Reading

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the salt mines

toys for mad scientists

Huh

I have picked up enough points from the workplace awards program that I could get a free 3-D printer.

Hmmm

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It won't be a surprise to you that I love beautiful writing. Writing that breathes, writing that twists, that flows like a river over smooth, unblemished stone; writing that evokes aroma, sound, imagery, that flexes the reader's imagination in new, unexpected ways; writing that makes us believe, for a moment, that we are really there for the events unfolding in front of us, no matter how extraordinary or strange they might be. Writing, in other words, that takes you on a journey.

In 2025, beautiful writing* is not in vogue. In my experience, the prose of most bestsellers today runs the gamut from "irritating" to "occasionally evocative." I've certainly read a number of contemporary works in the past two years where the story was well-executed and easy to read. In these books, the writing is in service of the story, not elevating it.

I sometimes watch videos about writing. While I would like to say my YouTube history is perfect and unbiased, I'm sorry to say it isn't. I'm vulnerable to clickbait like "why no one writes beautifully anymore" or "people don't know how to write." And recently, I happened to click on one of these videos.

What followed was roughly an hour of conservative dogwhistles, interspersed with the seeds of good ideas. I felt very mixed about the whole thing, as the literary crisis in the United States is real, and again—I rarely pick up books these days that stick with me because of their writing. To make matters worse, I visited the creator's Substack, only to find even more conservative ideas like objective morality (based on Western ideals, of course) and facts over feelings, while the creator cherry-picks sources of questionable credibility to support her claims. Eurgh.

So let's have a bit of fun. Let's discuss that video against two other videos I've watched about writing and see how it holds up. At the end of my analysis, I'll even try to offer some ideas (purely subjective) of my own on the question of beautiful writing. We'll begin with the video I took issue with.

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( Read more... )

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* NB: within traditionally published work in English in the United States

The Straw Hats are not "conservatives".

Cut for length...

( ... see the actual post! )

Current Mood: tired

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Drawtober 2025 Prompt 29. Bell

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Current Mood: worried

Diverging Media Worlds

15 or so years ago I began hearing more about how people have increasing difficulty talking to their parents or other relatives who listened to faux news and thus inhabited increasingly divergent media universes than they did. I never had that problem – my parents (and now just my mom) are basic centrist liberals who have never watched (and would never) watch faux and enjoy the Daily Show. We didn’t always agree on politics (me being a democratic socialist), but we very much lived in the same media universe, and our facts were mostly the same.

Now I have a similar problem, because my mom watches NBC, ABC news, or CNN and reads the Washington Post, and I don’t and instead get my news from Bluesky, What the Fuck Just Happened Today? (which is awesome), Daily Kos, and similar lefty sources. Recently I discovered my mom hadn’t heart of the costumed protests (starting with frog guy) in Portland, hadn’t heard of any but the largest No Kings protests, and most concerningly had no idea who JB Pritzker (the governor of Illinois, and by far the most credible 2028 presidential candidate on our side) was or how he'd been standing up to 47, and she also hadn’t heard or seen anything about 47’s increasingly obvious mental decline (like the recent video of the Japanese PM leading him around, which reminded me astonishingly much of how my mom used to lead my dad around while he was still mobile (he died of Alzheimer’s). OTOH, she has heard of Gavin Newsom and has also heard news reports that he is (gag) the only possible Democratic candidate in 2028). That’s what you get when billionaires own all large-scale media in the US, because billionaires almost universally support authoritarians.

Current Mood: cheerful

Finished the story

Got up at 10:00 and had breakfast and coffee. The calendars I ordered from Calendars.com arrived, I was not expecting them until Friday.

Then I showered and dressed. I called

mashfanficchick to find out if ze was doing anything today, ze was not.

I called the management company about the front door again. We'll see if anything happens this time. If not, next time I threaten to call the city 311 and complain to them.

I emptied the trash in the bathroom, separating out the recycling and putting that in the recycling bag. Then I cleaned the toilet, which needed it. Then I took out the trash and cardboard recycling. The place where we're supposed to put the garbage, behind the building, was a mess. I was going to take out the plastic recycling but when i saw the mess I decided to wait.

Then I walked around the block, as usual when I take out garbage or recycling.

Came back in and started working on the story I've been writing. I did that for the rest of the day, off and on with emailing the FWiB (his power came back on at 1:19 am) and puttering on line.

I finally reached the end of the story minutes before it was time to Team the FWiB. We talked til my meeting at 8:00.

I had trouble getting into Zoom, and that was a portent. I had extreme technical issues with the meeting. The computer kept kicking me out of the meeting. Fortunately Zoom didn't end the meeting, and S was able to take over each time, so I guess it was fairly successful. But it was a pain. I closed all the other windows that were open, even had to restart the whole computer once, nothing helped.

After it finally ended, I had dinner and went and lay down. I called

mashfanficchick to discuss plans, ze is working tomorrow, I'm thinking of going to the Queens Botanical Gardens to see fall flowers.

Then I played solitaire on my phone til pet feeding time. Used up the last of Christie's normal turtle food, tomorrow we find out what she thinks of the new stuff. Fingers crossed.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. Clean toilet.

3. Finished the story.

4. My meetings and the people there.

5. Especially S.

6 Plans for tomorrow, and Halloween.

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Milestone

Video appointment with chemotherapist today. I'm done with immunotherapy! The scan says I've been stable.

I still have:

* bone strengthening (not marrow encouraging) med every 12 weeks, infused
* Scans every 3 months

So that means a trip or two to the cancer center every 3 months, although if they keep it at 3 months for the one and 12 weeks for the other, they may fall out of sync.

I should probably celebrate this?

I don't pray...

... but I'm sending all the good-luck thoughts I can to those in Jamaica.

Hurricane Melissa is now in the top five strongest storms ever in the Atlantic, with central pressure at 896mb and sustained winds over 180, with a record measured gust of 241mph.

This is basically an F-4 tornado many miles wide surrounded by F-3 tornado winds for a long, long ways. It will be dumping more than five FEET of rain on some parts of Jamaica over the next couple days.

Current Mood: calm

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Drawtober 2025 Prompt 28. Bridge of Stars

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Current Mood: curious

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internet

Is the Internet down?

Not completely, if you're reading this. But Mastodon (where I've been doing most of my posting) is down. So are some other sites. I wonder why?

Current Mood: cheerful

Eye surgeon and shopping

Got up at 10:00 today and had breakfast and coffee. Then puttered online and wrote a little bit more in the story I'm working on.

Finally at 1:00 I showered and dressed, and then killed time online until 2:00 when I left for my 3:00 appointment with the eye surgeon. I got there early of course, but not all that early. They checked me out pretty thoroughly, and the result is that I've healed fine, my vision is excellent now, and, thankfully, my eye pressure is too. I always worry about that because Dad had glaucoma.

They had a box of chocolate bars for raising money for Archangel Michael Church Greek School, and I of course bought a bar with almonds, because how could I resist chocolate for the Archangel Michael? It's really good chocolate too.

Anyway, I have another appointment in six months. I think they want to keep tabs on me until my right eye deteriorates enough to need cataract surgery too. I hope that's a long time coming.

So I caught the 12 bus back to Flushing and went to Duane Reade to pick up prescriptions, and to get some lubricating eye drops, since the doctor said I should use some. Then I went to meet up with

mashfanficchick and go shopping.

We met in Starbucks. I got my usual pumpkin spice latte while I was waiting for zer. Then we took the bus to BJ's and went shopping for stuff there. I got some chips to bring on Halloween, and some mushroom cream pasta bowls for me.

The Kid called while I was there and we talked for awhile. Nothing new.

Then we took a Lyft to the mall where Costco is, and also went to Aldi, where I got some shower gel, and Petco where I got turtle food, but not the brand I always get. They were out of the Tetra Repto Min, and I had to get something else. I hope Christie likes it.

At Costco I didn't get anything. It was almost 9:00 by the time we finished.

mashfanficchick saw me to the bus stop for the 88 bus, which I took to Main Street and the 44 home from there.

Didn't Team the FWiB because he has a power failure at his place. He called me while I was on the 12 bus to tell me, I got that call and was able to talk to him, but then he called again while I was on the bus to BJs, which I didn't hear. He left a message that they said the power wouldn't be back til 1:00 am, so we wouldn't be able to Team at all today. Bummer.

Oh, on the more cheerful side, I got an answer to the email I sent to Frank C. That's nice. I have to answer him tomorrow.

Anyway, I got home a bit after 9:30, and had dinner. By the time I finished it was pet feeding time. I fed the pets, Christie still had two days worth of her regular food left, so I won't know what she thinks of the new stuff til Wednesday.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. The Kid.

3. Good report from the eye surgeon.

4. Got shower stuff.

5. Got turtle food.

6.

mashfanficchick

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: cape town
Current Music: Battle Beast - Black Ninja

Entry tags:

music,
weekly

Battle Beast - Black Ninja

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Nothing

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Book group

Tonight is another meeting of my book group, which at this point has been running for twelve years at this point.

We're a bit inconsistent, since in twelve years we've read 59 books, but we have read at least one book every single year. Some of them were excellent, like Bunnicula, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, The Devil in the White City, or The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and some of them were garbage, like Anno Dracula, The Secret, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, or Supernova Era. We've read fiction and nonfiction, history and biography and science and political analysis, fantasy and sci-fi and historical fiction and drama, classics and books written within the last year, and all kinds of things in between. People have joined and left but the core group remains.

redpikachu started it as a way to read more books and it's worked, at least for the books we've read.

We spend a lot of time also just talking about our lives, but I'm heartened after reading that Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing. Other than the wine on Shabbat, most of the drinking I do at all is when I pour a glass of wine, sit down at my computer, and fire up a Discord video chat. And I just remembered that we used to do Google Hangouts back when that was a realistic video call solution.

Here's to many more years.

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Drawtober 2025 Prompt 27. Fire

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Current Mood: pleased
Current Location: The Rookery

Entry tags:

economics,
hpc

Supercomputing and Affirmation

Every so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).

Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.

This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment is $44 (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.

Current Mood: cheerful

Starsky and Hutch chat

Last night I read the new Penric and Desdemona novella on my Nook, the whole thing. It's 114 pages. I was up til 3:45 and then I turned out the light and slept til 12:30. It was very good, as good as the rest of the series, but rather melancholy.

I got up, had breakfast and coffee and went to the Starsky and Hutch Creative Work Session, and chatted. Had a very good time, and got some writing done, a new story for Halloween, not the Advent Calendar.

We chatted til about 6:00, and then ended. I heated up the leftover garlic naan from the Indian food we had on Thursday. Then at 7:00 I Teamed the FWiB.

We talked til 8:30, when we ended, and I called Middle Brother. He's fine, nothing new, Of course he's looking forward to Halloween.

Then I had dinner, and called the Kid, who of course didn't pick up.

I puttered on my phone in bed, mostly playing solitaire, and then got up to feed the pets. I did that and then started here. And that's all.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. The new Bujold novella.

3. The Starsky and Hutch fandom.

4. Did some writing.

5. Middle Brother is well,

6. Halloween is coming soon!

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fic: biggles

FIC "Biggles and the Bloom of Ecstasy" Biggles/EvS (Biggles Series) E

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Project progress

In the interest of accountability: yes, I have worked on Eldest's quilt. Previously I was at the point of needing some more blanks drawn (done), and then 20 blocks needed sewing and then assembling. The goal was to do 2 per weekend and then assemble over a few weeks.

However! After two weekends, I have 5 blocks sewn, and one nearly done, being thus a block (and a half) ahead). I have also assembled the first four into a two by two block thus having got ahead on the assembling. Thus, I am feeling tentatively confident about minimum goal: finish top by the end of the year.

I've also attempted to progress Youngest's. Sadly, while I know I had an image that they wanted to have converted, I have not found where I filed it. That is not a this week problem though. I have only progressed Middlest's by dint of sending them another reminder that they need to actually decide on a pattern.

Other than that my craft has near stalled. I have started back on the playing the Hanon's, but only a few pieces every few days, and only the first set of 20, on loop. It does help my hands when I do, but also, I'm struggling to find the motivation.

Reading wise, I have simplified my life down to seven currently reading, mostly because Storygraph added the 'pause' option, which adequately reflects how I feel about a lot of books. One of my thoughts about the last week of the year is to set myself a goal of finishing or abandoning one book per day. Which won't be that hard, as there are several I had put somewhere sensible I found today which are all past half read. In terms of reading goals, the number of works is past the goal, because I started tracking online short fiction (if it were already there) which I kind of wish I could separate out. I'm not anywhere near the number of pages goal, but I also haven't been tracking where I'm up to, so it might be that when I sit down and capture where I'm up to I'll be much further. Whether I get there or not isn't an issue -- I've been doing a lot of academic reading and really haven't had the time/energy for fun reading.

I had another thought when I started the last paragraph, that was more than just the 'where are the two reading goals' but eh, I've forgotten (possibly: tidy the library. or do the next pass through of the library check, given that Librarything has a better way of doing it than I've previously found).

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: Cloud Cuckooland
Current Music: Chirpy Chirpy Cheep

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Drawtober 2025 Prompt 26. Noisy

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Current Mood: cheerful

Meeting and dinner out

Got a good nights sleep last night so I feel much better. I did get to sleep somewhat later than I would have hoped because the new Lois McMaster Bujold Penric and Desdemona novella dropped on Barnes and Noble so I was able to download it to my Nook. So I did that before I slept. But I did resist the temptation to start reading it.

Anyway, I got up at 9"00 feeling much better and had breakfast and coffee. I showered and dressed and took the 16 bus to Bowne Park, because the church we meet in now is being used for early voting, so we had to meet in the park where we used to before we got the church. I got there quite early, but G was already there so we sat on a bench together.

The meeting was unusually heavy and deep. But it was good. Afterward I got a ride fro S to the diner.

I took the bus home, and dropped into the Starsky and Hutch chat. I didn't stay long though because I texted

mashfanficchick to ask about having dinner with Elyssa, and ze said if I wanted to join them I should come right over. So I said goodbye in the chat and took the 44 bus to Flushing where I discovered what I should have remembered, that the 7 train isn't running between Main St and Mets/Willets Point. Instead there's a shuttle bus. So that took extra time.

But I got to

mashfanficchick's before Elyssa got there, and hung out until she did. Then we went and picked up Liz G who was coming too.

By weird coincidence they settled on having dinner at the same diner we go to after my meetings. I had a regular dinner though, the brandy rigatoni. We had a good time talking and then Elissa drove us all home.

I Teamed the FWiB for a short time, a little over half an hour, and then I got a text from

mashfanficchick to give zer a call, so I did and we made some plans for Monday.

Then I started here, and soon I'm going to bed to read my Penric and Desdemona.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. My meetings and the people there.

3. Nice weather so it was comfortable in the park.

4. Got a little time in the Starsky and Hutch chat.

5. Dinner out with friends.

6. New Penric and Desdemona novella.