threeofwands

Between one thing and another we wound up having a semi-impromptu mini-break in Chester, including a few hours at Chester Zoo.

... where we went into the bats enclosure and were transfixed for about an hour, basically from the moment we walked in until chucking-out time.

It's a big dark room, artificially crepuscular, with lots of trees (dead) for roosts, and somewhere in the vicinity of 350 bats (Seba's short-tailed and Rodrigues fruit bats). THEY WILL COME SO CLOSE TO YOU. THEY WILL COME SO CLOSE TO YOU. They were flying well within a foot of our faces. You could FEEL THE WIND FROM THEIR WINGBEATS.

And A was greatly honoured by one LANDING ON THEIR TROUSERS.

There were many other Excellent Creatures -- the Humboldt penguins in particular were very excited by the rain (so much porpoising), and the giant otters were indeed giant, and there was an enormous dragonfly, and the flamingos went from almost entirely asleep (including one baby that had not yet got the hang of the whole one-leg trick) to YELLING INCESSANTLY after being buzzed by the scarlet ibis.

Extremely good afternoon out, 13/10, would recommend.

kaberett

Reading. Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie: finished the Radch stories; on to The World Of The Raven Tower!

The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman: in progress; not yet Cross with it but also not yet Impressed by it.

More Dreamwidth catchup.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac!

Eating. SO many tomatoes.

Exploring. Poked around Preston a very little!

Growing. ... SO many tomatoes. More watering system established at plot (so hopefully all the peppers will still be alive and well upon my return). Sowed some probably-past-it seeds.

Observing. A saw a deer on the drive up to Preston! A proper big one with antlers and all! We were very impressed.

Also the local owl Yell.

kaberett

Or at least "the other line I meant to highlight from the Wikipedia article":

There is increasing evidence that the smooth muscle that lines the airways becomes progressively more sensitive to changes that occur as a result of injury to the airways from dehydration.

I had only taken 700ml of water with me; I'd blithely assumed I'd be able to top up at the café and then had Too Much Social Anxiety to ask or even check whether they had a jug out, because that's a thing my brain is definitely Doing at the moment. ... and then on the way back I was desperately thirsty and stole most of A's water, and I am just personally finding it Very Interesting that the thing my body wanted me to do most was More Fluids.

kaberett

Have a Wikipedia link.

( Read more... )

usuallyhats

How the World Made the West - Josephine Quinn
The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
A Song of Legends Lost - MH Ayinde
The Maid and the Crocodile - Jordan Ifueko
Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley
Heavenly Tyrant - Xiran Jay Zhao
The Tusks of Extinction - Ray Nayler
The Breath of the Sun - Isaac Fellman
Vox Machina: Stories Untold
Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes - Frances Hardinge
The Rose Rent - Ellis Peters
Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity - Luke Pepera
The River Has Roots - Amal El-Mohtar
The Mercy Makers - Tessa Gratton

Death of the Author - Nnedi Okorafor
City of All Seasons - Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley
The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects - Bee Wilson
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain - Victoria Mackenzie
Some Body Like Me - Lucy Lapinska
The Death of Mountains - Jordan Kurella
The Dragonfly Gambit - AD Sui
Pluralities - Avi Silver
I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman trans Ros Schwartz
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel
Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops - Tim Robey
The Deep Dark - Molly Ostertag
Wheel of the Infinite - Martha Wells
Remember You Will Die - Eden Robins
Pagans - James Alistair Henry
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

Witch Week - Diana Wynne Jones
Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones
The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
The Night Parade of 100 Demons - Marie Brennan
Penric's Mission - Lois McMaster Bujold
We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain - Lanre Bakare
The Memory Hunters - Mia Tsai
All Systems Red - Martha Wells
Artificial Condition - Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol - Martha Wells
Exit Strategy - Martha Wells
Network Effect - Martha Wells
Fugitive Telemetry - Martha Wells

This is a three month round up because August happened to me so much. But! It did also feature me discovering that I could reread Murderbot, so I had a great time with that. (Still not sure I've recovered my ability to reread in general, but nice to add in something else I can handle rereading.)

I read a lot of things that I loved these last few months, but the words for most of them are not coming, so here we are. I do want to try and get back in the habit of writing stuff up as I go along, and maybe even actually posting monthly again - we shall see if I manage it.

The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley (four stars), Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky (three stars)

The Ministry of Time
I wasn't sure as I was reading this whether or not I liked it, but I blazed through it at a rate of knots and I think I've come down on the side of yes. It's near-future sf about a woman who becomes the liaison to a time-displaced polar explorer (and also makes a lot of bad choices, just so many, I loved her so much and had such a low opinion of her decision making skills), but it's also a thriller and a romance and has a lot of stuff about climate change and the experience of being an immigrant... and yet it somehow manages to make all of that work together incredibly well. And it's very funny, and the characters are all beautifully drawn - yeah, I think I loved it.

Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky
I would have liked this a lot more if it had been shorter. It's a satire on the dangers of letting automation take over from humanity, and it makes its points well, but it makes all of them over and over and over again and it gets quite frustrating. I was invested enough in the main characters and their relationship to finish it, and I did like that it resisted the trope of the robot who inevitably becomes human, but it really needed to be half the length.

Didn't finish:

A Palace Near the Wind - Ai Jiang, When the Tides Held the Moon - Venessa Vida Kelley

A Palace Near the Wind - Ai Jiang
I've really enjoyed some of Jiang's shorter fiction, but this one really wasn't coming together: it was just deeply unclear all the time how anything in its world actually worked ("the trees are people!" "all of them? How tree-y are they? How TALL are they?"), and while shorter fiction in particular can often get away with worldbuilding on vibes, the fact that I was questioning it suggested that the writing wasn't fully taking me with it. It did also feel like it was tipping from "protecting the environment is important" into "we should live in the woods, eschew all technology and eat only plants" in places.

When the Tides Held the Moon - Venessa Vida Kelley
As we know romance is more miss than hit for me, but I was intrigued by the setting of this one. I started off quite enjoying it, but the pace was so slow that it gave me time to notice that the characters and world were on the thin side, and ultimately I got bored and wandered off about halfway through. I did love the illustrations, though, and I think if the pace had been tightened up a bit I would probably have finished and liked it.

kaberett

Have achieved More Event Prep: both the arrows catalogue updating (albeit not printing), and Folding All The Potions ~~that printed successfully~~.
Friend is watching Orphan Black for the first time. I am getting Yelling. It's DELIGHTFUL.
Yesterday, leaving the lower limbs class that has been prescribed in an attempt to reduce the risk of reinjuring my ankle again, I... turned my ankle. (This is not the good bit.) In more or less the same way I did in April, that was the motivation for the current round of physio, but whether it was the exercises having actually helped anything at all or the fact that I was wearing different (and more supportive) boots or just pure luck, while it's a bit sore it is not e.g. refusing to bear weight any time I don't pay adequately close attention to how I load it, so I'm counting that one as a win.
We forgot New Elephant Day on Monday (Sheldrick Wildlife Trust calendar) so instead had New Elephant Day today... AND IT AN ADORABLE BABY RHINO. 13/10, etc.
I am nearly at the point where I think I might be able to read the Wikipedia page on action potentials and derive meaning from it? I'm definitely slightly less confused about the cell biologist's definition of depolarization than I was even yesterday...

kaberett

multiple colours of sliced tomatoes, prominently featuring some blue-black with red stars

(By "today's" I mean not "all of those harvested today, nor even yesterday" but rather "the tomato course with dinner".)

I really love the ridiculous stars on the tops of the Blue Fire.

starshipfox

Thanks to the anonymous person who bought six months of paid account time for me! That was very surprising and very kind.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

kaberett

Reading. ( Regula Ysewijn, McKinley Valentine, David J. Linden, Ann Leckie )

Skimmed several more pain-related papers.

... and I am also making some actual progress on catching up with my reading page! By which I mean "... I'm almost a whole entire week into May." I make no promises about how far I'm going to actually get.

Watching. 'nother episode of Farscape: S02E05 The Way We Weren't. Will concede that this made me go "... okay, yeah, I see why I needed to watch everything that went before, and damn it I am Having Some Feelings".

I have now sat or indeed wiggled my way through through Squish The Fish (Cosmic Kids' "baby yoga") in its entirety, it being a great favourite of The Toddler. I continue to have fascinating conversations about things that are easy for toddlers versus for grown-ups with the resident physiotherapist.

Cooking. A sweetcorn, tomato and runner bean curry, unearthed via Eat Your Books when I realised I had somewhat unintentionally got the nice organic veg box people to bring us runner beans (of which I am generally suspicious because of the texture of the pod).

Two loaves of actually vaguely competent bread (turns out scraping together the executive function to make the timing work... works better).

For breakfast this morning: the next recipe from the Welsh cakes book, being blackberry and apple splits (thereby using up some of the stewed apple in the freezer!). Could stand to have significantly less sugar than the recipe suggested and frozen blackberries very much want to make something that could only generously be called a purée rather than a soup, and definitely benefitted from being left to stand and cool before any attempt is made at the actual splitting, but A is very happy so I am content :)

Eating. Pizza Express takeaway to go with the Farscape on Tuesday evening when we were very, very tired.

Lunch in the café at Forty Hall this afternoon, featuring orange-and-lavender loaf cake!

Blackberries and onions and tomatoes and my mother's fig jam. Many very good food. Very pleased yes.

Exploring. Forty Hall! We went on an ADVENTURE this afternoon to get LUNCH there, which was slightly complicated by the part where ( breathing, everything is fine )

such that I spent a significant amount of time on the way both there and back again going "nope, need to stop" and spending a while lying on the grass staring up at the blue sky and the wispy white clouds through the various oak trees we passed. I have thoughts about this specific medical experience that I might write up elsewhen, BUT we WENT ON AN ADVENTURE and explored the farm shop and had lunch/afternoon tea in the café and walked around the walled garden and went home VIA THE (outskirts of the) BEAVER ENCLOSURE (thank you all, looking up that link means I have just discovered that TOURS NOW EXIST as of last month!!!) (more context: first beavers reintroduced to London after something like 400 years, back in 2022). Very very pleased to have managed this.

Creating. Hmm. I haven't been creating, as such, but I have definitely been consulting with A about some 3d prints to make sorting the in-game currency easier at Admin: the LRP!

Growing. Everything is tomatoes. I have not managed to get overwintering onions going; maybe tomorrow?

Rooted lemongrass potted up; let's see how long it takes me to kill it this time.

Observing. Alas no beavers, but lots of excellent birds, including two excursions (one solo, one partnered) to visit the cootlings :) The one that hatched last (by a considerable margin) is very definitely still no more than about half the size of its elder siblings!

denise posting in

dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

kaberett

Went out to get mozzarella to have with lunch. Realised halfway down the hill that we could go all the way down the hill and watch the latest batch of cootlings. DID SO while eating raspberries. Excellent.
Lunch also included home-made Tomatoes and Basils and Bread, and also separately a small baguette with fig jam courtesy of my mother and brie courtesy of Somerset via The Supermarket. V pleasing.
Excellent chapter of book has introduced me to all kinds of things including pain asymbolia.
I have DONE SOME ADMIN: THE LRP PAPERWORK. There is paperwork that is DONE and consequently in the RECYCLING. I have sent SO MANY E-MAILS. I am getting some really lovely responses! And soon there will be FEWER THINGS.
Playing with pens! Continuing to really enjoy playing with pens.

kaberett

BREAD. I have coaxed myself back into giving it vaguely sensible timings, and shockingly it works better when I don't leave it to get sad and lonely.
I slightly tripped and bought myself a writing slope last week? ... I am somehow surprised that it's being useful, specifically for when I'm being a horrible laptop + paperwork goblin on the sofa.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, I am going through a bunch of tragically overdue paperwork for Admin: the LRP purposes (the person it is overdue to is... me) and found the answer to a mystery. (I am somewhat baffled that I apparently got the answer to this mystery at the second event this year and yet had completely forgotten that I'd managed anything of the kind until Just Now, two weeks before E4; I think I'm probably just going to chalk this up as another piece of evidence that my brain just... wasn't... working very well at all in June.)
TOMATOES. Actually this is related to the Good Bread -- I had an excellent bread-and-butter-and-tomatoes-and-parsley lunch, which was delightful. The Purple Ukraine are so good and I like them so much.
Today I have managed non-zero tidying, and the flat is marginally better and more usable for it. Mostly sorting out some of my gardening horrors on the patio; partly Wrangling The Dishwasher and some of the washing up; partly the aforementioned overdue paperwork, a consequence of which is putting a bunch of paper IN THE RECYCLING. Is good.

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threeofwands

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Page generated Sep. 12th, 2025 03:03 pm

Reading

BATS

vital functions

[embodiment] that was the other thing I meant to say about EIB

[embodiment] some notes on exercise-induced bronchospasm

Books and comics read in June, July and August 2025

all things very

today's tomatoes (before the spring onion and balsamic vinegar)

(no subject)

Code deploy happening shortly

vital functions

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

small delights

more good things

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November 2019

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