muchtooarrogant

I hung out with a guy from Ecuador today, and we talked about what immigrants always talk about: how much we miss the food we can't get here. (His wife is originally from Venezuela -- they both grew up in Spain before ending up in England -- and our extensive talk about food made me miss the Venezuelan who made arepas, but I think that place didn't survive lockdowns. Apparently there's no Ecuadoran food here; the closest thing he could console himself with is a Colombian place in Liverpool.)

When someone from queer club who has chronic pain and fatigue asked for help with the heavy lifting of moving house, of course I volunteered. This was the man-with-a-van that he hired.

It's funny, when Matt told me to text Dennis I expected that Dennis would be an old gammony bigot, but instead I got Denis, an adorable wife guy, a decade younger than me, helping people move house as a side hustle.

Denis called me Matt at first, which didn't bother me -- Matt's the person he's mostly been dealing with! -- but he could not have been more apologetic. And then apparently he called me Kevin for a while, which did make me laugh (I didn't even know this until he apologized for it!). I did try to assure Denis that all these white guy names are the same but he was adamant.

I don't know Matt well, except that he's a single-in-the-sense-of-not-cohabiting person who's 30 or 40 years old. I expected a room full of stuff. This guy had an amount of books I'd expect from boomers who haven't had to move to a new house in fifty years. And the heaviest bookcases, I think Matt said they were made of old scaffolding or something? And because the bookcases had to go in the van first, they had to come out last, and thus be taken upstairs when I was already wiped out.

We collected stuff from his storage unit and brought it to his house first, then went to his previous house to get stuff from there and there was so much we didn't think we could fit it all in the van and that we'd have to come back to make a second trip. We really really didn't want to do that, though, and managed to avoid it by packing the van so full that Denis's hand truck had to come with us in the front -- I sat in the middle, and it got shotgun. But we were so pleased with ourselves for not having to go back, and it's a damn good thing. I could barely walk the 20ish minutes home by the time we finished -- and when I got there, it took me most of an hour to eat and shower even though I very much wanted to do both of those things!

As we were dragging the bookcases up the stairs, Denis could not stop talking about how strong I was, he was shocked when I told him (not quite in so many words) that I have a bullshit email job, he absolutely thought I was a fellow manual laborer. "How did you get so good at this?" he said. I didn't know how to tell him it's a combination of my dad instilling his (manual laborer) work ethic, and transgym making me hench.

I was not looking forward to having to go help V's relative get stuff from his mum's house to the tip again tomorrow, but it sounds like we almost certainly won't be needed! He got extra done this week and extra help today, which is wonderful for him and well-timed for me. Apparently the last bit, a friend of his with a van, might fall through tomorrow so we're on standby but that slight possibility feels a lot better than the absolute certainty!

Now I'm off to take some more ibuprofen and sleep forever.

hafnia

(As per usual, if you have a burning question, you can ask here!)

A science fact everyone should know and/or that is cool.

Oh, gosh — the difficulty with being someone with expertise in chemistry is that I never know what people do/don't know, because stuff that I take for granted might be something that everyone does, or it might be something that makes everyone sit up and go, "what the fuck are you talking about?"

Suppose I can be a little self-indulgent, since it's my journal, and say —

The history of synthetic dyes is really interesting stuff. We'll settle on that, because it's weird and fun.

We're (probably) all familiar with the whole thing about how purple is the color of royalty because for centuries, purple/violet dyes were incredibly difficult to come by — think Tyrian purple, which was labor-intensive and required thousands of snails to create.

As alchemy became chemistry, with chemists moving more toward natural science and away from transmutation, part of the shift in approach was a desire to understand what gives rise to different natural products. How do we make them, what's their structure, etc. Not dyes so much as medicines and other valuable products that can be found in nature but that it might be nicer to be able to synthesize.

Starting in the early 1800s, we're getting a better grip on the periodic table, etc (though it isn't a table, yet) — we've been able to isolate some of the elements, we're beginning to have better understanding of different reactions, especially organic reactions, and what leads to the products that are desired. There's an interest in understanding how plants like indigo are able to work as dyes — can we isolate what molecule it is that gives rise to those dye colors. A lot of work is done to identify that molecule — one that gets called aniline — though the interest in it is less in using it as a dye (since it's not useful as one) and more in using it as a precursor for other chemicals (like eventually, polyurethane).

So.

Fast-forward to 1856. William Henry Perkin is a student at the Royal College of Chemistry. His PI, a guy named August Wilhelm von Hofmann, was an important organic chemist (he coined the term "synthesis" and if you have ever taken organic chemistry you are certainly familiar with his work) who had done a great deal of work on aniline and was hellbent on synthesizing quinine. He had a scheme that he thought would work to create it, and like all great PIs, he shoved it off on one of his students — in this case, Perkin. "Go do this and see if it works" — nice to know that some things never actually change, ha.

The synthetic scheme itself was unsuccessful — instead of making quinine, Perkin made what we would charitably call "black goop". Trying to clean it out of the flask he'd done the reaction in with alcohol, he was surprised to realize that the liquid was bright purple. Some initial tests showed that it could dye fabric, and so Perkin dropped out of college to patent it, selling it as "mauveine", and kicking off the synthetic dye frenzy. Mauveine was cheap and easy to make — after all, we'd figured out how to make aniline industrially — and so here was a color that had previously been unattainable, suddenly everywhere. People went a bit nuts for it, you had everyone running around wearing mauve, to the extent that different satirical publications wrote about the "mauve measles", and chemists everywhere sat up and went, "If that asshole can do it, I bet I can, too" — the real basis of scientific discovery. (TRULY.)

The craze for mauveine would eventually die down, as other aniline dyes (as they were called) were discovered, and other colors became available, but mauveine was the first. Despite its drawbacks (it's carcinogenic and prone to fading), it was the first commercially significant synthetic dye, and it really did kick off a huge line of work in organic chemistry.

It's sort of funny, actually, but the first line of synthetic dyes would also lead (indirectly) to the discovery of sulfa antibiotics. :)

cosmolinguist

I'm going to Huddersfield for work on Monday, Wrexham on Wednesday, and at the very end of today I had a call where I ended up agreeing to go to "somewhere near Walsall" on Friday next week (I'm still awaiting the promised email with more specific details than that!).

(For non-locals, these are all 2ish hours away, or less, but one of these in a week would usually be a big deal and leave me really tired the next day and etc.)

They're all trips I really want to make, all for unrelated things that just happen to have turned up at the same time. I'll be fine. But oof!

Tomorrow I'm helping a fellow Queer Club member move heavy furniture to his new place, while V has an unpleasant hospital appointment testing for something potentially serious. Sunday D and I will once again be doing tip runs for V's relative who's clearing out his mum's house...

Everything is... a bit intense at the moment.

I do have almost all of the next week off work (except for a trip to Chester lol, which I actually really want to do). Really looking forward to that.

hafnia

(you know the drill, etc, etc. You can ask here! I will probably answer!)

Talk about fiber arts!

I'm skipping day 11 for now, since it turns out I have quite a lot to say :x but! We'll get to it later in the month, I promise.

Fiber arts!

My grandma was a quilter and did a lot of hand-sewing projects; my mom is also a quilter who does hand-sewing stuff.

My grandma taught me how to embroider, and from her and my mom I learned how to sew, which led to things like quilting and costuming as well as basic hand-sewing for clothing repair and alterations. (If you need a pair of pants hemmed, I'm here for you. :) )

In college, I learned how to knit, though as it turns out I'm absolutely terrible at it — tension is good and I don't drop stitches, but I'm just. Seemingly incapable of enjoying the process? Which is funny, really, because I also crochet, and I'm quite good at it and enjoy it a lot.

Not that I've crocheted anything noteworthy in the last couple of years, but, er.

I picked up cross-stitch during lockdowns because it was easy and didn't take a lot of brain. I've since gotten pretty good at it (the one in the background is also one I did).

The next cross-stitch thing I'm planning to do is this one. :)

I have some vague crochet plans for finishing an afghan I started literally years ago, but, well, we'll see?

halfshellvenus

Apparently, I caught a bad night of Olympic Ice Dancing earlier this week. Someone explained that there is a Rhythm Dance segment, which was 90's themed and drove most of the frenetic gesticulating that was jarring to watch. The final program was more like what I was expecting— more couples-style dancing than parallel dancing, and a bigger romantic element. I loved the music Zingas and Kolesnik skated to, as well as their choreography. The Canadian team did a wonderful job, though, and beat them out for the bronze medal. As for Chock and Bates vs. the French team, I preferred the French performance. It combined grace, power, and skill really well. Also, Chock kind of rubs me the wrong way (she comes off as brittle, somehow, making her performance less appealing).

And now there's controversy about the French winning gold, and none of it seems to have anything to do with the actual performances. \o? Both routines seemed flawless, and the artistry is always subjective, so who knows? I would think the lifts and balanced poses (which were very creative in all the routines) would be the hardest to judge, in terms of technical difficulty. Maybe they're just new to me, and there are some established criteria for them? At least we're not in the days of throwing out the Russian judge's scores...

Speaking of dance, we are going to the ballet this weekend! There is a performance of Sleeping Beauty, and the music is too good to pass up. I would have liked to have seen whatever the Dracula ballet was over Halloween weekend in the Fall, but we had to go out of town. I'm hoping this will be good. About 10-12 years ago, we went to an all-Stravinsky program for my birthday, which had the Firebird Suite and The Rite Of Spring. We really enjoyed it! Normally, there is The Nutcracker at Christmas, and then a couple of gala events that are more pop culture, and the galas have never appealed to us. This should be more our style.

On the subject of dreams again, I dreamed last night that we were in a wreck and the insurance company totaled our 4Runner. Boy, would that ever be depressing! I mourned the loss of my first car (an '85 Toyota Tercel), but that was mainly for sentimental reasons. Our 4Runner is 30 years old now, and we still love it. Plus, I really prefer having levers and buttons on the dashboard, and that's almost gone in newer cars. The Prius we lost to the garage fire had its touchscreen die about 7 or 8 years in, and that really reduced the A/C and music functionality. I don't want to go through that again.

Here's hoping the 4Runner will still be with us for a long time to come...

cosmolinguist

This morning I got to call one of the candidates we interviewed yesterday and offer her the work placement. That felt nice.

But also weird. I've never done anything like this before! I am in a very technical sense her line manager, in that her actual manager, my manager, is now on leave for the next week and a half and he asked me to take care of this. Which meant not just the fun phone call but doing paperwork, and that meant having to write down my own name and contact details where it said "Manager."

Wild.

The less said about the rest of the work day the better, but the rest of the day was good. I went for a nice long walk in the warm(ish) drizzle with Teddy, who drank from so many muddy puddles that he had a big dirty circle on his snout. Like the dog equivalent of a kid with a milk mustache. The air smelled amazing, the plants and the soil are starting to wake up.

Then angelofthenorth invited us over for cheesy toad in the hole, which is a genius idea and I think I might have to make it in future. It was great to see her, and Mr Smith.

And since we'd all planned to go to the gym, she and I walked there while D drove V home and then came back to join me (Miriam having gone swimming). The gym is so much more fun with him there.

hafnia

(You know the drill! You can ask here if you have a question you'd like answered!)

Favorite dessert to make?

Ha. So — I love to bake, but I am not really a Dessert Person. Like, there are specific desserts I like eating, but more often than not, I will just buy them because I apparently have fancy taste and my desires exceed my skills (or, you know, certain stuff is just annoying to make).

Anyway, all that to say, the list of desserts I have made and enjoyed making is pretty short, but we'll go ahead and run through it...

1). Chocolate Pie.

This is, as it sounds, chocolate pudding in a pie crust.

I don't like making pie crust, but pie crust that you make yourself at home is worlds better than anything you can buy frozen (alas!), and so I Suffer and Endure and Make It. :D

Chocolate Pie is Max's favorite and so I make it for him every Thanksgiving and sometimes for Christmas. These are the two occasions he knows it is safe to ask for chocolate pie.

2). Tiramisu.

It's not really baking, but! I have a solid method in my back pocket which does not involve raw eggs (eww), so.

Hard to go wrong with coffee, ladyfingers, and brandy (or rum) layered with whipped cream/marscapone and chocolate. Yum. I made one this year for Max's birthday and it was gone within about two days. :D

3). Macarons.

...I feel like someone is going to come out going WHAT at me, because I just said my desires exceed my skills, but!

Macarons are Just Okay. THERE, I SAID IT.

Anyway I wanted to prove to myself that I could make them, so I did. It ended up being surprisingly fun; they were not picture-perfect (I needed to whip my eggs more), but I am actually planning to make some apricot ones here in a couple of weeks and see if they work out better this time.

(I made blueberry and raspberry last time, per the request of the person I was making them for; they were Aggressively Fine, but if I'm doing jam, I want it to be strawberry or apricot. Certain People may laugh now.)

4). Danishes.

Again, this is one where I feel like people are going to go, what, but!

Laminated pastry is actually fun to make, though if I'm making puff pastry I prefer to use it for things like chicken pot pie or apple turnovers (which I don't add much sugar to, so I suppose they're borderline acceptable to eat for breakfast).

I made Danishes for my dad for Father's Day the last time I was out there for Father's Day, and the entire plate of them was gone within about thirty minutes. My brother-in-law ate, like, six. (They were, to be fair, not huge, but still!)

At some point in the next few weeks I am also planning to try my hand at making eclairs again, now that I've actually got the equipment for it (specifically, nice piping bags and such), so I guess that + the macarons will be it. Eclairs are probably the thing I buy most often at Safeway that makes me go, "ugh I do technically have the ability to do this but I'm lazy."

(To be fair to the Safeway nearest the house, though, their bakery is quite good. The eclairs I get there remind me of the ones I used to get from the bespoke bakery my mom's friend ran in Salt Lake, which is not something I can say of any other grocery store bakery I've gotten stuff from.)

Anyway.

Frequently, if it's Just Me And Max and it's not a special occasion but I want something dessert-y, it's cookies. I have a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie recipe memorized and have had it memorized since I perfected it when I was, like, 10.

("Perfect" according to my grandfather, who was Very Picky about cookies, but I digress. I'm fond of it! I don't think it's to anyone else's taste, but Max likes to dip them in coffee, so.)

There you go. :D

halfshellvenus

I watched Another Country again last night, for the first time in about 40 years. Rupert Everett was as gorgeous as ever! Though Colin Firth didn't look like much at that age (despite already having that voice), and Cary Elwes was... really blond. \o? I didn't feel the pangs I used to get when the movie first come out, but it was enjoyable. I also spent far too much time scouring the various crowd scenes trying to spot other actors who later made it big, but found nothing other than the three above.

We've been watching S2 of Night Manager, which improved as soon as Tom Hiddleston shed the fake glasses and began his Con Of Charm. Speaking of voices—his is so silky! I also loved the sexy-dancing with Camilla Morrone and Diego Calva. And the appearance of ( Spoilers ) One more episode to go.

And on another hunky note, Brilliant Minds is currently all about the transformation of Dr. Josh for me. I actually checked IMDB.com early this season to see if the part had been recast, but no. Teddy Sears was an okay-looking guy before, but letting his hair go gray and changing the style turned him into a hottie! I've seen photos of other roles, and this is really the best he's ever looked. I'm not rooting for him to get back together with Wolf, though—I'd like to think Dr. Josh has more sense. Wolf is... work. A lot of work. And I'm not loving the flamboyant nurse they introduced this season. The show has a main character who is gay—was there a complaint about it lacking gay stereotypes? And the new asshole resident is similarly unwelcome...

I'm in the last episode of Orphan Black, and they seem to have wound up the series nicely. I'll miss it and all the sestras, though. I've enjoyed the journey with them all. Five seasons was really helpful for all of the garage-biking I've done since November, too. Now what? I have some potential action/thriller shows in my Netflix list, but most are just 1 or 2 seasons. And I'll be in there most of this week—yesterday was too windy to bike outdoors, and today starts three days of rain. :(

If it weren't for the ads, I would probably watch some of the Winter Olympics in the garage. I caught a little of it late last night. I missed Men's Figure Skating already (as I always seem to), and it looks like Ice Dancing has become Rhythm Skating, which... *sigh*. It seems to mostly now be loud music and gangsta-style dancing. What a change from the romance of Torvill and Dean! Last night also featured a couple of new-to-me sports: free-style skiing (which contains elements of snowboarding) and ski-sprinting. That last one... wow. I've never seen someone try to ski uphill before, and there was a lot of that. Overall, those women were strong. It was quite a workout.

All right, back to work. Carry on! :D

cosmolinguist

I helped conduct five interviews this morning (which as my manager who's doing them with me pointed out is always weirdly draining -- there's something about having all these potential futures appear before you, where the decision you make affects people's lives so differently, depending on what you choose...even here when it's only for a ten-week placement like this).
I had a really demanding meeting this afternoon that I had not been able to prepare for at all. It went okay but oof. Coulda been better!
Then we went to go collect groceries, and V's shoes which have been repaired.
Then I had counseling. Today we talked about what we ended up calling different "circles" of my life: work, Minneapolis, local stuff (by-election mostly), household, community care, self-care... Normally when one circle has felt like too much there's been a nicer one I can shift my focus to, but lately it feels like they've all been shitty. It helped to talk about this even if it wasn't anything I don't think about regularly.
I walked into my bedroom where I do counseling (it's on the phone) and my first thought was oh yeah, I meant to change the bedding yesterday and then I didn't...I should do that. And it was mostly done by the time she called! And I did the rest right after.
And on only the second time I went back upstairs after that I remembered to take the laundry down with me! And the washing machine was free so I chucked it right in. This is all like warp-speed, by my usual standards.

I didn't even have time to walk Teddy today. But we did get fancy takeout (yay, vegetable tempura!) re-scheduled from me fucking up the plan last night, and watched some TV and I managed to stay mostly awake until 9pm. That's good enough.

denise posting in

dw_news

Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for

dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update

dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update

dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.

hafnia

1). The sourdough starter appears to be working. I made English muffins with it tonight. They were good! I'm going to try baking bread this week; we'll see how it turns out.

2). I applied for two jobs. One, I am massively overqualified for (it's a temporary position within public works for the city — basically I'd be doing as-needed water quality testing).

The other is a part-time writing gig for a publication I'm familiar with thanks to Hobby Reasons. Saw that they were hiring, immediately went, "!", and since they said zero experience required, figured I'd shoot my shot. I am incredibly unlikely to get it, but this is The Year of Becoming Comfortable With Rejection, so, you know, if I hear back with anything that's not a form, "we've decided go to forward with another candidate...", I will be a happy creature.

3). Someone I don't know left me a really lovely comment on a thing I wrote (and posted to AO3, and will share when it's no longer anonymous i.e. after the collection fully reveals). It was just really well-timed and genuinely kind, and I very much needed it. ♥

EDIT 2/11: I did in fact get rejected. They were extremely kind about it and encouraging about pitching to them, but they want someone who has experience specifically on the back end that I do not. The rejection was personalized and encouraging, so that felt...weirdly good? Huh.

cosmolinguist

My alarm went off two hours earlier than usual today. I'd had the kind of bad sleep you do when you know you'll need to get up early: it took me longer to fall asleep in the first place and I woke up repeatedly, convinced at one point that I'd definitely slept too late until I looked at the clock and saw it was 4:30am.

I was starting work early so I could be interviewed for BBC Radio Leeds. It went really well, thanks I think to a journalist I'd spoken to a couple weeks ago. I had a really nice conversation. And then a quiet morning with a big cup of coffee while I gently got myself up to dealing with meetings and emails.

My mood and mental state have been low all weekend, and I'm really struggling with sleep again. And eating.

Oddly, in a total inverse of the past...oh, year or more, it seemed like I was feeling least bad during work hours. Walking Teddy now kinda marks the end of my work day, and it's a really nice little ritual that sometimes gives me time to file away the work day and think about what's ahead. But today, I didn't feel the usual relief at finishing work, but more... overwhelmed maybe. Everything feels like so much at the moment: watching the effects I'm seeing around me from ICE, Gaza, the Epstein files, UK politics thanks to the by-election we're living amidst, politics in sports from the Olympics to Bad Bunny...

All my podcasts are being boring and/or not updating, they're all conspiring to make me actually read my book-club book even though i don't wanna -- it's The Day the World Came to Town, about the multiple airliners' worth of passengers that descended on a small Newfoundland town on 9/11 when the U.S. closed its air space. I'm still at the beginning and just stressed out hearing about people in Europe getting on these transatlantic flights, the normal day the air traffic controller thought he was going to have... The book is leaving me both agitated and bored at the same time somehow.

I screwed up a plan to get nice takeout as a treat tonight, I couldn't help do this week's Tesco order as had been the plan for this evening, and I could only sit through half of Sinners, my favorite movie from all of last year, before I had to go lie in the dark. But that was hours ago; I can't sleep.

hafnia

(Continuing to harp about this, but if you want to ask a question, you can do so here!)

Worldbuilding I'm most proud of?

That's...a good question. I have built a lot of worlds!

I think the short list has got to be:

1). Hexas (because it's genuinely really fun and I had a great time thinking through e.g. how the fuck it is that certain stuff would work — like, "okay, the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery, because slavery as a concept doesn't really exist in this world — magic changes a hell of a lot of things", eventually settling on "it was fought over acceptable uses of magic, what would or wouldn't be acceptable magic in this setting".

Really interesting to think through how e.g. settlement of the US etc would have worked if not for colonialism. I still think about it sometimes.

2). I'm putting this behind a little spoiler tag because, well, it's kind of...weird; it's about the big project on AO3 so of course if you're like, "I don't want to read about it", good news, you don't have to!

There's also what

shadaras lovingly dubbed "Regency lakefuck world", which is very much a collaborative effort. I think I've written 90% of the text that exists for it (probably more like 95% at this point, good lord), but the worldbuilding and story development were definitely a team effort. It's...weird? And fun? Had to think about the class system, how a world where physical sex is mutable (not fixed) would affect — well, everything. Like, does it make sense for transphobia to exist in a world where changing your physical sex through magic is commonplace and widely accepted? Probably not. So what does exist, then, to drive conflict, and what are players rebelling against?

We ended up talking through a lot vis a vis: social mores and magic, and how it is that these two things tie together in specific ways. It's led to a fair amount of plot, but there's also just lots and lots of weird little bits about how stuff works. Like — if sex is mutable, okay, what does that mean for gender and gender roles? There's also bits about like, "if people live forever and divorce is uncommon, does that mean that non-monogamy is not an issue so long as inheritance isn't complicated by questions of paternity?" &etc.

All of this and it doesn't touch on how magic works in this world, who has access to it, or how other people who are not as long-lived view it. It's fun! And yeah, I'm very proud of it.

The series is here, though if you want a feeling for the world without having to read something E-rated, I will say cheerfully to watch this space, because as soon as stuff reveals for

seasonalremix, I will link what it was I wrote that takes place in the same world (though with different characters, it's a little comedy of manners, sort of).

3). The Night Market.

It's...

Imagine if Faery was real, that it still abutted our world in some ways, and the Fey had to change/adapt to keep up with the times.

The Night Market is how I envisioned that working. It's gone through several iterations; I keep meaning to get back to it and finish the book, but I haven't, yet. Eventually, probably.

cosmolinguist

1 what's your favourite kitchen appliance?
I never really thought about ranking them. The kettle is probably my favorite because it gets used the most.

2 do you have a collection of anything?
Random things related to Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch)

3 what's the best job you've ever had?
Probably the one I have now.

4 what's the worst job you've ever had?
Temping for minimum wage in a team that chased people up for overdue loans. I was new to the UK, so my partner and I were ineligible for all benefits, and I had a lot more in common with the people on the other side of these phone calls I could hear all day long as I was becoming The One Who Could Make the Printer Work and learning to like bananas because we had free fruit in the office and I needed the calories.

5 what's your favourite piece of furniture and where did you get it?
The green couch I bought the WonderHouse is pretty good. I can't remember where it came from; V sorted it out online of course.

6 what's your go-to recipe when you want to make something that requires minimal effort?
"Minimal effort" to me is taking something out of the freezer and putting it in the oven, which isn't a recipe. I guess in terms of things that I'd call a recipe that aren't difficult (and really pay off in how delicious it is, there's always the broccoli halloumi thing.

7 are you married or do you intend to get married?
I am not. I wouldn't say I intend to but I didn't intend to the other time either and it ended up being useful for geopolitical reasons so I wouldn't rule that out again in the future.

8 do you have kids? do you want them?
No and...I do not want to have them in terms of from my own body, and I'm fine that my life doesn't seem to have brought me any, but also if it had I think that would've been fine too.

9 are you on good terms with your parents?
...yes? This kinda came up at transgym yesterday: on the spectrum between good parents and shit parents mine are kinda...shit in practice but also... I talk to them every Sunday evening, which a lot of people would consider being pretty close and my parents consider less than the minimum to be happy.

10 do you have siblings? do you hang out with them?
ahahaha I have never found a good answer to this question. Do I have siblings in that I do and he turns up in anecdotes and suchlike? Or do I not in that if I say I do people ask stuff like "do you hang out with him?" and I can never hang out with him.

11 do you vote?
I vote in two countries! I just applied for a postal vote for the upcoming by election, because I can't remember if I'd done that since I got the notifications about it expiring.

12 what's the biggest purchase you've ever made?
Technically the mortgage on my old house but that didn't feel like a purchase. Next up is my Indefinite Leave to Remain which cost me I think I calculated about £7500 -- at the time. Using the Bank of England's inflation calculator, that'd be £12,828.24, and that's not counting that the Home Office has more-than-doubled the costs of those visas and applications since.

13 what are your hobbies?
Listening to podcasts, watching baseball.

14 what's a hobby you'd like to get into?
Hiking.

15 do you collect anything?
Aches, cynicism, grudges... wait, is this a question about knickknacks?

16 how long have you known your oldest friend?
I'm not really in very good touch with anyone I knew before I moved here, so probaby 18 or 19 years (despite being partners and good friends before that, neither D or I can remember what year we actually met but it was either 18 or 19 years ago).

17 are you a member of any clubs or associations?
local Queer Club. I have a gym membership lol. I don't think anything else?

18 have you ever changed fields in your career or education?
I'm a millennial, we don't get fields and careers. Not the disabled ones among us especially.

19 how many wisdom teeth do you have and have you had any removed?
I had them all taken out at 18, I didn't want to, my dentist said I had to, they'd be causing me loads of pain. They never did. I'm still convinced he did it to get money out of my parents.

20 what's your favourite beverage?
Coffee

21 do you have any living grandparents?
I did until a year ago.

22 do you have nieces/nephews/godchildren/other kids in your life that aren't yours?
D's niblings, his sister's two kids. They are great. They're also tweens/young teens now so increasingly absent/mysterious/incomprehensible, but still such good fun when we do get to hang out.

23 what's the coolest place you've visited?
There are so many, and it's hard to compare them. At the moment my first thought is the Atomium in Brussels.

24 what's your most recent degree and has it been useful to you?
BA (Hons) Linguistics. It has been very useful to me: not in an employment sense (beyond the fact that I think having a degree made it easier to get my job), but it has been so helpful to me to be able to approach my life and the world through this lens.

25 would you rather own a dishwasher or a washing machine if you could only have one or the other?
Oh the times in my life when I haven't owned a (working) washing machine have been absolutely miserable. It's much easier to wash dishes by hand than to wash clothes by hand (or go to the laundromat even if there is one closer now than there used to be because it's where my barber was!).

26 do you make a list before going to the grocery store or just wing it?
We mostly shop online. D has a kind of master list that we just tick off what we need each week(ish) when we do the order.

27 what's your favourite household chore?
Mowing the lawn.

28 what chore do you hate the most?
Cleaning things I don't know how to clean/never feel like I get it clean.

29 do you have houseplants and how are you at keeping them alive?
We have so many, I'm so lucky. V looks after them; this is something else I would be shit at noticing in time. But I love living surrounded by them.

30 what's your living arrangement? (who do you live with, in what kind of building, do you own or rent or other?
I live with my boyfriend and his partner, in a suburban semi-detached house that I think was social housing? Sold in the 80s to a builder who...did things to it himself, many of which have consequences we're still living with. Technically the mortgage is D's and I'm a lodger but in practice all three of us contribute to the bills/food/household stuff.

hafnia

(If you want to ask me a question, there's a handful of spots left, and you can do so here!)

Talk about the art of running one-shot ttrpgs

A bit of context here before we leap in: if you're not familiar with tabletop, one-shot adventures are games that can be played in a single session (typically somewhere from 3-5 hours, depending on the table).

( There is certainly *something* to running them... )

cosmolinguist

This afternoon, diffrentcolours and I were watching a documentary about chemistry with Jim Al-Khalili. (D has done sterling work getting the TV to be able to talk to his file server, so it's way easier to watch random things he has downloaded for us...like this BBC documentary about the history of chemistry.)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, D said of Dr. Al-Khalili, "He has a good scientist head."

"He really does!" I replied immediately.

Then I paused.

Then I said "Wait, I don't know what that means, and I don't know why I was so convinced of it."

Maybe it's the baldness?

Bald/shaved heads are so good. This came up at transgym this morning too: I was complaining about how much sweat my hair has absorbed because it's too long now --the last haircut I had was on my birthday! 3-4 weeks is plenty for my hair to need cutting again; the one problem with really short hair is it doesn't stay that way for long. And my barber has suddenly turned into a laundromat -- seriously, it only took a month for it to be open as a completely different kind of business! -- so I need to try a new one and I haven't had time and ugh...maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, as I was complaining, I was overhead by F, a guy with a shaved head, who said "enjoy it while it lasts!" Apparently he's still in his 20s, bless him. But it got me and our friend A talking about how much we like bald guys as an aesthetic, and then D told us about the subreddit for bald people, where guys share photos of them with thinning/receding hair, all sad about it, and then photos of them bald, happy, no longer giving a fuck. I think it's that "the way to win the game of conventional attractiveness is not to play" transformation that makes this seem sexy to me.

(Not that baldness can't be conventionally attractive, but a lot of balding guys seem to think that. Even if they're just having to get used to the change or confronting their mortality or whatever they do, I don't know. But it seems to do them some good to have to come to terms about it, if not embrace it.)

(Plus obviously bald heads are sexy because a nice close shave is fun to touch, and in the right circumstances I think the stubble can feel good too...)

hafnia

Full list of questions is, of course, here — there are still slots open if you have something you desperately want to know! :)

Day 6: What's it like being a GM/DM for ttrpg?

Okay, so.

Do you remember when you were a little kid, and you would play pretend? Maybe you were lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids, maybe you had a sibling, or maybe you were on your own. Whatever the case, you probably engaged in imaginative play, right? "Make-believe" or "pretend" or whatever you call it, maybe with props/costumes or maybe just with your imagination.

Right, so!

When I was a Wee Thing (back in the Mists of Time, aka the 1990s, this is fine), I was always the one that was going, "HEY! We're playing Pretend! Let's all get together, and..."

I would tell everyone the rules (usually just the premise/"don't be a jerk about this"), and then we'd just...play. Memorable games include:

-PIONEERS! (I had just read Little House in the Big Woods and, well, I was 6, what do you want)
-MURDER DETECTIVES (someone was murdering dolls in the dollhouse and we had to figure out who it was)
-Knights of the Round Table (I was Merlin; my friend's older brother, who was "too cool" for this kind of stuff but still painfully interested played King Arthur and told the littler kids what quests to go on)
-PRINCESS IN DISGUISE (my favorite, probably, where we were all royalty of some convoluted line or another who had to ??? to get our kingdom back — those question marks are because it usually varied a great deal)
-WITCHES (we made potions in the yard from various plants. I feel like most kids do this)

Right, um.

Running tabletop is a lot like playing those games again, but as an adult and with a better budget.

I feel like I could simply end it here, but no, really, ah — it's collaborative storytelling, where you are all agreeing to some conceits about the fiction (e.g. "this is high fantasy and takes place in this setting"), and then the dice and whatnot are for randomness. As the GM/DM, it's not really my job to "tell" the story so much as it is to gather all the disparate threads together and come out with a pleasing narrative.

It's literally what I used to do when I was playing Make Believe with my friends thirty-odd years ago, which makes sense given that ttrpg at its best is imaginative play for adults.

So. Yeah.

That's what it's like.

Good to know I haven't matured past the grand old age of eight, I guess? :P

halfshellvenus

I was in labor. And not only dreading the progression, but also kicking myself because we gave away our baby-bucket/stroller combo years ago, along with all of our other baby stuff. For perspective, our youngest child is 26. :O

The springlike weather continues here in Sacramento, with highs near 70^o all this week. I've had some great bike rides, and the one on Monday even included a half-mile stretch of the bike path that smelled like pot stickers and their dipping oil. Mmmmm!

TV-wise, I started a one-season show last night called Chasing Shadows (with Alex Kingston and her fabulous hair). I made myself go to bed in the middle of episode 4. It's far more captivating than I anticipated.

Earlier this week, I watched Dance With A Stranger for the Rupert Everett experience. It was one of his early movies, in which he played a petulant cad (boo) while looking absolutely gorgeous. Wow. The sound quality, though-- this was Amazon with ads, and it was like having an industrial fan or airplane going in the background.

Book-wise, I finished the last of the T.L. Huchu YA magician series that centers on a young ghost-talker named Ropa Moyo. I thoroughly enjoyed all of them, even as I sometimes got frustrated with Ropa for making impulsive decisions (the character ages from 14-16 during the series). Huchu's cycle is set in near-future dystopian Edinburgh, and rich with humor and slang. Dosh. Cheddar. Knapf. And those were some of the ones where I didn't Google the terms.

I also read Daniel H. Wilson's Hole In The Sky. Not as good as his Robopocalypse series, but it has his usual great mixture of sci-fi, horror, and soulfulness. It looks like The Clockwork Dynasty is the only remaining e-book I haven't already read, but I'll wait on it. Instead, I put a hold on Joe Hill's King Sorrow.

On tap for this weekend: more yard work, and posting a Craigslist ad for a pair of bookcases we need to get rid of. I want them out of here so I can build their replacements1 And that doesn't even account for the shelves, desk, etc. being stored in the garage. :O

cosmolinguist

Today's Teddywalk took us a slightly unusual way -- I let him choose, within reason. He didn't spend as long sniffing the grass triangle as before, and afterward when I wanted to drag him more directly back toward his house he scampered off the other way. This took us to a tree-lined residential street where he decided to poop next to one of the trees just as a man parked his land barge just behind us and the kids that got out of it were entertained by this free show.

This route also took us past a school where, even though it was nearing 5 o'clock, kids were going toward the school, with their grownups. They kinda looked like they were wearing pajamas? Some were in bathrobes or oodies. Some seemed to carry pillows or soft toys. One was almost hidden behind a Stitch that must have been fully half her size. It was adorable.

I had a pretty good day otherwise too.

Work was oddly satisfying.

A bunch of things happened to coincide today: I presented my new train report twice, first to a panel of subject-matter experts and accessibility advocates that I'm on, where people were very kind about it (especially as it was at the end of an hour and a half meeting that some people had to leave early and/or thought was only an hour long; one made sure to apologize for leaving halfway through but told me he'd read the report and it was good, which was very sweet).

Then in the afternoon I presented it to a group of lived-experience campaigners, a group I attended back when I was a volunteer who didn't have this job yet. They did their usual thing of wanting to vent their spleens on any tangentially-related topic, but I'm used to that and I kinda love it. Afterward, my colleague who runs these meetings messaged me to thank me and say she appreciates that I always handle the questions so well. I didn't think I'd done anything special! But despite that (or actually because of it!) this was really nice to hear.

And as well as feeling particularly competent with the different audiences my work is for, I also had a quick one-to-one(ish) with my manager which indirectly addressed the stuff I've been stressing about lately and where seemed much happier than I'm used to hearing with the work that I have done in the last year and the stuff that's coming up this year.

It's funny because the other day, on our way to the theater, D pointed out where transgym yoga had moved to: one of those "not actually far away but hard for me to find/get to on a bus" places. So I actually looked at yoga on the transgym website and not only was it on this Friday (it's every other week), but it was back at its old location! My hips are so much happier now, and it'll be good for my brain too.

And now, after a week that was really truly about a month long, it's the weekend! We have basically no plans, and the fascists aren't even yelling at the hotel this Sunday!

So many good things.

hafnia

The master list of questions is here — the 16th, 22nd and 24th are all free, if you want to ask anything! :D

Talk about SPACE HEIST (how you came up with the idea, where you currently are in designing it, whatever else you wanna say...?)

Oh, glob, this is a deep pull. Ha. Okay.

For those that aren't in the know, Space Heist is a 2d6 ttrpg I designed and wrote myself. It takes place at a point where humanity has gone to the stars, interstellar travel is common, and people are scattered across the galaxy. Think space stations, alien planets, incredibly advanced tech...

Right, um, anyway. I started writing it about 5 years ago, in 2021. As far as "how did I come up with the idea", uh. People who have been around here a Long Time probably recall different short stories I wrote at various points in time about something I called the "Explorer Corps" — basically, a human-centered operation that was dedicated to "charting the uncharted" and hired the "best of the best" to do it. When I came up with it originally, it was very much, "I need something that works to put scientists into space but isn't NASA".

The very first long-form campaign I wrote/ran was wrapping up in 2021, and my players all wanted to play something science fiction. I'd thought about running TechNoir or Scum and Villainy, and neither one of them really appealed to me. So, instead of running something like Mothership or a Lasers and Feelings hack, I went, "I've been thinking about designing a game", and wrote Space Heist, using all that old Explorer Corps vibes/worldbuilding.

At this point, the player documents are a hot mess, but they're technically done. I have yet to start working on the GM documents beyond some basic notes on setting and how to run the game that are more philosophy than "here's how this works, mechanically". I have run it — I've run a couple of one-shots in it — and i'ts one of the things I get asked to run most frequently, because the people who like it, really like it.

The last couple of playtests, as well as getting more familiar with playing 2d6 systems like PbtA, means that I've got a bunch of thoughts about players and how skills etc work. I need to review and revise the documents, something I'm planning to do in the next month or so. After I revise the player documents (which will be pretty involved), I may run some further playtests (FUN) to see how stuff hangs together, if it does. I also need to actually write the GM guide for this — most of it is just "vibes", but there are some setting things and one-shot ideas that people who run it should be aware of.

It's my goal for this year to go ahead and get it up on itch.io, whether that's being like, "this is in alpha, please give me feedback, you can download it for free", or if I actually do get what I would call a 1.0 release ready and release it as a pay-as-you-want PDF. Right now I'm leaning toward the latter, just because I can't envision myself wanting to do a lot more iterations of it, and the only thing that's really stopping me is the knowledge I have zero artwork for it (but that I would want to either make or commission art — the former is intimidating, but the latter requires money I don't have to dedicate to a project like this right now).

So!

Kind of weird, but it came up in therapy the other day — my therapist asking, like, "so how are you doing at putting more of your stuff out there" (since it's something I have talked about with him pretty extensively — not monetizing projects, specifically, but putting stuff in a place where other people can see it and take joy in it). I said that I was planning to release Space Heist this year, and he was all for it. Guess I'll have at least one person holding me accountable? Heh.

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Aimless Ramblings

Only 7 Chromosomes

Reading

Henchqueer

Talking Meme Month - Day 13

The next week

Talking Meme Month - Day 12

That's more like it!

The manager type

Talking Meme Month - day 10

Chunks of Hunks

Feels like it should be the weekend by now

Update on legal cases: one new victory! :) One new restriction :(

small victories.

Strugglebus

Talking Meme Month - day 8

fun meme from cmcmck

Talking Meme Month - day 7

Heads

Talking Meme Month - day 6

Last night, I dreamed

Good day

Talking Meme Month - day 5

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