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Of course, untangling solar power billing comes with complications, since the amount of power used and the amount of power generated fluctuate by the seasons. And the monthly statement I get from the solar monitoring company (which is different from my solar energy provider) goes by calendar month, while my PG&E billing period starts mid-month.
But it only took me one repetition of "give me a human being" (at normal tone of voice) and about a minute on hold to talk to a knowledgeable human being. She was patient when I wanted to explain the detailed chronology of my solar installation (which turned out to be directly relevant to some of my questions). I got answers to all the questions that PG&E were relevant for and the answers were satisfactory.
One of the mystifying aspects was that, during August and September, and to a lesser extent, October, the solar report says I was putting more energy into the grid than I was consuming. And yet PG&E was charging me for energy -- less than my previous consumption, but not a negative amount. Turns out this is because my solar system shouldn't have been connected "live" to the grid at all until the final approval in November. (You may recall me posting about all the delays in getting the final inspection done.) So I shouldn't have been getting any advantage at all. I'm guessing that I was being billed for consumption during the part of the day when I wasn't generating, but that during the hours when my panels were keeping up with consumption, the PG&E meter registered it as "no consumption."
I really hope that PG&E was, in fact, monitoring calls for quality, because I gave the representative a long thank you, explaining in detail how satisfied I was with the experience.
I'm in Bristol for work for a couple of days. The work is annoying - it's a poorly-scoped ISO27001 audit, pencilled in for five days but I reckon we can do it in two, so I'm hoping I don't have to go back next week.
I spent the train down being That Wanker with my laptop out, updating another couple of documents ahead of the audit. Turns out with no Internet or other distractions I can actually get a few hours of useful work done... I cut about half of our Disaster Recovery Plan out, reducing verbiage to make it more streamlined and effective.
I was clever enough to get an earlier train into Manchester for my connection; the train I was recommended only gave me ten minutes to change at Piccadilly, and ended up running at least 7 minutes late. I managed to end up with a table seat, which was nice, but several hours wearing a mask is always going to suck. The CO2 meter was giving levels up to 2000ppm, so it was definitely worth doing (for reference: 400ppm is "fresh air"; 800ppm is where the CO2 helps the virus to breed. I try to stay under 800ppm without a mask).
Got into Temple Meads, bought a milkshake for a homeless guy, and hopped in a black cab to my hotel. It's a Premier Inn, rather perfunctory, but it'll do the job. I had dinner and went for a walk, which reminded me how hilly Bristol is!
I also enjoyed hearing some proper Bristol accents, and had to stop myself mimicking them. I'm close enough to where I grew up that my accent's veering to the rural anyway!
Going back to Cry Cry Cry these last few weeks. I'm so obsessed with the storytelling in the music, especially the percussion (and some kind of drone?) around 2:54 to 3:20, before the mandoline comes back in.
Age: eh
I mostly post about: My own thoughts. Tumblr interactivity felt hollow so I cam e here.
My hobbies are: making up AUs and drawing digital art on crack ships when I have the motivation. My current hyperfixation is Aqua from Kingdom Hearts and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7
My fandoms are: currently just the AU I've created for Kingdom Hearts. Didn't like the ending of the third instalment so now it's just a Keyblade Guild living in peace with Aqua x Sephiroth as my main focus.
I'm looking to meet people who: wanna chat about any similar fandom interests with me. Happy to talk about Kingdom Hearts, K-Pop Demon Hunters, Zootopia, ATLA and LOK (no LOK haters please), anything nostalgic from the early 2000s, really
My posting schedule tends to be: sporadic
When I add people, my dealbreakers are: no NSFW stuff
Before adding me, you should know: Due to religious reasons, I do not celebrate or participate in anything to do with Easter, X-Mas, Halloween or Thanksgiving
Challenge #3: Write a love letter to fandom.
John Green says of going to home games for AFC Wimbledon, "I'm with 8,000 people whose love is oriented in the same direction as mine." That, to me, is fandom. It's a group of people who have oriented their love in a similar direction, whether that's toward a show or an actor or a band or a character or a hobby or something else entirely. (Honestly, love oriented in the same direction might be foundational to almost all human-built institutions, and the problem with some of them is that the object of their love doesn't inspire pro-social behavior, but that's outside the scope of this post.) It doesn't matter what the object of the love is so much as the way that all that love aimed at a similar place amplifies itself, like vector multiplication.
The funny thing is, the way I do fandom these days, It's almost less about the object of the fandom and more about the idea of fandom, the love and the passion it inspires. Which is not to say that I'm not in some fandoms. I'm very active in Star Trek fandom, and love hanging out with people who love it with me. It's always fun to find people who share some of my other current interests like Sherlock Holmes, Murder She Wrote, Superman, and Jane Austen, or to reminisce happily with people who remember the loves that I'm less active in but still remember fondly like X-Files and Stargate.
But there are definitely people in fandom spaces with whom I share no fandoms, and I still enjoy their company, because they're doing the fandom thing too. That is, they're passionate about something, and so passionate that they want to talk about the thing, and make more of the thing, and put their joy and passion into the world so that other people can share it. Elsewhere on this year's snowflake, someone mentioned how much they love seeing someone be passionate about something, even if they don't share that passion. I like that. It is a joy to see humans be happy and excited about things they love, and to be unabashedly passionate about them.
Let people enjoy things has become a meme, almost a cliche, but that's because it so often needs to be said. Fandom at its best is a safe place where people are allowed to enjoy things without mockery or disdain, and in a world where that is all too often not the case, that's a very valuable thing.
⌈ Secret Post #6942 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 17 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.
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brickhousewench tipped me to Heading Prints, a company that makes scarves using book art as inspiration. They offer bandanas, skinny scarves, large rectangular scarves, square silky scarves, and also a few rings with designs to match some of their most popular scarf designs. Also, these are much more affordable on average than most fashion scarves I've seen, although they do cost more than the cheap random ones in a discount store.If you've seen my post "How to Simplify Fashion," then consider these scarves as an option for color-matching. Look for a scarf whose colors you love and want to use. Wear it while clothes shopping to test if new clothes match your colors.
I have elevenish favorites this year (I combined books in series, because I make the rules). My top book, which is no big secret as I've been shouting about it for months, is the only one ranked; the rest are here in alphabetical order.
( Favorite Books )
( The numbers and musings )
That's a wrap on 2025! If you read any of my favorites and have readalikes, I'm always hyped for recs. If you wrote a favorites post for your SFF reading, I'd love to see it (and then link it in Intergalactic Mixtape, haha).
Author:
kaliraFandom: Last Quarter
Ship/Characters: Adam/Mizuki
Rating/Category: T/Het
Prompt: Last Quarter (2004), Adam/Mizuki, under a different moon
Spoilers: the movie generally
Summary: As it has all her life, the moon watches over Mizuki through this one, last shift between worlds, this last shift in her.
Notes/Warnings: major character death
Wordcount: 1,525
Read on AO3
This all-new Painted Wastelands Bundle tours The Painted Wastelands, a prismatic pastel realm from Agamemnon Press for use with Old-School Essentials and other tabletop fantasy roleplaying games.
Bundle of Holding: The Painted Wastelands
You know how sometimes you look at a word or phrase you’ve known all your life and suddenly wonder about it? That happened to me with by and large, and it turns out to have such an unexpected background I thought I’d post it. OED (entry from 1933):
1. Nautical. To the wind (within six points; cf. by prep. A.I.ii.7) and off it.
1669 Thus you see the ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and learge.
S. Sturmy, Mariners Magazine 17
[…]2. In one direction and another, all ways; now esp., in a general aspect, without entering into details, on the whole.
1707 Tho’ he trys every way, both by and large, to keep up with his Leader.
E. Ward, Wooden World Dissected 351769 Miss Betsey, a charming frigate, that will do honour to our country, if you take her by and large.
in Southern Lit. Mess. vol. XVII. 183/2
[…]
The relevant senses are by 1.d. “Nautical. Close to the wind. Chiefly and earliest in full and by” (c1500 “What worde to sey, he [sc. the loodsman] is in doute, Eyther warae the lof, or ells full and by”; 2001 “With a foul wind, the boat was sailed full and by, and estimates made of the deviation from the direct track”) and large III.18. “Nautical. Of a wind: crossing the line of the ship’s course in a favourable direction, esp. on the beam or quarter” (1578 “Hauing a large winde, we kept our course vppon our saide voyage”; 1984 “With the wind large, and the yard braced in a little, it [sc. the tack] lay directly under the yard”). I expect AntC already knew this, but nautical terms are mare incognitum to me.
( Spoilers )
This afternoon, while I was hiding from work and feeling sorry for myself because of a worsening headache, angelofthenorth asked me "So how was The Moonwalkers?"
I then talked for like fifteen minutes without stopping.
Oops.
I figured she'd have read D's entry about this from last night -- she's good like that -- so ( I started with the accessibility stuff: )
But this wasn't a huge problem, I was busy being excited about space.
"For 45 minutes I forgot about the world's problems," D said. I love that!
I...did not.
One of the Artemis II astronauts who was interviewed for this movie said something about Apollo being "ahead of its time" and immediately I was grumpily thinking no it's not! we're behind ours! JFK referencing the Wright Brothers made me ponder that it was about sixty years from them to the moonwalks, and it's been another sixty years since! What do we have to show for ourselves? (Lots of other things, I know, but no one's even left Earth orbit! Yes the ISS is cool but it's reaching the end of its lifetime, and it's still Soyuz ferrying people to and from! The splashdowns look beautiful and poetic at the end of a movie like this but where are our goddam spaceplanes?!)
Basically, everything I have to say about that I said in 2011 when the only thing more modern than Soyuz ceased operation and in 2012 when Neil Armstrong died.
But since I couldn't just link angelofthenorth to things in a real-life conversation, I had to attempt to re-create those thoughts and everything that links into them: my waning interest in "space" as the 2010s went on and SpaceX got increasingly dull (to me, I am not a rocket man) and -- even before it became so tainted by its association with Elon Musk -- depressing as a symbol of yet another thing being left to private whims which I believe is a public good. The only thing about these old entries that I wince to read tonight is my optimism and naïveté, but while I'm sad for my younger self I'm not ashamed of having those things.
Anyway. Like I said I probably talked for fifteen entire minutes without a break. I wasn't even self-conscious about it, until the end.
Luckily (?) angelofthenorth said it was cute, and endearing.
(the summary isn't up for some reason, but the full title is 'To prohibit funds for the Armed Forces to engage in operations to invade or seize territory from Canada, the Republic of Panama, or the self-governing territory of Greenland.')
While I wanted 365, I’m happy with what I read. Although I did realize just after Christmas that an awful lot of what I read was just indifferent - I did worse than usual at reading things I actually felt were good.
I wanted to write 60k words of prose & 60k words of RPG book. What I got was 25,881 words of prose, & 15,696 of RPG book, which I kept putting off, because preparing for the next session of the next game I was running was more important.
If I counted my session notes towards my writing goals, I’d have blown my goals away. I’m running ten games, now that it’s my day job, and I probably wrote at least 10,000 words of session prep per game. So I’ve got the habit of regular writing down, it’s just a matter of work-life balance. Putting the words on the projects I want to be putting them on.
I kept admitting out loud when I was wrong. It continues to be good for me.
For 2026, I’m setting the same three goals at the same levels. I’m also setting three more.
First, I want to finish All Gentle Sounds, the eldritch ghost story murder mystery near-future sci-fi slow burn polyamorous romance I’ve been working on since 2020. Towards that end, if anyone would be interested in reading it, I’ll post chapters, locked & filtered. Getting fresh feedback is hugely motivating for me, and my writers’ group, the Unstable Orbitals, hasn’t met since the pandemic started. Please let me know if you’d like to be added to that filter!
Second, I’m going to finish at least a draft of The Callous Corps Officers’ Handbook, the RPG setting book I’ve been only slowly adding to since 2024. Not sure how best to drive my productivity there; I’ll think about it (is that something people would also like to see excerpted or discussed here?).
Third, in February I was diagnosed with diabetes. I’ve made some major lifestyle changes accordingly and saw some great early improvement on my blood glucose numbers, but I backslid quite a bit over the holiday, and I didn’t manage to start any regular exercise. So I want to do that, and make myself accountable for that.
All of those things probably mean more blogging, if only because doing this stuff where other people can see it keeps me honest.