wyntarvox

Posted by Greg Ross

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/08/mementos-2/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/?p=70913

At midday each June 21, a shaft of light pierces the roof of a mausoleum in Brussels’ Laeken Cemetery and creates a heart of light.

It’s not clear whether this was deliberate. The tomb’s occupants, Louise Flignot and Léonce Evrard, died in 1916 and 1919, and the mausoleum was not built until 1920. Its designer, one Georges deLarabrie, is not known to have produced any other work, and the planning documents don’t mention the heart.

When Sir Lawrence Tanfield died in 1625, his wife composed this inscription for their joint monument at Burford in Oxfordshire:

Here shadows lie
Whilst earth is sadd,
Still hopes to die
To him she hadd.
In bliss is hee
Whom I loved best;
Thrice happy shee
With him to rest.

So shall I bee
With him I loved,
And he with mee
And both us blessed.
Love made me poet,
And this I writt;
My heart did do it,
And not my wit.

See Workaround, Reunion, and Early Arrival.

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/08/mementos-2/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/?p=70913

azurelunatic

I got the standards and brackets for that shelf system, and we are currently at Home Depot, after buying what I sincerely hope is the right configuration of board feet for eight shelves. It's secured to the roof and we're using surface streets.

It's too close to bedtime to start on repair plating the 8 foot boards to the 2 foot boards, probably.

kaberett

goslings! (Canadian; one still very yellow and fluffy, several more rather larger.)
SNAILS. so many excellent snails. we went out on a couple of stupid little walks and saw MANY snails.
ate the last of my birthday cake, with discounted raspberries courtesy of one of said stupid little walks. <3
the post brought Several more books for me (two pain-related, ...some cookery) and I am very pleased with them. particularly looking forward to warm bread and honey cake, though given that I've still not actually read Salt Fat Acid Heat I don't rate my chances of getting to it any time soon...
current borrowed-on-a-whim-from-the-library book: Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. First chapter was paperclips; current chapter is a whistlestop tour of The History Of The Pen, including a much more loving biography of the BIC Cristal than I am normally exposed to via fountain pen fandom!

conuly

A shocking number of people will blithely tell us all about the book they read, in English, on an English-language subreddit, and never tell us that they didn't read it in English. I can only catch so many of them - if they don't say "English isn't my first language" or make any obvious foreign language errors then I'll never know. (Some of them say "I read this in my own language" and then don't tell us what that language was.)

Most of these people, if prompted, will tell you what language they read it in. Three times now, I've had to ask twice because they refused to answer the question in a useful way, and every time that person has been Greek.

I thought it was a little funny the second time, but three times is the start of a worrying pattern, especially as it's not at all the most popular not-English language posted there. Maybe there's something going badly wrong with their school system?

(And, sidenote, even if you're certain it was translated from English you still ought to tell us the language it was written in. At least in theory this can help us weed out false positives, although I may be expecting too much of fellow commenters to that subreddit.)

***************

( Read more... )

senmut

Marking Dates (531 words) by Sharpest_Asp
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Leverage
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Eliot Spencer/Alec Hardison/Parker
Characters: Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Parker [Leverage]
Additional Tags: Origami, Fluff
Summary:

Hardison and Eliot mark the date in a way that Parker will enjoy.

Marking Dates

The saying that money can't buy happiness had to have been thought up by a rich person, Hardison decided. He kept folding the non-sequential bills, setting up a menagerie of wild animals. After he had twenty-six of them, he put them in the box, closed it, and left it on his desk, just where the box had been for several days.

Parker had noticed it on the first day it was there, asked about it two days after that, then forgot it existed as it became part of her surroundings. It was the perfect place to hide something in plain sight — though he'd taken the precaution of spritzing it with his aftershave, to hide the money smell.

Parker was funny enough about money that she might have smelled it otherwise.

When Eliot came in that evening, Hardison caught his eyes, looked at the box, got the slow blink of agreement, and that was that.

Two days later, the box was gone, and Parker studied that space, making the cute frowny face she did while cataloguing where everything was supposed to be.

"Where'd the box go?" she asked.

"Have to find it," Eliot answered, before he and Hardison exchanged a grin. Her eyes lit up, so Hardison continued. "Scavenger hunt, in our building, out of the way spots… with things to find on the way to the box."

"What kind of things?" she asked, even as she was getting excited.

"The kind of things you like," Eliot said, and she did a tiny little clap and bounce before vanishing.

"And that, my friend, is how we say 'happy anniversary' to her," Hardison crooned, amused, and going to watch the spy-eyes through the building. Eliot joined him, putting him in a brief headlock playfully.

"Figuring out her love language wasn't so hard," Eliot said, but he was smiling when she found the first animal, right where he'd thought she would, an alligator. "How in the hell did you find an origami A to Z?"

"Man, everything is on the internet now," Hardison told him, still thrilled they'd found a gift that worked.

Parker found the last animal, cunningly folded so it appeared striped, making it a zebra, and the box was just ahead. She opened it, seeing cash — multiple currencies even! — and the note that said 'happy change together day'. Her chin wibbled, for just a moment, before she put all of her finds in the box. She'd had to back track for the otter and the shrew when she realized they were in alphabetical order, but now she had a full menagerie of money.

Her men — both of them were hers and theirs and ours — made fusses on days that weren't Christmas, but not in the way she saw other people do it. That, among many things, kept her falling in love with them every day, knowing neither one would ever push her in a path she couldn't handle.

She'd have to make a run on a store before she went back up to them; junk food for Hardison that had some pretzels in it, and she'd pick up that smelly cheese Eliot had insisted would make great brioche grilled cheese sandwiches.

Current Music: "Virtual Insanity" - Jamiroquai

andrewducker

My brother Mike got me this for my birthday, and it just takes a weight off my mind being able to say "bring the steam temperature up to 95 degrees and hold it there"

(Control over oil temperature when frying eggs is also awesome.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

maju

Woke up to a very dark and gloomy morning. It had been raining slightly before I got up so I decided I wasn't going to go to parkrun. Instead I walked to Safeway in very light rain, and then to the post office in slightly heavier rain. At parkrun time (9 am) it was raining quite heavily and I was glad I wasn't there, but now it has cleared up and the sun has come out, and I'm feeling annoyed at the lack of cooperation from the weather this morning. I did buy some groceries (milk - essential for my cups of tea, plus a few other things) and also dropped off some unwanted books at the little book exchange in the post office building.

I also browsed quickly through the farmers market which was just opening outside the post office. I did not buy anything healthy; instead I bought a small lemon meringue pie. It was a toss-up between that and a chocolate whoopie pie.

lightreads

Asunder

4/5. For reasons, an isolated death speaker, who gained her powers through a deadly compact with an eldritch demon thing, gets bound at the soul to a man from another culture. Their attempts to separate take them on a long road trip across this strange fantasy world with a complicated recent political/religious history.

I liked this. It is about many kinds of joining and sundering – social, political, romantic, familial, religious. But the heart of it is the relationship that forms between two people unwillingly joined and forced to trust each other. Our protagonist is the sort who has a really hard time understanding when people are kind to her, because she’s had almost no experience of that. She doesn’t really figure it all out in this book, but she does come a long way.

I will say, there is supposed to be a sequel to this book, but my understanding is that the publisher didn’t buy it. Yet, hopefully? This got a surprise award nomination, so. But my point is, if the sequel happens, then great. If it doesn’t, then this ending is really not okay.

Content notes: Recollections of child abuse/domestic violence, a threat of . . . forced pregnancy by a demon is I guess what you’d call it.

sovay

For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

rmc28

I'm playing an ice hockey game tonight in Cambridge, a charity fundraiser between Warbirds and Tri-Base Lightning. But until then I have a strangely unscheduled day. I might sleep or read or something.

I could post about what I've been up to lately!

Work:

spoke on a panel about effective 1:1s, it seemed to go well
played my usual Senior Tech Woman role for a colleague's recruitment panel, and am happy that our preferred candidate has apparently just accepted. (a frustrating number of timewasting applicants more or less obviously using LLMs to write their applications and generate their free-text statements on suitability for the role; I really resent having to wade through paragraphs of verbose buzzword bilge to ... fail to find any evidence they actually know how to do the job)

Hockey:

KODIAKS WON PLAYOFFS on the bank holiday weekend oh yes they did. So proud of the players, and definitely earned my share of reflected glory managing the team this season and running around half the weekend. League winners, Cup winners, Playoff winners, promotion to Division 1 next season, utter delight.
Very much an Insufficient Sleep weekend, we topped off the playoff win with a night out in Sheffield, I got back to my hotel as the sky was getting light, good times.
Kodiaks awards evening last night: lots of celebration of the hard work and lovely camaraderie of this group of players, A and B teams both. I got to announce and hand out the B team awards, and I received a really nice pair of gifts for me as manager: a canvas print of a post-final winners photo, and a personalised insulated travel mug (club logo and MANAGER on it). I love this team.
I'm still enjoying also playing with Warbirds, and have now been to a few summer Friday scrimmages run by Tri-Base. I went to a couple of Friday scrims at the end of last summer and felt everyone was very kind but I was pretty outclassed. I'm pleased to feel like I'm keeping up a bit better now after training a lot harder this last season.
I trained three days in a row this week (Warbirds Monday, Haringey Greyhounds tryouts in Alexandra Palace on Tuesday, Kodiaks Wednesday) and that was Too Much and I was pretty sore Wednesday evening and Thursday. Rest days are important even if I am much improved in fitness compared to this time last year.

Other:

I did a formal hall at my old College! Using my alumna rights and having a nice evening hanging out with old friends (who were the ones to suggest the plan). Good times, will do again but probably not this term.
I had an excessive number of books out from Suffolk libraries that needed returning, so I did a flying visit to Newmarket by bus last Saturday, this turned out to be the cheapest/quickest way across the county border. I managed to stick to my resolution not to borrow any more physical books but slipped and fell on the "withdrawn books for sale" stand. Managed to only come home with four.
I did a little indoor cricket the Friday before playoffs (it's now finished due to exam period), and some nets practice last Sunday, but I keep being too busy to actually play any of my team's games. I'd like to do more nets practice though, that was intense but also felt like I was beginning to improve.
I did a little table tennis with Active Staff but that's also now suspended for exams. I'm considering getting a cheap set of bats and balls for me and the family to go use at the local rec ground, or in the free indoor tables at the Grafton Centre.

Coming up: my summer is full of ice hockey camps and tournaments (Prague, Hull, Sheffield, Biarritz) and my old club Streatham have just announced all their summer training sessions will be "Summer Skills Camps" open to all interested WNIHL players, so I'm looking at going to London regularly again in July and August.

futilitycloset_feed

Posted by Greg Ross

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/07/associate-degrees/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/?p=70903

In 1988, traversing synonyms in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, A. Ross Eckler found his way from TRUE to FALSE:

TRUE-JUST-FAIR-BEAUTIFUL-PRETTY-ARTFUL-ARTIFICIAL-SHAM-FALSE

He found his way back again by a different route:

FALSE-UNWISE-FOOLISH-SIMPLE-UNCONDITIONAL-ABSOLUTE-POSITIVE-REAL-GENUINE-TRUE

He was using the dictionary’s ninth edition; see the article below for his conventions regarding qualifying synonyms. Two more examples:

BAD-POOR-MEAN-PENURIOUS-STINGY-CLOSE-SECRET-FURTIVE-SLY-CUNNING-CLEVER-GOOD

GOOD-CLEVER-CUNNING-SLY-FURTIVE-SECRET-TICKLISH-CRITICAL-ACUTE-SHARP-HARSH-ROUGH-INDELICATE-INDECOROUS-IMPROPER-INCORRECT-WRONG-SINFUL-WICKED-EVIL-BAD

LIGHT-BRIGHT-CLEVER-CUNNING-SLY-FURTIVE-SECRET-HIDDEN-OBSCURE-DARK

DARK-OBSCURE-VAGUE-VACANT-EMPTY-FOOLISH-SIMPLE-EASY-LIGHT

Somewhat related: Lewis Carroll invented word ladders, in which one transforms one word into another by changing one letter at a time:

COLD-CORD-WORD-WARD-WARM

Each intermediate step must itself be an English word. Donald Knuth once used a computer to find links among 5,757 common five-letter English words. 671 of these, he found, were not connected to any other word in the collection. These he dubbed “aloof” — and noted that ALOOF itself is such a word.

(A. Ross Eckler, “Websterian Synonym Chains,” Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 100-101.)

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/07/associate-degrees/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/?p=70903

sovay

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

highlyeccentric

Last Sunday I had lamb, but had to go get more ingredients before I could make Nagi's slow-roasted middle eastern lamb shoulder. I ended up running too late to make it in a slow-cooker, and still short a few items, so I had-hocked it a few ways. The leftovers turned out amazing though, kept going all week.

( Spiced Lamb Shoulder )

Nagi serves hers with lemon herb couscous. I (being gluten-intolerant) recommend basmati rice, cooked with at least half the liquid being stock. You may wish to add sultanas to the rice.

Recommended toppings:

( Yoghurt sauce )

( Ful Medames )

Serve: Lamb on a bed of rice, with roast vegetables and the two dip/sauces.

Leftovers 1: Same thing, minus the yoghurt if you're taking it to work to reheat. If carrying it in a container to reheat, do include an orange wedge, and a dash of extra water, to infuse with the rice.

Leftovers 2: Ful Medames on celery sticks, as a component of Girl Dinner / Picky Tea.

Leftovers 3:

( Lamb and Feta Pizza )

Leftovers 3b: Leftover pizza.

Leftovers 4, which I made at the same time as the pizza:

( Spiced vegetable and bean soup )

Leftovers 4b: soup. Mix yoghurt sauce through if you're taking it in a container to work.

Leftovers 5: Wraps/soft tacos/thingy with fuul medames and lamb. If you have leftover mushroom / zucchini from the pizza, toss that in here. Add avocado if you have any.

Leftovers 6: at this point just "uses for ful medames", but ful medames mixed with Jack M's banana chili ketchup makes a good spread base for breakfast burrito.

This has been: a week of lamb and things that go with lamb.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3099/

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

https://xkcd.com/3099/

conuly

has got to be shrinkflation of dumb phone games.

**********************

( Read more... )

senmut

Almost the end of a decade in 1989. Revolutions, crackdowns, changes in power ... look, 1989 left a mark on my psyche. Evidently I was escaping into the cinema as much as I was to the roller rink, judging from me opening 20 tabs even with me being picky. Going to narrow that down some. Okay, 11 in the final cut.

( kinda grouped in genre broadly )

china_shop

I was just clearing out my screenshot folder and re-found some things I made a couple of years ago during the Guardian rewatch. They amused me, so: repost!

Shen Wei meme in two parts that reads "Came to Wedding" and "Kicked the Groom".

Shen Wei meme in two parts that reads "Came to Wedding" and "Kicked the Groom".

:D

[Tumblr post #1 | Tumblr post #2]

kaberett

A significant part of the problem is that we only start saying "all pain is in the brain" (or "the tissue isn't the issue" or whatever) to people with complex or chronic pain.

And there's a good reason for that! It's the same reason that I need to have a much more detailed idea of the fine detail of what an atom is and how it behaves than the vast majority of the population, for whom the Bohr model is perfectly adequate!

... and we need to explain that, we need to explain why we don't tell people with simple acute pain that All Pain Is In The Brain -- it's not because it's any less true for them, it's just that for most people most of the time they don't need to worry about that level of detail. But if you don't explain that, it sure do sound a lot like "your pain isn't real (unlike those people over there)".

Lies-to-children. That. That thing. That's a thing I need to explain.

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wyntarvox

March 2011

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Mementos

The Shelves

some joys of the day

JFC what is it about Greeks?

PRIDE 4: Hardison/Eliot/Parker

Photo cross-post

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Asunder by Kerstin Hall

Interesting Links for 07-06-2025

It's morphogenesis

A mostly-free day

Associate Degrees

Finally, time to write the book on you

Roast Lamb à la Nagi + Leftovers Thereof

Neighbor-Source Heat Pump

Absolutely the worst, most insulting sort of shrinkflation

Fandom50: #15

Random Guardian meme and pic

[pain] today's articulation

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March 2011

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