Bank Holiday Grantchester Picnic

Aug. 12th, 2025 11:15 pm
jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
Come join me for a picnic to celebrate late summer bank holiday (Monday Aug 25th), by the river at Grantchester. About 1pm until we get bored.

Bring general picnic things, anything you're likely to want. I will bring some general things to get us started.

If the weather is hot some people may also swim.

etymology of the day

Aug. 12th, 2025 10:05 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
Arancini. The small balls of risotto coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried.

*Little oranges*.

This is not in any way an obscure or difficult to look up etymology, and yet somehow it was not until yesterday, on the tube, that I suddenly needed to look up from the book I was reading and *stare*.

(Earlier this week -- no, wait, late last week -- I was indexing a cookbook that included arancini. This week I am reading *The Land Where Lemons Grow*, because it's mostly a history of citrus cultivation in Italy with occasional recipes, so I wanted to read it Properly before indexing it and getting rid of it again. Apparently what it took for me to Have A Realisation was the combination in temporal proximity...)

Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn

Aug. 12th, 2025 12:42 pm
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[personal profile] rachelmanija


Zoe Ardelay and her father have lived in exile in a small village since he, a former courtier, had an argument with the king. At the opening of the book, her father has just died of natural causes. Then Darien, the king's advisor, shows up and announces that Zoe has been chosen as the king's fifth wife. Zoe, immersed in the drifting, passive phase of grief, sets out with him for the capital city she hasn't seen since she was a child. The story does not go in any of the expected directions after that, starting with the conveyance they use to get there: a new invention, a gas-powered automobile.

This small-scale fantasy is the first of five "Elemental Blessings" books, but stands alone. It does end up involving the politics and rulership of a country, but it's mostly the story of one woman, how her life changes after her father dies, and the relationships she has with the people she meets. It's got great characters and relationships, focuses on small but meaningful moments in a very pleasing manner, and has outstandingly original worldbuilding. Most of it is not set in court, and involves ordinary poor and middle-class people and settings. The vibe is reminiscent of early Robin McKinley.

Welce, the country it's set in, has two aspects which are crucial to both plot and character, and are interestingly intertwined. They may seem complicated when I explain them, but they're extremely easy to follow and remember in the actual book.

The first aspect is a system of elemental beliefs and magic, similar to a zodiac. The elements are water, air, fire, earth, and wood. Every person in the country is associated with one of those elements, which is linked with personality characteristics, aptitudes, aspects of the human body, and, occasionally, magic. This is all very detailed and cool - for instance, water is associated with blood, wood with bone, and so forth. We've all seen elemental systems before, but Shinn's is exceptionally well-done. The way the elemental system is entwined with everyday life is outstanding.

How do people know which element is theirs? Here's where we get to the second system, which I have never come across before. Temples, which are not dedicated to Gods but to the five elements, have barrels of blessings - coins marked with symbols representing blessings like intelligence, change, courage, joy, and so forth. Each blessing is associated with an element. People randomly pull coins for both very important and small occasions, to get a hint of what way they should take or, upon the birth of a child, to get three blessings that the child will keep for life. The blessings a child gets may or may not show their element - if they don't, it becomes clear over time based on personality.

The blessings are clearly genuinely magical and real, but often in subtle ways. I loved the blessings and the way they work into the story is incredibly cool. Same with the elements. Zoe's element is water, and her entire plot has a meandering quality which actually does feel like a water-plot, based on the qualities ascribed to water in the book.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes small-scale, character-based fantasy AND to anyone who likes cool magic systems or worldbuilding. It's not quite a cozy fantasy but it has a lot of cozy aspects. I can see myself re-reading this often.

There are five books, one for each element. I've since read the second book, Royal Airs. It's charming and enjoyable (and involves primitive airplanes, always a bonus) but doesn't quite have the same lightning in a bottle quality of Troubled Waters.

More mostly useless advice!

Aug. 12th, 2025 11:54 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
DEAR HARRIETTE: As parents, I'm sure most of us have experienced a squabble or disagreement between our kids. I definitely have, but they're usually short-lived. Currently, two of my girls aren't speaking and haven't been for a few months. This all started because my older daughter made a joke about me owing her back pay because my younger daughter's college tuition was more expensive than hers. My younger daughter, who is usually quite docile, blew up at the comment. She called her older sister ungrateful, rude and spoiled. They argued like I've never seen before, and they haven't spoken since. I tried talking to my younger daughter about it, but she won't apologize. I don't think her sentiments were wrong; the joke was in poor taste. I think as a family we should never be so hostile toward each other. How do I get my girls back on track? -- Family Disagreement

Read more... )
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
DEAR HARRIETTE: Over the years, my mom and I have struggled to forge the ideal smooth-sailing mother-daughter bond that other people have. We used to bump heads a lot. Now that we no longer bump heads, we just have a hard time connecting and enjoying each other. I want things to get better, but she often compares my relationship with her to the one I have with my dad. My dad and I are pretty playful together, and he's easy to talk to. I think my mom constantly mocking the dynamic I have with my dad is her version of banter or "breaking the ice," but I wish she would stop comparing so that she and I could find our own groove. How do I get her on the same page as me? -- Mommy Issues

Read more... )
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I went to the toilet at 4am a few days ago, and bumped into Gideon coming back from a toilet trip. Apparently he just takes himself if he wakes up in the night. No idea how long this has been going on for!

(Sophia comes and gets me, for company.)

Wow, these people....

Aug. 10th, 2025 06:39 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
1. DEAR ABBY: My son is 20 and a senior in college. He's a baseball player and is about to ask the girl he's been dating for a year and a half to marry him. My wife and I don't get along with her at all. She has a myriad of health problems and takes eight prescriptions a day. Because of her conditions, she rarely has the energy to do anything but lie around when she comes to our house. She used to have a job packing groceries at a market, and she would frequently log 10 to 12 miles a day walking. She quit that job for a job at an ice cream shop where she does little walking.

We had a get-together at my other son's house, and she said she couldn't come because she was too tired. My wife sent my son a message saying, "Really? From scooping ice cream?" The girlfriend needed to use my son's phone and saw the message. Her feelings were hurt, and now she will have nothing to do with us. (They still expect us to pay for their wedding, and for gas and maintenance on his car to visit her parents almost daily.) We want to support our son, but we are over it with her. There is so much more I could tell you. Please help. -- DAD WHO'S OVER IT


Read more... )

**************


2. Dear Eric: My wife of 50 years told me that she no longer wants to live with me. I am currently living in our summer home with no friends or social contacts/networks. She has no interest in reconciling.

We didn't fight or argue, and I am at a loss as to what triggered her declaration. This has taken me totally by surprise. I thought we had a good marriage, with occasional ups and downs. There are no abuse, addiction or infidelity issues. I worked my whole life and am now retired. As soon as we had children, she was able to stay at home and lived comfortably raising our children and taking care of the household. The children have sided with their mom and won't speak to me. I think she has poisoned them against me, but don't see the gain in her doing that.

I am miserable. I am 74 with neurological mobility issues. I fear that I will fall, and no one will be around. Senior housing for me is too expensive and will deplete our planned retirement resources. We were counting on eventually selling our summer home to supplement our finances later in life. This is no longer possible as I am living in that house. This is not how I wanted the last chapters of my life to end.

I have had five sessions of therapy with no results. My therapist says I'm not at risk to myself or others and I am perpetually slightly depressed but not debilitated. Without more concrete information, he cannot help me. I am not a bad person, yet here I am.

– Totally Betrayed


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3. DEAR ABBY: Our 23-year-old son, "Ed," was clean-cut, into working out and staying healthy, watched his diet -- he even joined a gym and was going every week. Ed has been dating a girl, "Emily," who is the complete opposite. She's probably a hundred pounds overweight. She's also dirty, (when she comes here, there have been days she doesn't take a shower).

Twice I have found Emily's lingerie on the floor. Last week, she left a pair of her panties on the bathroom floor. I showed Ed and told him that was the SECOND time I had found her underwear (the first time I didn't say anything). I said, "You have to talk to Emily and tell her not to leave her underwear laying around."

I see a change in Ed. My son hasn't cut his hair in 2 1/2 years and he no longer appears to be as into working out. This is not who we are as a family. My husband and I are fit for our ages (60s) and by all standards clean and orderly. Should I say anything to Ed? I feel like Emily is changing who he is. -- NOT THE SAME IN THE EAST


Read more... )

**********


4. DEAR ABBY: Our 40-year-old son has become a full-fledged narcissist and blames us (his sister, her husband, my husband and me) for a family schism that has gone on for two years. He tells lies about us and keeps us from our granddaughter. Any attempt to contact him has been met with venomous, foul-mouthed texts in return.

Our son went through a nasty divorce and horrible custody proceeding, but we did our best to support him financially and emotionally during that time. He is now supposedly happily remarried, but he continues to deny us access to his daughter. We are heartbroken. This is not the way we raised him. Any suggestions? -- BAFFLED IN NORTH CAROLINA


Read more... )

******


5. DEAR HARRIETTE: My husband and I recently planned a weekend trip out of town, and we arranged for our children to stay with their aunt, my husband's sister, while we were away. We thought everything was going well until, halfway through our trip, we received a call from her saying that one of our kids had started acting out. She told us that she doesn't tolerate that kind of behavior in her home and insisted that we come pick him up immediately. I was shocked and honestly upset. I understand that our son can be a handful at times. He's going through a bit of a rebellious phase, but I feel like she overreacted. We trusted her to help us out, and instead of trying to manage the situation or even calling us for advice on how to calm him down, she made us cut our trip short and made us feel like we were being irresponsible parents for going away in the first place. Now there's tension between us, and I don't know how to approach this. Am I wrong for feeling like she could have handled things differently? -- Not Helpful

Read more... )

vital functions

Aug. 10th, 2025 10:43 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Allie Brosh, Jeannie Di Bon, Helena Attlee, Louis MacNeice, friends misc. )

... and several of the magazines that have been sat around causing Guilt and a sense of Obligation, subsequent to which I have happily recycled them. Favourite fact from the three so far: Garden Organic/the Heritage Seed Library are trialling using tuning forks to pollinate their tomato crops! ( Facebook | Instagram )

Bonus: sifting through a pile of notebooks etc to try to work out who the hell they belong to, mostly salvaged from the pile that was due to go out to event-freecycle on the basis that SURELY I could do something useful with them if, you know, I sat down with them at a time that wasn't in a field under Significant time pressure while Very tired. And I could! One and a half remain unidentified (I say "half" because We're Working On It).

Writing. A lot of lost property e-mails.

Cooking. One new recipe from East: paneer, spinach and tomato salad, accompanied by the herbed naan from the Leiths How to Cook Bread book (this is probably on my To Cook Through list). I was into this!

Also vaghareli makai ("spiced Indian corn") by way of David Lebovitz, and a slightly underwhelming lemony fennel and broccoli pasta (significantly improved by the addition of pine nuts).

Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Blackberries. Local plums are starting to be ripe!

Exploring. Poked around the green belt a bit to see how the plums were doing! And I think that's most of it?

A very brief poke around the entrance to the Pimp Hall Nature Reserve following a successful drop-off of Objects to the adjacent Household Waste Recycling Centre; tragically the signs on the gates claimed that they'd be locked at 4 p.m., which we had not quite anticipated, and we only reached them at 3.58. Next time, perhaps!

Creating. Hmm. Does sitting around knolling for the purposes of the big lost property post count? I think it probably does; certainly while the photos still aren't good (am I contemplating a lightbox and a tripod of some kind of this specific terrible hobby? to my slight horror, I kind of am...) the arrangements are getting much easier to parse visually, I discovered upon going back through a bunch of them, which I am pleased about.

Growing. Found a surprise pocketful of dried Sugar Magnolia pods, so I am definitely in the black when it comes to number of seeds for next year, which is a pleasant surprise!

I've taken a lot of photos.

Aug. 10th, 2025 08:10 pm
andrewducker: (obey)
[personal profile] andrewducker
My Dropbox Camera Uploads folder was up to 115GB and 18,000 files (dating back to 2010). So I went through and divided it into subfolders based loosely on years. Turns out that I take as many photos per year since Sophia was born as I took in the whole time from 2010 until her birth.

And that I take about 2,000 photos/videos per year, coming to about 15GB.

I also discovered that if you move 2,000 files from one Dropbox folder to another then it takes about 15 minutes to process the changes!

More Hugo Films: Dune, The Wild Robot

Aug. 10th, 2025 06:52 pm
emperor: (Default)
[personal profile] emperor
It's past the voting deadline, and I didn't vote in the dramatic presentation long form category, but I'm still trying to watch the shortlisted films.

I'd not seen Dune part one, so watched that and then part two (which was on the shortlist this year). It's one book turned into two lengthy films, and part two has a rubbish ending - we get no sense of Paul becoming Emperor as any kind of triumph before it's undermined by the immediate start of the next war. They are both grand spectacles, but their pacing is odd - at times it seems to be dragging and then key events are rather rushed over (so you're left not really quite understanding what happened without resorting to plot summaries after the fact). And the racial politics have dated poorly, shall we say? And I don't think the whole sandworm ecosystem is even vaguely plausible. But there's some great scheming and some interesting characters (albeit that a lot of the villains are entirely 2-dimensional).

The Wild Robot is an altogether different film, very heavy-handed with its messaging and happy to tug on the heart-strings. The plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny (robot has access to all human knowledge, but doesn't know how geese swim? etc.), but it's well-animated and has lots of fun moments. And despite being the film of the first book of a trilogy, it actually has a decent ending! But I really struggled to suspend my disbelief because the plot is so full of holes.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
Dear Annie: My sister "Kendra" and I are not very close and only communicate two to three times per year, mainly in emails. Kendra sold her home and moved out of state. Through our sibling, I heard that she listed her house high to begin with and had to come down on her price in the end but made a decent amount on it. I never commented on how much she made or didn't make on her old house; I felt that was absolutely none of my business. When she moved and posted pictures of her new house, I commented that I was happy for her.

Fast-forward to me selling my home a year or so later. After my home sold, the information on it went out to the various housing sites, incorrectly showing that it took a loss. We actually did make a nice profit on it. The information that went out was a typo and was corrected about four weeks later.

Kendra was quick to reach out in an email stating she saw online how much we sold for and was surprised at the extreme money loss we took. She then asked if it was a short sale or foreclosure and commented that we must have been very upset about it.

I feel this was none of her business, even if it was the right information. Am I overreacting that I feel it was quite rude for her to comment on my personal business? How should I reply back to her? -- Perplexed


Read more... )

(no subject)

Aug. 10th, 2025 12:18 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
DEAR HARRIETTE: Since I was young, I've found that I've always had strange anxiety-induced habits -- pulling at the edges of my hair, sucking my thumb, picking at scabs, etc. Over time, I'd find a solution, or I'd just sort of grow out of it. At present, I scratch the insides of my palms when I'm nervous, stressed or frustrated. I think I may do it at other times, but I haven't pinpointed all of the triggers. Lately, it's been out of control. I haven't been able to resolve this one, but I'm so ready to leave it behind. How do I find a lifetime solution for all these behavioral tics? -- Old Habits Die Hard

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Photo cross-post

Aug. 10th, 2025 10:59 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


Pretty big fire on Arthur's Seat.

(The kids were just discussing whether the volcano had erupted, which I think we're pretty safe from.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

(no subject)

Aug. 9th, 2025 08:47 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
My mother desperately wants grandchildren. I’m nearing 30 and have never wanted children; my partner feels the same way. We would both rather focus on our careers, and there are also some hereditary health conditions in our family — nothing life-threatening, but enough that we would rather not pass them on.

Despite knowing all this, my mother pressures us constantly. Every time I explain my position, she becomes distraught and insists I just don’t understand the joy a child would bring. She’s in poor physical and mental health, and these conversations quickly spiral into intense emotional distress. Any attempts at therapy have been flatly dismissed.

Now she’s saying that she’ll cut me out of her will if I don’t have a child. There’s not much money involved, but I worry that, if it comes to that, she might also cut off contact altogether. My sibling has already severed ties with my mother over her mental-health struggles. I want to keep my mother in my life, but I can’t stand the thought of this one issue dominating whatever time we have left together.

I’ve started to consider telling her I can’t have children because of fertility issues. That would be a lie, and I feel uneasy using something so many people genuinely struggle with as an excuse. Still, her fixation on grandchildren is seriously damaging our relationship. Should I lie to my mother to try to save our relationship, or keep telling the truth and watch things fall apart? — Name Withheld


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Checking In - 8 August 2025

Aug. 8th, 2025 11:05 pm
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)
[personal profile] dewline
No visitation today. Got some shopping done, and the map projects have slowed down a bit. One job application filed this afternoon with the feds.

I suppose that's enough for today, right?

victory of the day

Aug. 8th, 2025 11:58 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."

-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.

So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)

(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


A middle-grade graphic novel about a boba shop with a secret.

Aria comes to stay with her grandmother in San Francisco for the summer to escape a bad social situation. Her grandmother owns a boba shop that doesn't seem too popular, and Aria throws herself into making it more so - most successfully when Grandma's cat Bao has eight kittens, and Aria advertises it as a kitten cafe. But why is Grandma so adamant about never letting Aria set foot in the kitchen, and kicking out the customers at 6:00 on the dot? Why do the prairie dogs in the backyard seem so smart?

This graphic novel has absolutely adorable illustrations. The story isn't as strong. The first half is mostly a realistic, gentle, cozy slice of life. The second half is a fantasy adventure with light horror aspects. Even though the latter is throughly foreshadowed in the former, it still feels kind of like two books jammed together.

My larger issue was with tone and content that also felt jammed together. The book is somewhat didactic - which is fine, especially in a middle-grade book - but I feel like if the book is teaching lessons, it should teach them consistently and appropriately. The lessons in this book were a bit off or inconsistent, creating an uncanny valley feeling.

Spoilers! Read more... )

Fantastic art, kind of odd story.

What I'm looking for in art.

Aug. 8th, 2025 08:15 pm
andrewducker: (No Time Travel)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I remember seeing a game which looked amazing. The whole world was destructible, there were thousands of different combinations of things to find in it, and they'd put a ton of effort in to making it a fun experience.

I played it for a couple of hours, and got bored of it, because it turns out that that isn't enough for me. Because what they'd made was also a Rogue-Like. Which is to say that it completely resets back to the start when you die, and that start randomly creates the world that you play through.

And I don't want to play through a whole different world each time, where everything is different to the last time I played. What I want for a solo game is for someone to lovingly craft a world, and then for me to learn that world inside out as I try to beat the various challenges in it*.

A few months ago [personal profile] danieldwilliam sent me this link to a Neal Stephenson essay. And while I didn't agree with him about everything, the idea of "microdecisions" has stuck with me. That what makes art art isn't the idea (although good ideas are important) it's all of the ways that that idea was reified into the finished work.

A key quote:
Since the entire point of art is to allow an audience to experience densely packed human-made microdecisions—which is, at root, a way of connecting humans to other humans—the kinds of “art”-making AI systems we are seeing today are confined to the lowest tier of the grid and can never produce anything more interesting than, at best, a slab of marble pulled out of the quarry. You can stare at the patterns in the marble all you want. They are undoubtedly complicated. You might even find them beautiful. But you’ll never see anything human there, unless it’s your own reflection in the machine-polished surface.

And if that works for you - if staring at the swirling polished surfaces is what makes you happy, then I'm delighted for you. I've certainly been very entertained by generated patterns myself in the past. And I can totally be distracted by it for short periods of time. But when I'm looking for something actually *engaging* then right now it doesn't work for me. I need something human** in there.

Another example of this - movies. The more that special effects became good enough that movies could show me *anything* the more I wanted things with *character* in them. Things where you could tell that someone (or some group of someones) had really wanted to get something out of their brains so that other people could see the world the way they see it. I was discussing with [personal profile] swampers the other day that we really appreciated the movies that A24 are putting out, because even when they're a bit of a mess they're a really interesting mess that someone had obviously cared about. The trailer for Eternity looks like it would absolutely annoy me in parts, but it would do so because I'd be experiencing someone's thoughts about the world, and I might learn something about them, and maybe also about me for engaging with it.

*Multiplayer games are different. When I played a ton of Minecraft with Julie I was happy for her to set the direction of what to make, and then I'd treat that as my challenge. But sandboxes with no set challenge don't interest me. And I have played a chunk of games like Slay The Spire or Balatro or Dead Cells . But even then I'd play for enough to get the hang of it and then stop, usually without actually beating it, because "Go back to the beginning and beat that for the 500th time so that you can spend 10 seconds losing the end before starting again" isn't much fun for me. Even with Hades, which does a great job of giving you a meta-story around each run that grows as you replay, I got all the way to fight Hades, lost near-instantly, and the thought of replaying the entire game for 20 minutes just to lose to him again filled me with exhaustion and I haven't been back since. If Noita had a "save" function and a set of specifically designed levels that were fun and were definitely beatable *and* a random world generator you could use once you'd played those levels then I'd probably have invested a lot of time in it.

**I am not against the idea that eventually AIs will achieve consciousness and attempt to impart something to us through the medium of art. And that would interest me. I just don't think that the generators we're currently investing in are that.

Photo cross-post

Aug. 8th, 2025 12:26 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


Last ever nursery drop off for Gideon.

He has Monday and Tuesday in a holiday club and then from Wednesday he's in school!

We've had a child in this nursery since 2019, it's going to be weird to not be there any more.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Redactle-related fact of the day

Aug. 7th, 2025 11:53 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".

(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)

Choices choices

Aug. 7th, 2025 10:27 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Work's "Active Staff" programme through the university sports centre is mostly dormant in August, but has just acquired a regular "give it a go" session for women's football on Thursday afternoons. (Hmm, I wonder what recent event might have prompted such a thing ...) Unfortunately this session clashes exactly with my favourite free exercise class, which has just rebranded from "yogalates" to "stretch and relax".

One of these activities will help my knee mobility and one of them is highly likely to mess up my knees further. Much as I want to be as tough as Lucy Bronze, I regretfully skipped the football and stuck with the stretches.

The Friday Five for 8 August 2025

Aug. 7th, 2025 03:03 pm
anais_pf: (Default)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
This week's questions were suggested by [livejournal.com profile] sparklesalad

1. What is one food (or meal) you used to hate but now love?

2. If you had to give up one of your favorite foods (or meals) for good, what would it be, and why?

3. Which food seems like it should be healthy and isn't, and do you eat it? Why?

4. If you were an item of food, personified, what would you be and why?

5. You've seen tomatoes and pies used for this purpose ... now think of a more inventive item of food one could throw at someone. What is it and why would throwing it at someone be hilarious?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Photo cross-post

Aug. 7th, 2025 12:27 pm
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


It was bath day, and I needed a physical book to read in the bath.

Thoughtfully my friends have written one and it was published a few days ago.

(The Needfire, MK Hardy. I'm two chapters in and rather enjoying it.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Irregular Listening Post

Aug. 7th, 2025 07:18 pm
highlyeccentric: Monty Python - knights dancing the Camelot Song (Camelot song)
[personal profile] highlyeccentric
Courtesy of a recent subscriber bonus episode (preview here of Gender Reveal, I have discovered Mal Blum, who has a new album out (I think I had previously had their country-ish EP on a list of queer country music that I was slowly working through, but never got to that one). I am enjoying it.



I like this song and was amused by Mal and Tuck discussing people taking it too literaly.

The music video is... weird, though. It seems average-good, close-ups on the singer appropriate to the song. But the group choreography is... weird. Perhaps just "niche indie artist can't afford really cutting edge music video"? But am I wrong in thinking that it felt like the choreographer did not know what kind of person Mal is or whose gaze to showcase them for?

I may have to go back and look at some of Mal's older music videos and form Opinions.

To-read pile, 2025, July

Aug. 6th, 2025 10:12 pm
rmc28: (reading)
[personal profile] rmc28

Books on pre-order:

  1. Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells (7 Oct 2025)

Books acquired in July:

  • and read:
    1. Moonlighter by Sarina Bowen
    2. Grown Wise (Liminal Mysteries) by Celia Lake
  • and unread:
    1. Death by Candlelight (Adam and Eve Mysteries 1) by Emma Davies
    2. The Little Cottage on the Hill (Little Cottage 1) by Emma Davies

Books acquired previously and read in July:

  1. A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine [2][Sep 2024]

Borrowed books read in July:

  1. Once Upon You and Me by Timothy Janovsky
  2. You Had Me At Happy Hour by Timothy Janovsky
  3. Cover Story by Mhairi McFarlane
  4. One-Touch Pass (SCU Hockey 4) by J.J. Mulder [8]
  5. The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton
  6. Fourth Wing (Empyrean 1) by Rebecca Yarros [2]

Rereads in July:

  1. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine [2]

I continue to enjoy all of Celia Lake's books, and I still adore the Teixcalaan books by Arkady Martine, whether reading or listening to them. Stuart Turton wrote the entirely gripping groundhog-day country house murder mystery, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and I found The Last Murder at the End of the World another very gripping science-fictional murder mystery, this time in weird post-apocalyptic flavour.

Fourth Wing is a massive fantasy tome (21 hours of audiobook!) about a lethal military college for aspiring dragonriders, which piles a great many tropes onto some rather wonky worldbuilding. It is very entertaining and I can see why it is hugely popular. I am part way through the even more massive sequel and I regret nothing.

[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

For Redactle reasons, yesterday I wound up working my way through Wikipedia's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities.

This turned out not to be helpful for Terrible Game Purposes, but it did mean that I came across a city in Anatolia, Turkey, "founded by the Phrygians in at least 1000 BC[E], although it has been estimated to be older than 4,000 years old".

The name of this city? Eskişehir.

"Eski" is the Turkish (and possibly Turkic?) word for "old" (antonym of "new" -- antonym of "young" is a different word). "Şehir" means "city".

We are so good at this.

The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister

Aug. 6th, 2025 10:42 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


The Haddesley family has an ancient tradition: when the patriarch dies, the oldest son summons a wife from the bog. Now living in Appalachia, the current patriarch is dying and a new bog wife must be summoned soon, but their covenant with the bog may be going wrong: one daughter fled years ago to live in the modern world, the last bog wife vanished under mysterious circumstances, the bog is drying up, and something very bad has happened to the oldest son...

Isn't that an amazing premise? The actual book absolutely lives up to it, but not in the way that I expected.

It was marketed as horror, and was the inaugural book of the Paper & Clay horror book club. But my very first question to the club was "Do you think this book is horror?"

The club's consensus was no, or not exactly; it definitely has strong folk horror elements, but overall we found it hard to categorize by genre. I am currently cross-shelving it in literary fiction. We all loved it though, and it was a great book to discuss in a book club; very thought-provoking.

One of the aspects I enjoyed was how unpredictable it was. The plot both did and didn't go in directions I expected, partly because the pacing was also unpredictable: events didn't happen at the pace or in the order I expected from the premise. If the book sounds interesting to you, I recommend not spoiling yourself.

The family is a basically a small family cult, living in depressing squalor under the rule of the patriarch. It's basically anti-cottagecore, where being close to nature in modern America may mean deluding yourself that you're living an ancient tradition of natural life where you're not even close to being self-sustaining, but also missing all the advantages of modern life like medical treatment and hot water. I found all this incredibly relatable and validating, as I grew up in similar circumstances though with the reason of religion rather than an ancient covenant with the bog.

The family has been psychologically twisted by their circumstances, so they're all pretty weird and also don't get along. I didn't like them for large stretches, but I did care a lot about them all by the end, and was very invested in their fates. (Except the patriarch. He can go fuck himself.)

It's beautifully written, incredibly atmospheric, and very well-characterized. The atmosphere is very oppressive and claustrophobic, but if you're up for the journey, it will take you somewhere very worthwhile. The book club discussion of the ending was completely split on its emotional implications (not on the actual events, those are clear): we were equally divided between thinking it was mostly hopeful/uplifing with bittersweet elements, mostly sad with some hopeful elements, and perfectly bittersweet.

SPOILERS!

Read more... )

p-fast trie, but smaller

Aug. 6th, 2025 06:21 pm
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[personal profile] fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-06-p-fast-trie.html

Previously, I wrote some sketchy ideas for what I call a p-fast trie, which is basically a wide fan-out variant of an x-fast trie. It allows you to find the longest matching prefix or nearest predecessor or successor of a query string in a set of names in O(log k) time, where k is the key length.

My initial sketch was more complicated and greedy for space than necessary, so here's a simplified revision.

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What To Do Next

Aug. 6th, 2025 01:03 pm
dewline: "Truth is still real" (anti-fascism)
[personal profile] dewline
Rachel Maddow argues that the United States is "there" now...



I have figured out some things that I have already been doing, that I will keep doing, in order to keep the Problem from fully installing itself in Canada. Other things, I need to either stop or start doing. There are lists that others have worked up, lists I should be copying from, to that end.

Resistance to the revival of the nightmare continues in the States and in Canada, of course, with or without me.

I'm also still looking for work because until either that job is secured or I'm driven out of the workforce to whatever result, I still have to live within the existing system.

[embodiment] physio notes!

Aug. 5th, 2025 11:05 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Today was Lower Limb Class #2, as ongoing follow-up for the most recent ankle reinjury. (On which status is: still a biiiit weaker when I'm pushing to limits, but not really noticeable in day-to-day life, e.g. I'm no longer regularly wincing when I jar it getting off a bike; definitely still feeling the work up the outside of my right leg when doing e.g. isometric holds on double heel raises.)

I am very amused by how "???!!!" the physios got when I tried to faint from things that "shouldn't" have been significant cardio and indeed aren't by my standards for cardio but crucially involved a lot of moving around and position changes while upright: sit-to-stand, lunges, crab-walking with knees bent. Apparently I have carefully selected for exercise done while seated or prone for really solid reasons, i.e. that would be the orthostatic hypotension. Which I apparently hadn't told the physios about as its own thing. ...whoops.

notes )

[personal profile] mjg59
There's a lovely device called a pistorm, an adapter board that glues a Raspberry Pi GPIO bus to a Motorola 68000 bus. The intended use case is that you plug it into a 68000 device and then run an emulator that reads instructions from hardware (ROM or RAM) and emulates them. You're still limited by the ~7MHz bus that the hardware is running at, but you can run the instructions as fast as you want.

These days you're supposed to run a custom built OS on the Pi that just does 68000 emulation, but initially it ran Linux on the Pi and a userland 68000 emulator process. And, well, that got me thinking. The emulator takes 68000 instructions, emulates them, and then talks to the hardware to implement the effects of those instructions. What if we, well, just don't? What if we just run all of our code in Linux on an ARM core and then talk to the Amiga hardware?

We're going to ignore x86 here, because it's weird - but most hardware that wants software to be able to communicate with it maps itself into the same address space that RAM is in. You can write to a byte of RAM, or you can write to a piece of hardware that's effectively pretending to be RAM[1]. The Amiga wasn't unusual in this respect in the 80s, and to talk to the graphics hardware you speak to a special address range that gets sent to that hardware instead of to RAM. The CPU knows nothing about this. It just indicates it wants to write to an address, and then sends the data.

So, if we are the CPU, we can just indicate that we want to write to an address, and provide the data. And those addresses can correspond to the hardware. So, we can write to the RAM that belongs to the Amiga, and we can write to the hardware that isn't RAM but pretends to be. And that means we can run whatever we want on the Pi and then access Amiga hardware.

And, obviously, the thing we want to run is Doom, because that's what everyone runs in fucked up hardware situations.

Doom was Amiga kryptonite. Its entire graphical model was based on memory directly representing the contents of your display, and being able to modify that by just moving pixels around. This worked because at the time VGA displays supported having a memory layout where each pixel on your screen was represented by a byte in memory containing an 8 bit value that corresponded to a lookup table containing the RGB value for that pixel.

The Amiga was, well, not good at this. Back in the 80s, when the Amiga hardware was developed, memory was expensive. Dedicating that much RAM to the video hardware was unthinkable - the Amiga 1000 initially shipped with only 256K of RAM, and you could fill all of that with a sufficiently colourful picture. So instead of having the idea of each pixel being associated with a specific area of memory, the Amiga used bitmaps. A bitmap is an area of memory that represents the screen, but only represents one bit of the colour depth. If you have a black and white display, you only need one bitmap. If you want to display four colours, you need two. More colours, more bitmaps. And each bitmap is stored in an independent area of RAM. You never use more memory than you need to display the number of colours you want to.

But that means that each bitplane contains packed information - every byte of data in a bitplane contains the bit value for 8 different pixels, because each bitplane contains one bit of information per pixel. To update one pixel on screen, you need to read from every bitmap, update one bit, and write it back, and that's a lot of additional memory accesses. Doom, but on the Amiga, was slow not just because the CPU was slow, but because there was a lot of manipulation of data to turn it into the format the Amiga wanted and then push that over a fairly slow memory bus to have it displayed.

The CDTV was an aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware that absolutely sucked. It was an Amiga 500 in a hi-fi box with a caddy-loading CD drive, and it ran software that was just awful. There's no path to remediation here. No compelling apps were ever released. It's a terrible device. I love it. I bought one in 1996 because a local computer store had one and I pointed out that the company selling it had gone bankrupt some years earlier and literally nobody in my farming town was ever going to have any interest in buying a CD player that made a whirring noise when you turned it on because it had a fan and eventually they just sold it to me for not much money, and ever since then I wanted to have a CD player that ran Linux and well spoiler 30 years later I'm nearly there. That CDTV is going to be our test subject. We're going to try to get Doom running on it without executing any 68000 instructions.

We're facing two main problems here. The first is that all Amigas have a firmware ROM called Kickstart that runs at powerup. No matter how little you care about using any OS functionality, you can't start running your code until Kickstart has run. This means even documentation describing bare metal Amiga programming assumes that the hardware is already in the state that Kickstart left it in. This will become important later. The second is that we're going to need to actually write the code to use the Amiga hardware.

First, let's talk about Amiga graphics. We've already covered bitmaps, but for anyone used to modern hardware that's not the weirdest thing about what we're dealing with here. The CDTV's chipset supports a maximum of 64 colours in a mode called "Extra Half-Brite", or EHB, where you have 32 colours arbitrarily chosen from a palette and then 32 more colours that are identical but with half the intensity. For 64 colours we need 6 bitplanes, each of which can be located arbitrarily in the region of RAM accessible to the chipset ("chip RAM", distinguished from "fast ram" that's only accessible to the CPU). We tell the chipset where our bitplanes are and it displays them. Or, well, it does for a frame - after that the registers that pointed at our bitplanes no longer do, because when the hardware was DMAing through the bitplanes to display them it was incrementing those registers to point at the next address to DMA from. Which means that every frame we need to set those registers back.

Making sure you have code that's called every frame just to make your graphics work sounds intensely irritating, so Commodore gave us a way to avoid doing that. The chipset includes a coprocessor called "copper". Copper doesn't have a large set of features - in fact, it only has three. The first is that it can program chipset registers. The second is that it can wait for a specific point in screen scanout. The third (which we don't care about here) is that it can optionally skip an instruction if a certain point in screen scanout has already been reached. We can write a program (a "copper list") for the copper that tells it to program the chipset registers with the locations of our bitplanes and then wait until the end of the frame, at which point it will repeat the process. Now our bitplane pointers are always valid at the start of a frame.

Ok! We know how to display stuff. Now we just need to deal with not having 256 colours, and the whole "Doom expects pixels" thing. For the first of these, I stole code from ADoom, the only Amiga doom port I could easily find source for. This looks at the 256 colour palette loaded by Doom and calculates the closest approximation it can within the constraints of EHB. ADoom also includes a bunch of CPU-specific assembly optimisation for converting the "chunky" Doom graphic buffer into the "planar" Amiga bitplanes, none of which I used because (a) it's all for 68000 series CPUs and we're running on ARM, and (b) I have a quad core CPU running at 1.4GHz and I'm going to be pushing all the graphics over a 7.14MHz bus, the graphics mode conversion is not going to be the bottleneck here. Instead I just wrote a series of nested for loops that iterate through each pixel and update each bitplane and called it a day. The set of bitplanes I'm operating on here is allocated on the Linux side so I can read and write to them without being restricted by the speed of the Amiga bus (remember, each byte in each bitplane is going to be updated 8 times per frame, because it holds bits associated with 8 pixels), and then copied over to the Amiga's RAM once the frame is complete.

And, kind of astonishingly, this works! Once I'd figured out where I was going wrong with RGB ordering and which order the bitplanes go in, I had a recognisable copy of Doom running. Unfortunately there were weird graphical glitches - sometimes blocks would be entirely the wrong colour. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and then I felt stupid. Recording the screen and watching in slow motion revealed that the glitches often showed parts of two frames displaying at once. The Amiga hardware is taking responsibility for scanning out the frames, and the code on the Linux side isn't synchronised with it at all. That means I could update the bitplanes while the Amiga was scanning them out, resulting in a mashup of planes from two different Doom frames being used as one Amiga frame. One approach to avoid this would be to tie the Doom event loop to the Amiga, blocking my writes until the end of scanout. The other is to use double-buffering - have two sets of bitplanes, one being displayed and the other being written to. This consumes more RAM but since I'm not using the Amiga RAM for anything else that's not a problem. With this approach I have two copper lists, one for each set of bitplanes, and switch between them on each frame. This improved things a lot but not entirely, and there's still glitches when the palette is being updated (because there's only one set of colour registers), something Doom does rather a lot, so I'm going to need to implement proper synchronisation.

Except. This was only working if I ran a 68K emulator first in order to run Kickstart. If I tried accessing the hardware without doing that, things were in a weird state. I could update the colour registers, but accessing RAM didn't work - I could read stuff out, but anything I wrote vanished. Some more digging cleared that up. When you turn on a CPU it needs to start executing code from somewhere. On modern x86 systems it starts from a hardcoded address of 0xFFFFFFF0, which was traditionally a long way any RAM. The 68000 family instead reads its start address from address 0x00000004, which overlaps with where the Amiga chip RAM is. We can't write anything to RAM until we're executing code, and we can't execute code until we tell the CPU where the code is, which seems like a problem. This is solved on the Amiga by powering up in a state where the Kickstart ROM is "overlayed" onto address 0. The CPU reads the start address from the ROM, which causes it to jump into the ROM and start executing code there. Early on, the code tells the hardware to stop overlaying the ROM onto the low addresses, and now the RAM is available. This is poorly documented because it's not something you need to care if you execute Kickstart which every actual Amiga does and I'm only in this position because I've made poor life choices, but ok that explained things. To turn off the overlay you write to a register in one of the Complex Interface Adaptor (CIA) chips, and things start working like you'd expect.

Except, they don't. Writing to that register did nothing for me. I assumed that there was some other register I needed to write to first, and went to the extent of tracing every register access that occurred when running the emulator and replaying those in my code. Nope, still broken. What I finally discovered is that you need to pulse the reset line on the board before some of the hardware starts working - powering it up doesn't put you in a well defined state, but resetting it does.

So, I now have a slightly graphically glitchy copy of Doom running without any sound, displaying on an Amiga whose brain has been replaced with a parasitic Linux. Further updates will likely make things even worse. Code is, of course, available.

[1] This is why we had trouble with late era 32 bit systems and 4GB of RAM - a bunch of your hardware wanted to be in the same address space and so you couldn't put RAM there so you ended up with less than 4GB of RAM
fanf: (Default)
[personal profile] fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-04-p-fast-trie.html

Here's a sketch of an idea that might or might not be a good idea. Dunno if it's similar to something already described in the literature -- if you know of something, please let me know via the links in the footer!

The gist is to throw away the tree and interior pointers from a qp-trie. Instead, the p-fast trie is stored using a hash map organized into stratified levels, where each level corresponds to a prefix of the key.

Exact-match lookups are normal O(1) hash map lookups. Predecessor / successor searches use binary chop on the length of the key. Where a qp-trie search is O(k), where k is the length of the key, a p-fast trie search is O(log k).

This smaller O(log k) bound is why I call it a "p-fast trie" by analogy with the x-fast trie, which has O(log log N) query time. (The "p" is for popcount.) I'm not sure if this asymptotic improvement is likely to be effective in practice; see my thoughts towards the end of this note.

Read more... )

(no subject)

Aug. 4th, 2025 10:06 am
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[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
Dear Carolyn: A friend and colleague has been MIA at work and in our friend circle for weeks. She claims she hurt her back, is in pain and having procedures and and and… And this has her missing meetings and deadlines and happy hour and dropping all the balls. She has not told anyone exactly what happened with her back. She said she was doing some light housework when it just hurt all of a sudden, which sounds ridiculous to me and everyone else I know. We don’t know what “procedures” she has had. We don’t know when she will get back to normal. We’re not talking about an old person here; she is 43! I called her the other day and I could hear the TV on, during the workday, which she turned off or muted when she took my call.

I feel like she is lying or exaggerating to get out of work — while not taking formal leave or PTO, because we can work remotely — and she is blowing off her friends and colleagues while we pick up the slack for her at the office and make her excuses at social functions. How do I figure out what’s really going on with her, and get her to do her own work again so I don’t have to fill in for someone who is home watching TV while I’m busting my you-know-what?

— Busting My You-Know-What


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[personal profile] conuly posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
Dear Carolyn: My dad, uncle and grandfather are all lawyers, and I always thought I wanted to be one, too. Until I realized in college I was much more interested in science. I switched my major to microbiology and graduated with honors. Now I’m in my last year of my PhD program, but according to my dad, I’m a huge failure and a disappointment.

My younger cousin graduated from law school and joined the family law firm, and it’s all he can talk about. My mom said I shouldn’t have gotten his hopes up all those years I said I wanted to be a lawyer. They also are still complaining that my switching majors cost them extra tuition. It’s not like I pulled a deliberate bait-and-switch; I changed my mind.

When my dad asked what my plans were and I told him I’d be looking for a postdoc position, he said I was going to waste my life in academia and never make any real money.

I think most parents would be overjoyed their daughter is getting a doctorate, but mine act like I’m a dropout and a failure. There’s no way to make your parents supportive or proud of you, though, is there?

— Changed My Mind


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[personal profile] siderea
I finally got around to pursuing a replacement of what we in the Bostoniensis Household refer to as the Lorem Ipsum card, which was itself a fiasco.

(Recap: PayPal, an organization full of people who are not as smart as they think they are and blessed with perhaps the deepest marketing reach in the US into the small business market for financial services, decided to offer to its business customers the greatest credit card deal of their lifetimes, unlimited 2% cash back on all purchases, and the market responded with all the decorous restraint of a river full of pirhana given a whole cow. Apparently we collectively took PayPal for all they were worth – I heard of small tech companies running their cloud services bills to the tune of five figures a month across on the card – until sometime in Sept 2024, when the grown-ups at PayPal discovered they were hemorrhaging money, and very abruptly shut the party down and exit the business credit card market all together. The hard inquiry on my credit report lasted longer than the actual card did. At the time, it was pretty upsetting, but now it's just hilarious.)

A couple weeks ago I decided to apply for an American Express Blue Business Cash card, which has no fees and has a cash back offer. I have to say, absolutely all the customer service agents – five now – I've spoken to have been exemplary. Yeah, alas, that's foreshadowing.

Unfortunately their IT services are demented. First there was the fact they sent me a notification saying my application had been, and I quote, "DENIED", with a link to find out why, and when I followed the link, I discovered my application hadn't been denied: it said that they couldn't run a credit check on me because my credit reports were locked (true), so I need to go unlock the specified credit report and let them know so they could continue processing my application. So I called in and did it in real time with an agent on the line and was approved on the spot. Fabulous. "Okay, you will be getting your card at your home address in three to five business days." "Uh, it's a business card, could you send it to my business address?" "Oh, no, it won't let me send your initial card to any other than your home address." "*sigh* Very well."

My new Amex card arived at my home on like the 30th or 31st, while I had my nose to the grindstone writing. Friday the 1st, I opened the envelope to find my new card, and then to activate it at the website.

I couldn't get it off the paper.

Or rather: in attempting to get the card off the paper, I wound up with a layer of glue and paper stuck on the back of the card, such that I could not read any but the first five digits of the card number, and the CVV was completely covered. It was like the paper was superglued on. It was annealed.

So I called Amex, and discovered that you can't get through the phone tree to a a customer service agent about an extant account unless you can prove you're the owner of the account with, yes, the CVV. Which I can't read. Because there's a half thickness of paper glued across it.

Also, you can't set up an account on their website without the full card number, which I also couldn't read, because there was a half thickness of paper glued across it.

So I called the number for applying for a card in the first place, and threw myself on the mercy of the sales agent, explaining why I was calling them instead of regular customer service: I can't get to customer service without knowing the CVV, and the problem I need help with is that I can't read the CVV. "I know I shouldn't be laughing," he said, "But this is kind of hilarious." He kindly set up a three-way call with customer service so I didn't wind up wandering unattended in a phone tree maze, and once I was talking to the nice people who could replace my card, he ducked out.

The customer service agent and I then discovered that Amex doesn't let you replace a card, for some reason, until an account is 10 days old. My account was, as of that moment, nine days old. She gave me a direct number to business card services in the hopes I could avoid the phone tree of doom; the agent also gave me some pointers about pressing zero to get through it, which trick I had tried on the other phone tree and it hadn't worked.

Saturday I was busy sleeping. Today, I called the phone number I had been given for business card services, and despite the phone tree trying to authenticate with the CVV, I managed to confuse the robot enough it finally found me a human. I got to explain all over again about the disfigured card, and they transferred me again to card replacement, who put the order right in.

I observed to the agent that the issue with the glue and the card might have something to do with them sending it to my home, where I have a black mailbox on a south-facing side of the building, and we had been having a heatwave, and maybe they would like to send my replacement card to my business address, where the mailboxes are indoors in air conditioned comfort? She agreed that would be a much better plan.

So now I await my new Amex. It's a 2% cash back on purchases offer, but only up to the first $50k of purchases, so companies can't use their AWS bill to bleed them dry, so maybe it will stick around a little longer than PayPal's Lorem Ipsum card.

Speaking of credit card offers possibly too good to last, for any of you sad you missed out on getting your own bite of the cow:

I recently discovered that AAA – yeah, the American Automotive Association, the roadside assistance people – has a really great credit card offer. (This may be region specific – I'm in their "Northeast" region.) Their Daily Advantage Visa Signature card has 5% cash back on groceries, no annual fee. Only the first $10k of grocery purchases per year, and then 1% thereafter – which is good, actually: it has a chance of sticking around. But that does mean up to $500/year in cash back on grocery purchases. Given what's happening to the price of food and paper goods, having a permanent 5% discount on groceries is freaking fantastic. It also has a bunch of other features (3% cash back on gasoline or electric car charging stations, e.g.) and 1% cash back on everything else (no limit).

The interest rate is usurious, so under no circumstances do you ever want to carry a balance on it. But if you are the sort of person who can reliably always pay off their balance every month on time: permanent 5% off groceries!

And, no, apparently you do not need to be a AAA member to get the card. (Though we are.)

We got one and I just finished reading the fine print. Seems reasonable. We don't know that our grocery delivery service will be recognized by the card company (it's Comenity Capital Bank under the hood) as a grocery store, but the service is run by a grocery store, and the charges have appeared on the previous card under the name of the grocery store, so here's hoping. We'll know later this week – our next grocery order is for Wednesday, and the charge typically shows up a day or two after that.

Also, we've never had a card with Comenity, so we don't really know how their IT and customer service are. The web interface for account management is very nice. We'll report back as we know more.

I'm not generally in the practice of recommending credit cards, and I can't wholly recommend this one, having not really exercised it yet to discover its landmines. But what's going on here in the Bostoniensis household is that we're cashing in on our good credit scores to take advantage of financial offers that pinch our pennies for us, as a form of hardening our household financially against inflation and other future economic vicissitudes. This has generally meant getting credit with better terms (either lower rates or higher rewards), and opening High-Yield Savings Accounts for our nest egg and my estimated tax payments as a self-employed person.

Given that eating food is a pretty universal custom and groceries are getting scary-expensive, I thought I would mention for anyone who wants to do likewise, and is in a position to do so.

Edit: Oh, yes, it worked with our grocery delivery order just fine. We're delighted.

vital functions

Aug. 3rd, 2025 10:40 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Celebrating. Two birthdays! Both, conveniently, in Cambridge.

Reading. The Age of Seeds, Fiona McMillan-Webster (finished). Cannot articulate why this turned into a bit of a slog (kept running off to look other things up? suspicion about the materials science fluency? difficulty engaging with The Climate Situation for leisure purposes? lots of other things going on?) but I did finish it and I have learned things. Sort of. I at least now have more of a vague outline about how seed dormancy works (on multiple levels) than I did previously, even if I did spend a lot of the explanation going "okay but what does that MEAN???"

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh. Two chapters left!

I also continue to take steps towards getting my head around neuroanatomy; today I have been particularly annoyed by (1) the terminology of "ganglion", and apparent variation in whether it is used strictly to refer to the peripheral nervous system, and also (2) Nerve and Muscle cheerily providing an incomprehensible-to-me introduction to the concept of action vs resting potentials, and the difficulties inherent in measuring them. This is possibly going to be another case of "read three pages, then go and do a lot more reading elsewhere to fill in". Have also been poking at a couple of wikibooks on neuroanatomy.

Listening. Bats! More than seeing, really.

Cooking. Birthday cake! "No, really, don't use pre-ground hazelnut meal, your mother prefers a more Rustic texture" now firmly established.

Eating. FIGS. SO MANY FIGS. MY MOTHER'S FIG TREE IS RIDICULOUS. We have brought about a kilo home? I think we have genuinely brought about a kilo home and that's after the quantity I've eaten in the past 36 hours.

(Schwarzbrot + Yarg + fig: yes excellent thank you.)

Exploring. Small adventures around Darwin Green and various other Cambridge back streets. Tragically the known black mulberry tree is not quite ready for Significant harvest yet, and also there was someone sitting (and smoking) on the bench once needs to climb upon to reach the majority of the branches that overhang the public highway.

Growing. Greenhouse chillis potted up before vanishing to a field: not dead! Sugar Magnolia: continuing to produce more pods! Tomatoes: still not ripe!

Observing. Many bats. Good dragonfly. Lots of red admiral butterflies on the buddleia. A SQUIRREL in a WALNUT TREE the existence of which I had not previously been cognisant: the pitter-patter of little bits of walnut fruit was somewhat perplexing until the involvement of Horrid Little Hands and Horrid Little Teeth dawned upon me, whereupon I was absolutely delighted to get to watch this creature in Action.

Weird Japanese Horror Films

Aug. 3rd, 2025 11:11 am
howdyadoitsnatty: (Default)
[personal profile] howdyadoitsnatty posting in [community profile] little_details
Hello again (thanks for the collective 'you should probably re-consider this' last time because I kind of needed that), I've got some more weirdly specific questions that I kind of am not sure how to begin tackling:

So one of my characters is a Japanese man who sort of has a thing for schlocky pulpy horror movies, and while I'm aware of some popular-ish examples of sort of cult horror films in Japan ( Like House (1977) or Tetsuo The Iron Man (1989) which vaguely fit his themes of 'being deeply uncomfortable with the world and his body') but these always struck me as kind of obvious and well known even outside of japan and not something someone who was really into weird stuff would actually select as a 'favorite'. For the sake of clarity: this is set in the present so even relatively recent films are okay.

I guess in general I'm looking for recommendations for stuff this sort of guy would be interested in, or at least something that someone who's a bit of a weird horror junkie would consider a personal favorite.

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Aug. 3rd, 2025 11:33 am
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