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creator: elisem

Weaving In a Loose End I Missed, Then Starting Work On Something Else

When I went to try on the buttoned crocheted collar, I found there was a loose end (or rather a pair of loose ends, since I had done the fuzzy edging with two yarns at once, and that needed fixing. So I did.

After that, I assessed the other crocheted thing I had gotten out, decided that it does indeed need to be partly taken apart, and began frogging. This may take quite a while, but I know what the garment wants now.

So far, all my crochet is free-form and made up out of my head. Some day I should learn to read patterns, which would also let me write down what I've done in case anybody else wants to try it.

Craft: crochet at first, and then uncrocheting
Time: one hour
Notes: having Blittle League on as I am taking something fairly simple apart turns out to work wonderfully, and I have been wanting to watch those episodes again
Thoughts: one of these times I should try crocheting something that involves putting pieces together, like hexagons or squares or weird escherian shapes

The OTW is Recruiting for TWC Committee Copyeditors, Tag Wranglers, and Fanlore Chair Track Voluntee

Posted by therealmorticia

https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otw-is-recruiting-for-twc-committee-copyeditors-tag-wranglers-and-fanlore-chair-track-volunteers/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=268361

Do you have experience copyediting or proofreading academic journals? Would you like to wrangle AO3 tags? Can you read and translate from Chinese to English? Can you read and translate from Italian to English? Do you have experience in managing or leading people?

We’re excited to announce the opening of applications for:

TWC Committee Copyeditor – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC
Tag Wrangling Volunteer – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 125 applications
Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Chinese) – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 45 applications
Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Italian) – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 30 applications
Fanlore Chair Track Volunteer – closing 24 September 2025 at 23:59 UTC or after 40 applications

We have included more information on each role below. Open roles and applications will always be available at the volunteering page. If you don’t see a role that fits with your skills and interests now, keep an eye on the listings. We plan to put up new applications every few weeks, and we will also publicize new roles as they become available.

All applications generate a confirmation page and an auto-reply to your e-mail address. We encourage you to read the confirmation page and to whitelist our email address in your e-mail client. If you do not receive the auto-reply within 24 hours, please check your spam filters and then contact us.

If you have questions regarding volunteering for the OTW, check out our Volunteering FAQ.

TWC Committee Copyeditor

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an international peer-reviewed Diamond Open Access online publication about fan-related topics that seeks to promote dialogue between the academic community and fan communities. Copyeditors professionally copyedit submissions for TWC according to Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) 18, Merriam-Webster online, and the TWC style guide. Editorial standards are those of a university press.

The copyeditor’s main responsibility will be to carefully copyedit word-processed manuscripts to correct errors of grammar, usage, style; normalize presentation of information; check the literature; and ensure consistency of usage of, e.g., presentation, capitalization, italic, and numbers.

Applicants are required to pass a brief copyediting test that will be drawn from live copy (a not yet published article that is currently in production). All returned tests will be assessed and the applicant provided with feedback.

Applications are due 24 September 2025

Apply for TWC Committee Copyeditor at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer

The Tag Wranglers are responsible for helping to connect and sort the tags on AO3! Wranglers follow internal guidelines to choose the tags that appear in the filters and auto-complete, which link related works together. This makes it easier to browse and search on the archive.

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy tag wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role, we’re currently looking for wranglers for specific fandoms only, which will change each recruitment round. Please see the application for which fandoms are in need.

Wranglers need to be fluent in English but we welcome applicants who are also fluent in other languages, especially Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Čeština (Czech), Español (Spanish), isiZulu (Zulu), Polski (Polish), Português brasileiro (Brazilian Portuguese), Suomi (Finnish), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), Türkçe (Turkish), Українська (Ukrainian), ไทย (Thai), Русский (Russian), беларуская (Belarusian) and 한국어 (Korean) — but help with other languages would be much appreciated!

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 125 applications

Apply for Tag Wrangling Volunteer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Chinese)

If you’re an experienced AO3 user who likes organizing, working in teams, or having excuses to fact-check your favorite fandoms, you might enjoy Tag Wrangling! To join us, click through to the job description and fill in our application form. There will also be a short questionnaire that will help us assess whether you have the skills and attributes that will lead to your success in this role.

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role we’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Chinese.We welcome all Chinese dialects! The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Chinese into English.

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 45 applications

Apply for Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Chinese) at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Italian)

Please note: you must be 18+ in order to apply for this role. For this role we’re currently looking for applicants who are fluent in both English and Italian. The work will involve both regular Tag Wrangling work and translating tags from Italian into English.

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 30 applications

Apply for Tag Wrangling Volunteer (Italian) at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

Fanlore Chair Track Volunteer

Do you have experience in managing or leading people? Are you an organizational wizard? Do you have an interest in preserving fannish history or experience in wiki editing? The Fanlore committee is looking for new Chair Track Volunteers to join our team!

Fanlore is the committee responsible for maintaining and promoting the Fanlore wiki. We promote Fanlore on social media, run Fanlore editing challenges, support Fanlore editors, write the wiki’s policy and help pages, and respond to emails from editors and readers. The Chair Track Volunteer position is for people who have the time and dedication to learn all about our operations so that they can be considered for the role of committee Chair.

We’re looking for someone who has experience in wiki editing and an understanding of social media, who is comfortable with personnel management and training new recruits, and who is experienced in leadership or management whether in a business or nonprofit environment. Candidates also need strong time management skills and the ability to work on and track multiple tasks at a time. If that’s you, please apply!

For your application to be considered, you will be required to complete a short task within one week of submitting your application.

Applications are due 24 September 2025 or after 40 applications.

Apply for Fanlore Chair Track Volunteer at the volunteering page! If you have further questions, please contact us.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otw-is-recruiting-for-twc-committee-copyeditors-tag-wranglers-and-fanlore-chair-track-volunteers/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=268361

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The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)

In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, it's now out in the open that an alien invasion is coming. But the aliens' doomed planet is far away and this is hard SF, so they're not expected to reach Earth for 400 years. The book follows a mostly new set of characters and international organizations as they try to work out a long-term plan to somehow defend Earth against a force with vastly superior technology and no interest in negotiating.

This book is 500 pages long and I don't think it had to be. I found the first half a real slog, as it mostly focused on plot elements that I felt were not plausible (not for speculative reasons, but for No Real Person Would Ever Do This reasons) and, surprisingly, a romance. I don't know if Liu got the criticism that the first book didn't care about people so he decided to put in a love story, or what, but the way he handles it is extremely strange and unrealistic and made me question whether he had ever interacted with a woman in his entire life, so maybe he should have stuck with ideas over people.

It also suffers from a rather flat and awkward English translation that calls way more attention to the fact that it is a translation than the first book's did. (They had a different translator for this one, but brought back Ken Liu for book three.) That's not the book's fault, but it definitely affected my experience of it.

That said, the second half did pick up a lot, and leaned much more heavily into Liu's strengths as a writer: the inventive worldbuilding and the show-stopping cinematic set pieces. I did enjoy that and it brought me back to what I liked about the first book. Liu has a distinctive knack for making even catastrophic and grisly events weirdly fun to read about because of how hard he commits to them and how intricately he constructs their details. Anybody can write about stuff blowing up in space, but not everybody can show exactly why and how it's blowing up, zoom into individual pieces of debris and out to massive chain reactions, and have a reader like me, who is often bored by action scenes, attentively following along every step of the way.

many spoilery thoughts

The main thing I thought was implausible was the concept of the Wallfacers. Basically, the UN chooses four people and gives them each unlimited resources to develop and enact a plan to defend against the aliens. There's no oversight and anything they do is legal and unquestioned. This is supposed to counter the aliens' ability to remotely surveil Earth; if the plan takes shape in one person's head, then the aliens, who are said to not understand secrets and deception, won't find out about it.

Many things about this concept invite skepticism, but my biggest issue is how the presentation glosses over the complexity of human societies. Liu assumes that essentially everyone in the world will tacitly support whatever the UN does, with no significant debate or objection, even when it directly affects people's lives. He has the Wallfacers using so many resources for their massive defense constructions that it's crushing the global economy, and people just twiddle their thumbs and let it happen. He often paints global reactions with an extremely broad brush, like "people felt/thought X" as though all of humanity were a monolith. I can't speak for countries other than my own, but in this situation I can confidently say that half the people in the US probably wouldn't even believe the aliens were real, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't put their faith in four people arbitrarily selected by the UN to save us all.

Sometimes Liu seems to know there are problems with these ideas, as when the narrative flashes forward a couple of centuries and the Wallfacer project is seen as one of the many "silly" things attempted during the initial panic over the invasion. Then again, Wallfacer Luo Ji's plan does basically work in the end, so I wasn't really clear on what the book was trying to say here.

I did enjoy the future worldbuilding, where most humans live in underground cities of massive treelike skyscrapers that hold up the ceiling where a holographic sky is projected. He did a slightly better job here of showing that cultures aren't all the same; a lot of people in the future are "hibernators" who were put into stasis in the past at various times and reawoken later, and their attitudes often differ from people who are native to the future. This also helped build a believable friendship between Shi Qiang and Luo Ji, since they're the only two people they know from their time. (I think this is the only compelling human relationship in the book, certainly better than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening with Luo Ji and the imaginary woman he made up in his head who turned out to be real somehow... It's a long story.)

I was also interested in the concept of the accidental generation ships. Almost the entire Earth fleet is destroyed by an alien probe that they thought was harmless, and the few crews that barely escape believe (understandably) that returning to Earth is suicide and that continuing to flee is humanity's best hope for survival. This entire scenario plays out over the length of a chapter, but whole books could be written about it! The part where they realize that they have too many people to keep alive long-term and some will have to be sacrificed read like an homage to "The Cold Equations," though I don't know if that story is as well-known among Chinese SF readers.

Of course it's also consistent with the book's generally pessimistic outlook on space exploration. I did know before I started reading what the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi Paradox is, but I didn't know the hypothesis was named after the book!! The idea is that the reason we haven't found aliens is that the galaxy is fucking dangerous and any planetary civilizations that foolishly jump around waving their hands and flashing neon signs trying to make first contact only make themselves a target. Aliens are out there, but the ones who have survived are the quiet ones. As a person whose favorite SF canon is Star Trek, this obviously doesn't align with my preferred way of looking at things, but it's internally consistent and not implausible, so I can roll with it.

I am invested enough to read the third book, and looking forward to getting back to a translator who knows what he's doing at least.

Liquidating The Assets

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/liquidating-the-assets/391617/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=391617

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Customer: "It's just too expensive! I can't justify it! Why is it so expensive?!"
Me: "Well, this is a premium brand, so it does cost more than the regular store brand."
Customer: "But those are expensive too! Why is all the ice cream so expensive?!"
Me: "They need to build certain things into the costs, such as the packaging, the research to develop flavors, and—"
Customer: "—I don't see how that has anything to do with me."

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(no subject)

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/390065-2/390065/

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(I am the dealer trade clerk at the dealership where I work. One day, I get a package containing the paperwork for a trade with Dealer 1. However, the name of the dealership on the package is a butchered version of our name, but it does have our address. Inside is a certificate of origin […]

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WWW Wednesday

a friend loaned me a bunch of manga and I had a two hour window sitting around with said pile, so I read as many as I could so I return them instead of carrying them home, and that definitely bulked out the "read this week" list lmao.

1. What are you currently reading?

Riverbay Road Men's Dormitory vol. 2 by Fei Tian Ye Xiang. I'm struggling a little cause I haven't ended up attached enough to the side characters to want to read a lot of chapters about them, but the first half seems to be mostly about them. I want to get back to the main ship, sigh. Still, even with that, it's a quick read, I expect to plow through fairly quickly (I'm about a quarter in rn, after two days).
我和我对家 by PEPA: idk if I'm improving/getting used to the tone, or if these sections have been easier, but I feel like I'm mostly catching more than I had been. Which maybe isn't saying tons but is still nice lol. I'm into the 30s now! Slow but steady - I'm reading one to two pages a day.

2. What have you recently finished?

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett: oh, this was good. this was very good.
Runaways vol. 5: Escape to New York by Brian K. Vaughan: I looked at the order very carefully and somehow managed to accidentally skip vol. 2 through 4. Oh well, guess I'll just read the ones I've got and not worry about it. Considering how much I missed it was surprisingly easy to figure out wtf was going on.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation manhua vol. 10 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
On or Off vol. 1 by A1: modern BL. very weird to read the reviews calling this fun, funny, lighthearted... it was like, cringe-worthy levels of second-hand embarrassment constantly. I didn't find it funny even once. I barely made it through. feels like more proof that people are looking for way different things in their porny BL manhwa/manga/manhua than I am.
Iberico Pork & Slave of Love vol. 1 by SHOOWA: modern BL, this felt a bit like being dumped into a story where I was already supposed to know who the characters are and stuff - I think it's a spin-off from something else - but I still liked it. Hoping both idiots will use their words in vol. 2.
Heaven Official's Blessing cinemanhua edition vol. 1 - 3 by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu: finally started these from Aloha comics. It's interesting to see the translation they choices by (deliberately or unintentionally?) not sticking with the standard way a lot of the names and stuff have been translated before.
Black or White vol. 9 - 10 by Sachimo
Given vol. 9 by Natsuki Kizu: I didn't realize this would be the last volume!
Apothecary Diaries manga vol. 12 - 13
BL Metamorphosis vol. 1 by Kaori Tsurutani: cute!
Lullaby of the Dawn vol. 1 - 2 by Ichika Yuno: I've been eagerly waiting for this and my hold on vol. 1 finally came through (and I saw vol. 2 was available so I grabbed it immediately so it'd be ready when I read it) and it hasn't disappointed. Fantasy BL, plot-heavy. I'm eyeing how few volumes there are and how slowly they come out with dread.

3. What will you read next?

hokay, I am caught up on book club, and I'm almost done with the emergency low-stakes fluff I bumped up my pile (Riverbay Road) which means, once again, Dream of the Red Chamber by Tsao Hsueh-Chin is, still and finally, next for novels.

for physical from the library, the next two volumes of Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan.

for Libby library, I've got a lot coming up due: LOVE MURDER BASKETBALL vol. 1 by Kurutta Hito, The Way of the Househusband vol. 11 by Kousuke Oono, I'm Kinda Chubby and I'm Your Hero vol. 1 by Nore, World's End Blue Bird vol. 3 by Anji Seina, and SCRAMBLUES by mame march are all due in 10 days or less. so. those, I guess. esp. the first, which is due in only 5 days.

Good dishes for beginner cooks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

This Eufy All-in-One Robot Vacuum/Mop Is $350 Off Right Now

Posted by Pradershika Sharma

https://lifehacker.com/tech/eufy-x10-pro-omni-robot-vacuum-mop-deal?utm_medium=RSS

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

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The Eufy X10 Pro Omni is currently selling for $549.99 on Amazon, a steep drop from its $899.99 list price and the lowest it has gone for, according to price trackers.]

Eufy X10 Pro Omni Robot Vacuum and Mop Combo

It’s pitched as an all-in-one cleaning machine: it vacuums, mops, empties its own bin, and washes and dries its mop pads. On paper, that’s the dream—drop it in the corner, set a schedule, and let it handle the basics while you do anything else with your day.

In practice, the X10 Pro Omni hits some impressive notes while missing others. Navigation is excellent, especially in tricky rooms where many robots get stuck or spin in circles. It hugs walls and edges well, even using a dedicated “edge-hugging” mop feature to clean right up against the wall (something most bots leave untouched). The dual mop pads also wiggle as they move, which does a better job of lifting dirt when you run multiple passes. Rugs and pet hair aren’t a big issue either, as long as the roller brush is clear.

Where it stumbles is with larger debris and error recovery. If something small gets caught, it can throw the whole system into a loop of alerts and failed attempts to restart. This Lifehacker review notes that instead of recovering quickly, it sometimes spirals into repeated errors that need manual intervention.

That leaves the X10 in an interesting spot. If your home mostly deals with dust, daily dirt, and the occasional hair tumbleweed, it can be a huge help. It’s especially appealing for homes with complicated layouts since its obstacle avoidance and pathfinding are among the best around. But if you’ve got kids dropping food or floors that collect bigger debris, this model may test your patience. At $549.99, you’re getting a feature-rich robot that nails navigation and edge mopping at a lower price than its rivals, but you’ll want to be realistic about what it can and can’t handle.

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Deals are selected by our commerce team

https://lifehacker.com/tech/eufy-x10-pro-omni-robot-vacuum-mop-deal?utm_medium=RSS

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Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/390064-2/390064/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=390064

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(I have just finished my final year at university. I have worked hard and am exhausted. My parents are really supportive and proud of my academic successes and endeavours. I get an email from the registrar’s office following the release of my final grades, saying that I have made the dean’s list, a prestigious honour […]

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RIP Robert Redford

I have to admit that when all the hubbub of him being cast in Winter Soldier happened, I was entirely out of the loop. He didn't have much presence in my life growing up, despite me devouring movies. But it's been nice to read about his life since yesterday. I never knew about all his activism.

Robert Redford, Environmentalism, and the Most Prescient Movie Ever Made by Dave Leviton is a good write-up.

I may look into a few of his movies when I get home. Meanwhile, here's a All The Predident's Men vid: Me and Bernstein down by the schoolyard by

findmeinthealps.

eta Sneakers is a movie that's being mentioned a lot, I may seek that one out. Here's a writeup at PC Mag (makes sense, as it's about cyber security, I believe?)

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I was so charmed by The Fairy Circus that I decided to see if the university archives had any of Lathrop’s other books, and indeed, they have The Colt from Moon Mountain... and the colt is a unicorn colt!!!!!!! Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have spoiled that, I went into the archive not knowing and nearly squeaked with delight when I saw the cover, but as it IS on the cover it’s probably not a serious spoiler. Unicorn befriends farmgirl! Delightful.

The archive people know me, by the way. I was rooting through my purse for my ID and the desk clerk was like, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen you before.”

I also read Dick Francis’s Whip Hand, the sequel to Odds Against. In Odds Against, iron woobie Sid Halley had been forced out of his jockey career by a tragic accident that resulted in a horrifyingly deformed left hand, which led to him becoming a private investigator, which over the course of the book led to him losing said left hand entirely.

About three chapters into Whip Hand, the baddie trains a shotgun on Sid’s right hand at point-blank range and threatens to shoot it off. Sid endures in stoic (but deeply terrified) silence; I the reader screamed like a tea kettle. “IS HE GOING TO LOSE ONE APPENDAGE EACH BOOK?” I shrieked with horrified delight at this new horizon of whumpiness.

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Another quote from A Sand County Almanac: “Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

What I Plan to Read Next

Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery! Which comes with a side mystery: Gaarder has published a number of books since the 1990s, most of which have indeed been translated into English, and yet most of them are not available through any of the various libraries to which I have access. Why not? Where are they? A mystery worthy of Gaarder himself.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Currently reading Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher, a Snow White retelling in which a healer specializing in poisons - one of Kingfisher's signature Sensible Female Protagonists - is called in to find out whether a princess is being poisoned or simply wasting away from the recent stress of a familial double murder(!), and I have just hit the point where all of my clever-to-bonkers theories about what is happening here went straight out the window. Or through the looking glass, as it were, which would not actually have been a twist if I'd read the blurb, but I... did not do that.

Continuing to read Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, a very funny and charming sort of road trip novel from 1889 where the road is the river Thames and the trip is full of comedic mishaps as well as side tangents about non-boat-related comedic mishaps and occasional flights of sentimental fantasy, like, since we're so impressed by random Tudor handicrafts, does that mean that the people of the far-off 2000s will value our random teacups as fine arts? (This is actually a pretty short/quick read but I'd been neglecting it for other books; now that I'm actually locked in, I'll probably finish in a day or two.)

In other media, the past week(ish) has been great for new music:
- "Armies of the Lord" by the Mountain Goats, which is a single from a forthcoming album described as a "full-on musical" concept album about a shipwreck, and also features backing vocals from Lin-Manuel Miranda??
- "Particle Physics" by Motion City Soundtrack, which is their last new single from The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World before the album comes out on Friday (!) and features backing vocals from Patrick Stump.
- For Gerard Way's next trick after My Chemical Romance's Grand Guignol theater production of a stadium tour, he is apparently working on a new band, The Mock-Ups, which just dropped their first single: "I Wanna Know Your Name"

Entry tags:

fandom: multifandom (limited)

Announcement: Small Fandoms Bang Open for Author Sign-Ups!

Round Fifteen of

smallfandombang | Small Fandoms Bang, the big bang for small fandoms, is open for Author Sign-Ups!

All small fandoms (once they have been verified as small) qualify, and there is no requirement that you have to have written a long fic before you sign up. The minimum word count is only 10,000 words and we give you plenty of time to get your fic written. All ratings, pairings, and genres are welcome, as are AUs, and crossovers/fusions between small fandoms. Check out the Author Sign-Up post for more information.

A 10,000-word big bang for small fandoms!

FAQ | Rules | Author Sign-Up | Beta/Cheerleader Sign-Up | Affiliate

(Author sign-ups are open now through October 31; Artist sign-ups open November 1st.)

If you love small fandoms, come check us out!

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The Day in Spikedluv (Tuesday, Sept 16)

I hit Walmart while I was downtown and Stewart’s on the way home. I did a load of laundry, hand-washed dishes, went for several walks with Pip and the dogs, scooped kitty litter, and showered. I stopped by the library on the way home from mom’s to pick up some books. I grilled steak for Pip’s supper.

I started the next Duncan Kincaid book and watched an HGTV program.

Temps started out at 48.7(F) and reached 77.2. I wore shorts and a tank top out of the house in the morning despite the cool temps because I was determined to enjoy the later warm temps. (With a sweatshirt, naturally. *g*)

Mom Update:

Mom was on the porch when I arrived, but still complained about having too little energy. ( more back here )

Entry tags:

September flowers: fairy crassula

Title: September flowers: fairy crassula
Artist:

mific
Rating: Gen
Fandom: original art
Content Notes: Made in Procreate. It's been a cold winter so there's not much flowering yet in September, in Auckland. This succulent in one of my hanging baskets has been lovely, though.

( full size below )

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Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/390063-2/390063/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=390063

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I work the entrance at a theme park that requires tickets for all guests 3 and up, so of course some people try to say their kid is 2 to get them in for free. Because of this and a popular video of someone trying to sneak in a school-age kid by stuffing them in […]

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The Wifi Password Is Schadenfreude

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/the-wifi-password-is-schadenfreude/391250/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=391250

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One of those guests was a German woman. In English, she was perfectly pleasant. In German… not so much.
Her check-in went smoothly at first. We were making small talk about where she was from when she got a phone call, presumably from her husband. As the old story goes, she immediately started badmouthing me in German while I continued her check-in.

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Interesting Links for 17-09-2025

1. DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing: (tags:politics terrorism USA censorship )

(no subject)

Posted by Not Always Right

https://notalwaysright.com/390062-2/390062/

https://notalwaysright.com/?p=390062

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My husband and I and our fifteen-month-old daughter had just left my parents’ house after dinner and an evening of board games. We’d seen weather alerts on our phones about storms moving in, so we wanted to make tracks. About ten minutes down the road, we heard a noise coming from the back seat – […]

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https://notalwaysright.com/?p=390062

Current Music: Donald Swann, "Say Who You Are"

If I press button A, all my pennies will go

I just had my first opportunity to shower in four nights, even without washing my hair, so I just had the same opportunity to free-associate in the shower.

I have no explanation for why I was singing the blessedly abridged setting of Kipling's "The Ladies" (1896) that I learned from the singing of John Clements in Ships with Wings (1941) except that it's been in my head ever since it displaced Cordelia's Dad's "Delia" (1992).

As a person who does think all the time about the Roman Empire, I am incapable of not associating Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" (1954) with Sydney Carter's "Take Me Back to Byker" (1963)—as performed by Donald Swann, the only way I have ever heard it—even though Sutcliff was obviously drawing on Kipling's "On the Great Wall" (1906) with her long march and songs that run in and out of fashion with the Legions and the common ancestor of all of them anyway is almost certainly "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (17th-whatever).

Somehow I remain less over the fact that Donald Swann was the first person to record Carter's "Lord of the Dance" (1964) than the fact that he did a song cycle of Middle-Earth (1967) and an opera of Perelandra (1964).

Oh, shoot, Swann would have made a great Campion. You register the horn-rims and immediately tune out the face behind them.

Ignoring the appealingly transitive properties of Wimsey, Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, I am not going to rewatch the episode of Granada Holmes starring Clive Francis, I am going to lie down before someone wakes me.