Activity from brainwane
Displaying post 150 to 200 of 541
Exercise together for 25 minutes via videocall
Come do a 25-minute novice-friendly workout session with me via free videocall. (I'm hosting a few of these; feel free to join any or all.) 11am US Eastern Time.
Exercise together via videocall
Come do a 25-minute novice-friendly workout session with me via free videocall. (I'm hosting a few of these; feel free to join any or all.) 7pm US Eastern Time.
Paperwork buddies: virtual anti-procrastination coworking call
Is there paperwork you've been putting off? Would mild peer pressure from other MeFites help you get started? Join a 25-minute coworking session! (I'm hosting a few of these; feel free to join any or all.) 1pm US Eastern Time.
Paperwork buddies: short virtual anti-procrastination call
Have you been procrastinating on some paperwork? Would mild peer pressure from other MeFites help you get started? Join a 25-minute coworking session!
"Grover makes one last frantic plea not to turn the final page"
Today I read and enjoyed the English Wikipedia-style-y plot summary for The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover, a classic children's book. Here's the edit that changes "However, nothing works (primarily because from the reader's POV these are simple illustrations, not actual difficulties)" to "nothing works (mostly because these are really simple illustrations, not actual obstacles)" (the "primarily" line having been added in 2014; thanks XTools Blame!). Previously, previously.
iCalendar files (.ics) - a couple ways to make or customize them
iCalendar (.ics) files (electronic calendar invitations) are specially formatted text and, if you're a programmer, maybe you'll enjoy Christine Spang's "Email as Distributed Protocol Transport: How Meeting Invites Work and Ideas for the Future" (34 minute video) (an Open Source Bridge talk from 2015), as I did. And/or: if you need to make a slightly complicated .ics file to attach to a message or make available as a download/feed, to invite people to several events in a series, Marudot's iCal Event Maker makes that easier.
"a social practice with an organic history"
Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera writes about his religious background and current politics: I like “unbuddhist” because it’s a pejorative to reclaim, perhaps, but also because it signals both opposition and proximity, in the same way that an atheist is someone who exists in a theistic framework and opposes it.
"we stand for Mourner's Kaddish for 11 months after someone has passed"
"This is a love letter to my friends and community. Please stay. You matter." "Mourners' Kaddish" is a song by musician Fureigh (disclaimer: a friend of mine) in the context of suicidality among transgender people. "my friend / I hope you know you’re dear / I’d rather celebrate you while you’re here."
"my piece explored the hilarity potential of wearing contact lenses."
The late comics artist Howard Cruse (previously) was the author of the groundbreaking gay comic strip series Wendel (a sample, "Shopping for Corn Flakes", and more strips). His site has a multipage illustrated autobiography including early sketches and gently self-deprecating humor.
"I don’t personally vet every prophecy that comes through these halls"
Catelyn Winona (Caffeine and Magix) has published several short stories or vignettes recently that subvert epic fantasy or superhero tropes. Here are three: "No Heroes Here" ("Daz was raised by a hero. That’s probably why she isn’t one."); a piece in which the Chosen One immediately takes up the Dark Lord's offer to join their cause; and "Wizards Stole My Brother" ("Being the Chosen One fucking sucks. That’s why Erika is furious when she finds out her brother got picked.").
The 2022 Ignyte Awards Shortlist
"The Ignyte Awards Committee Is thrilled to announce the finalists for the 2022 Igynte Awards. The Awards seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscape of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts towards inclusivity within the genre. To that effect, the committee feels that these creators, creations, entities and perspectives from 2021 present the brightest lights in speculative fiction’s future." 19 of the shortlisted works are readable for free online, including many short stories and novelettes. Voting is open now (anyone can vote) and closes June 10th.
"is there a loathly lady in the tale? well SORT OF"
"The Seven Daughters Of The Cailleach Foraoise" by Dyce (Sarah Blackwell) is tagged "new fairy tales / going old school with this one / threes and sevens and animals in danger and trick questions / the lot / enjoy": "Being kind of heart, he wrapped his hands in his cloak to protect them, and freed the young fox despite its attempts to bite him." Thematically related: Kate Clayborn writes a Twitter thread on the Canterbury Tales, the loathly lady, and 'a quest to find a true answer to the question "what do women most desire"' (nitter view, Threadreader view): "i really need to say a word on behalf of my old friend the wife of bath" [Content note for mention of rape in Twitter thread.]
"choose wisely whether your office is going to be cool with that"
"am i taking notes? am i dicking around on my tablet? who knows! not my boss!!!" Kitty Unpretty writes an extremely opinionated list of office supplies recommendations -- organizers, highlighters, a hanging file frame, a paper folder, washi tape, and more. "now i always remember to take the slip off to include with the check because, i want my paperclip back. don’t you dare put my cute paperclip in the file cabinet. it’s mine." This post is colorful, literally (lots of colors) and figuratively (profanity).
background, process, art, puzzles
Graphic designer Justin Ladia served as the Art Director of the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. His lengthy retrospective includes fun art, spoilers for some puzzles (which you can play online), and a fascinating, detailed start-to-finish case study of what it takes to direct the art for a big complicated collection of mostly-online experiences.
On persuasion and fear
Two discussions of persuasion and susceptibility to persuasion. On scar tissue among people who experienced the post-9/11 shift in public American discourse, and on a different variety of scar tissue for people who came to political awareness in the last ten years, and how they respond to different kinds of rhetoric. On conditions for the formations of cults, and building resilience to being recruited.
A few university instructional and research approaches
"... now I was getting to know a swathe of 20 first year students, few of whom had any interest in majoring in Philosophy, and with whom I’d keep in touch throughout." Harry Brighouse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, describes a structure that helped him work better with First Year Interest Groups (seminars with linked courses). "Who wants another workshop or class that’s just going to serve more of the same old people who are currently being served, in the same old way they’re already being served?" Lindsey Kuper, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz, discusses "Going all in on weird outreach" (several paragraphs in), in particular encouraging undergraduate students to create zines about a CS research project.
Hugo Award finalists include a story in tweeted images
The 2022 ballot for the Hugo, Astounding, and Lodestar Awards, awards for achievement in science fiction and fantasy, has been announced. Worldcon members submitted 1368 valid nominating ballots (up from 1249 last year and down from the heights of the 2010s); voting will open in May and the final results will be announced on September 4. Notably, "Unknown Number" by Blue Neustifter a.k.a. Azure Husky (previously) is a story that was originally published as a Twitter thread containing a series of simulated text messages.
"to restore a more traditional set of aesthetics and outcomes"
After more limited trial runs in the 2021-2022 season, in March "Major League Baseball ... announced a variety of experimental playing rules that have been approved by the Competition Committee and the Playing Rules Committee for use during the 2022 Minor League season." "Consistent with the preferences of fans, these rules are designed to improve the pace of play, create more action on the field, and reduce player injuries." Minor league teams will test out a pitch timer ("to create a crisp pace of play"), larger bases, and constraints on defensive positioning ("a minimum of four players on the infield, with at least two infielders completely on either side of second base"). If the rules work well in the minor leagues this year, then MLB might alter its major league rules in the future.
"a perfect reader and a potential friend"
"I’ll be remembering her for the rest of my life. I never met her." Author Celia Lake grieves a reader and critic who deeply understood her work, writing of "this tremendous gap in my life now that feels impossible to find words for".
Iconic cats and other April 1st goodies
"We’re celebrating April Fools’ Day by getting back to what the internet was originally built for: all cat content, all the time." The Noun Project (previously), a site where you can download freely licensed icons and photos to reuse in your projects, today offers collections such as Cat Commerce, cat body language, and a work-from-home cat. Please feel free to also use this thread to share fun April 1st projects and treats!
Movie: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Satirical biopic in which singer Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) overcomes adversity to become a musical legend.
"reform all the tawdry inefficiencies"
"Running Walden Three is not a feel-good exercise. It is a job, and it is a difficult one. We can make an executive love Walden Three, but we can’t make a fool into an executive." "Tomorrow’s Dictator" is a short, dark scifi story by Rahul Kanakia, published in 2012, in which it's hard to hire good brainwashers, er, community managers.
"less interested in analysis, and more interested in daily practice"
An interview with Alok Vaid-Menon, "I Understand the Project of Trans-Feminism To Be About the Liberation of All Genders", and an essay by lazenby ("non-binary/agender gender identities... represent one of the most important realizations it’s possible for a person to have") [previously] discuss gender and art.
Chelsea Troy on advice and backup
"On offering help that’s actually helpful" by Chelsea Troy:
there are two kinds of help: 1. Advice, and 2. Backup. And it’s exceedingly common to offer #1 to people who need #2.
"different types of problems toggle...different facts and relationships"
Lawsky Practice Problems is a website that generates multiple-choice practice problems for United States federal income tax classes and often provides useful redirections for wrong answers. "The problems are a random selection of facts, names, and randomly (but thoughtfully) generated numbers about a range of basic tax topics and partnership tax topics" such as depreciation, options as compensation, home mortgage interest deduction, capital gains, etc. Professor Sarah Lawsky also works on Catala, a "domain-specific programming language designed for deriving correct-by-construction implementations from legislative texts".
Blame It on the Stardust: A Star Trek Vid Album
Over the last three years, beatriceeagle has made fifteen fanvids celebrating, critiquing, and reflecting on Star Trek -- one vid for each song in the album Rainbow by Kesha (formerly Ke$ha). The playlist on YouTube has 14 videos and AO3 links to a fifteenth bonus track. Standouts include
"Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down": "A vid for the underserved and screwed-over characters of Star Trek", and "Praying": "Some things only God can forgive. (Kira and Dukat)". "Praying" previously on MeFi.
Dragons, governance, teaching, inheritance, transformation
"The Divine votaries in the roadside temples become easier to convince as Tishrel goes higher into the foothills, recognising on sight what he is. It’s Tishrel himself who is forgetting now, with words from his past drifting in fragments through his mind. All this is yours, Tishrel. One foot after another. Before the individual, the state." "To Embody a Wildfire Starting" is a fantasy novelette by Iona Datt Sharma (previously), published this year. Their summary: "Now the revolution has come, Tishrel is on his way home to the Eyrie, the socialist dragonish community of his upbringing; it turns out that both he and it have changed."
"But enough with the veiled warnings."
"There are a lot more seems-haunted old-house-turned-traveller’s-rest places than most people think, and in my experience most night auditors are hollow-eyed, faintly eldritch, and disinclined to let someone check in just before dawn." "The Late Traveller" by dyce (Sarah Blackwell) is a short fantasy story set at "a little old hotel in the middle of nowhere, with a creaking wooden sign instead of neon".
“A language?” “Sure. Between Japanese and English.”
"You shall not bear a child, but a language.” "Annunciation" by P. Akasaka (a Japanese writer living in the UK), published last month in Strange Horizons, is a short, fantastical story about an unexpected pregnancy.
Family reconciliation near the risen water
"The distance from the Stop & Go to his childhood home is the length of time it took to eat a bag of spicy pork skins and throw the evidence in a neighbor’s garbage can so his mom wouldn’t know he’d been ruining his dinner. But he’d measured it in a teenage boy’s appetite, and the walk seems quicker now. The streets narrower, the telephone poles shorter, the sky closer, everything more squat, and the gritty smell of the marsh clinging on even two blocks up the street." "Babang Luksa" by Nicasio Andres Reed is a short speculative story published last month in Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice.
The story behind and after the photo
"The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos", by Annie Rauwerda for Input. The ending is cute!
"ordinary friends can still cobble things like this together"
"Last year, in cooperation with many of my friends on a private social network, I took an idea from neighborhood organizations here in Chicago and started a small online-only mutual aid fund. Over twelve months, we distributed more than seven thousand dollars from some friends to others, mostly in increments of $100 USD..... A number of the people involved made requests at one point and donations at another, which I think illustrates how important the fluidity of a mutual aid project can be." Brendan Adkins writes about how the group did this, in case you'd like to set up something similar. Disclaimer: written by a friend of mine.
Is there an aesthetic dominating today's English-language written SF/F?
Elizabeth Sandifer suggests that we are now experiencing a "clear aesthetic shift in how sci-fi works" in observations that started as this Twitter thread. She notes "Diversity as an underlying assumption....A massive dollop of fanfic and romance influence....It’s stylistically a big tent" and suggests the prospective name "Tor Wave." (Followup comments from Sandifer.) A related conversation about the label "squeecore" started with an episode of the Rite Gud podcast (transcript) and has drawn responses from Doris V. Sutherland - "'Squeecore' and the Cartoon Mode in SF/F", Camestros Felapton - "Is there a dominant mode of current science fiction?", Cora Buhlert - "Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed" & "More on the Squeecore Debate", and Simon McNeil - "Notes on Squeecore".
"I totally called it"
"Obsessed with the ornithologist (Mario Cohn-Haft) who heard a birdsong he didn’t recognize in 1988, predicted that the song was made by a new species of bird, and then spent the next 25 years looking for it before finally discovering evidence for the previously undescribed species in 2013." Proposal (586) to South American Classification Committee. Predicted antwren birdsong and three recordings of other birdsong shared by Cohn-Haft on xeno-canto, "Sharing bird sounds from around the world".
What came first? Or last, or in between?
Wikitrivia by Tom J. Watson is a game you can play for free in your browser. You get cards representing historical events, and have to put them in chronological order (like the card game Chronology). The software reuses data from the Wikimedia project Wikidata (previously).
"They’re not my roses but they’re for a comrade in arms."
Some vintage feel-good pieces from Steve Dublanica's blog Waiter Rant: "Miracle Pizza", "Twenty Year Payback", "Bride & Groom", and the more bittersweet "Tapestry". (Previously, previously.)
A set of connected medical mysteries
"A View from the Bridge" by Matthew O. Dumont, MD
is an excerpt from his 1994 memoir Treating the Poor: A Personal Sojourn Through the Rise and Fall of Community Health. Blogger siderea recommends it as "a medical mystery – a psychiatric medical mystery – that goes in a very unexpected and illuminating direction" and recommends: "This is worth reading unspoiled."
Feminist, nonfiction, &c. Hindi films/TV recommendations
I'd like to watch some films or TV shows that include a lot of characters speaking Hindi. I enjoy the big-budget song-and-dance you get in fictional Bollywood blowouts, but I often dislike the romance plots because the men treat women so condescendingly. Like, right now, I'm in the middle of watching Kal Ho Naa Ho and started yelling at the screen when Khan's character got all "you need to learn to smile" at the female lead. So can you recommend some alternatives?
"This is my favorite soup!"
URLs, maintenance, and history
"That’s when I first ran across the idea of the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator or PURL ....I guess PURL is the original URL shortener. But it was created not to abbreviate otherwise long and otherwise cumbersome URLs, but to make them more resilient and persistent over time." Ed Summers discusses the history of a piece of web infrastructure developed in the 1990s to mitigate broken URLs and still used by some organizations today, such as the Federal Depository Library Program.
"Anything out of the ordinary?" Yes, if you'd like, every week!
The short, light fantasy story "Scales and Fire" by Jeff Soesbe features a dragon who needs to track down who tried to poison her. "After I roasted the apothecary, his wife started talking." It's in Abyss and Apex, which you can follow via RSS feed. In fact, while I'm at it....
"I am horrified; I am delighted."
Two speculative stories about women whose adventures don't go the way they think they will. “So I’m your only hope,” Sabeena presses, “which means there’s bonus pay, ain’t it? "The Prince and the Pirate" by Andrea Tang (previously) is a fast-paced science fiction story of a sarcastic, galaxy-weary contractor rescuing an old acquaintance. She said we were only going to ask for a minor demon, one who could help us with our homework and harangue our exes. "The Exorcism of Lily Quinn" by Claire Schultz (published this year) is a spooky fantasy/horror story involving a not-great friendship and a student who doesn't know whether she's possessed.
"a drawing of a horse, an orchid, or in fact any related object"
"Mother, if I see another insipid line drawing of the wonders of Twinklebed Falls, I don't know what will happen, but I know it will be disgraceful." "The Watercolors of Elfland" by Marissa Lingen (previously) is a gentle comedy-of-manners fantasy story involving a party with light refreshments, a botanical discovery, and just-out-of-frame Sidhe.
"My sister is not going to be into something so sepulchral"
"I have my own personal banshee. Most mornings, usually during my second bowl of cereal, she lets out a soul-melting wail to give me a heads-up on my impending death that day. I used to get worried, but it’s been going on awhile. And I’m still here." "Keening" by Josh Denslow is a short fantasy story in which it is frustrating and edifying to have a banshee as a constant companion.
"It doesn’t feel like a win."
"Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future" by Carlie St. George is a short story playing with/within the horror genre, involving found family and a sort-of-chosen career protecting others. "Here’s the thing about surviving a slumber party massacre: no one really wants you around anymore. All your friends are dead, and your mom is dead, and you get shuffled off to live with your miserable Aunt Katherine, who blames you for getting her sister killed because she’s an awful human being like that."
"You’ve got to get out clean when the mission’s over."
"The lieutenant is not stupid; she is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, so I’ll have to be extra careful about how I rewire this security door panel so she doesn’t notice I’ve inserted something that shouldn’t be there, a tiny chip that someone from outside can activate to open the door without triggering any of the ship’s notification systems." "How to Defeat Gravity and Achieve Escape Velocity" by Miyuki Jane Pinckard (published this year) is a short science fiction story involving a crush, sabotage, abandoned asteroid miners, and a heist or two nested within a scheme.
"It reminded me of a dandelion seed"
“The Last Ship Out of Exville” by Phoebe Barton is a short sci-fi story that's quick and angry and loud, like a punk rock song. "They call me the Sorceress, because holding together a community like Exville takes a little magic. We’ve got outcasts from Earth and Luna, Martian dustpunks, Venusian hotshots, and Belter wanderers, and all of them with their own ideas of how to live together. It’d be even harder if we didn’t have all those fascists on Callisto growling at our door."
Ted Lasso: The Missing Christmas Mustache
"It isn’t uncommon for this particular demon to be summoned"
Two short fantasy pieces from the points of view of the monsters. In an untitled horror piece by synchronmurmurs, you are the haunted house: "...humans began running away from you just because you’d opened a shutter to let in some light, or when you’d open doors for them to allow passage through your lonely halls." And in this heartstring-pulling Tumblr collaboration among many writers, "An old and homely grandmother accidentally summons a demon. She mistakes him for her gothic-phase teenage grandson and takes care of him. The demon decides to stay at his new home."
"threads the ends of her hair in like pouring a sacrament"
"Today one of the minders rolls one Veena Kaur Chan into my hairbay for a shampoo and cut. New client, transferring in from Palliative....I’m programmed to be autonomous, so I can access the public domain base for hair puns—hey, if I get a client who’s responsive, it can cheer them up." "Coiffeur Seven" by Kiran Kaur Saini, published this year, is a short science fiction story in which a piece of technology learns to care better for an Indian woman.
"It's fine, whatever, everybody should have a thing"
Tony looks down, and -- "Oh," he says. "That's Scabby the Union Rat." "Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City" by hetrez is a Captain America/Iron Man slash story in which "Steve and Tony accidentally start a national do-gooders association and fall in love." (I'm linking here per the permission mentioned in the author's profile.)