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Snowflake Challenge: day 6

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Top 10 challenge

I'm onna train, so here are 10 railway stations I like. In no particular order, and for various different reasons.

1. Frankfurt Hbf. This was where my international rail travels began. Standing on the concourse, looking at the departure boards (getting slightly earwormed by Stuttgart and Fulda), realising that I could get pretty much anywhere from here...

2. London St Pancras. It's beautiful. It's not actually a terribly pleasant experience getting a train from here (maybe the East Midlands and South Eastern platforms are better) but from the outside it's a fairy tale castle.

3. Stockholm. Rolling in, bleary eyed, off the sleeper from Malta, through dingy orange lights, and then suddenly you're in this marble palace. (I got chugged in Stockholm station. I don't know what I was doing to look like a Swede with disposable income rather than a discombobulated tourist, but there we go.)

4. London King's Cross. Never mind all that wizard nonsense, it has a fully functional platform zero. Also the toilets are free these days.

5. Liège Guillemins. Just glorious.

6. Ryde Pier Head. When it's operational and when you don't just miss the train because the catamaran was thirty seconds late. But there's still something fun about a station in the sea.

7. Dawlish. Train to beach in under a minute (your mileage may vary, as may mine considering I haven't been there in about a decade).

8. York. Never mind a pub in the station, it has one on the platform. Lovely stained glass, too.

9. Norwich. Light, gracious, makes you glad you've arrived.

10. Luxembourg. Stained glass again - and just time for an ice cream before the train.

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What I'm Reading: Longhorns by Victor J. Banis (2007)

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Current Music: Pavement, "Grave Architecture"

Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped around on shady ground?

Running this many days without sleep, I find it hard to tell whether I had an insight about creativity this weekend or just reinvented a 101-level objection to LLMs and so-called generative AI, but it ocurred to me that such technologies are not capable of allusions. Their algorithms are not freighted with the same three-dimensional architecture of associations which accrete around information stored in the human cold porridge, all the emotional colors and sensory overtones and contextual echoes which attend the classic example of a word like tree when you throw it out across the incommensurable void between one human mind and another to be plugged into their own idiosyncratically plastic linkage of bias and experience whose least incompatibility may be the difference between a bristlecone and a birch and Wittgenstein has to lie down with a headache, but all of these entanglements form as much of the texture of a writer's style—of any human communication—as the word cloud of their vocabulary or their most commonly diagrammed sentences. It has always interested me to be able to detect the half-rhymes or skeletons of familiarity in the work of other writers; I have always assumed I am reciprocally legible if not transparent from space. I've seen arguments against the creativity of LLMs based on intentionality, but the unintended encrustrations seem just as important to me. By way of illustration, this thought was partly sparked by this classic and glorious mashup.

I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.

I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.

Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.

I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.

(no subject)

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260112.html

What's happening to this meteor?

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260112.html

(no subject)

oof, another 2 day gap in update.

Was it only yesterday that we had the taiko new year's? Spouse woke up early to make food, and then we went to rehearsal, followed by mochi making, followed by performance. Around 2pm was when I hit a wall re: energy and ability to People, so 2-3pm was pretty miserable because I was still trapped at the taiko thing and there was still more socializing to do. I crashed after I got home, and then crashed even more at night. But at least the event was done, and I got to have freshly-pounded mochi in ozoni soup, which is the best thing ever.

Today was the first day of the semester, so there was a lot of running around getting curriculum pulled together, but tomorrow should be more relaxing because it's doing stuff I've already done before. Whew! Really looking forward to a morning where I get to slow down and plan for the semester and send some emails and update some google forms. \o/

I should also: clean up my car (long-overdue), and get to drawing my comic again.

I think when I'm more tired I can hear more of the electricity in the lights

Sailing Rigs

https://xkcd.com/3193/

I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.

https://xkcd.com/3193/

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Daily Happiness

1. Well, the bathroom sink did not stay unplugged for long, and after trying Drano again a couple days ago, it pretty much stopped draining altogether, so we ended up having to get a plumber out after all. But we got someone to come today (it wasn't an emergency as we could just use the kitchen sink, so didn't want to call over the weekend) and he was able to fix it very quickly and it wasn't expensive. And Carla asked him if he could take a look at the knob that switches between the shower/tub faucet, which has not been working for like a couple years, and he fixed that without charging extra, so now we can switch to the tub faucet if we want to.

2. Although the rain is gone, it's so windy that we're still getting a ton of berries coming down from the tree out front, so I took the car in for a wash again and once again there was no line, so when the guy offered to let me go through twice, I took him up on it. The car looks much better!

3. We had a meeting at work today to get approval for some expenses on the project we're working on and I was expecting it to be difficult but it was super easy!

4. Ollie has also been enjoying Carla's new suitcase.

Current Music: Is Love What You Don't Know · F.S. Blumm · Nils Frahm

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Is Love What You Don't Know · F.S. Blumm · Nils Frahm (2016)

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sigh

One character in my Outgunned game gets a laptop as part of his starting gear. Game is set in 1977 so I told the university age player he could have a programmable calculator or a slide rule.

"What's a slide rule?"

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Recent Reading: Empty Wardrobes

I collect false treasures in empty wardrobes.

This quote by Paul Eluard opens book #14 from the "Women in Translation" rec list, which continues to fatten up my TBR list. This is Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. This novella, originally published in the 1960s, is about the ways in which women are subsumed by the men in their lives, or otherwise are buffeted about with less control over their lives than they ought to have.

The forward by Kate Zambreno is a wonderfully complementary piece. She talks about the anger she feels going to a woman's funeral and hearing the dead woman sanctified by men in her life who did nothing but take from her, who can speak of her only to praise what she did for others, and can say nothing about what the woman herself was.

Sometimes you can read a book and just know the author was angry when she wrote it. This is one of those. The book uses the phrase "discreet rage" about one of its characters, and I think that sentiment succinctly describes the whole book. The protagonist, Dora Rosario, is ten years into widowhood, and she has devoted her entire life to mourning her unremarkable husband as much as she had previous devoted her life to supporting his every opinion regardless of whether or not she agreed with it. Now, a decade on, her mother-in-law reveals something about Dora's late husband that changes her entire perspective.

I would like to believe we are moving away from the world portrayed in Empty Wardrobes (though not with as much success as I'd like), but this is a stark reminder of how even a few generations ago, in the Sixties, a woman's identity was so controlled by her husband's. There are only two men in this book--Duarte, Dora's dead husband, and Ernesto, the longtime partner of a side character--and they both, through social structures, exercise incredible control over the lives of the women around them without any respect or even knowledge of their impact.

The three main women in this book--Dora, her daughter Lisa, and the narrator--each take a different approach to the male romantic partners in their lives, and none of them comes out the better for it (well, perhaps for Lisa, but I personally doubt it will last), because the ultimate problem is societal attitudes about the way men and women are meant to relate to each other.

It's not a long book, and I can't say much more without spoiling things, but I also think it does some fabulous things with its narration and perspective, and the way it doles out information. Really an excellent framing that allows for a lot of fluidity and filling in gaps with your own visions while remaining clear in the nature of the story it's telling.

This book was only translated into English in 2021, which is a shame, because I think it would have struck a nerve much earlier, but we have it now! Costa does an excellent job with the work too; the writing is full of punchy phrases like the above, and she captures some realistic dialogue--characters repeating themselves, responding in ways that don't quite match up with what was asked, etc.--while keeping it natural-sounding.

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resolutions 2026

2026 Goals

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music monday

Music Monday: Bluesnik by Jackie McClean

Watch on YouTube

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snowflake challenge

Snowflake Challenge #5

Snowflake Challenge: A mug of coffee or hot chocolate with a snowflake shaped gingerbread cookie perched on the rim sits nestled amidst a softly bunched blanket. A few dried orange slices sit next to it.

Challenge #5

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

1. Strength Training. I have been doing the same strength training workout over and over for many years. So if anyone has a program, book, website, app, YT channel, etc. they like for strength training (hand weights, using your own body weight, which I prefer, home workout or gym machines because I do go to the YMCA twice a week, I also have some of those rubber bands with handles somewhere), let me know, keeping in mind I'm a 50-year-old obese woman who strength train a maximum of four times a week.

2. Tarot resources. I just got my first tarot deck for Xmas so if you have tarot resources you like, let me know.

3. Poetry. I'm always keen to know what poems speak to people.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: 3 AM - Matchbox 20

Wash away.

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Top Ten Times I Called It In And Walked Away

In no particular order, not alphabetical, chronological, or according to any level of importance -

1. Supernatural - I know people who watched it all and my hat's off to them, but after season eight, I knew it wasn't for me anymore.

2. Teen Wolf - sometime in season three or four, it went from being a show on MTV to an MTV show, and I was done.

3. House - end of season five or six, when not only had the characters grown stale, but the lighting had gone sour.

4. True Blood - somewhere in there, between seasons, I realized I couldn't do it anymore.

5. Game of Thrones - for all that I was enjoying myself, I realized it was a provisional, conditional love, and the creators had violated the last of those provisions.

6. Marvel comic movie adaptations - animated and live-action Spider-Man movies, Deadpool, the X-Men region, TV shows, the MCU as a whole. Much like House, the lighting's sour and the characters aren't nearly as much fun to watch anymore. I'll still come back from time to time, and leaving the movies is different from leaving the fandom, and it's not my fault they set standards that they then failed to meet.

7. X-Men comics in general and Joss Whedon in particular - because even though I watched Buffy and Angel long after walking away from Whedon, I knew from seeing him kill off a character he said he loved writing that he wasn't someone I could trust anymore, and when Marvel gave the go-ahead for that move on top of all the other repeated future ends of the world, I knew I couldn't trust them either.

8. No small number of fandom-based podcasts - because I don't have much patience for "um" and "like" and "you know" and other such filler words when I know you've taken notes and prepared for this well in advance, and you've also set up multiple Patreon tiers. When there's money involved, I expect you to use your time better than that.

9. Stargate Atlantis - because for all the raw entertainment value it offered, that value came tempered with a feeling of obligation and a gradual lack of playfulness - which can be done, provided the show commits to being more serious. I didn't get a sense of that.

10. Doctor Who - because the tidal nature of the show meant it'd gone out, and I never bothered to wander back to find if it's come back in, which told me all I needed to know about how much I'd enjoy spending more time with it.

Let me emphasize this isn't an anti-rec list, this isn't a set of warnings about not getting into something to begin with, this isn't even much of a set of complaints. This is something that, for all the frustrations involved, makes me happy because learning to know when to stop is a very grown-up skill. Knowing when you need a break or you've had enough takes work, and acting on that takes additional work. It's something that can be applied to situations more serious than a TV show - a friend who's no longer fun to hang out with, a job that's draining you dry. Walking away from something that ultimately doesn't mean much makes it easier to do it for something significantly more serious.

I could probably come up with another five or ten without much trouble, but if I did, it'd turn into an airing of grievances instead of a meditation on learning a new skill in a safe, controlled environment.

Current Mood: awake

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Heated Rivalry rec

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Potential project list

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daily

Daily Check-In

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Monday, January 12, to midnight on Tuesday, January 13. (8pm Eastern Time).

Poll #34077 Daily Check-in

This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 25

How are you doing?

I am OK.
16 (64.0%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
9 (36.0%)

I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single.
9 (36.0%)

One other person.
11 (44.0%)

More than one other person.
5 (20.0%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

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Three for the Memories Open Until January 24th

threeforthememories is off to a great start! You have until January 24th to make your own post. I made mine today about my 2025.

2) Speaking of things to rec, saw the film House of Dynamite and thought it was wonderfully done –- except for the ending. ( Read more... )

I do think that its structure was helpful, given that just 10 minutes in there is a lot starting to go on, and it helped to have it reinforced with repeated elements.

3) Another yes from me was for the series The Beast in Me. This is mostly because I thought it was particularly well done. I'm not a big fan of the murderous husband/neighbor type thriller because they're always guilty and one of my DNW is gaslighting elements. But I thought this was a particularly well developed story and one with less "shocking twist!" than unexpected surprises that relate to character development.

4) The documentary about the making of Frozen 2 was very interesting, and rather surprising, in seeing how Disney approaches making an animated film. I'd think that -- given the costs and enormous amount of labor -- they would have a script nailed down before starting. And not just a draft, but one that had been run past the internal focus groups, had a table reading done by the cast, etc. Instead they scrapped tons of work from animators, some of which took them a year, because they kept veering back and forth on elements of the story, rewriting the central songs, etc. ( Read more... )

5) The re-release of the Beatles Anthology on Disney+ promised a new episode and remastered footage. It certainly looked very good, but as I'd seen it during its 1990s release, I noticed more about the big gaps in it. ( Read more... )

Poll #34076 Kudos Footer-555

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6

Want to leave a Kudos?

View Answers

Kudos!
6 (100.0%)

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fandom trumps hate

Signal Boost: Fandom Trumps Hate 2026

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Lake Lewisia #1355

While the ground is frozen and there is little for gardeners to do but wait, the temptation may come to try growing things in unusual, climate-controlled locations. If you have a greenhouse, cold frame, or suitable windowsill, this can be an appropriate outlet for your gardening impulses and will, at worst, result in some premature seedlings. Please resist the urge, however great, to plant seeds in your partner’s coffee mug, the office break room sink, your car in an elaborate raised bed arrangement on the dashboard, or in any other places you would not wish to eventually deal with a full-grown marigold shrub, pumpkin vine, or ambulatory tree sapling.

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LL#1355