Currently reading: Number 5 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl (slowly), and I'm partway through the audiobook of Jamaica Inn by Daphne duMaurier, which is hella gothic and really well-written. I'm mildly entertained by DCC but I cannot keep all the fancy spells in my brain and the body count is pretty excessive (especially once you know that all the NPCs are real people!)
Up Next: The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott, sequel to The Witch Roads. Happily it's available on Bookshop.org DRM-free, so I could download it and sideload it onto my Kindle.
*+*+*
In other news, work is insane and and and. But at least Prop 50 passed, and at least some of the Dems are figuring out that we need them to FIGHT BACK. But this shutdown sucks. I can't be more specific than that.
Bah.
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scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 6th, 2025 12:40 am)
Full Moon on Guy Fawkes. Pretty cool-looking moon, too.
— JS
Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson, and thus finishes the Fractured Europe Sequence. I enjoyed it a lot, though sometimes it made me feel as though I just wasn't smart enough for it; there are a lot of chapters which begin so completely in medias res that you just have to soldier on until you hit the background/flashback that explains what is going on. Although the last book ties up some of the loose ends, they are only loosely tied, so to speak, and it feels very open-ended. (To be fair, there was no overarching action plot here, just generally tying up ends and solving mysteries. Also I didn't realize for far too long that some of the POV chapters were actually in the past relative to present action (or rather, took place at the same time that some of the events in other books took place; time has passed.)
What I've recently finished listening to:
The Strange Case of Starship Iris wrapped up its final season a few weeks ago. I liked it overall, though I definitely preferred the political action/adventure parts more than the personal relationships parts, other than the general bonding of the crew as a unit. I also found it rather on the nose with respect to Current Political Events, but hey, it's not Jessica Best's fault that she wrote an SF podcast about freedom-fighting rebels up against a juggernaut of an iron-fisted government just when, you know. waves hand around helplessly
What I've recently finished playing:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard! I enjoyed playing but I was ready for it to be over. I (female Qunari mage) romanced Harding, but the romance content is -->.<-- (Though admittedly there was some nice emotional content relative to the romance near the end.) On the one hand, the fact that most of the decisions about what to do and say don't seem to have much effect on things made it feel less fraught and scary, like - I often look up spoilers for major decisions because I don't replay games and so I want to make sure I don't end up with some horrible ending. On the other hand, it probably contributed to me feeling less involved with the game on an emotional level.
I didn't like that the choice of race and faction didn't have a whole lot to do with anything. I mean, I had extra Shadow Dragons dialogue, but mostly I didn't know anything extra about Minrathous. And I was Qunari - but an adopted war orphan with zero connection to anything remotely Qun, so I felt really dumb talking to Taash (and especially Shathann) about Qunari customs.
I did really love the graphics, and all the very interesting landscapes, the different cities and landscapes (the Ossuary!!!) and especially the Crossroads. The companion banter is super fun and I sort of wanted to set them all up with each other! I especially loved Taash and Lucanis talking about capes, hee. I did everybody's quests, of course, and got everyone to Hero status, and all my factions to three stars.
I did the Regrets of the Dread Wolf questline and met Mythal, and...I really tried to give good answers, but every time I failed, to the point where I figured there was no way of avoiding the fight. So I ended up having to fight her and hoo boy that was tough. And then! I looked at an "endings" walkthrough and it said I had to have resolved the quest peacefully to get the best ending, so I resigned myself to having screwed up, but haha it turns out they recommended that only because that is such a tough fight, yay, I got the best ending.
(I did not look up spoilers for the rest of the endgame, but fortunately I managed to not get my sweetheart killed.)
Anyway, it was fun, but when I finished I didn't want to jump into another epic right away, so I started playing Monument Valley, which several of you had recommended to me - and that was delightful! It's like, what if M. C. Escher had designed a puzzle game? I finished the first game and am now doing the "appendices". I also have the second game, so that's probably next.
B is playing Horizon Forbidden West, and I can't resist looking over his shoulder every once in a while. The Horizon games are still my favorites! (He's still in early days, not yet to the Embassy, just doing stuff in Chainscrape.)
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 5th, 2025 10:33 pm)
This handsome little man got fixed today! It’s super important to get your animals fixed, especially if they’re indoor/outdoor like our kitties are. Spaying and neutering is essential for being a good pet parent, and I’m so glad we were able to get Saja taken care of.
He is very drowsy and sleepy, so after feeding him a Churu tube, he is off to his cat bed to rest for the evening. Enjoy his drowsy glam shot, and have a great day!
-AMS
⌈ Secret Post #6879 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 12 secrets from Secret Submission Post #982.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 5th, 2025 03:14 pm)
Well, that was an evening, wasn’t it.
Zohran Mamdani won decisively in NYC, of course, and that was the headline event in terms of optics, but then there was everything else, that went the Democrats’ way this election night: Governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, along with the undercard races, Democrats gaining a dozen seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, surprising statewide victories in Georgia, Democratic Supreme Court Justices being retained in Pennsylvania, and out in California, Proposition 50 passing comfortably. Almost none of these were razon-thin wins; the Democrats ran up margins.
Over on Truth Social Trump had a tantrum about it, but then, he would, wouldn’t he, and the simple fact of the matter is, all of this is substantially his fault. Turns out that out-and-out grifty fascism isn’t, in fact, very popular, especially when the promised benefits of that nonsense — lower food prices and inflation kept in check — are nowhere in sight, and when the only part of the government that is working is the part that floods cities with armed paramilitary violating people’s constitutional rights. Trump doesn’t appear to think this election was about him and his government, but of course nothing is ever his fault.
I’m not naive enough to believe that this is it, this is the turning point where the nation shies away from the brink, not in the least because the result of this off-off-year election year will be to convince Trump and his pals that the problem was that they didn’t suppress voting more, so 2026 will absolutely have more shenanigans. Fascists don’t like free elections! Who knew! And that will be a thing we get to deal with. With that said, I don’t imagine things are going to get better for the Trump administration in terms of, well, anything, between now and November of next year. It’s entirely possible that their cack-handed attempts to rig elections simply won’t be enough. That’s not to say that they won’t try, however.
Those caveats noted, let’s not pretend last night wasn’t, in itself, a big deal. Democrats essentially ran the table in the big races and even flipped some long-held GOP seats in the deep south, and that’s not nothing. Mamdani throat-punched the Trump-endorsed Cuomo not once, but twice — as well as he fucking should have (the fact that 40% of New York City voters went for a sex creep who pretty much believed he was entitled to the mayorship, is a whole other discussion to have some other time). It’s also not nothing that a Muslim Democratic Socialist got over 50% of the vote in a three-way race and still would have won even if all of GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa’s votes had gone to Cuomo instead. Sliwa said last night that he’d been offered $10 million to drop out. I’m glad he didn’t, but even if he had, Mamdani would still have been making his victory speech.
There’s been some hand-wringing among the pundit class that Mamdani, famously brown and an immigrant, might now be the poster boy of the Democratic party, which seems stupid on its face and doesn’t get any better as one drills down. There is no doubt the GOP will strive to scare a bunch of rural white people with Mamdani, because the modern GOP is an unapologetically racist party that exists to scare other unapologetic racists (and people who are willing to be swayed by unapologetic racism) into compliance against their own interests. What all of them miss is how Mamdani actually won, despite all the frankly despicable racism and anti-Muslim bullshit that was thrown at him. It’s a formula that, as it happens, is easily transferable to other Democratic candidates in other races, even when their underlying conditions are different than in New York:
I’d say there are probably two other points to add here: Mamdani ran a campaign based on optimism and inclusion, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of the modern GOP, which is fueled by hate, fear and exclusion. Also Mamdani ran to win, as opposed to running to not lose, which is a different thing and has a different tenor to it. I think there’s a sense, particularly among younger voters, that the modern Democratic party runs campaigns to not lose more often than not, which makes them safe and not capable of actual change, and also pisses people off, because right now is not the time to run cowardly campaigns. If what the DNC and others in the Democratic party, and the general pundit class, are taking away from Mamdani’s win is oh, no, a Muslim socialist rather than looking at the mechanics of how he won and won a fucking majority of votes in a mayoral election with the largest turnout in decades, then they are stupid and need to stand aside and let others lead.
With regard to California’s Proposition 50, I’m glad it passed and I hate that it’s come to this, but come to this it has. The GOP is now Trump’s party, and Trump doesn’t actually give a shit about democracy and never has. This fact delights a lot of GOP politicians on both the national and state level, who find democracy an annoyance at best and would happily stuff everyone but white male landowners into a hole if they could. Texas’ wholesale plan for an off-season revamp of its legislative districts to turn the state even redder is egregious. The fact that the GOP expected Democrats only to whine about it but otherwise do nothing was, well, naive, especially when California is being led by an ambitious egotist like Gavin Newsom, who clearly has the presidency in his sights for 2028.
At least Newsom’s redistricting proposal was put to an actual popular vote, rather than simply shoved into being like it was in Texas, so there is some veneer of propriety to it. To be clear, I suspect that if redistricting was put to a vote in Texas, it would pass. But I don’t imagine it even occurred to Abbott, Paxton, et al to do it that way — they find democracy annoying, after all. In a perfect world neither Texas nor California (nor any other state) would get to resort to such electoral shenanigans, representative districts would not be relentlessly gerrymandered, and we could all eat ice cream sundaes and never gain weight or get gassy. We do not currently live in this perfect world.
Finally, on a personal note:
THIS IS TRUE. Sherrill recently recommended The Dispatcher as “a fun beach read” (true) and now she’s Governor-Elect of the great state of New Jersey. Is this a coincidence?!? I mean, yes, yes, it is, correlation is not causation and all of that but even so, if you were running for governor of a state in our great nation, I would say at the very least recommending my work during interviews couldn’t hurt. Just try it now and then, is what I’m saying. You’re welcome.
Anyway. A good night for people who are not racist fascists and/or sex creeps. We need more nights like these, especially hopefully a year from now. They will not happen without effort. Take a couple days off to enjoy the moment and then let’s all get to it for 2026.
— JS
I called after lunch today, and the receptionist told me that all the slots had been filled already (even though the slots only opened for booking this morning - I checked their hours - at 8 am) so I would have to call back on November 17th when the next batch of appointment slots (for later in December I guess) opens up, "and preferably as early as possible in the morning!"
This isn't a functional system.
It might be the best way they can manage the resources they have, but it's clearly a health center that doesn't have enough doctors.
This is not an acceptable way to access a doctor's care in a public health system!!!!
(It's because conservative governments have had control in Finland and have been shoving through 'healthcare reforms' and insane cutbacks to all the social services over the last few years.)
An appointment with a private GP at the chain of private health centers with a branch in town has a base price of 100€, but it's 140€ for specialists and I suspect might be more for psychiatrists. (I haven't seriously considered going there, so I didn't check the specifics. Checking how the psychiatric medications are going for me is theoretically a more long-term monitoring anyway, not a one-time visit.)
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ladybusiness Nov. 5th, 2025 01:29 am)To distract myself, while I was redoing my bookshelves, I made a list of books where I thought, "Wow, I would love to be able to read that again for the first time."
( Read more... )
Since my massive reading slump in 2020, I've become a lot kinder to myself when it comes to re-reading. It's nice to spend time with familiar characters and worlds. I'm trying really hard to be gentle with my brain, which is overtaxed by the Horrors. An election year seems like the perfect time for a reread spree. It's very likely all of these books, and their companion/sequel novels, will be on my December TBR/2026 reading list.
(The print version's out next week, but the ebook was released today.)
( some mostly unspoilerly thoughts )
I also saw that someone put together a carrd of human translated baihe novels!
I also finally ended up buying not a big fluffy white comforter as I was looking for earlier this year, but a white "cooling blanket" from Rest. It was a NYT Wirecutter recommendation, and it was on sale, which made me feel slightly better about spending money on it. And I do like it. I like it enough that I bought a second one in navy blue to switch out while the white one is being washed. The one thing I dislike though, is that to get the full "cooling" effect (I put it in quotes, but the material is some kind of tencel thingy that cools off very quickly, so even when I feel too hot, I can kick it off and pull it back on after a few minutes and it is cool again), is that you can't use it with a top sheet. And I know some people never use a top sheet, but I was not one of those people until I bought this blanket. But the whole point is to have this fancy cool material against your skin. *hands*
It is lighter than a comforter and probably won't work if you need weight on you to sleep, but along with the pillows, and the percale sheets I've been using since the days of frequent hot flashes and night sweats (which have thankfully become much rarer these days), I've found my sleep has definitely improved. It also helps to keep the bedroom as cool as possible. Tbh, being hot is the #1 reason I can't sleep, and even now, after all these improvements, I do still sometimes have a bad night of sleep for whatever reasons, but I feel like it's a lot less often than it used to be.
In other news, I was off today for Election Day, but since I voted by mail, I didn't have to go anywhere. I ended up taking care of some chores around the apartment that needed doing since the cleaning ladies will be coming on Thursday. And now I'm watching the Rangers lose to Carolina. Sigh.
*
⌈ Secret Post #6878 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 18 secrets from Secret Submission Post #982.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Books on pre-order:
- Platform Decay (Murderbot 8) by Martha Wells (5 May 2025)
Books acquired in October:
- and read:
- The Mirror & The Maze (Wrath & the Dawn) by Renée Ahdieh
- The Crown & The Arrow (Wrath & the Dawn) by Renée Ahdieh
- The Moth & The Flame (Wrath & the Dawn) by Renée Ahdieh
- On The Fly (Portland Storm 2) by Catherine Gayle
- Taking A Shot (Portland Storm 3) by Catherine Gayle
- Light The Lamp (Portland Storm 4) by Catherine Gayle
- The O Zone by Kelly Jamieson [7]
- Hockey Halloween: A Charity Anthology
- and unread:
- Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells [1]
Books acquired previously and read in October:
- The Element of Fire by Martha Wells [Sep]
- The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells [Sep]
Borrowed books read in October:
- The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown (Baby Ganesha 2) by Vaseem Khan [3]
- The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star (Baby Ganesha 3) by Vaseem Khan [3]
Much of the month's reading has been alternating between hockey romance and Mumbai private detective stories, along with a complete failure to read my long-awaited pre-order of the latest Martha Wells. (but I did read different new-to-me Martha Wells, so yay?)
[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited
cimorene Nov. 4th, 2025 10:44 pm)And it's so good! I'm only making cocoa with it right now, but it impressed me right away. I use lactose-free dairy products usually, but I suspect that they disagree with me too, just mildly, especially cocoa made with milk. I've always been too lazy to test that systematically. Eliminating all dairy for an extended period (which I have a few times) isn't rigorous enough because other things can upset my stomach too, including just... anxiety.
I really love lattes - mostly chai and matcha, but I like coffee lattes too - and I've been wanting to make them for years and years. I was originally planning to get a milk steamer as a reward when and if I ever pass the driving test, but currently I'm trying a caffeine-free diet to see if it helps my anxiety. I'm not sure if I will decide to consume it again when the trial is over (I'm doing two and a half months minimum on physician's advice), and there's no point buying one if not.
There's popcorn flavored oat milk at the store. Bewildered and concerned. Don't like that.
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 4th, 2025 05:42 pm)
Some stories go beyond the page, presenting themselves as “living stories,” as author Charles H. Melcher calls them. Read all about these living stories in the Big Idea for his newest book, The Future of Storytelling, and see how a story can be capable of invoking all the senses, make you the main character of the story, and offer a glimpse into the future.
CHARLES H. MELCHER:
My quest to find the people and technologies that are reinventing storytelling has often led me to some unexpected places.
One evening in 2014 I found myself in a former mail-processing facility in London, taking in a performance of The Drowned Man by the immersive theater company Punchdrunk. The conceit was that you were in a Hollywood-like film studio where a movie was being shot. Upon entering, guests were given masks and asked to keep them on at all times and not to speak. Otherwise, there were no rules, and the nearly 600 guests were free to roam around the building like ghosts, either exploring the many intricately designed rooms or following specific actors as they performed scenes in different locations.
After a couple hours of wandering and watching, I grew tired and was thinking of calling it a night, when just then a beautiful young actress in a tight leopard-print dress and ruby-red lipstick drifted into the room. I chose to stay a little longer and see what unfolded. I followed her, along with some of the other guests, as she performed different scenes, until she ducked behind a door that I hadn’t noticed. On a whim, I decided to see where she was headed, so I followed her. She was waiting for me on the other side and quickly shut the door behind me and locked it. She motioned for me to follow her down a hallway into a little office. There, she reached up and took off my mask. My cloak of invisibility had been removed, and I felt exposed, face-to-face with this actress, just the two of us.
She hung my mask on a coat rack and took a Humphrey Bogart– style trench coat off the hook. She put it on me, tying the belt and adjusting the collar just so, and then led me by the arm down a narrow corridor that got progressively darker until it was pitch black. Finally, she let go.
I was alone in the dark, every one of my senses on high alert. After what felt like a long time, I suddenly heard a voice over a loudspeaker yell, “Action!” followed by a popping sound and an explosion of light, then another pop and another burst of light. As my eyes adjusted, I realized I was surrounded by about thirty silver umbrellas, the kind photographers use to diffuse strobe lights. And then I saw her, the actress, starting to walk slowly toward me—but she was completely transformed. She had an intense, almost crazed look in her eyes. I was worried that she was no longer a friend but a foe—maybe even insane. As she drew closer to me, I froze, fearful that I was going to need to physically defend myself against her. She raised her hand up toward my neck and then laid it gently on my cheek. When she took another step forward, I could feel the warmth of her body up against mine. I could smell the sweetness of her perfume. Instinctively, my hands went around her waist.
As she looked longingly up into my eyes, I was no longer afraid of her—now I was afraid of myself. What role was I willing to play here? I’m a happily married man, but there I was, alone in a room with a beautiful starlet in my arms. While I contemplated whether to lean in for a kiss, I heard the same voice over the loudspeaker yell, “Cut!” and everything returned to pitch black. The actress moved away and I was alone, every part of my body shaking with excitement and uncertainty. Then I felt her hand on my arm, and she led me back down the corridor into the small office, where she removed my trench coat, hung it on the hook, and put my mask back on. Finally, as she was about to see me unceremoniously out the door, she stopped and whispered in my ear: “I think you would be great for the part.” I was off again, left afloat among the hundreds of other ghosts in the building. I’d entered the experience as a voyeur, but by the end, I was playing a role—in fact, I realized I had been auditioning for the role of the leading man. And as unsettling as it was, I loved it. For the rest of the weekend, I walked around London just a little bit taller, feeling like James Bond, with the sense that adventure might be waiting for me around any corner.
This experience made me realize that I was craving a new type of storytelling, one that is participatory, multisensory, interactive, and highly personal; stories that aren’t confined within a screen, a pair of headphones, the words on a page, or a theatrical proscenium but exist all around us, engage with us, and even change based on our decisions. And I’m not alone: Creators and audiences all over the world are embracing embodied, immersive stories, although the scale and breadth of this trend is still invisible to most.
A revolution in storytelling is taking place, and it is going to have profound implications in almost every field. It’s happening in the top-secret tech labs of Meta, Apple, and Google; in avant-garde performances at fringe theater festivals; in escape rooms housed in storefronts of suffering shopping malls; in cores of quantum supercomputers containing next-generation artificial intelligence; in the newest VR and AR headsets; and in centuries-old museums. It’s happening at festivals like SXSW, Cannes Lions, and Comic-Con; in restaurants and bars; in old garages and abandoned bowling alleys; in Hollywood studios and Madison Avenue advertising agencies; on university campuses and at nonprofit organizations. It’s happening in the middle of the desert in Nevada and on a palm-sized device that lives inside the pocket of nearly every person who will read my book The Future of Storytelling.
As the publisher of Melcher media and the founder of the Future of StoryTelling (FoST) Summit, I’ve been incredibly lucky to get invited into the studios, labs, offices, and academic corridors where the future of living stories is being invented. I have come to believe that if we can understand the mechanics and unleash their full power, living stories – a term I coined – have the potential to become more popular than Hollywood and gaming have ever been. Artists and storytellers have a new opportunity to serve their audiences by creating experiences in which the audience plays an active role.
Something beautiful happens when creators relinquish control of the narrative to their audience. The reason living stories are so powerful is that they engage not only our eyes and ears but our whole person. They gift us experiences that our brains and spinal cords are primed for, thanks to millions of years of evolution. You can feel your response to a living story in the hairs on the back of your neck, in the pit of your stomach, in the ache in your thighs as you move and choose, emote, and think through these experiences.
Just imagine: How different is it to read a book or see a movie about surviving a natural disaster than to believe in the moment that you did? How much more satisfying is it when you, not King Arthur, are able to pull the sword out of the stone? Stories have always provided us with a safe, instructive way to survive the world, as we observe characters making choices (often the wrong ones). With living stories, those characters are us, and we learn from the choices we make, and learn deeply, because we feel them throughout our own bodies. Living stories are a gateway to a more intense emotional life, to living more fully in the world.
I wrote The Future of Storytelling not to undermine the traditional storytelling forms, or to suggest that they should or will be replaced. I wrote it because of my love for living stories and my excitement for what these stories can and will do now and in the future, due to breakthroughs in technology, storycrafting, world-building, and our perpetual yearning for new paradigms.
For storytellers, audiences, and stories themselves, it’s an exciting time to be alive.
The Future of Storytelling: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 4th, 2025 05:30 pm)
All the Scalzis voted today, because that’s what you do. Here we have are electing township trustees and board of education members — not hugely sexy, but actually important for where we live. Every election counts, is what I’m saying. If today is a voting day for you, I hope you went out there and did the thing — and if you haven’t done it yet, as of 12:30pm, it’s not too late! You have several more hours! Do the thing!
— JS
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 4th, 2025 12:47 pm)Hello, everyone! Recently I did a piece over the fact that I’ve been writing on the blog more or less officially for a year now, and I asked y’all what you thought of the content so far and what y’all want to see more of, and all that good stuff. I also said that it’s pretty clear from my history that I tend to write about restaurants, outings, and unique experiences more than anything else, as it’s what I have really enjoyed doing and writing about and it also makes for new and exciting content.
Despite these types of pieces being my most commonly written genre and them being well-received, I’m here to say that I’m going to be slowing down on those types of posts specifically.
I wasn’t exactly expecting to get a whole dang house right now, and now that I have one, my priorities are shifting. So too must what I do and what I spend money on shift, as well.
As much as I love dining out, partaking in bougie experiences, and driving far away from home just to do weird activities, again, I have a whole dang house now! I suddenly have… a utility bill?! And the house itself plus all the awesome decorating I’m about to do is not, uhhh… cheap.
In response to this, I must reel in my extravagant purchases and galivanting around the surrounding cities, spending all willy-nilly on excellent food and drinks. Instead, I will have to start making my own excellent food and drinks, and I hope that y’all end up enjoying that content just as much. I know some people in the comments of my previous post said they like my baking posts and would like to see more cookbook reviews/cooking at home content. So, it’s y’all’s lucky day because that’s about to be a huge chunk of what I do!
Aside from cooking at home and talking about cookbooks, being a home cook, cookware I like, etc., I’m also planning to do posts over the house itself. Things like the decorating process, how I’m devoting an entire bedroom to my 200+ Squishmallows, fun things like that. I also plan to do more movie reviews, because I have lots of streaming services and will be at home plenty enough to watch stuff now. Also, more sticker content! Basically things that I can do at home. I’m about to become the biggest homebody you’ve ever seen.
Honestly, change is very difficult for me, and it’s going to be hard to do things differently than I have been doing them for years. I think that all things considered, though, that this is a good change. I love cooking and baking, and having the chance to improve my skills and learn more about home-cooking is exciting. I truly love going out, but it can also be exhausting. This past year in particular it’s really been getting to me how busy I am and how much running around I do. I think it’ll be nice to be more anchored to one place. My new home.
And this isn’t to say that I’m never going out again or won’t be dining out literally ever. Just that my focuses are shifting right now. It’s all very exciting, honestly! I’m glad y’all are here through this journey, and I can’t wait to share more.
-AMS
brokenframe posting in vidding Nov. 3rd, 2025 09:37 pm)⌈ Secret Post #6877 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 27 secrets from Secret Submission Post #982.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Candy? SENT as of 6:47 PM PST 11/4!
Drinks? SENT (twice, lol) as of 6:51 PM PST 11/3!
Books? SENT as of 6:39 PM PST 11/3!
( INSTRUCTIONS & REMINDERS )
SENDING DEADLINE: Friday, November 21, 2025
Extensions/Defaulting: Pre-research your post office/courier service hours, and plan to send as early as you can! BUT if your best-laid plans fail, and you need an extension -- we get it! Please bypass the shame spiral and email us ASAP. We want to know what's going on but rarely hesitate to grant brief extensions, especially to historically reliable swappers.
And, of course, if you need to default for any reason, the above is doubly true!! Life happens, but if you let us know as soon as it does, we can help out your recipient AND probably have you back next year with minimal anxiety.
One More Time: don't forget to check in at Swaps Central! And a safe, merry Swapstide to all!
Current FAQ and very old resources post here, for anyone who needs them. Questions and comments here or via email, as always.
Kat & Livi & Helen
3/5. Scifi about a refugee linguist who is forced into a dangerous mission to retrieve ancient data off a starship mere weeks from destruction from a dying star.
This is a space survival story with horror undertones, and a strong commitment to enemies-to-friends as our narrator travels the ship in the company of two people who are intimately connected to the massacre of his family and community. I’m into that as a project, and did enjoy it, though I think the book does not entirely do the legwork on how this relationship develops. That’s a hard thing to pull off, to be clear.
The other thing to know about this book is that it is first person narrated by someone with absolutely galloping ADHD and close to zero impulse control. He is a lot. And the book flows with his thinking – somewhat erratically, with lots of interruptions and a million tiny chapters. I think part of that is by design, and part of it is first book messiness. And also being about 20,000 words too long. But my point is, whether you enjoy this book or not will probably turn on whether you can vibe with the narrator. I sometimes could and often couldn’t, so here I am.
Content notes: Recollection of massacre, violence, body horror.
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 3rd, 2025 04:17 pm)Found via Facebook, a fake testimonial from “me” being excited that a scam site got “me” a dozen reviews on Amazon and Goodreads over the space of a few weeks. I obviously did not make this testimonial, and also, bluntly, I wouldn’t be excited by a dozen Amazon/Goodreads reviews. “3 Days” pictured here, already has 3300 ratings/reviews on Amazon and over 4000 on Goodreads. I’m not now, nor have I been for some time, in the business of trying to plump up my Amazon/Goodreads review numbers. I certainly wouldn’t be recommending a service to do the same. They’re scams all the way down.
I suspect the people who regularly read here know that I or other well-known authors are not in the business of giving testimonials to sites that purport to “help” authors with reviews, but there are lots of aspiring writers who, shall we say, live in hope that there’s a shortcut to getting one’s name out there, and that something like this may be one of those shortcuts, and who might see my name, or the name of some other similarly notable author, and allow themselves to be convinced this sort of scam is a good idea. So this post is to tell them: No. Sorry, no. No author you have ever heard of is going to be scrabbling for Amazon or Goodreads reviews, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be doing it like this. Save your money.
— JS
cimorene Nov. 3rd, 2025 05:07 pm)A few years ago in the winter when we were using the cast iron woodstove sometimes, someone (me) uhmmmmm absent-mindedly left some candle holders sitting on top of it with candles in them and those included ones carved out of solid blocks of pink rock salt (hideous, they belonged to my MIL, who was addicted to candles. Why didn't we just get rid of them? We hated them. Natural aversion to throwing things away. We have since thrown them out). So it turns out that ummm the candles completely liquefy if you do that and then light a fire in the stove, and they like cause the salt to run and melt onto the surface of the wood stove and salt is bad for cast iron. So. Big rust spots.
And the rust spots have got worse with time, because when it first happened and we tried to get them off, we tried with normal google and duckduckgo searches and got no better advice than sandpaper and steel wool. We only managed to get a tiny bit of the rust off and determined that getting it all off would have taken about 5000 hours of hand-sanding. Since that was not a worthwhile proposition, we left it that way for another year.
So anyway, I tried Marginalia a month ago or something, and it only took a few minutes to unearth a thread about restoring cast iron woodstoves on an old-fashioned bulletin board on "finishing.com, the home of the finishing industry". It's straight out of the internet 20 years ago. And the information was MUCH better!
- WD-40 softens rust
- wire brushes, not sandpaper or sandblasting (although industrial, like, having the stove ripped out and taking it to someone who will sandblast it is the nuclear option if it's completely covered in rust everywhere)
- wire brush attachments for power drills
That was all the info we needed! WD-40 never seemed stinky to me when I was using it on door hinges and stuff, but when you spray it over the visible rust on a wood stove it is noticeable, though not TERRIBLE; it smells kinda like you're in an auto shop, but not in the middle of the car part. Like by the entrance.
You can get visible change on small rust spots with a handheld wire brush. A few hours on two days with the drill attachment has seemed to do the majority of it. It's very hard to work in eye protection goggles and a high filtration mask though. I have to stop, lift the glasses to look, then lower them and start again every minute or so. We are not planning to repaint the spots that have been taken back to the silvery iron, according again to the advice on this bulletin board. Apparently lighting a fire after the WD-40 is already going to be stinky enough and the paint would be worse. You can get protective stove polishes of some kind apparently.
This stove is a Jøtul 3 Classic cast iron woodstove, in a traditional 19th century style. It's completely inappropriate for this 1950 modern-style house. The expected stove in the livingroom is (and no doubt was) a masonry stove, which is much better at heating an area because the ceramic conserves heat and releases it gradually. The form of masonry stoves, which are of course built on-site, was typically streamlined in the years after this house was built. Nowadays you can't build them yourself anymore and that makes them more expensive, so somebody probably replaced the original one when it failed with this cast iron stove perhaps in the 1980s, which was the last time this model was made. But crucially, although a woodstove is completely inappropriate to the house and less functional, there were and are woodstoves that are more minimal and modern in form and they could've just got one of those. But nope.
Anyway, we can't afford a masonry stove like, ever, but our ambition is to replace this woodstove with a Porin Matti, a cheaper alternative to a masonry stove that is still slightly better at retaining heat than a cast iron stove, and which also (a) was in popular use in 1950 and (b) looks similar to the style of masonry stoves typically found in our type of house. These only cost about 2500€ (not counting labor), in contrast to masonry stoves which are typically over 8000€ not counting labor (and requiring much more labor because the mason has to build it on site out of blocks and tiles). We would've been able to buy one this year probably if we hadn't had this broken sewage pipe issue, which ended up costing around 10k. (We had previously earmarked that money, an inheritance from my great-uncle who died recently, for restoring the outer front door and maybe a stove; but the last of it got used on the plumbing instead.)
scalziwhatever_feed Nov. 3rd, 2025 02:08 pm)
What is The Time Traveler’s Passport? It’s an Amazon-exclusive anthology of six short stories — one written by me! — that have time travel as an integral part of their plot. Not even counting me, it’s a pretty grand line-up of authors: R.F. Kuang, Peng Shepard, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake and P. Djèlí Clark. My story “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” was released early on the Amazon “First Reads” program, but now the entire anthology is up and ready to be read.
Here’s the link to Amazon’s page for the anthology. If you have Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited, you can check out these stories at no additional cost; for everyone else you can buy the entire anthology for a nice low price, or pick and choose the individual stories. The stories also come with audio narration (mine performed by Malcolm Hillgartner), so you have options on how to take in the tale.
These are all excellent stories by fantastic authors (credit here to editor John Joseph Adams for putting it together), and well worth your time to check out. Enjoy!
— JS
