mneme | Network

Because she is bringing us old bats into disrepute (we are more or less in the same age cohort), this is exactly the sort of thing that gets us dismissed, and it's quite clearly weaponised incompetence to get her son to run around buying stuff on the internet for her while she does not do due diligence over her headphones.
You be the judge: should my mum stop asking me to buy her new headphones?:

My son Henry is exaggerating terribly. I don’t lose headphones all the time. I simply put them away in different places and occasionally forget which place that was.
This happens to everyone, especially when you live in a house where things move about over time. I live on my own, in a large, eccentric home. I’m not a hoarder but I often forget where I put things. Henry will come over and find the headphones after I have lost them, and while I’m grateful to him for helping me find them and buying new ones, I could do without some of his lectures.
I’m 76; I don’t need to be told to “be more careful”. I just live my life how I want and sometimes I’m a bit scatty.

It Is Not Rocket Science, lady.

Mind you, also irksome is that thing when somebody prates on of 'in my day' and I think, not merely that I was there in that day and we had electric light and everything, they are, a little calculation suggests, actually somewhat younger and should not be going on like that.

This was something that flitted past me where someone was being driven bananas by her mother-in-law interfering with the baby and upsetting its routine and doing all those things annoying relatives do because they are not going to be kept up all night by agitated babby.... And there was sense that MiL was 'oh, these new-fangled notions' as if in her day it was Ye Wisdomme of Ye Village Cronez rather than paediatricians advising new mothers.

I will, as a historian of medicine, concede that ideas of How To Bring Up Baby have gone through changes, but suspect that 'if babby has got to sleep, let babby sleep in peace' has always been pretty central.

(I realise that there may yet come a time when in a miasmatic wasteland this crone of the tribe maunders on about the time in her day when they had vaccines and codliver oil....)

lsanderson

D.C. Memo: Trump suggests states should cover Medicare, other programs to free up funds for military
Plus: The president insults Somalis – again; Dems to pushback on war funds request; Bondi still to face Epstein questions; Blaha wants restitution to consumers over tariffs; and more.
by Ana Radelat
https://www.minnpost.com/dc-memo/2026/04/d-c-memo-trump-suggests-states-should-cover-medicare-other-programs-to-free-up-funds-for-military/

Trump threatens 100% tariff on drug makers that don’t strike deals to lower US prices
New tax will hit branded drugs and active ingredients while exempting generics for at least one year
Lauren Aratani and Reuters
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/02/trump-100-tariff-us-pharmaceutical-drug-makers ( Read more... )

roadrunnertwice

So, in many recent years, there's been a massive fall PDF sale run by an on-again/off-again comics publisher called Shortbox. The gal who runs it, Zainab Akhtar, has a tremendous sense of taste and is plugged in to scenes of emerging cartoonists in a way that seems implausible, so the offering is always rich in this very particular overlap of weird/high-quality/unobtainable/inexpensive.

I think they're taking this year off, but keep an eye out in the future.

Nina Vakueva — Dream Loop (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. Lightweight but very nice looking.

MIUWN — How to be a Good Human (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A cryptic little scented-vinyl nightmare.

Serena Cirillo — Joy (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. A girl absorbed in a work deadline builds a droid to help clean out the squalid family house she's moved back into.

I liked this a lot, it's got this old quiet one-off manga feel. You know how sometimes a really top-quality scanlation team will make a point of picking the most off-path stuff they can find, just quiet oddball things with almost no chance of a commercial translation? This feels like one of those. Hmm, I guess that was a really vague description in spite of its specificity. Anyway, it's quiet and contemplative and pretty. I thought the bridge scene in the middle where Joy is looking at Mari's old family photos and perceptual time comes to a halt was really striking and effective.

Mapurl — Injest (comics)

Jan 21

2025 Shortbox haul. I liked this a lot! A dark little story with a very pleasing shape.

Asia Miller — Jubilee (comics)

Jan 21

Shortbox 2025 haul. This was berserk, I loved it. A librarian with a pillbug motif joins up with a sluttily-dressed bounty hunter, and then a bunch of Incal-lite shit happens.

Pupi — To Buy a Forest (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. Slice of life. Not bad. "Burocracy..."

Fortune's Fool, Tess Powel — The Last Wizard of Cwmdafi (comics)

Jan 22

Shortbox 2025 haul. This comes in both English and Welsh versions, which is rad. Woman moves back to her grandpa's hometown to take over his wizarding business. Small town small business slice of life. Good ol' Cupboard Cat.

Erin Roseberry — Fallen into the Garden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Another lovely little SF comic by the author of The Maker of Grave Goods, this time featuring lesbian dogs.

lilyresh — Flood Water Maiden (comics)

Feb 6

Shortbox 2025 haul. Sort of a medium-dark mood piece in an ongoing catastrophic flood. Not bad, though it kind of trails off.

Jeff Noon — Falling Out of Cars

Mar. 21

It’s been a long time since I read anything by Jeff Noon, but he loomed large in my experience of the ’90s. This one was a Joanne McNeil rec.

Took me a tentative age to work through this, with many interludes of putting it away for months. This is intense psychedelic SF in a sort of tone-poem mode, and it’s in large part about dementia. It’s very beautiful, and intensely irritating and unpleasant to the touch; there has been a global and permanent outbreak of a strange physical and metaphysical sickness (sometimes called the Noise), and effectively it has fractured the entire world into a single vast Alzheimer’s ward with no nursing staff in sight. The effects of this scenario on the narrative voice and the momentum of the story are brutal. Most of the people we see are stumbling blearily on, drunk on loss and pain and dissatisfaction, and only intermittently capable of maintaining a train of thought or a thread of purpose.

Our protagonists, at least, are on a quest; a rich man who blames the current state of the world on a single great sin has sent them in search of broken shards of a magical mirror. The shards and their magic are real; it’s unclear whether the rich man is right about their connection to the Noise’s origin, but it’s very clear that the world’s fall cannot be reversed.

I think I liked this without enjoying it. I definitely had to hold its poetic pain and joy and delirium at arm’s length — don’t get too invested, don’t take these people’s assertions at face value, they do not always know who they were and what they're doing. Very nearly too intense for me.

There’s a brief view of some kids who haven’t known anything but the present world, and are building new visions of what it is to be a conscious being when communication and meaning have disintegrated; while I wanted more of that, I accept that our narrator Marlene was incapable of recognizing and evaluating their lives in the way I craved.

There's also one particular segment that I found superbly thrilling and creepy, and is sticking with me harder than the rest of the book: when Peacock is telling the story of the time he killed himself. Someone pulled the trigger; someone walked away; a mind within a body is present here today — any deeper chain of causation or stain of identity has been washed away in the noise.

512pixels_feed

Posted by Stephen Hackett

https://512pixels.net/2026/04/artemis-iis-view-of-earth/

https://512pixels.net/?p=35365

Commander Reid Wiseman’s view is one we haven’t seen of our world since 1972:

Hello, world

https://512pixels.net/2026/04/artemis-iis-view-of-earth/

https://512pixels.net/?p=35365

silveradept

Let's begin with the story of how the industrial musical creator gave a year off of her job to someone he believed had a good novel in her, and how very, very right he was.

The Slacktivist on the death of Nicholas Brendon, and on the ways that his most famous character, Xander Harris, seemed to bleed into the actor's life (mostly to the negative), but also the ways in which revisiting Xander, Warren, and Joss, the one who created them both, provide us with a cautionary tale. Be suspicious of anyone who claims they are a male feminist. The male part, they may have, but the feminism part is almost certainly lacking, and you can tell because they have made a claim to it.

A principal who read the absolutely hilarious and entirely child-appropriate book "I Need A New Butt!" to second graders is going to get his job back, and hopefully with back pay. Because, yes, someone complained about it, and the school decided that reading the book was inappropriate to children. I suspect the people making that decision also want to make sure that there are underpants on the child in In the Night Kitchen, and that there's nothing "objectionable" in their picture book collections.

The International Olympic Committee is historically one of the worst organizations you would want in charge of international sport, and they continue their abysmal track record by announcing genetic testing to determine whether or not an athlete is allowed to compete in the women's division of a sport, with anyone that shows up with an SRY gene banned for not being a 'biological female'. Thus, they ban trans athletes…and anyone else who has this particular gene. They claim they will carve out exceptions for androgen-insensitivity and other situations where an athlete "[does] not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone," but this is still the organization that used to require women athletes to parade themselves nude before a panel of doctors charged with determining whether they were really women or not, so I can imagine they will be just as good with such potential exceptions as they have been with Caster Semanya. (Not that, y'know, there's an entire contingent of trans athletes in every national sport federation looking to take the place by storm, but more than a few organizations are pretending there are so they can continue to get money from bigots, and to avoid having to take a stand on the right side of history against the forces that would ridicule them or make things harder for them to continue making their money if they actually had morals.) If you search for the evidence that supposedly backs these new tests, you are chasing vittras as they laugh at you, and often arrive at the assertion of a eugenicist who can't even prove their own assertion (and who will blame it on the test subjects instead of himself.) Or you land at the fact that these policies have been implemented and abandoned and implemented and abandoned because reactionaries want to classify people into neat boxes, and people, being constructed of multiple combinations of building blocks in nearly-infinite variations, defy being classified into neat boxes, and so the definition of "man" and "woman" is almost always political because it cannot be technical or scientific, and the IOC is certainly a political organization, perhaps even more so than the NOCs and federations that it serves as an umbrella for. We're still in this phase where we believe that women have to look a specific way before we will acknowledge they are women, and so many of our elite athletes are not in the category of being sufficiently feminine to be acknowledged as women.

( And more people who make bad choices, and cover for other bad choices, and otherwise try to legitimize those bad choices )

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Kairi III

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy, mild, and damp. It rained again last night. At least the howling wind has calmed down.

I fed the birds. I haven't seen much activity though.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 4/3/26 -- I've seen a pair of house finches feeding each other. <3 courting behavior.

.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

What is nostalgia?

I’ve been reflecting on nostalgia lately,
specifically regarding the differences
between growing up in the '80s and '90s
versus the experience of kids today.

It is extremely different, and I suspect that the bad changes outweigh the good ones, considering the generally poor health of young people today.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

susandennis

The other day, I was looking for some granny square chicken ideas. I googled and then clicked on images and fairly quickly found a viable candidate but, on the way, I also spied a very cool looking fish. Made with a granny square base with nose and tail added and then outlined in black. I thought it was an Etsy image but I could have been wrong about that. It was not a professional image. I noted my search terms and figured I'd go back and find it later. Only now, after two days of searching, I cannot find that sucker anywhere! I have googled the universe looking and nope. Nada. Nothing even close. I no longer care about the fucking fish but I am major bummed about my personal fail.

I just tried again and Google suggested I try Gemini. Fair suggestion. And an even bigger fail. Now I need to see if I can stop looking. It's obsessive.

I had the entire pool to myself this morning, not even the sun joined me. It was lovely.

Before I left, I loaded the laundry in and got it started. It's now got about 40 minutes til done.

I made Bonny a welcome home sign.

And that's about it so far today. No big plans - no little plans for that matter. But, probably I should get dressed anyway.

silveradept

I have been on a not-very-great headspace kick lately, and I think some of it has to do with things that are out of my control and that I cannot influence in any way to make the lives of the people around me better. Some of it is feeling foolish and unintelligent that the solutions to puzzles I am trying to work out don't immediately leap out at me and allow me to progress even further along, as other people are doing just fine.

And some of it, in this case, is feeling like I am being misunderstood, or that I am misunderstanding, and that those kinds of things are waking up the slumbering brainweasel that is cousin to "you are an impostor" but instead takes the tack of "you are actually bad at all of this, and you have been clinging to self-delusion that you are anything other than bad at everything."

This is a weasel that is impervious to counterexample and abundance of evidence. Mostly because of the experience I had with my first work supervisor, and how really awful the relationship with my ex turned out to be (and how long I stayed in it and tried to defend it or at least believe that it wasn't really that bad.) You know, the usual things that leave scars as they heal and always threaten to just open up again and start bleeding everywhere if they get poked.

( As usual, something happened at work that has roused this particular weasel, and now I'm probably overthinking it. )

My experiences have led me not to the confidence of the mediocre white man, who can explain away any fault as being someone else's problem, or not actually relevant to them, but instead to the pathways of someone who carries themself like they expect to be hit at some point, and probably without any warning signs they can detect. I'm trying to be good at my job, but being good at my job involves other people, and people are notoriously hard to read properly.

I dunno. Maybe I am bad at my job. (Peter says, after all, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, so maybe I've already found mine.)

Maybe I'm bad at relationships. (This is an unknowable item without outside perspectives, and those outside perspectives each have their own criteria for figuring out whether I'm good or bad at it, rather than a single "objective" standard.)

Maybe I'm bad at everything. (That's not true, but it can certainly feel that way if you go too long without something giving you a trout-slap or managing to break through with enough feelings of competence to get above the anhedonia line.)

Guess I'll go eat worms? (But there aren't any gummy worms in the house right now, and also, it's well-past time I was in bed at the time of finishing this entry. Post time on this is after I've had a night's sleep, but this feeling of general incompetence persists even across sleep.)

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: Scylla and the Sirens - Rock and a Hard Place

james_davis_nicoll

A reminder to Canadian citizens and permanent residents: you have but a day to vote on the Aurora Awards!

I am but one of the eligible candidates. Each of us is as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. M

ore information here.

andrewducker

Can't go anywhere in Scotland without finding a castle.

(In this case Waverley train station)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

mount_oregano

I received a preview copy this book in exchange for writing a blurb if I liked it. The description intrigued me: a science fiction story from an outstanding author about translation. A psychic connection allows a linguist to impersonate a species upon whom space travel depends.

But I didn’t get the story I expected. Here’s my blurb:

I felt shattered, betrayed by all my hopes. Everything we believe about linguistics says shared language leads to greater understanding and compassion. This is why I translate. But language is also a technology, and technologies can destroy. S.L. Huang shows how lies using language can create an unthinkable disaster.

I can’t say more without spoilers. The Language of Liars will be published on April 21. You won’t be disappointed

settiai

First of all, relax! I'm far from being picky, and I can pretty much guarantee that I'll love whatever you decide to create for me. These are nothing but guidelines, for you to take to heart or ignore to your heart's content. Also, hey! You're writing me fic or drawing me art! That's automatically a good reason for me to love you, no matter what. So, please, keep that in mind. Trust me, you can pretty much do no wrong. ♥

( More details under the cut. )

Current Mood: curious

larryhammer

Following up on this post, this year for April Fools the Monterey Bay Aquarium posted under the Kriller Waves Radio label a 1-hour mix of anchovy, sardine, and mackerel schools moshing to thrash metal.

---L.

Subject quote from Theme From Shaft, Isaac Hayes.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2026/04/03/what-do-i-have-to-do-to-get-some-disrespect/

settiai

I've been experimenting with my air fryer a lot the last few weeks now that I'm properly moved into my new apartment and don't have an oven. I already used it a fair bit even when I had an oven, but I've been trying more and more things recently that I've never cooked in it before.

( Food talk under the cut. )

I'm very curious to see what I figure out how to make in the air fryer next.

Current Mood: accomplished

james_davis_nicoll

A collection of (Michael Hanson voice) speculative fiction stories from Amal El-Mohtar.

Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories by Amal El-Mohtar

rynling

( Read more... )

The weather is warm, and the sakura are in bloom. It’s going to take time to recover from this year’s horrible winter, but I’m getting there. 🌸

wickedgame posting in

fandom_icons

Fandoms: Addicted, Bridgerton, Cobra Kai, Elite, Guardian, I'll Turn Back This Time, Mako Mermaids, One Piece, Shadowhunters, Superman & Lois, Zorro

the rest are HERE @

mundodefieras

flowing_data_rss_feed

Posted by Nathan Yau

https://flowingdata.com/2026/04/03/ballroom-design-many-notes/

https://flowingdata.com/?p=81529

After demolishing the East Wing of the White House and rushing into construction of a ballroom, the administration was finally ordered to stop until the plans go through the necessary reviews. NYT’s the Upshot made notes on the ballroom design, which is more flashy than practical, such as a stairway to nowhere and fake windows.

I like the enhanced byline: “Junho Lee is a trained architect, Larry Buchanan studied fine arts, and Emily Badger has long written about urban planning.” Apparently NYT has been doing this for a few years.

Tags: architecture, ballroom, Upshot, White House

https://flowingdata.com/2026/04/03/ballroom-design-many-notes/

https://flowingdata.com/?p=81529