Network [Sally's Journal]

Time to review some more books.

• The Paris Match by Kate Clayborn: Soon after Layla arrives in Paris ahead of her ex-husband’s sister’s wedding, she discovers that Emily is having doubts about getting married. The only other person who knows this information, other than the bridal couple, is the best man, Griffin. Layla’s initial interactions with him haven’t been amicable but they agree to work together to support Emily and Michael during the week of pre-wedding festivities. Griffin is determined to ensure that the wedding proceeds as planned. Layla just wants Emily to be able to focus on her relationship so that she can make a decision without being distracted by stress or drama.

This is obviously the set-up for a romance between Layla and Griffin, but I was most interested in all the mysteries. ( Why did Layla get divorced? What’s the story behind Griffin’s burn scars? Would the wedding go ahead? )

• Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone: Lenny’s latest baby-sitting gig in New York is looking after a seven year old Ainsley. Ainsley’s grumpy uncle who lives upstairs is instantly suspicious of Lenny. After Miles confronts her, Lenny ends up confiding in him – that outside of her work, she is a mess, because she’s grieving for her childhood best friend and avoiding going home to the apartment they shared together.

Miles has lost close family members and is currently struggling to connect with his sister and his niece. He suggests that he and Lenny help each other.

When I first read the blurb, I thought this arrangement sounded contrived but in context – Miles has already observed Lenny in several situations and found out that she’s yet to do anything on her “Live Again” list before he comes out with his awkward and not fully coherent proposal – it felt believable. ( This book is like a warm hug. *gets distracted rereading* )

• Call Me Maybe by Cara Bastone: This revolves around phone calls between Vera, who is desperate to fix an issue with her business website before she attends an expo, and Cal, who answers when Vera contacts her website hosting service for customer support. Parts of the story are told through pure dialogue.

I had downloaded the Kindle sample some time ago, probably after I read Ready or Not, and it hadn’t grabbed me. While reading Promise Me Sunshine a few weeks earlier had certainly given me increased confidence in Bastone’s storytelling, I don’t remember finding the first few chapters of this any more compelling the second time round.

I think it was just more that I was in the mood for contemporary romance but not in the mood for making decisions and this was just there, in my Kindle app. Well, the sample was there, I did have to take steps to buy the rest of the book but somehow that still seemed like less effort than finding something else to read.

Not a very rational decision, considering that I thought the book would be vaguely okay at best. But I mention this because I actually ended up liking it! ( “But the best parts of the internet don’t usually trend. They’re the little moments. When you can find someone who feels the exact same way about something as you do. Or someone makes a joke that perfectly hits your funny bone. It can really make the world less lonely.” )

• Sweet Talk by Cara Bastone: The sequel to Call Me Maybe begins with Vera’s brother, Eliot, who is struggling with insomnia, sending a late-night message to the wrong number. Eliot has dyslexia, which possibly explains why he accidentally clicked on the wrong contact in his phone and definitely explains why the name he clicked on is an unidentifiable typo.

The recipient of his message knows who Eliot is but is reluctant to confirm her own identity. However, she’s a night owl and she is happy to have someone to talk to at this hour.

I thought the name of the game was going to be how to get out of this conversation with my pride still intact. But no. The name of the game is now chatting with a cute guy in the middle of the night without being the one to accidentally end the conversation first.

Like Call Me Maybe, parts of this are told through pure dialogue.

I enjoyed this story even more than the first one! I liked the mysteries – What led to Eliot’s insomnia? What is Jessie struggling with? Why doesn’t she want to tell him who she is? Also, this is a very sweet, very supportive romance.

• Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston: Joni, a successful songwriter, is visiting her family for the summer when her parents announce that they are planning on selling the family’s music hall business. She also discovers that she has a telepathic connection with another musician.

I was intrigued by the telepathy, and some of the bits about songwriting. I was also interested in seeing Joni dealing with her mother’s early-onset dementia diagnosis and her feelings about change. However, something about the North Carolina beach town setting didn’t feel quite real to me and I couldn’t pinpoint what it was – nor why it was bothering me. ( ‘Gigi darted her eyes between the two of us. I could just imagine the thoughts running through her head. The AO3 tags. I would never hear the end of this. I could already tell.’ )

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https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5868

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It's complicated how grief works. Life grows around it, yet it still lingers.

On June 16th, I received a message about the death of a friend. At that moment, I was in the final minutes of a uni lecture. One minute I was learning about Goethe and Schiller, the next I was receiving some of the worst news of my life.

I went into shock right away. It was all so sudden. I couldn’t understand what had happened. How could a healthy young woman, not even 30 years old, simply die on just any Tuesday? It didn’t seem real. Still, I was shaking as I walked out of the classroom, aimlessly. My first impulse was to call L. After I’d calmed down a bit, my other friend, D, walked me to the bus stop. I didn’t know what to say. I just kept walking, still trembling, still in shock.

The next day, I found out what had happened. While T was with her boyfriend, she had a seizure followed by cardiac arrest, likely caused by an untreated pneumonia. It took 45 minutes for her heart to start beating again. Still, the outcome was tragic: after days in the ICU, she was declared brain dead.

The day of her wake and funeral was one of the saddest days of my life. The atmosphere was heavy not only because of T’s death, but also because her passing was the second loss for her parents. Years ago, her brother died at just 20 years old. Now all of their children are dead. All of them.

That day, I finally understood the power of a hug. Each one brought me endless tears, but also strength and affection. All of us - friends, family, and acquaintances - gave each other tight hugs, the kind of hug that touches the other person’s soul and says, “I’m hurting too, but eventually we will be okay.”

Throughout the morning, I thought a lot about whether I wanted to see T.’s body. Hours later, I finally mustered the courage to do so, thinking that it might help me come to terms with her death. Here’s why I felt that way: I didn’t attend the wakes of other friends or my grandfather, so even today I feel as though their deaths are just a rumor. It’s as if they were still alive.

To be honest, it didn’t help me that much. When I saw the body, I could tell it was T, but she didn’t look human. She was more like a wax figure... The color of her skin was completely different, for example. Even so, I approached her and whispered everything I would have wanted to say to her if I’d had the chance.

When the time came for the funeral, we all walked towards the grave with our heads bowed. That’s when I completely fell apart, because it finally became clear that she would never come back. Her parents asked the gravedigger to bury her with the bouquet of flowers I had brought. I felt as if she had been buried with a piece of me.

Afterward, my friends and I made a promise: our next meeting can't be at a funeral. We need to stay close to each other and never let go.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve already cried all my tears. Other times, I remember her and cry.

If God exists, he’s going to have to give me a good explanation for this.

location: São Paulo, Brazil

Music:: Death of a Martian - Red Hot Chili Peppers

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Bag 9 for a change is not more tree but all the plants, including more Breath of the Wild plants and mushrooms.

And now I have a decision to make...

So far I'm resisting the temptation to buy a second kit and just build both...

Mood::

contemplative

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Start clean-slated (659 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jumanji (1995)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alan Parrish/Sarah Whittle
Characters: Sarah Whittle (Jumanji), Alan Parrish
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Growing Up Together, Childhood Sweethearts, Childhood Trauma, Time Travel
Summary:

All she has to do is wait for their future to unfold, and unfold herself into the person she was always meant to be.

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While my colleague and I were speaking about Srs Bsnss with our industrial partners last week, we heard a roaring noise outside the window. The 250th anniversary flyover displays by the fighter jets had begun.

We grabbed our hats and sunglasses and went onto the roof to have a closer look.

Watch on YouTube

It ended up being a very close look indeed. (I would like to point out that none of us were the ones clapping.)

Watch on YouTube

This was a more comfortable view of the formation flying.

Watch on YouTube

Here they are coming from t’other direction.

This continued for around 10 minutes before they all zoomed off, presumably to base for a little rest from the heat.

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I've been reading Worlds Without Number recently and of course, as I do with basically every gritty fantasy setting that I find, I think, "Oh, I should convert the mechanics over to Exalted 2e! This is a game where an ambush could take out even a well-equipped but unprepared party, where every spell is a puissant working, and where bizarre monsters and hostile creatures abound! Perfect for Exalted." It works for years for Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Anyway, this isn't as much about that, it's about the way Worlds Without Number does fantasy races. The default setting is Dying Earth, so far in the future that all records of the past have been totally lost--the book drops hints that it's the same continuity as Stars Without Number, the sci fi game from the same company, but enough time has passed that the star-spanning Terran Mandate is no longer remembered even in legend. Humanity was confined to the homeworld and ruled by capricious aliens collectively called Outsiders), who placed most humans in subterranean "Deeps"--the worldbuilding excuse to have dungeons to adventure in--and experimented on others. Fantasy races, then, are the descendant of these experiments.

Worlds Without Number then does all the traditional fantasy and sci fi niches with these. Dwarves are humans adapted to underground Deep living and with a deep psychological commitment to a particular ideal they call their "Plan"--I assume the author has borrowed this from Dark Sun dwarves' Focus. Elves are self-reincarnating immortals, who are reborn as another elf when they die and in extreme circumstances can commit identity-suicide and call on a mighty warrior or powerful archmage prior incarnation to slaughter their enemies. And orcs are the "Anakim," warriors engineered by the Outsiders to kill as many humans as they can.

It's obvious that the game is going for orcs that you can kill on sight without any moral questions, and so the background is that the Anakim were engineered with what they call "the Hate", an instinctive and overpowering revulsion and disgust response when in the presence of baseline humanity (and human-similar demihumans). Couple this with reduced inhibition and increased aggression, and it means that Anakim react to nearby humans with unprovoked brutal violence. Peace isn't possible because only the strongest-willed Anak can even be in the same room as a human without immediately trying to murder them. The only reason they aren't a larger threat than they are is because all of that poor impulse control and violence means that Anak society is a patchwork of squabbling tribes led by the strongest and most violent leader whose leadership only lasts so long as the rest of the tribe is afraid of them. Warlords who can manage to unite multiple tribes are rare and have to lead the Anakim against the hated humans before one of their underlings pulls them down.

The book does say that there's a certain kind of player who, when confronted with this, will make it their goal to cure the genetic engineering in the various "Blighted" species, like the Anakim or the Houris (who are beautiful and graceful and never suffer from old age but experience immense contentment and satisfaction from obeying orders, no matter content or issuer of the order) or the Zakathi (who are immensely strong but need to completely exhaust themselves with physical labor every day or wither away and so usually die in their 50s when their bodies give out). And it is possible--one group of Anakim slaughtered their Outsider overlords, stole their tech, and managed to modify their psychology using it and selective breeding so the Hate is expressed as contempt against the unruly humans and their aggression is all social status-jockeying rather than an axe to the face. These Anakim call themselves the "Aristoi" and think they're better than humans. Maybe your PCs could do the same thing! They can certainly try.

I really like this approach because it sidesteps most of the questions players ask about always-evil orcs--they weren't created by the gods and they aren't naturally evil, they were created as an anti-human weapon by asshole aliens and they used to be human--and provides an epic goal for players who are bothered by this. And if they're not bothered by it, they can just attack first because almost every Anak they see will attack on sight with no quarter asked or given. And it explicitly says some Anakim do have the willpower to resist the Hate, so there's room for backchannel dealings, accompanying a merchant clandestinely dealing with some Anak warlord looking for an edge against other tribes, etc. That's excellent worldbuilding that is directly applicable at the table, and we can always use more of that.

Music:: The Midnight - Jason (feat. Nikki Flores)

Mood::

thoughtful

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Got down another 250 words last night and the story is finished. I'm going to give it a couple of days of rest then I'll go in and look for the usual grammar errors, perspective shifts, and repeated words.

Tonight is movie night with the GF so I may not get any words down but we'll see. Sometimes I can't go to bed right away after walking in the door. (But heaven help me if I open a bottle of wine. 2000 words later and I'm thinking, well if I go to bed now I can get four hours of sleep before my next meeting tomorrow...)

Day 7 Tally

ysilme

Day 6 Tally

sanguinity

badly_knitted

sylvanwitch

trobadora

cornerofmadness

dswdiane

shippen_stand

ysilme

the_siobhan

( past tallies )

Let me know if I have missed your name at any point. And don't forget you can jump in (or out) at any time.

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Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1,000-year history, the world’s most famous university has admitted female students.

This would be rather startling to the ladies who had studied as home students, at Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh's and St Hilda's, before women were admitted to Oxford degrees which was what actually happened in 1920 -

- and those ladies who were still around were there to collect the degrees they were now entitled to.

I am so hoping that this is a blurb produced either by AI or by some intern at the publishers who has not actually read the book but has gathered that it is about women going to Oxford in 1920?

Because if the book is written in some apprehension that there were No Female Students among the dreaming spires before 1920 I hope the author is visited in her sleep by the shades of all, or at least some of, the women who were, who included some notoriously stroppy and acerbic characters.

This is even more egregious than the historical romance which posited a daughter of an Oxford prof at a date of obligatory celibacy for College fellows, which is a bit niche perhaps, but Women's Struggle for Education is surely well-documented???

(Come on down, Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: a fragment of history)

In further Did Not Do The Research, or at least have a Brit-Picker, JD Robb Stolen in Death has significant plot around theft of Important Jewels - from the Tate in London, wtf, surely you meant the V&A....

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Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/ancillary-justice-by-ann-leckie/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=67396

When I first read it in 2014, this was actually the first ever book where I included the second paragraph of the third chapter as part of my review. It is:

I unrolled the bundle of clothes I had bought for her— insulated underclothes, quilted shirt and trousers, undercoat and hooded overcoat, gloves— and laid them out. Then I took her chin and turned her head toward me. “Can you hear me?”

I wrote then:

This book draws from a lot of sources – the quoted paragraph makes it clear that there is a debt to The Left Hand of Darkness, but I felt there was a lot of Iain M. Banks and some C.J. Cherryh there too – but really takes it all to a whole different level. Lots of big ideas here, of which the two biggest are that almost all characters are referred to by female pronouns, reflecting the narrator’s perception, and that the narrator herself is one remaining human-shaped unit of a former spaceship-sized collective consciousness which controlled dozens of mentally conjoined bodies. There’s stuff here about love, and colonialism, and some vivid set-piece descriptions of planets and incidents. I love ~~Brian Aldiss’s~~ Philip K. Dick’s description from thirty years ago of good sf being stories which are not about “What if?” but about “My God, what if…?!” and Ancillary Justice ticks that box. It is all carried off with tremendous assurance and control, and the fact that this is a first novel makes it all the more impressive.

It has already won the Golden Tentacle award for best first novel from the Kitschies, and certainly my vote will be one of those supporting it for the BSFA Award; and I don’t think that will be the end of it.

Indeed, it was not the end of it. When I met Anne Leckie at Loncon that summer, I asked her to sign my copy of the book and also to date it, because I knew (and she did not) that it would win the Hugo that evening, to add to the Golden Tentacle, BSFA, Locus, Clarke and Nebula Awards. It is quite possibly the most awarded novel in SF history.

Coming back to it twelve years on, I still really enjoyed it. The plot is a fairly straightforward revenge plot, but what makes it is Leckie’s deft portrayal of the non-human protagonist, an artificial intelligence formerly running a spaceship, now incarnate and seeking revenge against an antagonist whose consciousness is similarly distributed. The landscapes are bleak and frankly medieval, to contrast with the far future of consciousness. The human onlooker thinks that they are at the centre of the story but really aren’t. It’s deservedly a classic. You can get Ancillary Justice here.

This was the only novel on both Hugo and Nebula ballots. It won the Hugo by a pretty impressive margin.

In the other categories, the Hugo for Best Novella went to “Equoid”, by Charles Stross (I remember as we queued for the post-Hugo reception, he indicated Ann Leckie’s Hugo with his own and said to her “That never gets old!”). The Nebula for Best Novella went to “The Weight of the Sunrise”, by Vylar Kaftan. The Hugo for Best Novelette went to “The Lady Astronaut of Mars”, by Mary Robinette Kowal, and the Nebula in that category to “The Waiting Stars”, by Aliette de Bodard. The Hugo for Best Short Story went to “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”, by John Chu, and the Nebula for Best Short Story to “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky, whose sfnal content is debatable but clearly struck a chord with some. (It was later used in evidence by the fraudulent Puppy campaigns; see Camestros Felapton’s Debarkle, page 165.)

That was the next on the sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners that I have been rereading. The following year, 2015, there weren’t any, because of the Puppies, so next up is Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor, which won for Best Novella in 2016.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/ancillary-justice-by-ann-leckie/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=67396

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We spent the 250th year of America's existence mostly indoors.

On Wednesday

sashagee went out to my parents' house for a long weekend, and Thursday after work I joined them. Friday we woke up, fresh and ready for fun summer activities, only to be greeted by a weather report promising rain, rain, rain, and more rain. There were vast storms sweeping across the plains, heading our direction, so don't make any big plans. So we didn't. We had a barbecue with both sets of grandparents on the schedule and that was it, and all the while the storm clouds got closer and closer.

Well, later that day when the North Aurora fireworks were scheduled for that evening, it rained. It rained for hours to the point where they eventually cancelled the fireworks and said they would reschedule them for a later day, and it rained enough that we couldn't eat outside on the deck like we were originally planning on so we ate inside. Fortunately there was a brief break in the rain sufficient for

sashagee's father to barbecue the hot dogs and burgers, so we got at least one Fourth of July barbecue in as is American tradition.

The next day the Batavia fireworks were scheduled, the main thing we had come out to see. And, well, there were more hints of rain. The morning was sunny when I went for a walk down by the river but the clouds started gathering, and by just after noon rain had started to fall. And then we all got flash flood warnings on our phone and it rained. And rained. And rained:

This was taken around 4:30 p.m. after hours of rain. According to my parents, they'd gotten almost 20cm of rain in the last two days (

sashagee's parents' neighbors said more like 30cm!). Needless to say, there were no fireworks--they were moved to the next night, and while I initially thought I would miss them but

sashagee would go, we all left on Sunday afternoon and now we're home because

sashagee was exhausted and wanted to rest.

So on this 250th anniversary we didn't see any fireworks at all. Emoji Sad Eagle Flag

So that was our Fourth of July weekend! Chill and low-key, since we couldn't really go anywhere or do anything, but the fireworks are always a highlight. Maybe next year.

Music:: Nothing

Mood::

wet

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She's fine, no worries - well, not fine fine, she's at the hospital, but it's nothing to worry about.

Taking the bus back from the hospital always gets me thinking about Hurricane Sandy. They named a corner after those two boys. They'd be in high school now, or even entering college. It's easy to judge their mother - and don't get me wrong, I do judge her, because she made every possible mistake from before the storm even hit, starting with not evacuating - but people do dumb stuff all the time and it usually works out just fine. People don't usually die because they did something stupid, they don't usually lose their kids over it.

It's been rainy too. It's really just a maudlin way to start a week.

But I still think, every time I take that bus from the hospital, that those kids should've gotten to grow up, and instead they didn't even get to go trick-or-treating that year.

The moral of this post, inasmuch as there even is one, is that if your area is under an evacuation order, or ought to be, fucking evacuate. Or if you've decided to shelter in place, shelter in place. Don't try to evacuate after the storm is already upon you. That's how it all goes wrong.

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Posted by Zach Weinersmith

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/turing

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Later they make you pay for the premium version in order to betray humanity.

Today's News:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/turing

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In my infinite wisdom, I agreed to pick-up an extra shift at the library yesterday. I think I have previously explained the whole weird culture around holidays at Anoka County, haven't I?

In a nutshell: when I first started (and Memorial Day weekend hit as one of my scheduled weekends to work,) I was told that I MUST make up my missed shifts within the pay period or use vacation/PTO to "cover" missed days. I immediately argued that this can't possibly be a requirement since I was both willing and able to work the hours as assigned, but denied by the workplace a chance to perform them--aka you scheduled me to work, I can come, but you told me no, the building is closed, you can not. But, if "making up" was, indeed, a requirement, what happens if I can't/I don't have enough PTO to cover the lost hours? Like, am I going to get fired because you scheduled me to work when the library was closed and I only just started and don't have the time acurred yet to "pay" for my "absence," which was not even my choice???? Many emails to HR later, I was told that, actually, if I want to take unpaid time and not use vacation that was fine. Any time. I don't ever have to use my vacation to "cover" hours in the case where the library is closed and I am scheduled to work. (This, btw, big shock to my boss... who has, I believe, spent her own vacation to "cover" time for decades.)

At any rate, I like getting paid and I wanted to demonstrate that, despite coming out of the gate fighting, I am a Team Player. Since it's the culture of this workplace that people to make up for time when the library is closed, I decided to work 10:30 am - 2:30 pm on the Monday after the holiday weekend.

What can I say? The job continues to be FINE.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to bond with a number of my coworkers. I had that one good conversation with the young person who is trying to decide what to do with her life now that her student loans are paid off, but that's it. Yesterday, I found out that one of the librarians (lesbrarian?) comes with a wife and I thought, foolishly, that this could be a thing that might bond us on some level. I, too, have a wife! But my attempts to communicate that were either awkward on my part in some way that I didn't realize or... kids these days don't see queerness as enough of a bond? Or both. I'm going with BOTH. But yeah, our conversation went something like this:

Me: Did you do anything fun over the holiday weekend?
Lesbrarian: (Answer that involves her and her wife getting to be the cool aunties.)
Me: Oh, that sounds awesome. I went to a science fiction convention (a bit of information about that), but my wife stayed home. She's not into the convention scene.
Lesbrarian: ...
Me: ...
Lesbrairian: ...
Me: Uh, there was some cool cosplay. Do you want to see pictures?
Lesbrarian: I wouldn't get the references.
Me:. Oh.

CONVERSATION TERMINATION, Abort! Abort!

One other time, several weeks ago now, I also had a similar conversation with someone else at work that was an abject failure. To be fair, that one started out rough because the circ staff person in question was explaining how you find a date on the copyright page and, even at the time, but not in enough time to filter myself I realized I was a bit too snarky in pointing out that I am quite familiar with copyright pages in books and where to find them. This, I think, put her on the back foot and I felt stupid and rude and so I tried to course correct, but it ended in this disaster (paraphrasing):

Me: (awkwardly) Uh... so, how are you otherwise?
Them: Not great, actually.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. What's the issue?
Them: *stares politically* Oh, you know, children are starving in Gaza and queer rights are eroding here.
Me: ...
Them: *stares more intensely in politics*
Me: (Not knowing how to signal that I am on side, I sort of stammer out:) Yes, well, uh... that is all awful and affects my family a lot, you know, since I am married to a woman.
Them: ...
Me:...
Them: I am also queer.
Me: Okay?
Them:...
Me:...
Them:...
Me: (awkwardly turns away to continue putting books in order on cart).

CONVERSATION TERMINATION, Abort! Abort!

So, like, I don't know if the problem is that everyone is very introverted and so conversations are generally difficult and awkward or if I'm vibing as an asshole somehow? Which, I mean, I could be? (See above where I accidentally snarked too hard and knew it.) I do have a tendency to just show up at work, do my work, and go home so maybe I am the cypher that no one knows how to approach. The person who has talked to me the most is definitely one of the problem employees, so maybe people assume that we are two of a sort? (She happens to be an SFF fan--like fan-fan, goes to cons, etc.) Anoka hasn't felt the kind of place where I'm encouraged wear my pride buttons on my lanyard, but maybe I should start? Maybe everyone is on edge because they work in a suburb? I certainly have felt that way. I've actually kind of presumed that I was the only queer person, but it turns out there's a bunch of us?

I am hoping that time will solve this, but I'm not entirely hopeful.

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Ready to pick the next Hennepin County Attorney? We’ve got a quiz to help!
Five candidates are running to lead the most influential office in local criminal justice. Sahan Journal created an interactive quiz called Meet Your Hennepin County Attorney to find out where they stand on the issues. (Also: The bobble heads are back.) (Automagical)
by Mohamed Ibrahim
https://projects.sahanjournal.com/meet-your-hennepin-county-attorney-candidates-election-quiz/?_gl=1*oz9vt6*_ga*NTQ5NTgyNDUxLjE3Nzg1MTMzMzk.*_ga_WNJ80Q5BTH*czE3ODM0Mjk0NDEkbzUyJGcxJHQxNzgzNDI5NDg5JGoxMiRsMCRoMA..*_ga_Z6V7V2LE27*czE3ODM0Mjk0NDEkbzUyJGcxJHQxNzgzNDI5NDg5JGoxMiRsMCRoMA..

Documents show intense tangle over subpoenas against Minnesota officials during ICE surge
Brian Bakst and Brandt Williams
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/07/07/now-voided-ice-surge-subpoenas-against-minnesota-detailed-in-newly-released-court-documents ( Read more... )

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Again, apologies! Most people pick up exotic stomach bugs abroad; I seem to have managed to pick one up in the loos at Gloucester Hospital (accompanying a friend to an appointment - I wasn't even there for me!). I have lost a couple of stone in a couple of weeks, and suspect it will take a while to get back to normal.

Never mine - onward!

Chapter 13 ( Read more... )

Chapter 14 ( Read more... )

location: office

Mood::

tired

Music:: None

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Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/google-is-suing-chinese-scammers-who-are-using-gemini.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=72244

Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort:

According to Google’s legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their own. In its Telegram channels, Outsider Enterprise reportedly provided instructions on how to use Google’s Gemini AI to create websites that imitate those of Google, YouTube, and government agencies such as New York’s E-ZPass. The group offered nearly 300 scam templates.

[…]

Google worked with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to block many of these malicious text messages, and Google notes that its on-device scam detection in Google Messages probably helped reduce the number of successful phishing attempts, too. This AI-powered feature apparently stops 10 billion scam texts every month, so it’s fair to expect it caught at least some Outsider Enterprise activity.

Another article.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/google-is-suing-chinese-scammers-who-are-using-gemini.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=72244

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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!

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I want to write something on this because it's been in the news lately, and people have been misunderstanding me on social media. Which is a little awkward as some of my friends are of pension age. There's nothing new here for people who have been paying attention.

For non-British friends: "The triple lock" is a policy device that's been around for about 14 years which says that every year the state pension will rise by one of (a) the rise in average wages; (b) the rate of inflation; or (c) 2.5%, whichever is the greatest.

This is mathematically unsustainable. It means that when the economy improves, wages rise, and the pension rises... and when the economy gets worse, inflation rises, and the pension rises. And if neither happens, the pension rises anyway by 2.5%. It's a one-way ratchet that means that for so long as it exists, the state pension will continue to rise compared to average earnings. At some point - given that tax income is very loosely related to average earnings - that will obviously be unaffordable.

This is not me saying that the state pension is too generous; I don't know enough about that to have a clear opinion about it. It is me saying that at some point, the triple lock will have to go - no matter how politically difficult that may be.

location: Aberdeen

Mood::

strident

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Recently-ish there was apparently a discussion going on in some corners of the internet about whether reading more than a hundred books a year is a sign that someone is not properly reading – not properly comprehending nor properly remembering – books. (Maybe it was a sequel to the reading more than a hundred books a year is overconsumption debate?)

I tried not to pay much attention to this. I am reasonably confident that the majority of sensible readers disagree with such a stupid opinion and if they don’t, well, I don’t actually care if some strangers on the internet are wrong about this topic. (I’d probably feel differently if someone came along, whether online or in real life, and started arguing at me about my reading habits, however.)

But I was reminded of the debate because I sat down to review things I’ve read by Rainbow Rowell and I was thinking about how different books each count exactly the same amount towards one’s annual reading total and yet can represent a completely different reading experience in terms of the amount of time, effort and critical thought given to the book.

Cherry Baby vs Jen, Again. Same author. Read both in April.

One’s a 400+ page novel that I have reread most of at least twice. I’ve spent time thinking about it, analysing my reaction and pondering how I would describe the book when I finally got around to reviewing it.

The other’s a 120 page graphic novel that Libby says I finished in 30 minutes. I’ve barely given it any thought since, I haven’t reread it and I don’t remember everything in it clearly.

But sometimes it can go the other way round – there are novellas I have reread and given a lot of thought to, and lengthy novels I have skipped and skimmed my way through and don’t remember very well at all.

Personally, I think that a book is a book is a book. And as the only person I’m comparing my annual reading total to is my past self, it doesn’t matter what I do or do not include. I aim to be consistent about how I record different sorts of books, but also, I figure that it evens out in the wash, so to speak, and any short stories or graphic novels are probably balanced out by any novels I read more than once in a year and yet only list once (and by the novels I didn’t include at all because I only reread half of them).

• Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell: I loved Rowell’s previous novel, Slow Dance, and have already read it several times. Once again, Rowell has written about a divorced thirty-something in Omaha who reconnects with a guy from her past. While I expected differences beyond those most immediately apparent – i.e. Cherry’s divorce isn’t yet finalised, she doesn’t have kids and the story takes place in the present day – I was expecting that Cherry Baby would be a similar sort of story to Slow Dance.

What I was not expecting was to find myself in love triangle territory. At first I was convinced I knew who Cherry would end up with and I became frustrated that the narrative kept including scenes that tempted me to feel invested in a relationship that (I thought) wouldn’t be endgame. And then I really wasn’t sure who Cherry would, or should, be with! That was stressful, because various developments happened and I didn’t know whether it was safe, for want of a better expression, to feel invested or whether I should be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Eventually I realised the direction this was heading in, sufficiently in advance of the ending that by the time I reached it, I was very much onboard. Once I finished it, I immediately reread parts because there had been earlier scenes that I hadn’t been able to enjoy or fully appreciate the first time round. I like this sort of rereading experience so ultimately I didn’t mind that this story was not exactly what I’d expected.

I didn’t like everything about this book, but at the same time I absolutely loved this book. I keep rereading bits of it.

As I said about Slow Dance, Rowell’s prose is evocative and allows her to capture her characters as individuals, opinionated and emotional, and clearly shaped by their experiences. And then seeing these characters build a relationship with someone who they can share all the messy, vulnerable parts of themselves with? That is very appealing.

( Upon reflection, I can understand why the book unfolds as it does. The story as a whole doesn’t actually revolve around one romantic relationship. Instead, it revolves around Cherry’s relationship with her BODY and specifically her relationship with how others treat her as a plus-size woman. )

• She-Hulk, vol. 1: Jen, Again by Rainbow Rowell: So I haven’t seen most of the recent MCU, but I did watch She-Hulk: Attorney at Law twice. I knew that this comic would not retell nor continue the TV series but I assumed that having met the character of She-Hulk in another story would be enough context to be able to follow this – I was able to enjoy Rowell’s Runaways graphic novels knowing arguably less (I did end up reading a few volumes of the original Runaways but only because I was curious). And I like Rowell’s storytelling!

So I was surprised that Jen, Again felt like coming in too late to a story, having missed something important. Too many characters who I didn’t know? The comic doesn’t assume that the reader knows any of these characters, and so introduces them, but it still a steeper learning curve than I had anticipated.

• She-Hulk, vol. 2: Jen of Hearts by Rainbow Rowell: This narrative seemed to me to be more focused than the first volume, but it may just be that I found it easier to follow – and to feel invested in – what was going on, having previously gained a better sense of what Jen’s (She-Hulk’s?) life is like and who is in it.

• She-Hulk, vol. 3: Girl Can't Help It by Rainbow Rowell: I enjoyed this but clearly not enough to feel any urgency to read the next volume, because I haven’t read it yet, even though it is available on Libby and I know it’d be a quick read. I’m not really interested in fight sequences. (I guess there’s a reason I don’t usually read this sort of thing?)

JENNIFER WALTERS, SHE-HULK.
Attorney-at-law. Nobody pushes this girl around.
(Except for that guy last issue who pushed her through a six-story window. She’s still not over that.)

My favourite part was the bonus chapter – She-Hulk and Friends in “The First Rule of Book Club is…” That was a lot of fun! I particularly enjoyed reading about superheroes arguing about whether or not the worldbuilding in their book club book was believable.

It also really didn’t matter how much I knew these characters, because it was clear from the way the conversation unfolded that they knew each other, and that made it interesting.

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Sally's Journal

like a warm hug

Faulty Memory

In honour of T

Great Deku Tree: part 10

fic: Start clean-slated, Jumanji (1995), G

Flyover videos

"There is nothing more reviled than the Orc", said the elvish king

Write Every Day: Day 7

Is this the blurb writer, or does the author actually believe this?

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Another rainy weekend

Spent the last two nights at the hospital with a resident

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Turing

Anoka Continues to be Weird (or it's Me)

2026.07.07

Death in the Andamans - chapters 13 and 14

Google Is Suing Chinese Scammers Who Are Using Gemini

Just one thing: 07 July 2026

The Triple Lock

reading Rainbow Rowell: Cherry Baby and Jen, Again

May

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
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7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31