supergee | Reading

Today is cloudy and cool. It rained last night.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 5/28/25 -- I planted 10 greenish-yellow 'Alicia' and 10 red 'Doubna' gladioli in the septic garden.

I saw a skunk on the patio.

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Current Mood: busy

redbird

I'm fine, as far as I know everyone's fine, but my trip to get blood drawn was more exciting than anticipated: the bus driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid either a bicycle or a pedestrian crossing in mid-block. She did that, checked to make sure that everyone on the bus was OK, then drove to the next corner, pulled over, and asked again if everyone was sure they were OK.

A few stops after that, someone asked me where he should get off the bus to get to "the little mall with Trader Joe's and MicroCenter." It took me a moment to figure out what he meant, because the bus we were on doesn't go there. So first I told him I wasn't sure, because this bus didn't go there, and then I started thinking about the problem. He said he wasn't good at directions, so I suggested a route that involved more walking but less chance of getting lost. I wound up signaling for his bus stop, and then telling him I was sorry, I'd forgotten they'd moved the bus stop, so [revised directions]. I should note, he didn't ask me for most of this, just what bus stop to use, and I was in the mood to do the extra bits.

The rest of the trip to Mt. Auburn to get blood drawn went smoothly. Once I got there, I had very little wait, and the phlebotomist did a very good job; I made a point of telling him so. On the way back, I stopped in Harvard Square to put more money on my Charlie card; buy and eat a slice of Otto's mashed potato and bacon pizza; and then went to Lizzy's to get Adrian a pint of non-dairy chocolate ice cream.

I was going to withdraw some cash from the ATM at the 7-11 at Comm Ave and Harvard Ave, but when I got there the screen said "windows 7. Press ctrl-alt-del to log in," which was literally impossible with the numeric keypad, so I just came home.

the_shoshanna

When I was ten years old, friends and I came back from seeing a James Bond movie and were playing at James Bond on our bikes, and I swerved too sharply, fell over, and broke my left leg. I broke both the fibia and the tibula, in fact, but they were clean breaks, very tidy. Hurt like screaming hell, though. As was the custom of the time I was the hospital for several days and came out in a full-leg cast. My father, who lived some distance away, couldn’t get there right away and sent me a dozen roses in the hospital, which made the whole thing absolutely worth it; I had never felt so grown-up!

But that was the end of my bicycling career. For fifty years.

Now, however, I've moved to a small, mostly flat, navigable city, and I want to try getting back on that literal-not-proverbial bike! I fairly often have places to go and errands to run where driving feels silly but walking might take juuuuust too much time, and a bike seems like the obvious option. But do I want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a new bike and run the risk that I won't enjoy it, or feel safely balanced after so long, or whatever, and will in fact end up not using it much? I do not.

Fortunately this city has a couple of nonprofit bike repairing and reselling organizations! So I stopped by one of them this afternoon and chatted with the head mechanic, and he picked out a bike for me from their (all donated) stock on hand, and we verified that it fits me. It needs some repair work and tuning up, which they will do over the next couple of weeks (him: "There's about six bikes ahead of you in line." me: "It's been fifty years, another two weeks is not a problem!"), and they asked for $125-$175, according to my ability to pay. I wasn't able to actually test-ride it, since it has no tires at the moment, but I was able to balance pretty well; I do feel pretty confident that I haven't forgotten how to ride a bike.

(And this time I hope to learn how to shift gears, too! Kid-me's bike was a three-speed and I just left it in second all the time.)

Now I just need to get a helmet -- which I do know to buy new/unused. And a lock. Whee!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3095/

Under the two-domain system, anyone who punches you is technically an Archaean pathogen.

https://xkcd.com/3095/

conuly

Which, I'm told, has prompted all the usual gross comments about the girl playing Hermione. Ugh. Why are people so disgusting?

(Also, fuck JKR, but she's not the one being awful inside this complaint. Not to fear, I'm sure she'll find a way to outclass them soon enough.)

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( Read more... )

james_davis_nicoll

The complete Deluxe Editions of Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number, along with Wolves of God, Silent Legions, and more.

Bundle of Holding: Sine Nomine Corebooks (from 2023)

lovelyangel

Sidewalk Sign for MudPuddles Toys & Books
Nikon Z8 • NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 S
f/4 @ 55mm • 1/1500s • ISO 200

Sadly, MudPuddles Toys & Books is closing its store in NW Portland on July 20. A liquidation sale will begin on June 13. MudPuddles years ago had taken over the store that used to be Child’s Play – a favorite store of mine (outside of Finnigan’s).

Child’s Play was important as that was where I bought Mr. Bear in April 2008. Mr. Bear is still keeping me company every night, even after 17 years. He’s a little bit ragged but has held up amazingly well. Still, no stuffed animal lasts forever, especially one that gets hugged to death every night.

So I thought I should make a trip to MudPuddles before they close. I had not been there in many years. I planned a special trip into Portland – and followed my plan yesterday (Tuesday) – a sunny day.

( A City Adventure Below This Cut )

minoanmiss

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

oursin

What I read

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World (Dr Greta Helsing, #4) (2025): somehow did not like this as much as the preceding volumes in the series.

Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (A Dance to the Music of Time #5) (1960).

Latest Literary Review.

Discovered entirely by happenstance that Robert Rodi's scathingly irreverent comedies of manners set largely in Chicago’s gay demimonde' are now available as ebooks at exceedingly eligible prices (I read them in the 90s/early 00s from the local library) so have downloaded all those and also:

Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps (vol 1) (2014), which collects and expands on his blogposts on Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. which was quite addictive, the sort of thing I thought I'd be dipping into and in fact read end to end, even while dissenting from his take on Fanny Price and muttering that he was not exactly au fait with the discourse on JA's views on the slavery question.

On the go

This was perhaps at least partly motivated by coming to the point in Dragon's Teeth where we get the Reichstag Fire and its consequences, and Lanny is caught in the middle of a whole mass of cross-currents while trying to save those of his friends who think that they will surely be all right....

Bitch In a Bonnet vol 2 (2014): covers Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Up next

Well, KJ Charles, Copper Script is allegedly due to drop tomorrow....

brithistorian

I got an email yesterday from one of my professors who I've been using as a reference. She said she had a student who was in the process of applying to grad school and was looking to hire an editor to help him improve one of his papers for inclusion with his applications. She remembered that I had experience in editing and wanted to know if I'd be okay with her passing on my contact information to him. I was up front with her about my editing experience (I've done lots of copyediting, style editing, and fact-checking, but no real heavy-duty developmental editing other than on my own writing), and said if she still felt comfortable recommending me to him I was interested. After reading this, she said was comfortable recommending me and would be passing my information on to him.

Now we finally get to the question part of this post: I've never hired an editor. I've never worked as a free-lance editor of this sort. But I know a lot of you have editing experience and/or ties to universities, so I'm hoping you can give me some guidance here: How much do editors usually charge for something like this? Should I be charging by the hour or by word count or what? At this point I have absolutely nothing to go on other than my instinctive valuation of money, which I already know is seriously fucked up from years of being broke.

mount_oregano

Fiction writers have an ongoing debate about whether or not to plot: that is, whether to use an outline. But outlines and drafts come in many varieties, which complicates the debate. Here’s everything I know about outlines and drafts condensed into handy bullet points (itself a kind of outline), which I hope will be helpful to you.

Why outline?

• Ideas for novels are too big to hold in your head all at once; you need some sort of notes.

• You might be able to write faster using an outline.

• Outlines can let you write less anxiously because you know what will happen next.

• Outlines are a “big picture” tool to help you revise/re-envision your story for subsequent drafts.

• Leonardo da Vinci used outlines when he painted; this is a respectable artistic tool.

Why avoid outlines?

• Your brain simply doesn’t work that way; you can do just fine without one.

• You lack experience using this tool, so it’s hard to figure out and feels uncomfortable.

A few kinds of outlines

• Three-act structure

• Save the Cat formula

• Romance novel formula

• Scrivener or other software

• 3 x 5 cards or Post-It Notes

• Pictures/scrapbook/artwork/poems

• Spreadsheets/charts/maps

• Hero’s Journey

• Heroine’s Journey

• Fool’s Journey

• Beat Sheets

• Snowflake method

• East Asian four-act kishōtenketsu

• Detailed scene-by-scene

• General chapter-by-chapter

• Character driven

• Theme or narrative focused

• Crisis or paradox centered

• A series of questions

• A series of causes and effects

• Continuous re-evaluation

• Joyous amalgam of all these

Some secrets to using an outline as a writing tool

• You can make an outline at any time: before, during, or after any draft or part of a draft.

• Your outline can be a simple list of beats, plot twists, or key scenes.

• The plot outline is not the manuscript outline, which might not be chronological or logical.

• There is no Platonic ideal story; a story can take different forks in the road along the way.

• You can begin plotting from the end, middle, or beginning of the story.

• Any single step or couple of steps of a standard plot outline can be a short story.

Kinds of drafts

• Zero draft, a wildly experimental initial draft that doesn’t “count” as a first draft.

• Dialog-only draft, with the rest to be filled in during subsequent drafts.

• Disconnected scenes, to be connected in a later draft.

• Fast drafting, writing as quickly as possible without looking back, NaNoWriMo-style.

• Writing each scene as a short story.

• Messy, ugly, crappy early drafts; only the final draft needs to be beautiful.

Exercise: a tiny outline

Summarize your story in three three-word sentences. Such as, for a romance: 1. Girl meets boy. 2. Girl loses boy. 3. Girl wins boy. Or for Hamlet: 1. Hamlet has doubts. 2. Doubts are resolved. 3. Hamlet gets revenge. Does your story have a beginning, middle, and end?

(This post is available as a one-page PDF here.)

dreamshark

The decrepit old kitchen drawers look the same on the outside, but now they all have beautiful new bamboo organizer trays inside, expandable for perfect fit! Yes, that is what I spent my week doing. It’s not like we retirees don’t keep busy.

james_davis_nicoll

conuly

That, or we have a new dog on the block that sounds a lot like a turkey and which will not shut up.

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( Read more... )

lsanderson

Feds arrest newest Feeding Our Future defendant at Twin Cities airport
Matt Sepid
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/05/27/feds-arrest-newest-feeding-our-future-defendant-at-twin-cities-airport

Trump cuts to NIH causing life-or-death delays in care: ‘Cancer shouldn’t be political’
Natalie Phelps, who has stage 4 colorectal cancer, has raised the alarm over how patients in the agency’s clinical trials are facing setbacks in treatment
Rachel Leingang
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/trump-cuts-nih-cancer-care

RFK Jr drops Covid-19 boosters for kids and pregnant women from CDC list
The move ends the CDC’s booster recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women, bypassing norms
Jessica Glenza
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/27/rfk-jr-covid-vaccine-kids-pregnant-women

Trump has no plan for who will grow US food: ‘There is just flat out nobody to work’
Farms rely on seasonal workers and undocumented immigrants, but the Republican’s plans to fill the gap would ‘legalize oppression’, advocates say
Tareq Saghie
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/28/farmworkers-h-2a-trump-agriculture

The Salt Path review – Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs hike from ruin to renewal
Marianne Elliott directs this affecting drama, based on Raynor Winn’s memoir, which builds steadily as the couple journey towards redemption
Cath Clarke
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/28/the-salt-path-review-gillian-anderson-and-jason-isaacs-hike-from-ruin-to-renewal

Spent by Alison Bechdel review – the graphic novelist faces up to midlife
In this playfully fictionalised memoir, Alison runs a pygmy goat sanctuary while making a name for herself on stage and screen
James Smart
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/28/spent-by-alison-bechdel-review-the-graphic-novelist-faces-up-to-midlife

Bovril: A meaty staple's strange link to cult science fiction
Veronique Greenwood
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250527-bovril-a-meaty-staples-strange-link-to-cult-science-fiction

What to do if your laptop is lost or stolen – tips for when the worst happens
From remotely locking it using a locator, to backing up a replacement, steps to help you secure your data
Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/28/what-to-do-if-your-laptop-is-lost-or-stolen

The return of Mexico's famous Tequila Express train
Jamie Fullerton
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250523-the-return-of-mexicos-famous-tequila-express-train

james_davis_nicoll

Lonely Rita has no end of meet-cutes with hunky men. If only Rita could stop shooting them in the head...

Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba

james_davis_nicoll

Mars fans anticipate trading only known habitable planet for world where any unprotected human would immediately perish

bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/location-tracking-app-for-foreigners-in-moscow.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70294

Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones.

Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information:

Residence location
Fingerprint
Face photograph
Real-time geo-location monitoring

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Qatar did it in 2022 around the World Cup:

“After accepting the terms of these apps, moderators will have complete control of users’ devices,” he continued. “All personal content, the ability to edit it, share it, extract it as well as data from other apps on your device is in their hands. Moderators will even have the power to unlock users’ devices remotely.”

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/location-tracking-app-for-foreigners-in-moscow.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70294

calimac

The reason I haven't posted for a week is that I've been out of town and lacked the ability conveniently to post.

I use my portable tablet computer to keep up with e-mail, assuming there's wi-fi I can access, but typing on the little popup keyboard is not conducive to writing at greater than minimal length. I did choose my hotel in part because it had a business center, guest-usable desktop computers, but I found on my first evening that both computers were frozen in awkward positions, and while the desk clerk agreed to put in a request for repair, nothing had been done by the time I left. Of course, there was a holiday weekend in there.

One of the hotel's two elevators was also out of service. Good thing that wasn't both of them, because my room was on the tenth floor.

The hotel was located in downtown Pittsburgh. The one in Pennsylvania. I was there - by far the furthest away from home I've gone since before the pandemic - on a compulsion I could not possibly resist, not that I wished to resist it. It was my brother's wedding. (He lives and works in Pittsburgh, as does his wife, who's a native of the area.) It took longer for him than it did for me to "find his person," as they put it in the ceremony, but he definitely has. I've met her a few times before, and they're ideal for each other.

The ceremony was held at the Grand Concourse, an elaborate and colorful preserved 19C train station converted into the kind of restaurant you'd visit for a special occasion, of which this was certainly one. There were about 30 guests, tucked into the corner of one small room for the ceremony, after which we spread out somewhat further for a very fine dinner in another room, one with a stunning view of the Monongahela River and downtown opposite.

It was a highly personalized occasion, and cherishable for all who attended. Among the guests were a couple old friends (i.e. since childhood) of my brother's, whom I know but hadn't seen in a long time. One of them is a rabbi, and he conducted the ceremony.

Part of the service was the reading of a modern version of the seven blessings, a Jewish ritual that was new to me. Seven people close to the couple were asked, and I and my other brother were among them. We each stood up, identified ourselves, and read a blessing as modified by the couple, and, at least in my case (I read the Wisdom blessing) elaborated on a bit by me: it seemed to fit the circumstances.

There was more to the celebration than the ceremony and dinner, and I'll say more about that, and about Pittsburgh - which I've been to before, but never deposited in downtown on my own resources - tomorrow.

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Arthur D. Hlavaty

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March 2025

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Page Summary

ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
redbird - blood draw, etc.
the_shoshanna - I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike
xkcd_feed - Archaea
conuly - Welp, they've cast the main trio for the Harry Potter tv show
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Sine Nomine Corebooks (from 2023)
lovelyangel - A Mini Adventure
minoanmiss - Then and Now
oursin - Wednesday has had more equestrian-products-related spam
brithistorian - AKICIDW: What does editing cost?
mount_oregano - A Few Varieties and Secrets of Drafts and Outlines
dreamshark - It’s what’s inside that counts
james_davis_nicoll - End of an Era
conuly - It's turkey o'clock.
lsanderson - 2025.05.28
james_davis_nicoll - Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba
james_davis_nicoll - Mars or bust
bruce_schneier_feed - Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow
calimac - radio silence
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 28-05-2025

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