This is more partial even than usual, because I've had some download problems that I've since fixed. But we can let that filter out to the second quarter; time waits for etc. etc.
I'm currently reading about Pompeii, and I was struck by the mention of about how little was recorded about that volcanic eruption and the cities that were "lost" in its aftermath.
I thought of how conspicuously absent our society's cultural response to the covid pandemic has been, even before Newitz themself drew an explicit parallel with the Spanish flu epidemic which apparently also had a similar effect.
I was struck by this because just this morning, I was in a meeting about an upcoming Mental Health Awareness Week event at work. I had to join a bit late so I don't know the context but as I joined, someone newish to my org -- which covers the whole country so we're mostly hybrid/remote -- said that starting this job was hard for me because going back to working from home was something he hadn't done "since covid." #CovidIsNotOver, of course. (I felt some kind of way listening to someone talk as if they were triggered by an event that is still ongoing if you ask me.) But he's totally right about how we haven't really addressed it in any meaningful way -- the lack of pragmatic mitigations almost requires us to participate in this cognitive dissonance of referring to the pandemic in the past tense when it's only the lockdowns, the testing, the mask mandates, the period of taking it as seriously as it warrants, which is past.
I was immediately reminded of that Audrey Watters piece I linked to the other day, about grief that isn't observed. If she's right that "it matters that GPT was released during the COVID pandemic (and ChatGPT shortly 'after')," (and how I appreciate the scare-quotes around "after" there!), this is a meaning that's lost if we don't talk about the covid pandemic.
I think covid is intimately linked to changes in transport infrastructure and the built environment that make my job harder -- hastily-enacted legislation to allow more tables and chairs on pavements means more obstacles that never had to undergo an Equality Impact Assessment; "pop-up" cycle lanes led to lasting trends in active travel infrastructure that still deprioritize pedestrians; e-scooters were seen as more useful in a world where people were discouraged to go anywhere but particularly to use public transport; I could go on -- and the further that lockdowns and other facets of pandemic mitigations get, the harder it is for me to address those things properly.
It's interesting to see what feels like such a modern ill also taking place as long ago as Pompeii, in as different a culture as that Roman one was. Is it such a fundamental human thing to just block out the bad times so thoroughly? I can't help but think we can do much better to look after ourselves, individually and as collective societies.
An epistolatory novel about the friendship between an American Jew, Max, and a German, Martin. As Hitler rises to power, their relationship sours, in some expected ways and some less expected, as their characters are revealed.
Very short, very powerful, very technically skilled, a quick easy read with an unexpected and unforgettable outcome. Seriously, don't click on spoilers if there's any chance you'll read the book. That being said, I read it because Naomi Kritzer told me the whole story and it was still great. Thanks for the rec!
The book was published in 1939 under a male-sounding pseudonym, but the style feels almost modern and the themes feel incredibly modern. There's an afterword about what inspired the book, which which is worth reading. Taylor had some German friends who seemed like kind, wonderful people, who became fervent Nazis and abandoned their Jewish friends. In a question so many of us are asking now, she wondered, What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?
A couple of days ago, I determined that my webcam wasn't working on my laptop, for calls with my parents, or on my work laptop.
D kindly took it away the other day, and diagnosed it as Dead. He also reminded me we had one that I could use for work but doesn't work on Linux -- something I'd entirely forgotten about; I think I'd conflated it with the other webcam which had stopped working entirely...
He also sourced a replacement, sent me a link. Which I said was terribly sweet of him but I didn't really need, just for my parents when I could shuffle things around and just use the camera on the laptop. But it arrived the next day; he'd bought it for me anyway. "Thirty quid to keep your parents happen seems worth it," he said. Awww.
So, tonight I was so looking forward to the call with my parents starting with something other than my mom complaining that she can't see me.
Instead, the first thing she said when my camera pops on was "You're getting those deep wrinkles in your forehead too, like Grandma [my mom's own mother]."
Which
a) only when I frown, or raise my eyebrows [so maybe this is the only way my parents will ever see me, lol]
b) my grandma was a badass, so I hardly mind looking like her!
c) to age is to live!
But most of all: she's treating me in a way she'd consider horrible bad manners if I behaved this way toward anyone.
Again. (A story I'm fond of trotting out is the time we were in a restaurant, my appetizer arrived, she looked disgusted at it and asked me warily what that was; I said "butternut squash soup" and she said "oh yuck!" A thing I'd have been told off for if I'd reacted that way to someone else's food that I both didn't have to and shouldn't have eaten!)
Can't believe D paid £30 for my appearance to be insulted like this, heh. It's a fancy webcam too; he said he got "only" 720p rather than the £50 1080p, and I was thinking this is already too big a number, I don't want my parents to see me in high definition (unfortunately for me, I said this as "that's too many p for my face!" which made D snigger because his mind is always in the gutter!). it's very zoomed-in too, which is unsettling for me too since I have to have my monitor so close to me. It's been such a long time since Mom commented on my facial hair and I'd like that to become a much longer time, an unbroken streak. She's gonna say whatever she wants as soon as she (thinks that she) is off-mic; all I ask is for her to be polite to my face!
The 2024 Second Edition of Onyx Path Publishing's Scion, the tabletop roleplaying game about the children of gods discovering their birthright in the modern world.
Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: Where do you do most of your crafting?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
When I'm fine-tuning my taping setup, I've realized that I don't need to obsess over every technical detail-specifically noise reduction.
My typical listening environment sits at a quiet 25 dBA, and since I usually keep my music levels around 50-55 dBA, optimizing for tape hiss just isn't a high priority. Functionally, I tape at roughly +2-4 dB using tape with at least 55 dB of dynamic range. This effectively pushes the hiss below 0 dB. While broadband noise is technically perceivable at 0 dBA, my ambient room noise does a great job of masking it.
Would this hold up if I switched to ANC headphones? Definitely not. In that isolated vacuum, the hiss would become immediately noticeable. If I were a heavy headphone listener, I'd likely flip on the Dolby B, but for my current room setup, there's simply no reason to. It's all about matching the tech to the environment.
I'm not sure what to say about Nicholas Brendon as he leaves behind a complicated legacy, except that we lost him way too young. I hope he is at peace now.
However kerk_hiraeth has been re-posting their old Xander fics In Memoriam, and I thought it would be nice to link them here.
Inside Knowledge Missing scene for S7 (post ep.11, Showtime) Drabble
Right Hand Man Post-series, Xander passes away 1.3k words
Partner and I are in need of a solicitor for a fairly routine and non-urgent matter, so, looked up who it was we went to last time we had a routine life admin thing requiring the services of a legal professional.
(This was actually a bit more time-consuming than I anticipated, have I mentioned that archivists are really Not All That at keeping on top of their own papers? The cobbler's children syndrome.)
But, I found the name of the practice and looked them up on The Internetz and they are there, as having gone out of business some few years ago, on Companies House website.
And they are by no means the first solicitors I have had dealings with, though I think the ones in Kentish Town saw me through the purchase of First Flat and present dwelling and possibly various other legal matters, but are now no longer operating more or less adjacent to the Tube station.
I suppose that these days one should not anticipate that you have Old Mr Thing the attorney-at law and Young Mr Thing his son who keeps up the practice and Even Younger Mr Thing who is being brought on in the family tradition -
- and that these things come and go like everything else and they are no longer quite the repository of folk memory like in mystery novels.
Way back when I was starting out as a Wee Babby Archivist, I remember that a big thing of the day, practically A Crisis, was solicitors' records. As I was never actually employed in a repository where I had any direct dealings with the problem, I'm not sure whether this was due to practices going defunct, or just somebody going down into the cellar and realising that they still had all the papers from Jarndyce v Jarndyce back to its origins along with tons of other stuff. But anyway, there were Massive Amounts of Very Misc Material (quite surprising what turned up) which looking back I suspect had all sorts of issues around ownership to complicate matters even further.
(If anyone has recs for N London solicitors would be glad to hear of them.)
Wish to inform those that are interested in Clorinda Cathcart's Circle that Volume 25, Choices: Taking Decisions will appear this coming Friday, 27th March:
A Parliamentary election causes considerable upheaval to the summer plans of Society in general, and of Clorinda and her circle. But besides any choices concerning the government of the nation, several of them find that they have to make decisions touching on more personal matters.
The delay in making this announcement has been caused, in part, by problems with the Google Books version: but it is hoped that these will be resolved in a timely manner.
You unlock this bakery with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension.
A dimension of icing.
A dimension of piping bags.
A dimension of wreckitude.
You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of bad taste and even worse skill. You just crossed over into...
The Twilight Zone.
BUM BUM BAAAAAHHHH...
Picture, if you will... a monkey. This monkey:
I know, creepy right? [shivering] Brrrrrr. Totally.
[resuming serious announcer voice] Ahem. Now picture, if you will, five ravenous-yet-dim-witted Shih Tzu dogs:
[sternly] Let's call them Muffy, Boopsie, Precious, Buttercup and Mr. Snuggles.
Now picture, if you will, a face of terror that watches in malignant silence far beyond your present capacity to understand. A face enigmatically bizarre in terms of time and space. A face...
...of a tweety bird.
Now picture, if you will, Meerkat Zombies...raising the roof.
"What up, playah?"
This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination, the ingredients... of the Twilight Zone.
BUM BUM BAAAAAHHHHH...
SQUEEDLEDEEEE!!!
Jennifer P., Matt N., Christine S., and Melanie L., picture, if you will... a dolphin eating a Snickers bar in flip-flops and a cardigan. Then tell me what that looks like. I've always wondered.
UPDATE! LeAnna and Woobie took up the dolphin challenge and sent in their ideas.
First LeAnna's:
AWESOME! Check out the flip flop thongs on his flippers.
And next we have Woobie's
See, the snickers bar is wearing the cardigan and flip flops because I apparently have no grasp of sentence structure. ?thought Who would have
Touché!
One more!
This one's from Vanilla Smoke. Awesome!
*****
P.S. Here's one more read for you Rod Serling fans:
It's a graphic novel - so basically a long-form comic book - about Serling's career and "descent into his own personal Twilight Zone." OooOOOooh. Looks awesome, and it has great reviews!
posted by moem at 12:32pm on 23/03/2026 under family
The last time I heard my father speak was when he called me from his hospital bed, using a 'landline' style GSM phone that I brought him because it was easy for him to handle (large buttons). He called me when I had just visited him, and was waiting on the platform to catch a train home. He asked me if I had made it to the railway station in time, and was happy to hear that I had.
So his last message to me was one coming from loving concern, and an opportunity he saw to do a caring, parenty thing, when for half a year our roles were mostly reversed (I had been doing things like helping him eat and brushing his teeth).
I like to think back of that conversation, now three years ago. It sounded so thoroughly and delightfully normal when we had it.
It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released:
Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools.
Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ARM Cortex memory protection was setup. Then the Memcpy operation was targeted during the header read, allowing him to jump to the attacker-controlled data.
As a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gaasedelen says the attack in unpatchable. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing for loading unsigned code at every level, including the Hypervisor and OS. Moreover, Bliss allows access to the security processor so games, firmware, and so on can be decrypted.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrissa at 04:34pm on 23/03/2026 under short story glory
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tired
thoughtful
calm
