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December Days 02025 #14: Terminal

Dec. 14th, 2025 11:18 pm
silveradept: A librarian wearing a futuristic-looking visor with text squiggles on them. (Librarian Techno-Visor)
[personal profile] silveradept
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

14: Terminal

Being a child of DOS sometimes gives me an advantage and a bit of comfort whenever a project or a task that I have to do involves the command line. I still love a good Graphical User Interface (GUI), and I firmly believe that most applications these days are well-suited to having a GUI, even if it's basically a visual wrapper for three command line applications dressed in a trenchcoat. Having a GUI makes your application more accessible to the person who does not feel at home running cryptic commands and not understanding what they will do. I especially like the people who provide the GUI in a terminal (a TUI) when it makes the most sense for their application to be run from the command line and manipulated in such a way.

Others extol the terminal and the command line as the superior option for all things, because the terminal runs faster than the GUI does, needs smaller files to produce the same outputs, requires less clicking and typing, and because being able to run a thing from the terminal generally means it can run on a much wider variety of things, instead of being locked to those things that have enough horsepower behind them to run graphical environments.

Still others, the people who get the side-eye, say that the terminal is the superior option for all because it functions as a skill gate. People who cling to their GUIs are still n00bs and lusers who have not demonstrated sufficient computer touchery and geekery to be allowed access to this particular tool, and therefore anyone who wants to use this jewel has to git gud. Snobbery is not a good look on anyone, but technological snobbery can be particularly vicious, and there are more people than we'd like to admit who fall into the third category of "people who don't want the less technical 'polluting' their spaces with demands for things like accessibility or an easier-to-use interface or syntax."

It is a potentially scary thing to type in a command that someone has put on the Internet, or in a script, or to run as an executable, and hope that it doesn't do something awful to your machine. And even scarier when the potential for malice is not embedded in an executable program, but instead a script inside an innocuous-looking document, or even as things that may or may not require someone to do anything before their system is compromised. And unlike many GUI programs, the command line is a place where the assumption is that you know what you're doing when you type the command and press enter. Great power, great responsibility, great potential for disaster. Not everyone necessarily wants to learn how the syntax of the command works, what it does and any tertiary pieces of knowledge that go along with it, like how to construct regular expressions, how to pipe the output from one program as input into another for further manipulation, or how to construct Boolean logic to capture all the possible conditions and find the correct one for the situation. These people are still valid users and they should have access to tools just as much as the people who want to run everything through the terminal.

Some of the most common situations I had for working with the command line as a youngling were, naturally, in pursuit of playing games. As described in the first post, once I left the comforts and constraints of Automenu, I learned how to navigate around in DOS and do things with it. As games progressed and started taking up more and more memory, there had to be some tricks involved to ensure there was enough available memory for the game to successfully run. DOS in those days had what they called "TSR" programs (no relation to the company that developed Dungeons and Dragons) - Terminate and Stay Resident. Most of the time, these TSRs were drivers so that hardware attached to the system would function properly. Others might be ways of taking advantage of greater amounts of system memory, and setting things up for something like bank switching, so that from the "conventional" memory space, you could still address, store, and retrieve things from "high" memory or "upper" memory that wasn't subject to the 640k limitations of "conventional" memory. (The deep dive into how to store and retrieve information from a Game Boy cartridge was intensely fascinating, and also helped me understand a little more about clever solutions used in limited circumstances.) The difficulty with TSRs is that they had to stay in the "conventional" memory space, and while there were all kinds of solutions and methods to access and use the higher memory spaces, many of them relied on there being enough conventional memory space available in the right places to implement their tricks. So, as time went on, while there may have been enough available RAM and processing power to run Sierra family games, the setup wasn't distributed properly to work.

Thus, the boot disk. From the TUI of the game installer, there was always an option of creating a "boot disk." In those days and times, DOS progressed through the various drives available to determine what to boot from, and the floppy disk drives were always assigned letters earlier in the alphabet than hard disk drives., so they would always be earlier in the boot order than the hard disks. By sacrificing a floppy to the installer, it would craft a DOS boot environment where the bare minimum of TSRs would be loaded to make playing the game functional, with the assumption that after using the boot disk to load the correct environment, you'd then proceed through the directory structure to the hard disk and load the game that way. And they worked very well, loading the drivers for keyboard, mouse, sound card, and sometimes the CD drive, as well as the tools needed to access the higher memory blocks. Once I was done gaming, I'd reboot the system so that it could return to normal operations and access to things like Windows. These days, we don't need to fiddle around with such things, even as RAM requirements and availability have grown. And these days it would be something more like a boot image of some sort, a way of loading a specific environment and then booting directly into the game itself. I wonder what kind of game might take that on as their packaging method, trying not to allow installs, even if they might allow for the mounting and running of the image inside some form of container, but otherwise trying to keep the entire thing on the disc image created.

Boot disks were another way of helping me get comfortable with the command line, and with giving me an incomplete understanding of how a computer actually sets itself up to run and produces the environment that the user will be working in. That's all basically abstracted away, and we only see a little bit of it when watching the console output scroll by as my current machines load up. I'm glad of not having to make boot disks any more, and I'm glad that we have more sensible ways of managing memory and startup now, so that people don't have to do arcane things to set themselves up for playing games and running software. Terminal comfort can come from other sources than hacing to rearrange your entire environment just to play a game.

For some time after that, as Windows got better, and then became the way that most games were played, and DOS eventually found its way to emulation, rather than being a major part of everyone's lives, those command line skills didn't pick up a lot of use, although they also never really went away, because, as I was getting older, this somewhat new-fangled object called The World Wide Web had joined the scene (again, telling you more about how old I am than not) and the interconnectedness of computers was now not only possible, but achievable to people who weren't on defense or university networks. The early parts of this interconnectedness relied on a few different protocols to make it all work - HTTP for HTML document transfer, FTP for binary file transfer, there was Gopher around, and a few other protocols. (All of these protocols still exist, although not many people are maintaining FTP servers any more, I suspect, having found it easier, faster, and better on the bandwidth to seed large files through BitTorrent.) ECMAScript/Javascript/Typescript were promising new ways of doing things, and a lot of website addresses at the time had a /cgi-bin/ in their paths, so even at that time, there were attempts to bolt interactivity and responsiveness onto the more static HTTP protocol.

Since I missed the BBS scene entirely, and never had newsreader access, I don't have the experience of dialing in with a modem and using a program to peruse the bulletin boards and the newsgroups - that would come later, with things like phpBB and other implementations of forum software, before we all decamped for our individual blogs and tried to link them together through rings and RSS. What I do have, however, is that there was a…surge? resurgence? rediscovery? of the Multi-User Dungeon and the use of the telnet protocol to connect to such things and interact with them. I won't say I was any good at any of them at all, and a friend of mine wanted to have me build some things for their own MUD, but I didn't get very involved with that, and so I didn't contribute all that much to it, either. I could have possibly learned a few things about scripting and other such things if I had persisted with the building aspect of it, but I didn't have the time nor the always-available Internet connection, to do most of my building and scripting work with. A more involved me might have instead grabbed the ability to run a local server on a non-Internet-connected machine and put together all of the things that needed doing to make it work, before uploading all of that to the live instance when I had an Internet connection. Which very well may have required either exporting in some way or retyping everything that I did in the local copy onto the non-local copy.

As it is, I entered university days with some amount of telnet experience with the MUDs, and a little more from having used the earliest form of using computers to make requests from other locations in the library system. (With the added bonus of being able to use that same system to look up and make requests from home, instead of having to be at the library to do so.) This made me particularly well-suited to using whatever computers were handy to do things like work on assignments, check e-mail, and do the occasional bit of socializing or other such between classes. While the university provided us with a disc of useful programs to put on our personal computers in the dormitories, or off-campus, I don't remember how many, if any, of the machines that were in the shared computing labs had those same programs present. As a further not-really-complication, since most students were comfortable with Windows machines, that usually meant the available machines were on the Macintosh side of the lab. As someone who could get things done in both of those environments, it mostly meant that I was on the Mac side of the lab instead of the Windows side. (Even more so in graduate school, as the Macs had a good text editor with syntax highlighting that I could use when I was away from my own Linux machine and its syntax highlighting.) The University e-mail system had a command-line interface and interaction point, and I think that was accessed by telnet as well. (What I remember much more clearly about it was that all of the servers we could connect to were identified as being arcade games. While we used a single point of entry to connect, the server we were assigned at random always was a classic arcade game. Zaxxon, Xevious, Pac-man (and Ms. Pac-Man), Asteroids, Battlezone, etc. I liked being able to get the reference and wondered which game I would be working with every time I signed in.) Pine was the system, I remember that, and it was a perfectly serviceable TUI to check, manage, and respond quickly to various e-mails that had been sent out and I was looking at in the time between classes, or when I was in the lab. I felt smart and technologically awesome that I was able to use the terminal for this kind of purpose, and to do it well. And, yes, I did feel a little smug and superior that I could do this on whichever machine was available, instead of having to wait for a specific machine to come available or to trek to a specific laboratory where those machines were available. My university-aged self is still unlearning things as much as they are learning things, and so I have to treat them with patience and understanding.

So when it comes to the terminal and the command line, I have decades of experience in using it, in having things blow up in my face, in having to use it because various utilities, servers, and tools run best (or at all) from terminal, and in using it because I want to see what a piece of software does, and whether I can get things to go faster from there than from other methods. I'd say that comfort with the command line is a second-order comfort when it comes to computers, because you can't really get comfortable with a command line until you are properly comfortable with the machine itself, and feeling competent and curious enough to try things, have them explode, recover from them, and otherwise recognize that many things that wreck a computer can be recovered from, although what form the recovery takes is different depending on how big of an explosion happened, and that most systems with a GUI will ask if you're sure before they do something destructive. This is the kind of thing that a spare machine is perfect for, because spare machines are what you do things that are destructive or explosive on, and then when they do explode or do unwanted things, you have gained knowledge about what to do or what not to do, or that the thing you tried to do was not properly formed, even if it was accepted as valid. Sometimes you discover some really cool things you can do and then take that knowledge back to the main machine to make it run better and more according to your needs.

Once you have the willingness to experiment and see what happens, and the knowledge backstopping you that you can get out of most common bad situations, and perhaps even the knowledge of how to reconstruct a system from scratch and start again, then you can start getting more comfortable on the command line and using the terminal when it seems appropriate or useful to do so. Because, again, many terminal commands don't ask if you're sure, they just do what you told them to do. (More of them probably should ask, but most of the core utilities and commands on any operating system were developed and used by people who did know what they were doing, and they probably found it annoying to have to confirm it every time they wanted to do something. For Linux specifically, even though many distributions of Linux are better about not requiring the use of the terminal or the command line, there's still a certain assumption baked in that the terminal is the real heart of using Linux, and everything else is eye candy, abstraction, or concession made to those who don't want to do everything from the terminal. The terminal-centric focus of Linux makes it both very powerful and very portable, since the terminal itself, and the core utilities don't require a lot of fancy anything to work, and can be put in embedded or underpowered systems to provide functionality and flexibility to their operation. Terminal commands and abilities are also part of creating scripts and programs that will chain together commands to produce useful output, which is the part where the possibilities expand outward exponentially.

I'm trying not to make the terminal sound completely intimidating, and that you need all the time and experience that I have with it to produce useful things and be comfortable with it. But especially in Linux systems, grasping the terminal and what you can do with it is almost a prerequisite for unlocking the full potential of such a system. And I don't fully know everything that I can do with the terminal, because I haven't had to learn it yet, so you don't have to know everything and read all the man pages before you can start using and experimenting with it. I do think, though, that having grown up in an era where the command line was the primary method of accessing programs and using the computer has made it easier for me to re-adopt a terminal, now that I've chosen an operating system that relies on it. I'd still rather that people took the time to put in interfaces and help for people when they release programs to users, or that, if it makes sense, they build a GUI component for their program so that it's more widely accessible, but that is not always the case.

I guess the point is to say that computer touchery does not have to involve terminals and text editors, and that there are several fine programs that require neither to run admirably and well. And that for as much as I have experience with it, there's still plenty that I don't know and may never know. It's one of the places where I can have a growth mindset about myself, and I think it's one of the places where others can, as well, so I'd encourage you to dive in, in whatever way that you can. There will be gatekeeping jerks, there will be unhelpful StackOverflow answers, and sometimes the thing that's the best and most useful response for you will be a blog post from decades ago, but there is a certain satisfaction, at least for me, that comes from accomplishing a task through clever program use or even writing the script yourself and seeing the output that you wanted to have happen scroll by in the console. I am unlikely to claim that I'm good at any of this, but I could venture forth that I am at least semi-competent.

Update

Dec. 14th, 2025 06:20 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
About 3 weeks ago I ordered 8 fencing panels, plus some stall mats.  It was a big chunk of money.  Then I found 6 more panels second hand on Craig's List. More money.  Then I found some picnic tables on Craig's List.  They are 8 feet long with aluminum tops. A nice size. They are out of a park in Napa. I can see why they were being replaced, some are in really rough shape, while others are fairly nice.  I ended up with four usable tables and one that needs new legs.  The legs that are still usable are quite rusty where they were in contact with the ground.  I've spent several hours knocking rust off table legs (the kind that curl around to also support the bench) spraying them with primer and paint.  Trying to get it done before it rains.  I've got 3 out of four either done or at least painted with primer.  
Then there is saddle foo with Firefly.  Read more with Pics )

Christmas Bird Count

Dec. 14th, 2025 06:08 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
We had a lovely sunny day again for the annual Christmas Bird Count.  Not as many birds as last year, but we did see a kestrel  --  And -- a golden eagle twice!!
M recorded the eagle a couple of weeks ago, so I was on the lookout.  Yesterday I was up on top of Split Rock with Denise, my farrier.  We saw a bird fly by, actually below us because the rock is 4 stories high and up on the canyon wall.  My instant though was turkey vulture.  We have a lot of them. A fraction of a second later my brain said: nope, wrong wing shape and slightly browner - and it is flapping it's wings.  Then a red shouldered hawk attacked it, repeatedly. Hawks don't bother vultures.  Today we saw it again and saw it close it's wings as if to dive, another thing vultures never do. Vultures flap a couple of times and then soar. Our group today agreed that it had to be a golden eagle. 
I saw a downy woodpecker, which was new for me.  We have tons of acorn woodpeckers and some piliated woodpeckers but not downy's at the house.  So that was fun.  Also the meadowlarks were singing at Split Rock, and I love them.  Sadly Duck Lake, which is a vernal pond, had no water in it yet, so no ducks.  Last year there were several wood ducks there. 

Daily Happiness

Dec. 14th, 2025 05:25 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I have recently ordered multiple things off Amazon that are not at all urgent, and they're offering good rewards for getting them delivered after Christmas rather than before (most have been 7% cash back but the most recent one was a $2 ebook credit). So now I have a ton of stuff arriving on the 27th. D:

2. I finally got all of Alex's books repacked into nice boxes and stacked on the new shelves I put in the shed. It's looking so much more organized. I ordered two more sets of shelves (one of the above-mentioned purchases) so then there will be three sets on each wall, which will mean plenty of space for long-term storage as well as things like toilet paper and paper towels, which we buy from Costco and they come in huge packages that are too big to store the whole thing in the house.

3. I love getting these shots of Gemma looking out the window.

[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

As mentioned several times before, I used to be a professional film critic, leaving the job in early 1996 to take a job at America Online, which at the time was the new hotness in the exciting field of online services (it’s been a while, yes). When I left the reviewing job, I went from watching six or seven movies a week to… none. I had a serious movie-watching detox for several months, during which time I focused on my new job, read some books, appeared on Oprah, and did all those other sorts of things people do when they’re not watching movies. What film finally got my ass back in a theater chair months later? Twister. It was a good call for a re-entry back into the world of cinema.

Not because it was a great film — it’s fine! — or a classic film — it’s really not! — but because it was a “B+” sort of film, a summer entertainment that had lots of fun action, an occasional bit of better-than-average acting, cool state-of-the-art-at-the-time special effects, and some memorable scenes (“we got cows!”). It’s unapologetically a popcorn movie, with lots of butter and maybe, just maybe, a dash of fancy salt. It looked good on big screens, but it also looked good on small screens, where it was, famously, the first major studio film release in that revolutionary new format: The DVD.

The story is easy to follow, too. Weather scientist Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) is about to lead her seriously rag-tag team of University of Oklahoma grad students on a quest to map the interior of a tornado, when her soon-to-be ex-husband Bill (Bill Paxton), shows up in his new truck, with his new fiancée (Jami Gertz, taking on what used to be called the Ralph Bellamy role), with divorce papers for the apparently avoidant Jo to sign. But before that can happen, Bill gets rodeo-ed into helping Jo’s scrappy team of storm chasers do their science, and from there the tornadoes, and the stakes, keep getting bigger. It’s science!

Well, mostly. The screenplay was written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin (then husband and wife), and has a lot of Crichton’s special blend of “science until science gets in the way of drama” (see: Jurassic Park, Congo, Coma, etc). It all feels kinda plausible if you don’t know much about meteorology, which is, honestly, nearly all of us. Crichton has Jo’s scrappy band of poor grad students go up against another team of storm chasers, led by an oily Cary Elwes, who have corporate backing and are just storm chasing for the money, although how there’s big money in storm chasing is never really explained (the nearly 30-years-later sequel, Twisters, explains how: By having the storm chasers be online influencer types. That avenue was not open to Mr. Elwes’ character. AOL was not that good). Nevertheless it’s enough for a second-order conflict.

The first order conflict is Jo versus the twisters; they are not just her academic interest but also her white whale, for reasons that are essayed in the first few moments of the film. The film never sells this point especially well — it’s more interested in doing a “will they or won’t they” bit of push and pull between Jo and Bill (you don’t really have to wonder how this is going to go, I already explained to you why poor Jaime Gertz is in this movie) — but it does give the film an excuse to keep putting Jo and Bill in situations involving strong winds that normal not-obsessed people would actively avoid.

Of course, if Jo and Bill avoided tornados, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. So in they go, and the good news for them (and us) was CGI in 1996 was just barely at the point where it could make twisters, and all the damage they do, look real, and really terrifying, onscreen (that and the absolutely monster sound design, which is often overlooked as a special effect but which really is key here. Both the VFX and the sound were nominated for Oscars). The twister effects are good enough that they still stand up pretty well three decades later. It’s not every bit of mid-90s CGI that doesn’t distract today’s viewer.

Speaking of special effects, this movie is weirdly overweighted with actors who went on to awards glory. Helen Hunt you probably know won an Oscar a couple of years later, but then, out there in Jo’s motley crew of grad students, is not only future Best Actor Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman but also Todd Field, who as a director, producer and screenwriter has been nominated for the Oscar six times. Jeremy Davies has a primetime Emmy for acting, Alan Ruck and Jami Gertz have Emmy nominations. So did Bill Paxton, God rest his soul. This is movie is friggin’ stacked, and nearly everyone in the film is just being kind of a goofball. It’s lovely, really.

(This movie was also the high water mark for director Jan De Bont, who did Speed before this movie, and then, rather disastrously, Speed 2 right after it. He was also the cinematographer of some notable action films, including Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October and Basic Instinct. I mean, Speed 2, we all make mistakes, but otherwise, a pretty nifty career.)

There’s nothing in Twister that will change anyone’s life, but as a movie you can just put on and dip in and out of while you’re setting up the Christmas tree or wrapping gifts or keeping one eye on Instagram or, I don’t know, polishing your silverware, it’s hard to beat. I put it on when I’m signing signature sheets for books. When you’re signing these sheets you want to be distracted enough that you’re not bored by the repetitive activity, but not so distracted that you mess up the pages. Twister is perfect for this. I can sign my name a thousand times, easy, with Jo and Bill getting buffeted by high winds pleasantly at the edge of my consciousness. This may or may not qualify as high praise to you, but trust me, I appreciate it.

Also, the film’s soundtrack has one of Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen’s best and most slept-upon songs:

Don’t look at me like that. I said what I said.

In any event: Twisters was a fun, no-pressure return to movies for me in ’96, and a fun, no-pressure movie to enjoy on the regular since then. It’s the very definition of a comfort watch. On this side of the screen. On their side, it’s a little windy. That’s a them problem.

— JS

in lieu...

Dec. 14th, 2025 05:57 pm
senmut: an owl that is quite large sitting on a roof (Default)
[personal profile] senmut
... of the misc.exhausted.me, I am going to offer a GOOD vaccination tale. As I see so many posts saying "yes it sucks but do it anyway", I want to offer the counter of "sometimes it does go fine".

I did Shingles/Flu/Covid in the fall, before Halloween, I think. NB: I 'd had covid for the first time this past winter, and it may have mitigated the vax some, or my body is finally adapting to it. I have had flu-like symptoms each time except the very first two shots, but! This time. With the trio of shots given on Friday evening, I had about a four hour window the next day, 10-ish hours later, of mild aches and NOTHING else.

Fast forward to this week. Shingles #2, and like I said, I'd seen so many people saying if the first one doesn't knock you low, the second will, and many react to both. Folks, my arm is still sore like I got TDaP, but I have had no aches, no fever, no lethargy. Sometimes, your body looks at the roadmap it just got handed, says okay, and just adds the necessary warning signs.

If you are over 50 (in the USA), consider getting it. I've known people with Shingles. YOU DO NOT WANT IT. Get vaxxed. And remember, every immune system is different, so don't assume you will have a bad time.

Anyone want anything?

Dec. 14th, 2025 05:36 pm
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Anyone want anything? Drabble, meta, rant, ridiculous lyrics that scan to I Had A Little Driedel, complete bullshit about a topic I know nothing about, etc? ;)


(These posts don't expire.)

(no subject)

Dec. 14th, 2025 04:38 pm
watersword: Keira Knightley, in Pride and Prejudice (2007), turning her head away from the viewer, the word "elizabeth" written near (Default)
[personal profile] watersword

On my way out the door to a vigil for last night's mass casualty incident; today is also the thirteenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, and there was an antisemitic mass shooting in Bondi Beach, Australia yesterday.

I do not know how I am going to get through this vigil and come home and light my chanukiyah, with its engraving, More life. The great work begins.

ETA: Ran into some coworkers at the extremely well-attended vigil and they came home with me to light the chanukiyah, and that helped.

letzan: (Default)
[personal profile] letzan

I want to shine an occasional spotlight on fandoms that are in flux. There are two kinds of fandoms here:


  • Fandoms that are growing rapidly, which are typically not in the top 20 now, and may never get there, but might be interesting for F/F readers to check out and encourage.
  • Fandoms that are losing ground on the top 20, and seem to be "post-peak." They may well peak again in the future, but it's a good moment to look back at the impressive amount of F/F which has been written so far.


I'd love for readers to help me signal-boost some recs for these fandoms. If you've read and enjoyed F/F fic in any of the fandoms listed in this post (either the new ones or the old standards), please send me some works you liked! I'll share all the recs I get in a future Week In Review post. Feel free to send recs on Tumblr as reposts, inbox messages, or DMs, and on Dreamwidth as comments or messages. (Let me know if you don't want to be credited for your rec.)

Fandoms that are growing rapidly



Each of these fandoms has at least twice as many total F/F works now as it did 12 weeks ago.


  • Dispatch (Video Game): This is a superhero workplace comedy video game, which was released in the past couple of months. The fandom is primarily M/M, but it's growing by about 20 F/F works per week. The top femslash ship is Blonde Blazer | Mandy/Invisigal | Courtney.
  • Pluribus (TV 2025): This is a post-apocalpytic SF TV show which premiered in November. Fic in the small fandom is almost entirely F/F, and the fandom is growing at about 10 F/F works/week. The top ship is Carol/Zosia (an author who is resisting the hive mind and the chaperone tasked to help her join it).
  • Pokemon Legends: Z-A (Video Game): This is a new RPG in the Pokemon universe. It's not predominantly F/F, but it's growing about 5 F/F works/week, spread over a couple of ships.


Fandoms that are losing ground



Each of these fandoms dropped on the chart by at least two places, comparing the average in the past twelve weeks to the twelve weeks before that.


  • Alien Stage (Web Series): This is a Korean animated web series in which aliens run a singing contest for abducted humans. The web series ran from 2022-2025. The fandom first appeared on the chart in 2024, and charted every week over summer 2025, briefly cracking the top 10. It's falling off the chart now, from an average weekly rank of 14.7 last quarter to 20.0 this quarter, presumably because the series ended. Fic in the fandom is about 1/4 F/F, and the top ship is Mizi/Sua.
  • The Owl House (Cartoon): a portal fantasy cartoon series that aired from 2020-2023, and has charted every week since mid-2020, 279 weeks in total. Its average rank fell from 13.4 to 16.8 this quarter, which is still pretty good for a show that ended over two years ago, but that chart streak is likely to end soon. The biggest ship by far is canonical F/F ship Amity/Luz.
  • Yellowjackets (TV): this thriller drama series about a group of teenagers stranded in the wilderness by a plane crash, has been a chart regular since 2023. The most recent season ended in April, so it's no surprise that the fandom has fallen out of the top five, from an average rank of 4.7 last quarter, to 7.2 this quarter. However, the current chart streak of 71 consecutive weeks is very likely to continue until the next and final season airs in 2026. Fic in the fandom is overwhelmingly F/F, and the top ships are still Shauna Shipman/Jackie Taylor, Lottie Matthews/Natalie Scatorccio, and Van Palmer/Taissa Turner, all of whom are members of the soccer team.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Dec. 14th, 2025 05:10 pm
[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking and signing books at the Chicago Public Library in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at 6:00 PM CT on February 5, 2026. Details to come.
  • I’m speaking at Capricon 44 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The convention runs February 5-8, 2026. My speaking time is TBD.
  • I’m speaking at the Munich Cybersecurity Conference in Munich, Germany on February 12, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at Tech Live: Cybersecurity in New York City, USA on March 11, 2026.
  • I’m giving the Ross Anderson Lecture at the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College on March 19, 2026.
  • I’m speaking at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA on March 25, 2026.

The list is maintained on this page.

(no subject)

Dec. 14th, 2025 10:37 am
skygiants: Nellie Bly walking a tightrope among the stars (bravely trotted)
[personal profile] skygiants
On a lighter Parisian note, I read my first Katherine Rundell book, Rooftoppers, which I would have ADORED at age ten but also found extremely fun at age forty!

The heroine of Rooftoppers is orphan Sophie, found floating in a cello case the English Channel after a terrible shipwreck and adopted by a charming eccentric named Charles who raises her on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry. Unfortunately the English authorities do not approve of children being raised on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry, so when they threaten to remove Sophie to an orphanage, Charles and Sophie buy themselves time by fleeing to Paris in an attempt to track down traces of Sophie's parentage.

Sophie is stubbornly convinced she might have a mother somewhere out there who survived the shipwreck! Charles is less convinced, but willing to be supportive. On account of the Authorities, however, Charles advises Sophie to stay in the hotel while he pursues the investigation -- but Sophie will not be confined! So she starts pursuing her own investigations via the hotel roof, where she rapidly collides with Matteo, an extremely feral child who claims ownership of the Paris roofs and Does Not Want want Sophie intruding.

But of course eventually Sophie wins Matteo over and is welcomed into the world of the Rooftoppers, Parisian children who have fled from orphanages in favor of leaping from spire to steeple, stealing scraps and shooting pigeons (but also sometimes befriending the pigeons) and generally making a self-sufficient sort of life for themselves in the Most Scenic Surroundings in the World. The book makes it quite clear that the Rooftoppers are often cold and hungry and smelly and the whole thing is no bed of roses, while nonetheless fully and joyously indulging in the tropey delight of secret! hyper-competent! child! rooftop! society!!

The book as a whole strikes a lovely tonal balance just on the edge of fairy tale -- everything is very technically plausible and nothing is actually magic, but also, you know, the central image of the book is a gang of rooftop Lost Kids chasing the haunting sound of cello music over the roof of the Palais de Justice. The ending I think does not make the mistake of trying to resolve too much, and overall I found it a really charming experience.

December Days 02025 #00: Fool

Dec. 13th, 2025 11:30 pm
silveradept: A green cartoon dragon in the style of the Kenya animation, in a dancing pose. (Dragon)
[personal profile] silveradept
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

00: Fool

The Fool, in all his forms, represents unlimited potential. The Major Arcana places him at 0, the number that requires some other number than itself to provide the context of what zero means. Zero is cyclical, and represents both start and end of journey at the same time, ready to embark upon new adventure and learn, and returning and integrating what has been gathered so that the next loop goes with more information and knowledge. Zero is the first index value, which is a thing you have to learn and remember when working with computers. Humans generally start from one when they count, because zero holds no intrinsic value to them. (Zero is actually a fairly abstract mathematical concept, despite being crucial to most operations. I think its only rival for importance and many-faceted-ness in mathematics is one.)

Unlimited potential describes infants and children very well, since their brains are in their most plastic states, learning and absorbing the world, language, society, and how to operate their bodies in space at a phenomenal rate. Eventually, that learning rate tapers off as decisions get made about what to practice and obtain skill in, sacrificing plasticity for efficiency, but it never goes away entirely. We get all kinds of "human-interest" stories in the media about someone of a somewhat advanced age picking up and obtaining great skill in a discipline that they had no knowledge or practice in not that long ago. The entire system of athletics, whether for Olympic prizes or lucrative sport contracts, starts very young and demands both skill and discipline to rise in ranks where someone might challenge for those same athlons. And in other tracks, we see stories all about smart people doing smart things (and a fair number of stories about smart people doing things they believe are smart, but have consequences that are clear and obvious to people outside of their specific discipline.)

Carol Dweck, in the early 2000s, published a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success that introduced to us two new concepts to work with: a fixed mindset, where someone believes their intelligence is finite and there is no way of developing it further, and a growth mindset, one that believes there is development potential skills, abilities, and intelligence. This became simplified in the popular parlance and spawned a fair number of ideas about how to keep people, and especially children, out of the fixed mindset, usually centering around the idea of praising students for the effort they've put into their work rather than suggesting that they lack smarts or other fixed qualities that would make them good at things like schoolwork and the various subjects. Dweck came back to revisit these ideas with clarifications and to squash the idea that effort was the only quality that was praiseworthy in helping someone develop a growth mindset in a 2015 Education Week article. And to say that most people have a mix of fixed and growth mindsets about their skills, abilities, and applications of intelligence.

I'll say that mathematics is one of the spots where there's the easiest contrasts of fixed and growth mindsets, although there's some confounding coming from xkcd 385 that contributes to some students being steered heavily toward fixed mindsets. I mostly mention this in the context that I didn't hit my math wall until integral calculus, where I didn't fully understand how I was supposed to go about transforming an equation into forms that I could apply rules to by using the various exotic and trigonometric properties of one, as well as the occasional shuffling of various components to one side of the equation or other so that I could, again, put things into forms where rules could be applied. This makes a little more sense, because geometric proofs were the thing I disliked the most because of the way they made me go through logic and fill out what I knew from what was provided. Despite the fact that I like playing games and solving puzzles, which is the same kinds of things, just with different visuals.

But until that, and with a fair number of other subjects, I was cruising with absorption of knowledge and doing well on tests, and all was well, at least in the realms that can be measured and quantified. My second grade teacher thought I might have a learning disability, because she never saw me do work in class. She saw that the work was good and done well, but she never saw me go to work on the worksheet and finish it while she was explaining and demonstrating the concepts and procedures on the board, such that I was done and quietly reading by the time she turned back around to give us time to work on our sheets. The tests came back that my weak spot was at least one grade level above my current space, and the opportunity to pick up that I did have something affecting me was lost, because that's not what was being tested. They wouldn't have diagnosed me then, anyway, because I presented atypically for my gender presentation at the time, and there wasn't any reason to test for it. These days, I think that if someone comes back as some sort of savant or "gifted" student, you should run them through a battery to see if they have any accompanying neurospice that could cause them great grief in their future.

This ease at things that others considered difficult meant painful emotional experiences when the perfect child turned out to be human after all. And I also had at least one physical altercation in my life because I saw something as simple that someone else found difficult, and they didn't like my attitude about it. (I'm not surprised that I would have come across as arrogant about it or similar. I wasn't intending to do it that way, but I'm definitely a poster child for "What I intend and how it's received are two different things, and I'm not great at accepting that it was received differently than I intended it to be.") It makes me sensitive to the disappointment of others, and it also makes me want to avoid situations of consequence or importance, because if it's important and I fail, then the fallout is both deserved and all my fault, regardless of how the failure happened, and someone will be by to punish me for failing soon.

Dweck is trying to encourage instructors and people who are working with others to adopt the idea of the growth mindset and try to foster it in others. Not just a matter of changing feedback so that it focuses on qualities and items that can be improved or the effort put into the situation (and avoiding feedback that references fixed or intrinsic qualities like "smart"), but also providing the scaffolding and feedback that allows for growth and learning, so that the skill can be not only practiced, but practiced correctly and well. It's not enough to praise effort if the answers are still coming out wrong and there's no understanding of what's going on and where the mistakes themselves are coming from. Humans are capable of learning and doing all kinds of things, many of them remarkably complex. Instruction and repetition and refinement are generally the ways that this works, and if we're going to require all of our small humans to go to school for twelve-thirteen years of their lives, we may as well make the environment as rich in opportunities to grow as we can. (There is an entire separate post here about the ways many educational systems provide the exact opposite of this growth-rich environment, and not all of it is the fault of the instructor and the feedback they give.) While that sometimes gets tritely summed up as "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right," that reduction makes it seem much more like it's a matter of willpower rather than one of opportunity.

Many of the creative arts, and several of the scientific ones, are less about people of great inherent talent having an inspired burst and then created a masterpiece out of whole cloth using nothing more than their raw talent. Musicians rehearse, writers compose, artists have references and practice works, dancers and athletes train and practice. The skill-taste gap is real, and while some things may be easier to pick up than others, the actual limitations of the brain and body are about whether the brain can translate verbal or demonstrative instructions into body movements, and whether the body in question can perform those movements at the desired level of skill and speed. Where I think a lot of our childhood pathways fail us is that we get told early on to focus on what we're good on, and our feedback tends to be in that form. The point of the schooling system (and the university system beyond that) is to get us in a state where we can perform labor for wage, unless we are one of the lucky few capitalists where we have enough for ourselves and our work is instead making others perform labor for us for wages. Creative arts and other such pursuits might be where our desire lies, but the necessities of not starving often prevent us from fully exploring those arts and pursuits, or they twist it into something that is used for not starving instead of for exploration, practice, and attempting to grasp a little of the numinous. The messaging about doing what you do well, combined with the artificial scarcity of capitalism, can often put us in fixed mindsets about creative arts, because the standard warps from "will doing this make me feel like a fulfilled and whole human being?" to "can I do this well enough for other people to give me money so I don't starve?"

The Fool and the concept of Beginner's Mind are intertwined with each other. Approaching any situation, including existing in a body of matter, with the curiosity of someone who doesn't know anything about the situation, but is interested in learning about it, or observing it and letting it move on, is to approach something with the greatest potential for growth. By shedding as many preconceptions as possible about the thing being approached, the full realm of possibility opens up before you. Admittedly, sometimes conceptions of things come with experience, and that's useful to bring in. Not approaching something with an expectation of how it will turn out, but being prepared in case it does go a way that you have experienced before. Zen, and its famed koans, and much of the practice of it revels in contradiction. Practicing meditation is so that you can get to where you already are. Sitting and observing the world as it goes by, without chasing after any one thing, lets the mind realize the impermanence of all things, the great constructions that take place within our very selves. Knowing about it makes it easier to jettison the whole thing and to practice approaching each moment of life as it is, rather than what it will be, or what it was, and without the structure of preconceptions clouding reality. It always seems impossible until it is done, and Zen tends to work toward the sharp flash of insight when it stops being a theoretical and starts being a practical. In response to another person saying they wanted to become a monk to "deepen their practice," a monk starts laughing and says the person seeking to become a monk already is one, and that there is no deeper to the practice of Zen, just the one level. The one, seemingly-impossible-until-insight level.

We see breakthroughs like this happen all the time with small ones and ourselves. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense, and then it does. With enough time, practice, and instruction, some things that were thought to be limits aren't, and it's not that the person is stupid, it's that they didn't have the right frame to work with. Or not enough opportunity to practice and refine. Or a low-stakes situation where they could get over the anxiety about it needing to be perfect or sale-worthy and instead focus on doing the actual practice.

There are going to be limits, where some things just won't happen, or be comprehensible, no matter how much good instruction and practice we get. I suspect, however, that most people don't actually reach their true limits on most things in their lives, because they don't get the opportunity to see where those true limits are. Many of the stories that appear in this and other series where I talk about myself are stories where I thought I wasn't "good at" something, but I could practice it and approach it in a Fool-ish way, and now it's (marginally) better than it was before. Because of the experiences my brain has had around praise and punishment, saying I have expertise in things is unlikely, but demonstrating that I have it is routine. And it's tempting to have a fixed mindset about things that are difficult, because I spent so much of my life with things that were not difficult to me. Letting myself overgeneralize into the belief that I used all my skill points on these things and there are none left over for anything else is an easier thing to believe, rather than it being a matter of time and practice. You'd think that being an information professional, where the formal training you go through is much more about learning underlying concepts and methods that then get put to use in specific situations, would make it easier for me to recognize and dismiss the fixed mindset, but, alas, brains. The best I can do is continue to be a Fool when I recognize the need for it.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
I was a bit surprised to come across this as Hartwell wasn't really the go-to editor where women's SF was concerned. An interesting snapshot of SF in a sixteen-year period. The end is the fall of the American republic. Not sure what was significant about 1984.

Read more... )

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