Network

Overnights, 2025

As usual, ordered by first visit and asterisks indicate multiple separate visits.

2025 got my travel ramping back up (finally), even though I only went to two conventions and one of them (Worldcon) was literally in my city (between my apartment and my usual airport, though technically there's also an airport with international service between my apartment and downtown -- LKE). Two overnights from delayed flights; both would have stuck me at DTW (Romulus, MI) except that for the second one I was able to rebook on the next morning's IAD-SEA nonstop instead.

The big trip was Kraków and environs, with a bonus pair of overnights in Calgary because business class YYC-KRK was literally half the price of SEA-KRK or YVR-KRK. Having NEXUS made a Canada stopover easy; though I kinda miss the old iris scan kiosks, the new facial recognition ones are a lot faster.

Cambridge, MA*
Seattle, WA*
Romulus, MI
Arlington, VA*
Calgary, AB, CA*
KL678 YYC-AMS
Kraków, PL*
Jaworze, PL
Balice, PL
Sneads Ferry, NC
Minneapolis, MN
Harrisonburg, VA
Sterling, VA
Port Townsend, WA
SeaTac, WA
Tysons, VA

Airports (connection-only*, new to me@): BOS, SEA, DTW (should have only been a connection, sigh), DCA, MSP, YYC@, AMS*, KRK@, ATL*, ILM@, IAD.

Tensegrity

https://xkcd.com/3190/

Entry tags:

icons

yet more tng icons

"Conspiracy" is a weird episode. I don't know why I got the urge to rewatch it, much less icon the heck out of it, but here we are.

( Onward for 36 icons featuring beardless Riker and Enterprise glamor shots )

Current Music: Fast Blood, "Rut"

How am I supposed to know what's real?

After a full week without water in the kitchen, the plumber cameth on half an hour's notice from the property manager and was horrified to hear about it, but he was swift and competent and we have a new and working faucet, which was all the problem turned out to be. Hestia made herself invisible in the bedroom throughout the proceedings. I washed a fork without first boiling water and it felt like a big deal.

I just finished reading David Hare's A Map of the World (1983), whose device of examining an interpersonal-political knot through the successive filters of the roman à clef, the screen version, and the memories of the participants reminded me obviously of similar exercises in metafiction and retrospect by Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, double-cast for an effect at the end approaching timeslip such as works almost strictly on stage. I did not expect to find some fragments preserved in an episode of The South Bank Show, but there were some of the scenes with Roshan Seth, John Matshikiza, Bill Nighy, Diana Quick. I wish I thought it meant there were a complete broadcast I could watch, but I'm not even finding it got the BBC Radio 3 treatment. More immediately, it reminded me of how many of the stories I read early were about stories, their propagation and mutation, their conventions, their shifting distances from the facts. "And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it."

The problem with the denaturing of language is that when I say to

spatch that the political situation is insane, I don't mean it's a little far-fetched, I mean it is driven by wants and processes that are not rational and it is exhausting to be trapped inside someone else's illness.

Current Mood: sick

Entry tags:

memes,
politics

Book meme

Snagged from

swingandswirl :

01. Grab the nearest book.

02. Turn to page 126

03. The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses? Oh, this'll be fun.

"Paying the federal militia to suppress the rebellion cost $1.5 million, nearly one-third of the entire excise duties collected during the ten years the excise law was in force."

:reads. rereads. looks around. sighs again:

I'll just be over here.

Entry tags:

icon babble

Do more text, dumdum.

senmut's post at

cultivativity about considering why you make what you make and what you enjoy about it, made me think of icons and text. The more icons I made, the less text they had, because I'm straight up terrible at text. Best outcome to hope for is it doesn't actively make the icon look like crap. But text is fun though! I'd really really like to make a return to being a bit more of a smartass in my iconning. And get some more quotes in there! Maybe that'll be my iconning resolution for the year?

As a reminder to myself: ( icons slathered with text )

[ SECRET POST #6940 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6940 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #991.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Entry tags:

snowflake challenge

Snowflake Challenge: day 3

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

It's late and I'm tired and badly in need of some gentle quizzing on the telly and then bed, but:

For too much of my life I've felt faintly embarrassed by my own enthusiasms. I appreciate the reminder that it doesn't have to be like that. Thank you, fandom, for being so loudly, unapologetically, gloriously enthusiastic.

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

I also didn’t expect

Such an open and bald admission that this is about the oil.

Entry tags:

snowflake 2026

(no subject)

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

I'm letting this vid clip show how far John will go for the man he loves.

Watch on YouTube

Entry tags:

End of Year Writing Meme 2025

I continue recovering very slowly but at least pretty steadily - and my things are gradually getting out of boxes too. In the meantime, I thought I could probably manage to do the end of year meme, so here it is:

The usual writing meme for the year. (Last year's post is here.)

( Cut for length )

Entry tags:

The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

This is a difficult book to review as almost all of the plot is technically spoilery, but you can also figure out a lot of it from about page three. I'll synopsize the first two chapters here. We follow two storylines, both set in an alternate England where Hitler was assassinated in 1943 and England made peace with Germany.

In one storyline, a young girl named Nancy lives an isolated life with her parents. In the other, which gets much more page time, three identical young boys are raised by three "mothers," in a home in extremely weird circumstances. They rarely see the outside world, they're often sick and take medicine, their dreams are meticulously recorded by the "mothers," and all their schooling comes from a set of weird encyclopedias that supposedly contain all the knowledge in the world, which are also the only books they have access to. There used to be 40 boys, but when they recover from their mysterious illness, they get to go to Margate, a wonderful vacationland, forever.

I'm sure you can figure out the general outline of what's going on with the boys, at least, just from this. What's up with the girl doesn't become clear for a while.

( Spoilers through about the 40% mark )

( Spoilers for the entire book )

This book was critically acclaimed - it was a Kirkus best book of 2025 - but I thought it had major flaws, which unfortunately I can only describe by spoiling the entire book. It's not at all an original idea, and I do think we're supposed to be ahead of the characters, but maybe not that much ahead. It also contained a trope which I hate very much and its thesis contradicted itself, but how, again, is under the end cut. It's a very serious book about very serious real life stuff, but that part really didn't work for me because of spoilers.

Lots of people loved it though. It would probably make an interesting paired reading with a certain very acclaimed spoilery book (( Read more... )), which I have not read as I have been spoiled for the entire story and it doesn't really sound like something I'd enjoy no matter how great it is. But I suspect that it's the better version of this book.

Content Notes (spoilery): ( Read more... )

Current Mood: groggy

Entry tags:

heated rivalry

data point re Heated Rivalry audience

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Entry tags:

Snowflake #3: love letter

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Title Formulations

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Entry tags:

social

Volunteer social thread #160

The Arctic vortex thingy must be out in force today. Snow's falling here, which hasn't happened in December or early January (despite it being winter here) in... I think decades, maybe 30 years or so.

ETA: how's everyone else?

Current Mood: curious

Andrew Zimmern picks tastiest and least tasty animals

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Entry tags:

questions

Question thread #147

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Entry tags:

activism

Emailing my legislators

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Entry tags:

Book fortune-telling meme

via

antisoppist

Grab the nearest book.
Turn to page 126
The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

The first book nearest me is Metallurgical Assessment of Spacecraft Materials and Parts by Barrie D. Dunn (1996).

The sentence is: "Special fibres giving more options in strength, stiffness, light weight, and endurance against heat have been developed (Klein 1988)."

The chapter containing it discusses composite materials and ways to control their properties. The thing that makes me happiest about that particular sentence is the use of the Oxford comma.

The second book nearest me is The political diaries of a chief whip by Simon Hart (2025).

The sentence is: "It feels like authority is ebbing with every hour."

The chapter containing it is titled "April 2021-January 2022" and I think we probably all remember painfully well the fiasco that was the handling of pandemic restrictions to which this sentence clearly relates.

Cue hollow laughter as I realise the sentence is applicable to both work and home life. Particularly with a teenager and a tweenager incessantly challenging boundaries.