adrian_turtle | Reading

but it *is* pretty sweet!

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A book I'm thinking of having play an important role in the campaign is Heinrich and Moritz Tod's Morally Uplifting Tales for the Edification of Recalcitrant Children, the Tods being the Old World analog of the Brothers Grimm. Uplifting Tales is an important cultural artifact and also the sort of book you'd read to kids at bed time if you wanted them to cry themselves to sleep.

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

My mother desperately wants grandchildren. I’m nearing 30 and have never wanted children; my partner feels the same way. We would both rather focus on our careers, and there are also some hereditary health conditions in our family — nothing life-threatening, but enough that we would rather not pass them on.

Despite knowing all this, my mother pressures us constantly. Every time I explain my position, she becomes distraught and insists I just don’t understand the joy a child would bring. She’s in poor physical and mental health, and these conversations quickly spiral into intense emotional distress. Any attempts at therapy have been flatly dismissed.

Now she’s saying that she’ll cut me out of her will if I don’t have a child. There’s not much money involved, but I worry that, if it comes to that, she might also cut off contact altogether. My sibling has already severed ties with my mother over her mental-health struggles. I want to keep my mother in my life, but I can’t stand the thought of this one issue dominating whatever time we have left together.

I’ve started to consider telling her I can’t have children because of fertility issues. That would be a lie, and I feel uneasy using something so many people genuinely struggle with as an excuse. Still, her fixation on grandchildren is seriously damaging our relationship. Should I lie to my mother to try to save our relationship, or keep telling the truth and watch things fall apart? — Name Withheld

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minoanmiss

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Current Mood: happy

conuly

It really seems like the deaths are piling up lately.

kareina

Stayed up way too late reading last night, but managed to get up early enough to shape bread rolls from the dough which had been in the fridge overnight, do my morning pilates as they rose a little, and bake them before it was time to get ready for work.

Today Keldor ran the Children's forge activity at the Viking Festival at Lofotr. He helped them make tiny swords out of nails.

I made progress on my soapstone pot and talked to people. One conversation that was particularly fun was with Zoe and Barbara, viditing from France, who have spent a couple of days exploring the museum. They started with the standard what are you doing questions, but kept following up with more and more interesting questions, and Zoe took lots of notes as I explained about the Viking Age soapstone industry. Eventually, I gave them the link to my masters thesis https://zenodo.org/communities/la-icp-msmaps/ , and told them to contact me with questions. I also told them about the SCA, and where to find us. I hope they do.

On one of my walks over towatds the toilet I saw a guy in a leather tunic and hood, and paused to compliment him on it. This lead to a conversation in which it was mentioned that he was performing with his Viking Age instruments in the boathouse that afternoon, so I set my alarm and went down there when it went off. It was a delightful show. He sang and played three different types of lyres, each patterened after a specific find, and a horn flute, and a bone flute.

After work Keldor still had energy, so we went over to the Archery range and played a bit. We tested the three sided arrowhead Keldor forged against a bit of the medieval style rivited mail that Jeno made. First we used the standard archery range arrows, and they simply bounced off the mail. Keldor's arrowhead went through it several cm. We assume that were there a decent linen gambeson behind the maile the person wearing it wouldn't have been seriously injured to have been shot at that range, with that bow. However, it wasn't exactly a heavy poundage bow.

After shooting and chatting for a bit we walked back to the car, checked the local store, which had closed at 18:00, and Keldor dropped me off at home, were I happily curled up with my book, and he went to the museum's workshop to polish and put an edge on some of the knives he has made here. He even found a bit of wood to put a handle on one.

I did my yoga a bit ago, so now we shall shower and sleep.

oursin

August is supposed to be this winding-down/wound-down month, right?

Well, for reasons which I concede are not particularly seasonal, the last week or so has been a bit of a flurry.

Getting next volume of The Ongoing Saga ready for publication in near future.

My tech person having issues with the website: it transpired that they had been upgrading some software which had had knock-on effects, but this involved a lot of three-way emailing about what was going on.

And I decided, for Reasons, to start putting together my talk for conference at end of September (rather than leave it until later I'd rather at least rough it out now and leave it to percolate) and this has so been the thing where the writing is the process and I am now actually feeling that I might have something a bit more original than I thought, and it has more of a shape to it. But the thing with this was that I kept having Ideas and going and adding bits and moving bits around, and realising I needed to go and Look Stuff Up, rather than just collate bits from my notes, so it was more of a vortex than I'd anticipated, and still ongoing.

Plus, the new physio exercises for hip/lower back and incorporating them into the routine, and, er, something or other was causing flareup of the Old Trouble, so there was working around that.

(Also, flurry of spam/phishing emails claiming to be 'support tickets' with deeply implausible references and origins.)

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: busy

rinue

Is this the year I finally get into Hüsker Dü? My problem has always been that I find the vocalist boring, but I was listening to a live set (in a recording) where I couldn't really hear the vocalist, and then I liked the music a lot. Potentially, if I listened to enough Hüsker Dü, I'd start singing along with it, and then the vocalist I'd hear would be me. Hmmm.

The current issue of Wired has an interview with that deranged tech guy who is trying to stay eternally young by injecting himself with his son's blood and semen and so forth, and he says something fairly revealing because I think it's a belief widely shared by our current tech guys: "Most people today spend every waking moment pursuing wealth. And the time they're not spending wealth, they're pursuing some sort of status or prestige."

Um, no. No, Bryan Johnson. No most people are not doing that. The revealed preference of most people is that they want a comfy chair and something good to watch on television, and want to spend as little time pursuing wealth and status as possible so they can spend more time in the comfy chair with the television.

It did make me think about my own motivations. Unfortunately for me, I am very much a team player, so the answer to "why did you do that" is almost always either (1) somebody asked me to or (2) I saw that it wasn't getting done - either because it was being done incompetently or because nobody stepped up at all. Absent one of those, I mostly play games and solve puzzles and read. The reason I say "unfortunately for me" is that there's an endless supply of (2) so I overclock most of the time. I have to be careful when listening to true crime podcasts because when an investigation is poorly handled I start thinking I need to switch careers and become a police detective. Just run straight toward the dysfunction.

james_davis_nicoll

The Sidewise Award for Alternate History is looking for new judges to join the award committee.

This is the first time in the 30 year history of the award that they've made an open call for awards judges.

Apply here.

rachelmanija

A middle-grade graphic novel about a boba shop with a secret.

Aria comes to stay with her grandmother in San Francisco for the summer to escape a bad social situation. Her grandmother owns a boba shop that doesn't seem too popular, and Aria throws herself into making it more so - most successfully when Grandma's cat Bao has eight kittens, and Aria advertises it as a kitten cafe. But why is Grandma so adamant about never letting Aria set foot in the kitchen, and kicking out the customers at 6:00 on the dot? Why do the prairie dogs in the backyard seem so smart?

This graphic novel has absolutely adorable illustrations. The story isn't as strong. The first half is mostly a realistic, gentle, cozy slice of life. The second half is a fantasy adventure with light horror aspects. Even though the latter is throughly foreshadowed in the former, it still feels kind of like two books jammed together.

My larger issue was with tone and content that also felt jammed together. The book is somewhat didactic - which is fine, especially in a middle-grade book - but I feel like if the book is teaching lessons, it should teach them consistently and appropriately. The lessons in this book were a bit off or inconsistent, creating an uncanny valley feeling.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Fantastic art, kind of odd story.

kareina

Woke just after 06:00, went to the loo, took my morning vitamin, went back to sleep till 08:00.

Woke up thinking of Obsidian and how I am now writing all of these post there, and copying each day into Dreamwidth after it is complete (so some days there are running notes made during the course of the day, when there is time for that). I have considered exporting all if my Dreamwidth blog posts enmasse and then importing them into Obsidian, which would take some effort to find appropriate tools to accomplish in such a way that all the metadata, including date/time stamps and tags imported properly. But today I realise that it would be more fun to import them by hand, one at a time, reading them as I go, starting with the oldest, written in 2005, and working my way gradually forward whever I have time and inspiration to do one or a handful. I could even go through and copy old letters I have written from my archive of my old email addresses from when I used to use (I forget the name of the email program I used that downloaded email from the server and organised it into folders based on which of my addresses it was sent to, and if it was sent to a mailing list--I exported all of that data to Thunderbird when that program ceased to be supported, and it could be fun to also read and archive in Obsidian the newsy letters that were sent to friends and family). Then I decided that my future self may do these things, and may also copy over info from the Word Document I started in the 1990's containing early memories of various places.

Therefore, I spent half an hour or so setting up a lifeline folder structure in this Obsidian, with a folder for everything before moving to Sweden, and in that folder dated sub folders for everywhere I have ever lived. Perhaps they will never be filled with data, or perhaps they will, but now the list of places I have lived exists here, anyway.

Then I got up, did 45 minutes of pilates, and cooked some "gryta" (the word simply means "pot", but refers to pretty much any one-pot meal that isn't liquidy evough to be soup). I had to make a pot of chilli, but we had only one can (ok, box) of tomatoes, so it went a bit of a different direction. Canned tomato and blended beans, plenty of mushroom powder and kale powder, some beetroot powder, some frozen vegetables, somevground sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, and flax seeds, butter, a small batch of egg noodle dough chunks, and most of the spices we brought with us. It came out yummy.

Then I baked a dozen bread rolls with that as the filling, and put the rest of the dough in the fridge to bake later, and the remaining gryta in the fridge for Keldor to eat tomorrow and the next day (I like the cold bread pockets to take with me for lunch, he would rather heat the gryta in the microwave before or after work).

After the cooking mess was cleaned up we put on nicer costumes than we wear for working in the smithy and stone carving and headed over to the festival. We considered looking for the shortcut through the woods, but ad we started walking to where it may start one of our housemates drive by and offered us a ride, so we took it.

As we arrived on site the sun was really beating down hard, and everyone else was delighted, especially after it rained so much yesterday. I, who enjoyed the nice cool temps yesterday, was miserable in the sunshine. So, after only one lap around to look to see what the merchants had, I retreated to my normal work corner under the tent roof. Today Rod and Lucy had set up their sale stuff there and she worked on her Viking mail, showing visitors how it is made.

I couldn't resist asking to try, so I spent the rest of the afternoon learning a new skill and applying it.

They had previously set up the rings ready to knit. They have two types--the ones you can open, which get rivited shut, snd the ones they forge-welded shut. These are tiny rings, with an inside diameter of 5 mm, made after a Viking age find. Apparently, that suit of chainmail had surrived as it had gone through the funeral pyre, and the coating of ash protected them from rusting away.

I haven't yet tried the preparation steps yet, but she explained them as:

For the rings to be rivited:

1. Coil a wire onto the mandrel

2. Remove the coil from the mandrel

3. Use the special ring cutting tool with a slot in it to cut off a ring fom the end of the coil (that slot makes it possible to cut the ring so that it has a several mm overlap)

4. Use another tool to flatten the overlapped section

5. Put that ring on a wire and repeat the process with the next ring

6. After there are enough rings with flattened overlap on the wire, take them to the fire and heat them enough to anneal them

7. After they have been annealed and cooled, put one ring at a time onto the drift plate, with the flat part over the hole in the plate

8. Use the drift to drive a hole through the overlapped bit down into the drift plate hole

9. Put the ring on a wire and repeat with the next ring

10. When there are a reasonable number of rings on the wire put them into the fire to be annealed.

11. When they are cooled, add them to bowl of ready-to rivit rings

For the solid rings:

1. Cut rings as described above, but instead of flatening and punching the overlap, simply forge-weld them shut. (I really want to see this done, so I can do a better description )

The pattern is 4:1, so every one rivited ring is attached to 4 solid rings:

1. Pick up a ready-to-rivit ring and use two tiny pliers to open it.

2. Loop four solid rings onto the open ring

3. Use the same two pliers to carefully close the ring such that the pointy part of the hole in the flat part of the ring slots back Into the hole in the other end of the ring

4. Put a rivit into the hole. You can either do what Rod does, and pick up a pre-cut rivit (3 to 5 mm long) and insert it into place. Or, you can do Lucy's prefered approach, and take a long length of rivit wire, if needed cut the end on the diagonal, and push it into the hole. Then trim off most of the wire, leaving only a tiny bit sticking out to be rivited. While it is much easier to poke the long wire into the hole, I didn't trim my first attempt short enough to successfully rivit it, so I promptly switched to Rod's approach.

5. No matter how you got it there, the next step is to use the first setting pliers, the ones with a hole that goes all the way through, to push the rivit wire further into the hole, by carefully lining up the bottom projection on the hole on the ring into the hole of the tool, and then closing the tool onto the rivit wire, which pushes it into place

6. Then use the second setting tool, the one with a divit instead of a hole, to do the final set of the rivit, by tucking the bottom of the rivit into thst divit, and then squeezing the pliers shut around the rivit.

This process, while fiddly, is surprisingly easy. None of these steps require much hand strength at all.

After completing that first set of 4 solid rings to one rivited you extend it by opening a new ring, sliding it through two of the solid rings (ones that are adjacent to one another), taking care to do so in such a way that the rivit on the new rivited ring will be in the same orientation as the first. Then add two new closed rings to the open loop, pinch shut the loop, double check to see that everything it sitting exactly as it should, and if it correct, rivit it shut.

I repeated this process today till I had a tiny snake 8 closed rings long (so 16 total closed rings, and 7 rivited)

Then I started a new row to begin turning it into a rectangle (three times I needed to cut open a rivited ring when something went wrong. Once because of a too long rivit that couldn't be set properly, but had been too squished to trim, once because I forgot to add two new closed rings, which resulted in one rivited ring doing no work thst wasn't already done by its neighbours, and once because I failed the correct orientation part, so half my snake had rings leaning one way, and the other half the other).

Adding the second row is easier, as the path to slide the opened rivit into its closed rings on the snake is less fiddly than it was for the first part. Even so, i just barely got the second row done by the time they had packed up the merchant booth at the end of the day. This means it rook me probably 3.5 hours to do that much (during which time I made a sale for them, as they were both away from the booth).

Lucy said I could keep the little bit but I have no use for it, so I suggested she keep it.

All in all it was a fun afternoon, sitting in the shade, learning a new skill, chatting with interesting people. I would also enjoy learning all the preparation steps.

We choose not to stay on site after they packed up the market, but just came back to the house and relaxed.

We did take the scenic route home, first following the trail along the lake shore, Then we went up the hill by the church, then the side path between the fields. That route is 45 minutes, so probably only half an hour if we skip the lake part and go directly to the turn off between the fields.

Suddenly it is after 22:00, so I will post this and do my yoga and get ready for bed.

redbird

I'm visiting

rysmiel for a few days. The trip up was borin, which is good: anything exciting would probably be bad news, or at least make you late for dinner.

It is going to be hot over the weekend, so we went out for a relatively early brunch today, so we could sit almost-outdoors at Juliette et Chocolat and eat crepes. We then walked around Jean Talon market, where I bought plums, blackberries, and a cucumber.

I have np real plans for the next few days, which is fine.

andrewducker

I remember seeing a game which looked amazing. The whole world was destructible, there were thousands of different combinations of things to find in it, and they'd put a ton of effort in to making it a fun experience.

I played it for a couple of hours, and got bored of it, because it turns out that that isn't enough for me. Because what they'd made was also a Rogue-Like. Which is to say that it completely resets back to the start when you die, and that start randomly creates the world that you play through.

And I don't want to play through a whole different world each time, where everything is different to the last time I played. What I want for a solo game is for someone to lovingly craft a world, and then for me to learn that world inside out as I try to beat the various challenges in it*.

A few months ago

danieldwilliam sent me this link to a Neal Stephenson essay. And while I didn't agree with him about everything, the idea of "microdecisions" has stuck with me. That what makes art art isn't the idea (although good ideas are important) it's all of the ways that that idea was reified into the finished work.

A key quote:
Since the entire point of art is to allow an audience to experience densely packed human-made microdecisions—which is, at root, a way of connecting humans to other humans—the kinds of “art”-making AI systems we are seeing today are confined to the lowest tier of the grid and can never produce anything more interesting than, at best, a slab of marble pulled out of the quarry. You can stare at the patterns in the marble all you want. They are undoubtedly complicated. You might even find them beautiful. But you’ll never see anything human there, unless it’s your own reflection in the machine-polished surface.

And if that works for you - if staring at the swirling polished surfaces is what makes you happy, then I'm delighted for you. I've certainly been very entertained by generated patterns myself in the past. And I can totally be distracted by it for short periods of time. But when I'm looking for something actually *engaging* then right now it doesn't work for me. I need something human** in there.

Another example of this - movies. The more that special effects became good enough that movies could show me *anything* the more I wanted things with *character* in them. Things where you could tell that someone (or some group of someones) had really wanted to get something out of their brains so that other people could see the world the way they see it. I was discussing with

swampers the other day that we really appreciated the movies that A24 are putting out, because even when they're a bit of a mess they're a really interesting mess that someone had obviously cared about. The trailer for Eternity looks like it would absolutely annoy me in parts, but it would do so because I'd be experiencing someone's thoughts about the world, and I might learn something about them, and maybe also about me for engaging with it.

*Multiplayer games are different. When I played a ton of Minecraft with Julie I was happy for her to set the direction of what to make, and then I'd treat that as my challenge. But sandboxes with no set challenge don't interest me. And I have played a chunk of games like Slay The Spire or Balatro or Dead Cells . But even then I'd play for enough to get the hang of it and then stop, usually without actually beating it, because "Go back to the beginning and beat that for the 500th time so that you can spend 10 seconds losing the end before starting again" isn't much fun for me. Even with Hades, which does a great job of giving you a meta-story around each run that grows as you replay, I got all the way to fight Hades, lost near-instantly, and the thought of replaying the entire game for 20 minutes just to lose to him again filled me with exhaustion and I haven't been back since. If Noita had a "save" function and a set of specifically designed levels that were fun and were definitely beatable *and* a random world generator you could use once you'd played those levels then I'd probably have invested a lot of time in it.

**I am not against the idea that eventually AIs will achieve consciousness and attempt to impart something to us through the medium of art. And that would interest me. I just don't think that the generators we're currently investing in are that.

oursin

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

lydamorehouse

Something other than a bumblebee for once!

Image: Another upside down bee, this time one that isn't a bumblebee!

Weird thing I am noticing. Bumblees give no craps if a phone camera is hovering over them. They're also slow moving, generally? I even had one curious bumblebee just latch on to my finger and inspect the camera for itself. Honey and other bees? Camera shy! It's much harder to get a picture of them!! So, here is, shockingly, a bee that is not a bumblebee.

Let's see, what's new with me?

Jas and Mason are continuing their whirlwind exploration of the Twin Cities. Yesterday was the "must see" of Minnehaha Falls, with the requiste lunch at Sea Salt. Mason apparently tried fried oysters for the first time, thanks to Jas. The two of them also did the whole walk all the way to the Mississippi River, since I mean, you're nearly there, so why not? Over dinner at Bole (an Ethiopian place here in St. Paul), Jas said that they had never actually seen sandstone in the wild before, as it were, and found it deeply fascinating. This is the sort of thing that I love hearing about because, having grown up surrounded by sandstone bluffs, I forget how uncommon sandstone might be to someone from another biome.

We took Jas to Bole because, while they have heard of Ethiopia restaurants, they have not been because berbere spices are a migraine trigger fro their mother. So, we were able to provide a guilt-free experience, which I think they quite enjoyed. We ended up sitting outside in the patio, despite the mugginess and threat of rain. It's always so much fun to show off the cool stuff in the city, you know? Our food (and our immigrants, damn it!) is always some of the very best parts of it all.

Since I believe I reported about this earlier, I thought I'd also give an update on Rhubarb's inappropriate urination issues? If you don't want to read about cat pee problems (and who would blame you!?), I will put it under the cut.

( Cat bathroom issues, solutions, and theories.... )

tl:dr we're still working on it? I have faith we'll get her fixed without having to restort to drugs.

That's all the news that's fit to print, plus some that had to appear under the cut.