sashajwolf | Reading

22 Ways To Celebrate Native American Heritage Month

November is Native American Heritage Month, when we all come together to honor and celebrate the culture, traditions, history, and contributions of American Indian and Alaskan Natives.

They left out the Real Rent / Voluntary Land Tax movement, where people of non-indigenous heritage send money to the nearest extant tribe or sometimes a formerly-local tribe that was ousted to live elsewhere. If you don't have that option, you can also chuck it into any current fundraiser to obtain land for a tribe or fight legal battles over land. Closely related, if you own land -- especially big enough for some of it to be wild or nearly so -- consider programs to share access with tribal people. Some folks have negotiated deals where the tribe will help manage the territory in return for sharing use of it, which can grant you access to much better techniques.

Current Mood: busy

cosmolinguist

I worked hard at work today, all day. My butt barely left my chair. I was pushing my brain to do a lot and it felt bad and stressful but at least I did enough work that I'm not too worried. I have two work trips this week, both about an hour away by train, but it eats into my time and energy so much to have to travel.

After work, I was aware that angelofthenorth had to take her cat to the vet and when D left too, to drive them, I figured I should make dinner. It was very basic but ready not long after they got back, so that worked out. And while I'd been working on that and waiting for things to defrost/the time to put the burgers in the oven after the fries got a head start, I made a Tesco order for tomorrow, which was sorely needed.

And then I ate dinner. And then, after dithering for a while, I did get myself to go to the gym. D kindly drove me there too, which got me through what felt like the most difficult part of the process. I happily pushed myself a little on the rowing machine and most of the weights and I even did some extra core exercises at the end, just like in lift club on Saturday mornings. The trainer for those classes would've been proud, I figured.

And then I came home and showered and now I'm in bed! I have some clean laundry I really should put away, and some more dirty laundry I should put in the basket to take downstairs, but that might not happen tonight. It feels like it's been such a busy day, one thing after another.

ysabetwordsmith

Five Ways Science Fiction Can Expand Beyond Homo sapiens

* The Past
* Cryptic Populations
* Sideways in Time
* The Future
* Science!

It left out crossbreeding with other species (like Spock in Star Trek) as well as backbreeding where remnant genes become more prevalent due to environmental pressures until speciation occurs. Regarding the latter, Sherpas are already a borderline species because they can survive at higher altitudes than other Homo sapiens due to their Denisovan heritage. They are at least a definable subspecies based on habitat adaptations, more realistically a remnant population of Denisovans with heavy Homo sapiens introgression. But when you start talking about biological differences among humans, then humans immediately start doing stupid things, so most scientists won't do it. Anyhow, if the Sherpas became isolated from other humans and stayed in the Himalayas, environmental pressure would push them toward more Denisovan-like traits.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is mostly sunny and mild.

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

I put out water for the birds.

My air plants arrived! :D So today I need to assemble the lantern terrarium.

EDIT 11/3/25 -- I took some pictures around the yard and started laying out pieces for the lantern terrarium.

EDIT 11/3/25 -- I've been working on the lantern terrarium, trimming the branch that will go inside and testing a few air plants to fit it. Currently I have it soaking in a tray of water to rehydrate the lichens.

EDIT 11/3/25 -- I've done more work on the lantern terrarium. I have the main branch soaked, and I picked up some more twigs and chips in hopes of creating more spaces to lodge the air plants. I've glued the first piece in place, the chip I cut off the bottom end.

While I was outside, I saw the great horned owl and heard it hooting. Then I heard a shriek. A baby owl! :D 3q3q3q!!! I am 99% certain that the conversation translates to this:

Baby: "I'm hungry!"

Mama: "Shh. Go to sleep. Shh."

Baby: "FEED ME!"

Mama: "It is the middle of the DAY. Now GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP."

EDIT 11/3/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 11/3/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 11/3/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

arlie

In a discussion of someone's comments about male and female communication styles, Richard Hanania said the following:

Is there anything more to be said here? There’s one more point I’d like to add, which is that questions like “what are the best ways to pursue truth” should in the main be settled not through punditry, but by markets.

Yep, the Truth is whatever pays best. Praise Capitalism!

To be fair, he doesn't seem to have intended this interpretation. The communication style discussion was set in a context of corporate behaviour. He's probably thinking of that subset of truth-seeking which involves identifying the most effective ways for a corporate entity to act, given a presumed desire to make ever larger profits.

But OMG, what a blooper. Especially in a context where he's talking about someone else's essay rubbing people the wrong way, because of somewhat egregious failure to mention obviously relevant context.

arlie

Some weeks ago, we set out from my driveway to drive to Costco. I basically know the route(s), but the turns to get there from whichever major artery you take are a bit tricky, so I asked Google Maps to direct me.

Google first told me to turn left, then, before I was out of the driveway, to turn right. By the time I'd made it to the end of the block, it had alternated telling me to keep going with telling me to make a U-turn several times. Once I got onto one of the two obvious routes to a relevant highway, it suggested a change of route, then switched back to approving the one I'd picked, a couple more times.

It settled down once I got to the highway, and I did not find a slowdown on the route I'd kind of randomly picked. (And if there had been e.g. a major accident, it would normally have given me a suggested change of route, once, and explained why.)

And once I got near my destination, it handled the exit and its confusing turns perfectly well. So it did what I needed, along with adding extra amusement as we set out.

I've been meaning to post this topic ever since, but something else has always seemed more topical. So I've forgotten the exact number of times it changed its mind. (Yes, I was counting.) But with another Costco trip planned for tomorrow, I've finally remembered and posted.

There've been no recurrences since then - but I don't use Google maps all that often, so the sample size is small. I am somewhat curious whether it will lose its mind again tomorrow.

ysabetwordsmith

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Today's Cooking
Gaming
Birdfeeding
Worldbuilding
Art
Birdfeeding
Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories Bingo Card 11-1-25
Philosophical Questions: Accuracy
Moment of Silence: Patricia Crowther
Birdfeeding
Holiday
Books
Wildlife
Garden of Repose
New Year's Resolutions Check In
Follow Friday 10-31-25: Kpop
Bingo
Climate Change
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Sustainability
Birdfeeding
Good News

Trauma has 34 comments. Affordable Housing has 57 comments. Robotics has 95 comments.

There will be a Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, November 4 with a theme of "Fairies and Fey." I hope to see you then!

"An Inkling of Things to Come" belongs to Polychrome: Shiv and needs $191 to be complete. Maiara and Arthur discuss taking notes.

The weather is cool and fall-like now. It rained a couple of days. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, two goldfinches, and a male cardinal. A great horned owl has been hoo-hooing outside. :D Currently blooming: dandelions, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, oxalis, firecracker plant, tomatoes, violas. Tomatoes, ball carrots, and groundcherries are ripe. Fields are almost all harvested.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today I am making Tomato-Basil Bread from Hello! 365 Tomato Recipes: Best Tomato Cookbook Ever For Beginners, the yeast version from page 32. We're out of parmesan cheese, so I substituted Manchego which is dry enough to grate and has a similarly sharp taste. Already the dough is a very pretty salmon-pink, currently rising in a bowl set inside a bowl of warm water to help maintain temperature.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- Bread punched down and set for second rise.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- Bread in oven.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- It's done! :D This is better than the earlier quickbread I tried. When baked, it is a bright, true salmon color thanks to the tomato sauce. The outside is crusty, the inside is springy and chewy, with a mild tomato flavor and herbal hints. If I make it again, I want to try the Little Italy Pizza Seasoning instead of plain crushed red pepper. The loaf is small and round, yielding oval slices. That's too small for grilled cheese sandwiches but would probably work for Bulgarian breakfast bread.

Current Mood: accomplished

ysabetwordsmith

New study: Dungeons & Dragons provides real benefits to people with disabilities and the elderly

“Serious leisure” refers to an activity that demands skill, commitment, and personal fulfillment, Messina defined. With the intricate world-building, score-keeping, and character development required of D&D, she said, it’s a blueprint for serious leisure.
[---8<---]
“Players were comfortable being themselves by engaging in the game pursuit,” she added, “but at the same time were building personas in line with, or in contrast to, their normal personality. They described it as a way to take charge, or lead an effort in ways that their normal personality would allow for, but they wouldn’t be inclined to do.”

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

kaberett

Observing. All Souls'. Candle lit; Seelkuchen eaten.

Reading. ( Rucka, Waitrose Cookery School, Stocks, Duncan, Ravindran )

Playing. Merrily pootling along with I Love Hue. Hatched my first dragon with Primal eyes in The Dragons Game.

Cooking. Two variations on a recipe: smitten kitchen's winter squash and spinach pasta bake and the recipe that inspired it, Ottolenghi's pasta and butternut squash cake. On the first day I definitely preferred the smitten kitchen version; on subsequent days I became increasingly convinced by the Ottolenghi. (You see, I had about twice as much of all of the ingredients as I needed, and the spinach definitely needed eating Imminently, and so I thought I'd make them simultaneously so we could do the side-by-side comparison and then freeze some...)

And then this evening I made another round of the wahaca autumn stew with pipián, this time with even wronger chillis but a sensible amount of herbs, and was delighted that it met with my mother's approval.

Eating. SCHWARZBROT with Lizard honey. Curries various courtesy of my father. Salads and lunches various courtesy of my mother. The dark chocolate & raspberry stars that are a Special Seasonal Treat. National Trust lemon drizzle cake. A RASPBERRY.

Exploring. THE NEW SITE FOR ADMIN: THE LRP. And this afternoon we went on an adventure to Anglesey Abbey, where the dahlias were alas gone but we found many many more cyclamen than we knew were there, and several things in the winter garden were at a different stage than I think I'd ever seen them before and were extremely pretty with it.

Creating. Carved a pumpkin for the toddler!

cosmolinguist

( cancer, child death, suicide [no one I'm close to] )

ysabetwordsmith

Today is sunny and cool.

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

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I trimmed weeds from the tulip bed. It's about 2/3 done now.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I trimmed weeds from rest of the tulip bed. \o/

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

I've seen a cardinal.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I spread the first bag of compost and manure on the tulip bed.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I spread the second bag of compost and manure on the tulip bed.

EDIT 11/2/25 -- I spread the third bag of compost and manure on the tulip bed. It is mostly covered but still needs another bag.

I picked a handful of basil leaves so I can make tomato-basil bread tonight.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

The Most Powerful Type of Worldbuilding by Curious Archive

I rarely link YouTube videos anymore, but this one had some good observations about "moldy worldbuilding" and how it shows the passage of time. So I'll throw out some ideas based on that.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

fayanora

Came across this video about a post claiming there were no female authors before J. K. Rowling, and the resulting thread providing SO many examples of how wrong that claim is. Like to the point that science fiction, fantasy, and novels in general wouldn't exist without female authors. Also, a female author started the trend of letting children have books that are more than stories to convey morals.

My contribution to the comments:

Rowling wasn't even the first female author to write a series about a young child going to a school of witchcraft with an eccentric headmaster and a stern and irascible potions teacher, featuring a horrible, blond, wealthy, stuck-up antagonist student as the protagonist's foil.

She basically plagiarized "The Worst Witch" series by Jill Murphy, gender-bent a bunch of the most prominent characters (Miss Cackle into Dumbledore, Miss Hardbroom into Severus Snape, Ethel Hallow into Draco Malfoy, and Mildred Hubble into Neville Longbottom), turned the original protagonist Mildred Hubble (gender-bent) into a side character, and spliced in a plot about wizard Nazis while replacing the much more interesting Mildred Hubble with a British children's fiction cliche character of "the poor unlucky orphan." All while being racist, transphobic, whatever you call being racist against the Irish, antisemitic, ultimately making the statement of "slavery is actually good mmkay," and being a bad writer with plot holes you could pilot a 747 through with plenty of room to spare.

kaberett

Today has been largely taken up by my first visit to the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP...

... or at least, my first visit in something like twenty years, because it's the old Cottenham racecourse and I absolutely went to one (1) race there in My Misspent Youth. Sudden wave of déjà vu on the final approach to the grandstand, as the perspective shifted to YEP, THIS IS A PLACE I'VE BEEN.

There was Make Tent go Up. There was meeting. There was Make Tent Go Down. There was being given Objects. And there was A BAT that did some beautifully ostentatious swooping against the darkening dusk, and I am delighted.

ysabetwordsmith

New study: Viewing art in galleries 'immediately' reduces cortisol levels, boosts health

“Our unique and original study provides compelling evidence that viewing art in a gallery is ‘good for you’ and helps to further our understanding of its fundamental benefits,” Dr. Tony Woods, the study’s senior author, said.

“In essence, art doesn’t just move us emotionally — it calms the body too.”

More specifically, cortisol levels — a key stress hormone in the human body — fell by an average of 22% in the gallery group, compared to just 8% in the control group.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

cosmolinguist

I mentioned that we saw Deliver Me from Nowhere, but I didn't have time to get into my thoughts on it, so here are some.

"One of the things that confuses me about this film," D said in his review, "is who it's for, other than cosmolinguist." And I can't help him there, but it definitely is for me. It takes place around the time I'm being born, only a few years before this man would become my favorite musician (I was about three when I could locate and play "Born in the U.S.A." from my dad's record collection, holding the LP carefully and putting the needle down in a way that wouldn't scratch it).

I love that it's about men and masculinity in a way you don't normally see them: I love how the relationship between Springsteen and Landau is portrayed, it's intense and it's emotionally savvy. I don't love the way that women are such secondary characters in this movie that I don't even know Mrs. Landau's name, but I also love the way Jon came home at the end of some of these difficult work days and talked to her about Springsteen's big ugly feelings that were driving the direction his work and life was taking at that point.

I love that the single-mother girlfriend -- who as I suspected was a conglomeration of multiple real-life people -- seemed to confront him with the force of all those real women when he told her he was leaving for California: he's messed up and he's stuck and he seems unwilling to do anything about that. (The road trip and arrival in California shift the dial more toward "unable," but you can't blame this woman for assuming it's "unwilling"; this is clearly not her first experience of young men disappointing her.)

I feel weird because I'm the biggest Springsteen fan any of my friends know with one or two possible exceptions -- more than one person has told me they're relying on me to let them know whether the movie is worth seeing or not -- but compared to the real devotees I am barely a casual fan -- I've only seen him once and not until last year! A lot of my favorite songs are older than me, or close to it, so I have absorbed them in that contextless all-at-once haphazard way that culture is, without time to spread it out or an expert to steer you in it. Born in the U.S.A. rocketed Springsteen from success to superstardom, and my dad was apparently part of that wave because he had that record and no others. I found it on my own, noticed Springsteen's songs on the radio on my own, re-discovered him (after a teenage period of being mortified that I'd ever loved music so uncool as to turn up on classic-rock stations) with "The Ghost of Tom Joad" on my own...

I say all that to say that I'd never realized how entangled Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. are as albums. I liked that the movie portrayed them as so intimately bound up together. We couldn't have had the stadium-filling without the bedroom-recorded demos that were never meant to be heard by anyone else. That really struck me: a lot of my younger years were about me trying to skip the weird confusing maybe-ugly fixations of my brain and heart, I wanted to get right to the likeable if not successful bits. But of course you can't do that. The only way to the cool successful thing might be through the ugly private things.

And you don't have to; the weird confusing ugly stuff might be able to be loved too.

I want to talk about Frankenstein and Breaking the Code too, but this is probably enough for today.

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy and cool.

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

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 11/1/25 -- I trimmed weeds from the daffodil bed.

EDIT 11/1/25 -- I spread the first bag of composted manure on the daffodil bed. It covered the far side and half the center.

EDIT 11/1/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 11/1/25 -- I spread the second bag of composted manure on the daffodil bed. So that's done, aside from raking up a pile of leaves to create the mulch cover for it. This concludes today's yardwork target. \o/

EDIT 11/1/25 -- I started trimming weeds from the tulip bed.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Here is my card for the Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories Bingo over in

allbingo. The fest runs from November 1-30. (See all my 2025 bingo cards.)

If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out. I've had a few requests for this and the results have been awesome so far. This is a good opportunity for those of you with favorites that don't always mesh well with the themes of my monthly projects. I may still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it. That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.

FAIRY TALES BINGO CARD

Pixie	The Nightingale	The deeds of ordinary folks keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.	Vision	Castle
Glory	Hero	Elves	Journey	Enchanted
Music	Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.	WILD CARD	Golden Hair	Fairies
Fairy Ring	Solitude	Shadow	The Dark Tower	Twilight
Golem	Trickster	Once Upon a Time	I didn't want power. All I wanted was control. Over my life.	Magical Power

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

How would the world change if there was an accurate measure of aptitude?

Little if any. Some types of aptitude can be tested pretty well. People often choose not to act on them. In fact, people often prefer the less accurate ones.

Current Mood: busy

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Sasha

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other dreams

Reading

Native American

Busy day

Science Fiction

Birdfeeding

Richard Hanania Blog Fail

Google Map Indecision

Monday Update 11-3-25

Today's Cooking

Gaming

vital functions

All souls

Birdfeeding

Worldbuilding

Rowling's die-hard fans are fucking stupid

new site!

Art

It has been a great week for snuggling up next to diffrentcolours and watching some Art.

Birdfeeding

Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories Bingo Card 11-1-25

Philosophical Questions: Accuracy

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March 2017

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