oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-07-13 08:04 pm
Entry tags:

Culinary

This week's bread: a Standen loaf, 4:1 Strong Brown/buckwheat flour, with maple syrup (last drain from bottle) instead of honey and Rayner's Malt Extract. V nice.

During the course of the week I made Famous Aubergine Dip to take to a BBQ.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe: approx 70/30% wholemeal/white spelt flour, Rayner's Malt Extract, dried cranberries, not bad.

Also made foccacia to take to BBQ.

Today's lunch: sweet potato gratin with black olive tapenade (as there were sweet potatoes left over from last week), served with warm green bean and fennel salad (I did use tarragon vinegar but I think this had rather lost its oomph) and baby green pak choi stirfried with garlic.

the cosmolinguist ([personal profile] cosmolinguist) wrote2025-07-13 07:54 pm
Entry tags:

Bucky Benny and Dwight

My parents showed me a picture of their new garden gnomes. They found one playing the drums first and got it, and then my mom found these others to make the rest of the gnome band.

My dad pointed to each one and told me, "Bucky the drummer, and the singer is his brother Benny, and then there's their friend Dwight." He's so funny, such a quiet guy but he comes up with these goofy things sometimes. Mom was mocking him for this. He just went along, telling me the names of "all my gnomes in the backyard, Paul and Tessa together. And I can't remember what the other two names are..."

I didn't know they had any gnomes, and it turns out they have a whole crowd now! With names!

marthawells: Murderbot with helmet (Default)
marthawells ([personal profile] marthawells) wrote2025-07-13 11:41 am

More Murderbot Articles

A really thoughtful essay on Murderbot: ‘Even If They Are My Favourite Human’: Murderbot Just Explained Boundaries

https://countercurrents.org/2025/07/even-if-they-are-my-favourite-human-murderbot-just-explained-boundaries/

“I Don’t Know What I Want”: The Line That Changed Everything

In the final moments of the season, Murderbot says: “I don’t know what I want. But I know I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want or to make decisions for me. Even if they are my favourite human.”

This is not a dramatic declaration. It is confusion wrapped in clarity. A sentence that holds discomfort and self-awareness in equal measure. It reflects a truth often ignored in stories about intelligence and emotion: that it is okay to not know, as long as that unknowing belongs to the self. In a world that constantly demands certainty, this line opens up space for uncertainty without shame.



* And a great interview with Alexander Skarsgård!

https://collider.com/murderbot-finale-alexander-skarsgard/

So, it just wants to start fresh and get away, and figure out who it is and what it wants. It doesn't really know that. I quite enjoyed that Murderbot didn't end up having answers to all the questions or knowing exactly what it wants. It's more messy and complicated than that. But it definitely knows that it needs to find its own path and make its own decisions, to make its own mistakes, and not have the Corporation or anyone tell it who it is or what it wants.
From the Heart of Europe ([syndicated profile] fromtheheartofeurope_feed) wrote2025-07-13 03:30 pm

Murderbot

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off All Systems Red, the first of the Murderbot stories. I ranked it last in my 2018 Hugo ballot, even though it clearly caught the Zeitgeist and won Hugo, Nebula and Locus.

But we loved the Apple TV series which has been released over the last few weeks. Alexander Skarsgård is great as the Murderbot, and sparks very attractively with the hapless humans who it is guarding, led by Noma Dumezweni as Mensah; meanwhile the show-within-a-show of Sanctuary Moon, starring John Cho as Captain Hossein, is beautifully realilsed. A great run of ten episodes, and I may go back now and read the stories with more sympathetic eyes.

spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-07-13 05:13 pm

In which there are 52 times Our Heroine improves her habitat, week 28

- "Terrorism": having difficulty comprehending that I live in a time when Labour leader Keir Starmer and his starmtroopers have decided to crimialise peaceful protest as "terrorism", including 100 or so people from across the UK arrested and facing 14 years in prison each as "terrorists" because they held up marker-pen-on-cardboard signs reading "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

People holding handwritten cardboard signs reading, "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

- Decided to celebrate something I love everyday.
9: The clouds I saw from a peak hour traffic jam were fabulously fluffy cumulus sky-sheep.
10: Wizo the Fleming. His name. And his son Walter fitzWizo. Both C12th. That is all. P.S. Pembrokeshire Council have wisely decreed the creation of a Wizo Trail for cyclists.
11: 7.30am tuneful recorder playing in an otherwise silent neighbourhood (no cars). I'm imagining an enchanting Good Neighbour of the faerie folk, but around here it was probably a bearded old hippie, lol.
11: a female Large (Cabbage) White butterfly, Pieris brassicae, flew across in front of my face then perched on the hedge next to my head so I could observe it about a hand length away, and note its wing patterns and antennae colours in detail.
11 bonus: my front lawn was suddenly full of happy, laughing, shrieking, playing people (mostly young). Get ON my lawn! Curtains were closed so I didn't twitch them to find out if anyone was in dress-up but there are usually one or two.
12: brief visitation in my home by a large patterned brown moth that was one of those "why aren't day-flying moths called butterflies?" beauties.
13: just laying in bed very early this morning, half-awake, and knowing I didn't have to get up. Mmm.

- Birb log: whenever I see the new taxonomy for Jackdaws I think about that redditor who people mocked for years for saying Jackdaws weren't crows / Corvus or whatever it was they said.

ExpandBirb log  )
From the Heart of Europe ([syndicated profile] fromtheheartofeurope_feed) wrote2025-07-13 02:50 pm

The best known books set in each country: Burkina Faso

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Burkina Faso.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
American SpyLauren Wilkinson30,165907
The Water PrincessSusan Verde3,2691,113
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African ShamanMalidoma Patrice Somé1,733382
The Weight of Sand: My 450 Days Held Hostage in the SaharaEdith Blais440948
Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom StruggleThomas Sankara1,725101
Ritual: Power, Healing and CommunityMalidoma Patrice Somé548174
The Red BicycleJude Isabella429165
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87Thomas Sankara498131

This was surprisingly easy to compile. The figure of the short-lived 1980s president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, looms over the country’s cultural footprint; two of his political texts are on this list, and the protagonist of this week’s winning novel fictionally seduces him while colluding in his overthrow. We also have two children’s books, two anthropological studies, and a real life hostage drama.

I disqualified only three books this week. I don’t know why anyone tagged Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale, as being relevant to Burkina Faso; it seems to be set in England and Wales. (Possibly the person using the tag acquired or read their copy of the book while travelling there.) Two other books cover Burkina Faso along with other African countries: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, and White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, by Susan Williams.

Coming next: Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malawi and Zambia.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia

andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-07-13 07:24 am
Entry tags:

Photo cross-post


My primate family.

The exhibition at the museum is very quiet and rather good. Recommended!
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

From the Heart of Europe ([syndicated profile] fromtheheartofeurope_feed) wrote2025-07-13 02:01 pm

13 July books

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

Non-fiction
The Bloody Sunday Report, Volume IV (2010)
A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (2013)
The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss (2016)

Non-genre
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (2013)
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton (2015)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving (2023)

SF
The Compleat Enchanter – The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea, by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (2006)
PEACE, by Gene Wolfe (2008)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein (2009)
Nexus, by Ramez Naam (2014)
HWJN, by Ibraheem Abbas (2017)
Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor (2023)

Doctor Who
The Glamour Chase, by Gary Russell (2011)

Comics
Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain (2018)
Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles (2020)
LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin (2020)
Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda (2020)
Mooncakes, by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker, letters by Joamette Gil (2020)
Paper Girls, Vols 1-6, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher (2020)
The Wicked + The Divine, Vols 1-9, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles (2020)

The best
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is passionate, witty and essential, and I wish I had read it twenty-five years earlier. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
The Cider House Rules is a lot longer, but also very much worth reading for a humane take on abortion, and much else, in mid-twentieth-century rural Maine. (Review; get it here)
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston includes many jewels by the great writer herself, and also a moving epilogue about finding her grave. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Arthur Vlaminck is plucked from his almost-completed PhD to become speech-writer for the French Foreign Minister. Grim and well-observed hilarity ensues in Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. (Review; get it here)

My favourite of my own reviews from this day

Reading “The Compleat Enchanter“,
when I came to the fourth section,
(set in Finland’s Kalevala)
somehow I began to wonder:
Can one write LiveJournal entries
in iambic tetrameter?
(Yes, I know that last word’s bogus
and perhaps that gives the answer.)

(Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor, attempts to turn intense personal psychiatric experience into a novel and doesn’t succeed. (Review; get it here.)

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-13 08:50 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-07-13 12:50 pm

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] kimsnarks!
qatsi: (Default)
qatsi ([personal profile] qatsi) wrote2025-07-13 11:28 am
Entry tags:

Logopolis

Book Review: Logopolis (The Black Archive 76), by Jonathan Hay
I was inspired to take a look at this after reading NWhyte's recent review, and I'm glad I did. As a child it was all about Tom Baker's final story as the Doctor; truly an era coming to an end. It's interesting that the story gains dimensions, as you gain knowledge. I realised during the 1990s that one of the regular writers in PC Plus magazine, Chris Bidmead, was in fact the same Christopher H Bidmead who wrote this story.

Jonathan Hay's overview of the story looks at the production aspects (Baker and Nathan-Turner agitated; the Police Box on the Barnet by-pass being removed between the story being written and filmed; filming not taking place at Jodrell Bank, despite being the obvious model for the Pharos project telescope), but most of the book is at least somewhat about the science. Bidmead was keen to bring "hard science" to Doctor Who, and thermodynamics is perhaps the hardest science of all.
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Arthur Eddington


Bidmead creates the concept of Charged Vacuum Emboîtements managed by the Logopolitans to manage his way out of Maxwell's demon, but his solution doesn't violate the second law; it merely transfers the entropy to a place beyond our own universe. Doctor Who has always had a scientific basis; for all the dei ex machinae, it doesn't generally rely on supernatural outcomes. But it's fair to say that science mostly takes a back seat. Not here: As well as entropy, we have human computers and the Watcher (an oddity which for me is never explained in the actual story, but which Hay plausibly ascribes to a quantum disturbance, the future Doctor appearing coincident with his current self).

Hay argues that all of season 18 (script edited by Bidmead) has a story arc about entropy and decay. Beyond the trip into e-space via a CVE, I hadn't picked up on that, although I had viewed it as the Doctor's body suffering such a series of assaults (artifically aged in The Leisure Hive; absorbed by a cactus in Meglos; falling into another universe) that regeneration was inevitable - "this body is worn out" as William Hartnell put it. After the change in the theme music for this season, and the known impending regeneration, in 1981 it seemed a real prospect that the TARDIS itself might be changed. Of course, it doesn't work out that way.

It's interesting that season 18 departs from the old formulation ending with a six-part story; although with seven four-part stories it's actually longer than previous seasons (even accounting for the loss of Shada due to industrial action the previous year). The egalitarian nature of the arc makes it difficult to raise Logopolis onto a plinth, and its own story arc continues with Castrovalva into season 19. But it probably is something of a high point; I had to rewatch it after reading this book, and Hay does it justice.
wychwood: Frannie smiling, with a heart (due South - Frannie heart)
wychwood ([personal profile] wychwood) wrote2025-07-13 11:57 am
Entry tags:

june booklog

Expand53. Beautiful Just - Lillian Beckwith ) I don't love this any more, but I can see why I did.


Expand54. The Whig Supremacy - Basil Williams ) Moving into ever more familiar territory...


Expand55. A Tale of Time City, 56. Eight Days of Luke, 61. The Game, and 62. Dogsbody - Diana Wynne Jones ) Apparently I have strong feelings about Dogsbody still. But these were all very readable, if in some cases rather slight.


Expand57. A Problem for the Chalet School and 58. The Chalet School Triplets - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) Always a pleasant time re-reading these.


Expand59. A Sorceress Comes to Call - T Kingfisher ) Kingfisher is just generally reliable for me, and this is not an exception.


Expand60. The Incandescent - Emily Tesh ) I enjoyed this a lot, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing where Tesh goes next! Recommended to anyone with an interest in pedagogy and school stories; what a great combination that definitely should be more common.
the cosmolinguist ([personal profile] cosmolinguist) wrote2025-07-13 11:01 am

Infrastructure

I've been camping on the hottest days of this summer. We just got home and I've had a shower and am drying off in front of a fan.

I am so grateful for electricity and indoor plumbing.

Infrastructure is great.

There are ice cubes in this house! I'm lying on a bed that won't deflate under me!

selenak: (Demerzel and Terminus)
selenak ([personal profile] selenak) wrote2025-07-13 11:26 am

Foundation 3.01

In which we make another time jump, the Foundation is now in its monarchical phase, while Empire seems to approach its version of the Third Century Crisis. Also: Demerzel is still my favourite.

ExpandSpoilers are explaining the Three Laws of Robotics and the Zeroth Law )
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2025-07-13 12:56 am
Entry tags:

meanwhile...

Quoted in the Yale alumni magazine: "You know the world is going crazy when Yale alums are making donations to Harvard!"

(This Yale alum donates to the United Negro College Fund, because they need it more than Yale does.)
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2025-07-12 05:49 pm
Entry tags:

Family resemblances are complicated

via [personal profile] oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
Expandcut for length )
lexin: (Default)
lexin ([personal profile] lexin) wrote2025-07-12 09:41 pm
Entry tags:

Home

I just took my hearing aids out because I’m trying to watch TV and the social club across the road from my home has just started to play host to live music. With my aids in, the TV and the music were an absolute jumble.
marthawells: Murderbot with helmet (Default)
marthawells ([personal profile] marthawells) wrote2025-07-12 03:05 pm

Murderbot Interview

Here's a gift link for the New York Times interview with Paul and Chris Weitz, who wrote, directed, and produced Murderbot:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/arts/television/murderbot-season-finale-chris-paul-weitz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.V08.exvw.M_qE37ROOT58&smid=url-share
From the Heart of Europe ([syndicated profile] fromtheheartofeurope_feed) wrote2025-07-12 04:00 pm

WSFS Business Meeting, online

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

The second session of the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting starts in 24 hours’ time, at 9 am PST, and will discuss (in Executive Session) the report of the Investigation Committee into the 2023 Hugos, of which I was a member, and various other rules changes and proposed new constitutional amendments. The first session was held on 3 July. You can find File 770‘s write-up here. I think it was a success. You can watch it here.

I spoke three times, at 1:19:50, 1:41:30 and 2:26:35; the vote went my way on the first two items that I spoke on, and the third, which I opposed, was referred to a committee, which is not a bad hit rate. (At least by my standards.)

I felt that it gained a great deal by being online and asynchronous with the convention. The most obvious gain was in numbers – 160 or so participants were present, which is more than normally show up for the in-person business meeting at WorldCon. The crucial vote on whether the meeting itself was in order and quorate under the rules was passed by 102 to 46. That was the highest participation in a vote all evening; the lowest was on C2 where 114 voted (though all other votes had over 120 participants).

By contrast, in Glasgow the two elections held at the 2024 Business Meeting attracted 89 and 88 votes, and the four counted votes ranged from 55 to 88 participants. In Chicago in 2022, the election for the Mark Protection Committee attracted 90 votes, and the serpentine counts ranged from 55 to 91. The highest counted vote in Chengdu in 2023 was 32, and the second highest 21, though my personal impression was that there were a lot more people than that in the room (despite complaints about its location). So the 3 July session had a lot more participants than the two previous Business Meetings combined.

One of the arguments that was made in favour of the online meeting was that it would boost participation from those who are unable to attend the in-person meetings due to other commitments, notably, running the actual convention. I think on pure numbers, the online Business Meeting proved its case on 3 July. I am not so sure if we brought in new speakers; there were indeed some new voices, but there were plenty of old ones (including my own), and in particular I’d like to hear more from the actual Worldcon runners. Perhaps tomorrow’s agenda will be more fruitful in that regard.

(The highest number of counted votes at a Business Meeting that I can quickly find was the vote to introduce E Pluribus Hugo in 2015, in the urgency of the Puppy crisis, where there were 186 in favour and 62 against, a total of 248 and a margin of exactly three to one. I hope we won’t see such dire circumstances again. Of course in many cases, votes at an in-person meeting are decided by a show of hands, and the fact that we take a 30-60 second interval to count votes in the on-line meeting does slow things down; but it also ensures that everyone’s vote is counted.)

The online aspect doesn’t take out all of the tedium – we really did not need to spend 25 minutes debating which bits of C.2 needed to be passed, and the fact that the meeting’s lowest participation vote came at the end of that is probably significant, but the great thing about watching in front of your computer is that you can go and get yourself a drink or a snack while waiting for that bit to be over.

There is much discussion about the way forward. Some object that this year’s meeting is not being held according to the rules, though that argument is surely over now, especially since future Business Meetings will presumably accept the decisions made this year. A nightmare proposal is that there could be a hybrid meeting. I am firmly opposed to that; I think you either have to go one way or the other. Counting votes cast both virtually and in person, and managing debate between online and in-person participants, will be brutal. We’ll see what happens in the remaining three on-line meetings this year, but I’m hopeful that the fully virtual process will successfully prove that it can (and perhaps even should) be done this way in future.

Meanwhile my own personal guide to the agenda remains available for consultation here:

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-07-12 12:02 pm

Huh

This is probably in no way significant, but it just occurred to me to check to see where WorldCon was the years I was nominated:

2010: Melbourne, Australia
2011: Reno, USA
2019: Dublin, Ireland
2020: Wellington, New Zealand
2024: Glasgow, Scotland

(I was nowhere near the ballot in 2009, Montreal)

At a guess, those are years where vote totals were a bit lower?

ExpandRead more... )