August 29th, 2025
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
posted by [personal profile] tamaranth at 02:20pm on 29/08/2025 under , ,
2025/133: Rose Under Fire — Elizabeth Wein
I think it is the most terrible thing that was done to me – that I have become so indifferent about the dead. [p. 317]

Reread, after a description of tipping a V1 -- the manouevre that leads to Rose's capture, and her incarceration in Ravensbruck -- in Spitfire

My original review from 2014 is here: I don't have anything to add, though I was surprised at how many details (mostly horrific) I had forgotten or repressed. I remembered, instead, the small kindnesses, the reunions, the love.

Unaccountably there is no UK Kindle edition available at present.

Mood:: 'sad' sad
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
posted by [personal profile] tamaranth at 02:03pm on 29/08/2025 under ,
v2025/132: Spitfire — John Nichol
'...it was thrilling to down an enemy aircraft. This feeling increased with my catching sight that the German crew had bailed out. I hoped the pilot would be able to bail out as I hoped that’s how someone would think of me.’ [loc. 1623]

Nichol's aim is to tell the human story of the men and women who flew and maintained the iconic Spitfire: a timely endeavour, as he managed to interview quite a few WW2 veterans who died before the book was published.

The book is as interesting for its insights into 1930s Britain as for its accounts of aerial warfare and mechanical detail. Initially, pilots were young aristocrats -- male, of course: 'almost exclusively recruited from the distinguished drinking clientele of White’s'. There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of heavy drinking: If we were flying the next morning and still had a hangover we would plug into our Spitfire’s oxygen supply and this usually did the trick.’"

Read more... )
Mood:: 'thoughtful' thoughtful
andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] andrewducker at 01:19am on 29/08/2025 under ,


Little smiley chap wanted to take a photo with me this morning.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

August 28th, 2025
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
posted by [personal profile] redbird at 02:38pm on 28/08/2025 under ,
I just had a reassuringly boring dental visit. I called yesterday because I'd been having pain on and off for the previous three days, and they gave me an appointment for this morning.

I felt much better last night and basically OK this morning, but I still wanted the dentist to check in case there was a problem—intermittent symptoms can be hard to diagnose. The dentist looked inside my mouth, poked in a few places, and took two X-rays, finding nothing wrong. His best guess is that something was caught between my gum and bone, and I got it out by cleaning my teeth yesterday; I don’t know why the previous three days of brushing and flossing hadn’t done the job.

The dentist did see a little tenderness in the area that had been hurting, and wrote me a prescription for something to rinse with. Other than that, call if there are further problems, or come back in three months for my usual cleaning.

I am pleased with the outcome: it stopped hurting, and the dentist confirmed that there's nothing wrong, so I don’t need unpleasant and possibly expensive dental work.

The dentist said to hold the prescription rinse in my mouth for “a few seconds,” then rinse with water, and I only need to rinse that side of the month. The printed prescription label says 30 seconds and not to rinse for 30 minutes afterwards, which I assume are the standard instructions for this medication.
hilarita: stoat hiding under a log (Default)
posted by [personal profile] hilarita at 03:34pm on 28/08/2025 under
If you are a fountain pen person, what stupidly expensive pen (let's say, for the sake of this argument, one that costs more than about £250) would you want to buy?
ffutures: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] ffutures at 12:37pm on 28/08/2025
Many apologies, this offer launched last night but I was very busy and forgot it was happening


HOSTILE HOT ZONES (new)
       https://bundleofholding.com/presents/HostileHotZones


I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, I'll probably update this a little tonight.

andrewducker: (Default)
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
posted by [personal profile] tamaranth at 07:49am on 28/08/2025 under ,
2025/131: Creation Lake — Rachel Kushner
Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.
He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking. [first line]

That opening hooked me, though it's not exactly indicative of the novel as a whole... Sadie Smith (not her real name) is thirty-four, a heavy drinker, a former FBI operative now employed as a translator for Bruno Lacombe, an ageing revolutionary who lives in a cave and communicates with his disciple Pascal Balmy by email. Read more... )

Mood:: 'thoughtful' thoughtful
posted by [syndicated profile] xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 27/08/2025
fanf: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] fanf at 02:39am on 28/08/2025

https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-28-strongly-typed.html

What does it mean when someone writes that a programming language is "strongly typed"?

I've known for many years that "strongly typed" is a poorly-defined term. Recently I was prompted on Lobsters to explain why it's hard to understand what someone means when they use the phrase.

I came up with more than five meanings!

Read more... )

August 27th, 2025
andrewducker: (Default)
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
2025/130: A Garter as a Lesser Gift — Aster Glenn Gray
He was not good; had never aspired to be good. He had only ever wanted to be a jolly good fellow, and to be too good, like Percy, destroyed all chance of ever being jolly. Percy would have pulled the covers up over his head before he ever let his host’s wife kiss him, let alone kissed his host. [loc. 621]

A refreshing and sweet novella, setting Gawain and the Green Knight in wartime Britain. The squadron drink at the Green Dragon, and one night a man in green appears...

Gawain chats to the Bertilaks about crime novels and the Blitz; kisses his hostess, and then his host; and returns (or is returned) to his squadron with a green armband, because he has 'been raised with a great belief in magic' and is disinclined to refuse a gift that confers protection. And when the Bertilaks come visiting (with a gift of wild boar, which hasn't been hunted in Britain for four centuries) he confronts them with his anger and grief that it was just a game...

A delightful read, which I wish I'd read at Christmas! The updated setting works very well, and Gawain is vulnerable, likeable and better at talking about his feelings than the original. But then, it is a different time.

Mood:: 'satisfied' satisfied
August 26th, 2025
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
posted by [personal profile] tamaranth at 06:17pm on 26/08/2025 under ,
2025/129: The Prey of Gods — Nicky Drayden
Now humankind is finally coming into its own, bending and stretching genes in the manner of gods. It was only a matter of time before they muddled their way into bending the exact right genes to reveal that they were gods. Those genes, gone dry and brittle from lack of use, are just begging for an open flame. [p. 61]

The setting is the Eastern Cape in 2064. Alphies (levitating robot assistants) have replaced smartphones; there's a new drug on the street, which seems to confer superpowers; and the roads and parks are overrun by hundreds of thousands of dik-diks.

Read more... )
Mood:: 'cheerful' cheerful
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Another collection of comments to other people’s journals:

[personal profile] elise was asking about "ways to learn to wanna when you're gonna hafta"

I said:

Sometimes I get things done by reminding myself that I don't have to want to do them, as long as they get done. Meaning that I'm not going to enjoy the task, but maybe I want to have done it, or maybe I'm leaning on bits of habit. That mostly works for small things: it's easier to think "don't have to like it, as long as it gets done" about relatively short things, like brushing my teeth, than about anything longer or more complicated.

Typing this, I realize that this is something I mostly do/need to do late in the day. Even with meds, I run out of executive function well before I run out of day (or evening).


[personal profile] cosmolinguist posted about feeling like everyone else hasn't just stopped talking about the pandemic, they're not thinking about it, and he quoted his manager saying "something like 'You're the only one who remembers covid.' Not in an accusing way or anything, just making an ob. Clearly based on the fact that I'm still masking and I've never seen any of my colleagues wear a mask at in-person gatherings."

My comment was:
As I said [on Mastodon], it reminds me of something Siderea posted about in 2018-19: a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, people didn't mention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though flu was still killing a significant number of people every year (as it still is today). People did write about World War I, and men who died there, and there were novels about the young women who were never going to marry because of the gender imbalance, but it looked from 2018 as though there was an agreement or decision not to talk about the pandemic.

Six years ago, that seemed odd; four years ago, I was deliberately posting almost every day just so I would have a record of what those first months of the covid pandemic had been like.



A comment to [personal profile] buhrger, who lives in Alberta, about finding a new doctor:

It's not just your area, or province, that is short on doctors who are accepting new patients. A couple of months ago, we were talking to a friend of Adrian's, Ruth; they are both dissatisfied with their current doctor, but Ruth has had trouble finding another that she can get to reasonably. Oddly, I am seeing a nurse practitioner in that practice, and am entirely happy to keep seeing her, and not just because I don't want to roll the dice on someone else taking me and my combination of medical things seriously while still taking as given that I am a competent adult.


Comment to [personal profile] ambyr’s post about characters with an annoying sort of genre-awareness:

I haven’t read any Moreno-Garcia, but that shape of genre-awareness feels all wrong to me. I'm fine with characters having no idea they're in a horror novel, or a detective story, or whatever. And I'm fine with characters being aware if it's something like "if he's really a vampire, we should make sure all the doors are locked, buy some garlic, and not invite anyone inside," or with "there's no such thing as a vampire, what is this person really hiding?"

For example, I'm amused by the Terry Pratchett books where the characters know that million-to-one shots often work, so they're carefully trying to contrive those long odds against themselves before trying to do something like shoot a dragon. For me, that works in part because it's a given that the Discworld runs partly on Narrativium, and is out at the far end of some sort of probability curve.

"Don't separate the party" is a fiction-flavored way of saying :don't wander off" or "we should stay together" that doesn't require us to think we're actually in a work of fiction--but I would be annoyed by a book where the characters routinely said thet, and then someone ran off without saying anything or taking useful equipment entirely because the plot required it.


#burger and I were talking about (not) carrying cash:

If I’m out and about (not just going for a walk in the neighborhood) it’s usually for some sort of errand, and even if the main goal is to pick up a library book I’ll be passing shops and it often makes sense to go inside: maybe this branch of CVS has the specific earplugs I’m looking for, maybe the supermarket will have good berries.

That’s separate from the fact that I carry cash and credit card in the same wallet as my ID and other useful cards including my transit pass. Some of that is just-in-case planning: if one kind of thing goes wrong, I may need ny health insurance card. If I’m picking up certain prescriptions, they want me to show ID.

But mostly, having enough cash to get home in case I lose, or someone steals, my wallet is an old, ingrained habit. Once upon a time, that meant always having a subway token and a coin for a pay phone. Now, I keep a $5 bill in my daypack, and one in each of my coats that has a zipper pocket. It’s a firm enough habit that the daypack also has a Canadian $5 bill, just in case. (I didn't put a five-pound note in my pack when we were in London. Maybe I should have.)
andrewducker: (Default)
posted by [syndicated profile] xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 25/08/2025
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

August 25th, 2025
ffutures: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] ffutures at 09:14pm on 25/08/2025 under ,
This is a repeat of the "deep-space alien horror" SFRPG Hostile from Zozer Games, based on the Cepheus Engine and previously offered in April 2022

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2025Hostile



Last time I said "My impression is a game that works pretty well if your players can live with corporate betrayal, virtually unkillable monsters, and the other tropes of this side of SF. I'm not entirely sure I want to play in that sort of universe at present, but it's well worth a look and pretty cheap." I don't see any reason to change any of that.

Another bundle for this system is coming soon.

andrewducker: (Default)

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