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Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile
Title is pretty self-explanatory. This was an interesting read.

Miss Morton and the Missing Heir
I was worried this series might be winding up, but it looks like there will be more. I prefer mysteries where the protagonist is more proactive about solving the case, whereas these ones it's definitely more of a "murder happens around the MC and she happens to make some discoveries" rather than really actively wanting to solve it herself, but I do enjoy the series.

A Death in Tokyo
Another Detective Kaga mystery. I am enjoying these. Sadly, it seems there's only one more translated in English, and the Japanese ones are not available as ebooks, so I won't be reading any more any time soon. (It's something to consider looking for on our next trip to Japan, I guess. Might pick some up if I can find them for cheap.)

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons
Humorous fantasy book about a young man who works as a dragon exterminator in a world where dragons are pests that infest peoples houses like rodents and gets involved in a much larger dragon-slaying quest after being summoned to clean up the local castle. I picked this up at a Little Library because of the title. It's written by the author of The Last Unicorn, which I have neither read nor seen the movie of, though I know it's a classic. This was a fun read, so I might check out some of his (numerous) other books at some point.

My Home Hero vol. 10-12

torachan

1. The rain has definitely arrived. I was able to get out and take a walk this morning during a break in the rain (and it didn't seem to have been very heavy before then anyway), but once I got home, it started raining and I wasn't able to go out in the garage to do my morning exercise (and puzzle time). It rained pretty steadily on my way to work, but wasn't pouring when I arrived, so I was able to get in the building without getting too wet. According to Carla, it rained off and on throughout the day, though she was able to get out for a little walk this afternoon. When I left work, it wasn't raining, and I thought maybe if it still was dry when I got home, we could take our evening walk before any further rain, but alas, it started raining almost as soon as I got out of the parking lot and only got heavier and heavier as I got closer to home. It's been raining pretty hard all evening, though I was able to get out to the garage for a bit when there was a short break, so I was able to use the exercise machine today. Still hoping there might be another break long enough to take another walk later, but we may have to skip it tonight. It's supposed to rain for the whole next week, with a couple maybe less rain days in the middle, so we'll see how this goes. (A bit bummed that it's going to be too rainy to make Disneyland pleasant tomorrow, because it's the start of the holiday season and we want to try to new foods, but we're hoping to go Sunday as that should have some less rainy periods.)

2. So glad it's the weekend. I'm making progress on stuff at work, but feeling stressed and blah about the project as a whole and just ready for a break.

3. It's payday today and when I went to pay bills I found that the air miles credit card suddenly charged me a membership fee. It had no membership fee when we signed up, but apparently that was just for the first year. Since discovering that the miles don't work well for a trip to Japan, the only thing they're useful for is Carla's occasional domestic trips to visit family, but it's not worth keeping the card if there's a fee. I checked the statement and it said you can get a refund for the fee if you cancel your card within 30 days of the fee being charged, so thankfully today was only ten days and I was able to cancel. Hopefully I will indeed see the charge reversed soon.

4. Gemma!

james_davis_nicoll

Outgunned's task resolution system involves rolling six-sided dice and looking for sets.

Some explanation behind a cut.

( Read more... )

wordpresstrac_feed

Posted by SergeyBiryukov

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/61247

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/61247/1763158271120505

Coding Standards: Cast base_convert() to an integer before arithmetic operations.

Follow-up to [35477], [53104], [56101].

Props justlevine. See #64238.

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/61247

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/61247/1763158271120505

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3168/

We're adding some industrial flypaper to minimize reflection or scattering of customers who might complain.

https://xkcd.com/3168/

cosmolinguist

I am endlessly amused that V and my mom have the same birthday. This is all the proof I need that astrology is unreliable: I could hardly imagine two more different people.

V liked the present I got for them, a t-shirt that says "All done" on it, under a sheet ghost who is apparently doing the bsl sign for that thing? I didn't even know that, V told me. I already thought sheet ghost (which they love) plus sentiment they find very relatable was good enough, but they're even more delighted with it than I expected.

And the flowers I ordered for my mom actually did turn up (doing this kind of thing internationally when you're sending them to the middle of nowhere is always an ordeal and I had to use a new company this year so I worried)!

Mom sent me an email thanking me. I even got what was clearly meant to be a photo attached, but is instead a two-second video of the flowers sitting on their kitchen counter. Which is even cuter if anything.

(I only get like one photo from my parents a year, because in between they forget how to attach them to emails.)

cmcmck

One of the many castles in the Welsh Marches and an impressive one!

Making our way in:

( More pics! )

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: 'ereabouts

languagehat_feed

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/opening-the-black-box-of-eebo/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18690

A new Digital Scholarship in the Humanities article by Eetu Mäkelä, James Misson, Devani Singh, and Mikko Tolone (open access) examines Early English Books Online (EEBO):

Abstract

Digital archives that cover extended historical periods can create a misleading impression of comprehensiveness while in truth providing access to only a part of what survives. While completeness may be a tall order, researchers at least require that digital archives be representative, that is, have the same distribution of items as whatever they are used as proxies for. If even this representativeness does not hold, any conclusions we draw from the archives may be biased. In this article, we analyse in depth an interlinked set of archives which are widely used but which have also had their comprehensiveness questioned: the images of Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the texts of its hand-transcribed subset, EEBO-TCP. Together, they represent the most comprehensive digital archives of printed early modern British documents. Applying statistical analysis, we compare the contents of these archives to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a comprehensive record of surviving books and pamphlets in major libraries. Specifically, we demonstrate the relative coverage of EEBO and EEBO-TCP along six key dimensions—publication types (i.e. books/pamphlets), temporal coverage, geographic location, language, topics, and authors—and discuss the implications of the imbalances identified using research examples from historical linguistics and book history. Our study finds EEBO to be surprisingly comprehensive in its coverage and finds EEBO-TCP—while not comprehensive—to be still broadly representative of what it models. However, both of these findings come with important caveats, which highlight the care with which researchers should approach all digital archives.

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is 2-fold. First, we aim to show, with major datasets often used for digital scholarship, that the collection history and composition of datasets matter, and cannot be ignored when doing research without jeopardizing the validity of results. Second, by demonstrating this principle in a descriptive manner across various dimensions of interest (including temporal, geographical, and linguistic coverage), we also wish to offer a solution: a series of practical guides for users of these datasets, with which they can make informed decisions about which imbalances they need to account for, and how. While this paper’s analyses of composition and its consequences will benefit users of the datasets of Early English Books Online (EEBO n.d.) and EEBO-TCP (n.d.) specifically, our guides offer a template which is readily usable for other collections, as evidenced by our sister publication on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Tolonen, Mäkelä, and Lahti 2022).

It looks like a valuable read for anyone who uses those archives. Thanks, Leslie!

https://languagehat.com/opening-the-black-box-of-eebo/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18690

sholio

christmas book cover with a couple, falling snow, small town

It is free book time again! This is a Christmas romance, a full length novel unrelated to my other series (though obviously it has shifter-romance-style werewolves in it). The link will work until the book goes live on Amazon on the 21st.

This book went through heavier rewrites than my books normally do, so please let me know if you notice any typos or inconsistencies and I will try to fix them!

As always, no obligation, but feel free to download and enjoy.

Free download from Bookfunnel:
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/1c4ety8smh

prisca posting in

fic_promptly

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brithistorian

One of the magazines I read is Korea Magazine, published by the Korean Ministry of Sports, Culture, and Tourism.[^1]. Yesterday I was reading the July 2025 issue[^2] and I encountered an interesting article which reminded me of the quote which I used as the title for this post.[^3]

You know how towns have festivals highlighting whatever product the town is famous for? You know: Crawfish festival, potato festival, mullet festival, and so on. Well, apparently the South Korean town of Boryeong is famous for their mud, to the point that they have a festival for it.

Once you get past the oddity of having a festival about mud, it's actually a good story that other places[^4] could benefit from: Boryeong was previously a coal-mining town, then when the mines closed in the early 1990s, they needed some other product to give the town a reason to exist. They discovered that the mud in the flats around the town was rich in bentonite and germanium, both of which are apparently beneficial for the skin, and so Boryeong went into the mud business. And now the mud festival, originally organized to promote the mud business, has become big enough to become an industry of its own, with mud-based entertainment opportunities, live music, and Korean music shows coming out to film episodes at the festival. The mud festival is now big enough to attract international visitors to Boryeong, most of whom would almost certainly not have even heard of Boryeong without the festival, much less have gone there. "Famous for our mud," indeed.

[^1] It used to be a free paper magazine, but now it's strictly an e-magazine.

[^2] I read a lot of magazines, but except for The Nation I don't read any of them in anything like a timely manner.

[^3] For those of you who don't recognize it, it's from My Cousin Vinny, which I highly recommend if you haven't watched it yet.

[^4] I'm looking at you, West Virginia.

starwatcher posting in

ebooks

https://earlybirdbooks.com/deals/best-ebook-deals

Filter genres and booksellers at top left.

sanguinity

Kelley Armstrong, Death at a Highland Wedding (2025)

Latest novel in the Rip Through Time series, in which a Vancouver B.C. police detective finds herself transported to 1870 Edinburgh, where she falls in with an undertaker who does forensic pathology work on the side, and they solve crimes together. This one is something like novel 5 in the series (with several additional novellas).

I wrote the... *checks AO3 to confirm* ...yes, still the only fic for Mallory and Gray (the Canadian detective and the Scottish undertaker). And every year since I wrote it, I know when a new novel has been published because there's a small influx of readers who turn to AO3 to self-medicate for the fact that Mallory and Gray still haven't gotten together yet. So I already knew from this year's comments that they don't get together in this book, either!

AND YET.

AND YET. (spoilers)

Gray proposes a marriage of convenience, Mallory turns it down because she's holding out for a love match, Gray begins to say something about maybe in time she will develop feelings for him -- but cannily phrased, so that she doesn't realize HE ALREADY HAS feelings for HER, and she storms out. AND THEN. He writes her a letter explaining all! Which she doesn't get because of murder mystery shenanigans! Which is very Jane Austen of him, but he NEVER REWRITES THE LETTER, NOR CONFESSES WHAT WAS IN IT, and we're left with them deciding on the last page that if they can't come up with a better option by the time his sister gets married, he and Mallory will do a marriage of convenience after all -- WHICH IS VERY PINING IDIOTS OF BOTH OF THEM AND I WOULD GO AND BITCH TO THE ONLY PERSON ON AO3 WHO WROTE FIC ABOUT THEM. EXCEPT THAT PERSON IS ME. SO HERE I AM. BITCHING TO YOU.

Yes, I'll read the next book in the series. No, they still won't have gotten together. Yes, I'll be as mad about it as I am right now. ARGH. (

grrlpup finds my frustration very amusing.)

E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), The Moccasin Maker (1913)

I have the impression that if I was Canadian I might have been more familiar with Johnson before this, as she was an early light on Canada's literary scene. She was more famed for her poetry than her stories, but I first heard of her because Chelsea Vowell (Metis) recommended the story "A Red Girl's Reasoning", which is included in this collection.

Johnson was mixed race herself, and a fair number of these stories feature protagonists in mixed-race marriages, sometimes happy, sometimes not. A lot of her characterizations are idealized, but I found the stories entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. I very much enjoyed how often she centered indigenous women, and how she routinely insisted on their agency and dignity -- "A Red Girl's Reasoning" is a prime example.

I also enjoyed that chinuk wawa made the occasional appearance! Johnson lived her later life in Vancouver, British Columbia, which was within the region in which chinuk was commonly spoken. Her use of the language is a little different than what I was taught down here, but still entirely comprehensible to me. (And for people unfamiliar with chinuk wawa, she explains the terms that can't be deduced from context).

Warning for those who check out the Gutenberg edition: the included foreword about Johnson is as racist as all get out.

Rachel Poliquin (illus. Nicholas John Frith), The Superpower Field Guide: BEAVERS (2018)

Breathless, dynamic, humorous, chock-full-of-facts middle-readers book about why beavers are extraordinary. I learned a bunch of stuff, and have to agree: beavers are extraordinary! The illustrations are in a deft, mid-twentieth-century cartooning style that I found charming. Will definitely check out other books in the series.

minoanmiss

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Current Mood: inspired

yhlee

This one's going to

helen_keeble. :)

wordpresstrac_feed

Posted by jorgefilipecosta

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64254#comment:3

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64254#comment:3/1763138879703375

Reopening for backport.

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64254#comment:3

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64254#comment:3/1763138879703375

wordpresstrac_feed

Posted by jorgefilipecosta

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64252#comment:3

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64252#comment:3/1763138785328032

Reopening for backport to 6.9.

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64252#comment:3

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64252#comment:3/1763138785328032

brithistorian

For as long as I can remember, I've disliked sleep. It seems like the biggest waste of time there could possibly be. I've used sleep as an argument against intelligent design — not necessarily against "design," but at the very least against "intelligent": Designing a mechanism that has to be shut down for at least 1/3 of its lifespan in order to function doesn't strike me as a very good idea. Combine this with my perfectionist/workaholic tendencies and you end up with someone who goes full tilt until they just can't anymore, at which point I end up going to bed several hours early, regardless of what I'm leaving undone, because I just physically cannot stay awake any longer.

I know it's not the healthiest way to do things, but I just can't seem to help myself, and until they come up with a chemical substitute for sleep that has fewer side effects than meth or cocaine, well. . . there I am. Or, well, there I was. As we were driving home from the dentist yesterday, A. came up with a way to weaponize my perfectionism against me: Make rest a quantifiable plan/goal for me to work toward (quantifiable both so that I can be sure that I'm doing it and also so that I can know when I've done it enough and don't have to do it anymore). She managed to get me to commit to two 10-minute meditations a week along with one night a week where I don't write (as writing is the last thing I do every day, so it often delays my bedtime). She tried to get me to commit to two meditations and two nights of not writing, I tried to talk her down to two meditations and one night where I try not to write, and this is what we settled on. I'm willing to concede that it's possible that taking this additional rest will make me so much more productive in the time that I'm not resting that I won't resent the time spent resting. On the other hand, if 52 years of sleeping almost every night hasn't reconciled me to the necessity of sleeping. . .

oursin

I don't think we actually have to claim she invented science fiction, because to the best of my recollection and without going and looking it up, various people in the C17th were doing similar things. Also, honestly, why can we not claim women among the Great Eccentrics of History? What we like about Margaret Cavendish is that she appears to have heartily embraced this identity rather than having it plonked upon her by a judgemental world: The Duchess Who Invented Science Fiction.

Though I am slightly muttering under my breath about the women of the time who were also Doing Science and Being Intellectual in a rather less flamboyant fashion e.g. Lady Ranelagh, and indeed women in the Evelyn circle....

***

Quiet persistence and a lucky combination of first husband dying after a few years of marriage and sympathetic second husband (see also Mrs Delany): Mary Somerville – the first scientist - she taught Ada Lovelace, plus she lived to be 92. (You know, I am sorry for those women in science who died tragically young, but we hear a lot less about the ones like Dorothy Hodgkin who had a long and spectacularly effective career in crystallography while suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and actually GOT THE NOBEL. I also mark her up for persistence in humanitarian concerns.)

***

Okay, Amy Levy did die, by her own hand, distressingly young: but her personal archive, up till now in private hands, has now been acquired by the University of Cambridge Library: The archive of enigmatic 19th-century writer Amy Levy has a new home at Cambridge University Library

cakewrecks_feed

Posted by Jen

https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/what-could-go-wrong-2025

I've often thought the "sex-reveal cake" trend was fraught with peril, and today's wreck is a good example of why.

In case you haven't heard of it, the reveal cake has either pink or blue icing hidden inside, depending on the baby's sex - but the kicker is, the parents bring that info sealed from their doctor to the bakery, so the cake is how they find out if they're having a boy or a girl.

So...you're trusting a baker to correctly communicate your baby's sex?

Gee, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

[whistling innocently]

Happily Kevin S. and his wife already knew they were having a boy, but for fun they decided to send a reveal cake to his parents to break the news. As is typical, they asked for it to be white on the outside and decorated with pink and blue polka dots, plus maybe a few question marks. Then they asked for blue icing inside the cake.

When the special order arrived at Kevin's parents' house, this is what they found:

o.0

And to think: someone looked at this and thought, "Yeah, that's what the customer wanted."

(John says you should read that cake out loud. So, go on. DO EET!)

Still, as baby cake trends go, it could always - ALWAYS - be worse:

...and frequently is. *sigh*

Thanks to Kevin and Stephanie F. for that revealing slice of humor.

*****

This book has over 2,000 5-star reviews and looks absolutely hysterical, definitely bookmark it for the new parents in your life:

How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill

*****

And from my other blog, Epbot:

https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/what-could-go-wrong-2025

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Happy birthday Wendy Carlos too

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Opening the Black Box of EEBO.

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Friday, November 14 - Challenge Week 7, Last Day

Yep, we're famous for our mud

Big ebook sale, Nov 14th, till midnight.

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