Viridian5's House of "...What?"

"Legendary magazine Starlog is being resurrected"
The classic magazine is being relaunched

I used to devour issues of Starlog.


...they noted that there was a considerable appeal to tackling a print publication at this point in time, where the SF/F news and commentary landscape is dominated by sloppy clickbait and AI.

Yeah, you don't say.

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So, I'm now reading BloodyMary. Have I seen Iron Lung? No. I've only seen Project Hail Mary through watching reactors watch it on YouTube. Yet here I am.


(Though, being a Metalocalypse fan, when reading fics I often have parts of Dethklok's "Blood Ocean" running through my head.)

From reeby10:
Put your mp3 player/phone/streaming collection on shuffle and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results.


It's the dark night of my soul
I'm so glad that you decided to come
Sell the kids for food
This whiskey sour
You'll be the killer
Data trails
Finger food and an ice-cold keg
You know I never meant to see you
Memories consume
Soldier
Loving you isn't the right thing to do
I've got to take a little time
I belong here where the world ends
We don't need no education
Infinity ...infinity?
One mile in the air, that's where she lives
Blink and you miss a beat


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This time I heard "Love Is the Drug" by Roxy Music playing at the Plainview Trader Joe's. I am so curious about the person doing this.

Discord on Desktop wasn't opening for me for two days, but then I went to a troubleshooting website, did one of the things, and now I'm back. I Ended Task on all the Discord stuff in Task Manager, which fixed the problem.

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I had a somewhat weird brain thing last night. Macy's decided not to set off the July 4th fireworks near Midtown, so Queens wouldn't get to see any, so I drove a friend around last night with us looking for homegrown, personal, illegal Queens fireworks or trying to get a view of downtown Manhattan where the Macy's fireworks were. We were on a deadline, so I had to figure out places to go in real time while driving instead of stopping and using my phone's map as I sometimes do for routes and live traffic conditions. I could feel my brain tilting and turning my mental road map as I figured out routes and locations while driving. I don't often have to change directions and destinations often enough and fast enough for it to be that noticeable.

My phone may have destroyed my memory for retaining phone numbers, but my map and direction sense (in areas I know) remain keen. (I am not someone who can instinctually know where, say, west is.)

After about half a year, a friend asking about my LJ led me to contacting LJ Help instead of trying and failing to figure out a solution myself through the FAQ. Turns out I needed to turn off Cyrillic services at the settings page. Who knew? Not me.

So, should I start dual posting, to here as well as my DreamWidth, again? (Individually, now that you can no longer do it automatically from DW.) Is there stuff folks missed that they want me to put here? I've been writing at my DW for over six months....

But is turning off Cyrillic services why I now can't leave a comment on a Russian friend's LJ? I don't want to contact LJ Help again so soon, also while figuring out a delicate way to ask if this is why I'm now prohibited from interacting with Russian LJ users.

I turned Cyrillic back on and tried to comment, but it still wouldn't let me do it. ~sigh~ Has turning it off once revealed me forever more?

(Will she be prohibited from commenting on my LJ?)

I put up some photos from 2019 I rediscovered. They whole batch looks a bit like a fever dream.... Lighting in window displays isn't always consistent from night to night and sometimes result in a "softer focus" look. You can see them at my Flickr.

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More of the original lights that came attached to my Christmas tree just burned out. Barely any still work, and the tree's not that old! I keep buying lights to apply manually.

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Kind of a PSA resulted from my own experience....

I've upgraded from the iPhone SE to 17, and it's reacting weirdly to me syncing it into iTunes: it won't show recently played songs in iTunes since I started using the 17 and it randomly mixed up all the cover images of the songs on the phone. The images are properly attached in iTunes but not on my phone anymore! Part of me keeps trying to find a pattern in the image switches but so far keeps running into a wall. Is there a way to fix this? I've synced it many times, and these things remain. (iTunes has all its recent updates.) My music is important to me!

An example of some of the hunh:

"Want" through "Bare" is all the same Cure album, Wild Mood Swings, but with four different incorrect cover arts. "Open," "High," and "Apart" are from the Wish remaster.

My chats with Apple Care--Regarding the issue with my iPhone 17 not syncing up properly with iTunes--didn't go great. I spoke to two people via Chat who couldn't help me, the last one asking me to attempt two solutions that might make other things worse. One thing I definitely will not be doing is paying for a monthly Apple Music subscription just to properly access music I already own. So I scheduled a phone call from a Senior Team member for the evening, hoping that person can create a solution we can all get behind.

Apple called me 12 hours earlier than scheduled and using the wrong phone number, even though I gave them the correct number and time during the chats twice, then sent me an e-mail about how they couldn't contact me. Shocker. I replied to both e-mails with the correct stuff. Then they still didn't call at the correct time, so I instigated and Karen-ed myself into getting a call from Apple senior support immediately.

It was illuminating in some bad ways.

There's a known issue with this in the current iOS: 26.2. (That showed up in my 17 but not the SE, which was also running 26.2 when I traded it in, so I'm thinking there may be some setting or programming stuff also involved we can't figure out? More people have 17s and such than SEs, so a lot of people have to be having this issue.) But since it's "just" about music, it's not something Apple will immediately resolve.

My other problem is that I have a lot of music I burned myself from CDs, so Apple Music might get rid of those if I'm not careful. Because it's third party! Legal issues! (I didn't realize until this phone call that apparently lots of record companies and music business people are suing everybody over rights.) Who knows if I should really have this stuff!

So the senior service guy said he would not suggest I delete the library and create a new one in case stuff I own but Apple doesn't approve of goes missing.

He's a DJ, and he says he pirates stuff himself. He was like, "Yeah, we're all turning into pirates. And I work for Apple." Because people will ask for a song while he's working but it might not be in his internet, legally feasible library. Brave new bullshit, enshittified world stuff.

The senior support guy says he has a ton of songs on hard drives that aren't connected to the internet to keep them safe from getting taken away or changed.

It's funny having an Apple employee saying he prefers flip phones.

Since I prefer to listen to the music I already own, even if the images are wrong, over potentially losing swaths of my songs, I'm sitting put.

I have music burned off CDs from local NYC '90s bands that never got a real record deal, stuff from singles CDs in the '90s, rare bands, rare muisc, and Apple wouldn't provide me with that kind of stuff. I still rip music off CDs into Tunes. I did it one night recently to test the sync problem, and saw that even sending over a single new music file screws up the cover album art image on the 17. (I have a disc drive as part of this laptop, not an external drive.) I have thousands of songs, and some of those CDs I don't have any more.

He commends me on avoiding subscribing to Apple Music, given the conditions I mentioned. With what this guy told me about Apple policing music, I'm not sure I trust them. I'd say 98% of my music is "third party," which means Apple distrusts them and doesn't guarantee they won't be borked and doesn't care if they are. Sorry, Apple, I'm not going to buy all my music from you just so you approve of what's on my phone.

So I'd have to be careful in my choices of what I do.

~snerf~ Here I am, listening to a Cure song on my phone with a Poe album cover on it, angry at everything.

So. Wish we all had a better solution available now. I have a brand new iPhone 17, as part of my family's plan, so switching away from Apple is unfortunately not an option. I had no idea things were reaching this point until this problem led me to contact Apple Care.


eta 2/14/26: Since LiveJournal will no longer let me post new entries publicly to LJ, I've been exclusively doing entries at my Dreamwidth.

My cat niece Kiwi Herman loved the catnip toys I bought for her (and my cat nephew, Winston Patrick) and rolled off the table a few minutes after this. Look at her tongue in one of the photos. The set of toys were mushroom-themed: two different cartoony mushrooms and one "can" proclaiming itself to be cream of mushroom soup. ( Collapse )


Cat nephew Winston Patrick inside the tree again. So many broken ornaments. There was a time or two when I was over there for the day where I thought he'd destroy the tree with me watching. Look at his face, zero regrets. It's his first Christmas. ( Collapse )

I hope you guys have an idea that could help me. I've upgraded from the iPhone SE to 17--my SE was four years old, its battery was starting to suffer, and the screen had some cracks and dings that sometimes hurt my fingers--and the 17 is reacting weirdly to me syncing it into iTunes (on my PC laptop): it won't show recently played songs in iTunes since I started using the 17 and it randomly mixed up all the cover images of the songs on the phone. Is there a way to fix this? I've synced it four times tonight, and these things remain. (iTunes has all its recent updates.) My music is important to me!

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I'm testing out its camera. Yesterday was so dark and rainy that I could barely make out the details of this angel in person but the iPhone 17 rendered this.

I've shot this statue many times over many years in differing conditions and seasons and with different cameras, but I've never noticed the wing edges looking this sharp before. I also usually shoot this angel when it's completely or mostly dry, thus the color difference; the whiter the whole thing is, the drier it is. This angel has a fairly unusual look and design, which is why I keep going back to it.

My winter cemetery shots are most often about shapes and structure, since everything has been stripped bare, and that's certainly true here.

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I only sent out a few Christmas cards this year, mailing them the morning of the 24th. I think part of the delay came from me not getting any cards from anyone aside from dine, so I didn't have many reminders. Nobody in my family sent me a card.

I ran out of tape completely halfway through wrapping the last present tonight! What are the odds?

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For seasons readings, I have a list of my Christmas-based fics here.

Happy holidays, folks!

I don't know what's been going on with the sunsets lately, but damn.

December 19, a sunset between rainstorms







December 20




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I didn't expect the latest iOS update to make such a huge difference to my CarPlay interface.

• I got Whamagheddoned Wednesday, but I expected it. You can't go into midtown Manhattan during the day during this season without hearing "Last Christmas," most often blasting out the carriage of a pedi-cab.


• I just updated to the new iOS. I don't like it. Why did they move around so many random things? Why the bubbles?


• I'll be doing threeforthememories again in January since I always enjoy it.


• I feel sad that I don't have anybody to be fannish with over Bergdorf Goodman's holiday windows. "Look! This window uses elements from their past 'Brilliant Holiday' and 'Bergdorf Goodies' window series!" Nobody else cares.

I have now gone through my Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas/holiday window photos, chosen which to work on, and posted them to my Flickr. They're... okay. I certainly like them better than the really low effort put into last year's. They're not the kind of thing that impresses me though, especially not when I remember series like "Land of 1,000 Delights," "The Winter Palace," "Land of the Bubblemakers," "An Enchanted Experience," "Let's Holiday," "A Brilliant Holiday," and "Once Upon a Holiday." (Okay, they're not so great with naming them.) I know what Saks can do in their Christmas displays.

It's like how I know Bloomingdale's can give us this, this, this, and this, but then this year they gave us this for Christmas/holiday 2025.

The Saks part of my 2025 Christmas photo run was further marred by two brightly lit food trucks reflecting on some windows and Saks staff storing the barriers they use to corral passersby during the day up against the windows at night. No thanks, all of you. That's why there are some whole or partial displays missing here.

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Alternately, Chag sameach!

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I woke up today feeling somewhat shiftless and undirected. In one afternoon, I then managed to

• make a dermatologist appointment,


• get the date and time for my pain management appointment changed since it would conflict with the dermatologist appointment,


• call in a refill for a prescription and find out if I have a different one on file already (I don't, so I have to get it during my pain management appointment,)


• try to get my neurologist and pharmacy to stop punting the ball on a new medication back and forth without giving it to me at last,


• pick up two prescriptions from the pharmacy, neither of which is the neurologist one but I'm trying.