badly_knitted: (Get Knitted)
[personal profile] badly_knitted posting in [community profile] get_knitted

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.


This Week's Question (courtesy of [personal profile] cora): What was your last project that got put into "time out" and why?


If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!



oursin: George Beresford photograph of Marie of Roumania, overwritten 'And I AM Marie of Roumania' (Marie of Roumania)
[personal profile] oursin

Or words to that effect.

Anyway, general sense of Point Thahr, Misst, in this piece: Can I learn to be cool – even though I am garrulous, swotty and wear no-show socks?

Mind you, and perhaps this is a generational thing, I murmur, thinking of dark jazz cellars and so on, I so do not associate 'cool' with:

Cool people are desirable and in demand; others want to be them or be with them. That social clout readily converts into capital as people buy what you’re selling, hoping it will rub off on them.... A much-publicised paper recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that cool people are seen as possessing six attributes: they are extroverted, open, hedonistic, adventurous, autonomous and powerful.

WOT.

And further on, we have an interview with somebody author of article considers Peak Cool:

[S]tudying fashion in London, she learned how to talk her way into fashion week events, pretending she was “supposed to be there – like, no doubt about it”, she says, eyes glinting. She then parlayed that talent for networking into styling and creative consulting work. “All the coolest people I know are hustlers,” Delaney says. “If you’ve just had it given to you, then it’s not that cool.”

Hustlers??? The truly cool do not hustle.

Perhaps this strikes me as particularly Not Getting It because I have just been reading Eve Babitz?

And IMHO, you do not 'learn' to be cool: if you are cool, what you do is imbued with coolth, even if it doesn't tick the obvious boxes.

Crafts - October 2025

30 Oct 2025 19:01
smallhobbit: (Floral SAL)
[personal profile] smallhobbit
Here's November's Mouse SAL:

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!

Thankful Thursday

30 Oct 2025 19:18
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

  • The return (yesterday) of my housemates. In large part because I am back to taking care of two cats in one room, rather than four cats in three rooms on two floors.
  • Dishwashers. I don't think I've ever mentioned dishwashers, but they are certainly worthty of gratitude.
  • Along those lines, having a clothes washer and dryer that I can get to without having to leave the house/apartment/wherever-I'm-living.
  • My trusty Edirol UA-25 audio interface. NO thanks to the flaky USB connector on my laptop.
  • Finding out that the biopsies taken at my gastroscopy all came out normal. They checked for several things which I don't have to worry about now.

A Reminder re: Politics

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

Update

30 Oct 2025 10:49
fuzzyred: Me wearing my fuzzy red bathrobe. (Default)
[personal profile] fuzzyred
I hesitate to call this a weekly update, but here I am, posting again. I'm not sure what it is, but posting has felt really difficult lately, so I've missed a lot of Thursdays. Things are going relatively well in my corner of reality though, so that's a good thing.

I've kept up with Duolingo and I haven't done too poorly with staying on top of the dishes and all of the falling leaves. Yoga has been so-so, probably around 75% of my intended goal; not terrible, but not as good as I'd like. I have read three books this month, which I'm really pleased with, but I think I may have forgotten about my flute practice. I've also had a rather hard time tracking my daily tasks lately, so I feel like I'll have to make a call to either remedy that or ditch it; I'm not sure which yet.

My birthday was earlier this month, and I had a lovely get together with some friends and family. I've also had a decent chance to hang out with my good friend and my boyfriend. It's mostly been small things, like lunches and going to a local national park, but sometimes those are the best kind of days. I need to make more time to see my family and to do more things with my friends, but I seem to struggle the most with making time for everything, especially if it means less time to do what I want (even if I want to do *both* things).

Something I've realized lately is that I don't have time for nearly as many hobbies as I'd like to. I'm not great at switching between things, so I'm likely to binge one hobby (say reading) and ignore the others (e.g. puzzles or knitting) in the meantime. I would love to be able to make time to do all of them at once, but I'm not sure how to make that happen. I'm not sure I *can* make that happen. It's not a problem, necessarily, it just means that I can't do as many things as I'd like in as short a time frame as I'd like. It also extends to not being able to pause the hobby/fun thing I'm doing to do "necessary" things, like dishes or yard work, or visiting family. I'd like to get better at managing my time and juggling my tasks, but so far, I don't have any ideas on how to make that happen.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep working on my goals as best I can, and I'm going to try to prioritize things I'd like to get done before the holiday season.

I hope you all are doing well and I hope to talk to you again soon! :D
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

(no subject)

30 Oct 2025 09:45
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] boxofdelights!

D.O.P.-T.

29 Oct 2025 23:55
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
The house I mentioned in this entry sold for the asking price in double-quick time; under offer by the end of the first weekend. Another Tesla owner.
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.


**********


Link
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Boo.

(Wait, and also nearly Halloween! Boo!)

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


Read more... )

Home from Alaska

29 Oct 2025 22:25
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
We are back in Sunny California tm.  Unfortunately I came down with M's cold a couple of days before we left.  It is a really vicious bug.  I never left the condo on Monday.  Got up at 3:30am Tuesday after no real sleep and went to catch our plane. Staggered in here and went to sleep.  Today has been bed rest interspersed with 5 or 10 minutes every couple of hours of cleaning up and watering. Sigh. Tonight I'm feeling a tiny, tiny bit better so hopefully tomorrow I can get up and do things.  My list keeps getting longer. 

Chena came off the flight her usual cheerful self and is clearly happy to be back home. I think she will miss our walks out in dog friendly Alaska parks.  Goodness there are a lot of dogs in that city!

I have my ETS dates for this year.  I will have obstacle competitions on April  25 & 26 and October 17 & 18Between now and then Carrie and I will try and do an Obstacle Fun Day once a month. I'm really hoping to do one in a week or two, and one in early Dec, but Jan and Feb might be too rainy.  Maybe tomorrow I'll make up some obstacle sheets for Fun Days. That is a nice quiet thing to do. 

(no subject)

29 Oct 2025 21:15
skygiants: Utena huddled up in the elevator next to a white dress; text 'they made you a dress of fire' (pretty pretty prince(ss))
[personal profile] skygiants
The other Polly Barton-translated book I read recently was Asako Yuzuki's Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, which I ended up suggesting for my book club on account of intriguing DW posts from several of you.

Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.

After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.

This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension spoilers I suppose ) But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.

Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.

It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!

wednesday reads and things

29 Oct 2025 19:04
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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