tree_and_leaf | Reading

YES YES YES.

SciShow did a collab with Tom Lum and ESOTERICA and delivered a deep dive into the history of the relationship of chemistry and alchemy and the politicization of the distinction between the two: "In Defense of Alchemy" (2025 Oct 17).

I cannot tell you how much I loved this and what a happy surprise this was. It ties into a whole bunch of other things I passionately want to tell you about that have to do with epistemology, science, and politics (and early music) but I didn't expect to be able to tie chemistry/alchemy in to it because I had neither the chops nor the time to do so. But now, some one else has done this valuable work and tied it all up with a bow for me. I'm thrilled.

Please enjoy: 45 transfiguring minutes about the history of alchemy and chemistry and what you were probably told about it and how it is wrong.

Watch on YouTube

ysabetwordsmith posting in

common_nature

Today we visited the Charleston Food Forest, Coles County Community Garden, and Lake Charleston. These are the lake pictures, thus meeting my fall goal for birdwatching / leafpeeping. (Begin with the food forest, community garden.)

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

siderea

I have been dealing with some health stuff. I recently got a somewhat heavy medical diagnosis. It's nothing life-threatening, and of yet I have only had the mildest of symptoms, and seem to be responding well to treatment, but it's a bummer. My new specialist seems to be fantastic, so that's good.

Meanwhile, I have also finally started having a medical problem I've been anticipating ever since my back went wonky three years ago: my wrists have finally started crapping out. Because I cannot tolerate sitting for long, I have been using my laptop on a rig that holds it over me on my bed. But this means I haven't been using my ergonomic keyboard because it's not compatible with this rig. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for my wrists to burst into flames again, but HTML and other coding has always been harder on my arms than simple text, and the research and writing I've been doing on Latin American geopolitics has been a lot of that. And while I can use dictation for text*, it's useless for HTML or anything that involves a lot of cut-and-paste. Consequently, I've gotten really behind on all my writing, both here and my clinical notes.

So I ordered a NocFree split wireless keyboard in hopes that it will be gentler on my arms. It arrived last night, and I have been relearning how to touch type, only with my arms at my side and absolutely not being able to see the keyboard.

You would not believe how long it took me to type this, but it's all slowly coming back. Also, I feel the need to share: I'm doing this in emacs. Which feels like a bit of a high wire act, because errors involving meta keys could, I dunno, reformat my hard drive or crash the electrical grid.

Here's hoping I get the hang of this before I break the backspace key from overuse or accidentally launch a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia.

* If, you know, I don't too dearly value my sanity.

china_shop posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: Going Fishing
Fandom: Guardian (TV)
Rating: G-rated
Length: 1,180 words
Notes: A missing scene for the Missing challenge. Set during the interrogation in ep 4. A million thanks to

trobadora for beta, and to the Slo-Mo Rewatch on

sid_guardian for the prompt.
Tags: Missing Scene, Episode 4, Da Qing interrogates Shen Wei, Zhao Yunlan POV, Cat Tribe Best Tribe
Summary: During the SID’s interrogation of Shen Wei, in episode 4, Zhao Yunlan sends Da Qing in to take a turn.

( Going Fishing )

sovay

I was thrilled to be informed last night of the new mapping of Roman roads, almost doubling the previously known mileage of the mid-second century CE. Naturally it has produced an interactive dataset, Itiner-e. I am waiting for the sea-roads to come online, but in the meantime I could walk from Durovernum to Segontium in about five days, more or less up the A5. Colpeper would flip. The smaller, less paved, less historically continuous routes are even neater, flooded under modern dams or trodden between the constellations of villas. "The roads are anywhere that the Romans walked."

Because it would otherwise have closed before I could see it, for the first time in five years and ten months I made it out to the MFA to see Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea, a meditation on marginalization, migration, and the sea as site of simultaneous beauty and atrocity pairing John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778) and J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) with Ayana V. Jackson's Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I & II (2020) and John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015). This last is a three-screen video installation subtitled Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime, which turns out to mean a breath-stealing churn of jewel-like navigations from black smokers through kelp forests to polar sheets against which is always playing the human use of the sea as unrenewable dump-site, the extraction of furs and oils and the disposal of bodies including a reenactment of the Zong massacre as if captured in the same grainily archival footage as the foundering vessels of Vietnamese boat people or the winter hunting of bears at Spitsbergen, the floe-slither of seals, the shoal-flick of egrets, the unzipping of a whale aboard a modern factory ship and the head-on gaze of enslaved faces whose humanity has outlasted the scientific racism that commissioned their immortalization by daguerreotype. Periodically one or more of the panels fills with theatrically historical tableaux, seaward figures stranded among a litter of clocks and chairs, bicycles and bones, a pram, a golliwog doll. The aristocratically scarlet-coated, tricorned Black man who surmounts the foreshore like a traveler by Caspar David Friedrich is Olaudah Equiano, enigmatically presiding like the memory of the Middle Passage. The soundtrack similarly interweaves journalism and opera, Nietzsche and Woolf, Melville and Heathcote Williams. It runs 48 minutes and is a hypnotically visceral, gorgeously difficult watch. It doesn't hijack the static art so much as it seems to gather it up, like a great wave. That it is ten years old has outworn none of its urgency on colonialism, immigration, the environment; it hit me much harder than I had imagined and I do not regret it. The waves I grew up with always knock you down.

To my bitter disappointment, I could not get an adequate photo walking home after sunset with only my phone for a camera, but the combination of a local porch-hung pride flag with the action of the wind on its accompanying anatomical model left over from Halloween now produces what I feel would be a respectably Chuck Tingle title: Mooned by the Gay Skeleton.

Current Music: Peter Bellamy, "The Land"

camestrosfelapton_feed

Posted by camestrosfelapton

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/some-more-forbidden-planet-thoughts/

http://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/?p=54301

I cut some stuff from the last Robot Fabulas chapter because I was wandering too far off track. While one of objective of the project is a means of following how science fiction in general developed, the focus is supposed to be on robots. Robby is obviously a huge deal in the movie (literally gets major billing in the opening credits) but the core plot of the film would still work without him. Which is kind of odd, because many of the themes of the film are ones that occur in robot centric stories. The tragic hubris of technology sits at the core of the film but Robby is oddly exempt from that message. Morbius is a Promethean figure like Victor Frankenstein but the monster isn’t Robby. To misquote the supposed cliche of detective fiction: the robot butler didn’t do it.

Variations on the plot of Forbidden Planet are legion. If we think of it as a prototype of Space Navy crew investigate missing colony/spaceship and encounter something powerful enough that they barely survive/escape than we can include:

The original pilot of Star Trek, “The Cage” in which Captain Pike and crew investigate a long missing human ship which apparently crashed on a remote planet. There is a beautiful woman and psychic shenanigans – no monster as such but a number of connecting elements.
Numerous other original series Star Trek stories e.g. from the first season “Shore Leave” which has the crew facing beings created from their subconscious when they visit a planet (but no lost colony) and “Miri” which has a lost colony and weird stuff but the cause is a scientific experiment gone wrong¹. Depending on how loosely we set the parameters there are many more.
Aliens, I don’t think Alien quite counts but the sequel hits many of the points. Of course the monster isn’t psychic and there’s no Morbius figure. Also both the audience and Ripley already know the basic answer to the mystery (the xenomorphs ate everybody).
Event Horizon, I’m stretching things a little as there is only a lost spaceship and no mysterious planet and the crew aren’t military but space-science hubris and spooky mind shenanigans are the order of the day. The twist here is the film’s Morbius analogue (Sam Neill) is one of the crew doing the investigating.

I’m confident people can think of many more

I don’t recall this episode and apparently it was banned by the BBC for years because they thought it would scare children. Yes, this was the same BBC that was busy making Doctor Who with the intent of scaring children. It was fine to use science fiction to scare kids but only if it was scaring them in a British way. ︎

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/some-more-forbidden-planet-thoughts/

http://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/?p=54301

james_davis_nicoll

Here we infer that LUCA lived ~4.2 Ga (4.09–4.33 Ga) through divergence time analysis of pre-LUCA gene duplicates, calibrated using microbial fossils and isotope records under a new cross-bracing implementation. Phylogenetic reconciliation suggests that LUCA had a genome of at least 2.5 Mb (2.49–2.99 Mb), encoding around 2,600 proteins, comparable to modern prokaryotes. Our results suggest LUCA was a prokaryote-grade anaerobic acetogen that possessed an early immune system. Although LUCA is sometimes perceived as living in isolation, we infer LUCA to have been part of an established ecological system.

case posting in

fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6882 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 36 secrets from Secret Submission Post #983.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

queen_ypolita

I saw The Choral mentioned in the local indie cinema weekly email, but when I went to book it for today, it had disappeared, so I checked the screenings at Vue and booked that instead. Looks like it's listed on the indie again, so whatever reason it wasn't available when I looked, it was resolved later, and I could have gone there after all.

Anyway, it was a good way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon but on the whole, it was a bit shallow and stereotypical. Some of that was probably because of the ensemble choral society aspect, so there were a bunch of central characters and all had to had their backstories told very economically. And it was yet another work to point to the enduring fascination about the first world war.

case posting in

fandomsecrets

[ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #984 ]

The first secret from this batch will be posted on November 15th.

RULES:
1. One secret link per comment.
2. 750x750 px or smaller.
3. Link directly to the image.

More details on how to send a secret in!

Optional: If you would like your secret's fandom to be noted in the main post along with the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret. If your secret makes the fandom obvious, there's no need to do this. If your fandom is obscure, you should probably tell me what it is.

Optional #2: If you would like WARNINGS (such as spoilers or common triggers -- list of some common ones here) to be noted in the main post before the secret itself, please put it in the comment along with your secret.

Optional #3: If you would like a transcript to be posted along with your secret, put it along with the link in the comment!

beaker_folk_feed

Posted by Drayton Parslow

https://cyber-coenobites.blogspot.com/2025/11/proving-flood.html

What ridiculousness, I ask myself, is the Facebook post I have found, claiming to debunk the Biblical Flood account?

Below I refute their ridiculous claims, one by one. I am afraid, dear brothers (and sisters, whose menfolk will I hope assist them over the hard theology and even godly science). I give the pitiful, science- and faith-light statements in blue, and my refutations in a godly, religious black.

Key scientific arguments against the historicity of Noah's Ark and a global flood include:

Geological Impossibilities

Lack of Sufficient Water: There is not enough water in the Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and ice caps combined to cover all landmasses, let alone the highest mountains, as described in the biblical account.

This is easy to refute. The whole thing was a miracle. G*d created a lot more water. Then removed it at the end, thus lowering the flood.

Absence of Global Flood Evidence: A global flood would leave specific, consistent geological evidence across the planet, such as a universal sedimentary layer and a massive genetic bottleneck event in human and animal populations; no such evidence has been found.

Have you never heard of the Oxford clay? It is certainly underlying geology everywhere I go. In any case, God tidied up afterwards. God hates mess. And how can you say there is no genetic bottleneck when Country and Western music exists?

Contradictory Geological Formations: Geological features like the Grand Canyon were formed by gradual processes over millions of years, not by a single, rapid, receding flood event. The existence of coal seams and other rock layers that require millions of years to form under specific conditions also contradicts a recent global flood event.

Not if God does it. The geological events were accelerated to God speed.

Fossil Record: The fossil record shows species appearing and disappearing over hundreds of millions of years in a specific order, a pattern that is inconsistent with a single, recent mass-burial event.

Everyone knows that God allowed the Devil to scatter these fossils across the world, with the specific aim of allowing atheists to follow the route to perdition that they deserve.

Biological Impossibilities

Biodiversity and Logistics: The number of species on Earth (over 1.7 million, excluding insects, microorganisms, and marine life) is far too vast for two of every "kind" to fit on a single wooden vessel, along with their necessary food and water for a year.

They were standing on each other's shoulders. And have you not read the Holy Book (Genesis 7:2), which clearly says there are seven pairs of every clean animal? If you cannot get the minor details of the word of G*d correct, how can we trust you to work out the volume of an anteater?

Animal Distribution: The global distribution of animals (e.g., kangaroos in Australia, polar bears in the Arctic) would be impossible to explain if all animals started from a single point of origin in the Middle East after the flood.

Noah dropped them off. He was conveniently supplied with a boat for that very purpose. And polar bears can swim.

Genetic Viability: A severe genetic bottleneck from having only two of every animal "kind" and eight humans would lead to catastrophic inbreeding effects and disease susceptibility, which is not observed in modern populations.

Once again with the author not knowing about the seven pairs of clean animals of every kind. Your grammar is wrong: that should be " catastrophic inbreeding effects and disease susceptibility, which are not observed in modern populations". And clearly God has provided a miracle to save us from inbreeding. Apart from in the Appalachians.

Ecosystem Survival: A global flood would have mixed fresh and saltwater, dooming all freshwater organisms and plants.

God separated them by an osmotic miracle.

Engineering and Physical Impossibilities

Ark Construction: A wooden boat of the dimensions specified in the Bible (approx. 450 ft long) would likely be structurally unsound and break apart in rough seas without modern engineering knowledge.

Did God not give Noah the design? Where does this "likely" come into it when you claim to be dabbling in science?

Waste Management: The sheer volume of waste produced by thousands of animals over a year would create an unlivable and toxic environment for all inhabitants.

Not at all. Just throw it over the side.

Archaeological Findings

Lack of Physical Evidence: Despite numerous searches, especially around Mount Ararat in Turkey, no scientific evidence of the Ark has ever been found. Alleged "discoveries" have been identified as natural geological formations or hoaxes.

This proves nothing. Lots of artefacts from the ancient world can no longer be found. Not even a miracle needed here.

Continuous Civilizations: Historical and archaeological records from ancient civilizations (e.g., Egypt, China) show continuous, uninterrupted human activity through the period when the flood would supposedly have occurred (~2,500 BCE), with no mention of a global flood event.

You can make up anything that is in books. Except the Bible, of course.

In conclusion, the scientific evidence

In conclusion. All nonsense.

https://cyber-coenobites.blogspot.com/2025/11/proving-flood.html

oursin

I am not encouraged to read the actual book, but this is amazing BURN:

beneath the carapace of difficult writing and literary allusion, there’s the gratifying gooey centre of a blockbuster PG western, with limited nudity, violent scenes and oddly simple moral choices.

Am now wondering how many pretentiously lit'ry tomes there are of which this could be said....

***

I was thinking that surely there is a class factor involved here, i.e. parents who can actually afford to be this over-involved in their offspring? When Helicopter Parents Touch Down—At College. Okay, am of generation which is quite aghast at this - I bopped off to New York for a summer during my uni years when making a phone call would have been prohibitively expensive.

***

Like I am always going on, 'exotic' ingredients have a long history in global circulation, c.f. lates from the Recipes Project: Globalising Early Modern Recipes

***

This is amazing and fascinating: The most widely used writing system in pre-colonial Africa was the ʿAjamī script - so widespread.

***

Lost grave of daughter of Black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano found by A-level student:

Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, escaped enslavement to become a celebrated author and campaigner in Georgian England. His memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was a bestseller.
His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe at a time when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.

***

Myths about people debunked:

‘Heroic actions are a natural tendency’: why bystander apathy is a myth Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help

Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.

james_davis_nicoll

Six books new to me: two fantasy, one science fiction, one that seems to be a mix of both, one horror, and one non-fiction.

Books Received, November 1 - November 7

How is it November already?

Poll #33815 Rings of Fate by Melissa de la Cruz (January 2026)

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33

View Respondents

Which of these (mostly upcoming) book look interesting?

View Answers

Rings of Fate by Melissa de la Cruz (January 2026)
5 (15.2%)

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison (June 2026)
14 (42.4%)

Letters From an Imaginary Country by Theodora Goss (November 2025)
15 (45.5%)

The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale by Joe R. Lansdale (October 2025)
3 (9.1%)

Fallen Gods by Rachel van Dyken (December 2025)
7 (21.2%)

The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes by Conevery Bolton Valencius (May 2024)
21 (63.6%)

Some other option (see comments)
1 (3.0%)

Cats!
25 (75.8%)

smallhobbit posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: Missing
Fandom: Spooks (MI5)
Rating: G
Length: 340 words
Summary: No-one knows where Lucas is

( When Adam Carter arrived on the Grid )

paranoidangel posting in

tardis_library

Title: Talk To Me
Creator:

AnonymousDandelion
Rating: General
Word Count/Length/Size: 500 words
Creator's Summary:
Two years gone, with no word and no warning, while the neighbors gossiped and the police gave up hope and her mother tossed and turned each night. And then to simply turn back up on the doorstep, like nothing ever happened—

No, that’s not true. Barbara is certainly acting like something happened. Her eyes are different and the way she carries herself is different, in some indefinable way that a mother’s glance can’t miss.
Characters/Pairings: Barbara Wright, Joan Wright
Warnings/Notes: None

Reasons for reccing: This is a nice, realistic reunion between Barbara and her mother, who knows her well enough to disbelieve the rumours.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73128591

languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71836&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hangul-as-a-global-alphabet-manque

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71836

Best 16:34 introduction to the Korean alphabet you'll ever encounter — by Julesy, of course:

Watch on YouTube

Her title: "The Lost Letters of Hangul That Could’ve Changed the World" (about two weeks ago).

Aside from restoring the lost letters, other things to consider for the further perfection of Hangul: parsing / spacing, indexing, ordering, inputting, capitalization, punctuation, linearization (instead of being imprisoned in the tetragraphic block form, which was strictly designed for compatibility with hanja).

Selected readings

"The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula" (8/6/09)
"Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part II" (12/24/09)
"Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part III" (10/7/10)
"Cha-cha Cia-cia: the last dance" (10/8/12)
"Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part IV" (1/5/24)
"Hangul as alphasyllabary" (5/14/25)
"Grids galore" (11/19/23)
"Hangul: Joseon subservience to Ming China" (5/14/22)
"Hangul for Cantonese" (11/18/24)
Coblin, W. South (2006). A Handbook of ʼPhags-pa Chinese. ABC Dictionary Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3000-7 — 'Phags-pa played a key role in the creation of Hangul
"Happy Hangul Day!" (10/9/23)
"The pragmatic and innovative Choe Sejin — 15th-16th c. Korean phonetician, translator, and interpreter" (4/21/22)
"Hangul Day" (10/9/05) — a very nice article by Bill Poser
"Hangul Day" (10/9/15) — catchy theme song; noteworthy comments
"A Dartmouth grad's contribution to the development of Hangul" (6/25/15)
"Korean Romanization" (6/26/21)
"The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
"Apostrophe in Hangul" (11/16/16)
"Sinitic 'ha ha ha' in Hangul letters" (9/18/20)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71836&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hangul-as-a-global-alphabet-manque

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71836

languagelog_feed

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71838&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=strange-prescriptions

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71838

An email recently informed me that the American Psychological Association has created an online version of the APA Style Guide (technically the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition, and that Penn's library has licensed it. A quick skim turned up a prescriptive rule that's new to me, forbidding the use of commas to separate conjoined that-clauses unless there are at least three of them:

This seems to be a generalization of the "serial comma" principle, which prescribes commas to separate "elements in a series of three or more items". And it's sensible enough to use commas in "yesterday, today, and tomorrow", but not in "yesterday, and today".

But generalizing this advice to conjunctions of that-clauses strikes me as wrong: a tone-deaf prescription, opposed by common sense as well as by a long history of contrary usage.

A trivial search in William James' Principles of Psychology turned up several hundred "incorrect" examples. Here are the first few from Volume I:

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her remembering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must always precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect.

They find that excision of the hippocampal convolution produces transient insensibility of the opposite side of the body, and that permanent insensibility is produced by destruction of its continuation upwards above the corpus callosum, the so-called gyrus fornicatus (the part just below the 'calloso-marginal fissure' in Fig. 7).

Wider and completer observations show us both that the lower centres are more spontaneous, and that the hemispheres are more automatic, than the Meynert scheme allows.

But Schrader, by great care in the operation, and by keeping the frogs a long time alive, found that at least in some of them the spinal cord would produce movements of locomotion when the frog was smartly roused by a poke, and that swimming and croaking could sometimes be performed when nothing above the medulla oblongata remained.

And from Volume II:

They tell us that the relation of sensations to each other is something belonging to their essence, and that no one of them has an absolute content.

Helmholtz maintains that the neural process and the corresponding sensation also remain unchanged, but are differently interpreted; Hering, that the neural process and the sensation are themselves changed, and that the 'interpretation' is the direct conscious correlate of the altered retinal conditions.

Hering shows clearly that this interpretation is incorrect, and that the disturbing factors are to be otherwise explained.

It can, however, easily be shown that the persistence of the color seen through the tube is due to fatigue of the retina through the prevailing light, and that when the colored light is removed the color slowly disappears as the equilibrium of the retina becomes gradually restored.

It's equally easy to find examples from other eras, other authors, and other publishers. Here are a few examples from Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy:

But this presupposes that we have defined numbers, and that we know how to discover how many terms a collection has.

It is very easy to prove that 0 is not the successor of any number, and that the successor of any number is a number.

We now know that all such views are mistaken, and that mathematical induction is a definition, not a principle.

Although various ways suggest themselves by which we might hope to prove this axiom, there is reason to fear that they are all fallacious, and that there is no conclusive logical reason for believing it to be true.

Why did the APA take this weird prescriptive step? It seems to be one of many cases where style guides are led astray by false logic.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71838&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=strange-prescriptions

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71838

rydra_wong

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/01/online-platform-independent-bookshops-ebooks-uk

Bookshop.org is now selling ebooks in the UK as well, with profits (as with paper books sold through them) going to indie bookshops; you can either pick a specific shop you love to benefit (in my case, Juno Books), or have the money go into a collective pool.

daily_otter_feed

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/11/8/a-rolling-ball-of-otter-chaos

Via Mark Dumont

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/11/8/a-rolling-ball-of-otter-chaos

selenak

Busy, busy days. Some media consumed in the last weeks were:

The Diplomat, Season 3: I was afraid the same would happen as with The West Wing - which series creator Deborah Cahn had also been involved in - , i.e. the reality I live in would make it impossible for me to watch a show in which the people working for the US administration might be fucked up in varying degrees, but all sincerely dedicated to the common good in terms of their motivation, and by implication the US public would not vote a creature like the Orange Menace into office (twice). (Hence my personal impossibility of a WW rewatch right now.) This turned out not to be the case. By and large, I enjoyed the season, though its global dangers not withstanding, I would still rather live in that reality (where the US President might ( do spoilery things ), but would not want to change the US into a mixture of ultimate corruption and theocratic autocracy, and the British PM is still a Boris Johnson expo with the thinnest of egos, but at least Nigel Farage doesn't exist. (BTW: it's not clear where The Diplomat's timeline departs from ours; resident Rayburn was clearly a Joe Biden avatar when the show started and there is some occasional talk about restoring the US image abroad, but they never say from what, and whether the Orange Menace's first assault on democracy happened or whether something else did.) Seaosn 3 deals with the fallout from season 2's cliffhanger ending, throws in some new twists (and characters), andwhile wrapping up its seasonal storyline again throws in a tag scene with a big new reveal/hook, while playing to its two strengths, i.e. bringing its central character into a series of convoluted political situations in which she has to extricate not just herself but others (including the US and GB), and her screwed up but intense relationship with her husband. ( More spoilery observations to follow. ) In conclusion, I continue to like this entertaining AU. I hope it gets another season, though if it doesn't, this finale despite its last moment reveal would also work as a finale.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps : Which I missed in the cinema but which is now on Disney +. Personal state of knowledge: I saw none of the earlier Fantastic Four movies, to which this one isn't connected anyway; the comicverse characters I encountered a) in an historical AU version via the comics 1602, and b) in the comicverse Civil War storylilne, which means I hardly saw them at their best. (Unforgotten: Reed Richards fanboying Joe McCarthy.) I'm happy to report these latest MCU versions are a delightful bunch, living in a canonical alternate universe (818) in the 1960s, and keeping in trend with both MCU Spiderman and the latest DCU Superman, we're not going through the origin story again but the movie introduces us to the character(s) when they're already superheroiing, albeit not that long. The cast includes Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Pedro Pasqual as Reed Richards, and Joe Quinn, since Stranger Things a Geek celebrity, as Sue's brother Johnny, with the unknown-to-me Ebon Moss-Bachrach playing Ben Grimm. Something that struck me as very sympathetic is that the movie treats the four as a true ensemble, i.e. Johnny and Ben aren't the sidekicks, and that the central dilemna when it's revealed ( and which is spoilery )

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Munich

a place no chart nor ship can show

In Defense of Alchemy [sci/chem, hist]

Photos: Lake Charleston

Update, Or: J? Where the hell is the j? [me, heath]

Guardian: fanfic: Going Fishing

We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago

Some More Forbidden Planet Thoughts

The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system

[ SECRET POST #6882 ]

Cinemagoing

[ SECRET SUBMISSIONS POST #984 ]

Proving the Flood

Misc things

Books Received, [strike] October 1 — October 7[/strike] November 1 - November 7

Spooks (MI5): Fanfic: Missing

Rec [fic]: Talk To Me by AnonymousDandelion

Hangul as a global alphabet manque

Strange prescriptions

PSA which I keep forgetting to post

A Rolling Ball of Otter Chaos

The Diplomat S3 and The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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December 2021

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