Reading

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A5 A'Zone Notebooks

Got these brand spanking notebooks today! Where I live, this brand is pretty popular among students.

cover

The pages insides are coloured and make doing homework a little less boring:

page

Anyone else prefer writing on off-white or coloured paper? It's easier on the eyes and basically the analog version of 'dark mode'.

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Looks like the mass lobby got NUMBERS \o/

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/06/25/trans-westminster-lobby-ehrc/

The organizers are estimating circa 900 people showed up, putting it on a par with the biggest LGBTQ+ lobbies ever (against Section 28).

Outstanding work from the Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, who also organized the legal briefing for MPs in May:

https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/trans-legal-experts-warn-supreme-court-ruling-could-be-breaching-human-rights-in-parliamentary-briefing-483801/

You can support them and get the "Maybe I'm trans?" badges or just support them without badges:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/maybe-im-trans
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/solidarity-projects-campaigns-fund

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meme

you can only be young once, but you can always be immature

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Current Mood: good
Current Location: Home and on my corner of the couchF
Crossposts: https://mrs-sweetpeach.insanejournal.com/790660.html

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project 52

Project 52

( Click here for Week #25 )

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( books (Abulafia, Greer, Tesh, Edington, Arroyo) )

astrology
I'm refreshing my knowledge. I used to be GOOD at it, and it's a thing I don't have to be healthy to do. I don't have to keep normal office hours. The trouble is most of my books are paper and reading paper is a migraine trigger. So it's slow going.

dirt
The thrips are srsly going after the rattlesnake beans, and it's making me crazy. Interestingly, they're less fond of the ornamentals. The bougainvillea sent up a new shoot that is thick enough to propagate, so I'm planning to do that in a week or two. The struggling spider plant is recovering. The teeny tiny leaf of the string of turtles has grown a nearly microscopic leaflet and a root inside its rooting bag of sphag & perlite. Maybe one day it'll be a real plant!

healthcrap
Skin clinic tomorrow. Cancelled botox for migraines on Monday, due to bureaucratic shenanigans I'm partly responsible for. Continuing to be in bed for 12 hours and sleep on and off for 7-9 of them. Little REM, little deep sleep, little rest, all thanks to the fibro. I've had PTSD triggers happening for the past week or more, I realized, which is getting me down. Good that I identified it, though, so at least I can point to some reasons for being a ball of anxiety and avoidance

yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday, go me, and had a nice time. I still feel little impetus to crochet or do anything else creative. I wish I did.

food
Started taking a big kid dose of a children's multivitamin in hopes of feeling better, and I do! I bought a ton of groceries after only doing one trip last month. The prices have gone up significantly, grrr. But now I have healthy options that aren't too hard to cook and will hopefully not find myself living on trail mix again...even though I bought fixings for that, too. Made mujadara again and upped the lentil to rice ratio. Again used 2 giant sweet onions bc anything less isn't near enough.

#resist
June 27: Stonewall Anniversary Protest
June 24 to 30: McDonald’s Boycott
July 4: Independence Day Boycott/Free America Protest/Weekend of Community Events
July 17: Good Trouble Lives On Day of Action (in honor of John Lewis, who died 7/17/2000)

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book report

Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I will read anything Adrian Tchaikovsky writes, and I read this, where a robot valet makes a decision his programming can't account for and is then thrust out of the safety and predictability of his manor home and into the chaos of the unknown, but it's a book that can't seem to commit to a perspective or tone. I mean:

Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay.

Is this robot valet on Tumblr? Nothing in the text justifies such a distracting choice.

This is not a page turner. At one point, I swear to god, Libby predicted it would take me 23 years to finish reading it. But it's Tchaikovsky, and so finish it I did. Even when dealing almost entirely with robots, his science fiction is humanist, concerned with individual choices, with no one person or group being the big bad. Instead the friction comes where systems overlap without comprehension.

Charles, House said at last. We are only following instructions.

This book is a world-building slow burn that examines the overlap of automation and humanity, and comes to a dire—but logical—conclusion.

There's also a short story set before this book that you can read at Reactor: Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Contains: the collapse of human civilization, robot harm and death.

reading!

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furious activity is no substitute for understanding

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books,
humor

For SallyMn (and anyone else who likes to read)

I don't know how to embed images that aren't mine, so here's the link to the Reddit post --

https://qr.ae/pAl6KF

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book log: reading wednesday

Reading Wednesday

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monuments

Small-town Great War memorials are so sad. You have this glorious statue erected To Our Brave Boys, Their Sacrifice Will Endure Forever, and then, added on to the side or back of the plinth, the World War Two memorial is like, "well, fuck."

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fic rec,
meme

I'll be in good company in hell

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monday poems

monday poem #332: Maggie Smith, "Animals"

Animals

The president called undocumented immigrants
animals, and in the nature documentary
I watched this morning with my kids,
after our Saturday pancakes, the white
fairy term doesn't build a nest but lays
her single speckled egg in the crook of a branch
or a tree knot. It looks precarious there
because it is. And while she's away,
because even mothers must eat, another bird
swoops in and pecks it, sips some of what now
won't become. The tern returns and knows
something isn't right—the egg crumpled,
the red slick and saplike running down the tree—
but her instinct is so strong, she sits. Just sits
on the broken egg. I have been this bird.
We have been animals all our lives,
with our spines and warm blood, our milky tits
and fine layers of fur. Our live births, too,
if we're lucky. But what animal wrenches
a screaming baby from his mother?
Do we know anymore what it is to be human?
I've stopped knowing what it is to be human.

— Maggie Smith
from Goldenrod

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chris evans,
movie

Materialists

I went to see Materialists this afternoon. Partly to get away from this hideous heat though I was planning on seeing it in any event. It got me thinking that the last time I actually went to the theater to see a movie it was Knives Out. Call it the Evans effect. 😀

I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a decent rom-com that definitely has something to say about dating and "checking all the boxes."

The acting was good but Dakota Johnson somehow managed to not have much chemistry with either Pedro Pascal or Chris Evans imho.

Chris Evans looks especially soft and huggable in it.

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The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

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Read 'The Pitt' Episode 1 Script '7:00 A.M.' By R. Scott Gemmill

Posted by siria

https://deadline.com/2025/05/read-the-pitt-episode-1-script-1236375461/

Below, Gemmill shares the 81-page writer’s draft of the premiere, “warts and all.” In his intro to the script, he talks about the challenges of doing a show set in real time for the first time and reveals the elaborate setup he used to keep track of the action during the writing process that involved a floor plan of the ER, Post-It notes and plastic markers.

https://deadline.com/2025/05/read-the-pitt-episode-1-script-1236375461/

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inkingitout (and the state of writing in general) status report

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music monday

he has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire

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hellerwork

Letting down my guard, or not

I've been reading my own book Embodying Hope as preparation for trying to get it out in the world again. Turns out there's a lot of good stuff in there. And a few things I might want to change. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to make a revised edition. Small, manageable steps!

Find Calm: Practice Rest and Regulation talks about low tone dorsal vagal rest, which is a fancy way of saying a very old nervous system response that's similar to freeze, but which happens when we feel relationally safe enough to completely let down our guard. It's the response that leads a child to melt into the arms of a trusted adult.

I've been thinking about that in relation to the bodywork series I just finished. I felt safe enough with the practitioner to continue going, but not emotionally safe enough to fully let down my guard. I would get sleepy during the sessions, but I don't know if that was this rest and relaxation response, or just dissociation. It's hard to know when to push through something uncomfortable to get the benefit from it, and when to quit because it's not a good enough fit.

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FIC: Caring For Your Dragon

Title: Caring For Your Dragon
Author: blueraccoon/rebecca
Rating: NC-17
Summary: They went home. Now they have to go back to real life. In which Will and Jean-Rene figure out how this mate thing works.
Notes: I said on AO3 it's been fascinating to watch this story come together because it involves people I've literally written millions of words about, but which have only been read by one person other than me. I found I kept having to pull out things where I'd added unnecessary filler exposition just to drop in details about people because I thought they were cool and wanted people to know the cool details. There were two entire passages that got yanked because they were tours of a house and another building and I was like "becc, come on, nobody wants to read that shit" so now they're in my side bits file and if you want to read those side bits let me know.

There will be more stories. I have the next two mostly written, and then some stuff after that, and things planned for future. It seems to have found a small but existing audience on AO3 so I'm happy about that, at least.