batwrangler: Just for me. (Default)
([personal profile] batwrangler May. 10th, 2026 04:18 am)
Murderbot 8
Martha Wells

Murderbot is still and always love.
torachan: onoda sakamichi from yowamushi pedal with a huge smile (onoda smile)
([personal profile] torachan May. 9th, 2026 07:14 pm)
1. Over the past couple years we've been trying to walk more places around town rather than automatically hopping in the car, and I'm very pleased with myself today for doing all my errands walking. We still have rhubarb in the freezer and I wanted to make a pie today, so I stopped at the neighborhood market I pass on my morning walk every day, but they were out of pie crust, so when I went out to the farmers market later, I continued on to the larger supermarket since I was about halfway there at that point and was able to get pie crust (and it was on sale!). When I got home, Carla reminded me about the Neosporin I was going to get for her toe, but I'd forgotten it. So I went out later this afternoon to the pharmacy and got that. Both the supermarket and the pharmacy are about a mile away, so it's not a long walk at all, but would previously have been just an automatic drive. Instead I got some walking in and made progress on my audiobook.

2. At Costco yesterday Carla got some croissants, and they come in a pack of twelve, so we'll be having sandwiches a lot for the next few days lol. Anyway, she made some tuna salad for dinner and added all sorts of things into it and it was probably the best tuna salad I've ever had. Looking forward to having some more for lunch tomorrow.

3. Molly testing out a new box.

marginaliana: A cat typing on a laptop. (Cat + computer)
([personal profile] marginaliana May. 8th, 2026 07:46 pm)
Things:

--Two joggers went past me the other day and all I caught was the phrase 'the touch grass doctrine.' I love the idea of it being a doctrine, like a religious precept.

--Yesterday in the subway station two girls were brainstorming how to convince a friend of the merits of polyamory - which, fine, you do you, but their proposed arguments were a) when you get tired of your boyfriend you can go hang out with your girlfriend and b) hanging out with your girlfriend will make your boyfriend want to hang out with you both because you're both hot, so he will stop being annoying. This seems to me to be... not the best angle to take. Then again, if you're college age, maybe this is convincing reasoning?

--I actually like everyone from this series of Taskmaster. This seems impossible. Usually there's at least one of them that I want to punch. Very weird sensation. No one to root against.

--Relatedly, I was walking through the park the other day and saw a robin with its dinner and mentally went "I found a worm!" in a deeply self-satisfied manner.

--Wrote another little ficlet:

North (478 words) by marginaliana
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sorted (Website) RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ben Ebbrell/Mike Huttlestone, Ben Ebbrell & Mike Huttlestone
Characters: Mike Huttlestone, Ben Ebbrell
Additional Tags: take it as gen or preslash as you like, pretentious metaphors
Summary: Compasses captivate Mike.
jesse_the_k: Closeup of my black dog's soulful brown eye (shadow Left Eye)
([personal profile] jesse_the_k May. 9th, 2026 06:44 pm)

It’s been three weeks since Shadow’s freedom day, after eight weeks of crate rest to ensure no stray heartworms clogged up his blood supply.

I’d hoped that on 15 April he’d spurt out the back door and explore every blade of grass and clump of dirt in our back yard. Instead, he’s deliberately lowering his DEFCON level in response to gentle encouragement and constant treats.

Recent achievements:

  • Leaving his crate and curling up in his own bed at the foot of ours. (He loves his crate; we only close the door when we leave him in the house)
  • Responding to my Shadow, come! by moving to me and sitting within easy reach of my treat-filled fingers.
  • Walking on our nearby bike path, which offers humans of all ages, other dogs, bicycles, ebikes, emotos, skateboards, power scooters — in general a hell of a lot of stimulation.
  • Walking briskly without stopping to sniff, attached to my powerchair (MyGuy transfers the connection from his lead to mine after we’ve left the house, because the ramp exit is super narrow.)
  • Permitting me to scratch his butt while MyGuy fondles his ears.
  • Meeting two of the gentler neighborhod dogs — just nose to nose; hasn’t done the full tip-to-tail sniff
  • Very politely greeting visitors, sniffing their fingers and returning to his crate.

Slow but steady, in the correct direction.

Today I discovered, at approximately 6 p.m., that The Gym is only open until 5 p.m. on Saturdays. We had had a fairly lazy day at home and I had been putting off My Own Gym until after I had talked A through their (second!) Liftoff Phase One workout; I spent the approach going "... this car park is suspiciously empty, I don't think it can possibly be just that the school isn't on today..." and, yep, closed already.

Read more... )

shivver: (Much Ado)
([personal profile] shivver May. 9th, 2026 01:02 pm)
My husband just came downstairs, walked into my room, and said, "F&#$ you!"

Apparently, he cannot get Dugga Doo out of his head.

(And yes, I did intend for this post's title to rhyme with the previous one's.)
Theme Prompt: #300 – Ceremony
Title: Too many minds already
Fandom: Dire Bound - Sable Sorensen
Rating/Warnings: (Language, violence, mature content, spoilers?) None
Bonus: (Yes/No - did you meet the bonus goal for this challenge?) Yes
Word Count: 626
Summary: (Optional) The one where Meryn ties the knot with Stark. And gets more than she bargained for in the process due to Dire Wolf magic.

Too many minds already )
lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
([personal profile] lightreads May. 9th, 2026 02:23 pm)
City of Others

3/5. Urban fantasy about a middle manager in a government agency in Singapore intended to keep the supernatural elements of society quiet.

Okay. Kind of Rivers of London but with a queer protagonist and far less voicey. Though it turns out the voiciness goes a long way to selling all the infodumping you need to do in a fantasy like this.

A good time, with a particularly interesting set of magical ideas. But I suspect someone made him cut, like, 25% of his manuscript or something, because there’s a lot of jerky pacing and weird gaps where I’m like ‘wait, we just met this person and now she’s a core part of the team and we all care about her? Did I miss something?’ Also, it’s all trying just that bit too hard to tie into a neat thematic bow (grief and letting go). Very debut, is what I mean. Naturally it is going to be a series; I might keep going, I might not.
shivver: (Much Ado)
([personal profile] shivver May. 9th, 2026 10:35 am)
My husband is currently doing a run in "Kingdom of Loathing" (a totally weird webgame that he's been playing for over two decades now; I played it as well and loved it, but didn't care to invest the time that it needs to be played well and stopped playing it after about four years) and he sent me an item description over Slack, with this exchange:

Him: Gabagool is not the most delicious member of the salumi-like meat family, but it is the most fun to say.
Me: That is so true. Sounds like a Doctor Who monster.

And then I thought for a moment about why it sounded like a DW monster, and I realized I was thinking about the Interstellar Song Contest's performer Dugga Doo. So, of course, I pulled up the video on YouTube.

And THEN I remembered Gallifrey One. You see, at the end of every Gally, the penultimate event is "The Year in Review", which is an hour-long video montage of things that happened during the past year -- usually clips of news events and interviews and such with the actors that played the Doctor or the companions.

This year, however, started with the entire Dugga Doo video, which everyone loved and we were all singing along. And then the video said:

"And now! One full hour of Dugga Doo!"

Best "Year in Review" ever!!

(No, it really wasn't a full hour of Dugga Doo. But it was hilarious.)
oursin: Painting of Clio Muse of History by Artemisia Gentileschi (Clio)
([personal profile] oursin May. 9th, 2026 04:12 pm)

Though I suspect it's more just 'did not bother to do any research'.

Two pieces in today's Guardian Saturday.

The one about blokes being (IMHO) totally scammed over testosterone doesn't appear to be online yet, but I, who have done my time in the noisome pits of sex-related quackery, was going: this is the latest round of what used to be rejuvenation operations of various kinds (HAI! WB Yeats!), the Blakoe energiser, electrical belts, devices to prevent the leakage of the precious manly fluids, pills to restore Lost Manhood, and I wouldn't be surprised if radium tonics had featured at some point.

The placebo reaction is a powerful thing.

And then we get The rise of the literary nepo baby? The children of famous novelists on following in their parents’ footsteps.

Well, maybe in these parlous times it does help getting an agent and one's foot in the door at a publisher? But it is hardly a new phenomenon that there is More Than One Writer In The Family.

Will concede that perhaps I am thinking of those literary families of an earlier era which were perhaps more into churning out more or less hackwork as a cottage industry (e.g. the Allinghams).

Then I bethought me that Angela Thirkell's son Colin MacInnes was also a writer, albeit, as one may see from that Wikipedia entry, a very different article from Mama, wot. (I seem to recall from the bios of her that I read that they were estranged and he was a hostile witness.)

There's also a bit of a reverse pattern in the Drabble family, whereby John Drabble took to novel-writing after his daughters. (Famous Sibling Literary Feuds....)

skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
([personal profile] skygiants May. 9th, 2026 09:47 am)
I have succumbed to peer pressure and started rereading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy -- well that's not true, I have reread the first book, Assassin's Apprentice, and told myself [lying] I PROBABLY won't go on from here, I just want to remember what's what! But it seems I will in fact be going on from here because to my surprise I thought Assassin's Apprentice was better than I expected or indeed remembered it being and now I want to get to the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is the one I actually actively remember as being good [citation: fourteen-year-old Becca, a notoriously unreliable narrator as we have many times established.]

The thing is I essentially remembered nothing about Assassin's Apprentice because at the time I read it I didn't really know the narrative value of the fraught emotional bond between a protagonist and their mediocre-to-bad mentor and Assassin's Apprentice is NOTHING but mediocre-to-bad mentors. This book is chockablock full of problematic adults intensely projecting their various personal traumas and failures on our young protagonist and attempting to extend him care and guidance through these various highly distorted lenses, and unfortunately their best at its best is never very good but you can't say they're not trying: not really appealing to me at fourteen but delicious to me at forty.

Assassin's Apprentice begins with the arrival of our protagonist on a royal doorstep, age sixish: this kid is the illegitimate son of the famously upright, faithful, virtuous, happily married, non-slutty heir to the throne, Prince Chivalry, and his unknown relatives have decided that it's time for the child to be Chivalry's problem. This immediately and publicly blows up the entire political situation in the country, as Chivalry and his wife subsequently remove themselves from the line of succession and retire to a remote country estate without ever interacting with the child in question.

So that's Fitz, a kid with no official status who's a walking Weird Situation For Everyone. As for his various mediocre mentors, we've got:

Burrich, who was Chivalry's overwhelmingly devoted right-hand man, and due to a one-two-three punch of inconveniently timed injury/Fitz's arrival/Chivalry's retirement has found himself demoted from Heroic Hand of the Heir to the Throne to local stablemaster and accidental foster parent to the kid who blew up his life and his boss'

Chade, the king's assassin, who started from a similar position to Fitz and has been tasked by the king with molding Fitz into just as useful a tool for the royal dynasty as Chade has been for all these years

Verity, Fitz's uncle and the new responsible-but-overwhelmed heir to the throne, a pleasant and dutiful man with minimal emotional intelligence, who is always sort of absently nice to Fitz until the Kingdom's Problems start Eating Him Alive and suddenly things become enjoyably fraught as the potential increasingly arises that perhaps the Kingdom's Problems would eat Verity alive a little less if he let them eat Fitz alive a little more, but he is not going to do that! because he has ethics! but they both know that the possibility is there!!

Lady Patience, Chivalry's wife, who shows up midway through the book when Fitz is a teenager like 'oops possibly this child should have been parented by us? who says you can't fix the failures of the past! I'm doing it right now!'

What I find charming about Lady Patience in particular is that it's really obvious that to Chivalry she was his beautiful carefree manic pixie dream girl and to everyone else she is a nightmare. In fact all these people are sort of nightmares, and they all do care deeply about Fitz, and are also all failing him in important ways that have to do with their own deeply personal blind spots. The book's strength is in the evenhanded way it looks at these people and their strengths and their failures, and lets both the love and the mistakes matter equally.

The book's weakness is in that Robin Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about. There's an evil prince who wants to usurp the throne, and there are also some evil pirates who are kidnapping people from the kingdom and turning them into Soulless Monsters, or rather what [personal profile] blotthis accurately describes as video game NPCs that you don't need to feel bad about killing. The fact that Hobb goes to great lengths to explain how everyone is very distraught about the situation and does some failed experiments to ensure that there's no way to turn these people back from being soulless monsters and you really truly don't need to feel bad about killing them really just makes it worse.

Also, I think it's important to note that Robin Hobb really is better than most of her peers at thinking about the practical requirements of domestic animals in a Nineties Eurofantasy environment; the proper care of horses and dogs forms a significant underlying element of the book and occasionally becomes a major plot point, especially since Fitz's Special Secret Skill is dog telepathy [Burrich thinks From Personal Experience this is an evil perversion that will ruin Fitz's life and that he must train out of Fitz as much as possible] [this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that]. Anyway the flip side of this is that Robin Hobb will Not hesitate to kill a puppy. Never think she won't do it. She has a knife to another puppy's throat right now. spoilers )
summerstorm: (Default)
([personal profile] summerstorm May. 9th, 2026 03:46 pm)
This week has been exhausting. Not because of anything active, but because of the way I've woken up every day. If it wasn't Ciri yowling, it was my sister talking loudly in the hallway at 10 am (which she'd give me hell for) and today it was Gorgug dry heaving on the floor. I almost went back to sleep yesterday, and today I did actually curl back up under the covers, though I never dozed again. I've been doing the bare minimum, which in fairness is more than my bare minimum was months ago, let alone years ago, but I would like to vacuum and mop my room, and I would like to have the strength to make coffee every day instead of resorting to energy drinks.

I've had zero games because the one consistent one, our DM is currently traveling, and I'm glad it's worked out this way, because the last time this happened I had to cancel on them, and I pride myself on being extremely reliable in this one aspect of my life.

-

Edit: I'd been meaning to look up how you're supposed to drink soju, because I could not remember the one time I had it at a Korean BBQ restaurant (in Prague), and it turns out I've been using the right glass this whole time, purely by accident, because I found it on the dryer rack two weeks ago and was like, what the fuck, who used my shot glass (that I have never used myself nor seen in four years)? Turns out my mom used it to try to sprout a lettuce? I've also been sticking to (kind of) drinking with friends, because it's a fantastic boost for ttrpgs with no negative side effects because it's so little. I'm pretty happy with this whole thing. (I do not "shoot the first glass." I sip from one (1) glass and then move on to kombucha or an energy drink. Because sobriety is important to me.)

-

Anyway, other than that, Hades 2 has eaten my life. It came out for PS5 at some point late last month, and I got it on April 27, because a friend gave me the money and because it's one of those indie games that's not eighty (80) whole ass bucks for years before it goes on sale. I was very overwhelmed at first, but learned quickly, and three days in, I put it on God Mode for no good reason and I've been coasting since. Rambling. )
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin May. 9th, 2026 12:28 pm)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] maevele and [personal profile] rosinarowantree!
goodbyebird: Star Wars: Leia kisses Luke's cheek. (SW kiss)
([personal profile] goodbyebird May. 9th, 2026 01:20 pm)
Very belated SW icons recs/praise for May 4th, but hey, SO MANY PRETTIES. You should take a look, trust. )

And the Icon Pass It On will run throughout the weekend, come join in! icons for all your space faves :D
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
([personal profile] rydra_wong May. 9th, 2026 12:09 pm)
Important things:

* Just as you should not read The Fortunate Fall if you want a romantic Happily Ever After, you should not read What We Are Seeking if you want a book which neatly ties up all its plot threads.

It's not quite in the same league of non-resolution as Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (my beloved), but.

Assorted important things happen; the initial situation is radically changed; key decisions are made and alliances are formed. How it will play out is something that will clearly evolve over subsequent years and decades, but the book chooses to leave it at that moment of resolve rather than resolution, with the crucial shifts being internal and interpersonal.

* As an author, Cameron Reed may be the most "not aromantic but she believes in their beliefs" I've ever encountered.

Romantic love is a very real thing in her work, but it doesn't sway the moral or narrative universe of her novels in the way we're trained to expect (and the presence of an explicitly aro character in What We Are Seeking is not accidental).

I love this SO FUCKING MUCH.

* John Maraintha and Iren and Laura and Suddharma and Vo and Pirro and Blue Green.
Tags:

When I got off the tram and took off my mask, it caught on one of my Bluetooth earbuds.

It made the earbud fall off my ear, bounce across the platform, and fall between the edge of the platform and the just-starting-to-move tram.

A transgym pal was waiting at the station and chose this moment to come over to me and say "How's it going?"

It's going bad! I explained, and he immediately jumped down onto the track to fetch it for me.

Aww! That is a good friend. The tram had just been, and they're like every twelve minutes on the weekend or something, so it wasn't really worrying but still.

And the earbud seems fine, phew.

silvercat17: Winne from William of Newbury attacking with her axe with text "My axe is all the blessing I need" (axe)
([personal profile] silvercat17 posting in [community profile] justcreate May. 8th, 2026 07:55 pm)
What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?
 
Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?
 
What do you just want to talk about?
 
What have you been watching or reading?
 
Chores and other not-fun things count!
 
Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky.

.