rustica | Network

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 :)

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.

sovay

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.

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.

Current Music: The Pack a.d., "Seasick"

simplyn2deep posting in

1word1day

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Dulcify (verb)
dulcify [duhl-suh-fahy]

verb (used with object), dulcified, dulcifying
1. to make more agreeable; mollify; appease.
2. to sweeten.

Other Word Forms
dulcification noun

See more synonyms on Thesaurus.com

Origin: 1590–1600; < Late Latin dulcificāre, with -fy for -ficāre

Example Sentences
He took mild mercurials, pills of soap, rhubarb, and tartar of vitriol, with soluble tartar and dulcified spirits of nitre in barley water.
From Project Gutenberg

They are dawdling and dulcified to a deplorable degree.
From Project Gutenberg

All the harshness of life will be dulcified; we shall lie dreaming on golden sands, dipping full goblets out of a sea that has been transmuted into lemonade.
From Project Gutenberg

But on this occasion, as she had awakened in an uncommonly pleasant humor, and was further dulcified by her pipe tobacco, she resolved to produce something fine, beautiful, and splendid, rather than hideous and horrible.
From Project Gutenberg

The savage of America, like the savage of the South Sea islands, has learned to dulcify the fecula, by pressing and separating it from its juice.
From Project Gutenberg

acari

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languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72862&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=saving-sami

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72862

"How toddlers in Finland are saving an endangered Sámi language"
by Erika Benke, BBC (5 days ago)

Special nurseries are helping the Sámi people in Finland to bring their almost-lost language back from the brink of extinction.

When I stayed in the Arctic Circle to finish writing The True History of Tea with Erling Hoh, I was amazed by the symbiotic relationship the Sámi there had with their vast herds of reindeer. And, yes, they do ride them, which someone was asking about here recently.

In 1995, only two families spoke Inari Sámi to their children, and just four speakers were under the age of 20.

…

Everything changed, Pasanen says, when local children began taking part in a novel, immersive language experiment. The programme has transformed a language that was once considered doomed after being inspired by indigenous language revitalisation projects in New Zealand, the other side of the world from Lapland.

…

Once back inside from the snowy playground, the 11 children of the Inari village nursery sit on soft pads resembling large tree slices.

Their room is adorned with traditional Sámi decorations and symbols: a Sámi flag and several drums hang on the wall next to a picture of a hand-painted, cut-out paper reindeer. The curtain has a fish pattern and the dolls are dressed in bright, handmade Sámi outfits. In the entrance hall, there's a row of traditional outdoor drinking cups made of birch, each belonging to a child, with names neatly written on the handles.

The children's faces light up as they sing Sámi nursery rhymes, clapping to the rhythm while they chant. Activities like this play a crucial role in preserving and passing down the Sámi language and cultural heritage, says Tiina Lehmuslehti, their teacher, who leads the session by gently guiding the children and encouraging them to participate.

This is an Inari Sámi Language nest – an early years education concept with the goal is to create a new generation of speakers by completely immersing young children in the indigenous language.

Language nests were first developed in New Zealand in the 1970s to help preserve Māori languages Following their success, they have since been recognised as a crucial tool for language revitalisation among indigenous communities, spreading worldwide.

Can the same not be done for Manchu? There are still 10,000,000 people who identify as Manchus, and there are nearly 200,000 Sibe individuals, of whom 30,000 speak a living Southern Tungusic Jurchenic language (Xibe) that is closely related to Manchu.

Bear in mind that, as recently as 115 years ago, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), ruled by the Manchus, was the largest Chinese dynasty in history, and one of the largest and most populous dynasties on earth at the time.

Selected readings

"Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
"Reindeer talk" (12/24/13)
"Reindeer lore " (12/8/16) — includes 95 comments with words for reindeer in different languages, plus descriptions of customs and culture concerning reindeer.

[Thanks to John Tkacik]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72862&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=saving-sami

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72862

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dailyicons

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Discussion & Miscellany

nwhyte on Whodle: a Whodunit Adventure Through Time and Space, by Tim Dedopulos, Roland Hall and Dave Knowles

Fanfiction
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Faux Pas by

badly_knitted (G | Donna Noble, Tenth Doctor, OFC)

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brithistorian

I don't expect much from Goodreads, but I was still surprised to learn that Goodreads members have named The Hunger Games as the "best book ever"!

badly_knitted posting in

get_knitted

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

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There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.

This Week's Question: What is your favourite thing to make?

If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

Current Mood: tired

smallhobbit posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: Bertie's New Socks
Fandom: Jeeves & Wooster
Rating: G
Length: 750 words
Summary: Bertie is delighted with his new socks, others are not.

( Jeeves, I called )

heleninwales

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.

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

( 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.

lydamorehouse

Ramadan has just started and my Signal group is having trouble finding enough protectors to fill evening slots. My Food Communists are talking about a $40,000 shortfall that may end their ability to feed people in hiding. March 1 is looming for people who haven't been able to pay rent and are facing evictions. Yet, local politicians are declaring victory and telling people it's time to "go shopping."

Meanwhile, ICE is still being tracked throughout Saint Paul (and presumably Minneapolis, but I don't have access to those Rapid Response groups). Reports that I've seen seem to indicate that the majority of the activity has moved out to the less well organized smaller towns and suburbs. Though the "sexy" part of the resistance--the gas in the streets, the violent confrontations--has dried up, the danger to our immigrant communities is far from over. There is zero sense that ICE is actually leaving. They have switched to quieter, more subtle tactics. They've gone further afield. But make no mistake, they are very much still here.

Last night I went to a Singing Resistance meeting for an action that took place this morning. I managed to miss this morning's action because my GPS decided that it wanted to autocorrect Street to Avenue! VERY DIFFERENT, GPS! In fact, a very important distinction!!! So, I ended up getting lost in downtown Minneapolis long enough to miss the gathering time. But, what was interesting to me is that these Singing Actions have, in the past, brought thousands of people into the streets. Famously, they sang songs encouraging ICE agents to defect outside of some of the hotels hosting them. The action today was for rent relief and trying to get the city officials to consider a temporary rent moritorium, something they were very willing to do during COVID, but which they seem less willing to do for Black and brown folks (shocking, I know!) At any rate, I went to the pre-planning/song rehersal last night with

rachelmanija who is visiting right now and... it wasn't an empty church, but it also wasn't standing room only. The organizers kept saying, "I think more people will join us tomorrow." Well, I wasn't able to. I sure hope other people did. Otherwise, it's going to be pretty sparse. They will not fill City Hall, like they hoped.

But, this seems to be part of a trend. I'd noticed the day after it was announced that ICE was pulling out, my Food Communists was almost ghostly. Plenty of bags of groceries still needed filling, but the number of volunteers that showed up to do the work was less than half of the normal amount. More people have showed up since, but we are nowhere near our previous number. It seems to be the regulars and the die-hards again--although thankfully the Veterans for Peace are still guarding the doors for us.

I ran into some neighbors yesterday when I was walking home from the Communists and they were returning from a daily protest. They also noticed a significant lack of bodies. People were still there, but the crowd was thinner. It's worrying because we are all still very much holding our breaths.

I guess people are buying into the idea that we won and that it's all over. I mean, I would very much like that to be true? I'm just not sure it is and it's disheartening to see that the energy could not, in fact, be maintained. Maybe people are just taking a breather. I hope that's the case.

sockshuppet posting in

fandomcalendar

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larryhammer

(I’ve no idea how much sense this will make if you don’t know the book in question.)

I’ve read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home many times—annually from when I was 16 till my mid-20s, and at least six times (probably more) since then. This time I made an experiment and read it out of order: I skipped Stone Telling’s first two sections until I reached her final section, then with greater social context read it all together, in a single day, before continuing on to the end.

I expected this to not work, but I was curious just how badly it wouldn’t work. The answer is, nowhere nearly as badly as reading chapters of The Dispossessed in internal chronological order, which utterly fails—that story is built around experiencing events in the order given. There is some loss of experience, as between her first and last sections there are pieces expecting you to have read her story beforehand (including a poem by Stone Telling), but it’s not as catastrophic as with The Dispossessed.

And now I know.

One thing that struck me this time: Pandora’s informant about Kesh medical practice is Alder of Chumo and Sinshan—the name Stone Telling’s husband had when she was still Woman Coming Home, who presumably found his third name, Stone Listening, at the same time she did. We don’t know exactly how long Pandora spent on her field studies, but that she has just the one informant suggests it wasn’t years upon years. And yet, the Archivist of the Madrone, when Pandora had only experienced enough of the Kesh to find their concepts of time confusing, knew of Stone Telling’s written narrative. Not a gotcha, but a hmmm.

I want to know more about Giver Ire’s daughter and Ire herself. They reappear more than anyone. Along with Thorn of Sinshan, they may be enough to constitute a reasonable Yuletide request.

(I still wonder how homosexual marriages, which are mentioned in passing only twice, work in practice in a tightly matrilocal culture.) (Pro tip to readers: the soundtrack of music and songs of the Kesh, which was included with the original publication on a cassette tape, is still available on Bandcamp.)

---L.

Subject quote from Freedom! ’90, George Michael.

osprey_archer

A busy weekend! I went to two shows, The Revolutionists and Galinthias.

The Revolutionists is a four-woman show set during the French Revolution. Playwright Olympe de Gouges is trying to write a play when her friend the Haitian rebel Marianne Angelie shows up asking for Olympe to write some pamphlets. Soon after, Charlotte Corday bursts in, asking Olympe to write some bitchin’ last words for her to speak on the scaffold after assassinating Marat. Last but not least, Marie Antoinette steals the show, a hilariously vapid and vain and yet pathos-filled figure.

Overall a lot of fun, although I must say I rolled my eyes whenever we veered into “this is a story about the Power of Stories (™)” territory. As a writer this theme surely ought to speak to me, and yet so often I feel that it’s asserted rather than demonstrated: the characters rattle on about the power of stories but the story if anything shows the opposite, given that three of the four heroines end up guillotined.

You might think the level of guillotining might make the play quite dark, but overall it’s funny and surprisingly upbeat. (For instance, when Olympe de Gouges dies, we get her last words and then a few different interpretations of her last words, starting with the urgent cry of “Please do my plays!”, which raised a laugh, because it arises so well out of her characterization up to that point.) Maybe a bit too upbeat? I’m not sure that “People are still telling your story centuries after you were guillotined, and isn’t that what matters?” actually is what matters. I for one would prefer not to be guillotined.

Galinthias is a recent play about a minor figure from Greek mythology: the midwife who delivered Hercules after Hera cursed his mother Alcmene with perpetual labor. In punishment for breaking the curse, Galinthias was in turn cursed to become a weasel.

However, in this retelling, Hecate has taken Galinthias under her protection, and one day a month, Galinthias gets to be human again. She uses her time as a human to act as a midwife and abortion provider, until young Xandra shows up all “I was raped by Poseidon! Can you get rid of the pregnancy?”

Galinthias is understandably reluctant to put herself in a position to be cursed by the gods yet again, but of course she ends up agreeing. They recruit Alcmene (not only Galinthias’s former queen, but also possibly her former girlfriend) and the three of them go on a quest that takes them across the Greek world. They visit Pythia, who sends them to Colchis where they meet terrifying but helpful Valley Girl Medea (“Daddy keeps killing people! It’s so boring!”), who sends them to the garden of the Hesperides where they have a slo-mo fight with a nymph who nearly strangles Galinthias with her own braid… Oh, and also Hecate has sent the Furies after them, because she’s so annoyed that her pet weasel ran away (still in human form) rather than come back as she is supposed to do.

Also lots of fun! Very funny, which is not necessarily what I expected when reading the synopsis which prominently content-warned the Themes of Sexual Violence. A solid adaptation. Perhaps reaching a bit too hard for contemporary relevance at times, but nonetheless deeply interested in Greek mythology and knowledgeable enough to explore it from new angles.

conuly

And I'm getting paid for every last one of them, including the 6 hours when the house slept and so did I. Normally, we're not actually supposed to sleep on an overnight shift - but almost everybody really does, so it's more like "don't get caught" - but c'mon.

For everybody at home, leaving without a replacement is not simply a fireable offense but an actual, factual crime. Also, I'm not sure how I would've gotten to the bus. I mean, it's right outside the door, and buses were running all night, but man, it was brutal out there. We needed a little shoveling, and neither I nor manager wanted to shovel, so we had to wait for the neighbors to get their sidewalks and then sorta patch us into theirs. (The transportation issue is also why I'm not blaming any coworkers who didn't come in. It was impossible. I genuinely don't think that this was a fixable issue, Staten Island got a lot of snow.)

In retrospect, what probably ought to have been done would have had to have been done in advance:

1. Manager should've taken as much discretionary money as possible, agreed to let staff order Chinese or whatever for two, three meals - something that reheats nicely - and offered to pay all our carfare home in advance, and then used that to straight up bribe at least one extra staff member to stay over the storm. With three of us, we could've had one on each floor and also could've more easily arranged sleeping shifts so somebody was awake at all times.

2. She also should've called up the families of those residents who frequently go home for an overnight and asked if they'd take their relatives from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. That's suboptimal for a lot of reasons - there's a reason they all live in a residence instead of with their families! - but it would've lightened the burden on us significantly if we'd had even just our two or three easiest residents away visiting their sisters and brothers.

But we all survived! My replacement actually showed up at midnight last night! But she declined to wake me on the grounds that I wasn't going home at midnight, and she was quite right. And then another staff member showed up this morning, and 90 or 100 minutes later my bus finally showed up. (And yes, I do insist on getting paid for that last hour and a half as well. I wasn't just sitting around, I was doing laundry, and supervising on the basement so that everybody else could handle the upper floors, and walking the guys out to their van so nobody slipped on ice.)

I'm home now, I showered, and I have the rest of the week off, off, off. Yay me!

If this happens again, I'm bringing a change of clothing.