November 5th, 2025
vvalkyri: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] vvalkyri at 01:13am on 2025-11-05
I know this sounds kinda weird
But I just remembered eggs and cheese can be very quickly made into a meal

I've had a lot of trouble of late with what to eat. And a lack of Easy Food. It's hard to explain.

I also went through so many years of my life never encountering a rotten egg; if I left them too long in the fridge they'd just dehydrate. Making two eggs and cheese involved a surprising number of badd eggs. Knowing the eggs were unknown old (I decant them into a different container) meant I was smart enough to break into a separate container.

At some point I should talk about halloween and the weekend. There was a lot of lack of cope on halloween itself, born from no eating enough (see above) which meant I hung out with my local noisemakers and later saw 28 days later.

Y'know, I'm really tired. I think to sleep at this point. I wish we had a hot tub here, but toe warmers moved to my back really helped.
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-11-05 under , , , ,

Happy birthday, dear [personal profile] bunnyhugger.


With the hour of early admission we got we headed first for Top Thrill 2. This rebuild of Top Thrill Dragster officially opened last year, but spent all but parts of two weeks down for Problems. After a shaky start this year it's been running decently, but we were in the strange position that we had ridden the next coaster --- Siren's Curse --- before we ever got on Top Thrill 2. We hoped this Halloweekends to ride Top Thrill 2 at all, and to ride Siren's Curse at night, and to save you many paragraphs, we succeeded.

Now to give you those paragraphs. When we got to the Top Thrill 2 entrance --- an oval, like you're entering a portal but without being transformed into sehlats or something cool --- the queue sign promised a wait of 0 minutes. This seemed optimistic but we figured it couldn't be too bad. The coaster, like Siren's Curse and Steel Vengeance, allows you to have nothing on but your clothes, and has small lockers you can put stuff in for free. So we tucked everything away, went through the metal detector that confirms you didn't keep anything on you but your metal belt buckle, and waited in a line maybe twenty minutes long. We realized we hadn't ridden Top Thrill at all since before the pandemic began and maybe not since 2018, if not longer ago. And we had a nice chat with some people near us in line about just what was changed and how it might be different.

The big difference is that instead of one huge burst of speed getting you up the top of a 420-foot tower, you get three bursts of speed, one getting you a fair bit up the top, then fall back downward and get another burst of speed sending you up the reverse spike, then fall back forward and get a last burst of speed to hurtle over the top. There's minor differences that I like. Particularly, you load in the station on a track that switches into the main back-and-forth segment, so that a train can launch while another loads and a third unloads. This combined with the nothing-in-the-pockets rule mean it can handle people really fast and that promises to maybe keep the line going well.

And the ride ... well, the acceleration is nothing like what the original Top Thrill, or Kingda Ka (RSVP) had. It is strikingly like what Wicked Twister had. (Though Wicked Twister's top speed, about 72 miles per hour according to the Roller Coaster Database, is what Top Thrill 2 manages in a single burst.) But it also adds these moments of being vertical --- facing upward, and then facing backward --- and floating, hovering weightless in the seat waiting to fall back down. Weightless moments haven't been in fashion for roller coasters for a while, but Top Thrill 2 and Siren's Curse both feature it and wouldn't work without it. I'm really glad to have it again.

If that weren't enough the top of the hill feels faster than Top Thrill Original offered. Certainly you feel more like you're in danger of being thrown out of the seat which, by the way, doesn't have a belt. Just a sort of barebones cage around you that nevertheless feels quite secure. [personal profile] bunnyhugger tells me this is because the new trains ride higher on the track than the old, so there's just this extra burst of centripetal acceleration on the top of the hill and, particularly, on the spiral as you start heading back down. It feels great.

The new Top Thrill is a remarkably better ride than the old. In many ways it feels like the good parts of Wicked Twister merged with the good parts of Top Thrill 1. The old Top Thrill we were content missing if there wasn't a short enough line; this, I think we're likely to find reasons that the wait isn't too long for us. There will be a sequel to this essay, don't worry.


Next up? ... Kind of a slow spot for photographs, actually, even before I lost my camera at Motor City Furry Con. Our next big event was getting our first pet mouse since Fezziwig's death and the first pictures are of her arrival.

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When Crystal first arrived she quickly set up a small, uncovered nest to figure out where she was and what might possibly be safe. So we got to enjoy a few rare moments of a mouse curled up unprotected.


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Here she is, making almost as small a bundle as she knew how.


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That's not to say she can't be long!


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Meanwhile Athena didn't see what all the fuss was about when it wasn't about her.


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She takes a curious sniff and listen at my camera.


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And she decides she's out of here. Bye!


Trivia: In 1540, Vannoccio Biringuccio summarized the explanation of how gunpowder propelled projectiles: fire took up ten times as much room as air, air ten times as much as water, water ten times as much as earth. So when earthly powder turned to fire, air, and moist smoke, the elements immediately expanded, exerting pressure on the ball. Source: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World, Jack Kelly.

Currently Reading: Comic books. And speaking of reading the comics ... What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Why is _Prince Valiant_ in reruns? I give disappointing answers to this and more!

November 4th, 2025
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
posted by [personal profile] redbird at 10:01pm on 2025-11-04 under
The three of us voted this afternoon, then went to the supermarket, where we had to deal with a pushy person who wanted us to sign dodgy-looking petitions: he said they were for same-day voter registration, but I noticed that the page he wanted us to sign didn't say what we were signing for. There are dozens of possible state ballot questions for next year, so it could be almost anything. (The procedure in Massachusetts, as I understand it, is people or organizations say "I want to put this on the ballot," and then the attorney general vets the proposals, and either OKs them or explains why not. After that, they can collect signatures.)

The only thing on the ballot in Boston today was city council seats, after the incumbent mayor's main opponent formally withdrew after coming in a distant second in the primary. Happily, I had a choice of five or six good candidates for the four at-large city council seats.

Addendum: there are in fact forty-seven "petition initiatives" on the state website, including a few that are labeled as versions A, B, or even C of the same thing. The list is on the state website: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/ballot-initiatives-submitted-for-the-2026-biennial-statewide-election-proposed-laws-and-2028-biennial-statewide-election-proposed-constitutional-amendments
the_sheryl: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] the_sheryl at 08:57pm on 2025-11-04 under ,
Here's what I read last month:

The Bullet that Missed - Richard Osman
The Other Half - Charlotte Vassel
Murder in the Eternal City - Ashley Gardner
For Duck's Sake - Donna Andrews
Mood:: 'sleepy' sleepy
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 08:53pm on 2025-11-04
As a result of umpty years spinning yarn, I have a lot of it sitting in bags waiting for a project.

So, I'm looking for an extremely simple bulky-ish sweater that I can knit with whatever is at hand and reduce the stash a lot.

Suggestions, anyone? It's been so long since I knitted anything but socks that I'm not sure if I even have any patterns.
minoanmiss: Minoan lady watching the Thera eruption (Lady and Eruption)
zenlizard: (BrainOnAPlate)
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

Halloweekends began for us Thursday, at least measured by when [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I were in the car together going somewhere. I'd taken our pet rabbit and mice down to her parents' the night before and introduced them to the mice. This I'd done with the mice in the pet carrier because I supposed that one put back into their bin they'd disappear under the litter and in toilet-paper tubes rather than deal with all this bother.

We left a bit before noon because we had to run a small errand at the bookstore where [personal profile] bunnyhugger sometimes works, and start off a bit slower than we'd have liked because of the dense construction zone around our house blocking off immediate access to highways. And for all that, we still arrived at Cedar Point almost exactly at 4:00, just as we'd have hoped. It would be too much to credit that for my big innovation this trip --- I had got exact change for the Ohio Turnpike fares and put them in a plastic bag on my divider console --- but that innovation was also very good. We also got really lucky in the parking spot, maybe the third or fourth spot closest to the front door of the hotel, the kind of spot we usually grab on Sunday after everyone's checked out and I move the car closer so it's easier to load up. We would lose that spot Saturday to go to the Merry-go-Round Museum in downtown Sandusky, but the replacement we got was almost as good.

We got once again a room on one of the wings off the rotunda, which are ones with single beds and therefore less likely to rent to families with bunches of noisy, squealing kids. So we have no explanation for why one night there seemed to be a family down the hall with kids doing footraces outside the door. They were quiet by the time we went to bed, anyway, and if they made noise early the next morning I didn't hear it. I'm sure that means everything was good.

I was a little confused at check-in about whether we needed early-admission tickets. Starting next year season passes aren't going to get you early admission to parks, a bonus we have used at Halloweekends and pretty much nothing else. But staying at the Hotel Breakers gets you that, and I had learned from [personal profile] bunnyhugger about this change and failed to process that we didn't have to worry about getting early-admission tickets until next year. If the policy lasts, anyway. The Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger has hit some rough spots, with --- particularly --- some of the parks having to give up on the new policy of charging admission to the haunted houses. (Not Cedar Point, though, at least this time.) Many things might be changed to win back goodwill or because someone tells them it's a way of stave off bankruptcy.

But we got everything settled in our room, dressed up as warmly as we could, and got into the park. Cedar Point had a roller coaster that officially opened in 2024 that we had never yet ridden; would we get to it this weekend?


And now, a quick dash through the end of the Michigan State Women's Pinball Championship, because I'm sparing you pictures of backglasses and of people you don't know facing away from you.

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Gladiators is a surprisingly fun game for a 90s Gottlieb and I play it often in simulation form. This was a rare chance to play the actual table, where I ... don't know what the replay value was.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger with her megaphone, giving instructions to the competitors. After this there's so many pictures of people standing at pinball machines and ignoring the camera, you have no idea. You can see the pinball flyers lining the dor in the background.


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Over by the food counter there's a couple board games you can play, including, oh yeah, the Pac-Man board game. I had that as a kid.


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Tile art on the wall shows beloved video game character (look up video game characters before publishing) posed so you'd think they were playing Lost World, a game that sad to say wasn't in the tournament.


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And now we're zipping ahead to the end of the night; Ypsi Pinball Podcast is gathering up their gear and [personal profile] bunnyhugger bows out.


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Last picture of the venue; the podcasting 'booth' is in teh background. The food is way off past even that.


Trivia: The Champagne Fairs, held once or twice a year through the 12th and 13th centuries, gathered merchants in each of the four towns of Troyes, Lagny, Provins, and Bar-sur-Aube, and gained prominence from the protection the Count of Champagne offered to merchants travelling to and from the event. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier. And yes, I'm irked that I did not realize this before we were in Bar-sur-Aube (briefly and for other purposes) earlier this year.

Currently Reading: Comic books still.

November 3rd, 2025
cellio: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] cellio at 05:09pm on 2025-11-03 under

At the shabbaton I led a text-study session that I called "Avram before Lech L'cha" (which was the week's portion). It was designed to be interactive, so this is a summary of how it went. Don't expect answers here, just interesting observations.

I started by saying that in the first three torah portions, God singles someone out for assigned tasks. The first is Adam, and there were no other options yet. The second is Noach, who was "righteous in his generation", a qualified statement. (Best of a bad lot?) Then comes Avram, and it just says God commanded him but the text doesn't tell us why.

We had a discussion about possible reasons, and then we looked at the first source. Almost all of what I brought is from Bereishit Rabbah (roughly contemporary with the g'mara, c 300-500 CE). All translations are from Sefaria: Read more... )

twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 12:21pm on 2025-11-03
I'm not sure how I'm feeling this morning.

We are waiting for an arborist and his crew to take down four trees, trim a fifth tree, and manage somehow to cut back some big vines that are hanging from other trees and look ugly. (I've cut the vines at the base; they're not alive, but just hanging there.)

One of the trees, a mimosa that hangs over the fussy neighbor's driveway, definitely has to go. The fussy neighbor is too lazy to get out a ladder and trim back whatever she wants on her side -- I'm saying lazy because she is three decades younger than I am and has a tall and able son and a tall and able husband. Together they should be able to trim back whatever they want... but no. She'd rather bitch at us about it than do it herself. I don't have a problem with that tree, which is split at the base and going in several directions, coming down.

But we're losing two beautiful wild cherry trees and half of the big magnolia tree because the branches lean over the house. The insurance company wants the roof clear of branches that might fall and damage something. The cherries lean over it from the back, the magnolia extends across it from the front. And there's an ash tree in back that is leaning, and has contracted emerald ash borer. It has to come out before it falls and hits our house or the friendly neighbors' house.

I love our trees, and we've lost so many in the last 33 years, especially the two big oaks. Now more are going down.

At least the weather is kind. The sun is out and the air is warmish.

And for the time being I'll stay here and read my Yuletide source and look for a story.
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 12:50am on 2025-11-03
I've been watching 'The Graduate', the early-1970s movie.

It feels like a reconstruction of a lost culture at an archeological dig.
cellio: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] cellio at 08:30pm on 2025-11-02 under ,

My now-former synagogue has an occasional shabbaton (Shabbat retreat), nominally once a year but sometimes the gaps are longer. They had one this past Shabbat; I've attended every one since I joined the congregation and if this isn't the last one, it will be the last one as "us" before a merger/acquisition, so I wanted to be there even though I've otherwise moved on to my new synagogue.

This one didn't have the usual longer lead time; a date became available and they jumped on it. We were missing several of the regulars and some newer minyan members weren't able to come, so it was small -- which could have made it more intimate, but it didn't have quite the right mix for that. There was a single member from the other synagogue, plus their interim rabbi, and I wonder how it felt for that congregant.

I couldn't help noticing that the average age has skewed way up (most are rather older than me), especially if you exclude the clergy (who have to be there).

Because it was Halloween, their interim rabbi led a text study on spooky stories from the talmud, which was pretty engaging. From what I've seen, text study is his strong suit, so I'm glad he did that. The senior rabbi prefers discussions to more formal study and did that. The cantor taught about a rare and distinctive trope (cantillation mark) that appears in next week's parsha, one of only four times in the torah. I hadn't previously noticed that, every time shalshelet appears, it's on the first word of the verse. His source sheet is public.

I got email on Monday asking if I would lead a text study on Shabbat afternoon. I called it "Avram before Lech L'cha" and drew a lot from Bereishit Rabbah, which I hope to write about separately. The afternoon sessions are always more lightly attended (some people take walks or nap or shmooze), but we had enough people to have good conversations and I overheard some comments that suggest I have fans. I think it went pretty well. My biggest fear in leading a study session (as opposed to giving a d'var torah) is always what to do if people don't engage. Fortunately, people did. Someday maybe I will get better at facilitating rather than wholly directing conversations like this.

Overall: I'm glad I went, but I felt less inspired and connected than in the past. Maybe that's the mix, maybe it's that our long-time now-retired rabbi set a really high bar, maybe it's the merger, maybe it's me. I don't feel the need to go to whatever follows this in future years, even if many of my friends are still going.

I came home from the shabbaton last night, and this morning went to a very nice welcome session and brunch for new members at my new synagogue. One era ends, another begins. (And Beth Shalom does a great job with welcoming newcomers!)

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
posted by [personal profile] redbird at 08:21pm on 2025-11-02 under ,
After several days in a row of being able to walk more than is now typical for me, and also doing PT, yesterday my ankle hurt enough that I stayed put as much as possible. I took a naproxen around lunchtime, which made no descernible difference.

I'm doing significantly better today, in terms of ankle and other joint pain. I didn't go for a walk, but did go outside to take out trash and spend a few minutes outdoors during daylight, and then started on what has turned out to be a lot of PT exercises. We're back on standard time as of this morning, meaning the sun set in Boston at 4:35 (we're near the eastern edge of this time zone).
leiacat: A grey cat against background of starry sky, with lit candle in the foreground (Default)
posted by [personal profile] leiacat at 12:42pm on 2025-11-02 under
Halloween brought with it a pair of new activities.

The first was finally getting to Virginia where a pair of my friends (who also throw a heck of a 4th of July party) host a mini haunted house in their carport.

The scale of the production is truly impressive: they pick a new theme each year, subdivide the space with flats and drapes, and guide small groups through before handing them pre-packed baggies of treats including the book that inspired the story. Last year's visitors reported being chased by a gorilla. This year's theme - I was told much more modest than usual - was Poe's Tell Tale Heart. With the lady of the house running cues in the control room in the back, the gentleman would guide each batch over a rickety "bridge" laid down on something to make it wobbly in the driveway and into the first room. There - along with creepy Victorian decor - they would be greeted by a creeptastic projected video. Behind the door was a blue-lit spider room, and around a corner a room with another volunteer seated by a fireplace ready to confess murder and reveal a pulsing light-up heart as the beating heart sound cues grew ever louder. Thunder crack, blackout, exit light. (Groups with tiny kids and whomever requested so would get a slightly less scary version of the story.)

We arrived an hour and a half before show-time, barely in time to help add finishing touches; costumed kids started passing the street around 5:30 and were directed to return later. Once the doors opened a crew of hosts' friends managed the line; I ended up spending an hour coralling the front of the queue before handing them off to the guide. It was quite enjoyable, and I'll be trying harder to reprise the experience in future years. (I am told there were about 250 people coming through, more than half of them kids.)

We had another party to get to, this one an annual tradition of Sound Guy's, and outdoors.

I find costuming generally stressful, and this year was no exception. I did have a pair of spider-web jeans I'd been meaning to find an excuse for, so adding the rest of the spider to the long overcoat seemed like a possibility, but I spent a few days stumped as to implementation. Inspiration hit as I stared at the coat and at my theater tool bag, and I outlined a spider shape on the back of the coat with spike tape. (For the non-theatrical folks, it's the brightly colored thin cloth tape used to mark places on the stage where things go. Similar to gaffer's tape, it's both nicely adhesive and easy to peal).

While I mostly spent time talking to people I already knew, there were enough people I wanted to keep hanging out with that when Spouse was ready to depart around 1am, I secured a ride from either of two other guests who lived in our vicinity.

In another hour I regretted that decision, both my energy levels and the temperatures dropping and the fire not quite adequate for keeping up either, but both of my ride prospects were going strong.

Everyone else still present being musicians, a decision was made to move the party indoors - a notion much welcomed by me, as a couch would be comfier to curl up on than a lawn chair - and play a while.

The house having multitudes of spare instruments, I was offered my choice, and - why not - asked for a guitar. Which I've taken a month of lessons in before leaving The Old Country, tried to keep up a few years for thereafter, and have not practiced since an aborted attempt to get back into it mid-pandemic. Somehow remembering that my experience, such as it was, was entirely classical, the host issued me a nylon-stringed instrument and didn't offer a pick. It had some manner of built-in tuner, but I had no brain cells to figure out a new thing, had someone play a high E for me, and tuned by ear.

I wasn't sure what to expect - I didn't exactly know any actual pieces that other folks were likely to. What happened next was someone strummed a chord and called out, "E minor". Our harpist hostess improvised a few bars, repeated them. One of the numerous guitars harmonized with it, and another. My left hand formed the familiar configuration for the chord, my right somewhat timidly plucked a basic pattern. Then, as the harp added variations, a slightly more complex one. The sound was living and a bit unpredictable and yet comfortingly safe to experiment in. A revelation.

The tune wound down, someone led another, and another, and despite being hopelessly outclassed in skill levels, my rhythms felt as integral to the whole as the intricate melodies and clever harmonies surrounding me. Time flew and it was past 4am and time to go home... and now this is a thing I've done, and it's hard to express just how amazing it was.
dianec42: Cross stitch face (DecoLady)
posted by [personal profile] dianec42 at 09:42am on 2025-11-02 under ,
I got to start a new color!

Is white a colour?
Will I ever decided which spelling of "color" I prefer?
Should I be using 3 strands instead of 2?
Am I going to use glow-in-the-dark thread in this project? NO!

Anyway. That's all the trees finished on the right-hand side. And a noticeable start on the moon.
cross stitch WIP
minoanmiss: Naked young fisherman with his catch (Minoan Fisherman)
posted by [personal profile] minoanmiss at 02:17am on 2025-11-02
Mood:: 'determined' determined
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

So stop me if you've heard this but we were at Cedar Point all day and I didn't have time to write anything. Instead, enjoy a dozen or so pictures from the Michigan State Women's Pinball Tournament.

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Artwork set up at the Crazy Quarters Arcade showing all stuff from the classic arcade games they have, plus Kangaroo.


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I don't think there was anywhere you could sit and eat immediately near this Lunch Box decoration but at least it has a lot of modern-looking faintly-ironic lunchboxes on the wall.


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And here's some of the games they have that aren't pinball.


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Here's the plaque for the winner (who wouldn't be [personal profile] bunnyhugger this year) and the first-through-fourth-place trophies. The International Flipper Pinball Association provided the plaque; the trophies were on [personal profile] bunnyhugger's dime.


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Crazy Quarters has some of these posters that I, too, would have thought were at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum.


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And here's a corner with a vintage-looking poster advertising Dracula from when he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon.


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In another corner where I couldn't quite get at it they had a playfield for an old-style mechanical pinball game, where you get points for dropping balls in scoops.


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger getting ready to give competitors their instructions and set things up for the matches to get started.


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Since I didn't have much of anything to do I looked around the area that we could play. Venue has a Scooby-Doo game like we'd seen when we were in California back in 2023, but I'm no good at it.


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Hung up around the venue are flyers for a lot of games, including here the 90s Guns N Roses and Dungeons N Dragons games.


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More vintage pinball flyers, including one based on the Broadway musical version of Tommy and the cartoon-mayhem-themed Mousin' Around.


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And some propaganda-style posters for Donkey Kong, Tron, and Dig Dug. I don't think freedom was at stake in the Dig Dug backstory. I thought it was just Dig Dug Guy getting creatures out of his garden beds.


Trivia: The first cesium-based atomic clock was built in 1955 by British physicists Louis Essen and Jack Parry. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time --- from Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.

Currently Reading: Comic books! At last. I picked up a couple at the comic book shop downtown and discovered that it has reached the level of expansion where it supports a fridge of out-of-market soda pop, which is how I was able to surprise [personal profile] bunnyhugger yesterday with a couple glass bottles of Moxie.

November 2nd, 2025
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

Ahead of our Halloweekends visit this year I did my lone preparing-for-a-trip responsibility and filled out the online form to hold our mail. Since the last time we had our mail held this somehow went wrong --- letters were delivered one day during the pause anyway, and we never got the big bundle of everything shipped at the end of our stay --- I checked the box to have them keep the mail at the main post office so I would pick it up myself. I also signed up for Informed Delivery, where they e-mail you a picture of the mail you're supposed to be getting that day, whether there's a hold or not. Over the weekend I got daily pictures but didn't know if that meant they were adding this to the hoard of mail at the main post office or if they had gotten the hold wrong and were delivering that every day.

Skipping ahead: when we got home Sunday night our mailbox was full. Over-full, in fact, with stuff dangling out of the mailbox because ours isn't actually that large and some of the stuff didn't bend. It looked like about the total mail we'd expect for the whole trip but I had no way of knowing if they skipped any days or anything. Mercifully if anything got rained on it wasn't damaged enough to show.

Monday afternoon, armed with the questions of why our mail wasn't held and if there was anything that was successfully held after all, I went to the post office with the printout of my hold-mail-confirmation. Guy went back and disappeared for long enough I was getting worried; I think everyone else in the five-person line was handled by the other clerk before mine got back.

There was no mail back there, of course. He said he checked all the spots held mail might be, and checked with a supervisor and with a carrier, though not the one working our neighborhood to confirm he wasn't overlooking anything. As best he can reconstruct the problem, it's ... well, you know what you need to get data from like ``whose mail is being held'' from the post office's central database system? That would be ``a person with authorization to access the central database system'' and right now there's nobody in the Lansing main post office with that access. He recommended that I fill out an in-person hold-mail request because that way then someone at Lansing is sure to see it.

While I was glad, I suppose, that we weren't missing any mail, I did not relish coming home to tell [personal profile] bunnyhugger all this because she is not as amused by folly as I am, and I lost most of my taste for post office folly when they lost a vintage postcard [personal profile] bunnyhugger had bought online and lost the remainder when they lost our held mail earlier this summer. But, you know, maybe it'll give you a giggle in these trying times.


Anyway. Next thing on my photo reel is mid-January 2025, and the Michigan State Women's Pinball Championship, held this year in Bay City, of Roller fame, and featuring [personal profile] bunnyhugger as the tournament director as well as publicity director. Hope you like.

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The venue: the Crazy Quarters Arcade, which occupies a lot of the Bay City City Market downtown.


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And the press would be there! [personal profile] bunnyhugger has learned that women's pinball tournaments offer local news exactly what they want most: human interest stories you can take a lot of good-looking B-roll footage.


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Here of couse is Bay City's famous Portal to the otherworld.


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And here's the venue, particularly, the pinball games. Lots of pinball games. Competitors are taking practice time and figuring out what games they'll plan on playing, and when.


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Local news interviewing [personal profile] bunnyhugger, who's gotten several short but intense bouts of learning how to talk to cameras.


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Other media! The Ypsi Pinball Podcast had a booth and after she was knocked out of tournament play [personal profile] bunnyhugger would pop in and give commentary with reasonable ease there. The figure in the center of Ypsi Pinball's logo there is the famed Ypsilanti Water Tower, which is not nearly as phallic as the Internet wants to point and laugh about.


Trivia: Scientists of many nationalities protested the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Fritz Haber for his work on ammonia synthesis and its use in ammonium sulphate fertilizer, as Haber also worked in Germany's chemical-weapons program and oversaw the first successful large-scale use of chlorine gas in April 1915. Source: An Edible History of Mankind, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

November 1st, 2025
minoanmiss: Minoan lady scribe holding up a recursive scroll (Scribe)
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-11-01 under ,

Pin-golf got started before I got home from work. The format lets you start anytime and the plan was that people could start playing a course anytime between 4:30 and 7:00. By the time I got home and walked to the barcade to join [personal profile] bunnyhugger a few people were already playing, and she was waiting for the chance to start herself. Past experience said it was a bad idea for the two of us to play at the same time, since it leaves the main desk with nobody watching it, but it's also just ... not done ... to play on your own if you can help it. So when the next couple people came in, [personal profile] bunnyhugger started playing with them while I watched the desk and gave people instructions and all that.

Fear and Trembling is usually a small tournament --- people shy away from the pin-golf format, it seems --- and since you can start anytime there's never a particular reason to start at this time, so folks drift in slowly. I didn't get to start playing myself until just before 7pm, when, among other things, FAE and DMC decided to ditch the cards they had been playing and start new ones (one could restart a try for a small additional donation to the charity). DMC's choice to restart came after he had accidentally been playing toward one objective but had written down, on the scoresheet, that he was attempting the other. It was clear to everyone what he had meant to do, but we have to go by what's on the page and with that failure to meet the goal, a 4, he decided to restart. This is how he and FAE ended up in a group with me.

Since I had tested out most of the objectives in the preceding half-week and had suggested or concurred with all of them you'd expect I would be good at the course, if you had no idea how pin-golf works. Even expert players have trouble with some of them --- DMC, an expert on the game Rush, failed on his first go-round to make that objective in a single ball! --- and I'm not an expert player. I think my only hole-in-one was the Rush objective, one that we had agreed was an easy one, but also that you need some easy objectives because it is too demoralizing when everything is impossible. Despite that even expert players DMC and FAE had a couple of 4's, representing objectives never made. And even some of the more novice players, in other groups, got a couple of objectives in three or even two balls, giving them a heck of a feeling of triumph.

I did just well enough to make the four-person playoffs, which took me by such surprise that when [personal profile] bunnyhugger told me I said ``no I did not''. The playoffs were further pin-golf, playing a bank of three holes at the choice of top-seeded DMC, and the objectives chosen by second-seed FAE. (RED and I just got to pick our order of play.) I did not do well in the first two of the playoff objectives, even though they were the same ones as the main course. The only one I managed was on the final game, King Kong, playing the goal of climbing to 200 feet of the Empire State Building, which you do by making a specific set of game-chosen shots, one of them a right bastard, because there isn't a reliable angle to set up the shot. I ended up giving up on aiming for that and starting a multiball instead on the correct supposition that in the chaos of three balls running around something would go my way, and it did.

Still, that left me in fourth-place, still taking home a trophy. RED took home third place, the trophy he liked best too --- one he happened to mention earlier in the night as being awesome, assuaging [personal profile] bunnyhugger's fears that she had made disappointing trophies this time around --- and DMC took second. This meant FAE won the Fear and Trembling tournament for the fourth time in a row and it's kind of a shame we can't give them permanent possession of a trophy. They just have to take home this year's first-place trophy again.

Still can't believe I made the cut but there's the trophy to prove it.


Now I'm going to close out Christmas lights pictures; I promised you I was going to be more sparing in these, didn't I? Go ahead and guess what amusement park photographs come up next.

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Pterodactyl light that's stationary and not animated, but the streaks in my windshield give it a little vibe of having just landed anyway.


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And I'm always going to be fond of showing a sea serpent. As I recall the serpent actually has only one tail, with the end alternating, and my picture got both lit at once.


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This Santa alligator looks like they've taken all the cold medicine.


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From the Noah's Ark display here's two raccoons, two squirrels, and two frogs hanging out. The rest of the Ark is on the other side of the street.


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Oh, bunch of people pointing at a lad in a basket, wonder what comes next.


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The reindeer are so glad that I'm leaving. You can see a bit of the raceway stadium stairs behind, in the picture, that you couldn't possibly see in person.


Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Wednesday' was 'Budhuvasara', meaning 'Awakening'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

October 31st, 2025
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
minoanmiss: Detail of a Minoan statuette of a worshipping youth (Statuette Youth)
mrs_sweetpeach: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mrs_sweetpeach at 12:49pm on 2025-10-31 under


  Click to embiggen  


(If the card refuses to load, click here to open it in a new tab).
Mood:: 'cold' cold
location: My home office
mrs_sweetpeach: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mrs_sweetpeach at 12:22pm on 2025-10-31 under
Click here )
Mood:: 'cold' cold
location: Home and on my corner of the couch
sabotabby: (possums)
posted by [personal profile] sabotabby at 07:17am on 2025-10-31 under
HAPPY SPOOOOKY DAY and blessed Samhain if that's your thing.

This week's podcast episode sure is spooooooky! It's It Could Happen Here's "Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI," and the moment that title popped up in my feed, I knew I'd be talking about it (even though I Don't Speak German covered Mother Night, this week, which is my favourite Vonnegut book. Maybe I'll talk about that one next week). 

I had never heard of the Occulture conference, which is...what you think it is. As a good little Marxist materialist, I am not a chaos magick practitioner or believer as such except that definitely magic and the occult are a terrain we should not cede to the enemy so I am not not a chaos magick believer, y'know? At the very least as a philosophical and narrative system it's something that I'm quite interested in.

And of course for all his being one of the most Problematic Faves of all my Problematic Faves—he killed his wife ffs—I never really got over my teenage obsession with William S. Burroughs. As the episode points out, he's lumped in with the Beats but more properly belongs with the Surrealists (and the Dadaists) in terms of what he was doing. And y'all know how I feel about the Surrealists and the Dadaists. So there's an unexpected amount of discussion of Burroughs as a magickian at the the conference and his techniques (some of which were extremely funny, such as cursing a restaurant that took his favourite thing off the menu) and particularly his use of technology to channel the non-human.

Which brings me to the argument that I get into way too fucking much, which is "well isn't GenAI basically the same as cut-up poetry," and that's apparently something that was asked repeatedly at this conference. Spoiler: No it is not. Like, neither artistically nor magickically, which is a relief as that wasn't necessarily where the discussion might have gone. The short version has to do with Third Mind theory, which is quite interesting, and again, I feel there's a much more materialist explanation for why it's not the same but I also appreciate the occultist explanation. 

Anyway it's a big meaty feast for my special interests and apparently there will be a second part dropping this weekend, so yay!

vvalkyri: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] vvalkyri at 01:37am on 2025-10-31 under , ,
Oddly, as it turns out, the yellow QR code worked fine for at least one other person's phone, but we did get some of those printed with green instead.

We had a ridiculous amount of food come in given the short lead time* and the direct donations to Capital Area food bank alone had hit $15,000 by this evening and that campaign had only started Tuesday morning.

(This morning, about 48 hours after it was posted, it hit $10k. We did the math. That sounds like so much money doesn't it? SNAP serves 41 million people a month. $10k is 53 people worth. Or 3 seconds of the year. You'll hear that in the live stream below.)


Originally we had confirmed congressman Khanna, Beyer, and Raskin (who had literally a 17 min availability window) but then Khanna had to bail in the morning and Raskin had to bail near go time.

So the event speaking only really went for about half an hour and closed down and then Walkinshaw showed up like 10 min later so he ended up in the group photo op but wasn't on a live stream but I sent someone over to get some video with him I hope it happened.
Edit: he was interviewed by NBC4 and posted the group photo we invited him into over his protest of 'but I only just got here' on his Instagram (I do wish someone had gotten him a better one)


. MSN picked up Fox 5 DC's live stream of the shorter than expected but really good speaking segment . Which is especially good, because the person someone handed a phone to to live stream to Instagram was initially told hold it horizontal and was and then a bunch of people told him to hold it vertical so he changed it so the Instagram live stream is sideways.


Walkinshaw, a new rep from Virginia, didn't seem mad and was really nice and joined our group photo, the one guy in a suit surrounded by the rest of us in high vis, and holding one of the signs, too.

I noticed in some photos that someone posted on Blue sky that Beyer went and joined the crowd behind the speakers after he spoke.


I am especially happy about my part in making this happen.

I'm also pleased that I can see evidence of my process improvements, possibly in these Getty pictures and possibly in somebody else's I forget - things like I taped up a sign that was in amongst the food on one of the tables and it was my idea to use blue tape to identify the people who had just been introduced to the press as people willing to talk to them, and I was part of starting us sorting like with like from the beginning and as it came in.

David told me that anytime he mentioned me people told him how great I was.

It was just astonishing this came together so very quickly. I think the organizing chat started Monday evening. Thank goodness they were afraid that the weather wasn't good enough on Wednesday and moved it to today and thank goodness the weather suddenly got better today.

Long after everybody else was on their way out, a photographer for Somal News showed up. I cajoled the guy who started this to give her a quick snippet, and later this evening sent her some further pictures. I look forward to seeing the article. At one point she asked about what's the deal with fun food not ballrooms and I had to explain the whole Trump ballroom and a swing demolition and found this article which is kind of heartening


We then got back here, went to noise making, talked with some people there, went to all about burger and got chicken tenders (i think I managed to leave my whole soda there which is a little annoying, and boy howdy am I grateful that David was able to come and pick me up and help me get out this morning even though that was the afternoon because oh boy howdy was I scattered), and then I went inside the house and sat down on the floor for an hour making it rather look late to try and deliver something to Laurel but how to really nice conversation with Charles and Lisa for a while in establishing that and now sometimes it's 1:30 in the morning partly because I've continued looking at articles and finding pictures and stuff and stuff and stuff.


I really need to spend some time on life maintenance tomorrow.

I have zero idea what I'm going to do for halloween. There's a house dance I've been kind of meaning to go to in annandale, there's an Acro evening Jam in Columbia, and there's some movies outside and I don't know what to call it but it's sort of 4:00 on the beltway. I guess I have a couple options for clothing but I don't really have the energy.



*I think we sent five cars out split between the two food banks that were not Capital Area Food Bank. I keep kicking myself for not having thought to post to the big mutual Aid Facebook group or the welcome to DC Facebook group or my building link, but there were just so many moving parts and I thought of a little some of that and then didn't get to it in time. And who knows maybe walk in Shaw could have spoken if I had been a little faster at trying to track down additional speakers. But honestly, the food was basically there as bait for the media. If you're going to buy food yourself, that's much more for mutual Aid and community pantries - real food banks can buy food at the same prices grocery stores do; it's so much better to give them dollars to do so. Although yes there's a bunch of stuff that they're less likely to buy, like, say, multi packs of canned chicken from costco. And those that handle fresh at all that's entirely donations.
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-10-31 under ,

This week my humor blog features some nonsense, some nonsense based on the English language, and even more MiSTing than usual, plus stuff you've seen before. And I get a bit of good news about Dick Tracy author Mike Curtis in the comments. Seek it in here:


Next up I'm going to be finishing off Christmas: we did a couple of tours of light shows and I refrained from taking a million blurry unfocused pictures of dots, so you're spared too much of all that. Let me show you.

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This was [personal profile] bunnyhugger's Christmas jigsaw puzzle, featuring a bunny and squirrel interrogating the reindeer, and a raccoon watching just in case. A very SpinDizzy Muck situation.


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Here's the Lake Victoria Light Show house, with something like half the lights on all at once. It's easier to watch in movie version but movies are hard to post.


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Lake Victoria Light Show snowman, who several times during the show comes out to be brutally melted by some punny tune.


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The house again, this time with at least all(?) the strands of light on the central tree lit and in a variety of colors. They're color-changing LEDs and synched up with the low-power FM broadcast.


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And now down to Brooklyn, Michigan, for the Nite Lites display! Here, a crane hauls twenty tons of candy cane.


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Would it be holiday lights without dentist content? Here's teeth pulling Santa's sleigh, or else all the reindeer have turned their rear ends to you.


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The official entrance to Nite Lights, at the Michigan International Speedway. There's like a half mile of lights of mostly sponsors leading up to this so there's a show before you even pay for the show.


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And a more ceremonial entry to the light show by driving through a castle walls, which in real life would be contra-indicated.


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Nice wavy Michigan here with the hat on its thumb because they didn't know of a better place to put it.


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I love those tunnels of light, and the slight streaking of my windshield adds surprising motion to the Christmas trees.


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Finally, some of that fairy-tale content: Rapunzel pulling a boy up to the shoe she lives in with her giant shoelace or ... I'm not sure what's going on here actually.


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And here's a Big Bad Wolf trying to blow out the Three Little Pigs' home, unaware that you can't just blow out LEDs! Silly wolf.


Trivia: The first attempted buyers of the Cunard Lines' Queen Elizabeth in 1968 were a group of Philadelphia investors who planed to moor the ship on the Delaware River and operate it as a hotel (as the Queen Mary was doing off Long Beach, California), but the group failed to check whether the cruise ship would fit in the river at that point (it would not) or how patrons would access the location (it would need a new highway built). Source: Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

October 30th, 2025
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
posted by [personal profile] redbird at 09:36pm on 2025-10-30 under ,
I had to call the management company about the heat again today. I and I think at least one other neighbor called in a problem Monday, and they sent someone who made a fix that he said might be temporary, but also said he had ordered parts for a longer-term solution. Tuesday was OK, but by the time I got up this morning [Thursday] the heat clearly wasn't working again.

The management company sent someone over fairly quickly. He first knocked to let me know they were here and thank me for reporting the problem, then came back to tell me they had to look at a sensor in Adrian’s room. So she hurriedly put on her bathrobe, the three of us masked, and I invited them in, with a warning about not letting the cats in. They looked at it, and came back a while later to replace it—apparently there was something wrong with the thermostat, and they replaced the sensors in each apartment, because they couldn’t be sure of which one was the problem. The heat came back on within the hour, and we’re OK for now.

Adrian and Cattitude both thanked me for being Speaker to Landlord on this one.
zenlizard: Because the current occupation is fascist. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] zenlizard at 02:24pm on 2025-10-30 under ,
Mood:: 'bouncy' bouncy
minoanmiss: Minoan Lady walking down a mountainside from a 'peak sanctuary' (Lady at Mountain-Peak Sanctuary)
flwyd: (smoochie sunset)
posted by [personal profile] flwyd at 09:51am on 2025-10-30 under ,
The thrashing tail and butt wiggle before they pounce on a toy is a cat's batting stance.
Music:: KGNU - Morning Sound Alternative
Mood:: 'quixotic' quixotic
location: Element Hall
minoanmiss: Minoan lady watching the Thera eruption (Lady and Eruption)
posted by [personal profile] minoanmiss at 11:21am on 2025-10-30
Mood:: 'hopeful' hopeful
vvalkyri: (Default)
It won't work, and I shall be sad after making a large version of your flyer that is all about resources for furloughed feds and then I try accessing the QR and the orange one works and the yellow one (unsurprisingly) does not.

Flyer with description of resources in a document avail by orange qr code. The qr code for  submitting more is yellow, and does not work.  Neither has a url mentioned. Provider org not listed.
I'd offered to print a bunch on the way up to the food drive/rally, and I guess the really important part is that people can access the resource list, but the fact that the submission QR doesn't work and there's no website at all on here (nor a mention of which org it's from, but it might not be from a specific org? there are SO many different resource compilation documents going around) makes me loath to make a bunch of these if maybe she'll have a chance to get me something less pretty and more functional. 

Also I had the bright idea to print an 8.5x11 one pager 'what are we on about?' as 11x17 and that seems to have created a SURPRISING amount of work, and my few minutes before bed turned into an hour. 

:sigh: 

I guess the good thing about having gone downstairs and done this is she'll see my message in the morning and maybe be able to get someone (it's not her design file) to fix it in time to still print them. 

I keep planning to try to get a movement started to push back on how what DC called making the Streatery program permanent is really just going to kill them.  And I desperately need to sleep.  


But my face is burning and I've got no idea what's going on with that at all. If I wake up sick I shall be very cross.  Especially since I'm the one bringing the tarps.

This was supposed to do the click to embiggen but it's being weird and i really want to sleep. 

Hm. this can't be a symptom of food poisoning can it? Last couple days have been a "eat the things what need eating"

austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

All the way ago last Tuesday [personal profile] bunnyhugger hosted this year's Fear and Trembling pinball tournament. This is her pin-golf event, where the goal is not to score points but to complete objectives in as few balls as possible. This is a fun and frustrating format, for everyone. Us, for the challenge of figuring out what tables to use and what objectives to set on them. Everyone else, for finding that they can't manage to do something on purpose that they always do incidentally while playing. Sometimes your best approach is to ignore the goal and just play a good game, but people only resort to that in desperation.

Speaking of desperation: one extra challenge we put on ourselves is that the tournament offers a player's choice of objectives, so we need to find tables that have two clear objectives that aren't just ``get a bunch of points''. Ideally they should be objectives you can make progress on that's saved, ball-to-ball, and should make it really clear when you've made the goal so you don't have to guess what happened. The point of this is to make choosing, and knowing you might have succeeded if you'd picked the other objective, part of the game.

Ironically, we passed on the challenge of picking which tables, turning the choice over to a random number generator. Well, we feel like we always pick the same games and after long enough you run out of different goals. The random number generator picked an interesting enough course, though, including a couple games I really like, at least one that I don't but am somehow good at, and didn't repeat too many from the last couple years' of games.

Picking objectives was annoying, in part because many modern pinball games have gotten complicated to the point there are jillions of things to do and the video screens, for all the space they have, don't always persistently show you what happened. Ultimately we only had to bump one game from the main bank to backup for want of being sure we had a clean objective. And there was testing, because with stuff going on we didn't have enough time at our local barcade to try them all out. I went two days in a row in the leadup to the tournament to try out objectives I wasn't sure about, but still left a couple games --- like Medieval Madness, which I've played so many times in person and in virtual form that I doubt there's anything I don't know --- with objectives that were technically untested.

Still, what's the worst that could happen?


That teased, let's wrap up photos of our trip to Crossroads Village from the last week of last year. I'm almost up to within the past ten months!

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Another intersection with a nice lighted fence and some really good reflections here.


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Here's the village's central tree and the reflections in the slush around it.


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Not Santa! Just one of his many statues waving around the place. Note the over-decorated tree in the background, one of the village's centerpiece items.


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The opera house and the coffee shop here, near the end of the night. The gift shop has already closed and is dark.


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The tree wrapped up tight in lights. I think this is the time we overheard someone asking and told them that yeah, we'd been here in the summer and the tree was still wrapped, just unlit.


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And a parting view of the train station and a lot of wet planks of wood.


Trivia: When developing the first periodic table of the elements Dimitri Mendeleyev supposed that the atomic weights of either tellurium (128) or iodine (127) must be wrong because tellurium clearly preceded iodine in order. Mendeleyev was correct about the ordering, but did not know of isotopes, or that there is enough abundant tellurium-130 that an unrefined sample's average weight will be closer to 128, while iodine-127 is the only common isotope of that element. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

October 29th, 2025
vvalkyri: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] vvalkyri at 09:25pm on 2025-10-29
And in a turn of dark hilarity, with only like 2 or 3 days of work on it we have so far 3 confirmed congresscritters but we've gotten nowhere finding anyone willing to speak who works in a food bank or mutual aid, who is receiving SNAP and looking at losing it, who is a fired or furloughed fed, or who is with USDA Food Nutrition Service.

But anyway. Yeah, 3-5 in front of USDA HQ on the Mall side near Smithsonian Metro, a rally (and food drive*) and we're sending the physical stuff to probably more the food bank in Arlington and the one in Gaithersburg** and we've raised over 5k in a day or two for Capital Area Food Bank and I feel guilty that I don't have a link that has links for all three.

I have no idea what I'm doing or wearing for Halloween.

I suppose I need to spend some more time trying to track down . . . something.

My phone died while I was in the library printing and I ended up talking with a lady for like 45 min after the library closed who plans to show up tomorrow (yay!) and who was telling me about things DC did to keep people from autofalling off medicaid when she was a case worker, and who also was telling me about some guy who was curing AIDS with herbs in the 80s; I went back to explaining PEPFAR and soft power somewhere in there. I think her name was Latisa. We also saw a desperately cute tiny dog.

I need way more sleep tonight.


*and yes we know generally it's best to just give $ to food banks and food pantries but hopefully the photographers will be really into the congresscritters helping load cars? (well actually I think they each have literally like 17 min windows of available time on site.)

** Manna food bank in Gaithersburg is desperate for additional volunteers the next few days:
"Manna Food Center in Maryland serves a significant federal workforce population. Because of the ongoing government shutdown, they are making emergency bags for furloughed federal workers in our area.
If you are available to volunteer for any of the shifts listed below, please contact Manna's Volunteer Coordinator, Kalandra Thompson, at 240.268.2520 x2520 or kalandra@mannafood.org
Volunteers are urgently needed for the following shifts:
· Thursday 10/30 9am – 12pm – 3 openings
· Thursday 10/30 9am – 12pm (Rescued Produce shift) – 8 openings
· Friday 10/31 from 12pm – 2pm (Frozen Meat Prep shift) – 9 openings
Manna Food Center Warehouse: 9311 Gaither Road, Gaithersburg, MD 20877
minoanmiss: A spiral detail from a Minoan fresco (Minoan Spiral)
mrs_sweetpeach: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mrs_sweetpeach at 01:07pm on 2025-10-29 under
location: My home office
Mood:: 'sick' sick
watersword: The cover image of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, a misty landscape with a small cottage (Stock: Arcadia)
posted by [personal profile] watersword at 12:04pm on 2025-10-29 under

As is tradition in this journal, I have a birthday cake for everyone: recs!

This year, it's Wimsey-flavoured. All of these should be read after reading Gaudy Night.

All Our Scattered Leaves by [archiveofourown.org profile] marycrawford. No archive warnings apply, rated G. "A selection of letters and diaries on the eve of the Armistice."

21 Oct 1918.-- Saunders has toothache and refuses to do anything about it, silly woman, walking around with her cheek swollen and smiling horribly at everyone like a perfect martyr, so tiresome of her and I have no patience with it -- have made appointment for her with Mr. Platt down in the village, whose ideas on sedation really quite modern, nothing like that horrible tooth-drawer my father had us visit when I was a girl, like something out of Hoffmann or am I thinking of Grimm?

That a Lover have his Desire by [archiveofourown.org profile] Nineveh_uk. Creator chose not to use archive warnings, rated G. "... because apparently it all happened quite late on Sunday evening, and they sat up half the night, kissing one another madly in a punt. From the Balliol hall to the morning after; at the end of Gaudy Night, Harriet and Peter take a punt on the river. Missing scene fic, the rest of that evening that DLS (curse her!) didn't give us."

'However did you do it?'

'Stood the porter a pint to 'phone Padgett and ask if Lord Peter Wimsey could be trusted with a punt. Don't worry: Padgett is as silent as the grave.'

'Is that the honour of the regiment?'

'Of course,' Peter continued, 'if you'd prefer the Daimler, an elderly and probably oil-stained Burberry, and to take your chances with the cow-pats...'

'Not on your life! I shall learn to live with luxury.'

'I certainly hope so.'

Peter and the Power of Suggestion by [archiveofourown.org profile] keswindhover. No archive warnings apply, rated G. "For once, Lord Peter Wimsey is at a loss. What on earth can a man buy his wife for Christmas that costs under a guinea? Harriet also has a one guinea budget for Peter's present, but she has had the good sense to ask for assistance from Miss Climpson. (And sometimes the best presents are the ones you make yourself.)"

She had mentioned a house and Peter bought it for her. Presumably if she had mentioned the desire for a tiger and some peacocks, there would now be a small zoo in the garage, along with Mrs Merdle. This time, she had felt, Peter needed a firm hand.

So for their second Christmas together she had stipulated, very clearly, that she required something small and modestly priced – no more than a guinea she had added hastily, realising just in time that Peter’s definition of modest was likely to vary from her own. Look on it as a chance to live within somebody else’s means, she had added, a little imp of mischief urging her on. And had been rewarded when she saw Peter’s eyes suddenly gleam behind his monocle, as he realised that a challenge had been laid down.

“Dulcius ex asperis,” he had declared, “Domina, I accept.”

Gentle Antidote by [archiveofourown.org profile] x_los. No archive warnings apply, rated T. "At twenty-one, Harriet Vane gets her Name. It's rather longer than she expected."

“Oh I don’t say that one can’t or shouldn’t love a man not one’s soulmate, of course, only that my husband could at times make himself quite difficult to like. So I quite understand taking care with these decisions, because heaven knows the lithesome limbs of youth and suchlike don’t long endure, nor does their memory adequately compensate one for the grumbling sulks of age."

Green Ice by [archiveofourown.org profile] Adina. No archive warnings apply, rated G. "Wooster has a reputation for pinching things--necklaces, amber statuettes, umbrellas--a reputation that becomes dashedly awkward when Lord Attenbury's emeralds go missing."

"Bertie, you blot on the family escutcheon!" the aforementioned aunt, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia, cried. "What are you doing here?"

"I like that," I responded with no little heat. "Here I drove from the distant metrop. in answer to an ancient relative's urgent telegram, only to have her look at me like some battered corpse the cat dragged in."

"I sent no blasted telegram!"

I tut-tutted. "You most certainly did."

"I did not."

"You did."

Traces Through Time by [archiveofourown.org profile] brutti_ma_buoni. No archive warnings apply, rated T. "Katherine Climpson explores the documentation of an unusual example of medieval matrimony."

Climpson, K., The Wimseys of Bredon: a textual study in marital relationships among the 14th century English high nobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), [xi, 439pp].

Introduction

Peter, second son of Mortimer Wimsey, 5th Duke of Denver, is well-known as an exemplar of unconventional medieval noble life. His bibliophily, cultural patronage and prominence in jurisprudence have been examined by, most recently, Pharos and McLellan in their illustrated biography, and challenged by Jones, who sees the Wimsey reputation for charitable giving as a typical example of high-status fourteenth-century power politics, rather than an exceptional personal commitment. This work does not attempt to reappraise the life of Wimsey alone. It contends, on the contrary, that his relationship and eventual marriage with Harriet (also Harriott, Henriet) Vane is a genuinely enlightening and exceptional case. With parallels to the John of Gaunt-Katherine Swynford marriage, its successor by half a century, the relationship transgressed social norms and was subject to censure and comment within high-status circles. These will to some extent be examined within the present volume. The focus, however, is on the reconstruction of an emotional relationship from the surviving records.


And if you would like to make my birthday extra awesome, please donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds or your local food bank, or tell me something you like about me. ♥

sabotabby: (books!)
posted by [personal profile] sabotabby at 06:50am on 2025-10-29 under
Just finished: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. I don't really have a lot to add: This was good and useful, especially if you're in the revision stage of a project, which I am not. It weirdly made me want to read a few of the books that it talks about as examples, though with my TBR list as it is and a general disinterest in YA literature, I likely won't.

Currently reading: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. It's time, fuckos! I've had a hold on this one since I read a bad review of it. I have heard that Kuang often doesn't land her endings, which I hope is not the case, because this has one of the best openings I've come across in a good long time. It begins with Alice Law, a postgrad in linguistic magick, preparing a chalk circle to go to Hell to retrieve the soul of her recently dead advisor, Professor Grimes, because he's on her dissertation committee and is her only chance to get tenure. The cost for going to Hell and returning is half your remaining lifespan, but Alice is more than willing to pay that in exchange for having a stable job, making her possibly the most relatable character in genre fiction. Her plans are interrupted by Peter, her hated academic rival and the department's golden boy, who insists on coming with her even though his prospects for career advancement are much better than hers.

Anyway this is completely hilarious and painful and only an inconvenient need to work and sleep is keeping me from it at the moment.
vvalkyri: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] vvalkyri at 12:15am on 2025-10-29
I am utterly boggled that 13% of Americans get food delivered DAILY.

Atlantic article aboutThe Innovation That Threatens Restaurant Culture

In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data provided to me by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group. The share of customers using delivery specifically, as opposed to picking up takeout or going to a drive-through, more than doubled from 2019 to 2024. In a recently released poll by the association, 41 percent of respondents said that delivery was “an essential part of their lifestyle.” For Millennials and Generation Z—the apex consumers of today, and of tomorrow too—it’s apparently even more essential: More than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13 percent use it once a day. Five percent use it multiple times a day. But the delivery boom isn’t confined to young people or to urbanites: About one in eight Baby Boomers uses delivery once a week, and so does about one in five rural dwellers. We are a nation of order-inners. A world, really—earlier this year, DoorDash announced a deal to acquire the British delivery service Deliveroo for $3.86 billion; the new, combined company will have 50 million monthly active users, spread over more than 40 countries.


I very occasionally get pizza delivered.

I don't think I've gotten anything delivered if I'm alone since early pandemic. Even during high pandemic I tended to go there to pick stuff up. And I learned early on to maybe search on grubhub or even use the menu on grubhub but actually call the restaurant. (I did that with New Big Wong the night all the restaurants shut down. Because they didn't have their whole menu up on the website. )
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

Guess who spent the whole day either at work or at pinball league? And you know who's going to see a double dose of Crossroads Village pictures to make up for it? If your answers were ``you'', meaning me, and ``me'', meaning you, then you, meaning you, were right.

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The centerpiece of any Crossroads Village trip is the carousel. Here's some horses on display showing off, particularly, the kind of shape they were in before restoration.


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And here's a case that shows off just how bad a horse's leg can be.


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More horse parts, including a tail. I'm sorry to report that's from an actual once-living horse.


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And here's the carousel. The blankets are festive and also protect the mounts from snow- and mud-caked boots.


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And who's the maker? Large C W Parker, Leavenworth, Kansas.


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Almost all the horses at the Crossroads Village carousel are sponsored by someone; here's two horses that I think are the ones we rode, and their dedication plaques.


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Went for a dramatic low shot between the horses here.


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And here's an over-the-shoulder picture to look back.


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This time around we rode in the chariot for some reason and it was a much better, more intense, ride than we imagined. In front is a row of kiddie-size horses.


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Exiting the carousel building we got this view of the wreath and what totally is not the couple on top of a wedding cake in the middle of that.


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Here's a giant white Christmas ornament ready to be walked into.


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While it was above freezing, once again, that meant the melted snow gave us good reflective puddles just everywhere.


Trivia: An April 1973 Consumer Reports review of the Mazda RX-2 found it burned a quart of oil every 875 miles (to lubricate the Wankel engine seals) and averaged 15 mpg, good by American standards but far lower than typical Japanese imports. Source: Car Wars: The Untold Story, Robert Sobel.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham.

October 28th, 2025
minoanmiss: Minoan women talking amongst themselves (Ladies Chatting)
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
posted by [personal profile] sabotabby at 07:20am on 2025-10-28 under , ,
 Barely making headlines yesterday was the announcement that governments have failed once again to meet climate targets. As Hurricane Melissa barrels towards Jamaica, threatening to do catastrophic damage, it's important to remember that these governments had a choice, that we as so-called Western civilization had a choice, and we chose wrong every single time.

The thing you may not have heard of at all was the announcement yesterday of the extinction of the Christmas Island shrew. This little animal was a victim of an even older human-caused catastrophe, the colonization of Australia and its surrounding islands by first Britain, then Japan. The invasion of Europeans introduced black rats to the island, which in turn introduced a parasite that wiped out most of the population. 

With so many other horrors, including the continuing horrors perpetrated by colonialism, take a moment to grieve for this tiny, innocent creature, which was a unique being that in our carelessness and cruelty, we destroyed. Just another beautiful life lost to the gaping maw of capitalism. The people in charge think that they can cheat death by colonizing Mars or uploading their brains into a god-machine but there won't be any little shrews there, and also their fantasies are impossible. There is only this world and we're shitting it up like we have a spare one stashed somewhere.
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

So skipping ahead a little bit in what I mean to report here: we just got back from our Halloweekends vacation at Cedar Point. I had filled out, online, the Post Office's form to Hold Mail. Sunday night we got home to a mailbox stuffed full of un-held mail.

You might remember that we had a problem holding mail this spring, when we went to France and they delivered one day's mail in the middle of the hold period, and then just ... like ... never really got around to delivering the held mail. Not in full, at least. So this time I had specified that I would come to the post office and collect the held mail, in person, and I did that today. Yes, I had a bunch of mail already, including some today --- theoretically the last day of the hold --- but how did I know there wasn't any more?

The clerk took my printed-out hold mail form back, and disappeared for a long while, during which (he would tell me) he looked in the various mail hold compartments, and talked with a supervisor, and with some carrier who wasn't ours but who knew something about the hold mail process, and they had nothing. So I asked why. With two hold-mail fails out of two tries (I forgot our Extreme Heat road trip) I wanted to know if I was somehow doing something wrong.

The clerk did not know why, as they never do. But he did ask if I'd filled out the hold mail form in person. No, I'd done it online. And so it turns out this was probably my problem. Because you know what you need when you have data in an online system about whose mail should be held and on what days? You need someone who can access the system and apparently our local post office currently does not have anyone who can access that system. This is a sufficiently ridiculous explanation that I believe it.

But they think that filling out a physical form, at the post office, will make it less likely that something goes wrong, I guess because someone at the post office will actually be able to read any of this. We'll see whenever our next multi-day trip out of town comes up.


Next thing on my photo roll is Crossroads Village, so we're in the Christmas-to-New-Years stretch of lots of lighting, so, please enjoy that. I am again trying to limit myself to sharing pictures that look better than usual.

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[personal profile] bunnyhugger looking like she's having a great time already as we get to Crossroads Village.


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Someone ahead of me peeking at the train as it arrives and isn't that a great halo around their hat?


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Here's the holiday train going into warp right past us.


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Inside one of the Crossroads Village preserved buildings. Here you see Santa Claus's Willy Wonka hat.


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There's a shuttle that runs from the front of the village back to where the carousel is. We never take it because waiting for it would be slower than just walking back there, but you can see here at least four of the same guy wearing the same blue jacket and cap taking the ride.


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But we're already back at the carousel building and looking back at the village, here.


Trivia: The fastest flight of the first-generation Bell X-1 aircraft was 960 miles per hour, Mach 1.45. Its highest was 69,000 feet. Source: American X-Vehicles: An Inventory - X-1 to X-50, Dennis R Jenkins, Tony Landis, Jay Miller.

Currently Reading: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham. I should say if you haven't figured this out. Given how for the past week I haven't had time to write up what I've been up to, and that we were at Halloweekends all last week, I haven't actually had time to read one page in like a solid week now.

October 27th, 2025
minoanmiss: plus size lady crowned with flowers (Neolithic Summer)
minoanmiss: Minoan version of Egyptian scribal goddess Seshat (Seshat)
posted by [personal profile] minoanmiss at 06:03pm on 2025-10-27
Mood:: 'pleased' pleased
minoanmiss: Girl holding a rainbow-colored oval, because one needs a rainbow icon (Rainbow)
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
posted by [personal profile] redbird at 02:59pm on 2025-10-27 under ,
I went to Somerville this morning for a fasting blood draw, to repeat the blood glucose test from a few weeks ago. She also ordered an A1C test and, apparently, a basic metabolic panel. I don't remember Carneb mentioning the basic metabolic panel, but I asked the receptionist to check whether I'd already had one recently, and he said I hadn't, so sure. I can spare an extra test tube of blood, I just didn't want to have to fight an insurance company about it.

From there, I took the bus to Arlington, hoping to order new glasses, but the optician's office was closed, with no sign explaining why. (It's a one-man shop, so if Ron is sick, there's nobody else to open the office or post a sign explaining when he'll be back.) Before making another trip, I'll call and confirm that he's open; it's an easier trip from Davis Square than from here in Brighton.

The timing worked for me to stop at Lizzy's Ice Cream on the way home; I bought pints of black raspberry, black cherry, and blueberry, which was listed as a seasonal flavor.

I may have overdone things, but when I woke up this morning it seemed like good timing for the fasting blood draw.

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