sfred | Network

Model kit of a fighting robot. It is white with pink highlights and is on a dark flat top stove.

Stargazer + Galaxy backpack + pink. Probably the quickest I've had an idea and then just bought and built it. Not an entirely clean job but given the circumstances, I'm really pleased with the end result.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. What would you do right now, if money were not an issue?

2. What would you do for the next three years, if money were not an issue?

3. What is bringing you the most joy right now that requires little or no money?

4. What types of things do you find enjoyable that require no money?

5. Is there anything you've been meaning to do for a long time, but put off because of money?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260708.html

Swift Boost Mission

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260708.html

ysabetwordsmith

This year I'm doing Community Thursdays. Some of my activity will involve maintaining communities I run, and my favorites. Some will involve checking my list of subscriptions and posting in lower-traffic ones. Today I have interacted with the following communities...

* Comment on Just One Thing (8 July 2026) in

awesomeers.

* Commented on Check-In Post - July 8th 2026 in

get_knitted.

* Commented on "Speak Up Saturday" in

tv_talk.

* Posted "Agriculture" in

first_nations_freaks.

Current Mood: busy

armaina

I, as much as many people, am tired of the amount of things that force itself into app-hood, but there are a couple things I've installed on my phone as apps that I'm glad I did, namely, the Wikipedia app and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary App.

So much of small searches are either just checking spelling, a thesaurus check, or fact-checking on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia app's been great because it saves tabs of all my searches if I want it to, and the Dictionary app is great because it gets right to what I need it for, word checking that I have too often done with a search engine and have decided they don't need my clicks.

Just nice utilities to have around.

sovay

Following the successful conclusion of one of

spatch's appointments for a change, we returned to Belle Isle Seafood and this time it was a beautiful gold-tilting evening and we could seat ourselves at one of the weather-polished open-air tables and a server came by with her pad of guest checks and for what we estimate to have been the first time in six and a quarter years we ate at a restaurant together. I got a plate of smelts piled just as high and sweetly sanded and ate them down to the fried tips of their tails and the delicate bones. Rob assures me that his baked haddock was as flakily rich as it looked under its crumbs and juiced lemon. We had duly observed the warning sign about the seagulls, but mostly we saw sparrows leaning like acrobats through the diamonds of the chain-link and a common tern that made an air-slicing swoop into the water after a small silver struggle of fish. I twisted corners of napkins into earplugs because of the planes roaring out of the peach-haze over Logan. The serpentine water was full of the shivered reflections of boats and the piers built green shadows under their Plimsoll lines. When we came home by way of Revere Beach where the glass-backed combers were still curling in high, the sun doubled itself fierily in the salt marsh off North Shore Road. Even more so now, the sea feels like a lifeline. Everything feels like choking and it is so important to have reasons to breathe.

Current Music: Quinquis, "The tumbling point"

thawrecka

I love how much the character 酒 looks like, wow, look at this bottle of stuff, like it's putting spirit fingers around a bottle of booze

alchemicink

Tagged by

linky! (Which reminded me that

eff_ess_oe also tagged me recently) Thanks y'all!

Last song: Bomb Dancing Megaranger, the second ending from Denji Sentai Megaranger

Currently watching: as you can guess from above, I'm rewatching Megaranger again 😁

Current obsession: Gokusen! I've been thinking about a fic I want to write (featuring the two main guys from season 3) for a solid week now. Maybe I'll actually start on it soon. Gokusen was just so fun.

Currently reading: sadly, nothing at the moment. Not even fic 😩

Currently working on: I've been steadily working on my

pod_together fic this week. Making good progress! I'm also trying to write something for

precuretokuprompt and another thing for

beagoldfish which might also get crossposted to

toku100challenge if I can get the wordcount to work out

Currently wearing: the same thing I wore to work: a sleeveless red flowery top (it has pockets!) and black leggings. I'm about to put my pjs on tho 😊

Last search: I was looking up My Summer of You on MyDramaList to check out the full cast list. (This was just me procrastinating on fic writing 😂)

Favorite flower: there are a lot of wild orange daylillies that bloom on the side of the road here every summer. I love them the most!

Tagging whoever sees this and wants to do it!

questionable_content_feed

https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5869

Claire is supportive

https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5869

hrj

I had my first physical therapy appointment today, though I've been doing some exercises 3x per day since last Thursday (cast-off day). She took measurements of various angles of range-of-motion and set up a more tailored set of exercises. Turns out there's an app for that: has a list of the exercises with demonstration videos and timers. I like that.

I got praise for my exercise technique (including having done a lot of finger work even before the cast came off). Typing as therapy is approved. I got clarification on the timeline for weight-bearing. (Timeline started at the operation, so I'm already up to 2-3 lbs occasionally.) The brace is only for extra protection when I feel I need it, plus at night. (I think they assume I flail around more in my sleep than I actually do.) I have a compression glove for general wear, which will help with mobility as swelling is part of what I need to overcome.

I have follow-up appointments weekly for the rest of the month to assess progress and adjust exercises. Yesterday I went to the gym for treadmill time, which I plan to make a daily thing.

The typing is slow and slightly painful, but my key-accuracy is much better than my first attempt several days ago. And last night I pulled out my almost-finished socks and did the cast-off (which I've been joking about for some time).

ysabetwordsmith

“IMPOSSIBLE!” No Work Food Gardens Based on Wild Edible Ecosystems

About 20 years ago, after I first started studying Permaculture, I went to work for a very sustainable Permaculture-oriented CSA farm. One day, after working all morning painfully tending, pruning, and weeding a patch of cane berries, I went for a bike ride along my favorite trail. Black raspberries were in season, so I went home, grabbed 3 3 gallon buckets and filled them up with raspberries.

That was when it hit me. NOBODY was working tending these, except for perhaps the deer and birds fertilizing them. Meanwhile, my own hands were covered with scratches from my morning work.

This is an example of humanity's earliest agriculture: encouraging plants we find useful in places where we go, and occasionally ripping out ones we don't want there. Wild plants can mostly take care of themselves. You don't have to fuss over them like delicate domestic fruits and vegetables.

My approach to laissez-faire permaculture is similar. I plant new things that seem promising. I try to help them establish. They live or die. The ones that live, I expect to take care of themselves. Some of what I grow is really good at that. \o/

Current Mood: busy

musesfool

My dental appointment went well - it was just a cleaning! - but they still want me to come every three months instead of twice a year. Sigh. Anyway, the appointment was timed so that I did not have coffee or breakfast beforehand, and didn't get home until a little after 1 pm, so I should have just had lunch. But I was so tired that sleep won out over food and I ended up taking a THREE HOUR ~~tour~~ nap. I did finally eat, but now I'm like, maybe I should just go back to bed? Idk.

Anyway, it's Wednesday and I have read some books!

What I've just finished
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. This was enjoyable but very low-key, even at the climax.

Long Live Evil and All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan. Hiilarious and very genre-savvy portal fantasy. I enjoyed both books and am hoping the third one sticks the landing. Sadly, it's not due out until next summer. Alas.

What I'm reading now
Dead Hand Rule by Max Gladstone, which is the third (and final?) book in the Craft Wars trilogy? series? Idk. I'm enjoying it but he is pulling people from all over the first series and I don't always remember who they are since it's been a while since I read those books.

What I'm reading next
As ever, it is a mystery.

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Ask - the Smiths

pauraque

In this sequel to A Memory Called Empire, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare and her imperial liaison/maybe-kinda-girlfriend Three Seagrass travel to the front lines of an interstellar war on a mission to try to decipher the alien enemy's language and establish diplomatic relations. What Three Seagrass doesn't know is that Mahit is also on a covert mission to sabotage diplomacy and keep the Teixcalaan Empire mired in an endless, unwinnable war.

I was so-so on A Memory Called Empire. I would say I had a stronger reaction to the sequel, both positive and negative.

First, the positive: I loved Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada, new characters in this installment. She's the passionate, brilliant captain of the flagship, he's her loyal, cerebral first officer who adheres to a stoic alien philosophy. They deal with high-stakes ethical quandaries as the lives of millions hang in the balance, and they love each other with an intensity that goes largely unspoken. Is this aspect of the book pandering to people who love Kirk and Spock? Perhaps, but I had a great time being pandered to. I wanted the entire book to be about these two.

I mostly liked the stuff about establishing communication with the aliens too, which is also classically Star Trek in tone and approach. (It bugged me a little that the linguistics wasn't more realistic, but you rarely get that in SF and it isn't really the point here.)

Unfortunately, the things I liked were pretty definitively outweighed by all the half-baked themes, garbled political messaging, and many characters' infuriatingly stupid choices and baffling cluelessness. It wasn't quite throw-the-book-across-the-room level, but at certain moments it got close.

Ranting and spoilers

- How can it possibly take SO LONG for the characters to figure out that the aliens are a hivemind???? It's not just that it's a basic SF trope and obvious to the reader from literally the first page of the book. It's also that all the prompting the characters need to make the leap is right there in front of them the whole time! Mahit herself has Yskandr's mind in her head, there are the Sunlit guards and the Shard pilots who share their perceptions through technology... To these characters, the existence of a species with a shared consciousness shouldn't even be surprising. But it still takes them 400 fucking pages to figure it out, and they act like it's a galaxy-shattering shock. This makes no sense whatsoever and it makes most of the characters look inexcusably dumb.

- I don't get the way the Mahit/Three Seagrass relationship is written at all. In the first book, they liked each other from the start and then nothing happened with it until suddenly they kissed at the end. In this one, they have a stupid fight at the beginning and feel weird and uncomfortable around each other for hundreds of pages until suddenly they fuck. This didn't work for me. It especially didn't work because I felt like I was supposed to side with Mahit in their argument, but I didn't, because Three Seagrass doesn't know what Mahit is mad about and Mahit refuses to tell her. Mahit's narration is explicit that she wants Three Seagrass to know what's bothering her without being told, so basically she's punishing Three Seagrass for not being fucking psychic. Am I the only one who thinks it would have been more interesting if they'd actually ever talked about any of the issues between them, rather than just winding themselves up about it in their heads?? By the end I wasn't rooting for them to get/stay together at all, so when Mahit ran away from the relationship (again) I didn't even care.

- I felt the lack of gender stuff in the first book was a missed opportunity. In this book, the author seems to be strenuously trying to miss that opportunity as hard as she can. There is one scene where Mahit (in their shared consciousness) accuses Yskandr of not understanding fashion for "female-bodied people." It's brushed off. There's another scene where Three Seagrass says she wasn't sure if Mahit liked people of her "gender and sex," and several where Three Seagrass silently wonders if she had sex with Mahit, or with Mahit and Yskandr, or just Yskandr. No further discussion of these points. I truly don't understand what Martine is going for here. She chose to create a protagonist who is a woman sharing a mind and body with a man. She seems dimly aware that there might be interesting things one could say about this. She apparently doesn't want to say any of them.

- Even leaving aside the gender issues, I think there's a lot more that could have been done to explore the mindsharing scenario. Yskandr often reads like an invisible sidekick who just pipes up now and then to give Mahit some information, advice, or a snarky comment. What is his experience/consciousness/sense of embodiment like? We don't get his own internal monologue, just the things he "says" to Mahit. It doesn't feel as weird and alien as it seems like it should.

- Mahit and Twenty Cicada should have talked! He's assimilated to Teixcalaan in some ways but maintained his cultural distinctiveness in others; doesn't that seem like an extremely relevant perspective for Mahit to hear? The books act like Mahit is the only one in the galaxy who has mixed feelings about Teixcalaan, but surely she can't be.

- On a larger level, these books are about an absolutist expansionist empire and the vulnerable republic it threatens, and nothing about any of that is resolved or even really explored all that much. The child heir Eight Antidote is an interesting character and he's trying to do the right thing, but there's so much more going on here that can't and won't be resolved by a kid with some moral fiber taking the throne. Having a relatively nice emperor does not solve the problems of imperialism. In this book we learn more about how systemically fucked up Lsel is too, and nothing happens with that either. The plot doesn't even make it hard for Mahit to decide whether to stay loyal to Lsel, since there are power-mad authorities on Lsel who want to KILL HER. No wonder people were expecting a trilogy here; this book does not wrap up a single loose end.

Okay, that's probably more than enough of a rant. TL;DR: Book dances around a lot of interesting speculative and interpersonal possibilities and solidly lands on very few of them.

g_uava posting in

fictional_fans

I wrote about the different effects of creating a GIF (moving image) or a collage (compilation of multiple images into one static image out of frames from the same scene, which I thought might interest other photo editors. While writing it, I came across the Fanlore entry on the picspam that likens picspams to fanart. It's a first for me to see picspams described that way!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3269/

Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

https://xkcd.com/3269/

armaina

Honestly, I feel a Kind Of Way (negative) about platforms that pride themselves on giving power back to the owners and they still can't be bothered to offer anything with an optical drive.

Services Like Frame Work and System 76 talk a big game about being able to build out your system however you like, which is mostly true, unless you want an optical drive. Worse still, their desktop cases don't even accommodate space to install it on your own. Especially for a desktop, what's even the point of getting it through them when places like microcenter and newegg (Or your local PC repair shop!!!! Support your local shops!!!!!!!!!!! ) will build the thing for you so what's their benefit really if they can't even give you space for an optical drive.

And yes, the ability to have built-in access to or means to install an optical drive I think is pretty dang important. An External Drive is something you use in a pinch, not a permanent solution. And I hate hearing 'you don't need one' excuses when I bring up this problem. Yes! I need one! I wouldn't be looking for it if I didn't! I wouldn't have gone out of my way to purchase a case with room for a drive bay if I didn't use it. I very frequently re-watch my DVDs as well as archive my music.

I'm reminded of this issue every time I watch Venture Brothers with Z. See, we don't really have space for a couch so the only way for us to watch something together and cuddle, is on the bed. But to watch it on the bed, we have to use the laptop, but to watch my DVD collection on the laptop, we need to use an external optical drive.

Out of curiosity I went looking around for laptops with optical drives. Turns out! Most stopped making laptops with optical drives back in 2019!! I had been hoping services like Frame Work and System 76 might rekindle that but it doesn't look like they even intend to go in that direction :/

And I'm sure this isn't intentional just opportunistic coincidental, that access to optical drives have scaled back as access to digital streaming services scaled up. It's really important that we keep access to physical media, but it's becoming an uphill battle to play it.

Current Mood: annoyed

ysabetwordsmith

"Plural Checklist" by leathersys on tumblr -- copied on DW by

synecdoches

I recently found an interesting survey on Tumblr by leathersys, called the Plural Checklist. They made this as a quiz for people who think they may be plural/multiple, but don't have classic amnesiac barriers, since a lot of quizzes and diagnostic tests are geared toward the most obvious dissociative symptoms. I like the questions, but I strongly dislike Google and don't want to send this info to a stranger, so I'm going to copy the questions here and consider my answers. Most of the questions were very insightful-- some shockingly so-- and only one or two of them made me feel like an out of touch old man.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today's word is "doff." Many folks will know it from "doff a hat" meaning to tip or take off. However, it's also used widely in fibercrafting to mean removing fiber from a tool.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Pop Culture Squad has a post about current Batman threads. In one of those, Oliver Queen / Green Arrow explains to Bruce Wayne / Batman what is wrong with the tech industry nowadays:

Ollie has a turn as the crusading liberal ex-millionaire, as he has a few opportunities to let us all know what he really thinks of Generative AI companies founded by tech bros. There’s one point where Ollie fills Batman in on it all. "They’re another generative AI company. Scraping personal data. Stealing art and stories and knowledge. Polluting and poisoning. Using masses of energy and water. Taking what the world actually needs to produce what nobody wants."

It's that last line I want people to remember and use to describe what is wrong with generative AI: "Taking what the world actually needs to produce what nobody wants." That's it in a nutshell.

Current Mood: busy

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Fred

Galaxygazer Concept

Just One Thing (09 August 2026)

The Friday Five for 10 July 2026

Swift Boost Mission

Community Thursdays

Acceptable Apps

We tried another way we never came back from

(no subject)

I love these little question meme things

Body Plan

Shall We Try Typing?

Permaculture

if it's not love, then it's the bomb that will bring us together

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine (2021)

Creating a GIF or a collage

Airport Meeting

Save The Optical Drive

Questions

Vocabulary: Doff

Artificial Intelligence

Profile

February 2026

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