Climate Change

Oct. 30th, 2025 03:32 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Yale study: Most Americans support climate justice — once they know what it is

Climate change is an omnipresent threat for us all, but its impact disproportionately affects non-white populations.

Inequalities stem from generations of racial injustice and colonization of Indigenous lands, contributing to ongoing marginalization and risk in BIPOC populations.

Climate justice is a movement that seeks to rectify those inequities, with the goals of reducing unequal harms of climate change, producing equitable benefits from climate solutions, and including affected communities in the decision-making process
.


Among examples of climate justice are taking steps to stop exploitative actions that worsen climate and environment, and ensuring that people have humane ways to escape environmental foreclosure.  The latter is crucial because right  now, victims of climate-driven eviction have no rights; they are classified as migrants without even the flimsy protections that refugees of war or discrimination have.  And if you look at the Dustbowl, you can see how very badly America has handled that issue in the past.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
For nearly the first time since the Cape, I slept. It required me to spend hours after midnight waiting for my body to get the unconsciousness memo and then repeat the process this morning after a doctor's office called back at the crack of business, but construction has been precluded by the recurrent nor'easter rain and it worked. The dreams were nothing to write home about, but at least I had them. And then we had a mild power outage, but still. Sleep! I could get used to it.

Problems for tomorrow

Oct. 30th, 2025 07:20 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

You ever look at all the tabs open on your work computer as you turn it off and think man, that's so much garbage that Tomorrow Me has to sort out, that poor guy, he's gonna hate me?

Had a kinda disappointing day at work today. I didn't get enough done, and next week is going to be busy so I really can't afford to do so little.

Birdfeeding

Oct. 30th, 2025 02:08 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is mostly sunny, breezy, and mild.  It drizzled yesterday.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 10/30/25 -- I planted 12 mixed crocuses around the barrel garden.

EDIT 10/30/25 -- I planted 12 Dutch irises around the yard.

EDIT 10/30/25 -- I planted 5 purple-and-white striped crocuses in the purple-and-white garden.  This concludes the currently purchased bulbs.

EDIT 10/30/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 10/30/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 10/30/25 -- I hauled a large fallen branch to the ritual meadow.

I am done for the night.

The Friday Five for 31 October 2025

Oct. 30th, 2025 03:03 pm
anais_pf: (Default)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
These questions were originally suggested by [livejournal.com profile] twirlandswirl.

1. Did you vote in your most recent applicable election? (If you're not yet old enough, do you plan to vote in the future?)

2. Have you ever protested or attended a march?

3. What political issue is the most important to you?

4. Are you a member of a party in your country? If so, which?

5. Do you ever plan to run for office?

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

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

Life with two kids: Wednesday shoes

Oct. 30th, 2025 05:45 pm
andrewducker: (Dr Who)
[personal profile] andrewducker
This morning Sophia announced, as we were about to leave the house, that she couldn't find her school shoes.

Her black school shoes.

The ones that are and integral part of her Wednesday costume. For the school Halloween disco. This evening.

Jane and I frantically tore the house apart for fifteen minutes and checked *everywhere*. Eventually we forced her, crying, to put on her trainers, promising her that if her shoes turned up we would bring them in to her.

Because we left fifteen minutes late we missed the bus. And so it was that we were halfway through the walk to school when Sophia quietly said "Oh."

And then told me that she'd just remembered that yesterday she'd come home from school in her welly boots, leaving her shoes at her peg.

You'll be delighted to hear that I didn't murder her.

A Reminder re: Politics

Oct. 30th, 2025 11:10 am
dewline: "Worst President Ever!" in Russian (Russian politics)
[personal profile] dewline
Putin has organized the automation of psychological warfare.

The Fairy of Ku-She by M. Lucie Chin

Oct. 30th, 2025 08:49 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A fairy's efforts to recover stolen arcane tools via illicit means produce spectacular calamity.

The Fairy of Ku-She by M. Lucie Chin

unpopular opinions

Oct. 30th, 2025 06:02 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
Saying that the creative process of creation/conception for a story/novel MUST START with character/goal/motivation is complete fucking nonsense. You will usually need it in the END PRODUCT (modulo weird edge cases like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men), but that doesn't have to be the inception.

cf. composing music, where this would be like saying to a composer: you MUST ALWAYS start FIRST with a melody or you MUST ALWAYS start FIRST with a harmonic progression or you MUST ALWAYS start FIRST with instrumentation etc. No??? You can start in any of a number of places and still wind up with music???

There are times you need to start with $XYZ because of the use case (if writing for a string quartet, that constrains your instrumentation, ranges, techniques).

But when writing music, I can START in ANY of these places (not a complete list) (and have done so at various points):

- instrumentation
- tempo
- time signature
- harmonic progression
- a rhythm
- a vibe
- key/mode/etc
- melody or leitmotif
- structure/form (e.g. theme and variations, ternary form)
- a transformation (e.g. diminution, retrograde)
- articulation(s) to feature
- trolling ("What if I rewrote Swan Lake's theme in 5/4?")
etc

You're not going to be able to tell which one from the RESULTING MUSIC as an end product.

For that matter, watching web/comic creators talk about story ideation is fascinating. A bunch of them start with "I drew this cool character, but who are they? what is their story?", which is absolutely not my process since I don't visualize, but it's a perfectly cromulent process!

The Accessibility Nails Collection

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:39 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

Somebody had brought their not-really-wanted nail polish to the queer social event I was at last night, encouraging people to use or take home anything they liked.

And just because I was sitting at the table near them for a while without much to do, and because I like bright colors, I ended up painting my nails. Bright yellow. (I was drawn to it because it looked like a fluorescent hi-vis yellow in the bottle. Once it was on it's "just" a nice bright primary yellow (someone else looked at it on me and said "I wore that color for a Simpsons drag show once," to give you an idea of what yellow it is), but that's still good.

I used to love nail polish, that and really chunky colorful jewelry were the only "girly" things I ever got excited about. And even then, my mom was always trying to steer me toward soft pinks and stuff and I chose more blue and green and the most "unnatural" colors.

But I haven't done my nails since before I left my old house. I was...busy, and then for a long time it felt too femme, like I struggled so much to get people to stop misgendering me, I didn't want to make that any more likely. And by the time that stopped being a concern I was well and truly out of the habit and all my nail polish that hasn't been touched in five or six years should probably be thrown away.

But here I did my nails very happily. It was nice that it didn't feel weird or feminine at all now. It just felt queer.

Also while making dinner tonight, I realized that when I'm chopping vegetables it's way easier to tell where my fingers end and the peppers or whatever begin if the ends of my fingers are bright yellow.

Not that I usually struggle with this, I'm used to doing it mostly by feel. It was weird that my eyes could help out!

That got me thinking about starting to acquire new nail polish (the old stuff I have needs to be thrown out really) based on what colors are easy for me to pick up!

The yellow has already half chipped off, so I'll have to see if there's any nail polish remover in the house that works! But this probably won't be the last time I paint my nails.

conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.


**********


Link

It's that awful time of month again.

Oct. 27th, 2025 12:10 am
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Boo.

(Wait, and also nearly Halloween! Boo!)

************


Read more... )

Write Every Day: Day 30

Oct. 30th, 2025 06:10 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
There will always be constraints—time, budget, materials and equipment. If you’re waiting for all of the roadblocks to be cleared before you begin, you might be waiting all your life. So stop waiting. Just do your best to put something into the world that wasn't there yesterday. We can do that. I hope you begin something today, maybe something you’ve been putting off or waiting on the just-right conditions for. Forget just right and try right now instead. You don’t have to know what you’re doing or how it will turn out. Just start.

– Maggie Smith, via Substack

My day 30: I added another 530 words to my WIP (and did a couple more Youtube art tutorials: a dragon and a black cat). Depending on how my arms are in a couple of hours, I might go to UK Writers' Hour and keep working on my WIP. It would be good to get it done.

One more day in October! Reminder that [personal profile] alightbuthappypen has offered to host for November.

The tally
Tally )

Day 28: [personal profile] alightbuthappypen, [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cmk418, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] the_siobhan, [personal profile] trobadora

Day 29: [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] cmk418, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora

When you check in, please say what day(s) you’re checking in for. You can join in or take a break at any time; you’re always welcome back. And please let me know if I’ve missed you.

Autumn and...another year goes by....

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:00 pm
jreynoldsward: (Default)
[personal profile] jreynoldsward

It’s a labored truism that after you’ve lived a certain number of years, time seems to speed up rather than slow down (mileage varies as to when that happens for each individual). Certainly, autumn seemed to sneak up on us this year, in part due to higher daytime temperatures. It doesn’t seem like it was that many days ago that I was still wearing T-shirts and no base layers to ride Marker. Now…while it’s the lightweight base layers, it’s still the beginning of five-six months with some sort of base layer underneath, sweater or sweatshirt on top.

Time passes, nonetheless. It’s weird to think that the husband and I are now in our eleventh year in retirement. Neither one of us really thought that we’d be living this life at this age—that was not the case for our parents. Medical advances, different jobs, not going through a world war makes a difference. That said, I know darned good and well I couldn’t keep up the pace of my younger years. Oh, the sustained effort can happen over a couple of days—and then I’m done. Not that I’m a lazybones or anything, it’s just—I get tired. The arthritis calls my name. And so on.

Part of this life is getting out into the forest to cut firewood. Yesterday, we went out for what might be the last load of this year. The chainsaw is complaining about eleven years of use, even with diligent maintenance, and while we might get one more session out of it, we might not, either. There was two inches of snow in our preferred cutting area, and the first of two controlled bull elk hunting seasons started today. We might get out again for woodcutting this year, or we might not. It all depends on our ambition and the weather.

In any case, for us, the wood harvest in fall is more about building a stockpile for next winter, not this winter. At some point we’ll stop getting out there because we’re just too old and tired for woodcutting.

Yesterday, however, was not that day. Even though we couldn’t find the one lodgepole pine we spotted at the end of our last cutting that would have made the perfect start for a big load, we still managed to find some good stuff. Nice lodgepole with pitch pockets that are good for starting fires; not so much white/grand fir. It was harder to see the good stuff on the ground because of the snow, but on the other hand, it was also easier to spot standing dead trees that we had overlooked before.

Fall is often a lot nicer for woodcutting than spring. It’s usually cooler, there’s less mud, and there are lots of opportunities for pretty pictures of autumn leaves. Yesterday was overcast with a sharp breeze that meant despite layering, we didn’t take off the layers. I took some shots with the artsy filters on my Canon Power Shot of golden tamarack against snow-covered firs and pines. Some turned out, some are…well, more material for book covers and promotions, I suppose.

#

Along with fall comes my birthday. Sixty-eight this year. Some years linger lightly, others bear a weight. For some reason sixty-eight has that resonance for me. As I said to my husband this morning, “A year and eleven months more, and I’ll have outlived my mother.”

But it’s not just that. There are some days when I catch myself after fretting about not doing enough and I have to think—I’m in my late sixties now. Sixty-eight and today I schooled my Marker horse at various gaits, including an attempt at racking. Which…I think he is doing. Either that or an extended fox-trot. He was a wee bit sparky, a wee bit on the muscle, but—he also called for me and fretted at the gate because he heard me talking to Dez and he wanted me there. Now.

I never thought I’d still be riding an energetic young horse in my late sixties. Here I am, however. Granted, he’s a safe horse moving into his full maturity at whatever age he really is (vet said seven in the spring of 2024, which would make him eight. Hard to be sure, though. Horse physical and mental maturity is really an individual thing). But still—besides the racking, I asked him to stretch out and gallop a little bit. We’ve spent most of the summer working on a slow, rocking-horse canter). Boy can move when he wants to, and today he wanted to. Which was fine. And it’s good to know that I can still gallop a horse on my sixty-eighth birthday.

#

Thinking about time passing also affects my writing, as well. I’m working on a high fantasy at the moment (yes, it will be a trilogy!) and one of the protagonists is an older man who has decided to step down from his leadership role because, well…his wives have died. One of the young women he helped raise as part of his extended family circle (in this world the terms Heartfather, Heartmother, and Heartsdaughter/Heartsson are common) has died and become a Goddess, while the other one has successfully overthrown the Big Bad Emperor (with the help of the woman who became Goddess). He has visions of the woman who is the heir to the new Empress, and…he not only wants to help his Heartsdaughter the Empress but he’s curious about this woman he keeps seeing in visions.

More than that, he grows to realize that he really, really wants to do something different with his life. He wants to matter—and it becomes clear that he wants to leave his position as Leader to his grandson, who is a rising star in his own right. He doesn’t have a reason to stay where he is, so…he’s moving on, to reinvent himself. And yeah, a lot is going to happen along the way.

#

I find it interesting that while I did have older protagonists pop up here and there when I was writing in my fifties, I really didn’t do much with them until my sixties. Part of the original Martiniere Legacy series is driven by the fact that the protagonists Ruby and Gabe are older, with a lot of life experience, and that knowledge shapes a lot of their decisions. The final book of that quartet, plus the matching individual related standalone books, ends up taking a long look at what later life can mean for different situations—including a clone whose progenitor was in his seventies, and who has inherited a lot of that man’s aging physical problems.

I’m fascinated by the places that my thought process is taking me these days. It’s definitely different from when I was younger.

Well, we’ll see what this year brings.


Today's Adventures

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:14 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we went around Charleston and Mattoon with a friend.

Read more... )

[music] Trailures and Other Fiascoes

Oct. 29th, 2025 10:18 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
I committed a mini-album on Bandcamp of Trailures and Other Fiascoes (= "failure trailers"). Hybrid orchestra instrumental music because mopey foxmoth can't sing.

(I know voice lessons exist but for medical reasons, sore throat for over a year; singing is contraindicated.)



(This is accumulated composition/production from the past few months; I'm bowing out of a bunch of things currently due to ongoing health stuff. I don't want to discuss health details further, thanks!)

Recent Reading

Oct. 29th, 2025 11:04 pm
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
[personal profile] davidgillon
 

Hidden Legacy Series, Ilona Andrews

(First trilogy reviewed here. As a quick primer, magic has existed since the mid-1800s, runs in families called Houses, led by the overpowered Primes, and mundane law enforcement mostly refuses to get involved with their feuds).

Diamond Fire

Book 3.5 as it's a novella, and Nevada Baylor, protagonist of the first trilogy, is about to marry billionaire Connor 'Mad' Rogan. But they're two wedding planners down and Nevada's middle sister Catalina has decided she's going to make this wedding work if it kills her, or if she has to kill someone else. The problem is, someone already has killing in mind, a major theft already happened, and prime suspect for that is probably one of Connor's mother's family. So it's shy, brilliant Catalina against a dozen spoiled Spanish aristos.

I like Catalina as protagonist, but I think my favourite character is the utterly irreverent Runa Etterson, a Prime specialising in poisons: "Yes, the frosting is definitely poisoned - everyone grab a spoon and dig in!"

Sapphire Flames

Catalina has now replaced Nevada as head of House Baylor and the Baylor PI agency, on the grounds it's the only way to stop Nevada working herself to death. Summoned on a mission of mercy, to lure a grieving teen off a ledge, Catalina is horrified to discover his sister is Runa Etterson, and that they are the only surviving members of their family after their mother and sister burned to death in a house fire. Runa is convinced it was murder, and as the new head of House Etterson, she wants the Baylor Agency to find out who did it. Meanwhile, her mother had her own safeguard in place, and has hired an assassin to avenge her, an assassin Catalina is horrified to discover is billionaire playboy Count Alessandro Sagredo, subject of her teenage crush. In person Alessandro is arrogant, entitled, and annoyingly, evenly shockingly competent. It's love at first hate. 

Emerald Blaze

"Holster your weapons, and step away from the monkey!"

Nine months on from Sapphire Flames and Catalina is mostly over Alessandro walking out on her in pursuit of his personal obsession. But when both she and her secret boss, the grandfatherly Linus Duncan, aka the scary Warden of Texas, are attacked by summoned creatures, Linus decides that the attacks mean Catalina needs to take point on the investigation of the murder they may relate to. Which is when Alessandro reappears, strangely stripped of his arrogance, humbled even, and swearing to protect her. Which considering the investigation means going face to face with not one, but four combat Primes, the prime suspects in the murder, and a bunch of assassins, might be just as well.

Ruby Fever

A year on from Emerald Blaze and the Speaker of the Texas State Assembly (ruling body of the Houses) has just been assassinated, while someone walked through Linus Duncan's overpowered security to leave him comatose, which means Catalina Baylor, Deputy Warden of the State of Texas at the age of 23, is on her own when it comes to who is running the investigations. But that doesn't mean she's on her own for actually getting stuff done, because she has the full assistance of her family aka House Baylor, and her fiance, Alessandro Sagredo. Plus an annoying Russian prince. And she's going to need all the help she can get, because this time it's war.


Okay, these are David-candy, and I had to ration myself by insisting I read each book twice before moving on to the next, otherwise I'd have blown through the whole double-trilogy in three days. There's a definite pattern to the two trilogies: Book 1, best of frenemies, Book 2, reconciled lovers, Book 3, partners. But Nevada and Catalina are different characters, possibly overly defined by their older sister/middle sister roles, and if their partners are both dangerous billionaire bad boys, they're at least different dangerous billionaire bad boys - Connor as a soldier and Alessandro as, well, Zorro.

They're very much about family - the Baylors start as the three sisters, their mother, their two male cousins, and Grandma Frida, all working together, but also found family, because by the time the second trilogy wraps they are up to somewhere around twenty characters considering themselves to have family ties - and all but a couple of the younger kids with fully developed characters. 

The world-building is equally good, as is the plotting, with underlying arcs binding the trilogies together. I think I caught a couple of things that were raised and not developed, but nothing major. They even covered a point in the Baylor heritage where I initially thought they'd missed the scientific implications.

Impressed.

wednesday reads and things

Oct. 29th, 2025 07:04 pm
isis: Kamala poster with text: Strong Female Character (kamala)
[personal profile] isis
What I've recently finished reading:

Europe at Midnight and Europe in Winter, the second and third of the Fractured Europe Sequence by Dave Hutchinson. The first was a reread (and again, I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten in the 10 years since I read it the first time), but I really enjoyed the SF aspect of
spoiler for the cool reveal at the end of the first book, which is explored in the second book the Community existing as a private England overlaying Europe in another dimension; the idea of the map (somehow) becoming the territory is just fascinating!
The third book went into more detail about Rudi's family background, and about how the actual mechanism of [spoiler] is basically the biggest and most important secret in the world, and about the Coureurs and their function.

I actually requested this for Yuletide, and one of my prompts was "worldbuilding - what's happening in the US?" and...one character meets with someone who has a Texas passport, so, there's a whole lot hinted at by that tiny detail right there!

What I'm currently reading:

Europe at Dawn, the finale of the series. This one feels more like various vignettes set in this universe, though I expect everything will come together eventually. I do like how the Situations that the Coureurs handle are all matter-of-fact cloak-and-dagger: a woman walks up to our POV character and says something fairly banal, and he responds with a similar sentence; when she's gone, he finds a slip of paper in his pocket with the name of a hotel in another city; he goes there and checks in, and there's another slip of paper in the bedside Bible; he finds the car with the number plate on that paper and he gets in and drives across the border and leaves it in the parking lot of a certain cafe, then he takes the train home. It's all very mysterious! and fun! (and leaves me wondering why go to all that trouble to hide things in places in so many steps, but...)

(B is reading the Fourth Wing series and enjoying it. I'm kind of gobsmacked.)

What I started watching and abandoned:

The Fall of the House of Usher, which, okay I liked the transposition to a very modern gothic story about the Sackler pharmaceutical empire a family which developed and heavily marketed an extremely addictive opioid, but I am not a fan of horror and gore and shows in which everybody is a horrible person. We lasted 3 episodes.

What I'm watching now:

Season 3 of The Diplomat, which got off to a magnificent and twisty-turny start!

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