podcast friday

Jul. 4th, 2025 08:58 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 Hi I am very tired.

Give a listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's entire last few weeks, which has been about the alter-globalization movement, but especially to this week's episodes, "Bread and Puppet: The Dawn of Giant Protest Puppets." (Part I | Part II). This is one of my special interests, stemming from how I used to teach at a puppetry camp, and I've actually been lucky enough to visit Bread and Puppet in Vermont on a road trip, albeit not quite lucky enough to see one of their shows. I am always in favour of more theatricality in activism and these episodes trace the evolution of one particular brand of theatricality that I'm especially a fan of.

I bet you will be surprised to learn that the personal stories of the two founders of the theatre are also especially interesting. Also, since Jamie Loftus is the guest, there is a tragic hot dog connection.

Photo cross-post

Jul. 4th, 2025 02:49 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


Got halfway to the bus stop to go to the pool and realised I didn't have my shoulder bag. Sprinted home, got it, and made it to the bus.

Got off the bus at the other end, realised Sophia's bag didn't have her swimming costume in it. Got a bus home, grabbed it, now in a taxi.

Fingers crossed that nothing else comes between me and drop-off and work!
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Reading Wednesday

Jul. 2nd, 2025 08:25 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 Just finished: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Yeah, I think this is my Hugo best novel pick. It was really good, really timely, fucking gross, and gave me nightmares. It's very much a confluence all of Tchaikovsky's quirks—rather darkly funny narrator, alien minds, and the particular type of resolution he goes for. All of those things happen to work for me quite a bit. This one reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Vandermeer but less nihilistic and I liked the characters more.

Currently reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was the only novel on the Hugo list where I'd never heard of the author or the book. I'm loving it so far though. It's a murder mystery set in a city where only engineered seawalls stop the things from Attack on Titan from demolishing the place every wet season. A noble is murdered in a mansion (not his mansion) via a tree growing through his body. The person charged with investigating the murder is an old autistic woman who doesn't leave her house so she gets a young man to be her eyes and ears. The murder mystery structure makes it rather different from not just this batch of nominees but the other award lists in general, which is also intriguing.

Time marches on

Jul. 2nd, 2025 10:20 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
As of this morning (2nd of July), we are now closer to 2050 than 2000.
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/101: The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker
I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’ humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. [loc. 1596]

This is the story of Briseis, a princess of Lyrnessus who was captured when the Achaeans sacked the city. Her husband and brothers were slaughtered, and she was given to Achilles as a prize. Later, Agamemnon's prize Chryseis was returned to her father, a priest of Apollo: plague had broken out and Apollo, the god of plague, needed to be appeased. Agamemnon complained about the loss of his property: Briseis was taken from Achilles and given to Agamemnon to replace Chryseis, and Achilles then sulked in his tent and refused to fight.

Of course the story is quite different from Briseis' point of view.Read more... )

June books

Jul. 1st, 2025 09:07 pm
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[personal profile] silentq

Books:

17 The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman.Read more... )

18 A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennet.Read more... )

19 how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems, Randall Munroe.Read more... )

clamp / median / range

Jul. 2nd, 2025 02:45 am
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[personal profile] fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2025-07-02-cmp.html

Here are a few tangentially-related ideas vaguely near the theme of comparison operators.

Read more... )

Photo cross-post

Jul. 1st, 2025 01:58 pm
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[personal profile] andrewducker


"Sophia, will you pose with your brother for a photo?"

"I will, but I'm very angry about it!"
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/100: Monsters — Emerald Fennell
The best thing about there being a murder in Fowey is that it means there is a murderer in Fowey. It could be anyone. [loc. 464]

The nameless narrator of Monsters is a twelve-year-old girl, orphaned in a boating accident ('Don’t worry – I’m not that sad about it') and living with her grandmother. Every summer she's packed off to an aunt and uncle who run a guest house in the quaint Cornish town of Fowey. There, she meets Miles, also twelve, and they bond over a murder Read more... )

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Joint Union Statement

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:53 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

We did finally meet with the university senior management on 10th June, over a month after we originally requested a meeting. It wasn't a complete success, but we did come out of it with assurance that the existing policy on gender reassignment was still in place, and trans people can continue to use the toilets that match their lived gender, that no-one should be challenging people in the toilets, and that any changes to the policy would not happen until after the EHRC guidance is published in the autumn, and would involve a proper consultation, and a full Equality Impact Assessment of the changes

We asked them to respond to the EHRC consultation as an institution, and gave them a deadline of 20th June to communicate the above facts with all members of staff, including information on how to seek advice and support (other than just the staff counselling service!)

Instead they published a statement on Sharepoint on Tuesday (24th June), which did not meet our requests. The unions have put out a joint statement today (drafted last week, but it took a while to get it online) as a result:

https://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/joint-trade-union-statement-on-the-supreme-court-ruling-on-the-equality-act/

EHRC Consultation

Jun. 30th, 2025 05:49 pm
lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)
[personal profile] lnr

Finished my response and submitted at 11:30 last night, having had to start from scratch on Sunday because a browser refresh had lost my previous attempt. I copied and pasted my responses into a document before submitting, as I'd been warned it wouldn't save them or send them to me. Tired now, and too hot today too, but glad I got it done.

Not sharing it all here, but from the final question:

Overall, as a trans inclusive feminist woman, I find this Code of Practice to be incredibly upsetting. I want to be able to include trans people in my life. I want to accept them in their lived gender. I'm happier with women's places which include trans people than I am with ones which exclude them. I want to have advice on how I can do this, and it's completely lacking here.

The Code is unclear in many places not just on how trans inclusive policies can work, but also on how the suggested trans *exclusive* policies can work in practice. It relies too much on the idea that you can always tell which people are trans and which people are not, and it seems willing to change existing practice significantly even where this will disadvantage trans people.

I don't think this is what the ruling in the Supreme Court was trying to achieve. The changes here are so incredibly broad, and so much at odds with other legislation, that they seem to go far beyond what is necessary, and it feels like an ideological stance to exclude trans people. If this is not the intention than it needs re-writing considerably.

Chaosium Convention Melbourne

Jun. 30th, 2025 11:49 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
My weekend started on Thursday evening, venturing out with Kate R., to the deco Sun Theatre in Yarraville, where a 20th anniversary screening of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" was showing with the making of the film, and with a Q&A session with the director and the producer. It was an especially clever low-budget film, deciding to produce in a 1920s style; black-and-white, silent, and with inexpensive but real special effects. Distacted by dinner, we ended up entering the cinema a good twenty minutes late, so on Monday we decided to watch again at my very local cinema (i.e., my place).

It was all a prelude for Chaosium Con, held at the Moonee Valley Racing Club with some 250 people in attendance. Chaosium is quite a fascinating company, as a producer of board games and role-playing games. Established fifty years ago this year, they have produced a great number of games which are very well received by aficionados, including the high fantasy "RuneQuest" once considered a serious rival to Dungeons & Dragons, "Stormbringer" from the world of Michael Moorcock, Larry Niven's "Ringworld", the highly acclaimed "Call of Cthulhu", and the literary brilliance of the Arthurian "Pendragon", and so many more. The company is "just right" in terms of size; large enough to be a successful global publisher, small enough to have personal connections with the fan base. This probably the right time to mention that my main RPG project for the second half of this year will be writing a campaign for "Call of Cthulhu" with the working title "Fragments of Time, Slices of Mind"; it involves "The Great Race of Yith", and that's all you need to know.

I was there to look after the RPG Review Cooperative stall, which did quite well because RPG fans love rummaging through old games from the 80s, 90s, and 00s. I became good friends with our neighbouring stall run by a blacksmith (Morgan F) and a 3D printer (Ash M). It also turns out that our Cooperative was also the only non-Chaosium sponsor of the convention, albeit with a modest sum. Also from the Cooperative, Liz B., worked on the registration desk, Karl B., ran several sessions of his post-apocalyptic Australian-setting RPG, and Chris McC., ran a session of "Superworld" set in Perth. I am encouraging the committee to release a double-issue of RPG Review for Chaosium games, new and old, this year. They have made an incredible contribution to the gaming world, and it will certainly be a real pleasure to explore and publish with the incredible and creative energy.
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/099: The Story of a Heart — Rachel Clarke
Depending on your point of view, the transplantation of a human heart is a miracle, a violation, a leap of faith, an act of sacrilege. It’s a dream come true, a death postponed, a biomedical triumph, a day job. [loc. 199]

Keira, aged nine, is fatally injured in a traffic accident: her heart keeps beating but she is brain-dead. Max, also aged nine, has been in hospital for almost a year because his heart is failing. This is the story of how Keira (and, more actively, her family) saved MaxRead more... )

Photo cross-post

Jun. 29th, 2025 04:31 pm
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[personal profile] andrewducker


We had a nice day on the beach in North Berwick. A few of Sophia's old nursery friends, getting back together, with a few siblings thrown in. They got on like it wasn't mostly a year since they last saw each other, and they had a ball digging holes, wading through seaweed and climbing on rocks. The weather was just as fabulous as it looks here.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.