diffrentcolours

Today is cloudy and cool. Last night it rained with high winds.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

What I thought was a branch blown down in the house yard is actually the contorta willow sapling that died. I may see if I can make something from it.

EDIT 1/9/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 1/9/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 1/9/26 -- I took a few pictures around the yard.

I raked another quadrant around the firepit.

EDIT 1/9/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

A friend asked for suggestions of ways to maintain posting momentum after

snowflake_challenge ends. There are plenty of ways to build momentum and keep up your posting frequency. Here are some ideas.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

redbird

We just went to a small, and surprising brief, vigil on the Common in memory of Renee Good 'and other victims of ICE," organized by MIRA, a local immigrants rights and support group. I'm glad I went, and some good things were said. There will I believe be a larger event tomorrow, but when I can show up for short-notice things on weekday afternoons, sometimes that feels like my job.

zimena

It's been a difficult start to the year for me.

Back when I moved into my current flat in 2020, I made friends with the neighbour who lived three doors to my left. Part of it was probably that we were some of the youngest people in the building - she was just a few years older than me. In many ways, she was everything I'm not - loud and easy-going and good with people, but also - I realised after a while - good at talking a lot and not sharing much of her real self. I didn't really get to know her until we started hanging out together. I'd go over to her place just to sit and talk for a couple of hours, or she'd sometimes come here. She had a lot of health issues, though, so over the last year or so I felt like we saw each other less simply because she couldn't deal with the same amount of activity or being around people as before.

Still... she became something I'd never had in my life before - a neighbour who was also a friend. Someone I trusted and could talk to and who'd call me if she didn't see me go out for a couple of days, or who'd instinctively check the lock on my front door when she knew I would be away for some days.

Well... she was found dead in her flat one of the first days of the year.

The police have closed off the flat, so even her family aren't allowed to go inside. Apparently, they're waiting for the autopsy report before they'll be allowed to proceed with anything else. I feel sorry for her two daughters and for the friends who were closer to her than I was. But I'm still feeling the emptiness, too. It feels so wrong to pass by her flat and look at the police tape, knowing that she won't be in there anymore. I also feel the lack of her presence where she used to often be - passing by outside, or even poking her head in through my door when I had it open for airing out my flat, or while being on my way in or out.

Even today, I've done absolutely nothing. Slept until late, dragged myself out of bed to eat a little, then slept again. It's now about 7:30pm, and this is the first time today in which I feel reasonably alert and not just completely empty and drained inside. Of course I've not been like this every day since learning of what happened to her, but I guess it's at least part of why I got such a reaction today.

ysabetwordsmith

Snowflake Challenge 5: Wishlist

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your wishlist if you feel comfortable doing so.

If you have wishes for transformative works of your own works or another's work, remember to include links to those sources in order to make it easier for people to create.

Be sure to check out other people's wishlists. Maybe someone will grant your wish! Maybe you will be inspired to grant a wish! If any wishes are granted, we'd love it if you link them to this post.

This is one of my favorite challenges. It can be difficult for a lot of people to ask for things, so remember not to put too much pressure on yourself for coming up with the perfect wishlist! Your wishes could be something you're recently interested in or something you've wanted for a long time but were afraid to ask for or anything in between. There are no limits!

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: excited

oursin

Steps towards identifying new Black voters in 18th-century Westminster and Hertfordshire, way back in 1700s, when being able to vote meant having certain property qualifications e.g. being a householder.

***

What did the Romans ever do for us? Not so much of the benefits we're always told: Urban populations in southern Britain experienced a decline in health that lasted for generations after the Romans arrived.

***

The history of mutual aid organisations: Prior to the development of government and employer health insurance and financial services, friendly or ‘benevolent’ societies were an important part of many people’s lives.

***

There are no pure cultures: All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history (and I don't seem to have saved the links about the numbers of immigrants in medieval England....)

***

This is an older link I don't think I ever posted: Vitriol to Corrosive Fluid: ‘Acid’ Assault in the Twentieth Century:

There seems to have been a spike in cases in the late 1960s, but the pattern established in the nineteenth century was clearly at an end. With fewer cases occurring, and fewer making headline news, the incidence of this unique offence continued to fall until its reappearance in a different guise in the twenty-first century. However, the ongoing digitization of late twentieth-century newspapers may yet reveal further cases.

elyusion posting in

dw_community_promo

If you like Japanese rock/metal bands dressed in various degrees of ostentatious fashion, please consider joining

vkotd to share your favorite v-kei songs or discover new ones. I'm looking forward to seeing fans on Dreamwidth's taste! ♪♪♪ ヽ(ˇ∀ˇ )ゞ

Current Mood: hopeful

loganberrybunny

Public

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

First things first: this is a review of the film. There's not much about the whole raucous "midnight screening" culture that appeals to me, and I don't think shadow casts and so on are really much of a thing here in Britain in any case. On another note, this first-run UK quad poster was designed by none other than John Pasche, the guy who made the Rolling Stones' tongue and lips logo!

Anyway, with my bisexual hat on,¹ Frank-N-Furter is not my queer icon. I don't see any real need to preserve historical representation in aspic, and plenty of things that were seen as ground-breaking in the 1970s can now be seen for the more uncomfortable ones they are. Frank is a well written character, and certainly charismatic, but a guy to be uncritically celebrated he ain't. We have a more advanced idea of consent than was often the case in the Seventies, for a start. The story is pretty silly, but rock musicals will do that, and several of the songs (not just "Time Warp") are decent or better.
¹ As Fred Astaire didn't quite sing: "I'm puttin' on my bi hat, 'cause I like 'em all, cat: women and the males."

The staging generally works, being an area where the campiness and deliberately cheap look works well, though it can look a bit... stagey, unsurprising given this grew out of a stage show. Tim Curry plays Frank superbly, and Richard O'Brien (who many of us in the UK will remember presenting The Crystal Maze in the early 1990s) is excellent as well. The rest are okay to good, so no real complaints other than the odd song lyric that's hard to hear. Not a film I'm going to rush back to, and as I say not one I'm at all interested in seeing in... that environment, but it's good to have ticked it off the list. ★★★

Current Mood: productive

spiralsheep

- If you use gmail or other google services then I strongly suggest checking your location is set to EU if possible (or other not-US if possible) and that you check to ensure "smart features" are switched OFF and remain OFF as google continues to roll out their AI, or switch to Proton (Switzerland) / Mailbox (Germany) / [your local equivalent] if you can afford them. Also, don't use Chrome as your browser, obv. And, of course, nobody with a choice ever used Microsoft. Switching away from US-based tech services generally, and especially services intentionally infected with AI spying and slop, has always been advisable where possible.

- If you are outside the US please set your default weather app to your local weather service that doesn't use US data, so the Met Office in the UK. One of the easiest ways to use disinformation to control people's actions or inactions in large groups is via weather forecasts. Yes, I'm serious.

- If there is anywhere you might need to go in an emergency situation that isn't on your regular routes then I suggest acquiring a paper map or directions you can read, and putting them in your regular travel bag (or car) etc. I would also suggest knowing alternative routes for your most important journeys. GPS is a service that the US and many local enforcement institutions can turn off at any time.

- I was in South London before the pandemic when, without any prior warning, the police decided to switch off all non-wired phone and digital services covering a busy shopping and high population area during the day when most people would normally be out of their homes. They don't do these tests in posh areas so many people are unaware of these possibilities.

- Sorry but we are where we are.

sabotabby

I've been steeped in work hell (which is just not letting up) so I haven't really caught up with DW or formulated anything more than a wish for [REDACTED] to happen to every single ICE agent and [REDACTED, replaced with screaming into the void] in general, but in the meantime, podcasts gonna podcast I guess? Honestly that's where I get my news because the mainstream media has either fallen for the lie of objectivity or just reports on things so shallowly that it's unclear as to whether things like gunning down a mother in her car as she tries to get away or kidnapping the leader of a foreign country are actual crimes or just "controversial."

Anyway.

Today I have a new podcast for you, AI Skeptics, with Cathy O'Neil and Jake Appel. Cathy O'?Neil wrote the fantastic (and still very relevant) Weapons of Math Destruction, so I was very interested in what she had to say about AI. Neither of them really come off as Professional Podcasters but the content of this is excellent and both they and their guests are insightful. "AI Versus Artists and Educators ft. Becky Jaffe" is the most recent one and most relevant to my interests.

It should be noted that folks on the podcast are skeptics rather than professional haters like me, so there's occasionally a use case, 90% of which I still disagree with. But it's an important and intelligent discussion, and the episodes are quite short and accessible.

andrewducker

1. Danish troops told to 'shoot first, ask questions later' if US invades Greenland: (tags:usa greenland denmark war doom )
2. What is the product placement in Lord of the Rings? (read the comments): (tags:lotr advertising viaSwampers )
3. How do UK voters feel about coalitions, and what kind would they like to see?: (tags:uk coalition politics polls )

poliphilo

Maria Goretti was an Italian peasant girl who was murdered (aged 11) while resisting a would be rapist. She died in hospital, forgiving her killer and hoping to meet him in Paradise. This happened in 1902. She was canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church in 1950.

Her killer Alessandro Serenelli repented in in prison, became a leading proponent of his victim's cult and died, aged 88, in the Franciscan convent where he lived and worked as a lay brother.

This is the only photograph that exists of Maria

Photograph_of_Saint_Maria_Goretti,_1902.jpeg

Photograph_of_Saint_Maria_Goretti,_1902.jpeg

And this is Alessandro in late middle age

I got on their track because we are currently being pummelled by a storm the French weather people have elected to call Goretti- and wanted to know what was behind the name.

Well, now I know. Initially inclined to be flippant, the more I read the more engaged I became. It's a sad, uplifting story- and if I said I ended my research with tears in my eyes I wouldn't be lying. Maria and (ultimately) Alessandro were simple, good people and I'm happy to have been introduced to them.

Meanwhile, asked to account for their choice of such an inappropriate name for their storm, the meteorologists gave a Gallic shrug and said, "Well, it works, doesn't it?" Gotta love the French. They know their culture is the highest on the planet and they don't have to explain themselves if they don't want to.

rydra_wong

On Monday evening I had the BEST time being repeatedly summoned by someone who (it gradually became clear) was wildly lost in the Duke's Archives.

Context: in Dark Souls, you can put down a summon sign so that other players can* summon you into their game to help them out (at the risk of also opening themselves up to potential hostile invaders).

You can only be summoned by people in the same rough level range as you, so if I don't feel like moving on yet from an area after I’ve completed it, I often put down my summon sign and hang around for a bit before I level up out of the usual range for that area. It’s been a lot of fun.

VERY IMPORTANT CONTEXT: there is no channel for voice or text communication. There's a very limited menu of gestures, and a few signals (e.g. repeatedly tapping the block button to jiggle your shield or weapon, which generally seems to communicate "I'm here, let's go!") which the fandom has evolved by default.

This makes communication challenging. But it also means it makes zero demands on my capacity for verbal conversation or pretending to be a semi-normal human being.

( Cut for length )

oursin

Happy birthday,

flemmings!

andrewducker

"No!" Yelled Gideon. "Throw it at Daddy!"
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

Intrepid explorers off to school.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

ysabetwordsmith

Dogs Build Their Vocabularies Like Toddlers

Basket the Border collie seems to have a way with words. The 7-year-old dog, who resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, knows the names of at least 150 toys — “froggy,” “crayon box” and “Pop-Tart,” among them — and can retrieve them on command.

The number is average. Most dogs can learn 100-200 words, typically 150-160. However, a majority of those are verbs like "sit" and "fetch." Nouns are less common, but most dogs learn a bunch of things like "food" and "leash." Having a vocabulary that is mostly nouns is uncommon.

Why a collie? Because people used to teach them the names of the sheep. "All in" is useful, but "Cut Molly" (out of the herd) is even more so.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

poliphilo

I woke in the night and my cold seemed to have gone away and I thought (no, don't roll your eyes; this is real, I really did think it) that the E.T.s had passed by and cured eveyone of whatever was wrong with them and we'd get up in the morning and find a new world had come into being from which disease had been banished forever. I rotated my thumbs and they didn't hurt. "That proves it," I told myself. "My arthritis is cured...."

On a mundane tnote, I'm no longer coughing uncontrollably- so a corner has actually been turned, but perhaps not for all humankind.

dorchadas

Classic Chicago winter thunderstorms.

Jokes aside it just rained for six hours straight. I've hear stories of people clearing storm drains by hand--they're clogged with fall leaves because this is not usually something we have to worry about--to clear the six to ten inches of standing water in their streets. Usually it's -10°C around this time of year after the New Year Temperature Drop but today it was 12°C and all that snow we should have gotten was rain. I can still hear thunder in the distance.

sashagee and Laila got drenched walking back from gymnastics and that was hours ago and then it kept raining.

At one point lightning lit up the entire house brighter than the noonday sun, and then the crash of thunder didn't come for at least five seconds afterward. This is crazy for January in Chicago.

Current Mood: peaceful
Current Music: The rain

ysabetwordsmith

Today's theme is Led Zeppelin.

fanmix_monthly -- Mixtapes & Fanmixes
A fanmix is a compilation of songs inspired by a fannish source.
[Active with multiple posts in January.]

landoftheiceandsnow -- We Come From The Land of Ice and Snow
Led Zeppelin fanfiction archive.
[Active with one post in December.]

tfc_musicianships -- We Jammin'. We Are The Underground
Musicians, engineers, and others of the scene.
[Active with one post in January.]

thefreaksclub -- TFC // The Anti-Thesis Social Network
Everything related to darker alternative subcutlures. Discussion on books, the occult, music, & more.
[Active with multiple posts in January.]

Current Mood: busy

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You Don't Live Like I Do

At the mercy of any sister with wrist scars and black eye goo

Network

Birdfeeding

How to Post Frequently on Dreamwidth

a small vigil

Painful start to the year

Snowflake Challenge 5: Wishlist

A few things lately noted

Visual Kei of the Day

Film post: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

In which you should check your tech

podcast friday

Interesting Links for 09-01-2026

Goretti

Anyway lately I've been crossing the gaps between the worlds to engage in jolly co-operation (tm)

(no subject)

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Animal Communication

Feeling A Little Better

Rain rain

Follow Friday 1-9-26: Led Zeppelin

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January 2026

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