eruthros

Looked out at the sky the other night and the moon was not that bright. Despite what appears in the photo below, we could see the entire ball of the Moon. It was just that the slice was brighter.

What was also very noticeable was Venus. After a number of attempts I was finally able to get a non wavery shot of it in close-up.

( Read more... )

runpunkrun

Photograph of a pomegranate (here standing in for an alien fruit) and a paring knife against a black background. Text: The Feast of St. Olaf, by Punk.

Author: Punk
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Team Sheppard
Rating: G
Content notes: No standard notes apply.

Size: 3,800 words

Summary: The hunting knife is twice the size of the fruit in his hand, but Ronon handles it with ease.

Read it on the AO3 or here »

( The Feast of St. Olaf )

Reblog on Tumblr
Email | The Underground | AO3

musesfool

Does anyone know where I can get a Trinity Santos icon?

*

Always need some Dorianne Laux during poetry month, so here's today's poem:

Prayer
by Dorianne Laux

Sweet Jesus, let her save you, let her take
your hands and hold them to her breasts,
slip the sandals from your feet, lay your body down
on sheets beaten clean against the fountain stones.
Let her rest her dark head on your chest,
let her tongue lift the hairs like a sword tip
parting the reeds, let her lips burnish
your neck, let your eyes be wet with pleasure.
Let her keep you from that other life, as a mother
keeps a child from the brick lip of a well,
though the rope and bucket shine and clang,
though the water's hidden silk and mystery call.
Let her patter soothe you and her passions
distract you, let her show you the light
storming the windows of her kitchen, peaches
in a wooden bowl, a square of blue cloth
she has sewn to her skirt to cover the tear.
What could be more holy than the curve of her back
as she sits, her hands opening a plum.
What could be more sacred than her eyes,
fierce and complicated as the truth, your life
rising behind them, your name on her lips.
Stay there, in her bare house, the black pots
hung from pegs, bread braided and glazed
on the table, a clay jug of violet wine.
There is the daily sacrament of rasp and chisel,
another chair to be made, shelves to be hewn
cleanly and even and carefully joined
to the sun-scrubbed walls, a sharp knife
for carving odd chunks of wood into small toys
for the children. Oh Jesus, close your eyes
and listen to it, the air is alive with bird calls
and bees, the dry rustle of palm leaves,
her distracted song as she washes her feet.
Let your death be quiet and ordinary.
Either life you choose will end in her arms

*

Current Mood: thoughtful

oliviacirce

Yesterday was Shakespeare's (alleged) birthday, so here (a day late, because yesterday was a little bit of a doozy) is a Shakespeare poem! It is also a poem about horses, since I haven't posted one of those yet this year, and is obviously a sonnet.

( Shakespeare's Horse )

rachelmanija

A science fiction novella about aliens, communication, and certain dark topics which are spoilery to mention. Though if you read the blurb for this book, it very strongly implies those topics and the specific shocking twist that involves them. It reminded me of China Mieville's Embassytown, though the latter benefited from its longer length.

Ro's species, along with some others, can jump into the minds of Star Eaters, the mysterious species that alone can mine the mineral that enables space travel. Ro is told that doing so is the only way to study them, and while jumping into their bodies extinguishes their minds, they are extremely long-lived beings and their minds definitely come back, so Ro is only doing the equivalent of causing a day-long blackout. The Star Eaters were apparently once enslaved, but now work voluntarily; communication with them is difficult and puzzling. Once you jump in, you're stuck for the rest of your life, but Ro is such a curious and skilled linguist that he's willing to give up everything to understand this oddly mysterious race. (I guess the possessing being's mind is supposed to only live for its species's normal lifespan? This is not explained.)

If you've read much science fiction, or many books in general, you have probably already figured out what's really going on. In fact it's so obvious that it seems strange that it takes the characters so long to do so, but of course no one knows exactly what story they're in.

Everything involving alien communication is great. But the plot is so predictable and grim that I didn't enjoy the book much.

( Read more... )

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3237/

Borat came out twenty years ago this year--closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today--but it honestly feels like it's been even longer, somehow.

https://xkcd.com/3237/

torachan

1. This morning on my walk I stopped in the bakery I always pass by since there were no customers at the time (a miracle), just to see what pastries they had in the case, and they had a lemon muffin with ube frosting, so I had to get it. Then since I was getting breakfast for myself, I felt I had to stop next door at the bagel place to get something for Carla as well, and they had a new carrot cake latte, so I got that for myself. The latte was fine, but I couldn't really detect anything carroty or cakey about it, but the muffin was really good.

2. Today was a work from home day again and I just took it easy. I am going in tomorrow, but it's been nice to have a mostly WFH week to ease back in to things.

3. One of my regular Thursday meetings was cancelled this morning, and the other (a 4pm one) was cancelled about half an hour before its start. My kind of day!

4. Jasper has claimed the top perch of the new cat tree as his own and has already spent many, many hours curled up there, but Ollie is the only one who's shown interest in the hole. We've never had a cat tree with a hole platform before, but watching him poke up through the hole to play with the dangle toy gave me some of the most joyous moments of my life. Truly a still photo cannot convey how silly and adorable he looked.

torachan

I had a really hard time getting to sleep that first night despite having gone a long time without sleep during our travel (no sleep for me on the plane) and the bed being relatively comfortable. Carla seemed to sleep well, though. I think I got a total of about 2.5 hours and then ended up getting up around 4am or something.

( Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium )

musesfool

It's been a few years since I posted some Shakespeare on his birthday, but I am tired so have one of the most famous poems in the Western canon:

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

*

I was all excited that it's Thursday, thinking about how there'd be a new episode of The Pitt until I remembered, alas, that there will be no new episodes until next January. Sigh.

I keep meaning to post my thoughts here and not doing it, so in brief, my thoughts on the season 2 finale of The Pitt: ( spoilers )

I guess this sounds like I had a lot of complaints but I really loved this season - I just thought the writing fell down a little sometimes, for some characters.

*

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Get Him Back - Olivia Rodrigo

raven

So mostly these days I am obsessed with The Pitt! I love the show so much, for itself, and because it's such a natural successor to MASH and other shows I have loved. I've said on Bluesky that it's the only show I've ever come across that really understands how teaching and growth and mentoring happen in a professional environment - fandom is full of academia stories, and indeed academics, and school and high school stories, but not so much the grown-up, affirming, important work of teaching someone to do your job because you, they and the job all matter. (What do I teach people to do! Not save lives. But it matters. I had a lovely, lovely email from one of my team before she went off on maternity leave that said wonderful things about my teaching, about what she'd learned from me, how her practice had changed as a result of me, at which point I had to go and lie down and cry for a while. When Robby says with emphasis, "This is a teaching hospital", it makes me think of it.

(Brief outline: Robby, otherwise Dr Michael Robinavitch, is a warm, scathing, compassionate soul who runs an emergency department in Pittsburgh, it's an ensemble cast of interns, resident doctors, patients, nurses and others and Robby is the keystone of it all in a tired, mentally ill kind of a way. Each episode of the show covers an hour, so the entire season covers a single shift. It's very good. Also Robby is played by Noah Wyle - and, as the show's executive producers lost a litigation against the IP-holders for ER, he is emphatically not John Carter. I love this. Robby feels, and is, beautifully imagined: a working-class Jewish man, who wears a magen David necklace, all because Carter was a WASP with a trust fund.)

I also love Trinity Santos, a brilliant lovely Filipina asshole of a lesbian, and Jack Abbot, who is Robby's friend and also mirror image - being to the night shift what Robby is the day - and also fascinating for himself. He's a former MASH combat medic which is what decided me for sure that the show deliberately draws on its predecessor. The Pitt isn't a sitcom, but it has the warmth MASH had; and Abbot, who is a lower-leg amputee, embodies some of its ambivalence. (And! In s2 they have someone deliver Henry Blake's "young men die" speech, with the same blocking as the original. I love it.)

Anyway I love this show. It is so rich and funny and so fucking human, all the damn time. Robby's PTSD is from covid, and his nightmares are of full PPE - and I was like, okay, do I want to watch this. Robby has PTSD from treating covid patients but my dad died from treating covid patients. But I did want to watch it, because it takes what it does seriously. I want to write a fic, about Robby and ( s2 spoiler ), and I also want it to be a daemon AU, because I am insane. I haven't written anything good in a year and like I said I am insane. Maybe I should just ask people to give me fic prompts.

wychwood

So basically these are all the same song, right:

Paul Simon - Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend

What else am I missing that goes on this list? And are there any equivalents about boyfriends? The only thing that came to mind was the Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You, which isn't quite the same vibe.

rydra_wong

It is currently 50% off on Steam, which I believe is as good as it gets in the post-Elden Ring era.

rydra_wong

I can STRONGLY rec Chants of Sennaar to anyone who enjoys deduction/puzzle games, and in particular the micro-genre of games that have translating a conlang (in this case, multiple conlangs) as their central mechanic.

Watch on YouTube

Looks like Sable, plays like a cross between Return of the Obra Dinn and Heaven's Vault.

(It makes the excellent choice which Sable also made and which more indie games should go for, namely putting all your characters in face-hiding hoods or masks so you can completely avoid uncanny valley bad face animation and spend your resources on other things instead.)

Made my brain ache in a good way and made me feel clever. I did have to draw maps (my spatial orientation is terrible, so others may not need to except for one specific maze-like area), and make assorted paper notes to solve various puzzles.

You have to not only successfully translate each language individually, but, later in the game, interpret conversations between pairs of languages. This requires knowing that the languages have different word order -- in a very simple way -- one language does object-first Yoda-speak, several languages vary in how they form plurals, etc., but you do have to be able to translate in a grammatically correct way, not just word by word.

And to get to the "true ending," the game requires you to go all out and "speak" the languages, by using a given language to correctly describe a picture you are given (with no text).

I admit I did get a tiny bit emotional when I made it to the end.

Has a subsidiary stealth mechanic, which I mostly enjoyed; near the very end of the game, it did briefly hit the point of requiring a somewhat quick response, but was still ultimately within the capacity of my abysmal reflexes. Nonetheless, it's not a zero-coordination-required game.

torachan

1. I had a WFH day today so we went down to DCA for lunch. It was such a nice day weather-wise (just the right amount of warm, lots of cloud cover for the most part but not just a grey sky) and the crowds were low. We had some delicious food from the Food and Wine Festival, which wraps up this weekend, and since it's been a month since we were there, there was lots of new merch to admire.

2. We were out for about five hours, which is the longest we've been away from home since we got back, and we were a little worried we might come home to another pee incident, but there was no pee! Jasper was super needy this morning (but he often is on mornings I work from home) and we had a good half-hour snuggle at my desk before leaving. He did hork on the sofa while we were out, but I would rather deal with a hundred incidents of vomit than a single pee incident, so while it wasn't ideal, it wasn't a big deal, either.

3. One thing I do not miss about Japan is the allergies. I have in the past decade or so developed some degree of allergies at home as well, having not ever had any growing up or in my early adulthood, but not to the degree that I get them in Japan. Before our trip, I think the weather here was bringing them out more as I did have some reactions many days, if not all, but I have been blessedly sniffle-free since getting back (though today my eyes are a bit stingy).

4. Molly's showing off her perfect snoot.

torachan

It's been exactly a month since we've been to Disneyland. Well, our Disneyland anyway. We had originally planned to go last weekend, but were still too worn our from our trip, so we put in for a mid-week trip today and went down for lunch.

( Read more... )

oliviacirce

It's Earth Day! I also missed yesterday, so here are two poems that go really well together, in my opinion. Variations on a theme!

( Third Rock from the Sun )

*

( On Earth As It Is On Earth )

musesfool

Today's poem:

Pyrocumulus
by Arthur Sze

Peony shoots rise out of the earth;

at five a.m., walking up the ridge,

I mark how, in April, Orion's left arm

was an apex in the sky, and, by May,

only Venus flickered above the ridge

against the blue edge of sunrise.

In daylight, a pear tree explodes

with white blossoms—no black-

footed ferret slips across my path,

no boreal owl stirs on a branch.

At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled

when a black bear snagged a shriveled

apple off a branch; and, waking out

of a black pool, I glimpsed how

fire creates its own weather

in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching

the ditch, I drop the gate: it's time

for the downhill pipes to fill,

time for bamboo at the house

to suck up water, time to see sunlight

flare between leaves before

the scorching edge of afternoon.

***

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Twins on tv

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Naomi Novik, The Summer War: Fantasy novella about a girl who ends up unwillingly married to a fairy prince as part of a treaty and/or revenge. Is it petty of me to be annoyed that an author who got here by writing queer fanfic and then did not write anything queer professionally (as far as I know; I haven't read the Scholomance books yet) has decided that now there can be queer characters in the background but mostly in unflattering ways? And also that the main character still needs to basically be rescued by her brothers even though the story wants me to believe she is Smart and Independent? Yeah, probably.

Cat Sebastian, We Could Be So Good:

lysimache keeps telling me I should read the second book of this historical m/m romance series but unfortunately I am the type of person who has to Read The Whole Thing From The Beginning so I said, no, I was reading the first one first. So this is the first one. It was kind of meh. It had a great 1950s NYC setting but nothing really happened and then it just kind of ended. Also we all know exactly what books the author read about being gay in NYC because there are only two and everyone's historical gay romance regurgitates the same facts from them (seriously, you can go to places other than the Navy Yards, I'm pretty sure) so I was really confused that the author seems to have missed the part where "fairy" actually has a really specific meaning. I guess now I read the second one? The second one is baseball.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Captain America #9 )

What I'm Reading Next

I guess the second Cat Sebastian book in that series? Probably?

Current Mood: full

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3236/

Thanks to differences in logging regulations, the messages actually turned out to be visible from the air.

https://xkcd.com/3236/

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

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eruthros

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Reading

Oh Venus

Fic: The Feast of St. Olaf [SGA, Team, G, 3800 words]

Either life you choose will end in her arms

if and and but

The Language of Liars, by S. L. Huang

Husband and Wife

Daily Happiness

2026 Japan Trip Part 2 (4/4)

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

(no subject)

side-effect of shuffling playlists

Also, in the unlikely event that I've sold anyone on Dark Souls

un-Babels your Tower

Daily Happiness

2026 Disneyland Trip #20 (4/22/26)

one of a billion small miracles

fire creates its own weather

Wednesday Reading Meme

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October 2025

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