Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 06:40 pm
Again, not really saying anything new here, just trying to articulate part of the problem that makes lots of sense in my head but maybe isn't obvious to everyone else...

Read more... )
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 11:51 pm
  1. 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.
  2. one (1) orchid flower is all the way open!
  3. supermarket had discount fancy croissant, so we are most of the way to prepped for Fancy Breakfast tomorrow morning :)
Wednesday, February 25th, 2026 12:36 pm
* I find SMBC pretty hit and miss these days, but today's comic smacked me in the face. :-)

* Idk if 4am!me's brain worries more than it should, or daytime!me's brain worries less than it should. I just know we're in a circular standoff, and I'm very tired.
Tags:
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 06:04 pm
Theme Prompt: #285 - Fresh Start
Title: Emotion Made Manifest
Fandom: MDZS
Rating/Warnings: G - some thoughts about parental neglect
Bonus: No.
Word Count: 745
Summary: Jiang Cheng prepares his art studio and reflects.

Read more... )
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 05:52 pm
Theme Prompt: #286 - Working Together
Title: Bitter Stars
Fandom: MDZS
Rating/Warnings: NC-17 - discussions of war, trauma, and other heavy topics.
Bonus: No.
Word Count: 1,000
Summary: Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji are united for a common purpose. It isn't what either one expected but that part doesn't matter. What matters is their goal; finding Wei Wuxian.

Read more... )
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 10:25 pm

Looking at my podcasts the other day, glaring at the ones I want to update for not updating enough, I did a thing that I know I've done before and I'm sure I will again: I thought gosh I really like that Gareth Dennis, why am I so behind on his??

Then I listen to some and (when it's not about train crashes) pretty soon I'm like I should be taking notes on this, this is about WORK. Free bus passes, driverless public transport, that's stuff I get paid to think about so I don't wanna do it in my spare time so much.

So the podcast episode goes half-unlistened to. Again.

I was already thinking that before the most recent episode, about the Gorton & Denton by-election. I listen to podcasts for escapism, that's why I like baseball! This is no kind of escape.

But today, maybe because of my time off (both a break from thinking about transport policy, and more time to listen to podcasts so I'm burning through them quicker) or maybe because the podcasts I like really aren't updating enough no matter how much I glare at the app, I put this one on.

It was at first pretty novel to hear a voice I associate with engineering disasters etc. talking about roads I've been on and places I know well.

I do think it's interesting how much transport has been emblematic of this election: when I first saw the locally-infamous "Patricia Clegg" letter that Reform is trying to deceive people with, the thing that stuck out to me most was "the buses aren't working," and I just scoffed at this slight on my beloved Bee Network -- not like I'm anything to do with TfGM or Labour or anything, but I'm really impressed at what Andy Burnham has been able to do and it really is nonsense to say that buses don't work when we have, for the first time, real-time information available in the app and AV announcements on increasingly many buses. This more than anything, more than even a candidate from Hitchin, made me feel like that letter was not written by any "concerned neighbour" but by someone who hasn't been to Manchester, not recently.

We got a postcard today "from" Andy Burnham himself telling us "the community has to unite around our candidate or you'll get a Reform MP" (typical Labour, telling us we have to do what they tell us to) and on this postcard, as well as the expected photo of him with the candidate is just a particular photo of yellow Bee Network buses that I've seen in every TfGM press release and news story about them. It really is a symbol of his; bringing about the first franchise outside of London, and the coming integration with local train services, really does feel miraculous.

So yeah, it really is interesting how much transport has been a useful lens to view the by-election with.

But man. Between this by-election and Minnesota, I'm like... never mind living in interesting times, I'm weary of living in interesting places.

Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 05:12 pm
So my wife (!!) was here for a week, which was lovely, but limited the amount of time I was willing to spend in front of a laptop. So my [personal profile] candyheartsex reveals post is slightly belated.

Firstly, I received this wonderful fic, with lots of worldbuilding and people trying to sort out cross-cultural relationships and hair petting.

paradise (2522 words) by WolffyLuna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s), Male Drow Used To Being A Disappointment/His Female Captor Who Thinks He's Pretty Great (OW)
Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Past Abuse, Age Difference, hair petting, Hugs, Elves, Fantasy setting
Summary:

Rhoklan looked down at the woven liana floor, and held his hands out, palm up.

Every time he apologised, he did that. Real error, false error, something that had nothing to do with him, he always stood like that, hands held out as an offering while he hid his face behind a curtain of white hair.

Suppressed irritation rattled in her chest. The problem was that she could not get angry with him for the habit without him doing it more.

It had taken her a month to work out why. The idea that it would even come up only angered her more. Even if she was purely a heartless pragmatist, why would she strike her secretary’s hands? He needed those to write!



And I wrote for [personal profile] firecat for the excellent prompt "Fairy Prince/Noir Detective", which I used as an excuse to experiment with contrasting prose styles.

Fae Fatale (524 words) by Violsva
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character, Fairy Prince/Noir Detective
Additional Tags: Pre-Slash, Pastiche, First Meetings, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Candy Hearts Exchange 2026
Summary:
It had been a slow afternoon. There had been a lot of slow afternoons lately.


Excellent exchange experience, as usual.

Now I am considering the Single Syllable Smut Challenge, reveals date April 1st. It would be nice if I could manage Phantom Tollbooth or Alice in Wonderland or some other fandom where it would be thematic, but I'm not sure I'm up to that.
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 04:12 pm
Milestone! I've finally recovered enough from my big abdominal incision five months ago that the cat can knead my stomach again.

I'm home sick today with a cold (negative flu and covid tests) and it's reminding me what good chronic pain flare company he used to be. I'd wake up from pain naps to find him curled into my side to share the warmth of my heating pad. All of which is to say that someone's earned himself a go with his treat puzzle. Or will, once he gets bored of purring in my lap.
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 04:11 pm
In the wake of the blizzard, the temperature rose a degree above freezing in the blue-and-white brilliance of sun and the local topography of snow-walls to shoulder-height compressed and calved like ice shelves. I had the impulse to visit the Robbins Cemetery on Mass. Ave. while out running errands and was prevented by absolutely nobody having shoveled within a block of the gates. I took a picture of a leftover slam-dunk of snow instead.

Image


Tickets have hiked considerably in price since the last production of theirs I attended, but I am intrigued that the Apollinaire Theatre Company is currently doing Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge—I assume it was proposed last season because of the topical-political of the undocumented immigrant angle which has only gone Mach 10 in relevance since. I have never seen the play; I read it in 2016 because Van Heflin originated the role of Eddie Carbone in the original 1955 one-act version. I am wondering how I convince their box office that I am actively pursuing a professional arts career.
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 09:31 pm
Last week was all choir all the time (concert went well, but the Concerts Without A Funny Turn card goes back down to zero, annoyingly) and then I went straight into a weekend of Extreme Socialising because [personal profile] shreena and [profile] quizcustodet came up for a visit. Friday night I went out with [personal profile] shreena and A for dinner, delicious food at a Vietnamese restaurant (the marmite-and-peanut-butter-coated cauliflower was especially good!).

Saturday was my birthday treat; the Lego Discovery Centre only lets you in if you have children with you, so [personal profile] shreena and [profile] quizcustodet donated me their children and bought me a ticket to go with them *g*. I really enjoyed it; there's a mix of rides (and a big soft-play area) and a little 3D film and also a big open area where you can, you know, play with Lego. There were stations for building specific models, stations that were just buckets of Lego for you to play with, a tiny zipline where you could build little machines and see if they could make it the whole way along, a car-building area with test track, etc etc. I spent probably half an hour or so building a tiny house (with contributions from [personal profile] shreena and their older son J), which was extremely soothing.

And then on Sunday we went to Cadbury World )

All-in-all a pretty good weekend, but an inevitably exhausting one. I am now attempting to live a deeply regulated life to try and get back to normal and untrash my sleep cycle, etc etc, so we'll see how that goes...
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 02:31 pm
Space lasers reveal oceans rising faster than ever

A new 30-year analysis reveals that melting land ice is now the main force behind rising global sea levels. Researchers discovered that oceans rose about 90 millimeters since 1993, with most of the increase coming from added water mass rather than just warming expansion. Ice loss from Greenland and mountain glaciers accounts for the vast majority of this gain. Even more concerning, the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating.
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 02:27 pm
This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, March 3, 2026. Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "World Cuisine." I'll be soliciting ideas for cooks, fusion chefs, immigrant cooks, eaters, farmers, foragers, food scientists, inventors, recipe writers, famous figures in food history, cooks of disadvantaged groups who should have become famous, superheroes, supervillains, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people active in the food world, cooking, gardening, harvesting, foraging, preserving, writing recipes, discovering things, decolonizing diets, building or using kitchen equipment, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, kitchens, restaurants, food trucks or carts, campfires, barbecue sites, laboratories, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, picnics, grocery stores, farmer's markets, roadside fruit stands, U-pick farms, gardens, food forests, other places where people make food, world cuisine, ethnic cuisines, cookbooks, online recipe archives, permaculture, heritage diets, climatarian diet, traditional foodways, culinary archaeology, food sovereignty, drought-resistant crops, trial and error, ethnic spice sets, weird food, fusion food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, new ideas in cuisine, alternate agriculture, lab conditions are not field conditions, ethics of food, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One has to figure out how to feed a diverse, far-flung group of people who sometimes have special dietary needs.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, including some aspects of food science.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different diets.  This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find and prepare enough food to survive, when city libraries are out of reach.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman uses herbs and healing foods to care for her village.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania.  Igor enjoys cooking and has gotten at least one of the werewolves curious about cooking the human way.

Hart's Farm is a community with food used as one of the popular bonding methods.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates in the Caribbean, among other groups and places, leading to a wide variety of foods.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all of whom need to eat.  Primal soups and high-burn soups often have special dietary needs.  Comfort food and healing food are also very popular here.  The Rutledge thread includes Kardal and his food truck Syrian Foods, along with references to Vermont, French, and hippie cuisines.  Pain's Gray, Shiv, and the Finns are all fond of cooking too.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 03:24 pm
I have just been out for a walk, a day after the blizzard: bright blue sky, temperature around freezing, and most but not all of the sidewalks have been cleared, so I walked down the middle of the street for a bit. The turkey flock that hangs out on Egremont Road is now up to at least 12 birds, two of which were sitting on a railing. [We got 16-18 inches of snow, I think--the official number from the airport is 16.5, which is significant, but a lot less than this storm dumped on some places.]
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 08:16 pm

https://dotat.at/@/2026-02-24-nsnotifyd-2-4-released.html

The nsnotifyd daemon monitors a set of DNS zones and runs a command when any of them change. It listens for DNS NOTIFY messages so it can respond to changes promptly. It also uses each zone's SOA refresh and retry parameters to poll for updates if nsnotifyd does not receive NOTIFY messages more frequently. It comes with a client program nsnotify for sending notify messages.

This nsnotifyd-2.4 release includes a new feature and some bug fixes:

  • The new -S option tells nsnotifyd to send all SOA queries to a specific server.

    Previously, in response to a NOTIFY message, it would send a SOA query back to the source of the NOTIFY, as specified by RFC 1996.

    (Typically, a NOTIFY will only be accepted from a known authoritative server for the zone. The target of the NOTIFY responds with a SOA refresh query and zone transfer. But it should avoid trying to refresh from one of the other authoritative servers which might not have received the latest version of the zone.)

    Mark Felder encountered a situation where it would have been more convenient to fix the address that nsnotifyd sends SOA queries to, because the source of the NOTIFY messages wasn't responding on that address.

    Since nsnotifyd is intended to work as glue between disparate parts of a system, it makes sense for it to work around awkward interoperability problems.

  • The nsnotify client program was broken and unable to create NOTIFY messages. D'oh!

  • I have adjusted the release process so that it works better with git archive and web front-ends that offer tarball downloads.

Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 01:16 pm
Today is cloudy and cold with howling wind. A beautiful day to stay indoors and write!

I fed the birds. Unsurprisingly I haven't seen any.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/24/24 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

A flock of sparrows is braving the wind to visit the feeders.  :D








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Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 01:34 pm
Snow was bad yesterday. I'm doing okay now. I've got work from home today due to road clearance issues. Would prefer to work from home tomorrow, too, but I don't think that's going to be an option.

Still practicing Dutch via Duolingo and Babbel. Still practicing Italian via Babbel.

Have knit four Melt the ICE hats so far. Two of them should be on their way to my sister but I inadvertently gave the PO an address she hasn't lived at in several years and I don't know where they forwarded the package to. One stays with me. One is going to a friend in Virginia. You can see two of them at my Ravelry, which I only just started updating again after knitting those hats.

I am dealing with a wide array of mood swings and weird symptoms which may be due to the official doctor diagnosis of 'perimenopausal but still ovulating', or to the fact that I am female and living in the United States in 2026, or to my own underlying hormonal/emotional issues that have been with me most of my life. Anyone who tries to tell me it's all in my head, yes, that is where my pituitary gland lives and the little bastard hates me.

So much shit I just don't want to deal with right now.
Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 12:19 pm
Nominations will close on Feb 25, 11:59PM UTC, a little over a day from now.

  • Gentle reminder: Please disambiguate your relationship nominations (include the fandom in parentheses behind the relationship)! This will help your nominations get approved faster.
  • If there are duplicates, wandering tags, or other errors in the tagset, please let me know.



  • Clarifications
    Creator's Choice of Fandom is not accepted. Please nominate under a specific fandom.

    Star Trek
    Katrina Cornwell & Philippa Georgiou
    Katrina Cornwell/Christopher Pike
    Katrina Cornwell/Mirror Philippa Georgiou
    Marie Batel & Number One | Una Chin-Riley
    Marie Batel/Christopher Pike
    Marie Batel/Katrina Cornwell
    Marie Batel/Number One | Una Chin-Riley

    Please nominate under a specific Star Trek instalment.


    Midsomer Murders - All Media Types
    Charlie Nelson/Jamie Winter (Midsomer Murders)
    Fleur Perkins & Jamie Winter (Midsomer Murders)
    John Barnaby & Charlie Nelson (Midsomer Murders)
    John Barnaby & Jamie Winter (Midsomer Murders)
    John Barnaby/Sarah Barnaby (Midsomer Murders)
    Midsomer Inhabitants & Causton CID (Midsomer Murders)
    Sarah Barnaby & Jamie Winter (Midsomer Murders)

    Please nominate under a specific media type.
    Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 05:31 pm
    Title: Bertie's New Socks
    Fandom: Jeeves & Wooster
    Rating: G
    Length: 750 words
    Summary: Bertie is delighted with his new socks, others are not.

    Tuesday, February 24th, 2026 05:24 pm
    Don't speak to loudly, but it's not raining today. We actually got out to the forest for a walk this morning and in the afternoon we had sunshine, and the daffodils are blooming... And after one decent day, rain is forecast for the rest of the week. :-(

    But we had a good walk in the forest this morning. We did the circular walk starting from the car park in Ganllwyd in a clockwise direction for a change. This means setting off up the very steep hill past the village hall and then on into the forest. As we walked we talked about all the other walks that we haven't done all winter because the ground will be too wet. Slogging through quagmires is no fun and can get slippery and dangerous. Perhaps sometime in the future the endless rain will stop and we'll be able to do those walks again?

    Anyway, here are walk pictures. Despite the forecast being saying it would be a dry day, it did start off misty with occasional faint drizzle. Looking out to the right as we plodded up the steep hill.

    Stone ruin

    A welcome touch of colour. There are different varieties of gorse so you can find it blooming somewhere all year round.

    Gorse in February

    More walk photos here... )




    In other news...

    We have a blackbird in the garden again. We always had a blackbird and I loved hearing their song as afternoon heads into evening and in the early morning. For some reason there was no blackbird last year. I had read that there was a virus affecting blackbirds, so perhaps that was it? But I'd seen three or four blackbirds around recently and now one has started singing.