mm, some things:

1.
Earlier this evening I wandered across the street to pick up a few things for dinner and ended up spending a good five minutes or so chatting with the queers canvassing for ballot propositions, because it's very easy to catch me with one about park funding, especially when they look like a pair of lesbians, which it turned out they indeed are. Apparently they recently moved to the area (one of them coming back, the other to stay with their partner).

Shall see if I run into them again, but they said I should check out the gaming place (when asked "what kind of gaming" I was informed "most kinds!", because despite the on-the-face marketing being minigolf it in fact also has board games and video games and would be cool with people playing ttrpgs there) in the next town over (where they live), so, it's quite possible! This area is, uh. Very small in some ways. (But, as they pointed out when talking about why they came here, generally quite safe for queer people in a way that the more southern state they moved from wasn't necessarily.)


2.
Today is a day where I feel like a person, and mostly that throws into relief how many days I do not, and I find this deeply frustrating but mostly in a "idk if there's much I can do about that?" way. It's very... look when the main problems are fatigue and brain fog, that's not stuff that people tend to have particularly helpful suggestions for?


3.
Slowly catching up on a Star Wars podcast (A More Civilized Age), and at one point the hosts got sidetracked talking about how holocrons (especially sith holocrons) are like AI chatbots, and I cannot get that comparison out of my head. It makes sense and it's hilarious, and also yup sure is a sith vibe.


4.
I mentioned watching the first bit of Maul: Shadow Lord here, and I finished it last week (the final episodes of s1 aired on May 4th, of course). It's very... well, obviously the whole thing needs to be full of set-up/lore for the greater universe, blah blah disney star wars blah blah. But the final two episodes in particular were just "yup, here's the disney playbook".

( Read more... )

Like, I'll watch s2 when it comes out because the animation is great and I enjoy Maul interacting with an apprentice and also girls/women with complicated relationships to lightside/darkside matters. But also, it's a show aimed at people who wanna see cool fights and I keep going BUT WHAT IF YOU HAD CONVERSATIONS AND THEMES. xD I am not the target audience, I know that, it's fine.


5.
I also somehow continue to keep up with Critical Role s4: Araman! It is enjoyable! I adored ep24, which was like 5hrs of talking and roleplaying and scheming with zero combat. I had way more fun than I was expecting with ep25, which was three straight hours of combat with the party that is mostly not statted for combat and who thus need to be CLEVER and STRATEGIC about what they're up to. If I gotta listen to D&D combat, I'd rather have it be the kind of combat where players are trying to figure out how to use unexpected skills and abilities to solve a puzzle that happens to be combat than one where the solution is "I roll to attack" 90% of the time.

(BLM going "holy shit I forgot you could do that, uhhhh, okay. I am about to tell you something that I did not think there is any way you could've learned in this combat, this is going to have MASSIVE implications going forward" to the Divination Wizard was genuinely a stand-out moment, and when he got to the reveal of "this is what you were supposed to think happened. this is what everyone else thinks happened. YOU know better, because you touched fate and saw through the facade." at the end it was extremely !!!. This is very hard to pull off in a combat-focused episode, and yet! Kudos to BLM and also Marisha for using her abilities in this way!)

anyway I'm particularly fond of the following PCs at the moment, though tbh I think the whole crew is fun to listen to:
- Hal: Mr Dad Man, whose brother's execution was the start of this whole campaign (orc bard)
- Thaisha: The Mom Friend, Except She's Actually A Mom, who was with Hal for a while (had a few kids together!) but then they split up (orc druid)
- Vaelus: what if you actually leaned into elves being very old and were also sad that your god got killed in the war (elven paladin)
- Murray: tired academic who grew up working-class and it shows (dwarf wizard)
- Kattigan: look sometimes the whole "my dog is my best friend" thing goes a long way when also you're sensible and kind (human ranger)

They just finished the first cycle of arcs, so they'll be drawing the whole crew back together soon. I am excited about this! I want the mixing of parties and seeing them all interact! Also it is going to be SO MANY PEOPLE and therefore a bit exhausting.


6.
Finally finished Max Gladstone's Dead Hand Rule, the penultimate novel in his Craft Wars series. It is very deeply a book about the contrast between being a person and a symbol, and what it means to bear great power, and what it means to choose between being yourself and a vessel for something greater, and also tbh rather much about how personal relationships shape national politics and how hard-and-yet-easy it is to allow yourself to love people.

v excited for seeing how he brings it to a conclusion because well he sure did end this novel by being like "the threat is here and realised and is a ticking time bomb, GOOD LUCK" at his protags. Very much "get your shit together and work together or DIE", tbh, which... okay a bunch of them are necromancers and some of them are therefore undead, so, like, death isn't the threat so much as the subsumption of existence into a colonizing force's clockwork wiles, which isn't great or what any of them want. So. It'll be fun to see them channel the power of gods and souls into a solution that hopefully doesn't blow the world up too much along the way.

Also perhaps I will actually read the entire Craft Sequence again, in chronological order (as opposed to publication order, because that's how I've read them as they release), before the final volume comes out. That'd be fun.

I'm a beginner artist and I really, REALLY, REALLY like how the artist Itousa does colors. I would really like to replicate the same thing in my works but what level of color theory do I need to pull this off.

( Examples Under Cut )

Intro/FAQ


My check-in: A paragraph, so far.


Day 12: glinda,

Day 11: acorn_squash, badly_knitted, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, glinda, sanguinity, sylvan_witch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme

Day 10: acorn_squash, badly_knitted, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme

( More days )


When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

Good evening!

How long was your writing session today?

• < 30 minutes
• 30-60 minutes
• 60-90 minutes
• 90+ minutes

And for your writing pace so far... Any changes to it?

• Yes, I'm going to pick up the pace from my usual speed.
• No, I'm sticking to my current pace.
• Yes, but I'm going to slow down so I don't burn myself out.
• ... I'm think I'm going to take a break for now.

SANDRA HÜLLER AS EVA STRATT IN PROJECT HAIL MARY

612 CAPS, DOWNLOAD

She was incredible!

( More pics )

Things, and also, stuff:

- NEW DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL TODAY!!! 🙌 🙌 🙌

- I did cancel the expensive hardcover in favor of the kindle edition and stupidly didn't think to check when the ebook actually becomes available. At midnight last night, I was refreshing my order page but the book was not yet available. A quick search revealed that Amazon releases things at midnight Pacific time, which I guess makes sense considering the location of their headquarters, and it saved me from staying up past my bedtime reading, but I was a little disappointed.

- Needless to say, not a whole lot of work got done today because I was READING. Luckily, I only had one meeting and that meeting doesn't require written notes, so...I answered emails and teams chats, but was otherwise glued to the book. ( minor spoiler from early on ) I'm sure I will have much more to say once I'm done reading. *g*

- Speaking of DCC, I learned the other day that the Avs' goalie, Wedgewood, is a fan (apparently he is a BookTok-er? or something?) and also last month, the Avs did a DCC-themed pet adoption night at which their mascot dressed up as Carl and all the potential adoptees were named after characters in the books. I can only imagine what the majority of people in that arena, who probably haven't read the books, thought was happening.

- Speaking of hockey, I am now kind of torn between rooting for the Habs and the Sabres, mostly because of Martin St Louis and being reminded about Mother's Day 2014 and also that if the Habs won it all there would be no White House invite to be grossed out by. I still think it's going to be Canes vs Avs in the end, and I guess I'd be rooting for the Canes, but that is a very unappealing final, imo.

- Once hockey is done, I will be able to catch up on SO MUCH TV: new seasons of Deadloch, For All Mankind, and Paradise, plus that surprise episode of The Bear that dropped last week and that new season (coming June 25th!), plus I still haven't watched s2 of Andor or Poker Face, and there's a new season of My Life Is Murder, as well! And I need to catch up on Abbott Elementary, too, and finish my Orphan Black rewatch. It is a lot!

*

Title: 'You've got to Walk Right Through that Fire'
Author: but_can_i_be_trusted
Fandom: Friends
Characters: Phoebe Buffay
Rating: PG
Warnings: Brief mention of canon seminudity; some disturbing concepts
Notes: Crossposted to 1character

Artist: Laura Branigan
Album: Flashdance OST
Song: 'Imagination'

Summary: Phoebe likes to think that she's the total package: Looks and brains, even if she's more street-smart than book-smart.

You've got to Walk Right Through that Fire

( Today we were not the first responders to an incident. )

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/more-vague-more-useful

I think that many synthetic organic chemists will be able to relate to the approach described in this paper, on software-aided route design. Its authors are trying to make such software take a viewpoint from higher over the synthesis, rather than working out every reaction. As noted in this commentary, for larger molecules that can leave you with a forest of rather-similar routes that differ in choice of protecting groups, relative oxidation states, order of reactions and other details that (in many cases) can well be adjusted when work is underway.

Instead, the idea is to generalize more about functional groups and bond disconnections. What you get is a route that’s based somewhat more on abstractions, but ones that a synthetic chemist can recognize and work with: “OK, there’s going to need to be an aminomethylene group coming off here; we’ll assume that’s going to be derived from some sort of carbonyl - could be an amide formation followed by reduction, or a reductive amination off an aldehyde, whatever.” That sort of thing, as you can see at right. It’s more of a strategic approach than a tactics-based approach. This way the different routes that might be generated really do have a greater chance of being different from each other, rather than being lists of variations on a theme. Looking at the paper, you can tell that it took a lot of human-intensive curation to generate the general pathways, but I think it’s worth the effort.

This is a lot closer to how most experienced chemists think, and the software hands off its suggestions in a form that a chemist is ready to evaluate and work with. Honestly, that’s what many of us do with a machine-generated route anyway - “It says here I need a methyl ester, but there are alternatives that I need to keep in mind”. The approach even avoids (a bit) the trap of having to depend on the huge shaggy mass of reported reactions, some of which may be real and some of which may not. “We’ll assume that there is a way to get this metal-catalyzed coupling step to work” is probably a lot closer to the truth than “Here, trust these exact conditions from this paper over here”. I mean, you might want to start with those, sure, but with only limited expectations that they will do the job for you. I well remember my first boss in my first job in this business sighing as yet another paper or patent reaction didn’t work as advertised, and saying “Lie, all lies”.

There’s still a huge amount of work to do to make computer-based retrosynthesis realize its promise; the problems mentioned in this post haven’t gone away. In the end, I think we’re still going to have to recapitulate much of the literature under more controlled conditions (and, I would recommend, with more attention to reaction scope than the original papers may have provided!) It will be an interesting problem to figure out where to direct such efforts for maximum impact, i.e., which parts of the chemistry literature need the most shoring up for the biggest real-world effect? Better knowledge of the rules behind metal-catalyzed couplings are an obvious place to start (there are rules, right?), but nominations for other candidates are welcome below. . .

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/more-vague-more-useful

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PWHL Detroit is confirmed. PWHL Vegas has gone from well sourced rumors to leaked. PWHL Hamilton is teetering on the edge between rumored and leaked. All the sourcing being accurate so far means that San Jose being the 12th and final team is very likely.

One reason this is interesting is that it points to a division/conference system and reduced travel being what's guiding this expansion. Well, that and which arena controllers will play ball. Most arenas are paid for and technically owned by the city, but a lot of control/profit goes to team ownership. (Here in Portland we have the Gold Standard of bad deals where if you buy a soda at a rock concert at Moda, profit even from that goes to the Blazers ownership. The Blazers! The only thing surprising about the Blazer's coach recently getting arrested is that I thought they all had infinite legal protection! I didn't think we could arrest any of them!) Edmonton, Dallas, and probably Denver and a few other cities, fell through because the main team's ownership can rent space to the PWHL but can't own the teams outright at this time. (Ten bucks says that both the Red Wings and the Kraken ownership have rights of first refusal on the PWHL teams they share space with)

Arenas paid for by tax payers can't be used for optimal returns for the cities because billionaires can only make some money out of the deals, not all of the money. And people are mad at the PWHL about it, saying they need to change their ownership model, rather than than being mad at the bad deals their city approved. (Again, I live in the city with the worst arena deals, a Live Nation venue being built against the clear wishes of the citizens, but I am angry at the right people... and also if the current Moda remodel funding bill gets cut to necessary HVAC and structural work only I will take a victory lap because I *have* been engaging people one on one to explain how fucked the deal is and comparing it to the actually decent deal Seattle has for CPA)

Anyway, not to defend a guy who is so rich that he committed to funding the PWHL for ten years whether or not it made any money because the entire cost of the league, salaries to travel to space rental, is a rounding error in his bank account, but changing the ownership model at this point would be bad for the league.

Also, at a point it looked like a done deal that we were going to let the Blazers take $600mill from Portland's climate fund to remodel Moda to increase the amount of box seats and high end experiences, reducing overall capacity. We were poised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into them reducing the amount of seats and making tickets less financially accessible to Portlanders. Fortunately, enough people have screamed about it that it's looking less certain. Now the Blazers are threatening to leave Portland. And I'm like... promise? Pretty please? I will help you pack! I never want to hear/see the words RIP CITY again as long as I fucking live. (The NBA is currently also expanding, Seattle is making a new team... so... move to where? Fuckers ain't got nowhere but here and they need to start acting like it.)

tldr: One reason the PWHL is hype is that they create additional revenue and economic activity for existing city investments. With the ten-year funding commitment it's a negligible risk - very solid reward proposition, if the people who control city assets are willing to play nice

The Other Shore, Rebecca Campbell, 2025 collection. Is this something I'm supposed to be reading for the Hugos? No. Is it an ebook I've been in the queue for for months that has now inconveniently come available right at Packet Time? Also no. However, it is a paperback I've had checked out for Way Too Long, so, finally finishing it is something, at least.

Ten stories here, eight previous published, of which I am sure I had read two and it's possible I read a third. Definitely recommended if you like her work.

"The High Lonesome Frontier" - Tor.com, 2016. (This is the one I might have read.) A song, the folk process, and how even in the information age something like a song is both transient and specific to time and performance and people. (Campbell is very good at specificity, concreteness of detail.)

"A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World" - This one is a mix of "men taking academic credit for women's ideas in the background" and "what if the revival of ancient ritual magic worked" - it's set in 1976 and if someone had told me that Le Guin wrote it in 1976 I would have believed it. (Well maybe the 80s for Le Guin specifically.)

"Lares Familiares 1981" - Liminal Stories, 2017. I liked this one - a logging family and a fae.

"On Highway 18" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2017. Also good - about friends growing apart, and urban legends, and the difficulty of knowing what actually happened, what kind of predator or pattern got someone.

"The Other Shore" - Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirits of Place, 2016. I liked this one a lot. An archaeological dig that starts turning up wildly mixed-up artifacts.

"Thank You for Your Patience" - Reckoning Magazine, 2020. I recommended this in my 2020 short science fiction reading and considered nominating it in 2021 but did not; I had her novelette "An Important Failure" on my novelette nominees and might have wanted to diversify authors a little, or might have just decided I liked other stories better. Anyways, a great story about the inhumanity of call centers and worker exploitation in general.

"The Bletted Woman" - The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2021. I thought I had recently read a review of a book along a similar line - maybe added it to my to-read list? But I can't find it now. Anyways, a woman with terminal illness decides to join an experiment attempting to make translators between the natural world and the human world. A good zombie story.

"Such Thoughts are Unproductive" - Clarkesworld, 2019. I did nominate this in 2020; it's the story that made me a Campbell fan in the first place. The total-surveillance, totalitarian state. Only more chilling now that we're so much further into the AI era.

"Wider than the Sky, Deeper than the Sea" - Another story about trying to bridge human and nature, this time as performance art. Campbell has such profound grief for what's being lost to the climate collapse, the Pacific Northwest ecosystems specifically because that's where she is (and that's where many of these stories are set). I really appreciate her as a voice for that. Interesting stuff about sacrifice and suffering for art and whether that's a good choice.

"Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita" - Shimmer Magazine, 2018. This one didn't really work for me.

One of the tricky but rewarding things about tracking is gait analysis. This is the skill of determining how an animal was moving based on tracks left behind. It can be tricky, in part because most of the animals we’re looking at move on four feet, and humans only move on two (most of the time, anyway). This makes it challenging to map out that movement using our own bodies. Though it can be fun to try, assuming you’re flexible enough.

Every species has a baseline gait, the way members of that species move when they’re relaxed and not in a rush. For humans it’s a walk; if we’re running, there’s usually some urgency afoot, pun not intended. Think about every dog you’ve ever seen, especially if they aren’t leashed. They might be dashing around and chasing things, but if they’re just kind of checking things out, the baseline gait is a trot. This also holds for coyotes and wolves, as well as African wild dogs and jackals.

One of my favorite tracks to find is American porcupine, which I’ve only seen at the Oregon Dunes and at Ancient Lakes in eastern Washington. The baseline porcupine gait is a direct register walk, which means that the animal’s hind feet step exactly where their front feet did. Each track you see on the ground is actually two tracks, one on top of the other. There’s also the indirect register walk, where the overlap is not complete. Like this:



This gait, combined with porcupines’ short legs—I’m not sure they’re even capable of running—caused me to designate their baseline gait as a trundle. This is highly unofficial, but it was amusing enough to me and the others at the Oregon Dunes tracking course that by the end of the class, we were all referring to porcupine movement this way.

Trundling really means to move by rolling, or to move an object by rolling it—this can be a wagon, a ball, or a wheel of cheese. But it can also mean moving heavily or clumsily. Porcupines aren’t clumsy, exactly, but with their short legs and unhurried movement, they don’t inspire descriptions of grace the way a deer or large cat does:



Thus, the trundle. It really gives a porcupine vibe, don’t you think?

RYAN GOSLING AS DR. RYLAND GRACE IN PROJECT HAIL MARY

1,514 CAPS, PART 1 (568), PART 2 (482), AND PART 3 (464)

This movie is VERY important to me. I'm so glad it's out!

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Random Community of the day!

fandom10in30

This seems like it would be fun for people who are into making icons! They run monthly challenges in which people try to make 10 fandom related to the month's theme. Looks like the current round is "Summer Fruits." Comm members can also vote on their favorite icons of the month. I saw some really pretty ones on my scroll through.