honey and sting

Well, THAT'S a first!

Since January, I've been working out with a local Goju Karate club. They're good folks. There are a couple of places where we disagree, and that's fine.

I made the decision that after December, I would discontinue my training with them. When I paid my monthly dues on Monday, I told the instructor that this would be my last month.

His face shut completely down. "Why?"

I didn't want to cause a problem, so I just said, "Eh. There's just some things that don't fit well, and I feel like it's time to go on."

But that wasn't good enough, and he kept pushing.

I have three rules about questions. The first one is: don't ask a question you don't want the answer to.

So I told him a few of the things that had led me to this point, only one of which was in any way a reflection of him or his teachings.

And we left it at that. Other students arrived, we had class, after which he said he hoped I'd change my mind.

Tonight I texted him that I wouldn't be able to make it, but "have a great class and an even better weekend, and I'll see you guys Monday!"

His response: "I have given this a lot of thought and given your view of me and my teaching, think it's best we just cut ties now. Please come get your money, I don't need it and wish you farewell."

WTF? "You can't quit, you're fired"?

Eh, I'll go by Monday night and collect my refund, and wish them all well and let them know that there's no hard feelings on my part. But this is definitely a new experience for me! LOL

For no good reason (yes I'm procrastinating on something), trying to decide tonight which is the most WTF of the music videos I have had to watch and rewatch and rewatch this year. Is it the WTFFFFF of the "clink clink" visual in Yum Yum? Or is it Shwekey deciding to stop the song right in its tracks to do a commercial for Baron Herzog? They are both so WTF.



-YUM YUM | Rabbi Greenspan | Featuring Afiko.Man & Mendy Worch | TYH Music



-SHWEKEY - Baruch Hashem It’s Shabbos



If you don't understand Yum Yum, don't worry, neither do I.

Wow, I knew I hadn't been hanging around DW for a while, but I didn't realize it had been THIS long!

This coming August will be one of those "milestone" birthdays for me: I'll be turning 60. (I know, I can't believe it, either!) So, I'm setting myself a goal to keep myself from losing too much ground to Father Time, in terms of my physical health and conditioning.

Last year, I set myself a challenge to be able to do a single set of 50 pushups by my 59th birthday. I am proud to say that I made that goal, and can still do them. In fact, these last few weeks I've been doing 55.

This year... well, this year, my good sense has clearly failed me! ;-)

The goal for this year: On my 60th birthday, I will do a single set of ONE HUNDRED pushups.

Did I mention that my good sense has clearly failed me?

I've gotten to that point 2-3 times before, and then for some reason stopped doing them. Let me tell you, "use it or lose it" hits FAST with something like this!

My plan is to increase by 5 reps each month. If I do that, it will carry me to my goal.

5/month may not sound like much. And from 0-50 reps, it isn't a lot. Once you get above 50, though, things change. 50-100 is more than twice as hard as 0-50.

There will be other goals, coming in with the new year. (I don't do "resolutions" any more, but I do still set goals.) But those will wait for another day.

Wish me luck!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

Summary: The titular girl turning 12 is Katie, a homeschooled girl in Kentucky in summer/autumn 2004. She is enduring the beginning of puberty -- having to wear a bra*, growing leg hair, getting her period -- while her best friends have temporarily moved to Wisconsin, she is getting bullied at church** youth group, discovering her budding feminist rage about dress codes, and, worryingly, might have a crush on a girl in her theater club. A midgrade graphic novel.

( Read more... )

The View from T'Khut (5776 words) by Laura JV
Chapters: 1/8
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Spock/Nyota Uhura, James T. Kirk/Spock, Sarek & Spock (Star Trek), Spock & Spock Prime
Characters: Spock (Star Trek), Spock Prime, James T. Kirk, Nyota Uhura, T'Pau (Star Trek), Sarek (Star Trek), Vulcan Characters (Star Trek), Crew of the Starship Enterprise
Additional Tags: Vulcan Culture (Star Trek), Vulcan Mind Melds (Star Trek), Vulcan Language (Star Trek), jj abrams should be ashamed of himself, Vulcan history, Vulcan mythology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, symbiotic red algae
Series: Part 1 of The View from T'Khut
Summary:

Part I: The Absent World. The planet vanishes, but her people go on.

Part II: An Archaeology of Loss. The world-death left a scar in spacetime, and a void in the heart of the Federation.

Part III: Time and Darkness. In which Ambassador Spock fires unexpected shots.

This story was a very long time coming. I have had the title for it for over a decade, and this summer I realized what story went with that title. It is complete but being posted in parts over the next few weeks and runs about 50K words all told.

Been meaning to update this for a while, so here goes:

After that, I relied very heavily for a while on the valved Aura (3M 9211+), it was how I got through summer 2024 since the non-valve Aura was just so hot. It was not the most comfortable, but between the Aura and the valved Aura, the valved Aura had advantages (both left marks on my face after wearing).

Then there was a combination of factors, including suddenly the valved Aura being out of stock where I was buying it and me stopping the habit of looking for them (if you want them, they're currently in stock in Uline, I assume also other places), because I'd switched entirely to the BNX F95 in both white and black, which are very light and breathable, which really outweighs the downsides (not many, but it feels like I do need to adjust it more than the regular Aura).

I've also dabbled with the BNX H95B, which has a different shape from the F95. It doesn't fit as well but it's also very light. It's basically a nice light mask for when I don't need to wear a mask for too long or talk or whatever.

But if I'm, for a wild example, waiting in a hospital waiting room for hours and hours, very nearly the only one masking, then the BNX F95 is absolutely the mask for that.

At this point, the Auras just live in coat pockets and backpacks as "oops, forgot to grab a BNX mask" backups. Because the Auras are great masks but they are much hotter and much tighter than the BNX ones.

Great interview about Murderbot:

Bifurcating Character with Incisive and Witty Inner Monologue: a Masterclass with ‘Murderbot’ Co-Showrunners Paul Weitz and Spirit Awards Winner Chris Weitz


Since SecUnits issued by the Corporation Rim ­(a group of mega-corporations ruling the galaxy in the distant future) are sentient, complete obedience to human orders is guaranteed by the “governor module” in each unit. However, Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård, who nabbed an Emmy for his intricate and chilling performance in the HBO series, Big Little Lies), figures out how to disable its module to gain autonomy. “Murderbot is sentient from the get-go — it’s basically a slavery narrative. It’s important to Martha that Murderbot was always sentient,” Chris says of the close collaboration with consulting producer, Wells. “All the SecUnits are under human control. They can think for themselves but can’t act for themselves. So, they experience this torture of being at the disposal of others.” In addition to exploring themes of humanity and free will, the series also calls into question the issue of personhood, as Paul notes: “To what degree are we going to grant personhood to non-human intelligence?”

https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/bifurcating-character-with-incisive-and-witty-inner-monologue-a-masterclass-with-murderbot-co-showrunners-paul-weitz-and-spirit-awards-winner-chris-weitz/


***


I'm trying to get back into the swing of things after basically three weeks of travel in October, catching up on household stuff, trying to get ready for the holidays, getting back into working on the current book. I think I was more mentally exhausted than physically, but it was still a lot.

I didn't stay more than a day in any one city (except for two nights in Allentown, PA, which was lovely) and I was mostly leaving before most of the hotels started to serve breakfast, so I was living on a lot of airplane food. I did get to ride the train for the first time in the US (the Acela Amtrack) which was fun. I've ridden trains in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Scotland, but never here.

There was a lot of emotional overwhelm, seeing so many people, but also it felt really good, because they were all people who cared about books and art and creativity. The smallest crowd was in New York, about 40-50 people, the largest was in Seattle with around 300. The Texas Book Festival in Austin was like an encapsulation of the whole trip, being in a giant crowd of people (the largest in the festival's 30 year history) who were all "books, books, books!" I've heard that people seemed to be going to more arts-related events lately, and that was what I saw on my trip.

As superhero movies go, this is a very good superhero movie. As regular movies go, I kept being annoyed about the seriously compressed timeline and some really basic suspension of disbelief, like "is anyone going to say Lex Luthor is lying about translation" because, uh. Also, how does anyone know Kryptonian? So many little things just drove me up the wall.

However! It was a good movie, and the Clark/Lois stuff was very well done, I actually really loved their interview/fight because it worked so well in with characterization, it didn't strike my "I cannot, I cannot, I cannot" that I tend to have about couples arguing.

The main effect of the movie was, after it was revealed that Lex had people going over every inch of every Superman fight so he could get a single strand of Superman's hair so he could clone him -- I went and reread some old favorite Smallville fics. Good times.

The movie also did something I noticed with the Knives Out 2: Glass Onion film, where it made the Cool Evil Rich Villain... not come off very compelling on the slash goggles. I did not walk out of this movie shipping Clark/Lex, even though I ship Clark/Lex. Lex Luthor, played by Why Do I Recognize Him Oh That's The Boy From About A Boy, is very well done and very well performed and is not a magnificent bastard and he has zero chemistry with Clark, but not in a way that detracts from the film. This is not a film where Clark and Lex have ever been on good terms; this is not a film where they even ever knew each other. There was nothing about the movie that was in the same flavor or theme as Smallville, but hey, always fun to go reread some stuff.

But for a movie that did Lois so well, did we have to have Eve The Awful Clingy Obsessive Wannabe Girlfriend with Jimmy who did not want to date her, just wanted info from her? That was so hard to endure. I think worse of the movie for making that decision, it casts a long tail on the movie even a week after I finished it, like "oh yeah so that was a movie that made me go reread some old fics from 20 years ago, and also had this unnecessarily misogynistic sideplotline played for laughs (?)".

Nathan Fillion also appeared to be treating this film as "I will do bad acting on purpose to show that my character is a buffoon" but mostly it just came off annoying.

I also have a nit to pick with this movie that is solely from watching it with the DVD closed captions, which kept noting when the main Superman theme was playing, which is: the soundtrack to this movie is ... well, it's got some perfectly acceptable pop songs peppered in. But the rest of it is just so bland.

But this movie is better than every MCU movie I've seen, with the exception of Captain America 2: A Good Spy Movie With I Guess Absolutely Zero Repercussions For The Worldbuilding Oh Well.

Title: The Deere Files Podcast Presents: The Heirs Of Samuel Westing.
Author: lannamichaels
Fandom: The Westing Game
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: What do a Supreme Court Justice, the chairwoman of the board of the largest employer in Wisconsin, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, the inventor of Hoo's Little Foot-Eze innersoles, and a dead union organizer who didn't exist have in common?


( There was no such person as Barney Northrup )