actuallyclintbarton

I somehow mentally misplaced a week when we were booking our covid/flu shots and I was looking at the last market date of the season for the little one on the corner. Unsure how my brain concluded that they were on the same day. (Market's last day is tomorrow, shots are a week from tomorrow, so it's FINE, just...odd.)

The rest of this is entirely about what we did for our little Thanksgiving dinner (with a bit of blood glucose talk), so it's going under a cut. ( cut! )

Current Mood: pleased

fred_mouse

Last weekend I got Eldest's quilt to the point that there is a 6x6 block section, which is now hanging on the wall. There are four more rows, being 24 blocks, that are to be made -- I had four of those done, so 20 to make. With the goal* of getting the top assembled by the end of the year I worked out that if I got two blocks done a week, by picking the fabric through the week and sewing one per Saturday/Sunday, that should be doable -- if I can maintain that rate, I'll be done by the 21st December, and then the uni will be on shutdown, and it is entirely reasonable to believe that I can assemble the rows (I might actually do some assembly ahead of that) and get it done.

I had some paper blanks to draw, which I did through the week (I was short four because of the mishap earlier with doing the margins wrong), and I've laid out three of the slightly odd ones. I sewed the first of those today, trimmed it, did a seam on the next, and declared that was enough. But it does put me ahead by a block and a half :) (the incomplete is a three pieces of fabric block, rather than a seven pieces of fabric block, so it is half done with a single seam. Yes, it is weird).

I had been underwhelmed with the selection of fabrics on the first block, but I trusted in the planning, and sewed them, and I'm really happy with the way they look. I might have to unpick the second one, because it isn't quite sitting right, but I might just trim it slightly differently.

I do have some other craft goals for the rest of the year, but if I only achieve one, this is the one that I want to have done. I have finished the second section of the brown / green blanket, I just have to cast on for the third (I'm picking up along the side, which is a new-to-me skill, and I am very much procrastinating. Going to go and lay it out now, and see if I can motivate myself to at least decide how many stitches I'm going to pick up :) )

* stretch goal: sandwich and start quilting; not plausible goal: bind / finish

lb_lee

Mori: listened to a second tape. Hoo boy was it a DOOZY. Enough so that no way am I uploading those notes tonight! It started out nice and boring... and then the second presenter came on and that train just done leapt ROARING off the track, making for the end of the earth like its ass was on fire. Damn!

Well, I have lots of new research to pursue because now I know where that whole dead cat nightmare of 2021 got its roots.

Also it looks like we have a tape of THIS disaster, transcribed here: http://whale.to/b/greenbaum.html (do not go to whale.to, it’s another Qanon conspiracy flat earth crackpot website. Oh god why.)

BUT NOT TODAY SATAN(ic cults). Time to relax with some nice lesbian vampire fiction instead!

lb_lee

Mori: Okay, so apparently we CAN absorb information through audio... as long as the INTERNET isn't involved with it, a blazing distraction of "CLICK ME CHECK ME MULTITASK BADLY!" So putting on a cursed tape with which to time our work shifts of spot-blacking and page-formatting Xenogals Ashcan works out really well! And we took NOTES! :D Which we are posting here for our own convenience.

The first tape we listened to was the one labeled 3-D “Ritual Abuse: Evaluation & Treatment Strategies for Children and Adolescents,” by Kimball Ladien, M.D., at the Believe the Children First Annual Conference. After having listened to the whole thing, I STILL don't know what year it was made, only that it was probably before 1990, because it mentioned the McMartin preschool case positively. The conference took place in Illinois, probably Chicago, and it mostly seemed to be Illinois people.

( Honestly, this wasn't NEARLY as bonkers as I expected it to be! )

lb_lee

We just received a collection of truly cursed audio cassette tapes from the Memory Wars—conference panels, it looks like. We plan to digitize them all and upload them to archive.org after checking to insure the audio is still understandable after 35 years, but being hard of hearing, have very little use for the tapes themselves. If you want one of these horrible cursed objects, please let us know!

The tapes’ labels identify them as:
• 3-D “Ritual Abuse: Evaluation & Treatment Strategies for Children and Adolescents,” by Kimball Ladien, M.D., at the Believe the Children First Annual Conference
• IVe-383-87 Conversation Hour - Child Abuse and Dissociation (“Summit” added in handwriting; maybe from 1987?)
• C153-20 Treatment of Adult Ritual Abuse Survivors
• 15-234-85 Child Abuse and Dissociation (maybe from 1985?)
• 05-834-93 Psychobiology of Trauma: Current Advances in Research... (by) Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. (maybe from 1993?)
• Id-383-87 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociation (maybe from 1987?)
• (handwritten label) Cory Don Hammond - Dr. Green 4th 1992 Conference (side A) C. Hammond on Dr. Greenbaum (side B)
• (handwritten label) C153-21 The Use of Play Therapy with Child & Adult Survivors of Ritual Abuse: V. Graham-Costain Orange CA 1990
• (handwritten label) Seventh Child Abuse Symposium ‘Cults’- Ritualistic Child Abuse 1986 San Jose CA Meeting Lt. Brad Darling, Kern, Co, Co. (two tapes, labeled in such a way that possibly there’s a missing third)

All things in parentheses are my notes. I have no other info about these tapes at this time, and likely won’t til after con this weekend.

silveradept

Let us begin with the fact that Reading Rainbow, a staple of many a young child of previous decades, mixing in library promotion, books, reading, and activities, is getting a new season with a new host, Mychal the Librarian. Someone who has already proven that he's perfect for the job on social media as a librarian, and who has already been working with PBS as their resident librarian for at least a year. Which continues with the way that Reading Rainbow has shows us a well-known Black man being excited about books, libraries, and exceling at things outside what certain people believe he should be good at.

Eastman Kodak is once again selling still picture film stock, but this time it will be selling directly to film distributors, who will likely be more than happy to have Kodak film camera rolls for their photography buffs.

If you are not already aware, Archive.Today is one of the more popular ways for people to get content as it appears on a website, but without any of the login walls and demands for support. It will not last forever, and it's worth supporting local and independent journalism with your currency, but there are quite a few places that believe you should have to pay up significantly just for a single article to look at.

At the end of that particular piece, there's talk about sharing the already wall-leapt version of the thing instead of the original. While the site does offer the original URL for what it has scraped, my citation scholarship kicks in and says that I should offer the original place, even if the way to read the same content is through archive.today or some other paywall jumper.

Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, primatologist, animal rights advocate, and generally good sport, now gets to explore the secrets of the universe at 91 years of age. We know, thanks to her, that "tool-using animal" is a bigger catgegory than just homo sapiens, and much more about the lives of chimpanzees. My first exposure to Dr. Goodall, however, was the introduction she wrote to one of the Far Side comic book compilations, where she talked about having been the subject of one of the comics and how she found it an absolute delight to have been part of humor, even with other people who wanted to take offense on her behalf. (Including the insitute that she's founded, taking offense to the doctor being called a "tramp" by a chimpanzee in one of the comics.) Her serious work with apes and chimps and such is also entirely notable, but the Far Side introduction is just a nice reminder to us that even scientsists have a sense of humor. (And, in fact, they often have a very sharp sense of humor.)

Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who gained a certain amount of fame as the chaplain of the men's basketball team for Loyola Chicago during an unprecedented NCAA tournament run, passed into the hands of her god at 106 years of age. 106 is an excellent innings, and from the report on her, it seems that she was someone who spent that time in the service that she dedicated herself to for her life.

Ninety-five years after the completion of her thesis, Oxford University awarded a posthumous Master's of Philosophy to the first Māori scholar they had admitted to their ranks. From the excerpts of her diary that one of her descendants shared, she seems to have been an excellent person full of an interesting life.

The online academic article and scholarly research repository JSTOR has opened their doors to non-institutional researchers, allowing a limited number of article viewings per month to registered users who are not affiliated with institutional subscribers.

( There's always more inside, from bad decisions to kidnapping squads and the use of truly shady surveillance software )

Last out, suggestions on where to go to get good programming and intersting shows if you've decided that you want less corporate oligarchy in your life. If you are thinking about taking up embroidery, there's a stitch bank that may be able to help you find and practice new techniques.

A prescient delineation between what the purpose of the library and the librarian is when it comes to a person's relation to information, and what the purpose of the ad company with a search engine or the LLM with inexhaustible confidence and (at best) an approximate knowledge of some things is for the same. Those who have lived through this era will not be surprised to find that the purpose of the LLM and the ad company is not to help you understand what you actually want and get you relevant resources, but instead to show you ads.

And finally, a searchable index of verious symbols that, when clicked upon, will copy the correct Unicode code point to your computer clipboard for easy pasting.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Louis Cole via Darren Korb - The End of Time (Unrivaled Mix)

mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

Having gotten some important things done (taxes, medical alarm), though just barely in time. NO thanks for procrastination.
Mario, of StudiOjo. Also, having a recording studio within easy walking distance.
Public transportation.
Sleep (what I get of it).
Insight.
Dreamhost.

NO thanks for getting old. Sure, it beats the alternative. But it still sucks.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: my housemates are all going to OVFF (leaving me with the cats)

fred_mouse

PSA: everyone please remember to do your breast self-examinations. This is absolutely a half-arsed is better than can't be arsed situation.

Earlier this year a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. So far so good, chemo seems to have done its job, etc etc.

It made me realise I wasn't reliably doing my breast self-exams post endometrial ablation, because I no longer have a menstrual cycle to remind me. And so I've been doing them somewhat regularly, possibly more often than once a month, because more frequent is better than less, and time is a slippery concept. Also, my breasts never ceased to be lumpy post teen years, and I'm never entirely sure that I'll remember what the lumps feel like, so more frequently is better for me. I'm aware that my breasts get more tender cyclically. However, the left one became continuously sore on the outside edge and into the arm pit, so I raised it with my doctor, who sent me for mammogram and ultrasound. Which was this morning.

Surprisingly, the medicos were not concerned about the left breast. I was called back for additional imaging on the mammogram for the right breast. And then there were a lot more images taken of the right with the ultrasound, and the sonographer went and got the radiographer to declare if they wanted more done. The upshot is that I have something that wasn't there on the previous scan. They were discussing wait six months and rescan vs biopsy; I made a flippant comment about also having had a benign nodule in a lung, and one about how bright the bit on the image looked. One of those two things flipped the radiographer to 'right, biopsy, get a referral from your doctor'.

This is on the side I'm not feeling anything wrong at all. Which is why the reminder: keep checking for these things.

Also, I'm having at least a mental health half day, because the idea of reading about imaginaries of genAI is Too Much.

lb_lee

You and the large dog escaped from the dungeon with 100557 points, the amulet of Yendor (worth 5000 Zorkmids), a garnet stone (worth 700 Zorkmids), 1 worthless piece of colored glass, and 1112 pieces of gold, after 19727 moves. You were level 14 with a maximum of 112 hit points when you escaped.

Hit return to continue:

Rawlin: A little past midnight, on October 15, 2025, I did it. I made it to level 40 (Hell) safely, tamed the Hell Hound with treats (Mori: didn’t know you could do that! We didn’t have to fight him at all, renamed him Good Hellhound) and when the Wizard of Yendor made himself invisible and began teleporting through levels, I decided to hell with it and used my painfully obtained wand of wishing to wish for a dead floating eye (Mori: didn’t know you could safely do that either), ate it, and then wished for three potions of blindness. After that, I quaffed both it and a potion of speed, and one or two hits at a time, I whittled him down and finally defeated him.

I used my final wish for three tripe rations, whereupon I climbed up through the dungeons until I returned to Level 9, where I had left my original pet dog for safekeeping. (It is impossible in hack103 for your dog to follow you all the way to Hell and back.) once little, the dog was now large and feral. I gave my dog treats and then we went home together, one level at a time.

I am pleased at my win.

Mori: by the end of the game, dragons were RUNNING from her! Didn’t know that was possible either! Good game, sugarcane.

kaberett

did eventually get myself out to the plot (after aborting the first attempt and going back to bed when I realised I'd made it almost to the main road without my bike helmet). successfully acquired More Saffron.
cooked a lot of beetroot, most of which I grew, for dinner -- one of the books I acquired from Oxfam just for interest, The Modern Vegetarian, has a "textures of beetroot": keftedes, tzatziki, a bulgur pilaf and a salad using the greens. I had a mix of colours, and the ombre gold-to-pink were very pretty in the salad. (and picking over the leaves very, very carefully yielded a tiny snail! who is now in the viv.)
I am continuing very slowly on the mend from the probably-a-cold from nearly a month ago: today I didn't get any active minutes walking up and down inside the house to hit step goal.
the post brought Fancy Chocolate. even some of it is Fancy Chocolate in my preferred flavour of same!
I have somehow achieved having my accounts almost agree with reality about how much cash is in my wallet! and I think I've found the remains of at least one Missing Receipt in the back pocket of a set of trousers, which does at least provide an explanation. it is very satisfying when I actually manage this.

lb_lee

Rage Against the Regime
Series: LB autobio
Summary: Biff rages out over politics, beats the shit out of a headspace wall, and then goes on a fetch quest to blow off steam.
Word Count: 1800
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! If you want to support writing like this (and have your votes count double!), check out our LiberaPay or Patreon! The book referenced is Burnout: the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski. Content warnings for consensual sex and the American political everything.

( Hark, adventurer! If only my goat could be brought to my daughter across the sea... )

lb_lee

Mori: in hack103, of course!

We each have our preferred Hack classes. Rawlin likes the wizard.

( Eating monsters, fighting dragons. We need a hack103 tag. )

kaberett

Reading. ( Brosh, Woodin, Saunders, Stocks, Duncan )

Watching. Another Farscape, while bleaching A this morning. ( Read more... )

Playing. The Tukoni: Forest Keepers demo. Once again a very soothing delight: potter gently about making other forest creatures happy, in a setting of gorgeous art. Exactly what our frazzled nerves needed.

Quite a bit of Fluxx.

Cooking. A butternut squash and quince stew with pipián, courtesy of the Wahaca cookbook.

Eating. A picnic of misc takeaway from Hammersmith station complex on Saturday afternoon! Ben's Cookies! Strawberries! Pizza Express this evening because No!

Exploring. The Autumn London Pen Show, where I spent only the planned amount of money on the planned thing and was delighted with the outcome. :) Little bit of a poke around Hammersmith followed by the Westfield centre thereafter.

Growing. Spinach! So much spinach! I am starting to harvest it. I am very pleased by this. And of course SAFFRON of which there has been LOTS (i.e. I might have enough home-grown saffron to make one or possibly two recipes, which is vastly more than I've ever had before and Extremely Exciting).

Observing. The bat! Possibly even two of them this evening, definitely not gone to sleep yet.

fred_mouse

today's important news is that I've cut all my hair off.

This has been planned since the beginning of 2023; with the 'when I'm obviously going grey' as the trigger point; I then waited until after the wedding. Hair at the back was long enough to repeatedly get caught in the waistband of trousers. Hair is halfway to packaged up to send to one of the wig making mobs. Thanks to chaomanor and maharetr for the loan of the clippers, and Youngest for a mostly even cut.

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

mdlbear

A couple of good things happened, but I also procrastinated way too much, which increases the stress level for this week. So does that make it a good week or a bad week? Maybe not.

So let's start with the good stuff for a change: N's book, The World as It Ought To Be, has been published! The eBook can be had right now from Smashwords, which has a free sample you can read online. My signal boost post from yesterday lists more sellers. Go take a look -- it's hopepunk, solarpunk, protopian gentle fiction, and if you're a fan of ysabetwordsmith's Terramagne poems, you'll probably like it.

Also, according to pv magazine International, Solar tops [the] EU power mix in June with [a] record 22% share. And I got my flu and pneumonia jabs, to go with CCOVID last week.

Somewhere in between, I had a gastroscopy Wednesday -- I'll find out the results this coming Friday. I don't expect really bad news, but they sent me away with a prescription for a proton pump inhibitor.

On the down side, I've procrastinated a whole lot, with the result that the HyperSpace Express website needed some fast work, and needs more this week. So do my US federal income taxes. Our plans for the Kaleidofolk studio album are slightly up in the air at this point, only in part because I haven't been practicing enough. And I still don't have a medical alarm pendant.

If time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once, it's not working! And I'm not helping.

And on the way down side, of course, the US is still in the hands of a fascist regime led by a convicted felon and his gang of thugs and unindicted traitors, and I'm extremely worried about my friends and family members who are still there. Not to mention the planet.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Current Mood: stressed
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag

kaberett

Went to the Autumn London Pen Show! Got the Lamy 2000 EF nib ground down to a needlepoint by Thomas Ang! Did not properly notice until settling in to play with it properly that it's got this amazing slightly stubbish character to it! And he also tweaked my Platinum UEF nib to be slightly less Horrendously Dry (which had somehow not occurred to me as a solution), and... having now settled down for a bit more writing for the evening, I think I might actually really like having two UEF/needlepoint nibs to use different colours of ink in.

The idea was to reduce the number of pens in regular use by dint of retiring the Platinum, not increase it. Oh no.

Some other things! The Rudi Rother Pelikan is even prettier in person; I still do not get the appeal of Leonardos (though to be fair I think my sense of their general appeal is massively skewed by That One Very Active Person who thinks they're The Most Beautiful Pens In All The World); the Visconti Van Gogh series do not impress me any more in person than they do in photographs; next time I can justify buying another TN insert The Inked Paw are delightful and we had an excellent chat and Trying Each Other's Pens while I was in Thomas Ang's queue (and they slightly discombobulated me by asking me if I had an Instagram when I flipped through my notebook to show what I use the UEF for...)

... yeah no I am just absolutely delighted by this ridiculous pen, EXCELLENT outing + date activity, Ben's Cookies also successfully acquired, Very Happy.

lb_lee

Rogan: We are uploading our sketchbooks to archive.org. When the uploads finish, you can grab them at https://archive.org/details/@lb_lee/lists/2/lb-works

The scans do not include comics pages, but cover all other pages from 2012-2016: project plans, headmate drawings, life drawing. etc. Please feel free to download copies for yourselves. This seems the easiest way to make sure they aren't lost. They are under a Creative Commons non-Commercial Share-Alike License. 194 MB total.

umadoshi

scruloose and I have our covid/flu shots booked for next weekend! There were earlier slots available, but not in walking distance. It'll take us right to the little corner market, and next weekend is its final day for the season. Convenient!

We finished season 1 of Silo a couple nights ago. (I've been intermittently earwormed with its OP theme music, which is fortunately a good piece, but I still would rather not have it [or anything else] stuck in my head.) That was a very solid season finale. Now to decide if we want to immediately go to season 2 or watch something else first/alongside. (Can anyone tell me, without spoilers, a] how much of the book[s] season 1 covers, and/or b] if the show is finished or if a third season is expected/hoped for?)

I went along for the drive when

scruloose ran a few errands this morning: a purchase return, two stops for local produce (blueberries, cranberries, broccoli, and a giant sweet potato; no luck getting baking apples), and picking up an order of Thanksgiving baked goods from Sully & Porter (née the Old Apothecary). We are now in possession of six adorably tiny tarts (half pumpkin, half lemon meringue) and six hefty cookies that I hope will freeze reasonably well so that they can be eked out.

Tomorrow evening will probably be when we throw together a Thanksgiving dinner of ham*, cranberry sauce, and some mix of roasted veggies. I consulted How to Cook Everything on the matter of the ham, and it gives an oven temperature and an estimated cook time and basically says "heat until hot, then eat", and it doesn't get much simpler than that.

*The most token little ham! I'm not actually sure how much I'll like it, as ham was never my thing growing up, so we didn't want a huge one to swamp us with leftovers. We'll see! I know it's possible for me to enjoy ham, as we've been to a couple of group meals where I did. (I can think of one here and one in Toronto, so the hams in question were cooked by two very different friends.)

Current Mood: okay

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

mdlbear

If you've been following this blog for the last year you will have run across references to our little publishing business, HyperSpace Express (often abbreviated HSX). And you may have noticed that my housemate N has been writing a book. IT'S FINISHED!

Go take a look at The World as It Ought to Be -- Stories from a protopian future, by Naomi Rivkis.

It's protopian rather than utopian -- sixteen linked short stories about ordinary people building a world that doesn't suck.

Protopia (n.) A world that is not perfect, but is getting better; one that is on the long arc toward justice, carried by human hands.

( Come visit for a while in The World As It Ought to Be: )

Buy it now from Smashwords (which has a free sample you can read online). It's also available at Kobo, Apple, and Barnes&Noble. Kindle and dead tree editions are coming in a few weeks.

Current Mood: helpful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag

kaberett

Another nine strands today. :)

a saffron crocus in flower, petals somewhat chewed

(Photo actually from Wednesday 8th, of the first one!)

Profile

mat

tumblr for your reblogging pleasure

December 2018

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Page Summary

umadoshi - Mainly a tiny bit of posterity: Thanksgiving dinner
fred_mouse - Craft - Eldest's quilt
lb_lee - That sure was a tape.
lb_lee - Tape Notes: Believe the Children Ritual Abuse panel by Kimball Lanier
lb_lee - Cursed Memory Wars Tapes
silveradept - So very much, as usual - Early October 02025
mdlbear - Thankful Thursday
fred_mouse - PSA, mental health day
lb_lee - Goodbye Wizard RawBlood...
kaberett - some good things make a post
lb_lee - LB autobio: Rage Against the Regime
lb_lee - Rawlin fights a dragon
kaberett - vital functions
fred_mouse - In lieu of a real post
mdlbear - Done Since 2025-10-05
kaberett - [stationery] ... oh NO I love it
lb_lee - Sketchbooks 2012-2016 Uploaded to Archive.org
umadoshi - Saturday mishmash, with the second half largely food-related
mdlbear - Signal Boost: The World as It Ought To Be
kaberett - proof of saffron

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Page generated Oct. 17th, 2025 07:58 pm

just focus and keep aiming

aw, coffee, no

Reading

Mainly a tiny bit of posterity: Thanksgiving dinner

Craft - Eldest's quilt

That sure was a tape.

Tape Notes: Believe the Children Ritual Abuse panel by Kimball Lanier

Cursed Memory Wars Tapes

So very much, as usual - Early October 02025

Thankful Thursday

PSA, mental health day

Goodbye Wizard RawBlood...

some good things make a post

LB autobio: Rage Against the Regime

Rawlin fights a dragon

vital functions

In lieu of a real post

Done Since 2025-10-05

[stationery] ... oh NO I love it

Sketchbooks 2012-2016 Uploaded to Archive.org

Saturday mishmash, with the second half largely food-related

Signal Boost: The World as It Ought To Be

proof of saffron

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December 2018

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