I was going to try a “What the bunny has been watching,” like an LJ friend posts, but it’s just too time consuming, considering I watch TV every night…
Instead, here are just a few that piqued my interest-
Violent Saturday- 1955. Cast includes Victor Mature, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine. A fairly good drama revolving around the lives of several of the characters. I always think of Mature as playing those ‘Swords and Sandals,’ Roman era characters, so this was a good change.
Bad Day at Black Rock- 1955. Along with Robert Ryan and Spencer Tracy, the cast also included Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. This drama revolves around Tracy coming into a desert town looking for a man he wishes to talk with, and all the townspeople treating him as a threat and not helping him. I’ve watched this several times and love Tracy’s character. Borgnine plays such a different role than in Violent Saturday.
No Down Payment- 1957. Cast includes Tony Randall, Joanne Woodward, and Jeffrey Hunter, among other well known folks of the era. Look up Hunter’s other appearances- Trekkies will know…
Another drama revolving around the interconnected lives of several families, this one set in one of those pop-up suburban Cali developments of the 50s. I love these period films where I can look at settings, clothes, vehicles, etc. and compare these to my childhood memories. I was two, in 1957, but the imagery shown carried into the early 60s as well. Much crossover!
Finally, Repo Man- 1984. Cast includes Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez. A cult favorite? Everyone is looking for a 1964 Chevy Malibu… and damned if a mid-sixties Malibu didn’t drive by my house while I was watching this! Anyway, bizarre.
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Friday to midnight on Saturday (8pm Eastern Time).
Did you think I'd abandoned this narrative? (Valid, if so...it's been a while) But no! Let us pick up again in Split...
As mentioned in my previous post, our final stop was supposed to be Split, but because of construction there, Romantica took us to Trogir instead, which was awesome so I'm glad it worked out that way! After our final night on the boat, we got on a bus to Split along with everyone else who was traveling further in Croatia, which was most of the group; I think only a half-dozen people took the bus directly to the airport.
Split is the second-largest city in Croatia (behind the capital, Zagreb) and the largest city we visited. Definitely a change of pace! Though while it has a lot of urbanization, it also has a very large park, which covers a long peninsula at the end of the city; we spent an afternoon there and hiked around on the mostly-paved trails, which gave us a nice vantage point for some photos:
MRS. HOLT: I refuse to listen to this when I can smell the sin on each and every one of you.
XANDER: Yeah? You smell sin? Well, let me tell you something, lady, she who smelt it dealt it!
Among the rolling hills of Uganda’s Masaka region, robusta coffee plants are producing larger, tastier yields thanks to a pilot program utilizing regenerative agriculture to battle droughts or erratic rainfall.
A catch-all term for a variety of growing techniques as simple as mulching to as complex as cover cropping, regenerative agriculture is especially useful in the coffee belts where nutrient-poor tropical soils and heavy rainfall make erosion a real threat to productive crops.
Of course regenerative farming works. Nature knows how to compensate for common problems. Humans just need to quick fucking up those processes.
Today in Social Anxiety: I approached a human and asked about filming myself in the gym, got the go ahead, proceeded to do so for deadlifts, spotted three things wrong myself, shared a video with some folk for a form check, and got some useful pointers and MANY contradictory opinions on what, exactly, my butt should be doing.
There were diagrams.
Also today I had the most comfortable experience lugging watering cans around of my life (not hanging off joints!!! it's a thing you can do when you have muscle!!! it turns out!!!), several plants are not dead, I didn't eat any more jostaberries but I really need to, and we had A Fantastic Time taking all the various sections of The Puzzle that we'd done and sliding them around the coffee table sadly. This was complicated by the fact that the coffee table is juuust wide enough for the thing to fit, with space at one end for the box to sit neatly once you're finished. Eventually we resorted to The Giant Puzzle-Doing Cardboard! There was Much Swearing, it is now sat happily on the table and I am grinning at it every time I look over, and yesterday she released another in the series.
I have, apparently, been having too much fun, and my back decided to take revenge.
Deets below, but first -- have some day lilies:
# Wednesday: And today's snippet to live by, from Diviner's Bow: A contract negotiation between a master trader and a trader. The master trader has just asked if the trader has reviewed the proposed contract and found it sufficient. She replies that she wishes to change one thing.
“You astound me," [the master trader murmured]. "Expose, I pray, the contract’s deficiency.”
“I found no deficiency. Merely, I wish to amend the initial period to three Standards, rather than six.”
“Six Standards is our usual term,” Shan said, sternly.
Padi opened her eyes wide.
“Is it, indeed?” she asked wonderingly.
Shan laughed. “I taught you that,” he said. # Thursday. Sunny and going to be hot.
Yesterday afternoon fell apart in a big way because my back started hurting, and it all went downhill from there.
On top of the pain, or because of the pain, I have had a very dicey stomach and today seems to be more of the same. Sitting in the window right now with Kelly on my lap and a cup of well honeyed ginger tea. Pretty soon I'm going to have to figure out something to eat.
Hope everybody is feeling better than I am. I'll check in as can. # Friday: Business first: "Kelly" cited in yesterday's posting to the internets, is actually Tali. Speech to text is not always very smart.
Well. Friday. Sunny, though the weather beans insist that it's cloudy.
Woke up this morning pain-free! I immediately started making plans more fool I, though I did manage to eat food for breakfast before my back started in again. So win, I guess, and I really do need to eat, before I get to the point where I just don't bother, a known danger which needs to be avoided at all costs.
To be fair, my back still doesn't hurt as much right now as it did yesterday, even yesterday evening when I convinced myself to eat an apple tart with ice cream, on the theory that even dessert is better than no food at all.
I had hoped that I would be able to write today and I'm still trying to figure out how to make that happen. On the one hand, it doesn't do anyone any good to just sit at the desk and stare, so the first assessment should be: Is my brain clear enough to allow me to write? And I guess the first test for that is sitting in the office chair and seeing if it hurts so much that I can't think.
What fun.
I should report that Tali is very much in favor of the sitting/ lying around doing nothing schedule. She's been my more or less constant companion in this. The other two have given up in fustration, and I really can't blame them for that.
I did yesterday finish listening to Neogenesis, and I must report a notable lack of "AI technobabble." Also? Boy, does a lot happen in that book! It's a trilogy all by itself.
I'll be taking a break from Liaden books for the next while to read Hornguard by Elizabeth Moon, which I'm looking forward to.
And now that my teacup is empty and Tali has gotten up to have a wee snack, I guess I'll go back and see how the desk chair likes me.
I hope everyone is having a lovely Friday.
PS. Apologies in advance for typos (voice-os?) that may appear in the above. # Later that same day: Sat with the manuscript and added about 500 words.
I've been alternating ice and heat every hour and a half, I guess, to try to help get my back to normal.
I have eaten lunch!
There are many chores that I should be doing-- clearing the dishwasher, reloading it, putting things away and etc. That'll happen later, by I which I mean--oh, tomorrow, or maybe even Sunday.
For now, I have dared a Tylenol against increasing pain, and hoping it won't make me sick.
My plans for the afternoon are taking my book to a comfy chair, turning on the heating pad, and reading.
This is even more boring than writing all day. My apologies. # This is one of Rook's whiskers. It is four-and-three-quarters inches long. # Sigh. So, I was warned a couple days ago to expect delivery of a package via USnail, which was not delivered and in addition vanished from Informed Delivery. It showed up in the timeline again today as an expected delivery, so I went to look at it on the Informed Delivery page.
The package under question left Maryland on July 7, and made it all the way to the Southern Maine sorting center, from whence it was sent on to the Essex MA sorting center--which is to say in the Completely Wrong Direction. Essex decided to send the package to Rochester, NY, where it languished for a day or so before this morning hopping on a mail truck going north.
The package is still listed as Going to be Delivered by 9 pm today, which probably means to the local post office, and not my house, but even so.
Even so--it still needs to get through at least one, and probably two, sorting centers in Mass, then the Southern Maine sorting center, which is the center that sent it back to Mass in the first place.
I wonder if I should start a betting pool... # And that's what's been going on at the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory. Fingers crossed that this will all be History tomorrow.
Guardian: 我能做到的就只能一个人闷在家里胡思乱想, all I could do was stay shut up in the house alone spiraling 我也会尽我所能把你禁锢在这里, I will do my utmost to keep you imprisoned here 姑娘，你的药单掉了, miss, you dropped your prescription
Me: 我又说你太闹，但我哭泣的时候是你给我拥抱🎵 该出现的所有表情瞬间掉了🎵 like I could resist using either one of those...
1) Signal boosting Squidgeworld's call for feedback about how to handle guest comments on the site. "Commission spammers (at least this most recent one) have been copy & pasting entire stories into ChatGPT, and then having ChatGPT formulate a question about that fic. So while a guest comment may have sounded heart-felt, if the comment ended with a, "Why do you think..." or "What inspired you to..." question, then they didn't read your story and come up with a question; AI did. And the person literally copy & pasted a ChatGPT generated question into a comment - that's how we knew.
The easiest way to deal with these type of people is to disable guest comments completely."
2) Platforms sought no age proof for any of 50 test accounts declaring age 16, researchers said. "Some dummy accounts received advertisements for youth banking products, an indication the platform registered the person's age range, Hammond said. One account which signed up to Elon Musk's X claiming to be 16 was served pornographic content, he added. None of the platforms let users sign up if they declared they were under 16. But just one, Australia-based live-streaming platform Kick, refused to let users create an account without proof of age."
3) The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. "From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice."
What I found most fascinating was this study's results: ( Read more... )
4) And it's not just text that video is displacing: End of an Era: Longtime Podcast Hosts Go Quiet as Video Dominates "Over the past year, various indicators of this transition have been piling up. Marc Maron ended his program after 16 years. Al Franken, an audio evangelist going back to the days of Air America in 2004, released his final episode last week, too. And many of the remaining audio-centric stars are attempting video in some fashion. (Witness Ira Glass, who is now recording promotional clips for This American Life.)"
It has come to my attention that some of you have never seen what I firmly believe to be the greatest music video of all time: Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It is the perfect marriage of a galactically bombastic power ballad and a writhing mass of 1980s video clichés, thrown into the path of a wind machine and blasted down a moodily lit corridor into the realm of legend.
In case you’re wondering what the heck they were thinking of when they made it, I remember Bonnie once explaining on TV that it’s about the dreams of a headmaster’s daughter, hence all the boys in (and out of) uniform. In retrospect, the whole shebang is quite fascinatingly female gaze-y, and I’m pretty sure it was a major formative influence on my pubescent imagination.
And yes, there is also a very amusing literal version, but for my money, the original is definitely the most hilarious…
A sad and deeply fond farewell to Bonnie Tyler (1951–2026). May somersaulting ninja schoolboys sing you to your rest.
Continued my short story kick with a new collection by Louise Erdrich, Python's Kiss; I particularly liked her unexpected* foray into sci-fi with a pair of stories set in a San Junipero-like digital afterlife, one about a woman plotting vengeance on her father (also dead, in the same afterlife) and the other about a woman whose version of heaven includes raising a construct of her daughter through (but not past) childhood, over and over, until the current version – the "8037th Caroline" – refuses to fade away and takes over her mother's (after)life instead. Two of the other stories I liked best also shared a thematic link, of women surviving abusive marriages: contemporary fiction played straight in "Wedding Dresses" – the titular dresses a story framework for a woman telling her niece about her four prior marriages – and with a magical-realism twist in "Borsalino," in which the main character's encounter with a ghostly thief in Venice decades before helps her leave her abusive husband. Snakes are another recurring theme. Cool black-and-white illustrations by Erdrich's daughter at the beginning of each story, frequently blurring line between drawing and comic strip.
* It came as a surprise to me, anyway— I'd forgotten about/haven't read her dystopian speculative fiction novel Future Home of the Living God.
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