*dusts off journal* I've been meaning to post updates for a while, but of course never got around to it.

Anyway, CB had a stroke while we were on a family vacation in Paris. He is doing well, all things considered--the damage seems limited to a slight droop in his mouth and double vision--but he's been in the hospital for about a week now. My parents are with me, and we are trying to figure out his care with limited access to his doctors (visiting hours are limited, and they often make the rounds outside visiting hours). We have a translator, though it's our tour guide who obviously doesn't have that much knowledge about medical terminology. We have some print outs of test results in French, but we're having difficulty getting access to actual medical records, since they usually are put together on patient discharge.

Does anyone have experience with internationally transferring patients and/or flying with medical escorts or on a plane with medical equipment? We obviously don't want to move him if it will endanger him in any way, but we would also like for him to begin treatment back at home as soon as it is safe for him to go back.

This is the third novel of R. F. Kuang I've read (after being impressed by the The Poppy Wars, first volume, but also emotionally so exhausted I didn't read the rest of the trilogy, amused and captivated in an emotionally distant way by Yellowface, and turned so much by Babel that I only read the first twenty pages or so and then gave up), and I think my favourite so far. There is academic satire but also genuine emotion throughout, there is great ambition epically realised (i.e. writing a trip to the underworld in the grand tradition of all the obvious suspects, but specifically one that reflects the present), and the horror parts hit home in a way that feels not derivative but specific for this particular version. (The novel is set in a universe where magic is real, but isn't concerned with how this altered history or not, just what it means you can study it at university.) Our main character, Alice Law, is the kind of messy, complicated and morally ambiguous (and not in a "nice" way) woman the author specializes in, though for me personally preferable because I had the sense of the narrative being on board with what it was saying about Alice's strengths and weaknesses through her initially very skewered perspective. Also she had a genuine learning process through that trip through the Underworld, and... but that would be spoilery.

( Spoilers realize the Underworld is modelled on a British University )


Also improving my week: This trailer for Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Frankenstein:

The only two things certain in life are death and taxes. In the hangover from Yom Kippur I've just finished filling out my Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, which I loathe with a passion. But death seems more significant this year.

Last night I got back from Yom Kippur services exhausted and still a bit light-headed from the twenty-five hour fast. The first thing I saw was an email from my mother about "the attack on Manchester." Amazingly it was the first I'd heard of it. The security people at the synagogue must have known but I don't think most people did. I should have realised when I saw a police car outside in the afternoon that something must have happened.

This is apparently "the first deadly attack on a British synagogue" and the deadliest attack ever on a place of worship outside Northern Ireland. (Per a useful thread by Sunder Katwala.) Also last night one (1) of my colleagues sent me an expression of sympathy, for which I was, and am, ridiculously grateful. Local and national Muslim leaders have also posted statements of solidarity, but taking the mood as a whole right now it's easy to feel (and maybe this is because I'm still exhausted, but I feel I've been exhausted for a long time) that most non-Jews are not interested in solidarity with the Jewish community right now because they don't think it's compatible, rhetorically at least, with being against what Israel is committing in Gaza. (And the ones who are, are interested for the wrong reasons.)

Hearteningly, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez did post a statement of sympathy – but most of the comments (on BlueSky! not even on X!) were variants on "Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" or "Criticism of Israel is legitimate." I would be a whole lot more convinced by the former if comments like this didn't keep cropping up on posts about Jewish holidays and/or the death of Jews.

(Feminism isn't transphobia, but you'd be amazed how many purported feminists haven't got the memo. Being anti-crime isn't racist or anti-immigrant, in theory, but you'd be amazed by how many people use one thing as cover for the other. I could go on.)

Anyway, the other email I came home to was from Caledonian Sleeper, saying that my journey to Aberdeen this evening has been cancelled due to a storm. I managed to quickly rebook, so I'm now going straight to Inverness on Monday for my writing retreat at Moniack Mhor. It's a shame I'm going to miss my weekend in Aberdeen but maybe I needed the rest. And it doesn't seem so important right now. I would really like to wear my little magen david necklace up to Moniack Mhor but it gives me pause that so many people seem to be unable to distinguish "I am proud to be Jewish" from "I support genocide."

Like I said, I'm exhausted.

Thank you for making me a vid!

I have a couple things that I put outside the cut tag, because I have two visual triggers:

1) Fast, high contrast flashes of lights or colors. This can be triggered by strobe lights, strobe effects, glitch effects, full-screen lighting effects, or repeated lightning strikes. It can also be triggered by stutter cuts (very fast intercuts of 2-3 frames) where there is high contrast in the footage used for the stutter effect. Stutter cuts are fine between two similar scenes, but not between one dark green and one bright red lit scene, between a nighttime and daytime scene, etc. Flashing has to be very fast to bother me—think three lightning strikes in a second (dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in one second).

2) Frame rate fuckery—when a show or a vid plays 24 fps footage in 30 fps or vice versa. So, like, when a film puts footage at the wrong frame rate to make it feel awkward or tense, which is super common in action films. (For example, the Bucky/Steve knife fight on the street in Winter Solider.) It can also happen by accident, if footage at one frame rate is put into a project with a different frame rate, or sometimes when a show needs to stretch or compress footage and they do it by duplicating every third frame.

I'll call these out in the source notes below for any fandom where they're relevant.

Please also feel free to run a sample by thingswithwings. She can explain them with examples if that would be helpful.

The rest of this post is additional details if you're interested!

( General Preferences )

I asked for: Babylon 5, Backspot (2023) [SAFETY], Bring Them Home / Aiskótáhkapiyaaya (2024) [SAFETY], Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper, Fancy Dance (2023) [SAFETY], The Great Canadian Baking Show (TV), Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA], Mythbusters (TV), Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, This Place (2022) [SAFETY]


( Babylon 5 )

( Backspot (2023) )

( Bring Them Home / Aiskótáhkapiyaaya (2024) )

( Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper )

( Fancy Dance (2023) )

( The Great Canadian Baking Show )

( Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA] )

( Mythbusters )

( Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards )

( This Place (2022) )

Ugh, I woke up at 3:30 this morning coughing my lungs out and didn't really sleep much after that. It's that itchiness in my throat and chest that make me think allergies, especially given that I haven't really been around people except at the dentist's office yesterday, so I don't think it's covid? But who knows at this point? My quest to get this year's flu/covid shots has been derailed a couple of times but I am off again next Friday, so that is going to be my next attempt.

In more fannish news, I read that Dungeon Crawler Carl has been optioned for tv, and now I want a Carl vid to Mike Ness's version of "Don't Think Twice."

*

Guardian: Nearly 100 years after her death, Oxford’s first female Indigenous scholar honoured

Reading the lost diary of the first indigenous woman to study at Oxford (by her descendant June Northcroft Grant, who accepted Papakura's MPhil certificate at the ceremony)

What a cool person and fascinating life; really interesting and impressive to see someone succeeding in doing academic scholarship on an Indigenous group from within that group, in that time period.

Someone's finally cast Francesca Mills as Ophelia:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2025/oct/01/hamlet-national-theatre-hiran-abeysekera-shakespeare-in-pictures

Which I have been saying should happen for six years, since seeing her in Barrie Rutter's Two Noble Kinsmen as the Jailer's Daughter (a role which I described as "semi-comic shitty-first-draft Ophelia"). Also Juliet now please, casting directors.

Here's the final tally for September. But first —

Quote of the Day:

"It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is just having written."

— Robert Hass

From the quotation book The Truth About Writing (2018)


Tally

( Days 1-29 )

Day 30: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, chanter1944, china_shop, cornerofmadness, goddess47, luzula, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme


If I've missed anyone, please let me know.

Rabbit, rabbit! Gotta start the month out right!

According to the dentist, my teeth are mostly fine but another old filling has started to crack so he wants to take it out and put a crown on it. Since I have money in my FSA because I didn't order new glasses, I said let's do it! So as long as he gets the approval from my insurance, I should be having that done on 10/22. I'll probably still have to pay about $500 out of pocket, but that's better than the whole $1500. As always, he marveled about the Maryland bridge I have, which has been in place since 1994; even when I got it, my dentist at the time said it would probably only last 5 years, so it's quite impressive. "Those dentists back then knew what they were doing!" he told me today, and I wanted to be like, "1994 wasn't that long ago," but it was 31 years ago apparently. That just seems wrong.

Anyway, I could barely stay awake on my way home, so I crawled into bed and ended up sleeping for THREE HOURS, which I was not expecting. I will take it though.

I made pancakes for dinner, but as I was mixing up my wet ingredients, I put what I thought was vanilla in the mixing cup, but as soon as I smelled it, I knew it was the wrong bottle. It turned out to be fior di Sicilia, which is lovely and smells like an Italian bakery, but is not what I wanted in my pancakes. Whoops. The vanilla bottle is the same size, so I have now rearranged that shelf so the vanilla remains in front and the fior di Sicilia is back behind a bunch of stuff. I also redid my wet ingredients - it was only an egg and some milk, so not a huge loss to start over.

Now I'm going to watch the new episode of Slow Horses and then later, the season premiere of Abbott Elementary.

*

Pet-sitting over the weekend was ok, not great. Bleu was a good boy and a sweetheart. Brie was fine when we were inside, but once she got out, it took a couple of hours - repeatedly - to coax her back into the house, because even though she was happy to climb into my lap on the couch, she flinched away whenever I stood in the doorway and called her to come in. Even just sitting in a chair and propping the door open and putting down treats to lead her in took a while. So that was not great. Additionally, because of the cat, I had to take a ridiculous amount of allergy medication just to breathe and my throat and chest were itchy the whole time.

On the plus side, the pizza I ordered was delicious!

I took yesterday off and scheduled a grocery delivery, which never arrived. Apparently none of the drivers would take it? I don't know what that even means, but I took that personally. I cancelled the order, and then today, put in an Aldi order which arrived on time and only cost half as much. *hands*

I'm off again tomorrow for a dental appointment. We are battening down the hatches for a govt shutdown at work, but should be okay if it doesn't last too long. Otherwise, there could be furloughs.

If you, like me, want to escape into fanfic, here's this month's recs update:

unfitforsociety has been updated for September 2025 with 10 recs:

✭ 9 Batfamily and 1 Batfam/Spiderman crossover

***

Just in case someone else missed it too - rarepairexchange reveals are delayed. Instead of 5 October, they're projected to happen on 19 October.

The reason I missed it: the delay was announced at the top of a pinch-hit post the day after the deadline (which was 21 September). I didn't even think to look at it at the time because I knew I didn't have time for any pinch-hits.

If that's you too, now you know. *g*

(Yesterday I happened to notice the new pinch-hit deadline, which is after the original reveals date, and got very confused. But the sticky post is up to date, which cleared up the current schedule, and then I tracked down the original announcement.)

cornerofmadness and china_shop will be hosting us in October! cornerofmadness will host the first half of the month, so head on over to her journal tomorrow.

I belated realized I hadn't reponded to check-ins on Day 27 (though I did add you all to the tally). Sorry! Kudos to everyone who wrote on the 27th! 8-D

I'll post the final tally tomorrow. Thanks everyone!


Quote of the Day:

"In conclusion, I am now convinced that I am a reader who decides to write until the opportunity to read again becomes available."

— Rolando Hinojosa, "A Voice of My Own," (1982/2011).


Today's Writing:

About 325 words of notes on the book I was reading. 8-)


Tally

( Days 1-28 )

Day 29: badly_knitted, brithistorian, callmesandyk, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 30: china_shop, sanguinity,

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet.

(Getting better at anticipating which things Voice Access will flub means interspersing direct keyboard entry with what it'll probably handle. Using Backspace and cursor keys a lot isn't great, either.)

I've known for a while that Kate Davies' garment designs and I are never to be, but now I understand why. Importing the decorative aspect(s) to a completely different garment framing would be feasible, though I'd lose her designs' thoughtful details---which are meant for bodies of many sizes and shapes with no shoulders.

Please consider this side view of Davies wearing her Powdermill cardigan (img src: her newsletter). Neatly depicted in the first link's photo: no fabric added to raise the back neckline (usually done via short rows). It means that her default expectation for how many rows one'd need from the front of the shoulder to its back---let's say from the blue-red-yellow rows fore and aft of the topmost pair of star-motif rows---is tiny compared to the expectations of some other designers. Even at larger torso circumferences, Powdermill has no shoulder-breadth accommodation.

Never mind the width left to right of my shoulders. Changing a garment's breadth front to back would require redesigning almost everything about it; lengthening the armhole, as I used to do, doesn't solve the garment-breadth issue and risks adding other issues. Having that thought has helped me figure out which patterns have provided more breadth front to back than I need, in setting up for a round torso.

Hurray for Davies' partner's excellent photography, I guess, as well as the clarity of Davies' knitting and design work. I've wanted since its pattern release to knit her Serkinet, and now I know that the best way forward is to find---or devise---a different loose cardigan pattern and apply the cables to it by stitch count, not to try rewriting Serkinet itself.
( current knitting benefits from hindsight )

Almost unrelatedly, at some point I intend to knit Sundial to consume the Hairst kit that has waited for me to have no shoulders. (Part of the kit began being Yvonne MT, but I realized I would never wear it.)

cornerofmadness and china_shop will be hosting us in October! cornerofmadness will host the first half of the month, and china_shop will take over hosting for the second half. Thanks much!


Quote of the Day:

This is funny to me because I've been reading far too much literary criticism…

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1885)


Today's Writing:

A little over 200 words worth of half-hearted notes. I read a lot, though. ;-)

Tally

( Days 1-27 )

Day 28: badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 29: china_shop, sanguinity, ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Darth Real Life hounds my every step these days, but I did manage to watch the ( Alien: Earth )

We still need a host for October! Only 2 more days left!


Quote of the Day:

A reader asks Saunders if he should edit an old WIP…

"You asked: 'If I start editing this, will I ruin it?'

I think you have to say to yourself: No, I certainly will not ruin it. (And if, perchance, you do, at some point in the process, feel you’re making it worse, take comfort in the fact that you can always revert to that earlier draft – which might be part of the subconscious’s long game.)"

— George Saunders, "Egads, What I Did Years Ago and Abandoned is Good! (A Dilemma)," from his Substack newsletter.


Today's Writing:

Alibi sentence! I had a day. I'm having another day! Grrrr…

Tally

( Days 1-26 )

Day 27: badly_knitted, brithistorian, callmesandyk, carenejeans, cornerofmadness, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora

Day 28: sanguinity

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

We still need a host for October! Which is only 3 days away!


Quote of the Day:

"This particular book (Return to Sender, his latest Longmire book) has Walt alone for much of the time. Early on, I had to decide: Do I give him someone to talk to? Maybe a dog? Or do I have him talk to himself? And I don’t know about you, but armed people who talk to themselves make me nervous. So I went with the dog — and he plays a bigger role in this story."

—Craig Johnson, interview in Cowboys and Indians magazine (May 2025)


Today's Writing:

Just over 300 words on none of things I'm supposed to be working on. Lalalala.


Tally

( Days 1-25 )

Day 26: badly_knitted, brithistorian, callmesandyk, carenejeans, cornerofmadness, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora

Day 27: sanguinity

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!