Cars and trips and maps we ripped

Oct. 2nd, 2025 09:41 pm
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
So that was definitely the Yom Kippur that was, but I have eaten a phenomenal quantity of unagi and seaweed salad as well as a sweet rice donut with red bean paste inside and part of [personal profile] selkie's cream bread and am inordinately entertained by this TikTok from the Fenimore Art Museum which N. shared with me. [personal profile] spatch lit last night's yahrzeit candle for remembrance of the dead. The rest of us are still here at the start on the other side. G'mar tov. My godchild gave my laptop existential angst.

Checking In - 2 Oct. 2025

Oct. 2nd, 2025 09:15 pm
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)
[personal profile] dewline
The knee x-rays are done. I expect to know what's up/down with those by mid-November.

I spent the afternoon filing job applications and watching a joint session of city hall's Finance and Planning+Housing committees. Which kept my brain ticking over well enough, I suppose.

Not much else to mention.
cvirtue: CV in front of museum (Default)
[personal profile] cvirtue
It's difficult to keep up with the firehose of crazy - get on the free email lists from organizations that monitor and respond to civil rights violations.
It will help you not get overwhelmed.

For example, last week, Trump told his people that any of these opinions mean someone is a potential terrorist:

anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
extremism on migration, race, or gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Note that there is no definition of "extremism."

Some articles:
Trump's NSPM-7 memo casts critics of Christianity as enemies of the state
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-memo-casts-critics

ACLU Statement on the Trump Administration's Memorandum Targeting Political Opponents
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-statement-on-the-trump-administrations-memorandum-targeting-political-opponents

Trump Called for a Crackdown on the ‘Radical Left.’ But Right-Wing Extremists Are Responsible for More Political Violence
https://time.com/7317383/political-violence-america-trump-crackdown-right/
carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
Here's the final tally for September. But first —

Quote of the Day:

"It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is just having written."

— Robert Hass

From the quotation book The Truth About Writing (2018)


Tally

Days 1-29 )

Day 30: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] chanter1944, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] luzula, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] the_siobhan, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] yasaman, [personal profile] ysilme


If I've missed anyone, please let me know.

Checking In - 1 Oct. 2025

Oct. 1st, 2025 09:20 pm
dewline: "Thank you kindly" - text only (Thank you kindly)
[personal profile] dewline
The results on the French skills tests came back. I'm not going to get that particular job. Clearly, I need more practice. Fortunately, there are places where I can get that practice without much cost.

The knee x-rays will happen tomorrow morning if I get my way. The lab is relatively convenient to my travel routines as it is, and the last I checked, they still require everyone to mask up. I hope that's still the case.

I am getting more sleep again. Productive sleep.

More job applications are going out this week. This is good.

And this is how October started for me.
duskpeterson: The lowercased letters D and P, joined together (Default)
[personal profile] duskpeterson

Deadly Introductions


ONLINE E-BOOK (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

Free at my website.


A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands: Novel and Side Stories (Crossing Worlds). Are you considering visiting the Great Peninsula? Are you in need of a guide? This guidebook by the internationally famous Ambassador of the God's Land will introduce you to the charming quirks (and deadly dangers) of the Three Lands of the Great Peninsula.

New installments:

1 | Deadly Introductions [expanded edition]. How to introduce yourself to inhabitants of the Great Peninsula, without being killed.

Index to the Guidebook. A detailed table of contents, serving as a chronological index to topics in the guidebook.


EARLY ACCESS

My readers at Patreon and Ream get the first look at Loyal Revenge (The Three Lands: Empty Dagger Hand side story). That short story will go into general release next month.


BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.

New installments:


UPCOMING FICTION

I'm at the final stages of editing Flight Through the Forest (The Thousand Nations: The Motley Crew #2). Barring major disasters, I'll be able provide early access to it to my Patreon and Ream readers next month.


Ways to offer me a tip, financial or nonfinancial )

siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1884180.html




0.

The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

    Somebody, oh, Johnny! Somebody, oh!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

– Sea shanty, presumed Guyanese

Let us appreciate that the only reason – the only reason – I know about what I am about to share with you is because of that whole music history thing of mine. It's not even my history. My main beat is 16th century dance music (± half a century). But dance music is working music, and as such I consider all the forms of work music to be its counsin, and so I have, of an occasion, wandered into the New England Folk Festival's sea-shanty sing. Many people go through life understanding the world around them through the perspective of a philosophical stance, a religious conviction, a grand explanatory theory, fitting the things they encounter into these frameworks; I do not know if I should be embarrased or not, but for me, so often it's just song cues.

So when I saw the word "Essequibo" go by in the web-equivalent of page six of the international news, I was all like, "Oh! I know that word!" recognizing a song cue when I see one. "It's a river. I wonder where it is?"

And I clicked the link.

That was twenty-one months ago.

Ever since, I have been on a different and ever-increasingly diverging timeline from the one just about everyone else is on.

In December of 2023, Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, tried to kick off World War Three.

He hasn't stopped trying. He's had to take breaks to steal elections and deal with some climate catastrophe and things like that. But mostly ever since – arguably since September of 2023 – Maduro has been escalating.

You wouldn't know it from recent media coverage of what the US is doing off the coast of Venezuela. At no point has any news coverage of the US military deployment to that part of the world mentioned anything about the explosive geopolitical context there. A geopolitical context, that when it has been reported on is referred to in term like "a pressure cooker" and "spiraling".

The US government itself has said nothing that alludes to it in any way. The US government has its story and it's sticking to it: this is about drugs.

As you may be aware, the US government is claiming to have sunk three Venezuelan boats using the US military. The first of these sinkings was on September 1st.

To hear the media tell it, the US just up and decided to start summarily executing people on boats in the Caribbean that it feels were drug-runners on Sep 1st.

No mention is made of what happened on Aug 31st.

On August 31, the day before the first US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel, at around 14:00 local time, somebody opened fire on election officials delivering ballot and ballot boxes in the country Venezuela is threatening to invade.

And they did it from the Venezuelan side of the river that is the border between the two countries.

That country is an American ally. And extremely close American ally. An ally that is of enormous importance to the US.

And which is a thirtieth the size of Venezuela by population, and which has an army less than one twentieth as large.

You would be forgiven for not knowing that Venezuela has been threatening to and apparently also materially preparing to invade another country, because while it's a fact that gets reported in the news, it is never reported in the same news as American actions involving or mentioning Venezuela.

Venezuela, which is a close ally of Russia.

You may have heard about how twenty-one months ago, in December of 2023, there was an election in Venezuela which Maduro claimed was a landslide win for him. There was a lot of coverage in English-speaking news about that election and how it was an obvious fraud, and the candidate who won the opposition party's primary wasn't on the ballot, and so on and so forth.

You probably didn't hear that in that very same election, there was a referendum. If you did hear it reported, you might have encountered it being dismissed in the media as a kind of political stunt of Maduro's, to get people to show up to the polls or to energize his base. It couldn't possibly be (the reasoning went) that he meant it. Surely it was just political theater.

The referendum questions put, on Dec 3, 2023, to the voters of Venezuela were about whether or not they supported establishing a new Venezuelan state.

Inside the borders of the country of Guyana.

2023 Dec 4: The Guardian: "Venezuela referendum result: voters back bid to claim sovereignty over large swath of Guyana".

Why?

Eleven billion gallons of light, sweet crude: the highest quality of oil that commands the highest price.

(I can hear all of Gen X breathe, "Oh of course.")

It is under the floor of the Caribbean in an area known as the Stabroek Block.

The Stabroek Block is off the coast of an area known as the Essequibo.

It takes its name from the Essequibo River, which borders it on one side, and it constitutes approximately two-thirds of the land area of the country of Guyana.

Whoever owns the Essequibo owns the Stabroek Block and whoever owns the Stabroek owns those 11B gallons of easily-accessed, high-value oil.


Image from BBC, originally in "Essequibo: Venezuela moves to claim Guyana-controlled region", 2023 Dec 6


As far as almost everyone outside of Venezuela has been concerned, for the last hundred years Guyana has owned the Essequibo.

Venezuela disagrees. Read more [5,760 words] )

This post brought to you by the 219 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

And the clock ticks faster every year

Sep. 30th, 2025 09:40 pm
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
[personal profile] sovay
I made landfall chez [personal profile] selkie around three o'clock in the afternoon and my godchild almost instantly wanted to show me the reorganization of his bedroom and take me for a walk as he biked with his familiar in his backpack and for the first time reciprocate in our time-honored ritual of my weightlifting him which I have been doing since he was a lankily small child and it took no effort at all.

Well, no one except you and me. )

My early birthday present from Selkie is a rare copy of Leib Spizman's Women in the Ghettos (פרויען אין די געטאס ,1946) in timeworn but otherwise astonishingly sound condition plus a Gol/Them sticker which I am using as a bookmark. I have been fed chopped liver and lime-yuzu soda and a variety of proteinaceous snacks. I even managed to doze a little on the train once my seatmate disembarked at New York and left me room to stretch my legs out in. I could have done without lightly hitting my head on a chair likely out of sheer exhaustion, but I plan to get as much sleep out of the windowless pit as I can. As a last grace note of the night, I did not expect to find my flash fiction "Teinds" (2007) listed among Maria Haskins' "A Short Fiction Treasures Special: 2 x 25 Gems from Strange Horizons' Archives." May all of it be some kind of template for the year to come.

Checking In - 30 Sept. 2025

Sep. 30th, 2025 10:07 pm
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)
[personal profile] dewline
No word on the skills tests from Sunday yet. I'm expecting that tomorrow.

My visit with Mom was shorter than I'd planned, because of chores and a newish job lead I needed to look into.

One of my map projects' requirements was something different than what I expected, and the news has come as both a relief and an entertaining challenge.
carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
[personal profile] cornerofmadness and [personal profile] china_shop will be hosting us in October! [personal profile] cornerofmadness will host the first half of the month, so head on over to her journal tomorrow.

I belated realized I hadn't reponded to check-ins on Day 27 (though I did add you all to the tally). Sorry! Kudos to everyone who wrote on the 27th! 8-D

I'll post the final tally tomorrow. Thanks everyone!


Quote of the Day:

"In conclusion, I am now convinced that I am a reader who decides to write until the opportunity to read again becomes available."

— Rolando Hinojosa, "A Voice of My Own," (1982/2011).


Today's Writing:

About 325 words of notes on the book I was reading. 8-)


Tally

Days 1-28 )

Day 29: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Day 30: [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] sanguinity,

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet.

Left you breathless in the brine

Sep. 30th, 2025 07:15 am
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
For so very few people will I haul myself out of bed before the mourning doves have even woken up, but since some of them live in the D.C. metro area, I am once again watching the world in dawn-flashed geometries of catenaries and crossties slide past me from a rear-facing seat of the Northeast Corridor. There were some excellent mussel-streaks over the Mystic and the brick-boxed windows are gilt-glinting even now. A milk of mist is actually hovering over the green spaces. I still feel a teleporter would be healthier on my sleep schedule.
carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
[personal profile] cornerofmadness and [personal profile] china_shop will be hosting us in October! [personal profile] cornerofmadness will host the first half of the month, and [personal profile] china_shop will take over hosting for the second half. Thanks much!


Quote of the Day:

This is funny to me because I've been reading far too much literary criticism…

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1885)


Today's Writing:

A little over 200 words worth of half-hearted notes. I read a lot, though. ;-)

Tally

Days 1-27 )

Day 28: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Day 29: [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
I forgot to bring my camera when I left the house to walk around the block this evening, but I saw a white hibiscus growing through a hedge and bees clustered around some brilliantly Halloweenish orange flowers. I have not had my head in the sand despite being under quite a lot of rocks this month, but I am still demoralized that an international friend's postcard could not reach me because of the intimidation theater of the tariffs. Nor am I thrilled that last week I had an unexpectedly bizarre interaction with a medical professional about Tylenol. I am much more cheered by the existence of ghost ponds and the renascent fern, not to mention the eleven-million-year-old asteroid no one knows yet where it hit. The Draconids peak on the eve of my birthday this year. Last week was still too many doctors, but I have hopes of fewer in the week to come. At least I managed for the first time on this new regimen to write about a film.
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Hey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.

Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 115

What country do you currently live in?

What is your age?

12-19
1 (0.9%)

20-29
5 (4.4%)

30-39
18 (15.8%)

40-49
29 (25.4%)

50-59
39 (34.2%)

60-69
15 (13.2%)

70-79
7 (6.1%)

80+
0 (0.0%)

To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?

carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
We still need a host for October! Only 2 more days left!


Quote of the Day:

A reader asks Saunders if he should edit an old WIP…

"You asked: 'If I start editing this, will I ruin it?'

I think you have to say to yourself: No, I certainly will not ruin it. (And if, perchance, you do, at some point in the process, feel you’re making it worse, take comfort in the fact that you can always revert to that earlier draft – which might be part of the subconscious’s long game.)"

— George Saunders, "Egads, What I Did Years Ago and Abandoned is Good! (A Dilemma)," from his Substack newsletter.


Today's Writing:

Alibi sentence! I had a day. I'm having another day! Grrrr…

Tally

Days 1-26 )

Day 27: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora

Day 28: [personal profile] sanguinity

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
[personal profile] sovay
Every time I watch Heat and Dust (1983), I want to write about its beautifully patterned expectations and ironies, its women who confront or evade them, its last extraordinary melding of time done with nothing more than a window that contains one decade and reflects another while the snow-flanked mountains stand behind them both, and it seems that I am writing about Harry Hamilton-Paul.

I shouldn't be surprised. In a film much concerned with cultural codes and transgressions, he's the most liminal character, the oddest man out, the last living memory of the scandal that rocked the Civil Lines at Satipur in 1923 when British India was the jewel of the never-set Empire of which he was most definitely not a builder. He's the storyteller, partly narrating the past thread of the film from his future as a tobacco-tanned old India hand who can't resist giving the same colonial advice about water and fruit and salads that he never heeded in his youthful days as—a meaningful, veiled word—the guest of the Nawab of Khatm. His presence at diplomatic functions is ambidextrous, dinner-jacketed at a state banquet, turbaned at a palace durbar, as likely to be found on his own time in an angarkha as a tennis shirt, belting out enthusiastically amateur selections from Pagliacci and acidly losing at cards to the ladies of the zenana. His role in them is blatantly unexplained. Nickolas Grace gives him such an arch, pointed face, his eyes ironically lidded even when flat on his back in a fever of homesickness and his serious statements edged like light comedy, he's impossible to imagine as even a one-time appendage of the repressive civil service which in any case considers him to have rather disgracefully let the side down, but neither does he seem, like his secretarial antecedents of E. M. Forster or J. R. Ackerley, even pretextually employed at the court of the Nawab. The British colony pronounces the censorious last word: "No Englishman has any business living in that palace." But of course he does, if a man as brilliantly virile and vulnerable as Shashi Kapoor's Nawab wants him there. Like a kinder revision of Cyril Sahib in Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Harry admits the possibility of queerness into the double-tracked heterosexuality of the plot. Bonding over the absurdities of imperial ritual with Greta Scacchi's Olivia Rivers, he drops the courteous hairpin of complimenting the playing-fields-of-Eton looks of her assistant collector of a husband, but his cynically comfortable company offers more than a diversion from the crashing propriety incumbent on a junior officer's wife: he's the dangerous proof that a sojourn in the subcontinent doesn't have to be circumscribed by casually racist platitudes and the insular summer exodus to Simla, that she too might meet something of the less tamely glamorous, princely India under the veneer of the Raj in the reciprocal person of the Nawab, for whom she is no more the typical memsahib than Harry is anything other than "a very improper Englishman." What she cannot see in her reckless innocence is the difference in the risks they run, how much more inflammatorily her cross-cultural desires intersect with the implacable conventions of both sides of the colonial project. Harry's situation is sufficiently ambiguous that the Nawab can claim him as if with the bridal cliché that his mother has gained rather than lost a son, but Olivia's unchaperoned visits to the palace set the rumor mill grinding even when their ostensible object is her heat-stricken countryman, reading all the London-fogged Dickens he can get his hands on. No political value is set on his virtue. And yet for just a little while before the tide of empire engulfs Khatm and strands its principal players in a flat in Park Lane, a chalet in Gulmarg, the denuded ghost of the palace left like a rain-stained shrine to its ruler's deposition, the triangulation of the friendship between Olivia and Harry and their mutual importance to the Nawab makes the three of them look like a ménage across borders, the charmed space of a triad not so totally unlike the tripartite composition of their writing-directing-producing team. The appeal of a hand on a shoulder, a fumble with unfamiliar undergarments. "We've left British India. Now you're in my power, like him. I'm only joking."

The production that broke them out on the international scene, Heat and Dust was model Merchant Ivory, produced by Ismail, directed by James, and closely and imaginatively adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own 1975 Booker winner with a cast as sumptuous and astringent as its dual-layered portrait of India. As the captivating Nawab, Kapoor gets to strike evasive, reflective, funny as well as mouthwatering notes, while Christopher Cazenove's Douglas Rivers may be a dutiful empire-builder, but we meet him first weeping for his wife: Scacchi's Olivia with her blossoming, owl-boned face moves against her colonial obligations out of defiance as well as naïveté and it suits a film so attentive to the limits of female autonomy that the resolution of her predicament should lie with Madhur Jaffrey as the regally chain-smoking Begum. By dint of wrapping itself around a mystery, the 1982 thread can't help feeling like a frame story even when interwoven with deliberate, blurring touches like a municipal office suddenly faded out of a bungalow, but Julie Christie and Zakir Hussein give the affair of Anne and Inder Lal enough of its own casual chemistry that it makes a contrast, although Ratna Pathak as Ritu is just sketched as the spouse this time around; the film seems more curious about the would-be sanyasi of Charles McCaughan's Chid, whose dead-end self-actualization lightly tweaks the latter-day colonialism of cultural appropriation. Walter Lassally shoots painterly set-ups and candid camera streets with equal assurance, including the introductory shot of Olivia looking straight out through the fourth wall of the letters to her sister that started Anne off on the whole quest to retrace her great-aunt's scandalous footsteps, whose bookend is an elegantly enigmatic, portrait-like moment where record and recollection have run out, leaving only the woman herself. The fact remains of my affection for Harry, who bridges the threads of time and when faced with the turmoil of dacoits and riots and the murky intrigues of the man he loves, admits frankly, "Well, when all these kinds of things happened, I just gave up and ran away to Olivia's house and begged her to play some Schumann." Fortunately, he and his film are prolifically available on various forms of streaming and more than one region of Blu-Ray/DVD. It only took me since before the last glaciation to get around to them. This indiscretion brought to you by my improper backers at Patreon.

Checking In - 27 Sept. 2025

Sep. 27th, 2025 09:09 pm
dewline: "Truth is still real" (anti-fascism)
[personal profile] dewline
Something called "National Security Presidential Memorandum 7" is now a thing?
carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
We still need a host for October! Which is only 3 days away!


Quote of the Day:

"This particular book (Return to Sender, his latest Longmire book) has Walt alone for much of the time. Early on, I had to decide: Do I give him someone to talk to? Maybe a dog? Or do I have him talk to himself? And I don’t know about you, but armed people who talk to themselves make me nervous. So I went with the dog — and he plays a bigger role in this story."

—Craig Johnson, interview in Cowboys and Indians magazine (May 2025)


Today's Writing:

Just over 300 words on none of things I'm supposed to be working on. Lalalala.


Tally

Days 1-25 )

Day 26: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora

Day 27: [personal profile] sanguinity

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
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

Just found a great episode on 20,000 Hz, a favorite podcast of mine.

SUBTITLES ON: WHY IS MOVIE DIALOGUE SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND?

Answer at [community profile] access_fandom, a comm I co-mod where we talk about making sure the full fandom experience works for all of us, no matter how our bodyminds work. Like many DW comms, it hosts useful knowledge going back a while, and is always ready to be revived.

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