 

Told Eva about the magazine.

Jul. 26th, 2017 02:16 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
"You should've gotten a subscription to Cricket."

"We already get a subscription to Cricket."

"So? N doesn't."

"N practically lives here. She doesn't need her own subscription."

"Don't you want her to read more!?"

(Okay, she didn't say that last line, but she thought it VERY LOUDLY.)
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I happened to be standing next to a pair of adolescents. First the girl remarked that she couldn't believe she'd lived on the Island 16 years and never taken the Ferry (I couldn't believe it either!) and then her friend, clearly trying to impress her with his experience, found himself in a loop, repeating "It can take them a long time to get off" at least three times. (It CAN take them a long time to get off the boat! There's always somebody who thinks the announcement to disembark wasn't actually directed at them). But I don't think she noticed, so that's all right :)

I hope they had fun! The boat is really the most affordable date in town, and certainly fun if you don't take it every day.

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


10 Relics From the Horse-Powered City Hiding in Plain Sight

The Man Who Blew The Door Off The Microbial World

The Rivers of the U.S., Collected Into a Nifty Subway Map

Spiral arms allow school children to weigh black holes

The entrepreneur who asked Stephen King for a blurb and got a book instead

Scientists Reverse Brain Damage in Drowned U.S Toddler Eden Carlson

Heinz Develops ‘Chicago Dog Sauce’ for the City That Won’t Put Ketchup on Its Hot Dogs (LOL)

The Clay Models Used to Analyze Entrails in the Ancient World

10 Ridiculous Feats of Literature (The story about Hemingway's short story is silly. I guess we're supposed to think the baby died, but c'mon, it's a baby. They outgrow clothes all the time, especially shoes. If the parents had been saving that pair for a special occasion, that occasion never came, is all. And "baby outgrew clothes" isn't a story, it's a piece of advice - don't save the dress up clothes for dressy occasions!)

Not in This Day and Age? On “Feisty, Cheeky, and Rebellious” Women in History

Utah home-birth rate is double the US average, report says

Why Hospitals Started Displaying Newborn Babies Through Windows

Curiosity is underemphasized in the classroom, but research shows that it is one of the strongest markers of academic success.

Child living with HIV maintains remission without drugs since 2008

Magic Can Be Normal

Where Are All the Black Boys in Middle Grade Fiction? A 2017 Assessment and Comparison

Is It A Good Idea To Pay Villagers Not To Chop Down Trees?

Can Tennis Offer a Means of Social Mobility in India?

Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better

12 Ways Airports Are Secretly Manipulating You ("Last year, the TSA announced it would give $15,000 to the person who comes up with the best idea for speeding up security." I have an idea - quit with the pointless security theater, and let us keep our shoes on! I'll be collecting my $15k now, please. Kindly send it in the form of $2 bills, thanks.)

The Un-Pretty History Of Georgia's Iconic Peach

What's the Matter With Little Free Food Pantries?

Beijing’s Balkan backdoor

South Park raised a generation of trolls

The Commodification of Orthodox Judaism

Which Anonymous Sources Are Worth Paying Attention To?

Rape Choreography Makes Films Safer, But Still Takes a Toll on Cast and Crew

The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked

The new astrology

Senate advances on healthcare, with dramatic return by McCain (Fuck you, McCain, you and the rest of them.)

Why an Effort to Thwart Some Boycotts of Israel Fails the Free-Speech Test

The Pentagon’s handling of munitions and their waste has poisoned millions of acres, and left Americans to guess at the threat to their health.

Amazon Prime Video

Jul. 26th, 2017 02:11 pm
alias_sqbr: Asterix-like magnifying glass over Perth, Western Australia (australia 2)
[personal profile] alias_sqbr
Prime Video Now available in Australia with a free 7 day trial!

A different 'Amazon Prime' site that seems to list the same stuff if you want to check it out without signing up

I signed up, poked through the fairly limited database, could only find one thing I really liked the look of (American Gods), watched a bit, got bored, and cancelled the trial. So, not a ringing endorsement from me. But hey, it was free and filled some time.

(People outside Australia may not understand how exciting it is to have streaming tv here at all. Thanks for the tip [personal profile] lilysea)
monanotlisa: Dutch pulls Johnny's ear to check for a tech implant (dutch & johnny - killjoys)
[personal profile] monanotlisa
[personal profile] mirabile, I received your Get Well Soon flowers -- thank you so much! They cheered me up a lot today on my last day of recuperating at home, and will continue to do so at night.



(Feel free to click the thumbnail.)

Also, y'all, I love this show, especially this season: Killjoys up to & including 3x04 ''The Lion, The Witch, and the Warlords'' )

demurral

Jul. 25th, 2017 10:39 pm
thistleingrey: (Default)
[personal profile] thistleingrey
Gil McNeil, The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club (2009), orig. pub. as Divas Don't Knit in UK (2007): I pulled it off a library shelf without breaking stride, while following Reason to the checkout machine. It's light yet unexpectedly sincere-sounding given its rather typed cast. It begins right after Jo's husband, Nick, has declared his intent to leave her for a younger woman, then crashed his car into a tree and died accidentally. Go! Mrs. Go, in a next-door subgenre if not the same one, makes the protag's change in circumstance the centerpiece of her journey; this novel moves mid-thirties Jo and her two young sons immediately from London to seaside Kent, where she turns her life experience as a tv producer towards running her grandmother's yarn shop. (The narrative knows its knitting and its knit-shop vagaries.) It's hard work to float that light tone all the way through 400odd pages of "nothing" while setting up the narrator's view on single parenthood, which is quite practical, and while establishing a neighborhood's worth of characters and interactions at school, and while not becoming a completely vapid, precious froth. At the same time, it's so light that I slid through it during digestive flare #1 in May, at a time when I couldn't even read fic---so I kept going )
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
So, yes, we got home tonight and saw that John McCain waited to take life-saving advantage of the ACA before he voted, along with fifty other Republican senators whose careers I hope will be even shorter-lived than it seems they want their constituents to be, to proceed with killing it and quite a lot of other people. These are highlights of the day I had before that.

1. [personal profile] spatch met me after my doctor's appointment this afternoon; we walked up the Esplanade to Back Bay (willows, cormorants, a blue reflected hollow in the overcast rippling in the river's wind-waves; I climbed a tree and developed a hole in my sock) and had dinner at the Cornish Pasty Co., where the chicken tikka masala pasty was approximately half the size of a human head and the toffee pudding with crème anglais arrived in a crucible. These are both endorsements. We had not planned on a book-gathering trip, but first there were the book sale carts at the West End Branch of the BPL and then there was Rodney's. I now appear to own Jack Weatherford's The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (2010), Jean Potts' Home Is the Prisoner (1960), Derek Jarman: A Portrait (1996) edited by Roger Wollen, and Cicely Mary Barker's The Lord of the Rushie River (1938), which I freely admit I bought because "Traveller's Joy" appears in the text as a folk song. The clouds had broken up by the time we were walking back over the Harvard Bridge and the Charles was full of white and pink sails, including a small flotilla circling one another and then crocodiling back to the MIT boathouse. Rob took a couple of pictures of me on the Esplanade. I am not all right with photographs of myself right now, so I am trying to make a point of them.

And the gunner we had was apparently mad. )

2. [personal profile] yhlee and [personal profile] telophase have developed a hexarchate Tarot. Specifically, a jeng-zai deck of the era of Machineries of Empire. You can ask it things. There are no illustrations as yet, but I ran two spreads from different factions and even allowing for the pattern-making capacity of the human brain it gave me scarily decent readings both times. Fair warning: it comes from a dystopia. I'm not sure it knows how to advise on light matters.

3. Courtesy of Michael Matheson: Robot Hugs' Gender Rolls. I'm not sure why we don't seem to own any dice, but fortunately the internet provides. I got non-binary femme-type dandy. I . . . can really live with that, actually.

We bought food for the cats. We bought ice cream for ourselves. I guess tomorrow I make a lot more calls.

(no subject)

Jul. 25th, 2017 09:30 pm
skygiants: Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena holding a red rose (i'm the witch)
[personal profile] skygiants
[personal profile] jothra went to a library sale last week and asked if I had any requests: "Weird 70s Gothics? Trixie, Belden?"

"WEIRD 70S GOTHICS PLEASE," I said, and Jo duly carried out her commission so well that I don't know if anybody's ever going to top it:



Portrait in Jig-Saw is apparently so obscure it doesn't even have a Goodreads page, which, having read it, I can honestly now say is kind of a shame.

Our Heroine's name is Alixander David Somerlaid MacDonald (I KNOW), otherwise known as Alisdair; she is a Strictly Sheltered Heiress who has been raised in a Freezing Castle in Complete Isolation and Solitude with only occasional visits from her father until she comes of age on her 21st birthday.

...for the record, the year is 1973.

My legit favorite part about these spoilers is that the entire plot relies on an alternate universe where the world's most famous postmodern novelist is a Thai princess, I want to live in THAT universe! )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu
At Readercon, I said that my Twitter usage was basically "open, see if Ursula Vernon has live-tweeted more of reading Swiss Family Robinson, close," and that remains true. But I promised to provide links to various people, and having opened tonight to see that a reading is in progress, I should follow through.

So:

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/855253438623625217 (April 20)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/855601923155689472 (April 21)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/855972038800023552 (April 22)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/857428575955419136 (April 26)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/861402977675902977 (May 7)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/861776626996129793 or https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/861805896590143488 and scroll up, it isn't threading properly) (May 8)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/864320654379798530 (May 25)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/868292932406784000 (May 26)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/871216625730674688 (June 4)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/872294427045318656 (June 6)

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/878827410568990720 (June 24)

and, now in progress:

https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/890028466393010177

Enjoy. (I will update this post as needed, to have everything in one place.)

40 Day Anime Meme - Day 13

Jul. 25th, 2017 09:40 pm
kalloway: (Yoyo Yoko)
[personal profile] kalloway
13 -- what is your favorite comedy anime?

Here is Greenwood is one of the most bizarre and charming series ever. It is hilarious, but it is not a straight comedy. In fact, the manga contains one of my go-to tear-jerker sequences... But when it's funny, it is very very funny.

Doujin Work is a short series based on a 4koma manga that is also hilarious. It is not afraid to go anywhere and (thankfully) often does. It chronicles the adventures of a group of doujin-making friends... working towards one of them trying to go pro as a manga-ka.

Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders

Jul. 25th, 2017 09:05 pm
flemmings: (Default)
[personal profile] flemmings
Have been hoping for the last five years that Kate Griffin would do something that came up to the mark of the Midnight Mayor series, but she hasn't, either before (Horace Lyle) or since (Stray Souls). Kitty Peck is also something very different and, either because it's July or just because, I found it too Hannibal-ish Grand Guignol for my taste. Someone on someone else's FL said her sticking point was violence against women and rape, and I think I agree. Is why I can't read that staple of the mystery genre, the serial killer of young women. Yes it happens; no it is not entertaining.

(Jack the Ripper has much to answer for. Before that, I seem to recall that mysterious mass murders were of families. But that lacks the necessary sexual thrill.)

Which said, I might have gone on to volume two if the library had it in anything but e-form on its clunky incomprehensible e-form platform. Even with a tablet or (unlikely) an e-reader I can't see me going for it. Pity because it does have its points.

Otherwise, my acupuncture studio has had another flood that will close it down, hopefully *not* for a month as in 2015, because at the end of that month I was a cripple with ramifications that went on for the next two years. With exquisite timing, I rescheduled Thursday's cortisone shot/ knee assessment for two weeks from now, thinking I wouldn't be sufficiently recovered from the current internal shenanigans to make it. Ah well, keep exercising and stretching...

FMK #18: Writers of Color

Jul. 25th, 2017 07:11 pm
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
[personal profile] melannen
Last week's F win was a tie between The Dragon and the George and Goblin Quest. I am waffling over which one to pick. Goblin Quest had discussion in the comments, but on the other hand, reading it would break my unbroken streak of not having read any of the many Hines novels I own.

K winner was the Callahan. I am going to keep Callahan's Crosstime Saloon but this may be the nudge I needed to just drop the rest.


Anyway, this week's FMK theme is SF by Anglophone Writers of Color. We will pretend the reason it was tough to get a set of ten together for this is that when I get one of these it doesn't linger as long on the to-read pile. (Actually, it was tougher than I expected because finding out race for a lot of SF writers - especially older and more obscure ones - is not simple. There does not seem to be an easily accessible and accurate masterlist of SF Writers of Color out there. And at some point, for some of then, I found myself thinking that if they aren't interested in making their ancestry part of their public bio, I need to not be looking this hard. I never did figure out if Philip Jose Farmer is actually in any way Hispanic.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll: Butler, Delany, Hamilton, Hurston, Martinez, Mosley, Reynolds, Takei, White, Wilson )

FMK: Discount Armageddon

Jul. 25th, 2017 07:25 pm
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
[personal profile] melannen
Poll post coming soon! But first, I have finished Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire!

It was fun! I enjoyed it! The characters were great! Much like the other McGuire I have read, I felt like the more I thought about it, the less there there was there! (I can't think of a single piece of internal evidence other than Verity's word that it took place in Manhattan instead of, like, Columbus, Ohio. The Price-vs.-Covenant thing really doesn't work with the logistics that are set up in the book. Verity's main character note is that ballroom dance is the most important thing to her, she tells us this at least every fifth page, and yet at no point does she ballroom dance, even as practice. Etc.)

And I did really like the variety of cryptids and the cryptid community, but the "cryptozoologist" thing still bothers me, in that a cryptozoologist is a very specific thing situated in a very specific time and culture - it is not something like "witch" that has enough meanings with enough history you can basically go with whatever - and I would really really love to read an urban fantasy about cryptozoologists - and Verity Price is really really not one. (I mean, you could make a cool backstory about how the Prices and allies adopted the terminology ironically in the 60s to further distinguish themselves from the Covenant - or that Sanderson got himself in WAY over his head with a Price girl at some point and came out very confused, which is a fanfic I would definitely read - but she does not seem to be doing that.)

But! It is a urban fantasy in which ALL OF THE SEX IS UNAMBIGUOUSLY AND EXPLICITLY CONSENSUAL, and I didn't even know that was a thing that existed, so I will forgive it A LOT for being that. (I would also enjoy the fanfic about how Price family sex education includes a unit about how part of their mission is to introduce the urban fantasy community to the idea of "affirmative consent" which it had previously lacked entirely.)

I have Down Among The Sticks and Bones on its way from the library, but I have learned it is NOT about the Skeleton Girl (with that title how is it not about the Skeleton Girl?) so I find I am not that excited about it coming.

FedEx: A Dramatic Tale

Jul. 25th, 2017 06:38 pm
settiai: (Blue Beetle/Booster Gold -- dreadable)
[personal profile] settiai
As I've mentioned in the past, I tend to have trouble whenever I pay FedEx extra for an evening delivery (between 5-8pm). Unfortunately, if I order anything that needs a signature, that's my only option as I'm not home to sign for packages earlier than 5pm. So requesting evening delivery is the only way for me to actually get what I order, since they won't deliver after 5pm unless you pay extra.

Cut to the last week of June. I ordered two packages that were scheduled to be delivered on Thursday, and I paid for evening delivery. As has happened several times in the past, the packages never showed up as being on the truck to be delivered. So around 7pm or so I called customer service and started a paper trail, as well as started livetweeting the whole story on Twitter.

FedEx managed to get in touch with the local facility, who told them the package was out for delivery. The driver just hadn't scanned it when he left. ("Uh-huh," I told the poor customer service rep with more than a little skepticism.) This gets a bit long, but it's honestly a rather amusing story. In retrospect, at least. It wasn't so amusing at the time. )

... and that's why I will never again order from any company that only offers FedEx as a shipping option.

Fidele Chapter 24

Jul. 25th, 2017 06:01 pm
misslucyjane: (tardis - public phone box)
[personal profile] misslucyjane
Fidele (108709 words) by misslucyjane
Chapters: 24/?
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Additional Tags: Romance Novel, Paranormal, PTSD, Hauntings, Kid Fic, Drug Use
Summary:

A house full of ghosts is no place to fall in love.

Malcolm Carmichael has been coping with his post-war trauma by taking lovers, teaching art to schoolboys, and trying to ignore the ghosts he sees everywhere. At the death of his mother, he realizes he wants more than just to coast on by, and leaves the exclusive school in search of something more.

Caleb Thibodeaux was so traumatized by the death of his parents in a fire that he hasn't spoken a word since. His uncle Noel hires Malcolm to be his tutor, and Malcolm discovers that Caleb is not the only Thibodeaux son with secrets. The plantation house Fidele is beautiful but haunted, and Noel is much the same.

Soon Malcolm is absorbed in protecting Caleb and Noel from threats both living and dead, and in uncovering the story of Fidele.



Read at AO3 or JennaLynnBrown.com
monanotlisa: AtS's Fred, reading a book, in olive-green soft coloring (fred - ats)
[personal profile] monanotlisa
Because my wife purchased it after watching the movie trailer, I too read the book, mostly in waiting rooms: A Wrinkle In Time )

I may pass on the follow-up books of the quartet (the ones I haven't read already), but I'm definitely looking forward to the movie, which looks visually stunning and well-cast.

Well, I wasn't expecting that!

Jul. 25th, 2017 04:49 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
I just won a free one-year subscription to a magazine put out by Cricket! We already get Cricket, so I went with Muse. Fingers crossed that the girls like it.

Music I Dislike

Jul. 25th, 2017 08:59 am
oracne: turtle (Default)
[personal profile] oracne
I was thinking this morning about the very few music groups I don't like, and why I don't like them. This was prompted by a song coming on the radio and me turning it off.

1. Steely Dan. I know, I know, Bard College. But the main singer's voice irritates the crap out of me. It's so...whiny. It feels like it is scraping every nerve. The twangy stuff in the background exacerbates the effect.

2. Elvis Costello. His voice is so-so to me, but also, an ex-boyfriend loved his stuff.

3. Florence and the Machine. I should like this band, but all their songs sound too similar to me, and there's not enough change within the songs, either with the style or within the singer's voice. Maybe if it was more Metal? Because I am okay with the repetitive nature of a lot of Metal, and Industrial. Regardless, the singer's voice always sounds a bit strained to me as well, so I guess there's subconscious discomfort with that.

4. Frank Sinatra. I have never liked his voice. I have no idea why. He gives me the creeps like knowing some man is following you down a dark street.

5. Kenny G. No, no, no. *cries*

What about ya'll?

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