jinian | Network

this morning i'm talking to a guy in one of my groups - he's staff, not a student, and for the purposes of this exercise we'll call him js because those are his initials - i don't remember the context but he asked me if i'd seen a movie called the old guard.

yes, yes i have seen a movie called the old guard. i did not mention that i watched it so hard i absolutely lost my mind on tumblr for a while.

then he told me not to watch the second one because it's not good. i did mention that when we (by which i meant the fannish corners where i hang out) heard there was going to be a second one we were very excited and that i still haven't seen it because i heard it was bad. apparently it ends on a cliffhanger to lead into a third movie? which, if the second was so bad, will probably never come to be.

then he brought up highlander - movie and tv show - and allowed as how he went to a highlander con back in the day (which was enough !!! for me) and got to talk to the swordmaster who said the swords sparked against each other during the various fights because the actors were using arc welders to do it. also he met the keeper of the canon who i guess kept the timelines straight. he's telling me about some of the characters and there was this one guy who was only going to be in a few episodes but the fans loved him so the show kept him - his name was methos - and i've never seen the show, right? but even i know who methos was.

it was a highly entertaining conversation but weird because while i kind of expect to find fans of genre tv and/or movies at work - i mean, i work with nerds - i only know highlander the series through online fandom so it was odd to meet an actual fan in real life. but fun!

on sunday i went on a food and walking tour of boston's seaport with

tamalinn, friend a, and friend a's hubs. we had ~~chowdah~~ chowder, fried clams, oysters, lobster rolls, and crabcakes. my favorite was definitely the lobster roll - it was SO GOOD - but the fried clams were a close second. i'm a sucker for a fried clam. we also got to see a bunch of the seaport including the fish pier and a bunch of guys unloading the fish (also squid). the weather cleared and the sun came out and there were A LOT of dogs and the only other person in our tour was a woman visiting from australia - she was going to salem after boston and we were all full of recommendations for her - and it was just a really fun day. and saturday i met my sister for dinner, by which i mean i drove to her place because she locked herself out and i have spare keys and then we went out near her. it was raining when i left but after maybe fifteen minutes it was BUCKETING DOWN, i mean it was biblical. and my car was fine! which is a relief.

for the americans in the audience who have been to in-n-out burger and like to order off the menu there's a reason you can't order anything bigger than a 4x4. and that reason is a guy who walked into an in-n-out in vegas and ordered... a 100x100. for the unfamiliar, that's 100 patties and 100 slices of cheese. a bun on the bottom, a bun on the top, and insanity in the middle.

the first known use of omg was in a letter to winston churchill. sounds like it was sarcastic, too.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: castle

torachan

1. Carla's toe seems to be healing up really well. She went out for a short walk tonight (first time doing more walking than just around the house or going to the store since Friday) and it didn't hurt or make it bleed or anything.

2. I bought some black sesame honey spread today at work and it's so good! I had it on the last of the Costco croissants and the flavor of the croissant was a little too strong for it, but I think it would be just perfect on toast.

3. Chloe's such a cutie.

penwalla

Before the chapter itself, we have a profile of Wren that I assume is some kind of military document. It's titled "Red Threat" which suggests it's like, an internal document detailing her as a person of interest due to her treasonous activities. But it's weirdly laid out and the included info doesn't make that much sense.
( wren is just a collection of female protag tropes in a tshirt )

konsectatrix

Hope everyone is well. <3

Working another season of what was meant to be a temporary/seasonal/secondary type of job vending flowers; I get lots of hours, I know everyone, my route is close to home, and yeah, it's physically taxing, but I'm basically larping a cozy game all day-- and I get all winter off.

Doom!Twin02 will be in Scotland for a semester; they're getting their master's in urban planning.

Doom!Twin01 is still a lab tech at one of Rutgers' farms, developing new varieties of turfgrass. I am still secretly hoping "turfgrass" is code for a tiny mammoth.

They both just got back from their yearly trip to South Korea, hanging out with their other family.

( I think I might've explained them before, but just in case... )

( Mr. Mouse has also been having adventures. )

I am drawing on occasion, most recently for a project by one of our line producer's screenwriting friends. I'm split between that and grumpily trying to work out storyboards for my own project (The music I settled for doesn't spark joy, and I should probably see if there's something I can do about that).

W is looking for new work; I am alternately cheerleading his efforts and having him binge anime with me, while being sat on (or yelled at) by an assortment of cats.

...I really need to work on my front garden beds. But guess what I never feel like doing after all day moving plants and setting up displays? XD

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: this tupinan song is too repetitive, i think

shadaras

mm, some things:

1.
Earlier this evening I wandered across the street to pick up a few things for dinner and ended up spending a good five minutes or so chatting with the queers canvassing for ballot propositions, because it's very easy to catch me with one about park funding, especially when they look like a pair of lesbians, which it turned out they indeed are. Apparently they recently moved to the area (one of them coming back, the other to stay with their partner).

Shall see if I run into them again, but they said I should check out the gaming place (when asked "what kind of gaming" I was informed "most kinds!", because despite the on-the-face marketing being minigolf it in fact also has board games and video games and would be cool with people playing ttrpgs there) in the next town over (where they live), so, it's quite possible! This area is, uh. Very small in some ways. (But, as they pointed out when talking about why they came here, generally quite safe for queer people in a way that the more southern state they moved from wasn't necessarily.)

2.
Today is a day where I feel like a person, and mostly that throws into relief how many days I do not, and I find this deeply frustrating but mostly in a "idk if there's much I can do about that?" way. It's very... look when the main problems are fatigue and brain fog, that's not stuff that people tend to have particularly helpful suggestions for?

3.
Slowly catching up on a Star Wars podcast (A More Civilized Age), and at one point the hosts got sidetracked talking about how holocrons (especially sith holocrons) are like AI chatbots, and I cannot get that comparison out of my head. It makes sense and it's hilarious, and also yup sure is a sith vibe.

4.
I mentioned watching the first bit of Maul: Shadow Lord here, and I finished it last week (the final episodes of s1 aired on May 4th, of course). It's very... well, obviously the whole thing needs to be full of set-up/lore for the greater universe, blah blah disney star wars blah blah. But the final two episodes in particular were just "yup, here's the disney playbook".

( Read more... )

Like, I'll watch s2 when it comes out because the animation is great and I enjoy Maul interacting with an apprentice and also girls/women with complicated relationships to lightside/darkside matters. But also, it's a show aimed at people who wanna see cool fights and I keep going BUT WHAT IF YOU HAD CONVERSATIONS AND THEMES. xD I am not the target audience, I know that, it's fine.

5.
I also somehow continue to keep up with Critical Role s4: Araman! It is enjoyable! I adored ep24, which was like 5hrs of talking and roleplaying and scheming with zero combat. I had way more fun than I was expecting with ep25, which was three straight hours of combat with the party that is mostly not statted for combat and who thus need to be CLEVER and STRATEGIC about what they're up to. If I gotta listen to D&D combat, I'd rather have it be the kind of combat where players are trying to figure out how to use unexpected skills and abilities to solve a puzzle that happens to be combat than one where the solution is "I roll to attack" 90% of the time.

(BLM going "holy shit I forgot you could do that, uhhhh, okay. I am about to tell you something that I did not think there is any way you could've learned in this combat, this is going to have MASSIVE implications going forward" to the Divination Wizard was genuinely a stand-out moment, and when he got to the reveal of "this is what you were supposed to think happened. this is what everyone else thinks happened. YOU know better, because you touched fate and saw through the facade." at the end it was extremely !!!. This is very hard to pull off in a combat-focused episode, and yet! Kudos to BLM and also Marisha for using her abilities in this way!)

anyway I'm particularly fond of the following PCs at the moment, though tbh I think the whole crew is fun to listen to:
- Hal: Mr Dad Man, whose brother's execution was the start of this whole campaign (orc bard)
- Thaisha: The Mom Friend, Except She's Actually A Mom, who was with Hal for a while (had a few kids together!) but then they split up (orc druid)
- Vaelus: what if you actually leaned into elves being very old and were also sad that your god got killed in the war (elven paladin)
- Murray: tired academic who grew up working-class and it shows (dwarf wizard)
- Kattigan: look sometimes the whole "my dog is my best friend" thing goes a long way when also you're sensible and kind (human ranger)

They just finished the first cycle of arcs, so they'll be drawing the whole crew back together soon. I am excited about this! I want the mixing of parties and seeing them all interact! Also it is going to be SO MANY PEOPLE and therefore a bit exhausting.

6.
Finally finished Max Gladstone's Dead Hand Rule, the penultimate novel in his Craft Wars series. It is very deeply a book about the contrast between being a person and a symbol, and what it means to bear great power, and what it means to choose between being yourself and a vessel for something greater, and also tbh rather much about how personal relationships shape national politics and how hard-and-yet-easy it is to allow yourself to love people.

v excited for seeing how he brings it to a conclusion because well he sure did end this novel by being like "the threat is here and realised and is a ticking time bomb, GOOD LUCK" at his protags. Very much "get your shit together and work together or DIE", tbh, which... okay a bunch of them are necromancers and some of them are therefore undead, so, like, death isn't the threat so much as the subsumption of existence into a colonizing force's clockwork wiles, which isn't great or what any of them want. So. It'll be fun to see them channel the power of gods and souls into a solution that hopefully doesn't blow the world up too much along the way.

Also perhaps I will actually read the entire Craft Sequence again, in chronological order (as opposed to publication order, because that's how I've read them as they release), before the final volume comes out. That'd be fun.

torachan

I originally hadn't been planning to go wait in line before the park opened, but with not being able to get any fast passes, I figured we'd better get in there early, so I went down to the park entrance around 8:30 for a 9am opening. It was super crowded, so I messaged Carla to join me ASAP, but I was wondering if she'd be able to find me in the crowd. Thankfully, while it was a huge mass of people at first, we were funneled into security lines and I was able to get in the line closest to where she would be coming in, so she was able to join me pretty easily.

( Day two! I probably should have split this into two... )

hannah

Someone canvassing for an upcoming local election talked to me today, and not wanting to walk off in the middle of a sentence, I stopped to talk to them for a bit. She didn't know if her candidate had a stance one way or another on compost or the proposed pied-à-terre tax, and encouraged me to check out a Youtube video. I pointed out if I couldn't look up her candidate, find the website, and find the link to the video on the website, she'd need to have a talk with the campaign manager.

I also said I wasn't going to watch the video, I was going to read the transcript since I can read faster than they can talk. I also said I wasn't going to go to any local debates, just look up the candidates' positions and track records and vote from there. She asked why I wasn't concerned with interviews or debates, and wanted to know why I didn't want to hear about their passion.

I told her passion was what cost Carter a second term.

From the look on her face, she wasn't at all prepared for me. Not for someone who didn't want passion informing their vote and not for someone to cite Carter. Especially when she said she hadn't known anyone who voiced wanting to vote Reagan in 1980.

I agreed the hostage situation was a factor, and suggested that if he'd been harsher in the debates - "Hey, Reagan, did YOU piss radiation for six months?" - it would've helped, but passion was no small part of it. So I didn't want to expose myself to any of it and would rather judge the candidates by their actions and political alignment.

I don't know what she hoped to find, and I don't think I was it. Nevertheless, I got some entertainment out of it, so I can't say I'm all that upset about having been waylaid this afternoon.

Current Mood: naughty
Current Music: Suburban War - Arcade Fire

flaskbringer posting in

fandomcalendar

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sanguinity

Intro/FAQ

My check-in: A paragraph, so far.

Day 12:

glinda,

Day 11:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

glinda,

sanguinity,

sylvan_witch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 10:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

( More days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

trobadora posting in

sid_guardian

The 520 Day Reverse Exchange deadline is tomorrow! Please post your completed assignment to the AO3 collection by 11:59PM UTC Wednesday 13 May! (What time is that for me?)

Your work must be complete to fill your assignment. It's fine to keep editing until reveals, but the first and each edited version must be a work that stands on its own.

If you have any questions or, for any reason, you can't make the deadline and you haven't contacted us already, please let us know NOW by replying to your assignment email (don't change the subject line) or commenting here. Comments here are screened.

General info, schedule and minimum requirements | Posting instructions

Thank you to everyone who's already submitted their entries, and good luck to everyone else for the final stretch! *\o/* *\o/* *\o/*

penwalla

Let's do this.

We will start by going over the synopsis of the book in full.

In the heart-pounding sequel to the New York Times bestselling dystopian romance Silver Elite, lines will be crossed, loyalties will be tested, and the fight for the Continent is only just beginning as Wren Darlington finds herself caught in the middle of two wars: one for the fate of her home and another for the fate of her heart.

LINES WILL BE CROSSED.

First off: let's not kid ourselves about Wren being caught between two guys for her heart. I would bet money this is going to be a Fourth Wing-esque love "triangle" where it's clear from the onset that Cross will win.

( here we go :( )

james_davis_nicoll

Remember Ken Whitman?

musesfool

Things, and also, stuff:

- NEW DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL TODAY!!! 🙌 🙌 🙌

- I did cancel the expensive hardcover in favor of the kindle edition and stupidly didn't think to check when the ebook actually becomes available. At midnight last night, I was refreshing my order page but the book was not yet available. A quick search revealed that Amazon releases things at midnight Pacific time, which I guess makes sense considering the location of their headquarters, and it saved me from staying up past my bedtime reading, but I was a little disappointed.

- Needless to say, not a whole lot of work got done today because I was READING. Luckily, I only had one meeting and that meeting doesn't require written notes, so...I answered emails and teams chats, but was otherwise glued to the book. ( minor spoiler from early on ) I'm sure I will have much more to say once I'm done reading. *g*

- Speaking of DCC, I learned the other day that the Avs' goalie, Wedgewood, is a fan (apparently he is a BookTok-er? or something?) and also last month, the Avs did a DCC-themed pet adoption night at which their mascot dressed up as Carl and all the potential adoptees were named after characters in the books. I can only imagine what the majority of people in that arena, who probably haven't read the books, thought was happening.

- Speaking of hockey, I am now kind of torn between rooting for the Habs and the Sabres, mostly because of Martin St Louis and being reminded about Mother's Day 2014 and also that if the Habs won it all there would be no White House invite to be grossed out by. I still think it's going to be Canes vs Avs in the end, and I guess I'd be rooting for the Canes, but that is a very unappealing final, imo.

- Once hockey is done, I will be able to catch up on SO MUCH TV: new seasons of Deadloch, For All Mankind, and Paradise, plus that surprise episode of The Bear that dropped last week and that new season (coming June 25th!), plus I still haven't watched s2 of Andor or Poker Face, and there's a new season of My Life Is Murder, as well! And I need to catch up on Abbott Elementary, too, and finish my Orphan Black rewatch. It is a lot!

*

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: At the Beach, In Every Life - Gigi Perez

kaberett

( Today we were not the first responders to an incident. )

hrj

It's my birthday today -- the first time in quite a while when I'm not going to Kalamazoo for my birthday. (The Medieval Congress) As a result, I don't really have standard practices for what to do to commemorate the day. There will be a family dinner on the weekend, but today it's just me.

So I started with a fancy-breakfast-in-the-garden, which I don't do as often as I could. (I prefer to start the day with my bike ride, which practice is incompatible with a leisurely breakfast.) Other plans involved a movie and going out for sushi. I half-heartedly dropped my movie plans (Sheep Detective) on facebook with a solicitation for company, but facebook is facebook, the day is a weekday, and unsurprisingly no one took me up on it.

In the past week I've moved into the next stage of learning skills for self-publishing by working on formatting The Theory of Related-ivity in Vellum. So far Vellum is user-friendly, in that every time I've had a question about how to do something, it's either easy to figure out, easy to find in the help files, or easy to determine that you just can't do the thing I'm trying to do. As one review of the program noted, it isn't really designed for complicated non-fiction books, but there are only a few places that's been frustrating.

I solved one issue not related to Vellum when I figured out how to get better resolution jpegs of my Excel graphs. (Something that was a bit of a "Doh!" moment once I'd solved it.) But it wasn't until I did a test-export of the project into ebook and pdf versions that I was reminded that the lovely multi-colored graphs that are so easy to publish online and in ebooks also need to work in black-and-white for the hard copy. (It isn't that I expect to sell all that many hardcopy versions, but I want to have the option.) So now I need to go back through a couple dozen graphs and select color sets that will provide good B&W contrast. (Tricky for the percentage bar graphs with 13 variables! But there are only two of those.)

I've also decided to put out my translation and commentary of the 18th century French appeal record of Anne Grandjean (gender and sexuality issues) as a published book. That one has me thinking about the complexities of designing layout for both ebook and print. For print, it might be nice to do facing-page text with the commentary at the bottom of the pages, but that's impossible for the ebook. (Also, I'm not sure it would be possible in Vellum, though I know exactly how I'd do it in InDesign.) I'm also thinking ahead to the LHMP book and some fun layout ideas that wouldn't work for both. I should probably take a look at some examples of print/ebook pairs that have complex layouts in print.

By "complex" I mean things like separate text boxes for sidebars. (One idea I'm toying with would be rather than having all my mini-biographies in a single section, inserting them as sidebars in the topical chapters that they're most closely relevant to.)

One of the secondary functions for publishing low-impact smaller projects is to explore these sorts of questions. But compared to the non-fiction projects, novels will be easy!

When I think about my writing catalog, it always brings me back to that ill-fitting advice that a writer should stick to focused "branding" even if it means having multiple pen names. But my writing projects don't separate out neatly that way. the Grandjean translation is directly related to the LHMP book. But the LHMP book is directly related to my lesbian historical fiction. And the historical fiction is closely connected to my lesbian historical fantasy. And there would be no point to distinguishing that from any of the other types of fantasy I write. I still have a twinge of regret for using a pen name for Baby Names for Dummies, because it, too, connects up with my historical research. And what would be the point in using anything other than my real name for the Related-ivity book, since my identity is solidly connected to the reason I was interested in the topic.

I am me. I contain multitudes. I refuse to be fragmented.

sweetsorcery

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shipperslist

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the_shoshanna

a less physically but more emotionally exhausting day

We started the day with a non-overwhelming breakfast! Just a bunch of veggies sauteed up together, no eggs no bacon no beans no toast (but yes coffee, and her coffee could punch Superman through a wall). We were delighted! Also, when we asked where we could find a laundromat to wash some clothes, she let us use her machine. So Geoff put a load through and hung it to dry before we left for the day; I had surreptitiously been doing some sink laundry and also I don't sweat the way he does, but I too am glad to have been able to properly wash some things. (Still gotta sink-wash a bra this evening, though; I've had too many destroyed by machines to trust one I don't know.)

Then we headed out to the bus station to catch a bus to the Hamptonne Country Life Museum https://www.jerseyheritage.org/visit/places-to-visit/hamptonne-country-life-museum/ . This was one of the things I specifically wanted to see while we're here, but sadly I was a bit disappointed. There was no living-history reenactor guide working today (the guy at the entry selling tickets said she would have been there but she had to go to a funeral, so I'm not going to complain), and the guide who took us around spent more time talking about what it was like to work there, and less about what it would have been like to live there in the various eras it represented (13th, 17th, and 19th centuries), than I was hoping for. (Honestly, a good episode of Historical Farm would have given me more -- thanks for putting me on to that show,

dorinda!) Still, it was interesting to poke around and look at things, and Geoff enjoyed it more than I did, which was good because I was the one who really wanted to go and if he'd been really disappointed I'd probably have felt guilty.

We did see a nineteenth-century apple crusher (which I immediately recognized thanks to Historical Farms!) and got to taste some of the cider they produce there. It was just fermented juice, no added sugar or rum or any of the other things that might be added to improve the taste, and it was like drinking paint thinner, I couldn't even finish my small cup. The guide said it was probably about 5% alcohol, but it felt stronger. So maybe it's a good thing I couldn't finish it!

Interestingly, the average age of the people visiting the museum seemed to hover around 70 that day. "School must be in session," I said to myself.

We finished up in the cafe, where we split an unexciting packaged sausage roll and a jacket potato with tuna mayo and sweetcorn. I don't know if the potato was a local Jersey potato, but it at least was very good! This whole concept of baked potatoes with stuff on them was something entirely unknown to me until a visit to Edinburgh years ago, when we got a number of out-and-about meals from a jacket potato shop that would put any of dozens of salads or sauces or meats or whatnots on them; I remember having to work hard to keep them from also plopping a giant knob of butter inside the potato as a matter of course. I mean, a buttered baked potato is delicious, but if you're topping your potato with a tomato-cucumber salad tossed in a vinaigrette, two tablespoons of butter really does not improve the experience. Anyway, I always think of that place when I have a jacket potato topped with something unusual to me, such as, for instance, tuna mayo with sweetcorn.

The bus we took to the museum was the same line we took home yesterday afternoon and it had the electronic announcement screen, but it wasn't on so I had to track us with my phone again to know when to get off. Ah, well. We had a nice five-minute walk through houses and farms from the bus stop to the museum site, and when we left to go back to the bus stop, the guy in the ticket office told us that if, once we got to the street the bus ran down, we went the other way from the bus stop we would come to an interesting old dovecote. We did walk that way for a bit, but didn't see anything promising, so we turned around and went up to the bus stop.

Rather than taking it all the way back into the capital city, though, we went only three stops (again tracking progress on my phone, for lack of any non-tech way to know where we were or which stop was ours), got off, and walked about fifteen minutes through more houses and potato fields and mildly wooded areas to get to the Jersey War Tunnels https://www.jerseywartunnels.com/.

The occupying German armed forces had this big tunnel complex built, largely but not entirely by forced labor and slave labor, originally as an ammunition store and barracks, later as a potential hospital in case of an Allied assault on the island(s). Now it's been turned into a really excellent museum of the occupation. When we bought our admission tickets we were also given replica ID cards, establishing each of us as an actual Jerseyite whose story we could discover as we went through the exhibits. (I was given the identity of a middle-aged Jewish woman who, when she was arrested a few years into the occupation, managed to escape her guards and flee to someone who hid her until the war ended.)

We made our way through the tunnels, each of which has been set up as a gallery documenting a different aspect of the occupation or part of the war, in chronological order: from the first decision that the islands wouldn't be defended, to the arrival of the Nazi forces, the gradual tightening of restrictions and rations, various people's attempts at resistance, escape, and sometimes collaboration, the arrival of a Red Cross aid ship just as the food situation got desperate, the experience of watching D-Day (remember, you can see France from here!) while still not being freed and while the local German commander was maintaining he would hold fast, until the final surrender and the arrival of the UK troops who raised the Union Jack again, as we saw reenacted a few days ago.

One particularly effective device was life-size human figures with video screens for their heads showing recordings of actors, so that you could imagine actually meeting and talking to the person who was depicted speaking to you. Here's a German soldier, fluent in English, who has bought your child an ice cream; do you let your child take it? Here's another who wants to hire you to do his washing, and you need money desperately; do you take the job? Here's a farm woman talking about food rationing, and how lucky her family is to have some livestock and chickens -- but of course the German authorities closely watch everything, including recording every piglet born, and god help you if you're caught hiding one. Here's a starving Russian slave worker who has escaped his barracks and stolen some carrots from your field; what do you do?

One informational signboard talked about collaborators, including women who went with German soldiers. It did acknowledge that, aside from the fact that the soldiers might be young, handsome, and -- at least in the early years -- friendly and congenial, being friendly with them might also mean extra food and security for the woman (and her family), but no explicit link was drawn between that signboard (which also explained the derogatory term "jerrybags" for such women) and a later one that told the story of a young woman who was "assaulted" (details unspecified but clearly sexual) by a German soldier while she was serving him in a restaurant, slapped him, and was promptly shipped to a German prison camp, where she died. Nor was a comparison made between "jerrybags" and the local workers who took jobs with the occupying forces to help build the tunnel complex. It all reminded me of the way that women's sexual purity so often stands in for and symbolizes all kinds of morality. Why is a woman who accedes to a soldier's demands and blandishments more of a collaborator than a man who takes a job furthering the enemy's projects?

On another note: as we approached the end of the war, plaques on the wall announced various milestones. I was surprised at the strength of my desire to spit upon seeing the one marking Hitler's suicide.

Anyway, the whole thing was A Lot, and very well done.

Eventually we emerged from underground and caught the bus home again. Once again we stopped on our way home from the bus station for an early dinner, rather than go home and then have to leave again; we found a nice sort of Spanish-Asian fusion place on one of the squares we walked through that had pleasant outdoor seating. (For COVID-cautious reasons we prefer to eat outside when we can; we're also masking on the buses and in other indoor public spaces. We haven't seen a single other person masking, but no one seems to give us the stink-eye about it, except possibly for one person on the bus the other day who seemed not to want to sit next to me.) Geoff had delicious lasagna that came with yet more delicious chips, and I, having not yet had any seafood other than some salmon at the arts centre cafe, had a sizzling plate of scallops and veggies in a vaguely oyster-sauce kind of sauce? Also a nice big glass of merlot, and Geoff had a pint of a Spanish beer called Madri, which he liked but I did not care for. And then back to the guesthouse and blogging!

One thing that has both startled and amused me is that several people (including the ticket guy at the Hamptonne museum), on hearing that we're planning to go from Jersey to spend ten days in Guernsey, have reacted with "Ten days on Guernsey?" in a very what-the-hell-would-you-do-that-for? tone of voice. I'm assuming that this is an expression of inter-island rivalry and not a real indication that we'll be bored out of our minds 😂 I mean, we did accumulate a list of things we might want to see there, and hikes we might want to do, and also we'll probably take a day trip to Herm.

But before then we still have three days here on Jersey to fill! It's likely to rain tomorrow and Thursday, so maybe we won't do another big hike, but we would like to see the Jersey Zoo...but for now, it's oh-so-exciting hand laundry for me, and curling up with some internet.

watersword

Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), previously named polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), affects one in eight women. However, the term PCOS is inaccurate, implying pathological ovarian cysts, obscuring diverse endocrine and metabolic features, and contributing to delayed diagnosis, fragmented care, and stigma, while curtailing research and policy framing. Building on an international mandate for change, we outline an unprecedented, rigorous, multistep global consensus process for the name change. Funding and governance were established with engagement of 56 leading academic, clinical, and patient organisations. Using iterative global surveys (with responses from 14 360 people with PCOS and multidisciplinary health professionals from all world regions), modified Delphi methods, nominal group technique workshops, and marketing and implementation analyses, we identified principles prioritising scientific accuracy, clarity, stigma avoidance, cultural appropriateness, and implementation feasibility. An accurate new name was prioritised over retaining the PCOS acronym or a generic name. Implementation approaches prioritised evolution rather than transformation. Preferred terms were polyendocrine, metabolic, and ovarian, reflecting the condition's multisystem pathophysiology, and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome was the consensus new name. Accuracy was improved by omitting cysts and by capturing endocrine, metabolic, and ovarian dysfunction. A co-designed global implementation strategy, including a transition period, education, and alignment with health systems and disease classification, is under way.

Teede, H. J., Khomami, M. B., Morman, R., Laven, J. S. E., Joham, A. E., Costello, M. F., … Piltonen, T. (n.d.). Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus process. The Lancet. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00717-8

psocoptera

The Other Shore, Rebecca Campbell, 2025 collection. Is this something I'm supposed to be reading for the Hugos? No. Is it an ebook I've been in the queue for for months that has now inconveniently come available right at Packet Time? Also no. However, it is a paperback I've had checked out for Way Too Long, so, finally finishing it is something, at least.

Ten stories here, eight previous published, of which I am sure I had read two and it's possible I read a third. Definitely recommended if you like her work.

"The High Lonesome Frontier" - Tor.com, 2016. (This is the one I might have read.) A song, the folk process, and how even in the information age something like a song is both transient and specific to time and performance and people. (Campbell is very good at specificity, concreteness of detail.)

"A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World" - This one is a mix of "men taking academic credit for women's ideas in the background" and "what if the revival of ancient ritual magic worked" - it's set in 1976 and if someone had told me that Le Guin wrote it in 1976 I would have believed it. (Well maybe the 80s for Le Guin specifically.)

"Lares Familiares 1981" - Liminal Stories, 2017. I liked this one - a logging family and a fae.

"On Highway 18" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2017. Also good - about friends growing apart, and urban legends, and the difficulty of knowing what actually happened, what kind of predator or pattern got someone.

"The Other Shore" - Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirits of Place, 2016. I liked this one a lot. An archaeological dig that starts turning up wildly mixed-up artifacts.

"Thank You for Your Patience" - Reckoning Magazine, 2020. I recommended this in my 2020 short science fiction reading and considered nominating it in 2021 but did not; I had her novelette "An Important Failure" on my novelette nominees and might have wanted to diversify authors a little, or might have just decided I liked other stories better. Anyways, a great story about the inhumanity of call centers and worker exploitation in general.

"The Bletted Woman" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2021. I thought I had recently read a review of a book along a similar line - maybe added it to my to-read list? But I can't find it now. Anyways, a woman with terminal illness decides to join an experiment attempting to make translators between the natural world and the human world. A good zombie story.

"Such Thoughts are Unproductive" - Clarkesworld, 2019. I did nominate this in 2020; it's the story that made me a Campbell fan in the first place. The total-surveillance, totalitarian state. Only more chilling now that we're so much further into the AI era.

"Wider than the Sky, Deeper than the Sea" - Another story about trying to bridge human and nature, this time as performance art. Campbell has such profound grief for what's being lost to the climate collapse, the Pacific Northwest ecosystems specifically because that's where she is (and that's where many of these stories are set). I really appreciate her as a voice for that. Interesting stuff about sacrifice and suffering for art and whether that's a good choice.

"Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita" - Shimmer Magazine, 2018. This one didn't really work for me.

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hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

April 2020

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Page Summary

tsuki_no_bara - well that was entertaining
torachan - Daily Happiness
penwalla - Broken Dove: Chapter One
konsectatrix - dusts off dw yet again
shadaras - also I made scones today and that was nice
torachan - 2026 Universal Studios Trip #4 (4/7/26) Universal Studios Japan
hannah - Erasing all the streets.
flaskbringer in fandomcalendar - WH40K Summer Fest Exchange 2026
sanguinity - Write Every Day: Day 12
trobadora in sid_guardian - 520 Day Reverse Exchange - 24 hours to deadline!
penwalla - Broken Dove: Synopsis, TOC, and Prologue
james_davis_nicoll - AI-generated profiles of TTRPG designers ignite fury across social media
musesfool - and i heard about the twister that lives inside your heart
kaberett - ... terrible hobbies
hrj - Random natterings
sweetsorcery - Mojo wanted.
shipperslist - !!!
the_shoshanna - a somewhat less ambitious day
watersword - /stares into the camera like i'm on the office
psocoptera - The Other Shore

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