ckd | Reading

Today was the quarterly meeting of our mythopoeic book discussion group. Most of us were there in person. One attendee came in by zoom from 2000 miles away. Another came in person from 2000 miles away. She was visiting.

Our topic was Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I reported something I found it has in common with The Lord of the Rings, which is: that the movie is very pretty, but the book is far better. I would peg it as my third favorite of all DWJ novels, #2 being Archer's Goon and #1 Fire and Hemlock. One thing we liked about it is that the lead character is a very old lady, which is rather unusual, even though she's not really a very old lady but is under a spell. One thing we did not like about the movie is that it robs Sophie, for that is her name, of her agency, which is one reason why it's so boring but the book isn't.

One other thing making the book interesting that's absent from the movie is the mind-expanding glimpse of what is at least putatively our world from the viewpoint of an alternative fantasy world.

In the course of more general discussion about books we've read lately, I came across a new wrinkle in pronunciation. I'm used to Stephen Colbert pronouncing Gollum (gaul-um) as if it were golem (go-lem). But here somebody was pronouncing golem as if it were Gollum. The two words have of course nothing to do with each other. Gollum is an intensely human (for a sufficient definition of human), intensely tragic figure who has fallen into a personal hell through his own greed, and is trying to get out but never quite succeeds. A golem is a mindless robotic servant creature made of clay. They're nothing alike. Attempts to find a connection via folk etymology, which is postulating sources by what a word happens to sound like to the hearer, are an inane form of literary analysis.

I opined that some movie which I'm not going to name was passingly enjoyable to watch, but the supernatural part of the plot did not hang together. Others said that people like it that way. I had my doubts to this, but instead merely said that "I consider a dislike of incoherent and inconsistent magic systems to be a feature, not a bug."

james_davis_nicoll

So, yesterday, the wheelchair ramp on the Rt 8 bus I was on developed a bug. Or the system that detects if it is deployed did. The ramp retracted correctly but the bus thought it had not, and would not move.

Ha ha! I pick my routes to maximize alternatives in case of break-downs. I just disembarked and talked over to the LRT. Which, I discovered, was having a minor service delay.

My contingency plans can handle two delays, but not three. Good for me there were just the two. It did mean I was only a little early for work.

On the way home, just after I disembarked from the LRT, an SUV cut the LRT off so the SUV could reach the parking lot ten seconds earlier. If the train had not stopped, I'd have had to stick around, both as a witness and because the accident would blocked the sidewalk between me and the stop I needed to get to.

Less than five minutes after the LRT near-miss, three SUVs tried to turn into the same lane at the same time. I don't think they hit each other but there was a short discussion between the drivers before they all left. I'd have had to stick around for that as well, because it would have blocked the route my bus uses.

canyonwalker

I've been pretty sanguine about the layoffs at my company this past week. I'm surprised how sanguine I've been about it. That makes me wonder, why am I so sanguine, this time? And yes, it's "this time" because this isn't the first layoff we've had this year. We had one in January that also impacted my team heavily. And while there were none in 2024, there were two in 2023 and one in 2022.

I think an obvious dimension of the answer for why I'm so sanguine is that, after all of these rounds of layoffs, I've become numb to it. Each one of them has hit my department, along with others. Each one has resulted in the dismissal of decent workers who were getting the job done, along with some who weren't. It's always when good people get whacked that I take it harder. This time there were more good people whacked, as a proportion of those dismissed, than last time. That tells me I should be taking it harder. And that's where the numbing effect comes in.

It's possible I'll be less sanguine about this layoff as take more time to think about it. The effects of January's layoff got worse and worse for weeks as flawed planning and execution became clearer and smart, capable people chose to quit because they lost faith in Management. (In the tech industry we call the latter brightsizing, a play on words against the euphemism "right-sizing" that Corporate America created to put a positive spin on the term "downsizing".) Within two weeks every seasoned manager in my department quit.

Indeed I already see reason for growing alarm over this layoff. This layoff hit the sales team hard. Cutting sales people is a pretty extreme thing in business. Sales people generate the revenue! I mean, cutting development staff has consequences, too, but those consequences often take 12-18 months to materialize. Cutting sales staff means a hit to the company's numbers next quarter.

And it's not like Management was just "trimming the fat". We were already running lean. When you make significant cuts to a team that's lean, you're not just trimming fat— or excess capacity. You're trimming muscle. You're dismissing good people who were doing work that counted. And the people left can't just "pick up the slack". They weren't slacking.

Management even acknowledges that they cut people doing real work. They've told us to think in the coming days and weeks about what we won't do because it's just not high priority enough. And while they've phrased that with empathetic words and intonation, and framed it to imply that we individual contributors have agency, it's starting to stink like 5 day old fish.... Why are they asking us to figure out what work gets cut? That should have been part of their strategy in planning the layoff!

gwynnega

Some of my earliest publications (mostly poetry) were in feminist magazines that I subscribed to in the 1980s-'90s and read cover to cover every month--for example, Sojourner, off our backs, and Bridges. It was always a thrill to be included in these journals.

Another magazine I submitted to at that time was Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics. It was a wonderful journal; I still have some back issues. I sent them a short fiction piece called "Women's Studies" for their Education issue; an excerpt from an unpublished novel, it was inspired by a life-changing women's studies class I took in my senior year of high school. I had a vague recollection that they had accepted it but for some reason didn't end up publishing it. To my surprise, last night I stumbled upon this page from Rutgers University; they hold Heresies' archives, which includes my unpublished story! The Scope and Contents note reads: "Fiction, 'Women's Studies.' Three versions of the manuscript, tracking sheet, and correspondence. The story was accepted for publication, but did not appear in the final issue." I'm weirdly delighted. (This reminds me that at some point I really should try and find a library to archive my papers.)

yhlee

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: ecstatic

oursin

This week's bread: the Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), turned out nicely if perhaps a little coarser than the recipe anticipates (medium oatmeal has been for some reason a bit hard to come by).

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari), v nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, texture seemed a bit off, possibly the dough could have been a bit slacker?

Today's lunch: the roasted Mediterranean vegetable thing - whole garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, red bell pepper, baby peppers, baby courgettes and aubergine (v good), served with couscous + raisins.

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: sad

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: nauseated

rolanni

What went before: Coon Cat Happy Hour arrives just as I'm finishing up the new Chapter-by-Chapter. Tomorrow, I've got some planning, and some writing to do.

Everybody stay safe; I'll see you tomorrow.

Cookie break!

Sunday. Sunny and warm.

Breakfast was -- what was breakfast? Ah! I know -- banana and grape "fruit salad" whole grain toast with cream cheese. Lunch will be a sweet potato in one form or another. I'm favoring stir-fried with onion and garlic at the moment, and maybe the chicken I have left over.

I finished filling out the attendees form for the book fair, and was rewarded with a page offering up an email address, in case I had questions, which of course I had questions, so I wrote. And received a lightning response. I am relieved to learn that there will be strong young persons standing by at the site to help schlepp. Also, I may be accepted by the event's official retailer to be one of those present for whom they will graciously do the arithmetic, make the change, run the cards, and so forth. So I may not need to get a Stripe/Square. OTOH, p'rhaps I should. For Science. Or something. Oh. For Preparedness. Often more to the point than Science.

So, bottom line: It looks like the book fair is a Go, and now I need to bug poor Jason at Baen for table toppers, and post cards and ... stuff.

In cat news, I brought Firefly with me into the bedroom last night, and she tried to sleep on my ankles, but eventually retired to the top of the dresser, which -- at least she bore me company. Tali and Rook both checked in during the night, and I think Tali actually spent, like, twenty minutes up against my knee before Duty, or crunchies, Called.

Somewhat surprisingly, it's Tali who's decided that she can take on copilot duties.

I have a couple more letters to write, then lunch, then it's time to write. I get to write a Fun! Scene! as a reward for having finished the Chapter-by-Chapter yesterday.

Oh! My birthday present to my self was a purple earring keeper, which is sparkly and very nice, but it needed something. Turns out the something it needed was Minerva. Thanks BaltiCon!

How's everybody doing today?

Today's blog post title is from Steve Miller, "Swingtown"

conuly

I'm even not bad at decluttering, so long as it's okay to literally throw everything out. (They'll sooner or later send another copy of that late bill, don't worry! And you can always order another birth certificate, probably.)

But I'm not so good at routine maintenance. Does anybody have any already set up daily/weekly/monthly/periodically checklists for various areas of the house that they can recommend?

adrian_turtle

There’s a transit app called City Mapper, that I used to use. (For values of “used to” ending very emphatically this morning.) It showed a variety of transit routes based on where you were, comparing them with each other and with biking and walking. It plans a route based on the schedule and then uses GPS to say how far away the next buses are coming. Useful for “this bus is crowded, I’ll take the next one in 5 minutes” or “the next one won’t be for half an hour.”

This morning I got up early to get to Somerville because there were things I wanted to do in the attic before meeting people at 11. Thanks to City Mapper, I just wasted an hour trying to make a bus connection that does not exist. The bus is not going through that neighborhood today. That’s fine, I hope it’s enjoying itself at the block party on the other end of town, but I want the transit app to know where it is. It is not fit for purpose.

skygiants

We watched Scavengers Reign because it was enthusiastically recommended to

genarti as fun animated science fiction about being stranded on an alien planet with interesting alien biology. Which is true! This is not incorrect! Not Mentioned was the extent to which it is also very definitely lovingly animated body-and-survival horror ..... every time we watched we checked in with each other like 'still good to proceed? not too much eugughghhhhhh?' '[grimly] let's watch at least one more episode and see what happens,' and in this way we eventually crawled through all twelve episodes.

NONETHELESS I do think it was very good, once we acclimated to the eugughghhhhhh factor. (I ended up higher on it than

genarti did, in some part because I liked the ending for my favorite character better than she liked the ending for hers.) The first episode introduces you in media res to the several sets of people stranded on this planet that the show will be following:

- Sam and Ursula, an older man and younger woman traveling together, who've developed a plan to bring down their heavily damaged ship, the Demeter,, still in orbit around the planet with most of the crew in cryosleep; Ursula is fascinated by the planet and interested in learning more about it, while Sam is laser-focused on Getting Out Of There
- Azi, a motorcycle butch who's been in crop-growing survival mode supported by (a) Levi (unit), a pleasant manual labor robot whose behavior is becoming increasingly altered by some kind of planetary growth thriving in its innards
- Kamen, alone and still trapped in his escape pod, on the verge of death until he encounters a telepathic creature that brainwashes him into symbiotic/parasitic collaboration, and yet somehow his biggest concern is still His Divorce

Over the course of the story, we learn through flashbacks more about who these people were on the Demeter and what happened to strand them on the planet, while they cope (or don't) with the various challenges of the planet and the hope of escape provided by the Demeter. The real fears that the show evokes, IMO, are isolation and transformation -- being, yourself, transformed without your knowledge or consent, or, perhaps even worse, seeing your only companion changing into something unrecognizable and untrustworthy. These are things that scare me personally very much and so I often found this a very scary show! But -- like Annihilation or Alien Clay, the two other stories that Scavengers Reign reminded me of the most -- it also evokes the flip side of this fear, the beauty and wonder of the transformative and strange. The animators loved animating these weird alien ecosystems.

You can watch the trailer here:

Watch on YouTube

(The trailer is very clear and accurate to the amount of body horror in the show. From this you will be able to tell that we did not in fact watch the trailer before we began the show itself.)

A second season was planned, but has not been ordered and may never be made; IMO the first season does stand as complete but I would very much like to see the second season and I hope it happens.

rmc28

Cambridge Kodiaks B played our first WNIHL game yesterday, against Invicta Dynamics in Gillingham. We had seven players making their WNIHL debut, including me. As team manager I'm delighted, as newbie player I had pre-game nerves for the first time in months, and the biggest smile on my face afterwards.

We lost, but that's almost not the point. Here's a team I didn't even think would exist three months ago, and we've made it happen, creating opportunities for players to grow and develop. One game down, 19 to go (and a playoff game against the North division next May to aim for ...)

james_davis_nicoll

Bureau of Sabotage agent Jorj X. McKie is assigned a legal and ethical trap: a planet of victims, who, whether rescued or left to their impending doom, present a danger to the ConSentiency.

The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency, volume 2) by Frank Herbert

oursin

Happy birthday,

brewsternorth!

yhlee

(cross-posted to

communal_creators)

Earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries (includes partial glossary of terms)

Watch on YouTube

I know there are a lot of people who haaaaaate being forced to sit through video but since audio playback is inherent to the enterprise...This is under a minute, promise.

This is a brief demonstration of the opening of one of my compositions partially engraved (~sheet music typesetting) in Dorico. The two industry-standard engraving apps in media composition scoring are Dorico and Sibelius; Finale used to be a third but was sunsetted to much consternation.

If you come from classical music (especially classical orchestral music), you may be ??? about the score formatting. This is because scores for session orchestra and concert/classical orchestra have different formatting! (See part 0: preliminaries for more detail as to why). Differences for session orchestra you see here include:

- Score is in C (NOT a transposing score for the conductor - nota bene, transposing is "allowed" for octaves), but we won't have e.g. horn in F or trumpet in Bb. ( Read more... )

As for playback:

- Guess what, Dorico and Sibelius at the level of orchestral scores are spendy. :]

- I'm using NotePerformer, which is the standard higher-quality playback engine, especially if you don't have time to mock it up in the DAW (or you're an art/concert composer for whom a mockup is not part of your workflow). But that's also money (~$130 USD).

NotePerformer is pretty credible with a lot of orchestral instruments. You still have to massage its output. For example, in Sibelius [not shown] you can set playback to molto espressivo (LOTS OF FEELING) vs. senza espressivo (NO FEELINGS EVER!!!) (etc). My experience is that particular instruments can be less "real"-sounding and the "vocalists" (both SATB choir and associated "solo" voices) are absolutely terrible, as in "my vacuum cleaner sings more credibly than this" terrible.

Aside: There are some good vocal VST libraries for specific use cases. I hate that I am often able to straight-up identify "Oh yeah, XYZ floating ethereal ~Celtic Twilight vibes soprano 'ahhh' ululation in this trailer/score/whatever was $SPECIFIC_VST_LIBRARY" because, apparently, I have no life; but this is not unusual in this field.

I know at least one full-time composer/orchestrator/musician who straight-up bounces NotePerformer output and then processes that in the DAW (reverb etc) and, you know, this person makes a living doing this. So that's one route one can take.

Why, you ask, can't we just export this score-stuff into a DAW with all the fancy (...spendy) VST instruments and "paste in" nicer/more individualized instruments? Dorico (and Sibelius) do in fact export to MIDI and MusicXML. [1] This is a very reasonable question that will be the topic of the next walkthrough (part 2), mainly because it's a surprisingly (annoying) complicated topic as to why this is rarely straightforward. (Let me tell you all about negative track delay...)

[1] Missed these glossary items earlier! ( brief explanations of MIDI and MusicXML )

Happy to answer questions, although I have no idea if anyone else finds this interesting. :p

vvalkyri

I'm struck by how bad I seem to be at making one-on-one plans nowadays. So reliant on being in the same place at the same time with people when I'm much more likely to have an evening free and not know what to do with it.

Tara and Liam are off to Amsterdam or close to it. I hadn't seen them in ages and hadn't been all that much in touch. I haven't been going to the physical therapist in columbia.

I feel like I have much less excuse with pluckedkiwi and Girlinpink. It was only 23 minutes to get home. They leave to move to New Zealand in the extremely near future. Or open house today and I'm only ended at 9:00 but they told me to still show up. I kept noting that they were yawning and they kept saying it was good to see me. I left 2 hours ago but somehow I'm still up.

Others who have left or cathy and Gary to Scotland and my high school friend Faisal and his wife to Portugal.

I spent a bunch of time the other night talking with a lifeguard in Spanish who was from ecuador, which reminds me that Dan is moving to ecuador. But he was planning that long before this election.

(Trying to explain trumpism and Reaganomics in Spanish was an experience. I eventually had to leave to English.)

I find myself wondering how stupid I am that I'm not looking to get out.

Unfortunately it's not particularly any better for Jews anywhere else.

In other news, it was really really good to see people at Simon's party, which is part of why I got there so late to p&g. So it would have been good to catch up with barchan once he got there but I was on my way out

I have to be at Glen Echo in less than 12 hours for a wedding
And I'm still wide awake and I still don't know what I'm wearing. And I would have liked to have time to go swimming beforehand especially since I won't be going to Acro first

Speaking of acro, I fell yesterday, and many kudos to my partner who managed to keep me safe. No biscuit to either of us for not making sure a specific person was identified to spot..

sholio

I fell down a rabbit hole this evening reading the comment reblogs on this Tumblr post on 90s TV. I ended up deciding to copy some of them here to save them from the inevitable linkrot and post decay.

https://www.tumblr.com/laylainalaska/794609119262900224

Original post:

I don't know what those '90s sci Fi TV writers were putting in their shows but I wish they'd start doing it again

#they de-escalated the stakes every once in a while so that you can see what the characters are like when they're not under duress
#they made statements about the world through allegory
#they invested in depicting developing friendships and relationships between their characters
#they assumed that their audience was paying attention to the screen and wanted to be there
#and that their audience has enough intelligence to follow narrative clues and even sometimes to predict the ending
#dont even get me started on this i will go ALL DAY

I don't agree with every single point in every reblog. I also think there's quite a bit of TV now that still does most or all of this, though usually it's the dramas and procedurals rather than scifi, and a lot that's not great about 90s and earlier TV. But there is also a lot of food for thought in here, so I just threw a bunch of the comments into this post to mull over.

The asterisks separate out each different reblog; basically each is its own separate comment, generally in dialogue with the original post rather than each other.

Thoughts are welcome!

( Under the cut )

calimac

I went out to a concert on Saturday evening. It was a local community orchestra doing Baroque pieces with a chamber ensemble, and I'll have more to say about that after my review of it is published in the Daily Journal next week.

Here I wish to point out that this is the first time I've left home for anything other than a grocery etc. run or a medical appointment in over a month, since August 10. That it's slow season for concerts isn't the reason for this, it just made it easier. The reason is the covid I contracted on the 10th, which showed up a couple days later. The infection was over in less than two weeks, but the effects on my general energy and on respiratory and food-ingesting systems have been lasting.

The difficulties with the last of these mean I'm not yet ready to approach dining in a restaurant. I can't eat much food and I need much more water than a restaurant is likely to serve. So, very unusually, I ate a quick dinner at home (B. was out at mass) before going to the concert, which fortunately was local. I forgot that there isn't a light at Alma and Channing, but otherwise I remembered how to get where I was going.

I found the concert-going experience a bit stressful, though the music was good. I may be ready to do this again in another couple of weeks, which is when the concert season really gets going.

sovay

I had not thought there were any meteor showers of consequence this month, but it seems that the swift pale streak between the telephone wires southwest of Cassiopeia belonged to the September Epsilon Perseids, so named despite their radiant in β Persei, the demon-star of Algol. I can hope it was not wildfire drift that accounted for the candle-tint of the half-moon, which was doing its autumnal trick of hanging like a lantern in the not yet leafless trees. The last of this summer's monarchs flew just before sunset, the twenty-second of her name.

Current Music: Suzanne Vega, "Left of Center"

fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-09-14-ratelimit.html

Last year I wrote a pair of articles about ratelimiting:

Recently, Chris "cks" Siebenmann has been working on ratelimiting HTTP bots that are hammering his blog. His articles prompted me to write some clarifications, plus a few practical anecdotes about ratelimiting email.

( Read more... )

lovelyangel

Portland Saturday Market
September 13, 2025
Nikon Z8 • NIKKOR Z 85mm f/1.8 S
f/2 @ 85mm • 1/1000s • ISO 100

It’s just about time for me to start assembling my annual photo calendars. And, as usual, I worry about whether I have enough decent photos for production. Usually I create three calendars, but because of changes in Jenni’s work, I no longer have to create a third calendar. That should make photo selection easier.

Anyway, the cutoff date for calendar photos is the end of September, and I thought I should take one last attempt to snag photos. Today was a perfect day for me to do a quick trip to Portland Saturday Market. The forecast for early afternoon was sunny in the mid 70s °F in Portland.

( Photos, Below The Cut )

sartorias

We've packed what we can pack. The movers come Monday to take our library away. We will live out of boxes and suitcase for a week, then depart altogether while the floor peeps come in.

With library going away I've resorted more to TV, and I couldn't resist going back to watch Nirvana in Fire yet again. Between my last rewatch and this time, some team of actual humans (No AI) had gone through the, ah, somewhat problematical subtitles and cleaned up spelling, grammar, and meaning, clarifying a lot of small stuff that watchers who did not know Mandarin could only guess at.

It's just brilliant. Even though on this watch I see the problems with the end starting a bit sooner than I remembered, and I still believe that one more episode would have pulled together all the dangling bits and tightened up the emotional arcs, still the overall emotional velocity absolutely rams you straight through and beyond. For a couple of days I couldn't do anything but go back to look at scenes (some for like the twentieth time, or more). Not perfect, but even after ten years, for me it's the best television show ever made.

Well, back to your regularly schedule chaos.

shati

Normally I go silent on here for months because I randomly forgot how to write in full sentences, but this time it was just because things got too miserable -- politics, A/C breaking, work, health, other health, other health, health insurance, medical bills, other medical bills. I think I only ever demonstrate intellectual curiosity and a love of learning in response to illness and injury (perhaps a side effect of inflammation!), so like: --How's it going, Shati? --Well, I've been practicing a lot and my Spanish listening comprehension has gotten way better, I can watch almost all of the Latam A:TLA dub without having to pause or look words up. --Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.

Things are still in multiple kinds of limbo on the health front, to the point where I basically can't leave my house again right now for more than short car errands, but I guess at least work is getting less busy and I have A/C again.

Back on my birthday I treated myself to the international shipping fees on a couple of books I'm not sure I'm ready to read yet, Los días del venado and Los días de la sombra by Liliana Bodoc. If I like them I'll probably be really mad at myself for not just buying the whole series, but the shipping was already more than I'd normally spend on my birthday, and I may never get around to reading them because they don't have library due dates. I was just excited to come across fantasy originally written in Argentinian Spanish; most of what I can find is either translated to Spanish or from Europe. If any of you have read them (in any language) I'm curious if you liked them! On the rest of the book front, I basically stopped reading while work was really busy and I was working hours late every day, so I'm halfway through a bunch of books that I'll have to return to the library and then borrow again on another trip.

( politics )

firecat

The New Yorker is trying to convince me that Bluesky has become annoying and everyone’s back on Xitter. Not linking because it’s paywalled. True or false?

I never got the hang of Twitter. I have similar problems with Bluesky. I don’t need a social site to deliver me more links. I want conversation. Is conversation dead? Where is it? (I know there’s some here…)

I miss Usenet, lol

conuly

I'll try to remember to upload the pic later. It's not a very good picture, but then, I was wary of trying to get too close.

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

( Read more... )

lovelyangel

Living Room, South End
iPhone 13 mini photo

This morning I finished vacating the big living room / dining room space. This room has not been this empty since I moved in at the end of 2002.

Living Room, North End
iPhone 13 mini photo

For reasons, I can’t take a picture of the garage right now, but there’s plenty of room remaining, and there is a good-sized walkway down the middle. The family room and my bedroom, on the other hand, are dense with towers of boxes. We can ride this out for a month. I’m relieved that the big room is (finally) empty and ready for the flooring crew on Monday.

The most interesting thing in the garage was the spread of all my photography studio equipment (excluding the large backdrop stand).

Photography Studio Equipment
iPhone 13 mini photo

canyonwalker

Episode 6.12 of Better Call Saul is entitled Waterworks. It's the second-to-last episode in the series. The final four episodes of BCS are structured as a flash-forward to Saul's life after the events of Breaking Bad. It's an interesting end cap to BB as BCS was a prequel to BB. Now, with these final four episodes it's a both a prequel and a sequel.

While the idea of a wraparound prequel/sequel is interesting, BCS's execution is lacking. The first two of these four episodes were so off-putting that I simply got up and walked away at the start of the third. The opening credits of ep. 6.12 started rolling and I decided I didn't care anymore. (Cue the Seven Deadly Words: Why do I care about these characters?) It's only now, 4 months later, that I decided to see how it ends.

Episode 6.12 isn't the end. That would be 6.13. But 6.12 helps get us there. And it takes too damn long doing it.

In Waterworks we see Kim's new life. She divorced Jimmy/Saul after their con against Howard inadvertently got him killed by a drug lord. She announced her intent to divorce in ep. 6.09. Here we see that it was official. And Jimmy was a jerk about it, treating her like crap at the time.A character who previous was partly sympathetic, even while also flawed, turn into an all-out jerk is a key reason for uttering those Seven Deadly Words.)

At the end of the flash-back scene where Kim gets Jimmy to sign the divorce papers, she meets Jesse Pinkman, portrayed by a visibly aged Aaron Paul. I saw flashback because even though this scene is in the timeline of the main BCS series, it's a jump back from these jump-forward episodes... and because Aaron Paul is now, like 18 years older than he would've been playing an age-appropriate Jesse Pinkman.

"How do you do, fellow kids?" - when a character is unbelievable (Sep 2025)

"How do you do, fellow kids?" - when a character is unbelievable (Sep 2025)

The scene is so bad. Paul is so visibly too old to be playing a much younger Pinkman. He even sounds like an old man rather than the early-20-something Pinkman. It's like that parody scene from 30 Rock where cynical producers try to cast Steve Buscemi as a teenager. The writers here would've done better to leave clearly middle-age Aaron Paul out.

Anyway... I was saying the episode was too long. In Kim's new life approximately 5 years later she's living in a small town in Florida with a guy named Glen (unclear if they're married or just BF/GF). It's a completely banal existence. She works at a sprinkler company named Waterworks doing marketing. Her colleagues and friends are all dull people. They spend the day gossiping about trivial stuff and worrying about whether Miracle Whip™ tastes as good in a tuna fish salad as real mayonnaise.

I felt genuinely sad for Kim, previously a talented and driven lawyer, living such a stultifying life. I know I would go crazy in such a situation. And while the episode could've made this point in a few minutes, they stretch it out 3x as long as it needs to be. They took it from "Wow, I feel sad for Kim," to, "Now you're just torturing us."

Ep. 6.12 also picks up on a scene that was left as a cliffhanger at the end of 6.11. Saul is robbing a cancer-stricken rich person whom he and his buddies/patsies in Omaha have targeted in their identity theft scam. Not content just to steal the innocent man's identity and financial data, though, Saul starts robbing his house. WHY? As I've noted before, Saul doesn't need the money. He is just being evil now.

This robbery scene also goes on too long. Not only does it become painful for us viewer, but Saul gets trapped by complications from being in the victim's house too long. These complications ultimately lead to Saul's assumed identity as Gene Takavic unraveling. He is recognized as Saul Goodman, fugitive wanted on charges of drug dealing and felony murder, and flees ahead of the police.

athenais

I am on day five of a miserable cold and I can't use my brain for anything but pretty pictures. I interrupt my viewing of two C-dramas and a K-drama to show you this beautiful rose in my garden. Glamis Castle is so pretty and has old-school glamour. It also smells lovely.

solarbird

Charlie Kirk was a vicious racist, misogynist, and anti-queer activist working to recruit anyone he could into his beliefs, someone who wanted LGBT people killed, who considered empathy a “new age” weakness and believed – and said outright – that any Black woman holding any position was too intellectually inferior to have it and so “stole” it from a white man.

And making all that into a durable political career became his life’s work.

Fuck Charlie Kirk. I’m glad he’s dead.

That he said and did all this vileness while dressed in a nice suit and in calm tones changes not one single goddamn thing, a fact which fucking nearly nobody has learned in over decades of the christofascist right performing the same. goddamn. routine. Say the most vicious, nasty, filthy, false accusations, slander and defame like a motherfucker, slime everything you can reach with contemptable evil, but do it all as a “gadfly” white heterosexual Christian man in a suit in careful tones and suddenly you’re “doing politics right.”

Fuck that, and for good measure, fuck Charlie Kirk.

He also openly desired bringing back public executions and said that children should watch them, and guess what?

He got his wish.

Somehow, though, pointing that out makes me the bad guy. Hilarious.

As always, his fellow-travellers were all-in on blaming trans people until it turned out his assassin was a groyper, a fan of human shitstain Nick Fuentes who hated Charlie Kirk for not being racist enough and misogynist enough. Kirk moving even further towards the fash in immigrant hate and anti-Black racism kept the peace between the two groups for a few years, but, well, Kirk saw the handwriting on the wall about the Epstein files and pushed for their release, and that was that.

“Oh noes, what are we to do about fascist on fascist violence?!” How about nothing. Yeah. Nothing sounds good. Or, I dunno, honour his last wish and release the Epstein files? That’d be nice.

But of course, I kid. Ha.

What is it, what is it, what’s the golden rule? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Well, an asshole did unto him exactly what he wanted done unto others, and I think that’s close enough.

So one last time: fuck you, Charlie Kirk. And you too, Fuentes, for good measure. And fuck you too, Gavin Newsom and anyone else who follows your example for eulogising and whitewashing this evil vicious fucker’s repugnant malignancy of a legacy.

He only got exactly what he wanted for people like me.

The irony, it is not delicious.

But it is, I think, entirely deserved.

Source. Source. Source.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

yhlee

Watch on YouTube

Dreaming Robots' Electric Eel Wheel 6.1 e-spinner with some sacrificial Rambouillet/Gotland wool blend. Sorry about the mess; too hot to go outside with this. I don't claim this is good spinning, just a brief demonstration of Getting The E-Spinner To Do A Thing.

selki

Yes, I did post once in June, but I want to circle back to Memorial Day weekend since I went to and volunteered for two SFF conventions (virtually) that weekend, and I want to talk a little more about SFF and reading and the other convention since then.

Balticon: a nearly-local convention with a big virtual track. I attended a few virtual panels/events, and virtual-assisted a little. I loved getting to hear the Baltimore Gamer Symphony perform -- the tech support for it, including streaming, went really well, and they sounded great! I ended up dropping my Patreon support for one author because her comments on a topic she should know about were so head-shakingly wrong and self-contradicting (wrong in opposite ways, within 5 minutes). I wish her well, but there are so many others to support. I'll probably virtual-volunteer again for Balticon, because I want cons to keep having strong virtual elements.
Wiscon: all-virtual, and many great panels, although one was really angering (and yes I left comments: the moderator trashed the panel subject, in which those of us who were attending should have been presumed to have be interested). I zoom-hosted one. The most fun was the exhilarating fanvid watch party, so well curated, with a super lively chat in Discord. Next year will be virtual too, and I expect to volunteer again.
Reading/listening/podcasting: I did a lot of reading this spring and summer to vote for the Hugos. I also guested on one podcast soon after the finalists announcement to talk about the Hugo Awards (overall) and the best novel finalist I'd read at that point (which ended up with my top vote), and on another podcast's later three episodes about the Best Short Story, Novella, and Novel finalists. We all had a lot of fun and were able to speak both enthusiastically and critically without yucking others' yums. Anti-colonialism ran rampant through a lot of what I read and liked. I loved Ray Nayler's phrase "extraction zone" in *The Tusks of Extinction*, describing everywhere but the few rich cities/people that want and extract more and more and more from everyone else. I think the phrase "extractive capitalism" helps a bit when I'm trying to talk about the most harmful end-of-the-spectrum of capitalism without being dismissed as a wild-eyed radical.
WorldCon: I virtual volunteered again, virtual-hosting many events especially in the early hours to allow panelists from around the world, especially Africa, to participate. That was important to me. Virtual attendees came from 43 countries, and 12 countries had 6 or more attendees each! I was really happy that so many countries participated. I tried not to overdo it, but signed up to do an extra hosting session at the last minute for at least one that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't stepped up, and it was a great panel. Many of the panels I hosted/attended were good. I signed up to virtual-volunteer for the next WorldCon. I was pretty happy about the Hugo Award winners. But, I was disappointed at the Hugo award announcement messups, the late apology of Seattle WorldCon, and the inadequate apology of the announcers (see comment).
Capclave next weekend: Nope, even though it's local and short-story oriented, a rare bird. I was thinking "Would it really be much higher risk to attend a few panels masked than to go shopping masked?" and went so far as to look at their website and the programming, but there is nothing at all about safety or accessibility, and one weekend away, their Code of Conduct page is literally "TBD". I can see what they're prioritizing, so I shall prioritize myself instead.

oursin

Seem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:

Should my girlfriend stop picking up other people’s litter?

(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).

As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.

skygiants

Broadly speaking, I liked Star Wars: The Mask of Fear, the first book in a planned trilogy of Star Wars Political Thrillers pitched as Andor Prequels, For Fans Of Andor.

This one is set right after the declaration of the Empire and is mostly about the separate plans that Bail Organa and Mon Mothma pursue in order to try and limit their government's whole-scale slide into fascism, with -- as we-the-readers of course know -- an inevitable lack of success. It is of course impossible not to feel the weight of Current Events on every page; the book came out in February '25 and so must have been complete in every respect before the 2024 elections, but boy, it doesn't feel like it. On the other hand, it's also impossible not to feel 2016 and Hillary Clinton looming large over the portrayal of Mon Mothma as the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes.

That said, as a character in her own right, I am very fond of Mon Mothma, the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes. With her genuine belief in the ideals of democracy and her practiced acceptance of the various ethical compromises that working within the system requires, she makes for a great sympathetic-grayscale political-thriller protagonist. I also like the portrayal of her marriage in this period as something that is, like, broadly functional! sometimes a source of support! always number three or four on her priority list which she never quite gets around to calling him to tell him she's back on planet after a secret mission before the plot sweeps her off in a new direction, oops, well, I guess he'll find out when she's been released from prison again!

Anyway, her main plot is about trying to get a bill passed in the Senate that will limit Palpatine's power as Emperor, which involves making various shady deals with various powerful factions; meanwhile, Bail Organa has a separate plot in which he's running around trying to EXPOSE the LIES about the JEDI because he thinks that once everyone knows the Jedi were massacred without cause, Palpatine will be toppled by public outrage immediately. Both of them think the other's plan is kind of stupid and also find the other kind of annoying at this time, which tbh I really enjoy. I love when people don't like each other for normal reasons and have to work together anyway. I also like the other main wedge between them, which is that both of them were briefly Politically Arrested right before the book begins, and by chance and charisma Bail Organa joked his way out of it and came out fine while Mon Mothma went through a harrowing and physically traumatic experience that has left her with lingering PTSD, and Mon Mothma knows this and Bail Organa doesn't and this colors all their choices throughout the book.

Bail Organa's plot is also sort of hitched onto a plot about an elderly Republic-turned-Imperial spymaster who's trying to find the agents she lost at the end of the war, and her spy protege who accidentally ends up infiltrating the Star Wars pro-Palpatine alt-right movement, both of which work pretty well as stories about people who find themselves sort of within a system as the system is changing underneath them.

And then there is the Saw plotline. This is my biggest disappointment in the book, is that the Saw plotline is not actually a Saw plotline; it's about a Separatist assassin who ends up temporarily teaming up with Saw for a bit as he tries to figure out who he should be assassinating now that the war is over, and we see Saw through his eyes, mostly pretty judgmentally. I do not object to other characters seeing Saw Gerrera pretty judgmentally, but it feels to me like a bit of a cop-out in a book that's pitched as 'how Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera face growing fascism and start down the paths that will eventually lead to the Rebel Alliance' to once again almost entirely avoid giving Saw a point of view to see his ideology from within. But Star Wars as franchise is consistently determined not to do that. Ah, well; maybe one of the later two books in this trilogy will have a meaty interiority-heavy Saw plotline and I'll eat my words.

(NB: I have not yet seen S2 of Andor and I do plan to do so at some point, please don't tell me anything about it!)

james_davis_nicoll

Six works new to me: two fantasy (one a roleplaying game), four science fiction. The roleplaying game is part of a series but otherwise, they all seem to be stand-alone.

Books Received, September 6 — September 12

Poll #33608 Books Received, September 6 — September 12

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent (October 2025)
6 (15.0%)

Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey (November 2025)
16 (40.0%)

Champions of Chaos by Calum Colins, et al
1 (2.5%)

Slow Gods by Claire North (November 2025)
19 (47.5%)

The Divine Gardener’s Handbook: Or What to Do if Your Girlfriend Accidentally Turns Off the Sun by Eli Snow (August 2026)
19 (47.5%)

Death Engine Protocol: Better Dying Through Science by Margret A. Treiber (April 2025)
11 (27.5%)

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

Cats!
27 (67.5%)

rolanni

What went before: Tools down for the day. The WIP currently weighs in at +/-72,300 words. Today is one of those days where I'm starting to panic because I have too much story to fit in the space that's left. Tomorrow, I'll be despondent because I'll have too little story to fit the space that's left.

Don't mind me.

I had originally kinda sorta intended to go to Belfast tomorrow to visit the Saturday Farmer/Makers Market, but I'm feeling a tad oppressed by All The Things, so, instead of going out, I'll stay in and, er, Cope. And, after all, next Friday I get to drive to Bath, so that'll be a nice outing. Sigh.

I have been accepted as -- I dunno. An author? A vendor? An author-vendor? at the Bangor Authors' Book Fair and Literary Festival in December, which has brought on a wave of What Were You Thinking, and wondering if I ought to bow out now and let somebody else have my space, but! There are All Those Books in the Basement that have got to be gotten rid of somehow. Problem being I'd need to load in (hardcover) books, load out (hardcover) books, woman the table, take payment, make change . . . and I keep forgetting that I'm 73 and have a bad back, and no longer a mere child of 48, with a partner to share the lifting. And it's not like I'll sell more than six books, tops, because -- science fiction that's not Star Wars, and has Netflix made a movie?

So! I'll sleep on that, I guess.

Firefly's style of gathering the crew together for Happy Hour is very low key. She kind of mooches in around 5, checks to see am I busy, offers a few brush-bys and takes up a position on the supply chest or the observation table. The other two wander in over the next few minutes, check in with me and take their stations. I'm not alone, here, and I can feel their presence, but nobody's yelling.

So, anyhow, tools down. I'll get the kids Happy Hour'd, pour myself a glass of wine and come back to the desk for half-an-hour to get the bill-paying queued up.

Everybody have a good evening. Stay safe; I'll see you tomorrow.

* * *

"Will he offer me his hunger? And will he starve without me?"
Counsel for separating the artist from the art rests.

Saturday. Grey and cool. Went to bed early, slept badly, got up early. All of which seems very unfair, but here we are. I feel that I would sleep better if any of the current clowder would sleep with me, but they're still processing their own loss, and without Trooper to gather everybody up and head for the bedroom, they sort of settle near each other and dream together.

Breakfast was two eggs, scrambled with onion, cheese, chicken; toast and sour cherry jam. Dinner will be left over noodles.

Having studied on this for six months, I am offering the quasi-expert opinion that the Second Year is Worse. Not that last year was a picnic, but systems that had been in place were still working. This year, I'm seeing the creep of entropy. Systems need care, after all, and there are So. Many. tiny subroutines to tend to. It really did take two of us to run this joint. Moreso because our real lives and our creative lives were so closely braided.

I had used to think that our System for Writing, for instance, in which we talked out ideas, ramifications, tried out bits of dialog, went for long rides, saying nothing, until one of us said, "But, What IF..." -- I used to think that was pretty inefficient. Fun, but inefficient.

The present system, where I have to write everything as a Try Out, and then manually sort it through the filter of the Intended Result? Not only sucks, but takes more time. Our chaotic little subsystem was actually a dream of efficiency.

Well. Live and learn.

So, today! Today, we change out cat boxes, and do laundry, and catch up the Chapter-by-Chapter, and -- write.

The unsettled night did produce a couple of ideas which might allow me to do the December book fair without loss of life, so I'll be writing some emails today.

Regarding this ^^ -- I have a handtruck. It's swell, and I know how to use it. Steve and I used to have tables at cons, as SRM Publisher. I have packed books in and packed books out, made change and all the rest of it. This is how I know how much work it is. Summing up: I do not (NOT) need a handtruck. Thank you for your attention to this detail.

Firefly and Rook are playing tag. This is good. Firefly is harder for Rook to catch than Tali, not because Firefly is faster (objectively, Tali is probably fastest), but because Firefly cheats, vanishes into doorways and waits for Rook to speed by, then darts off in the other direction, trailing nah-nah-nahs like red balloons.

And I think that's all I've got this morning, if I want to get the rest of the to-do done.

What's everybody doing today?

This morning's blog post title brought to you by Meatloaf and Ellen Foley, "You took the words right out of mouth"

sovay

I am glad to read that a classicist on Tumblr whom I do not know feels validated by a poem I wrote a dozen years ago, because she's right in turn about the linkage of ideas that led to its writing: the evocatio of Juno from Veii in 396 BCE, the evocatio of Tanit from Carthage in 146 BCE, the assimilation of Tanit to Juno Caelestis rather than Ištar-starred Venus, the self-fulfilling loop of enmity that a double-thefted goddess makes of the Aeneid and under it all the irony that Vergil even in his Renaissance aspect as magician could not foresee, that Carthage-haunted Rome was itself built on the needfire of the most famously sacked city of the ancient world, Troy whose gods Aeneas salvaged from the night of its destruction and now we remember Rome as the epitome of decadence, the eternally, contagiously falling city.

Also I had just been turned down by a housing situation that I had painfully wanted, but the classical stuff was all still bang on.

Current Music: Frank Turner, "The Next Storm"

Profile

blue shark of friendliness

January 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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19	20	21	22	23	24	25
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Page Summary

calimac - went to a book discussion
james_davis_nicoll - Transit
canyonwalker - Why so Sanguine about this Layoff?
gwynnega - a blast from my past
yhlee - a 3-ply yarn
minoanmiss - HALLOWEEEN
oursin - Culinary
minoanmiss - I need to write about Cassandra again
minoanmiss - ugh
rolanni - The music's callin'
conuly - So, the way I grew up I'm actually shockingly good at deep cleaning
adrian_turtle - City Mapper
skygiants - (no subject)
rmc28 - Milestone
james_davis_nicoll - The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency, volume 2) by Frank Herbert
oursin - (no subject)
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 14-09-2025
yhlee - sampled orchestral mockups + music production: part 1: brief demo of engraving software + playback
vvalkyri - Marking another
sholio - Tumblr meta on 90s TV
calimac - went to a concert
sovay - On the edge and off the avenue
fanf - a few notes on ratelimiting
lovelyangel - Portland Saturday Market 2025
sartorias - September is nearly half over...
shati - (no subject)
firecat - We need to talk
conuly - I saw a whole family of deer the other day!
lovelyangel - Library Update #10: Empty Room
canyonwalker - Better Call Saul 6.12: Waterworks
athenais - The last rose of summer
solarbird - charlie kirk got his wish, why are they complaining?
yhlee - not good spinning demo: EEW 6.1
selki - Memorial Day and Onward ;-)
oursin - Rubbish
skygiants - (no subject)
james_davis_nicoll - Books Received, September 6 — September 12
rolanni - I bet you say that to all the boys
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 13-09-2025
sovay - We just ended up clutching at the empty rituals like gamblers clutching long odds

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