hannah: (Interns at Meredith's - gosh_darn_icons)
hannah ([personal profile] hannah) wrote2025-06-10 10:42 pm

Aches.

At some point in between sitting down to write and finishing the night's wordcount, something went nasty on the right side of my neck. Suddenly and without any seemingly inciting cause, too. Not even lifting more weight than I should've tried or falling and landing badly. The oddness of it doesn't help the pain, but at least it seems to point to an acute cause that should, ideally, clear up after a hot shower and some sleep.

Waking up to hail this morning was a surprise; getting out of the subway after the day's rains had all passed to leave the air in one of those hauntingly fragile summer afternoons was just as much a surprise, if a far more pleasant one.
queenlua: (Default)
Lua ([personal profile] queenlua) wrote2025-06-10 03:41 pm

more science more love

Last migration season, I subscribed to this nifty newsletter by a PhD student at UCLA—an "Early Bird Arrival Forecast" that sends personalized emails based on your location, and tells you which birds are early/peaking/late migrants in your area. It's data that I probably could figure out via other sources, but I suspect the data backing his emails is superior, and his simple summary & targeted recommendations were very handy for me to get a sense of what I might see in the field—"ooh, warbling vireos are peaking this week; let's go find one!"

Anyway. I enjoyed his recommendations again this migration season, and also, ngl his final email of the season this year weirdly made me tear up a bit:
There are no birds forecast for this week or last week, so it's time to close down the Early Bird Forecast for your region. Very sad :(

Thank you so much for participating in the second season of the Early Bird Forecast! A few asks from me before you go:

[. . .]

2. Last year, I provided a link for people to donate to me personally (AKA to "buy me a coffee"). In light of recent realized and proposed cuts to government-funded science programs, this year I would like to steer people towards donating to nonprofits that do efficient and important conservation work at home and abroad. A few good charities in this mold are Birdlife International, The American Bird Conservancy, and The Nature Conservancy. If you would like to look for something more local, check out your city or region's Audubon chapter.

3. If donating is out of the question for you, consider contacting your representatives and let them know that you believe federally-funded science is worth supporting. The Early Bird Forecast is actually a by-product of a NASA-funded research fellowship I received in graduate school. If the current administration's proposed budget becomes law, funding for NASA-funded research like mine will decrease by over 50%. This science funding is cheap in the grand scheme of things – If you are the average taxpayer, you paid $0.0006 for my research (thank you!). Plus you get Early Bird Forecast for free, what a steal!

Happy Summer!
god knows a phd student could always use some spare change; incredibly classy of him to point towards Science As A Whole rn instead.

something something "he's not giving up & i'm not either" etc
jazzyjj ([personal profile] jazzyjj) wrote in [community profile] awesomeers2025-06-10 09:52 am
Entry tags:

Just one thing: 10 June 2025

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
Larry Hammer ([personal profile] larryhammer) wrote2025-06-10 07:02 am
Entry tags:

“teardrop on the fire / of a confession / fearless on my breath / most faithful mirror”

A c-novel recommendation: I Am Average and Unremarkable, a xianxia by Yue Xia Die Ying (“butterfly shadow beneath the moon”). I’ve enjoyed four other novels by the author, including serious historical romances and the lighthearted xianxia Ascending, Do Not Disturb. If you like the latter, you will likely enjoy this, as it has much the same sense of humor—and more of it.

Our Heroine, Jiu Hui, is a young yao, a word that can mean anything from spirit to monster to demon, but in this world, spirit comes closest—in this case, she’s a plant spirit, specifically a garlic chive spirit. (Yes, that’s a lol.) Other yao in this world are animals and sometimes plants that have absorbed enough power to attain sentience and, for the more advanced, the ability to take human form. Most humans, however, believe yao are inimical monsters as dangerous as demons (also present in this world), so she always presents as human.

The story starts with Our Heroine seeking to join a human cultivation sect because she’s reached the limit of what her remote yao village can teach her about human-style cultivation. Because the larger righteous sects are very into being righteous scourges of both yao and demons, she joins a small, relaxed sect. (Very small: five masters and ten disciples.) This turns out to be an excellent fit, as her apparently weak sect emphasizes evasion and deception techniques, and its interactions with other sects are best characterized on a sliding scale from mooching to grifting—and she, too, is very much a trickster figure. The story doesn’t use the term, but I think of them as specializing in the Dao of Shamelessness, though like many literary Tricksters, they stand with what’s right when it counts. Meanwhile, her Junior Sect Brother, recruited at the same time, turns out to be, ah, let’s call him socially awkward—as in, not well socialized—and he is hardly the only character with a background that is not simple.

It’s a fun book, rolled out with solid pacing. (The author notes are hilarious.) It also has a carefully laid plot that’s the spine of a surprisingly serious thematic core for a xianxia—it examines, from multiple directions, the question of when a sacrifice for the greater good, both willing and not, is morally acceptable. That there’s a literal Omelas situation is only one thread of this. Deep spoilers for the ending in rot13: Gur puvyq va gur onfrzrag vf na vzcbegnag punenpgre, naq gur abiry pyvznk vf onfvpnyyl Bhe Urebvar tbvat ‘jub gur shpx frg hc guvf ohyyfuvg gebyyrl ceboyrz’ naq qrslvat gur urnirayl qnb sbe orvat hawhfg.

I highly recommend this to anyone who’s already read a couple xianxia—it’s probably not a good starter story for the genre, as it leans heavily on convention to avoid explanations, even more so than Ascending, Do Not Disturb. It doesn’t help that the fan translation is a little wobbly (the translator particularly has trouble with verb forms). But if you have the background and can tolerate imperfect prose, this is a great read.

---L.

Subject quote from Teardrop, Massive Attack.
prettygoodword: text: words are sexy (Default)
prettygoodword ([personal profile] prettygoodword) wrote2025-06-10 06:48 am

hyperspace

hyperspace (HAI-per-spays) - n., (math.) a Euclidean space of more than three dimensions; (science fiction) a notional space orthogonal to the usual dimensions of space-time often used for faster-than-light travel.


The mathematical term came first, coined in 1867 when mathematicians were first working through concepts of n-dimensional topology. Using higher dimensions as a shortcut emerged as a concept in the late 1920s, in stories by Kirk Meadowcroft and John Campbell (hyper-drive, a mechanism for traveling through hyperspace, was coined in 1941). The prefix hyper- (from Ancient Greek hupér, over) can many anything from over/above and beyond to excessive and intensely as well as huge/giant -- several meanings apply here, but "extra" more or less encompasses all of them. Other words with hyper- include hyperactive ("excessively active") and hypertext ("text that is beyond [the current text]").

---L.
hannah: (Library stacks - fooish_icons)
hannah ([personal profile] hannah) wrote2025-06-09 10:31 pm

Dial in the number.

The day's major accomplishment was getting some hand-holding for my hard drive problem and getting the man on the other end to laugh a bit when I said I knew enough to get myself into trouble but not how to get out of it. Hopefully I can get my act together enough to send it out for repairs in a day or two.

The secondary accomplishments were taking the stairs to the gym, and making an attempt to reach out when I felt myself going down a spiral.
soc_puppet: A sunflower against a blue sky with a few stray clouds; text reads, "Summer of the 69" (Summer of the 69)
Socchan ([personal profile] soc_puppet) wrote in [community profile] fictional_fans2025-06-09 09:48 pm

2025's Summer of the 69 is now open!

A photo of a sunny summer day; text reads, "Summer of the 69"


Community: [community profile] summerofthe69

Event Description: Summer of the 69 is an event focused on creative works about the sexual position, open to all fandoms and to original works, and to all types of creations. Participation is through two means: A comment meme where users can leave and fill prompts, and themes posted weekly to get creative juices flowing.

The 2025 fest has officially opened! If the above description interests you at all, check out the following links:

Community profile
2025's Theme Calendar
2025's Comment Prompt Meme
2025's First Theme: "First Time 69: Everyone has to start somewhere"
larryhammer: a wisp of colored smoke, label: "softly and suddenly vanished away" (disappeared)
Larry Hammer ([personal profile] larryhammer) wrote2025-06-09 07:51 am

“i told this heart of mine our love could never be / but then i hear your voice and something stirs”

For Poetry Monday:

One word is too often profaned,” Percy Shelley

One word is too often profaned
    For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
    For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
    For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
    Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,
    But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
    And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
    Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
    From the sphere of our sorrow?


Another poem Shelley wrote in 1822 that was posthumously published with the editorial title “To ——.” In this case, —— was Jane Williams, with whom he did not in fact have an affair—he wrote several poems to her, all professing deep friendship, but he seems to have truly kept things at that level (with his history, that’s not a given). Jane Williams and her husband, Edward, were close friends with both Shelleys, and Edward died in the same boating accident that killed Percy. The word is, of course, at the end of line 9.

(That rhyme of accept and reject gets a side-eye.)

---L.

Subject quote from My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own, Connie Francis.
prettygoodword: text: words are sexy (Default)
prettygoodword ([personal profile] prettygoodword) wrote2025-06-09 07:26 am

macrocosm

Another theme week -- following on 'all' prefixes with 'large' prefixes, and following on the universe with the:


macrocosm (MAK-ruh-koz-uhm) - n., the universe considered as a whole; the total or entire complex structure of something; a complex structure, such as a society, considered as a single entity that contains numerous similar, smaller-scale structures.


Coined in Medieval Latin (and taken into English via French around 1600) from Ancient Greek roots makrós, large/long/far + kósmos, the universe -- which sounds like a redundancy: The universe already contains all, so why additionally specify that it's large? That last sense is the key one, as philosophers needed words for the concepts of macrocosm and microcosm, that the whole is reflected in its parts -- that as on earth so in heaven, and that there's correspondences between, for example, the human body and the heavens:

Der Mensch als Mikrokosmos
Thanks, WikiMedia!

This is a very common concept in ancient philosophies worldwide, including Ancient Greece, and theorizing about it continued in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Other words with macro- include macrobiotic ("prolonging life") and macrometer ("large/long measurement"). (I was going to use macron, but that's not a prefix but rather noun use of the neuter of makrós, and not prefixing anything.)

---L.
oracne: turtle (Default)
oracne ([personal profile] oracne) wrote2025-06-09 08:52 am
Entry tags:

Letter Writers!

Love for our Elders is a program to send handwritten letters to older adults. "Our mission is to alleviate social isolation among older adults through handwritten letters and intergenerational connections."
hannah: (On the pier - fooish_icons)
hannah ([personal profile] hannah) wrote2025-06-08 10:12 pm

All go together.

Today's luxurious disappointments are in the fields of scheduling issues and data preservation.

The latter is because a hard drive stopped working. I got a couple error messages about moving and deleting files - "Error 0x8007045D: the request could not be performed because of an I/O device error" - which was soon followed by Error code 43, then "Cannot open drive for direct access". At this point, I'm pretty secure in saying it's not going to get fixed by trying the hard drive on another computer, or that I can fix it myself. As such, I'm going to leave it alone in the hopes it doesn't get worse and look into local data recovery centers to see which one can best help me.

In the former's case, it's because Escapade is scheduled opposite a few movie screenings at the MOMI I'd very much like to see. I can probably juggle them around, pick which movies versus which panels, and it's more than a little annoying to have to choose between two fun things to look forward to. As I said, luxurious disappointments.
jazzyjj ([personal profile] jazzyjj) wrote in [community profile] awesomeers2025-06-08 06:43 pm
Entry tags:

Just one thing: 09 June 2025

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!
daughterofshadows: A photograph of a nebula and stars (Default)
daughterofshadows ([personal profile] daughterofshadows) wrote in [community profile] silwritersguild2025-06-08 11:31 pm

Mereth Aderthad Interview: Interview with Kai by Shadow

Mereth Aderthad 2025 Interview with Kai by Shadow. Featured artist for "Gil-galad was an Elven King: Kingship and Personhood in the last High King of the Noldor."

Kai is a Tolkien artist whose work captures both the dramatic moments of the legendarium and the moments of friendship and love between characters that drove these storied events. Kai's work often captures light and radiance, making him fitting as a featured artist for Maglor's Mereth Aderthad 2025 presentation, "Gil-galad was an Elven King: Kingship and Personhood in the last High King of the Noldor." Kai spoke with Shadow about how Maglor's topic was instantly inspiring, his range of interests over the years in the legendarium, and the meaning behind the painting he made for Maglor's presentation.

You can read Shadow's interview with Kai here.


yourlibrarian: Archie is Sweet-crymeariver_ (HORN-ArchieSweet-crymeariver_)
yourlibrarian ([personal profile] yourlibrarian) wrote in [community profile] common_nature2025-06-08 01:38 pm

Crown Point Vista House



Just returned from a road trip through Oregon and part of Northern California. On leaving Portland we followed the route of a tourist trolley and started out at Crown Point Vista House. The views of the Colombia River were indeed impressive and well worth the twisty drive up to its height. The structure itself with its stone and stained glass was also interesting to see. The bathrooms on the basement level were all marbled -- not the usual for tourist stops!

Above is the overall view east. Read more... )