Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.

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Monday, May 21st, 2012
nineweaving	8:54a	Advisory So in the dream, I was listening to the BBC telling me what words were difficult to spell today. "...and Birmingham." "Birmingham?" I said, buttering my toast. "Why Birmingham?" And the radio answered, "The 'k' is silent." Nine (1 Comment |Comment on this)
tithenai	12:09p	Exercise Log: Gym Edition, Week 13, Day 1 ( Today. ) I was surprised by how quickly I was done! And on with the lunching and marking and such. Current Mood: determined (Comment on this)
xsmoonshine	5:07p	Overheard on the train There is a secret level called the cow level. Scary. There are flowers chasing you, and unicorns. And then a mushroom explodes and you die. ~ teenage boy on a train (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 20th, 2012
flemmings	11:40p	Today was a perfect July day. Pity it's only May. But sun and blue skies and warmth and a cool breeze, birds singing, gardeners gardening, and fireworks in the evening. Am probably slightly sunburned: I feel a bit odd and zonked. The Minority Council was wonderful, a perfact holiday weekend book. Am so sad it's finished, and so sad I have to wait for the next one. I feel I should probably review the Vlad Taltos books in order to read his latest, but I'm not sure I want to hear Vlad's voice after two weeks of Michael's. I did read a little 1Q84 after lo these many weeks, and probably should press on with it. In the kind of summer we're looking to have, reading Japanese might be the last thing I want to do. (Comment on this)
thekinginyellow	7:27p	UMS Redux: Squaring the Circle I've been giving some desultory thought to ways in which the UMS schema, which I rather liked in some ways, might be salvaged and made more accessible/compelling to a wide range of people.  The most likely-seeming idea I've had thus far involves, basically, stealing wholesale from the indie RPG Legend.  ( This is a cut. ) (Comment on this)
Monday, May 21st, 2012
xsmoonshine	10:21a	Day off At hospital with parent to have her leg checked. Blurgh. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 20th, 2012
yuletide [ healingmirth ]	10:12p	New Year's Resolution Stories: May 14th - 20th Sadly, there's nothing new this week in the NYR 2012 collection, but now's a great time to go back and catch up on one of the 64 stories posted so far this year. Last year, our first week without a NYR story was in March, so an extra thank you to everyone who's kept the slow-and-steady NYR spirit alive 2 months further into the year. Want to join in the fun? The journey to writing your own NYR story starts with the list of prompts: now in google doc and html table flavors. (Comment on this)
kate_nepveu	9:34p	Korra S01E07, "The Aftermath" ( spoilers ) comment(s) (how-to) | link
desperance	6:14p	Big yellow eye is blinking A dozen years ago, Harry and I drove all the way down to Cornwall from Newcastle, in order not to see the solar eclipse; it was cloud cover all the way, and all we observed was a dimness. But here I am in California, and I don't even need to leave my garden. There hasn't been a cloud for weeks; the sun is still high enough to make observations easy; I am playing with sheets of paper and pinholes. Something has licked half the sun away already. Anyone seen A'Tuin recently? *glowers suspiciously at turtles* What the boys will do when their sunshine disappears, I do not know. That also might be fun to observe, but I shall be outside. Am acquiring last-minute tan, just in case it never comes back again. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
earis	8:50p	All I want for Christmas is the fuck out of this house. (Comment on this)
rachelmanija	12:52p	Want vs. Need What would I like to do today? Curl up with any one of the delicious-looking books which have just arrived in my home! Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. WWII girl pilots and spies, female friendship, and did I mention that they're WWII girl pilots and spies? This is by one of my favorite authors, and people are saying it's amazing. Please do not spoil. I am sure it has many twists. Everybody Sees the Ants, by A. S. King. I have no idea what this is other than Sherwood highly recommends it, it was nominated for the Andre Norton Award, and she said that it is very psychological and the less you know before reading, the better. Please do not spoil! Shadow Ops: Control Point, by Myke Cole. Contemporary military fantasy by an author who did three tours in Iraq. I expect the military details are all very accurate. This looks very enjoyable. Bonus: black protagonist is actually on the cover. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. Fun-looking nonfiction. Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. Written by a man with an autistic daughter, it promises to pull in personal accounts, science, history, and culture to explore the increase in or increased awareness of autism. What do I actually need to do? Complete an online course in Trauma-Focused CBT. By the way, the course seems very comprehensive, as far as comparatively brief online courses go, and it is free if you register. If you complete it, you get a certificate. It's intended for children who have gone through a traumatic event, but could be adjusted to work with adults. I have to complete the course, produce the certificate, and demo a section in front of the class. ETA: Also, the therapist and the child can play a game where different names of emotions are written on individual pieces of paper. The therapist and the client take turns picking out one of the pieces of paper out of a box (without showing the other) acting out the emotion and having the other person try to guess the feeling. My emotions upon imagining myself doing this exercise: horror, embarrassment, anxiety, panic, hysteria, inappropriate laughter, denial, disbelief, doom. Well... I know which section I WON'T be demonstrating to the class! Please taunt me by discussing the books I have mentioned. No spoilers, please. I will select one to reward myself with when I'm done. Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1039242.html. Comment here or there. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
mrissa	2:29p	Love interest question from a friend A friend of mine was talking about a work-in-progress yesterday and asked what I/we look for in love interests in urban fantasy, and I'm afraid conversation turned and I didn't really answer. So I'm putting it here because I feel contrite and hope that someone else will answer too and help her out. I don't think my answer is different for urban fantasy than for anything else. If there's a clear main character who has one or more love interests in a book, first and foremost I want them to be people with their own agendas and problems and interests. And second I want it to be clear why at some point they might have wanted to hang out together. They don't have to still be good to hang out together, because all sorts of things shift and change in people's lives, and all sorts of people who once loved each other or even still love each other are not really good at spending time in the same room any more. But I like to be able to see how at some point they were. I feel like if something is going to not work for me in the "love interest" department of a book, it's quite often having characters who supposedly have "chemistry" in a physical/sexual sense but don't actually like each other. I can almost never pick that up off the page. I mean, I expect there are lots of people who could hypothetically have reasonable sex if they wanted to but don't like each other enough to find out. This does not interest me, and having a character I'm otherwise supposed to want to spend an entire book worth of time with going, "Yes, we have nothing in common and I feel like punching him every time he opens his mouth, but he is Such A Hottie," makes me far less sympathetic towards that character. The world is full of quite reasonably attractive people who don't make one feel like punching them; go find one. (I will very very occasionally make an exception for this if the characters have a long history that does not consist entirely of wanting to punch each other. Complicated relationships are okay. Antagonism and sex: no thanks, not for me.) Beyond that, there's a mishmash of things I'm a sucker for in any character and the sorts of things I look for when my friends start dating someone new. It depends on the book whether my answer is "good with a soldering iron" or "good with an axe," but "good to random old people" is probably on the list. May be less likely to show up in a novel than axes or soldering irons, though.... (8 Comments |Comment on this)
tagmeth	1:18p	Old Pantheon Gods Thanks for your feedback. It seems that I left myself fairly free to develop this class of gods, who don't have much of a role in Tai-tastigon. So here's your chance to contribute a god, if you feel so inclined. The rules: Bottom line: I haven’t said enough about the OP to significantly restrict me now. I can set them up more or less as I like a. They are Rathillien’s oldest gods, predating the Four and the Kencyr temples b. Their power initially came from the faith of their followers and from Rathillien directly. Now the latter is funneled through the Four. What change does that make? They are aware, grudgingly, that the Four have been elevated above them, as the Greek gods came to rule over and replace the titans as top dogs. (Did anyone ever worship the titans? Were they perhaps prehistoric deities?) c. They align with the Four. Those that didn’t either died off or are barely hanging on. It wasn’t a battle, just a fundamental shift in power. (?) d. OP Gods can appear in any aspect, human, animal, object, monster e. For most of the crafts and professions, people have turned to their Guild Lords and grandmasters, ie to the New Pantheon in Kothifir. People pray to Mercer for success in business, to Ruso for inspiration, to Shandani for health. They are the major pantheon with King Krothen as their Zeus. f. There’s still some overlap, though, eg. Vedia the healer who lives Undercliff. There may be other reasons for OP deities to exist even though NP gods roughly cover the same territory. I have some 14 OP gods, each linked to one of the Four, but could use more if only in passing. Any ideas? (15 Comments |Comment on this)
veejane	12:00p	The Japanese iris are blooming! I can take no credit for them except inasmuch as I did not uproot them this spring, correctly guessing they are not weeds. Once they're done, I should divide them; two of the three clumps are getting that ring effect of needing separation. Did some trim painting (damn those unstraight lines); much more to do but none of it urgent. Current urgent item is the fact there are definitely raccoons in the attic; we audio-located their next (they were chittering) and have located from inside and outside the hole by which they got in. Considering they're plural, that means babies, so it's a bit dicey to try to trap or even cut off the critters till the babies are old enough to leave the nest temporarily. (If they were left behind, and starved, they would do so above my living room, smellily.) Neighbor B. is DIY to a fault (he's also a cheapskate), and wants to work on various crackpot solutions himself, but even he admits he can't reach the roof trim where the hole is. So hopefully we'll be hiring a professional. (I had to get him up into the attic to hear them himself to get the ball rolling towards "no, this is not a mere side effect of an old building; we have to do something about this!") I have moved mostly over to Dreamwidth. Please comment there if you can. (Comment on this)
chomiji	12:17p	LJ Weirdness Meme OK, It's actually an LJ meme, but many of the DW folks who'll be reading it are former LJers, anyway. Seen at evilchuckles's place: So, chomiji, your LiveJournal reveals… You are… 1% unique, 24% peculiar, 46% interesting, 21% normal and 9% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy writing). When it comes to friends you are popular. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is conventional. Your overall weirdness is: 31 (The average level of weirdness is: 28. You are weirder than 69% of other LJers.) Find out what your weirdness level is! OK, then! The writing journal was rated as weirder, with an "intellectual" writing style. I'm wondering what they're using to derive that rating. The fact that most of my recent actual content on that journal has been on other sites (like AO3) - I just post the summaries and links to the LJ - may have something to do with it. This entry is also posted at Dreamwidth. Comment at either location, as you prefer. Current Mood: lazy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
sartorias	7:23a	Fiction, History, and Time A couple of recent conversations (including a letter conversation with mrissa about history and social customs)plus some interesting links made me think about exploring the connection between history and fiction beginning with time. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
redbird	7:46a	Congratulations! papersky's wonderful Among Others has won the Nebula. Yay, Jo! Cross-posted from Dreamwidth (http://redbird.dreamwidth.org/1337064.html), where there are comments. I welcome comments here or there (OpenID and "anonymous" are fine if you don't have a DW account). Current Mood: pleased (1 Comment |Comment on this)
steepholm	10:27a	Simulacra and Simulation We are all familiar with this picture of President Obama and his close friends watching the crucial Champions League penalty shootout. Everyone is tense, but note particularly the strain on the face of Hillary Clinton, a lifelong Bayern Munich fan, as Didier Drogba strides up to take the decisive kick. I couldn't help but be reminded of it this morning, when I came across this picture taken at the time of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. There's Obama again, his mouth neutrally agape, while beside him Ordinary Dave punches the air as the leader of al-Qaeda is "taken down". Angela Merkel, meanwhile, grips the back of a chair, betraying her nervousness that the invasion of another country's sovereign territory to carry out an extra-judicial murder might just possibly breach some law or other. I don't say that two pictures constitute a genre. But I do suspect that Gil Scott-Heron and Baudrillard both had a point. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
gerisullivan	12:03a	In honor.... Color me joyful -- Among Others by Jo Walton received this year's Nebula Award for Novel. In honor, and because I simply can't think of anything else to do with all this emotion while putting the finishing touches on a layout that needs my attention tonight, I'm listening to Janis Ian's Welcome Home. Congratulations, Jo! Current Mood: leading with my heart (1 Comment |Comment on this)
papersky	4:01a	I won! I won the Nebula! Wow. Very tired now. (Wow. That was unexpected.) (169 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
alecaustin	8:39p	Congratulations! ...to papersky, for her well deserved Nebula Award win for Among Others. Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
elisem	9:21p	WOOOOOO! Congratulations on your Nebula win, Jo! *dances the happy happy dance, throwing sparkles around, and waving at papersky* (3 Comments |Comment on this)
gerisullivan	9:21p	Congratulations to... ...Gavriella Levy Haskell, 2012 winner of the Emogene Mahony Memorial Prize for the best essay on a literary subject written by a first-year student! It was one of 16 prizes awarded by the English department at Smith's Ivy Day Awards Convocation. Gavi's paper was on Peter Mark Roget, of Roget's Thesaurus. I enjoyed her enthusiasm when she told me about the paper back in April, a few days after she finished it. I look forward to reading it soon. Emogene Mahony received her Bachelor of Arts from Smith in 1900. Thanks to Google, I found various past winners of the award, including a 1957 newspaper article mentioning that year's winner. The only other things I've learned about Emogene is that she was an Associate on staff at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome in 1907-1908, was listed in the Woman's Who's Who in 1914, and that her name also graces a Smith Music Prize for proficiency at the organ. Oh, and she lived in Scarborough on Hudson, NY, in 1916-1917. (I love living in the future.) A directory from the American School of Classical Studies that dates from the mid-1930s or later states Emogene died January 15, 1925. :-( I love learning even these small tidbits about a woman I'd never heard of before today. Smith awarded more than 100 prizes today, most of them named for (and presumably funded by the gifts of) Smith alumnae. 'Twas a good day. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
mrissa	6:12p	Notes on dinner So if you decide to use large tomatoes instead of ramekins or dinner rolls as implements for holding raw eggs to bake them in a moderate oven, it'll work just fine, but the acidity of the tomato will interact with the egg and increase the needed baking time to about 40, 45 minutes for a moderately firm yolk. I salted the inside of the tomato lightly and lined it heavily with basil before cracking the egg into it, and then I stuck a thin slice of baguette over top and put a little cheese on that. I'll use more specifically chosen bread (likely Swedish rye) and cheese next time, but I didn't want to go to the store for this experiment, so I used the bit ends of what we had, and it turned out fine once we figured out about the acidity. Pretty tasty, worth remembering. And now you know, and knowing is, if not half the battle, at least some appreciable fraction. The book I'm reading right now seems to think that the rest is breeding the right horses, but since it's regarding 1812, I'm not sure it's universally applicable. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
flemmings	7:01p	Thoughts on 'Minority Council' Oh yes, the Matthew Swift books drive me up a wall. They drive me so up a wall that the minute I finished 'Neon Court' I trekked on over to Bakka-Phoenix prepared to shell out $20 plus for vol 4, and was delighted to find it available mass market paperback, light in the backpack and less than $10. But they still drive me up a wall. Pleasantly, unlike Ackroyd and Mieville, the other two Londoners on the go, but still. Wall. Vertical direction. Towards ceiling. 'Oh my God why am I reading this who's gonna get cut/ shot/ burned/ killed in unspeakable ways this time?' Violence is so not my thing. ( List of arghities that go with the Swift territory ) And an oddity that may not just be Swift. 'He was sat on the bed, reading a book.' This pattern occurs over and over. What happened to 'he was sitting'? (6 Comments |Comment on this)

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