I know it's spring

Sep. 7th, 2025 11:20 am
mab_browne: Blooper still The Sentinel showing Blair kissing Jim (JBSurvivalKiss)
[personal profile] mab_browne
I know it's spring because there are lambs in the paddocks, and I finally admitted to myself that I should sign up for a members' card at my local garden centre.

Watching "Kpopped" on Apple TV.

Sep. 5th, 2025 02:49 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

Yesterday I started watching Kpopped, the new song competition show that blends K-pop and Western artists. I watched the first two episodes last night, and I'm really enjoying it. I think the format is really great — everyone has fun because the stakes are so low. Each episode follows the same format:

  1. A K-pop group is split in half.
  2. Each half of the group works with a Western artist to create and perform a "K-popified" version of one of that artist's songs.
  3. The in-studio audience votes on the winning group.
  4. Immediately after the winning group is announced, the two halves of the K-pop group are reunited to perform one of the group's songs along with the Western artists.

There are no penalties for losing, no prizes for winning. Just performance and comradery between musicians.

The two episodes I've watched so far are:

  1. Half of Billlie performs "Savage" with Megan Thee Stallion, the other half performs "Lady Marmalade" with Patti LaBelle.
  2. Both halves of Itzy perform with Emma Bunton and Mel B from the Spice Girls. One group performs "Wannabe" and the other performs "Be As One."

A recurring theme is the Western artists having trouble learning the K-pop choreography. (Except for Patti LaBelle — out of respect for her age, they had her stay still and everyone danced around her.)

About riding a pegasus

Sep. 5th, 2025 01:47 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I'm currently reading Dragons of the Autumn Twilight[^1] by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and it's given me a question about riding pegasi. I had always pictured pegasus riders as sitting behind the wings, probably leaning forward and holding on the bases of the wings. But in chapter 12, when the characters have to ride pegasi, Weis and Hickman explicitly describe them as "sitting in front of the powerful wings." This seems to make sense, because it would put the riders in front of the flapping of the wings (and the powerful gusts of wind that the wings would create), but at the same time it seems problematic from a point of view of equine anatomy, because it doesn't seem like there would be room for a rider to be in front of the wings. And as I write this post, I find myself wondering if there's really something here, or if I've just been struck by an oddly chosen word that the authors wrote and then never looked back at.[^2]

When you think about humanoids riding on pegasi, where do you imagine them relative to the wings?

[^1] I missed reading the Dragonlance books back when they were new, but I was recently able to grab a huge mob of them as ebooks from Humble Bundle and I'm enjoying them. It's brutally obvious (at least in the first book, which this is) that they're the result of someone recording their D&D campaign as a novel, but they're still fun to read. [^2] It doesn't help matters that the pegasi use magical/psychic powers to put the characters to sleep as soon as they take off, in order to keep them from freaking out during the course of the ride.[^3] [^3] Which then opens up the question of how unconscious humanoids stay on the pegasi's backs. Do the pegasi have magic for that as well?

New Worlds: Supply Lines

Sep. 5th, 2025 05:10 pm
swan_tower: (Default)
[personal profile] swan_tower
My New Worlds patrons having voted for a set of military topics this month, we're taking a look at the logistical side of warfare! Not to the depth that an officer or military historian would study it, of course, but we can at least manage a top-level overview of how worldbuilding factors shape the way armies get fed. Comment over there!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/aUYkJO)

Laundry room

Sep. 4th, 2025 03:32 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
One of the things I have been doing with myself in the last three months is watching videos in an online interior design course, mostly because various things about the house bother me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's not mean to be a pro-level course, and there's various things I already know, but it's helped me figure out one room so far, by forcing me to slow down and first think about who uses the room, what for and how it's used.

It's the laundry room. One would think, "Laundry, duh." But it's also circulation space, because it connects the house to the garage which is the door we use 99% of the time, and it's also storage space. And I would like it to be hang-dry space as well, because the other options for hanging clothes to dry are untenable for various reasons:

1) the first and foremost is my ADHD. The more steps I have to do, the less likely it is to get done. Get out the drying rack, take it somewhere in the house or back porch, set it up, hang clothes, check if they're dry, collect them, bring them in, break down the drying rack, and put it back where it's stored? OH HELL NO.

2) drying outside also makes the clothes smell like the outside and I've never had problems with this before, but both [personal profile] myrialux and I concur that the outdoors smell we get on clothes here is not appealing. Plus, we live in POLLEN CENTRAL and would like to not be allergic to our clothes.

3) the best place to dry inside is the spare room/gym and if clothes are hanging there that I need to move before working out, I won't work out (ADHD again). The spare bath is taken up by the litterbox, and the main bath is back to issue #1, with the added problem of fitting the drying rack in the tub. Any other room gets HUMID and GROSS.

So! I have a PLAN for the laundry room, once we get the $$$ saved up. Steps:

1) hire our neighborhood appliance handyman company to stack the washer and dryer on one side of the TINY room and swap the dryer door to open on the same side as the washer.

2) measure the back wall, to allow for power and water outlets and the dryer vent in the next step, which is...

3) install simple shelving of the rails-screwed-into-studs with shelves on them type, adroitly avoiding the outlets and vents above, as well as pegboard on part of it, to allow for...

4) the wall-mounted drying racks that will require a bit of space to extend/fold out. And then finally...

5) a closet rod installed across the room for clothing that can be put on hangers and hung.

SIMPLY RENDERED PEECTURES BELOW THE CUT...
you know you want to know more about my laundry room )

*snore*

Sep. 4th, 2025 02:56 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
It's been a mildly eventful few weeks, mostly because I ended up with a cold for a week and a half. Other than that, nothing too hairy happening.

I did get baby's first AO3 scam comment! It enthused over my story, especially the way I brought the world and the characters to life, making it real and immersive, pulling the reader in. And, of course, sparked creative ideas of their own and they wanted me to talk to them on Telegram or whatnot, presumably to try to scam me out of money for fanart that'll never arrive. Blocked, deleted, reported.

This, uh, is the work that they loved so much. You can see the GLARING PROBLEM with the bot's comment about my...story. XD
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

When I read about the Ndlovu Youth Choir translating "Bohemian Rhapsody" into Zulu, of course I had to go check it out right away. I was absolutely blown away. Listening to the song is amazing, but then watching the video is just a whole other level. It's like a song that doesn't even belong in our universe somehow crossed over from its home to show us an alternate world we could have.

Direct link to Youtube (in case the embedding goes bad) is here

Two poems!

Sep. 3rd, 2025 04:07 pm
swan_tower: (*writing)
[personal profile] swan_tower
I have not one but two new poems out this week! Putting me up to double digits in the number of poems I've had published so far, whee.

The first is in Merganser Magazine: "Hallucination," about AI, linguistics, and the wish for a better world.

The second, "Cutting the Cord" in Small Wonders, is probably the closest to straight-up science fiction I've ever written? It's got aliens and a space elevator in it, anyway.

Both are free to read online, so enjoy!

QOTD: On the 1950s

Sep. 3rd, 2025 10:56 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

"Much of the Fifties existed in order to edit out of history the freedoms of wartime: a renewed McCarthyite puritanism drove homosexuality further underground with the inevitable psychic consequences. By the mid-to-late Sixties, there were all sorts of exposé! books, but not then: just a few coded, discreet novels (like James Barr's Quatrefoil), which would usually end in suicide or death."

Jon Savage (quoted in Loaded, by Dylan Jones)

Books read, September 2025

Sep. 3rd, 2025 08:13 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian
  • 3 September
    • Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 26 (Tomohito Oda)
  • 6 September
    • I'm in Love with the Villainess (manga), vol. 5 (Inori)

Disgruntlement

Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:45 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I received an email tonight saying I had a comment on one of my fics, which is a rare enough event that I got extremely excited. Then I read the comment. The first sentence sent my heart soaring:

The way you write is cinematic.

Then I read the remainder of the comment:

I only do paid comic work, and I think we could create something amazing. Let’s chat on Insta: [REDACTED]

So I reported them to AO3 (this sort of commercial solicitation violates the site's TOS) and I'm going back to writing.

(Also, just out of curiosity, I went to their Instagram. Even if I was interested in hiring someone to make a comic based on my fic, it wouldn't be them — their work was sub-mediocre at best!) ^^

AKICIDW: Camera lenses

Sep. 2nd, 2025 03:38 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I imagine that a web search could turn up the answer for this (or at least it could have, before AI ruined web search), but I feel like one on you could probably explain it to me better, and you might even enjoy imparting your knowledge to someone, so I'm asking the question here.

This morning I was reading the interview with Chow Yun-fat in the Giant Robot 30-year celebration book, and I was hoping one of you could explain what he's saying here about the difference in space and cameras between Hollywood and Hong Kong films:

In the Hollywood studios, you have more room, more space, I mean for the dimension for the camera, for the screen. But in Hong Kong, our buildings, our rooms are narrow, so we must use a lot of action or movement because the depth is not enough to expand the whole images in the picture. So we must use a lot of movement. Also, we must use a lot of wide-angle lenses to enlarge the environment, the space. So every time you see actors in the movie we look wider, fatter because the lens can make the people like that [puffs up his cheeks for emphasis]. Usually here [in Hollywood] we are using 50mm lenses for the close-up or 85mm lens. But in Hong Kong we use 35mm or 28mm, because the depth is not enough.

I'm not understanding the relationship between size of the lens and depth of the picture (and TBH I'm not entirely clear on what he means by depth of the picture). I thought the different sizes of lenses were for different distances between the camera and the subject, but apparently there's more to it than that? (Or else I'm entirely wrong about that?)

swan_tower: (Default)
[personal profile] swan_tower
Years ago, I formed the idea of making novella-sized short story collections organized around particular subgenres. Sorting through the stories I had at that point, I determined that there should be six of these (or, well, seven, but one of those I set aside for a slightly different plan; it turned into Driftwood).

Today, the last of those six is finally published at Book View Cafe!

cover art for A SONGBOOK OF SPARKS, showing a twist of golden sparks against a black background

I was able to publish Maps to Nowhere and Ars Historica almost immediately; it took a little longer to do Down a Street That Wasn't There and to decide that, really, I wasn't going to write any more short stories set in The Nine Lands, so I could go ahead and publish that one. Because I became determined to balance out the regions featured in A Breviary of Fire, the fifth of the set came out only last year. And then secondary world fantasy lapped the pack with The Atlas of Anywhere a few months ago.

But it took a while to complete the sixth of the original set, A Songbook of Sparks, because its requirements were very particular. As the cover and title suggest, this is a follow-up of sorts to A Breviary of Fire (as Atlas is to Maps), likewise consisting of stories drawn from traditional folklore -- but in this case, it's specifically folksongs. Ballads and the like. And after a spate of writing those while I was in graduate school, I just kinda . . . stopped. Without having quite enough material to cross my minimum threshold for making one of these books. So it's only quite recently that I wrote and published the last story needed to complete this set!

But now it is done, and out in the world: you may buy it in ebook or print, as you prefer. Within you'll find nine stories, one unpublished poem that mashes up sources half a world apart, and -- a bonus specific to this collection -- the lyrics of the traditional songs that inspired the stories. Enjoy!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/GqaT2h)

Labour Day 2025, After the Fact

Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:11 am
dewline: Text: Workers' Rights Don't Start or End With Labour Day (labour day)
[personal profile] dewline
It was quiet for me, even allowing for my visit with my mother. Busy, yes, and also quiet.

Back to the job-search grind for me today, of course. Yes, I see the push to RTO continue in spite of good medical, fiscal and ecological sense.

A Tradition

Sep. 1st, 2025 08:54 pm
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
Autumn Day
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell


Lord, it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine:
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one
whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
and wander on the boulevards up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

* * * * * *

What is it that brings me back to this poem every year, other than the wish to offer some sort of honour to the world in its cycles? (And to poetry.)

Rilke was intolerably self-indulgent in a number of ways, but nobody ever wrote the pure grief of existence so well. I suppose I mean that he was probably depressed and so am I.

Here's what I like: that the opening address is to the creator, and is either an acknowledgement and submission, or a gentle reminder, or both.

I like -- and I don't know where or with whom this device originates, but it is beloved of many modern poets, including me (the psalms? does it come from the psalms?) -- the way the speaker exhorts everything to do what it would do anyway. His will is irrelevant to the vine and the wind, but that makes his instructions a kind of radical acceptance -- I enter so completely into the wish for things to be exactly as they are, as they are intended to be, even as they wound me with their beauty and their ephemerality, that my will becomes identical with their actions.

And the turn of course, between the radiant second stanza and the stark third; from the fruit as almost heroes of the journey into wine, to the "whoever" who seems to have no place in harvest or celebration, but is already among the dry leaves.

It is, as they say, me: "whoever" is me. I wish I wrote long letters. Rilke's journals and letters are extraordinary. I wish I had some consolation for you now other than the world, but so far as I can see there never was any consolation other than the world.

§rf§
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