April Recs

May. 1st, 2025 01:53 pm
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
My comments on reading in April are a couple recs: firstly, The Executioner's Daughter by Ashley Warren. D&D level 3 solo adventure/CYOA story, very cool.

And I have also been greatly enjoying Ballarat National Theatre's podcast production of Persuasion. Highly recommended.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
I was going to post a link to quilt pictures here and then I thought I should post pictures of the other quilts I've done and then I realized I didn't really have any good pictures of them and then it was two months later.

So here are pictures of a quilt I finished in March! (Tumblr) (Twitter)

And here are some of the other things I did in the past two months that didn't make it here:

Learned more programming

A bunch of unrelated thoughts about The Old Guard on Tumblr: one, two, three

Listened to some French podcasts

Signed up for my local city councillor's mailing list, which I recommend if you are that kind of person and have a decent city councillor

Had meta-thoughts on omegaverse (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Provided a blood sample for the Ontario Health Study's COVID antibody study (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Was moderately snide about "accessible design" by non-disabled people (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Birding

Feb. 9th, 2021 02:03 pm
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
I have been getting the Cornell Lab's email newsletter, and it's nice to just have something straightforwardly focused on nature show up every two weeks. This time they had an essay by political scientist Christina Greer on ... basically that.

And then in non-bird related news I went to her twitter and found that she's moderating a discussion on the impact of COVID-19 and health outcomes for marginalized people tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, run by the Museum of African American History. Registration seems to be free.

Edit: Unrelatedly, the United Arab Emirates just went to Mars.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
Blue Beads in the Tundra

Note that the first sentence of this article contains a really major error: the actual "first European item[s] ever to arrive in North America" were on the other site of the continent, in Newfoundland, and at least 400 years older. (The Norse also landed, though did not settle, on the mainland at Labrador.) What the archaeologist quoted actually says is “[t]his was the earliest that indubitably European materials show up in the New World by overland transport.”

It's really neat because we knew the Silk Road facilitated trade between Europe and East Asia (earlier than we'd expected!), and we knew there was cultural movement and interchange around the entire high Arctic region, but we hadn't had hard evidence connecting all of these trade routes together.
violsva: The words HATPIN TIME, over a pearl topped pin; a reference to The Comfortable Courtesan (hatpin time)
So. Cadillac-Fairview malls use digital information kiosks to show you store locations, which are poor design compared to just using a goddamn map. Only one person can use them at a time, they require you to touch the screen, they take longer, you can't see the whole mall at a glance, etc. I have been generally annoyed by them for the past year or so as I go to job locations in various malls that I haven't visited before. But they were just annoying, and poor design, and a bad idea during a pandemic. Fine. Pretty much everything is these days.

Turns out they can also be used to nonconsensually collect biometric information. Which CF was then storing in a third-party database. Or, CF claims, the third party was continuing to store them without their knowledge. That's not a defense.

The cameras were deactivated in 2018 when the government started investigating. Cadillac Fairview refused to "commit to ensuring express, meaningful consent is obtained from shoppers should it choose to redeploy the technology in the future."

Events

Feb. 1st, 2020 02:04 pm
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
[community profile] marvelfemslashevents is having a Big Bang, signups open until the end of February.

And

is open on [personal profile] rthstewart's journal!

Also:
promo banner
violsva: Geoffrey Tennant from Slings and Arrows, offering a skull (have a skull)
Okay, I have [twitter.com profile] violsvn . Let's see what happens.

Feel free to follow or tell me your handle!

(Slight change in username because I am experimenting with gender presentation.)
violsva: Illustration of Holmes and Watson, seated, with the caption "Cut out the poetry, Watson" (Holmes)
Does anyone have any advice on how to get yourself to actually close some damn browser tabs?
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
So I saw this tweet*:
And went "But that'd be great! Ghosts are neat and then you'd have someone to talk to other than the children!" And then of course I had half a gothick novel plotted.**

I assume that this and the harsh-satire-of-superheroes idea I had last week are evidence that my writing brain is coming back after the overexertion, but currently I am just remembering that all long form writing projects eventually end in exhaustion and hating everything you've written, so I'm not exactly in the mood to start either of them.

*I am not actually on twitter, I just look at other people's twitters.
**Yes, Harold, of course they're lesbians.
violsva: Clint Barton and Kate Bishop shooting together, covered in bandages, from the end of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (hawkeyes)
1. I have one more paragraph to write on this thing. It'll probably happen tomorrow.

I'm looking at the denouement here, and my brain is going "no, you can't stop here, there's all this work to do digging up the conspiracy and figuring out who was working for them!" Which A) would be a lot of writing, B) is not the kind of plot many people find interesting, and C) is contrary to my stated policy on this project. So I'm not writing it.

Unless the sequel shows up, which is isn't going to because I don't actually have the canon knowledge to write it anyway.


2. Putting the (NSFW) link here: This Is What It's Like to Have Sex With Hearing Loss


3. World map shirts! I have no idea what the quality or business is like, I just saw them and I really want one and I can't buy one right now so I am telling you about them instead.


4. Have two quotes from Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden, since I'm not sure if I will end up finishing it before it needs to go back.
Archaeological excavations of cities such as Taraz (in Kazakhstan) and Samarkand show that the designs on the products often catered to the stylistic preferences of the neighbouring nomads as well as the local urban population. For example, seals on gemstones from ancient Samarkand (the archaeological site Afrasiyab) have two different styles: one depicting a bull with wings, reflecting the mythological subject matter preferred by the townsmen, the other a goat in flight with an arrow in his neck, an example of the scenes of the hunt so dear to the nomads. (p 19)

The Uighurs, hitherto predominantly nomad pastoralists, began to settle, taking up urban and agricultural pursuits. Like their mentors, the Sogdians, they developed a rich commercial sulture as Silk Road traders and a complex spiritual life in which Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all represented. In the eastern steppe zone, they replaced the Sogdians as culture-bearers. ... The post-imperial Uighurs produced a rich literature, largely religious in content, for a population of which perhaps one-third was literate. The shift in the role of the Uighurs is reflected in a phrase from an early tenth-century Arab historian, Ibn al-Falqîh, who called them "the Arabs of the Turks." (p 47)

This book is made more difficult by the fact that the maps are all the precise opposite of the one in "The Hunting of the Snark."


5. Pride was two weeks ago and I am still finding random glitter.
violsva: A graffiti white maple leaf surrounding the words Toronto Maple Waffles (toronto maple waffles)
In the spirit of Shitpost February I just realized that I could knit a cushion cover like this or this.

[personal profile] consultingpiskies is dubious but this is going to be GREAT.

Feeds

Dec. 14th, 2018 04:26 pm
violsva: Illustration of Holmes and Watson, seated, with the caption "Cut out the poetry, Watson" (Holmes)
New-to-Dreamwidth people may be interested to know that Dreamwidth can be used as an RSS and Atom feed reader. Details on how to set them up are here, the most popular feeds are listed here (for ease of finding blogs/webcomics to subscribe to), and my mood today can be seen in panel five here/here.
violsva: Illustration of Holmes and Watson, seated, with the caption "Cut out the poetry, Watson" (Holmes)
[personal profile] rthstewart is hosting a Three Sentence Ficathon!

What is the 3 Sentence Ficathon?
This is a challenge where you answer a prompt with a fic consisting of only three sentences. It's open to all fandoms and you can post and answer as many prompts as you like, as many times as you want.
...
Can I still post if I need more than 3 sentences? Or should I just abuse grammar in ways the English language never contemplated?
Yes. Yes.


Come play!
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
I just put up a few things from tumblr and I think I'll keep doing that, because tumblr inspires me to thinky posts but I want them somewhere I can find them again.

Various

Mar. 6th, 2014 06:44 pm
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (trudeau)
Today is the 180th anniversary of the incorporation of my city <3<3.

March is Bisexual Health Awareness Month.

And from [personal profile] james_davis_nicoll, the CRTC has notified two pornography channels that they don't have sufficient Canadian Content, and may have their licenses revoked.

And in other news, I know that it's perfectly normal Canadian weather for March and other people have it much worse, but THIS IS ENOUGH SNOW STOP IT.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
So I saw a post somewhere recently about weird simultaneities in history. For example, there were still mammoths around when the Egyptians were building pyramids.

Other things that happened before mammoths went extinct: women wrote poetry.
violsva: full bookshelf with ladder (Default)
From Tumblr, going here because I don't trust Tumblr not to lose stuff:

you know what we need? we need queer romcoms. we don’t need any more sad lifetime movies about queers who end up dead or heartbroken. we don’t need any more real life stories. we need queer romcoms.

ladies falling in love after they stumble against each other on the subway.
guys who work for opposite companies and bicker at the meetings until one of them kisses the other.
a trans lady bartender who always ends up having deep philosophical chats with a drunk girl who gets dumped every week by a different person.
an asexual journalist falling in love with the football player xie interviews every week after the matches, and having cute make outs and a lot of awkwardness around the ace thing with the fight and the ridiculous gesture of love and the make up.
happy fluffy endings after a lot of dumb cute shit happening.
queer rom coms !!!
-- Queerhawkeye

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