Scottish railways

2025-10-30 18:06[personal profile] mtbc
mtbc: maze K (white-green)
A joy of commuting by train is seeing the Scottish Gaelic station names. My journey is from Sràid na Banrighinn to Waverley Dhùn Èideann and, along the way, highlights include that Falkirk High becomes Bràighe na h-Eaglaise Brice. Otherwise, I am also exposed to Gaelic via BBC Alba which often makes for a pleasantly relaxing way to kill a bit of time, they have low-budget cookery shows and the like, with subtitling in English.
mtbc: maze K (white-green)
I've been working through Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, actually available from Glasgow libraries. Next, I thought I'd try a bit of Bujold, starting out the Vorkosigan saga with Shards of Honor or Cordelia's Honor seemed a good idea. No luck, though, neither Glasgow nor Edinburgh has either! Well, at least Edinburgh finally laid their hands on Melvyn Bragg's Credo so I'll give that a try, though I fear it might be a bit bulky for comfort in commuting.
l33tminion: (Default)
Yeah, the White House probably does need more event space. But if Biden or Obama's approach to that problem was to bypass all process and demolish an entire wing during a government shutdown as quickly as possible so as to present it as a fait accompli? The Republican reaction to that would definitely not be calm. And it's incredibly naive to think either the ballroom will be paid for entirely by donations or that the all donations nominally for the ballroom will go to that project, given the history of how responsibly Trump-affiliated nonprofits manage their donations.

Trump is also trying to get the DOJ to pay him $230M in recompense for prosecuting him for his obvious and egregious crimes. This includes asking for actual damages for legal fees he never paid and punitive damages which the law bars paying. The decisions on all of this will be made by people who were Trump's personal lawyers, including those defending him in these specific cases. This by itself seems a wild scandal, but it's just another day in (what's left of) the Trump White House.

There's also been talk about the supposed necessity of a third Trump term, term limits be damned. Of course this is trolling, but this is an administration that governs through trolling, stupidity of the plan (as after the 2020 election) is no barrier to the existence or seriousness of the attempt. Personally, I'll bite the bullet on the (admittedly still too contingent) prediction: If Trump isn't dead or something, they'll try the straightforward plan of just running and winning the Republican primary. And in that case, I think SCOTUS would say on 1st Amendment grounds, political parties can put forward the candidates they want, however foolishly (after all, eligibility rules theoretically could be changed, no matter how much a constitutional amendment is definitely not actually happening). And if he wins, will they want to rule in a way that amounts to "the Republican can't win"? I'd guess it would come down to some combination of "whether he's 'obviously ineligible' is a non-justiciable political question", "that's the responsibility of the Electoral College", and "the mechanism is impeachment". Of course, that would also require Trump to actually win, or for one of his alternative slate of plans to actually succeed.

Trump's also ordered the military to restart nuclear weapons testing. Don't know where to begin with that. Seems insane.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)


A fairy's efforts to recover stolen arcane tools via illicit means produce spectacular calamity.

The Fairy of Ku-She by M. Lucie Chin
conuly: (Default)
This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.


**********


Link
conuly: (Default)
Boo.

(Wait, and also nearly Halloween! Boo!)

************


Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)


The seventh all-new library of Sanity-shattering tabletop roleplaying ebooks inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos.

Bundle of Holding: Tentacles 7
wychwood: a room completely full of books (gen - stacks of books)
I like the book meme that is going around - I saw it first on [personal profile] naraht's journal, but it seems to be spreading vigorously!

Lust, books I want to read for their cover:
I don't think there's anything at the moment, but I first read Flying Dutch by Tom Holt because of the Josh Kirby cover! Does that count?

Pride, challenging books I've finished:
Speaking purely personally, finishing Arcadia by Iain Pears was a real achievement, although I've no idea why I found it so impossible a read. I've read some books that would probably fall under the popular definition, but I feel like it doesn't count if I was reading them for fun! Maybe St Augustine's City of God; that did feel like a real achievement to get through, it's so enormous.

Gluttony, books I've read more than once:
I mean. Even these days roughly 40% of my reading is re-reading, and growing up it was a lot higher than that! I don't understand people who never re-read. Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons can stand for the vast number.

Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest:
lol where to start. I acquired Consilience by Edward O Wilson in 2009, I think that may be the oldest physically sitting on my to-read shelves.

Greed, books I own multiple editions of:
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan - I have a Penguin Classics copy, a giant hardback edition with illustrations that looks rather William-Blake-esque, and a tiny pocket hardback that used to live permanently in my rucksack pocket. Oh, and an ebook from Project Gutenberg.

I also have a few dozen audiobooks that duplicate paper or ebooks I already had, and an increasing number of ebooks duplicating paper I already had. Mostly I get one format or the other, but I've picked up quite a few cheap ebooks of favourites where I don't want to get rid of the original, or where I have the whole series in paper and don't want to give away the one or two I have in ebook, etc... I suspect I will gradually prune things down over time.

Notably I'm up to nearly 50 Chalet School ebooks now! But I have spent nearly forty years accumulating my paper set, and it's going to take a while before I'm ready to give them up. Greed indeed.

Oh, and five? six? Bibles? One in German. Plus a couple of New Testaments including one in Greek (I don't even read Greek, it was just so beautiful!).

Wrath, books I despised:
I'm sure there are a ton of better choices that will come to me after I post this, but such is life. I looked through my "Product of its Time" booklog awards and found some promising candidates, but then I remembered Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, which left me with the sort of loathing that feels appropriate for this category. It's not that it was rubbish, because those mostly aren't worth despising really, it's that it was just persistently unpleasant in a gloating kind of way that left me wanting a shower. Ugh.

Envy, books I want to live in:
Relatively few, without a guarantee of being one of the lucky ones! Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books are pretty invested in everyone getting an equal chance, more or less, so that might not be too bad as long as I could be sure of being in the Commonweal and not one of Reems' slaves or something.

Otherwise mostly looking at positive high-tech futures, to be sure of having access to medication and/or medical treatment for my numerous chronic health conditions! Maybe Bujold's Vorkosigan saga? I'd like Beta, I think. But again, I could end up on Jackson's Whole, and that would not end well for me. Maybe a Star Trek novel, that universe is probably as safe as anywhere I can find.
heron61: (Amerika The Vile)
15 or so years ago I began hearing more about how people have increasing difficulty talking to their parents or other relatives who listened to faux news and thus inhabited increasingly divergent media universes than they did. I never had that problem – my parents (and now just my mom) are basic centrist liberals who have never watched (and would never) watch faux and enjoy the Daily Show. We didn’t always agree on politics (me being a democratic socialist), but we very much lived in the same media universe, and our facts were mostly the same.

Now I have a similar problem, because my mom watches NBC, ABC news, or CNN and reads the Washington Post, and I don’t and instead get my news from Bluesky, What the Fuck Just Happened Today? (which is awesome), Daily Kos, and similar lefty sources. Recently I discovered my mom hadn’t heart of the costumed protests (starting with frog guy) in Portland, hadn’t heard of any but the largest No Kings protests, and most concerningly had no idea who JB Pritzker (the governor of Illinois, and by far the most credible 2028 presidential candidate on our side) was or how he'd been standing up to 47, and she also hadn’t heard or seen anything about 47’s increasingly obvious mental decline (like the recent video of the Japanese PM leading him around, which reminded me astonishingly much of how my mom used to lead my dad around while he was still mobile (he died of Alzheimer’s). OTOH, she has heard of Gavin Newsom and has also heard news reports that he is (gag) the only possible Democratic candidate in 2028). That’s what you get when billionaires own all large-scale media in the US, because billionaires almost universally support authoritarians.

new intro !!

2025-10-29 04:38[personal profile] charmmypaws posting in [community profile] addme_fandom
charmmypaws: (angel)
 name: amanda ( she / her )
age group: 30's
country: usa.
subscription / access policy: i don't accept people into my circle or whatever you call it... until i get to know you and trust you. plus, i won't always be active on this site so lol
fannish interests: icons, writing / roleplaying , editing graphics.
i like to post about:  on this account, i just say whatever strikes my fancy lol. or just me venting.

about me: i'm somewhat new to dreamwidth as i came from tumblr. i used to rp on there and lost interest on there. it overwhelmed too much for me. so im trying to get used to here. so yeah, i have a few rp accounts in case anyone is interested lol. but on this account, i'll just post personal stuff.

other hobbies: coloring books, collecting stickers and anime stuff, plushies, watching letsplays on youtube. i do game but not much due to my health. napping is nice too.
i'm looking for people who are: nice, kind, and trustworthy. not those who back stab me. as you can tell i don't have many friends. whether irl or online. just to mention, i'm not exactly too nice. i'm blunt and tell how it is. i'm not all that social so.. yeah.

journal info: minors dni as i will be venting. like a lot as i suffer from mental and physical health issues.
mtbc: maze M (white-blue)
I still see new things from the railway carriage, or at least things I forgot seeing previously. This morning I saw some fields that had actual scarecrows. I wonder how effective they are.

I also saw somebody leave their bag on the seat beside them when we stopped at a station and people boarded to find a seat. I used to have a list of ways that drivers annoyed me but it grew so long it seemed a bad idea; I shan't start a railway passenger annoyance list.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)


How could a man die in front of Atocha Chief of Police Loren Hawn when that man died twenty years before?

Days of Atonement by Walter Jon Williams
beatrice_otter: This looks like a good day for World Domination (World Domination)
All the cool kids are doing it, so I guess I will too:

How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A. Anatomy of a Secret--Jadzia Dax in the Reboot universe.
B. the bells are going to chime--My Fair Lady, Eliza/Colonel Pickering post-movie
C. Currency--Star Wars/Babylon 5, Han and Chewie take a job carrying cargo to a place so far out in Wild Space they've never even heard of the Empire. Or the Jedi.
D. The Desert Between--Reboot, Spock/Uhura, and vulcan worldbuilding
E. Essential To Your Own--TNG, Data/Geordi
F. Family Matters (The Things Inside Remix)--BSG, Dee is on Pegasus, finding her place. A Six is on New Caprica, learning what she doesn't know. Lee Adama is a Cylon prisoner, but this is not his story. A New Caprica AU.
G. The Genetics Factory--Criminal Minds/Stargate, In Detroit, homeless addicts are turning up dead. But there's more to the case than meets the eye, and the BAU finds themselves looking for something they don't understand. For Derek, it gets personal.
H. The Heart's Desire--Rivers of London, Abigail has earned her right to become a practitioner of magic. Now, the training begins.
I. Interview with the Robot--Fandom for Robots
J. Just Like Old Times--Stargate SG-1, Teal'c and Daniel, on an adventure.
K. Kitty and Georgy (The Healing Old Hurts Remix)--Pride and Prejudice, Kitty is often ill, but she is determined to live her best life anyway.
L. Little Ship Lost--TNG, On a routine mission, a wormhole opens up near Enterprise, and a ship pops out. It's challenging to rescue people who don't trust you.
M. Matters of Perspective--TNG, Picard and Guinan post Time's Arrow
N. Not Place, But People--Enterprise, The older Enterprise wasn't destroyed after all. When it limps back to Earth, Trip finds Lorian and invites him home to meet the family.
O. The Offer--Vorkosiverse, An AU where Aral didn't survive Mad Yuri's Massacre, but his sister did.
P. Pale Battalions--SG-1, Teal'c goes home after a glorious battle in Apophis' name.
Q. 
R. Revenge of the Zillo Beast--Star Wars, Mace and Anakin have killed the Zillo Beast every way they can think of in different time loops. Maybe killing the Beast won't solve the problem?
S. Schoolwork--DS9, Jake misses his dad, now he's with the Prophets, but he still has his friends, his family, and his career.
T. Third Chance--Star Trek, AU, This isn't the first time Ro has had to start her life over, nor the first time she's had to deal with people who don't like or trust her.
U. Undiscovered Stars--Star Wars/Star Trek, Just how far out in the Unknown Regions was he, Lando wondered, that they didn't use hyperdrives?
V. Vast Beyond Knowing (The Details Remix)--Star Wars. Anakin, Luke, Rey. The desert taught them much. But not everything.
W. Wachet Auf--Rivers of London, In 1940, Nightingale has to catch a Nazi spy armed with a magical device. In 2016, Nightingale and others fall into a magical coma, and Peter Grant must figure out why it happened and how to end it.
X. X is for Xenophobia--SG-1, Little Jake Carter knew all about people who Weren't Like Us.
Y.
Z.

22/26, not bad. Interesting that I have X but not Y; from looking at other peoples' lists, it's usually the other way around. (If I'd done more Stargate Alphabet Soups, I might have filled in the missing letters.) I have, by the way, written 264 fics in approximately 110 fandoms over the course of almost 20 years. (Some fandoms are squishy, and it depends how you count them.)

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)


Nearly two dozen Mythos investigations in many eras from the open-license Cthulhu Eternal tabletop roleplaying game line produced by Cthulhu Reborn.

Compatible with your favorite Lovecraftian percentile-based systems)

Bundle of Holding: Cthulhu Reborn

(no subject)

2025-10-27 14:59[personal profile] redbird
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
I went to Somerville this morning for a fasting blood draw, to repeat the blood glucose test from a few weeks ago. She also ordered an A1C test and, apparently, a basic metabolic panel. I don't remember Carneb mentioning the basic metabolic panel, but I asked the receptionist to check whether I'd already had one recently, and he said I hadn't, so sure. I can spare an extra test tube of blood, I just didn't want to have to fight an insurance company about it.

From there, I took the bus to Arlington, hoping to order new glasses, but the optician's office was closed, with no sign explaining why. (It's a one-man shop, so if Ron is sick, there's nobody else to open the office or post a sign explaining when he'll be back.) Before making another trip, I'll call and confirm that he's open; it's an easier trip from Davis Square than from here in Brighton.

The timing worked for me to stop at Lizzy's Ice Cream on the way home; I bought pints of black raspberry, black cherry, and blueberry, which was listed as a seasonal flavor.

I may have overdone things, but when I woke up this morning it seemed like good timing for the fasting blood draw.
l33tminion: (Default)
I usually do something about how I'm thinking about the upcoming election, so here goes.

Mayor - Wilson: Somerville is having a challenger vs. challenger mayoral election this time, and it seems the big difference between the two candidates is on housing: Both in favor, but Jake Wilson supporting a more incremental approach of upzoning areas of the city near transit (note that's most of it), Willie Burnley taking Somerville YIMBY's favored "upzone all of the 'neighborhood residence' zone to 'urban residence'" approach. I think their agendas are similar, but I think Wilson will be more able to get stuff done, and "get rid of 'neighborhood residential'" is a much harder sell despite being very similar in result to more targeted upzoning.

City Councilor At-Large - Istvan, Wheeler, Mbah, Link: This is Somerville YIMBY's slate.

Question 1 (New City Charter Ratification) - Yes: After a long process to update Somerville's charter, the new version seems to be something with broad consensus support: Mayors past, present, and future are in favor, city councilors are in favor, local civic groups are in favor, etc. Seems like a straightforward improvement.
.
Question 2 (Four-Year Mayoral Term Instead of Two) - No: More discussion here. I was leaning "yes" earlier, now I'm leaning "no". A bit uncertain. Best argument for: Longer terms help new mayors recruit better high-level staff. Best argument against: City council is every two years, and the power balance is still stacked against them, even if the new charter passes.

Question 3 (The Palestine One) - No: Well, here I feel even not making a recommendation is likely to get me yelled at. Here's the full wording:

"THIS QUESTION IS NOT BINDING: Shall the Mayor of Somerville and all Somerville elected leaders be instructed to end all current city business and prohibit future city investments and contracts with companies as long as such companies engage in business that sustains Israel's apartheid, genocide, and illegal occupation of Palestine?"

I guess the way I break this down is like so: I think analysis of a ballot measure should be focused on the case where it actually does something. In that condition, I think it's likely to hamper city government here while not doing any good for anyone.

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