oursin: Books stacked on shelves, piled up on floor, rocking chair in foreground (books)
[personal profile] oursin

Paging the ponceyness police, what?

It’s never been easier to build an impressive-looking library, especially if you’re mostly interested in the colour and size of your books. Is this necessarily a bad thing?

In an age of constant scrolling, there is social capital to be gained by simply looking as if you are a cultured person who listens to music on vinyl and reads lots of books. And creating an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf is now easier than ever, thanks to an increase in booksellers who trade in “books by the metre”.

You know, I would be just slightly more sympathetic with people who are about The Aesthetic of BOOOX if they would ever demonstrate a touch of quirkiness and have shelves of (okay maybe nicely preserved copies) old Penguins? or those rather nifty little volumes of The Traveller's Library. Or just something that would suggest that this is more than just a step up from manifesting your Posh by having a lovely set of Heron Books Collectors Editions (bound in sumptious leatherette).

I think that if you're going to have Randomly Chosen For the Decorative Vibe books scattered about your pad, you should actually have to read at least some of them. And be able to respond to somebody asking about them without having to resort to whatever garbled wifflewoffle some AI engine serves up.

Okay, I am now meanly recalling the complete set of the works of Bulwer-Lytton in very good condition that lurked on a shelf in a bookshop I used to frequent. And also wondering as to whether there are collected editions of CP Snow's yawn-worthy 'Strangers and Brothers' sequence.

On the other hand, they might pick up something that they enjoyed and found engrossing, and develop the habit of reading. I would be there for that, in fact.

My own aesthetic is, the books have taken over, what do you mean, curated? maniacal laughter.

Book Review: The Whispering Mountain

Jul. 22nd, 2025 10:19 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] littlerhymes and I polished off our romp through Joan Aiken’s Wolves sequence with The Whispering Mountain, a side story to the main series focusing on Owen Hughes, son of the captain of the ship which takes Dido home to England (with incidental stops along the way to restore a reincarnated Arthur to his throne, etc.).

When The Whispering Mountain takes place, Captain Hughes is still lost at sea dealing with the etc. Meanwhile, his son Owen is living unhappily with his grandfather, who manages a museum in a small village in Wales. Said museum has just come into possession of the legendary golden Harp of Teirtu, which is coveted by the local lord Malyn, a wicked man who owns a vast collection of golden objects.

When Owen’s grandfather refuses to hand over the harp, Malyn sends a couple of thieves to steal it. They not only steal the harp, but kidnap Owen, and frame him for the theft in the process.

And we’re off! We gallop through a typical Aikenian melange of fierce wild animals (boars, wolves, a couple of tiger snakes), also a fiercely loyal pet falcon named Hawc who likes to ride around on the head of his owner Arabis, Arabis’s poet-father who is too absorbed in writing an epic poem of King Arthur to quite notice the Plot swirling all around him, and of course Prince Davie.

“We’re finally meeting Prince Davie!” I crowed, because we never did manage to catch up with him in Is Underground before his tragic death. But no, this is a different Prince Davie: Davie Jamie Charlie Needie Geordie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart, known in The Cuckoo Tree as King Dick, the father of the Prince Davie of Is Underground, who will remain forever a golden shadow.

We also meet a bunch of small furry people who live under the Whispering Mountain, who I believe are drawn from the same substrate as Sutcliff’s Little Dark People: the theory that Britain’s fairies are in fact memories of an older race that was driven underground by successive waves of invasion.

Except Aiken being Aiken, she takes this in a wildly new direction: the little dark people are not the original Britons at all, but were in fact kidnapped by the Romans from their original homeland for their gold-working skills. After the Romans left Britain, the goldworkers hid under the mountains for two thousand years, becoming small and furry as a result of environmental pressures, making beautiful golden objects (including, for instance, harps), and longing for their warm sunny homeland.

Do they make it back to their warm sunny homeland? Of course they’re on their way by the end of the book. This is Aiken! The good are rewarded, the bad are punished, and sometimes one of the good ones dies too just to add a bit of spice to the proceedings.

And here, for now, we come to the end of the Aikens. She wrote many, many more, and we may swing back around someday to read some of them, but right now we are on to our next adventure: a reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
[personal profile] sovay
Major props to the Somerville Theatre for accommodating the accessibility needs of my still-healing mother so that she could get out of the house tonight for the first time in a month and a half and watch the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which she first showed me in high school on rental VHS. It was my introduction to Glenn Ford and my second experience of Van Heflin and remains on the long list of movies I love and have never written about, but I had never seen it on a big screen, either, and its silver drought winter-for-summer looks like nothing else in the Western catalogue. It's full of tensions and strange tenderness, high-angle shots like the sky soaring back, sweat beading like the rain that doesn't fall. It's a film about failures and fisher kings: how could I not love it? My mother had a wonderful time. I am so glad she had a wonderful time. It was her first movie in theaters in five years.

Write Every Day: Day 21

Jul. 21st, 2025 06:26 pm
sanguinity: (writing - semicolon)
[personal profile] sanguinity
Intro/FAQ
Days 1-15

My check-in: Two more titles, and posted all the stories. Woo-hoo!

Day 21: [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] sanguinity

Day 20: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] nafs, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] yasaman, [personal profile] ysilme

Expandmore days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
[personal profile] sabotabby did me as a mermaid!

stonepicnicking_okapi: record player (recordplayer)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
I am combining my usual Music Monday with answers to Sunshine Challenge #5

Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-2.png

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show (or any other of your choice - game, comic, anything else)! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.
Creative prompt: Write a fic or original story about a character reluctantly doing something they are hesitant about.


I struggled a bit with this prompt. It's not really my thing to try to convince someone else to like what I like. But I don't mind talking about 4 songs by Korean rapper Agust D (aka SUGA of BTS, real name: Min Yoongi).

So in my mind, Agust D has 4 great songs: Agust D, Moonlight, Daechwita, and People No. 1.

"Agust D" is the best pump song. I listen to it almost every time I exercise. There are military style snare drums, and he samples James Brown's "It’s Man’s Man’s Man’s World." James Brown is a big deal where I'm from (South Carolina). Here on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y_Eiyg4bfk&list=RD3Y_Eiyg4bfk&start_radio=1

"Moonlight" is my favorite song. It's a me song. It sounds like me. Rolling, strolling, people-watching, and not getting in anyone's business. Not too fast. Not too slow. Not too angry. Nothing to do with sex, romance, or love. [Live in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1_WpxS3NqI&list=RDz1_WpxS3NqI&start_radio=1] And it has this line, which is universal for poets and songwriters:

Verse1 은 존나 빠르게 썼는데도
I wrote Verse1 fucking fast,

Verse2 는 진짜 안 나오네 쥐어짜도
but can’t make Verse2 no matter how hard I rack my brain


"Daechwita" is his most important song because it introduces the world outside Korea to Korean culture. Daechwita (literally “great blowing and hitting”) is a genre of Korean traditional music consisting of military music played by wind and percussion instruments, generally performed while marching. And the video is epic.



"People No. 1" is his best song. He had something to say, he said it well, and the beat pushes. The closest I've ever come to finding something I might want to tattoo on my skin permanently is this line from the chorus: 뭐 어때 [What about it] On youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHbl6mt6X80&list=RDsHbl6mt6X80&start_radio=1

This is the chorus:

뭐 어때
What about it

스쳐 지나가면 뭐 어때
If you brush past, what about it

뭐 어때
What about it

상처받으면 뭐 어때
If you get hurt, what about it



때론 또 아플지도
Sometimes you might be in pain again

가끔은 속상해 눈물 흘릴지도
Sometimes you might get upset and shed tears

뭐 어때
What about it

그렇게 살면 뭐 어때
If you live like that, what about it

---

For the creative challenge, yesterday I did a double drabble about Watson going to Devon with Sir Henry Baskerville.

Title: Hesitancy
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Length: 200
Summary: Watson reflects on the decision to go to Dartmoor with Sir Henry Baskerville.

ExpandRead more... )

But why do they want to?

Jul. 21st, 2025 06:12 pm
oursin: My photograph of Praire Buoy sculpture, Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, overwritten with Urgent, Phallic Look (urgent phallic)
[personal profile] oursin

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

You know, women are notably broader in their reading parameters? I'm not convinced by this argument:
He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Or maybe it just Wasn't All That?

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Because the damselly laydeez never, ever dabble in the waters of crime or genre fiction....

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

Picture Book Monday: A Time to Keep

Jul. 21st, 2025 12:06 pm
osprey_archer: (yuletide)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I had the vague idea that A Time to Keep: The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays was a book of holiday celebration suggestions, and I suppose you could use it that way, but what it is really is a picture book of memories of Tasha Tudor’s holidays with her children. (Like the earlier Kate Greenaway, Tudor cheerfully clothes her children in the garb of an earlier and more picturesque era.)

She recalls dancing round the bonfire for the New Year; sugaring off in March; an Easter egg tree the decorated eggs of “goose, duck, chicken, bantam, and pigeon,” with tiny canary eggs at the very tip top. (What I would give for a sight of this tree in real life!) May baskets and Maypoles in May, watching the fireworks in the nearby village from the top of the hill on the Fourth, and her daughter’s birthday in August, with a stunning two-page spread showing the cake all glowing with candles as it floats down the stream.

Even if I had a stream, I don’t believe I would ever come up with the idea of floating a cake down it, or have the guts to do it. What if the cake capsized! But this is the difference between me and Tasha Tudor: Tudor doesn’t imagine what could go wrong, but how ethereally beautiful it would be if the cake floats down the stream all right.

A Halloween party for Halloween, with bobbing for apples and “pumpkin moonshines,” as Tudor calls jack-o-lanterns; and then Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, starting with the Advent Calendar and St. Nicholas Day (with St. Nicholas cake, whose existence I have hitherto not suspected), and a walk through the woods on Christmas eve to see the Christ child in a full size creche. And then back to the house for the Christmas tree, all glimmering with candles…

All of this is quite a lot of work, of course. A full size creche does not construct itself, and a Christmas tree with candles has to be fresh cut from the woods and watched like a hawk. But so much of the joy of holidays is in the work, if you feel the work not as a task that needs to be disposed of but a part of the celebration.

(no subject)

Jul. 21st, 2025 09:39 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] coughingbear and [personal profile] kerk_hiraeth!
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
Before the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. [personal profile] spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.

stonepicnicking_okapi: holmes in silohuette (holmessilouhette)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Chapters 2-5 of The Hound of the Baskervilles is the London part of the story.

We meet Doctor Mortimer, and he presents the problem to Holmes. We learn of the curse of the Baskervilles and the death of Sir Charles Baskerville [and get the wonderful line: Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!]and the apparition of a hound and the arrival of the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville. Sir Henry gets a warning letter and loses one of his boots (twice).

Sir Henry

sir henry baskerville

Holmes does some detective work, three threads snap: 1. the caretaker Barrymore is in Dartmoor (so he can't be following Sir Henry in London), 2. the Baker Street irregulars can't find the newspaper from which the words of Sir Henry's warning letter were cut, and 3. they can't correctly identify the man by the cabbie who drove him.

And Holmes dispatches Watson to Dartmoor to accompany Sir Henry.

"...there is no man who is better worth having at your side when you are in a tight place..."

And we get Holmes paraphrasing Laertes in Hamlet when the mysterious follower gives his name to the cabbie as Sherlock Holmes:

A touch, Watson--an undeniable touch!" said e. "I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own."

hansom baskerville chapter 5

Write Every Day: Day 20

Jul. 20th, 2025 06:05 pm
sanguinity: (writing - semicolon)
[personal profile] sanguinity
Intro/FAQ
Days 1-15

My check-in: Dinking around with the pod-together stories. Some, uh, research for possible titles? Which did not pan out, but so it goes.

Day 20: [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] sanguinity

Day 19: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] the_siobhan, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Expandmore days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

Culinary

Jul. 20th, 2025 07:44 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.

Write Every Day: Day 19

Jul. 19th, 2025 03:04 pm
sanguinity: (writing - semicolon)
[personal profile] sanguinity
Intro/FAQ
Days 1-15

My check-in: More work on the pod-together stories. Today was largely "what you need to know to enjoy this story" fandom summaries, but also a handful of titles and working out some of the posting details. ("A handful of titles," fml.)

Day 19: [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] ysilme

Day 18: [profile] badlyknitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] chinashop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] glinda, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] nafs, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Expandmore days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

Sunshine Revival #4: Fun House

Jul. 19th, 2025 12:53 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: beach (beach)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-5.png

Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.
Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.


Part 1

Here are 10 interesting things I've done (Note: all these took place 15+ years ago. I am not interesting anymore.).

1. I was a participant in phase 1 of a clinical trial for an Ebola virus vaccine.
2. I was in Rwanda on the 10th anniversary of the genocide.
3. I allowed a Sri Lankan child to put me in my underpants in a bathtub of what looked like tomato soup and whack me with something like a cabbage leaf. It was strange. This was for a project on ayurvedic medicine.
4. I survived an earthquake in Bolivia.
5. Skydiving.
6. Guanacos laughed at me when I was hiking in Tierra del Fuego. They see you (and you don't see them) and they make his noise like laughing. It's funny and weird.
7. I hiked alone part of Ruta de los Jesuitas between Argentina and Chile. This is an ancient path that the Jesuit missionaries would walk between camps.
8. When landing in Zanzibar, the small plane dropped too fast, and something happened to my ears, and I was completely deaf for the first day of my stay there. It was strange.
9. On 9/11, I was working on an organic pineapple farm in Ecuador which only had radio contact with the outside world, and I didn't know what happened for about three days until I went to an internet cafe in the nearest town to figure out what the kids were talking about.
10. A baboon once stole my breakfast jam.

Part 2

Title: 221 B
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD)
Rating: Gen
Length: 300
Note: POV building, in response to this scholar's comment in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: It is curious how frequenly Holmes' clients took insufficient care of their property. The result was always highly satisfactory for Holmes invariably made a reconstruction of the missing client from the missing article.
Summary: How 221B helps divert its occupant.

ExpandRead more... )

Some v misc things

Jul. 19th, 2025 03:47 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

The Case of the Missing Romani American History:

The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.

***

A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.

A challenge to a duel was in fact by this time a common-law misdemeanour, and killing one's opponent counted as murder, though apparently there were few prosecutions in either case. It is perhaps disillusioning to the readers of romantic fiction to discover that politics seems to have figured so heavily as the casus belli.

***

Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.

***

Two entries in the People B Weird category:

Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:

Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.

(What next, Wombles porn?)

And

I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):

"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.

We wish to know whether he gets woken up by a siren in the middle of the night to go and huddle in the nearest air-raid shelter. Singing 'Roll out the Barrel'.

sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Obviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."

[personal profile] spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.

We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.

FREEDOM!!! FREEDOM AT LAST

Jul. 19th, 2025 01:53 am
passingbuzzards: Cartoon Kirk handing a drink to Spock with a distressed smile, without looking. (st: spock + kirk big yikes)
[personal profile] passingbuzzards

The spacebar on my 2019 MacBook Air has finally given up the ghost for good, at least to the extent of having large dead zones at either end and requiring a lot more effort to press, and since repairing it would mean a full-keyboard replacement I decided it was time to simply throw in the towel and END MY SUFFERING and get a new fucking laptop.

I am now armed with a 2020 MacBook Air (I was going to go for a current m4 in the hope of avoiding it being hit by the obsolescence hammer too soon, but it turns out that after the 2020 model they got rid of the wedge shape, and unfortunately given that my no. 1 requirement from my fic machine is that it be comfortable to type on for 6+ hours at a time the prospect of a bump under my wrists was genuinely a dealbreaker…) and would therefore like to give an official send-off to the Plague Upon My Life, the Blight Upon My Days, the worst keyboard Apple (or indeed anyone) has ever made, the butterfly keyboard.

Which was so fucking bad that in 2022 Apple settled the class action lawsuit about it for $50 million, and I truly wish I’d heard about this at the time, because I, too, deserve court-mandated restitution for six fucking years of This Bull Shit! (“Apple Owes Everyone An Apology and It Should Start With Me, Specifically”—ME TOO, Casey Johnston, me too.)

Please picture the following as a montage of this keyboard’s greatest hits, with a soulful classic rock ballad playing the background and lots and lots of audio-muted swearing and hair-tearing on my part:

  1. After about 6 or so months of use the original keyboard was having such catastrophic issues with double-press and no-press keystrokes (see the WSJ article typed on such a keyboard and left unedited for an extremely accurate sample of how bad this was) that I was obliged to crawl out to the Apple store at the nearest indoor mall in February 2020 despite already being extremely aware of the pandemic and really not wanting to go, so as to make use of Apple’s free butterfly keyboard replacement program, launched in 2018 in acknowledgement of just how badly they fucked up this keyboard design. (To give credit where credit is due, whatever it was they apparently did as part of that replacement actually did completely resolve the no-press/double-press issues, but oh my god. Oh my god.)

  2. For the subsequent 5 years please picture me having to continuously lift the laptop 75° to vigorously blow under the keys to get them to stop sticking due to tiny pieces of dust stuck under the mechanism, every. Single. Day.

  3. In addition to this process there were at least a dozen (two dozen?) occasions (genuinely I have lost count of how many. so many. so many and all of them were agony) when I was obliged to spend anywhere from 15 minutes to well over an hour prying up keys with a needle or a guitar pick to clean underneath them, which was particularly excruciating because when they get stuck it can be really very difficult to pry up the keycaps without snapping the tiny plastic hooks that go under the mechanism! Which I inevitably did on multiple occasions.

  4. ...As a consequence of which I was, over the course of 2023 to 2025, obliged to buy new keycaps for the left Command key, the N key, the spacebar, and the spacebar again (the second time also with replacement hinge, which somehow worked 100% less well and got more stuck than the broken hinge, resulting in the new one going in the trash) which comes out to OVER SIXTY DOLLARS spent just on replacement keycaps for this terrible fucking keyboard.

ANYWAY. Dear 2019 MacBook Air, you served me lo these 6 years! Under the circumstances to say you did it well would probably be a bit of a stretch, but. You did serve. Rest in fucking pieces, butterfly keyboard, you gave me so much more grief than any piece of technology should reasonably be permitted to do and I am FINALLY FREE.

Collage Journaling: Medieval

Jul. 18th, 2025 08:02 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: journal (journal)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
I love this washi tape of hanging flowers.

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