[ SECRET POST #6836 ]

Sep. 23rd, 2025 06:24 pm
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⌈ Secret Post #6836 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 29 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

A little while ago I got Stable cortical body maps before and after amputation via an NIH press release; today it was *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in people with chronic disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis...

... which dovetails neatly with the bits I just got out of The Painful Truth (Monty Lyman) about the bidirectional relationship between insomnia and pain, where each worsens the other but insomnia worsens pain more. (It's bedtime, so I'm not going to pick the book back up to get you those onward references just now.) With n = 5232, and their conditions including "cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke", "CBT-I was associated with significantly improved outcomes" (for insomnia severity, and moderately improved outcomes for sleep efficiency and sleep onset latency).

What'll be next? WHO KNOWS.

lunch with friends of Adrian's

Sep. 23rd, 2025 04:49 pm
One of [personal profile] adrian_turtle's comrades from the hav invited the three of us to have lunch in their yard today, after Rosh Hashanah services. We all had a good time--I hadn't met either R or their partner Peter before, and I liked them both, as did [personal profile] cattitude (as did Adrian, of course). We sat and talked for a couple of hours: the three of us brought a vegetable frittata and an apple cake, both of which Adrian made yesterday; R. and Peter contributed salad, challah, and of course the location. It was the right amount of food for five people; we took home 1/6 of the frittata, and gave them the last slice of cake, since we have more at home.

R and Peter live in Allston, near the Packard's Corner T stop, so not in walking distance, but easy by transit. The conversation wandered, as good conversations will. We were there for a couple of hours, longer than I'd expected, and I didn't notice the time until we got home and I looked at the clock on our stove.

Bold

Sep. 23rd, 2025 04:14 pm

These days, I will often find myself puzzling over, what was that person's name? connected with some Thing in the past. I was actually struggling to recall the name of the very weird woman who was the landlady of the bedsit I inhabited near Mornington Crescent in the very early 70s, with whom there came about Major Draaaama (it eventually popped into my mind, as these things do, a couple of days later when I was thinking about something else: see also, finding that book one is looking for in the process of looking for something entirely different.)

I am not sure if this is AGE or the fallibility of human memory, and is it actually AGE and the wearing out of the little grey cells, or just having That Much More stored in them, so that they resemble one of those storerooms in museums where no-one has catalogued anything for centuries and curators have gone in and nicked stuff to sell on eBay -

- I think this metaphor is going a bit too far, somehow.

And yet one can recall quite readily, in fact one might even say intrusively, an obscure pop song by a not particularly renowned group.

That is, after reading that Reacher novel, The Hard Way, the other week, I found myself being earwormed by The Hard Way, a single put out by The Nashville Teens (who were from Surrey) in 1966 which got to all of 45 in the charts. It's not on iTunes even or in any of the compilation CDs, it's obscure. And yet I remembered it and who it was by.

Maybe it was being repetitively played on one of the pirate stations of my youth?

The title is because every time there's a Rapture predicted, I listen to Astro Zombies. It seems appropriate.

---

As some of you may have noticed from my shrieking on social media yesterday, My Chemical Romance announced tour dates for 2026. The closest they're coming to me is San Diego or L.A., and yes, discussions are being had about which show I should try to purchase tickets for. EXCEPT that I'll have to purchase those tickets later, because they go on sale on Friday, right when I'll be in the office for an all-day meeting. 
:: wails ::

The Stroppy One pointed out that more tickets always become available closer to the concert dates, and while I know he's right, that doesn't sooth the wailing fangirl part of my brain. Stupid work calibration meetings.

---

Yesterday I discovered the clothing company Market of Stars, and specifically this duster. I flailed a lot about in on Bluesky and Tumblr, because my god that is pretty and I already thought of two different outfits I could use it with. To my complete shock, someone who's followed me for years and years sent me the money for it, saying they wanted to spread some kindness. I am shocked but grateful.

---

IG has started showing me a lot of witchy content. Not just the aesthetic IG witches, but people who's approaches are similar to mine. I don't know why the algorithm started doing that, but I prefer it to the hordes of "alt" makeup tutorials done by baby faced, dripping with collagen youngsters. (I found all of them adorable, but found myself muttering "Okay, now show me how to do that with permanent eye bags" a lot.) 

---

As many of you know, my company hosts the all-hands Company Kick-Off event at the beginning of every year in Phoenix AZ, and there's always a costume theme for the first day. The 2026 theme is ... teams. Any way someone wants to interpret that, but of course all the examples were sports-related. But! I came up with a brilliant idea and presented it to my team: we all carry notepads and oversized pencils, and ta-da! We're the writing team. My peeps liked it, so that's what we're doing.

Tigers

Sep. 23rd, 2025 02:21 pm
Someone I kinda, sorta, vaguely know was mauled to death a couple of days ago by one of his own tigers.

Ryan Easley:



Very long-term readers may remember I spent a good chunk of 2009 traveling with the Culpepper/Merriweather Circus, and that's where I met Ryan. He was one of Casey Cainan's proteges and when a painful divorce drove Casey to take himself & his tigers to Saudi Arabia, Ryan stayed on with Kelly Miller.

A very nice guy, Ryan couldn't have been kinder or more dedicated to the comfort of his animals, so if you're a PETA supporter or believe circuses exploit their animals—& I will concede: Some do—put a plug in it for now please. Thanks!

###

I think what it comes down to is the old story about the frog riding across the river on the scorpion's back. The scorpion turns on the frog & stings him to death because such is the scorpion's nature.

Tigers are predators.

You don't actually have to do anything to a tiger to get them to turn on you.

Tigers don't even have to think you're doing something to them to get triggered and turn on you.

Tigers will just turn on you because their innate preying & territorial instincts surface unpredictably.

Thus, tiger-training is a high-risk profession. I doubt very many tiger trainers make it to a ripe old age.

###

In other news, I am just rolling along on that old conveyor belt.

I did manage to clear the afternoon so I could labor a bit on the Work in Progress—Neal & Grazia are now standing in front of the old Sampson Opera House talking about sex—but first I must exercise.

And speaking of sex...

The real-life Daria is back from Switzerland, & I can't tell whether our texts are flirty.

They might be.

We both like gurlZ as much as we like boyZ sexually, and real-life Daria uses seduction kinda the way I use humor. Plus, of course, she's very beautiful.

I want to know everything about you, she texted from Switzerland. You’ve captured my imagination.

Hmmmmm...

I let her read Chapter 1 of the Work in Progress, and of course, that fascinated her—though I did go to great lengths to explain: The character is clearly based on you. But it's not you.

Most of the time, I feel like I am absolutely done with that part of my life (and good riddance!)

But every once in a while...
It's forever since I posted, which is due to a variety of things, quite high among them being tired and returning to work, and also that I prefer to do DW posts on my laptop and this one is reaching the end of its life. Though I have done some more enjoyable things this summer, and am just back from visiting my parents. So with the train delay compensation payment requests submitted, it's time for a post. Books.

To Each His Own, Sciascia. What can I say, other than that I should have read it years ago? This is simply a superb book. The form may be a detective novel, the subject is political, the condemnation sharp, the writing exquisite (I read it in English). A pharmacist in a small Sicilian town receives an anonymous death threat, and is duly murdered. Life continues much as before, except for mild-mannered academic Professor Laurana, a little vain and certainly naive, who finds himself following a lead and slowly drawn into a dangerous situation. I can't recommend it highly enough to people who enjoy a book that is really, really well-written. Especially as it isn't even a challenging ride - part of the beauty of the prose is its straightforwardness. The narrative isn't complicated, but perfectly chosen; it is the situation that is twisted.

Legend of the Condor Heroes, Jin Yong. A wuxia (martial arts society historical fantasy, think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) novel set in the 1200s, this is the first of a trilogy published in the late 1950s and with many, many film and television adaptations since then. Like a lot of genre ur-texts that are basically pulp, it tells a rollicking story in sufficiently competent prose and makes for a fun read, although the translator's choice to translate some names* and not others felt a bit odd. If I tell you that chapter 2 involves a lengthy fight in an inn, it will give those who have watched cdramas a sense of the kind of book this is. Long-lost relatives, treachery, and beautiful chaste women abound. At some point, I'll read the next one.

*Her argument for keeping the title, despite the birds not being condors, is much stronger.

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. I ordered this from the library and was very much looking forward to it after enjoying Some Desperate Glory, but alas, I wasn't impressed. The concept of a magical boarding school story from the perspective of the teachers is great, but unfortunately I found this deeply unconvincing: thinly plotted, didactic, a trifle smug, and the worldbuilding doesn't hold up at all. Paired with Some Desperate Glory, I can see that Tesh feels passionately about education, but you need more than that to make a good novel, especially given the aforementioned worldbuilding, which fails specifically in terms of secondary/tertiary ed. You can have learning magic at school being basically socially irrelevant like Classics, so it doesn't matter that it is only taught in very expensive private schools and the entire rest of the population is shut out except for a few who have to learn it for public safety, or you can have magic be something that military R&D are passionately interested in and every shop needs to pay for magical wards for safety, but you can't have both. In the world she sets up, in every respect except "this school is unjustifiable and of course the protagonist is appropriately aware but it is also old and special and lovely", there is no way that several Scottish universities and the redbricks wouldn't have been teaching sorcery ab initio since the 1920s at the latest and the government funding it. Also, if you are telling me that the teacher cares, she really cares, and is a sensible, competent professional woman, then why the hell is she repeatedly behaving like Harry Potter and his progenitors going off to investigate things without telling anyone? I could go on (the caretaker!), but I'll spare you.

Idlewild, James Frankie Thomas. A fandom osmosis read, except it turned out to be a misosmosis. I was under the impression that it was about intense Theater Kids (US spelling for what seems to be a US phenomenon) at New England private university level possibly murdering one another, i.e. a bit of a The Secret History rip off. It is not. It does feature sort of Theater Kids, but at an expensive New York private high school. Unfortunately, fairly contemporary US private high schools are about the last setting that I am interested in reading a novel so this book started out as not really my kind of thing and remained so. But, I did read it, and I did think it was a good book. There is no murder, but there are a couple of very intense queer teenagers in a very intense friendship at a Quaker-ethos school that I thought was rather well depicted as supposed to be offering something different because it was a Quaker-ethos school, but that actually was failing its pupils in a highly conventional manner*, and US 2003 setting that seems well-drawn but that, obviously, I didn't personally relate to. Mostly what I admired was the novelist actually having something to say and saying it in a book about queer and trans experience, in a particular time and place, and accepting that something with any depth is inherently not going to speak to everybody's experience, and Thomas doesn't waste his or the reader's time hesitating to commit to his story and characters. It didn't speak to me personally - much though I enjoyed the recognisable early 2000s LJ milieu - but what does that matter? It spoke to other people, and it made an effort to be something.

*I found myself wondering whether Fay would have been better off at a standard school that would haved force all pupils through the hoops to higher education and its potential for self-discovery, or whether that would have been even more destructive.

WHY

Sep. 23rd, 2025 12:12 pm
would my Framework charge if plugged into one outlet but not another? I tested the outlet from which it did not charge and it works for other devices.

[Update]

I shut it down for an hour and everything works again.


Oh, the joys (and perils) of visiting unfamiliar places and times...

Adventures in Tourism: Five SFF Stories About Travel

Funny thing about this singer

Sep. 23rd, 2025 09:11 am
Youtube pushed a song from this source at me.

I don't think they exist. There are no non-generated images of the singer and their pace of output is suspicious. And their FB bio references ai.

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

Sep. 23rd, 2025 08:56 am


Oxford sends its best to study World War Two in this (grinds teeth) Hugo-winning tale of sound and fury.

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

all the first days at once

Sep. 22nd, 2025 07:54 pm
It's Erev Rosh Hashanah (for the year 5786 A.M.), the equinox and thus the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere, and Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, all on the same day. What bliss!

[ SECRET POST #6835 ]

Sep. 22nd, 2025 06:33 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6835 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #976.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

the world carries on

Sep. 22nd, 2025 03:22 pm
I Am An AI Hater: "I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you're pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn't read it anyway. You'd ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider."

How to not build the Torment Nexus: "I guess what I'm saying is that it's getting close to impossible to be in this industry -- at the moment -- without being on the Torment Nexus Team. And lest you think 'at the moment' is load-bearing... well, I wouldn't lean too hard on it. I don't see shit improving too soon."

How to Tell the Difference Between a Lone Wolf and a Coordinated Effort by the Radical Left: McSweeney's, no humour beyond the obvious repeated dark variety, plenty of links and documentation.

And, not about the present and thus more cheerful reading, Your Review: Joan of Arc: "This is, then, an agnostic's review of the evidence for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person." Fascinating reading.

Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard

Sep. 22nd, 2025 01:57 pm


The SHADOW OF THE WEIRD WIZARD corebooks, supplements, and adventures.

Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!

Sep. 22nd, 2025 06:14 pm

Though probably African frogs do not say that (the chorus from Aristophanes' The Frogs).

Anyway, this was of considerable interest to me having had to do with archives relating to these here amphibians (in which they were described as 'toads'):

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years

and also read the ms of a work by A Friend on the history of pregnancy testing in which they played a significant role.

They replaced the rabbit test ('did the rabbit die' - the rabbit had to die, actually, in order to examine its ovaries) as this was a non-lethal test and kept producing yet more frogs.

And there was quite an issue of what to do with the little blighters once chemical testing became the norm - as I recall attempts to dispose of them as pets.

Also

The frog is genetically surprisingly similar to humans, which means that scientists can model human disease in this amphibian and replace the use of higher sentient species.

Do we not feel that this is the beginning of some Golden Age sf/horror work? FROGMAN.

Clarke Award Finalists 201

Sep. 22nd, 2025 09:52 am
2015: Five Britons sign for the doomed Mars One venture, the UK pays off its WWI War Loans, and the Liberal Democrats’ adroit political maneuvering yields memorable electoral returns.

Poll #33648 Clarke Award Finalists 2015
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35


Which 2015 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
22 (62.9%)

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
7 (20.0%)

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
6 (17.1%)

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
4 (11.4%)

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
15 (42.9%)

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
17 (48.6%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2015 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
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