john | Reading

things I fucked up today so far, a list:

forgot to take my meds before I left the house
forgot to put my gym clothes in my bag
forgot my ipad with my weightlifting app
forgot my headphones
forgot to transfer a giant file overnight
didn't finish my tea before I left the house and the contents of the abandoned cup will be gross when I get back after several hours of 84°F/28°C

I hate being so dependent on the bus system, when the bus system is so crappy. Buses should come every ten minutes!

things I got right:

I have my wristwatch
I have a fresh tube of sunscreen to leave in my gym locker
I had naan and brie for breakfast
I am wearing office clothes
my hair is brushed
I have my thermos of hot tea
I have my office key

I am pretty sure I can skedaddle off campus around 3, which will give me enough time to get snacks for the Board Annual Meeting tonight.

ETA: Okay, I snuck out of the morning event and ran home and took my meds and got all my stuff and the giant file is transferring (fingers crossed the transfer time estimate is a lie and I can drop the thumb drive off with a colleague before I leave), and maybe the day is looking up.

rydra_wong

Watch on YouTube

Featuring some of the most batshit possible Heath Robinson arrangements for making a tiny quasi-acoustic version of their industrial noise. MIDI-triggered mug pinging!

Daveed Diggs: "Thank y'all for this opportunity to do needlessly complicated shit."

ETA: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jte7_yZuZVk -- short on some of the aforementioned batshit Heath Robinson arrangements.

watersword

Okay, now it's summer.

Got an enormous bag of spinach at the farmer's market this morning, contemplated having popsicles for lunch, and after dinner went for a walk down to the cemetery, got ice cream, and wandered over to the garden. A perfect 1.5-mile stroll. The spinach will be turned into palak paneer, I will once again have an opportunity for popsicle meals later this week, and my evening routine for the next three months is sorted. (Well, in future I will try to make it to the cemetery before they close the gates, although I did glimpse squirrels joyously converging on the now-deserted road through the graves, so at least I have learned a lesson about what happens in the cemetery at dusk.)

pegkerr

I had a medical procedure scheduled for this past week, but I was uncertain whether it would be able to go forward because of my cough. If the anaesthesiologist said the cough was too severe, it would be canceled.

Accordingly, my priority this past week was quiet and rest, trying to get my cough to calm down. Annoyingly, the air quality in the Twin Cities remained problematic, so I couldn't sit outside on my porch.

So I stayed behind shut doors, near my air filters. I took showers with shower bombs infused with peppermint and eucalyptus. I drank oceans of tea to try to calm my coughing. I ate cough drops until I was sick of the taste. I curtailed my exercise.

I simply rested.

(My efforts were successful and I underwent the procedure last Thursday. I was recovering yesterday, which is why this collage is a day late.)

Image description: A door is ajar at night. Light outlines the crack, but the opposite of the door is a field of stars. An owl at rest sits peacefully in the lower left corner, eyes closed. Upper left corner: a blooming white poppy (signifying rest) with a glowing full moon shining at its center.

Quiet

22 Quiet

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: peaceful

rydra_wong

Recced Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire to a couple of people lately, picked up my copy again to refresh my memory of something, and now it has its teeth in me and won't let go until I reread the whole thing and I've already had to go to YouTube and listen to the Cry Cry Cry cover of "Cold Missouri Waters."

And then I found an amazing quote from the songwriter, James Keelaghan, which is one of the best descriptions of the book I've read:

https://nathans-roncast.castos.com/episodes/how-james-keelaghan-wrote-cold-missouri-waters-part-1

And so just the story itself is compelling. But for Norman Maclean's writing of it, like, I don't know if you know the book, but Norman McLean was sort of, the fire was an area of specialty for him, for, you know, it was one of his little private obsessions. And he always meant to write a book about it. And he started to write the book, but he died before it was finished. And the book was then sort of completed by his editors and also by his son.

So you not only get the story of the fire and incredible amount of detail about how the smoke jumpers fit into the National Forest Service, how they were created as a unit, but also stuff about the mathematics of how fire spreads in various circumstances. But you also get this sense of MacLean being a writer who is running out of time to tell the story that he really wants to tell because he knows he's dying. He's in a great deal of pain, I think, when he's writing the book. And all that comes through this, this impatient, irascible old man, this voice actually comes through in the book. And then I felt like, yeah, you know, I really need to write a song about this.

Anyway Dodge just ordered them to drop the heavy tools so I have to get back to the book now.

rydra_wong

At the time of writing, 41 46 51 66 75 87 93 MPs have signed the early day motion to reject the EHRC's new guidance:

https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65938

Write to your MP to tell them to sign it! Praise them if they already have!

If you have Bsky, Trans+ Solidarity Alliance have a skeet about it you can boost:

https://bsky.app/profile/transsolidarity.bsky.social/post/3mnb3wyefxc2g

Scottish Trans (in collaboration with Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and TransActual, because the collaborative work going on here is so phenomenal) have an "email your MP to reject the EHRC code of practice" template form:

https://equalrecognition.eaction.org.uk/rejectthecode

The Hansard transcript of the response to Seema Malhotra's statement on the EHRC guidance yesterday is blistering:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-06-01/debates/CE610C68-7093-454F-B897-AF008EE7E7A0/EqualityAct2010CodeOfPractice

denise in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

rydra_wong

https://www.transsolidarityalliance.com/post/mass-lobby-date-change-25th-june-2026

It's now the 25th.

pauamma in

dw_dev

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

pauamma in

dw_volunteers

I survived a heatwave.

How's everyone else doing?

denise in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

rydra_wong

Via

sabotabby, A Meal of Thorns, from the Ancillary Review of Books.

Jake Casella Brookins (whom I have loved ever since he described Prophet as “Gay X-files slash where they walk away from The Hurt Locker and wind up in Solaris instead”) and a guest do deep exegesis on a sf/f (or adjacent) book.

Every ep I've listened to has been really good.

(Also OMG the next ep is on The Fifth Head of Cerberus.)

rydra_wong

For once in my life, for once in my entire fucking life, it appears that I may actually have been Lacking The Vitamin.

(Iron.)

pauamma in

efw

Complete lyrics for Bach's Coffee Cantata, in a poorly modernized version of the wrong German topolect. Said translation implies that the "coffee" is, in fact, a different product from the Colombian highlands. No explanation.

rydra_wong

Okay, not just the miners; the trade unions as a whole showed the fuck up (and have already been showing up for trans rights in the UK in a big way). But it was, also, very much the miners:

The Guardian: ‘Bigger and better than ever’: how Durham Pride beat Reform’s funding axe with help from the miners

[The LGBTQ+] community “showed their heroism” during the miners’ strikes, he said. “They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”

He added: “That relationship’s prevailed ever since, [and so] the Durham Miners’ Association have decided to make this a priority in County Durham.”

(For those who don't know the particular history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbians_and_Gays_Support_the_Miners )

bitterlawngnome

Is there an interesting story behind your username?
It was given me by a family member/housemate, Goodland, some 25 years ago ... "Bill, you're the biggest, bitterest lawn gnome I've ever met" (I'm 6'4"/194 cm). And then there was a sash made out of duct tape, Mister International Bitter Lawn Gnome 200x whatever year it was. The sash was to mock the Bear Contests that I railed against at the time (awards given to the most attractive people by a sexual minority community based on the idea of inclusiveness and breaking down the heierarchies of attractiveness linked to privilege).

( more more more questions )

A source of just the questions if you want them: https://findingfriends.dreamwidth.org
Thanks to

greenfinch for the idea.

pegkerr

I'm going to keep this short because it's such a bore to go on and on about my personal health. And there have been too many collages on that subject this year. My sister once passed along a humorous observation from her brother-in-law, a retired pastor, about the dangers of visiting his elderly parishioners: you have to sit through the organ recital.

I would spare you, but there really isn't anything else I can do a collage about because the sudden flare-up of my spring allergies (I am violently allergic to tree pollen) necessitated the cancellation of all of my plans for the week. I didn't go out, I canceled walking with my friends, I didn't make it to church, I barely did my volunteer work, and I canceled a planned and much-anticipated day trip with a couple friends to a bird sanctuary in Wisconsin, which just SUCKED.

It's been very frustrating. I can't sit out on my front porch and eat breakfast. I can't go outside without wearing a mask. I spent most of my concentration on simply trying to breathe this week. In desperation, I got a virtual urgent care visit on Saturday to get a prescription for a steroid inhaler, but due to the holiday, it couldn't be filled until Tuesday.

I have several doses under my belt, and I'm starting to feel a little better, thank goodness.

Um. I did finish another chapter this week, and I'm quite pleased with it. That's something else to talk about, yes?

Image description: Background: a circle of the tops of trees silhouetted against a blue sky, seen from a view looking straight up. Top: dangling catkins holding birch tree pollen. Center: a woman's face, her eyes screwed shut, holding a tissue to her nose. Lower center: a blue medical mask, overlaid by an inhaler.

Breathless

21 Breathless

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: sick

denise in

dw_maintenance

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

watersword

To my genuine astonishment, the Tatler Fairyland story got a pretty positive response in crit group, and I have a great direction to go for revisions. ?!?!

Meeting the person who successfully got the other pollinator garden approved got me a couple of potentially very useful contacts and a copy of their application, which I am shamelessly copying. Cross your fingers that my various ideas, especially for watering, work out, because that is probably the main blocker. (And me being willing to talk to vendors for price quotes, ugh.)

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John

June 2026

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Reading

ugh

CLIPPING TINY DESK CONCERT

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2026 52 Card Project: Week 22: Quiet

I have made a tactical mistake

UK people: trans rights

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Mass lobby date change

Question thread #151

Volunteer social thread #164

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Podcast rec

Very short health update

This entry brough to you by diego001 and me

Miners Support the Lesbians and Gays

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2026 52 Card Project: Week 21: Breathless

Testing needed in advance of code push!

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June 2026

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