Reading

Current Mood: informative
Current Location: Schildhaven Centraal, The Hague

Entry tags:

PSA: The World As It Ought to Be ebook giveaway

This morning Naomi Rivkis announced aGoodreads giveaway of 100 copies of her book, The World As It Ought to Be (Protopia #1)

The lucky 100 winners will be selected by lottery at the end of the month. Or, if you can't wait, or don't live in the US or Canada, go over to Naomi's website and buy yourself a copy now. It's on sale at $2.99 all month, and there are five or six different ways to buy if you prefer a format other than Kindle.

Current Mood: blank
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag

Entry tags:

recurring

Rabbit rabbit rabbit!

Welcome to June, 2026!

Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!

Happy Kalends of Iunius! Are you ready for Iuno Moneta? She's ready for you!

Current Mood: dry

Entry tags:

babble,
house

This is a test entry

But it might as well have some content, so: yay, our crawlspace work is done. No more water incursions to the garage, hopefully. (It took one HECK of a rainstorm to make that happen, but I'd rather it not happen then, either.)

(no subject)

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

(no subject)

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

[ SECRET POST #7086 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7086 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 32 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1012.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Current Mood: depressed?, grieving, short on hope
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: not enough

Entry tags:

Done Since 2026-05-24

Not a good week, for reasons I can't quite identify. Maybe it's the chronic pain that the 3g/day of paracetamol my GP suggested did little to touch. Maybe it's anticipatory grief, knowing that Ticia's health is declining. Maybe it's thinking about how little I got done. (And less about how little I got done in the last week, and more about the last year. Maybe the last half-decade.) Maybe it's worry about my son, trans and out of work in the nightmare that the US is becoming. Knowing that if I hadn't moved here, he could have moved in with me. Knowing that the US isn't going to get much (if at all) better in my lifetime. All of the above, I suppose. Much of it stuff that I have no control over. That doesn't keep it from being depressing.

And it's not that I didn't get anything done -- I did. I got my US taxes computed to the point where I could (and did!) file an extension, went for a walk every day (two shorter than usual but all over 2/3 of a kilometer), and learned a new word (zemblanity, the exact opposite of serendipity). But it wasn't enough.

Well, at least I can look forward to our trip to Majorca to see the eclipse in August. Provided it isn't ruined by things I can't control, but can't help worrying about.

Linkies: How British beavers help fight flooding from climate change : NPR Zorn's lemma ("The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?") Woodturning: A Different Take On Cubes! -- I find this guy's woodturning videos incredibly soothing. Mostly at 2x speed, with the sound off, but that's because of impatience. Which isn't really the point. Snails, Monks, and Murderous Rabbits: The Weird World Hidden in the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts. Celebrating Thirty Years of the Internet Archive with the ‘Class of 1996’ (and what does it say about me that I remember all that).

( Notes & links, as usual )

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Poetry Fishbowl Report for May 5, 2026

Our theme this time was "Older Scenes and Forgotten Characters." I wrote from 11 AM to 3 AM, so about 14 hours, allowing for lunch and supper breaks. I wrote 2 poems on Tuesday plus 5 later in the week.

Participation was down slightly, with 8 comments on LiveJournal and another 39 on Dreamwidth. A total of 12 people sent prompts. There were no new prompters.

Read Some Poetry!
The following poems from the May 5, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl have been posted:
"How Great You Really Are"
"Restoring Them to Their Former Glory"
"Where There Is No Respect for Life"
"The Worst Thing in Life"

Buy some poetry!
If you plan to sponsor some poetry but haven't made up your mind yet, see the unsold poetry list from May 5. That includes the title, length, price, and the original thumbnail description for the poems still available.

This month's donors include:

janetmiles and

gs_silva . All sponsored poems from this fishbowl have been posted. There are 2 tallies toward a bonus fishbowl.

The Poetry Fishbowl has a landing page.

[ SECRET POST #7085 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7085 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1012.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

[ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #1013 ]

[ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #1013 ]

The first secret from this batch will be posted on Jun 6th.

RULES:
1. One secret link per comment.
2. 750x750 px or smaller.
3. Link directly to the image.

More details on how to send a secret in!

Optional: If you would like your secret's fandom to be noted in the main post along with the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret. If your secret makes the fandom obvious, there's no need to do this. If your fandom is obscure, you should probably tell me what it is.

Optional #2: If you would like WARNINGS (such as spoilers or common triggers -- list of some common ones here) to be noted in the main post before the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret.

Optional #3: If you would like a transcript to be posted along with your secret, put it along with the link in the comment!

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Unsold Poems for the May 5, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl

The following poems from the May 5, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl are currently available. Poems may be sponsored via PayPal -- there's a permanent donation button on my Dreamwidth profile page -- or you can write to me and discuss other methods. There are still verses left in the linkback poems "A Sense of Weather Changes," "The Loving Embrace of Night," "Generations of Cooks Past," "Homefree and Clear, " "One Bite at a Time," "Mishpocha," "Changing Your Nature," and "Besa."

"The Hardest Thing in the World"
Story Date: Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Summary: Tarnish goes to the Riverton Sobering Center rather than to a bar, but this time Roy is not there and Tarnish has to pick someone else to talk with.
395 lines, Buy It Now = $198

Tarnish trudged through the snow
toward the Riverton Sobering Center.

Today had gone to hell, again,
because that's how it went for him.

"Save All the Pieces"
Story Date: November 17, 2016
Summary: Stylet runs into a snag with his giant ground sloth project.
296 lines, Buy It Now = $148

Stylet had been getting
great results from his work
recreating giant ground sloths.

"To Love without Condition"
Story Date: Saturday, August 15, 2015
Summary: Jarom Brahmaputra meets a girl and reconsiders his soulmark.
106 lines, Buy It Now = $53

Peace House was hosting a fundraiser
for Raleigh Carpenter, whose stepfather
had quit paying for her college tuition.

Entry tags:

Blackout Bingo - 2X2 Greek Myths

Title: Death at the Spring Play
Fandoms: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Ratings: G
Pairings: Miss Marple, Inspector Slack
Prompts from the Themes List: Wall, Crew, Family, Gold

Death at the Spring Play on AO3

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Art

Stunning Mosaics Made by Londoners with PTSD Offer Pieces of Healing in Community Artwork

Tucked away in the parks and alleyways of East London lies one of the city’s most vibrant collections of public art.

What makes it all the more special is the mending of mental health maladies that transforms its volunteer artists.

The sometimes sprawling, Roman-inspired masterpieces are the work of the Hackney Mosaic Project and its founder Tessa Hunkin.

I suspect that the fitting of tiles into a mosaic offers similar benefits as stacking-sorting games like Tetris. Since PTSD is fundamentally a "stuck" problem, processes that focus on organizing things can jostle the brain into sorting memories into the "past" category.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Birdfeeding

Today is partly cloudy, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 5/29/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 5/29/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 5/29/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

followfriday,
music

Follow Friday 5-29-26: Music

Today's theme is Music.

( Read more... )

[ SECRET POST #7084 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7084 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1011.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Education

The Monty Hall Problem: Why Switching Doors Wins 2/3 of the Time

The host does not open a door uniformly at random. The host opens a door that he knows hides a goat, and he never opens the door you initially selected. These constraints are not incidental — they are the entire source of information in the problem. The host's action is not a random event that preserves symmetry between the remaining doors. It is a deliberate, knowledge-guided action that breaks that symmetry in a precise and quantifiable way.

I've heard the claim before, but this explanation of how it works is the best I've seen.

[ SECRET POST #7083 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7083 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1011.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Testing needed in advance of code push!

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)