June 4th, 2025
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mrs_sweetpeach: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] mrs_sweetpeach at 11:43am on 2025-06-04 under
Mood:: 'mellow' mellow
location: Home and on my corner of the couch
minoanmiss: Minoan lady scribe holding up a recursive scroll (Scribe)
sabotabby: (books!)
posted by [personal profile] sabotabby at 07:14am on 2025-06-04 under
Just finished: real ones, Katherena Vermette. This one ruled. I don't have a lot to add to what I said last week except that I really enjoyed it. If you want a good pairing (or you're not super familiar with the context of the Canadian arts scene), Jesse Wente's Unreconciled provides a great non-fiction one. But yeah, I loved the characters, I loved the poetic, Impressionist writing style, it was emotionally affecting without high stakes or pacing, which is something that genre writers could learn a lot from (more on that later). Vermette seems to be putting out great books with impressive frequency but this is the one I've enjoyed most so far.

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. This one was imperfect and ambitious, but I'll take that over boring any day. It's a master class in how to do some interesting worldbuilding; there's a lot going on in the background, and you get it only as a sketch. Oh yeah, there are lizard guns. Why are the guns lizards? Eh, don't worry about it, keep up. It's pretty New Weird in the tradition of Miéville and Tchaikovsky (positive) so I liked that quite a bit.

I have two big critiques, one big and one small. First, the small. This is critically acclaimed, nominated for a bunch of awards, and put out by a real press. And yet. And yet. Alefret, the main character, has one leg. This is clearly established in the opening line. His leg is slowly growing back thanks to an experimental serum that's delivered via wasp sting (again, cool) but it's slow and he's on crutches for the entire book, something that is done very well and really gives a good sense of the character's physicality. And then there is a scene where he is having dinner with two elderly sisters who have a cat. Under the table, the cat brushes up against his ankles and he holds his legs very still. WTF? Which editor let that through?

My bigger complaint is that I don't think she quite lands the ending. As I've said, it's ambitious, a story about whether pacifism can survive a horrific war.
spoilers )

Cottagers and Indians by Drew Hayden Taylor. This is a one-act play based on the true story of Anishinaabe people trying to re-seed lakes with wild rice, over the objection of white cottagers. And it's amazing, obviously. Everything he writes is great and this is particularly affecting. It's a dance between two difficult, complicated characters, and while the white cottager character could easily be a hideous caricature, Hayden Taylor is too much of a humanist to take the easy road out. There's also a great afterword by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, because of course there is.

Currently reading: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls. This is a bilingual (!!!) Indigenous futurist comic about two defenders of the earth, beautifully illustrated in a Formline style. If you want to learn Tahltan, I can't think of a cuter way. There's a lot of pew pew pew and it's very fun.

Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot. JFC not another cozy horror, fuck me. This one starts out very promising, with a teenage girl, haunted by the ghost of her recently dead brother, trying to burn down the family house before it kills the rest of her family. 25 years later, Robyn, who grew up in the tiny town of Black Stone, has fallen on financial hard times after the death of her husband, so she moves herself and her teenage child, Ellis, back home into the very same house. Ellis meets a number of residents, mostly young people, who insist that the house is haunted, and that there's a strange power that it exerts by displacing death into the surrounding towns, while keeping the people in Black Stone alive for a very long time. This is a good set up for horror. I'm here for it.

However, it turns out that the haunted house is nice, actually??? and everyone in the town is very nice??? Ellis is recovering from a life-threatening eating disorder that they in part attribute to "anti-queer cultural norms" and yet they do not encounter anyone who doesn't want to be their friend and/or date them, they immediately get a job at the cool coffee shop without a resume, and everyone in their life is accepting and friendly. Once again, a queernormative setting wants to have its anti-oppression cake and eat it too. I guess maybe the house is somehow making everyone in this small town cool and rad and multicultural, but I dunno, I lived in a pretty small town and it wasn't great.

Also all the kids are goth or alternative in some way and listen to the kind of music that I like. I can buy that there are tons of teenage Black girls in the year of our lord 2025 who listen to Bjork and Sigur Ros. What I cannot buy is that in a tiny town, one of them would just happen to meet and fall for a kid who listens to Frightened Rabbit and the Mountain Goats.

Anyway, I am suspecting that the girl who spent 25 years in a mental institution (what) is going to end up being the villain of the piece, because this is what reading cozy things has led me to suspect. But let's see.
minoanmiss: Nubian girl with dubious facial expression (dubious Nubian girl)
jducoeur: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jducoeur at 10:09pm on 2025-06-03

I just found out that Peter David, one of the legendary writers of the comic book field (and novels, and TV, and other stuff, but I knew him first and foremost from comics) passed away last week.

For posterity, here's my comment on the locked post where I found out about it. (The Kickstarter "blog" for The Babylon 5 Preservation Project, which ran a long obit.) Also includes a few extra footnotes in italics.


Damn -- I had missed that Peter had passed. Not a surprise under the circumstances [he's been quite sick for quite a while], but he'll be much missed. He was one of my favorite writers for most of my adult life.

I was at that "Three High-Verbals" talk at MIT [in Kresge, October 6, 2001], which was the second time I got to meet him. (The first having been after Universicon at Brandeis University, many years before. We wound up commandeering my living room for the after-party, resulting in Peter sitting in my easy chair for hours, telling stories to about two dozen college students sitting around him on the floor.)

Anyway, that was one heck of a memorable talk. Peter read his beautiful, sober But I Digress column about 9/11. Neil read "My Crazy Hair" (demonstrating that yes, Neil could read the phone book and people would happily listen). And Harlan picked a fight with the audience about how the Internet was destroying society, and proceeded to argue with them for half an hour. It seemed very true to each.

Once it was all over, we got to the signings, and I came up to Peter with a Trek fanzine that my wife had picked up at a NY convention in the mid-70s. [This was Jane's first-ever SF convention -- she wheedled her father into taking her into NYC for a Trek con when she was a teenager. I don't remember exactly how old she was at the time, but I vaguely remember it being '74.] Peter's eyes practically bugged out, and he yelled for Caroline [his wife] to come look. Turned out that his piece in there was the first thing he'd ever had published anywhere, and he hadn't seen a copy of it in decades.

That signed zine is buried somewhere in my stacks; I've been looking for it since his heart attack. I still rather regret not having just given it to him at the time...

the_sheryl: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] the_sheryl at 04:54pm on 2025-06-03 under , ,
Here's what I read last month:

Installment Immortality - Seanan McGuire
Mourner's Waltz - Seanan McGuire(novella)
The Number Ones - Tom Breihan (non-fiction)
Cat with a Clue - Laurie Cass
Mood:: 'bored' bored
minoanmiss: Nubian Minoan Lady (Nubian Minoan Lady)
posted by [personal profile] minoanmiss at 03:19pm on 2025-06-03
Mood:: 'pleased' pleased
minoanmiss: Minoan version of Egyptian scribal goddess Seshat (Seshat)
minoanmiss: Minoan youth I drew long ago. (Minoan Youth)
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
posted by [personal profile] sorcyress at 04:26pm on 2025-06-02
It's extra help in the library time!

After the first half of the year, I got rather into the habit of expecting 0-1 students, usually on the low end of that range. But then I've had a few weeks in a row of the pre-calc teachers sending me students to make up tests and things, or do body doubling, and suddenly this week I have _three kids_ hanging out with me. Two are doing tests (one mine, one a pre-calc kid) and the third is finishing up work with me semi-helpfully remembering how limits work.

(I have not yet cynically said "I suppose you can see how often this gets used in the real world" but it's coming)

We're very much at the end of the year, and things are pretty self-paced, which means sometimes in class I can even grade a test or two. Which is good, because the major work task I have right now is, uh, grade all the tests. And everything else that is outstanding. And shake my head and sigh at the students who are obviously using AI, badly. (I miss when they were using photomath badly, at least that wasn't --as I saw someone describe genAI today-- "smarmy").

I had a fourth student arrive! I briefly had FOUR STUDENTS at once which is an absolute record for library help! This was another one of my kiddos even, and I was able to help him grasp the trig stuff he managed to miss entirely, and then throw the test at him to finish up. It will be much more successful than the two days he spent staring at it in a panic because he didn't know any trig.

***

In my real life, I have begun playing Stardew Valley (edit: no spoilers please), and decided it is the Bee's Knees. This shocks basically no one who has ever met me. Am I able to moderate my playing? I will be! But, uh, not quite yet. I need to calm down about it a little bit, or get _really_ strict about playing a day at a time and pausing in between each day to go accomplish real life tasks. (To be clear, I started it on Saturday, and finished the first day of fall yesterday, so we are moving along real nice. But also I did like eighteen hours in two days so UH.)

I'm also doing my reading (I have two days before my check-out pops for Drop of Corruption and I'm only about two thirds done), and getting ready for LCFD weekend quite soon (where hopefully I will not have an infinite amount of grading to do, although I am apparently going direct from work to my ride's house to camp. So I'm packing whatever I haven't already graded! (note to self: This means you'll be packing the work laptop, and shouldn't need to also bring your personal one).

Tonight is the high school graduation, and I've kinda just decided to go direct from school to there. This might be annoying in terms of baggage, but I think it will ultimately be fine. Worst case scenario, someone steals my work bag and I am very sad oh no.

The hardest part about Stardew Valley is that right now it feels _happy_ in a way that means I should probably talk to my therapist. Because Saturday was not otherwise particularly happy, and Sunday was better but also not exactly joyful and HM. What exactly am I looking for here? Control? Simple well definied tasks? An extremely imposed bedtime that I can't avoid no matter what? A morning routine that can always be the same followed by a variety of pleasant ways to spend the afternoon and evening?

(Sunday was good because I was helping LB move, and community is good. It's nice to get to pretend to be butch sometimes, and there was a lot of walking back and forth between old and new houses in pleasant weather. But it was also a lot of social-with-people-I-don't-know which can be fun or can be hard, and LB being extremely efficient which was actually great but then meant everything was done in like...three hours including the eating lunch at the end part. And back into my own head we go!)

***

The real answer is I'm looking for "not being burnt out" and video games can feel like that, kinda sorta sometimes. It is unfortunate that the only real cure for burnout is "rest, prolonged" and I don't get access to that until mid-July. And then I need to figure out the rest of my plans, like when I'm going to Maryland and the like. Sigh.

okay, I think I have figured that out, and also I think I'll be in town for about two weeks, assuming the timing works for my mom. Which means I should definitely _actually see people_ in MD, and also like, I dunno, go to a bells practice? Note to self, send some emails closer to. But as always, it's primarily a chance to hang out with my Cool Mom.

And then I'll have queer Scottish on the 7th, and then two full weeks of very little planned1, and then into the school year! Huzzah!

***

We keep going. Tonight there might be ice cream. I do like that part.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I uh. god willing and the creek don't rise, it's very little planned, but that little is a _lot_.
minoanmiss: The beautiful Finn as the king he is (Pharaoh Finn)
minoanmiss: Minoan lady watching the Thera eruption (Lady and Eruption)
minoanmiss: Minoan version of Egyptian scribal goddess Seshat (Seshat)
firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)
posted by [personal profile] firecat at 01:52am on 2025-06-02 under
"Peter Stormare Gives Update on ‘Constantine 2’; Keanu Reeves Reportedly Unhappy with Script" by Meagan Navarro (very similar articles seen on a number of other entertainment news sites).

"'But to do a sequel, the studios want to have, you know, cars flying in the air. They want to have people doing flip-flops and fighting action scenes,' Stormare said."

I think I agree with Keanu. We already have the John Wick franchise. IT IS AWESOME. But we don't need the Keanu-as-Constantine franchise to turn into another John Wick franchise.

I hope they resolve this soon because I am DROOLING at the chance to see Stormare play Lucifer again.
vvalkyri: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] vvalkyri at 11:48pm on 2025-06-01
I feel like I should note that tonight's everquest was way shorter than expected and we'd be out aurora hunting now if there were aurora and that i'm definitely feeling some of the aerial stuff I did yesterday...

and Pkid taught me all about some of the airport history near montreal, which was kinda neat.
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 11:46pm on 2025-06-01
elynne: (Default)
I must apologize profusely for the shortness of this chapter and the forthcoming delay, but for whatever reason this spring is absolutely kicking my ass in several directions, and it’s violently disrupted my writing schedule. So I’m going to be taking a break for the month of June, and work on getting back into the groove. The next chapter will be posted Sunday, July 6th. Thank you all so, so much for reading, commenting, and enjoying the story.

Read more... )
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
posted by [personal profile] redbird at 06:25pm on 2025-06-01 under ,
My GI doctor says the celiac test is negative. This is both unsurprising and a relief: the doctor ordered the test because of comorbidities, not because there were any signs of celiac, but celiac is common enough in people with collagenous colitis that it was worth checking.

I do still need to contact her office tomorrow and ask about that follow-up appointment.
Mood:: relieved
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dianec42: Cross stitch face (DecoLady)
posted by [personal profile] dianec42 at 04:23pm on 2025-06-01 under ,
Finished cross stitch of deer in woods

Pattern is from the book Cross Stitch In The Forest. I foolishly thought, “This is just 4 colors! It should be simple. And I can use threads from my stash!”

Dear reader, it was not so. One 123stitch order for DMC 988 and more 989, hours of eyestrain from working on dark fabric, and about a billion three-quarter stitches later, I can confidently state that I HAVE NOT LEARNED A THING and intend to start Upon A Star (the one with the wolf and the moon) pretty much any second now.
minoanmiss: Modern art of Minoan woman fllipping over a bull (Bull-Dancer)
minoanmiss: sketch of two Minoan wome (Minoan Friends)
elynne: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] elynne at 01:27pm on 2025-05-31 under , ,
malada: Canadian flag text I stand with Canada (Default)
posted by [personal profile] malada at 11:01am on 2025-05-31 under
Recently someone I know was complaining how bad Biden was. "He was so old," they said. "Going down hill. He never should have ran again (in 2024).

Well, maybe Joe was to old and should have handed it directly to Kamala Harris much soon. But I asked them, "Name me a bad policy he endorsed."

That shut them up.

'Nuff said.

Get better Joe.
Mood:: 'thoughtful' thoughtful
leiacat: A grey cat against background of starry sky, with lit candle in the foreground (Default)
posted by [personal profile] leiacat at 09:19am on 2025-05-31 under
Meanwhile, I stage managed Much Ado.

Speak low if you speak love )
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-06-06 under ,

This week I'm trying something I haven't done in ages on my humor blog: letting Robert Benchley write it. I like this. He's got a pretty solid comic voice. Here's what you might have missed if you weren't reading it day-by-day:


With that having got you moderately amused now please enjoy the end of our stop-in at Cedar Point last July, as photographed:

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This is not the Space Age ride mentioned as a rotation point. This is a ride in Planet Snoopy, a completely separate kids area on the other side of the Coliseum from the Kiddie Kingdom.


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And this is a small performance area in Planet Snoopy that I think we've never been around when it was in use.


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Walking over to something or other (Iron Dragon) we saw a pack of musicians performing in front of the Coasters Diner. Also someone who bought a seagull backpack, that's nice.


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Also you can see a mother who does not have the time for people in poodle skirts dancing.


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And here's Iron Dragon, always a favorite, although in its last season before the indignity of a fast-pass line-cutting lane was installed.


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Meanwhile the griffin, now gold, stands proudly there and refuses to explain why it vanished for a few years and why it's in front of Iron Dragon instead of the griffin-themed GateKeeper.


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Now here is the turnstile outside the Cedar Downs racing carousel. I photograph this just because I'd never paid any attention to the manufacturer of the turnstile before, so here we go.


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The afternoon light flatters the horses here.


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The lights inside not being on improves the composition here. I should have centered the center area, though. If I ever get the chance I'll have to re-photograph this right.


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Tilting the camera this severely emphasizes how the horses are racing, moving back and forth in those slots, so that some look like they're leaping ahead of the pack.


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Cedar Downs is next to the Cadillac Cars, last remaining tracked car ride.


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And that's our drop-in done. Here's a look to the front of the park from Cedar Downs on the right and in the concrete you see how much has been done to dry up the rain already.


Trivia: On the fourth flight day of Gemini 4, the astronauts found themselves unable to turn off the computer (to conserve spacecraft power). Even after switching the unit to off the computer light stayed on, with no malfunction light. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 63: The Abdominal Snowman, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. There's a lot of energy going into this story, especially after the four thousandth college football story by Sims and Zaboly.

austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-06-05 under ,

More of not having time to write anything so please enjoy Cedar Point as on the day we dropped in last July.

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Resting in the Kiddie Kingdom as it might have rained. We had always thought this building had to have been the station for a train ride or something like that, before its long use as a lost-persons center. Turns out no, it never was. When the Kiddie Kingdom used to be enclosed this was the way you entered and exited, though, which is why it's a substantial building without any particular entertainment value.


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The Kiddie Kingdom motorcycle ride where you go around in a small vehicle and hit a buzzer lots.


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And the control panel for the station, including the note about what ride an operator here should go to next (Space Age).


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Enough of the Kiddie Kingdom; we're back at Blue Streak and ready for a front-seat ride! Soon.


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I got to see the sign with the text to read in case of service interruptions, but I couldn't get my camera to take a clear photo of it.


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The lift hill and the queue area that normally seems over-ample for Blue Streak. It fills up a bit come Halloweekends.


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And here's Cedar Point's Windseeker! Will this be the time I finally ride it?


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Yes. Despite the recent rain the ride was going and I chose to take this moment for a ride that proved pretty normal, compared to getting stopped up top like at Kings Island.


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Here's what the ride looks like at full height from under the queue's covering.


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And I liked this picture of a guy almost trapped between the fence railings up front. Tighten this up and you have a good album cover.


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Yeah, like that! Now you have the whole image of the guy not knowing he's confined to a narrow column, and that in-between fences behind and in front of him.


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Windseeker exits on this nice view of the back of the Wild Mouse's lift hill, and so you can see the back of the cat who's reaching for a mouse car.


Trivia: On Gemini 4's third day of flight Pat White, wife of astronaut Ed White, besides talking with her husband also passed along some capcom notes to adjust some dials, and the flight surgeon's instruction to drink more water and get more rest. Pat McDivitt, Jim McDivitt's wife, repeated the drink-more-water instruction. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 63: The Abdominal Snowman, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.

austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-06-04 under ,

You know what we did after that Kennywood visit and that Pinball event? If you guessed ``went to an amusement park, probably Cedar Point'' good news, you get to see pictures of exactly that event now:

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Traditional establishing shot, proving that both my car and Cedar Point were in view at the same time.


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The entrance, looking not as grand as it did during the eclipse but still, nice. Note the electronic sign warns that Top Thrill 2 will not open today; it could have said, all season.


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Boardwalk Nights! The Cedar Point 150 sign turns out to be a good spot to put signs for all kinds of temporary events.


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Blue Streak, standing firm despite the threatening clouds.


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And here's Raptor, again with clouds that look like they don't want any fun going on.


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Of course even a short visit to Cedar Point will see carousels, such as the Kiddy Kingdom one here.


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We spent a little time looking around the Kiddie Kingdom rides, mostly out of a sense that someday they're going to renovate them otu of existence and we'll feel bad about that.


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Though a lot of the Kiddie Kingdom rides are like this, a toy vehicle going in a circle with a buzzer the kid can press to make noise.


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There's the carousel. The armored horse on the left is a fiberglass replica; the original is, last anyone confirmed, gathering dust in the art department for some reason.


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Back to rides, like the spinning tubs one here that was closed lest the rain you see there make it unsafe to operate.


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Here's two of the rabbits on the Kiddie Kingdom carousel. At the end of the season an operator claimed they had names, although we're not sure we believed the claim and I'm not sure I remember them. They were straightforward ones like you might make if you weren't trying very hard, like, Snowball and Caramel or something like that.


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Kiddie Kingdom Carousel, some flat kiddie ride or other, and one of the domes of the Coliseum.


Trivia: On the second day of its flight Gemini 4 astronauts surpassed the total duration record of all eight previous United States astronauts combined, as well as the duration record for a multi-crew spacecraft set by Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov on Voskhod 2 three months earlier. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 62: WEE vs I.O.U., Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Yep, that sure was another college football tale, although this one at least introduces the element that Olive Oyl eats a lot of olives, thereby justifying one element of this one Gene Deitch-made 60s Popeye cartoon.

(PS: there is no significance to the subject line, a lyric from Sparks's ``Tips for Teens''. I couldn't think of a good song to use and this was playing. Pay it no mind.)

May 31st, 2025
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 01:59am on 2025-05-31
Sometime during lockdown in the last four years, my arches fell. They had never been particularly high, but they felt fine in Birkies and so on. But now I am doing foot exercises to get them to show up at all, and if I don't it is really painful to walk any distance.

This cuts into my abiity to regain stamina and general fitness.

The exercises are starting to help significantly, so now all I need is a day or two without a major rainstorm or enough after a rainstorm that I won't be getting wet just by walking around near trees and bushes.

A friend told me that it takes at least 6 months to get one's energy back after COVID. Well, I was diagnosed Jan. 20 and it went for a couple of weeks actively and a few more overall. It took more time to be rid of the bad taste from the Pax than I expected. So I'm still within six months of it. I keep telling myself this.

The other thing that interferes with my health at the moment is variable tinitis, as in it comes and goes, and when it's there I have to find a soundscape in my CALM app that has that tone in it, so that the app's sounds distract me from the one inside my brain. Usually it works, but last night the inner sound had apparently retuned itself (autotune is the plague) and did not match anything on Calm except a wind in the trees, so I wasn't able to sleep, since the 'wind in pines' just didn't work. There is a downside to having perfect pitch and noticing when the inner-produced noises change.
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)

Now to close out pictures of the Women's International Pinball Tournament, as again, no time to write just now.

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Pinburgh championship banners seen from the first floor, near where they keep all the Long Croquet Mallets on the wall.


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A break in the action. This might have been lunch or just the time before the scheduled next round.


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The waiting area, waiting around.


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I went over to this little side balcony where I got an extreme shot of the previous WIPT champion banners.


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And over there they had the original King Kong! Hi-Deal is one of Bally's last electromechanical games, but don't worry, it's another collect-the-playing-cards game.


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From by Hi-Deal you get this view of the tournament organizers area, with all the people wearing STAFF shirts and plastic crates of stuff.


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Here I got up real close to the top-four-finishers plaques and you know what I discovered about how they're held up?


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Yeah, it's all done with cans of soda pop! Only the first place finisher gets a Diet Coke, everyone else has to accept Regular Sprite.


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This is just side art from a bouncy-ball crane game that, I don't know, there's something appealing even though the kangaroo face was drawn kind of weird.


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Disused PAPA call-a-tournament-official-over station; you push the button and they get word that someone should be over. They had a couple of these off hidden behind things. Anyway I don't know what the winged, horned pinball is supposed to mean.


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Later in the day the bagels were replaced with lots of popcorn.


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And at the venue we saw Labyrinth for the first time, playing it enough to understand there's cool stuff going on here, not enough to understand how to do any of it on purpose.


Trivia: Capcom Gus Grissom gave Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White the go-head for his spacewalk one hour 33 minutes into the flight. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler. They would try opening the hatch at just under four hours into the flight.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 62: WEE vs I.O.U., Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Noelle observes it's the last Tom Sims-penned story so of course it's another college football tale.

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

I don't have the time to really write anything up right now, so please enjoy pictures of the Revived Women's International Pinball Tournament, 2024 edition.

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[personal profile] bunnyhugger discovering how much of Total Nuclear Annihilation she's lost touch with.


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A look across the lower level of the movie theater. It was before noon so that's why the lower level isn't busy enough to be dead. Later, the smell of movie popcorn would dominate things.


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And here's the trophies for the top four finishers! [personal profile] bunnyhugger would not be among them, but she didn't do badly.


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Waiting area and lounge set up for players in the middle of the floor, along with a projection screen that would show whatever they thought deserved it. On the side you can see a Genesis, conceivably the one of my long-departed glory days at Pinburgh.


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People gather together to hear opening announcements and play the Pinball National Anthem (the high-score theme from Space Station).


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And gathering for the group photo, with both real cameras and cell phones!


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[personal profile] bunnyhugger joins in the Pledge of Pinball Allegiance (liberty and just a wee bit more margin on the ball save timer for all).


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Round one! Tragically, [personal profile] bunnyhugger's tournament would begin with Paragon. The format was the same as the WIPT of 2019, at least.


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And here she faces up to, ugh, Paragon.


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Sometime later she writes down scores (probably) for one of the other games that bank. Feels like Aladdin's Castle to me, but no way to know for sure. Or she's just setting the pen down.


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Meanwhile with nothing else to do I got some time in on blob-themed game Quicksilver, in the free-play area.


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Not sure I'd ever seen the airbrushed side panel art on a Quicksilver before. Turns out this melty blobby game manages to find room for silhouetted nipples.


Trivia: Albrecht Dürer, after receiving one of Martin Luther's works as a gift from Duke Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony in 1520, wrote (Duke Frederick's secretary and court chaplain) that he would draw Luther's portrait and engrave it in copper, ``if God helps me to come to'' him. Dürer would never meet, nor draw, Luther. Source: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 61: King Bee and Queen Bee, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. And after an intriguing start the characters just decide to leave. It's a choice that kind of makes sense but it should have been used as a stronger punch line.

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

I mentioned in passing the Zen Tournament, the traditional end-of-the-pinball-season match where teams of players try to win a double-elimination contest. We had that Tuesday night and once again [personal profile] bunnyhugger and I were a team. The format was, apart from the teams-of-people-playing, the same as we used in league finals, best-of-three matches and a team eliminated only after losing a second round of that.

The surprising thing, especially given we hadn't practiced at all. On our very first game against the team of PCL and DG, Black Knight: Sword of Rage, we lost, but after rallying from an enormous gap, and losing by only a couple hundred thousand points. I felt great for that; [personal profile] bunnyhugger felt the opposite. On Dungeons and Dragons we learned that there was a brand-new code update just that day that made Dragon Multiball, the thing everyone goes for, more difficult to reach. We won anyway but it was luckier than it should have been. We lost on the last game, though, and went into the Second Chance Bracket.

But once there we were we started doing well again. This included some really dominating games of Tron, The Beatles --- I think we had a million points plus on the first ball, and that's where you'd hope to be after two balls --- and in the next round, had a game of Pulp Fiction where we made up a half-million-point gap on one ball. I count myself lucky when I get a half-million points a whole game of Pulp Fiction, never mind on one ball and splitting flipper responsibilities. If that weren't enough we managed to beat the team of DMC and RED --- my pick for the team of destiny here --- in three games, winning on Tales of the Arabian Nights thanks to a killer first ball, and squeaking out a win on Jaws on the bonus of the last ball.

So this put us into finals, against the team of PCL and DG again. They beat us on Godzilla, like we kind of expected, although we didn't do badly. On The Addams Family it took us a little while but we finally got the rhythm of the skill shot, and shooting the ramp, and shooting the chair to start modes and that gave us a very easy win. Then they picked Jurassic Park, which we never play, and rarely play well, and we just couldn't do anything. We even failed to get the T-Rex Multiball started, so the game was a loss. And with that, we lost the tournament, but we got far closer than we were expecting, We should have expected; [personal profile] bunnyhugger had been counting on using down time during the tournament to get some work done so naturally she would have no time.

For the side tournament --- there's always a side tournament --- [personal profile] bunnyhugger brought in her All-American Girl toy machine, The Flip Side, figuring there was no way this could be such a long-playing game as to make the tournament drag on. In this she was correct. She did not foresee the possibility of someone beating her long-held high score on her own table, and while RED did not beat her high score, he came closer than she was comfortable with. We also streamed this on PCL's rig, which was very funny because the rig is set up for a pinball game of normal dimensions, not something small enough for a squirrel to be able to play. I don't know that this is the first time anyone's streamed The Flip Side for an actual sanctioned pinball tournament but it's a rarity at least. So if anyone caught the stream, they got to enjoy that oddness too.


Coming up now on the photo roll: the Women's International Pinball Tournament, the thing we really went to Pittsburgh for. This used to be held the day after Pinburgh finals, but with ... well, there was a revival of Pinburgh. Without the backing of ReplayFX and the dispersed collection of games from PAPA headquarters it can't command the Anthrocon convention center, but after all, the important thing in a tournament is the playing, right? So here's how that looked ...

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The new location of Pinburgh! Which we almost drove right past because we ... were expecting some kind of dedicated sports-event facility, not the upper level of a multiplex.


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But here it is, the revived Women's Intergalactic Pinball Tournament. Also something held there for the first time, the pre-Pinburgh Bash At The Burgh tournament that we didn't get to.


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They had the rights to the name as well as the banners from Previous Pinburgh, including the ones that reflected the 2019 champions that would have debuted at Pinburgh 2020.


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And ... there's the venue, the mezzanine level of the multiplex here. You can totally date these photos to this year because there's Yet Another Alien Movie among the posters.


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Players warming up. Also filling up, since they provided bagels! If we'd known I probably would still have eaten so many eggs from the hotel breakfast but still, that's nice seeing.


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Spanish Eyes! And still featuring its Pinburgh 2019 bank sign, so there's a good chance I played this literal table for something that counts before. Also look at that art; it's a pity that artist didn't do more games.


Trivia: One of the Sanskrit words for 'Friday' was 'Sukravara', honoring Venus and meaning 'bright, resplendent'. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 61: King Bee and Queen Bee, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle.

siderea: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] siderea at 12:23am on 2025-05-31 under ,
Back in 2013, I winnowed down the entire listings of Boston Early Music Festival events, official and fringe, to a curated concentrate of just concerts and other events featuring music from before 1600 AD. There were about 35 of them.

The 2025 BEMF is just nine days out and the Fringe Concerts listings updated today has a total of fewer than 30 listings.
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-05-31 under , ,

When last I reported about my lost camera and Motor City Furry Con we'd had established two important things. First, they had my camera! Second, it was in storage so who knows when they'd find the chance to recover it?

Well. I could manage going to Pinball At The Zoo without a camera and even the handful of things we got to in May without. Mostly local pinball stuff, although this might be the first time I don't have a proper ``what we compete for'' picture of the plaques at pinball night. But we are coming up on things I must have a camera for, and while yes, my iPhone is probably adequate for most purposes I want a camera that's a proper camera.

So I went looking and found a used Panasonic Lumix camera, one very close to the camera I had before my misplaced camera. And I finally have all the pieces I need for it together --- camera, memory card, battery and spare battery, charger, and the data/power cable that connects it to a computer or USB power supply! I even found that my old camera bag, the one used for the previous camera, fits this new one just fine. It lacks a strap --- I'd transferred that to my Samsung camera so that's in the Motor City Furry Con Lost And Found Storage Locker right now --- but the important thing is I can take good pictures and plenty of them. And the zoom on this doesn't --- yet --- get jammed up partway through, putting it ahead of my Samsung.

Now, of course, I just have to explain what I need to take pictures of that made me spend money on this.


We close the month now with something I bet you'd never thought you would see: the end of Kennywood pictures from our trip last year! And what comes up to follow this? Hm. There's so many possibilities ...

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Oh yeah, we rented a locker for the second time ever and had to get stuff out of it. Do you see our locker number? Well, it was easy to remember since it was 1054 and I need hardly remind you what an important year that was.


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Super Kaleidoscope, the charming circular-shaped building up front with the candy shop inside. It just looks good. You can make out the Old Mill's frontage in the background.


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The Goodnight heart, last thing you see before entering the tunnel to leave Kennywood.


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They've painted the tunnel with all kinds of Kennywood memorabilia and items, including a replica ticket from nearly a century ago and the reminder to gentlemen after using the washroom.


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Looking back at the park from the parking lot.


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And here's a panoramic view at the end of the night, to match the one had at the start of the day.


Trivia: The pancreas's name reflects its label as ``pan'' (all) and ``kreas'' (flesh), an organ of all flesh. The name may reflect early lack of knowledge of what it did and was simply there. Source: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.

May 30th, 2025
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
posted by [personal profile] sabotabby at 07:15am on 2025-05-30 under
 When someone tells you that something is "inevitable" or "here to stay," you shouldn't believe them. You should, in fact, do something between vicious mockery and other, more high-level spells on them. They are lying to you and they want you to suffer.

In the past, massive political and socioeconomic changes were enforced through violence. Before Margaret Thatcher could have people believing that There Is No Alternative, she had to crush the miner's unions. Before neoliberal structural adjustment policies were enforced on the Global South, governments and corporations had to rig elections, murder Indigenous people, and starve their populations. 

So why are we accepting this massive change—the enshittification of all things from labour to education to the arts—that no one asked for and no one wants? Because we are a very passive, bovine population that has been conditioned for decades to accept anything that Big Tech tells us that we want. Which is why I get daily emails from companies and my employer giving me best practices for incorporating plagiarism into my pedagogical practice, etc.

The handful of independent tech reporters who still have brains, like Ed Zitron and in this case, Paris Marx, put the lie to that. Tech Won't Save Us has a great episode, "Generative AI is Not Inevitable with Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender" that discusses how obvious it is that gen AI has not lived up to the hype, that it's an industry propped up by wishes and VC capital rather than an actual market, and that we can actually nip this in the bud. It's very empowering and I'm definitely going to check out the book that the two guests wrote.
austin_dern: Inspired by Krazy Kat, of kourse. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] austin_dern at 12:10am on 2025-05-30 under ,

This week my humor blog has seen a lot being made out of the fact Wikipedia has a list of notable soups. But there's also other stuff, no less weakly motivated. For example:


Now something that never needs motivation, the sharing of pictures of Kennywood. Enjoy!

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Here's a picture of some of the horses from the inside of the carousel, showing off the less-elaborately-carved sides.


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This is the band organ, a Wurlitzer something or other model.


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Here's that carousel tiger scaring off some riders.


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And someone so delighted she's clapping and leaning back. (Yes, I know, she's taking a picture and not stepping back a little.)


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Is that the night already? Vending booths all closed up here.


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The traditional picture from the bridge of the Racer and midway games and Jack Rabbit. That tree on the right's obscuring the logo almost completely now.


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It is the end of the night! Grand Carousel with all the lights off, and people being quietly but insistently pushed toward the exit.


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So here's another quick picture of the lake, looking over towards Steel Curtain so there's none of that pesky nature obscuring the buildings.


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The waters were quite still and the reflection of Steel Curtain looked great.


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And here's Jack Rabbit where you can see the neon logo and the parts of the legs that still aren't illuminated.


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Refreshments continues to be one of [personal profile] bunnyhugger's favorite pieces of neon.


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And here's the Kangaroo. The rainbow-lit roo is part of a lights animation, the extra brightness and colors jumping from right to left.


Trivia: During World War II, Japan had 99 motorized farm tractors. Source: The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Lizzie Collingham. (Given the typical size and landscaping of rice paddies it's not obvious that more would have helped much, and in any case, fuel and oil were short.)

Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.

May 29th, 2025
extraarcha: small Diabetic icon (Default)
posted by [personal profile] extraarcha at 04:24pm on 2025-05-29 under , ,
History Lesson


Read what William Shirer discovered when interviewing everyday Germans after WWII. Every German city lay in ruins and millions had been killed.

"There was so much that was true that did not make sense: the monumental apathy of the German people and their deep regret, not that they had started the war, but merely that they had lost it; their whining complaints at the lack of food and fuel and their total lack of sympathy or even interest in the worse plight of the occupied peoples, for which they bore so much responsibility; their boredom at the very mention of the Nuremberg trial, which they were convinced was only an Allied propaganda stunt; their striking unreadiness for, or interest in, democracy, which we, with typical Anglo-Saxon fervor and blindness, were trying to shove down their throats."

  ~ William L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary

Their deep regret, not that they had started the war, but merely that they had lost it.

So, it's something i watch: is the MAGA cult going to be any different?
I'm not expecting that will happen.
minoanmiss: Nubian girl with dubious facial expression (dubious Nubian girl)

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