randomness | Reading

Here we are in the middle of 2026, which is as good a marker as any to see where my movie watching is at. Thanks, Letterboxd, for enabling my OCD! All stats are as of June 30th.

I watched 197 movies in the first half of the year. I have a not totally serious goal of 500 this year, which is a number I hit in 2023 after which I decided to stop being quite so obsessive. You don’t need to make the number go up every year, so I pulled back for the sake of my sanity. Now, however, I have more free time. The math says… maybe, particularly since I’m gonna see like 75 movies at Fantasia. (I do count shorts in this.)

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/07/07/midyear-reels/

chhotii

1/4 cup water
1/4 cup chickpea flour (more if from Indian grocer, as that seems to be sifted more than Bob's)
1/2 teaspoon yeast
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/8 teaspoon salt or 1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
1 tablespoon chia seeds
1 tablespoon olive oil
(Optional: 1 tablespoon almond flour)

Mix in a jar until well-mixed. Close jar and set aside until yeast has done its thing and it's quite bubbly (20 minutes or so on the counter in hot weather; several hours in fridge).

When ready to cook, remove lid and microwave 1 minute.

Empty jar into pan with a little oil and cook for a minute or so, crumbling the chickpea cake and mixing into other stuff.

kenjari

The Jasmine Throne
by Tasha Suri

This fantasy novel is set in a world reminiscent of ancient India. The action largely takes place in Ahiranya, a land subjugated by the Parijatdvipa empire and whose language and religion have been suppressed. Priya is a maidservant in the regent's household, serving Bhumika, the regent's Ahiranyi wife. Both of them are former temple children of the Hirana, survivors of a conflagration that killed elders and children alike. Bhumika and Priya each try to help their people survive under Parijatdvipa rule. Then Malini, sister to the Emperor, is imprisoned in the deserted Hirana temple. Priya is then assigned to be Malini's servant and the two of them find themselves on new paths towards freedom and power (and a bit of vengeance).
The Jasmine Throne was really good. I loved the world-building, and the way things about the magic and the history were revealed through Priya and Malini's experiences and memories. Suri takes her time with both the world-building and character development. It can feel a little slow, but is well worth it. Priya, Malini, and Bhumika are all complicated, and often morally ambiguous, women with different ideas about how to change the world so that it serves them better. I especially liked the growing relationship between Priya and Malini, full of longing despite their being on different sides of the political conflict. Suri explores the different ways people can find and use power, and the ways women's power is both feared and underestimated.

Current Mood: exhausted

bryant

This is a Scott McNealy story. Kids these days may not remember Scott; he was the long-term CEO and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He was legendary for being outspoken, opinionated, and a maverick. He wasn’t a technical guy at heart, leaning way more towards the business side. Nevertheless, he was pretty smart about which way the technical winds were blowing.

Sun Microsystems was built on the idea that a computer which wasn’t attached to a network – preferably the Internet – was less useful. I’ll loop back and talk about the first two jobs I had at Sun at some point. Right now, we’re gonna talk about the last job I had at Sun, which was working on the internal Javastation deployment program. Javastations were perhaps the pinnacle of Scott’s network-oriented philosophy, so this was pretty important stuff.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/07/03/attaching-files-to-email/

redbird

Now that I'm sure my Teva sandals fit well enough for me to walk to the store and back, I have ordered a second pair online, as planned. This pair is purple, which they didn't have at the brick-and-mortar store. Mail order has real advantages, but shopping in person let me try them on. This is one of four or five different styles I tried on that afternoon.

Yesterday was the first time I'd walked any distance in these sandals. I grabbed them while pulling on clothes and hurrying out before it got too hot (extreme heat warning starting at 10 a.m. yesterday).

For my reference, these are Teva Tirra sandals in a women's 9.

vvalkyri

Mom died 12 years ago today.

I forgot to look up her yard site. I probably missed it. My day is already fairly committed. I'm committed to being in a frog suit at the black cat call time 6:45
I doubt I'll be able to dial into a minion at a time that works.

Then again, I guess I probably could dial into Friday evening services tomorrow.

Nadine of Amphipha fame teaching art as protest three today flare, which is just North of National Gallery East wing.

Tomorrow, there will be a frog announcement of an upcoming press conference in which there will be an amicus brief submitted relating to frogs and ecology and the duck pond actually not duck pond reflecting pool.

At 10:00 not 1:00 meeting I can get out to far Virginia easier on Friday as well as it will hopefully be slightly less hot especially in essentially a mobile tent in the Sun

Last night after a late dinner we four adults we're still talking in the hotel lobby and the child was half asleep on the couch. A lady came up to us asking for hugs. Interestingly, one of the guys had noticed her because of the Mickey mouse t-shirt; I had noticed she had barbell piercings under the Mickey mouse t-shirt. But we each gave her hugs and I asked are you okay what's going on she said she didn't want to start crying but she said we lifted her heart and she left.

bryant

In my inevitable quest to learn more about the history of our new home in the Twin Cities, I recently read Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs as a primary source on the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. That strike was a significant moment in US labor history, beginning a shift towards industrial unionism – the idea that all workers in a given industry should be part of the same union, rather than organizing unions by trade. It also, not coincidentally, triggered real growth for the Teamsters and was one of the turning points leading American Trotskyists to split from the Stalinist Communist Party USA.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/07/01/teamster-rebellion/

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

redbird

This is mostly just to say "hi, still here." There's not much going on here.

After the cats' annual checkup, it turned out that one of them (Molly) has a urinary tract infection. We gave the vet the OK to run more tests using the same blood sample, to identify the pathogen.

It's some form of E. coli. I picked up the pills on Saturday, while cattitude was out of town doing family stuff. He got home late last night, and we just gave Molly the first of seven pills. Once we've done that, they want us to bring Molly back so they can draw more blood to check that the antibiotic did the job.

Adrian and I took the opportunity of Cattitude being away to cook and eat mushrooms: stuffed mushrooms Friday, and a mushroom-barley casserole Saturday. We agreed that the casserole was easier, and it was less work, so we're unlikely to make stuffed mushrooms again. (Adrian pointed out that the stuffed mushrooms weren't difficult, it was the difference between "easy" and "very easy.")

vvalkyri

I just want to mark that
1) Don Stallone's Memorial yesterday was really amazing. And hopefully I will have time to write more about that later.

2) I am mostly out of the boot but I did not go to Acro today because many reasons.

3) I am still losing to a mouse but I found another placement. Have before that I dealt with. Across the street neighbor had initially offered to bring cats over, but then apparently not. There's still in the middle of moving to Laurel at some point. And I'm sad not to have an across the street neighbor I'm friends with at that point.

3) I'm going mildly crazy trying to figure out how I'm working the end of the week. I had originally had plans in for Virginia, a friend's farm and another friend's Farm actually, but now I'm looking at maybe trying to get back to see the fiasco of fireworks given that they are even closing off a good deal of the river for more barges. But I doubt I can actually get home at that point even though they're not starting the fireworks until at least 10:30.

4) I've been doing a lot of emergency apartment reorganization what with maintenance coming in tomorrow, and I managed to leave my dome light on Tuesday when I parked on the street so a friend could use my spot on Wednesday and I still haven't gotten the car going again. Because.

5) which did mean I was on a bike to try and look at the flyover at 6:30 on Thursday in time to see the Royal Air Force (10 of them) go directly over my head right outside Audi field where I was about to get back on the bike to try and get closer to nats Park and then turn on their smoke and then swirl around and I guess that's when they went over to nats Park to do their real flyover from behind the school board. Which means I had an unique perspective of them filling my vision... And I had not been clever enough to already have the camera open on the phone and failed to get it out in time. Incredibly pissed about this aside from everything else about how I detest this phone so much I need to do something about it

6) the watch and the phone keep losing connection to each other which is incredibly inconvenient, but I don't know if it's the watch or the phone or both so I'm sort of thinking of just getting like a $40 smartwatch which I did not know existed but then what do I do with the sort of working otherwise

7) Nadine is amazing. Otherwise known as Amphifa. Washington Post had a profile on team algae who have been hanging out at the reflecting pond, pool for a while. There was a memorial mass today morning the now absent algae.

There's all sorts of shows that the black cat starting tonight and going through all week. Today was go-go. There's a WrestleMania on Thursday that'll probably involve one belt that involves frogs and the reflecting pool. And there's a whole lot of Civic engagement and lobbying and training and everything else all week during 7 Days in dc. Here's the schedule link: 7DaysInDC.com

kenjari

Ocean Light
by Nalini Singh

This is the 17th Psy-Changeling paranormal romance, and the series is still going strong. Bowen Knight, leader of the Human Alliance (one of the arms of the still-fragile Trinity Accord between humans, psy, and changelings) is recuperating from an assassination attempt while facing another grave problem - the experimental chip in his head designed to shield against telepathic attacks is deteriorating. Bowen is receiving an equally experimental treatment at the BlackSea changeling underwater station Ryujin. There he meets Kaia, head chef for the station. They share an immediate connection and ultimately fall deeply in love, while facing the risks to both Bowen from the chip and the sea changelings from an unknown enemy.
I enjoyed this one quite a bit. I loved Kaia - she's warm and caring but also a good example of how those qualities can make someone as fierce and strong as combat and political power can. Bowen is also great - he's utterly devoted to Kaia and determined to protect both their people's. Their relationship is very mutually supportive. I really liked the action and intrigue subplot - it was exciting and illuminated several aspects of the growing alliance between humans, psy, and changelings. Most of all, I loved seeing more of the sea changelings and their city as they have been very mysterious in their previous appearances in the series.

Current Mood: lazy

bryant

My friend Sarah Gould keeps telling me I should write an autobiography because I love telling stories. I cannot deny the premise of the argument, and I know I want to redevelop my writing skills; thus, I’m going to start capturing some of those tales of how I got from there to here. Like all good stories, I’m going to start in the middle. Don’t expect any of this to be linear.

Full post: https://popone.innocence.com/archives/2026/06/26/arriving-at-netcom/

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.

We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.

You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.

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Midyear Reels

Chickpea crumble

Book Review

On Attaching Files to Email

sandals

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Teamster Rebellion

June Wrap-Up

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Drive by

Book Review

Arriving at Netcom

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