selenak: (Young Elizabeth by Misbegotten)
[personal profile] selenak
German-French channel ARTE also put up the complete Wolf Hall, so I was able to watch the six parter they did based on Hilary Mantel's third Cromwell novel at last. What I thought of the novel itself, its plusses and minuses and how it deals with the history, you can read here, so this review is mostly about how it fares as a book adaptation and tv miniseries.

Spoilers have heretical opinions on Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell )

Oddly recurrent stomach issues

Sep. 24th, 2025 07:05 am
andrewducker: (Hold Me)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Facebook reminds me that we had norovirus on this day in 2021 and 2023. Jane has spent the last 24 hours with D+V. What are the odds?
nineveh_uk: Illustration that looks like Harriet Vane (Default)
[personal profile] nineveh_uk
It's forever since I posted, which is due to a variety of things, quite high among them being tired and returning to work, and also that I prefer to do DW posts on my laptop and this one is reaching the end of its life. Though I have done some more enjoyable things this summer, and am just back from visiting my parents. So with the train delay compensation payment requests submitted, it's time for a post. Books.

To Each His Own, Sciascia. What can I say, other than that I should have read it years ago? This is simply a superb book. The form may be a detective novel, the subject is political, the condemnation sharp, the writing exquisite (I read it in English). A pharmacist in a small Sicilian town receives an anonymous death threat, and is duly murdered. Life continues much as before, except for mild-mannered academic Professor Laurana, a little vain and certainly naive, who finds himself following a lead and slowly drawn into a dangerous situation. I can't recommend it highly enough to people who enjoy a book that is really, really well-written. Especially as it isn't even a challenging ride - part of the beauty of the prose is its straightforwardness. The narrative isn't complicated, but perfectly chosen; it is the situation that is twisted.

Legend of the Condor Heroes, Jin Yong. A wuxia (martial arts society historical fantasy, think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) novel set in the 1200s, this is the first of a trilogy published in the late 1950s and with many, many film and television adaptations since then. Like a lot of genre ur-texts that are basically pulp, it tells a rollicking story in sufficiently competent prose and makes for a fun read, although the translator's choice to translate some names* and not others felt a bit odd. If I tell you that chapter 2 involves a lengthy fight in an inn, it will give those who have watched cdramas a sense of the kind of book this is. Long-lost relatives, treachery, and beautiful chaste women abound. At some point, I'll read the next one.

*Her argument for keeping the title, despite the birds not being condors, is much stronger.

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. I ordered this from the library and was very much looking forward to it after enjoying Some Desperate Glory, but alas, I wasn't impressed. The concept of a magical boarding school story from the perspective of the teachers is great, but unfortunately I found this deeply unconvincing: thinly plotted, didactic, a trifle smug, and the worldbuilding doesn't hold up at all. Paired with Some Desperate Glory, I can see that Tesh feels passionately about education, but you need more than that to make a good novel, especially given the aforementioned worldbuilding, which fails specifically in terms of secondary/tertiary ed. You can have learning magic at school being basically socially irrelevant like Classics, so it doesn't matter that it is only taught in very expensive private schools and the entire rest of the population is shut out except for a few who have to learn it for public safety, or you can have magic be something that military R&D are passionately interested in and every shop needs to pay for magical wards for safety, but you can't have both. In the world she sets up, in every respect except "this school is unjustifiable and of course the protagonist is appropriately aware but it is also old and special and lovely", there is no way that several Scottish universities and the redbricks wouldn't have been teaching sorcery ab initio since the 1920s at the latest and the government funding it. Also, if you are telling me that the teacher cares, she really cares, and is a sensible, competent professional woman, then why the hell is she repeatedly behaving like Harry Potter and his progenitors going off to investigate things without telling anyone? I could go on (the caretaker!), but I'll spare you.

Idlewild, James Frankie Thomas. A fandom osmosis read, except it turned out to be a misosmosis. I was under the impression that it was about intense Theater Kids (US spelling for what seems to be a US phenomenon) at New England private university level possibly murdering one another, i.e. a bit of a The Secret History rip off. It is not. It does feature sort of Theater Kids, but at an expensive New York private high school. Unfortunately, fairly contemporary US private high schools are about the last setting that I am interested in reading a novel so this book started out as not really my kind of thing and remained so. But, I did read it, and I did think it was a good book. There is no murder, but there are a couple of very intense queer teenagers in a very intense friendship at a Quaker-ethos school that I thought was rather well depicted as supposed to be offering something different because it was a Quaker-ethos school, but that actually was failing its pupils in a highly conventional manner*, and US 2003 setting that seems well-drawn but that, obviously, I didn't personally relate to. Mostly what I admired was the novelist actually having something to say and saying it in a book about queer and trans experience, in a particular time and place, and accepting that something with any depth is inherently not going to speak to everybody's experience, and Thomas doesn't waste his or the reader's time hesitating to commit to his story and characters. It didn't speak to me personally - much though I enjoyed the recognisable early 2000s LJ milieu - but what does that matter? It spoke to other people, and it made an effort to be something.

*I found myself wondering whether Fay would have been better off at a standard school that would haved force all pupils through the hoops to higher education and its potential for self-discovery, or whether that would have been even more destructive.

WHY

Sep. 23rd, 2025 12:12 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
would my Framework charge if plugged into one outlet but not another? I tested the outlet from which it did not charge and it works for other devices.

[Update]

I shut it down for an hour and everything works again.

Funny thing about this singer

Sep. 23rd, 2025 09:11 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
Youtube pushed a song from this source at me.

I don't think they exist. There are no non-generated images of the singer and their pace of output is suspicious. And their FB bio references ai.

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

Sep. 23rd, 2025 08:56 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Oxford sends its best to study World War Two in this (grinds teeth) Hugo-winning tale of sound and fury.

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

Interim update

Sep. 23rd, 2025 12:15 pm
[syndicated profile] charlie_stross_diary_feed

So, in the past month I've been stabbed in the right eye, successfully, at the local ophthalmology hospital.

Cataract surgery is interesting: bright lights, mask over the rest of your face, powerful local anaesthesia, constant flow of irrigation— they practically operate underwater. Afterwards there's a four week course of eye drops (corticosteroids for inflammation, and a two week course of an NSAID for any residual ache). I'm now long-sighted in my right eye, which is quite an experience, and it's recovered. And my colour vision in the right eye is notably improved, enough that my preferred screen brightness level for my left eye is painful to the right.

Drawbacks: firstly, my right eye has extensive peripheral retinopathy—I was half-blind in it before I developed the cataracts—and secondly, the op altered my prescription significantly enough that I can't read with it. I need to wait a month after I've had the second eye operation before I can go back to my regular ophthalmologist to be checked out and get a new set of prescription glasses. As I spent about 60 hours a week either reading or writing, I've been spending a lot of time with my right eye screwed shut (eye patches are uncomfortable). And I'm pretty sure my writing/reading is going to be a dumpster fire for about six weeks after the second eye is operated on. (New specs take a couple of weeks to come through from the factory.) I'll try cheap reading glasses in the mean time but I'm not optimistic: I am incapable of absorbing text through my ears (audiobooks and podcasts simply don't work for me—I zone out within seconds) and I can't write fiction using speech-to-text either (the cadences of speech are inimical to prose, even before we get into my more-extensive-than-normal vocabulary or use of confusing-to-robots neologisms).

In the meantime ...

I finished the first draft of Starter Pack at 116,500 words: it's with my agent. It is not finished and it is not sold—it definitely needs edits before it goes to any editors—but at least it is A Thing, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My next job (after some tedious business admin) is to pick up Ghost Engine and finish that, too: I've got about 20,000 words to go. If I'm not interrupted by surgery, it'll be done by the end of the year, but surgery will probably add a couple of months of delays. Then that, too, goes back to my agent—then hopefully to the UK editor who has been waiting patiently for it for a decade now, and then to find a US publisher. I must confess to some trepidation: for the first time in about two decades I am out of contract (except for the UK edition of GE) and the two big-ass series are finished—after The Regicide Report comes out next January 27th there's nothing on the horizon except for these two books set in an entirely new setting which is drastically different to anything I've done before. Essentially I've invested about 2-3 years' work on a huge gamble: and I won't even know if it's paid off before early 2027.

It's not a totally stupid gamble, though. I began Ghost Engine in 2015, when everyone was assuring me that space opera was going to be the next big thing: and space opera is still the next big thing, insofar as there's going to be a huge and ongoing market for raw escapism that lets people switch off from the world-as-it-is for a few hours. The Laundry Files was in trouble: who needs to escape into a grimdark alternate present where our politics has been taken over by Lovecraftian horrors now?

Indeed, you may have noticed a lack of blog entries talking about the future this year. It's because the future's so grim I need a floodlight to pick out any signs of hope. There is a truism that with authoritarians and fascists, every accusation they make is a confession—either a confession of something they've done, or of something they want to do. (They can't comprehend the possibility that not everybody shares their outlook and desires, to they attribute their own motivations to their opponents.) Well, for many decades now the far right have been foaming about a vast "international communist conspiracy", and what seems to be surfacing this decade is actually a vast international far-right conspiracy: from Trump and MAGA in the USA to Farage and Reform in the UK, to Orban's Fidesz in Hungary, to Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey and Modi's Hindutva nationalists in India and Xi's increasingly authoritarian clamp-down in China, all the fascist insects have emerged from the woodwork at the same time. It's global.

I can discern some faint outlines in the darkness. Fascism is a reaction to uncertainty and downward spiraling living standards, especially among the middle classes. Over the past few decades globalisation of trade has concentrated wealth in a very small number of immensely rich hands, and the middle classes are being squeezed hard. At the same time, the hyper-rich feel themselves to be embattled and besieged. Those of them who own social media networks and newspapers and TV and radio channels are increasingly turning them into strident far-right propaganda networks, because historically fascist regimes have relied on an alliance of rich industrialists combined with the angry poor, who can be aimed at an identifiable enemy.

A big threat to the hyper-rich currently is the end of Moore's Law. Continuous improvements in semiconductor performance began to taper off after 2002 or thereabouts, and are now almost over. The tech sector is no longer actually producing significantly improved products each year: instead, it's trying to produce significantly improved revenue by parasitizing its consumers. ("Enshittification" as Cory Doctorow named it: I prefer to call the broader picture "crapitalism".) This means that it's really hard to invest for a guaranteed return on investment these days.

To make matters worse, we're entering an energy cost deflation cycle. Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they're still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere. It turns out that many agricultural crops benefit from shade: ground-dwellers coexist happily with PV panels on overhead stands, and farm animals also like to be able to get out of the sun. (This isn't the case for maize and beef, but consider root vegetables, brassicae, and sheep ...)

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they've been overtaken by renewables. (Some oil is still going to be needed for a very long time—for plastics and the chemical industries—but it's a fraction of that which is burned for power, heating, and transport.)

We can see the same dynamic in miniature in the other current investment bubble, "AI data centres". It's not AI (it is, at best, deep learning) and it's being hyped and sold for utterly inappropriate purposes. This is in service to propping up the share prices of NVidia (the GPU manufacturer), OpenAI and Anthropic (neither of whom have a clear path to eventual profitability: they're the tech bubble du jour—call it dot-com 3.0) and also propping up the commercial real estate market and ongoing demand for fossil fuels. COVID19 and work from home trashed demand for large office space: data centres offer to replace this. AI data centres are also hugely energy-inefficient, which keeps those old fossil fuel plants burning.

So there's a perfect storm coming, and the people with the money are running scared, and to deal with it they're pushing bizarre, counter-reality policies: imposing tariffs on imported electric cars and solar panels, promoting conspiracy theories, selling the public on the idea that true artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and promoting hate (because it's a great distraction).

I think there might be a better future past all of this, but I don't think I'll be around to see it: it's at least a decade away (possibly 5-7 decades if we're collectively very unlucky). In the meantime our countries are being overrun by vicious xenophobes who hate everyone who doesn't conform to their desire for industrial feudalism.

Obviously pushing back against the fascists is important. Equally obviously, you can't push back if you're dead. I'm over 60 and not in great health so I'm going to leave the protests to the young: instead, I'm going to focus on personal survival and telling hopeful stories.

That's No Moon...

Sep. 22nd, 2025 09:23 pm
ffutures: (Default)
[personal profile] ffutures
Playing around with my mirror lens on micro 4/3 again, this time with an aluminized mylar filter for solar work - gives a yellow tone which is "nicer" than the white of a more accurate filter.

Four sunspots are visible, but there is also a circular mark which is an artifact, probably grunge in the lens or on the sensor. Picture 1 is the best of 15 or so images, picture 2 is the same image with labels, picture 3 was taken separately with the camera in a slightly different position, showing that the four spots are real since they are still in the same position relative to the disc of the sun, while the round mark is in the same position on the frame but a different position relative to the sun.







Another Fantasy Bundle - Weird Bundle

Sep. 22nd, 2025 08:42 pm
ffutures: (Default)
[personal profile] ffutures
This is an offer of the Shadow of the Weird Wizard RPG frpm Schwalb Entertainment, based on the Shadow of the Demon Lord system:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/WeirdWizard



Slightly less apocalyptic than the original game, but built around similar ideas. Not my cup of tea, but it's a reasonable idea if you like that sort of thing.

Team Orca and other whimsies

Sep. 22nd, 2025 02:29 pm
rolanni: (Default)
[personal profile] rolanni

Monday. Sunny and warm. All windows that open have been opened.

Breakfast was eggs scrambled with the last of the potato salad. Yes, I do this a lot. Yes, I like potatoes far too much. Lunch is in the oven -- a small salmon steak, because I can't remember the last time I actually ate fish, which is not particularly good news, as the cancer docs think that fish three times a week is just about right. Admittedly, my personal best was twice a week for several months, and that was with Steve pushing for all he was worth to make it happen.

I am very much liking this new writing schedule. Sat down at 9, and got up at 11:30 1,280 words the richer, and they're good, says I, as shouldn't.

Tomorrow, unfortunately, a break in the schedule, as I have an early visit to the vampires scheduled, something that hasn't happened in way too long, ref hospital exploding, doctors landing all over the map, having to apply to be a new patient at the practice my PCP landed at, And! all like that.

I was watching a Josh Johnson clip, in which he was talking about the fact that the orcas had attacked another yacht, and the resonate phrase was, "Who expected the orcas would step up?" Which got me to wondering if there was a TEAM ORCA! sweatshirt and how I would go about getting one.

Facebook has also been serving me reels from Quincy's Tavern, which is an ... interesting work perhaps in progress. And it gives me the chance to use the word "ledgerdemain" with non-ironic precision, and with admiration.

Now that lunch is done, I'm on to the business part of the daily schedule: I seem to have a phone call and two letters to write, and! a Sooper Sekrit project to work on. So? I'd best get at it.

How's Monday going for you lot?

Oh, wait!  Pictures.

Rosebush update!  It's doing splendidly -- new flowers and buds promising more:




And, I had intended to take a selfie, to prove that I was feeling much more the thing, but ... Rookie had a better idea.  Admittedly, he is much more glamorous.


Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard

Sep. 22nd, 2025 01:57 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The SHADOW OF THE WEIRD WIZARD corebooks, supplements, and adventures.

Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard

Clarke Award Finalists 201

Sep. 22nd, 2025 09:52 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2015: Five Britons sign for the doomed Mars One venture, the UK pays off its WWI War Loans, and the Liberal Democrats’ adroit political maneuvering yields memorable electoral returns.

Poll #33648 Clarke Award Finalists 2015
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36


Which 2015 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
23 (63.9%)

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
8 (22.2%)

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
6 (16.7%)

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
4 (11.1%)

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
15 (41.7%)

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
17 (47.2%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2015 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

My/Our 12 Pen Person Questions

Sep. 22nd, 2025 01:46 pm
abyssal_sylph: Kanaya and Rose are on a red with brown couch, reading a book with the HS quadrants symbols on it, both look very happy. (rosemary reading (homestuck))
[personal profile] abyssal_sylph posting in [community profile] journalsandplanners
"My/Our" put in the title because we're plural, but hi I'm Jade (she/they/bark)! I wanna get this system more into journaling again :] but for now here's my/our anwsers.

Read more... )

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