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lb_lee
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smallfandomfest
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the_mary_sue_feed
A woman got onto a flight heading to Chicago. Then she heard the rather youthful voice of a “frat boy brother” on the intercom that took her by complete surprise.
TikToker Lindsey Powers, a Chicago-based content creator, was taking a flight back home when she heard a bona fide “frat boy” on the intercom. A pilot, who sounded younger than she expected, issued a warning for passengers to stay in their seats due to inclement weather by saying, “It’s all over the Rockies and stuff, so it’s just gonna be a little bumpy.” The casual way he made the announcement surprised Powers, whose video detailing the pilot’s announcement has over 358,000 views.
juan_gandhiПочему толпы всякой шушеры наезжают на Викторию Боню? Она совершенно нормальная. Что вообще за обстановка ненависти в этой проклятой русскоязычной культуре, когда чуть что - и здрасьте, вас ненавидят. Откуда все эти блядские претензии.
Боня, конечно, могла бы и не соваться в эту помойку. У неё уже и с русским языком проблемы; живёт себе в Монако. Но имеет же право. Что всякая сволочь лезет-то?
Не люблю. Вообще хочется как-то оттуда совсем эвакуироваться, из всего этого дискурса. Но никак пока что.
leesa_perrie
soemandfred_mouseI've been struggling both with energy and motivation for exercise. At some point, I opened a browser tab to Darabee and it has sat there since (best guess: since last year).
Today, I'm browsing it and thinking about options. It has programmes for people with very low fitness, and my intention is to start there. I've decided to look at the options in 'monthly' programs, and filtered only to the lowest difficulty, which gives me 8 options. Which is too many, can't do decisions.
Fortunately! Only looking closer, the Recovery: Post Cold, flu or covid option is 15 days while everything else is 30 days, and committing to the bare minimum feels about where I'm at. Also, I find the title reassuring. So that was a 'eh, pick the easiest' kind of decision making. It lists the exercises as being 'yoga, breathing, stretching', which sure, that sounds like a place to start.
Will I stick with it? Historically no. But the exercise I do any of is better than the exercise I do none of. I .. might remember to check back in?
mdlbearLast week had some high points: reading the draft of N's next book, and a nice zoom reunion-ish thing. (I initially thought there were two of those, but the other was last Saturday.) Also sent several emails and made two phone calls following up (well, one and a half -- I abandoned the second after looking in my spam folder and finding the reply I was hoping for), paid our property tax, and got my US taxes done to the point where I could have filed for an extension, but determined that I didn't need to because I'm living overseas.
I'm supposed to celebrate accomplishments, even small ones. Right?
On the other hand, I only took five walks (skipping one because of pain and the other because of timing) and two short guitar-practice sessions. I can try to blame the latter on hand issues, but really (on the gripping hands?) it's mostly just laziness.
I am not at all happy with my body. See above under pain, and here under diclofenac. I'm not all that old, am I? Not happy with my brain, either -- see next paragraph.
Getting back to the zoom reunion-ish thing(s): there was a 65th reunion of my high school class last year; it was in Norwalk, Connecticut on the day after Thanksgiving, and I didn't go. Which was painful, because I'd ghosted the 50th for reasons I still don't entirely understand, although suffering from burnout may have had something to do with it and makes a convenient shorthand excuse. Anyway, enough people complained about not being to go for some other classmates of mine to organize a zoom version, which was last night. It was pretty good, although I lost the thread of what I was about to say at one point, resulting in an uncomfortable pause. See above about brain.
The reunion-ish thing Saturday didn't get called out last week, so I'll mention it here. Seems every year Carleton College has a "Coffee With Carls" event, and this year they had a virtual version for people who couldn't make it to one of the cities where versions of it were hosted. (There must be a briefer and less awkward way to phrase that.) Not bad, but it got cut short by a power outage before I had a chance to speak. Maybe next year.
Huge congratulations to this year's Filk Hall of Fame inductees: Margaret Davis, Tim Griffin, and Amy McNally! 🎉
Linkies: The system prompt for Meta’s AI model got leaked in 2 hours. The two Greatest Software Systems ever built: NASA Shuttle vs TeX.
And finally, Born on [April 15] in 1921, the Singer-Songwriter Behind the Most Famous No. 1 Hit Novelty Song of the 1950s. See Wednesday for spoiler.
selenak
the_mary_sue_feed
A woman went to Walmart in a comfy outfit. Then, she overheard a man who was much older than her make an inappropriate comment to his companion that stopped her dead in her tracks.
Kaleigh Marie, a regular TikTok content creator who posts occasional baking content, was having a regular day until she overheard a man tell his child something genuinely despicable. The worst part? He said it loudly without any caution, embarrassing her in the store and leading to her eventual post. Kaleigh made a TikTok about the encounter, which has over 1.3 million views. She added that those defending the man were part of the problem.
mellowtiggerAs I warned about yesterday, winter is not yet done with Minneapolis.
Here's the view out of the patio door at the front of my house this morning. We have sub-freezing temperatures forecast for tomorrow morning too.
P.S. I wanted to mention somewhere that while I was digging with a shovel in the front yard yesterday, a lady from next door (public housing unit) stopped to thank me. "For what," I asked, genuinely confused. "For the air conditioner and the whistle," she said. I replied while smiling, "Oh, sure!" Not very eloquent, but I'm not exactly the master of human interactions. When I finally ordered a new smaller air conditioner unit last spring that would fit properly in my bedroom window, I offered the older/bigger unit to them for free, so it wouldn't go unused. Plus, they got one of foeclan's 3d-printed whistles when I delivered notes to my neighbors back in January.
pauraque
dorktower_feed
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siriasheafrotherdon for audiencing.juan_gandhiscottaaronson_feedSir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (1934-2026) won the 1980 Turing Award for numerous contributions to computer science, including foundational work on concurrency and formal verification and the invention (with Dijkstra) of the dining philosophers problem. But he’s perhaps best known, to pretty much everyone who’s ever studied CS, as the inventor of the Quicksort algorithm. I’m sorry that I never got to meet him.
Michael O. Rabin (1931-2026), of Harvard University, was one of the founders of theoretical computer science and winner of the 1976 Turing Award. In 1959, he and Dana Scott introduced the concept of a “nondeterministic machine”—that is, a machine with exponentially many possible computation paths, which accepts if and only if there exists an accepting path—which would of course later play a central role in the formulation of P vs. NP problem. He’s also known for the Miller-Rabin primality test, which helped to establish randomness as a central concept in algorithms, and for many other things. He’s survived by his daughter Tal Rabin, also a distinguished theoretical computer scientist. I was privileged to meet the elder Rabin on several visits to Harvard, where he showed me great kindness.
Sir Anthony Leggett (1938-2026), of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was one of the great quantum physicists of the late 20th century, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize for his work on superfluidity. When I knew him, he was a sort of elder statesman of quantum computing and information, who helped remind the rest of us of why we got into the field in the first place—not to solve Element Distinctness moderately faster, but to learn the truth of quantum mechanics itself. Tony insisted, over and over, that the validity of quantum mechanics on the scale of everyday life is an open empirical problem, to be settled by better experiments and not by a-priori principles. I first met Tony at a Gordon Research Conference in southern California. Even though I was then a nobody and he a recent Nobel laureate, he took the time to listen to my ideas about Sure/Shor separators, and to suggest (correctly) what we now call 2D cluster states as an excellent candidate for what I wanted. In all my later interactions with Tony, at both the University of Waterloo (where he was visiting faculty for a while) and at UIUC (where my wife Dana and I considered taking jobs), he was basically the friendliest, funniest guy you could possibly meet at his level of achievement and renown. I was bummed to hear about his passing.
rocky41_7 posting in booksToday while waiting for my car’s brake pads to be replaced, I finish The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. This is a short (fewer than 100 pages) fairy tale-inspired horror story about a mermaid and a plague doctor who get wrapped up in the sick games of a village they pass through.
I liked the idea of this story a lot more than the execution. Have you ever had the sense a book really wanted to say something profound about human nature? This book felt like that constantly. It also felt like the author desperately wanted the reader to be impressed with her large and esoteric vocabulary. Things were phrased and rephrased in ways that felt keenly like they were only there so the author could use a specific word. Which, fair, we’ve all done it, but the scaffolding showed so plainly here it felt very clumsy. I’m not usually one to fuss too much about purple prose, but the language here often felt decorative enough that meaning was obscured rather than clarified.
I like the vibes in this book, and the two main characters were engaging (although I felt like the half-mermaid children were a pretty glaring dropped thread) and the plot interesting, and some of the writing was beautiful, but more often it was distracting. I never sank into the book, which was too bad, because there were some cool moments.
Can’t say I’m inclined to look into more of Khaw’s writing, because I think her style is just not for me. I don’t think I wasted my time with this book, but I don’t need to see more from her.
beatrice_otterdontstophernow in fffx 2025torachan
highadrenalinemod posting in highadrenalineexchangeallthingslinguistic_feedI once chatted with a guy from Hawaii, we started talking about languages. I mentioned that while I’ve heard very little of it and hardly seen more of it written down, the Hawaiian language seems to have extremely similar balance of vocals and consonants as Finnish does, so it’s actually pretty likely that there are some words that exist in both languages, but mean one thing in Hawaiian and a completely differen thing in Finnish - much like in Japanese.
He didn’t find it plausible, so we agreed to disagree. Later on he mentioned that his name is [firstname] Kalani Kanaele, and when I told him what that translates to in Finnish, I had to spend like 20 more minutes trying to convince him that I’m actually not fucking with him.
Okay so in finnish, “kala” means “fish” - just any fish, fish in general, and “kana” means “chicken”. “Ele” is “gesture”, as in a physical movement that an animal or human does to nonverbally communicate something. The -ni suffix is a possessive referring to oneself, essentially “my”. In finnish, compound words are of the “if it doesn’t exist yet, I can make one up on the spot” variety, so almost all nouns can be slapped together to refer to something specific.
So, broken down like this and put back together, this dude’s name translates to “the chicken-like gesture that my fish makes.”
This is pure poetry
jazzyjj posting in awesomeershannah
olivermossolivermoss
soc_puppet posting in anime_mangathe_mary_sue_feed
If there’s one piece of online dating advice that we most often hear, it’s to never allow a stranger to pick you up from your home and take you somewhere else.
However, it’s important to remember it’s not a hard and fast rule. People online have techniques through which they can build enough trust to make you do things you otherwise wouldn’t.
yourlibrarian posting in common_nature
the_mary_sue_feed
Coldplay hasn’t checked in on the woman caught having an affair at one of their concerts. And, honestly why would they?
TMZ managed to see Kristin Cabot out and about this week. They had to ask about the moment where she was caught on camera with Andy Byron. It feels like the entire world saw the clip and her life basically went left at that moment. During Coldplay’s show in Boston, the two got shown on the Kiss Cam and quickly tried to get out of frame. Unfortunately, the video made its way to social media, and that was that. Now, TMZ is asking the questions.
the_mary_sue_feed
Donald Trump’s administration is currently dealing with a legal case surrounding those illegal deportations. However, things are about to get weird in court.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg was in the midst of a criminal investigation into Kristi Noem and deportation flights. Politico reports that a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the latest efforts to hold the administration accountable. This is the second time that the investigation has been blocked by an appeals court panel.
moonhare
kaberettAround the beginning of March (before I started lifting! it's okay, I promise I am monitoring all of this responsibly <3) I had a couple of weeks where I didn't manage to do as much stretching of my hips as usual. Whereupon. my left leg. pitched a tantrum. So I have been grumbling along with sciatic-nerve pain for the last month and a half, and getting on with life around it because, you know, pain, watcha gonna do.
... this morning, on the way to Acquire Breakfast, it blessedly, unpleasantly, emphatically twanged -- and there ensued several whole hours wherein it didn't hurt.
Tragically I then resumed sitting on the sofa in order to poke at computer some more, and despite position shifting......... yep, it retwanged itself.
I Am Doing My Stretches. :|
Some good things nonetheless:
soemandmellowtiggerI'm a big advocate of recognizing climate change.
For instance, back in 1960, this USDA map shows Minneapolis in zone 4a. Sometime later, we changed to 4b, and today we're in zone 5a. We're still fully surrounded by zone 4b, though, so it's only because of the "heat island effect" that we're considered a warmer zone. You can see that island of heat on this map. That's fine, I suppose.
Unwelcome, however, is receiving plant shipments on dates that are still too early for actual cold weather habits in this part of Minnesota. I planted things a few weeks ago, when they shipped much too early, then we had a hard freeze down to -7C/20F. I received more plants on Thursday, only a little too early. I kept them indoors, because I saw the forecast for below-freezing temperatures this morning. That's also fine, I suppose. After work today, I got some asparagus and roses into the ground finally. I had to dress warm, because the wind chill was 3C/37F.
I have a few more delivered plants to put into the ground, but I'm waiting until Monday morning's sub-freezing weather passes. One of these plants is another rose, but it's already blooming! It just seems terribly wrong to try putting it into the ground right before a freeze.
That photo isn't great, but the single open flower at the top is still visible. These last remaining plants will just have to wait for Monday afternoon. I wish all of these plants weren't delivered until late April, like what would happen years ago, when we were still in zone 4.
alethia"It's late to start riding," Jack said as Robby straightened, a neutral statement that was a protest nonetheless. They knew how to say things without saying anything, the two of them.
Maybe that was part of the problem.
Robby stared down at the still-sleeping baby. "I have a lot of things to see," he said, almost to himself, a double layer to that, one that Jack found oddly heartening.
"And people to love," he said, taking a flier on it because why the fuck not.
starwatcherlb_lee - “No! It’s just plain dumb!”: Glass Onionthistleingrey - current stitchingflareonfury in smallfandomfest - Pimp: The Hunting Party (TV series) by flareonfurythe_mary_sue_feed - Woman gets on flight to Chicago. Then a ‘frat boy’ pilot gets on the intercom: ‘Can confirm many ofjuan_gandhi - А что там за очередная херня на интернетахbillroper - Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!leesa_perrie - Website Updates Completedsoemand - Static, Synths, and Sunday Blissfred_mouse - Exercisemdlbear - Done Since 2026-04-12selenak - The Testaments 1.04 and For All Mankind 5.04the_mary_sue_feed - Woman goes to Walmart in a normal outfit. Then an older man comments the most vile thing to his son:mellowtigger - yup. snow.pauraque - SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991)dorktower_feed - Let Us Prey – DORK TOWER 17.04.26siria - 2616 / Fic - ERqueenslayerbee in fandomcalendar - DCU FEMSLASH SELF-PROMO WEEKENDjuan_gandhi - ещё этимологииscottaaronson_feed - Three greats who we’ve lostrocky41_7 in books - Recent Reading: The Salt Grows Heavybeatrice_otter - Fic: Learning the Stepstorachan - Daily Happinesshighadrenalinemod in highadrenalineexchange - Delay Until Wednesday, almost there!allthingslinguistic_feed - I once chatted with a guy from Hawaii, we started talking about languages. I mentioned that while&hejazzyjj in awesomeers - Just one thing: 19 April 2026hannah - The ocean's open hand.leecetheartist - Important Dateolivermoss - In my Coachella Eraolivermoss - My hopes for the playoffssoc_puppet in anime_manga - Humble Bundle: Kana Manga Mini-Bundlethe_mary_sue_feed - Florida man picks up Hinge date. Then he starts driving her somewhere she didn’t agree to go: ‘Neveryourlibrarian in common_nature - Grebes in the Rainthe_mary_sue_feed - Why Would Coldplay Check in on the Woman Having an Affair on the Kiss Cam at Their Concert?the_mary_sue_feed - Trump Administration Deportation Flights Case Hits Turbulencemoonhare - More comicskaberett - sciatic nerves were a mistakesoemand - ⛵︎mellowtigger - Minneapolis is not ready for zone 5 yetalethia - The Pitt Fic: Take a Flier (Abbot/Robby, NC-17)starwatcher - Too good not to share.timeasmymeasure
