yes good event
Jun. 14th, 2026 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThe DRAINAGE (ie Thursday rain that would have rendered the previous site wretched all weekend was mildly inconvenient on Thursday and then became Fine Actually). The friend we brought along had a really good time with sledgehammers. Social overtures. Once we'd made it through Thursday, things ran... smoothly? Gigglefests with multiple groups of people. Yes Good.
Culinary
Jun. 14th, 2026 07:25 pmoursinLast week's bread held out very well:
There was even enough to include in a frittata, along with red bell pepper and pepperoni, for Friday night supper.
Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, with Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour
Today's lunch; a stifado-type casserole of diced beef, served with slowcooked Bellaverde broccoli, baked San Marzano tomatoes and sticky rice.
The universal solder that connects all of us and dissolves all of us
Jun. 14th, 2026 12:14 pmdolorosa_12I've returned from a week away in Amsterdam, which I visited with my mum. The two of us were last there together in the winter of 2005 (although I've been back since, mainly to change trains en route to Matthias's family in Germany), and it was great to revisit the same places in the sunshine — and discover the city, much changed.
I kept a haphazard paper journal throughout the week, and will transcribe it behind the cut.
( Canals like the veins of a city )
I've put up two photosets over at![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
ronnidolorosa: a general Amsterdam batch, and a collection of cats.
The less said about the chaotic journey home the better (suffice it to say that I made it onto my Eurostar train in Brussels with twenty minutes to spare), but I returned to a fully stocked fridge (so many strawberries and tomatoes!), a bottle of pink sparkling wine, and an incredibly lush garden.
I'm only peripherally engaged with the men's World Cup, but I accidentally stumbled into a very Balkans corner of Instagram, and discovered the absolute banger that is the Bosnian team anthem (a thirteen-year-old song about the bittersweet experience of being an immigrant, reworked by the surprised and ecstatic fans into an anthem for their team). It's so catchy, and the video is gold!
Now to catch up with ten days' worth of Dreamwidth!
I kept a haphazard paper journal throughout the week, and will transcribe it behind the cut.
( Canals like the veins of a city )
I've put up two photosets over at
ronnidolorosa: a general Amsterdam batch, and a collection of cats.The less said about the chaotic journey home the better (suffice it to say that I made it onto my Eurostar train in Brussels with twenty minutes to spare), but I returned to a fully stocked fridge (so many strawberries and tomatoes!), a bottle of pink sparkling wine, and an incredibly lush garden.
I'm only peripherally engaged with the men's World Cup, but I accidentally stumbled into a very Balkans corner of Instagram, and discovered the absolute banger that is the Bosnian team anthem (a thirteen-year-old song about the bittersweet experience of being an immigrant, reworked by the surprised and ecstatic fans into an anthem for their team). It's so catchy, and the video is gold!
Now to catch up with ten days' worth of Dreamwidth!
Big Catch-Up on Book Reactions
Jun. 13th, 2026 12:01 pmlabingiThis is partly review, mostly idiosyncratic personal response. Disclaimers: I am a picky reader. My discontents often reflect more on me than the book. Summaries may contain very light spoilers.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Lecke
Book’s quality: Good
My enjoyment: So-so
( Read more... )
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Book’s quality: Quite good
My enjoyment: Good
( Read more... )
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Book’s quality: Quite good
My enjoyment: frustrated! Such a near miss.
( Read more... )
Ancillary Justice by Ann Lecke
Book’s quality: Good
My enjoyment: So-so
( Read more... )
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Book’s quality: Quite good
My enjoyment: Good
( Read more... )
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Book’s quality: Quite good
My enjoyment: frustrated! Such a near miss.
( Read more... )
A feline birthday | First market visit of the year
Jun. 13th, 2026 03:05 pmumadoshiBefore even more time passes, I want to tell you all that last weekend it was our Jinksy!bear (and Claudia!kitten)'s thirteenth birthday. I'm managing not to let my brain actually crunch the numbers to figure out exactly when in the coming year he'll (please, God) cross the line of "has now lived half of his life without her".
He's unmistakably showing his age, although he doesn't yet seem old. I can never shake the fact that when I was a kid, thirteen would have seemed OLD for a cat; it always seemed to be such a marvel when a cat lived well into their teens. (One of my childhood cats, Jenny, lived until afterscruloose and I moved home from Toronto! She made it to nineteen, which is still a fairly impressive age now.)
I will forever wish we'd had the chance to see what kind of little old lady cat Claud would have been, and forever be grateful for how long we've had Jinksy. He continues to be just ridiculously sweet. We are so lucky to have him and the blues.
Today wasn'tscruloose's first market visit of the year, but it was mine. They went to pick up a meat order at one of the year-around main ones last week, and that errand meant that we didn't go to the little in-walking-distance market when it had its first day of the season last Saturday. But today we made it out, and since there wasn't much of a crowd--presumably due to the steady, if not heavy, rain passing through this morning--there were still plenty of strawberries available when we got there. (I wasn't surprised that things were quiet with the weather, and obviously financial pressures are hitting so many people brutally hard, but it was still quieter than I expected, esp. given that it was the first of the strawberries.)
First market haul of the year: strawberries (two quarts), salad greens, a sweet potato, eggs, a small dense sourdough loaf, kimchi, and kimbap (the sort that look exactly like onigiri--triangular and fully wrapped in nori, rather than rolled).
He's unmistakably showing his age, although he doesn't yet seem old. I can never shake the fact that when I was a kid, thirteen would have seemed OLD for a cat; it always seemed to be such a marvel when a cat lived well into their teens. (One of my childhood cats, Jenny, lived until after
scruloose and I moved home from Toronto! She made it to nineteen, which is still a fairly impressive age now.)I will forever wish we'd had the chance to see what kind of little old lady cat Claud would have been, and forever be grateful for how long we've had Jinksy. He continues to be just ridiculously sweet. We are so lucky to have him and the blues.
Today wasn't
scruloose's first market visit of the year, but it was mine. They went to pick up a meat order at one of the year-around main ones last week, and that errand meant that we didn't go to the little in-walking-distance market when it had its first day of the season last Saturday. But today we made it out, and since there wasn't much of a crowd--presumably due to the steady, if not heavy, rain passing through this morning--there were still plenty of strawberries available when we got there. (I wasn't surprised that things were quiet with the weather, and obviously financial pressures are hitting so many people brutally hard, but it was still quieter than I expected, esp. given that it was the first of the strawberries.)First market haul of the year: strawberries (two quarts), salad greens, a sweet potato, eggs, a small dense sourdough loaf, kimchi, and kimbap (the sort that look exactly like onigiri--triangular and fully wrapped in nori, rather than rolled).
Have they even met another human being?
Jun. 13th, 2026 04:21 pmoursinI suppose it is probably par for the course that the kind of bloke figuring in this article, Matchmakers Are Being Paid $25K to Find Trad Wives for Rich Men has apparently never met a specimen of the female of the species? or possibly another person.
Because those lists sound like somebody who has made up a list of requirements which don't have anything to do with personal preferences - okay, these are probably guys who live on Soylent and rawdog plane flights and so on and have not ever given any thought to the matter of developing individual tastes in things?
Anderson and other professional matchmakers tell WIRED that the men they work with are increasingly asking to be set up with traditional religious conservative women—regardless of whether they themselves self-identify as traditional, religious, or conservative.
I wonder what they mean when they say 'religious' or 'Christian', because, honestly, that covers a lot of territory, hmmmmm? ('Religious' could include a range of non-Christian options, 'Christian' =/= 'conservative'.)
Plus, the men do not sound to be prizes, even with the moolah (assuming it is actual moolah and not some crypto-based dream or AI bubble):
[T]here seems to be a disconnect between some of these men and the women themselves, who are often either already partnered or uninterested in the driven, sometimes socially awkward men who want to date them. For instance, when Anderson did finally manage to find a woman who fit her Austin-based client’s criteria, he alienated her almost instantly with his self-deprecating humor and boorish table manners[.]
Supposing that the women in question have bought into the 'tradwife' thing in the first place, I suspect that they have an image of rather more graciousness and traditional masculine courtesy than appears here in the prospective provider/protector.
The concluding anecdote:
One of her clients, a Dallas businessman in his early forties, went on several fruitless dates with a string of women, all of whom were, per his request, young, conservative, and Christian. But they never quite clicked, until she matched him with someone who was none of the above. They hit it off, and they’re currently still dating.
....
["]Someone may come to you wanting one thing and then realize the things they thought mattered weren't the most important things to be seeking after all.”
suggests that what, in fact, these guys need is just to Get Out More.
(no subject)
Jun. 12th, 2026 06:19 pmskygiantsA few weeks ago I was grimly gearing up to do the Hugos homework when suddenly I realized that Hugo voting privileges do not actually pass over year to year, only nominating privileges. I'm free! Flinging the nominations list joyously to the wind in favor of catching up on overdue library books and the massive stacks of books in my own home! However before this happy revelation I did read The Raven Scholar which had vaguely been on my list anyway, largely on a series of planes.
I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.
Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --
-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --
Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!
AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.
After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. ( some broad strokes plot spoilers from here )
So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!
I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.
Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --
-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --
Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!
AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.
After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. ( some broad strokes plot spoilers from here )
So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!
Things
Jun. 13th, 2026 07:52 pmvassBooks
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.
Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.
Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.
That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.
Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.
Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)
Weather
Wet and cold.
Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.
Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.
Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.
That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.
Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.
Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)
Weather
Wet and cold.
Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.
International Moves & Taggle! (Battleship replacement)
Jun. 12th, 2026 10:07 pmextrapenguinAll right, I am back in Finland, and so is my stuff! For the forseeable future, my lifestyle will consist of doing laundry (bc bedbugs yay).
My battleship replacement,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
taggle, is currently in sign-ups! We've already got a hair over 50 people, which means we're going to be able to make teams and run it. Slightly behind schedule on a number of things (my new hobby is moving internationally while in the setup phase of my events), but we're doing it! If interested, go and join the discord (link in the rule post at taggle) or just drop some prompts. Sign-ups will run for at least another 24h, unless we have a huge surge for some reason. (Hard cap 140 people; currently still under 60.)
Also I need to write a bit onvidukon_cardiff, which I experienced online, mostly either on airport wifi or on a train. (Again, my new hobby is moving internationally.) I premiered three vids, one in the Then vs Now vidshow.
My battleship replacement,
taggle, is currently in sign-ups! We've already got a hair over 50 people, which means we're going to be able to make teams and run it. Slightly behind schedule on a number of things (my new hobby is moving internationally while in the setup phase of my events), but we're doing it! If interested, go and join the discord (link in the rule post at taggle) or just drop some prompts. Sign-ups will run for at least another 24h, unless we have a huge surge for some reason. (Hard cap 140 people; currently still under 60.)Also I need to write a bit on
vidukon_cardiff, which I experienced online, mostly either on airport wifi or on a train. (Again, my new hobby is moving internationally.) I premiered three vids, one in the Then vs Now vidshow.Assortment
Jun. 12th, 2026 04:31 pmoursinSurprise, surprise: anti-air-pollution intervention has measurable health benefits: Emergency hospital admissions fell after introduction of London’s T-charge and Ulez, study suggests.
***
A celebration of the end of England’s badger cull, despite the loss of nearly 250,000 animals, shot or trapped unnecessarily; Cattle in England to get tuberculosis vaccine from 2030 as badger cull to end
***
Miller helps save watermill for the second time.
***
Memories of Spare Rib (I do wonder if the lack of online availability as at time of writing was due to the BL cyberattack and it may be restored?)
***
‘The first humble beginnings of an agitation’: the women’s suffrage petition of 7 June 1866
***
An Unreliable Archive of Internationalism: The Women's Christian College, Madras: 'the significant, overlooked work of colonised women in shaping the terms of the institution’s commitment to internationalism'.
***
From Olympia to Hyde Park: British anti-fascism in the summer of 1934
podcast friday
Jun. 12th, 2026 06:57 amsabotabby Yep I'm back on my bullshit.
This week's episode is Tech Won't Save Us, "Do AI Chatbots Belong In Schools? ft. Tom Mullaney"
I bet you're going to be real surprised at the answer.
The cool thing about this episode is that it looks at chatbots in the history of ed tech in general. I've often said that the ultimate goal for education is that you'd have 50 students or so warehoused in a classroom, completing modules on screens, disciplined by non-unionized babysitters, while a handful of teachers get paid to write and perform lessons. But that was overly optimistic; those teachers would get paid too much and you can have LLMs write it instead.
It's not that all ed tech is bad. It's just that most of it, historically, has been 1) garbage and 2) in service of privatizing and degrading education.
It shouldn't surprise me that the following approaches to combatting LLMs in schools have failed:
1) The catastrophic, world-destroying environmental cost
2) Intellectual property
3) The cognitive damage it does to children (we have accepted causing brain damage to children in schools, thanks to covid and sports)
Possibly all that remains is the legal liability battlefield. I've had some luck, when chatbots get forced on us, in pushing back by asking if lawyers have reviewed liability if one of the company's products causes the kid to kill themselves or commit a violent crime, given that its architecture is based on software that has caused kids to die by suicide and murder others. No one has seemingly thought about this so it's always a relief hearing tech journalists like Paris Marx and teachers like Tom Mullaney pushing back on the consensus that "personalized tutors" are maybe not a great thing to be inflicting on children.
This week's episode is Tech Won't Save Us, "Do AI Chatbots Belong In Schools? ft. Tom Mullaney"
I bet you're going to be real surprised at the answer.
The cool thing about this episode is that it looks at chatbots in the history of ed tech in general. I've often said that the ultimate goal for education is that you'd have 50 students or so warehoused in a classroom, completing modules on screens, disciplined by non-unionized babysitters, while a handful of teachers get paid to write and perform lessons. But that was overly optimistic; those teachers would get paid too much and you can have LLMs write it instead.
It's not that all ed tech is bad. It's just that most of it, historically, has been 1) garbage and 2) in service of privatizing and degrading education.
It shouldn't surprise me that the following approaches to combatting LLMs in schools have failed:
1) The catastrophic, world-destroying environmental cost
2) Intellectual property
3) The cognitive damage it does to children (we have accepted causing brain damage to children in schools, thanks to covid and sports)
Possibly all that remains is the legal liability battlefield. I've had some luck, when chatbots get forced on us, in pushing back by asking if lawyers have reviewed liability if one of the company's products causes the kid to kill themselves or commit a violent crime, given that its architecture is based on software that has caused kids to die by suicide and murder others. No one has seemingly thought about this so it's always a relief hearing tech journalists like Paris Marx and teachers like Tom Mullaney pushing back on the consensus that "personalized tutors" are maybe not a great thing to be inflicting on children.
(no subject)
Jun. 12th, 2026 12:00 pmmarymacBooking birthday parties and playdates while juggling school closures and public transport shutdowns and Eldest's boyfriend is Canadian-Jamaican and I am tired.
3 webcomic things make a post
Jun. 11th, 2026 09:38 pmerinptahTrying to do “1 like = 1 rec” Pride Month webcomic recs again this year. I’ve added some new good stuff to my reading list since the last round! …But still haven’t rebuilt the network I had on pre-X Twitter, where I did the first round.
Give them a like and a repost to help out?
—
Wanting to pick good recs has prompted me to do a bunch of catch-up reading. I’m behind in a lot of webcomic archives. Ended up moving several of them to my “recs for Finished, or at least Permanently Ended, webcomics” list.
Every time I go to update that page, I think: should I reorganize this somehow? Are there things I should explain better? Is the formatting weird? Should I just import all the entries into my Tagpacker recs and use that instead?”
…And then all those options seem like a lot of work, so I just add to the existing list, in the existing format.
How’s it working for other people? Feedback welcome.
—
One of the archives I’ve been trying to catch up on is Kevin & Kell. (So far I’ve made it from “2 years behind” to “1 year behind”.)
This strip, I had to stop and just sit with it for a while.
Today we did a culture
Jun. 11th, 2026 07:43 pmoursinOff to the Royal Academy to see the Michaelina Wautier exhibition before it finishes.
A female artist who was pretty much erased; painted in genres not usually associated with lady painters; and we note the probable significance of having a male artist (brother) in the family, in fact it looks as though several paintings were collaborations between them.
Worth seeing, even if her paintings do not have the drama of her contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi.... (No decapitations.)
Observed while we were out a poster for this forthcoming exhibition: Hepworth in Colour at the Courtauld, so I think that is going on the agenda.
Also considering the Escher exhibition, adjacent in Somerset House though I'm not sure one would want to combine the two?
small steps etc
Jun. 10th, 2026 09:47 pmrinIt took an entire day but :
- I emptied the closet
- cleaned it
- installed drawers/shelves
- went through every article of clothing that i own and bagged up donations
- put everything away T-T
- I have a mountain of laundry to do because I've been putting it off for two weeks
- emptied out the dresser and moved everything from the dresser to the closet
- take the dresser outside and arrange a donation pick up for it
- drop of the clothes for donation
- re-arrange the bedroom a bit
