[embodiment] some post-surgical notes
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Apparently I'm not writing up a detailed version of this, so in brief...
i might get a manned moon flyby for my birthday!
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Then on the Saturday we went to Thinktank, the science museum, to see the Space Vault exhibition and also TWO shows in the planetarium because we are suckers for a planetarium. Unlike the Leicester Space Centre we did not get to vote on any trivia questions, but we did learn about summer stars and also the Artemis project. The exhibition itself was full of space-and-astronaut objects that mostly weren't actually very exciting (a piece of broken insulation! a manual! some gloves!) but they did a good job of contextualising the artefacts and adding audio and visual components (although the audio was frankly not loud enough to actually listen to, given the volume in the rest of the floor) and I enjoyed myself. Although, as with last time I went to Thinktank, it was obscenely hot and humid, so I started dragging fairly quickly; possibly I am cursed.
Otherwise I have mostly been preparing for GRADUATIONS, mostly the part where I have to be on campus every day. I made what eventually turned out to be twelve portions of pasta bake, now largely filling my freezer, to be eaten for lunches etc, and attempted to mentally adjust to the prospect. Today was the first day, and so far I have done one ceremony (the first of the season!); I'm signed up for a second already, so we'll see how it goes...
Costume Bracket: Round 4, Post 5
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
( Outfits below the Cut )
Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!
Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!
Costume Bracket Masterlist
Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.
Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

Ellie is a Lipan Apache teenager in a world where magic, vampires, ghosts, and so forth are known to be real. She’s inherited the family gift for raising ghosts, though she only raises animals; human ghosts always come back wrong, and she’s happy with the companionship of her beloved ghost dog Kirby, not to mention her pet ghost trilobite. But when her cousin, who supposedly died in a car crash, returns in a dream to tell her he was murdered, she finds that knowing who killed him isn’t as helpful as one might imagine…
Ellie’s cousin Trevor told her the name of his killer, Abe Allerton from Willowbee, but he didn’t know why or how he was killed. Ellie enlists her best friend, Jay, a cheerleader with just enough fairy blood to give him pointy ears and the ability to make small lights. More importantly, he’s good at research. They learn that Willowbee is in Texas, near the town where Trevor lived with his wife, Lenore, and their baby. Jay brings in help: his older sister’s fiancé, Al, who’s a vampire.
All of them, plus Ellie’s parents and a ghost mammoth belonging to her grandmother, play a part in the effort to solve the mystery of Trevor’s death and bring his murderer to justice. And so, in a sense, will a major character who’s long dead (and not a ghost) but who’s a big presence in Ellie’s life: Six-Grand, her great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, the last person to have a gift as powerful as Ellie’s… and who vanished forever into the underworld.
I enjoyed this quite a bit. I mean, come on. GHOST TRILOBITE. GHOST MAMMOTH. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s heartfelt, it has lovely chapter heading illustrations, and it’s got some gorgeous imagery - I particularly loved a scene where the world transforms into an oceanic underworld, and Ellie sees a pod of whales swimming in the sky of a suburban neighborhood.
It's marketed as young adult and Ellie is seventeen, but the book feels younger (and so does Ellie.) I'd have no qualms handing it to an advanced nine-year-old reader, but it also appeals to adult me who misses the time when "urban fantasy" meant "our world, but with ghosts, elves, and so forth."
I seem to have a massive batch of reviews of interest hanging about
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The following are all in the area of environmental history: enjoy!
Rebecca Beausaert. Pursuing Play: Women's Leisure in Small-Town Ontario, 1870-1914.
Beausaert’s discussion of the growing popularity of outdoor recreation in the early twentieth century, as opposed to earlier forms of indoor leisure such as book clubs and church gatherings, also highlights the role of women in the rise of environmental activism in towns like Elora. In these communities, grassroots efforts to maintain the local environment and cater to the influx of ecotourism travelers flourished, further illustrating the agency of women in shaping both their social and environmental landscapes.
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McNally’s emphasis on the role of race in Muir’s thinking, and, therefore, on his vision of wilderness preservation, helps readers more clearly see Muir not as wilderness prophet but as a man of his time coming to terms with the consequences of American expansion.
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The book begins with Rio in the nineteenth century and shows that Cariocas regularly went to bathe in the ocean. The work incorporates an assortment of sources to give a vivid picture of this process. For instance, it was customary for bathers to go before dawn—as early as 3 a.m.—since many in Rio went to bed early in the evening, but also due to colorism within Brazilian society. The dominant white society enjoyed swimming in the ocean but also prized fairer complexions and thus aimed to avoid the sun. Yet, few amenities existed for sea-bathers. The city dumped its sewage and trash into the ocean and provided few lifeguards, which resulted in frequent drownings.
In chapter 2, a personal favorite, Barickman discusses the evolution of sea bathing from a therapeutic practice (thalassotherapy) in the nineteenth century to a leisure activity that provided a space for socialization across gender lines by the 1920s. Locals went to the beach to escape the heat of the summer, rowing emerged as the most popular sport in the region, and, as in other parts of the world such as the United States and the Southern Cone, beach-going became a popular way to make or meet friends. In short, the beach became a public space at all hours of the day, not just before dawn. Moreover, the beach captured the “moral ambiguities” of nineteenth-century norms (51-63). Men and women of all races and classes could be present in public spaces partially nude, to observe others and to be observed, in ways that society did not permit beyond the beach, but this continually frustrated moral reformers.
Chapter 3 centers on the work of Rio’s civic leaders to “civilize” the city in hopes of altering public perception of the city as a “tropical pesthole” (p. 69).
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David Matless. England’s Green: Nature and Culture Since the 1960s:
The range of sources and topics is impressive, but at times the evidence is noted so briefly and the prose proceeds so quickly that breadth is privileged over depth. For example, the deeper connections between England and global ideas of green (as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund), the influence of colonial experience on conservation events of the 1970s, and the tensions between the various governmental nature management organizations would all have benefited from a little more attention. Yet, even if the reader sometimes wishes for a slower pace to get their thoughts in order, Matless offers enough analysis to build the examples up into a clear and insightful picture. The reader is left with a general appreciation of the central environmental debates of the period and good understanding of how they evolved over time. For scholars, it is a multidimensional study that adds something new and long awaited to British environmental and cultural history. For others, it is a fascinating book filled with interesting stories, cultural context, and many moments of nostalgia.
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Michael Lobel. Van Gogh and the End of Nature.:
Lobel makes a systematic case for a new way of seeing Van Gogh’s paintings. Carefully introducing readers to a host of environmental conditions that shaped Van Gogh’s lived experience and appear repeatedly in his paintings—factories, railways, mining operations, gaslight, polluted waterways, arsenic, among others—Lobel compellingly invites us to see Van Gogh as an artist consistently grappling with the changing ecological world around him. Color and composition, as two of Van Gogh’s most heralded painterly qualities, appear now through an entirely different perception influenced by a clear environmental consciousness.
***
Ursula Kluwick. Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water:
The author sets out to consider how Victorians understood water, seen through nineteenth-century fictional and nonfictional writings about the River Thames. In chapter 2 she points out the existence of writing that emphasizes how polluted the Thames was as well as writing that never mentions the pollution, and wonders at their coexistence. The conclusion that the writings don’t relate to any real state of the river is not particularly surprising but points to the author’s overall intent, summarized in the book’s title.
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Rauch views these caricatural depictions—including portrayals of sloths as docile and naive creatures, as seen in the animated film Ice Age (2002)—as potentially detrimental to the species’ well-being. Through his analysis, the author critiques how sloths have been appropriated to fulfill human (emotional, cultural, and economic) needs and how this process misrepresents sloths, leading to harmful stereotypes that diminish their intrinsic value and undermine their agency.
Finished Refunct over the weekend and genuinely cannot rec too highly
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/
For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.
Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).
N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.
It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.
It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).
Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.
Will absolutely be playing it again.
(no subject)
Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
We sail the ocean blue,
And our saucy ship's a beauty;
We are sober men and true,
And attentive to our duty.
-- only then towards the end of that song, shifted to a classical music orchestral piece that I had the damnedest time placing but that was something I knew I a) had heard within the past year, at one of the concerts I went to, probably late 2024, b) had not heard within the last month, c) had an annoying tendency as an earworm to loop (not just stick as earworms do, but literally loop back on itself), and d) had been in my head before, months ago.
It felt very much like either Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, and I was confident it was a symphony, so I went to imslp and started browsing the sheet musics. It was none of the Tchaikovsky ones, so I tried Beethoven, though I was fairly sure it wasn't the 9th. I also googled for "classical music that sounds like Indiana Jones" because some of the bit in my head reminds me of IJ music, only that confused things because the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky'a 6th contains a (different) Indiana-Jones section. Obviously the symphonies preceded Indiana Jones, just as the 4th movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony preceded Jaws, but still. It had to have been some sort of inspiration.
Anyway I eventually found it: the beginning of the 4th movement of the 5th symphony (https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3xUNCQ4TbN4&si=qqSWtKaUa7qsXghO) ... not the first measures, but the stretch 0:30 to 1:00 with the cascading runs down and the horns and then the bit I fondly consider the Indiana Jones section. (I think it's the modulations?)
So then I had to listen to the whole symphony, and I had almost forgotten just how fucking amazing it is. The first four notes get overused in popular culture to the point of being almost cheesy, but other than that it's just utter perfection. And listening to it makes me incredibly happy omg.
(It's one of my favorite symphonies -- my all-time favorites are Beethoven's 5th, Sibelius' 2nd, and Tchaikovsky's 4th (clearly I need a first and third to round it out) -- and it's one that, if I'm alone, I'm moving to, not just "conducting" with hands but full body emphasis. Obviously I behave at concerts, so I don't distract others, but. It's just. Good. So good.
(If you don't know it besides the duh-duh-duh-DUHHHH motif that starts the piece, go listen.)
...of course, fair warning, it does sometimes get bits stuck in your head...
[note to self -- this entry took exactly an hour to write]
Daily Happiness
Monday, July 7th, 2025 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
2. I'm really enjoying Mario Kart World. And just ten more days until the new Donkey Kong game, which looks like it will be amazing!
3. Molly is demonstrating the proper way to help at the computer.

(no subject)
Monday, July 7th, 2025 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Lately I've been feeling older, as if I didn't age for many years and now suddenly things are going a lot faster, and part of that is apparently existential crises about what preferences are personal choices vs quirks of biology or something else.
Apple, as Promised, Formally Appeals €500 Million DMA Fine in the EU
Monday, July 7th, 2025 11:40 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Here’s the full statement, given by Apple to the media, including Daring Fireball:
“Today we filed our appeal because we believe the European Commission’s decision — and their unprecedented fine — go far beyond what the law requires. As our appeal will show, the EC is mandating how we run our store and forcing business terms which are confusing for developers and bad for users. We implemented this to avoid punitive daily fines and will share the facts with the Court.”
Everyone — including, I believe, at Apple — agrees that the policy changes Apple announced at the end of June are confusing and seemingly incomplete in terms of fee structures. What Apple is saying here in this statement is they needed to launch these policy changes now, before the full fee implications are worked out, to avoid the daily fines they were set to be penalized with for the steering rules.
Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:
Apple also reiterates that the EU has continuously redefined what exactly it needs to do under the DMA. In particular, Apple says the European Commission has expanded the definition of steering. Apple adjusted its guidelines to allow EU developers to link out to external payment methods and use alternative in-app payment methods last year. Now, however, Apple says the EU has redefined steering to include promotions of in-app alternative payment options and in-app webviews, as well as linking to other alternative app marketplaces and the third-party apps distributed through those marketplaces.
Furthermore, Apple says that the EU mandated that the Store Services Fee include multiple tiers. [...] You can view the full breakdown of the two tiers on Apple’s developer website. Apple says that it was the EU who dictated which features should be included in which tier. For example, the EU mandated that Apple move app discovery features to the second tier.
Like I wrote last week, “byzantine compliance with a byzantine law”.
[Sponsor] Drata
Monday, July 7th, 2025 09:38 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.
‘F1’ Is Doing Well at the Box Office, and Is Now Already Apple’s Top-Grossing Theatrical Film
Monday, July 7th, 2025 06:52 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Rebecca Rubin, reporting for Variety:
When it comes to Apple’s biggest films, F1: The Movie has officially moved to pole position.
I will allow this pun.
F1 has generated $293 million at the global box office after 10 days of release, overtaking the entire theatrical runs of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon ($158 million worldwide) and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon ($221 million) to stand as Apple’s highest-grossing movie to date. That’s not a particularly difficult benchmark to break, since Apple has only released five films theatrically and two of them, Fly Me to the Moon ($42 million) and Argylle ($96 million), were outright flops.
Not to mention that Wolfs, last year’s crime caper starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, was supposed to get a theatrical release but didn’t, leading to bad feelings and, later, a cancelled sequel. Wolfs wasn’t bad. I’d say it was decent. Critics seem to agree. But with Clooney and Pitt starring and Watts at the helm, it felt like a movie that should have at least been pretty damn good. And it wasn’t.
So it’s not just that F1: The Movie is doing well at the box office. It’s seemingly a good movie that delivers what it promises.
★ Full-Screen Ad for ‘F1 The Movie’ in Apple’s TV App Linked Directly to the Web, and Nothing Bad Se
Monday, July 7th, 2025 06:26 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
MG Siegler, on Threads last week:
We’re already beyond ridiculous with the full-on ad assault from Apple as everyone is well aware by now. But the wild thing here — in this full screen pop-up in the Apple TV app — is that it’s not in-app but links out to the web to pay?!
At least here in the US, if you just opened the TV app on iOS 18 last week, you were presented with this full-screen ad (replete with all those dumb ®’s, despite Apple’s ads for the same thing in the App Store omitting them).
There were two buttons to choose from: “Not Now” and “Buy Tickets ↗︎”. If you tapped the “Buy Tickets ↗︎” button, boom, you just jumped to the F1 The Movie website in your default browser. Kyle Alden, on Threads:
That’s weird, Apple’s new full screen F1 ad in the TV app links out to the browser to compete the transaction, but for some reason doesn’t include any full screen interstitials warning of the big scary web, nor a confirmation dialog that it would open in the browser? Must be an oversight.
The hypocrisy isn’t that Apple didn’t show a full-screen scare sheet for this link-out to the web. It’s that they require other developers, who are doing it to sell digital content, to show a scare sheet/confirmation.
One of the subtle differences with this particular promotion is that buying movie tickets is not “digital content” — even if they’re just passes in Apple Wallet or saved QR codes in an app like Fandango. You’re purchasing a real-world experience, so it’s not eligible for Apple’s In-App Purchase (IAP) system. This is why when you buy theater tickets in the Fandango app, Fandango charges your credit or debit card directly. Same when you pay for rides in Uber or Lyft. It’s really subtle for something like a movie. Pay for a movie to watch on your TV at home? That’s a digital purchase. Pay for a movie to watch in a theater? Not a digital purchase.
I understand the distinction between digital content (that’s consumed on your Apple device) and real-world goods and experiences (even if you pay for them in apps on your Apple device). But how many iPhone users understand this distinction? Like, if you polled 1,000 U.S. iPhone users who (a) purchase in-game content in games like Candy Crush, and (b) hail rides in Uber or Lyft, what percentage of those iPhone users do you think could give a coherent answer as to why their in-game purchases must use Apple’s IAP system, and why Uber not only doesn’t use IAP to charge for rides, but is not allowed to use IAP for that? I’d bet fewer than 1 percent. (I’d also bet that fewer than 1 percent care, which is why they don’t know.)
Is it inherently confusing to have a button in an app that jumps you out of the app to your default web browser (probably Safari, especially for people who might be confused) to complete a transaction, without a scare sheet or even a confirmation alert? I can see the argument that Apple’s answer is “Yes, it’s potentially confusing for many users”. But I can’t see the argument that the answer is “Yes, it’s potentially confusing for many users, but only if they’re trying to buy in-app content or subscriptions, but not confusing at all if they’re trying to buy, say, movie tickets.”
Polccoyo Mountains
Monday, July 7th, 2025 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
It was beautiful and remote and while there were two or three parties of tourists, it was easy to feel alone in the landscape. B. and I were a bit dubious that it could both retain its character and generate enough income to hold off the allure of mining company big bucks.
( Photos )
The road up to Palccoyo went along multiple switch-backs from tarmac to dirt track, and past alfalfa farmers on the lower slopes (the alfalfa feeds the guinea pigs which are a local speciality - if you are interested they taste a bit like duck) to alpaca farmers on the higher slopes (alpaca is genuinely nice meat, quite lamby but more restrained). On the way back down I tried to photograph alpaca from the taxi resulting in a lot of blurry photos of alpaca of which these are the best.
( Photos from the taxi )
Beginning on clearing up some open tabs, etc
Monday, July 7th, 2025 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Reading this, I'm very much reminded of certain sff stories I read - late 60s/early 70s - that were either directly influenced by this research or via the population panic works that riffed off it: review of Lee Alan Dugatkin. Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity. Does this ping reminiscence in anyone else? (I was reading a lot of v misc anthologies etc in early 70s before I found my real niche tastes).
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What Is a 'Lavender Marriage,' Exactly? Feel that there is a longer and (guess what) Moar Complicated history around using conventional marriage to protect less conventional unions, but maybe it's a start towards interrogating the complexities of 'conventional marriages'.
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Sardonic larffter at this: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'
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Not quite what one anticipates from a clergyman's wife? The undercover vagrant who exposed workhouse life - a bit beyond vicarage/manse teaparties, Mothers' Meetings or running the Sunday School!
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Changes in wedding practice: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Wedding Days:
After the Reformation, Anglican canon law required that marriages took place in the morning, during divine service, in the parish of either the bride or groom – three features which typically elude modern weddings, which usually take place in the afternoon, in a special ceremony, and are far less likely (even if a religious wedding) to take place within a couple’s home parish. The centrality of divine service is the starkest difference, as it ensured that, unlike in modern weddings, marriages were public events at which the whole congregation ought to be present. They might even have occurred alongside other weddings or church ceremonies such as baptisms. A study of London weddings in the late 1570s found that, unsurprisingly given the canonical requirements, Sunday was the most popular days for weddings, accounting for c.44 percent of marriages taking place in Southwark and Bishopsgate. (By contrast, Sunday accounted for just 5.9 percent of marriages in 2022).
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Dorothy Allison Authored a New Kind of Queer Lit (or brought new perspectives into the literature of class?) I should dig out my copies of her works.