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He was on his way out of the building, so I only had time to ask Johnny Knoxville two questions.

First, to whether he's got any plans on releasing a collection of his writings: he's been talking to people he knows about it, so while it's not a definitive answer, the possibility remains open.

Second, to what Muppet adaptation of classic literature he'd like to star in: Wuthering Heights. He didn't say what role he'd take, but there's few that wouldn't be worth full ticket price.

The Museum of the Moving Image screened Jackass: Best and Last, and I signed up for a seat and got in. As is true with every Jackass movie, it's best seen in a packed theater where everyone's laughing hard enough to hurt and having the time of their lives. The Q&A after had Knoxville say gravity was his medium. Jeff Tremaine and Spike Jonze spoke also, about musical cues and levels of trust and pranks played when the cameras weren't rolling. Afterwards, there was wine and cheese and little sandwiches, and just enough time for me to ask Johnny Knoxville two questions before leaving for the night.

I also had a moment to ask Tremaine if he planned on producing more documentaries and found he's working on one right now and that he deeply enjoys doing those. I told him I was sure the world would open itself up to him, then excused myself when some other people came up for selfies. Me, I didn't bother with pictures. I have the ticket stub and my answers as mementos, and they're more than enough to make me happy.

Current Mood: touched
Current Music: Make Your Own Kind Of Music - Cass Elliot

petrea_mitchell

Tips for international travel to cons. (Mostly tips for any international travel at all.)

dine

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petrea_mitchell

Remember when I said I expected cherries to be $10 a pound at the farmers' market? Well, technically I'm wrong: the place that sells them by the pound has them at $9.99. Not using whole dollars is very unusual at the farmers' market, but in this case I guess they really, really didn't want to add that extra digit.

hannah

It's been very nice having the Knicks as a conversation topic the last couple of days. I know it won't last beyond this coming week or so, but for now, it's a pleasant feeling to be able to ask pretty much anyone about it and know it'll be responded to in a positive way.

Piggybacking off my mom's Netflix account to work through some sub-par movies I still want to see is usually enough to work through less-than-stellar lunches, but sometimes it's too much for even a great movie to distract me from what I'm eating. I managed something else for the next couple of days out of the canned goods I had around, so I'm only slightly disappointed. So it balances out.

Of more interesting note, I killed a cockroach last night. I'm not wondering how it got into my bathroom - it's New York City - and had a moment of trying to catch it that had me saying, "Oh, yeah, you can fly" before I trapped and presumably suffocated it with foam cleaning spray. I say "presumably" because I used an old plastic container to scoop it up and throw it out the window. It might still be alive out there. I haven't gone to check. If I'd seen it anywhere else in my building, I doubt I'd have even thought about killing it, large an insect as it was. But in my apartment, especially my bathroom, I'm not ceding even the minuscule inches it took up.

Current Mood: complacent
Current Music: Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp - Mercury Rev

dine

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thornsilver

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jesse_the_k

Since my last update, there’s been welcome climate change. We’ve been training him to ignore sudden noise and movement — I deploy some freeze-dried beef liver at the same moment MyGuy stomps or talks loudly or generates air pressure changes. Out on walks he rarely reacts to cars or analog bikes.

The best news is Shadow is actively seeking our approval.

The black haze of hair at the foot of my recliner proves the time he spends looking for my love. (Luckily for all of us, I can independently wield our analog carpet sweeper to expose the blue-green carpet again — so this happy interaction doesn’t increase deployment of the Ugly Vacuum Monster.)

In the past month, he’s begun to rest his chin on my knees. Today two remarkable events: his silky soft chin anchored my right foot, which MyGuy captured for the ages:

( click for pic )

Later he sidled up to MyGuy for attention, lay down in sphinx pose, and then permitted MyGuy to roll him on his side and stroke his back and side.

dine

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duskpeterson

The semi-attached bedchamber I mentioned before is assigned to the Chara To Be – that is, the heir to the Chara.

For centuries, no women except the Consort and the High Lord's wife have lived in the East Wing of the Chara's palace. Any children of the Chara and the High Lord have been raised elsewhere in the palace. The current High Lord visits his children daily, often spending entire evenings with them.

The one exception to the rule against families dwelling in the East Wing is that, upon reaching the age at which he can read, the Chara To Be is moved to the bedchamber directly next to his father's quarters, so that he can begin to learn the law. He is tended by servants and, in recent decades, by a tutor assigned to him. The tutor lives elsewhere in the East Wing; however, the Chara To Be may enter the Chara's quarters at any time, and he is permitted to spend time playing with the scribe-boys across the hall. He is thus less isolated than were earlier Charas To Be: young boys who were expected to quietly read law books all day.

The previous Chara To Be is now Chara. He is young enough that he has not yet married, but presumably he will do so and will install his own heir in the bedchamber.

The bedchamber is guarded by the same men who guard the Chara. Do not approach that door in the corridor.

[Translator's note: The Ambassador first came to know the Chara To Be's chamber during the period of Re-creation.]

dine

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petra

( Yelling (positive) )

Current Mood: charmed
Current Music: I tried to write you the prettiest song in the world

petrea_mitchell

Index, A History of the explains how scrolls were labeled in Ancient Greece:

In order to identify a scroll without having to unroll it, a small parchment tag-- essentially a name label-- would be glued to the roll so that it stuck out, displaying the author and title of the work. It was known as a sittybos, or more commonly sillybos (whence our word syllabus, which we use to describe the contents of a course, just as a sillybos indicates the contents of a scroll).

For the Romans, the tag was an index. Which leads to this:

Meanwhile, we may quibble over whether the Latin indices or the Anglicized indexes is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: sillyboi.

hannah

I heard the Knicks victory before any announcement. The whole city was screaming. In my case, the screaming was from an apartment across the hall and in the building next door, not the entire city block, but still. Plenty enough to hear. Then I saw the announcements and the victory posts, many of which were about victory celebrations. I had a few minutes of thinking I was tired, then decided: now or never.

Two blocks is enough to muffle a lot of sound, believe me. The screaming around me had died down fast, and two blocks over, the partying was still going. It was nothing compared to some of the more heavily attended areas - in my neighborhood, there were a handful of bars and a lot of people at home watching TV, rather than a lot of people at bars and a handful at home, so there weren't traffic cones being worn as hats or people jumping onto street signs. There were, however, fireworks.

Not huge Fourth of July shows, no. But fireworks just the same. I'd heard someone talking about them and knew I had to see for myself. I wandered into cheering and clapping and clapped along for a while, happy to be part of a crowd where everyone was there for the same reason, thinking if I'd missed fireworks that being there was still good.

I hadn't missed them. I might have if I'd left two minutes earlier, but I was in the right spot in the crowd to be standing next to someone setting them off. They didn't go up that high, and they didn't light up the whole sky, but they were blazing up into the night and leaving trails of sharp smoke, yellow and red and green, beautiful high-speed sounds followed by the little booms.

I've seen pictures of other parties. They looked suitably epic. However, I wouldn't have stood right next to the fireworks at those, so I wouldn't say I missed out on anything.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: nothing now

satsuma

After I bought an xteink 4 a couple weeks ago, a couple people on fedi asked for my thoughts on it, which I've attempted to collate below, now that I've broken it in a little.

For those unfamiliar the xteink 4 is an extremely small (the 4 is a reference to it's 4 inch diagonal screen) minimalist ereader produced by a chinese company which has recently gone semi-viral. The main draws are its adorably small size, minimalist featureset, and the fact that it's not affiliated with any ebook storefront so you retain control over your own files. The main drawbacks also seem to be its annoyingly small size, lack of basic features (eg. a clock or a touchscreen), and lack of affiliation with any major ebook storefront turning DRM-lockin into a major stumbling block when it comes to actually transferring your collection. If you're in the first camp you will, like me, probably enjoy it while those in the second camp will hopefully self sort out.

This is probably all the info you actually need to decide if you want one, but some more info on my personal experience under this cut for those curious

As mentioned above, I've really been enjoying it so far! It arrived like, literally the day I was packing up to leave for our annual two week vacation in the woods so I mostly just quickly threw whatever I could on it and then accepted that that would be my reading material. The portability made it really nice as a vacation device, since I could just stick it in my pocket and forget about it until I found myself bored somewhere.

While it theoretically can synch books over wifi, for my initial setup I just plugged the micro SD card into my computer which has the upside of a much faster write speed (and not having to figure out how to use a keyboard on a non-touch screen that can only be navigated with four buttons). As far as loading books went, DRM-free epubs I'd purchased where I still had the original file on my computer were extremely straightforward to load—I used Calibre's export feature which automatically creates a file tree (so all books by the same author are in one folder) but I did test and just throwing epubs in there via finder works just as well. A bit more of a challenge to do but still easy enough was books I'd purchased that were in incompatible formats (eg. .mobi). Calibre was able to convert with minimal issues, but obviously you can't just load them directly. These two categories accounted for probably 60% of my ebook collection.

Another other 35% were books where I'd either downloaded the file through iBooks storefront, or lost the original file after loading it into iBooks. However, despite the majority of my ibooks collection being DRM free books that are in .epub format, apple has done some sort of horror to their book files that render them illegible to calibre/the xteink. Many of these were public domain stuff that I can just redownload from project gutenberg or standard ebooks, but there's a few I'd really like to rescue like the murderbot series (which I know is non-DRM). So far the only information about this on the internet seems to be an unmaintained ibooks to calibre plugin on github and one shady website which claims I should just run their bash script so we're leaving this as a task for future me.

Besides the access issues, which were really more on iBooks than the xteink the other big friction point (for me) is that the xteink lacks a backlight. This upside is this does help stretch the very tiny battery further (they claim it will last for 14 days of "regular" usage but I'd run the battery down to 30% by day 7 so either crosspoint-more below-is more energy intensive than the stock OS or I was being an unusually heavy reader?) But it does mean you'll have to keep track of a reading light as well, if you're planning to use it in low light situations. I got the one xteink is selling on their site which works fine, but is a little cooler toned than I'd prefer in the evenings. If you're planning to use your reader with a reading light, I'd strongly recommend picking up a cover for your ereader as well, so you have something to clip your light to besides the screen itself.

One of the main drivers of the xteink's success is that, if you buy it direct from manufacturer, the device is completely unlocked so you can load whatever operating system you want on it. This has proven like catnip for the open source tech nerds who are buying them for all sorts of weird hobby projects like running doom. But if you're just going for no-frills usability, the go-to choice is CrossPoint. It extends the core software in a few key ways (the missing feature from the stock software which pushed me into downloading was that I couldn't figure out chapter navigation. Still not sure if it's literally not an option or just hidden in some obscure place I didn't think to check?).

Crosspoint also offers more customization than the stock OS does on a number of fronts including a greater variety of UI themes & the ability to use fonts loaded to your SD card. The second one is key for cnovel fans—while crosspoint has been working on adding UI translations and general language feature support (RTL language rendering is a recent addition), the xteink 4's flash memory (the stuff actually built into the device for the operating system, as opposed to on the SD card) is just too small to store extensive multi-language font support. So, while they target different character/language coverage sets which might work better or worse for your needs, both the stock OS and Crosspoint leave you with annoying missing character diamonds littered across any sufficiently multi-lingual text.

If you're on the fence because you're new to ereaders, its worth noting that afaik the xteink is the cheapest eink reader on the market—everyone else's "budget friendly" version is over $100 while I got mine direct from manufacturer at 10% off the list price of $69. Hopefully used/refurbished ones will start popping up at even cheaper prices once all the nerds get tired of playing with them.

petra

Outrageous Fortune (2333 words) by ThisAintBC
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slings & Arrows, due South
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Darren Nichols, Ellen Fanshaw, Maria (Slings & Arrows)
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions
Summary:

Most people stare at Darren as if he is the abyss, or perhaps a modern art installation, which is as things should be and all in all very gratifying. Maria, unfortunately, stares at Darren as if he is a misbehaving toy poodle.

New Burbage takes on a familiar tale.

*

Somehow I missed this when it was posted, despite having beta-read its inspiration. That's okay, I suppose, because it meant I could die laughing today instead of two years ago. Absolutely flipping glorious Darren Nichols voice, perfectly comprehensible if you don't know Slings & Arrows as long as you know who Martha Burns is, in due South context, and that she plays Ellen Fanshaw.

Current Mood: howling with laughter
Current Music: I am Darren Nichols. Deal with THAT.

petra

Eight o'clock: TV hour (400 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Project Hail Mary (2026), Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ryland Grace
Additional Tags: The Rachel Maddow Show - Freeform, Fuck Her Or Be Her?, All The Colors of the German Rainbow
Summary:

Dr. Ryland Grace, in academic disgrace, mopes and watches TV. It helps.

Current Mood: wistful
Current Music: Bull pucky!

petra

Kashyyyk Kennel Club-Certified Humans (1198 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chewbacca & Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo
Characters: Chewbacca, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Leia Organa, Lando Calrissian
Additional Tags: Han Solo is Chewbacca's Dog (Star Wars), Crack, Star Wars Holiday Special References, Ignores Solo: A Star Wars Story
Summary:

Chewbacca does his best to be responsible for Han's care and feeding, but the Human needs some serious obedience training, and it's hard to be a disciplinarian all the time. Maybe the princess can be a good influence.

Current Mood: woof
Current Music: I want the moon to make me howl

petra

[Podfic] There once was a princess from Alderaan (3 words) by pezzax_shenanigans
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Amilyn Holdo/Leia Organa/Rey/Rose Tico
Characters: Amilyn Holdo, Leia Organa, Rey (Star Wars), Rose Tico
Additional Tags: Limericks, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes
Summary:

Podfic of There once was a princess from Alderaan by Petra:
A limerick of sapphic persuasion.

*

Short, speedy, charming as hell.

*****

[Podfic] The man with the katanas (37 words) by Ravin_Pods
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Welcome to Night Vale, Deadpool (Movieverse)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cecil Palmer/Wade Wilson, Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Characters: Cecil Palmer, Wade Wilson
Additional Tags: Double Drabble, Stolen Kiss, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming
Summary:

Cecil's broadcast from your average cancelled Thursday.

Podfic of The man with the katanas by Petra.

*

The sound effects really make it, and I adore this podficcer's radio voice.

Current Mood: drowned in moonlight
Current Music: Or, as they say in Limerick

mific

Clean Sweep by YankingAwry, a favourite writer of mine. An AU where Shane's with the Metros and Ilya's a Janitor at Bell Centre (he and Irina having emigrated to Canada). Great writing, funny, interesting changes in both Shane and Ilya due to the AU.

Scott Hunter's Side Gig (series) by nestorius.
Most of nestorius's fics are a tad too grim for me, but these are great, although they're still a bit dark, being horror, but in a more amusing way. Scott is basically Dean Winchester when he's not playing for the NHL, and Kip turns out to be bitey, and to find Scott's side gig very hot. Ilya intermittently gets sucked into the madness, and finally Shane as well, although he immediately represses it. Extreme though the AU is it makes perfect sense with Scott's backstory. Very much recommended if you like darker stuff where only the monsters end up permanently dead. Great competency kink, too!

And

siegeofangels is writing HR! Well-written porn, with a twist:
Designated Penalty is a little like the Winners Room trope, with a League-mandated system where a "Designated Penalty" team member takes punishment for team losses, and provides a sexual reward for any player who does well. This year, the DP for the Centaurs is Shane. Siegeofangels writes this very explicit stuff in a no-nonsense style where it's all very much routine and "the way things are", and Ilya's fine with it, having been the DP himself with Boston, previously. Shane is of course very into being used and proud to "take it for the team", and the Centaurs are all lovely with him. Very hot and weirdly sweet, in a trippy idfic kind of way.

Swagger is omegaverse with Shane helping Ilya through a heat. The twist here is that Ilya's a dominant omega, and Shane's a subby service-alpha. Once again, very hot, interesting dynamics, and again with the straightforward writing, making the very cracky premise seem just another part of life.

Profile

Staying Sane While Staying Inside

August 2020

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Page Summary

hannah - End of an era.
petrea_mitchell - SMOF News, volume 5, issue 43
dine - I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else
petrea_mitchell - Left digit bias strikes again
hannah - Haven't time to settle.
dine - the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it
thornsilver - Trying to fall asleep.
jesse_the_k - Shadow Day 112: Tangible Warming
dine - Music Monday
duskpeterson - FIC: The Chara To Be's chamber (Tempestuous Tours)
dine - ice ice baby
petra - Interview with the Vampire 3x2
petrea_mitchell - Labels and linguistics
hannah - 4-1.
satsuma - Playing with the xteink 4
petra - Recommendation: Outrageous Fortune - Darren Nichols puts on a due South-inspired play
petra - Eight o'clock: TV hour - Project Hail Mary story, gen
petra - Kashyyyk Kennel Club-Certified Humans - Star Wars story
petra - Podficced - Star Wars & Deadpool/Welcome to Night Vale
mific - HR recs

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