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redbird) wrote2025-07-05 02:43 pmlooking for a link/website
Edited to add: A the shirts were less expensive than I expected, which is a large part of why I'm interested. Those may have been sale prices, I don't remember.
Also, the were made of either linen or a linen blend, not "line".
rmc28) wrote2025-07-05 08:00 amTo-read pile, 2025, June
Books on pre-order:
- Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells (7 Oct 2025)
Books acquired in June:
- and read:
- Playing for Keeps by K A Findlay (Kim Findlay) [7]
- The Charlie Method (Campus Diaries 3) by Elle Kennedy
- and unread:
- Dying to Meet You by Sarina Bowen
- Sort Your Head Out by Sam Delaney
- The Pairing by Casey McQuiston
Borrowed books read in June:
- Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
- The Domino Pattern (Quadrail 4) by Timothy Zahn [8]
- Judgment at Proteus (Quadrail 5) by Timothy Zahn [8]
Annoyingly, when I thought I'd cancelled my KU subscription in May, Amazon thought I'd suspended it for a month, so I got charged again in June. And as the above makes clear, I didn't really get my value for the month of it. The Timothy Zahn Quadrail series is really fun (Trains! In Space! And also galaxy-spanning conspiracy and action adventure with really interesting aliens!) and I'm glad I got to finish it, but I have now definitely and for real cancelled the subscription until further notice.
I don't expect to read much this month either, with the women's football Euros running most of the month. Farocation is running again and I didn't yet get through all the books from last summer, so I'm being even pickier about which ones I decide to pick up this summer.
[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited
fred_mouse) wrote2025-07-05 02:06 pmRidiculous weekend plans
I need some down time this weekend. I have any number of things I want to have done, but I'm restricting myself to things that can be done sitting on the bed, minimal movement. To whit:
Finish reading The Dictionary of Lost Words- DONE! Highly recommended fictional account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary- Read Attached - book on romantic relationships. in progress (started Saturday)
- Finish Creating a Second Brain - collected from the library yesterday, read a chapter on the bus
- Finish Library of the Dead - this one is due back on Monday, and being Libby, will get autoreturned.
Which, not actually outside the bounds, as long as I am actually doing those.
stretch goals, of which I'm hoping to achieve at least one
- close tabs (current: 526, goal: <500) in safari
- finish reading the fic I'm part way through (there might be more than one of these.
- progress Eldest's quilt (this is not an 'on the bed' activity; it is added so that if I need to get up and move around, I have a task)
- write up my goals for the next 6 months
- blog post about how the study is going.
runpunkrun) wrote2025-07-04 09:25 amFancake's Theme for July: Working Together
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fancake's theme for July is Working Together!If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!
fred_mouse) wrote2025-07-03 11:41 amtypo du jour
..look at the underlying code or moth...
- me, describing someone else's approach to understanding large language models.
isis) wrote2025-07-02 06:17 pmwednesday reads and things
Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the 6th Shardlake novel. This is all about the heresy hunts in the last few years before Henry VIII's death - one faction wanted to go back towards Catholicism, one wanted a radical re-imagining of religion and social structures, and if you wanted to stay in the regime's good graces, you walked the narrow path of "the King is the divinely ordained leader of the Church, and whatever he says goes." Warning for historical burning of heretics, plus canon-typical violence; also for weird religion and contentious legal cases. Matthew Shardlake still has a crush on the queen (Katherine Parr).
What I'm reading now:
My hold on Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons came in, so that. Just barely started.
What I recently finished watching:
American Primeval, which, huh, I've never before encountered media in which the Mormons are the bad guys. (This is not a spoiler. It's pretty clear from the get-go, but it gets more pointed and cartoon-villainy toward the end.) Definitely violent and gory, though also it felt very clearly written to Tug The Heart Strings (and then, often, deliberately kill the character it's just tried to make you care about) at which at least for me it failed to do. I liked Abish, Two Moons, and Captain Edwin Dellinger, and James Bridger amused the hell out of me, but - I mostly enjoyed it, but I don't feel it was superlative. I got tired of the filter to wash out colors so it looked almost old-photo sepia.
I did enjoy the historical setting of the Mormon War; as I mentioned last time, I researched it for my Yuletide story, and I think it's just an interesting time, the settlement/colonization of western North America.
What I'm about to start watching:
Murderbot! We always wait until enough episodes are out that we can watch ~every other day and not have to wait.
What I'm playing now:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which was recommended to me as a "spooky atmospheric puzzle game", and I'm enjoying it a lot. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors in what might be Germany in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? I told my brother about it because it's cheap in the summer sale at Steam, and he decided it sounded good so he is playing it now, a bit behind my progress but because of the nonlinearity he's ahead of me in some things. We're trying to give each other elliptical hints when needed.
redbird) wrote2025-07-02 04:46 pmWednesday reading
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.
runpunkrun) wrote2025-07-02 08:27 amThe Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James
The thrills were not thrilling, but the mystery might have been interesting if we weren't getting it from both ends. As it is, not worth the time.
Contains: References to rape, domestic abuse, and child death; descriptions of dead bodies; ghosts.
rmc28) wrote2025-06-30 10:03 amPacking
Regrettably, we have to go home again this afternoon. I am packing with the intention of leaving our luggage at the hotel while we do one last amble along Southsea beach.
Swag count:
- 11 pens
- 9 commemorative guidebooks (to the various ships, museums, and the dockyard as a whole)
- 2 notebooks
- 2 postcards
- 1 travel mug
- 1 fridge magnet
- 1 birthday card from the Spinnaker Bar staff
Also some chocolate from the Lindt outlet store. My suitcase was fairly full when we came. I'm sure I can make it all fit ... somehow.
The seed for choosing Portsmouth for this getaway came from seeing a sign for "Explosion Museum" while driving a bunch of hockey players to Gosport rink back in May. I'm very glad I went with that impulse, it's worked out well.
fred_mouse) wrote2025-06-30 03:48 pm'Typo' of the day
Today's annoyance with YouTube auto-craption:
"Current university"
Locals, who know what the tiny set of options are, can possibly identify what 'Current' is relatively easily. In my case, given that I was watching this from within Curtin University, it was even easier, once I worked out that that was what is going on.
But oh! it annoys me that people don't review the captions for even that level of obvious mistake (I'm not calling that one egregious. The ones that mess up the name(s) of Country included in an Acknowledgement of Country are egregious. I've never seen the same error for a Welcome to Country, which I assume is because the Indigenous people associated with the production of such know too well how badly it can be messed up).
redbird) wrote2025-06-29 02:12 pmfarmers market
I left the house as soon as I'd had my morning tea, and went to a market that opens at 10 on Sundays. I got there at about 10:20, before they'd sold out of anything I wanted, or might want.
What I particularly wanted was raspberries, and I bought two small boxes of those (totalling about a pint).
Busa Farms had a bin full of nice-looking shell peas, and I bought almost two pounds, because Cattitude is very fond of fresh peas. When I got home, he told me that he'd thought he had missed the local pea season this year. I also bought a bunch of red radishes, because they caught my eye while I was in line to pay for the peas. (Busa had both red and purple radishes, which somehow made them more appealing than if there'd only been one kind of radish.)
Hi-Rise Bakery was there, and I bought a small loaf of their concord bread, which is the right degree of crusty for the three of us. (They also have a thicker-crust "luce.")
The raspberries are from Kimball's, where I also bought a few diva cucumbers.
Stillman's Farm didn't have lamb sausages, but when I asked about it, the vendor said "probably next week" and asked what kind I liked. She is going to report back that they had a request for merguez sausages. I don't know whether we'll get to the same market next week, but it sounds like there will be lamb sausages at the other local farmers markets soon.
A lot of other things looked good, but I decided I didn't need lettuce (multiple varieties), cherry tomatoes, or fish.
fred_mouse) wrote2025-06-29 09:39 pmGoal setting question(s)
Now that I've written up the six month summary of how my 2025 New Year's Resolutions have gone, I'm looking at what I want for the next six months. Which might turn out to be a 12 month set of goals; I'm kind of being flexible with whatever works.
But!
One of my intentions is that I have goals for each of the areas of my life that are important to me--there is no rating of how big that area has to be, just that I see it as an important circle. Two of these I did not manage to get a coherent goal for across the last six months. I'm not sure that it is possible to have coherent goals, but that might be me looking from the wrong perspective.
Which is where my question comes in: what suggestions do people have as to goals for 'Family' and 'Social'? I'm okay with drive by commentary from people who aren't familiar with the limitations of my life, because not knowing those details might be an important part of different perspective.
fred_mouse) wrote2025-06-29 06:04 pmNew Year's Resolutions - close out
Given that the last three weeks have been a completely different pace, and my expectations of my self for the rest of the year are quite different to where I was at the beginning of the year, I'm going to close out the set of goals I set myself at the beginning of the year (Note: I'm not working from that page, but from an offline edited version). The last update I did was May 20th. I contemplated writing a new set of resolutions in this post concurrently with wrapping up these, but have decided instead to create an offline document of Mid-Year Resolutions. I might get around to posting that, but chances are low.
( Lots of details, possibly only interesting to me )
tl;dr: great progress for work; good progress on craft, reading, physical - exercise and health; not great on house, organisation, decluttering, writing, garden, learning, money. No goals to compare to for family or social. Having a list continues to be useful.
redbird) wrote2025-06-28 04:36 pmacelightning has died
acelightning has died. She was one of the people I only know online, but feel like friends because we have real conversations (in her case, here on Dreamwidth and previously on LJ).rmc28) wrote2025-06-28 09:37 pmHoliday fun
Friday:
- Mary Rose, worth the admission fee all by itself, thoroughly absorbing exhibition of the many many objects found within the wreck, and amazing to see the preserved timbers themselves from lots of different angles.
- lunch
- dockyard boat tour, including a good look at the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier currently in dock (I cannot look at aircraft carriers without Danger Zone playing in my head)
- HMS Victory, audioguide version with dramatic retelling of the battle of Trafalgar. Very absorbing, impressive amount of the ship available to visit even while restoration is ongoing, very tiring.
- back to hotel and flop for a little
- walk, ferry, bus to Gosport ice rink, disco skate, bus, ferry and walk back to hotel; ice is rather worse than Cambridge, but ferry+bus beats 2x Cambridge buses any time
Saturday:
- sauna and swim for me
- walk to the dockyard, waterbus to the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower
- lunch
- walk ~2 miles to Submarine Museum
- walk through of HMS Alliance, also a look around HMS Holland 1 (the first ever Royal Navy submarine)
- my body in full rebellion against "museum walking" by this point, we took the waterbus back to the main dockyard, got cold drinks, and got back on the dockyard boat tour - different guide, different focus, well worth it
- little wander around Gunwharf Quays and a little shopping in the outlet stores; having forgotten to bring my ereader, I resorted to buying a newspaper and we sat quietly ignoring each other in a curry gastropub for a while. Eventually we ordered some curry, which was really rather good, and then toddled back to the hotel
- I decided I'd had enough moving for the day, so now I'm lying on the hotel bed with Glastonbury on the TV, life is good
Tomorrow I think we'll do a couple of brief museum things at the historic dockyard, and then perhaps go for a wander through Southsea. I'm going to watch England v Jamaica tomorrow afternoon (I think R has less than zero interest in football, women's or otherwise) and we've a reservation in the Spinnaker Tower for sunset cocktails tomorrow evening.
physical issues
My leg muscles, especially the ones that stabilise hips, knees and ankles, have been giving me some grief since I went clubbing after the Kodiaks won playoffs at end of May. I'm reasonably sure it's muscular fatigue and not joint/ligament damage. Rest helps, but so does gentle movement: if I sit still too long everything has seized up a bit when I stand up, but loosens up again as I start moving. Skating and hockey are fine once I'm warmed up. Yoga and general stretching seem to help, as do hot baths and sauna. Steady walking is a lot better for me than the stop-start of museum walking, as the last two days have made clear. I love museums but right now the spirit is willing and the flesh has Had Enough.
rmc28) wrote2025-06-28 09:56 amHoodies
I have been resisting buying a number of great hoodies from the assorted Historic Dockyard museum shops, on the grounds that I already have More Than Sufficient Hoodies, related to either ice hockey or musical theatre. R said obviously I need to wait for an ice hockey musical and get that hoodie.
Suggestions welcome for the topic / plot of such a musical.
fred_mouse) wrote2025-06-27 10:32 pmSignal boost
thestory inside is doing July signups. I'm not taking on any extra commitments, not even suggested reading, at the moment, but I have very much enjoyed the suggestions I have had from this group. If you have a TBR list you can share, you too can have this excitement in your life!
It works on a buddy system - they pick three books from your list for you to read, you pick three books from their list for them to read. Sign ups close on the 1st July.
duskpeterson) wrote2025-06-27 09:27 amThe Royal Sanctuary: The corridor (Tempestuous Tours)
A long, windowless corridor leads into the royal sanctuary. The corridor's entrance is next to a walled-up gateway that originally led directly into the courtyard of the royal residence. The corridor itself is kept deliberately unlit, to recreate the circumstances under which captives were led here before being enslaved. Just walk toward the light at the end of the corridor to reach your destination.
[Translator's note: A chase takes place in that corridor during Death Mask.]