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Sorry if you're a fan of boring old dry land...

Five SF Stories Featuring the Sudden Formation of New and Exciting Bodies of Water

rolanni

Tuesday. Sunny and cool.

Woke up without pain! Two hours later, I do have a tiny ache, which is entirely livable, and I'm shaking bad, but shaking doesn't hurt. Onward.

Scrambled an egg with onion, garlic, and sweet pepper, and toasted the last bits of homemade bread to top with sour cherry jam for breakfast. Which is the first thing I've been able to make and eat in, um, four days. Yes, I do know how to lose five pounds in four days. Not recommended.

Someone had asked if there wasn't anyone who could help with the food, and, err no. The issue this weekend wasn't my usual antipathy to actually making food (I could have ordered in, if that had been the case), but that the pain was so bad, I couldn't eat. I won't bore you with how difficult it is to convince yourself to eat two spoonfuls of cottage cheese so you can take the Tylenol, but trust me -- No Fun.

I'm still doing Tylenol, and may hit the ache with some CBD lotion on my way back to Steve's office after I finish this note, which is not dictated, but I'm feeling so much better -- I can't tell you.

Embroidery is still off the table for tonight. Ellen has courageously agreed to drive me to the cancer center (and back!) at stupid o'clock tomorrow, which is one less thing to worry about, and a load off my ... back. Am I going to stained glass on Thursday? Let's get through today and tomorrow first.

I did snatch a moment out of a relatively pain-free half-hour yesterday to painter-tape cardboard to the inside of the Problematic Table. Do I think Rookie will try to go through the no-longer-big-enough space between the table bars, and get stuck again? How do I know? He's a cat. The best I, a mere human, can do is Plan for the Worst.

I think that's all the news. I have three more Bits to do for the Sekrit Project, and my inbox and physical desktop are a mess.

The Plan is to make myself another cup of tea, go back to Steve's office, do the Bits, reassess, and see if settling in with a heating pad and a book is my next best move, or I'm up for More Adventure.

What're your plans for the day?

In case you missed it, the cats declared Selfie Tuesday

james_davis_nicoll

How could a man die in front of Atocha Chief of Police Loren Hawn when that man died twenty years before?

Days of Atonement by Walter Jon Williams

sartorias

I love Boston so much, especially this area around Harvard. The trees are rich with color, the air is brisk, requiring all my layers of flimsy California-wear, and the sidewalks brick with lumps of tree roots. I love it all.

Yesterday I went with Nine to the Mapparium on the other side of the river. (The bus ride down Massachusetts Ave is great for scenery!) If you've never heard of it--I hadn't until one of the Viable Paradise workshop writers clued me in--it's an enormous glass globe that you can walk into, to see the entire world, worked in jewel-toned glass, as it was in 1935. It was constructed to be a reminder that we are all in this world together; a needed warning then, as now. (Naturally those who need it most won't see or hear.)

We had a great time looking, then testing the amazing sounds created by voices enclosed in glass.

Afterward we met up with Rushthatspeaks for tea and chocolate at L.A. Burdicks. Oh, they know how to do chocolate so, so right. Delish. We chatted and reminisced and cackled like maniacs. Today we'll visit the Fogg to see a Botticelli that is usually hidden in a private collection. I can hardly wait!

I'm coming down from the high of a very successful workshop, and a month of splendid visiting and seeing and fast-lane busy. The workshop writers are so talented and so focused, and all this in beautiful Martha's Vineyard.

Tomorrow homeward bound!

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We talk about different goal systems, pros and cons of resolutions, arts and crafts for tracking goals, human psychology, and more. You can share your resolutions or other goals. There are weekly check-in posts in January, and monthly ones in the rest of the year, for folks to talk about their accomplishments. December-January is the most active period, and it starts ramping up in November as lots of people begin thinking about their goals for the next year.

2025 New Year's Resolutions and Other Goals is the guide post for this years goal-setting activities.
For more details on relevant topics, see "Things You Can Talk About Here."

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Current Mood: busy

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Current Mood: busy

sovay

As part of my birthday month,

spatch just presented me with a little black cat bag containing the Criterion flash sale fruits of Orson Welles' The Immortal Story (1968), which I had loved at the start of this month.

I just want an extra week in the month to do nothing but sleep instead of talking to doctors and bureaucracies. I can't believe we are almost out of October. It should be an inexhaustible resource.

Current Music: Lord Huron, "Watch Me Go"

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beatrice_otter

All the cool kids are doing it, so I guess I will too:

How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A. Anatomy of a Secret--Jadzia Dax in the Reboot universe.
B. the bells are going to chime--My Fair Lady, Eliza/Colonel Pickering post-movie
C. Currency--Star Wars/Babylon 5, Han and Chewie take a job carrying cargo to a place so far out in Wild Space they've never even heard of the Empire. Or the Jedi.
D. The Desert Between--Reboot, Spock/Uhura, and vulcan worldbuilding
E. Essential To Your Own--TNG, Data/Geordi
F. Family Matters (The Things Inside Remix)--BSG, Dee is on Pegasus, finding her place. A Six is on New Caprica, learning what she doesn't know. Lee Adama is a Cylon prisoner, but this is not his story. A New Caprica AU.
G. The Genetics Factory--Criminal Minds/Stargate, In Detroit, homeless addicts are turning up dead. But there's more to the case than meets the eye, and the BAU finds themselves looking for something they don't understand. For Derek, it gets personal.
H. The Heart's Desire--Rivers of London, Abigail has earned her right to become a practitioner of magic. Now, the training begins.
I. Interview with the Robot--Fandom for Robots
J. Just Like Old Times--Stargate SG-1, Teal'c and Daniel, on an adventure.
K. Kitty and Georgy (The Healing Old Hurts Remix)--Pride and Prejudice, Kitty is often ill, but she is determined to live her best life anyway.
L. Little Ship Lost--TNG, On a routine mission, a wormhole opens up near Enterprise, and a ship pops out. It's challenging to rescue people who don't trust you.
M. Matters of Perspective--TNG, Picard and Guinan post Time's Arrow
N. Not Place, But People--Enterprise, The older Enterprise wasn't destroyed after all. When it limps back to Earth, Trip finds Lorian and invites him home to meet the family.
O. The Offer--Vorkosiverse, An AU where Aral didn't survive Mad Yuri's Massacre, but his sister did.
P. Pale Battalions--SG-1, Teal'c goes home after a glorious battle in Apophis' name.
Q.
R. Revenge of the Zillo Beast--Star Wars, Mace and Anakin have killed the Zillo Beast every way they can think of in different time loops. Maybe killing the Beast won't solve the problem?
S. Schoolwork--DS9, Jake misses his dad, now he's with the Prophets, but he still has his friends, his family, and his career.
T. Third Chance--Star Trek, AU, This isn't the first time Ro has had to start her life over, nor the first time she's had to deal with people who don't like or trust her.
U. Undiscovered Stars--Star Wars/Star Trek, Just how far out in the Unknown Regions was he, Lando wondered, that they didn't use hyperdrives?
V. Vast Beyond Knowing (The Details Remix)--Star Wars. Anakin, Luke, Rey. The desert taught them much. But not everything.
W. Wachet Auf--Rivers of London, In 1940, Nightingale has to catch a Nazi spy armed with a magical device. In 2016, Nightingale and others fall into a magical coma, and Peter Grant must figure out why it happened and how to end it.
X. X is for Xenophobia--SG-1, Little Jake Carter knew all about people who Weren't Like Us.
Y.
Z.

22/26, not bad. Interesting that I have X but not Y; from looking at other peoples' lists, it's usually the other way around. (If I'd done more Stargate Alphabet Soups, I might have filled in the missing letters.) I have, by the way, written 264 fics in approximately 110 fandoms over the course of almost 20 years. (Some fandoms are squishy, and it depends how you count them.)

elainegrey

Well, that was a thing. I took a long weekend, and there were ups and downs.

Thursday and Saturday night took nice long dog walks at dusk in the nearby mega-development along trails and lamp-lit streets. Carrie and i went with my sister and her dog on Thursday, returned with Christine on Saturday.

Friday night i saw my niece in as the lead in "She Kills Monsters," which is about the relationship between an older sister and her younger deceased sister, in which the elder realizes that assumptions that her younger sister was cisgender or heterosexual were not necessarily correct. It was a little surreal to watch sitting next to my younger sister, while watching my niece play opposite her girlfriend.

Sunday i met up with my sister and dad at a house he's looking at in between the two of us. I hope he jumps on buying it. [News: he's decided not to move again. Oh well.]

I spent lots of time resurrecting coding environment in my laptop, using mise to handle dependencies and environment along with poetry for python. Had a headache getting my diagramming tool container running. I think i was just (1) trying to run on a port with something else on it and then (2) had conflicts with the development environment user/workspace/folder configurations. Instead i chased the container management system, switching to a new system, and fiddled forever with ai assisted node scripts (i don't know javascript really) to see if there were firewalls etc etc oh good grief. Very cranky making.

And my project was aligning my records of absences with work's. By definition, work is correct for previous years, and it seems the offset errors are in previous years. So i put in offset corrections. But that was fussy and annoying. However, i learned about "frictionless" data manifests. That delights me no end. In general i am trying to learn to manage things "right" in semi-standard idiom and patterns. Over the past few months i've developed a personal style guide (leaning heavily on work's) and a workspace template. This was the first time trying to get the template running at home, so, yes, some bumps.

CPAP has been stopping in the middle of the night and my ("smart") watch started dying within hours of a full charge. Sunday morning i woke in a terrible mood because i had awakened 03:30ish to a watch with just 3% battery after going to bed with a day and 21 hours of charge. I also woke to no air. I couldn't fall back asleep, so i ended up spending hours trying to factory reset and reconnect to my phone with no luck. I think i found some setting that will fix the CPAP behavior: i didn't know if i was turning it off in the middle of the night myself, but last night i slept well.

This morning i had to fast -- including NO TEA!! -- for a "wellness" blood draw to get a $500 reduction on my health insurance premium. I think it will be worth it. I stopped in the past because it was all very intrusive with lots of participation in online portals that seemed pretty annoying. This year it simply (it seems?) requires a bio-metric screening. What i don't know is if the coaching is triggered by being pre-diabetic or simply a BMI trigger. It doesn't seem that one has to engage with the coaching to get the reduction in the premium. I trust my doctor, i don't need an algorithm. Anyhow, i survived the fasting by not taking my vitamin B in the morning, and beat back the caffeine withdrawal with coffee.

I did get blue and have had lots of self recrimination about not being outside this vacation. But trying to accept my focus. We did have a lovely Sunday dinner with a Quorn roast (mushroom based protein loaf) with home-grown chestnuts among the carrots, onions, and potatoes, and a cranberry relish with home-grown persimmons and spice bush spices. I thought i might have overdone it with the spice bush, using all of last year's frozen pulps+sugar. Fortunately Christine still loved the relish, and i was motivated while it was cooking to get this year's second harvest of pulps separated from seeds. (The first harvest went bad in the fridge as i neglected it.) By the time of the second harvest some of the spice bush berries had dried out on the shrub. People often dry them whole, so i had some of those ground over slices of persimmon for breakfast for several days: also yummy.

sovay

This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from

foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.

Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.

Current Music: Niecy Blues, "Exit Simulation"

james_davis_nicoll

Nearly two dozen Mythos investigations in many eras from the open-license Cthulhu Eternal tabletop roleplaying game line produced by Cthulhu Reborn.

Compatible with your favorite Lovecraftian percentile-based systems)

Bundle of Holding: Cthulhu Reborn

james_davis_nicoll

2020: Boris Johnson proposes an unbuildable bridge between Scotland and Ireland, Universal Credit successfully sends stress levels soaring, and the Tories handle Covid as skilfully as they did Brexit.

Poll #33767 Clarke Award Finalists 2020

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

Which 2020 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
1 (2.5%)

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
34 (85.0%)

Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4 (10.0%)

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
12 (30.0%)

The Last Astronaut by David Wellington
1 (2.5%)

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
18 (45.0%)

Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2020 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
The Last Astronaut by David Wellington
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

ranunculus

I'd love to call this post Alaska Adventures, but really we have been very, very quiet this last week. M had a bad cold which, hopefully, I am not catching.
The beautiful fall foliage that was here when we arrived has now disappeared. Yesterday it tried very hard to snow, but only managed a few tiny flakes. It's cold, but not yet really icy, with the first big winter storm approaching as we leave to go back to 80F in Ukiah. ( More, with pics )

elisem

In 2015, Naomi Kritzer wrote a story called "So Much Cooking." I really love it, even though it's a hard read these days. It's about a pandemic, and about making do, and about taking care of each other. One of the recurring plot points is that the narrator, a food blogger, doesn't have some significant ingredients for any recipe they try, so they improvise and this teaches the readers of their food blog useful tricks to get by when supplies are uncertain, partial, patchy. It was the account of making cookies without eggs or oil that made me think of possibilities. And the Sven-Saw cleaning actually went better than I expected.

It happened because there does not seem to be either mineral oil or mineral spirits or WD-40 or any other semi-plausible things around the house. This does not usually matter for me on a daily basis, but the Sven-Saw needed to be cleaned, and it was going to be a bigger than usual job for ADHD reasons. As is true of so many things around here.

It would be one thing if it were just the abundance of resin that the smallish tree stump I needed to saw was dispensing with every stroke. That might not have been too bad, but it got more difficult because as I was assessing what to do about this, I got distracted and had to attend to something, and then realized that meds were overdue, which meant fixing something quick to eat so the meds didn't bounce, and the Sven-Saw sat in the kitchen, patiently waiting.

I don't know if it was patiently waiting or what. It might be patient.

I try not to anthropromorphize everything, because some things don't like it.

Anyhow, it may or may not be patient. What it definitely was was resin-laden. And the distraction took long enough that the resin was doing its best to dry on the saw blade, and this is not the way a person is supposed to take care of their tools. Which set me looking for the right thing to use, and not finding either right things or wrong-but-maybe-worth-a-try things... until I realized that this was possibly solvable by the peanut butter trick.

The peanut butter trick is a thing someone taught me to remove glued-on or stuck-on labels from glass containers. When soap and water doesn't work because the adhesive in question doesn't care about soap or water, you take a very small spoonful of peanut butter, and you generously coat the label you're trying to remove with it. Go out beyond the edges some, because having it soak in at the edges is a win. Put it down and ignore it for at least fifteen minutes. Then come back and look at whether the peanut butter has at all soaked into the label. It probably has. And the now-altered label may well have changed its mind about soap and water. Try some soapy water and a scrubby or a rag or whatever you've got. Chances are, the label and its adhesive will now come right off.

I did have peanut butter, and I knew the peanut butter trick would probably work, but there wasn't all that much peanut butter, and what there was, I had plans for. So I tried an alternative.

Friends, I am here to report that it is quite possible to clean semi-dried tree resin off a Sven-Saw with mayonnaise in place of peanut butter. I did do some additional work on some recalcitrant bits with some dry baking soda, but honestly, some of those marks might have already been on there before I started. I'm pretty sure the Sven-Saw blade is shinier than it was.

But we probably should either lay in some of the usual remedies, or figure out where they have got to if we already have some, as is sometimes the case in this here palace of ADHD.

Anyhow, reading is educational, or a least good for jogging the memory, the saw is clean enough to put away until tomorrow, when I'll take up work on that stump again, and I am a relieved saw caretaker, because whew.

Have you used any interesting substitutes in household problem-solving lately?

elisem

The Sven-Saw is my friend. Even so, getting the muscle memory back to work is going to take a little while. And this particular stump is going to take a little while and then a longer while. After all, I haven't used it for about... whoah, thirty-some years? Eeep. But it's fall yard work season, and needs must.

As someone who has recently gone through the first intake session with a professional counselor for agoraphobia and for grief (which are the two things my GP requested I be seen for), I am now at least technically under care for these things, but anyone who's been through it knows that intake sessions are not quite getting-work-done sessions. They're more like is-this-therapeutic-pairing-going-to-work? sessions. (Signs point to yes. This is a relief.) I look forward to finding out what we can do about various things. In the run-up to this, I have been doing what I can to combat agoraphobia (or more like confuse and distract it) and hopefully lessen it with the strategic use of yard work. During the spring and summer, my goal was "get out and spend seven minutes at least in the yard improving something." It did help some. Also our yard looks better, which probably relieves some of the neighbors.

The Sven-Saw, a marvelous tool made here in Minnesota, enters the picture because there are some saplings that need to be cut off and the little stumps painted with stump-killer before winter. All of them are pretty much broomstick size or smaller, but there is one that's four to six inches wide depending on how you measure it. It's this stump that needs the Sven-Saw, because the stump killer wants a fresh cut to work on.

The biggish stump is inconveniently placed, and I have trouble getting at it. Part of that is pre-existing mobility and agility difficulties. The stump cannot be picked up and put on a convenient cutting frame; it has to be cut off horizontally a few inches above the ground. This is because of where it is: at the corner of the garage where the parking pad meets the alley. Our garage door is perpendicular to the alley. There is a small strip of land along the alley side of the garage which some long-ago person enhanced with a concrete-walled raised bed. It's not very tall, but it's tall enough to get in the way at the corner when I'm trying to get at this stump. It (the stump) is tucked in to a little notch of bare soil at the corner of the garage, where the alley-side raised bed strip ends before the length of the garage does. It (the raised bed strip with little concrete walls) stops early because some sensible person thought ahead, and designed it so that it is nearly impossible to run over the little concrete corner of the raised bed when trying to park. (I suppose someone might manage it, but they'd probably sideswipe the whole alley wall of the garage and then be too far in to successfully maike the turn into the parking pad.) Anyway, there's a little postage stamp of bare earth at the alley corner of the garage that runs a foot or so along the alley side of the garage before the concrete wall of the raised bed kicks in. And that's where the stump is.

Because of the concrete, I can really only get at the stump from one angle. While I can go at the cut from either side, it's all in the same cut, with a total variance possible of maybe fifteen degrees. Maaaaybe. This is due to the slight slope and where the pavement of the parking pad is. It's a tricky spot. Add in my mobility and agility difficulties, plus the dizziness and balance issues that have recently been added to my character sheet, and the necessity of bending over and trying to saw horizontally, and it turns into a two day job with a lot of breaks for resting while my gyroscopes reset.

All the other bits needing cutting and then painting with stump-killer will be much easier, barring one or two that are doing creative things around some pipes outside the house.Take the hard one first, get it out of the way. That's the plan. And it's a good plan.

It's just going to take a little longer than I thought.

Have you done yard work lately? If so, how has it gone? Any stump issues or adventures?

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chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/10/26/lohengrin-with-a-twist/

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Tuesday not dictated

Days of Atonement by Walter Jon Williams

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New Year's Resolutions and Other Goals

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And where the arrow leads, you never know

Les Mis Holiday Exchange 2025

SPOOK ME MASTER LIST 2025!!!

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Trying my best to arrive

Bundle of Holding: Cthulhu Reborn

Clarke Award Finalists 2020

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Reading Is Educational: thanks, Naomi!

Another Toku Holiday Special 2025

Yard Work as Technique for Easing Agoraphobia

British Comedian RPF Exchange - Semiflash 2025

Suppose Elsa did kill Gottfried...

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