1crowdedhour | Network

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Ride a Rising Storm. I'm usually a second book person, but this one took a minute to win me over. I think the bar was set so high by the first one that when the second one felt like "more of the same," I was disappointed. It is, however, going somewhere, and it finished up with a bang, and I am very excited for the third one. (But where it finished with a bang was more like a starting pistol. Do not expect closure here. This is very much a middle book.)

Lila Caimari, Cities and News. Kindle. A study of how newspapers evolved and influenced the culture in late 19th century South American cities, which was off the beaten Anglophone path and rather interesting, especially because the way that snowy places were exoticized pretty much exactly paralleled how these cities were exoticized in snowy places.

Colin Cotterill, Curse of the Pogo Stick, The Merry Misogynist, and Love Songs from a Shallow Grave. Rereads. And this, unfortunately, is where the series ends for me. I enjoyed Pogo Stick, and then the other two had mystery plots that were "serial killer because tormented intersex person" (REALLY STOP IT, these books came out in the 21st century, NOT OKAY) and "bitches be crazy, yo" (WELP). The mystery plots are not nearly as central to these mysteries as one might expect of, well, mysteries, but on the other hand they are integral to the book and not ignorable and I am done. When I read this series previously I endured these two in hopes that it would get better again, and now I know it doesn't. Well. Five books I like is more than most people manage.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Field Guide to the End of the World. I still resonate less with prose poems than with other formats of poem, and this had several, but it was otherwise...unfortunately apropos, a worthy companion in our own ongoing ends of worlds.

Tove Jansson, Moominpappa's Memoirs. Kindle, reread. Charming and quirky as always, with some hilarious moments about memoir that went over my head when I was small.

Laurie Marks, Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic. Rereads. I still really enjoy this series, but on the reread it was quite clear to me that water is very, very much the weakest element here, no contest. The water witches are not really portrayed as people, nobody with water affinity gets to be a character, they're very much the "oh yeah I guess we have more than three elements" element in this series. Water is the element I connect with the most strongly. I still like this series, I still think it's doing really good things with peace being an active rather than passive state and one that has to be made by imperfect humans--more unusual things than they should be. As with the Cotterill books above, the fact that it was a reread meant that I couldn't keep saying to myself, "Maybe there'll be more on this later," because there won't, the series is complete. But in contrast to the Cotterill it was complete in a way I still find satisfying.

Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing. This is a family history novel with strong--in fact integral--fantastical elements, but only the realistic plot resolution is satisfying, not the fantasy plot at all. The fantasy elements are required for the plot to happen as portrayed, there's no chance they're only metaphors, but they only work as metaphors. Ah well. If you're up for a Chinese family history novel that goes into detail of the horrors of both the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, this one has really good sentences and paragraphs. But go in braced.

nineweaving

rushthatspeaks and I took a delighted young Fox to the Stone Zoo for a much-belated Christmas present. (The Antarctic weather we've had would have daunted all but the hardiest animals, let alone us.)

Some of the denizens, of course, revelled in the snow.

The Arctic fox was snug and smug.

The snow leopard was serenely aloof.

Wolves on the horizon! Shades of Willoughby Chase.

The colobus monkeys have a mischievous toddler. Its parents clearly told its older sibling to babysit, and the brat kept teasing and tigging and dive bombing the poor guy from the ceiling.

Fennec fox. Those ears!

The orangest flamingos!

Red panda.

I didn't get pictures of the bats or the bears, and the otters stayed snug in their grotto, over hot chocolate and Monopoly. They must play something.

Nine

lsanderson

ICE

After my ICE arrest, I learned one crucial way to treat trauma. We can all take part
An illustration of numerous gentle, overlapping hands forming the shape of a protective flower enclosing a small, curled up child.
I was detained for writing a op-ed about Gaza as a student at Tufts. My experience has only made me feel more connected to others facing oppression
Rümeysa Öztürk
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/18/rumeysa-ozturk-trauma-children-ice-gaza

Conservative Georgia town pushes back against ICE detention center: ‘We are Americans after all’
Social Circle, a mostly Maga town, builds strange bedfellow coalition against plans to convert warehouse
Timothy Pratt in Social Circle, Georgia
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/18/ice-detention-center-warehouse-georgia

More News

In other session news, a bill backed by more than two dozen GOP lawmakers would make protesting in front of someone’s place of residence a gross misdemeanor. Legal repercussions could also include restraining orders, Fox 9 reports. Via MinnPost
https://www.fox9.com/news/residential-protesting-minnesota-new-gop-proposal-feb-2026

Nevada sues Kalshi to block company’s prediction market operation in state
State regulators seek to block Kalshi from offering events contracts that would allow residents to bet on sports
Reuters
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/18/nevada-kalshi-lawsuit-prediction-market ( Read more... )

geraineon posting in

cnovels

Happy Lunar New Year to everyone who celebrates!

This is your weekly read-in-progress post~

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

brightknightie

I posted the

fkficfest "2026 Pre-Game Survey" yesterday. It's open through February 27. Twelve folks have responded already (including two names new to me) so the ten-day opportunity may be longer than needed! Current writer tally: Six yes, six maybe.

Please do comment there or here if you feel strongly or confusedly about any of the survey questions or game circumstances. As always, I reserve the right to do what I believe will work best for the fest community based on all evidence, not the pre-game poll alone. (And I might need to work around my own obligations.)

As "simple step one" in giving myself an easier time as mod this year, I'm not looking up canon quotations for the admin post subject lines. It's not that it was ever that big a chore -- I have a PDF of the forkni-compiled quotations Dorothy used to build her concordance tool so long ago -- but it had indeed become a chore.

lannamichaels

okay so Ernie Of Sesame Street is legalnamed Ernest Monster, without question, but what is Bert short for? Albert? Bertram? Hubert? Herbert? Robert?

I may spin out a quick Sesame Street Regency AU drabble... but I think it's gotta be Bertram.

mount_oregano

At the Capricon science fiction convention earlier this month, I led a writing workshop.

“It’s A Start: A Workshop On Your First Paragraph — A good opening paragraph for a story or novel will carry the work to success. In this workshop, we will consider seventeen different ways to start a work of fiction, explore how each one will affect the reader, and evaluate the promise it sets for the story.”

Opening paragraphs are hard to write because so much rides on them. They should evoke the tone, voice, setting, genre, characters, stakes, conflict, trajectory, intrigue, point of view, grab attention, make readers feel they’re in skillful hands, and be interesting for the reader — or some of this, at least. Different kinds of opening paragraphs let you focus on the elements that matter to the story you want to tell.

Seventeen is a somewhat arbitrary number, but these openings offer a clue to the breadth of possibilities available. You could start with something unexpected, an image, action, simplicity, questions, curiosity, quotes, a frame, dialogue, emotion, captivation, philosophy, change, the protagonist, setting, a prologue, or flash-forward.

You can download a PDF here that explains each one and offers a couple of examples. Happy writing!

james_davis_nicoll

Classic SF was chock-full of dubious ideas; Martin Gardner supplied the antidote.

One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense

james_davis_nicoll

Only witches hunt demons, all witches are women, and Uroro cannot be defeated by any woman. Uroro feels entirely safe, right until the world's first male witch defeats him.

Ichi the Witch, volume 1 by Osamu NIchi & Shiro Usazaki (Translated by Adrienne Beck)

feurioo posting in

tv_talk

Watch on YouTube

Release: March 20

Summary

Detectives Dulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe are in Darwin to investigate the death of Eddie’s former policing partner Bushy. However, their plans are soon diverted when a body part is discovered in a remote town called Barra Creek. With the Northern Territory police force focused on a large-scale search for two missing backpackers, Dulcie and a very reluctant Eddie are tasked with identifying the John Doe.

Sticky, sweaty and juggling comprehensive thrush infections, the detectives find themselves embroiled in a world of crocodile-fuelled tourism, overstretched Indigenous rangers, cagey locals, and seven-metre prehistoric predators – all of whom call Barra Creek’s stretch of land, and water, their home. As the humidity builds, and Eddie and Dulcie dig deeper, more questions arise for our duo – not only about the case, but the many secrets that lie beneath the surface of this small town.

thawrecka

新年快乐！

I meant to post yesterday but I've been feeling a bit tired and rundown this past week. Hopefully better by the weekend - I have lunar new year celebrations and a friend's birthday to get to. Not to mention my book club tomorrow night!

Things watched recently:

• Seven episodes of Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter, an isekai BL anime about an accountant accidentally ending up in a fantasy world, reforming the royal accounts department, getting hooked on magical energy drinks it turns out he's allergic to... and being saved from an overdose by a handsome young knight in the world's silliest fuck-or-die scenario. And then continuing to make political waves with his accounting!!! power, which is just so satisfying to watch. DAMN THAT MAN LOVES TO ACCOUNTS. The subtitle of the show is correct, the other world's book do indeed depend on the bean counter, and not everyone is happy about him tracking their spending... I'm having so much fun with this! It's funny, but also in a strange way an office worker power fantasy, but also there's political fallout for everything and that feels right, too. Once the season's over I'll have to track down the books.

• All of season one of Lord of Mysteries, first in Chinese, and now I'm watching the English dub. I really will have to track down the novels, the first of which is already out in translation here (apparently the second is out elsewhere in the world but doesn't arrive in Australia until next month?? sigh). I'm hoping to track down that book tomorrow night, if the book store that claims to have a copy really does.

This is also a transmigration story, but it's a steampunk-y horror transmigration fantasy. The main character ends up in a world where people take potions to cultivate into eldritch monsters, basically. He spends the first episode bewildered (and so did I hahaha) but pretending he has any clue what's going on, and I think one of my favourite things is how both his Chinese voice actor and English voice actor give him the kind of voice that can trick you into thinking he's almost a totally normal guy... and then you step back and look at the facts and you're just like, wtf, Klein! He's a great character, but I also like a lot of the supporting cast; my favourite character is actually Leonard, a guy who once fell down a flight of stairs because he was distracted reading a book (relatable). Leonard regularly tries to act cool and mysterious at Klein, who keeps calling Leonard a weirdo instead of being impressed, and I'm very entertained.

I do have... extremely mixed feelings... about the evil secret sect of people who take potions that make them women which gives them more powers to do more evil things, and by mixed feelings I think that has very unfortunate implications but they are all unfortunately also so sexy.

• I watched the remaining episodes of Betrothed to my Sister's Ex, a really charming cinderella story type anime I started last year. Which is actually really good. I appreciate that it doesn't just have the charming romance of Marie coming to be loved by rich handsome dweeb Kyros and everyone else in the castle, as well as slowly learning to love herself, it also deals with how she and her younger sister were abused by their family in different ways, and the ending is a happy escape for both of them. I really liked it!

• I also finished This Monster Wants to Eat Me, a subtly yuri-flavoured anime about the main character's suicidal depression, and the monsters that would prefer her not to die, actually. And like, it really is very good, but it is also so heavy so it makes sense it took a while for me to finally get to the final episodes.

• Cosmic Princess Kaguya (2026), truly the superior of the animated lesbian space princess movies I've watched so far this year. It does zip through plot very fast, so it's not without flaw, but I loved this lesbian sci fi take on the tale of the bamboo cutter, and the scissoring handshake is just an A+ detail. Great songs, a lot of fun.

• Which means Lesbian Space Princess (2025) is the lesser animated lesbian space princess movie I've seen this year. The songs are okay. I was stunned to learn after the fact that the homophobic blokey spaceship was voiced by Richard Roxburgh. It is sometimes funny. The best joke was the Maliens and the thespian. I don't regret watching it, but like... eh.

• Scarlet (2025): Wow, it's amazing how IMAX can make a bad film worse. I didn't realise before going to see it that this was an AU version of Hamlet where Hamlet is a girl who meets a handsome Japanese man from the present day in the afterlife, so that was... strange. It's uh not good. Some of the emotional stuff would have worked better if those scenes had not been dragged out, and a lot of the animation is TV quality limited animation. Morally incoherent, which is a feat because it's so thin and slight. The bit with the imagined Shibuya dance sequence is uh... I don't even know. That sure was a film I watched.

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260217.html

Some

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260217.html

github posting in

changelog

Branch: refs/heads/main Home: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth Commit: 472e7ca0671a6f37896549ef3e935b8cfdd52f03 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/472e7ca0671a6f37896549ef3e935b8cfdd52f03 Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-02-16 (Mon, 16 Feb 2026)

Changed paths: M bin/worker/ses-incoming-email

Log Message:

Fix SES worker to expect S3 action notifications

The SNS notification now comes from the S3 action's topic_arn (terraform change), so receipt.action will always be type S3. Revert the non-S3 skip to a proper error since it would indicate a misconfiguration.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com

Commit: 4895912982e33afbf41b439bc7d38d1a625b25b7 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/4895912982e33afbf41b439bc7d38d1a625b25b7 Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-02-17 (Tue, 17 Feb 2026)

Changed paths: M bin/worker/dw-embeds M cgi-bin/DW/Task.pm M cgi-bin/DW/TaskQueue.pm M cgi-bin/DW/TaskQueue/SQS.pm M t/taskqueue-dedup.t

Log Message:

Add max_retries support to TaskQueue to avoid DLQ pileup

Failed SQS tasks that exceed the receive count threshold are now marked complete instead of being left for the dead letter queue. The SQS layer passes ApproximateReceiveCount through to tasks, and start_work checks it against a configurable max_retries option. Applied to dw-embeds where unreachable remote hosts cause repeated failures that fill the DLQ.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com

Compare: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/compare/6792621c5547...4895912982e3

To unsubscribe from these emails, change your notification settings at https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/settings/notifications

ysabetwordsmith

Life is full of things which are hard or tedious or otherwise unpleasant that need doing anyhow. They help make the world go 'round, they improve skills, and they boost your sense of self-respect. But doing them still kinda sucks. It's all the more difficult to do those things when nobody appreciates it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our accomplishments and pat each other on the back.

What are some of the hard things you've done recently? What are some hard things you haven't gotten to yet, but need to do? Is there anything your online friends could do to make your hard things a little easier?

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

NASA fired three rockets into the northern lights and the results are stunning

NASA has pulled off a high-flying aurora investigation, launching three rockets into the glowing northern lights over Alaska. One mission targeted mysterious dark patches called black auroras, while the twin GNEISS rockets created a 3D scan of the aurora’s electrical currents. All rockets reached their planned altitudes and returned strong data. The result: an unprecedented look at how these dazzling light shows are wired from space to sky.

That's such a cool concept for an experiment!

Current Mood: busy

kaffy_r

Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has died at the age of 84. We were driving north on Ashland Avenue when the word came over the radio. I gasped, and did that "Nooo!" thing that's so cliche, but proof that cliches have their roots in truth.

I knew he was old; I knew he had progressive supranuclear palsy; I knew he could no longer walk or speak, this man whose oratory raised the hopes, dreams and resistance of so many black, brown, and marginalized people. I knew he was going to die. But I didn't want it to happen.

I knew he was a complex man. I knew he was vain. I knew he was a little apt to enlarge himself in many instances. I knew he'd made antisemitic comments years ago; I knew he felt sidelined by Barack Obama's presidential campaign, after doing the hard work of paving the way for a black president with his own two surprisingly successful campaigns in 1984 and 1988. I knew he'd had a child out of wedlock.

But he didn't let his vanity outpace his love for others. He relearned humility and other lessons after each misstep. I knew he acknowledged and supported his natural daughter. I knew he was a gifted organizer as well as an orator, I knew he visited Cook County jail every Christmas when others might have - indeed had - forgotten those men. I knew he walked the walk as well as talked the talk. And there's another cliche that has its root in truth.

I met him three times. Once, on the street, heading for Grant Park, the night Obama won the presidency in 2008. He took my questions, brief as they were, and answered me in as thoughtful a way as one can in about 30 seconds. I met him a second time when he spoke to students at Niles West High School in Skokie, a significantly Jewish community. I met him a final time, at a Wilmette synagogue, where he spoke, his voice already being conquered by his illness. He would never have remembered me, but I remembered him.

I'm not black. I'm not really poor. I have privilege that he never had. But I remember his "I am Somebody." I remember. And I cry.

I'm not a Christian believer, not really, not for years. But I can hope that if the God he tried so hard to honor is there somewhere, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson reaches the seat of the Lord, that Lord will look to him and say, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

Here is what an excellent Chicago writer, Neil Steinberg has to say about Rev. Jackson, who was, and is, quintessentially Chicago. And here is a link to a local CBS News special on him.

Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Remembering Jesse Jackson

annavere

I finished Counterclaims a couple of nights ago. Took a day off to recuperate. I am so glad to have that behind me and to be literally halfway through the series, with the grimmest part over.

ysabetwordsmith

Jesse Jackson, a leading voice for civil rights, dies at 84

A former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., he launched two historic presidential campaigns while spreading a message of hope and resilience: “I am — somebody.”

( Read more... )

Current Mood: pensive

ysabetwordsmith

Thanks to a lot of work from

fuzzyred, the landing page for Not Quite Kansas is now visible! \o/ It's dark fantasy with demons and angels. You can read the introduction and the previously published poems. This series is featured in our current Half-Price Sale if you want to see more.

fuzzyred is hosting a pool in case you want to magnify your impact with the quarter-price option.