Rynling R&D (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rynling) wrote2026-02-09 09:00 am
rynling) wrote2026-02-09 09:00 amEntry tags:
The Case of the Silent Construct
My wizard detective story “The Case of the Phantom Portrait” was accepted for publication, so I’m thinking it’s time to write a new one.
( Read more... )
Anyway, this story is about creativity and copyright law. And about how the latter shouldn’t exist.
Idk man, sometimes I think about how large animation studios treat their artists, and it makes me want to write stories about murder.
( Read more... )
Anyway, this story is about creativity and copyright law. And about how the latter shouldn’t exist.
Idk man, sometimes I think about how large animation studios treat their artists, and it makes me want to write stories about murder.
osprey_archer (osprey_archer) wrote2026-02-09 08:08 am
osprey_archer) wrote2026-02-09 08:08 amEntry tags:
Picture Book Monday: Only Opal
I was quite excited about the picture book Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, as I’ve been low-key obsessed with Opal Whiteley for years, and what could be better than a book about Opal illustrated by Barbara Cooney?
For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.
I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).
After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”
Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!
But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.
For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.
I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).
After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”
Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!
But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.
Fanhackers (![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
fanhackers_feed) wrote2026-02-09 07:30 am
fanhackers_feed) wrote2026-02-09 07:30 amFandom is fandom because of fans’ activities and participation. The fandom object can be any c
Fandom is fandom because of fans’ activities and participation. The fandom object can be any canon, we could argue then. Descriptions of typical canons still emerge. Sometimes they originate from what is already the result of fannish beheaviour. Indeed, Pearson says about a similar discourse in 2010:
The definition accorded with film studies’ use of cult to refer to marginalised films that were perceived as trashy or, worse, offensive (due to violent or sexual content), that were hard to see (at least in pre-internet days), and that were treasured by a core group of aficionados who kept moving the goalposts to insure that rarity of what they valued.
As these texts were treasured, of course, the fans accessed them even when that required them to put in work, not required by regular viewers. It was not that these texts are treasured because they are hard to access. But Wu, in 2019 does show that a sense of exclusivity can arise from this extra work that the fans do.
So, if my love creates work, can my work also create love? Pearson also points at that many limitations were lifted due to the appearance of the Internet and we live in a different world of global media today. If that sense of exclusivity disappears, will the goalpost move again?
Fans not only help each other to access texts, but also to access different readings, an initiation described by Jenkins. Fandom is still the fandom of fans’ activities and participation.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Pearson, Roberta. 2010. Observations on Cult Television. In The Cult TV Book, ed. Stacey Abbott, 7–17. London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
Wu, Xianwei. 2019. “Hierarchy within Female ACG Fandom in China.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 30. https://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1456.
Szabó Dorottya
Entry tags:
Day 9 Theme - The Scholar
Today's theme is The Scholar.
Here are some ideas to get you started: Also know as The Sage, she has studied and seems to have a wealth of knowledge at her disposal. She enjoys teaching others and gives good advice. What is she an expert in? How was her time at school? How do those around her react to her sharing her knowledge?
Just go wherever the Muse takes you. If this prompt doesn't speak to you, feel free to share something that does. You can post in a separate entry or as a comment to this post.
Want to get a jump start on tomorrow's theme? Check out the prompt list in the pinned post at the top of the page. Please don't post until that day.
Here are some ideas to get you started: Also know as The Sage, she has studied and seems to have a wealth of knowledge at her disposal. She enjoys teaching others and gives good advice. What is she an expert in? How was her time at school? How do those around her react to her sharing her knowledge?
Just go wherever the Muse takes you. If this prompt doesn't speak to you, feel free to share something that does. You can post in a separate entry or as a comment to this post.
Want to get a jump start on tomorrow's theme? Check out the prompt list in the pinned post at the top of the page. Please don't post until that day.
Schneier on Security (bruce_schneier_feed) wrote2026-02-09 12:04 pm
bruce_schneier_feed) wrote2026-02-09 12:04 pmLLMs are Getting a Lot Better and Faster at Finding and Exploiting Zero-Days
This is amazing:
Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what stood out in early testing is how quickly Opus 4.6 found vulnerabilities out of the box without task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting. Even more interesting is how it found them. Fuzzers work by throwing massive amounts of random inputs at code to see what breaks. Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren’t addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of logic well enough to know exactly what input would break it. When we pointed Opus 4.6 at some of the most well-tested codebases (projects that have had fuzzers running against them for years, accumulating millions of hours of CPU time), Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.
The details of how Claude Opus 4.6 found these zero-days is the interesting part—read the whole blog post.
News article.
Annie D (scaramouche) wrote2026-02-09 08:02 pm
scaramouche) wrote2026-02-09 08:02 pm
Just having some thoughts today
The algorithm feeds you more of what you already like, so this is likely to be a snapshot of a subsection of certain social media platforms (instagram and youtube, because I've seen it myself; tiktok and twitter, as reported to me by friends since I'm not on either; maybe others). Within this subsection of certain social media platforms, you'll find that if there are posts or videos praising Malaysia or showing photos/footage of major Malaysian cities, there will be comments from my fellow Malaysians jokingly decrying it as AI, or fake news, or "actually this is Singapore/Thailand/Indonesia, please don't come to Malaysia, we still live in trees". It's a whole joke and in-joke, and some non-locals have figured it out and play into it. We will be there, in the comments, refusing to directly claim the positivity from outsiders.
I've seen some comments claim that this trend is because we're afraid of overtourism. That may be the motivation of some, but IMO not the major one.
With a disclaimer that this is my personal impression of why we feel and respond this way, and of course I can only speak to those of my own social and business circles that have discussed this, and I think that younger generations have their own interpretation of it. I think the real reason goes back to how we used to feel in the 1980s and 1990s, as a South East Asian country that the international community didn't really know about. Oh, people know about our famous neighbours: Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia. But we kept getting left out of the global conversation; an afterthought in news, business dealings and pop culture, or folded in/mistaken for our more-famous neighbours.
After a while, I believe, we preferred it that way. Being low-key means we don't get sucked into geopolitical drama as much, and the global perception of us (IF ANY) would be so wrong that it's easier to laugh about it than get upset. (The "we still live in trees" was a legit thing for years, before we took it.) Singapore can get the high-profile billionaire expats. Indonesia and Thailand can get the cultural exposure. To not know about us is to have no expectations about us, which is to be pleasantly surprised by us, if you visit.
Because we know very well what our shortcomings are. We love our food, our cultures (major lion dance troupes are ours!), our mishmash of identities. But we also know our infrastructure is uneven, our cities are not walkable (with only a few exceptions), our salary levels are not competitive, conservative populism still reigns, LGBTQ people might as well not exist (though they do, in the cracks of plausible deniability), and that we can be insidiously bigoted in ways that aren't obvious without context. But on the flipside, our standard of living has improved in such a way that a lot of us don't realize it has improved: our metro lines are great, some of our government services are better than some more advanced countries, our banking and payment systems are excellent, the multiculturalism is so ingrained that we take it for granted until non-locals point out how unusual it is. So while we do feel pride in ourselves, whatever that means, we also don't feel that being loud about it is the right way to go.
It's not self-deprecating, I think. More like, it comes from an awareness that we can do better and wincing preemptively before our ugly bits get exposed.
I've seen some comments claim that this trend is because we're afraid of overtourism. That may be the motivation of some, but IMO not the major one.
With a disclaimer that this is my personal impression of why we feel and respond this way, and of course I can only speak to those of my own social and business circles that have discussed this, and I think that younger generations have their own interpretation of it. I think the real reason goes back to how we used to feel in the 1980s and 1990s, as a South East Asian country that the international community didn't really know about. Oh, people know about our famous neighbours: Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia. But we kept getting left out of the global conversation; an afterthought in news, business dealings and pop culture, or folded in/mistaken for our more-famous neighbours.
After a while, I believe, we preferred it that way. Being low-key means we don't get sucked into geopolitical drama as much, and the global perception of us (IF ANY) would be so wrong that it's easier to laugh about it than get upset. (The "we still live in trees" was a legit thing for years, before we took it.) Singapore can get the high-profile billionaire expats. Indonesia and Thailand can get the cultural exposure. To not know about us is to have no expectations about us, which is to be pleasantly surprised by us, if you visit.
Because we know very well what our shortcomings are. We love our food, our cultures (major lion dance troupes are ours!), our mishmash of identities. But we also know our infrastructure is uneven, our cities are not walkable (with only a few exceptions), our salary levels are not competitive, conservative populism still reigns, LGBTQ people might as well not exist (though they do, in the cracks of plausible deniability), and that we can be insidiously bigoted in ways that aren't obvious without context. But on the flipside, our standard of living has improved in such a way that a lot of us don't realize it has improved: our metro lines are great, some of our government services are better than some more advanced countries, our banking and payment systems are excellent, the multiculturalism is so ingrained that we take it for granted until non-locals point out how unusual it is. So while we do feel pride in ourselves, whatever that means, we also don't feel that being loud about it is the right way to go.
It's not self-deprecating, I think. More like, it comes from an awareness that we can do better and wincing preemptively before our ugly bits get exposed.
andrewducker (andrewducker) wrote2026-02-09 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2026-02-09 12:00 pmEntry tags:
- batteries,
- blogs,
- constitution,
- diet,
- food,
- health,
- history,
- impressive,
- jurassicpark,
- language,
- links,
- movies,
- music,
- nazis,
- omega3,
- patriarchy,
- politics,
- scarlettjohansson,
- security,
- swearing,
- temperature,
- time,
- uk,
- video,
- voice
Interesting Links for 09-02-2026
- 1. Jurassic Tank Top: The Uncanny Valley of Agency
- (tags:scarlettjohansson patriarchy movies JurassicPark )
- 2. Etymology of "Foo"
- (tags:language history swearing )
- 3. World's first mass-production sodium-ion battery keeps 90% capacity even at -40c
- (tags:batteries temperature )
- 4. Blood omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia (incidence drops from 0.19% to 0.11%)
- (tags:omega3 )
- 5. I was totally blown away by this beatboxing. Just totally unbelievable. (Wing: Dopamine)
- (tags:music video voice impressive )
- 6. Substack's "Nazi problem" won't go away
- (tags:Nazis blogs )
- 7. The time of day when you eat could be key to success for intermittent fasting
- (tags:food time diet health )
- 8. Last week the Prime Minister lost control of how documents should be reviewed for security reasons.
- (tags:security politics uk constitution )
Lewis Powell (js_thrill) wrote2026-02-09 06:23 am
js_thrill) wrote2026-02-09 06:23 amBaseball!?
I'm always saying "why isn't this sci fi short story mostly descriptions of a game of baseball?"
Lewis Powell (js_thrill) wrote2026-02-09 06:11 am
js_thrill) wrote2026-02-09 06:11 amEntry tags:
This Year 365 songs: February 9th
Today we are treated to Some Swedish Trees
I like this song a lot. The music reminds me a bit of the opening to Amy AKA Spent Gladiator, and the annotations return to Darnielle's meditations on his penchant for indirect narrative. The lyrics here leave one with a lot of questions, if you focus on them as a narrative, but (as Darnielle notes), the tone is not one of intentional secret-keeping. It is more like eavesdropping on bits of a story being told at a nearby table in a coffeeshop, and missing pieces as a result of only hearing the parts spoken loud enough to reach you.
I like this song a lot. The music reminds me a bit of the opening to Amy AKA Spent Gladiator, and the annotations return to Darnielle's meditations on his penchant for indirect narrative. The lyrics here leave one with a lot of questions, if you focus on them as a narrative, but (as Darnielle notes), the tone is not one of intentional secret-keeping. It is more like eavesdropping on bits of a story being told at a nearby table in a coffeeshop, and missing pieces as a result of only hearing the parts spoken loud enough to reach you.
My Fannish Corner (mxcatmoon) wrote2026-02-09 04:48 am
mxcatmoon) wrote2026-02-09 04:48 am
Entry tags:
Sunday Check-in
Working on an unexpected Miami Vice fic that hit me today, and I'm almost finished with the rough draft. I watched a really angsty episode, and decided, yeah, I need to make it worse. 😉 Now when I started writing it, I had no idea how it would end. There were three possible outcomes, one happy, one unhappy, and one a mix of both. That's the fun of writing for me, the being surprised at the endings. Turns out it's the unhappy one, but it has to be that way, for several reasons. I have some points to make about the characters and their relationship, and the time they lived in as well. Things that have been bouncing around in my head for awhile.
I wrote a slashy episode post about it on Tumblr, as well. Because, wow, these two throw me for a loop sometimes I can't believe what I'm seeing. I don't even think it's subtext anymore, not when it's so difficult to think of a non-slashy reason for some of these behaviors...
Oh, and I also made my first 'short'. I recently discovered a secret (shh!), that some of the mass-produced box sets that are put out by companies that aren't the studios... don't have copy guard. So, you can extract them to a hard drive. So, if I ever get the patience and experience, I could actually make songvids... I've always wanted to! But I have zero patience.
So, I haven't been writing any more Three Sentence Fics. I did a couple earlier in the week but haven't posted them anywhere else yet, haven't had a chance.
I wrote a slashy episode post about it on Tumblr, as well. Because, wow, these two throw me for a loop sometimes I can't believe what I'm seeing. I don't even think it's subtext anymore, not when it's so difficult to think of a non-slashy reason for some of these behaviors...
Oh, and I also made my first 'short'. I recently discovered a secret (shh!), that some of the mass-produced box sets that are put out by companies that aren't the studios... don't have copy guard. So, you can extract them to a hard drive. So, if I ever get the patience and experience, I could actually make songvids... I've always wanted to! But I have zero patience.
So, I haven't been writing any more Three Sentence Fics. I did a couple earlier in the week but haven't posted them anywhere else yet, haven't had a chance.
lucymonster (lucymonster) wrote2026-02-09 08:38 pm
lucymonster) wrote2026-02-09 08:38 pmEntry tags:
Horror movies, Australian edition
It feels strangely awkward watching movies about people who talk and behave like me! I know I’m not alone in that; Australian cultural cringe is a well studied phenomenon, and we don't exactly have a local equivalent of Hollywood churning out all-Aussie blockbusters on a regular schedule. When I think of Australian cinema, I think of boring arts grant dramas that no one wants to watch and culturally hyperspecific comedy that we don't want anyone else to watch lest the world know us for the bunch of dags we really are. Fun, tropey genre films are supposed to be about Special Fake Movie People with accents I've never heard in person and manners that are upside down from mine.
And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D
The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.
Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.
Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.
You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.
And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D
The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.
Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.
Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.
You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.
calimac (calimac) wrote2026-02-09 01:03 am
calimac) wrote2026-02-09 01:03 amconcert review: Oregon Symphony
Yes, I’m in Portland, and this concert in the large and old-fashionedly ornate (it doesn’t have restrooms, it has “lounges”) Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown turned out to be the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. Music Director David Danzmayr led his crackerjack orchestra through Anna Clyne’s Color Field, a typically imaginative Clyne work with some evocative open harmonies, and concluded with a thoroughly robust rendering of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in which the tuba struggled a little in “Bydlo, “ but there were otherwise no problems. The orchestra has newly acquired a custom-made bell, and this clanged out like nothing you’ve heard before in the grand conclusion.
But the highlight of this concert came in between: the Bruch Violin Concerto, and it wasn’t the highlight just because the estimable Gil Shaham was soloist. I just heard this concerto last month from San Francisco, and the soloist was smooth-toned but rather characterless, while the orchestra was even bland and dull. Not this time. Here we heard why this is one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. The orchestra was as burstingly robust as they would be in Pictures, and Shaham, though I’ve heard him perform wonders before, was simply amazing, a standing rebuke to plainer soloists. Every note had character, and his mostly high and dry tone varied tremendously, including some of the tenderest soft passages that could still be heard over the orchestra. Thrilling.
But the highlight of this concert came in between: the Bruch Violin Concerto, and it wasn’t the highlight just because the estimable Gil Shaham was soloist. I just heard this concerto last month from San Francisco, and the soloist was smooth-toned but rather characterless, while the orchestra was even bland and dull. Not this time. Here we heard why this is one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. The orchestra was as burstingly robust as they would be in Pictures, and Shaham, though I’ve heard him perform wonders before, was simply amazing, a standing rebuke to plainer soloists. Every note had character, and his mostly high and dry tone varied tremendously, including some of the tenderest soft passages that could still be heard over the orchestra. Thrilling.
Vriddy (vriddy) wrote2026-02-09 08:39 am
vriddy) wrote2026-02-09 08:39 amEntry tags:
1,000,072 words
And I passed the 1M words written (not all of them edited!!) (yet!) this morning. It was so strange to add my daily couple of paragraphs to the Leopard/Tree fic knowing this was coming lol. Wow. Glad I had my little crisis about it last year so I can just nod at it today while I step above it (crisis: ✅). I think when I started writing again in 2020 and firmly settled on the "one million bad words before you can get to the good ones" mindset, I expected I'd feel at least competent when I reached the milestone. Alas. Maybe because of the crappy first half of last year, I feel like I lost 2/3 of what I knew and still have to relearn so much about my own process and how to (hopefully) write well -- I've done it once or twice before, surely I can again ;) Anyway, that's done! \o/ Next milestone, one million edited words??? Though I guess I'm not really measuring that in any way that's easy to track, haha. It'll work out ;D This is cool. Maybe I should bake a word count celebratory cake like I used to during the lockdowns. Though I'll have to write the digits on top very small with so many of them now XD (Edit: OR MAKE A BIGGER CAKE I GUESS!!!!)
I miss sitting down with the concept for a novel and having a long first draft to lose myself into ahead of me, but mentally I can't do that while I have two other on-going novels, especially with the Soul Thief still a first draft itself. I think maybe when the structural edits are completed, that may free up the mental slot for "Big First Draft." I started the prep work on that, spending some time thinking about why I wrote it and what I want to leave readers with before actually starting the edits, this time. Like, who is the actual audience, also.
( Rambles on who to share one's writing with... )
Anyway, reaching a big milestone you've been working toward for years is kind of incredible actually. I'm awed. I'm happy. If nothing else, I've proven to myself that I can stick with it. I've learnt a ton. I've made connections with people, both on the reader side and on the writer side. Met all of you here! And I'm so excited to learn even more in the coming 5-to-10 years, which is the time period I'd given myself for that original milestone, haha. ONWARD!! :D
I miss sitting down with the concept for a novel and having a long first draft to lose myself into ahead of me, but mentally I can't do that while I have two other on-going novels, especially with the Soul Thief still a first draft itself. I think maybe when the structural edits are completed, that may free up the mental slot for "Big First Draft." I started the prep work on that, spending some time thinking about why I wrote it and what I want to leave readers with before actually starting the edits, this time. Like, who is the actual audience, also.
( Rambles on who to share one's writing with... )
Anyway, reaching a big milestone you've been working toward for years is kind of incredible actually. I'm awed. I'm happy. If nothing else, I've proven to myself that I can stick with it. I've learnt a ton. I've made connections with people, both on the reader side and on the writer side. Met all of you here! And I'm so excited to learn even more in the coming 5-to-10 years, which is the time period I'd given myself for that original milestone, haha. ONWARD!! :D
murgatroyd_666 (murgatroyd_666) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
girlgenius_lair2026-02-09 12:04 am
murgatroyd_666) wrote in girlgenius_lair2026-02-09 12:04 amMonday's Comic
https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20260209
So ... What IS that?
And yeah, we all liked Wooster.
So ... What IS that?
And yeah, we all liked Wooster.
sovay (sovay) wrote2026-02-08 11:00 pm
sovay) wrote2026-02-08 11:00 pmIf I'm hoping, then I'm hoping for the frost
I am feeling non-stop terrible. I took a couple of pictures in the snow-fallen sunshine this afternoon.
( And be the roots that make the tree. )
spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.
( And be the roots that make the tree. )
spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.
My Fannish Corner (mxcatmoon) wrote in vocab_drabbles2026-02-09 01:21 am
mxcatmoon) wrote in vocab_drabbles2026-02-09 01:21 amEntry tags:
#182 - Surcease
This week's word is
Surcease
verb
sər-ˈsēs ˈsər-ˌsēs
To desist from action, also: to come to an end: cease, discontinue.
Surcease
verb
sər-ˈsēs ˈsər-ˌsēs
To desist from action, also: to come to an end: cease, discontinue.