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Friday Flora: Tuber Time

I'm a big fan of the "string of" plants: string of pearls, string of turtles, string of frogs, you name it. I have a string of hearts and a string of arrows among the various plants on one of my narrower windowsills.

They generally seemed pretty happy there. However, a series of calamities have befallen my houseplants over the last 11 months. Think scale, powdery mildew, mealybugs, and wildly fluctuating temperatures and humidity levels...sometimes in the course of a single day. So I was not pleased to find that some as-yet-unknown-to-me pest had started nesting in my string of hearts.

For some reason, I kept not doing anything about it. And for some reason, the string of hearts carried on living and growing quite happily in the face of my neglect. I started to wonder...

Turns out, those little globes aren't insect nests at all, but tubers. How cool--and cool looking--are these things? Better yet, I can clip some of them off, pop them in medium, and have a bunch of new baby string of hearts after they take root.

It's a constant battle between houseplants and books in this residence, and for the time being at least, it looks like the houseplants are in the ascendant.

これで以上です。

Picking apart a phobia

Some interesting (to me) progress on understanding my longstanding spiderweb phobia; not surprisingly, it isn't exactly and only spiderwebs. Back when I went to Norwood's birthday party, the subject came up of random things that gave us heebie-jeebies, and I mentioned spiderwebs as usual. His other ex asked me "Is it a texture thing?" which nobody had ever asked me before. I said maybe, or maybe in part, because the texture of having a web on you is pretty gross. Even though I also remembered trying one time to explain that a strand of web, once clinging to me, isn't exactly doing the web thing anymore... so I said that beyond texture there's also something about an invisible unknown structure in the air, holding stuff up, but whose extent is not known. I'm not particularly scared of cobwebs that are covered in dust or in dew/fog/moisture, or not in the same way -- though I'm still not about to go putting my hand in them, maybe that's the texture part.

So then more thinking. Looking at a dust-covered cobweb in the Esh bathroom, thinking "I could touch that and it would be gross, but I'm not getting much of a fear response." (Maybe I should touch it tomorrow).

Then in someone's backyard, there was some netting over an enclosure, and it looked invisible in some places because of the shade and the angle of the light; I could see leaves caught in the netting, and looking at that made me uncomfortable in a recognizable and related way. As if the leaves, hovering there obviously in a plane and supported by something, were stuck in a giant spiderweb. Weirdly, having become aware of it, I even got a ghost of the same feeling with bubbles in a coffee pod later (there were little bubbles on the surface of a big bubble -- annoyed, I made myself poke it with my finger to pop the bubbles).

Unless I'm surprised by something, or there's a web I have to deal with, this is all more a matter of discomfort than real fear.

I'm not the only one. There's some recent-ish discussion on Reddit lately, sometimes calling it "araneophobia", sometimes talking about things stuck on webs and "floating in the air" as a trigger (I identify with that). There's an article on Medium too, discussing it as a sensory "fear of touching" thing. For me, I think it's useful to realize that the sensory thing exists but is largely separate from the fear thing. And, I guess, nice to realize that I can still learn more about myself at this point in life.

Current Mood: alarmed
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House

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learning by proxy

Remember my fellow trans facilitator A-the-lady? Well, she's out of commission for a few weeks due to a horrendous bike accident on the way to Pride involving the accursed streetcar tracks and, of course, vehicular traffic. Unlike me in my two accidents in the last year, she didn't ask for trouble; she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mayunn, cyclists shouldn't need to be braver than the troops just to get around.

Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: Ulali, "All My Relations"

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post-Pride peripatesis

Four days no update? Well, I didn't have much to say until yesterday evening. LLMs have finally affected my work, and thus far it hasn't been positively. The sooner this bubble deflates the better. I feel completely justified in getting yesterday off, which I largely spent doing house & garden chores.

But! Yesterday I attempted to go to the women's munch, but the Wildrose was closed for the week after Pride. Do they do that every year? Maybe, and I just hadn't noticed. I can hardly blame them given how utterly bananas Pride weekend is for them.

And who should I run into just across the street from the 'Rose but P, whom I met at the Dykes on Bykes fundraiser a few months ago? The 'Rose was closed, but Vermillion wasn't, so I got some culchah with my beer and talked with an honest-to-goodness dyke on a bike. P is from Florida, which I can't believe I'd forgotten. P knows fellow Florida escapee Funny Lady, because Funny Lady knows everybody. The two of them have something in common: charm.

I'm not feeling too patriotic today. Plan for today: hit Uwajimaya with Tacoma Girl for Asian eats, and then probably read books by dadburn ferriners*. Screw all my dumb, butt-kiss-craving countrymen.

*Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

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political

July 4th

Jay Kuo takes a break from chronicling the regime's crimes to share some honest hope for today, and the days and months ahead:

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/celebrating-independence

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the media may not care, but ICE is still running roughshod over LA this July 4th

Okay, so, one of my best friends still has people from her neighbourhood being disappeared. It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.

I’m not going to ID her here, not with undead pieces of shit like Laura Loomer literally calling for feeding everyone like her to alligators. But and she’s been talking about what’s going on around her, and there are fundraisers for families (via GoFundMe). They’re linked below, but mostly… honestly, I just want to let her talk.

Here are some of her words.

I know it’s drowned out by bigger news, and there’s 10000000 other things going on that require attention, I totally get it, but

ICE raids are still happening daily in Los Angeles and people are getting taken off the street

It’s not really safe for me to walk around, especially in the mornings to get errands done around my neighborhood

this is small and just one person, but please consider donating to Reyna. She is a tamale vendor I grew up with. She would laugh with my family and knew us as kids. I’ve never been so heartbroken like this. She literally has never been in any trouble. Her only crime was going to work her regular route selling her food and not being documented.

These are Zapotec (indigenous Mexican) community members who got taken on the first mass day of raids. They’re still trying to reach their goal.

I know this is like moral outrage shit, but like this is my community. It’s personal and it’s still happening and it’s just getting more and more brazen cuz cameras aren’t on them anymore.

They are stopping people based on racial profiling alone, they have taken people even with proof of citizenship in their cars or on their person, and the conditions they throw you into are basically deadly in their mini concentration camps with barely any food/water, no access to medication or hygiene products and not even any proper beds to sleep in.

It feels like the only people being searched for are those with connections here and those are the lucky ones. Dozens of others have no family or relatives here so they get forgotten about.

And no one should be forgotten.

Do what you can.

It should go without saying, but to be clear – neither of these fundraisers are for her. That might matter for some people, so I’m saying it.

Do what you can.

Next big protest day is July 17th. But there are many more things you can and should be doing.

Do what you can.

Everywhere.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

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The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Ninety years after her grandmother's family was stalked by a witch, international student Minerva Contrera's studies land her in a similar position.

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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writing

writing thoughts and the politics of fiction

Writing has been difficult. I only wrote 10,000 words this month and I don't think too much of that was new. I've been having trouble rewriting the novel. Feeling very didactic right now.

( the bit where fiction is about the real world, too )

And yes, it's hard to focus on writing sometimes when my train of thought just wants to scatter.

Maybe with a (more or less) clear weekend, I can get some focused writing done? IDEK. I hate rewriting.

--

Also, I'm tired.

The Big Ugly Bill Passed.

I didn't really have any illusions that it wouldn't, but I called my congresscritters anyway.

I kind of feel like whatever happens, I resisted this in the little ways which were available and allowed to me as an American. My conscience is clear. I'm planning on making Malicious Compliance my habit going forward.

I feel like May Leitz is kind of a philosopher for our times. Everyone has this idea about what they're going to do when generational evil is staring them in the face. But when the generational evil of our lifetimes surfaces, there's nothing we can do. it's like we're tied to a chair, and we watch.

Also: I think I picked the perfect time to quit all Web 2.0 Social Media, frankly.

Back last summer, I begged someone who was planning not to vote in the November election to understand that voting is basically the one of the few times we are actually allowed a voice, one of the few instances in which we are allowed to actually affect anything. And I was called a dumb shitlib because of it. I wonder how that person, how all of the people who were proudly voicing that opinion back then, are feeling about that now.

I mean, going from what I've seen online (before I quit social media) this person has probably just doubled down since then. Which is why I'm echoing something

sabotabby and I agreed upon in a previous post: whatever else happens, we've earned Being A Little Shit About It to the folks voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, and the people who enabled the Face-Eating Leopard through their inaction. As a treat.

I mean, we're all probably going to be visited by The Leopard in one form or another. But the ones who voted for it, assuring themselves that the Leopard wouldn't eat their faces, or the faces of their friends and loved ones? And the ones who abstained from voting, smug in the assumed moral superiority of their inaction? Yeah, they deserve it.

(The Leopard is practically a Tulpa or an Egregore at this point.)

I don't blame people here in the USA for maybe not wanting to celebrate the 4th tomorrow. But my sister just had gender confirmation surgery, and she is getting the hell out of dodge before things get much worse. That's something to celebrate. And I still get to spend time with my friends, for the time being.

I think we all just need to adopt the "gargle my balls/here is my bag of fucks" attitude going forward, especially when faced with MAGA, ICE, or other Trump Gestapo Goons. Our best defense is to give them, their bigotry, their egos, and their fascist posturing, exactly the lack of deference and respect they deserve. These people deflate when we refuse to play along, when we refuse to fear them, when we mock them openly.

Current Mood: "There are no men like me." "There are always men like you."

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Star Wars Fic and Meta - From All The Spaces Between Times - Chapter 51

Title: From All The Spaces Between Times
Chapter: Chapter 51 - Hanging Inside Dreams and Blood
Author:

elrhiarhodan /

elrhiarhodan
Fandom: Star Wars, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars — Obi Wan Kenobi (TV), Star Wars — Jedi Apprentice Books
Characters Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, Watto, Quinlan Vos, Padmé Amidala, Sabé, Darth Maul, Yoda, Mace Windu, Adi Gallia, Quinlan Vos, Professor Huyang, The Force, Plo Koon, Vokara Che, Siri Tachi, Aayla Secura, Bant Eerin, Bruck Chun, Xanatos du Crion, Sheev Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Hego Damask II | Darth Plagueis, Komari Vosa, Bail Prestor Organa, Bail Antilles Prestor, Rael Averross, Nim Piana, Original Characters, Other Characters To Be Added
Pairings: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Shmi Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Qui-Gon Jinn, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, eventual Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon Jinn (we’re arrived)
Word Count: ~ 5300 this chapter
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: Graphic depictions of medical torture. Sith lightning.

Summary: Obi-Wan Kenobi has never known it, but he has always been the Force’s Champion, destined to suffer infinite sadness in defense of the Light. On his last turn on the wheel, responsibility for The Chosen One, the false child of prophecy, had been thrust upon him with no warning, and Darkness held the upper hand.

But this time, the Force has marshaled its power and will protect its Champion until the time is right, no matter how long Obi-Wan has to wait and how much he has to suffer.

Or,

Obi-Wan is reborn as a twelve-year old.

He wakes up on a slavers’ ship, with all of his prior life’s memories intact, and he’s bound for Tatooine with a Force-inhibitor collar around his neck, a bomb implanted in his spine, and no way of knowing what state of the Galaxy is in.

Just another day in the life of the Force’s Champion.

Chapter Summary: Darth Plagueis needs to decide what to do with his apprentice, Darth Sidious. The man is, by all accounts, a failure.

Sidious, though, isn’t going to go down so easily. His body may be wounded, his powers diminished, but his mind is still sharp and he has put plans in motion that will bring his master down.

From All The Spaces Between Times —Chapter 51 - Hanging Inside Dreams and Blood (On AO3)

( Meta — Chapter 51 - Hanging Inside Dreams and Blood )

Every time I run something

I embrace new tools. In Fabula Ultima, for example, the order in which characters go in combat varies. I found it hard to keep track of who'd gone, so I went out and got poker chips and little round labels. Now, I can just toss the chips representing characters into a bowl once they've gone. Order!

OK, except it turns out I can't tell blue from green under the ceiling light in the room where I DM and the names on the labels need to be bigger.

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a few things at the end of the week

Working this Saturday - about 4 hours. I get time off in lieu, which is better than nothing but also...kind of annoying. I didn't have that much on anyway, and can spend the day in my room, crafting and waiting for a ping of notifications.

Project Manager acknowledged the holiday. Still haven't received notification that my contract is being renewed though, but I can't imagine they have anyone else positioned to do my job yet...

All my holiday tours are paid for. Once I have the renewal of work contract, I shall go ahead and book/check my places to stay.

--

B2's strata management (HOA, but less about aesthetics more about practicalities) is wanting another payment for the 'collective kitty' for works around the building. I am personally of the opinion that this is being driven by a retiree who has invested in an apartment in the building and doesn't really care if the works are too expensive for the owner-occupiers, because she can just raise the rent on her renters and unless they want to be kicked out.

Anyway, that stresses B2 out and she comes and stresses on us...

(I tend to hide out in the study when that happens, I love B2, but she is very loud and present and I'm not always up for that. B1 seems to enjoy her being here...except when B2 is stressing on B1.)

And she won't accept assistance from the parentals (which I understand, because financial assistance to the parental generation tends to mean they feel they have a right to have a say in your life which...even I - living pretty much in a way they don't criticise as much - don't want that).

--

Will try to join in with

sunshine_revival but I feel...out of it. I'm not involved in any of the fandoms that most people are involved in, and my characters and pairings are all out of joint (mostly thx to TPTB, who never seem to see in my favourites what I see in them).

I have adjusted my sign-ups and profiles and stuff to state that I'm against AI. But even putting those statements out there feels like waving a flag telling people to kick me, I'm so used to having my fannish preferences weaponised.

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: Kygo - Out of This Town (feat. Sasha Alex Sloan)

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Train, train, take me away

Current sitting on the train waiting for it to leave. I was just having a discussion with people about how America's train network is bad, and to be fair a lot of it is extremely bad (if you're not a freight container), but at least in Chicago I can take the L from my home downtown, take the bus from the L stop to the train station--well, I could have, I walked--and then take the train from Chicago out to the suburbs to visit my family. Not owning a car saves our family quite a lot of money, which is good considering how much we spend on health care even with good insurance.

The weather continues to be awful. Today it's 31°C (feels like 36°) with 81% humidity, about the temperature it's been all week and the temperature it's going to be until Monday. We kept getting threats of a thunderstorm and it kept not happening, except for maybe a few drops of rain here and there. On Sunday, Laila had a make-up swimming lesson and literally right before I was going to leave, I checked my phone and there was a warning about a massive thunderstorm sweeping through with winds up to 45 mph, possible tree branch falls, and a note to seek shelter immediately and not to go outside. I broke the news to Laila, who had been eagerly shouting about going swimming, and she got quiet and walked over to her room. When I asked her if she wanted me to hang out with her in room or read her a story, she looked up at me, said, "No" and shut the door.

She ended up taking an angry nap. I told that to the other dads at the Jewish dads meeting I went to and they were very impressed--one said it was a better way of dealing with her frustration than they managed sometimes.

It turned out that we did not get anything more than a few raindrops, but that's because the rain went north of us. Ravinia got multiple inches in an hour.

Train's moving. Time to get back to reading.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Elliot Berger - Diamond Sky (feat. Laura Brehm)

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Based and Orbpilled

Yesterday, after binging it over the course of a week and a half, I went to a discussion about チ。―地球の運動について― (chi. chikyū no undō ni tsuite, "Orb: On the movements of the Earth"), a series about the progress toward the Copernican Revolution, and talked about it for an hour and a half. Summary: ★★★★★

Discussion below spoils the entire show:
( Orbpilled )

( Notes I took while watching )

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thinking about someone I should not bother thinking about

Once upon a time, I was friends with a guy named Jim. A very, very few of you might know him. Almost all of you won’t.

I walked away some years ago, blocked him on the socials over his support for the fascist, because I said that the fascist’s promises absolutely, positively, literally required American concentration camps, and that’s what he was supporting by supporting the fascist, and I could not abide that…

…and yet, he carried on, saying I was a fool, and that none of it would ever happen.

(I asked him then why did he support someone he insisted was lying to him. I do not remember getting an answer, before I quit.)

So now that we have American concentration camps…

…and now that people with direct access to the fascist are talking about sending literally every American citizen of Latino heritage there to die…

Laura Loomer on X, screencap-quoted on Bluesky:"Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now."El Norte Recuerda on Bluesky, who posted the screencap:"The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us."

(it will require more concentration camps than that, of course, but that’s a detail which makes no difference)

I wonder…

…has he yet been moved to repentance?

Or is he still a good and solid member of that wretched cult?

It’s immaterial now, of course. We are long past the point where the pebbles’ opinions matter, and crimes already done cannot be undone.

But once in a while, I think of it.

And for a moment – a pointless, irrelevant moment – I still wonder.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

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review

Blight (Sleep of Reason, volume 2) by Rachel A. Rosen

Director of the nation formerly known as Canada Quinn Atherton is determined to deliver much mass murder as it takes to achieve peace, order, good government. Why do so many ingrates object?

Blight(Sleep of Reason, volume 2) by Rachel A. Rosen

three things make a post?

Betrayed by fandom osmosis: I thought all the episodes of the last series of Taskmaster were out. Imagine my disappointment when I went looking for episode 10 and realized episode 9 had a timestamp of 5 days ago.

I started watching season 3 of the Australian version, but I kind of don't like anyone in the line-up. Maybe if I give it some time.

*

I haven't seen the last two episodes yet, but I am greatly enjoying Cloudward, Ho on Dropout.

*

Seven months after I stopped playing with my Sunday group (and roughly three after they moved to 7 PM EST and I was fully freed from thinking about rejoining them), I've come to realize how much I dreaded that game, felt judged for my choices, and did not trust the DM with a character I was deeply invested in. I still struggle with my ADHD and general social faux pas (plural) and have moments where I beat myself up or wanna crawl into a hole because I feel I was super annoying/took over too much, but I trust my DMs, I have fun, I look forward to every session. It's much freer.

My alt-Mummy film

The inspiration being the 1999 Mummy movie is not without problematic elements.

Imagine an Egyptian film company wanting to make a movie about idiots waking a horror in Canada that only the Egyptian lead can resolve.
( Read more... )

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Wednesday reading

Boston's Orange Line, by Andrew Elder and Jeremy C. Fox. This is a collection of black-and-white photos, going back to the start of the old elevated orange line, with captions. This was for the "explore Boston history" square on the BPL summer reading bingo. If I'd noticed the "images of rail" series title, I wouldn't have borrowed this book. The captions are just about enough to confirm that there's more than enough to be said on the subject to make a book, but this isn't. This has a disjointed discussion of the lengthy "realigmnent" of the orange line to its current route, and a couple of paragraphs on the decision not to run an 8-lane interstate through the middle of Boston and Cambridge, and no suggestion that anything similar had happened elsewhere. Ah, well.

There are suggestions on the library website for some of the squares (including "with a green cover"), but not this one. Searching the catalog for "Boston histpry" got me this, along with, among other things, a book about the Big Dig, a book about the Great Molasses Flood (which is at least mentioned in this, with a picture of damage to the orange line), and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

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bundle of holding

Bundle of Holding: The Dark Eye MEGA (from 2023)

The June 2023 Dark Eye Megabundle featuring the English-language edition from Ulisses Spiele of the leading German tabletop roleplaying game of heroic fantasy, The Dark Eye.

Bundle of Holding: The Dark Eye MEGA (from 2023)