Reading

Entry tags:

fluffing,
games

“i can still hear you saying / you would never break the chain / chain keep us together”

Short shameful confession: It is oddly satisfying to fill in the middle number of the middle square of a sudoku.

---L.

Subject quote from The Chain, Fleetwood Mac.

malamute

malamute (MAL-uh-myoot) - n., an Alaskan breed of husky.

who's a good malamute? you are!

Thanks, WikiMedia!

A particularly large breed of husky, bred for hauling heavy freight sleds. The name (which English has used since the 1890s) is short for Malamute dog, which is named after the Malamute people, a subgroup of Inupiaq of the Kotzebue Sound region and Kobuk River valley. Where they got their name, I can't track down atm, but it's an Inupiaq endonym. [Sidebar 1: To oversimplify a confusing situation and nomenclature system, the Inupiaq are those Inuit peoples who live in Northern Alaska, in contrast to those Inuit who live in Canada and the Greenlandic Inuit who live in, well, Greenland -- the modern nation boundaries happen to nearly align with borders between cultural and linguistic zones.] [Sidebar 2: I should have addressed this by now, but the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples, formerly all collectively called Eskimo, have a separate heritage from all other Indigenous peoples of the Americas, having crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia much later, "only" around 3000* years ago.]

* Exact timing disputed.

---L.

kayak

kayak (KAI-ak) - n., a light narrow boat that has both ends tapered to a point and a surface deck that is propelled by sitting person with a double-bladed paddle, specifically: a) a traditional boat of Inuit, Aleut, and Yupik made of a frame of wood or bone covered with animal skin that closes watertightly around the waist; b) a modern boat that resembles this, typically made of wood or fiberglass.

A traditional one, being used by a seal-hunter with a harpoon:

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Also a verb, to travel by kayak. A flexible purpose boat, made in different styles for different environments -- originally, it was mostly a hunter's boat. We got the word in the 1750s from Inuktitut name qayaq, where the qai- part means surface/top.

---L.

Current Mood: groggy

Entry tags:

Fic: Reconnection

Title: Reconnection
Rating: G
Type: Fic
Size/length/word count etc.: 402
Prompt: 017: Twilight
Fandom/Ship: The Kingdom; Yang Dongsik | Louis, Go Sungho | Mujin
Notes/Warnings: Refers to The Kingdom’s lore.
Summary Louis throws parties, in part to let the others know where to find him when they remember who they are.

( This one he modeled after Versailles. )

Find the table with the list of fics here

Current Mood: Weary
Current Music: Golden - Huntr/x

Entry tags:

12 Week Year WAM Week 13

Weekly Score: 29.4% (10/34)

Goal 1: Declutter house and take care of family. 24% (6/25)

Review: I got caught up with laundry, and didn't feel the need to do more. So I didn't do much. No cleaning, and no dishes, either. There's only two of us, and we didn't do much cooking.

Goal 2: Catch up on Fannish50. 44% (4/9)

Review: I got some of these done, and only posted one. I'm almost caught up, though, and I can keep working on this.

Intentions for the future: Next 12 Week year. I can't believe it. G1: Do my physical therapy exercises. I had to stop them because I broke my foot, and everything hurts again. I am back in for my elbow, so I need to remember to add that in with everything else. G2: Take care of myself. THis includes getting to bed at a decent time, making sure I eat three meals, at least, go on walks, and try to whittle down my todo list, spend a pom a day on doing that. G3: Finish GYWO Build-a-Bingo and 100Ships. I will finish the Bingo, as I have a deadline for that, and I'll get as far as I can on 100Ships. Each fic I write goes for both challenges, so that works out, and as soon as I'm done with the Bingo, I'll keep writing on 100ships.

I also realized I'm doing this wrong. I've been doing the 12 Week Year for how long, and have just... made everything go 13 weeks. I just realized I don't need to do it that way. it's only supposed to be 12 weeks! So that's going to help too. So that's going to help too.

Entry tags:

book post

partial notes on Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux

When, in the course of human events, one reads a little bit too much of Marilynne Robinson's incredible prose, and then plays a little bit too much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and thus gets the two very different types of work all muddled in one's head, and is thus seized with the need to go spit out many thousands of words of Clair-Obscur-fanfiction-in-the-style-of-Marilynne-Robinson, but becomes aware partway through the project that one's understanding of the culture and structure of the Paris Conservatory during the Belle Époque era is incredibly thin, and this lack of understanding is really becoming awkward given that one has gone and invented an entire subplot involving multiple professors at aforementioned conservatory in one's fanfiction based on a passing mention in canon that "oh such-and-such character went to conservatory" and literally nothing else—well, it thus becomes necessary to go read a well-regarded biography of a contemporaneous French composer to amend that lack of knowledge.

Which is how I found myself reading Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life by Jean-Michel Nectoux (translated by Roger Nichols).

("You really have a knack for nerd-sniping yourself," a friend observed dryly when I explained my present pitiable state of affairs. Yeah I sure do, huh.)

As I've been reading this primarily for convoluted fanfiction research purposes, what follows should not be construed as a review or anything even approaching one (I haven't even finished reading the book yet!), but, more of a... thinking-aloud session? Because there's a great deal that's amused me, and also a great deal that's made me very ponderous, and also stuff that just straight-up confused me (recall my aforementioned staggering lack of historical/contextual knowledge)... and yeah the only way I know how to think these days is via blog posts, apparently.

( Read more... )

Oh, also, one last funny bit about the translation: there's a bunch of words that are left with the French spelling, for no particular reason I can discern? The funniest of these is "rôle," which is always spelled the French way, even though there is no semantic difference to be had there. Whatcha trying to prove with that little hat over the O, lol. Though I guess The New Yorker still spells coordinate and cooperate as "coördinate" and "coöperate" so. I guess we all have our little spelling hangups :P

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Big Machine - The Goo Goo Dolls

Waiting for you.

The first day of fall. Rosh Hashanah beginning a new year. And giving blood, too. It took me just over six minutes, which isn't bad except for how I know I can do better than that. I'll keep hydrating and hitting the treadmill.

I'm also going to leave the bandage on until bedtime, as usual. It's yellow, so I feel like I should pick a dress for tonight's dinner that'll really make it pop.

Entry tags:

meme,
poetry

“here is the church here is the steeple / you were looking for saints but you only found people”

For Poetry Monday, some self-indulgence. Cut for length:

Cathedral Close, Larry Hammer

Too close, and you see nothing—old
pale limestone, quarried
with smoothness rocks forget
and fleck to worn grains, weather-worried
and rough to hold
against your palm. And yet

( too far, you see too little )

First drafted in my mid-twenties after hiking through slot gorges in Canyonlands National Park, based on memories of growing up a 10 minute walk from the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and revised over the next decade (after a visit to confirm details).

---L.

Subject quote from Best Guess, Lucy Dacus.

igloo

I thought I was done with words from Native American / First Nations languages of North America, only to remember I haven’t covered words from Inuit, Aleut, and Yupik peoples (the latter two also living in northeastern Russia) —for they indeed have given English enough common-enough words for a theme week. [Sidebar: for a discussion of the term Eskimo, see husky.] Starting with the most obvious one:

igloo (IG-loo) - n., a durable, domed shelter constructed of blocks cut from hard snow.

Contrast with tupik, which is a tent-like summer shelter made from animal skins. Although we associate igloos with all Inuit, not to mention Inupiat of Alaska and Yupik of eastern Siberia, they’ve been most commonly built in central Arctic Canada and adjacent northwestern Greenland. [Sidebar: TIL the blocks are not laid down in rings but a rising spiral.] We got the word from Inuktitut iclu, which means a house of any construction—somehow in English it got applied to only a snowhouse, which is icluvijaq in Inuktitut. Inuktitut is, broadly speaking, the main Inuit language of Canada, though it’s better described as a dialect continuum than a single language: across its range, speakers from one band can understand those from neighboring bands but not from further off.

---L.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

I need to quit my job so bad 😐

But first! A holiday.

Entry tags:

Taskmaster s20e2 and part 6 (and last) of the Worldcon write-up

Taskmaster s20e02 -- ( More, with spoilers )

Ania was apparently doing doodles in the downtime between tasks, and has doodled all of her tasks and the various in-studio tasks. She has been sharing these on her Insta, and they are also being linked to on Reddit: episode 1 and episode 2 so far.

I think I'm going to just finish TMNZ s6 after the current main TM series wraps up, like I did last time. 3 TM episodes + 1 rewatch with

lunasariel proved a bit much outside of bingeing mode. I know who won TMNZ, and that also made me less excited to finish it, so it'll keep, and make the wait for the next thing (NYT, presumably, although according to people who went to s21 studio recordings this past week, CoC 4 is going to be filming studio in November, so that's probably also coming soon).

*

And finally, let me finish up the Worldcon write-up before I embark on the next set of adventures.

Earlier parts are here:
- part 1: Tues/Wed,
- part 2: Thursday
- part 3: first part of Friday
- part 4: rest of Friday, first part of Saturday (Ada Palmer motherlode)
- part 5: Saturday, Hugo awards and related thoughts

( Sunday, Aug 17: panels and Dealer Room )

And that was the last of my panels for Worldcon -- and also the last of ALL panels for Worldcon, because I certainly got my membership's worth of panels :D

( Dinner with queenlua )
( Hotel and Monday morning flight )

( A few final photos )

So, yay, a very successful Worldcon, despite the bonus Covid infection. No regrets on any panels or events I attended, just low-key frustration with not being able to be in two places at once, and warm "next time" feelings about hanging out with

tabacoychanel in person for the first time, Doing a Con as part of a group that was living together, and getting to see/chat with authors/people whose stuff I didn't make it to.

Seriously tempted to do it again next year in LA...

Entry tags:

biggles,
exchanges

out of order

I signed up at the last minute for another flash exchange, the Out Of Order Exchange for nonlinear storytelling, and somehow ended up with two lovely Biggles fics: Lost In-Between Here & There, a sweet EvS h/c ficlet, and Just In Time, a clever time travel fic featuring Algy and EvS. Thank you to both anonymous authors! I'm enjoying the laid-back approach and quick turnaround of flash exchanges lately, and there seems to be a steady stream of them with every imaginable theme.

vitrify

vitrify (VI-truh-fai) - v., to convert into a glass or a glass-like substance through heat fusion; to be converted into glass.

So both a transitive and intransitive verb. The relevant Wikipedia article is glass transition, which is a rather complicated topic as a glass is a rather complicated substance compared to a crystal. The relevant etymology is (in the 1590s) Middle French vitrifier, from Latin vitrum, glass, ultimately from the PIE root *wed-ro-, water-like (vitrum was also used for woad), from *wed-, water.

---L.

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: Mr Jones - Counting Crows

Strolling through.

The highlight of the day was sending out a pair of novel queries, the first in a while. Beyond that, not much. I got the flu and TDAP boosters yesterday, so my arm's sore enough I didn't want to move it a whole lot, certainly not for weightlifting, so all it was in the gym was the treadmill.

I also found out why I hadn't been informed of certain family developments: they're all on the family group chat. However, everyone else is using the iPhone's proprietary message system. Last week I turned that off to just get text messages, thinking that might help with coordinating movie theater seats - if an iPhone message wouldn't get sent, maybe a text would. Then the other people arrived and I didn't think about it for several days, until my dad gave me a call the other day about recent ongoing developments. I tried turning that feature back on, but it didn't bring in the backlog of things that'd been shared, so I'm still at a loss for how things are going. I'm also really tempted to turn it back off, just to see what happens. Except given how my phone's already largely incapable of getting internet-based message services, there's not much of a difference to be made.

filicology

filicology (fil-uh-KOL-oh-jee) - n., the botanical study of ferns.

Thanks, WikiMedia!

Better known as pteridology, the difference being this is from Latin filix, fern, instead of Ancient Greek ptéris, fern. Since -ology is from Ancient Greek too, I suppose pteridology is the more well-formed word, but I still like this one better.

---L.

Entry tags:

“had my first kiss on a friday night / reckon i didn’t do it right”

A few links hoarded up, sometimes for a while:

“This guy saved a PNG to a bird.”

A very small selection of very good P.G. Wodehouse quotes. (via)

From Neal.fun: I’m Not a Robot, where you solve increasingly ridiculous CAPTCHAs. Level 11: “Select all the squares with Waldo” (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Castle on the Hill, Ed Sheeran.

ecphrastic

ecphrastic or ekphrastic (ek-FRAS-tik) - adj., containing a vivid literary description of a work of visual art; clear, lucid.

That last sense appears rarely in dictionaries, though to be fair this word itself appears rarely in dictionaries, in contrast to ecphrasis, the description itself. A famous example ecphrasis is Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," though I'm just as fond of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." Like many terms from rhetoric (for literary works are all rhetorical acts) this comes from Ancient Greek ekphrastikós, adjectival form of ékphrasis, description, from ekphrázō, describe, from ek-, out (alternate form of ex-) + phrázō, explain/point out.

---L.

galactoid

galactoid (guh-LAK-toid) - adj., resembling milk, milky.

Another uncommon word I'll rarely use but am glad to know exists. The resemblance to galaxy is not coincidental, as that originally meant specifically the Milky Way, referring to the smear of stars across the sky, and only much later was it recognized that some of the nebulae in the sky are the same sort of structure as the one we're in the middle of. Coined around 1880 from Ancient Greek gála, milk.

---L.

Entry tags:

Worldcon part 5: Hugo Awards and assorted Hugo thoughts

Picking up the Worldcon write-up on ( Saturday, Aug 16 with the Hugo Awards Ceremony )

The Hugo stats (final ballot voting) came out the next day, but the nomination/long list stuff took much longer and was only recently released (as I understand it, because that work had been done by the PREVIOUS Hugo committee, which all resigned in protest of the ChatGPT kerfuffle, and a different team took over) after the finalists were announced. Links to everything

( Hugo stats nattering )

Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Crush - Zerobase1

Fannish50 #35: S2

S2 is the stage name of Noeul, a Thai actor in one of the first Thai dramas I saw. Possibly the first Thai drama, and still one of my favorites.

If you're curious, it's "Love in the Air." He plays Rain.

( The world is on fire, and I am angry )