Amorous toads

Oct. 21st, 2025 03:42 pm
oursin: Photograph of Stella Gibbons, overwritten IM IN UR WOODSHED SEEING SOMETHIN NASTY (woodshed)
[personal profile] oursin

This was in one of my inboxes this am (ironically, Mme C-C-'s):

Nice to connect beyond work
Hi,
We’ve crossed paths around the office a few times, and I’ve been meaning to say hello. I recently joined a dating site and thought it might be easier to connect there outside of work.
If you’re open to it, here’s my profile: [redacted link]
You’ll need to sign up to view it.
No pressure at all—just an invitation to chat in a space that isn’t tied to corporate email.
Either way, wishing you a great week.
Best,
A colleague

How creepy is that? (sending it in to phishing reporting).

(Or maybe run it past Ask A Manager???)

***

Actually, it is a bit of an insult to bufo bufo to characterise anyone doing this sort of thing as a toad, no? Especially when the poor things are currently suffering a good deal in their quest for LUHRRVVV: can Britain’s toads be saved from traffic and terrible decline?

(No, they are not zipping around doing dangerous driving in fast cars, parp-parp, like Mr Toad.)

They are trying to get to suitable mating areas:

toads like large ponds. Their ability to stay out of water for longer than frogs, means they can travel further to reach them – sometimes hundreds of metres, Petrovan says. They tend to stick to their ancestral migration routes – it’s common for adult toads to return to their birth pond to mate.

This is why the toad crossed the road.

I think I have heretofore mentioned the people who help toads to do this thing: in fact it's a bit of a recurrent theme.... (going way back).

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:55 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The story that began the grand tradition of picking on a teenager's work.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

(no subject)

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:57 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] adore!

a trip to the heart of the world

Oct. 21st, 2025 10:25 am
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi
Just after I wrote up Makiko Vories at senzenwomen, Y said “let’s go out to Omi-Hachiman and see some Vories buildings,” entirely coincidentally. So we took a two-day trip, stayed in an inn by the lake with a hammock on the balcony, saw a lot of beautiful buildings in both Japanese and Western styles (they all have big windows everywhere, which I love), went on a punt trip down the river, took a cable car up the nearest mountain to see the site of an ex-castle, and enjoyed ourselves in general.

I’ve been working on one of those awful software translations—I hate software stuff, give me machine tools, screws and bolts, or motion control any day of the week—and it has various This Units and That Units, which is at least mildly amusing because it keeps bringing to mind Murderbot. I wonder if the SecUnits ever came with manuals and if anyone had to translate them.

I’m volunteering with a Japanese class for Chinese teenagers, eight fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds with only very rudimentary Japanese; tiring because they are reluctant and easily distracted compared to my Saturday juku kids (who vary hugely in motivation but are remarkably well-behaved and 乖乖), but a fun challenge, everything from a girl who looks like an aspiring idol (hair to her hips, very slim, very well-dressed) to a kid on the autism spectrum who sticks firmly to his OWN pace in everything to a shy little anime otaku to a smart-mouthed young man who tries to use his fluent English to get away with things with me (I resorted to 这小子! to put him in his place). I can follow maaaybe half their talk among themselves, it’s too fast and too slangy, but it’s good practice for me (although I’m so used to “Speak English! Not Japanese!” that deliberately trying to shift into Japanese and make them speak it too is a real challenge). Haven’t yet had a chance to ask any of them if we have any fannish interests in common.

So when I bought my bassoon it came with a repair contract at the store, a large, high-end-ish musical instrument chain store; I’ve taken it back a few times for tuning up, always with the store clerk who sold it to me in the first place, a helpful, personable young man I’ll call S here. Last week I got a letter from the store in very formal terms: “we would like to inform you that [S] has resigned under the provisions of Employment Regulations Article ###. If you have any concerns about his work with you, please contact either the woodwind department or the accounting department as below…”. I took this to Y to see if he had any ideas and he’d never seen anything like it either; we concluded that S must have embezzled something??? but I certainly wouldn’t ever have guessed at such a thing, and I kind of feel bad for him. Need to check and see if my bassoon teacher knows anything more (all bassoonists have about 1.5 degrees of separation). I feel like I’ve brushed up against the first scene of a detective story. (Also, who am I going to get to fix my bassoon now if I need it?)

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 最好的我们, a duet from some years ago with Zhou Shen (they are close friends). Apart from being musically lovely it’s kind of amusing visually: the two singers are rather similar in features and coloring to begin with, and on this occasion they had almost identical haircuts into the bargain, so there’s a kind of 水仙 effect an octave apart.

Photos: Just a few, I haven’t been taking that many lately. Might add some of Y’s Omi-Hachiman photos later on. Lake Biwa, decorations on a mountaintop shrine, and a striking evening sky seen from a train.


Be safe and well.
sholio: murderbot group from episode 10 (Murderbot-family1)
[personal profile] sholio
Yet another instance of the Whumptober prompts basically being used for creative inspiration, but not really whump as such.

I feel this works equally well for TV-verse (future) or bookverse (probably post-System Collapse, but it could be somewhere between Fugitive Telemetry and Network Effect).

No. 20: "That's New."
Symptomatic | Fancy Event | Resignation

450 wds under the cut )
sholio: aged sepia paper with printed text saying "If undelivered, return to Air Ministry, London" (Biggles-london air ministry)
[personal profile] sholio
I return to Whumptober! Obviously the days are completely off at this point, but I'm doing a bit of catch-up.

No. 13: “How dull is it to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished.”
Never Enough | Insignia | Forced Retirement

Biggles & EvS, late in canon (600 wds)
Also posted on Tumblr.

600 wds under the cut )

Kill the Beast, by Serra Swift

Oct. 20th, 2025 02:36 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Nothing lastingly bad happens to the dog in this book.

Sorry but not all that sorry to those of you who wanted that suspense, but Brandy is a lovey good big boy and I think most of you will have a much better time if you don't have serious worries about the mastiff. This is a debut novel, so Serra Swift doesn't have a lot of trust built up. This is the beginning of building it. Brandy gets a nice chewy in his nice bed. He is fine.

The humans...well. The humans are a bit more messed up. A bit more tangled in grief, a bit more vengeful, a bit more desperate. The Beast has been slaughtering humans since time out of mind, and after Lyssa Carnifex (Cadogan) loses her brother she swears that she will put an end to it no matter what. She manages to dispatch a large and varied number of magical beasts, but The Beast eludes her. But when she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, it seems like she's found someone who's just as dedicated to helping her slay The Beast as she is to doing it. She just has to put up with Alderic's annoying fashion sense and weird priorities.

...or so she thinks. Obviously, "or so she thinks," there's not a book if there's not an "or so she thinks." I don't feel like the twist is one that will surprise most experienced fantasy readers, but if you're looking for an engaging and well-written adventure fantasy, this may well suit.

Pinch Hits & Mid Sign-Ups Notes

Oct. 20th, 2025 01:31 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Sign-ups close at 9pm UTC 24 October. We're more than halfway through sign-ups - if you haven't signed up, get in quick! If you have signed up, we're glad to have you. Please check all your details are correct.

If your sign-up includes a letter link, please make sure that link works for all viewers! In particular, if your letter is on tumblr, please set it up to be viewable for people who do NOT have tumblr. If you're using Google docs, we recommend linking a web-published version of your letter.

Pinch hits

Pinch hits are a major part of Yuletide. Pinch hits are writing assignments that need to be claimed by volunteers, and pinch hitters are the writers who claim and fulfil them. Currently, we publish pinch hit details on [community profile] yuletide_pinch_hits, but we also send out notifications of new pinch hits to members of the Yuletide Discord server who have taken on the "yulephs" role, and to anyone subscribed to the Google Group for Yuletide pinch hits.

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Sign-ups

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Coincidence?

Oct. 20th, 2025 07:48 pm
oursin: Grumpy looking hedgehog (Grumpy hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

Another flare-up of lower-back issues. This will be the third time this has happened with Academic Thing impending.... (podcast particiption scheduled for tomorrow). Can do without this, really. in particular the associated insomnia.

***

Further cause of miff: thought from listing in back of an NYRB paperback that there was a Jessica Mitford volume I did not have - further delving reveals it is merely The Making of a Muckraker under a different title with a new introduction and one chapter that is not in my 1979 Quartet p/b. Huh.

***

Honestly, I look at the headshot at the top of this piece and go, 'man, he is such a square he is cubed': after 70 years of hip-shaking thrills, is rock’n’roll dead?

Come on (thanks Chuck): styles of music have their day and time moves on.

Will concede that have recently been reviewing books leaning heavily on popular music culture of the 50s-70s and its impact, but you know, that was a particular time and context, and anyone doing rock now is pretty much a tribute band or very very retro, surely?

It was clear from the works I was reviewing that The Scene was constantly shifting and moving on and developing niche scenes differentiating themselves from The Mainstream and so on and so forth.

And it is one thing to be nostalgic, and to be interested in a bygone epoch of popular music culture, and another to believe that it has to keep on being a living scene.

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

Oct. 20th, 2025 02:04 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A bundle for Daniel James Hanley's tabletop roleplaying game of Gothic and Romantic Horror in the decadent, disastrous age of Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon, and Lord Byron.

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Clarke Award Finalists 2019

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:54 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2019: The Tories somehow find someone worse than May to be Prime Minister, UK pleas to the EU for a Brexit negotiation do-over on the grounds “our negotiators were fucking numpties” fall on deaf ears, and Tory MPs reject multiple Tory Brexit proposals, for which UK voters rebuke the incompetent Tories with a massive majority.

Poll #33744 Clarke Award Finalists 2019
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29


Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Rosewater by Tade Thompson
7 (24.1%)

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
2 (6.9%)

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
21 (72.4%)

Semiosis by Sue Burke
10 (34.5%)

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
4 (13.8%)

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
1 (3.4%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
Semiosis by Sue Burke

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Except very occasionally if I can locate a spot that currently has reception.

So while that's going on, replies to anything may be delayed, but I'm reading when I can and distractions are still very much appreciated.

ETA: may now be fixed, I am deep in spoon debt and would like to be allowed to falldowngoboomnow.

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