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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sonia |
Sat 2026-01-17 10:44 |
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Link: Require a passcode for your iPhone/iPad How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad by John Gruber. Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, “Hard-lock my iPhone”. |
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Weekly proof of life: mainly media again I finished Chuck Wendig's Wanderers (which according to the acknowledgements clocks in around 800 pages in hard copy) and wound up in that all-too-familiar place of "that was interesting, but I don't think I'm going to bother with the sequel". (Although by definition, I imagine the sequel must be telling a very different kind of story.) No idea why it is that I can often tell only partway through a book that I probably won't pick up its sequel and yet still want to finish the current one.
I also just read Inside Threat, the sixth of K.B. Spangler's Rachel Peng [see icon] novels. There's one more planned, and then that's it for this novel series; I think she's still intending to write a third Hope Blackwell novel (some of the events of that probably-someday book directly influenced what happened in this one, but the whole 'verse is a very twisty pretzel in terms of chronological vs. publication order). And this reminds me--I don't think I ever mentioned here that Act III of the A Girl and Her Fed comic, the core of the whole thing, wrapped up a few months ago, ending the series. (IIRC, Spangler does have ideas that could eventually turn into a fourth act of the webcomic, but has no current plans to pursue doing it. It sounds like AGAHF and the associated works understandably got harder and more exhausting to do over the last decade as the real-world US political situation got worse and worse and worse.) There isn't a whole lot I can say about a sixth novel in a series, but Spangler's descriptions of the series when she's doing promo on Bluesky always entertain me. Yesterday she posted "It's book launch week! Spend the weekend catching up with my bargain basement cyborg hivemind. Murder, mystery, and a detective who just wants to be left alone with her poetry and bad romance novels"; here's her "what's this series about?" Bluesky thread from a few days ago. So once again: highly recommended, and it's entirely possible to just read this set of novels without reading/knowing the comic. It means not knowing a lot of things about the world overall, but they're things that Rachel herself doesn't know at this point (and doesn't learn about until Act II of the comic, which starts after her books have wrapped up). I enjoy the comic and other material very much, but the Rachel books are by far my favorite.
And that bit got long, so just quickly: --I'm a few more chapters into Braiding Sweetgrass and haven't picked up a next novel yet. -- scruloose and I are current on the new season of The Pitt and four episodes into Pluribus, and just watched the season 2 premiere of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. (Now to just hope this season covers past vol. 10 of the manga, since after we finished season 1 in 2024, I read volumes 7-10 before deciding to stop reading ahead and stick with the anime. It'd be nice to get at least a bit of new-to-me material this season, given that. Anyone know offhand how many episodes S2 will be?) --And I've technically started a new (!) video game, in the form of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (on Switch), but am not very far at all yet.
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Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
 U.S.S. Athena
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Episode 1 |
(Spoiler-free Commentary) The premiere episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available for free viewing (for I don’t know how long) at YouTube. I made time to watch it last night. I had been hopeful for a good showing, and I was not disappointed. I’ve always loved Holly Hunter (since Broadcast News... and, yay! The Incredibles!) and want her to be a big success here. Also, I’m a fervent Trekkie – from way back to the actual broadcast years of the original series in the 1960s. In the episode, Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti were fabulous, as expected. The cadets were the expected variety of races, temperaments, maturity, composure, and intelligence; they have room to grow. (One odd thought... if you take the academy’s chancellor and most? all? of the academy’s recruits into space... wouldn’t losing them all at once be catastrophic for the academy? I guess we’d better hope that only a small percentage of cadets are on the Athena at any one time. Dunno.) I don’t have the time nor the budget to subscribe to Paramount+, so I won’t see the remainder of season one until much later. But I’ll continue to monitor reviews. There are always lots of review articles online. I did follow review articles of Foundation and Murderbot when I was watching those series. There are plenty of Starfleet Academy reviews online currently. There was one article I enjoyed: I Love That Holly Hunter Can’t Sit in a Chair Normally on ‘Starfleet Academy’ at Gizmodo. And I too love that about Captain Ake. What was really interesting was the comments section of the article. Apparently a large number of Trekkies really dislike the new show. Reading their complaints was interesting. I hope the producers of the series ignore that feedback and simply continue on their chosen path. On the other hand, a couple of comments did resonate with me. I LOVED her doing all that! I'm 5'2" myself and while I don't often get the chance to be in chairs like her character's, I could see myself doing that on occasion. I almost certainly did as a kid. As for those having a "problem" with this show, I am a long-time Trek fan, having started watching as a kid right after it went into syndication in the 1970s (I'm just one year older than the franchise), and I love every iteration. Are they all perfect? No. Do some of them challenge Roddenberry's vision? Of course. Are they woke? You better believe it, from day one 60 years ago! But they never stray so far that you can't recognize the ultimate message: We can be better. We can do our best to be kind, understanding, tolerant, collaborative and uplifting. If you don't like that, fine; don't watch. But don't tell me Starfleet Academy is not Trek, because it very, very much is, and it proved that in the first two episodes right off the bat. –– MartinCand: I liked her character, immensely. And look – I’m 70, and I know they’re targeting a generation that’s several removed from me, but it’s still Trek … and I love it.
And I’ve got to say … when they brought the Athena (god, what a gorgeous starship) down to San Francisco, with Rufus Wainwright singing “you’d better wear some flowers in your hair,” it was practically a religious moment for me. I feel sorry for anyone who can’t share that joy. –– ZaphodHaters probably didn’t like Lower Decks or Prodigy or Strange New Worlds either. Well, let them sulk elsewhere. I like all flavors of Trek. (Admittedly, I have some reservations about Enterprise.) Haters include non-Trekkie White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. SMH. Let Miller know that Star Trek has been “woke” for 60 years. |
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Media Roundup: Sequential Art Here’s another Media Roundup after not months and months! Hopefully I’ll be reading and watching things other than fic a bit more often and thus post these media roundups more often than I was.
I seem to have gotten into the habit of reading a lot of graphic novels in December and January. I currently have a big pile out from the library – and I’ve read a few of them, and hopefully will get around to even more of the pile.
Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology by Angela Hsieh— A very charming graphic novel about two girls on an adventure. Featuring charming art and very cute geo fauna! (As a Mandarin learner I did find the almost but not quite hanzi characters a little bit frustrating)
The Pale Queenby Ethan M. Aldridge—Another YA graphic novel, this one featuring an f/f romance. I really liked the fae in this book – they were a good mix of beautiful and scary. The art is also lovely!
Crush of Music— I’m still watching this very slowly, the subtitles have mostly been better for the last few episodes –so that’s nice. I’m enjoying seeing Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen interact in this – at one point they played the kazoo together!
Various Batman ect comic—So I mentioned in my 2025 media review post that I accidentally acquired a new fandom, that fandom is batfam. This is embarrassing for me because for years I've been prone to what R calls “the Batman rant” where I complain that punching people in the face is a dumb way to reduce crime rates. Plus I just feel like superhero comics are a space that's pretty hostile to me and my values. But apparently if you give me fic about a family of 3-8 adopted siblings finding each other/bonding and don't make me think too hard about the moral foundations of the universe then I'm willing to suspend my moral disbelief.
Anyways I got sucked in enough to be curious about the source material and have been reading stuff on hoopla. I'm fairly impressed with their comic reading interface too, it has a nice flow. (It doesn’t play well with my RSI issues but then neither does turning pages) The actual stories vary in quality, but some of them are surprisingly good. Even the not very good ones are surprisingly more-ish. I’m bringing a lot of emotional investment in these characters from my fic reading which also helps make the comics more engaging.
The Cross-Dressed Union—I thought that if my media theme at the moment is comfort that I should really start a new crossdressing girl drama since that's a big comfort trope of mine, So I asked around for recs and started this drama about an arranged marriage between a crossdressing woman and crossdressing man. It sounded fun but so far I’m pretty meh about it. I think my biggest problem is that the ML is the main character, and for these kinds of stories I prefer more focus on the FL. Also it's not doing enough with gender |
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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #9: Tropes Are Tools It's time for another ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png) snowflake_challenge, and this one is geared more toward those of us who like to talk about the building blocks, the character types, and the storytelling pathways that link and underlie any given specific story being told. Challenge #9
Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
( Discard the momomyth and understand that Tropes Are Tools )
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| maju |
Sat 2026-01-17 12:55 |
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My daughter and the girls have gone to visit a friend who lives an hour or so away, west of us and therefore closer to NYC. Just as they were leaving it started to snow lightly and as time passes the snow is getting heavier. Presumably the snow ploughs will be out and they won't have any trouble getting home again.
Yesterday I actually sat down and started getting the edge pieces of the puzzle in place, and I'm going to work on the puzzle some more this afternoon while it's quiet. My motivation for getting started was that my youngest daughter gave me this puzzle for Christmas and I don't want her thinking I'm not going to do it. |
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The Happenstancers at 21C |
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The Friday Five on a Saturday - If you could change one life-changing event in the life of someone important to you, would you?
I know there's a philosophy that experiences make you who you are and you shouldn't wish them away, but I have a few friends who have been through what I feel is a disproportionate and unfair amount of tragedy in their lives. Partner suicide, early death of parents, sudden loss of physical health, financial hardship, homelessness. I don't think any one person should have to go through all of those before the age of thirty. And yet. Here we are. So yes, I absolutely would change that for certain people if I could.
- Which do you think is easier to do, being friends for many years, or being life partners for many years?
Uh, neither? Both take work! You have to listen and try to empathise and forgive and communicate. All relationships require effort, and if they don't, someone is being used.
- Have you ever walked away from someone you considered a friend?
Yes. It's not very pleasant. But occasionally necessary for the sake of self-preservation.
- If you had to choose between telling the truth and hurting a friend or lying and making them happy, which would you choose?
Barring a handful of exceptional circumstances, most of which involve an immediate threat to life, lying and making them happy. Life is difficult enough without intentionally causing pain.
- Which would you rather hear--the truth which will hurt, or the comforting lie?
The comforting lie, if it comes to that. I'd hope it wouldn't, most of the time. I'd like to believe that truths can be delivered kindly, most of the time.
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Today I Learned Orson Scott Card has a substack. |
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Books Received, January 10 to January 16  Three works new to me, all from various TTRPG Kickstarters. 2026 feels kind of light on upcoming books. Books Received, January 10 to January 16 Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13 Which of these look interesting?
View AnswersInvincible – Superhero Roleplaying (Alpha) by Adam Bradford & Tomas Härenstam (July 2026)
6 (46.2%) Fabula Ultima Bestiary by Emanuele Galletto (May 2026)
3 (23.1%) Arkand: City of Wave and Flames by Johan Sjöberg (April 2026)
3 (23.1%) Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%) Cats!
11 (84.6%) |
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Random Doctor Who Picture
Ah! The BBC Foam machine. For a brief period, it figured prominently in Doctor Who.
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How Are You? (in Haiku) Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku.
=
Signal-boosting much appreciated! |
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Saturday, 17 January 2026
: the Stoat Distribution of the Day.
Day 4513. There are 341 red stoats, 175 blue stoats, and 484 green stoats. |
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I'm at Arisia, yay! My brain has been kindof a mess lately, and I subsequently overpacked (which is fine, it means I have lots of nice clothing options) and then spent the entire trip to the con cussing because my bag situation was annoying (it being entirely my own making didn't make it less annoying). But! I am at the con, and after a brief initial interlude in the room getting prettified, I was able to pretty well relax into it. It helps that I started with a completely stunning outfit that bewitched the youth! (Seriously, I looked great and got a lot of nice comments from everyone, but there were a distinctly higher-than-normal number of teenagers looking at me with stars in their eyes, which felt good. I like being proof that you can be weird and wild and everything you were dreaming of when you were young. (I know because I would've looked at myself with stars in my eyes, and that's a good thing to remind myself of sometimes). I wore the outfit to the Bridgerton Ball, which had rather more dancing than last year (which is to say, any). Antonia was calling, and among other people, Clara was playing. It was a pretty nice time! Speaking of teenagers with stars in their eyes, I danced with two separate people who I'd guess to be in their early to mid twenties, both of who seemed super excited and happy to dance with me. Felt good! After, I did a bit of lobbyconning --I apparently haven't quite figured out what my angle on how to have charming semi-small talk with people I haven't seen in ages-- I ate some snax and had a bit of room quiet time. I've arranged with mom to volunteer some for Goat Check, which I'm actually looking forward to --I won't actually do any grading, but I like the idea of pretending to. I hope you have nice plans for your weekend. I'll try to keep updated with pictures and things. Under the cut are a few for tonight! ( honestly it's mostly just photos of me looking cute )Goodnight! ~Sor MOOP! |
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NGC 7023: The Iris Nebula |
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| sonia |
Fri 2026-01-16 20:56 |
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Questioning assumptions, bicyclist edition I'm training for a 100K bike ride in April, so I'm going out on long hilly rides on the weekends. The weather has been delightfully sunny and warm (if a bit odd for January), and they've mostly been great rides.
However, people seem to assume they need to cheer me on. Maybe because I'm a woman, or because I'm not skinny, or because I climb hills slowly, but I do get there.
Half way up Spruce St., a woman waiting to pull out from a side street in her car gives me two big thumbs up as I approached. I smiled and kept biking. That would have been fine. But she rolls down the window and says, "You can do it!" I said, "This is only the thousandth time I've climbed this hill." She was smiling and nodding, and then her face fell as I said "thousandth," probably because she was assuming I would say, "first." Maybe she won't make as many assumptions next time.
Then, getting close to the top, a couple of guys pass me on mountain bikes and one of them says, "Good job!" I said, "You too!" After all, we had both climbed the same hill to the same point. He looked surprised, because young men get to congratulate middle-aged women, but not the other way around.
Yesterday I biked up the hill, down the far side, and then back up. At the corner of Grizzly Peak and Claremont (the beginning of the steep fast descent out of the hills), there is often a Mexican produce stand, and I like to stop there for fruit, even if it tends to end up bruised on the ride down. This time I bought pistachios and mandarins, and they did better on the descent.
When I rode up, there was an older white dude arguing about his total in Spanish with the young Mexican woman staffing the stand. They started over counting it all up and it turns out she was right (surprising me not at all). He said something about buying fruit for his friend with the nasty flu, and I said I was keeping my distance then. He said, "I didn't touch him or anything."
He had been over on the seller's side of the table, and now he came around and said, "Nice bike." I thanked him and answered his questions about it. At this point he's touching the handlebars and standing quite close to me, blocking my way forward. I paid the seller and said, "Excuse me please." He said, "Why do you have to be so rude?" I said, "I need to go home." He said, "You're being rude!" I sighed and backed up the bike to get out of there. He said, "Why do you have to be so American?" as I rode away.
Reminds me of the time a guy on a bike stopped me to ask for directions on a dark rainy night in Portland. I'm generally willing to help, but it was a wide, empty street and he stood too close and blocked my way, at which point I similarly said, "Excuse me" and biked around him. He called after me, "Don't go! I need help!" Which he may have, but he wasn't going to get it with threatening body language. He had a European-sounding accent and maybe it was ignorance of American personal space, but I wasn't going to ignore my spidey-sense to find out.
This dude at the fruit stand spoke unaccented English, so I don't know if he's from somewhere with less personal space, but I don't think I was the one being rude. I guess wherever he's from, he gets to touch other people's (women's) stuff and take up as much time as he wants. |
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This year begins with an increase in atrocity and destruction - Early January 02026 Let us begin with an annual roundup of things that had to be removed from rectums, because people make bad decisions about objects without flared bases. Trans women whose culture includes the quinceañera are celebrating the rite of passage for themselves as an important touchstone of their lives. A white suit worn by Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway in a Star Trek: Voyager episode is about as loud a billboard declaring Janeway queer as you could get away with on television at the time. I get to be part of the Lucky 10,000 in understanding that suit and its origins, and so, hopefully, do you. People familiar with the culture and traditions of Hawai'i explain why the live-action Lilo and Stitch disrespects that entire tradition, history, and the original animation's messages as well. The ways that humans have for expressing affection for each other are greater than sex and romance, and many of those acts that WEIRD people would classify as sexual or romantic are instead culturally appropriate expressions of affection. Because there's still not an underlying acceptance of the idea that people can be affectionate to each other without it being sexual, and extra so for people of the same perceived gender. What we think of as local culture and tradition is global culture and tradition. We have just forgotten that things like food migrate and then integrate really well into wherever they land. Which is why you will occasionally have someone yelling that Italians of an era before the tomato migrated out of the Americas are not having marinara sauce with their pasta. The idea that there is only one human culture, and what we have are a bunch of local implementations and place-and-time specific manifestations of it, is really rather true, but because our memories and our records don't always persist over time, we forget that we have already done this before. Repeatedly. Research into autism that has done less assuming the neurotypical is "normal" and the standard continues to find things that are classified as deficits and disorders are often strengths and consistencies, just at a different angle than the neurotypical one.
Claudette Colvin, who was getting arrested for not giving up a bus seat in a segregated South before Rosa Parks became the face of it, has died at 86 years of age. ( Murder most foul, an administration gone rogue, and techbros on the warpath inside )Last for this entry, dressed as the pink ranger from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers / Zyuranger, Martha Root demonstrated how she had gained control of white supremacist websites, had the members talk to chatbots, and then deleted the sites live during the talk. A plea to start posting the snippets of our lives again, rather than trying to figure out what would be the best for the algorithm or withdrawing entirely from posting because we are trying not to chase the unsatisfiable algorithm. I think that will be an easier task on sites where there is no algorithm to game, but the difficulty of getting people to those sites is that they also need to have their friends decamp to a compatible network as well, and that's not necessarily an easy sell, even if someone wants to leave a toxic environment. (And, as has been well-documented in places like the Fediverse, for minorities, it's a question of leaving one toxic platform for another, and evaluating whether or not the controls on the new platform are good enough that they won't get subjected to more harassment getting through their filters or not.) The ways that people are using chatbots as social and erotic companions, even though a fair number of them know they're chatbots. Which is the kind of future the techbros would like - interactions as event flags with characters that aren't human and don't have human needs or changes in mood. And a method that presumably allows you to not have CoPilot or other "AI" features in your Windows 11 install, and sets things up so that they won't reinstall themselves, either. (Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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some links Random link: We Were the Scenery (2025), a 15-minute documentary about the experiences of two of the background extras in Apocalypse Now (1979). It's written and produced by their child. Coincidentally, Piecework magazine's newsletter recently had a link to a short essay on Hmong story cloths and the US NE---same cluster of ruptures, different segment. Aditi Rao's review of Spinney's Proto and Scappettone's Poetry after Barbarism asserts mildly that "both books mobilize language, and the prospect of translingual communication, as their objects of study, with markedly different political ambitions and veneers," but there's so much thought and care amongst the review's remarks that I can't summarize. The review's title is " Against Babel: or, How to Talk to Strangers." |
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