Wiscon report

May. 27th, 2025 07:25 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
This year's Wiscon was all-online, and billed as a "gap year," with fewer program items than I'm used to, and no dealers room.

I went to two program items--a "US immigration law and worldwide fandom roundtable" and a panel on "the wild world of modern agtech and why isn't it showing up in current SF."

The roundtable was about as cheerful as you'd expect, with a lot of discussion of both past and feared legal difficulties in traveling to cons, and alternatives like smaller gatherings and online cons. Most of us thought that online wasn't as good as in person, but that it's significantly better than nothing. (There may be some selection bias here: people who didn't think an online con was better than nothing wouldn't bother attending.) And a couple of people noted that their choice has been online or nothing at least since 2020, for reasons like disability or budge that don't have much to do with Trump.

The panel on current and future agriculture was fun. Some of the "what SF is getting wrong" was about TV and movies, showing a garden plot that's much too small for the population it's allegedly feeding, and that the fictional future is even worse/stupider about monoculture than the real world today.

Other than that, I hung out on the Discord server. Most if not all of the program items were recorded, and will be available to convention members for a week after the end of the con, but I may not get around to watching any of them, even less interactive things like readings and the guest of honor speeches.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
OP: Hey, looking for a board book series from when I was a kid! It was traditional fairy tales and fables, and the part I really remember is the illustrations! I'm sure if I see those illustrations I'll know it's the right book!

Me: Care to describe these illustrations? Even a little? Were they brightly colorful or more muted, or maybe black and white? Were they realistic or cartoony?

OP: Oh, they looked similar to the hare and the tortoise board game! Like, when I saw that I first thought it was the books!

Me: Oh, I guess you're gonna make me google that instead of providing a link, cool.

Guys, it turns out there are at least five different editions of this game, each one with a totally different art style.

Meanwhile, on a different thread on the same post:

Other Commenter: Could it be Aesop's fables?

Me, silently: WTF, buddy? That's not a suggestion.

OP: Oh, no, it was more colorful than that!

Me, a bit less silently: WTF? Like... what edition are we talking about? You need to help us help you!

All comments are paraphrased, but seriously.

Edit: I am absolutely dying at this point to ask who, exactly, OP thinks Aesop is, but that conversation is not going to go anywhere productive. I'd really better forget the whole thing.
oursin: Photograph of a statue of Hygeia, goddess of health (Hygeia)
[personal profile] oursin

Was alerted to Zoom seminar I must have signed up for ages ago and not put into my diary, with link, approx 30 mins before it was due to happen.

Well, that was interesting and informative: 'Protest and Identity Formation in the Time of Covid: The UK in Historical Context', if ultimately rather grim.

Given that I am in the cohort that thinks the response of The Powers That Be was very much in the Day Late and a Dollar Short ballpark and marked by gross ineptitude even where corruption was not in play, I had not realised how much there was resistance based on the belief that it was an excuse for the imposition of The Iron Heel (and this crisscrossed a wide spectrum of beliefs).

And a lot of the evidence for that was actually not widely reported.

And one observes that there are doubtless differences between the overall picture and the impact of immediate local policing practices.

But looking at what one might consider the wider penumbra of the panic (the torching of 5G towers e.g.) I was reminded (I would be, wouldn't I) of some of the episodes in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium, especially as the speaker invoked the Black Death as a comparison point for epidemic + social upheaval.

Two Ethics Quests from Ask A Manager

May. 27th, 2025 10:42 am
minoanmiss: Minoan version of Egyptian scribal goddess Seshat (Seshat)
[personal profile] minoanmiss posting in [community profile] agonyaunt
I am having trouble including the link, due to not being able to see properly. sorry about that.

1. Manager husband is cheating with a much younger employee Read more... )

2. My employee has terrible attendance issues … in this economy? Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A flamboyant thief fulfills a seemingly minor commission and wins the attention of an alarming number of patriots from two empires.

The Crown Jewels (Divertimenti, volume 1) by Walter Jon Williams

(no subject)

May. 27th, 2025 07:39 am
skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
[personal profile] skygiants
I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )

(no subject)

May. 27th, 2025 09:48 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] redroanchronicles!

TIL

May. 26th, 2025 07:23 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

That the place I was very glad to leave in my youth is now The Top Place to Visit in the UK, though I think 'visit' may be the operative word there, after all back in my day the foreign language students and other summer visitors had an entirely different vision of it. Street foodstalls and trendy bars, not to mention galleries, Not In My Day, though we did have the walks in nature and seascape.

***

(The person who asked about this could have found the info themself, it was really easy to find.) Stillbirths only had to be registered in England from 1927.

(This was the person who had found me as A Nexpert in a field I don't consider my main field of xpertise via Google AI. I was, in fact, able to provide quite a bit of information from the depths of Mi Knowinz. )

***

How to decode the less than intuitive citations in footnotes to Gould and Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1898 edition).

(Though I think the person asking the question to which this was actually the answer could possibly have given the matter a little thought and worked it out themself? Maybe not: maybe they have not had the years of dealing with Weird Citation Practices that are under my belt.)

***

Still got it for telling people Where To Find Archives....

Bundle of Holding: Grim Hollow

May. 26th, 2025 02:17 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying setting for D&D Fifth Edition and compatible systems from Ghostfire Gaming.

Bundle of Holding: Grim Hollow

Clarke Award Finalists 1998

May. 26th, 2025 09:01 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
1998! The Good Friday Agreement gives Tories something new to undermine, Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Enoch Powell makes his greatest contribution to Britain by dying, and Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper puts him in the running with Thomas Midgley Jr. for single individual who did the most to undermine public health.

Poll #33168 Clarke Award Finalists 1998
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39


Which 1998 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
31 (79.5%)

Days by James Lovegrove
1 (2.6%)

Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand
8 (20.5%)

Nymphomation by Jeff Noon
3 (7.7%)

The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper
14 (35.9%)

Titan by Stephen Baxter
8 (20.5%)



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

Which 1998 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Days by James Lovegrove
Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand
Nymphomation by Jeff Noon
The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper
Titan by Stephen Baxter
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
The Wikipedia article on the motif of the star and crescent gave a lot more information than I'd expected, but I still don't know why it's so associated with Islam in the present day.

Speaking of symbols made literal, here is a snake saved from eating its own tail. I don't know anything about snakes, but this does look like a vet's office, so if the vet thinks that hand sanitizer is the way to go then it's probably the way to go. (Also, I strongly suspect most of the people in the comments talking about how hand sanitizer to make a snake not eat itself is animal abuse or that the fact that the snake did this is a clear sign of animal abuse don't actually know any more about snakes than I do. If they're right, it's not because they really know.)

***********


Read more... )

(no subject)

May. 26th, 2025 10:01 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] aedifica, [personal profile] the_rck and [personal profile] thornsilver!

Three More Amazing Videos

May. 25th, 2025 04:47 pm
jesse_the_k: Head inside a box, with words "Thinking inside the box" scrawled on it. (thinking inside the box)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k

The Secret History of Font Piracy

Today [youtube.com profile] LinusBoman talks about font theft. Back in the 1990s I worked in a desktop publishing service bureau. Font foundries were still using a pricing model based on industrial customers with several blocks worth of printing presses and thousands of books. Font piracy was so widespread as to be fundamental. Good times—Linus brings it all back with an excellent news hook: how the unavoidable you wouldn’t steal a car message that scolded at the start of every VHS or DVD used a pirated font. Pro captions, silent title cards subdivide the video into eight sections.

Watch on YouTube
or stream 21 minutes here )

Linus Boman is so my type of design nerd. More about him at TimesNewBoman.com


Kevin B Parry animates himself doing impossible things

Watch on YouTube

stream six minutes of amazing here )

Audio is instrumental music. I invite you to write image descriptions; here are the first three:

  1. Kevin in red hoodie stands in corner, falls slowly to ground — at moment of impact human becomes eight red balloons, bouncing lazily
  2. Big cardboard boxes in empty room. Kevin stands behind one of them, jumps into the air and then into the box. His body sinks in and he’s suspended by his armpits — at the same time as his legs push up from inside another box
  3. Leaning on a counter, Kevin slides his right hand along the corner towards the camera, and then his hand detaches and begins to slide all the way to the end of the counter, where he drums his fingers. Then the fingers slide back to his arm.

Watch Kevin on all the platforms: https://lnk.bio/kevinbparry/


Visual ASMR

Anthony Howe of [youtube.com profile] HoweARTdotNET sculpts stainless steel into "kinetic sculpture," installed outside and set in motion by the wind. Most comprise a circular metal structure atop a 10 to 20 feet curved column. The circle supports four to eight rings that rotate perpendicular to the circle. Each of these rings is decorated with assorted shapes, including discs, commas, sticks, flaps, and blades. The rings are staggered so that the motion seems infinitely various; the shiny stainless steel creates cascading light and sparkles as it moves, along with the illusion of interlocking gears moving forward and backward at the same time.

If you’re at all photosensitive, scroll on by — do not open this "details" arrow

Many static pictures to admire at https://www.howeart.net

55 seconds of very flashy kinetic sculpture video, no audio

Culinary

May. 25th, 2025 06:00 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

Last week's bread seemed to be holding out but got very dry and was eked out with the rolls.

Friday night supper: the rather ersatz 'Thai fried rice' with Milano and Napoli salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, something like 60:40 strong white/white spelt flour (end of bag of the latter).

Today's lunch: venison crumble, with this diced ragu which is more or less rather more finely diced than usual venison, cooked in a moderate oven in red wine with shallots and garlic and a few juniper berries for a couple of hours and then a crumble topping of 2:1:1 strong wholemeal flour/strong white flour/pinhead oatmeal + butter + seasoning + crushed coriander seeds (I think I made rather more of this than I usually do) spread on and baked in somewhat hotter oven for a further 30 minutes; served with Boston beans roasted in pumpkin seed oil with fennel seeds and splashed with gooseberry vinegar, and baby pak choi stirfried with star anise.

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