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My Most Reread Fics of 2025

I had another slow year both for new fics and rereads, but here's some of the fics I returned to most often in 2025:( Read more... )

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bundle of holding

Bundle of Holding: Tales of the Valiant

The tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Kobold Press of high adventure in a Labyrinth of infinite worlds, and more.

Bundle of Holding: Tales of the Valiant

That PayPal 'Automatic Payment Status' Email Is a Scam

Posted by Emily Long

https://lifehacker.com/money/that-paypal-automatic-payment-email-is-a-scam?utm_medium=RSS

Another PayPal phishing scam is circulating, this time with email notifications about recurring or automatic payments. The messages originate from a legitimate PayPal address, allowing them to evade some security filters and leave recipients worried that their accounts have been compromised—perhaps just enough to ignore the obvious red flags and call or email scammers back.

I personally have been targeted by this scam with at least five separate emails, though all have gone straight to my spam folder. Here's how scammers are exploiting PayPal settings to land in your inbox.

How the PayPal scam works

If you're targeted by this campaign, you may receive an email with the subject line "Your automatic payment status has changed" or "Recurring Payment Reactivated." The layout imitates a real PayPal notification and includes a message about a high-dollar payment being "successfully processed" along with a customer service email and phone number to contact PayPal support.

The email is full of red flags: It is addressed to a random name (or, in one of the messages I received, "Hello Update Invoice"), has poor spelling and wonky formatting, and simply doesn't make sense. You can easily spot oddities like bold text and Unicode characters, which BleepingComputer notes is a trick used to bypass spam filters and keyword detection.

Credit: Emily Long

Where the trick lies is in the sender field, as the email comes from service[at]paypal[dot]com, a legitimate PayPal address, and paypal.com is in the signed-by field. As Malwarebytes Labs describes, this is likely an abuse of PayPal's subscription billing feature. If a merchant pauses a customer subscription, the user will receive an automatic email from PayPal notifying them that their payment is no longer active. Scammers are likely setting up fake subscriber accounts using Google Workspace mailing lists, so automatic emails being generated are sent to everyone on those lists. If you look at the "To:" field, you'll see that the message isn't actually addressed to your email.

Exploiting these types of loopholes to make phishing emails seem legit is a common tactic, and I've covered several similar PayPal phishing campaigns already this year. According to a statement provided to BleepingComputer, PayPal is working on mitigating this specific flaw.

Ignore PayPal payment notifications

If one of these PayPal messages lands in your inbox, don't engage with it. Scammers frequently use emails, texts, and calls about account security and financial transactions to scare you into action, and the impersonation of trusted institutions is often pretty convincing.

If you are concerned about activity on your PayPal account, go directly to the app or website and log in to view alerts and check transactions. Do not use contact information or click any links in the original notification, as this increases the chances of compromising your information or downloading malware to your device.

https://lifehacker.com/money/that-paypal-automatic-payment-email-is-a-scam?utm_medium=RSS

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Movies: Silent Night Deadly Night, 100 Nights of Hero

Movies: the nocturnal edition, I guess!

Silent Night Deadly Night (2025). A nice young man who sometimes puts on a Santa suit and murders naughty people as directed by the voice in his head meets a nice young woman who sometimes really loses her temper.

This was a delight. I had the BEST time. It's a remake of a 1980s slasher I haven't seen, but the premise of that one sounds like it's played straight as a "guy in a santa suit goes on a psychotic killing spree" kind of thing, and this one is a lot more complicated/enjoyably weird in its execution. The lore of this movie is absolutely bananas, just total nonsense, but is never overexplained, which it seems like is where so many of these kinds of bonkers movies fall down. The script is surprisingly smart overall, I felt, with a lot of care and affection for its characters. It doesn't hurt that I adore Ruby Modine, who previously had smaller parts in Happy Death Day (the roommate) and Satanic Panic (the daughter). And the ending is *chef's kiss*. I would watch the hell out of a sequel that follows what happens next.

On a personal note, as someone who loves Christmastime but has had less opportunity/excuse to indulge in it as I've gotten older, I really enjoyed the over the top Christmas theming of this.

It does have a couple of awkward lines about gender(tm), which maybe are trying to do a thing, but do not succeed in my opinion. There's also an incident with a white supremecist which would have felt more successful if we'd seen, like, a single non-white person by that point in the movie. The movie also does not look great; it's kind of all sludge. Oh well, we can't have everything.

I think this movie is already almost out of theaters. If it sounds fun to you at all, I would absolutely recommend chasing it down for some Christmas-flavored horror cheese.

--

100 Nights of Hero (2025). In a misogynistic dystopia, a young married woman (Maika Monroe) whose inattentive husband is away on business must cope with a would-be suitor (Nicholas Galitzine) with the help of her maid and best friend (Emma Corrin).

I checked this out because the descriptions I saw were sending gay signals, and indeed, this is very gay! Monroe and Corrin's respectively repressed and hidden gay longing is great. It also, unlike the movie above, is beautiful and stylish, even though they were clearly working with a fairly small budget. The aesthetics are top-notch. And Galitzine (of Red, White, and Royal Blue, among other things) does a great job playing a hot himbo whose sense of menace is undercut by how dumb he is.

Unfortunately, the actual story a) is not my kind of thing and b) IMO sucks pretty hard on its own merits. If I had realized quite how much of a satirical fable it was, I would not have gone to see it. This takes place in a universe where women are killed for such sins as literacy, extramarital sex, and not getting pregnant within nine months or so of getting married. This last one is the key for our sad wife Cherry, whose husband and the villain of the piece simply declines to have sex with her, even when the local Puritan-flavored but fictionally religious order says she'll be executed if she doesn't hurry up and get pregnant.

I do get that we're trying to critique men's control of women's bodies, but like... this is not a scenario that has widespread analogue in the real world. Men refusing to have sex with women, even when the women's lives are at stake, is not a thing! RL misogyny is bad enough, you don't have to make shit up! The fact that it's suggested (but not confirmed) that the husband is either gay or ace makes it worse, as he's the only possibly queer man in the movie, and it makes it much much much worse that he's also played by the only actor of Middle Eastern descent that I noticed. In fact I think he's also the only character of color still alive at the end of the movie; all the various women of color have died. (Including Charli XCX's character, who along with her two sisters is executed for knowing how to read.)

This movie makes the Barbie movie look subtle. I would say I don't know who it's for, but apparently it's for the other five or so people on bluesky who've seen it, all of whom gave it gushing reviews. IDK man.

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with an open smile and with open doors

Today I mostly Power Automated. Or attempted to. I had to call in the expert several times, and at least one of them he was like "yeah I don't know why it's not working either", which was at least validating. My first flow is now sending emails, although I still need to tweak it a bit.

Also: honestly what sort of bullshit is it that you can't get Microsoft Forms to send an email to the person who filled out the form with their details in! That's been, like, basic form functionality for at least fifteen years, and it's all very well saying "oh well you can do it with Power Automate", but that is much more complicated than ticking a "send submissions to user" box and requires access to a whole separate system plus someone to set up all the permissions for you to use whatever Outlook mailbox, etc etc etc...

Anyway. I have three? four? forms that my boss wants me to have up and running before Christmas. Now I've got all the accesses and permissions configured that should hopefully be possible, which is good because I did promise...

On the home front, I have now ordered all the remaining Christmas presents I can do before Christmas Day itself (why do so few places allow you to buy gift-cards to ship on a particular date!), wrapped all the physical things I already have, sorted out the last grocery delivery before Christmas so I won't accidentally starve, and checked in with my siblings to discover that other people have been working on the stocking presents for my parents, and what isn't bought is at least planned.

I built a beautiful tracking spreadsheet that shows what each parent is getting, calculates how much each of us has spent, and checks that against the notional budget for hopefully easier working out who owes what to whom once we're done. And so far no one has got super mad at me for being "bossy" or declared refusal to participate, which is unfortunately what tends to happens. I'm trying to back off now while we're still OK!

Now off to choir!

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The price of postage

When I order things from Japan and Korea, my goal for managing postage costs is to have the postage cost less than the item, which I'm usually able to manage. Recently one of my friends sent me a package from within the US, for which the postage cost 3x the cost of the item!

Out-Heroding Herod

In which I take my bathysphere into th’abysm of Hamnet.

Warning: here be spoilers.

I was of seven or eight minds about seeing this flick. The reviews have been ecstatic, not to say hysterical. “Tore my heart out and stomped on it in spike-heeled boots” does not appeal. I don’t like being bullied into pity and terror. Having plunged, I can report that Hamnet goes well beyond tear-jerking all the way to snot-fracking. Even the falcon dies. As the lights went up, a woman kept repeating piteously, “But I just came to see Jessie Buckley.” And indeed, her acting is spectacular, full-on Euripides. If you like it raw, this is one for the statues.

And the movie? A real curate’s egg, well acted, well shot, and ill founded. I have serious problems with the whole conceit, the authenticity, the script—which, given that the novelist Maggie O’Farrell shares writing credit with the director Chloé Zhao, is somewhat troubling. It’s badly worldbuilt.

To begin with, there’s that damned red dress.

Agnes (pronounced “Ann-yes” here) wears it everywhere: to hawk in, to hoe muck, to bloody well give birth in, in an earthy cavern in the woods. In its designer’s stated vision, it’s the color of a scab, the color of menstrual blood. (Can you say, period piece?) My take is, oh my goddesses, right there is a fortune in imported cochineal, a crime against the sumptuary laws, a color for a countess or a cardinal. And she’s wearing this unwashable illegal finery without a smock to keep it clean. Which in Elizabethan mores is unspeakable. She does own a smock, because she wears it when she’s forced to bear her twins indoors, with unwanted women’s aid, instead of in communion with the greenwood-sidey-O.* (In the weirdest error in this movie, the boy pops out without a cord to cut.) Otherwise, she goes about like Mad Maudlin in prigged petticoats, barefoot and bareheaded, with her hair tumbling down her back in elflocks.

That is because she is a “forest witch,” conceived as a sort of noble savage or a woo woo Mary Sue, the only splash of vivid color in a world of dour browns and faded blues.

And yes, I get it, I get the strong desire to let the radical woman be powerful, the (oddly Copernican) center of this world. I would applaud it in another story. But this is also Hamlet's story, a creation myth. Couldn’t they have allowed poor Will a bit of inward, answering fire? Let her strike it in him? They might have let him be as good with words as she with mugwort. But no: he scritches with his quill and crumples, howling. He’s even rather inarticulate, poor soul, though he does get to tell her Orpheus and Eurydice: not brilliantly, but still.

It’s a badly-needed moment of Elizabethan-ness. Mostly Hamnet feels oddly like a modern problem play, backdated: a marriage breaks down over the tragic death of a child and the husband’s absence at work. The dialogue is flatly modern. It’s as if these people were strangers to their own world. Getting on for 20 years into their marriage, she doesn’t know what a play IS (did he never talk about his day job?); he calls her falcon a “bird.” This guy is supposedly Shakespeare. He could have talked varvels to her.

Of course, the Thing about Hamnet—the central conceit—is that Shakespeare’s son’s death was his inspiration for Hamlet. This is, to say the least, reductive. It turns Hamlet, in all its complexity and wit and rage and glory, to a form of couples therapy. And it plays hell with the actual timeline of its creation. On all the evidence, Shakespeare spent the years 1596-1600 writing festive comedies and Falstaff. Yet the film shows him living monkishly in London (no lovely boy, no Gwyneth Paltrow), at the point of breaking from his grief and guilt. He wasn’t there for his family, he wasn’t there. It even—oh, good gravy—has him looking down one midnight on the Thames beneath a cloud-wracked moon, about to jump, reciting (or composing?) “To be or not to be.” That’s when I slunk down into my seat and covered my eyes. If they’re not ashamed of that, I am.

What scraps we get to see of Hamlet are severely cherry-picked, distortions and excisions. There is no place here for fratricide, incest, antick madness, or revenge, no room for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, alive or dead. This is not a Hamlet that I long to see in full. Indeed, I don’t see that Zhao had a vision of the living whole in mind: she’s sampling.** What we do get (besides that bathetic soliloquy beside the river) are the bits that O’Farrell can use to back her thesis: “Get thee to a nunnery” (self-loathing); the tettered Ghost, who so far forgets himself as to kiss his son; the duel, to echo Will’s teaching his boy swordplay; Claudius’s murder (daddy issues with John Shakespeare); “the rest is silence.” Hamlet falls far downstage. And Hamnet’s mother, reaching from the yard, takes his dying hand.

You could say, that is all the Hamlet Agnes can see; but all the audience sees it too, in a wave of catharsis rolling backward through the groundlings into the galleries. All reach out. A lovely moment built upon two hours of contrivance.

Well, I didn’t spend quite the whole thing gnashing my teeth.

So what did I like?

The casting of brothers, Jacobi and Noah Jupe as Hamnet and Hamlet.

Anything with the children, who did beautifully. I liked the three little boys chanting Latin to the tutor’s inattentive ears. (But then, I always did like John Aubrey’s note that Shakespeare had been “a schoolmaster in the country.”) I liked Susanna (“witty above her sex,” as her epitaph says) reading Sonnet 12 aloud, as if she’d had it in a letter from her dad. I really liked Hamnet and Judith’s gender-swap, foreshadowing their bed-trick with death. I could believe this as the genesis of Twelfth Night, with its death and resurrection of the brother twin. But no, it had to be Hamlet: tragedy not romance. The three of them—Susanna, Hamnet, Judith—playing at the wyrd sisters was charming if wildly anachronistic.

I liked Emily Watson’s small part as Mary Shakespeare.

I smiled at Shakespeare’s Chandos-portrait earring.

They found a really lovely forest of Arden. Welsh, I think.

That was a convincing Stratford, both in sunshine and pathetically fallacious rain. Indeed, most of the settings were good, though the Globe within was shockingly rough-hewn and unpainted. More of the drab aesthetic: only Agnes is allowed to be a splash of color in the crowd, though by this time, her old red dress has faded to a rustier vermilion. The very few gentry in view wear black. Even the players, the peacocks of the age, are in dreary colors, and Hamlet in what looks like faded denim. And really, there was no reason to have a forest backcloth at Elsinore, except that the Arden icongraphy required it.

I’d be shocked if a prestige piece like this didn’t win Oscars, which is one in the eye for the Oxfordians. Or perhaps, seeing what a tarradidle this makes of Shakespeare’s life, they’ll smirk.

Nine

* Leaning her back against an oak. I wonder if this is a deliberate inversion of the ballad, the Cruel Mother turned Hecuba?

** This will be taught in schools: it matters.

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DC K.O Round 5: Harley Quinn vs Zatanna #1

( Read more, )

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Three for the Memories Coming Back Next Month!

3 for the Memories' 2025 session will be open for posts on January 3, 2026 and will run for 3 weeks until January 24. Do let others know about us, as anyone can participate by just joining the community.

Just a reminder of how the event runs:

1) Three photos only per person during each annual session. Members are encouraged to discuss the reason for their choices.

2) Photos can be hosted at Dreamwidth or elsewhere, and should not be larger than 800 px width or height.

3) All three photos should be in the same post. Cut tags should be placed after the first photo.

3 for the Memories is not a competition, and entries are not being judged. Rather, participants are encouraged to share photos they took in 2025 that they find meaningful in some way or which represent how they experienced the year.

Feel free to drop any questions about the community or how the event runs in comments!

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Reading Wednesday, the Dog Days of Summer Edition

These are probably going to be short and sweet, given I read them in late August through September. I'll hopefully catch up to where I am now by the time next term starts, and I go back to only reading stuff for school. Expect a bunch of books about gender, followed by all the romance novels I read on my off time, lol.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, narrated by Jefferson White
I had only the vaguest memories of the account of Haymitch's games from Catching Fire, or anything else from Catching Fire, for that matter. I never did read the other prequel. If Haymitch is one of your favourite characters, and you just want backstory on all the olds who show up later in the original series, this is solid fun. Collins did a good job of thinking through where everyone came from, and how they got like they are when Katniss meets them. Effee showing up is especially fun. We also get confirmation of several queer characters (which I assume she wasn't allowed to do in 2008), and an interesting note about the Capital banning generative A.I..

I enjoyed all the themes of the amount of groundwork needed to put into a revolution, and how the lives of the people in this story eventually led to the events of the first books. Especially how the characters themselves feel like they've failed and wasted everything, but the reader can tell how it's more a process of (horribly) figuring out what works and what doesn't.

At the same time, it didn't feel like a story of only moving pieces into place for the "real story" that will start later. It certainly doesn't read as a stand alone novel, but it does stand up as being about these characters in this moment. Haymitch is such a sweet kid when we first meet him, and is a bit more of a dynamic lead than Katniss (i.e., he actually likes people and wants to talk to them), and given the pile of characters we meet for the first time (because these games have twice the number of tributes), each of the new people get enough development for the reader to become least somewhat invested in what happens to them (spoiler alert: it's the Hunger Games, so...).

I always found the games themselves the least interesting part of the earlier books, which is largely true here as well, but the story still moves along pretty fast. They probably would've been more interesting if I remembered what the story was supposed to be, as Collins puts a lot into the contrasts and surprises. The post-games section did draaaaaaaaaaaaag though. Especially the recap of the games we'd just read about, and the part that was set up as this huge poetic tragedy. I think if you're like... 14, you'd be weeping through the end, but I found it overdone, and thought her editor should've made her stop.

Still, I'm happy to have read it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I hadn't read these in fifteen years, so I thought I'd swing back through to remember what we were supposed to know about all the characters we met in the prequel. Enjoyed it. Games still dragged.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
So most of the characters from Haymitch's book actually show up here, it turns out. So I read this one. Enjoyed this too, though found the games section dragged a bit. The love triangle continues obnoxious, and I did myself the favour of not reading Mockingjay again.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
I've been hearing bits of this quoted since it came out, and it's quite good. I think the target is more people involved in public life, but it was still good to listen to, these being the times that were given to us. I know it's his area, but I wish there had been more examples from autocracies other than 1930s Germany, for the sake of variety, if nothing else (there were a handful of comparisons from the Soviet bloc, but it was very Nazi centric).

I think it's on YouTube for free, if anyone wants to listen. I'll probably go back to it later, so that I take more on board.

Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians by Austen Hartke
Solid primer if you're interested in the a gender-diverse approach to Christian theology. Hartke talks to a variety of other trans and non-binary Christians, especially those involved in ministry, about their relationship with God and the Bible. Each chapter focuses on a few lines of scripture, which are largely clobber verses, and discusses how they can be seen as trans affirming. It's really beautifully expressed, and thoughtfully takes on some difficult parts of the Bible. Hartke does talk about how frustrating it is to feel like he has to spend so much time justifying himself and talking about the clobber verses, when he just wants to talk about religious gender euphoria. He's since put out a second edition, which might refine that approach, but I haven't looked at that yet. I really appreciated this edition is an intro, however, and helped me put together a church service for Trans Day of Remembrance.

Apple's Latest iOS Update Includes a New Way to Receive Notifications

Posted by Jake Peterson

https://lifehacker.com/tech/apple-update-iphone-display-light-up-notification?utm_medium=RSS

There are fewer and fewer hardware differences between iPhones and Androids as the years go on, but back in the day, that was far from the case. At one point, many major Android devices came with dedicated LEDs that would shine whenever you received a notification. It was a passive way to know whether you had something on your phone to attend to, without having to actually wake up the display and risk getting unnecessarily sucked into your device.

iPhones have never had this specific feature, but Apple included a workaround for anyone interested in a similar experience. For years, you've been able to dive into Accessibility settings to turn your iPhone's LED flash into a notification light. Any time you received a text, app notification, or call, your camera flash would go off, ensuring you didn't miss an important update. This can be helpful both those who are hard of hearing, and who wouldn't be able to rely on audible alerts, or anyone who keeps their phone on silent, but would like a visual cue that they have a new notification.

For the first time in years, Apple is updating its flash alerts feature. With iOS 26.2, which the company released on Friday, you now have the option to have your iPhone's display itself flash for new alerts. You can choose to make the display the only light that flashes, or to use the feature in tandem with the LED flash, which I think makes the most sense for people who like this option. That way, it won't matter whether your iPhone is face up or face down: You'll always see a light flash for new alerts one way or another.

Display flash doesn't work like you might expect, especially if you've used LED flashes before. I thought my iPhone would flash a bright light on and off again a few times, mimicking how LED flash alerts works. Instead, when you get a new notification, the screen instantly increases the brightness for a few seconds, before lowering it again. It works—you're bound to notice your display jump in brightness if it isn't already maxed out—but it doesn't quite grab your attention as well as the LED flash.

How to set up Flash for Alerts on iPhone

To start, open the Settings app on your iPhone, then head to Accessibility. Scroll down to Hearing, then choose Audio & Visual. Scroll to the bottom of this page, then tap Flash for Alerts.

If you're running an older version of iOS, you'll only have the option to enable "LED Flash." However, those running iOS 26.2 and newer will also see an option for "Screen." Choose that option if you want the display to flash for new alerts, or "Both" to have both lights enabled.

You'll also find two choices that affect when these flash alerts go off, no matter which of the above options you pick. First, you can choose whether your iPhone will use flash alerts while locked. If you disable this option, you'll only see these light alerts when your iPhone is unlocked. Second, you can choose whether to use flash alerts in Silent Mode. I'd keep that setting enabled, since it seems most useful when your iPhone has no other way to alert you to new notifications.

It's also important to note that using an Apple Watch can complicate this feature a bit, at least in my experience. While giving this option a test, I had trouble getting alerts to come through on my locked phone without first going to my watch. If you have an Apple Watch, and its notifications mirror your iPhone's, you'll get the most out of this feature when your iPhone is unlocked.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/apple-update-iphone-display-light-up-notification?utm_medium=RSS

My Favorite Amazon Deal of the Day: The Sony WH-1000XM5 Headphones

Posted by Daniel Oropeza

https://lifehacker.com/tech/my-favorite-amazon-deal-of-the-day-sony-wh-1000xm5?utm_medium=RSS

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Sony's 1000X series have been around since 2016, improving on the previous iteration to eventually land on the Sony WH-1000XM6, the best over-ear headphones for audio quality currently on the market. But not everyone can (or needs to) drop nearly half a grand on headphones. The WH-1000XM5 are a generation older and were the best headphones for audio quality up until this year, when they were succeeded. They're currently $248 (originally $399.99), the lowest price they've ever been according to price-tracking tools, and they now come with free Sony WF-C700N earbuds. To put how good this deal is into perspective, the WH-1000XM4 are $100 more right now.

Sony WH-1000XM5 Noise Canceling Headphones with WF-C700N Noise Canceling Earbuds

I have been a loyal customer of the 1000X line for many years; they're my go-to headphones for most activities. The WH-1000XM5 came out in May of 2022 to an "outstanding" review from PCMag for their top-notch audio quality, but also for their exceptional audio when using its best-in-class active noise-canceling (most headphones lose their audio quality when using ANC). The headphones are also well-designed to be comfortable for long sessions.

The ear controls use tapping and swiping, which aren't my favorite, but it's what all the modern headphones are moving toward. There's an app that comes with the headphones that lets you adjust your EQ settings to your liking, including what the swiping and tapping functions do on your headphones.

A great touch on these headphones that is often neglected is a Stereo 3.5mm connection, perfect for those who want to use a wired cable without worrying about battery life. Speaking of battery life, Sony says you can expect about 30 hours, but it will vary depending on your usage of ANC. They are compatible with AAC, LDAC and SBC codecs and have multipoint connection (you can pair them with more than one device at the same time).

The Sony WF-C700N earbuds are normally $119, and are "good" earbuds accorcing to PCMag's review. If you're looking for great headphones for audio quality with ANC with some free earbuds at a great price that arrives before Christmas, consider this deal.

Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now

Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00)

Sony WH-1000XM5 — $248.00 (List Price $399.99)

Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ 10.9" 64GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Graphite) — $139.99 (List Price $219.99)

Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00)

Blink Outdoor 4 1080p 3-Camera Kit With Sync Module Core — $74.99 (List Price $189.99)

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus — $29.99 (List Price $49.99)

Meta Quest 3 512GB Mixed Reality VR Headset with Controllers — (List Price $499.99 With Code "QUEST50")

Deals are selected by our commerce team

https://lifehacker.com/tech/my-favorite-amazon-deal-of-the-day-sony-wh-1000xm5?utm_medium=RSS

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books

Recent Reading: Illustrated Books

Frederik Sonck (illus. Jenny Lucander, trans. B.J. Woodstein), Freya and the Snake (2023 / 2025)

Finnish children's book about the snake that lives in the rockpile, a father's earnest but unsuccessful attempt to avert a fatal conflict between the snake and his children, and his children turning on him after he finally resorts to killing the snake.

"Snake murderer," they say. They will not eat ice cream with a snake murderer. Also, murderers do not get to attend the funeral.

I loved this book. I loved how judgemental the kids are, how exasperated and slitherer-outer the mother is, and how harried the father is. I of course would have preferred textual confirmation that the snake was venomous, but it's reasonably clear there was no great solution here -- just as it's clear that level of nuance is not gonna fly with these kids.

Dee Snyder (illus. Margaret McCartney), We're Not Gonna Take It (1984 / 2020)

Illustrated version of the famous Twisted Sister song, in which the rebellious anti-authoritarian teenagers of the music video have grown up to become authoritarian parents of toddlers -- toddlers who do not consent to such brutalities as baths and bedtimes.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one. I associate the original version with freedom of gender expression and rebellion against abusive parents, and there's still a thing going on here about the tyranny of parents, but now that's a joke. The parents know what's best and eventually the babies go to sleep and dream happily, and... hrm. The whole thing is very defanged and cute and I'm not sure I'm quite on board for it.

Octavia E. Butler (illus. Manzel Bowman), A Few Rules for Predicting the Future (2000 / 2024)

Illustrated edition of Butler's 2000 Essence essay on the art of science fiction predicting the future, originally written in the context of the then-recently published Parable of the Talents, the sequel to Parable of the Sower, both of which forecast a United States that never addressed the developing problems of fascism and climate change. This volume was published in 2024, the once-future year that Sower is set. While Butler's vision for 2024 doesn't match what I see out my window, we are very much reaping the harvest of our runaway fascism problem. (If you can use "reaping the harvest" for an ongoing and advancing situation.)

Which is to say. This essay has aged very well. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to give it another think, and in fact I have re-read it twice since checking out this volume. I like her stress on there being no silver bullet but a multiplicity of checkerboarded solutions -- one for each of us who chooses to apply ourselves to it! -- and likewise her observations on the generational effect of what looks reasonable and preposterous, both looking ahead and in hindsight.

I'm a little mixed-feelings about the volume itself. It's very pretty and the paintings are gorgeous, but there's only four of them, so as a stand-alone edition it feels a bit... thin. Then again, it got me to read her essay again, so in that sense, it's a success.

Genie, Make a Wish

Netflix's k-drama Genie, Make a Wish was so much fun! A psychopath invokes a Genie that aims to corrupt humanity.

Trust k-drama to make me ship m/f! <3 These two are adorable together, and Kim Woo-bin (5-8 in Black Knight) is as hot as usual. *fans self*

There's also a canon lesbian character, but she gets a storyline à la When Marnie Was There. iykyk

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Three-Part "Messiah" Podcast

Making Messiah on Freakonomics. There's a transcript as well.

The podcast does have some advertisements.

Micah Aaron Tajone Kalap Obituary

Micah was a co-worker at the theatre. He was the sort of person who becomes a front of house manager by age 18.

Micah Aaron Tajone Kalap Obituary

As it happens, the bridge nearest the funeral home was just torn down. As a result, access looks like this...

(Buses are even worse)

Entry tags:

f: ballet

Ballet Experiences

In an effort to actually get some wear out of my formalwear, I have decided to take up going to the ballet. Here are the first two.

Carmina Burana (Paris Ballet Theater, Choir & Orchestra of Budapest)
I caught a matinee (16:00) at the Palais de Congrès and was basically the only person who was dressed up at all :'D Ah well. (Achivement unlocked: overdressed at the ~~opera~~ ballet in Paris.)

I reserved the tickets knowing absolutely nothing about what I was getting into, beyond "high culture", so I the fact that it was a ballet was a, uh, surprise.

Anyway. I loved it! There were basically two prima ballerina roles, and the music was great. More ballet should have a choir on stage. The, idk, multimediality? of having a soloist singer sing an aria while the dancers danced a pas de deux or variation was cool. All the drama was on point. I think this is a good production, and they're touring in the rest of France + neighboring regions, so if you can, I rec going!

I also bought the programme and basically everyone named, from production to roles, is from East of the Iron Curtain. (The one exception, The Temptress, is from Italy.) It's noticeable in how the style of dance is much more Vaganova/Russian school, with open shoulders and an engaged back. The same corps is putting on a Swan Lake in March/April that I will catch.

Notre Dame de Paris (Paris Opera Ballet)
This one was at the Opéra Bastille, and people did dress up! (Not all tho; I spotted several people in jeans and t-shirts, puffer coats, or sweatpants. Also a random old lady told me I was truly magnificent.) Sartorial observations below.

This ballet didn't end up working for me. Some of it was synchronization issues (several in the corps de ballet, but also one in a pas de deux between Esmeralda and Quasimodo), some of it was the costuming (all the women were in microskirts and the styling made them look at most 15), but mostly it was I think the fact that it's a French production.

You see, the French style of ballet is all about clean lines, exact positions, control, #chic, #cleangirl. It is fundamentally incapable of adapting Notre Dame because it is fundamentally incapable of depicting horniness. Phoebus and Esmeralda both lost their shirts during a pas de deux and it was not horny, Frollo was just an evil sorcerer who had a stick up his ass in an unhorny way, the prostitutes were unhorny and so was Phoebus dancing with them. I have seen hornier Swan Lakes. Everyone needed to go on a vision quest to find their inner Odile. The Quasimodo & Esmeralda worked, because that's based on innocent sentiment, but the Phoebus/Esmeralda and Frollo -> Esmeralda didn't come across properly at all. Also Frollo came across as sympathetic (99% sure unintentionally) because there's something just that pathetic about having a dude solo dance one half of a pas de deux while two people are dancing the actual pas de deux.

Esmeralda, in a microskirt, being not at all seductive.

However, this does choreographically give the entire corps de ballet (in fact, everyone but Phoebus) some movement stuff to do that's usually reserved for jesters, so this is the production to put on when your corps de ballet has jester envy.

Not super impressed with the company, but I guess I'll catch at least Romeo and Juliet in Apr/May before giving up. Also kinda want to see La Bayadère in Jun/Jul because I've never seen that before.

anthropological observations on clothing
The average Frenchwoman is rail thin, but more of a pear/spoon type – not much beneath, but even less up top, if you will. As such, the "dressy" clothing seems to be elevated pant + elevated shirt + nice scarf. Any dresses are cut incredibly straight in the skirt, at max a very drapey A-line. The goal is to look ~effortlessly put together~, i.e. spend an hour of effort to look like you simply pulled out the first two items from your elegant, curated closet and put them on without thought.

(The person sitting next to me was wearing an actual nice dress with a pleated skirt. Then her similarly dressed friend turned up and turns out they're Russian.)

(By French standards, I am tallish with a broad ribcage. I also objectively have broad shoulders, and an amazingly athletic butt and thighs. There is no way I am able to give the same vibes as the locals lol. Anything I wear will look more playful, intentional, and/or dramatic.)

John's Final Straw

Posted by john (the hubby of Jen)

https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/johns-final-straw-2025

Thanks to Natalia R., Anony M., Sandra B., Lisa S., and Vicky G. for sparking the idea.

*****

P.S. I agree, you COULD do a better job yourself. So have you seen these new silicone "piping bulbs?"

8 Pc Bulb Decorating Kit

Y'all. Go read the reviews; these things are apparently total game-changers. Easy to fill, clean, no more leaking piping bags, AND they fit all the Wilton metal tips we already have! I don't do much cake decorating these days, but I do pipe caulking for crafts, so I'm excited to try these out.

https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/johns-final-straw-2025

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oh happy day!

Time to go have an outdoor adventure!

How ChatGPT's New Image Generator Stacks Up Against Gemini's Nano Banana Pro

Posted by David Nield

https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-chatgpt-image-generator-compares-to-gemini-nano-banana-pro?utm_medium=RSS

Following the major image editing upgrades added to Google Gemini back in August—under the whimsical codename Nano Banana—it's OpenAI's turn to supercharge the tools you get for image manipulations inside ChatGPT. The new update is called GPT Image 1.5, and is rolling out now for all users.

One of the key improvements here, as was the case with Nano Banana, is the way that ChatGPT can now edit a specific part of an image while keeping everything else consistent. You can add or remove something, or change the color or style of something, without ending up with an entirely different looking picture.

Another feature ChatGPT has now borrowed from Gemini: the ability to combine multiple images together in one scene. Want you and your best friend in front of Sydney Harbour Bridge? No problem—just supply the source pictures and the AI will do the rest. You can also change visual styles while maintaining consistent details.

OpenAI says the new image editor and generator is able to follow instructions "more reliably," and render pictures up to four times faster than before. Text can be more varied in style and size, and images should be more realistic and error-free in general—though OpenAI also admits there's still room for improvement.

It's the best image generator tool we've ever seen in ChatGPT, and it all looks impressive at first glance—but how does it stack up in practice against Gemini and Nano Banana? I put the two models to the test via the $20-per-month plan on both platforms (that's ChatGPT Plus and Google AI Pro, respectively) to see how they compared.

Rendering and editing images

Open up ChatGPT on the web or on mobile and you'll see there's a new Images tab on the left-hand navigation pane. This takes you to a library of your existing pictures, together with some new prompts for creating images. You get some suggestions for prompts, plus an assortment of preset portrait image styles you can apply.

A journalist, lamp, and countryside scene courtesy of Gemini. Credit: Gemini

A journalist, lamp, and countryside scene courtesy of ChatGPT. Credit: ChatGPT

I tested out the new GPT Image 1.5 model by getting ChatGPT to generate a busy tech journalist, a lamp in the middle of an empty warehouse, and a cartoon-style rolling landscape of hills in the fog. I then got Gemini to create the same pictures with the same prompts. While the results were pretty varied, in terms of quality and realism they were pretty equal—the occasional issue with weird physics and repetition, but nothing too bad.

Both ChatGPT and Gemini are now quite competent at clean image edits, too: Both AI bots seamlessly switched the journalist's clothing to a shirt and tie without touching any other part of the picture. This would have taken a significant amount of time to do manually, even by a Photoshop expert, and shows just how transformative AI imaging is becoming.

Color changes were all handled with aplomb, but the AIs struggled a bit with perspective changes, where I asked to see the same shot from another angle. In these cases, instructions were less well-followed and the images were less consistent (as new areas needed to be rendered), though ChatGPT did a little better than Gemini at getting good results.

Clothing can now be swapped out in seconds (Gemini edition). Credit: Gemini

Clothing can now be swapped out in seconds (ChatGPT edition). Credit: ChatGPT

The classic "remove an object from this picture" challenge was handled with aplomb: Both Gemini and ChatGPT were able to remove a cottage from the countryside scene with surgical precision, leaving everything else intact. Again, these are the kind of time-intensive image edits that would previously have needed a lot of careful effort, and that can now be done in seconds.

Gemini's attempt at removing a cottage. Credit: Gemini

ChatGPT's attempt at removing a cottage. Credit: ChatGPT

Combining and remixing images

Another talent ChatGPT and Gemini now have is being able to combine images together. So you can have separate photos of you and your parents, put them together in the same shot, and then add in a background of wherever you like. You can get perfect family photos without actually gathering together your relatives together or going anywhere.

This was an area where Gemini and ChatGPT did struggle a bit more: The editing dexterity was still impressive, but the results didn't always look like a single, coherent scene. Lighting is sometimes off, or elements from different images appear at different scales, and you'll have to do a bit more tweaking and editing and reprompting to get everything right.

ChatGPT did fare slightly better at blending different images and elements together, and changing the overall look of a picture. When I tried to get the AIs to mix all my images together in a moody film noir shot, ChatGPT produced something pretty consistent—the Gemini effort looked a lot more like a cut-and-paste job.

It can be fun remixing photos again and again—adding new people, changing the weather, moving the location—and both these bots are now capable of some rather incredible results. Remixing photos of family and friends will be popular, but it's not all that easy: With people you know, any generative AI that gets added tends to look wrong, because neither ChatGPT nor Gemini knows exactly what these people look like, how they smile, how they're built, or how they tend to stand or sit.

Gemini can combine images—but they look like different images. Credit: Gemini

ChatGPT did a better job at creating a new image that looked correct. Credit: ChatGPT

In terms of ChatGPT vs. Gemini, they're both at a high level now—a level that puts advanced Photoshop-style editing capabilities at everyone's fingertips. If either AI model has the edge right now, it's ChatGPT's, but there's not much in it. It's also going to be fascinating to see where these image editing capabilities go next.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-chatgpt-image-generator-compares-to-gemini-nano-banana-pro?utm_medium=RSS