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apod_feed May. 25th, 2026 05:21 am)
apod_feed May. 25th, 2026 05:21 am)
What's that passing in front of the Sun?
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awesomeers May. 24th, 2026 09:36 pm)
jazzyjj posting in awesomeers May. 24th, 2026 09:36 pm)It's challenge time!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
tags:
Happy Sunday! I have safely returned from my weekend anime convention trip! I'll write separate posts about that later. Instead, here's what I have to share from the past week (which feels like a million years ago now)
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Hugo homework continues. I'm posting about it real time on the sync read post, but also posting here as I finish things I consider stand-alone books (novellas and longer) and complete categories:
6. Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle – Hm. I don’t think I’ve read anything by Annalee Newitz prior to this, but I've read them and other people talking about their books, which set my expectations pretty low. And thencyanmnemosyne finished this novella and described it as, “If I had been asked to blurb it, my blurb would be ‘Great for fans of the Monk and Robot books’” – and since I HATED the first Monk and Robot book – well, OK, I strongly disliked the book itself and HATED that it won the Hugo – that further lowered my expectations.
But actually I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, where it’s all getting to know our plucky band of misfit robots, making noodles (I do want some noodles now), and traipsing around future!San Francisco, and getting to hear what NorCal is like post ?the war of secession?. So, I was pleasantly surprised for the first part of my reading journey. But then I got to the parts where there are supposed to be, like, emotional arcs? and maybe themes more serious than “yum, noodles!”, and from here the book worked considerably less well for me. ( More, with spoilers )
7. Naomi Novik, The Summer War – this isn’t new ground for Novik, but she’s doing a thing she does well, and that I enjoy her doing, so, like, no complaints from me. This hasn’t got, for me, the iddy appeal of Uprooted’s central relationship, or the poignancy of Miryem the well-realized Jewish protagonist of Spinning Silver, but I do really enjoy Novik’s fairytales as a baseline, and her fey, with their alien morality that makes them at once laughable and compelling, which is a neat trick. And Novik also just writes prose in a way I really enjoy, which is on display here, and which was a big part of how much I liked this novella. ( Spoilers from here )
Short stories: ( Tia Tashiro, Isabel J. Kim, Thomas Ha, J.R.Dawson, Samantha Mills, Effie Sieberg )
Short stories (6/6): Missing Helen > Wire Mother > In My Country > 10 Visions > Laser Eyes > No Award > Revise You
Novelettes:
( Never Eaten Vegetables, H.H.Pak )
( The Millay Illusion, Sarah Pinsker )
( When He Calls Your Name, Cat Valente )
( Rapport, Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, Martha Wells )
( The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed )
( Kaiju Agonistes, Scott Lynch )
Novelettes: (6/6) Never Eaten Vegetables >> The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For > When He Calls Your Name / Kaiju / Millay Illusion (I keep fiddling with the order... I think the Valente one has more of a point, under the thicket of words, though admittedly I found 'Kaiju' more fun and 'Illusion' less of a slog > the ART one (I liked the additional ART canon, I love ART, but in no way is that worth a Hugo).
*
Taskmaster also continues:
Taskmaster s21e07 – Amy looks really cute in her patterned dress and her boots and with her hair like that! ( Spoilers from here )
John Kearns was the Taskmaster Podcast guest and, wow, I really do find him unlistenable. I multi-tasked through most of the episode, because otherwise I would’ve turned it off, and I did want to hear Ed’s thoughts on the episode, which I don’t think I got any of, just pause-ridden unrelated rambling from Kearns, and fell asleep during the last bit, which I’m not going to attempt to repeat. Ah well.
Taskmaster Australia s5e03 – I keep looking forward to Anisa’s outfits and she keeps not disappointing! ( Spoilers )
6. Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle – Hm. I don’t think I’ve read anything by Annalee Newitz prior to this, but I've read them and other people talking about their books, which set my expectations pretty low. And then
cyanmnemosyne finished this novella and described it as, “If I had been asked to blurb it, my blurb would be ‘Great for fans of the Monk and Robot books’” – and since I HATED the first Monk and Robot book – well, OK, I strongly disliked the book itself and HATED that it won the Hugo – that further lowered my expectations. But actually I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, where it’s all getting to know our plucky band of misfit robots, making noodles (I do want some noodles now), and traipsing around future!San Francisco, and getting to hear what NorCal is like post ?the war of secession?. So, I was pleasantly surprised for the first part of my reading journey. But then I got to the parts where there are supposed to be, like, emotional arcs? and maybe themes more serious than “yum, noodles!”, and from here the book worked considerably less well for me. ( More, with spoilers )
7. Naomi Novik, The Summer War – this isn’t new ground for Novik, but she’s doing a thing she does well, and that I enjoy her doing, so, like, no complaints from me. This hasn’t got, for me, the iddy appeal of Uprooted’s central relationship, or the poignancy of Miryem the well-realized Jewish protagonist of Spinning Silver, but I do really enjoy Novik’s fairytales as a baseline, and her fey, with their alien morality that makes them at once laughable and compelling, which is a neat trick. And Novik also just writes prose in a way I really enjoy, which is on display here, and which was a big part of how much I liked this novella. ( Spoilers from here )
Short stories: ( Tia Tashiro, Isabel J. Kim, Thomas Ha, J.R.Dawson, Samantha Mills, Effie Sieberg )
Short stories (6/6): Missing Helen > Wire Mother > In My Country > 10 Visions > Laser Eyes > No Award > Revise You
Novelettes:
( Never Eaten Vegetables, H.H.Pak )
( The Millay Illusion, Sarah Pinsker )
( When He Calls Your Name, Cat Valente )
( Rapport, Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, Martha Wells )
( The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed )
( Kaiju Agonistes, Scott Lynch )
Novelettes: (6/6) Never Eaten Vegetables >> The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For > When He Calls Your Name / Kaiju / Millay Illusion (I keep fiddling with the order... I think the Valente one has more of a point, under the thicket of words, though admittedly I found 'Kaiju' more fun and 'Illusion' less of a slog > the ART one (I liked the additional ART canon, I love ART, but in no way is that worth a Hugo).
*
Taskmaster also continues:
Taskmaster s21e07 – Amy looks really cute in her patterned dress and her boots and with her hair like that! ( Spoilers from here )
John Kearns was the Taskmaster Podcast guest and, wow, I really do find him unlistenable. I multi-tasked through most of the episode, because otherwise I would’ve turned it off, and I did want to hear Ed’s thoughts on the episode, which I don’t think I got any of, just pause-ridden unrelated rambling from Kearns, and fell asleep during the last bit, which I’m not going to attempt to repeat. Ah well.
Taskmaster Australia s5e03 – I keep looking forward to Anisa’s outfits and she keeps not disappointing! ( Spoilers )
(koonj_feed May. 24th, 2026 10:11 pm)
koonj_feed May. 24th, 2026 10:11 pm)Many years ago, I visited and observed my child’s 1st grade classroom at the Reggio Emilia UIUC lab school. The two autistic students (my kid, high-functioning and masking, and the other boy, very hyperactive) had been paired together to count pennies with a young teacher’s aide.
All other kids were in small groups doing 1st-2nd grade advanced math. I watched in grief while all the white and Asian kids got their completed work checked by the master teacher. Meanwhile my child tried to follow instructions as his partner threw the pennies in the air, and the young aide got on her knees to collect them.
None of the teachers leading the other groups paused to take a single glance at my son or his partner.
There have got to be better ways between this and homeschooling. Meantime, I bear the guilt of not taking my high functioning autistic child out of school to educate him myself, – because I had to work for a living, teaching other people’s kids at college.
Reading. I managed a bit more of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish before it got autoreturned to the library; I do not regret the outdoor activities I was doing instead of finishing it up but I am also mildly disgruntled that it's likely to be around another month before I get it back from the library. (Yes, it has won me over from my initial grumbles about Intro To Phylogeny.)
I have managed to reread approximately, generously, a chapter and a half of Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone), which I still want to complete before I have another go at Dead Hand Rule, because I absolutely do not have adequate recollection of how WP finished. And yet: my brain it goes eeeeeeeeeenh.
Watching. Apparently it has been a week in which I was willing to do audiovisual processing, and not just on my special interest?
In NOT my special interest news (see also Exploring), I appreciated this very short documentary on the piece of artwork at the centre of the Kerdroya labyrinth.
On Friday I hit the point of going "okay, this is ridiculous, what the hell is going on that I am managing to move that much weight in what is nominally a barbell row", tried to get the internet to tell me how I should expect row vs bench weights to look, and found a Renaissance Periodization video on 11 Barbell Row Mistakes (content note: masturbation jokes in questionable taste). RP are a source that Casey Johnston trusts, and I trust Casey Johnston sufficient to take that rec (though, to be clear, not on all things), so I watched it! And I now think I know some things I'm doing suboptimally and for that matter some things Johnston recommends doing suboptimally or unclearly! So obviously I am impatient to wave a stick around and see how it feels, and I am next scheduled to do this with barbell rows on... Wednesday.
I have three other videos from that sequence open in tabs.
Listening. Tragically we did NOT listen to a bunch of Hidden Almanac on the way down to Cornwall and then back up again, because it would not have been to my mum's taste and we did not wish to ensadden her on the journey.
Playing. Have replayed Tukoni: Prologue on my own machine for the purposes of getting the Steam achievements (incidental to wishlisting the full game as and when it gets released). Also a couple of rounds of Scrabble.
Cooking. Uh. Let's see. There was... quiche? There was a quiche, and also cheese straws. A questionable stirfry that did broadly achieve the goal of delivering protein.
Eating. ASPARAGUS incl purple. Birthday cake. A sampler of commercially available Greek and Greek-style yoghurts. The LENTIL MOUSSAKA of my mother (second portion). Bean burgers also of my mother. ALPINE STRAWBERRIES from the garden!
Exploring. Helston Sports Centre and associated environs (involving BUSES).
Kerdroya!!! We wanted somewhere to stop and eat our Gear Farm pasties on our way back upcountry, due to divers alarums and excursions we wound up on Bodmin Moor at lunchtime (i.e. well behind schedule), so we sat on some grass and watched cows wade in and out of the lake and then while A was eating their Cornetto we went to see how long a walk it was to this labyrinth. WE ARE IN LOVE WITH THIS LABYRINTH. In addition to showcasing the various kinds of rock found around Cornwall and their accompanying styles of hedging we also got to see an excellent variety of foxgloves (white to very deep pink), a thing my mother called "whispering grass" that is not Stipa tenuissima that I am not going to finish looking up properly right now (short, seed heads bow over, fascinating sort of inverted-teardrop-shaped white-to-pink scaled situation?), scarlet pimpernels cascading down the vertical faces, ...
Growing. The at-home plants have not all died while I was away, despite the nightmares about the lemongrass! Indeed the poblano has NEW FRUIT on it!!!
Meanwhile, in Cornwall I Actually Did Some Weeding.
Observing. Goldfinches! Stonechats! Cormorants! Choughs!!! Barn swallows! Cows In Water; many calves and lambs; so so many Excellent Flowers.
The waves.
Goodness it's been an excellent week for spending time quietly outdoors.
tags:
(cosmolinguist May. 24th, 2026 08:44 pm)
cosmolinguist May. 24th, 2026 08:44 pm)D and I had a nice time this afternoon, asking local pubs and restaurants if they'd put up a flyer advertising the local queer club that we're on the committee for.
D had designed and printed the posters today; they look great (while also being full of useful information and as accessible as printed things are going to be).
I can really recommend joining an in-person thing, printing stuff on paper, and going around asking strangers if we can put it up there; everyone was kind and friendly -- sometimes even to the point of suggesting nearby derelict buildings that are full of posters, heh. (We didn't take that advice but felt good about worthy of this inside info.)
This has been on my mind, because of the EHRC guidance. Yesterday morning, I said on fedi:
I went to transgym this morning and it was fun and silly and supportive and no one mentioned the EHRC thing and I used the men's room.
The world is still out there for us. As it should be.
The weather has been glorious today too, cloudless blue sky and it actually hit 80F today. We apparently walked 3.5 miles in the course of all this (and getting to and from home of course). I had a pint of Sam Smith's alpine lager, a nonalchoholic ginger beer, and a delicious apple juice with added mint and ginger, so I stayed hydrated!
Tomorrow I'm hoping to drag myself to the gym, since there won't be circuits on a bank holiday. D said he might join me, which would be great. And it also means that we can flyer the gym/library itself, and maybe a few other places that were closed when we went past today.
tags:
This week's bread: a loaf of Marriage's Organic Country Fayre Malted Brown Bread Flour, v nice.
Friday night supper: ven pongal (S Indian khichchari).
Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50/50% white/wholemeal spelt flour. molasses, raisins: turned out rather well.
Today's lunch: a sort-of cassoulet thing, with the other half-pack of pancetta, Belazu Judion Butter Beans, garlic, onion, bay leaves, 5-pepper blend, panko breadcrumbs, worked pretty well; served with buttered spinach and chicory quartered, healthy-grilled in pumpkin seed oil and drizzled with lime and lemongrass balsamic vinegar.
Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Pairings/Characters: Boromir; Faramir, Aragorn, OCs
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Length: 95,516 words
Creator Links:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Scribbler
Theme: Journey & Travel
Previously recommended bybeatrice_otter for the themes pre-AO3, fixit AU, plotty fic, novel-length, family (link to rec)
Summary:
Against all odds, Boromir survives Amon Hen. Ashamed and filled with remorse, he goes on a quest for redemption. Bound by his promise to a sick man, Faramir keeps the secret of his brother's survival. But as secrets are wont to do, the truth comes out eventually and Aragorn journeys north to bring Gondor's prodigal son home.
Reccer's Notes:
Although previously recommended for other themes, this fic is perfect for Journey and Travel as we follow Boromir's travels through Gondor and beyond while he tries to regain the honor he feels he lost on Amon Hên. Again and again he meets new people and sees how the war impacted their lives.
The story encapsulates the aspect of "wandering" that first drew me to LotR: how immediate the surroundings are when you're out by yourself, how much shelter and food matter for this kind of travel, or weather and season. The story spans over a few years, during which he sometimes stays in a place for a few months, often out of necessity. I love how the story shows the physicality of Middle Earth, so to speak. You can feel the distances.
Among other things, this story contains
- canon-typical violence
- death of a beloved pet
Fanwork Links: The Long Road Home on ao3
Pairings/Characters: Boromir; Faramir, Aragorn, OCs
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Length: 95,516 words
Creator Links:
Theme: Journey & Travel
Previously recommended by
beatrice_otter for the themes pre-AO3, fixit AU, plotty fic, novel-length, family (link to rec)Summary:
Against all odds, Boromir survives Amon Hen. Ashamed and filled with remorse, he goes on a quest for redemption. Bound by his promise to a sick man, Faramir keeps the secret of his brother's survival. But as secrets are wont to do, the truth comes out eventually and Aragorn journeys north to bring Gondor's prodigal son home.
Reccer's Notes:
Although previously recommended for other themes, this fic is perfect for Journey and Travel as we follow Boromir's travels through Gondor and beyond while he tries to regain the honor he feels he lost on Amon Hên. Again and again he meets new people and sees how the war impacted their lives.
The story encapsulates the aspect of "wandering" that first drew me to LotR: how immediate the surroundings are when you're out by yourself, how much shelter and food matter for this kind of travel, or weather and season. The story spans over a few years, during which he sometimes stays in a place for a few months, often out of necessity. I love how the story shows the physicality of Middle Earth, so to speak. You can feel the distances.
Content Notes
Among other things, this story contains
- canon-typical violence
- death of a beloved pet
Fanwork Links: The Long Road Home on ao3
I have been getting up and having coffee and a little internet before heading to the pool. This morning I decided to flip it. I fed the cats, put on my suit and got there a little before 6:30. I had a great swim and then came home for coffee and breakfast and internet. I think I'm going to try this for a while.
I did discover that Fibit (now, officially, Google Heath) is now giving me step credit for swims. When I used Garmen to track, they always did. They had a point system and everything you did was translated to points - it was a great system. My watch said that I had 500 steps when I got to the pool. After 30 minutes of laps, it said I had 2,500 steps. Interesting.
I checked the mail on the way back from the pool so I'm likely done with steps for the day. Neither knitting or crochet is listed as an exercise in the 'new' app.
Yesterday, I pulled down some of my summer shoes and realized that I do not like any of them and most are not even comfortable and two pair were too high - they just screamed broken bones in a fall. So I got rid of all of them. I swear my closet burped. I still have plenty of shoes.
Julio's favorite toy is recharging and he's not happy. He's huddled under the dresser.
Baseball is early today.
I did discover that Fibit (now, officially, Google Heath) is now giving me step credit for swims. When I used Garmen to track, they always did. They had a point system and everything you did was translated to points - it was a great system. My watch said that I had 500 steps when I got to the pool. After 30 minutes of laps, it said I had 2,500 steps. Interesting.
I checked the mail on the way back from the pool so I'm likely done with steps for the day. Neither knitting or crochet is listed as an exercise in the 'new' app.
Yesterday, I pulled down some of my summer shoes and realized that I do not like any of them and most are not even comfortable and two pair were too high - they just screamed broken bones in a fall. So I got rid of all of them. I swear my closet burped. I still have plenty of shoes.
Julio's favorite toy is recharging and he's not happy. He's huddled under the dresser.
Baseball is early today.
.
