ceruleanmornings. Network

( 17. An Academic Affair - Jodi McAlister ) Enormously fun and I'm hoping for sequels!

( 18. The Shots You Take - Rachel Reid ) Fairly forgettable, but still entertaining enough to keep me reading.

( 19. The Spy Who Loved Me - Ian Fleming ) I don't think Fleming is for me, but there was some enjoyment available.

( Greenwing and Dart - Victoria Goddard ) Fluffy, fun (despite a substantial amount of mortal peril) and a generally satisfying binge.

( 26. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie ) Dated but I think still worth reading.

( 27. Holiday in Death, 28. Festive in Death, and 29. Framed in Death - JD Robb ) I always enjoy these - but particularly liked the opportunity to revisit the early part of the series in contrast to the newer state of things!

( 30. Derring-Do for Beginners - Victoria Goddard ) I was hoping for more actual, you know, Red Company, but this was so much fun I can't have too many regrets.

( 31. Jane Austen: A Life - Claire Tomalin ) I think this is probably as enlightening as it could reasonably have been, but I was a little disappointed, somehow, despite learning a fair amount. It's not badly-written at all, but it never really won me over somehow.

( 32. Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ) Ultra-violent, really thumpingly Message-y, and strangely compelling; I don't think I'll ever want to re-read it, but I am interested to see where Adjei-Brenyah goes from here.

( 33. Blood Sport, 35. The Edge, and 37. Risk - Dick Francis ) A trio of delightfully exciting nonsenses; I'm so sorry I didn't discover Francis years ago, but on the other hand at least they are a source of joy for me now.

( 34. Men Explain Things to Me - Rebecca Solnit ) A short but concentrated dose of feminist rage.

( 36. Outcrossing - Celia Lake ) On paper this absolutely should be my jam, but it entirely is not.

( 38. Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 2 - CRC Payne and Starbite ) Adorable. This series is just so fun.

( 39. Just One Damned Thing After Another - Jodi Taylor ) This is a fun concept, but the archaeology / history is worse than in Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel books and that's saying something. I didn't hate it, but I had to disconnect my brain way too much to enjoy it.

( 40. Ambiguity Machines - Vandana Singh ) A really excellent collection, even though I couldn't muster quite the delight I wanted from it.

( 41. Get A Life, Chloe Brown - Talia Hibbert ) I enjoyed this, although I'm not sure if I'll read more Hibbert.

Mood accomplished

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bookscorpion posting in

common_nature

This morning I went to check out the big insect hotel near the canal and I was just in time to catch a whole bunch of male European orchard bees who I am fairly sure had just hatched (the females will hatch a little later in the year).

( Read more... )

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halfcactus posting in

journalsandplanners

Made a little flip-through video to celebrate me surviving two months of Hobonichi Cousin a.k.a. my first daily journal:

How is everyone doing with theirs?

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3221/

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

https://xkcd.com/3221/

wychwood

I was fascinated to read Jo Walton's post on How to read sixteen books at once at all times, because I have recently - and somewhat inadvertently - set up something similar for myself.

In mid-February I got fed up of all the half-read things in my ebook reader, so I went through and tagged a bunch of them - things I wanted to read, things I meant to get around to, etc - in a special collection, and then said "OK now you can only read things from this collection". I started out with 25 books, but added a few more either because a) they were new Dick Francis books that I wanted to read (2 books), or b) they were for a book group meeting that I had suddenly realised was approaching (2 books). Since then I have read only one ebook not in that collection (another book group! but a chapter-by-chapter one, so I don't want to read the whole thing yet), one paper book (oh look for a different book group), and a few chapters of other paper books, and the collection is down to 12.

It's actually been tremendously productive as an approach ( rambling about my reading habits )

In conclusion, it's been great for my reading but terrible for my booklog, which is sadly behind even though I've been working on it reasonably regularly.

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autobotscoutriella posting in

common_nature

a Canada goose, sitting on grass, looking peeved

The geese have returned! This one was NOT happy to see me.

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3220/

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

https://xkcd.com/3220/

muccamukk

The YouTube algorithm has seen my interest in figure skating and started offering me classical ballet (I think, always difficult to tell how one gets where one ends up).

So I've been watching bits and pieces of that, as well as all of The Royal Ballet's Cinderella. I therefore offer you some fully random observations, from someone who never got into any kind of dance as a kid, and therefore knows baaaaaasically nothing about the topic. (I have been to several ballets in person, The Nutcracker of course, and the Winnipeg Ballet's Svengali..)

I like classical ballet (I'm not really watching modern) because it's quite ridiculous, and unconnected to anything that has ever happened on the face of the Earth.

I have learned that there's dialogue! Classical ballet has a kind of sign language, done through gestures, so that the dancers can explain plot points such as "We make evil men dance until they die!" and "This lake is made of my mother's tears!"

There does not seem to be much point to the male principal dancers. They have thighs like birch trees, which allows them to leap impressively high in the air, but they don't spin around on nothing but their big toe, which makes them less interesting to watch. Their main purposes seems to be to move the plot along, and act as a "Ballerina holder upper."

Maybe it's just because I'm not good enough at reading the mime, but the romantic dances are... not very romantic. They mostly seem to be the ballerina holder upper holding up the ballerina while she spins around on her big toe.

I don't know if there's non-transphobic/misogynistic way to do the comedy roles where male dancers play female characters, but Cinderella sure didn't manage it.

The plot of Giselle is really interesting (boy meets girl, girl dies when she finds out that boy has a fiancée, girl joins chorus of vengeful ghosts, vengeful ghosts attempt to kill boy, girl saves boy), and I wonder if there have been modern retellings like there have of other old fairytales.

I'm pretty sure the human body is not designed to do any of that.

Which is all I have for now.

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fandom: other plays

kalloway

Many swords, again... worked on archiving and got a decent bit done. Close to a half-dozen new fandom pages? Felt pretty good. ^_^ I've refined my workflow and while I don't know if it's actually going any faster, it feels faster. Before, I would code up five or so pieces, put them on Neocities, and then put them on DW. Now I'm just doing one at a time, putting it on Neocities then immediately putting it on DW and logging it. Makes it a little easier to pause, if nothing else.

I do wish I'd put a little more forethought into how I'm logging what I've done, but I don't think there's any perfect solution there. After a point it'll be much easier, like when I'm just cruising through AO3 by fandom when there's only a few dense fandoms left. Right now I'm all over the place and logging things into composition books is getting kind of gnarly.

Worked a bit more on MG Tallgeese Flugel, but mostly worked on stuff for 30 Minute Label Day. Definitely not a prize-winning display, but a fun one. And that's honestly what I want - a fun display and one people can interact with. Like, I'll offer to let people touch, gently, and check out articulation and details and whatever. There's not much that can be broken beyond repair, if anything. Need to get back to my [Redacted] contest entry, too, as that's coming due very soon.

Goal for the week is getting my desk cleaned up. What even is going on here?!

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kalloway posting in

smallweb

Beware the Ides of March, they're probably what's causing that alignment issue.

What have you been working on and how are things going? Found any cool resources to share? Or just want to say hi?

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chatter post

wychwood

Wow, that fortnight went fast. I was busy, and when I wasn't busy, I couldn't face anything more demanding than lying around reading. This week had four choir rehearsals on two projects and a concert, but also I had two days off work. On Thursday I went out for birthday brunch at a very fancy place and then to The Coffin Works, which is one of those weird niche local museums - in this case, a factory that made not coffins, but coffin furniture; handles, plates, linings, etc, and also shrouds. It was as much fun as these tiny museums usually are! Which is to say, a lot.

Newman Brothers itself only sold to undertakers, as one would expect, but they aimed at the richer end of the market, and apparently their handles were the ones used by the Royal Warranted undertakers for about fifty years, including for Churchill, George V, Queen Mary, George VI, the Queen Mother, and Princess Diana. When they shut down in 1999, apparently the current holder bought up the entire stock, and the museum is hopeful that the Queen's coffin had them too! But they can't prove it.

It's also really interesting seeing how significant Birmingham was as a manufacturing centre - according to the Pen Museum, Birmingham produced 50% of the world's pen nibs in the 1850s; when the Newman Brothers factory opened, there were fourteen factories in Birmingham making coffin furniture; apparently there were several hundred different clock and watchmakers... I tend to think of, you know, the big automated factories, and gigantic industries like mining and smelting and so on, but Birmingham was just absolutely full of these small operations, making a terrifying percentage of the world's small metalwork components. It's such an interesting picture.

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mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

fred_mouse

two more radiation treatments to go; I have a mild (and itchy) looks-like-sunburn across a roughly 20cm square running between my armpit and my midline
the new medication I'm supposed to start after radiation is back ordered until May. need to contact the specialist on monday
general body health alternating between 'ow' and 'fatigue'. but i'm getting some stuff done
mental health - struggling with the cognitive load of daily treatments, but mostly chill.
i have started the 'reading fiction' part of my project; the first book has a lot of details, but suffers from coming out in 2020 and thus is showing a lot of the pre chatgpt tropes surrounding AI
I am knitting a tiny fifth doctor scarf as a decorative item; it is getting less and less accurate to the pattern as I go on. I only have six of the seven colours....
reading? not much.
walking home from the hospital? did it the once. have not had the spoons since. have been using the cane more than some.
other exercise? bugger all.
garden: birds have eaten all but one pomegranate. hoping that one gets ripe enough. guava are ~2cm across; I thought i had done a good job of thinning, but nope. have not thinned the feijoa even that much so argh.
family: youngest has a job contract signed; to be starting in ?august.

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3219/

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

https://xkcd.com/3219/

muccamukk

National Theatre's Importance of Being Earnest (2025)

Watch on YouTube

Free to view now until the 18th, GMT, I assume.

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fandom: other plays

sisterofbloomerjunior posting in

unclutter

My mother died a few weeks ago, so amongst other duties, I'm donating some of her items - mainly clothes, though I did include a box full of books to the Epilepsy Foundation. So it's seven bags of her clothes (Four to EFMN, Three to Ridwell), one teddy bear from Valentines Day donated also in a box, and the aforementioned box.

Edit if I haven't mentioned it: We sold the Buick. :)

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yourlibrarian posting in

common_nature

Loved the look of this sunset through a cloud gap the other night.

( Read more... )

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sunset

muccamukk

The Battle Against Enshittification

dw_dev: AI and Dreamwidth.
Great post from

mark about exactly how DW could use AI (potentially spam filtering), and how it will never use it (feeding your posts into the maw).

404 Media: 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back.
Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission.
When users select the 'expert review' button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions 'inspired by' related experts. Those 'industry-relevant perspectives' include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.

Wired: Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI 'Expert Review' Feature.
I'm sure everyone enjoys getting sued by Stephen King.

The Flytrap: Sex Workers Versus the Algorithm.
Mostly about payment processors, but also about filtering: the endless dance around content bans requires constantly coming up with new ways to craft video titles and content that are frustrating not only for adult performers, but also their customers.

The Guardian: The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all.
Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon.

Canadian Politics
(I'm actually saving fewer links about this, because it's mostly pretty disheartening. And I can't deal.)

TheBreach: Pierre Poilievre is misleading the public about refugee healthcare (Video: 3 minutes).
Desmond Cole fact checks his misinformation and explains how blaming the most vulnerable distracts us from fighting for good health care for all.

The Tyee: Advocates Hope a Ruling Will Change RCMP Treatment of Indigenous Witnesses.
But critics say the Canadian rights tribunal didn’t go far enough after finding police discrimination.
Nominally good news, but so much about this case pisses me off. $7k each? Seriously? Reminder that the one person who got state protection in all of this, the guy who (allegedly) abused all those people, is John Furlong. Fuck that guy.

The Breach: A notorious RCMP unit shaped B.C. universities’ reaction to Palestine encampments.
From Fairy Creek to university campuses, CRU-BC is positioning itself as the go-to police force for repressing dissent.
Category: jackbooted thugs.

Kind of Cool, Actually:

HeatherCoxRichardson: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter | Reckoning with Jason Herbert Podcast (Video: 1:43 hours).
Words cannot express how validating this was. Lo! How many long years have I said that AL:VH is the most historically accurate Lincoln movie? HCR agrees.

The Tyee: What Can You Do with Used Plastic and 3D Printers? Meet Two Pros.
Not sure how scalable this is, but it's a cool project.

The Narwhal : In northeast B.C., fresh food is scarce. This First Nation hopes geothermal energy could change that.
Cool project to restore food security after Site C fucked it up, hopefully they can get funding.

NorthernBallet: Northern Ballet's Gentleman Jack | Costumes (Video: 2 minutes).
I've really been enjoying the promo clips for this new ballet. I hope there's some way to watch it online.

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denise posting in

dw_advocacy

Case: Netchoice v Wilson, 3:26-cv-00543, (D.S.C.)

Netchoice's litigation page: Netchoice v Wilson

Netchoice filed the motion for preliminary injunction on March 9. It isn't available on the docket in RECAP yet (and I'm over my threshold for PACER fees that will get refunded for the quarter, or else I'd put it there!) but it is available on Netchoice's litigation page: Motion for Preliminary Injunction. They haven't included the declarations, but here's Dreamwidth's declaration as filed, authored by yours truly. Because of the wild incoherence of so many of the provisions of this law, many of which were new because a lot of states have switched to using different model legislation, I had to write almost all of our declaration for this one from scratch (while recovering from a lumbar puncture, lying flat on my back in bed: never let it be said I am not completely extra about the lengths to which I will go to fight against this bullshit), so much less of it will look familiar than usual, but boy was I mad.

We'll let you know when the judge makes a ruling on the PI! And three cheers as always for the Netchoice team and for the outside litigation counsel team, who is Lehotsky Keller Cohn for this one and who put in massively heroic effort to get this filed as fast as possible thanks to the law taking immediate effect.

kalloway

Apparently last week was just a week of Doing Things, because along with setting up Saint All-fi (works most of the time well enough, thus far), I also made my first Suruga-ya order for the year. It arrived yesterday, and didn't get dinged for tariffs because it was all books. (One gunpla server is waiting to see how the tariffs are now and where the break-even point is for sales/fees, dollar-wise.) Two Gundam books, two Fire Emblem books. One replaces a weirdly damaged book from some years back, one I've never actually seen in stock before, two others just very good prices.

Premium Bandai did varying price points of Gundam Kit Fukubukuro this year, and just put up a few more sets. I snagged one earlier in the year and thought it okay and after some dithering, picked up another. They've all been very good deals, as far as MSRP goes. Since the one I just ordered is still a mystery to everyone, I'm going to try to keep it a surprise til I open it. This is difficult because plenty of people will receive theirs first and post to discords/reddit.

I am still mired in various projects, so my poll is still open for just a smidge longer.

Also,

taichara and I had talked about Final Fantasy for weeks (months? years?) and what to play and I finally said 'roll for it' and we're playing Final Fantasy VII. I'm playing the Switch version, and trying out the various cheats for lulz. I am about to go into the Shinra building.

I also started playing Arknights again, kinda. I downloaded it onto a tablet so I could uninstall it from my phone (still there despite not playing in a year) and whoops, no guilt and a bunch of goodies, along with some nice QoL. Doubt I'll stick with it for more than a few weeks, but I did kinda miss everyone.

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Page Summary

wychwood - february booklog of excess
bookscorpion in common_nature - Orchard Bees
halfcactus in journalsandplanners - Journal flip-through: Jan-Feb (Hobonichi Cousin A5)
xkcd_feed - Landscape Features
wychwood - voluntary constraint of choice: a rediscovery
autobotscoutriella in common_nature - goose on the loose
xkcd_feed - Rotational Gravity
muccamukk - and now for something completely different
kalloway - A Reckoning of Swords 74
kalloway in smallweb - Hey There, Smallweb! Let's Chatter!
wychwood - they didn't call it the workshop of the world for nothing
mark in dw_maintenance - Performing some traffic maintenance today
fred_mouse - life lived in dot points
xkcd_feed - Planets and Bright Stars
muccamukk - It's Here!
sisterofbloomerjunior in unclutter - Spring cleaning at too high a price. TW: Death
yourlibrarian in common_nature - Hole in the Sky Sunset
muccamukk - links list (the Internet may be getting worse)
denise in dw_advocacy - Update, Netchoice v Wilson (South Carolina): motion for preliminary injunction filed
kalloway - (no subject)

Style Credit

Style: Atlantic for Summertime by ninetydegrees
Resources: Texture by Design Shard, Icons by Romeo Barreto, John Caserta, Denis Chenu, Pedro Lalli, Marcus Michaels, P.J. Onori, Laurent Patain and Cor Tiemens from The Noun Project and Sans Olive

Profile

ceruleanmornings

Greetings

If you came here from various fandom links where I write fan things, well, hello! We should be DW friends!

January 2026

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18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Indigo Evenings

Network

february booklog of excess

Orchard Bees

Journal flip-through: Jan-Feb (Hobonichi Cousin A5)

Landscape Features

voluntary constraint of choice: a rediscovery

goose on the loose

Rotational Gravity

and now for something completely different

A Reckoning of Swords 74

Hey There, Smallweb! Let's Chatter!

they didn't call it the workshop of the world for nothing

Performing some traffic maintenance today

life lived in dot points

Planets and Bright Stars

It's Here!

Spring cleaning at too high a price. TW: Death

Hole in the Sky Sunset

links list (the Internet may be getting worse)

Update, Netchoice v Wilson (South Carolina): motion for preliminary injunction filed

(no subject)

Links

Page Summary

Style Credit

Profile

Greetings

January 2026