Ridiculous indulgent breakfast situation (though having now looked up Culinary Strata because A asked, I am extremely unconvinced that pistachio croissants with raspberries)... counts.
Therapy session, spent entirely talking about One Thing (with tendrils), has left me feeling distinctly more settled.
Today's primary Make Numbers Go Down project has been working my way through some of the short fiction I've had open in tabs since [mumble]. Highlight thus far is Naomi Kritzer's The Thing About Ghost Stories (cn parental death, dementia).
The other New Thing I started consuming today is A Physical Education, which is extremely and often graphically about diet culture and disordered eating, but which 11% of the way through the audio file I am Very Much Enjoying. Further updates to follow. (The library only has audio, I apparently put a hold on it seven weeks ago though I can't at this point remember where I came across it, and The First Headphones I Have Ever Tolerated remain excellent. Shokz OpenRun Pro.)
The Child liked the replacement mock cherries; spring flowers are excellent (we are firmly heading into daffodils now); Routine Dinner tonight DID work even though the app initially Frightened Me by claiming first available pickup was tomorrow morning.
Made it to the plot! Brought home more salad than we actually wanted to eat this evening! Mostly lamb's lettuce but some bonus baby beetroot and spinach leaves :)
Also, the broad beans are starting to emerge (well, the ones that didn't get partly dug up and then abandoned on the surface unmunched, anyway; those have now been reinterred).
In the course of Making An Effort to Close More Tabs I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and downloaded a bunch of things I'd apparently been interested in for Some Time: Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
I spent some of the evening doing minor crafts with supplies A acquired, to make replacement cherries for a children's board game, using red wooden beans and green cotton string. I am mildly concerned that the Child might disapprove of the string being green rather than red, but We Shall See...
Nature continues to progress! New developments from the past two-ish weeks include ( shortly )
OTHERWISE: -Winter Olympics were amazing, why do we only get them once every few years, how are snow and ice sports so beautiful and fascinating and aesthetically pleasing.
-I would like to read fic but honestly I have just fallen down the rabbit hole of m/m sports romance novels, starting with everything Rachel Reid has to offer, then KD Casey, now Ari Baran, and who knows what's next, with a slight detour into warm and cozy Kind by Hannah Leigh. I feel like at SOME POINT I should stop. If you ask me to tell apart all the different couples I've read about in the past 2 weeks I would be hard pressed to explain all the different characters and plots. And yet.
-Enjoying the new season of The Pitt and a few other show's I'm following, but nothing makes me as happy (and heartbroken, but mostly happy) entertainment-wise as watching a new episode of Shrinking every week. Just, how is that show so good.
-Nature! It's one of the warmest winters I can recall, less rain and warmer weather and a shorter green period, but there are still winter flowers, and I do my best to hike and picnic on the weekends as much as I can. This past weekend I went up to the Golan with a friend, just 2 days of walking around the peace and quiet of the green green north, which was incredibly lovely. The weather makes it constantly feel like Passover is just around the corner, which is disorienting and kind of nice and kind of not.
On Saturday I went to an incredible production of Cabaret. It's one of my favorite musicals to see in live theater, and this production really was incredibly, 360-stage Kit Kat Club and all, and I might have written more if I weren't falling asleep but I very much am, alas.
We've seen some questions lately about AI and how it relates to Dreamwidth, especially around scraping and training. Rather than answer piecemeal, I wanted to talk through how denise and I are thinking about this and try to be explicit about some things.
Dreamwidth is a user-supported service. We don't build the service around monetizing user data, and that informs how we approach AI just like it informs everything else we do.
Your content and AI training
Dreamwidth does not and will not sell, license, or otherwise provide user content for AI training. We have not and will not enter into data-access agreements for AI training purposes.
We will continue taking reasonable technical steps to discourage large-scale automated scraping, including known AI crawlers, where it is practical to do so. No public website can prevent scraping with absolute certainty, but we will keep doing what we reasonably can on our side.
AI features on Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth will not introduce AI features (and we have no current intention of doing so) that use or process user content without a public discussion with the community first.
We're only phrasing it like this because we can't predict the future and who knows what will be possible and available in five or ten years, but right now there's nothing we can see wanting to add.
If that ever changed, the conversation would happen openly before any decisions were made.
Site admin uses of AI
Keeping Dreamwidth usable means dealing with things like spam and abuse, and that sometimes requires automated admin tools to be more efficient or effective.
We are not currently using AI-driven systems for moderation or similar decisions.
If we ever decide that an AI-based tool would help address a site admin problem like spam, we will explain what we are doing and how it works (and ask for feedback!) before putting it into use. Any such tools would exist only to make it easier and more efficient for us to do the work of running the site.
AI and code contributions
Dreamwidth is an open-source project, and contributors use a variety of tools and workflows.
Contributors may choose whether or not to use AI-assisted tools when writing or reviewing code. Dreamwidth will not require contributors to use AI tools, and we will not reject contributions solely because AI-assisted tools were used.
For developers: if you use any AI-assisted development tools for generating a pull request or code contribution, we expect you to thoroughly and carefully review the output of those tools before including them in a pull request. We would ask the community not to submit pull requests from automated agents with no human intervention in the submission process.
I think it's important and I want to be able to review, understand, and maintain any contributions effectively, and that means humans are involved and making sure we're writing code for humans to work with, even if AI was involved.
Important note: this applies to code only. We expect any submitted images or artwork (such as for styles, mood themes, or anything else) to be the work of a human artist.
And to be very explicit, any AI-assisted development does not involve access to Dreamwidth posts or personal content.
In short summary
Dreamwidth does not and will not provide user content for AI training
Dreamwidth have not and will not enter data-sharing agreements for AI training and we will do what we can to prevent/discourage automated scraping by AI companies
Dreamwidth will not introduce AI features without a public discussion first
Any site admin use of AI tools will be explained openly and part of a public conversation
Contributors can choose their own development tools for code, but we do not accept images or artwork generated by AI
Oh, and we'll probably mention this (or a subset of this that isn't code related) in an upcoming dw_news post, but will defer to denise on that!
Sure, you could go with rubber duckies and baby blocks, but that's sooo last decade. Today's shower cakes are all about the biology of baby-making: tasty and educational!
And while you're at it, why not congratulate dad, too?
Of course, mom also did her part:
Whoah, whoah, whoah! TMI, Dad, TMI!
You could even illustrate the whole process with the aid of disturbing plant analogies:
Raise your hand if you're going to have nightmares about daisies sprouting Alien-style from your midsection tonight. Anyone? Anyone? Just me? Alrighty, then.
Granted, the process doesn't always start exactly the same way:
Thank goodness that cup is labeled. Otherwise, we'd have some concerned coffee drinkers on our hands right about now.
And what does all this love math equal?
(No, your eyes do not deceive you: that IS a Fetal Bite cookie in that there uterus cake. Excellent.)
And that brings us to the Big, Life-Changing Moment!
AAAAAAUUUGGGHHHH!!
Yep, I'm changed for life.
Casey D., Heidi D., Hillary M., Kristin J., Jess, Shari W., & Tiffany D., when you're ready to have "the talk" with your kids, feel free to come back here for visual aids.
*****
This book has over 2,000 5-star reviews and looks absolutely hysterical, definitely bookmark it for the new parents in your life:
Oh, hi, everybody! It's been a little bit since we did a code tour, hasn't it? But never fear, we're here to walk you through the changes that have happened since the last time we took a tour through the code changes in Dreamwidth.
There we go! Another year's worth of code commits, issues resolved, and attempts to make Dreamwidth a greater and cooler place to be. And to have it continue working into the future.
(We should do these more often, but volunteers and, well…*gestures broadly around*. So it may be a while before someone has the spoons to do this again, but we're always trying to be more consistent about it.)
inCompleted White Puzzle!!! We were right about That One Piece being the missing one, and now that I'm not worried about spoilers I have poked the internet and it (mostly in the form of reddit) confirms that Those Are The Missing Bit.
one (1) orchid flower is all the way open!
supermarket had discount fancy croissant, so we are most of the way to prepped for Fancy Breakfast tomorrow morning :)
Guys, is there an MCU person here (or an MCU person you know), who's be willing to play dev buddy by email for a Purimgifts participant? It's Purimgifts, so "Women, Jews or the persecuted" chars need to be the focus.
It snowed until around 3 pm today! Just...so much snow. Friend L sent me a pic from her building in Manhattan and it was like the storm had barely had an impact, yet by me, even though the street had been plowed, it was all snowy again. Anyway, thankfully, my boss is also under about 2 ft of snow out on the island, so we are not going in tomorrow (the person who was supposed to come meet with us had their flight cancelled, so they never even made it to NY, so that will all get rescheduled, too). Whew.
Anyway, have some brief thoughts on recent TV:
- Shrinking: ( spoilers ) This show remains hilarious and endearing.
- Pluribus: I finished it and I don't love it but I am interested in seeing where it goes. ( spoilers )
I got up to watch the hockey this morning and despite Team USA pulling it off in OT, I do not accept that Bill Guerin was proved right in his choices. Eighty-five percent of the game was played in their defensive end and they only won because Connor Hellebuyck stood on his head. Maybe a little more scoring power on the team could have given them some breathing room. I am just saying. I'm happy for Hellebuyck and the Hughes brothers, and I got a little teary when they brought out the Gaudreau jersey and his kids, and I'm not gonna lie, watching Jon Cooper and Connor McDavid (along with Sam Bennett, Tom Wilson, and Brad Marchand) lose was pleasing to me on a deep, personal level, but overall, I'd still have preferred the Finns or the Swedes take home the gold.
I then baked some oatmeal for breakfast for the week, and made macaroni salad for a few days of lunch, and then for dinner, I made angel hair as planned, though when I actually read the recipe, it was not anything new to me - it was what I always do for a super quick tomato sauce, except they were adding chile crisp to it, which I guess is the thing nowadays - every recipe I read has chile crisp in it, but I'm not really a chile crisp person. I have the heat tolerance (in terms of spiciness, though I also don't like my food super hot temperature-wise either) of the whitest baby you know.
Anyway! It is a super easy but delicious meal and if you don't mind waiting a few extra minutes, you can do it all in one pot. Boil your pasta - angel hair is best for this, imo - and reserve a cup of pasta water before you drain it. Return the pot to the stove over low heat and add in a nice glug of olive oil (2 tbsp if you need a measurement), and then add a whole can or tube of tomato paste to the oil (so between 4 and 6 oz). Stir it around and season it as you like - I used garlic and onion powder, oregano and red pepper flakes and salt, but if you want to get fancy, you could probably saute a diced shallot and some minced garlic in the oil for a minute or two before adding the tomato paste - for 2-3 minutes, until it's all hot and sizzling. If you are so inclined, add chile crisp to suit your taste. Then add the pasta back, and about half the reserved water and toss it until the pasta is coated. I only used 4 oz of angel hair, so if you have more, you might need more water. Then put it in bowls and sprinkle it with parmesan cheese. If you are in an even bigger rush, you can sizzle the tomato paste in a frying pan while the pasta cooks and then combine it all back in the pasta pot. The couple of minutes you save isn't worth having to wash an extra pot to me, but it might be to some people.
Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )
ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.
Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...
Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.
Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.
Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...
Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...
NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.
Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.
This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.
A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...
Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)
Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?
Reading: Last week I finished Stephanie Burgis' Wooing the Witch Queen (fun!) and read Heated Rivalry. I opted to just skip straight to the actual HR novel rather than first reading the Scott/Kip novel, which worked out fine, since I also had that context from the show. I enjoyed it a fair bit, but now I'm in the awkward position of wanting to see the next chunk for Shane and Ilya but no more urgently than after I finished watching season 1 of the show. The choices now are a) read the entire series (presumably doubling back to actually read book 1), b) skip ahead and read The Long Game, or c) hold off entirely and wait for season 2 of the show.
I also read a few more volumes each of Hikaru no Go and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but I'm still in rereading territory with both. (I think I've already read up to vol. 12 of Kurosagi, but for Hikaru, I think the odds are against me really realizing when I've hit new territory until I go to enter a volume in Goodreads and find it's not already on my Read list there.) Watching:scruloose and I are caught up on both The Pitt and Frieren, and we finished Midnight Mass last weekend (a very solid, intense ending).
With my crunch time at work starting, it's not an ideal time for us to start a show that's a significant time commitment or that's going to leave me desperate to see a next episode when work is eating most or all of my evenings. It's possible this will result in me just showing scrulooseHeated Rivalry, since it's apparently our key cultural export of the decade and all. *g* Only six episodes and I don't have to worry about being impatient to see what happens next or about being spoiled.
(I still don't feel actively fannish about HR at all, but am enjoying being adjacent to it and seeing all the fannish excitement and meta and such. I have saved many fic recs to my read-later list on A03, but have yet to actually read a single one [and may never, given how slowly I go through fic--there's still a steady stream of Guardian fic I haven't read that also goes on that list].) Weathering/Working: We have what sounds like a significant nor'easter blizzard arriving at some point tomorrow, with heavy wet snow. Will this be where our luck fails for the season and we lose power for the first time? (I'm completely astonished that it hasn't happened yet. Probably it's not really because the generator and backup power are warding that off, like carrying an umbrella around...)
And of course the spring crunch is set to start tomorrow in the late afternoon, right around when the storm is likely to be in full swing. Will the weather have much impact? (Mainly, I guess, in terms of Those Who Speak all being able to make it there safely; I kinda hope that there's some kind of backup power in their actual building, but I don't know for sure one way or the other.)
...Cake! This one combines two hot and happening trends: gray and ombre. Plus polka-dots, which will never go out of style.
Let's hope gray doesn't, either, because pretty much my entire house is painted gray. Some people might think that sounds depressing, but just look at this cake:
Then I learned that it was modeled after a Vera Wang gown, and I felt totally smart and stylish for a second. Then I looked down at my ensemble of mismatched sweats and slowly lowered my hands from their 'raise the roof' position.
Isn't it great how all the ribbon and fabric look like actual ribbon and fabric? Just amazing.
I sure hope you enjoyed today's gorgeous gray gateaux and that your Sunday is especially sweet!
******
P.S. I was browsing "gray whale" things to link today - because whales are awesome -but then this blue whale butter dish popped up and it's so stinkin' cute you get it instead:
I want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration.
Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.
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