ah, yes, this again

Sep. 6th, 2025 05:10 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
At this point, because life is too short, I block on sight people I see recommending anything by/to do with the serial racist TERF harasser Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Zen Cho's summary), who now writes as "Maria Ying" (with someone else)? (WinterFox, Requires Hate, whatever the hell other pseudonyms and/or monikers). There's a chance current readers/recommenders/etc. have no idea and just haven't heard, but like I said, life is too short, so why give any more time of day than "nope, blocking" to someone running around reccing a harasser?

(I was in her targeting crosshairs but fortunately only in a glancing fashion, unlike people I know whom she harassed in pretty awful ways, in an ongoing pattern of behavior.)

(no subject)

Sep. 5th, 2025 03:45 pm
camwyn: A gray sewing machine with the Singer logo on its knob (sewing machine)
[personal profile] camwyn
Debating making myself a new long-sleeved shirt for office use this fall. The dress code started off as business casual, went to 'vaguely business casual tops and jeans and moderately respectable sneakers' after COVID, and periodically flicks back to 'wear suits and business shoes' on days when we have clients visiting the office.

that being said, I am considering how many sharks I can get away with on this top.

Music Friday

Sep. 5th, 2025 12:37 pm
muccamukk: Billie tips his face towards the bi-flag sky, eyes closed, as Tré and Mike kiss his cheeks. (Music: Bisexual Green Day)
[personal profile] muccamukk

This live show is great, also. Low-key looking at tickets for when they're on the coast next month.

Yesterday I beat the Capra demon

Sep. 5th, 2025 03:01 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Please enjoy this eloquent depiction of The Capra Demon Experience:



(Content note for animal harm in the form of killing horrifying skinless zombie dogs. Also one man's slow descent into existential despair.)

This is a notorious point where a not insignificant number of people ragequit and stop playing the game altogether.

Also as previously mentioned I struggle badly with tracking multiple inputs, I have the reaction speed of a slime mould, and my default combat state is "panicked and flustered."

It took me about 7 hours (spread across multiple days -- admittedly, most of this time was doing the boss run again and again and again and then dying within seconds of the fight starting) and I am very proud of myself.

(And right now I am dealing with a medical stressor -- hopefully nothing, but had to go get some tests, waiting on results -- so I will take my distractions and wins where I can get them.)

wheel wheel

Sep. 4th, 2025 06:34 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
Taking a break from MUD coding.

Latest singles preparing for a 3-ply "leaf" yarn!



This one is also slated for Local Astronomer Knitter Friend. :)



This book has genuinely been my favorite read all YEAR. It's so engagingly written (I love technical/craft instructional books), wry moments of humor, but incredibly clear explanations of the engineering of a spinning wheel along with the MATH.

reel WIP

Sep. 4th, 2025 02:11 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).
yhlee: a stylized fox's head and the Roman numeral IX (nine / 9) (hxx ninefox)
[personal profile] yhlee
a.k.a. I haven't had time to code anything yet lol.



cf. [personal profile] telophase's once-upon-a-time of sketch featuring BUSTY BLONDE CHERIS with her SPACE FERRET. (I still have the pic, [personal profile] telophase, not sure if I have permission to reshare or where there's a link? XD)

latest spinning WIP

Sep. 3rd, 2025 07:47 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee


Sorry about the laundry in the background. Meanwhile, it's not even 8 a.m. and it's too hot already to stay outside. Nice sunny day means at least the laundry will dry quickly?!

Rest in Power Graham Greene

Sep. 2nd, 2025 04:40 pm
muccamukk: Cluster of purple and white lilac flowers. (Misc: Lilacs)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I think there will be more in depth obituaries to follow, but here's a couple I liked.

CBC: 'Like watching Gretzky play hockey:' Colleagues remember actor Graham Greene.

CBC (Video): Remembering Graham Greene (interview with Jesse Wente).

I just saw him in Sweet Summer Pow Wow last week. Hard to imagine he's gone.

Books read, late August

Sep. 2nd, 2025 04:46 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. This is the most like Oliver Sacks of anything I've read since Oliver Sacks died, and one of the ways in which that's the case is that Anand is writing from her own experience as a neurologist but also as someone who has gone through relevant symptoms and has a particular perspective, so: in the tradition of Sacks rather than attempting to clone him. If you like "weird things brains do oh goodness" stories, this will be your jam, and it sure was mine. Also Anand is meticulous about gender: if there are relevant studies that talk about the occurrence of a particular condition among trans women as compared to cis women, cis men, or trans men (or etc. with other groups in the spotlight), she will note them as clearly and calmly as she would something about cis women, treating it all as part of our composite picture of how the brain works and what affects it. Highly recommended.

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. This book completely wrecked me. It's in some ways a gentle story about subtle and small-scale magic and about human relationships in our own structurally substantially unequal society. It's also about long-term grief where most stories that touch on grief are fairly short-term (months or 1-2 years) or muted somehow, and it's the only recent book I recall really delving into helping your parent with their grief while you, an adult, deal with your own differently-shaped grief for the same person. It's really beautifully done, I wanted to be doing nothing else but reading it once I started reading it, and also it was emotionally devastating in parts.

Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. Sometimes I feel like the most confusing parts of history are not the really distant ones--who doesn't like a good Ea-Nasir joke--but the things that happened just before you arrived or as you're arriving. They're simultaneously foundational to a bunch of the world around you and happened while you weren't looking, in ways no one thinks to teach you formally. For me, born in 1978, the Iranian Revolution is one of those things, so when I spotted this on the library's new books table I picked it up immediately. This is a detailed history from someone who got to interview many of the Americans involved, and who is committed to not oversimplifying the benefits or detriments of the shah's reign. I could have wished for somewhat deeper Iranian history, though there was some, and stronger regional grounding, but also those things can be found elsewhere, it's all part of the process. The fact that there's an American flag on the cover of this book as well as an Iranian flag is not an accident. A book that was focusing on Iranian relations with for example France in this period would have a very different take.

Stephani Burgis, A Honeymoon of Grave Consequence. Discussed elsewhere.

Robert Darnton, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution. This is a microhistory of booksellers and their job routes and wares in the pre-Revolutionary era. Of all of Darnton's books, I'd say this should be low on the list for people who are not deeply interested in the period, least of general interest. Luckily I am deeply interested in the period. So.

John M. Ford, From the End of the Twentieth Century. Reread. Satisfying in its own inimitable way. Those poor skazlorls.

Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass. Reread. And the threads Karen was pulling out of the genre/literary conversation at the time were so different from the ones Mike did, I hadn't intended to read them in close proximity to compare and contrast but it was kind of fun when I landed there.

Gigi Griffis, And the Trees Stare Back. This is not my usual sort of thing--creepy YA with eventual explanation--except for one major factor: it's set in the lead-up to the Singing Revolution in Estonia. Really great integration of historical setting and speculative concept, bonded hard with the characters, loved it. Most of the historical fiction I read has me reading through the cracks of my fingers, wincing at what I know is coming but the characters do not. This was the opposite, I spent the entire book super-excited for them.

Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of the American Prairie. I am always disappointed to find out that I am already pretty expert in something, because I learn less that way. The American Prairie! Soil restoration, water conservation, habitats, farming...it turns out I already know quite a lot about this. Darn. If you don't, here's a good place to start.

John Lisle, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA. Ooooof. This is another "I saw it on the library's new books shelf" read for this fortnight, and its portrayal of CIA misbehavior was...not a surprise, but having this amount of detail on one project was...not cheering.

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. If you internalized the idea that historians should be effaced as completely as possible from the writing of history, in the pretense that the history wrote itself really, this will not be the book for you. Ada Palmer is as major a factor in this book as Machiavelli or any of the Medicis. If, on the other hand, you enjoy Ada's classroom lecture voice, it comes through really clearly here. There are some places where I was clearly not her target audience--I honestly don't have a personal investment in what Machiavelli's personal religious stance was, so the chapter about why we want him to be an atheist was speaking to a "we" I am not in. Still, lots of interesting stuff here. Including, surprisingly, cantaloupes.

Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You. This is a thriller about social media influencers in the group that would have been called "Mommy bloggers" a generation ago, set in the Mountain West. It's very readable, and if you know anything about tradwife influencers you'll see lots of places where it's spot on. I think people who read a lot may find the twists less twisty, but it doesn't rely solely on twists for its appeal.

Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History. I haven't had a satisfying generational epic in a long time. This one spans Earth and Mars, with point of view characters in four generations and multiple points on their partially shared timeline. My preferences would have been for more of everything, more all around--for a generational epic this is comparatively slim--but still very readable.

Sophy Roberts, A Training School for Elephants: Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Grab for Africa. The subtitle calls this a curious episode. It is instead a staggeringly depressing demonstration of how colonialism was fractally horrible. Zoom in a little closer! more horrors! hooray! No. Not hooray. And Roberts is clearly not claiming it is a cause for celebration, but...well. For me this microhistory was more upsetting than illuminating. Maybe I should stop looking at the new books shelf at the library for a minute.

Jessie L. Weston, The Three Days' Tournament: A Study in Romance and Folk-Lore. Kindle. Comparison and contrast of different appearances of a particular legend throughout western/northwestern Europe and England. Nostalgic for me because I used to read a lot more of this sort of thing.

Darcie Wilde, A Purely Private Matter, And Dangerous to Know, A Lady Compromised, A Counterfeit Suitor, and The Secret of the Lady's Maid. This is not all the Rosalind Thorne mysteries there are, but it's all the Rosalind Thorne mysteries my library had. If you like the first one, they are consistent, and I think you could probably start anywhere and find the situation and characters adequately explained. Regency mysteries! Do you want some of those? here they are.

DIY loom weaving WIP

Sep. 2nd, 2025 11:46 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
I had some leftover of a single I'd spun and decided to be cheap and DIY a loom to explore weaving it in a smol format. Still in progress but this will be going to [personal profile] eller. :3







Cardboard, polyurethane clear coat (to stiffen it up a bit. I used an X-acto knife and Japanese push drill because I had them around.

Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher

Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:45 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


After disliking both The Hollow Places and The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher, and for similar reasons (idiot heroine who refused to believe in magic when it was happening right in front of her; annoying tone), I gave up on her works. But since lots of my customers like her, I ordered this book. And when it arrived, it was so beautiful that I had to pick it up and examine it. And then I figured I'd read a couple pages, just to get an idea of what it was about. Those couple pages quickly turned into the first chapter. Then the second. The next thing I knew, I was actually enjoying the book, and finished it with great pleasure.

Anja is a scientist specializing in poisons and antidotes, who regularly takes small doses of poison to understand their effects and test out antidotes. She saves the lives of poisoned people, sometimes. This gets her enough fame that one day the king shows up, asking her to save his daughter, Snow, who he believes is being poisoned...

This is a very loose retelling of "Snow White," making clever use of elements like the apple, the mirror, and the poison.

Like the other books of hers I read, this one is set in an unambiguously magical world and/or has a portal to an unambiguously magical world, and has a heroine who doesn't believe in magic. I guess this is an obligatory Kingfisher thing? At least in this one, Anja doesn't deny that things are happening when they're clearly happening, she just thinks that maybe there is some underlying scientific explanation. This makes at least some sense, as she's a scientist. (Though in my opinion, science is basically a framework and a worldview, and a scientist in a magical world would be doing experiments to figure out how magic works, not denying its existence.) In any case, Anja does not act like an idiot or a flat earther, but pursues the clues she finds and doesn't deny what they suggest. She's kind of monomaniacal, but in a fun way.

Hemlock & Silver meshes multiple genres. It's not a horror novel or even particularly dark for a fantasy, but it has some genuinely scary moments. It's often very funny. And one aspect of the story, while technically fantasy, is so methodically worked out and involves so much science (optics) that it feels like science fiction. There's also a murder mystery, a romance, a surprisingly agreeable rooster, and a talking cat. It all works together quite nicely.

catten yarn has entered the chat

Sep. 1st, 2025 04:58 pm
yhlee: pretty kitty (Cloud)
[personal profile] yhlee


Still fussing with the settings on the wheel (especially how aggressive I want takeup). Cloud seems to think the e-spinner is purring.

Labor Day Book Poll

Sep. 1st, 2025 01:12 pm
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 118


Which books would you most like me to review?

View Answers

Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher. The first book of hers I've actually liked!
53 (44.9%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. Fantastic cross-genre western/historical/horror/fantasy.
37 (31.4%)

Into the Raging Sea, by Rachel Slade. The best nonfiction shipwreck book I've read since Shadow Divers.
40 (33.9%)

The Blacktongue Thief/The Daughter's War, by Christopher Buehlman. Excellent dark fantasy.
27 (22.9%)

The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Three timelines, all involving witches.
17 (14.4%)

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Exactly what it sounds like.
36 (30.5%)

Archangel (etc), by Sharon Shinn. Lost colony romantic SF about genetically engineered angels.
37 (31.4%)

We Live Here Now, by Sarah Pinborough. Really original haunted house novel.
36 (30.5%)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones. Outstanding indigenous take on "Interview with the Vampire."
49 (41.5%)

When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb. A Jewish demon and angel leave the old country; excellent voice, very Jewish.
65 (55.1%)

Some other book I mentioned reading but failed to review.
4 (3.4%)

a finished yarn!

Sep. 1st, 2025 12:46 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee






Finished yarn! This one's going to [personal profile] niqaeli. Spun on an Ashford Traveller, plied on an EEW 6.1.

Labour Day

Sep. 1st, 2025 10:03 am
muccamukk: Text: Love > Anger, Hope > Fear, Optimism > Despair. (Misc: Canadian Politics)
[personal profile] muccamukk
Heather Cox Richardson: August 31, 2025.
Almost one hundred and forty-three years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade.

The Tyee: Why One Young Union Organizer Sees a Brighter Future.

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matt_doyle

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