We are pleas'd to inform gentle readers that it seems that the Google Play edition of Choices: Taking Decisions is available, although there remains a curious problem with the preview in Google Books.
This is legitimately one of the most alarming things I've heard about AI. I can see no lie.
2026 Apr 6: Alberta Tech [YT]: "Vibe Coding is Gambling" [56 seconds]:
2026 Apr 6: Alberta Tech [YT]: "Vibe Coding is Gambling" [56 seconds]:
Guest Review: Empathizing with the Abuser: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao
6 Apr 2026 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helloladies posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ladybusinessPlease welcome our anonymous reviewer!
The Poet Empress by Shen Tao is a debut Chinese-inspired fantasy centered on a poor village girl who rises from a concubine to the empress-in-waiting to an abusive prince heir. In a bid to save the kingdom from the tyranny of his reign, Wei decides to kill him in the only way she can, by writing a magic poem. Only deathly poems have to be love poetry, and only by knowing him well enough to love him can she kill him.
( Read more... )
I finished edits on Luke over the weekend (Westerly Cove 4). Feel free to grab a copy 'til it goes live on Amazon on April 17!
Get it on Bookfunnel:
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/30s06n16u7
(Blurb is still a work in progress.)
Get it on Bookfunnel:
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/30s06n16u7
(Blurb is still a work in progress.)
All the
fail_fandomanon Rules and Information (and Ban Requests): https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/1076.html. The short version: no embeds, don't out people's real names, don't be that much of an asshole, body fluids are off topic, Mods reserve the right to freeze, screen, and delete the fuck out of stuff. FFA discussion covers a wide variety of topics and has a very flexible view of 'fandom' that includes politics, current events, and cooking techniques. FFA is a Choose NOT to Warn experience. Meme away.Other posts on meme:
- Personal Issues, Off Topic Conversation, Religion, & Everything Else post (PP #32)
- Fic and WIP Post
- Book Clubs, Watchalongs, & Readalongs
- Prompt & fill fests: for FFA Post #1000, FFA's 10th anniversary, FFA Post #1500, & FFA Post #2000
Search
- Unofficial FFA archive & search: Dememe.info Username/password pairs are nonnie/pony, nonny/seal, or ayrt/velociraptor. As of 2025, Dememe is geoblocked for the UK.
- If you have a DW account, you can use DW's content search. Don't forget to tick the box to search in comments. You can also use FFA Rocks.
Related communities and additional resources
- New unofficial FFA wiki (archive: ffawiki_backup)
- New unofficial FFA Writers Tips & Recs wiki
- Unofficial Fyeah FFA tumblr
- Unofficial FFA recs list
- Unofficial FFA Discord Chat
- DW Blocker link & tips and now New! 2024 Updated DW Blocker Guide
- How to link to another account on DW or other sites. If you don't want to create a clickable link, type a backslash (\) before the @.
Meme rules do not require spoiler cuts. But here are two ways to make them:
| HTML-5 (recommended) | |
Demo:spoiler titleSome spoilery content. |
|
| Alternative for inline spoiler-cuts - details here | |
| Demo: spoiler title Some spoilery content. |
|
If you would like to be banned to avoid anonfailing, please leave a logged-in comment at the rules post. It will be automatically screened.
Next post: will open when this posts hits 5000
Previous post: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html#comments
Regular view - First page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729899.html#comments
Regular view - Last page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729899.html?page=999#comments
Top Level view - First page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729899.html?view=top-only#comments
Top Level view - Last page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729899.html?view=top-only&page=999#comments
Flat view - First Comment: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729899.html?view=flat#comments
Flat view - Most Recent: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729899.html?view=flat&page=999#comments
Dememe flatview emulator is at https://dememe.info/flat_view (same login as the regular Dememe info above).
These topics are banned:
- 'Which topics belong on main meme'
- the game Hogwarts Legacy
- discussion about current events in Israel and Palestine
- US Politics
Only one clearly named top-level thread for each of the following topics:
- Disruptive and Provocative Opinions (DAPO)
- sexual abuse and rape culture
- UK Politics
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine and related current events
Artemis 2 lunar flyby is Monday. What to expect
After launching on April 1, 2026, the Artemis 2 mission has already passed the halfway point between the Earth and moon. It will enter the sphere of the moon’s gravitational influence — where lunar gravity begins affecting it more than earthly gravity — today, Sunday, April 5, 2026, aka Flight Day 5. Tomorrow, April 6, Flight Day 6, the 4-person crew will perform its closest flyby to the moon. The brave astronauts will pass approximately 4,600 miles (7,400 km) above the lunar surface.
During this loop around the moon’s far side, the astronauts will break the all-time human distance record from Earth. The crew of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission set this record at 00:21 UTC on April 15, 1970 (7:21 p.m. EST on April 14, 1970). At that moment, Apollo 13 was approximately 248,655 miles (400,171 km) away from Earth’s surface.
Exciting!
After launching on April 1, 2026, the Artemis 2 mission has already passed the halfway point between the Earth and moon. It will enter the sphere of the moon’s gravitational influence — where lunar gravity begins affecting it more than earthly gravity — today, Sunday, April 5, 2026, aka Flight Day 5. Tomorrow, April 6, Flight Day 6, the 4-person crew will perform its closest flyby to the moon. The brave astronauts will pass approximately 4,600 miles (7,400 km) above the lunar surface.
During this loop around the moon’s far side, the astronauts will break the all-time human distance record from Earth. The crew of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission set this record at 00:21 UTC on April 15, 1970 (7:21 p.m. EST on April 14, 1970). At that moment, Apollo 13 was approximately 248,655 miles (400,171 km) away from Earth’s surface.
Exciting!
King Charles III England Coast Path
The King Charles III England Coast Path (KCIIIECP), originally and still commonly known as the England Coast Path, is a long-distance National Trail that follows the coastline of England. Opened on 19 March 2026 by King Charles III, the trail extends for 2,689 miles (4,328 km).
Sections of the English coast already had established walking routes, most notably the South West Coast Path. However, the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 required Natural England, under section 298, to create a continuous coastal path. The first section, along Weymouth Bay, opened in 2012. The walking route is the longest coastal trail in the world, and its total length increases further when considered alongside the Wales Coast Path.
Those of you who live in or visit the United Kingdom may wish to explore this amenity.
The King Charles III England Coast Path (KCIIIECP), originally and still commonly known as the England Coast Path, is a long-distance National Trail that follows the coastline of England. Opened on 19 March 2026 by King Charles III, the trail extends for 2,689 miles (4,328 km).
Sections of the English coast already had established walking routes, most notably the South West Coast Path. However, the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 required Natural England, under section 298, to create a continuous coastal path. The first section, along Weymouth Bay, opened in 2012. The walking route is the longest coastal trail in the world, and its total length increases further when considered alongside the Wales Coast Path.
Those of you who live in or visit the United Kingdom may wish to explore this amenity.
King Charles III England Coast Path
The King Charles III England Coast Path (KCIIIECP), originally and still commonly known as the England Coast Path, is a long-distance National Trail that follows the coastline of England. Opened on 19 March 2026 by King Charles III, the trail extends for 2,689 miles (4,328 km).
Sections of the English coast already had established walking routes, most notably the South West Coast Path. However, the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 required Natural England, under section 298, to create a continuous coastal path. The first section, along Weymouth Bay, opened in 2012. The walking route is the longest coastal trail in the world, and its total length increases further when considered alongside the Wales Coast Path.
Those of you who live in or visit the United Kingdom may wish to explore this amenity.
The King Charles III England Coast Path (KCIIIECP), originally and still commonly known as the England Coast Path, is a long-distance National Trail that follows the coastline of England. Opened on 19 March 2026 by King Charles III, the trail extends for 2,689 miles (4,328 km).
Sections of the English coast already had established walking routes, most notably the South West Coast Path. However, the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 required Natural England, under section 298, to create a continuous coastal path. The first section, along Weymouth Bay, opened in 2012. The walking route is the longest coastal trail in the world, and its total length increases further when considered alongside the Wales Coast Path.
Those of you who live in or visit the United Kingdom may wish to explore this amenity.
How is the writing going today?
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3
Today I
View Answers
wrote
2 (66.7%)
edited
1 (33.3%)
posted
0 (0.0%)
sent to beta
0 (0.0%)
researched
1 (33.3%)
planned
0 (0.0%)
had a break
1 (33.3%)
dealt with life
1 (33.3%)
After much low-key drama (original ortho referral to UCSF got hooked in with my nutritionist, who also happens to be in ortho but not for this) I got another referral and will be seeing ortho on this side of the Bay. I start with the P.A. and there's probably going to be more imaging, most likely an MRI which means I need to take my nose stud out. JFC, that's going to be a thing but whatever. In any case, back stuff is moving along.
Went out for a walk this morning without my walking poles for the first time and things are feeling a lot better. Only did an easy 30 minutes so as not to aggravate anything but overall, it felt good. I know the surrounding neighborhoods pretty well so I can easily eke out a route that doesn't have a lot of people around while I am having big feelings about my body.
Went out for a walk this morning without my walking poles for the first time and things are feeling a lot better. Only did an easy 30 minutes so as not to aggravate anything but overall, it felt good. I know the surrounding neighborhoods pretty well so I can easily eke out a route that doesn't have a lot of people around while I am having big feelings about my body.
Saturdays I am part of a group working through "The Artist's Way." Participants have ebbed and flowed through according to our various schedules but the time working on it has been valuable. There's definitely some class issues embedded in it which are much more evident to me now as opposed to when the book came out in the 90s, especially when we're talking about time, being able to make space within your current situation. However, it's been useful to do this and meeting new folks is always fun.
Have a quilt or two I want to start. Mostly just have to cut things and prep and get on it. Also have to start a wedding quilt for the godson. After I do one the first one that's scratching my brain, I'll start on the one for the wedding. The wedding is in October but I know me and how I work/not work with time. I already have the fabric so it's just a matter of getting started.
Our sportsgay transformation continues. Baseball is incoming. We went to the second exhibition game between the Oakland Ballers and the San Jose Giants in San Jose. Got to see our baseball friends and enjoy a mostly dry game. Shirley and I came prepared for rain and there was a bit of a drizzle but nothing too bad. Our team got waxed but we all still had a good time anyway. The Ballers were able to get the original Battle of the Bay trophy from NBC Sports and the original artist refashioned it to reflect that it is now the San Jose Giants vs. the Ballers instead of the SF Giants and the (formerly) Oakland As. The Ballers' season opener is May 19 so not too long now.
and with three unnecessary modifiers.
What about the three Marcuses. Are there three Marcuses? If so you have one of the Forbidden Texts.
- And I, Claudius, generated all of them!
-- Et tu, Claude?
All the
fail_fandomanon Rules and Information (and Ban Requests): https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/1076.html. The short version: no embeds, don't out people's real names, don't be that much of an asshole, body fluids are off topic, Mods reserve the right to freeze, screen, and delete the fuck out of stuff. FFA discussion covers a wide variety of topics and has a very flexible view of 'fandom' that includes politics, current events, and cooking techniques. FFA is a Choose NOT to Warn experience. Meme away.Other posts on meme:
- Personal Issues, Off Topic Conversation, Religion, & Everything Else post (PP #32)
- Fic and WIP Post
- Book Clubs, Watchalongs, & Readalongs
- Prompt & fill fests: for FFA Post #1000, FFA's 10th anniversary, FFA Post #1500, & FFA Post #2000
Search
- Unofficial FFA archive & search: Dememe.info Username/password pairs are nonnie/pony, nonny/seal, or ayrt/velociraptor. As of 2025, Dememe is geoblocked for the UK.
- If you have a DW account, you can use DW's content search. Don't forget to tick the box to search in comments. You can also use FFA Rocks.
Related communities and additional resources
- New unofficial FFA wiki (archive: ffawiki_backup)
- New unofficial FFA Writers Tips & Recs wiki
- Unofficial Fyeah FFA tumblr
- Unofficial FFA recs list
- Unofficial FFA Discord Chat
- DW Blocker link & tips and now New! 2024 Updated DW Blocker Guide
- How to link to another account on DW or other sites. If you don't want to create a clickable link, type a backslash (\) before the @.
Meme rules do not require spoiler cuts. But here are two ways to make them:
| HTML-5 (recommended) | |
Demo:spoiler titleSome spoilery content. |
|
| Alternative for inline spoiler-cuts - details here | |
| Demo: spoiler title Some spoilery content. |
|
If you would like to be banned to avoid anonfailing, please leave a logged-in comment at the rules post. It will be automatically screened.
Next post: will open when this posts hits 5000
Previous post: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729511.html#comments
Regular view - First page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html#comments
Regular view - Last page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html?page=999#comments
Top Level view - First page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html?view=top-only#comments
Top Level view - Last page: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html?view=top-only&page=999#comments
Flat view - First Comment: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html?view=flat#comments
Flat view - Most Recent: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/729698.html?view=flat&page=999#comments
Dememe flatview emulator is at https://dememe.info/flat_view (same login as the regular Dememe info above).
These topics are banned:
- 'Which topics belong on main meme'
- the game Hogwarts Legacy
- discussion about current events in Israel and Palestine
- US Politics
Only one clearly named top-level thread for each of the following topics:
- Disruptive and Provocative Opinions (DAPO)
- sexual abuse and rape culture
- UK Politics
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine and related current events
I should probably have sat down to write this earlier this morning, but I had another job to apply for and some appointment/interview one-car family shinanigans to untangle for tomorrow. I will see what I can remember.
I headed off to the convention hotel early on Sunday morning because I wanted to meet up with a friend with whom I played a multi-player journaling RPG called "The Machine." I was the first person to write the entries and so I had not seen how the story ended. I hung out with them in the Bozo Bus Tribune office, read the journal. I agreed to take it with me in the hopes that maybe we could find a fourth player to pass it on to as there was room in the diary, and... I literally, JUST NOW, realized I lost the journal somehwere at the con!
What is spooky about this?
The RPG actually suggests that you consider leaving the journal somewhere for others to find. Apparently, without intending to, I followed the rules.
Weird.
Anyway, I had one panel on Sunday, a panel I was dreading because not only was I moderating, but also it did not seem like something we could talk about for an hour. That is "The Second Book." As I was telling a lot of people I ran into before the panel, the problem I had was that for a lot of professionally published authors the answer to the questions posed as part of the panel description, like, "How do you know if you have a second book's worth of story?" and "When do you decide to write a sequel?" is often, "When the publisher tells me they're going to buy it." Which is kind of a bummer of an answer? Like, we *could* have had a "welcome to the cold hard truths about publishing" panel, but I did not think that was what Minicon intended for this discussion. Plus, half the panelists were self- or small press published. Clearly, they likely had different answers to the questions--fun answers! Interesting answers!
I think the panel went okay? I did try to strike a balance.
It's often hard to tell how the panel is going when you're the person moderating because, while your fellow panelists are talking, you're trying to listen for things in what they are saying to build on, while also trying to gauge the audience's interest level and making sure all the panelists who seem keen to jump in or add on or otherwise have a chance to speak get an opportunity to do so (and, of course, making sure that folks who aren't good at jumping in still have a chance to talk, if they want.) It's a lot of mental gymnastics. A job that I don't make easier for myself by preparing for. I prepare? I sometimes bring questions I don't want to forget to ask, but sometimes I show up with nothing. Not because I'm not ready to lead the discussion or ask questions, but because I really prefer, when possible, to have a dynamic, on the fly conversation among the panelists. So I just say that up front on any panel I'm moderating, ie, "I hope we can have a conversation," and then I also I encourage people to jump in when they have a thought. It can be more difficult to manage, but it tends to make for a livelier panel than those that just pose a question and go down the line to get answers from panelists 1, 2, 3, ... At least, IMHO, which, let's be honest is probably not all that humble if I'm the sort of asshole who shows up without notes. *grins*
This was a tough one though, because, as I mentioned, the answers really do depend on how you're publishing. I wrote a second book the series because my agent sold a three book contract after he sold my first novel. That was the entirity of my thought process on the matter. But, we did pull out more creative answers and we talked a bit about the "new" (it's several decades old by now) trend to have a first book just end in the middle of the adventure because the PRESUMPTION is that there will be a follow-up book that will simply pick up where the story left off. I hate these? I feel like a book should have a beginning midddle and end. I wrote my series with a larger plot also happening that built-up as the story continued, but each book can stand alone. This is really not been the done thing for some time, and it can bite an author in the butt. I got to the end of Marguette Reed's book Archangel and literally thought that I had a faulty copy as it seemed to end mid-scene. There has not been a second book to my knowledge.
And, I mean, I am currently struggling to write the sequel to Welcome to Boy. Net so there's that.
Anyway, I ended the con by helping a friend jump her car. As I told a different friend later, I do believe that it is my solemn duty as a butch lesbian not only to always offer to aid any damsel in distress, but ESPECIALLY if the trouble is car related. They might pull my butch card if I don't!
I'd forgotten to mention that one set of folks that I ran into was Paula R. B. and Erik B. Paula has been knitting Norwegian Resistance hats and asked me if I wanted one made for me. Of course, I said yes. I feel, in fact, that the only properly magical way to get one of these hats is if someone knits one for you (or you knit one for yourself.) I did not expect that she would be able to finish an entire hat in one day, but she did. By the time I was leaving the con, she handed one to me!! I have not yet taken a proper selfie in it, but I will do that ASAP and post it here.
I headed off to the convention hotel early on Sunday morning because I wanted to meet up with a friend with whom I played a multi-player journaling RPG called "The Machine." I was the first person to write the entries and so I had not seen how the story ended. I hung out with them in the Bozo Bus Tribune office, read the journal. I agreed to take it with me in the hopes that maybe we could find a fourth player to pass it on to as there was room in the diary, and... I literally, JUST NOW, realized I lost the journal somehwere at the con!
What is spooky about this?
The RPG actually suggests that you consider leaving the journal somewhere for others to find. Apparently, without intending to, I followed the rules.
Weird.
Anyway, I had one panel on Sunday, a panel I was dreading because not only was I moderating, but also it did not seem like something we could talk about for an hour. That is "The Second Book." As I was telling a lot of people I ran into before the panel, the problem I had was that for a lot of professionally published authors the answer to the questions posed as part of the panel description, like, "How do you know if you have a second book's worth of story?" and "When do you decide to write a sequel?" is often, "When the publisher tells me they're going to buy it." Which is kind of a bummer of an answer? Like, we *could* have had a "welcome to the cold hard truths about publishing" panel, but I did not think that was what Minicon intended for this discussion. Plus, half the panelists were self- or small press published. Clearly, they likely had different answers to the questions--fun answers! Interesting answers!
I think the panel went okay? I did try to strike a balance.
It's often hard to tell how the panel is going when you're the person moderating because, while your fellow panelists are talking, you're trying to listen for things in what they are saying to build on, while also trying to gauge the audience's interest level and making sure all the panelists who seem keen to jump in or add on or otherwise have a chance to speak get an opportunity to do so (and, of course, making sure that folks who aren't good at jumping in still have a chance to talk, if they want.) It's a lot of mental gymnastics. A job that I don't make easier for myself by preparing for. I prepare? I sometimes bring questions I don't want to forget to ask, but sometimes I show up with nothing. Not because I'm not ready to lead the discussion or ask questions, but because I really prefer, when possible, to have a dynamic, on the fly conversation among the panelists. So I just say that up front on any panel I'm moderating, ie, "I hope we can have a conversation," and then I also I encourage people to jump in when they have a thought. It can be more difficult to manage, but it tends to make for a livelier panel than those that just pose a question and go down the line to get answers from panelists 1, 2, 3, ... At least, IMHO, which, let's be honest is probably not all that humble if I'm the sort of asshole who shows up without notes. *grins*
This was a tough one though, because, as I mentioned, the answers really do depend on how you're publishing. I wrote a second book the series because my agent sold a three book contract after he sold my first novel. That was the entirity of my thought process on the matter. But, we did pull out more creative answers and we talked a bit about the "new" (it's several decades old by now) trend to have a first book just end in the middle of the adventure because the PRESUMPTION is that there will be a follow-up book that will simply pick up where the story left off. I hate these? I feel like a book should have a beginning midddle and end. I wrote my series with a larger plot also happening that built-up as the story continued, but each book can stand alone. This is really not been the done thing for some time, and it can bite an author in the butt. I got to the end of Marguette Reed's book Archangel and literally thought that I had a faulty copy as it seemed to end mid-scene. There has not been a second book to my knowledge.
And, I mean, I am currently struggling to write the sequel to Welcome to Boy. Net so there's that.
Anyway, I ended the con by helping a friend jump her car. As I told a different friend later, I do believe that it is my solemn duty as a butch lesbian not only to always offer to aid any damsel in distress, but ESPECIALLY if the trouble is car related. They might pull my butch card if I don't!
I'd forgotten to mention that one set of folks that I ran into was Paula R. B. and Erik B. Paula has been knitting Norwegian Resistance hats and asked me if I wanted one made for me. Of course, I said yes. I feel, in fact, that the only properly magical way to get one of these hats is if someone knits one for you (or you knit one for yourself.) I did not expect that she would be able to finish an entire hat in one day, but she did. By the time I was leaving the con, she handed one to me!! I have not yet taken a proper selfie in it, but I will do that ASAP and post it here.
We made it through the Triduum! Actually, in some ways I felt like this year was less stressful than it often is; somehow I just... wasn't as worried about things going wrong. I knew we would cope if they did. And, in fact, nothing really did go wrong, although as ever I have notes for next year. Between that and the free time I did manage to find (taking Maundy Thursday off work so that I have the day free before the service in the evening is the best idea, and I desperately needed that break this year) I have bounced back pretty well already. Although Fr A decided that we were going to kneel down between every single intercession on Good Friday, and my thighs were so stiff the next day! I felt very feeble for it, but also, ow.
Yesterday was family Easter, which is always nice but a bit exhausting just from the sheer volume of people (we had thirteen for dinner this year) (didn't seem unlucky though!). But today I slept in, refused to shower or get dressed, and ended up with enough energy to do the first couple of rounds of moving things back to where they ought to be after several days of dumping bags and pocket contents and so on on the nearest service; the desperately overdue washing up (I've not been home for many meals, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it wasn't great!); and, unexpectedly, even some of the "I must at some point" tasks.
I washed the net curtains in my bedroom - turns out they're actually white, who knew. They were already up when I moved in here and I haven't taken them down since, so it really was time. I hung them straight back up as the best drying option - it was a lovely fresh day, bizarrely for a bank holiday. I still need to do the spare room net curtains; maybe tomorrow. And I've added a reminder to my to-do list to wash them once a year, although I have no idea whether that's a reasonable length of time... anyone have any opinions?
And I did three of my sewing projects pile - I've had a t-shirt and a hoodie sitting on the blanket chest for at least six months, and I tore the pocket of my new hoodie slightly on Saturday, as well as bringing my horrible sweaty alb home from church to wash again, with the fraying sleeve I meant to fix last time. So the two hoodies and the alb sleeve were all hand-stitching projects and are now done; the alb hem and the t-shirt need the sewing machine really, and I have hopes for tomorrow on that. I'm so bad at sewing, but none of these are really visible and they're better than they were before I started, so that will have to do.
My reading took up most of the rest of the day; I finished the initial ebook collection I'd made on Thursday, and made a new one with 23 books in it which I am very much enjoying working on.
Yesterday was family Easter, which is always nice but a bit exhausting just from the sheer volume of people (we had thirteen for dinner this year) (didn't seem unlucky though!). But today I slept in, refused to shower or get dressed, and ended up with enough energy to do the first couple of rounds of moving things back to where they ought to be after several days of dumping bags and pocket contents and so on on the nearest service; the desperately overdue washing up (I've not been home for many meals, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it wasn't great!); and, unexpectedly, even some of the "I must at some point" tasks.
I washed the net curtains in my bedroom - turns out they're actually white, who knew. They were already up when I moved in here and I haven't taken them down since, so it really was time. I hung them straight back up as the best drying option - it was a lovely fresh day, bizarrely for a bank holiday. I still need to do the spare room net curtains; maybe tomorrow. And I've added a reminder to my to-do list to wash them once a year, although I have no idea whether that's a reasonable length of time... anyone have any opinions?
And I did three of my sewing projects pile - I've had a t-shirt and a hoodie sitting on the blanket chest for at least six months, and I tore the pocket of my new hoodie slightly on Saturday, as well as bringing my horrible sweaty alb home from church to wash again, with the fraying sleeve I meant to fix last time. So the two hoodies and the alb sleeve were all hand-stitching projects and are now done; the alb hem and the t-shirt need the sewing machine really, and I have hopes for tomorrow on that. I'm so bad at sewing, but none of these are really visible and they're better than they were before I started, so that will have to do.
My reading took up most of the rest of the day; I finished the initial ebook collection I'd made on Thursday, and made a new one with 23 books in it which I am very much enjoying working on.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
~2000 years later, this is still 100% timely. That's a depressing observation regarding humanity's potential for progress ... or lack thereof.
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
~2000 years later, this is still 100% timely. That's a depressing observation regarding humanity's potential for progress ... or lack thereof.
In case you haven't been encountering the links elsewhere, I'm now up to 10 (of 16) segments of my essay "The Theory of Related-ivity: A History and Analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo Category." (You can start here. Each individual segment has a link to the next--up through everything currently posted. https://alpennia.com/blog/theory-related-ivity-segment-i)
In theory, the individual segments should be showing up on the RSS feed of my blog here on Dreamwidth, but there's a glitch whereby the RSS feed pays attention to the date when the blog was originally created, not the date when it goes live. So anything I've set up well in advance (like this series) never shows up at all.
Once the whole thing has been published online, I'll be doing some revisions based on feedback and then releasing the work in ebook form. Haven't decided if I'll offer it for free or set a nominal price. I don't want to create friction for people who want to read it, but on the other hand there's the phenomenon that people don't take seriously what they can get for free. There will also be a hard copy version available at that point (obviously for a reasonable price).
In theory, the individual segments should be showing up on the RSS feed of my blog here on Dreamwidth, but there's a glitch whereby the RSS feed pays attention to the date when the blog was originally created, not the date when it goes live. So anything I've set up well in advance (like this series) never shows up at all.
Once the whole thing has been published online, I'll be doing some revisions based on feedback and then releasing the work in ebook form. Haven't decided if I'll offer it for free or set a nominal price. I don't want to create friction for people who want to read it, but on the other hand there's the phenomenon that people don't take seriously what they can get for free. There will also be a hard copy version available at that point (obviously for a reasonable price).
Easter Monday. I slept pretty badly (repeatedly waking, and not taking ibuprofen when I first woke with a headache; I've absorbed the notion of "if possible, don't take ibuprofen if you're going to be lying down right afterward" and this tends to result in this exact situation of "wake up in the night with headache, tell self you'll go back to sleep and it'll go away [which never works], wake again later with no reduction in headache, take ibuprofen when about to lie back down anyway").
I had slightly larger, albeit still small, ambitions for today prior to the bad sleep, but we ventured out briefly on an unsuccessful quest for scones (we verified the shop was open and I even called ahead to try to make sure they had scones, but I got voicemail and no one returned my call, so we gambled and lost). Ah well.
( all the rest is various food talk [with a bit about eating + blood glucose aggravation] )
I had slightly larger, albeit still small, ambitions for today prior to the bad sleep, but we ventured out briefly on an unsuccessful quest for scones (we verified the shop was open and I even called ahead to try to make sure they had scones, but I got voicemail and no one returned my call, so we gambled and lost). Ah well.
( all the rest is various food talk [with a bit about eating + blood glucose aggravation] )
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
NOTE: This is a living document and will be updated in response to changes and new types of spam as observed by OTW volunteers.
LAST UPDATED: March 30, 2026
As AO3 continues to grow, there has been an increase in the amount and variety of spambots that attempt to harass or scam users. Spambots may try to imitate other users and even AO3/OTW volunteers to appear more realistic. This post shares a brief update on how we’re working to combat this issue, what types of spam we’ve seen, and what you can do if you encounter spam comments on AO3.
What We’re Doing
Protecting our users from scammers and bots targeting AO3 is important to us, and we are actively working to combat spam on the site in a variety of ways—both visible and not. We will not share a detailed list of every change we’ve made (so as to not provide spammers with information about how to circumvent these measures), but some examples include introducing comment rate limits for logged-in users, changing the default comment setting on new works to “Registered users only”, spam checking comments and comment edits from new users, and making a variety of improvements to the admin tools used by our Policy & Abuse volunteers to handle reports and remove spam comments.
We continue to consider and undertake additional technical changes to help prevent and improve our response to spambots. However, it is important to us that any anti-spam measures we implement do not substantially harm users who are browsing or attempting to comment normally. Many more aggressive anti-spam measures would make AO3 less accessible, particularly for users using assistive devices such as screen readers.
In addition to taking technical steps to help address the issues, we continue to post updates about spambots and other important changes to AO3 on our Tumblr, Bluesky, and Twitter/X. We encourage you to follow us on these platforms to stay informed about what’s going on.
Types of Spam Comments
Below is a list of different types of spam comments that have been posted on AO3 over the last year. We intend to maintain this list and add new types of spam to it as they are identified; however, this list may not include every type of spam comment that could possibly be received. We encourage you to remain vigilant and follow internet safety best practices.
If you’re not sure if something is a spam comment, you’re welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Before doing so, we encourage you to click through the links below to learn more about each type of comment and use your best judgement to determine if a comment appears to be genuine or could be a scam.
- Art Commission Spam: These comments come from both guests and registered accounts who pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for your fanfic. They may ask questions or praise your work to try and get you to reply to them, before convincing you to contact them off AO3 (often via Discord). They will try to scam you into paying for their art, which is either AI-generated or does not exist at all. (First reported August 2024, news post published December 2024)
- Deprecated Fandoms Spam: These guest comments claim that AO3 will be “deleting works to conserve server space”. There is no such thing as a deprecated fandom and there is no limit on the number of fanworks that can be posted to a specific tag. (First reported May 2025, Tumblr announcement May 2025)
- AI Use Accusation Spam: These guest comments will accuse you of using AI in your work. They may mention a particular AI generator or AI detection service, or claim that they “saw you remove the AI prompts from your work”. (First reported April 2023, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
- Harassing Spam: These guest comments will accuse you or another user of promoting discriminatory beliefs, deceiving fans, or similar behaviors. They often suggest that you “consider adding more diverse characters” to “repair the trust you’ve lost with your audience”. (First reported October 2025, Tumblr announcement November 2025)
- Praise and Unsolicited Suggestions Spam: These guest comments will compliment your writing but then offer ridiculous suggestions for how to make your work better. Similar to the harassing spam, they may ask you to add a minority character to your work or threaten to publicly expose you if you don’t do what they want. (First reported October 2025)
- Special Character/Keysmash Spam: These comments are usually long and consist entirely of emojis or nonsense, keysmash-style sequences of characters from a variety of non-Latin scripts or languages (e.g., Chinese, Cyrillic, Thai, etc). (First reported November 2025)
- Reporting To Authorities Spam: These guest comments threaten to report you or your work to the authorities or your employers. They also may allege security concerns like your email being compromised or spyware on your computer. (First reported December 2025, Tumblr announcement December 2025)
- Disparaging Spam: These guest comments insult you or your writing, claiming that you “wasted your talents” or “have no life”. They may also threaten suicide or tell you to delete your work. (First reported December 2025)
- PowerShell Spam: These comments present you with a piece of code to enter into your computer’s terminal/command line. While they claim that the purpose of the code is for your protection or security, the code in these comments would actually delete all documents from your hard drive. (First reported January 2026)
- Doxxing Threat Spam: These guest comments claim that they know where you live, have seen you in person, and/or threaten to meet you face-to-face. They often say that they have or will post your personal information (name, address, etc.) online or that they are stalking you in real life (e.g. “left a gift in a briefcase near your house”). (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement January 2026)
- Spam Impersonating OTW Volunteers: These guest comments claim to be AO3/OTW volunteers and say that there has been a data breach or that AO3 and other sites (such as Reddit) have been sending out fraudulent password reset emails. (First reported January 2026, Tumblr announcement February 2026)
- Downtime Spam: These guest comments claim that the March 2026 AO3 downtime was caused by hackers and AO3 has a virus that will destroy your device, and encourage reformatting your device or deleting all your works. (First reported March 2026)
None of the accusations these spam comments make are true. The bots are merely spamming false accusations in order to alarm or harass AO3 users. It is generally safe to ignore these comments once you’ve removed and/or reported them as outlined below.
What You Can Do
Do not engage in conversation with spam commenters. Do not provide your email or social media contact information to a commenter who asks for it. Scammers try to get you to talk to them privately, because it is often easier to deceive or manipulate people in a one-on-one conversation.
Do not click on any links, run any code commands on your computer, or search out and harass any users named in these comments. Scammers often copy the username of a real AO3 user on their guest comments to make them look more real. Pay attention to the “(Guest)” indicator which will appear next to the name of anyone who comments while not logged in.
For spam comments on your own work, the best way to handle them depends on whether they are from registered accounts or guests. Refer to the instructions below on how to handle Spam from a Guest User or Spam from a Registered Account.
If you see a spambot comment on someone else’s work, you can report the comment as spam to Policy & Abuse (even if it’s a guest comment) as you would a comment on your own work. You can also let the creator know the comment is from a bot and that they should mark it as spam.
Please don’t report comments that have already been deleted. As part of handling a report about spam comments (whether from guests or registered accounts), we will remove other comments made by the same bot. If the comments have been deleted, the bot has already been actioned and no further reports are needed.
Spam from a Guest User
If you receive a spambot comment on your work which is posted by a guest:
- Go directly to the comment on your work, either by clicking on the link in your email or in your AO3 inbox.
Note: The “Spam” button only appears when viewing a guest comment directly on your work. This is because the AO3 comment inbox is merely a copy of the work’s comments—deleting a comment from your AO3 inbox does not delete the comment from the work itself.
- Click on the “Spam” button to mark the guest comment as spam, remove it from your work, and help train our automated spam-checker to reject similar spam comments in the future.
Note: Marking guest comments as spam does not submit a report to the Policy & Abuse committee, but unless you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, there is no need to submit a separate report.
To prevent future guest spam comments, you may also want to consider disabling anonymous commenting or restricting your work to registered users only.
If you are reporting multiple guest comments, please submit only one report and include all comment links in your report description. (You can get the direct link to a specific comment by selecting the “Thread” button on the comment and copying the URL of that page.)
If you are receiving dozens of guest spam comments in a short time period, we recommend turning on comment moderation and providing us with a link to the unreviewed comments section of the affected work(s) instead of reporting the comments individually.
Spam from a Registered Account
If the spam comment is posted by a registered AO3 account:
- Select the “Thread” button on the spam comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.
- In the “Brief summary of Terms of Service violation” field, enter “Spambot”.
- In the “Description of the content you are reporting” field, enter “This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME.” (replace USERNAME with the account’s actual username)
- Optionally, you may also choose to block or mute the account.
Please don’t report multiple spam accounts in one report. Each account is actioned separately and listing more than one account per report delays our response to you.
Closing
In general, please follow internet safety best practices and be cautious of unsolicited advertisements or harassing comments on your work. For some advice on other ways you can protect your AO3 account, take a look at this internet security guidance from our Policy & Abuse volunteers.
An all-new Runecairn Bundle presenting Runecairn, the one-on-one tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of Soulslike Viking fantasy from By Odin's Beard, along with the weird-West RPG We Deal in Lead.
Bundle of Holding: Runecairn
There are so few Easter books that I don’t usually bother with any special Easter reading, but I stumbled upon a couple while I was hunting down all those Christmas books for Picture Book Advent. So this Easter morning, I made a cup of the very fancy hot chocolate from Burdick’s (really should have bought more) and read my Easter books.
The first was Tasha Tudor’s A Tale for Easter, which is about a little girl’s Easter. It’s hard to remember when Easter is (so true), but when Mama makes hot cross buns for tea on Good Friday, you know it’s just around the corner… and that’s when you have your Easter dream of riding a fawn to meet baby bunnies and ducklings!
The second was Jan Brett’s The Easter Egg. Every Easter, all the bunnies make beautiful eggs, because the maker of the most gorgeous egg gets to ride with the Easter Bunny as he makes his rounds. There are dyed eggs that have been turned into flower pots, carved wooden eggs, luscious chocolate eggs, classic psyanki eggs, even a mechanical egg… An explosion of delicious detail that really plays to Brett’s strengths as an illustrator.
I was also completely charmed by the borders on this one. Each page is bordered with branches of pussy willow, which over the course of the book swell from tiny buds to full pussy willows - and then on the last page, each pussy willow bud is a tiny bunny! It’s subtle enough that most people won’t notice, but it’s just delightful when you see it.
The first was Tasha Tudor’s A Tale for Easter, which is about a little girl’s Easter. It’s hard to remember when Easter is (so true), but when Mama makes hot cross buns for tea on Good Friday, you know it’s just around the corner… and that’s when you have your Easter dream of riding a fawn to meet baby bunnies and ducklings!
The second was Jan Brett’s The Easter Egg. Every Easter, all the bunnies make beautiful eggs, because the maker of the most gorgeous egg gets to ride with the Easter Bunny as he makes his rounds. There are dyed eggs that have been turned into flower pots, carved wooden eggs, luscious chocolate eggs, classic psyanki eggs, even a mechanical egg… An explosion of delicious detail that really plays to Brett’s strengths as an illustrator.
I was also completely charmed by the borders on this one. Each page is bordered with branches of pussy willow, which over the course of the book swell from tiny buds to full pussy willows - and then on the last page, each pussy willow bud is a tiny bunny! It’s subtle enough that most people won’t notice, but it’s just delightful when you see it.
Sting - "Shape of My Heart" (Live)
I think this is the first Sting song I ever heard. Still sounds good.
I think this is the first Sting song I ever heard. Still sounds good.
Quote of the Day:
"Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion — that’s plot."
— Leigh Brackett
My Check-In:
A bit of work on the Neverending Project, and some poking at drabbles. The prompts are a lot of fun. But I'm out of practice!
Tally
( Days 1-4 )
Day 5:annavere, badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme
Day 6: china_shop
Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
"Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion — that’s plot."
— Leigh Brackett
My Check-In:
A bit of work on the Neverending Project, and some poking at drabbles. The prompts are a lot of fun. But I'm out of practice!
Tally
( Days 1-4 )
Day 5:
annavere, badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilmeDay 6: china_shop
Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
Today is sunny and cool.
I fed the birds. I haven't seen much activity yet.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I started raking part of the orchard so I can sow grass seed there.
I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did more raking in the orchard. There are a lot of dead branches that need to be removed.
I've seen the turkey vulture overhead again. I glimpsed a metallic green beetle, likely a tiger beetle.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I sowed grass seed over the raked portion of the orchard.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I started setting up where to plant the American plum.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I planted the American plum in the savanna. I mulched around it.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I planted the spicebush in the savanna and mulched around it. This concludes the batch of seedlings from Prairie Moon.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did some grass trimming in the savanna.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I sowed a scarlet runner bean under the large redbud tree in the savanna. This year I'm experimenting with growing legumes as living fertilizer.
The honeybees are very active, with a constant stream going in and out of the be tree.
I've seen a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did more work around the patio.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I gathered a trolley of branches from the orchard and dumped them in the firepit.
I am done for the night.
I fed the birds. I haven't seen much activity yet.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I started raking part of the orchard so I can sow grass seed there.
I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did more raking in the orchard. There are a lot of dead branches that need to be removed.
I've seen the turkey vulture overhead again. I glimpsed a metallic green beetle, likely a tiger beetle.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I sowed grass seed over the raked portion of the orchard.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I started setting up where to plant the American plum.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I planted the American plum in the savanna. I mulched around it.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I planted the spicebush in the savanna and mulched around it. This concludes the batch of seedlings from Prairie Moon.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did some grass trimming in the savanna.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I sowed a scarlet runner bean under the large redbud tree in the savanna. This year I'm experimenting with growing legumes as living fertilizer.
The honeybees are very active, with a constant stream going in and out of the be tree.
I've seen a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I did more work around the patio.
EDIT 4/6/26 -- I gathered a trolley of branches from the orchard and dumped them in the firepit.
I am done for the night.
Innovation Theater
The federal transportation funding model was designed in an era of large-scale capital expansion. That structure persists today. Projects compete within funding categories that prioritize new capital investment and visible transformation. Good stewardship — making what you have work better, doing more with less — is not rewarded.
The federal standards do a bad job of meeting people's needs, because they measure the wrong things. However, the article includes an example of a different way to measure what a bus system does...
( Read more... )
The federal transportation funding model was designed in an era of large-scale capital expansion. That structure persists today. Projects compete within funding categories that prioritize new capital investment and visible transformation. Good stewardship — making what you have work better, doing more with less — is not rewarded.
The federal standards do a bad job of meeting people's needs, because they measure the wrong things. However, the article includes an example of a different way to measure what a bus system does...
( Read more... )
A concatenation of things Relevant To My Research Interests (I guess), or, well, I feel I ought to keep up with this sort of thing....
Exiles of love?: uncovering lesbian voices in interwar Czechoslovakia, by someone I know, or at least, whose partner I know and whom I know by association.
Confining yet Convenient: Using Gender Norms to Defend Oneself in Cases of Rural Spousal Violence in Post-Independence Ireland: because that sort of thing could happen, using the system (see that book on 'economic divorce from deserting husbands' in late C19th England).
Review of Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster, which is again, about how the system allows of certain flexibilities.
***
How to piss off historians: Drought, Conflict and the Use of Historical Data and Methodologies in Interdisciplinary Palaeoclimatic Research:
Norman et al. argue that historical sources support their conclusions that drought contributed causally to the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367CE and to other late Roman conflicts. Although historians have developed rigorous methodologies for effective analysis and interpretation of surviving texts, the authors outline no methodologies for dealing with the textual evidence. Further, there are issues with the historical ‘conflict’ and numismatic datasets and with their interpretation.... the textual evidence discussed by Norman et al. does not, and cannot, support the authors’ assertions.
Swing that codfish!
***
Is this not lovely news? posthumous work by Vonda McIntyre forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in May
As well as a pub whose loss is to be mourned, there was a bus terminal plus petrol station/car wash thing on the corner. This was abandoned, then occupied by squatters, then reclaimed and finally demolished. Then Lidl applied for planning permission.
We have been waiting for our Lidl to appear.
This weekend diggers appeared on the site.
We have been waiting for our Lidl to appear.
This weekend diggers appeared on the site.
- Sci-Fi Author Andy Weir Has One Major Issue With The Star Trek Franchise. It's too political, he thinks, which is the dumbest thing I have ever heard about Star Trek, and makes me not want to read Weir's books.
- Church dismantles a huge pipe organ and finds an older history. St Mary's Church, Beverley had a bunch of medieval and Tudor carvings and window that were obscured by an organ. They sold the organ because they couldn't afford to repair it and now they've got access to a ton of history that was previously hidden.
- This Is the No. 1 Cheese in the World, According to the 2026 World Championship Cheese Contest. It's Beemster Royaal Grand Cru, a 12-month-aged Gouda from the Netherlands. Yum!
- Silver Screen Sleuths Noirvember: Witness (1985). I had never thought of Witness as a noir film, but this argument sold me on it.
- My Season of Ativan. Amanda Peet's essay about finding out she had breast cancer while both of her parents were in hospice. As a cancer survivor, I found it both heartwarming and disturbing, which is kind of par for the course with cancer.
- Dogs became man's best friend far earlier than thought, scientists find. 15,000 years ago!
- The Strange and Fascinating History of Dr. Kegel. There's more to him than the pelvic floor!
- What I Did For Love #2: Say it Out Loud. In which an older woman reconnects with the one who got away.
- That Bridge: How it took 20 years and Susan Morgan to reconstruct the Skillman Street and I-635 intersection. We moved here in 2018 and only recently has this intersection been completed. Good for her.
- 'It involved the Mafia, Freemasonry and the Vatican': The mysterious murder of 'God's Banker'. I remember this from when I was living in the UK. Never explained, really, and probably never will be.
- Netflix Already Has Two New ‘Peaky Blinders’ Series — and a New Duke Shelby. The least surprising news ever, but also spoilers for the film.
- What Does Extreme Wealth Do to the Brain? Interesting to the locals because Mark Cuban is on the record here.
- Doctors Couldn’t Help Them. They Rolled the Dice With A.I. If I were younger, this would be me. I'm too old to fall for chatbots, though. Doctor Google is hard enough to sift through.
- Exclusive: South Congress Hotel Will Be Replaced by a Splashy Boutique Brand. And this is how we lost Otoko.
- This Donut Chain Sells The Worst Glazed Donut (But It's Also One Of The Cheapest). It's Voodoo. Why yes, I already hated them, but thanks for letting me know I'm objectively right too.
I'm just coming to the end of a fantastic four-day weekend, and I'm not ready for it to be over. I never travel over the Easter weekend — it always comes at exactly the point in the year when I need a lot of rest and recovery — and so, other than day trips, I stick fairly close to home. My rule is that I go the furthest away on the Friday, and then stay progressively closer and closer as the four days continue, and I find that this works well.
This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.
On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.
Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.
Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.
You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.
I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.
Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.
Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.
Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?
Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.
This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.
On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.
Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.
Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.
You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.
I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.
Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.
Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.
Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?
Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.
Every year when spring comes I feel more sun-starved,
touch-starved, warmth-starved, petrified in my bones.
I go out and lift my face to the sunlight, sunshine, and
just for a moment, I feel it: the relief of still being here,
the joy of having a body
that needs, a mind that tethers
itself to whatever love it encounters. I walk
with my eyes closed, or squinting, arms by my sides, and
I feel my hands, bare to the sunrays, present again,
safe,
and alive,
for the first time
since October.
touch-starved, warmth-starved, petrified in my bones.
I go out and lift my face to the sunlight, sunshine, and
just for a moment, I feel it: the relief of still being here,
the joy of having a body
that needs, a mind that tethers
itself to whatever love it encounters. I walk
with my eyes closed, or squinting, arms by my sides, and
I feel my hands, bare to the sunrays, present again,
safe,
and alive,
for the first time
since October.
Revenge Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
The second movie comes out next month... The Devil Wears Prada 2: Maybe This One is Jewish?
I mean, scriptwriter Aline Brosh McKenna said in an interview a decade ago that she had wanted to make the first movie Jewish but in early 2000s Hollywood that was unthinkable. So maybe this time is different? lololol of course not.
Anyway in preparation, I checked out Weisberger's sequel, which is set 10 years after the first one and is even more subliminally Jewish because Andy has made herself even more subliminally Jewish. She has dumped her Jewish boyfriend Alex from the first book and marries Max, a WASP millionaire who went to Duke and Harvard Business school.
Andy is a culinary Jew and one of the quiet coded ways Weisberger suggests marrying Max is a mistake is with very subtle culinary signifiers. When she is hanging with Jewish BFF Lily they eat rugelach, when she is commiserating with her mother they talk about the Federation luncheon in the City. But her first date with Max is eating steamers. And when she is in Max's world there are shrimp and crabs galore. Weisberger never uses the word Jewish in Revenge Wears Prada, but at some deep inchoate level culinary Jews are still Jews. They feel the wrongness of the shrimp in their bones even as they eat them by the pound.
Max does step on a glass at their wedding, but it's buried in the middle of a paragraph that starts "The rest of the ceremony was a blur". It's a signifier that in marrying a non-Jew she is drifting further away from her authentic self.
They have a fight over an insistence that she change her last name from Sachs to Harrison upon marriage. She likes the idea of sharing a name with her husband, but Sachs *means* something to Andy in a way she cannot put words to. The final compromise is that she will change her name but continue to use Sachs professionally. Her body physically rebels against the idea of losing her Jewish name; her mind tells her she's being irrational but her body wins. Of course, Miranda waged the same battle decades earlier and rejected her Jewish name... the whole point of Revenge in the book's title is not quite Revenge, but it is a sort of repetition. Andy will once again get the opportunity to work for Miranda and she will have to decide if she is the same person she was a decade earlier, or if she has become a better, stronger, more moral person.
And in the end, her Jewishness wins. She divorces the WASP after he betrays her ambitions for his own (and she frames it in generational tribal terms: what Max has truly betrayed is Andy's ability to transmit her values to her daughter) and the final chapter is swathed in the signifiers of her return to the fold: all of the food of her grandmother's shiva, to start, as a hint that she is finally ready to return to Alex, her Jewish ex-boyfriend and true love.
The second movie comes out next month... The Devil Wears Prada 2: Maybe This One is Jewish?
I mean, scriptwriter Aline Brosh McKenna said in an interview a decade ago that she had wanted to make the first movie Jewish but in early 2000s Hollywood that was unthinkable. So maybe this time is different? lololol of course not.
Anyway in preparation, I checked out Weisberger's sequel, which is set 10 years after the first one and is even more subliminally Jewish because Andy has made herself even more subliminally Jewish. She has dumped her Jewish boyfriend Alex from the first book and marries Max, a WASP millionaire who went to Duke and Harvard Business school.
Andy is a culinary Jew and one of the quiet coded ways Weisberger suggests marrying Max is a mistake is with very subtle culinary signifiers. When she is hanging with Jewish BFF Lily they eat rugelach, when she is commiserating with her mother they talk about the Federation luncheon in the City. But her first date with Max is eating steamers. And when she is in Max's world there are shrimp and crabs galore. Weisberger never uses the word Jewish in Revenge Wears Prada, but at some deep inchoate level culinary Jews are still Jews. They feel the wrongness of the shrimp in their bones even as they eat them by the pound.
Max does step on a glass at their wedding, but it's buried in the middle of a paragraph that starts "The rest of the ceremony was a blur". It's a signifier that in marrying a non-Jew she is drifting further away from her authentic self.
They have a fight over an insistence that she change her last name from Sachs to Harrison upon marriage. She likes the idea of sharing a name with her husband, but Sachs *means* something to Andy in a way she cannot put words to. The final compromise is that she will change her name but continue to use Sachs professionally. Her body physically rebels against the idea of losing her Jewish name; her mind tells her she's being irrational but her body wins. Of course, Miranda waged the same battle decades earlier and rejected her Jewish name... the whole point of Revenge in the book's title is not quite Revenge, but it is a sort of repetition. Andy will once again get the opportunity to work for Miranda and she will have to decide if she is the same person she was a decade earlier, or if she has become a better, stronger, more moral person.
And in the end, her Jewishness wins. She divorces the WASP after he betrays her ambitions for his own (and she frames it in generational tribal terms: what Max has truly betrayed is Andy's ability to transmit her values to her daughter) and the final chapter is swathed in the signifiers of her return to the fold: all of the food of her grandmother's shiva, to start, as a hint that she is finally ready to return to Alex, her Jewish ex-boyfriend and true love.
Liaden Universe® InfoDump #138 (because there were two 136s)
In This Issue:
Liaden Universe® Constellation Volume 6
Kin Right Update
The State of the Contract
Fey Duology Re-issue
From the Mailbag
Convention Appearances
LIADEN UNIVERSE® CONSTELLATION VOLUME 6
Collecting eleven stories and one acceptance speech, the sixth constellation includes the following previously published stories: "Standing Orders,” “Gadreel’s Folly,” “The Last Train to Clarkesville,” “Wise Child,” “Songs of the Fathers,” “From Every Storm a Rainbow,” “Our Lady of Benevolence,” “Chimera,” “Neutral Ground,” “Mother’s Love,” and “Core Values,” plus a foreword from the author, original to this volume.
Kindle and trade paper editions will be published on May 5. There's no word yet regarding an audio edition.
Cover art by Sam Kennedy
KIN RIGHT
The twenty-eighth Liaden Universe® novel has been turned in. KIN RIGHT is the direct sequel to SALVAGE RIGHT (2023) and also to DIVINER'S BOW, as Shan crosses storylines to finally arrive at Korval's spacestation as directed by his delm, um, three books ago.
Baen has tentatively scheduled publication of this title for "Spring 2027," exact date to be determined.
THE STATE OF THE CONTRACT
There are two more Liaden novels under contract with Baen Books, now that KIN RIGHT has been turned in.
THE FEY DUOLOGY
The rights to DUAINFEY and LONYEYE returned to Lee and Miller several years ago, and it was the intention of the authors to let them lie. However, there have been recent requests that these two titles be made available, which is, among other considerations, A Teaching Moment. It's now my intention to re-issue DUAINFEY and LONGEYE as an e-omnibus, available through Baen and Smashwords. The books will be released as they were always intended to be released -- under a pseudonym -- and will include a introduction from Sharon Lee.
FROM THE MAILBAG
1 Why do we have to wait a WHOLE YEAR for KIN RIGHT?
Because that's how trad publishing works. Baen has other authors and other books in queue ahead of KIN RIGHT, which will be dealt with in its turn.
2 Will there be more Liaden books after this contract is fulfilled?
It's my intention to continue writing for as long as I am able to write and there are characters who want me to tell their stories. So, that's a "Yes, Goddess willing."
CONVENTION APPEARANCES
Sharon Lee does not plan to attend any conventions in 2026.
THE SMALL PRINT
Sites of Interest:
Lee and Miller Patreon Support Page
Pinbeam Books: an online catalog, with vendor links, to all Lee-and-Miller, Miller, and Lee self-published works
Splinter Universe: features outtakes, splinters, oddities from the Lee&Miller writing career, currently hosting the Liaden Read-Along
Welcome to Liad: The official homepage for Liaden Universe® news
Blogs and Other Webly Things of Note:
Sharon Lee’s Blog
Facebook Connections:
Steve Miller Memorial Page
BlueSky:
Sharon
Xitter:
Sharon
DISCLAIMER
This InfoDump is a product of the Liaden Universe®, accept no imitations. You have received this message because you asked for it. If you wish to subscribe to the Liaden Universe® email list, to unsubscribe from the Liaden Universe® email list, or to change your delivery email address, go here
US lower court judges are challenging Trump’s ‘war on the rule of law’, experts say
Impact of rulings by these judges has been sizable, slowing or halting some of the president’s most extreme policies
Peter Stone
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/06/trump-lower-court-judges-challenges
‘It started with a tipoff’: how a Guardian investigation exposed child sex trafficking on Facebook and Instagram
Meta has just lost a multimillion-dollar legal battle over its failure to prevent children being sold on its platforms. Here’s how we uncovered evidence that became part of the case against it
Katie McQue
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/06/investigation-exposed-child-sex-trafficking-on-facebook-and-instagram-meta ( Read more... )
Impact of rulings by these judges has been sizable, slowing or halting some of the president’s most extreme policies
Peter Stone
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/06/trump-lower-court-judges-challenges
‘It started with a tipoff’: how a Guardian investigation exposed child sex trafficking on Facebook and Instagram
Meta has just lost a multimillion-dollar legal battle over its failure to prevent children being sold on its platforms. Here’s how we uncovered evidence that became part of the case against it
Katie McQue
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/06/investigation-exposed-child-sex-trafficking-on-facebook-and-instagram-meta ( Read more... )
The regular weekly post for us to talk about any and all of our thoughts about the week's new releases.
Kickflip - Eye Poppin'
Kiss Of Life - Who Is She
AKMU - Joy, Sorrow, A Beautiful Heart
Young Posse - we don't go to bed tonight
Dayoung - What's a girl to do
Keyvitup - Legendary
hrtz.wav
Ampers&One - God
Rescene - Runaway
Hwasa - So Cute
Katseye - Pinky Up
New MVs are also added to an ongoing Youtube playlist.
Last week's MVs: 30 March
Feel free to add new comments in the replies for songs/MVs we missed.
[ Rec Something Wednesday | WIP Wednesday | Monthly General Chat | Comment Fest ]
Kickflip - Eye Poppin'
Kiss Of Life - Who Is She
AKMU - Joy, Sorrow, A Beautiful Heart
Young Posse - we don't go to bed tonight
Dayoung - What's a girl to do
Keyvitup - Legendary
hrtz.wav
Ampers&One - God
Rescene - Runaway
Hwasa - So Cute
Katseye - Pinky Up
New MVs are also added to an ongoing Youtube playlist.
Last week's MVs: 30 March
Feel free to add new comments in the replies for songs/MVs we missed.
Tell us: Do you have an unconventional living arrangement to bring down housing costs?
Are you a Baby Boomer leasing a room to a Gen Zer? A couple living with a friend? Part of a group that all went in on buying a house together? We want to hear from you.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/06/business/housing-massachusetts-living-arrangement/
Are you a Baby Boomer leasing a room to a Gen Zer? A couple living with a friend? Part of a group that all went in on buying a house together? We want to hear from you.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/06/business/housing-massachusetts-living-arrangement/
1. Still failing on the sleep front, but I keep hoping the next night will be better. We’ll see!
2. We had planned to go to Dotonbori this morning before heading over to Universal Studios, but were both worn out from yesterday’s sunburn and Carla was sore, so we decided to skip it for this trip and just rest in the morning before we needed to check out. There were some shops nearby that were on the list to check out (Muji and HMV), but they both didn’t open until 11, so we rested and then packed up and checked it and had the hotel hold our luggage. The Muji was a huge one that has a cafe, too, so that’s where we had lunch.
3. Another change in plans was that we were going to take the train to USJ, but with Carla being so exhausted the idea of lugging our bags on public transport was not appealing so we decided to just get a taxi. It was of course much more expensive than taking the train would have been (even though it’s only five miles away), but it was worth it.
4. The Front Gate Hotel here at USJ is way nicer in every way than the Hankyu Respire in Umeda was, even though it’s much cheaper. The Respire you’re definitely paying for the convenience of being in the heart of the city.
5. We got the 1.5 day tickets for USJ so we just went in for a few hours this afternoon/evening to explore the park. Could not get into Super Nintendo Land, but hopefully tomorrow.
2. We had planned to go to Dotonbori this morning before heading over to Universal Studios, but were both worn out from yesterday’s sunburn and Carla was sore, so we decided to skip it for this trip and just rest in the morning before we needed to check out. There were some shops nearby that were on the list to check out (Muji and HMV), but they both didn’t open until 11, so we rested and then packed up and checked it and had the hotel hold our luggage. The Muji was a huge one that has a cafe, too, so that’s where we had lunch.
3. Another change in plans was that we were going to take the train to USJ, but with Carla being so exhausted the idea of lugging our bags on public transport was not appealing so we decided to just get a taxi. It was of course much more expensive than taking the train would have been (even though it’s only five miles away), but it was worth it.
4. The Front Gate Hotel here at USJ is way nicer in every way than the Hankyu Respire in Umeda was, even though it’s much cheaper. The Respire you’re definitely paying for the convenience of being in the heart of the city.
5. We got the 1.5 day tickets for USJ so we just went in for a few hours this afternoon/evening to explore the park. Could not get into Super Nintendo Land, but hopefully tomorrow.
The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1889). This novel, co-written by RLS and his stepson, is a rather macabre comedy of errors and unfortunately I find that style of heavily misunderstanding-based humour and plotting stressful rather than funny, so I didn't enjoy it very much. (It also had me repeatedly thinking, surely that's as much contrived coincidence as you need to make the plot work?... No, evidently not, here's another one...) But on the level of sentences and dialogue it's very well-constructed and I admired that. As I noted of The Dynamiter (co-written by Fanny), it doesn't show obvious signs of having two different authors, and if the style and subject are rather different from RLS's other books it's not clear how much of that was due to Osbourne's style and how much was RLS varying things as he was wont to do.
They Were Defeated by Rose Macaulay (1932). I can remember the title of this book catching my eye years ago, but I didn't get round to reading it until I recently found a copy in a second-hand bookshop with a cover design immediately making clear that it's set in the 1640s in Cambridge. That sounds interesting, thought I, and the good thing about the Civil War is that you can call your book They Were Defeated without giving away which side you're writing about, because do you stop in 1649 or keep going to 1660? In fact it's more complicated than that: the book is set in 1640-41 and only reaches the actual war briefly in the epilogue, the title is not a straightforward reference to one side or the other and the average main character's viewpoint is that the Puritans in Parliament are worse than the King but the King is hardly worthy of ardent loyalty either. It is a strange book and has several aspects worth discussing, so I'll take it in points:
1) Macaulay really commits to the use of historical language in dialogue. She warns the reader of this in a prefaratory note and apologises for any inaccuracies; I don't know the period well enough to comment on how accurate it really is, but it's certainly believable and doesn't feel forced or unnatural. Occasionally there are letters written by the characters which—between unfamiliar language use and abbreviations and period-typical bad spelling—get genuinely difficult to read, and I say that while having some experience of reading seventeenth-century letters and diaries. I'm impressed.
2) Barbara Pym might have liked this book, because it has a lot of her seventeenth-century poets in it. The book is divided into three parts, each of which has a poetic epigraph whose author appears as a major character, with the most major being Robert Herrick. (Herrick's Wikipedia page notes that he wrote a lot of love poems addressed to women, but that he was a lifelong bachelor and it's generally supposed that these women were fictional; Macaulay conjectures that they were mostly fictional but one of them was real, while also giving a definite impression that Herrick is in love with the recently-deceased Ben Jonson.) Anyway, I'm not a huge poetry fan but it was an interesting aspect of history to see in a book.
3) More relevant to my interests was the discussion of contemporary theological and political controversies: it's very much a book set in the lead-up to the Civil War and the details of King and Parliament, Puritans and Papists and Arminians and Calvinists and what all the different factions are doing and arguing about and I found it all terribly interesting. For an author who's such a stickler for historical accuracy in language I did find the repeated mentions of witch-burning rather odd, and I wondered about the plausibility of one main character's openly-avowed atheism and absolute disbelief in the supernatural, especially its being regarded by the other characters as regrettable and embarrassing in one's friend/father/associate but no worse.
4) About three-quarters of the way through, the book (somewhat suddenly, but not without foreshadowing) plunges into one of the worst het romances I have ever encountered in fiction. Straight up on the shelf that contains Jamaica Inn, The Bostonians and that one Georgette Heyer book I tried to read before running away in horror. I am not known as the world's greatest fan of Lucy Honeychurch/George Emerson, but if I wanted a reminder that 'I want you to have your own thoughts, even when I hold you in my arms' really was a pretty good and important thing for someone's male love interest to say, I clearly only had to read this. Mitigating things slightly, this isn't a romance novel, there's plenty of other interesting stuff in the book and the author is partially (though certainly not fully or with good priorities) aware that it's not a good thing. Aggravating things quite a lot, the plotline is resolved through a ridiculous melodramatic ending.
So what do I make of it on the whole? I don't know. It's a weird one. A deeply flawed book that ultimately doesn't work in saying what it wants to say, but possibly worth reading for the stuff you get along the way.
Ashenden; Or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (1927). I recently bought an omnibus of some of Maugham's lesser-known novels, and also Of Human Bondage has been on my list of things I really ought to read for a little while, and so naturally I next decided to pick up a book that's neither Of Human Bondage nor in the omnibus. Ashenden is a collection of short stories about a writer who becomes a secret agent during the First World War, closely based on the author's own experiences doing the same thing. It opens with a preface in which Maugham explains and defends his fictionalisation process: real life, and especially the real life of a spy, doesn't have the neat plots, full explanations of what happened and nicely-tied-up loose ends desirable in fiction, so some editing is necessary. There follow a series of stories about Ashenden's time as a spy in Switzerland, Russia and elsewhere, which are remarkably lacking in nicely-tied-up loose ends, neat plots and full explanations of what happened given that introduction. I suppose they're still neater than the real events that inspired them, but the endings definitely incline towards ironic twists and abrupt revelations of inefficacy and sometimes of tragedy that leave a lot of questions unanswered. Thrilling and dramatic spy stories these are not; the general mood is of half-resigned, half-amused cynicism about both the humorous, absurd little details of the spy's life and the horrific larger events in which he takes part (and Ashenden is complicit in some pretty bad actions over the course of the book). It would make an interesting comparison with John le Carré later in the century, probably. I didn't find the prose as enjoyably precise as in Cakes and Ale, there are a lot of comma splices, which I don't particularly remember in that book.
They Were Defeated by Rose Macaulay (1932). I can remember the title of this book catching my eye years ago, but I didn't get round to reading it until I recently found a copy in a second-hand bookshop with a cover design immediately making clear that it's set in the 1640s in Cambridge. That sounds interesting, thought I, and the good thing about the Civil War is that you can call your book They Were Defeated without giving away which side you're writing about, because do you stop in 1649 or keep going to 1660? In fact it's more complicated than that: the book is set in 1640-41 and only reaches the actual war briefly in the epilogue, the title is not a straightforward reference to one side or the other and the average main character's viewpoint is that the Puritans in Parliament are worse than the King but the King is hardly worthy of ardent loyalty either. It is a strange book and has several aspects worth discussing, so I'll take it in points:
1) Macaulay really commits to the use of historical language in dialogue. She warns the reader of this in a prefaratory note and apologises for any inaccuracies; I don't know the period well enough to comment on how accurate it really is, but it's certainly believable and doesn't feel forced or unnatural. Occasionally there are letters written by the characters which—between unfamiliar language use and abbreviations and period-typical bad spelling—get genuinely difficult to read, and I say that while having some experience of reading seventeenth-century letters and diaries. I'm impressed.
2) Barbara Pym might have liked this book, because it has a lot of her seventeenth-century poets in it. The book is divided into three parts, each of which has a poetic epigraph whose author appears as a major character, with the most major being Robert Herrick. (Herrick's Wikipedia page notes that he wrote a lot of love poems addressed to women, but that he was a lifelong bachelor and it's generally supposed that these women were fictional; Macaulay conjectures that they were mostly fictional but one of them was real, while also giving a definite impression that Herrick is in love with the recently-deceased Ben Jonson.) Anyway, I'm not a huge poetry fan but it was an interesting aspect of history to see in a book.
3) More relevant to my interests was the discussion of contemporary theological and political controversies: it's very much a book set in the lead-up to the Civil War and the details of King and Parliament, Puritans and Papists and Arminians and Calvinists and what all the different factions are doing and arguing about and I found it all terribly interesting. For an author who's such a stickler for historical accuracy in language I did find the repeated mentions of witch-burning rather odd, and I wondered about the plausibility of one main character's openly-avowed atheism and absolute disbelief in the supernatural, especially its being regarded by the other characters as regrettable and embarrassing in one's friend/father/associate but no worse.
4) About three-quarters of the way through, the book (somewhat suddenly, but not without foreshadowing) plunges into one of the worst het romances I have ever encountered in fiction. Straight up on the shelf that contains Jamaica Inn, The Bostonians and that one Georgette Heyer book I tried to read before running away in horror. I am not known as the world's greatest fan of Lucy Honeychurch/George Emerson, but if I wanted a reminder that 'I want you to have your own thoughts, even when I hold you in my arms' really was a pretty good and important thing for someone's male love interest to say, I clearly only had to read this. Mitigating things slightly, this isn't a romance novel, there's plenty of other interesting stuff in the book and the author is partially (though certainly not fully or with good priorities) aware that it's not a good thing. Aggravating things quite a lot, the plotline is resolved through a ridiculous melodramatic ending.
So what do I make of it on the whole? I don't know. It's a weird one. A deeply flawed book that ultimately doesn't work in saying what it wants to say, but possibly worth reading for the stuff you get along the way.
Ashenden; Or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (1927). I recently bought an omnibus of some of Maugham's lesser-known novels, and also Of Human Bondage has been on my list of things I really ought to read for a little while, and so naturally I next decided to pick up a book that's neither Of Human Bondage nor in the omnibus. Ashenden is a collection of short stories about a writer who becomes a secret agent during the First World War, closely based on the author's own experiences doing the same thing. It opens with a preface in which Maugham explains and defends his fictionalisation process: real life, and especially the real life of a spy, doesn't have the neat plots, full explanations of what happened and nicely-tied-up loose ends desirable in fiction, so some editing is necessary. There follow a series of stories about Ashenden's time as a spy in Switzerland, Russia and elsewhere, which are remarkably lacking in nicely-tied-up loose ends, neat plots and full explanations of what happened given that introduction. I suppose they're still neater than the real events that inspired them, but the endings definitely incline towards ironic twists and abrupt revelations of inefficacy and sometimes of tragedy that leave a lot of questions unanswered. Thrilling and dramatic spy stories these are not; the general mood is of half-resigned, half-amused cynicism about both the humorous, absurd little details of the spy's life and the horrific larger events in which he takes part (and Ashenden is complicit in some pretty bad actions over the course of the book). It would make an interesting comparison with John le Carré later in the century, probably. I didn't find the prose as enjoyably precise as in Cakes and Ale, there are a lot of comma splices, which I don't particularly remember in that book.
Wu Lei | A Moment But Forever | Bridgerton
https://tinpix.de/2026/wulei_c7f8b.png
https://tinpix.de/2026/moment120_13.34.png
https://tinpix.de/2026/bridgerton401_me1a9vb1_o.png
These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Space Exploration
Climate Change
Birdfeeding
Fossils
Birdfeeding
National Native Plant Month
Social Media Design
Philosophical Questions: Miracles
Follow Friday 4-3-26: Marvel
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
History
Review: 12 Rivers
Community Thursdays
Website Updates
Cyberspace Theory
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Flower Fest Bingo Card 4-1-26
Birdfeeding
Earth Month
Books
Linguistics has 46 comments. Philosophical Questions: Pregnancy has 65 comments. Safety has 77 comments.
There will be a Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, April 7 with a theme of "I am SO done with this!"
It rained most of the past week, sometimes with howling wind. :/ Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, a male goldfinch, a male pheasant, a turkey vulture, and a fox squirrel. Red-winged blackbirds have been singing overhead. Leafing out: mayapple, Dutchman's breeches, trillium, yellow trout lily, Solomon's seal, lily of the valley. Currently blooming: daffodils, violets, grape hyacinths, tulips, cherry, anemone, leucojum, yellow violet. Some of the peonies have buds.
Space Exploration
Climate Change
Birdfeeding
Fossils
Birdfeeding
National Native Plant Month
Social Media Design
Philosophical Questions: Miracles
Follow Friday 4-3-26: Marvel
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
History
Review: 12 Rivers
Community Thursdays
Website Updates
Cyberspace Theory
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Flower Fest Bingo Card 4-1-26
Birdfeeding
Earth Month
Books
Linguistics has 46 comments. Philosophical Questions: Pregnancy has 65 comments. Safety has 77 comments.
There will be a Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, April 7 with a theme of "I am SO done with this!"
It rained most of the past week, sometimes with howling wind. :/ Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, a male goldfinch, a male pheasant, a turkey vulture, and a fox squirrel. Red-winged blackbirds have been singing overhead. Leafing out: mayapple, Dutchman's breeches, trillium, yellow trout lily, Solomon's seal, lily of the valley. Currently blooming: daffodils, violets, grape hyacinths, tulips, cherry, anemone, leucojum, yellow violet. Some of the peonies have buds.
A week of improving emotional weather, led by two or three major good things:
There's been some nice crossword puzzle progress. I met with my collaborator Z and finalized clues for a puzzle (thus finalizing it entirely) and we sent that in to the NYT, and at the same time we're most of the way to a final next grid, so we're going to have another soon. In the meantime, one that I was working on by myself suddenly filled really nicely. I'm still going to iterate on it, but now I'm absolutely certain it's worth submitting once it's done. Feels good to be generating puzzles again after a lull.
I went to Anime Con for a while (again, with squirrel) and it was a lot more sexualized than the science fiction cons tend to be. So many cartoon boobs. SO MANY. We had a good talk about how many women there seem surprisingly okay with the asymmetrical hypersexualized stuff, and it led me to think back about the arc of my own experience with The Male Gaze. There's a while when being able to pull that gaze around is new and fun and exciting. Then a while where one realizes that attracting people that way too much, too quickly, can kind of warp how they relate to the rest of you. Then a decade or two in the workforce, often trying quite hard to keep sexuality out of the picture while learning more than you wanted to about patriarchy, sexism and microaggressions. All in all... sure, I saw a lot of young women and enbies at Anime Con. But the 50-year-olds I saw there were almost entirely men.
The house is still leaking. I talked the bug into removing a square of drywall from our unit's wall in order to better see what's going on in the ledge technically outside our unit, and that paid off in that we were able to see some water running down a board. But at some point we'll have to fix a big hole in our wall.
Artemis II news is giving me life, in the context of the rest of the news. Lunar flyby tomorrow, bring it!
And hmm, it turns out that Walkabout Mini Golf on the VR headset is more fun than I would have expected? I have introduced the bug to this too.
- My Zillian stock sale went through, enabling a small and pre-planned shopping spree. In particular, I was waiting for this before purchasing a new sewing machine (a refurbished Janome Sewist 740dc) and DDR pads. Both of these should provide many hours (hopefully years) of use. I also ordered a new battery for my laptop, which is from late 2022 and which I don't feel like replacing yet.
- Spent an evening helping apfelsingail move into her new apartment, and the squirrel helped too. So satisfying on multiple levels! We got all the moving company's boxes unpacked.
- Circus training went well, overall. I've been confused at some of it going well and some of it going badly, but I had a really good talk with Tiny Person in which we figured out the pattern. What's happening isn't great -- I'm holding tension, and it's messing up my movements, so that anything requiring speed and momentum is a struggle while the things I can creep into slowly are going just fine. But it's good to have figured it out. I'm working on more flowing, swinging, circular motions and trying to let the tension go. In the meantime, on the slow side of things, I did my best-ever backbend press into forearm stand. So there was that.
There's been some nice crossword puzzle progress. I met with my collaborator Z and finalized clues for a puzzle (thus finalizing it entirely) and we sent that in to the NYT, and at the same time we're most of the way to a final next grid, so we're going to have another soon. In the meantime, one that I was working on by myself suddenly filled really nicely. I'm still going to iterate on it, but now I'm absolutely certain it's worth submitting once it's done. Feels good to be generating puzzles again after a lull.
I went to Anime Con for a while (again, with squirrel) and it was a lot more sexualized than the science fiction cons tend to be. So many cartoon boobs. SO MANY. We had a good talk about how many women there seem surprisingly okay with the asymmetrical hypersexualized stuff, and it led me to think back about the arc of my own experience with The Male Gaze. There's a while when being able to pull that gaze around is new and fun and exciting. Then a while where one realizes that attracting people that way too much, too quickly, can kind of warp how they relate to the rest of you. Then a decade or two in the workforce, often trying quite hard to keep sexuality out of the picture while learning more than you wanted to about patriarchy, sexism and microaggressions. All in all... sure, I saw a lot of young women and enbies at Anime Con. But the 50-year-olds I saw there were almost entirely men.
The house is still leaking. I talked the bug into removing a square of drywall from our unit's wall in order to better see what's going on in the ledge technically outside our unit, and that paid off in that we were able to see some water running down a board. But at some point we'll have to fix a big hole in our wall.
Artemis II news is giving me life, in the context of the rest of the news. Lunar flyby tomorrow, bring it!
And hmm, it turns out that Walkabout Mini Golf on the VR headset is more fun than I would have expected? I have introduced the bug to this too.