sir_guinglain

2016: The Chilcot Inquiry illustrates the meticulous process by which the UK went to war in Iraq, Lord Lucan is declared dead, and the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU is at worst the second stupidest collective decision made by a Western democracy in 2016.

Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"

Poll #33672 Clarke Award Finalists 2016

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5 (29.4%)

Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (11.8%)

Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
2 (11.8%)

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
5 (29.4%)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
16 (94.1%)

Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)

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

Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Way Down Dark by James Smythe

Tags:

clarke award

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/ghost-devices-by-simon-bucher-jones/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63611

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Deftly, Mr Misnomer stitched the transparent thread through the innards of the computer. His long surgeon‘s fingers spliced the nanoscopic connections with practised ease. Fizzing and spluttering, the autopilot of the crashed skimmer sprang to life.

Another book that I really didn’t get on with. The plot ostensibly is about Bernice Summerfield investigating a mysterious artefact, the Spire, which is almost three hundred miles high (or almost 482.803 kilometers high, as Philip Jose Farmer would have said). I found the writing very confusing, with too many characters whose means and motivation were not clear to me, and a choppy narrative abruptly switching between points of view. I understood what happened at the end, but not so much of the beginning or middle. You can get Ghost Devices here.

This is the second last of the Bernice Summerfield novels that I read in 2014-15 and did not get around to writing up at the time. The last is Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks, which promises to be a little different.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/ghost-devices-by-simon-bucher-jones/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63611

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others
Warnings: n/a
Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father.
Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.

Prologue / Previous Chapter

( Read more... )

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Fields of Gold - Sting

Tags:

- The State of the Me: v. tired. Nothing dreadful, merely too "geriatric" to support regular heavy menstruation. My family: dragging the average age of menopause waaay up since forever, lmao.

- Futuristic lolibobs: an attempt will soon be made on at least four islands in a week. Might be awol for a while. I haven't sent you to Coventry, and aten't ded (probably).

- Ghosts of lolibobs past: I can't stop thinking about these three wholly unrelated things...

1. Those British seaside food kiosks that hedge their weather-related bets with cheery signs for "ice cream" on one side of the window and "hot food" on the other. I'm now imagining a typical British holidaymaker emerging from the front of the queue with a whippy cone in one hand and boiling tea in the other, lol.

2. While changing trains in Cardiff with time to spare I wandered out of the station to see what I miss when I'm in a hurry and there's a wonderful statue of headmistress Betty Campbell, the first Black headteacher in Wales, which has been there since 2021. It's a realistic depiction, by sculptor Eve Shepherd, of Campbell literally larger than life, at 4m (13ft), and surrounded by equally well-sculpted local children, mostly reading. The inscription on the back quotes Campbell: "We were a good example to the rest of the world, how you can live together regardless of where you come from or the colour of your skin." - "Roedden ni'n esiampl dda i weddill y byd o sut y gallwn gyd-fyw beth bynnag yw eich gwreiddiau neu liw eich croen.". Campbell was chosen as the subject in a public vote, ahead of other women such as poet Cranogwen, suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas, Labour Party organiser Elizabeth Andrews, and anthropologist Elaine Morgan, so it was a significant sign of widespread respect in addition to the honour of a public statue in Central Square, next to one of the busiest pedestrian street crossings in Cardiff.

Images of the Betty Campbell statue (wikimedia).

3. There's gNo place like gnHome. Still thinking about the bare grass expanse hosting Llarge Llandudno LLandudgnomes around the base of supports for a street name sign rooted in the lawn of a suburban garden, and the way the gnomes weren't blocking the sign but enhancing it: displayed like a collection in an open air museum; prompting viewers to acknowledge the gnomes in a commentary on suburban culture, subverting passing glances like a Banksy, or like being Rick-rolled by traditional genii loci ("never gonna give you up"); or an accumulation of gifts after one or two were initially placed by the gnHome-owner.

Llarge Llandudno Gnomes

Surrounding a street sign on a suburban lawn,
huddled like a team playing capture the flag,
arrayed like an army of watchful guards,
clotted like antibodies against invasion,
aggregated like pebbles set in concrete,
clumped in a clod like earth elementals,
clustered like petals round the disc of a daisy,
a constellation of gnomic gods.

Tags:

It's a long weekend where I am, so Monday is the new Sunday. Which brings me to the topic of the post!

How goes the decluttering? Have you shifted anything out of the house? Found something to sort through? Had thoughts on things you can let go of?

Comments open to locals, lurkers, drive by sticky beaks, and anyone I've forgotten to mention.

Tags:

weekly check in

https://bachtrack.com/22/296/view/29435

I really should not be living and working with my parents and specifically my mother, she drives me bonkers. She struggles with prioritization and worries about the tiniest stuff. She is currently so cranky about the tshirt order who are running late for the first time in many years and she's ready to throw them out as a supplier. so much taking things personally! I am very tired right now and she is asking me how many honeys to order. I dont' know how many honeys we sell in a year, this is my first full year here. she has so much knowledge about stuff but dear god. it's so much to manage her.

The weekend went well, we were pretty prepared for things. Saturday was busier than Sunday, both days were sunny and very hot. We hit 80F on Sunday. bleh. sweating, so much sweating. I hydrated with apple cider and a little water. too much apple cider, my stomach is extremely upset right now. I also didn't eat much, but I wasn't hungry, a combo of too hot and lots to do which was an absolutely huge mistake. the first weekend is practice for busier weekends and working out the problems. I need to pack a lunch, so even if I take a bite every ten minutes, I'll get through a whole sandwich.

morning list: hiking boots (to swap to when ground dries out), lunch, water bottle x2, cash drawers, hoodie, blanket

the harvest has to start today, so I'm planning to do a half day of harvesting this afternoon and then relax some more. We got some stuff harvested yesterday morning real quick to fill out empty displays, but there's lots of pumpkins out there. we are starting daytime outings this week too. busy busy busy.

other reasons I need my parents to move out: my dad is on a computer call, so I have to take farm calls in the other room away from my computer. separate offices needed. ETA: I moved to the kitchen, they have followed me to keep talking to me! Double ETA: I went over to my shed for an hour and my mom came over to have a lot of feelings at me about baked goods, when I told her I went there for peace and quiet and she could have called me. then 45 minutes later, she needed to talk about something, she called me and when I didn't get back to her in one minute (I saw the phone call as I was calling my dad about the bad dehumidifier in the church that was leaking water everywhere), she tracked me down in the church. jesus fuck. to be fair, I'm hungry and therefore cranky but also wtf

Tags:

farming,
personal

It's challenge time!

Comment 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!

Tags:

just one thing

Tags:

I do not think these are healthy or useful ways to look at SEX. Notches on the bedpost was bad enough, or how many times per night they could Do It, but really, these are taking the whole thing to new levels.

My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. How can I change his mind?:

He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!). He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive?:
Response:I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?

I suppose there isn't actually some scoreboard somewhere out there Rate My Manly Performance but I wouldn't entirely rule that out, alas.

Because of this: Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture:

Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors — Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.

Apparently, 'Zhu insists he has a deeper, more profitable mission: to gamify health and build an empire around male fertility'.

Yeah, well, I'm over here going

a) tortoise and hare, and are those sprinters whooshing right past the ovum in their mad gallop?

b) bit of an assumption that they are actually, you know, viably fertile, which I don't think at all correlates with speed. Motility is one thing, having what it takes to fertilise that ovum is another (and haven't I read something somewhere about It Is The Ovum That Chooses? Heh.)

c) Mary Ellman's image in Thinking About Women: 'the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.

Tags:

Happy birthday,

violsva!

We watched Silo (AppleTV) seasons 1-2 over the past week or so. General reactions:

Click here

Draggy and depressing first season, really fun and engaging second season with an infuriating letdown of a season ending. (Even sudden surprise Jessica Henwick could not salvage that hot mess. Which apparently is the books' fault, but still.) I enjoyed most of the season two character arcs enough that I'm pretty happy to consider it a satisfying 2-season show. Maybe I'll write up more details later?

Feel free to ask me questions in the comments. I have not read the books it's based on, though I get the impression the show follows the book trajectory pretty closely.

Exchanges:
- Currently have a placeholder signup in for

festivids. I need to finish my signup (closes on the 30th).
- Almost certainly signing up for

amperslashexchange, currently in nominations.
- I haven't signed up, but extremely tempted by Back from the Dead Flash Exchange, currently in nominations/signups (til Oct 3).
- Biggles holiday exchange is definitely running again! Planning post and polls here at the comm.

I don't have plans to do Yuletide this year, unless the FOMO gets to me too much.

Tags:

Hey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.

Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 58

What country do you currently live in?

What is your age?

12-19
0 (0.0%)

20-29
3 (5.3%)

30-39
8 (14.0%)

40-49
16 (28.1%)

50-59
20 (35.1%)

60-69
6 (10.5%)

70-79
4 (7.0%)

80+
0 (0.0%)

To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?

Tags:

pols,
us,
war

and now Callie is angry at me.

**********

( Read more... )

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: G
Characters: Feanor, Daeron, Fingolfin, Findis, Nerdanel, Curufin, Maglor
Warnings: n/a
Summary: Midwinter is meant to be a time of feasting and merriment, but Fëanor does not find it so, especially with Daeron of Doriath in attendance.
Note: theScrapWitch on tumblr asked me to write a scene from Mezza Voce in Feanor's POV--and I ended up with a whole fic.

Mezza Voce

AO3 / SWG

What about us?
What about all the broken happy ever afters?
What about us?
What about all the plans that ended in disaster?
What about love? What about trust?
What about us?
- “What About Us?” by P!nk

- -

( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: You Raise Me Up - Josh Groban

Tags:

An empty jacuzzi is an ideal spot for wild! shenanigans! And it's also great for slowly sneaking toward mom, like the mighty predator you are.

Purrcy was very concerned, walking hunched and close to the floor, because there had been the distant sounds of a *very* large growling something out there in the sky earlier ... he REALLY hates the Thunder Growler, this is his Sad Face about it

My new icon is Clio, the Muse of History, from this painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Moreelse, because she doesn't look *at all* like a Greek goddess picking heroes, she's a young woman taking notes on your stupid-ass behavior.

Last week Bret Devereaux's Friday post was On the Use and Abuse of Malthus, and I commented:

The standard description of the demographic transition has a important counterexample. Birth rates in France started falling in the 18th century, before industrialization or a drop in infant mortality. Guillaume Blanc's 2023 paper, The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France, begins with a quote from Malthus, in fact. Blanc presents preliminary evidence that France's demographic transition was the result of secularization & anti-clericalism.

A reasonable level of birth control could be achieved using only materials found in the home (mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus--not to mention oral sex, sodomy, or the other thousand & one fun activities that are not PiV), once French people stopped worrying what God wanted them to do. The assumption that premodern people *had* to have as many offspring as possible is not supported by this evidence.

Faustine Perrin (2022) suggests that the Enlightenment/the Revolution/anticlericalism led to a rising level of felt equality for French women in marriages, so that they were better able to assert their desire to bear fewer children.

In the present day, this ties into the work of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, whose article on The Downside of Fertility I just read because she talked about Bujold's Vorkosigan series in an economics podcast. TLDR: Bearing & raising children is hard work, labor even, and women are reluctant to do it if they don't have help.

Tags:

I used part of my stuck-in-bed-with-owies day to catch up on my story index of 2025, at the end of which I discovered I never finished updating the one from 2024. 2024 will have to wait, because at the moment I am just floored by how many fucking limericks I have written this year.

If you subscribe to me on AO3 and you don't like my poetry, I am so, so sorry (insincere). This will continue unabated, as I just came to the (un)fortunate realization that I can do limericks for Kinktober.

For anyone whose ears perked up at the mention of Kinktober, here's a possible kink list for you.

Current Mood: poetic
Current Music: The apples fermented inside the lamented

We are 24 hours into tag approving! We began with 6078 individual fandom nominations to sort (where if two people submitted the same fandom, that would count twice towards the total). We have 3687 fandom nominations still to sort. Please review the questions below to help us sort them quickly and correctly!

Please link your nominations page if telling us what to do about your nomination - thank you! Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.

If we've processed any of your nominations and something doesn't look right, please comment (with your nominations page) to tell us about the problem and how you think it should be corrected. Questions are welcome.

Aliens (1986) - These characters are also nominated under the broader fandom Alien (Original Movies 1979-1997), so we would like to merge your nominations in with the rest of the original movies.

Bibi Blocksberg (2002) - Nominator, do you specifically only want the first movie, or may we approve this as the canonical Bibi Blocksberg (Movies 2002 2004)? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Book of Night - Holly Black - We also have evidence for this fandom as the Charlatan Duology, and another participant has nominated it under that name. We’d like to combine your nominations, but please get us in touch if there’s a reason that won’t work. Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Clocktaur War Series - T. Kingfisher, Swordheart - T. Kingfisher, Temple of the White Rat Universe - T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel - T. Kingfisher - We have some overlap in these nominations. The fandom as a whole is eligible, so we could combine them under Temple of the White Rat Universe, or the Temple of the White Rat Universe nominator could have their characters split into the other fandoms if you are willing to do that. Please comment with a link to your nominations to help us sort this out!

Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac - Nominator, you may see some oddities as we get this set up separately from La Comédie Humaine. Pardon our dust, and hopefully you’re used to it by now! Let us know if anything looks wrong when the final tagset is released.

Designing Women - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer).

Dragonfly - Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin - Our understanding is that these are all in the same continuity. We are planning to combine Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan, especially as there is character overlap in those nominations. Dragonfly nominator, do you have concerns with folding that nomination into Earthsea as well? If so, we would appreciate help understanding exactly what you’re looking for and how to differentiate the larger Earthsea universe.

Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia Wrede - We won’t approve the character nomination Morwen's Cats (Enchanted Forest) as they are all individually named. Nominators, could you please each choose a cat? (Scorn has already been nominated.) Please link your nominations page when you reply.

MAIJO Otaro - Works - We don’t approve fandoms consisting of all of a creator’s works, and the nominated characters appear to come from at least 2 novels. Nominator, could you pick one of Maijō’s works to nominate, along with the associated characters? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

夢中さきみに。| Muchuu sa Kimi ni (Manga) - We also have a nomination for the Anime; the nominator of that fandom says they have not read the manga but believes these could be combined if needed. Does the Manga nominator have a preference? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer).

Nescafe Advertisment - While this is a canonical fandom on AO3, it’s under review to be renamed, so we’ll approve this as Nescafe "Arctica" | "Polar Explorers" Advertisments (Russia) which is the likely new name. However, we’d like more information on the characters. We’re not sure which of the men is “First Polar” and which is “Second Polar”; some works in the fandom use Ivanov and Petrov. Also, we haven’t seen a polar bear in the 3 ads we’ve found - can you link us to the one that has the polar bear, please?

老洞 | The Old Miao Myth (TV) - Nominator, for the character Jin Bong, are you looking for Chin Pong? We’ve checked several sources and want to confirm whether this is a romanization issue or something else.

Outcast (Video Game series) - this has been nominated with character 'Any' and no other characters. If you mean you are interested in any characters, we will approve this without characters, but we wanted to check just in case there is a character actually named Any. Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer).

Prophet - Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald - could we please get more information about 'Prophet' as a character (aside from being the title)?

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025) - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer)

Tennis RPF - We have separate nominations for 2020's Men's Tennis RPF (characters: Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Alex de Minaur, Taylor Fritz, Terence Atmane) and 2025 Grand Slam Season (Tennis) RPF (characters: Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner) - may we combine these under the former fandom name? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Community LJ | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth

Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.

Tags:

2025,
nom review

The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:

Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?

The audio version of “Data Ghost” my short story from the recent Storyteller: the Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology is now online at Pseudopod!

https://pseudopod.org/2025/09/26/pseudopod-995-data-ghost/

Also, Queen Demon, the sequel to Witch King, will be out on October 7, in ebook, hardcover, and audiobook narrated by Eric Mok.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/queen-demon-martha-wells/b7abd63577bd30a5?ean=9781250826916&next=t

Tags:

upcoming publications

Clarke Award Finalists 2016

Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones

A Hundred Miles Through the Desert - Chapter Twelve

In which our heroine's brain remains on holiday

Weekly (ish) check in

Shakespeare in New York at the COC

One weekend down, five to go

Just one thing: 29 September 2025

Interesting Links for 29-09-2025

Menz B Weeerd

(no subject)

Updates

Poll: Sense of geopolitical awareness [pols, US, war]

Accidentally worked 9 days in a row

All the Broken Happy Ever Afters - Chapter 1

2 sets of Purrcy; blogcomment record: the demographic transition in France

There once were subscribers so patient

Nominations Queries Post 1

I don't know what to make of this

Short Story

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