3rdragon | Reading

Overheard on Reddit, u/Itsyademonboi:

Sorry, Nazis are from Germany under Adolf Hitler, what we have here is Sparkling Fascists.

Yep, I'm following up right on the heels of yesterday's first story of the year with today's first poem of the year! "Dulle Griet Stages a New Assault" is out now in Strange Horizons -- and because they decided to make it part of their "Criticism" issue, and my poem is ekphrastic commentary on a painting, it comes with a brief essay from yours truly!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/iwWcto)

marthawells

So yeah, kind of hard to concentrate on work while being consumed by rage. I've been to conventions in the Minneapolis area and I have a lot of friends up there, and one of my goddaughters and her husband live there.

For instance, this is Greg Ketter, from DreamHaven Books, where I've done signings, at the protest and running into tear gas:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XHDR1PnqPeg

I've been doing mutual aid and sending donations where I can (https://www.standwithminnesota.com/) which is helping my sanity somewhat.

Other stuff I should link to:

Interview with me on Space.com https://www.space.com/entertainment/space-books/martha-wells-next-murderbot-diaries-book-is-the-family-roadtrip-from-hell-on-ringworld-interview

Weather permitting, I'll be guest of honor this coming weekend at AggieCon in College Station: https://www.aggiecon.net/

That's all I've got right now. Abolish ICE.

swan_tower

Sunday Morning Transport is making all of its January stories free to read, and that includes my latest piece: "The Final Voyage of the Ouranos"!

If you're getting Mary Celeste vibes off it, you're not wrong; the genesis of this story was entirely me going "oooh, I want to do something kinda like that." (It is not, however, a retelling of that specific incident.) The setting of my previous SMT story, "The Poison Gardener", struck me as the ideal place for such a narrative, and the editor, Fran Wilde, snapped it right up!

sartorias

What can I do to help besides donate? I am doing my best to target specific needs in donations, as our funds are pretty severely limited. But it never seems enough.

Last night I self-comforted by rewatching Leslie Howard's impassioned anti-war and anti-Nazi film Pimpernel Smith. It's all the more poignant considering the toxic hellspew going on now, and doubly so considering that he was shot down in 1943. So he didn't get to see the end that he predicted in a memorable speech in the film's final moments: he tells the German commander about to shoot him that Germany will not prevail, that they will go down an ever darker road until the terrible end. The lighting is suitably dramatic, only one of his eyes visible.

Among the many excellent quotations tossed off during the film is one by Rupert Brooke, who wrote brilliant and impassioned anti-war sonnets and prose before dying in 1915, so he, too, did not get to see the end of that horrible war. (This elegy to Rupert Brooke is worth a listen.)

Though Howard did not live to see the end, his film inspired Raoul Wallenberg to rescue Jews in WW II, which he would have applauded; the people Pimpernel Smith is rescuing are scientists and journalists imprisoned by the Gestapo.

The film is not just anti-Nazi, which is important. But unlike so many American films made at the time, with their guns-out, let's go blast 'em all attitudes, frequently using Nazi to represent all Germans, which was just as false as today's representation of all Americans as Trumpers.

It's worth remembering the Germans who did not support Hitler's regime, and lived in fear of the next horror their government perpetrated, whether on outsiders or on themselves. Many acted, many others froze in place. Kids, bewildered, tried to survive. I knew a handful of these: my friend Margo, who died ten years ago, was a young teen during the forties. Her mother had ceased communication with the part of her family that supported Hitler. She hid the books written by Jews behind the classics in their home library, and exhorted her two girls to be kind, be kind. Until Margo was sent to music camp on a Hitler Youth activity (all kids had to join) came home to find her home rubble, her mom and sister dead somewhere in that tangle of brick and cement after an Allied bombing mission. Her existence became hand to mouth, including what amounts to slave labor. She was thirteen at the time.

Another friend's mom, a Berliner in her mid-teens, had been coopted to work in the Chancellery typing reports for the German Navy, as there were no men left for such tasks. She lived with her mother, walking to and from work in all weather until their home was bombed. They lived in the rubble, drinking rain water that sifted through the smashed walls; her mother died right there, probably from the bad water; there was no medical care available for civilians, only for the army. This friend's dad was in the army--he had been a baker's apprentice in a small town mid-Germany until the conscription. He was seventeen. He was shot up and sent back to the Russian front five times. He survived it; I remember seeing him shirtless when he mowed the lawn. He looked like a Frankenstein's monster with all the scars criss-crossing his body, corrugated from battlefield stitchwork. That pair met and married while floating about in the detritus of the war. No homes, living off handouts from the occupation until the guy was able to get work as a construction laborer. (Few bakeries, though in later life, he made exquisite seven layer cakes and other Bavarian pastries for his family.)

What can we do? Keep on resisting, without taking up arms and escalating things to that level of nightmare. I so admire Minnesotans. I believe they are doing it right.

gingicat posting in

davis_square

Summary:
- begins at 10AM Sunday (tomorrow)
- parking on ODD-numbered side only
- no parking on main arteries including Harvard Avenue, College Avenue, and Boston Avenue.

Details:( Read more... )

yhlee

siderea

For those of you in the parts of the US for whom an ice storm is predicted and who have no idea of what that is except that it means it will be cold:

1) If you have an ice scraper to clean the ice off your car, have it inside with you, not in the car. Because at a sufficient level of ice coating, leaving your ice scraper in the car is like leaving your car keys in the car.

1a) Honestly, at a certain level of ice coating, it's more like having one's car coated in concrete, and you shouldn't waste your energy and body warmth whaling futilely at it. One of the failure modes is you succeed in getting the ice off but take the windshield with it.

2) You probably associate winter storms and coldness with grey-overcast skies and darkness. But once it is done coming down, often the arctic winds that drove the storm will blow the clouds away, the skies clear and the sun will come up. I cannot begin to describe how bright it gets when the sun is shining and the whole world is made of glass. If you packed your sunglasses away for the winter, go get them out. If you store them in your glove compartment of your car, again, maybe go get them and have them inside with you so you can see what you're doing when you are trying to get the ice off the car.

3) All that said, maybe just don't be worrying about leaving home. A fundamental clue is that an ice storm is not done when the storm is done raging. For as long as there's a thick glaze of ice on everything, the crisis is not over. Your life experience has given you an intuition of physics that says ice forms where water pools and is therefore mostly something flat. But in an ice storm, you get ice coating absolutely everything including sloped and vertical surfaces. YouTube is willing to show you endless videos of people attempting and failing to walk up quite gentle slopes covered with ice and cars slowly and majestically sliding down hills. Driving and walking can be unbelievably dangerous after an ice storm. Try to ride it out by sheltering in place and don't try to go out in it if you can at all avoid it. Remember, it's not about how good a driver you are, it's about how good a driver everybody else on the road isn't.

4) Snow and ice falling off buildings can kill you. Yes, I know snow looks fluffy, but it is made of water and can compact to be quite solid and if it attains free fall it can build up quite a bit of momentum. Icicles are basically spears. If you endeavor to try to knock snow or ice off from a roof or other high structure, be real careful how you position yourself relative to it.

5) Now and until this is over is absolutely not the time to do anything that entails any unnecessary risk. Any activity that is at all discretionary that has even a remote likelihood of occasioning an ER trip is to be avoided. Boredom, I know, makes people find their own fun. Resist the urge.

yhlee

Nicolas Niarchos. The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth. I think I got this rec from Farah Mendlesohn. Apparently the entire "green energy" resource supply chain (including/especially the batteries) is fucked to hell and gone, including/especially in the human rights arena. Which is not surprising as such, but this is a field I don't follow in any detail (the world is FULL OF THINGS TO KNOW and I can't be expert in them all).

From the jacket copy:

In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. Why are the children of the Democratic Republic of the Congo routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia's seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress?

This is ©2026 and just released, but of course...:gestures at current events:

:looks at small collection of slide rule, Napier's bones, abacuses, manual typewriters: Well.

yhlee

Featured Friday: Yoon Ha Lee [Zealotscript.co.uk, interview].

I apologize in advance for the closing :kof: pun.

Which one of your characters would you most like to spend time with?

Excuse me, I had to be revived from a fit of the vapors. I give my characters difficult lives (when they survive at all) so it’s a common joke in my family that if they ever came to life, I am so, so very dead. I guess Shuos Mikodez from Machineries of Empire is the least likely to kill or torture me inhumanely for no reason. Alternately, Min from Dragon Pearl is like ten years old and I am not only a parent, I used to teach high school math so I reckon I can handle her. (Famous last words…)

swan_tower

When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, he was thinking in terms of a hollow planet. There's another sense in which we can think about the center of the earth, though -- a more spiritual one.

We can approach this in two dimensions. Horizontally, the center of the world can be called the omphalos, from the Greek word for "navel." The Greeks had a myth that Zeus loosed two eagles from the opposite ends of the earth which, flying at equal speed, crossed each other's paths at Delphi, thereby proving it to be the precise middle of existence. A stone sculpture there -- the original of which may now be in the museum at Delphi, or that may be a later replica -- served as a sacred object to mark the spot.

I should note in passing that this idea can also be executed on a smaller scale than the whole world. The Roman Forum contained the Umbilicus Urbis or "navel of the city," the reference point for measuring all distances to Rome; Charing Cross has served the same function for London since the nineteenth century. That's a very pragmatic purpose, but not incompatible with a spiritual dimension: the Umbilicus Urbis may also have been the above-ground portion of a subterranean site called the Mundus or "world," which was a gateway to the underworld.

Which brings us to the (sort of) vertical dimension. Axis mundi as a term was coined for astronomical purposes, but it's been extended as a catch-all for describing a widespread religious concept, which is the connection point between different spiritual realms.

An axis mundi can take any form, but a few are noteworthy for cropping up all around the globe. One of the most common is the world tree, whose roots extend into the underworld and whose branches reach into the heavens. The exact type of tree, of course, depends on the local environment: the Norse Yggdrasil, one of the most well-known examples, is usually said to be an ash (though some theorists hold out for yew), while the Maya saw theirs as a ceiba, and in northern Asia it might be a birch or a larch. Depending on how flexible you want to be with the concept, you might see as a world tree anything that connects to at least one other realm, like the oak at Dodona whose roots supposedly touched Tartarus, without a corresponding link upward.

Mountains are the other big motif. Olympus, Kailash, Qaf, and Meru are all singular and stand-out examples, but anywhere there are impressive mountains, people have tended to think of them as bridges between different spiritual realms. They more obviously connect to the heavens than the underworld, but especially if there are caves, their linkage can extend in both directions.

Approach it broadly enough, though, and an axis mundi can be basically anything vertical enough to suggest that it transcends our mortal plane. The folktale of Jack and the Beanstalk? It may not be sacred, but that beanstalk certainly carried Jack to a different realm. The Tower of Babel? God imposed linguistic differences to stop humans from building it up to the sky. Even smoke can be an ephemeral axis mundi: ancient Mesoamericans, burning the bark paper soaked with blood from their voluntary offerings, are said to have seen the smoke as forging a temporary connection to the heavens above and the deities who dwelt there.

These two concepts, omphalos and axis mundi, are not wholly separate. While the latter term can apply to anything that connects the realms, like a pillar of smoke, a really orthodox axis mundi -- the axis mundi, the fundamental point where many worlds meet -- is often conceived of as standing at the center of the universe, i.e. at the omphalos. (In a spiritual sense, if not a geographical one.) It's the nail joining them together, the pivot point around which everything turns.

And it does occasionally crop up in fiction. In Stephen King's Dark Tower series, the eponymous tower toward which Roland quests is a canonical axis mundi, linking many realities together. That actually makes the conclusion of his quest a difficult narrative challenge . . . because how do you depict the literal center of the cosmos in a way that's going to live up to its significance? (Without going into spoilers, I'll say that King provides two answers to that question. Many readers find both of them unsatisfying, but to my mind, they are just about the only way you can answer it. Neither one, of course, is a conventional denouement.)

Even without journeying to the fundamental center of creation, however, I think there's unused room for this concept in fantasy. Plenty of stories send their characters between planes of existence via some kind of gateway or portal: an arch, a ring of standing stones, or something else in that vein. I want more beanstalks! Maybe not literally a humble crop plant on steroids, but more vertical transitions, where you feel the effort of the characters climbing up or down to reach a heavenly realm, the underworld, or an alternate reality -- one that, by the climbing, is implied to exist in a certain spatial relationship with ordinary reality. Make them go on a long journey to reach that point of connection, or undergo more effort than a bit of chanting to create a structure imbued with the capacity to carry them across those boundaries.

Ironically, this is a place where science fiction sometimes winds up preserving more of a folkloric feeling than its sibling genre does. Space elevators are absolutely an axis mundi rendered in literal, mundane terms -- complete with placement at the center of the world, since the lower end of the cable would need to be near the equator for the physics to work. Mind you, a space elevator doesn't extend into the underworld (. . . not unless somebody writes that story; please do!), but as we saw above, sometimes the concept is applied to one-sided connections. It's close enough for me!

Patreon banner saying "This post is brought to you by my imaginative backers at Patreon. To join their ranks, click here!"

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/bzQCUD)

yourlibrarian posting in

common_nature

A couple of photos from a foggy morning, with some geese serenely sailing by. You can better see the scrum of ducks in the next photo, gathered around the aerator. We can only assume that it's the best place to get algae from, maybe it pulls it to the surface?

( Read more... )

archangelbeth

https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/20/cdc-measles-briefing-lost-elimination-status-cost-of-doing-business/

You still support the person who enabled all this to happen?

yhlee

The keyboard's legit great but I replaced some of the keycaps (the black ones that let the glow shine through) because I cannot find the hecking function keys in the dark reliably; I don't often use them outside of music production, the lighting in this room sucks, and I have a horrifying number of typing keyboards where the function key locations are just enough offset to throw off touch-typing.

custom keycaps and space bar

I'm unreasonably happy with the space bar! The seller will 3D print custom images/text if you send an image so I made a design for hilarity. :)

ursula

glowingfish asked:

The Golden Age of published science-fiction was more or less from 1955 to 1975 (lets say). Why did it end when it did? Do you think that science-fiction (or fantasy) published after 1975 was different, or do you just think it had less ability to become part of the "canon"?

This is really non-standard periodization! Wikipedia has the Golden Age of science fiction starting in the late 1930s, in connection with sci-fi magazine publishing history; the end of your period is solidly New Wave.

The counter-argument is the aphorism that the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve; by that rule, it's interesting to think about who was twelve in 1955-1975, or whatever guidelines you want to pick, and what influence they might have had on defining a canon, once they reached their twenties or thirties. The people who were twelve between 1955 and 1975 were mostly baby boomers, in the standard US generational framework; that was my parents' generation (and

glowingfish's parents', I'm guessing), and it makes sense that the stories they considered formative would seem quasi-canonized to our generation.

mdehners posting in

gardening

Last month I was rereading one of Alaric Albertsson's books( think it was 'To Walk a Pagan Path') and there was a chapter on creating a calendar meaningful to where you actually live...so I decided that this was going to be one of my projects for this yr.
It's pretty simple; just Journal what happens each month in the natural world around you. I live presently in E Tennessee and actually, the Solstices and Equinoxes pretty well "map" here in Loudon County but we can fine tune things.
This yr, of course, had to be anomalous;>! Normally, within a couple weeks of Winter Solstice we get temps in the high teens. This yr until last week it had actually got to 70F! Now, it's "seasonal" with today in the 40's.Due to the warmth my neighbor's early Daffs budded up and right now they don't look like they'd recover. Me? Mine are breaking ground and at least one Snowdrop has buds, though most are just breaking ground a well.
We've also got Canadian Geese, Ducks and at least one Heron here on the inlet....a BIT early.
Preliminary name for 1st month; "Frikkn Freezing Moon";>!
Cheers,
Pat

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Lenoir City(Nevermore;>!)
Current Music: Skald Radio

marycatelli posting in

book_love

Scourge of the Spaceways by John C. Wright

Starquest book 5. And it is seriously a running story. Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes.

( Read more... )

siderea

Hey, Americans! Do you live around or south of the Mason-Dixon line? If so, your weather report for later this week is shaping up to be a bit exciting. Looks like Actual Winter will be visiting places that historically have been poorly prepared for this sort of thing, i.e. TX, the South, and the mid-Atlantic.

(Also eventually the NE, but a forecast of a few feet of snow is threatening us with a good time.)

H/t to the RyanHallYall YT channel. He's a well-reputed amateur, but his report is congruent with what I'm seeing in conventional weather reports:

Watch on YouTube

https://youtube.com/shorts/nh4JEVGWfFU

Good luck and remember running a charcoal grill in your living room is a dumb way to die.

siderea

I found this intriguing. YouTuber KnittingCultLady, who is an Air Force veteran and author about two books on military culture from the standpoint of cults(!), put out this rather frustrated video clarifying how members of the military respond to illegal orders. The tl;dr is they will follow orders of ambiguous legality, and refuse to follow orders of obvious illegality, and what is obviously illegal may not be what civilians think.

2026 Jan 18: KnittingCultLady on YT: Some Examples of Recent Malicious Compliance from the Military, ALSO Listen Carefully To My Words:

Watch on YouTube

She doesn't put it this way, but it sounds from what she says that what makes something obviously illegal is that it resulted in a courtmartial or other nigh-universal condemnation when tried previously. Orders that are for doing things that are war crimes by the letter of the law but which did not result in prosecution or other negative consequences for the perpetrators when done in the past do not trigger the sense that they are illegal, e.g. if it was okay for Bush to seize Noriega, then clearly it must be legal for Trump to seize Maduro.

sartorias

Our space opera Exordium began life as a mini-series screenplay over four decades ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, returned as a hastily corrected e-book series, and now is relaunching for the last time after Dave and I, now retired, were able to go over it more slowly. It always needed a more thorough going-over. But also, over the years, so much has changed!

From Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your forty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

The world of Exordium was always a future world replete with echoes of a distant, earthly past that let us shove in all the things we loved in books, art, film, and TV and use them to create the kind of science fiction/space opera we liked.

We were a couple of twenty-somethings in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Younger readers probably can’t imagine the impact of that film on a generation accustomed to SF movies that were either glorified monster fights or preachy future-shock stories filled with plastic furniture and tight jumpsuits that would take an hour to get out of if you had to pee.

On our way out of the 2:30 a.m. showing, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that, but . . . tech that makes sense!”

“More than one active woman!”

“FTL battles that make strategic sense in four-space!”

“More than one active woman!”

Together: “Pie fights! Fart jokes! Ancient civilizations! Cool clothes and machines!”

Thus was born Exordium. At the time Sherwood worked as a flunky in Hollywood, so the first version was a six hour miniseries. On the strength of it we got a good Hollywood agent, and there was a bid war shaping up between NBC and the then-new HBO when . . . boom! The mega-strike of 1980. When that was over, the studios were so depleted that min-series projects were put on hold—for the most part a euphemism for “killed.”

So we decided to turn it into books—and that meant breaking the chains of “can’t do that on TV,” developing the sketchy cultures, and completely rethinking the necessarily limited space battles, which had been confined to bridge scenes with rudimentary 1980s style FX. Dave dived into military history to figure out more about how the ships and tech he’d come up with would fight. Sherwood delved into cultural history to develop the social and political maneuvering we wanted.

Dave also got into high-tech PR and started thinking harder about how the technologies of the future would change humanity. Our world acquired an interstellar ship-switched data network. Our characters acquired “boswells.” Today we call them smartphones, which don’t yet have neural induction for subvocalized privacy. Boswells were (and are) great plot devices, with an intricate etiquette of usage.

But we totally missed social media. That wasn’t a problem, of course, when we sold the series to Tor in 1990, where, despite an awesome editor and nice covers, it mostly vanished into the black hole of the mass market crash. But now we’re bringing them back. Thirty years into the future we didn’t see, which features a publishing industry that didn’t see it either.

The challenge with retrofitting SF is: what do you do with science fiction that purports to take place in the future, but contains elements that look, well, quaint? You either grit your teeth and reissue the book as a period piece, or you rewrite it. And if you choose the latter, what’s inside the can may be more Elder God than annelid.

A lot of what was daring in our original (in our future, everyone is brown, with white being the largely unwanted exception; gay relationships are a part of everyday life, as well as polyamory, etc) is now commonly found, which is great. But other aspects were tougher. In Exordium, we had to wrestle again with the original screenplay, much of which still shadowed the story, especially in the first book. The language that would pass Programs & Practices in 1980 required made-up cusswords; the default for soldiers and action characters was male; by the nineties Dave had developed the idea of the boswells but in Exordium, everyone seemed to be running to computer stations for communication.

We kept the cuss words. Many readers don’t like neologisms, especially for profanity, but the Exordium idiolect had become too much a part of the worldbuilding: for example, the word “fuck” is a great expletive, but it also carries centuries of negative baggage. In our world, sex had completely shed the guilt, especially for women, so we jettisoned slang and idiom that still evoked that old misogynism.

Everything else needed a serious revamp, including the complex battle scenes, which had to be purged of the last traces of non-relativistic widescreen physics. (It helped that some very competent military gamers had developed an Exordium tactical board game based on the paperbacks.)

Rewriting wasn’t all work. One of the joys of revisiting a world in this way is discovering the zings, connections, and hidden history you missed the first time around. Rewriting becomes like looking into a Mandelbrot kaleidoscope.

We kept the fun elements: A playboy prince with unexpected depths, a gang of space pirates and their ass-kicking female captain, ancient weapons from a war lost by the long-vanished masters of the galaxy, coruscating beams of lambent light, intricate space battles where light speed delay is both trap and tool, twisted aristocratic politics more deadly than a battlefield, a bizarre race of sophonts that venerates the Three Stooges, a male chastity device mistaken for the key to ultimate power…

And yes, a high tech pie fight.

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rowyn

It struck me while I was writing this that I do not yet have a public entry mentioning my mother's passing. I have written about her extensively in daily access-locked entries but not much has been in the public monthly reviews. Mom's health continued to decline through December. She passed away early in the morning of January 5. I don't know what else to say, but I wanted something to be in a public-facing entry for the friends who don't have a Dreamwidth account.

Goals 2025

Move to North Carolina: I have done this! I may even have completed all the bureaucracy associated with moving. I'm not sure if I had to de-register my car with Missouri.

Assist parents: I did this thing too.

Collect the rest of my Apothecaria Journal into epubs: I made two more epubs out of my Apothecaria journal. You can download the epubs: here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PZBpM45Ot8QiTKG3e7OU701dbV8m5T-_?usp=sharing . I didn't edit this project because it's way too annoying to edit individual jpgs for each page. While I was writing the journal, I wrote two scenes between Umbral and Magnus that aren't part of the journal and aren't illustrated. Those weren't posted with the serial, but they're included in the epubs.

Independent of my Apothecaria journal, complete six writing/publishing stages:

I completed 5 stages:

For A Wolf-Shifter's Pack: finished initial edits, final edits, cover creation, and layout/publishing

For The Jewel-Strewn Night: finished initial edits.

I worked on some other things. I made some progress on drafting A Dragon's Secret, did a very small amount of initial edits on A Game to You, and made meaningful progress on outlining a new book. None of this is complete. None of it is even halfway done.

I wrote a total of 45,963 words of fiction in all of 2025. The last year where I wrote less fiction than this was 2014. From 2016 through 2024, I wrote more fiction in November than I wrote in all of last year.

Last year sucked hard for writing, is what I'm saying. It sucked for every stage of the publishing process, for that matter. I set my goals low because I knew 2025 would be bad, and I still didn't meet those goals.

I am not disappointed in myself, but I am disappointed with RL. I thought we'd talked, RL. I thought you were gonna be better than this. Maybe not a lot better than this, but a little. You gotta make an effort here, RL.

Complete monthly updates

I've been slower about doing these in 2025, I think because the hyper-detailed posts about my life make me feel like the month-in-review is unnecessary. Like 'do I read the book, do I really need the Cliff Notes for it too?' But the review posts give a nice summary view that's hard to pick out from all the everyday details. I am glad that I've kept doing them. Despite how often I felt like "I got nothing done this month either" was the takeaway.

Also, looking back at the summary reminds me that while my mother's declining health was far and away the worst part of 2025, it wasn't the only difficult part. I had the gallbladder attack in January and the surgery in March and the move in April, too.

Be gentle with myself

Yeah, I think I'm doing all right on this one. Like yes, I am frustrated that I didn't write or edit more in 2025. But I'm not frustrated with me. It's not 'oh, I should've tried harder.' There was a lot going on. I'm not beating myself up over it. I'm not beating myself up over the things I failed to do in RL, either. It is what it is.

Stretch Goals 2025

Keep up with the art habit now that Apothecaria's complete

I spent far less time drawing in 2025 than I did when I was illustrating daily (fictional) journal entries. But I spent enough time on art that I completed an art summary by month image: https://photos.app.goo.gl/iztciamHArjYBtVV7 . I did an absurd amount of fan art for Olive, my favorite Time Princess character, and I have no regrets. Doing more fan art of her this month. It's all good.

Exercise 15+ times per month

I did not succeed at this every month, but I'm giving this an honorable mention because, under the circumstances, I did freaking awesome at exercise. I exercise 14 times in January (because gall bladder attack), counted minimum effort in February (because gall bladder sapping all energy), counted moving prep in lieu of exercise in April, and exercised 8 times in May (because COVID and Mom's broken leg). For the other 8 months, I exercised more than 15 times. I may well have averaged over 15 times per month even if I count February and April as total losses. Given everything that went on this year, that I didn't give up on physical activity entirely is a triumph.

Try some more journaling games

I started "Reincarnated as the Unlovable Villainess", and while I only wrote up three of the thirty days it's meant to run, I had fun with those days.

Write 50 blog posts

The vast majority of my posts were access-locked this year, so it's not obvious to people who don't use Dreamwidth, but I wildly overachieved on this. I posted a detailed account of almost every day in 2025. It's wild. I didn't post each day -- I'd often post a batch of days at once -- but I have 160+ entries total. Not the kind of "essays on a particular topic of interest" that I think of for a blog, but whatever. I wrote a ton of nonfiction here. My diary entries probably come to 500,000 words; more than I've ever written before. It's become a habit I don't want to quit.

Goals for 2026

Modest goals seems like the plan for 2026, too.

Provide care for Dad
Assuming Dad's health does not precipitously decline or some other new disaster: complete five writing/publishing stages
Complete monthly updates
Read 2 books
Be gentle

Stretch Goals 2026

Keep up with the habit tracker most days
Do some art every month so I can make an art summary at the end of the year
Exercise 15+ times per month
Try some more journaling games. Maybe a short one.
Finish the "Villainess" journaling game.
Redraw an old picture that I'd put considerable effort into at the time
Promote my books a little
Write 50+ blog posts
Track reading
[Open space, feel free to add stretch goals as desired]

Details

Caregiving

Dad is pretty self-sufficient in many ways, and most things he really needs help with (laundry, showering, general cleaning) his aide or the housekeeping service takes care of. Pretty sure I spend less time caregiving for Dad than I did for Lut in last few years of Lut's life. But it would not be realistic for Dad to live alone. He needs someone who can remember things for him, as well as someone who can make appointments for him and suchlike.

Writing/Publishing Stages

The stages are:

Outlining
Drafting
Initial Edit
Final Edit
Cover Creation
Layout/publishing

So five of these might look like:

The Jewel-Strewn Night: final edits, cover creation, layout/publishing
A Dragon's Secret: Finish drafting
Finish a new outline

It doesn't have to be these exact ones. It can be any five stages. I can finish drafting a different book, or editing A Game to You, or complete five different outlines. Whatever it takes. Also, cover creation counts as a stage whether I do it myself or hire someone to do it. Hiring someone is also work. Different work, but nonetheless work.

I finished five stages in 2025.

Five stages is not enough to take a book from beginning to published. From 2016 through 2024, I did more than this every year. Generally a lot more than this. I've averaged two books a year since I started publishing in 2015. In most respects, I have far less going on in 2026 than I did in my most productive years. In 2018, when I published three books, I was working 32 hours a week and providing care for Lut, who'd already been diagnosed with cancer. In 2026, I'm retired, and while I'm still caregiving, I am caregiving-while-wealthy -- which is doing it on easy mode -- and my father is arguably healthier than Lut was.

But 2026 Me is traumatized by nine years of caregiving and watching four loved ones grow sicker and eventually die. And wondering when my 88-year-old father will take a sudden turn for the worse. And that's not even mentioning the worsening state of national and global politics. There's no sense in making a comparison.

Right now, five stages feels pretty ambitious. Finish drafting a book? In this life? Idk man. Still. I want it on the goal list.

Reading

I saw a post from someone who was like "I set my reading goal at 2 books one year and I read like 13 and the next year I set it at 3 books because let's not get overly ambitious about this." Y'know, I can probably manage two books in a year. Maybe I'll even finish the webserial for Housekeeper of the Dungeon finally. (I kinda forgot it existed until I looked at StoryGraph recently and saw it on my Current Reads list). Let's not get overly ambitious on this one.

Track Reading

I've been using StoryGraph to track what I've finished; it's a little clunky but not to bad. It's hard to use for first-reading things, because I'm reluctant to enter an unpublished book that the author plans to publish later, but for most other cases, it's fine. I noticed it has a "Paused" status, so I may start using that with all my Tapas manwha that I can't finish reading because the rest is not yet written/illustrated/published/translated (I seldom know the exact source of the bottleneck.) I'm not holding myself to that, because I've started so many manwha on Tapas.

tally posting in

common_nature

My favorite photo from my trip home during the holidays.

Current Mood: moody

yhlee

Catlin(s) (from CJ Cherryh's Cyteen)

for

ilyena_sylph

digital fanart: Catlin I & II from CJ Cherryh's Cyteen

archangelbeth

...to see if people can send me their email privately. All comments should be screened so only I can see them. And maybe the poster? If the poster can see their own posts, that'll be fine.

bookscorpion posting in

common_nature

The snowdrops are starting to flower, I am so excited.

siderea

(h/t

hudebnik)

Two things: this is a thing that has happened, I have a read on what it is that nobody else seems to have come up with.

1) The thing that happened:

2026 Jan 16: NYTimes: "Thousands of Chinese Fishing Boats Quietly Form Vast Sea Barriers" by Chris Buckley, Agnes Chang and Amy Chang Chien

The most interesting thing here is the visualization animations, so if that link doesn't work for you:

2026 Jan 17: TaiwanPlus News [TaiwanPlusNews on YT]: "NYT: China Tests Civilian Fishing Boats in Maritime Military Operations"

Watch on YouTube

2) Take:

“The sight of that many vessels operating in concert is staggering,” said Mark Douglas, an analyst at Starboard, a company with offices in New Zealand and the United States. Mr. Douglas said that he and his colleagues had “never seen a formation of this size and discipline before.”

“The level of coordination to get that many vessels into a formation like this is significant,” he said.

Yeah, so, about that:

Watch on YouTube

It turns out that the world leader in developing systems for coordinating large numbers of semi-autonomous vehicles is China.

The way a drone show works is that the design of the show and the intended positions and trajectories of all the individual drones is calculated and stored on the coordinating computer, from which they are transmitted to the drones during the show. However, drones in the air can be knocked off course by turbulence, so they also have onboard collision avoidance and position resumption algorithms.

The drone show company in question, Shenzhen DAMODA Intelligent Control Technology Co., Ltd. brags they can control 10,000 drones from a single laptop.

There were only 2,000 ships. Well within what their system could handle.

So what this could be is a test of such a coordination technology deployed to civilian boats.

Perhaps on each of those ships was either a sail-by-wire system that puts them under remote/autonomous control, or a receiver/interface that relayed instructions to the human pilots from a drone-controller that both received orders from command-and-control and managed the specifics of positioning through the same sort of collision-avoidance and repositioning algorithm as light-show drones.

Also, I suspect the way DAMODA manages to control so many devices from a single laptop – I was not able to quickly get a bead on this, and it would be unsurprising if they were less than forthcoming about their secret sauce – is that they have been figuring out ways to offload more and more of the steering logic onto the drones themselves. There comes a point, I suppose, where the logic for collision avoidance and repositioning crosses over into what used to be called (back in the 1980s and 1990s) flocking algorithms. Perhaps this was a test of a flocking algorithm based system for boats.

In any event, this might not be an example of a lot of people doing a thing. This might be an example of a thing being done to a lot of people. I mean, it almost certainly is the latter in that the government of China's modus operandi is to "voluntell" its citizens, and one of the concerning things here is the apparent use of civilians for military maneuvers. I'm saying this might be a test of a system that doesn't rely on acquiescence to government authority.

rix_scaedu

In which there is more shopping and Anadrasata is not all sweetness and light in company.

This piece runs to 2,922 words, and I hope that you enjoy it.

Index Page.

Hakkarsday, 17 Deichen, 1893 C.E.
Sebti, 7 Kaalen, 2187 T.M.L.
2 Mikistli, 22 Coatl, 6.11.2.1.8.4.3

Dear Journal,

More rain this morning, but I think that it looks like it has settled in for the day. It is probably a good thing that my laundry for the trip home is well underway.

( Read more... )

siderea

This was it. This was the week that America admitted America is going fascist – which is to say has gone fascist, i.e. has had its government seized by fascists with broad fascist support for imposing fascism which it is now doing with zeal, i.e. has an acute case of fulminant fascism.

I've been watching this bear down on us for a half a century, so it's slightly dizzying to finally have everybody else come into alignment. One of the basic exigencies of my life has been moving through the world being reasonably certain of a bunch of things that I knew the vast majority of my fellows thought were insane to believe. Over the last ten years, more and more people have been noticing, "what are we doing in this handbasket and where is it going?" but – as evidenced by the behavior of the DNC over the last year – it's taken the secret police gunning Americans down in the streets (since I started writing this: and throwing flashbang grenades at or into (reports vary) passing cars carrying little kids) for the greater liberal mass to come around.

Obviously, it would have been nicer for the realization It Could Happen Here to have not required It Happening Here to be the conclusive rebuttal of their pathological skepticism. But one of my favorite sayings is, "There's three kinds. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves," (Will Rogers) and this is why. Clearly America needed to piss on the electric fence for itself. I try to be philosophical about it.

I just felt, if only for myself and posterity, I should note this long-in-coming nation-wide realization has finally been attained.

I'm not getting too carried away, though. It's hard to be too jubilant when the problem that brought us here is still very much with us, by which I don't mean the fascism itself, I mean the terrible mentality on "my" "side" that causes that pathological skepticism and other catastrophic thinking faults that brought us to this pass and lead to the fascists getting away, quite literally, with murder.

siderea

This is blackly hilarious and absolutely worth a read.

Leftist journalist Laura Jedeed showed up at an ICE recruiting events to do scope it out and write about what she found. What happened next is... eye widening.

2026 Jan 13: Slate: "You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof." [Paywall defeater] by Laura Jedeed:

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.

[...]

I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.

“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”

As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.

And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”

The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.

Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.

Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Click through to read the whole thing.

yhlee

By way of

sovay: Stand with Minnesota, appears to be locally vetted. I've made a modest donation to one of the listed organizations.

(Still buried under health + family + work + school stuff as well, sorry - if I'm not responding or late to respond, that's why.)