The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
20 Nov 2025 09:09![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
A park guide's life is upended by a pandemic and her charming, idiot son.
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
Just One Thing (20 November 2025)
20 Nov 2025 08:02nanila posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
awesomeersComment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
More about Medicare
19 Nov 2025 18:45redbirdadrian_turtle talked to a different advisor (also with SHINE, like the person we talked to Monday).He told her that "CommonHealth" is a Medigap plan, which you can only enroll in if you are under 65 and on Medicare because you're disabled. They don't require you to have less than X amount of money or income, but the premiums are based on a percentage of your income, and for us would be significantly less than a standard Medigap plan. He urged her to apply by printing the form and sending it in with a cover letter saying that this is a CommonHealth application, because otherwise they might treat it as a MassHealth application, which is not what we'd be looking for.
Standard Medicare Open Enrollment ends on Dec. 7th, making this seem urgent--especially if we want to trust it to the post office--but I remembered that the letter saying my current Medicare Advantage plan won't be offered next year said I therefore have more time to choose a new plan.
So, I opened a chat window at Medicare.gov, and ran into a weird bit of terminology. Open enrollment ends on Dec. 7th, but I have a "special election period" from Dec. 8 to the end of February. The agent wanted to make clear that if I don't choose a plan by Dec. 31st, I wouldn't have Part D drug coverage or a Medicare Advantage plan.
I then asked if the special election period also applied to Medigap, and they told me that Medigap doesn't have annual open enrollment, if you don't buy it within six months after starting on Medicare the private insurance companies don't have to sell it to you. At that point, I thanked him and said that Massachusetts has different rules, and I think I need to talk to someone from the state.
Watching The Adventures of Superman
19 Nov 2025 18:37james_davis_nicoll"(...) What made you ask that?"
"Because he has compassion. He aids people in trouble. He helps the weak. "
It is possible the bad guy in The Secret of Superman has issues.
Well that was weird
19 Nov 2025 21:33davidgillon4AM-ish I wasn't asleep, and heard something which I couldn't work out if it was an aircraft or thunder.
So I popped open the bedroom window to see if it was any clearer that way, just caught the very end of it, and still couldn't tell.
I stood listening for a while, as it's rarely that quiet, and I could hear a freight train going past in the cutting down the hill - you can only really hear the trains at that time of night as otherwise they're drowned out by the traffic noise.
And then, for about 10 seconds, I heard the distinctive clip-clop, clip-clop of horse's hooves. WTF?
If you hear hoofbeats, suspect auditory illusions?
I have no idea what it actually was, but it sounded like hoofbeats. At 4AM.
Bundle of Holding: Yeld 2E
19 Nov 2025 13:59james_davis_nicoll
This new Yeld 2E Bundle presents the 2024 Second Edition of The Magical Land of Yeld, the all-ages tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Atarashi Games about young heroes (called Friends) finding their way home.
Bundle of Holding: Yeld 2E
james_davis_nicoll
Civilization has crashed, humanity may be virtually extinct, but library books must be returned to their proper facility!
The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, volume 2 by Haruo Iwamune (Translated by John Neal)
Reading Wednesday
19 Nov 2025 06:44sabotabbyCurrently reading: To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy by Jon Tattrie. You ever read a bio of someone you've never heard of? It's an interesting experience. It's kind of shameful that I hadn't heard of Charles R. Saunders until his induction into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame this year, but that's kind of the point—he died broke and unknown and was buried in an unmarked grave before his friends and fans figured out where he was and crowdfunded a memorial. He was a Black author and journalist from the US who fled the draft and eventually settled in Halifax, and he pioneered the genre of sword and soul, which is Conan-inspired stories set in fantasy Africa. Again. Hadn't heard of it. Tattrie worked with and was friends with Saunders (he was one of the aforementioned crowdfunders) so Saunders' life story is interwoven with Tattrie's investigation into what happened to him and why. He also gets a big assist from Charles de Lint (!!) who kept all of the many letters that Saunders wrote to him. I am reading this for podcast-related reasons but I'm genuinely fascinated by this story and will probably check out Saunders' novels based on this if I can find them.
Just One Thing (19 November 2025)
19 Nov 2025 08:06nanila posting in awesomeersComment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Only a little bit behind - Early November 02025
18 Nov 2025 22:48silveradeptEarly hominids appear to have not only used tools, but passed that knowledge down through the generations. Which will evolve the understanding of the earliest ancestors of the human species, as science is wont to do.
If you haven't received a flu vaccine for this year, it might be a good idea to do so, even if the protection might not be ideal because of a new mutation showing up after the formulation had been decided.
The complete history of the nation must be preserved, and that means a lot of places are trying to keep and digitize the collections of Black newspapers and broadsheets they have in their collections.
Also, Dick Cheney is no longer able to create a more terrible world, having died at 84 years of age. If his name is invoked from here on out, it should be as a warning not to do what he did.
( There's more inside, about people who have made cruelty the point and disclaim any responsibility of care for what they've created. )
Last out for tonight, an eyesore with a bad caricature and Randian-libertarian messaging is now providing a better message, since the land and the billboard were bought by the local Native nation.
And research now suggests that humans do instinctively work to help each other, rather than passively watch others be hurt, especially in emergency situations.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Creatively Describe your Employment History
18 Nov 2025 19:08flamingswordgenderjumper said, “There's a meme I cannot easily share here about neurodivergent folks having eclectic career tracks and a friend inspired me to do my own list of occupations.” And now I am sheeping my own way along this meme! Childcare Lackey
Unpaid Tutor
Freelance Prankster
Librarian’s Assistant (volunteer)
File Clerk
Fried Chicken Distributor
Magic the Gathering Referee / Comic Salesperson
Cancer Care Volunteer
Coffee Slinger
Sword Shop Assistant
Call Center Wage Monkey
Copying Machine Slavey
Professional Person-Rubber
Volunteer Phone-Banker
Bath Product Artisan
Professional Nose
Short-Lived Booth Babe
Scientific Interviewee
Server Maintenance Codemonkey
QUILTBAG Community Moderator (unpaid)
Autism Research Autodidact (unpaid)
Business Criticizer
This is roughly chronological? But y’all know how my memory do.
crunchy brown butter baked carrots
18 Nov 2025 22:34![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
smittenkitchen_feed
Plus, if you’re feeling a little fearless, dishes like this are also a friend to those with one oven (hi!) and many things to reheat at once. My approach? I Jenga them. I stack rectangular and oval dishes two or three high in the oven, turning each so it steadies on the one below. Just don’t bump anything, okay?
The Met Gala 2026 Theme Announced
18 Nov 2025 15:52tuesdayritualThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, a staple in New York and the fourth-largest art museum in the world, announced the theme of the 2026 Met Gala yesterday.
‘Costume Art,’ announced Monday as the next big show at the museum’s Costume Institute — launched by the starry Met Gala in 2026 — aims to make that connection more literal than ever, pairing garments with objects from across the museum to show how fashion has long been intertwined with different art forms.
“Costume Art” also marks the inauguration of the brand new 12,000-square-foot galleries that have been built adjacent to the Met’s Great Hall. This sparked curator-in-charge Andrew Bolton to pair paintings, sculptures, and other objets d’art with garments from the Costume Institute to highlight the “centrality of the dressed body” across disparate parts of the collections. You can learn more about some of juxtapositions in this Vogue article.
The article also mentions that Bolton is featuring bodies not often highlighted by the modern fashion industry, including aging and fat bodies. I’m hoping he is brave enough to include disabled bodies, as well. The mannequins are being built to challenge normative conventions and introduce more diversity.
And, of course, what is a Costume Institute exhibition without the red carpet of the Met Gala? While the true delight will be visiting the exhibition in person, I also can’t wait to see the glitz and glam of the celebrities attending the gala night.
Interesting things from American Historical Review
18 Nov 2025 08:05brithistorianThis morning I was reading the September 2025 issue of American Historical Review and I happened across two things that struck me as particularly interesting.
The first thing was a typical graphical matter. A page in American Historical Review contains 21.5 cm of text, of which 1 cm is occupied by the divider separating the article text from the footnotes, so 20.5 cm of actual text. A typical page is divided up with somewhere in the nature of 13 cm of text and 7.5 cm of footnotes. However, this being history writing, footnotes are prone to swell up to take more of the page. But I had never, in all my reading of history, encountered a page like page 1044[^1] of this issue, which contained 3 cm of text and 17 cm of footnotes! To make matters even more extreme, when I started looking at the footnotes, I noticed that one of the footnotes continued over onto the next page, so that actual ratio was 3 cm of text to 22 cm of footnotes! This was in the section of a paper that detailed the background historiography of the matter being discussed, so more extensive footnotes are to be expected, but even so, I've never seen anything like this before.
The second thing was a historical matter. It was at the beginning of Giuliana Chamedes' paper "Unpaid Debts: Socialist Internationalism and Jamaica's Bid for a New International Economic Order" (which also contained the extensively footnoted page above). I was so amazed by the first paragraph of this paper that I'm going to type it out in its entirety in order to share it with you:
In 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by an overwhelming majority. The initiative called for the literal and figurative settling of the debt between imperial and formerly colonized countries. Rather than just redistributing wealth within countries, the time had come to address wealth inequality on the world scale. To do so, the NIEO called for the reorganization of international trade, debt relief, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the institution of oversight for multinational corporations. It insisted on the protection of economic sovereignty for decolonized and decolonizing countries to "correct inequalities and redress existing injustices," suggesting that decolonization was an ongoing struggle. Many countries participated in the NIEO's drafting, including Jamaica, one of the founding members of the Group of 77 (G77). A "high point in the expression of a new internationalism, namely, that of countries emerging from colonialism," the NIEO represented a landmark in global history, as Sabrine Kott and others have argued. But by the early 1980s, the project was dead in the water.
My mind was blown upon reading this paragraph. Despite having a master's degree in history and having done a lot of reading outside of school in matters of history and politics, all of this information was new to me. I'd never even heard of the Group of 77. I read this paragraph a couple of days ago, I've done a lot of thinking about it since then, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how different the world would be if the NIEO had proceeded as planned.[^2]
[^1] American Historical Review uses continuous numbering across a volume, so this issue actually started on page 1009.
[^2] The phrase "the early 1980s" should give you a clue: The Reagan and Thatcher governments played a large role in stopping the NIEO.
Just one thing: 18 November 2025
18 Nov 2025 06:28jazzyjj posting in awesomeersComment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!