These are active communities in Dreamwidth from Winter 2025-2026. They include things I've posted, but only the active ones; the thematic posts also list dormant communities of interest. This list includes some communities that I've found and saved but haven't made it into thematic posts yet. This post covers A-I.

See my Follow Friday Master Post for more topics.

Highly active with multiple posts per day, daily posts, or too many to count easily
Active with (one, multiple, many) posts in (current or recent month)
Somewhat active (latest post within current year, not in last month or few)
Low traffic (latest post in previous year)
Dormant (latest post before previous year, but could be revived because membership is open and posting is open to all members or anyone)
Dead (not listed because there are no recent posts, plus membership and/or posting are moderated)
Note that some communities are only active during a limited time, or only have gather posts on a certain schedule.

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1. It sprinkled a little this morning but otherwise did not rain. Very windy, though, and cold! My clothes were not made for the piercing wind. Also even though there’s been rain, I’m in air conditioned buildings too much and feeling really dried out. Definitely will be glad to get home tomorrow.

2. I don’t like having to eat out for every meal, but I’ve been able to try a lot of new places. I’ve been trying to stick to places we don’t have at home (with the exception of Shake Shack yesterday). This morning I went to Philz Coffee for breakfast and got a breakfast burrito (decent) and an amazing cashew latte. Lunch was at a pizza place called Arthur Mac’s, which had good pizza and super delicious sweet potato tater tots. For dinner I went back to the same food hall as yesterday and at at Super Duper Burgers, where I had a burger with a fried egg on top (tasty but messy), jalapeño cheese fries, and a strawberry chocolate shake.

3. I have trouble sleeping a lot of the time so I’m always worried about sleeping somewhere other than my own bed, but I slept all right last night. I’m exhausted again today so hopefully won’t have much trouble again.

I took advantage of the day and took in a small William Eggleston exhibition. I started reading Clockers on the way there and a book that commanding of my attention put me in the right frame of mind to take in the colors. And the colors were why it was there - it's called The Last Dyes because these prints, the ones I saw today, were made with the world's last materials for this kind of printmaking. Kodak decided to stop making the necessary materials for the process some decades ago. I don't know if it was for cost, environmental concerns, lack of a market, another reason, or a mix of several. What I can say is that all the critics were right: knowing that going in gave it an autumnal feeling. Something fading out.

They were also right that it's astonishing to see the colors up close. More than once I got as close as I could to take in the depth of blue or red or green, thinking that it was like seeing paint made from crushed-up gemstones. The intensity of color, the intentions of the lines and shapes. I'm happy to watch his fascinations with what makes America tick, and I was very happy to stop and look close and then step back and look far and take in all the different parts and pieces in the compositions. More than once I looked at something off in the distance and then farther in the distance and saw how it was a reflection of something in the foreground. Walls and fences at a parking lot. The swirl of a sign matching the clouds behind it. The flowers, the fence, the truck, the houses peeking out.

What really struck me was how the outdoor photographs had such good distance to them. There wasn't a horizon but there was clarity to a long ways away, and more than once I'd think that this was human influence as far as the eye could see. The tilled fields. The cars off in the far distance. The car right up in front of you that you couldn't look away from even if you wanted to see the stream just beyond it. Forcing you to pay attention to what's really there.

I seem to be Canadian now, which is very exciting. (My paternal grandfather was born in Ontario.) I need to pull together a relatively short stack of documents to prove it (3 birth certificates, 2 marriage certificates, 2 name change records), and fingers crossed Canada (home and native laaaaaand) will welcome me home.

It is supposed to snow AGAIN this weekend. I keep reminding myself that this is how winter is supposed to be.

My to-do list has three MUST DOs on it:

• write up notes for therapist before Monday session
• read & comment on manuscript for crit group Tuesday
• pollinator garden email

If you see me doing anything else except, like, keeping body and soul together for the next few days (if it snows more than half an inch, I'll have to take care of my neighbors, and a friend is coming over with her kid to encourage me to clean and have dinner, but other than that — !), yell at me until I go back to my aforementioned tasks.

I spent this week in slide deck hell and the week before in spreadsheet hell. There is still more slide deck hell to come, but I think I can pace it out a little more now. But spreadsheet hell will not end until May, thanks to HHS (pdf link). I like accessibility work, but I also like digital paleography and information architecture and wireframing and right now accessibility is expanding to fill all the available time and then some. Fortunately, one of the slide decks from hell actually requires me to work on a writing project, so I can cling to some vestige of being a creative person who doesn't live in slide deck or speadsheet hell. Maybe someday I will actually be one! Maybe someday I can contribute to CanLit!

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Thursday, February 19, to midnight on Friday, February 20 (8pm Eastern Time).



Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72824&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-brings-the-tarim-mummies-back-to-life-part-2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72824

[VHM:  N.B.:  I had nothing to do with this.  It's all between Gemini and Gemini, with J. P. Mallory acting as the amanuensis.  He can also evoke the woman from Xiaohe or Cherchen Man (Ur David) via Gemini or one of the other platforms if you'd like to hear "Mair" conversing with them.]

==========

---

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72824&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-brings-the-tarim-mummies-back-to-life-part-2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72824

⌈ Secret Post #6985 ⌋

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


01.



( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 06 secrets from Secret Submission Post #997.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

fic_rush is open! For the next 72 hours, please join us anytime at fic_rush_48 and comment on the latest hourly post about your projects, progress, lack of progress, research, "research"... It's been a pretty quiet place lately but we're always happy to see new people!

Good timezone, Purimgifters! Believe it or not, there are only four days left until the deadline on February 23 (anywhere in the world)!

If you haven't posted all of your fics and art yet, now's a great time to check out our Posting Guide here or our Embed Guide here. And if you're not quite ready for that yet, some options...

Extension. If you’re sure you can complete your assignment, you just need a little more time, this option is for you. To request an extension, please email purim_gifts@yahoo.com.

The backup protocol. This option is for people who’re not sure whether they can complete their assignment, but who really really want to. A backup is a pinch hitter assigned ahead of time. If you complete your assignment, that’s great! If you don’t complete your assignment, you can call it off at the last minute - while your pinch hitter had had a much longer time to prepare. To request a backup, please email purim_gifts@yahoo.com.

Partial default. This option is for people who already know they can’t complete their assignment, but who want to post what they can complete. To request a partial default, please email purim_gifts@yahoo.com.

Full default. If you’re absolutely sure you can’t complete your assignment, this option is for you. You can activate it by emailing purim_gifts@yahoo.com, or by hitting the “Default” button at the AO3. Either way, you won’t be penalized for it; life happens, and we get that.

And if you’re not sure which of those options is right for you, please email purim_gifts@yahoo.com ASAP! We're happy to help, and the sooner we know what's going on, the more options we have. We're also here for tech support, if you need a little help getting things posted and embedded!

Wuthering Heights (2026). Young woman is torn between her love for the best friend she grew up with and her wealthy new-money neighbor.

I enjoyed this a lot. Emerald Fennell's visual spectacle is always on point, and in particular the costumes and sets are fantastic. There are a bunch of amazing set pieces, and the artificiality of Linton's mansion and the wardrobe he gives Cathy vs the organic squalor of her home and childhood were really effective IMO in contrasting several different binaries at once. I loved every single ridiculous dress. I was also really into Cathy and Heathcliff's starcrossed love. Heathcliff is so gone on her, and even when he's trying to be manipulative, he mostly comes across as desperate. (When he approaches Linton's ward Isabela in hopes of making Cathy jealous, he is the most gentlemanly ravisher you have ever met.) And Cathy is clearly equally gone on him, even if she gets in her own way sometimes.

I think the script could have used some work. For one thing, several secondary characters' motivations were left as exercises to the viewer (Cathy's father and especially her companion Nelly); like yes, I can form theories about why they did what they did, but maybe a little less subtlety here is in order. Also, just to make Cathy and Heathcliff feel a bit more complex as characters and/or to just make their relationship more toxic or at least complicated. Honestly, my main criticism here is that Fennell, against all expectations and especially considering her work on Saltburn, doesn't go nearly as weird and batshit as the story could support. The visuals yes, the character dynamics no.

Overall, though, a good time. I ship it and immediately went looking for fic. (There were 15 fics in the tag, half from before the movie even came out, and half the new ones were crossovers. RIP.)

--

The Tunnel (2011). An Australian mockumentary about a news crew that goes into abandoned subway tunnels underneath Sydney looking for a story.

I'm always interested in mockumentary horror, as opposed to your standard found footage, so I was excited to check this out. Unfortunately, the longer I sit with it, the less I like it. First of all, the whole point of the mockumentary aspect is to add depth, context, and contrast to the found footage, but IMO the interview clips here were almost extraneous. There were one or two nice moments, like when they have the anchor listen for the first time to what another crew member in the tunnels had heard through his head phones, but there was very little else that we couldn't have gotten from the found footage itself. The news investigation framing all felt a little off as well; the supposed pretext for going into the tunnels feels a little overheated. "Politicians fail to give updates on big proposal" does not feel like the red flag for a huge scandal, and various other aspects that were treated as potentially newsworthy just weren't, IMO. Also, surely the most terrifying part of underground horror is the threat of getting lost? I was astounded by how little a concern this was in the movie, even when they were running around without any care whatsoever for where they were.

What really killed this for me, though, was the gender politics. As with so many found footage type movies, there's one female character, the news anchor, and everyone else is male. (Why is this????) There are repeated assertions from the guys both in the found footage and the interview segments that the anchor doesn't know what she's doing, doesn't deserve her position, and probably is fucking the station director. And what do you know, they're right, several people die because of her ambition and poor judgment, not to mention how she goes into crying hysterics several times. In 2011!! Just brutal.

There's a behind the scenes doc about the movie that I managed to watch five minutes of, and before I turned it off, it was entirely about what genius fundraisers the creators were, and how they "disrupted" the Australian film funding model by "inventing NFTs before they were big." (They raised funds by ~selling frames of the movie to donors.) So... yeah.

The movie isn't entirely without merit; there's some great found footage moments. If you just want to watch people stumble around underground being chased by unknown monsters, you could do worse. But a very qualified rec.

--

Prince of Darkness (1987). Per Shudder, this John Carpenter movie "follows a group of quantum physics students in Los Angeles who are asked to assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient cylinder of liquid discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan."

NGL, I watched this because I really really wanted to see a movie about the liquid embodiment of Satan, and now I have, I guess. This was just bad. There are some memorable moments; I loved the dripping fluid floating upwards and that the canister (OF FLUID) was locked to "only open from the inside." The dream transmissions for the future were honestly rad. The bugs and creepy-crawlies everwhere were really effective sometimes. There's also a fun sense of claustrophobia as the night goes on and things close in around the characters. Also, frankly, the devil and Jesus as extraterrestials who came to take over and warn Earth, respectively, was neat! I wish the movie had gone harder on that!

OTOH, the eventual romance began with the guy being such a creeper that I was sure he was being set up as a villain, and then he's a big old sexist to her right before he asks her out, and I hated that. The demon instapregnancy was so predictable and tedious. One of the guys repeatedly has homophobic comments made to and by him, and also he's weirdly racist to one of the girls, and this is all for no apparent reason except as a characterization note. And overall the movie was just slow and lacking in charm. I would love to see this exact premise from someone who was actually good at writing characters.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they were interested in specific elements of the plot or if they're a John Carpenter completionist.

I realise it's only mid month but February has been a MONTH.

( The Oh Noes cut for those who'd rather avoid them- not personal ones cos I'm OK )

7. It has been grey and wet here in London for ever - at least from the start of the year with maybe 2 days of blue skies and sunshine and it's taking a toll.

8. Went to Wales last week and only took one of the two cats. The other hid and so stayed home with a pile of food. Athena - the usually quiet reserved cat - came with me and we had some bonding time without her sister getting in the way. Artemis, the little fiend who stayed home, has been making up for the fact that she was cruelly abandoned - in a warm flat with plenty of food and water and oodles of toys - ever since!

9. Relatedly having spent the week in the cosy, tidy cottage I'm even more determined to subdue and sort out the utter chaos of my living situation in London where I have tried to effectively cram the. Contents of a 3 bed house into what is essentially a two room flat.

10. I've not been able to get to the allotment or do any gardening because WET. Not amused.


The Hell Yes's

1. I spent last week working remotely from the cottage which also included a lot of naps, TV, good food and a ridiculous amount of crocheting. And though it took me 2 days to get the cottage warm - it was Wales and the mountains looked fancy with a good dusting of snow. I beached myself on the couch and barely moved from Monday to Saturday (it was grey, wet and cold there too). Of course coming home on Saturday the weather did change and for a few precious hours there were blue skies and sunshine.

2. I gave myself a pass this week and lived on ready meals while trying to bring some order to 3 work related email inboxes and 2 personal ones. I'm getting there.

3. Work has at least been productive if not enjoyable. But tomorrow I'm going to a Park colleague's community planting day for a couple of hours, next week I'm spending a day handing out free trees and the week after we are having our borough wide seed swap - all of which should be fun things.

4. Crocheting has been super productive - at the beginning of the month I finished a blanket I started the week before Xmas, I've got about half a hexi cardigan finished (even though I have to frog some back), I've almost finished the granny squares for two project bags (just need to stitch them together, line them and make handles), and I'm just over halfway through some Wednesday evening classes to crochet an Easter/Spring wreath. Crochet club every Friday from 1 to 2:30pm is the non-negotiable in my diary. Time to be creative, learn new stuff, have a chat and hang out with 5-7 other fun women.

5. The ex is at the cottage this week which means I get to use his washing machine tomorrow before and after work (2-3 loads of washing) and do some more if needed early Saturday morning.

6. On that note I'm taking myself off to bed with a giant mug of Horlicks and a couple of eps of Starfleet Academy!

Terminal hubris yet again took me out to the nearer supermarket, yes on a garbage day, yes after that 10 cm dump. Possibly the Whatever that flattened the sidewalk by me yesterday also did down the block and the snow/ ice piles were from people cleaning off their cars. But possibly the Whatever couldn't touch the ice because people put salt down before the sleet stopped falling which naturally led to an unmoving ice sheet. A common mistake in these parts. But I needed milk onaccounta indulging in daily hot cocoa, and tomorrow will be 5C ie melt, plus rain, which means even more slop, so out I went. Really must get an all-terrain walker, though no guarantee that would handle slush any better.

This is also the reason why, after going to bed last night, I got up and cancelled tomorrow's physio. If the sidewalks are passable I'll see if the spot is still open but I strongly suspect they won't be. 

However having prudently put one of the Thermacare disposable heating packs on my grumpy back, I was able to clear the rest of my frontage of the ice layer. Wasn't enough to do NND's but at least it's a start. Only because I did this after coming back from the super I was getting light-headed from all the exertion and needed to rest and do deep breathing from time to time.

A come by chance setting on my tablet which I can no longer find allows you to switch up the wallpaper of one's login. I selected landscapes so now, in the brief interlude before inputting my PIN, I have vistas of forests and meadows and deserts and rivers and mountains. My sadness is that they don't tell you where these places are, and that I only get three seconds to view them before the screen goes black again. But they're a nice little pleasure to offset the annoying FUBARs of this new update.

New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater

A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.


This is super exciting because of its double benefit: battery materials and drinking water.  Also awesome, unlike rare minerals used in many batteries, sodium is something Earth has in great abundance. \o/

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: What is your favourite thing to make?


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.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

Today is cloudy and cooler, but still unseasonably warm.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and a male house finch.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I saw a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I refilled the hopper feeder.

I raked off the leaves from the goddess garden. There I found one lavender crocus in bloom along with many more sprouts.

Oddly the honeybees are not visiting the crocuses as usual. Instead they are nosing around the seeds in the hopper feeder. Go figure.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I started raking leaves off the daffodil bed on the east side. So many shoots now!

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I finished raking leaves off the daffodil bed on the west side. Just as I wrapped up that activity, it started drizzling rain. *sigh* I was hoping to gather up leaves later and put them somewhere, possibly behind the log garden.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

My seed starting kit arrived! :D What makes this awesome is that it comes with its own light system. That means it's not restricted to window use; it can go anywhere -- within reach of an outlet if we use a USB wall wart, or wherever else with some sort of battery pack. It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out.

While I was heading to the mailbox to fetch that package, it started raining again. There are puddles in the street. But then the sun came out, so I looked around -- and glimpsed part of a rainbow to the northeast. Naturally I trotted up the road in pursuit of a better view. It was a bright, full rainbow with a partial double on the outside. :D 3q3q3q!!! Definitely one of the better ones I've seen. I got a lot wetter than was strictly necessary, but I so don't care.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- The rain let up.

I did more work around the patio.

I raked up the leaves left from the rain garden and dumped them behind the log garden.

EDIT 2/19/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I raked up the leaves left from the daffodil bed, filling the trolley twice, and dumped them behind the log garden. Then I raked the leaves away from the front of the log garden and dumped them behind. This revealed a lot of shoots, mostly grape hyacinths with some crocuses mixed in.

I heard honking overhead and saw a skein of geese flying north. :D

I am done for the night.

Posted by Greg Ross

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2026/02/19/the-beautiful-city/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/?p=72728

Plato’s Republic itself does not begin, as some of the modern writers would have it, with some such sentence as, ‘Human civilization, as seen through its successive stages of development, is a dynamic movement from heterogeneity to homogeneity,’ or some other equally incomprehensible rot. It begins rather with the genial sentence: ‘I went down yesterday to the Piraeus, with Glauco, the son of Aristo, to pay my devotion to the goddess; and desirous, at the same time, to observe in what manner they would celebrate the festival, as they were now to do it for the first time.’

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2026/02/19/the-beautiful-city/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/?p=72728

It was SUPER cold and windy out that day and our 110-yr-old stone house leaks like a sieve in the main room, so Purrcy spent Caturday curled up adorably on our bed. *So* friendly.



Purrcy and I were just waking up from a nap, and he was looking *exactly* like a loving kitty whose tummy was only a little bit of a trap. But totally worth it, I swear.

---

Two weeks of books, because last week got away from me.

#25 The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie. Re-read. Because I needed to read something I'd read before where every sentence is *good*.

#26 Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer.
What an excellent way to write history! It's very much based on Palmer's teaching, on what she's learned about what works to reach people, on coming at questions from a variety of directions and styles to get students/readers to get both a feeling for the past, and a feeling for how our understanding of the past has changed.

For instance, one of the stylistic techniques Palmer uses is giving various people a Homeric-type epithet, so that it's easier to remember them and keep them sorted: Sixtus IV (Battle Pope), Innocent VIII (King Log), Julius II (Battle Pope II!); French philosopher Denis Diderot, with whom Palmer feels a particular mental connection across the centuries, is always "dear Diderot", and so on. Honestly, I really wish a historian of China would do this, it would make keeping the names straight SO much easier.

So it's a truly excellent approach to history in general and the Renaissance in particular, but I had to knock my five-star rating down to 4, because the last part of the book includes Palmer including as one of her refrains something that's a pretty obvious mistake, and *someone* should have spotted it & taken it out.

The mistake is stating that cantaloupe is a New World food, like tomatoes, and that discovering these fruits which didn't conform to the established hierarchy of which fruits are good/valuable/noble helped undermine the idea of a great chain of being, next stop! French Revolution. No. Cantaloupe is *not* a New World introduction, and people were suspicious of it & remained so for a long time because they thought it was "too cold and watery" or "distorted the humors" ... but was probably related to the fact that today cantaloupe is the item in the produce department most likely to be contaminated with Salmonella, wash it when you get it home.

It's really a pity that an obvious, checkable mistake was left in & repeated, because it detracts so much from the value of the whole book (at least for food historians). Maybe it can be fixed for a later edition. I've mentioned it to Palmer, we'll see if she ever speaks to me again ...

#27 Pretenders to the Throne of God, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The finale of the Tyrant Philosophers series, sticking the landing while leaving the world completely open. Ties up threads from all 3 previous novels, though it can be confusing especially since most characters we've seen before aren't traveling under their previous names.

As I think about it, the most curious thing about the series is that we really don't know much about the Pal's *philosophy*, what kind of Right Think they're trying to impose. Is Palaseen anti-theism where their martial success comes from, because they decant every magical or religious item they get their hands on for its power? Which of course means their whole culture is powered by a non-renewable resource their success is rapidly running them out of, whoops, which I thought was going to be more of a plot point in the series overall.

One of the constant pluses of this series is how it's focused on people who aren't rulers or bosses or the ones who get books written about them afterwards. It's the small people, the ones who don't run things (or not for long), the stretcher-bearers and soup-stirrers. Yasnic/Jack is a small man with a small god, yet he's the vector of great changes. It's not really that he's small-*minded*, except in the way he thinks only about the people (or gods) in front of him, not the "big picture" other people keep yapping about. He's a Holy Fool, but he really is holy (even when he claims he isn't).

#27 Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
Big Idea SF, with contrast between humans living in a virtual worlds and those in physical reality, and machine intelligences in both, and the quantum nature of information, but the prose just ... sits there. I'm not invested enough to diagnose why the sentences seem so flat to me, but they are. Very hard for me to get through because of it.

Then over this past weekend I binged the Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell, which I'd somehow missed when it was new:

#28 Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Quite amusing, comedy-of-manners murder mystery, told for the most part in *letters!* by gad, written in that joyous era of free-floating bisexuality so aptly associated with the original Edward Gorey cover, before the Plague Years arrived. The murder plot was implausible, but the book is *fun*.

#29 The Shortest Way to Hades
Amusing enough, but I didn't LOL as I did at some of the other Hilary Tamars. Possibly because I had too much sympathy for the first victim, and I felt as though no-one else did. I think there's a British class thing going on there.

#30 The Sirens Sang of Murder
I startled my family by the volume of my LOLs. There's actually serious stuff mixed in there, along with the froth of a comedy of manners and tax law. Peak Hilary Tamar!

#31 The Sibyl in Her Grave
Yeah, this one didn't work for me. Too much of the action and the plot hinges on Maurice, an experienced CofE vicar, not having the experience or resources to deal with a mentally disturbed parishioner. But mentally disturbed parishioners who fixate on the vicar (priest, iman, rabbi) are par for the course, they happen literally all the time. Maurice is a social worker, he should be able to actually *help* Daphne, and he should have people around him to be an effective buffer against her.

Or does this reflect English society of the 90s? That Daphne is supposed to read as merely one of those "odd, unstoppable people"? Because to me she *clearly* reads as someone who's been horribly abused all her life and needs some real, *serious* therapy to become a functioning member of society.

#32 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen.
This re-read was prompted by reading about the reception history of Jane Austen, and how at the time and for much of the 19th C readers found Austen's heroines not "feeling" enough: they really wanted heroines who were more like Marianne, less like Elinor.

Although Elinor is in many ways the most admirable of Austen's heroines, she's also the one who changes least, I think, and that makes her fundamentally the least interesting. To *grab* as a character we'd have to see Elinor change and struggle more--which is why the Emma Thompson movie is the extremely rare example of an Austen adaptation that's *better* than the book. There, I said it.

We've had a very persistent winter here this year and this has happily meant that I've had lots of visitors at my bird feeders. Today I had the opportunity to photograph this adorable little Long-Tailed Tit (Aegithalos caudatus caudatus) while it was hunting for seeds on the bike-shed roof just outside my window.

Click to enlarge:


( one more photo... )