interdimensional, and finally universal scale. (Yes, this is the sort of book where rather than wondering if your favorite character survives, you wonder instead if there will be a habitable universe for them to survive in by the last page.)

This book took me a long time to read, not only because it's 600 pages but also because I kept stopping due to real life distractions. I also don't have the book anymore because it had to go back to the library. So I'm afraid this post is going to be more vibes-based than going into a ton of detail, even though seventy million things happened in the book that would each be worthy of detailed discussion.

My ultimate impression of the book (and of the series as a whole) is that there are a lot of things that the author and I will just never see eye-to-eye on, but I don't mind setting that aside because I like the way he explores his ideas even if I disagree with their fundamental basis.

cut for length )

51/302-304-305-306: Deep Breath

Dec. 29th, 2025 08:23 am
rejectomorph: (Default)
[personal profile] rejectomorph
I missed an entire weekend. It was sunny, too, after a very wet Friday. There was a whole lot of sleeping going on, mostly done by me, as when I woke up (by day at least) I heard other people going about their business the way they do, and I left them to it without interfering, the way I do, and so everything was normal, the way it ought to be. Of course that means there's nothing to write about, which I can live with since I can't focus on writing very well anymore anyway.

But then sometimes I'd wake up in the dark, and then it would be weird. My sense of time gets totally buggered (I think that's the scientific term) when I wake up in the dark anymore, and when I look at the readout on the phone it seems I'm always surprised at how much or little time has passed since I was last conscious, even though I often can't remember when I was last conscious and am only making wild guesses. As often as not, I'm also even surprised at what day it turns out to be, but then that happens when I wake up in daylight as well, so maybe a different issue.

Also when I wake up in the dark I frequently have fleeting glimpses of vanishing dreams, and get the feeling that they are making themselves scarce because they don't want me to know just how freaking weird they are. Can brains protect themselves from oncoming madness by avoiding thinking about it? Because sometimes that's what it feels like my brain is trying to do. I don't think It'll work. In the end I expect I'll be batshit crazy, no matter what I try, consciously or not, to do to prevent it. But damn, those dream fragments are freaking ultimate weird!

But I digress. Or evade. Or something. I think I should eat something other than the two triangles of a Toblerone bar I bought on sale recently but still paid too much for and now am using to fool my stomach into thinking it's been fed a meal. I especially don't feel like cooking this time of day, and wish I had an old-school coffee shop nearby that served breakfast all day, although if I did I'd also have to wish I still had the energy to drag my disintegrating carcass thither and sufficient cash to cover a tab about double in constant dollars what it used to cost for the same stuff back when I did have such places nearby. Come to think, that's even scarier than those dreams that flee like roaches when I wake from them. Maybe I'll just open a carton of yogurt and forget that lost civilization I once inhabited.

Two more sunny days, including today, until showers arrive for the year's end, and then three straight days of chilly rain to begin 2026, or so the forecast says. So it has come to this. I'm apt to see another year begin, and have no idea why. Should I apologize? Expect an apology? I probably ought to just nap some more. Might as well, can't dance.


Belated Sunday Verse )

Incidental shopping photos [stuff]

Dec. 29th, 2025 03:51 pm
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
1. When I was in REI, browsing through various cycling products, I was surprised to discover that yes, you can buy specifically-made cycling jorts, of all things:

You can just buy jorts nowadays

News you can use?

2. The Westlake Center Bus Tunnel will forever be the Westlake Center Bus Tunnel, no matter how many light rail lines run through it. I hadn't realized that construction for the 2 Line is well underway.

Westlake bus tunnel

3. Enroute to Pacific Fabrics, I walked past this door store. They had a huge sign painted that read, "Come on in, we'll gladly show you the doors!"

Wood Door Shop

4. The front of the building where Pacific Fabrics is located is given over to Pacific Iron and Steel, where you can sell back scrap metal. The fabric store is around the corner, on the upper floor of the warehouse:

Pacific Fabrics

Here's a great example of some of the fun fabrics for sale:

Pacific Fabrics
umadoshi: (Christmas - string of lights (roxicons))
[personal profile] umadoshi
(As is so often the case, I'm generally up to date on reading my DW circle, but not doing at all well with commenting.)

I guess at this point we're well into the liminal last bit of the year. (I said to [personal profile] scruloose earlier that I still try to hold "Christmas is twelve days, dammit" in my heart, but it's hard, especially when our observance of the the holiday at all is so low-key.) We had masked visits with both sets of parents (mine on Christmas Eve and [personal profile] scruloose's on Boxing Day), and in between, Christmas Day was just the two of us and the cats and the Netflix fireplaces. My mom sent us home with Christmas stockings and some gifts (also very low-key; we still keep nudging for just not doing presents at all), and the latter included a hard copy of the most recent edition of Garner's Modern English Usage, which was a delightful surprise.

We actually had a white Christmas, which has never been a sure thing and is getting rarer and rarer at terrible speeds, but now ice and rain are arriving, to be followed by a cold snap, so I'm really glad we don't need to leave the house anytime soon. (See also: will we lose power? Very possibly! >.< But we're pretty well-equipped to deal with it.)

I'm feeling like I should be looking ahead or setting small goals or trying to find specific things I want to focus on, but so far I'm not really scrounging the brain for it. Anyone want to tell me about how you're approaching it?

(I do think I'll sign up for a GYWO wordcount goal again, despite having written almost literally zero words this year, but at this point I have the grim suspicion that the words may stay gone until a new full-on fannish obsession hits me, and that's so infrequent for me. ;_; I have so many Guardian WIPs and fragments. [And while I'm enjoying seeing all the fannish glee over Heated Rivalry, I don't currently feel fannish about it myself {which, honestly, I'm okay with}.])

Recent media, mostly books: All Is Bright, Llinos Cathryn Thomas' "read over Advent" novella, which was lovely; The Dark is Rising (book), which I'm glad to have finally read; I don't know if/when I might read the books that follow it; Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher; Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk; KJ Charles' Masters in this Hall (which I should've checked the series info about first, as it's the third Lilywhite Boys book and I haven't read the second. Oops); and Brigid Kemmerer's A Curse So Dark and Lonely.

[personal profile] scruloose and I finished listening to System Collapse, so we're out of Murderbot books. Yesterday (?) we listened to the four-minute audiobook sample of The Thief, which I might be able to work with? But wow, the voice sounds so much older than Gen to me. (Also, Kobo, four minutes is a reasonable sample length, but it literally cuts off mid-word.)

I watched the season finale of Heated Rivalry pretty promptly on Friday morning, for fear of being spoiled, which meant [personal profile] scruloose, who hadn't seen any of the show previously, pretty much watched it too while feeding the cats and having their own breakfast. (I did give them some background info first.) As noted above: not feeling fannish, but I thought that was really well done overall, and the actors seem like an absolute delight.

And we've watched two movies since starting vacation (Wake Up Dead Man and Sinners), which brings me up to a whopping four [4] movies this year.
oursin: Fotherington-Tomas from the Molesworth books saying Hello clouds hello aky (Hello clouds hello sky)
[personal profile] oursin

Out for my walk today, went through the pocket park behind the house, and there was a lady with a small terrier (I think), that was going absolutely spare under some trees -

- and looking up I finally saw, right up at the very top where it had attained to, a squirrel, which was presumably the reason for the agitation.

Had some passing converse with the dog's owner anent this, who claims that he will never actually catch a squirrel, even though they are tame enough that if you go and sit on one of the park benches they will come and look you over.

Mostly the dogs that one sees being walked in the park are less vociferous, perhaps they have grown wise to the ways of squirrels.

So anyway, I passed on to the other somewhat larger park, and see no advance yet in what is supposed to be a development involving a pergola (???) and further eco-stuff but at least there is no longer unsightly work being done at that spot.

Have only very lately discovered that two objects which I vaguely thought, had I thought at all, were maybe bird-houses, are actually insect-houses. Much to my chagrin, I can find nothing about this on the park website which boasts of various eco and environment good stuff that goes on there (I am still trying to work out what the sparrow-meadow is, have not seen plume nor feather of a sparrow on my ambles).

However, I can at least point dr rdrz at this site where I perceive that insect houses are quite A Thing: designed to provide safe nesting, hibernation, and breeding spaces for beneficial pollinators such as solitary bees, butterflies, ladybirds, and lacewings'.

I assume solitary bees are a specific species, and have not actually been expelled from their hive for some vile transgression, to roam the earth etc etc etc like an apian ancient mariner.

(no subject)

Dec. 29th, 2025 08:11 am
skygiants: Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender peers through an eyeglass (*peers*)
[personal profile] skygiants
The Queen's Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis did quite a good job of giving me historical context around the lives of artisans and upwardly mobile bourgeois in 17th and early 18th century France and only a mediocre job IMO of convincing me of its central argument, but I was reading it for the former and not the latter so I can't say I was disappointed per se ...

As the author, historian Joan DeJean, introduces her narrative, she was browsing the National Archives when she came across two documents: the first, appointing Jean Magoulet as official embroiderer to Queen Marie-Thérèse of France; the second, decreeing that Magoulet's daughter Marie Louise should be put in prison and deported to New Orleans on charges of prostitution. DeJean immediately dropped what she was doing to Get To The Bottom Of This and went on a deep dive into the entire Magoulet family as well as the family of Louis Chevrot, the young man whose involvement with Marie-Louise resulted in the charges above.

In order to write this family saga, Joan DeJean has pulled out every relevant family document -- marriage licenses, birth certificates, guardianship statements, criminal charges, recorded purchases, etc. etc. -- and she does a clear and interesting job of explaining what we can learn from them, what these kinds of documents normally look like and what their context is, what the specific features of these family documents imply, and letting you follow her logic with your own brain. I appreciate this very much! I had no idea, for example, that it was standard in 17th-century France for the court to appoint a guardian for any child who lost a parent, even if they still had the other parent living, to ensure that their financial interests were protected, something that came up often in this narrative where a lot of kids were losing parents in situations where their financial interests were not particularly protected. It's a really good example of historical detective work, how you can draw a picture of a family through time through the bureaucratic litter they leave behind, and I appreciated it very much.

On the other hand, Joan DeJean also occasionally slips into writing like this --

In the course of their attempts both to get rich quick and to save their skin when they got into bad straits, the Queen's Embroiderers became imposters, tricksters, con artists nonpareil. They lied about everything and to everyone: to the police, to notaries, to their in-laws. They lied about their ages and those of their children, about their professional accomplishments and their net worth. They caroused; they philandered; they made a mockery of the laws of church and state. The only truly authentic thing about them was their extraordinary talent and their ability to weave gold and silver thread into the kind of garments that seemed the stuff of dreams. In their lives and on an almost daily basis, haute couture crossed paths with high crime.

Savage beauty indeed.


-- which made me laugh out loud every time it happened. So, bug, feature? who could say ....

Anyway, Joan DeJean makes a pretty good argument for most of the family gossip she pulls out about the Magoulets and the Chevrots, but the center of her argument about the Great Tragic Romance between Marie-Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot rests on a really elaborate switcheroo that I simply do not buy. In drawing out her family saga, DeJean has become obsessed with the fact that there seem to have been two Marie-Louise Magoulets, one being more than a decade older than the other, and, crucially, also more than a decade older than Louis Chevrot; I guess this is technically spoilers for a three hundred year old scandal )

But a.) context about material culture and craftsmanship is what I was here for and context is what I got, in spades, and b.) if you're going to invent a historical conspiracy theory, make it as niche as possible, is what I say, so despite the fact that I don't BELIEVE DeJean I still spiritually support her. Has she perhaps connected a few more dots than actually exist? Perhaps. But I still certainly got my money's worth [none; library] out of the book!
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
My Aunt L's birthday is the day after Christmas, and she loves nothing more than a trip to the bowling alley for a good game. So, it's the one time of year I ever go bowling. There was a smaller group of us this year, so we just occupied two lanes.

Annual birthday bowling gathering

One of our lanes, however, was clearly possessed. It kept stealing our bowling balls and refusing to give them back, even when we capitulated and used multiple different balls of the wrong weight. My Uncle D had to go back over to the counter 7-8 times to get them to send someone over to manually fix that.

Other entertaining moments included giving my Aunt D a copy of a zine I just made. I'll blog more about the zine soon. It's about ants.

Annual birthday bowling gathering

My Uncle D had not just one but TWO occasions where he had a gutter ball bounce right back out of the gutter at the last moment and knock over some pins!!

Because our lane was possessed, at one point my Aunt D accidentally bowled while the gate was down, realizing her mistake only a few seconds after she'd released the ball. It was one of those slow-motion accidents, watching the ball travel all the way down to the pins at far end of the lane, where it smacked into the gate...and then slowly, slowly rolled all the way back to her, right down the middle of the lane. By the point it reached her we just laughed and laughed.

The people in the lane next to us had a couple young children bowling, so they had those gutter bumpers that will go up for just the young child, then retract so everyone else has to just cope with the emotions of a gutter ball. One time when it was the young child's turn, she bowled, and somehow managed to get the ball to bump up and OVER the gutter bumper, into the gutter! That was a first.

My Aunt L was very happy to have gone bowling, as usual. She's 75 at this point, so it's great she can still happily heft her bowling ball. She even got some beautiful new purple bowling shoes for Christmas this year.
cimorene: A psychedelic-looking composition featuring four young women's heads in pink helmets on a background of space with two visible moons (disco)
[personal profile] cimorene
When I bought this laptop, it was mostly because I have to spend so much time in the dining room with a cat away from my desktop setup. I didn't intend it to REPLACE my desktop, though. The desktop has a much larger hard drive and a large ssd, even though the motherboard is older. I didn't transfer all my media directories because that computer was still there.

Buuuut then my motherboard finally kicked the bucket and the desktop wouldn't boot at all. Since I was only turning it on every few months, replacing it did not seem urgent and I didn't feel like looking up the specifications I would need to follow in ordering a replacement motherboard (to be compatible with my compact case and be good for installing Linux on... etc).

Except then the LLM "generative AI" (it's not AI) bubble got so big that datacenters started buying up all the computer components as well as sucking up all the drinking water, and now motherboards are very expensive and they just keep getting MORE expensive.

At dinner the other day (we ate with BIL's family the night before last) our teenaged niblings were talking about Nvidia and how their nerd friends are shocked and full of condemnation for Nvidia's actions and how everybody should sell their Nvidia stock and also how their nerd friends are also stuck putting off building new PCs for the foreseeable. I assume some of them are going to have to cave since they are gaming, which is probably a bit harsher on their systems than I am on my little laptop. I didn't quite comprehend the nature of Nvidia's scam, partly because I was the only one there who hasn't read a news article about it apparently, and partly because I probably stopped paying attention mid-sentence a couple of times, but I gathered that everybody hates it.

So now my main computer is my beloved laptop, Nenya, a Lenovo ThinkBook 14 (I used a ThinkPad for work and they really are great, but they cost a lot more and I don't really need to be able to throw my laptop off a cliff..., so I scaled down to one of their slightly less sturdy lines), about 3 years old now. And I don't have all my files on her - my music collection, most notably. I just have the last set of songs that I had transferred to my phone before my desktop died. Nenya still has the Windows install she came with in case of emergency, but she dual boots and I have been using Linux Mint whenever I didn't need to log in with Windows in order to like, buy media files with DRM on them, or whatever.

In the last six months or so, the mouse started being way worse, and I found out that replacing its batteries or using a corded mouse didn't help. The trackpad was also bad, but not as bad as the mouse. It was enough to prevent me from using Nenya to fill my design blog queue, but streaming video doesn't require a lot of mouse movement. However, [personal profile] waxjism had occasion to borrow her and ask me more specifically about the mouse issue, and we finally reinstalled the OS and upgraded to Linux Mint 22.2 Zara, the latest LTS release from last month. (I have preferred LTS releases for the last decade or so because I am much less willing to go through the hassle of reinstalling than I used to be in my early 30s.) I'm not positive about the mouse issues so far - the trackpad is better by default, but I noticed it getting laggy when I had a ton of tabs in Firefox open. Maybe Firefox is hogging processor or something.

SAMMY

Dec. 28th, 2025 11:01 pm
daveio: (Default)
[personal profile] daveio

Why should I watch SUPERNATURAL?

Well. Basically, it's brotherly MANPAIN and suprirsingly deep lore. And it’s that for fifteen seasons of around 20 episodes each.

And somehow, it never gets old.

vital functions

Dec. 28th, 2025 10:35 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Me, a few days ago:

... I picked up the bad and naughty book I'm not supposed to read after 8pm because it's too annoying It was annoying

So that's how The Story of Pain (Joanna Bourke) is going. Read more... )

I have also made a tiny bit more progress on Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), read one and a half magazines sent to me by Organisations Various that I feel bad recycling unread but which have a tendency to Accumulate in that state, and some of a Libby sample of Cloistered (Catherine Coldstream) based on one of you mentioning it mid-November, which I have just about got up to on my reading page. Also, I am up to mid-November on my reading page.

Added to the queue are Vespertine (Margaret Rogerson; courtesy of someone mentioning it a while back, probably [personal profile] skygiants, and my library Acquiring A New Copy), The Long Journey of English (Peter Trudgill; a present from my mother, in her capacity as a linguist), and Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes (Rob Wilkins; a loan from my father). For the sake of my spreadsheet of books (with the increasingly inaccurate filename books-2011.ods) I am probably going to be trying to finish rather than start things for the rest of the calendar year (not the Bourke) but we'll see how that goes.

Listening. ... an episode of Elementary that a relative was watching...

Playing. Scrabble! Monument Valley 3. Inkulinati (having another go at beating my head against a run at Master difficulty).

Cooking. Another batch of the quince and squash stew. Two days' worth of minestrone (with bulgur wheat because we are apparently out of tiny pasta, but not that), which worked well as Some Lunches. I think little else of note.

Eating. So much of my mother's cooking various, including a few last tomatoes from her greenhouse (!!!). Also my father's mince pies.

Exploring. Several stonks around Cambridge, including visits to some little free libraries and to various likely locations for snowdrops (mainly the grounds of Churchill, up at the chapel end, where they do indeed exist). Brief trip to Anglesey Abbey, which also has snowdrops coming out and one very enthusiastic daffodil; winter garden remains lovely.

Growing. The pineapple leafs are taller than the (remaining, trimmed) originals, as of... two weeks ago? Ten days? But I think I hadn't yet mentioned and it's still making me smile.

There is one (1) curry leaf cutting that is Not Yet Dead.

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January 2025

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