sorcyress | Network

I only went a tiny bit Karen when I called Dr. Funnyname again today to send all the stuff that the Sculptor asked for. They have indeed done so, and I've confirmed receipt.

But then the Sculptor's office asked for a "clearance" letter that says I'm "medically optimized" for surgery as planned. I, uh, thought that was part of what he sent, but I guess not. I called again, and Dr. Funnyname's office says they'll send it. I guess I'll find out in a matter of hours.

So I'm not completely out of the woods, but the trees are thinning out. If somebody's trying to make me feel better about what's likely to be a hellacious recovery, it's working.

Jeez.

Current Mood: meshugah
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: Dr. Funnyname's funky hold music

kaberett

This has become a bit of a staple of our rotation for when the veg box is made of brassica, and also brassica, and finally some brassica (I do frequently actively opt in to this, to be clear, but also... brassica). However! As you might have noticed, I have just developed a special interest in picking things up and putting things down again, and this in turn means I am going hmm about eating more protein.

When previously mentioning this recipe I have noted that As Usual my household thinks it wants about twice as much veg as written for the quantity of noodle. To this the protein variation essentially adds: some tofu that you've tossed with soy sauce and five-spice or other flavouring of your choice and then baked; and some edamame beans.

Base recipe can be found at Ocado or the Graun, and a fuller write-up will appear under a cut at Some Point in the Hopefully Near future (if only so the instructions are in the order that I want them to be in!).

petrea_mitchell in

agonyaunt

Actual headline: Why Tho: My birthday kid wants to invite everyone in class to his party - but not this 1 boy

Dear Lizzy,

My son is in third grade, and his birthday is coming up. He’s told me he wants to invite his whole class to his party (at a park) except for one kid.

This kid is a menace, if I am honest. He breaks things in class and yells and hits. He is actually quite mean to my son. I want to respect my son’s wishes here, but is it fair to invite everyone except him?

To Exclude or Not to Exclude

( Read more... )

rachelmanija

As you may have guessed, I completely failed to live up to my goal of reviewing everything I read, even in brief. Rather than attempting to catch up to my backlog, I am re-starting from where I am.

Yesterday I did a quick book cull by pulling books off my shelves that have been sitting there for ages, reading the first couple chapters, and deciding if I was likely to continue. I focused on books I'd started before and not gotten very far into. Here are the books that landed in the "move to Paper & Clay's used section" bag.

Trouble and Her Friends, by Melissa Scott

See the new cover? If you've been wanting to read this, it's now available as an ebook!

This is a classic lesbian cyberpunk novel that I have tried to read at least three times, and never managed to get very far into. I kept putting it back on the shelf because it's a classic and probably objectively good, but I'm just not that into cyberpunk. If a lot of the action is taking place online, I tend to lose interest. Also, some books just don't grab me, due to a mismatch between me and the book, rather than being objectively or even subjectively bad. This is clearly one of them. Someone else can be thrilled to find it at Paper & Clay, take it home, and enjoy it.

The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashling-Garcia

A tea specialist becomes a spy in a far-future colonized world! Unfortunately, this starts with a prologue which reads much like the infamous "trade war" crawl at the top of The Phantom Menace. Yes, I know that turned out to be prescient, but the problem was that it was written in a stultifying manner. The next couple chapters were much more lively, but also had a tendency to clunky exposition - some of which was pretty cool, to be fair. This was the second time I attempted this book, and had essentially the same reaction I did to Trouble and Her Friends - not bad, but not for me.

Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher

This has been described to me as "Pokemon in alternate ancient Rome," which sounds amazing. For at least the third time, it failed to grab me. I got about four chapters in and there's still no Pokemon. Someone else will like it more than me.

The Hum and the Shiver, by Alex Bledsoe

A race of people called the Tufa have lived amongst normal humans in Appalachia since the beginning of time. They can see ghosts, have music-based magic, etc. This opens with a Tufa woman very very clearly based on Jessica Lynch, who was a real-life American soldier who was wounded and captured in the US/Iraq war, returning from Iraq. I found this in poor taste. The general style also got on my nerves.

While doing this, I got sufficiently grabbed by the openings to keep reading and finish Maureen McHugh's Nekropolis, which hopefully I will actually review. I also returned Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and Tanya Huff's Sing the Four Quarters to the shelf.

loganberrybunny

Public

£1.59/litre for unleaded and £1.92/litre for diesel at the Texaco garage in town. The price has been stable for a few days now, but everyone's keeping a watching brief. We're still in the "phoney war" period, I suppose. It'll spark into angry life when people start having their holidays cancelled because there isn't enough jet fuel for the planes. Nobody in government has dared mention this prospect yet, which may come back to bite them.

Current Mood: restless

thewayne

Well, it's not a cool function, it's an option on a function. Specifically, the Weekday function.

I'm finishing up our taxes. Normally I'd finish them in February or March, but it's been a heck of a few months. One of the things that I do is dump all my prescription drug purchases into a spreadsheet and calculate the day of the week, so I can take a mileage deduction on my state taxes for weekend pickups since I'm not working those days.

Nevermind whether or not we're going to dinner or a movie....

Anyway, the function ends up being:

=IF(WEEKDAY(A1,2)>5,42,"")

A1 is my date field of when the transaction takes place. By default, i.e. without a number changing the day of the week for the date the starting DOW is Sunday = 1. By supplying the 2, you're telling Excel that Monday = 1, therefore if the DOW is greater than 5, it's Saturday or Sunday, therefore the weekend! If that's true, plug in 42 (round trip to Alamogordo and back), otherwise make it a blank cell.

Five trips for an additional 210 miles, at $0.21 per mile towards my state taxes! I have to manually eliminate dupes for multiple transactions on the same day, being multiple drugs refilled and picked up at the same time.

I use spreadsheets a fair amount, but not for anything particularly complex, just as a general purpose tool, so I was kinda chuffed to find this. The question is whether or not I'll remember it for next year!

oursin

Have just out of the blue had an email from a meedja person about what a cause of death on early C20th certificate MEANS, a colleague of theirs contacted me - what must have been in days of yore - and I was really helpful. I think that may have been a case in which Sid was involved, this was not, but we do our best in posing as a Nexpert.

I was able to flash a bit more relevant knowledge in the question portion of online seminar this pm (even though I dozed off, did not sleep well last night, during part of the actual seminar).

Have got off my desk and conscience something that has been hanging over me, to wit, second review of article I did a previous review of some weeks ago. Was somewhat prejudiced about it (it is actually not at all bad doing what it does) because it rather glances over the amount of work that went into getting the archive used into usable condition (personal interest there noted) and role of archivists in between the creators of the records and the end-users.

Think I mentioned some while ago possibility that longtime academic friend and self may be editing for publication Important Work on Significant and Highly Relevant Subject of friend of ours who died very unexpectedly last year. We have now received the draft manuscript and it seems more of a manuscript (rather than notes and materials) than we had feared.

Still have review that has been hanging over me and keeping getting put off to do.

Have podcast to record later this week.

Also must begin to turn my thoughts to being instructive yet entertaining on the history of ye baudruche (and finding illos, fortunately I already have quite a few).

purplecat

Late last year, maybe early this? Toby Hadoke asked various people he knew what 17 missing Dr Who episodes they would pick if they were the only 17 left to be found. It now transpires he almost certainly knew, at that point, that 2 episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan had been found, but it got me thinking. My list is something as follows:

1. & 2. The Tenth Planet episode 4 and The Web of Fear episode 3. These both complete stories and are significant, in the first case for the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton and, in the second, for the first meeting with the Brigadier.

Then I have a string of picking one episode from any story for which no episodes exist so.

3. Marco Polo - there are three episodes in contention for this: episode 3 (which features Ping-Cho giving a storytelling performance something not attempted elsewhere in Doctor Who, or much at all these days), episode 5 which features Tutte Lemkow who is mildly (in)famous for having been in Doctor Who three times, none of which survive and having provided choreography for a fourth episode which also doesn't survive, and episode 7 (which is believed to have good fight scenes which, obviously, don't survive well on audio). I'm going to go for Marco Polo episode 3 for the storytelling - alas poor Tutte Lemkow.

4. The Myth Makers episode 1 - the choices here were episode 1 which sets the scene or episode 4 which pivots from farce into tragedy and introduces new companion Katarina. Doctor Who rarely enough does outright comedy that I've picked the introductory episode and it also features Tutte Lemkow so yay!. Also, with the recent returns we have 3/5 of Katarina's episodes and I've no real desire to see more.

5. The Massacre episode 4 - on the other hand, I'd rather see the conclusion of this one, which seems to have been pretty grim throughout, but I'd be interested to see how the Massacre of St. Bartholemew's Eve portrayed via woodcuts worked in practice. It does mean we miss out on William Hartnell's turn as the Abbot of Amboise however.

6. The Savages episode 4 - Episode 4s are tempting in and of themselves, but in this case we get Frederick Jaeger's impersonation of aspects of the first Doctor - seems well worth it.

7. The Smugglers - lots of choices here. Episode 4 once again has a lot of fighting that doesn't work well on audio, but I'm going to go for The Smugglers episode 2 where Polly convinces the stable boy that she can do voodoo.

8. The Power of the Daleks episode 1 - the other side of the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.

9. The Highlanders episode 2 - in which the Doctor repeatedly bangs a man's head on a desk in ruse to convince him he is ill with a headache.

10. The Macra Terror episode 1 - because it includes the scene in which the Second Doctor is neatened up by a machine - which was cut from the animation.

11. Fury from the Deep episode 3 - which ends with Maggie walking out into the sea.

So now I have 5 left.

12. The Space Pirates epsiode 5 - The Space Pirates is not much loved but people hypothesise this is because the only episode we have involves the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe stuck in part of a disintegrated space station for the whole episode. So let's have another and I've picked one that features the character Dom Issigri because no one seems to know what he looks like.

13. The Power of the Daleks episode 4 - for no other reason that it would be nice to have a later episode of this, after the Doctor has ceased to be quite such a stranger to everyone, and episode 4 of 6 seems as good a place as any to stick the pin.

14 & 15. Marco Polo episode 7 and The Smugglers episode 4 for the aforementioned fight scenes.

16 & 17. The Daleks' Masterplan episodes 4 and 12 for the deaths of Katarina and Sara respectively.

musesfool

Today's poem:

A Dictionary Names the Wind in the Trees
by Susan Cohen

Psithurism because
what else would we call sound embedded
with leaf mold and breath
zithering just below the daily drone
of power saws and chippers,
eons of air shifting
like an old Chevy through leaves,
riffling papery corn fields
and the eucalyptus,
stuttering through windbreaks,
jittering an aspen
in a beam of breath,
lisping nothing pins me down
in the language of the Huron,
in Olmec, in Sanskrit, chittering
all its unpronounceable names,
its tunes with the shiver of pine needles
and the moves of a river?
Psithurism comes as close
to the clash of wind and trees
as orgasm comes to the friction
of muscles, nerves, bodies,
which is to say when so many words
cannot catch it,
those of us always searching
for just the right one may
as well stop speaking
and lift our heads
like mule deer, ears twitched
for the smallest sound.

*

Current Mood: busy

watersword

+ gorgeous sunny warm day
+ MULTIPLE asparagus spears emerging!
+ finally managed to book 2/3 of my birthday trip flights
- something in how I configure my browser means I cannot interact with the airline website and must do everything on the library computers
- I bragged to my therapist yesterday about how productive and upbeat I am now that it's properly spring and today I think my everything is made of molasses

unicornduke

I finished it in March but didn't have the energy to take pictures but I got it out yesterday and got some nice photos. They could have been better but I was working with what I had, which was my phone on a box on the tailgate of my truck, held upright by the handle of a 300ft measuring tape. I really ought to get a phone mount for pictures, I had one but it disappeared in the move.

A picture of a man wearing a thick, knee length grey peacoat in front of blueberry bushes.

A picture of a man wearing a thick, knee length grey peacoat in front of blueberry bushes.

( process rambling below the cut )
It is such a warm coat and I was sweating by the time I got all these photos taken yesterday. But coat! It's done!

moon_custafer

Lying awake at 4:30am, I suddenly realized how Goon Show-influenced this episode was. Embarrassing that it took me so long, given that one of the performers is straight-up doing the Bluebottle voice.

princessofgeeks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

moon_custafer

impressionistic painting of a billboard in a field

moon_custafer

The lunchroom at my current job:
painting of an office lunchroom

painting of office lunchroom and a view of electrical pylons out the window

davidgillon

I walked into the lounge at my mother's care home this afternoon to find two alpacas holding court.

Now I knew they were going to be there as an 'enrichment activity', I was in fact there to be sure my mother got to see them if she wanted to, there was even a van outside the door advertising them (plus glamping and various other farming related money spinning projects). But I just wasn't ready for the sheer ludicrousness of alpacas in the lounge.

It turns out alpacas in the flesh look like someone crossed a deer with an Old English Sheepdog and turned the floof dial up to 11. At which point my reality sensor threw a divide by cucumber error.

(The alpacas couldn't have cared less about the lounge, the residents, or the various toddlers and older kids that had been brought in by staff members - school holidays this week - the only thing they were interested in was the dish of alpaca feed being held under their noses)

Current Mood: Floofed

princessofgeeks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: ecstatic

regshoe

Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) is going on tour again from September! It's very good, and you should go and see it if you can. :)

bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/upcoming-speaking-engagements-55.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71945

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

I’m speaking at DemocracyXChange 2026 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 18, 2026.
I’m speaking at the SANS AI Cybersecurity Summit 2026 in Arlington, Virginia, USA, at 9:40 AM ET on April 20, 2026.
I’m speaking at the Nemertes [Next] Virtual Conference Spring 2026, a virtual event, on April 29, 2026.
I’m speaking at RightsCon 2026 in Lusaka, Zambia, on May 6 and 7, 2026.
I’m giving a keynote address and participating in a panel discussion at an ICTLuxembourg event called “Europe at the Crossroads of AI, Power & the Future of Democracy.” The event will be held at the University of Luxembourg’s Belval Campus on May 12, 2026.
I’m speaking at the Potsdam Conference on National Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany. The event runs June 24–25, 2026, and my talk will be the evening of June 24.

The list is maintained on this page.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/upcoming-speaking-engagements-55.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71945

lydamorehouse

For months now, I've been turning my phone on by plugging my earphones into the jack. Some time around last August (I remember because it first happened when I was one of the GoHs at Diversicon,) my on/off button just stopped working consistantly. If someone texted/called me or if I lucked out, I could sometimes turn it on.Eventually, it fully failed. I discovered that the screen would turn on when it registered a device being plugged in, so I just carried around a zillion pair of earphones so I could always turn it on as needed.

I've been skating by on that for... well, I mean what is that? Almost six months?

Last night the earphone jack gave up the ghost. It accepts no plug into that jack as anything real. If I'm listening to a podcast, everyone gets to hear that I'm into "Betwixt the Sheets" and other sex history podcasts. That is, when I can turn it on. Right now, the only thing my phone will still recognize as a device is its charging cord--but only when active, as in plugged in. In essence it's a landline now, which is not what I need and, as it happens, I still have a landline.

I found a place on University that supposedly will deal with ancient technology like my Samsung, so, hopefully, they'll be able to fix one or both of the phone's problems. It'd be cool if I could actually turn it on the normal way again, but I'd settle for a working earphone jack.

Before you yell at me, yes. The plan *is* to buy a new phone. They're not that expensive. This will be an "in the meantime" as we wait for it to arrive solution. And, yeah, I'm aware that it's possible that the repair person will tell me that the cost of fixing it is more than the price of a new phone (keeping in mind that my family buys cheap-ass phones from Tracfone.) In which case, I'll figure something out. I can keep a charging cord in my car and so maybe before I go out on school patrol I can plug it in and just make sure I am always tapping the screen so I don't lose the ability to go on mic or, you know, hang up. I'll still be without headphones, which would suck, but you know, needs must.

My appointment at the shop is for noon. I'm hoping for something simple and cheap.

Wish me luck.

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Katarina Whimsy

April 2026

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Page Summary

sistawendy - medical madness
kaberett - [food] Meera Sodha's udon noodles with red cabbage and cauliflower... and some protein
petrea_mitchell in agonyaunt - Why Tho: Can we leave out the horrible kid?
rachelmanija - Book Cull Reviews
loganberrybunny - Petrol station latest
thewayne - I just found a cool Excel function!
oursin - There's no knowledge but I knows it
purplecat - Doctor Who Missing Episodes
musesfool - chittering all its unpronounceable names
watersword - (no subject)
unicornduke - The Coat
moon_custafer - Royal Canadian Air Farce, “The Mad Trapper of Rat River”
princessofgeeks - *runs screaming*
moon_custafer - Painting Update 2– closer to the Abstract
moon_custafer - Painting Update
davidgillon - When Life is Too Surreal
princessofgeeks - Holy Christ
regshoe - Somewhat important news
bruce_schneier_feed - Upcoming Speaking Engagements
lydamorehouse - Wish Me Luck

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medical madness

[food] Meera Sodha's udon noodles with red cabbage and cauliflower... and some protein

Why Tho: Can we leave out the horrible kid?

Book Cull Reviews

Petrol station latest

I just found a cool Excel function!

There's no knowledge but I knows it

Doctor Who Missing Episodes

chittering all its unpronounceable names

(no subject)

The Coat

Royal Canadian Air Farce, “The Mad Trapper of Rat River”

runs screaming

Painting Update 2– closer to the Abstract

Painting Update

When Life is Too Surreal

Holy Christ

Somewhat important news

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Wish Me Luck

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April 2026

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