squirrelitude | Reading

gingicat posting in

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/

Current Mood: awake

bookscorpion posting in

common_nature

a comedy in four acts:

greylag goose flyrunning on the water

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siderea

Polka-dotted extraterrestrials with prehensile toes and monster groove have come to save humankind with virtuoso looped microtonal rock in compound time signatures.

Look, based on that description, I wouldn't have given this the time of day myself either, but there's a reason these maniacs have become an absolute phenomenon.

Gentle readers, Angine de Poitrine.

Absolutely read the comments. As much of a treat as the band.

Watch on YouTube

Like a lot of things that have arrived from space, their initial point of impact on this planet was Québec. Some clever person noticed that their track titles are phonetic spellings of Québécois slang (Joual).

mtbc

A few years ago, driving from Portland, ME, back down to Belmont, MA, on Hallowe'en, we experienced a heavy blizzard. This Easter Sunday here in Glasgow, the morning started off with a lovely blue sky then gray turned to sleet then to handsome snowflakes that are settling. Update: Now the sky's back to blue.

The snow could at least confine itself to winter. I still vote for using R.'s citizenship to live on a tropical island instead! Fortunately, our dog L. is wholly unfazed by rain and snow.

mtbc

I have always been interested in the paranormal. There have been stories among family that touch on ghosts, telepathy, etc. that are difficult to explain, e.g., seeming rather more than just a person hallucinating a thing. Also, there are historic UFO sightings that include independent witnesses and various kinds of corroboration that are difficult to explain in terms of publicity-seeking liars.

I wouldn't say that I believe in anything concrete in that sphere, goodness knows there's enough of an assorted bag of inconsistency there. Even when there is consistency, one wonders how often it's because of the spread of memes, like when we all saw the striking grey alien staring at us from the cover of Communion in every bookstore. Still, some of it seems trickier to dismiss so it seems to warrant further attention.

For the older incidents, like around Ellsworth AFB, it's difficult to see what more we can discover now. For the newer, it may be rather easier to forge convincing evidence. Still, it would be interesting to collate and look closely at some of the best-evidenced most-inexplicable examples.

Unfortunately, popular treatments of such will tend to be less critical than they should be so as to sell more copies; perhaps Richard Hall's work is an exception. Wikipedia used to detail some interesting incidents but they were one of many regrettable casualties of deleting content on the basis of insignificance. If you want to know what Makka Pakka calls his trumpet, these days you will have to look elsewhere.

sorcyress

Oh hey, it's April 4th! That means my babymost sister --the one who loved Lord of the Rings way more than any of us other kids-- is finally coming of age, hobbitwise! I'm so pleased for her! Happy birthday Alys!!!!!

And I remembered to check in earlier today, and I know exactly what I'm getting her for her birthday, and it's something you could get her too if you want: the preorder link for The Stolen Women is finally active and the book has a drop date of October 27th! There's gonna be an audiobook (!) version and an ereader (!!) version!

It's "a retelling of the Sabine Women myth 'for those who love Gladiator but hate the patriarchy'"! It's real good sister feels! It's got queer characters! It has a character who I largely want to punch in the face because he's so annoying and also one hundred percent my favourite! I last read it in the back half of 2023, so it's going to be three years of better edits and more refined since then! I am SO EXCITED FOR ALYS!!!!!!!!

I will be purchasing several copies. I might not be joking when I say "oh yeah, I'm going to order a copy from every local bookstore I love". I already started with PSB, I'm sure I'll be able to from Harvard Square bookstore, and probably Sidequest, and then where else. Does Rodneys let you order new? If you want a copy, please hmu and I'll get you one, if you can't get yourself one. Pretty sure I'll see if NESFA lets me donate one to them.

Happy Birthday, Alys! You're so fucking cool! <3

~Sor
MOOP!

sorcyress

This morning started with kissing Austin on the forehead, grabbing my bags, and catching the bus for breakfast at Thrantar's house. He and I and Lucretia and Gwen ate some eggs and potats, then threw everything into the car (including ourselves) and began to drive drive drive down to Philly for the North American Festival of SCD!

The three of them are all "competing" --quotation marks because Boston is the only branch sending an "improvers" team (dancers who've been doing so for less than two years, no one is looking too closely at the fact that Lucretia has been, uh, closer to five I think?)-- in the festival, I'm just going along to cheer and dance and the like. It should also be a nice chance tomorrow evening/Sunday morning to hang a bit with Galia, who I adore and haven't seen in fuckin' ages.

The drive was really splendid! The company was good, I got to be in charge of the music (Thran has borrowed my CD cases for other road trips, enough to get a sense of my weird mix tapes from my early teenaged years and yet somehow tolerate them, although after I played enough things and let him actually make requests, he voted for Alex Sturbaum/sing-along folky stuff.) and there was shockingly little traffic for what is kindof a three day weekend? It's been a long time since I did an Easter weekend roadtrip, and luckily this time does not involve cramming 5 adults into a sedan, nor going all the way as far as Atlanta.

It did involve going as far as Maryland, since that's where Thrantar and I grew up (and Lucretia, it turns out, although we left her and Gwen behind when we drove through Philly, where the fest actually will be). Park the car amongst the usual Friday Night Crowd, and open the unlocked front door and shout "burglars!" as is my wont. Round the corner into the kitchen and stride up to mom for a hug, as they happily declare "that WAS the voice I thought it was!"

I like having a family situation where I can show up on the doorstop and be all "hey, can I stay the night here?" on zero notice. It pleases me! A little surprise now and again is good fun!

So Thrantar and I ate some pizza, and then he went off to spend the night with his buddy Ryan and I hung out with the Friday night crowd, learning about lockpicking and watching celebrity bake-off. The crowd petered out in time for mom and I to play a charming new game she'd just bought called Inkwell. It's a nice enough little strategy game, with truly stunning components, and we had a pretty close game through most of it. I'd be interested to find out how different it feels with five rather than two.

It's nice to be in my family house, which does feel rather nicely like home (I continue to hope dad meant it when he said this was the last house they'd buy, that they're planning to grow old and retire in this one). It's a hideous house in the suburbs, but it's what I am raised to, and I am fond of it! And it's full of good people and I like _that_ a lot.

Tomorrow I will awaken very early, so that Thran and I can make it to Philly in time for his 10am team call. I'm planning to dance a bit and do some grading and knit and hang out in general. It's a nice weekend, I think! I hope yours is going well too.

~Sor
MOOP!

silveradept

Let's begin with the story of how the industrial musical creator gave a year off of her job to someone he believed had a good novel in her, and how very, very right he was.

The Slacktivist on the death of Nicholas Brendon, and on the ways that his most famous character, Xander Harris, seemed to bleed into the actor's life (mostly to the negative), but also the ways in which revisiting Xander, Warren, and Joss, the one who created them both, provide us with a cautionary tale. Be suspicious of anyone who claims they are a male feminist. The male part, they may have, but the feminism part is almost certainly lacking, and you can tell because they have made a claim to it.

A principal who read the absolutely hilarious and entirely child-appropriate book "I Need A New Butt!" to second graders is going to get his job back, and hopefully with back pay. Because, yes, someone complained about it, and the school decided that reading the book was inappropriate to children. I suspect the people making that decision also want to make sure that there are underpants on the child in In the Night Kitchen, and that there's nothing "objectionable" in their picture book collections.

The International Olympic Committee is historically one of the worst organizations you would want in charge of international sport, and they continue their abysmal track record by announcing genetic testing to determine whether or not an athlete is allowed to compete in the women's division of a sport, with anyone that shows up with an SRY gene banned for not being a 'biological female'. Thus, they ban trans athletes…and anyone else who has this particular gene. They claim they will carve out exceptions for androgen-insensitivity and other situations where an athlete "[does] not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone," but this is still the organization that used to require women athletes to parade themselves nude before a panel of doctors charged with determining whether they were really women or not, so I can imagine they will be just as good with such potential exceptions as they have been with Caster Semanya. (Not that, y'know, there's an entire contingent of trans athletes in every national sport federation looking to take the place by storm, but more than a few organizations are pretending there are so they can continue to get money from bigots, and to avoid having to take a stand on the right side of history against the forces that would ridicule them or make things harder for them to continue making their money if they actually had morals.) If you search for the evidence that supposedly backs these new tests, you are chasing vittras as they laugh at you, and often arrive at the assertion of a eugenicist who can't even prove their own assertion (and who will blame it on the test subjects instead of himself.) Or you land at the fact that these policies have been implemented and abandoned and implemented and abandoned because reactionaries want to classify people into neat boxes, and people, being constructed of multiple combinations of building blocks in nearly-infinite variations, defy being classified into neat boxes, and so the definition of "man" and "woman" is almost always political because it cannot be technical or scientific, and the IOC is certainly a political organization, perhaps even more so than the NOCs and federations that it serves as an umbrella for. We're still in this phase where we believe that women have to look a specific way before we will acknowledge they are women, and so many of our elite athletes are not in the category of being sufficiently feminine to be acknowledged as women.

( And more people who make bad choices, and cover for other bad choices, and otherwise try to legitimize those bad choices )

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Kairi III

silveradept

I have been on a not-very-great headspace kick lately, and I think some of it has to do with things that are out of my control and that I cannot influence in any way to make the lives of the people around me better. Some of it is feeling foolish and unintelligent that the solutions to puzzles I am trying to work out don't immediately leap out at me and allow me to progress even further along, as other people are doing just fine.

And some of it, in this case, is feeling like I am being misunderstood, or that I am misunderstanding, and that those kinds of things are waking up the slumbering brainweasel that is cousin to "you are an impostor" but instead takes the tack of "you are actually bad at all of this, and you have been clinging to self-delusion that you are anything other than bad at everything."

This is a weasel that is impervious to counterexample and abundance of evidence. Mostly because of the experience I had with my first work supervisor, and how really awful the relationship with my ex turned out to be (and how long I stayed in it and tried to defend it or at least believe that it wasn't really that bad.) You know, the usual things that leave scars as they heal and always threaten to just open up again and start bleeding everywhere if they get poked.

( As usual, something happened at work that has roused this particular weasel, and now I'm probably overthinking it. )

My experiences have led me not to the confidence of the mediocre white man, who can explain away any fault as being someone else's problem, or not actually relevant to them, but instead to the pathways of someone who carries themself like they expect to be hit at some point, and probably without any warning signs they can detect. I'm trying to be good at my job, but being good at my job involves other people, and people are notoriously hard to read properly.

I dunno. Maybe I am bad at my job. (Peter says, after all, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, so maybe I've already found mine.)

Maybe I'm bad at relationships. (This is an unknowable item without outside perspectives, and those outside perspectives each have their own criteria for figuring out whether I'm good or bad at it, rather than a single "objective" standard.)

Maybe I'm bad at everything. (That's not true, but it can certainly feel that way if you go too long without something giving you a trout-slap or managing to break through with enough feelings of competence to get above the anhedonia line.)

Guess I'll go eat worms? (But there aren't any gummy worms in the house right now, and also, it's well-past time I was in bed at the time of finishing this entry. Post time on this is after I've had a night's sleep, but this feeling of general incompetence persists even across sleep.)

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: Scylla and the Sirens - Rock and a Hard Place

puddleshark posting in

common_nature

The woods in early April. Full of sunlight and birdsong: the pensive silvery songs of robins, the repetitive two-tone squeak of coal-tits, chiffchaffs singing their own name, and nuthatches whistling like football referees.

( Read more... )

mtbc

I am a fan of manned spaceflight. If we are confined to this planet only, especially if we remain such poor stewards and with such capacity for destruction, then we will be limited and eventually gone, leaving nothing behind but artifacts.

I was concerned for Artemis II, fearing that something like Apollo 8 was a jump too far too fast after a long fallow period, and that showhorses had too greatly replaced sober experts in program management. It was with considerable relief that I watched the astronauts achieve orbit and I am glad that their time in orbit has provided the confidence for their present journey onward to the moon, incidentally arriving at around the dates of first contact for Star Trek and Babylon 5.

I do not know if my children will get to see us establish a longer-term presence on the moon, perhaps even among asteroids, but I can dream. In the meantime, at least I can reasonably hope for the astronauts' safe return.

asakiyume

If I need a friend I just give a wriggle,
Split right down the middle.
And when I look there's two of me,
Both as handsome as can be.
--from "A Very Cellular Song," by the Incredible String Band

Division takes a whole and splits it into parts, and those parts are necessarily smaller than the whole, increasingly smaller the larger the number of divisions ... unless, as with cellular mitosis, the divided parts grow, so that the two halves each become as big as the original whole was. If those two both divide and give us four that grow as big as the original, and then if the same happens at eight and sixteen and on and on, then pretty soon we've got a lot, maybe too much, a big mass, a big mess. We could end up like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, flooded out by too many animated broomsticks lugging too many buckets of water, a cancer of servant broomsticks.

...These thoughts brought to you courtesy of glancing down at a newspaper and seeing this headline:

(In this case it's a transitive "divide" that's meant, not an intransitive one, but I was taken with the notion of a budget just mitosising away, burgeoning out of committee, expanding beyond the district--who knows what happens next.)

ysabetwordsmith posting in

common_nature

Earth Month -- April 2026

Earth Month takes place during April every year. It’s a time to raise environmental awareness and create consciousness around the issues that affect mother nature during this time of crisis. Every April, leaders, and environmental activists from all over the world join hands to create sustainable development and offer climate solutions, to minimize our carbon footprint and prevent further harm to our planet’s natural resources. It’s increasingly important to observe this month as Earth starts to unravel the harmful effects of climate change which not only poses a threat to our existence but is irreversibly damaging all forms of life.

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Current Mood: busy

signoftea posting in

common_nature

It's getting warmer, the days are getting longer, and the scent of spring is coming in through the open window. Bird activity is very high. Some days, my birding app detects up to 25 different species within 20 minutes. Some of them are migratory birds, on the way back to where they came from in the winter. The others, about to start breeding, make as much noise as they can.

Today, as I was watering my balcony flowers, I looked down at the lawn because I saw some movement there. Two wood pigeons were wandering around, and between them, a hedgehog! I've never seen one in the open in broad daylight before. They're mostly nocturnal, as far as I know.

I googled "hedgehog active during the day" and found out that this could be a sign that the hedgehog is injured or malnourished. It did look a bit thin, as far as I could see from two storeys above, but not weak or distressed. It was walking around purposefully and seemed to be eating something, probably earthworms. In the information I found online, it said hedgehogs are often thin in the spring, because they're recovering from hibernation. It doesn't have to be a reason for concern. So I guess it doesn't need help right now.

When I checked again a few minutes later, both the hedgehog and the pigeons had disappeared.

I'm going to keep an eye out for the little hedgehog in the coming days. If I see it again and it looks like it needs help, I might take it to the vet, or to a rescue center.

mtbc

When people pause in uttering a sentence, my mind is often eagerly prompt in filling the space. For example, on the train there is an announcement about the carriage, I forget what, but there's a pause where I want to fill it in with, … may be larger than it appears or somesuch, which I suppose my brain concocts from some combination of Doctor Who and car side-mirrors. There is also an announcement instructing to tell them if one sees something strange (a headless horseman or a two-headed goat or whatever) which also includes a brief pause, ripe for completion with, … then throw something at it.

More striking, though, is that my brain wants to put words to music. I notice when existing mundane sentences fit a line of music from some song or jingle, could be from any time or genre, ranging from Henry Mancini to South Park. And, with little tunes like fancier alarm tones, my brain wants to add lyrics to them. They range from nonsensical to unprintable but there you are. Sometimes it will just substitute part of a sentence: for instance, from this commercial from my childhood, I notice various other unlikely things that might be, … just enough to give your kids a treat.

For me, the most striking part is that, although I am neither musical nor lyrical in any competent sense, my brain clearly notices when an existing verbal phrase fits an existing line of music or vice versa. This suggests that I am indexing somewhat by syllable patterns, perhaps emphasis too; that would explain why, when I am trying to remember a word, I will typically have a good idea how many syllables it has. There's some cognitive architecture lesson here about how brains handle language, at least mine.

mtbc

Britain has many nice fancy buildings and engineering marvels whose origins coincide with the the height of its colonial era. I surmise that the colonies were exploited such that their wealth turned into shiny domestic things. In visiting Paris and seeing the many old, grand buildings, and noting that France also had many colonies, I wonder if my theory holds analogously there too.

Glasgow's Victorian buildings seem to have developed a bit of a habit of collapsing and burning down. I can't help but suspect that, as we all end up as second-tier powers, it's nice to have the shiny things (if we don't think about why we have them) but there's going to be decreasingly many, no longer is there means to create them. They're valuable but perishable leftovers of a past era.

sorcyress

We will go to space today!

I'm rewatching the last T-3minutes of the NSF stream, mostly because I really want to hear the guy shout "LET'S GO TO THE MOON!!" again, because that was so charming! Of all of this, that was the part that made me most gleeful, hearing his glee!

I smiled so hard my face nearly started hurting, starting maybe at T-30seconds? Crying too, obviously, I have been crying on and off this entire afternoon as I watch different parts of the stream.

I'm sad Grandpa Perks didn't get to see us go back. I'm distraught ShadowKev didn't live long enough to get to appreciate a manned moon launch. He, at least, lived through one in the past. It's my first.

I'm thirty-six and a half years old, and it's the first time I've ever gotten to watch us launch our way to and towards and around the moon. We're not even landing on it yet (sounds like Artemis IV is aiming for 2028) but it's far and away the closest we've come in fifty-four years.

My favourite-least-favourite-favourite xkcd comic is 65 Years. It is fantastic to think that it's going to be wrong.

We will go to space today. And tomorrow. And next year and the year after. And again and again, over and over again. Somebody will, someday.

~Sor
MOOP!

pilottttt posting in

common_nature

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You can read more about how we visited Troy here (in Russian).

sorcyress

Today has been a mixed accomplishing things day. I was out sick from work yesterday (for brain bullshit reasons) so I had to do a little bit of catchup with myself. Which I.....mostly didn't do! But I did enough and it was entirely okay.

Part of why I didn't do more is because I got distracted playing phone games after school. Which is not great. But then Clayton saved me by stopping by my room at just the exact time I would have to leave in order to get home before therapy. I could've continued fucking around and done therapy from work, but then I wouldn't have had a nice conversation with my friend nor would I've been home in any kind of timely manner.

Therapy was fine. Not super organized, but Jenn did encourage me to not just do bullshit after the thing. I managed to start some knitting during the end of it, and that was good! that carried me into actually constructive not-video game time.

I did some good knitting! I started a new yarn in Alys's scarf, then immediately frogged it and tried again simultaneous with a second yarn. This was the correct solution because I did a good job of choosing contrasting colours and now this godawful weird yarn has made the most incredible moss-like pattern. I loooove it! I am very sad that I don't have more of the yarn to figure out something for realsies to make out of it. (yes yes, I should find a picture for this)

Knitting meant I was listening to music, and that meant I, uh, recorded the song I wrote a couple years ago and rewrote a bit for YTS. And I don't want to put my work on YouTube because fuck google. So it's on Bandcamp now. (This is not a professional or good track, but also it does not cost money, so cool).

ANYWAYS.

Then it was time to make dinner and I actually spent a fairly pleasant ninety minutes in the kitchen getting things done and listening to more music. Clean the stove, make some pasta, cook some broccoli, catch up on a *lot* of dishes. It was good and I'm glad to have done it! But man, I'm glad to be done with it.

Played a wee bit of Slay the Spire (which felt _good_, just doing a bit of one round) and now I'm busy watching Taskmaster with my favoured. It's going very well!

Tomorrow I'm going to hang out with Ruthie a bit (possibly with her toddler possibly without) and, uh. Ideally do some unpacking from last weekend and repacking for the next. And then also maybe some grading?

And that's me!

~Sor
MOOP!

bookscorpion posting in

common_nature

This weekend, we went to the botanical gardens and we saw a big group of Bohemian waxwings! They are very rare guests here on their way to and from Scandinavia and I had never seen one before. I did know instantly what they were seeing them all sitting in the tree though.

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August 2024

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Page generated Apr. 6th, 2026 06:29 pm

Scamperings

Reading

Boston Globe soliciting interviewees

(no subject)

🔺 [music]

It's no longer winter

Curious about the paranormal

Happy birthday happy bookday!

Drive by Day!

(no subject)

Not feeling my best lately.

The Woods in April

De la Terre à la Lune

division

Earth Month

Nature diary

Unbidden lyrics and random tunes

History and the Remains of Empire

Our new world is so close

Persian squirrels inhabiting the ruins of the legendary Troy

(no subject)

Bohemian Waxwings

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August 2024

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