silvercat17

Today did not go at all according to plan. On the other hand, I got a two hour nap.

I think there is something wrong with the software update that got pushed to my CPAP, because it has developed an annoying habit of stopping pushing air in the middle of the night and having to be restarted by my desperately trying to breathe in more air through my nose. I am going to start a conversation with the manufacturer.

princessofgeeks

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princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: bitchy

scrubjayspeaks

“You don’t play fair,” the boy protested as he held up his scorched palms, suddenly looking both much younger and much older than the teen he had been posing as. The girl shrugged her shoulders, resettling the battle jacket she had borrowed from her aunt so that the barbed wire epaulets sat squarely again after the boy had once more attempted to grab at her despite her protests. “I play by the rules,” she corrected, thinking that cold iron had a remarkable effect on all manner of assailants, fae or otherwise.

---

LL#1419

princessofgeeks

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ysabetwordsmith

“IMPOSSIBLE!” No Work Food Gardens Based on Wild Edible Ecosystems

About 20 years ago, after I first started studying Permaculture, I went to work for a very sustainable Permaculture-oriented CSA farm. One day, after working all morning painfully tending, pruning, and weeding a patch of cane berries, I went for a bike ride along my favorite trail. Black raspberries were in season, so I went home, grabbed 3 3 gallon buckets and filled them up with raspberries.

That was when it hit me. NOBODY was working tending these, except for perhaps the deer and birds fertilizing them. Meanwhile, my own hands were covered with scratches from my morning work.

This is an example of humanity's earliest agriculture: encouraging plants we find useful in places where we go, and occasionally ripping out ones we don't want there. Wild plants can mostly take care of themselves. You don't have to fuss over them like delicate domestic fruits and vegetables.

My approach to laissez-faire permaculture is similar. I plant new things that seem promising. I try to help them establish. They live or die. The ones that live, I expect to take care of themselves. Some of what I grow is really good at that. \o/

Current Mood: busy

isis

Hello from Colorado, which is on fire :( We are not actually near any of the big fires, but we are getting smoke in the mornings from two of them, which means that several times in the past few weeks we've had to get up at 3 am and close the windows and turn on the air purifier. Anyway:

What I've recently read:

The Astrobiology Immersion Program by

startingatmidnight, short-novel-length (~50K) Project Hail Mary gen, I think

petra recommended it. AU in which on the way back to Erid, Rocky and Ryland Grace bodyswap. I love bodyswap as a trope and it's especially rich when the bodies are alien to each other. I thought it was a little long, and the handwaving a little handwavy, though the ultimate "why" resolution was super interesting, and I really liked that the story continues through to the consequences on Erid.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, which is a sort of literary dark-humor western, with a really fun narrative voice. Charlie and Eli Sisters are Bad Men With Guns who wield them for a mysterious mogul called the Commodore. Except Eli's got a sensitive side, and he's starting to wonder why he's killing people for money when he could just settle down and run a trading post somewhere. My favorite part, oddly, was the throughline of Eli being completely unable to hold onto any money; if he doesn't give it away out of soft-heartedness as soon as he gets it, it's stolen, and I was delighted every time it happened.

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, which was a recommendation from

merit - I couldn't resist the premise of a woman waking up with amnesia and learning, through letters written from her former self, that she's a high-up bureaucrat in a secret organization of people with supernatural powers who deal with supernatural crimes and threats to the country. Sort of like Rivers of London but with Ghostbusters-level humor. ETA: and now I am reminded of another reason I really liked this: the main character, Myfanwy Thomas, discovers (somewhat to her surprise) that she is frighteningly competent at her job. Also there is a fantastic female character with whom I ship her (and there is fic). Anyway, lots of fun, and I'm now reading the second book in this series, Stiletto.

What I've recently watched:

S4 of Dark Winds, which unfortunately had quite a bit of action in LA - not that I have anything against LA, it's just it's not the familiar Four Corners scenery. As soon as they (metaphorically) hung a German on the wall I was expecting it to fire (metaphorically) Karl May, and I was not disappointed.

We've just watched the first episode of S2 of the live-action One Piece. I love how goofy it is!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3269/

Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

https://xkcd.com/3269/

armaina

Honestly, I feel a Kind Of Way (negative) about platforms that pride themselves on giving power back to the owners and they still can't be bothered to offer anything with an optical drive.

Services Like Frame Work and System 76 talk a big game about being able to build out your system however you like, which is mostly true, unless you want an optical drive. Worse still, their desktop cases don't even accommodate space to install it on your own. Especially for a desktop, what's even the point of getting it through them when places like microcenter and newegg (Or your local PC repair shop!!!! Support your local shops!!!!!!!!!!! ) will build the thing for you so what's their benefit really if they can't even give you space for an optical drive.

And yes, the ability to have built-in access to or means to install an optical drive I think is pretty dang important. An External Drive is something you use in a pinch, not a permanent solution. And I hate hearing 'you don't need one' excuses when I bring up this problem. Yes! I need one! I wouldn't be looking for it if I didn't! I wouldn't have gone out of my way to purchase a case with room for a drive bay if I didn't use it. I very frequently re-watch my DVDs as well as archive my music.

I'm reminded of this issue every time I watch Venture Brothers with Z. See, we don't really have space for a couch so the only way for us to watch something together and cuddle, is on the bed. But to watch it on the bed, we have to use the laptop, but to watch my DVD collection on the laptop, we need to use an external optical drive.

Out of curiosity I went looking around for laptops with optical drives. Turns out! Most stopped making laptops with optical drives back in 2019!! I had been hoping services like Frame Work and System 76 might rekindle that but it doesn't look like they even intend to go in that direction :/

And I'm sure this isn't intentional just opportunistic coincidental, that access to optical drives have scaled back as access to digital streaming services scaled up. It's really important that we keep access to physical media, but it's becoming an uphill battle to play it.

Current Mood: annoyed

ysabetwordsmith

"Plural Checklist" by leathersys on tumblr -- copied on DW by

synecdoches

I recently found an interesting survey on Tumblr by leathersys, called the Plural Checklist. They made this as a quiz for people who think they may be plural/multiple, but don't have classic amnesiac barriers, since a lot of quizzes and diagnostic tests are geared toward the most obvious dissociative symptoms. I like the questions, but I strongly dislike Google and don't want to send this info to a stranger, so I'm going to copy the questions here and consider my answers. Most of the questions were very insightful-- some shockingly so-- and only one or two of them made me feel like an out of touch old man.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today's word is "doff." Many folks will know it from "doff a hat" meaning to tip or take off. However, it's also used widely in fibercrafting to mean removing fiber from a tool.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Pop Culture Squad has a post about current Batman threads. In one of those, Oliver Queen / Green Arrow explains to Bruce Wayne / Batman what is wrong with the tech industry nowadays:

Ollie has a turn as the crusading liberal ex-millionaire, as he has a few opportunities to let us all know what he really thinks of Generative AI companies founded by tech bros. There’s one point where Ollie fills Batman in on it all. "They’re another generative AI company. Scraping personal data. Stealing art and stories and knowledge. Polluting and poisoning. Using masses of energy and water. Taking what the world actually needs to produce what nobody wants."

It's that last line I want people to remember and use to describe what is wrong with generative AI: "Taking what the world actually needs to produce what nobody wants." That's it in a nutshell.

Current Mood: busy

princessofgeeks

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ysabetwordsmith

Today is partly sunny and warm.

I fed the birds. I've seen a small flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 7/8/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 7/8/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 7/8/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 7/8/26 -- We started breaking up the parts of the birdgift tree that had fallen into the south lot. There's about twice as much mow path past it now. We dumped 2 wheelbarrows of sticks into the firepit in the ritual meadow.

EDIT 7/8/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 7/8/26 -- I cracked open 2 apricot pits and got 2 big perfect seeds. I cracked open two batches of cherry pits and got several good seeds. I think the advice to let seeds air-dry for a few days is bad. One day at most. They shrivel up pretty fast.

I walked around for a bit. I saw 2 bats flying quite low in the house yard, and more flying high over the road and other places. I'm not sure if they're the same bats or not. I don't know how many I actually have.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

fayanora

AI truly is doing to people, for real, what people used to think TV would do to people: turn them into mindless shambling zombies.

These AI addicts have zero creativity, zero intelligence, and zero care about anything but their addiction. It's sad to see. All that noise pollution, heat pollution, water consumption, and stress to the electric grid just so some knuckle-dragging lotus eaters can atrophy their brains on bot-pureed brain vomit.

Watch on YouTube

adore

I'm enjoying this meme my DW friends are doing (

matsushima and

blackcatofmisery off the top of my head) so I'll be doing it too, for the month of August! How it works is, you pick a day and ask a question in the comments of this post. I'll answer it with a post on that day. I'm curious about what y'all are curious about.
1

matsushima: Do you like your name? If you were to choose a new name, what would it be and why?
2

matsushima: What book(s) made you want to be a writer?
3

china_shop: How did you come to start watching Kdramas, and what do you like most about them?
4 5 6 7 8
9

yarnofariadne: Do you have any writing rituals?
10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31

Current Mood: curious

armaina

I could use the social medias for these microthoughts

or

I could post them here. (using tag Quips for these microthoughts)

Any time I'm listening to a really great song in a minor key that flips to a major key for the chorus, I feel so disappointed. The reverse is alright, though.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners Season 1 is a lesson in what happens when you don't listen to your partners when they caution you to take care of your mental health.

The more I experience and learn, the more convinced I am that most self-ascribed 'empaths' are just people with elevated OCD and Anxiety that have never done anything about it.

duckprintspress

okay, let's do this... so like. basically all I've done since last Wednesday (when I had surgery) is read. The lines often blur, and I keep having to reread stuff cause I'll realize I got through a paragraph or a page without actually getting any meaning out of it, so it's been a slog, but I haven't been able to brain anything else, either, so I just. kept at it. (My surgery went fine, and I'm healing quickly, I'm just absolutely walloped by fatigue. I tried not taking my painkillers today, because I have work I need to do, and I hoped that not taking them would help, and the result is that I'm sliiiiightly more pain... and still fatigue-walloped. oh well.)

1. What are you currently reading?

Cooking with Monsters: Harm-to-Table by Jordan Alsaqa: this is the sequel to a comic I was pretty meh about, and I'm still pretty meh about it. I can't even really put my finger on why, it just feels like it's missing some spark that'd really draw me.
this is the longest I've gone without making progress on Daomu Biji vol. 2 since I started in January. I just haven't been able to brain Chinese, I haven't been studying much either. I need to make sure I don't lose the habits, tho. I've worked too hard to fuck this up now.

2. What have you recently finished reading?

Copper Coins vol. 1 to 3 by Mu Su Li: I've previously read a fantranslation, so this is a reread for me, and that was intentional. I figured a reread of a not-too-complicated book was about what I could brain. And I was right. I think I liked this one better on a second read-through, the dynamic between Xue Xian and Xuanmin hit better for me this time.
DNF: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson: I cannot fathom how this mess of a book got nominated for a Hugo. That it has a higher average rating than The Tainted Cup makes me despair for the future of Western fantasy literature. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it fairly literally, in the sense of: I already often feel that I do not click with books that are popular in the Western queer spec-fic-o-verse. For a book like this to get such high ratings means that I will increasingly find no place for myself in these reading circles. Clearly they're hitting for a lot of readers (books like Winter's Orbit and A Memory Called Empire, as more examples), but they are such solid misses for me, and it's frustrating to feel like I'm seeing the threads of how a genre I grew up with is going to have less and less to interest me. So I don't despair for it in a general sense, but I do despair for it in the sense of "a genre that actually has books I want to read and will think are good." and that's really sad to me, especially because, well. it's annoying to see something you think sucked get praised to the skies, while other books you think are better get ignored. (to clarify, I don't think The Tainted Cup is an example of a book that's getting ignored by the Western queer spec-fic-o-verse. it's gotten a ton of positive, and well-deserved, press. But these are the same circles that regularly look down on the East Asian BL I favor, turning their noses up at it as ~fetishization~ and meanwhile Meng Xi Shi is out here writing politics so far beyond what a book like The Raven Scholar manages...)

anyway. manga.

10 Dance vol. 8 by Inouesatoh: I have waited almost 2 years for this, my hold came through this morning, I finished reading it within 30 minutes of waking up. Fuck but that was so so so so worth the wait. (vol. 7 ended on a brutal cliffhanger.)
Fated NOT to Meet vol. 2 by Ei Eijou: I'll own I went into vol. 2 without any memories whatsoever of vol. 1, and it still read pretty well lmao.
Kaiju No. 8: Relax vol. 1 and 2 by Kizuku Watanabe: silly spin-off one-shots for Kaiju No. 8. They were cute. I read them in reverse order (since there's no plot) and liked vol. 1 better than vol. 2.
Syrup: A Yuri Anthology vol. 2: continues to be a delightfully toxic collection. The back blurb says it's dark and include taboo topics, and the reviews lambasting it are full of people going "omg this was so dark and the topics were so taboo." Some people just don't deserve evil GL.
Murderous Lewellyn's Candlelit Dinner vol. 2 by Sumnagi (re-read)
Twittering Birds Never Fly vol. 2 and 3 by Kou Yoneda: the characters in this are intriguing but I find it really hard to follow - both in terms of keeping track of the plot and side characters, and also the jump between flashbacks and present day events.
Yes, No, or Maybe? manga vol. 1 - 3 by Michi Ichiho and Yukimura: this read better than the anime... watched. It felt more dubcon and less non-con, which is a big plus.
Marriage Toxin vol. 4 - 7 by Joumyaku and Mizuki Yoda: it's losing some of its charm already, which is sad.
I Can't Say No to the Lonely Girl vol. 2 by Kashikaze: continues to be cute.
Golden Kamuy vol. 4 by Satoru Noda: I must have been a mess when I read this, I hardly remember what happened lmao.
Yona of the Dawn vol. 35: Mizuho Kusanagi: my library doesn't have vol. 36. wah.
Saiyuki: Resurrected Edition vol. 4 by Kazuya Minekura: what a useless stopping point, and I don't have access to Reload atm. I realized well before the end that clearly the main story wouldn't get resolved within the base 9 volumes (consolidated into 4 vols in the version I read) but I didn't realize just how unresolved that'd actually mean.
Sakamoto Days vol. 22 by Yuto Suzuki
Dandadan vol. 16 by Yukinobu Tatsu
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime vol. 18 by Fuse

3. What will you read next?

Novels: I've decided that, for now, I'm saying "screw it" to my neatly-ordered-I'm-supposed-to-read-what's-next-on-the-top-of-the-pile TBR, and just impulse read. I've pulled out the My Husband and I Sleep in a Coffin duology by Wu Shui Bu Du, and I'm also eying the duology Twin Jades of Jiangdong by Fei Tian Ye Xiang.

Physical library loans: none!

Digital library loans: nothing is due in under a week, so eh, whatever I feel like. I accidentally stacked my Holds full of stuff again, even though I vowed to myself I wouldn't. In my defense, my libraries got a bunch of stuff that'd been unavailable/on my "notify me" list, so I was really eager to grab those now that I could. Of those, I think I'm most excited for I Want to Be Your Girl vol. 4, which is the last vol in the series and I really liked the middle 2 after being a little meh about the first. I also cannot *wait* for Our Not-So-Lonely Planet Travel Guide vol. 7. The one I was absolutely most excited for was 10 Dance vol. 8 but that hold came through this morning and I have already read it lmao.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

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!

fayanora

I finally got one of those "day of the week" pill organizers because I kept skipping doses for as many as several days in a row despite having Dosecast, mainly because:

1. The Dosecast app I use to track my pills doesn't consistently do its pop up notifications like it should, and there's no beeping or other sounds associated with its pop up notifications even when it is doing them.

2. The process of getting out all the bottles, getting the pills out of each bottle, piling the pills up in front of me, taking the pills, and putting everything away takes SO many spoons / energy slots that even when I was getting the notifications for the daily pills, I would get pre-emptive stress that depleted my energy and made me more prone to postponing it. Then it would be two or three days of skipping them because of my time blindness and I would get extremely annoyed with myself.

3. It doesn't help that doing all the activity every day to get that many pills ready depleted my energy enough that it made actually taking the pills harder to do. If you don't know what I mean: I have always had a problem with swallowing pills. I find most people's directions/instructions on how to do something new to be very confusing, to the point that I have to figure out how to do the thing myself pretty much all the time because of it. And when I was a kid, up into my teens, I was taking pills so infrequently - despite getting frequent migraines - that my poor ADHD memory and difficulty forming new habits meant that even when I was managing to figure out how to swallow pills, I was forgetting how to do it by the time I next had to do it. This lasted until a couple years ago, when I finally figured out and memorized how to take pills without gagging or choking. But the thing is, this takes concentration and focus to do. I have to mute anything with words in it to free up processing power for the task. And even though I know how to swallow all those pills at once, my having to go through a very difficult and stressful process of getting eight pills ready at once depletes enough system resources that if I tried swallowing all those pills at once, I would gag, choke, and possibly even puke. So to prevent that, I was having to take no more than three pills at once, and STILL had to concentrate very hard on doing it, because the smallest bit of mind wandering or split attention would make me gag on them.⁽¹⁾

Anyway, I finally bought a pill organizer, so I could skip the daily, energy-depleting, stressful process of getting the pills ready. I now only have to do that process once a week, and I can do it AFTER taking the pills. How is it going, you ask? Two days in a row, I popped open the pill box for the day, tossed all eight pills into my mouth, drank some iced tea (I can NOT dry-swallow pills), and swallowed all those fuckers all at once. I did still have to pause YouTube to be able to do it, but still, I did it!

I have never had any issues taking the Metformin on time unless it was at the same time as the others, since it's just two pills, so I didn't get one separated by day/night. Just the "once daily" version. (Hell, sometimes when I would skip most of the pills, I would still take the Metformin since it's a pretty important one.)

So that's a big relief. One less stressor in my life, two if you count my annoyance at myself from skipping taking the daily pills. Life got easier, and it only cost me like $4. (I had to get a big one because there are so many pills.)

(1) = This tendency to forget how to do things I've done before applies to pleasant things, too. It was only two or three months ago that I finally figured out how to properly roll a burrito, and it has taken all that time since to get mostly consistently good at it. I still sometimes fuck it up.

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Just One Thing (8 July 2026)

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