Advent calendar 11
Dec. 11th, 2025 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
antisoppistARTHUR (singing): ♪ Get dressed you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay! ♪
DOUGLAS: Yes, perhaps save the full rendition for tomorrow morning.
ARTHUR: Thank you, Douglas! Best present ever! Oh – and actually that’s great, because I got an extra present for everyone. The other thing you left off my list, Skip.
MARTIN: Hmm?
ARTHUR: This!
MARTIN: Mulled wine!
(Arthur pours out glasses of the mulled wine.)
MARTIN: How lovely!
DOUGLAS (murderously): You ... took my Petrus ’05 ... and you ... mulled it?
ARTHUR: Well, not properly. I don’t have the stuff. But, you know, I whacked in some fruit juice and some sugar and the rest of the orange Tic Tacs, and then I just blitzed it in the microwave! It’ll be close enough!
DOUGLAS (murderously): You ...
MARTIN (interrupting): Of course it will be close enough! And it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it, Douglas?
DOUGLAS (murderously): Absolutely. Thank you, Arthur.
ARTHUR: Oh, you’re welcome! Merry Christmas!
(They clink glasses, drink, and then all choke and cough.)
CAROLYN: ... That’s actually rather good!
News
Dec. 10th, 2025 01:46 pmmarthawells* The Murderbot and fantasy novel Humble Bundle has returned for two days. The charity donation is still World Central Kitchen:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books-encore
* I'll be co-guest of honor with John Picacio at AggieCon 55 on January 30-February 1 2026 in College Station, TX.
https://www.aggiecon.net/
* Also you can preorder Platform Decay, the next book in The Murderbot Diaries, at whichever retailer you prefer, and it will be out on May 5, 2026. Published by Tor Books, cover art by Jaime Jones, edited by Lee Harris.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/platform-decay-martha-wells/8cf1662cf8bf8d15?ean=9781250827005&next=t
Wednesday went for the annual eye-test
Dec. 10th, 2025 07:10 pmoursinWhat I read
Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.
Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.
Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....
On the go
To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.
Up next
The new (double-issue) Literary Review
Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.
Advent calendar 10
Dec. 10th, 2025 11:04 amantisoppistBilly Blunt blew a little note on the mouth organ, and they started on their carol.
By the end of the first verse the Blacksmith was bringing his hammer down in time to the music, and it sounded just like a big bell chiming; and then he began joining in, in a big humming sort of voice. And when they finished he shouted out, 'Come on in and give us some more!'
So Milly-Molly-Mandy and Billy Blunt and little-friend-Susan came in out of the dark.
It was lovely in the forge, so warm and full of strange shadows and burnt-leathery sort of smells. They had a warm-up by the fire, and then began another song. And the Blacksmith sang and hammered all to time; and it sounded - as Mr Jakes the Postman popped his head in to say - 'real nice and Christmassy!'.
Tidying up some tabs
Dec. 9th, 2025 04:00 pmoursinLondon Pride has been handed down to us:
Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.
Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery
***
Heritage endangered:
The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.
Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert
According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.
I have a lot of questions here about disinterring the original - I have very cynical thoughts about the church 'archive', as probably a storeroom in a basement somewhere - and in general things which are literally hidden in the (unprocessed, uncared for) archives of some institution.
And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.
***
Gender and learning:
The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???
Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)
The Spy Who Loved Me - chapters 2 and 3
Dec. 9th, 2025 02:43 pmthemis1 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
girlmeetstroubleChapter 3: ( Read more... )
Comment: Looking in the mirror made me laugh since authors are advised against using that as a way to describe a character! I’m not sure the large info dump in chapter 2 about the social ins and outs of Canadians are relevant to anything much! I’d quite forgotten how much of this book there is before anything happens.
late in time behold him come
Dec. 9th, 2025 02:04 pmwychwoodParticularly because work is otherwise not as rich in successes as I would like. My inbox is a disaster area (everything in there requires action; I aim to keep it under 100 items and right now I'm running at 125 on a good day), the last report I actually completed in full was for July and I have a cumulative 2800 items to review in case they need moving, 900 duplicate records that need cleaning up, three test plans to write, an entire component that is supposed to go live before Christmas but which isn't with me for testing yet... and none of those things are even on the action tracker Boss Lady and I go through in my weekly 121.
But I did cross off one of my ten KANBAN items this morning and deleted two or three to-do list items. I'm hoping that tonight I will sleep instead of going for a series of one-hour naps all night, and maybe tomorrow I'll have the energy to tackle Power Automate...
Advent calendar 9
Dec. 9th, 2025 09:31 amantisoppistThe pleasant custom of sending Christmas cards prevailed in Tilling, and most of the world met in the stationer's shop on Christmas Eve, selecting suitable salutations from the threepenny, the sixpenny and the shilling trays. Elizabeth came in rather early and had almost completed her purchases when some of her friends arrived, and she hung about looking at the backs of volumes in the lending-library, but keeping an eye on what they purchased. Diva, she observed, selected nothing from the shilling tray any more than she had herself; in fact, she thought that Diva's purchases this year were made entirely from the threepenny tray. Susan, on the other hand, ignored the threepenny tray and hovered between the sixpennies and the shillings and expressed an odiously opulent regret that there were not some 'choicer' cards to be obtained. The Padre and Mrs Bartlett were certainly exclusively threepenny, but that was always the case. However they, like everybody else, studied the other trays, so that when, next morning, they all received seasonable coloured greetings from their friends, a person must have a shocking memory if he did not know what had been the precise cost of all that were sent him. But Georgie and Lucia as was universally noticed, though without comment, had not been in at all, in spite of the fact that they had been seen about in the High Street together and going into other shops. Elizabeth therefore decided that they did not intend to send any Christmas cards and before paying for what she had chosen, she replaced in the threepenny tray a pretty picture of a robin sitting on a sprig of mistletoe which she had meant to send Georgie. There was no need to put back what she had chosen for Lucia, since the case did not arise.
Advent Calendar 8
Dec. 8th, 2025 04:21 pmantisoppistA final deciding factor was that if Wimsey did not spend Christmas at Fenchurch, he would have no decent excuse for not spending it with his brother's family at Denver, and of all things in the world, a Christmas at Denver was most disagreeable to him.
Accordingly, he looked in at Denver for a day or two, irritated his sister-in-law and her guests as much as, and no more than, usual and thence, on Christmas Eve, made his way across country to Fenchurch St Paul.
"They seem," said Wimsey, "to keep a special brand of disgusting weather in these parts." He thurst up his hand against the hood of his car, discharging a deluge of water. "Last time it was snowing and now it's pelting cats and dogs. There's a fate in it Bunter."
"Yes, my lord," said that long-suffering man. He was deeply attached to his master, but sometimes felt his determined dislike of closed cars to be a trifle unreasonable. "A very inclement season, my lord."
Attached post-it note: "Sorry for double author and consecutive bell-centred extracts but my options are limited!"
Note from me: The bell bit (and more rain) is in the longer extract we all got.
Not the only one having those visions, Margaret....
Dec. 8th, 2025 03:34 pmoursinMargaret Atwood seems to be claiming some kind of unusual prescience for herself when writing The Handmaid's Tale:
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was “bonkers” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.
Me personally, I can remember that the work reading group discussed it round about the time it first came out - and I remarked that it was getting a lot of credit for ideas which I had been coming across in feminist sff for several years....
I think the idea of a fundamentalist, patriarchal, misogynist backlash was pretty much in people's minds?
I've just checked a few dates.
At least one of the potential futures in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).
Margaret O'Donnell's The Beehive (1980) .
Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) and sequels.
Various short stories.
Various works by Sheri Tepper.
I'm probably missing a lot.
And assorted works in which there was an enclave or resistance cell of women embedded in a masculinist society.
I honestly don't think a nightmare which was swirling around at the time is something that can be claimed as woah, weird, how did I ever come up with that?
I'm a bit beswozzled by the idea that in the early-mid 80s the USA was a shining city on a hill, because I remember reviewing a couple of books on abortion in US post-Roe, and it was a grim story of the erosion of reproductive rights and defensive rearguard actions to protect a legal right which could mean very little in practice once the 1977 Hyde Amendment removed federal funding, and an increasingly aggressive anti-choice movement.
Culinary
Dec. 7th, 2025 06:31 pmoursinThis week's bread: Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), a bit dense and rough-textured - the recipe says medium oatmeal, which has seemed hard to come by for months now (I actually physically popped into a Holland and Barrett when I was out and about the other day and boy, they are all about the Supplements these days and a lot less about the nice organic grains and pulses, sigh, no oatmeal, no cornmeal, etc etc wo wo deth of siv etc). Bread tasty though.
Friday night supper: groceries arrived sufficiently early in the pm for me to have time to make up the dough and put the filling to simmer for sardegnera with pepperoni.
Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, 4:1 strong white/buckwheat flour, dried blueberries, Rayner's Barley Malt Extracxt, turned out very nicely.
Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Exotic Mushroom Mix (shiitake + 3 sorts of oyster mushroom) and garlic, served with baby (adolescent) rainbow carrots roasted in sunflower and sesame oil, tossed with a little sugar and mirin at the end, and sweetstem cauliflower (some of which was PURPLE) roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.
Advent calendar 7
Dec. 7th, 2025 12:38 pmantisoppistEarlier, as Christmas Eve had turned into Christmas Day, she had listened at the window to the faraway church bell from the village ringing midnight. It was a still night and not cold, the wind in the direction to send the sound of the bell here; it would be a warm start to Christmas after the storms, and the lack of frost and cold left the landscape wintry without dignity; the bell's resonance was more pedestrian than it'd have been on the kind of crisp cold winter night tonight ideally ought to have been. Dead. Dead. Dead, the bell went. Or maybe: Head. Head. Head. The village church had only one bell so couldn't play a tune. It sounded, she thought, like someone at the back of memory hitting at stone with an axe, which is an act that'll do nothing but ruin a good blade.
also recent reading
Dec. 6th, 2025 11:46 amthistleingreySonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, The Rajes 1 (2019)
Recipe for Persuasion, The Rajes 2 (2020)
Incense and Sensibility, The Rajes 3 (2021)
Beyond the pairwise romance ostensibly cranking its plot, the first book is a love letter to third-culture kids whose lives have been bent by contradictory familial expectations, and an acknowledgment of bits of the wreckage wrought by postcolonial aspiration. Light touch, relatively, but I appreciate that these books say some of the quiet things aloud about costs and---better---that several characters encourage each other to speak to someone specific.
"Raje" isn't ordinarily a surname, which makes it a good choice.
Perhaps the most important feature of the setting, as a fix-it, is that when the kids who figure in these books as adult characters were growing up, several older relatives were local. I also appreciate the queer side-character situationship, whose arc suits the books' setting.
Anyway, four books total---none for Mansfield Park, which I think would be tough to fit. The fourth is The Emma Project (2022), which I've begun.
Sunday Online Chat
Dec. 6th, 2025 09:25 amsartorias