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[personal profile] kaberett

I supplied knives and fine motor control; the toddler supplied art direction; the toddler's resident adults supplied outlines for me to cut around (and candles, and matches, and in fact all of the cutting of the tiny pumpkin).

one large and one small pumpkin, carved, with candles, in the dark

Recent Reading

29 Oct 2025 11:04 pm
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
[personal profile] davidgillon
 

Hidden Legacy Series, Ilona Andrews

(First trilogy reviewed here. As a quick primer, magic has existed since the mid-1800s, runs in families called Houses, led by the overpowered Primes, and mundane law enforcement mostly refuses to get involved with their feuds).

Diamond Fire

Book 3.5 as it's a novella, and Nevada Baylor, protagonist of the first trilogy, is about to marry billionaire Connor 'Mad' Rogan. But they're two wedding planners down and Nevada's middle sister Catalina has decided she's going to make this wedding work if it kills her, or if she has to kill someone else. The problem is, someone already has killing in mind, a major theft already happened, and prime suspect for that is probably one of Connor's mother's family. So it's shy, brilliant Catalina against a dozen spoiled Spanish aristos.

I like Catalina as protagonist, but I think my favourite character is the utterly irreverent Runa Etterson, a Prime specialising in poisons: "Yes, the frosting is definitely poisoned - everyone grab a spoon and dig in!"

Sapphire Flames

Catalina has now replaced Nevada as head of House Baylor and the Baylor PI agency, on the grounds it's the only way to stop Nevada working herself to death. Summoned on a mission of mercy, to lure a grieving teen off a ledge, Catalina is horrified to discover his sister is Runa Etterson, and that they are the only surviving members of their family after their mother and sister burned to death in a house fire. Runa is convinced it was murder, and as the new head of House Etterson, she wants the Baylor Agency to find out who did it. Meanwhile, her mother had her own safeguard in place, and has hired an assassin to avenge her, an assassin Catalina is horrified to discover is billionaire playboy Count Alessandro Sagredo, subject of her teenage crush. In person Alessandro is arrogant, entitled, and annoyingly, evenly shockingly competent. It's love at first hate. 

Emerald Blaze

"Holster your weapons, and step away from the monkey!"

Nine months on from Sapphire Flames and Catalina is mostly over Alessandro walking out on her in pursuit of his personal obsession. But when both she and her secret boss, the grandfatherly Linus Duncan, aka the scary Warden of Texas, are attacked by summoned creatures, Linus decides that the attacks mean Catalina needs to take point on the investigation of the murder they may relate to. Which is when Alessandro reappears, strangely stripped of his arrogance, humbled even, and swearing to protect her. Which considering the investigation means going face to face with not one, but four combat Primes, the prime suspects in the murder, and a bunch of assassins, might be just as well.

Ruby Fever

A year on from Emerald Blaze and the Speaker of the Texas State Assembly (ruling body of the Houses) has just been assassinated, while someone walked through Linus Duncan's overpowered security to leave him comatose, which means Catalina Baylor, Deputy Warden of the State of Texas at the age of 23, is on her own when it comes to who is running the investigations. But that doesn't mean she's on her own for actually getting stuff done, because she has the full assistance of her family aka House Baylor, and her fiance, Alessandro Sagredo. Plus an annoying Russian prince. And she's going to need all the help she can get, because this time it's war.


Okay, these are David-candy, and I had to ration myself by insisting I read each book twice before moving on to the next, otherwise I'd have blown through the whole double-trilogy in three days. There's a definite pattern to the two trilogies: Book 1, best of frenemies, Book 2, reconciled lovers, Book 3, partners. But Nevada and Catalina are different characters, possibly overly defined by their older sister/middle sister roles, and if their partners are both dangerous billionaire bad boys, they're at least different dangerous billionaire bad boys - Connor as a soldier and Alessandro as, well, Zorro.

They're very much about family - the Baylors start as the three sisters, their mother, their two male cousins, and Grandma Frida, all working together, but also found family, because by the time the second trilogy wraps they are up to somewhere around twenty characters considering themselves to have family ties - and all but a couple of the younger kids with fully developed characters. 

The world-building is equally good, as is the plotting, with underlying arcs binding the trilogies together. I think I caught a couple of things that were raised and not developed, but nothing major. They even covered a point in the Baylor heritage where I initially thought they'd missed the scientific implications.

Impressed.

kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
[personal profile] kaberett

I have, in the latest book, got to The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes, but this one makes a point of describing it as a "reductionistic approach".

The Thing Is, of course, that much like the Bohr model (for all that's 250 years younger, give or take), for many and indeed quite plausibly most purposes, The Cartesian Model Of Pain is, for most people and for most purposes, good enough: if you've got to GCSE level then you'll have met the Bohr model; if you get to A-level, you'll start learning about atomic orbitals; and then by the time I was starting my PhD I had to throw out the approximation of atomic nuclei as volumeless points (the reason you get measurable and interpretable stable isotope fractionations of thallium is -- mostly! -- down to the nuclear field shift effect).

Similarly, most of the time you don't actually need to know anything beyond the lie-to-children first-approximation of "if you're experiencing pain, that means something is damaging you, so work out what it is and stop doing that". The Bohr model is good enough for a general understanding of atomic bonds and chemical reactions; specificity theory is good enough for day-to-day encounters with acute pain.

The problem with specificity theory isn't actually that it's wrong (although it is); it's that it gets misapplied in cases where Something More Complicated is going on in ways that obscure even the possibility of Something More Complicated. The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that it doesn't get presented with the footnote of "this isn't the whole story, and for understanding anything beyond very short-term acute pain you need to go into considerably more detail". But most people aren't in more complex pain than that! Estimates run at ~20% of the population living with chronic pain, but even if we accept the 43% that sometimes gets quoted about the UK, most people do not live with chronic pain.

There's probably an analogy here with the "Migraine Is Not Just A Bad Headache" line (and indeed I'm getting increasingly irritated with all of these books discussing migraine as though the problem is solely and entirely the pain, as opposed to, you know, the rest of the disabling neurological symptoms) but I'm upping my amitriptyline again and it's past my bedtime so I'm not going to work all the details of that out now, but, like, Pain Is Not Just A Tissue Damage, style of thing.

Anyway. The point is that I still haven't actually read Descartes (I've got the posthumously published and much more posthumously translated Treatise on Man in PDF, I just haven't got to it yet) and nonetheless I am bristling at people describing him as reductionist (derogatory). Just. We aren't going to do better if we also persist in wilful misunderstandings and misrepresentations for the sake of slagging off someone who has been dead for three hundred and seventy-five years instead of recognising the actual value inherent in "good enough for most people most of the time", and how that value complicates attempts at more nuance! How about we actually acknowledge the reasons the idea is so compelling, huh, and discuss the circumstances under which the approximation holds versus breaks down? How about that for an idea.

Milestone

28 Oct 2025 06:25 pm
azurelunatic: Karkat Vantas yelling. His shirt has the astrological sign Cancer in grey. (Karkat Yell)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Video appointment with chemotherapist today. I'm done with immunotherapy! The scan says I've been stable.

I still have:

* bone strengthening (not marrow encouraging) med every 12 weeks, infused
* Scans every 3 months

So that means a trip or two to the cancer center every 3 months, although if they keep it at 3 months for the one and 12 weeks for the other, they may fall out of sync.

I should probably celebrate this?
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Sarah Russell of The Ostomy Studio, the person who made such an enormous difference to my general State Of Being just over a year ago via the medium of a private Pilates lesson pre-surgery, has just announced publication of the new Exercise and Physical Activity after Stoma Surgery best practice guidelines that she's been working on for literal years along with some amazing collaborators!

The principles here are the bedrock for the private lesson I had before surgery, and are also what I used as my foundation for rehab despite not after all needing to work with a stoma; I've not read them in full, but if you know folk they might be of interest to then please do pass the link on <3

silveradept: A head shot of a  librarian in a floral print shirt wearing goggles with text squiggles on them, holding a pencil. (Librarian Goggles)
[personal profile] silveradept
[The folks at [community profile] holly_poly wanted a little exchange primer for people who haven't done things before, and since I'm helping out a little bit on their socials side, I thought I'd put one together, based on my extensive experience over the years in participating. If you've never taken part in one, I highly recommend it, they're fun. And if you have additional information to contribute, please do!]


So, you're thinking about participating in a fandom exchange, and you're not entirely sure how this process all goes? Don't worry. Here's a walkthrough of what exchange participation looks like, from the first parts of nominations to the joys of reveals. Since a fair number of exchanges are run on the Archive of Our Own, this guide assumes you already have an account there to sign up with. If not, they're free to get, but they might take a little while to get to you in the queue, so getting one now, before the meat of an exchange starts, will ensure that you're ready to participate.

Let's get into it with the first phase of an exchange - nominations.

Nominations



Nominations is the part of the exchange where you get to suggest what kinds of things should be included in the exchange's tag set. Nominating does not obligate you to sign up afterward, but a lot of people will if their nominations get through because then they know they'll have something they'll be excited to write about. Most nominations are also finite, so even if you're brimming with things you want to see, you'll only get to put in so many into the tag set.

Nominations have to fit the exchange's focus and format. For something that's just a general exchange, anything might be possible, but most exchanges focus on specific fandoms, characters, situations, or relationships. Holly Poly, for example, is a polyamory-focused exchange. Holly Poly nominations must include more than two entities in them, otherwise it wouldn't be a polyamorous relationship. And since it's about polyamory, they want "/"-type relationships that are romantic or sexual, rather than "&"-type relationships that are platonic and don't have romantic or sexual components to them. If I Fics, I Sits, however, says that anything can be done, so long as there's a cat in the relationship, since it's focused on cats.

Where possible, try to use the canonical tag on AO3 for nominating. Two things to remember when you're doing nominations for Holly Poly or any other exchange hosted on AO3:
  1. AO3 does not do ship names, so if what you want is Zutaraang, you have to put in "Zuko/Katara/Aang." Yes, they make you spell it out.
  2. All canonical AO3 ships are in alphabetical order, by last name, if the character has one, and by their only name if not, so that Zutaraang relationship is in the AO3 database as "Aang/Katara/Zuko". The autocomplete can try to help you some if you put in at least one of the participants, but you'll have to wade through the dropdown to get to the thing you want if AO3 thinks you're looking for something else first.


Make sure you also check anything the exchange mod has posted about any deviations they might be making from AO3 canonical tags for their exchange. Sometimes a tag tries to slide into another place and the mod has to change the tag to make it stay in place, or separate shows / games set in the same continuity are being combined into a single universe tag. Or exchange moderators will ask you to nominate the most specific version of the character or relationship as possible, because characters and their relationships do change between media adaptations, and sometimes fans have strong opinions about which version they want to see.

Once you've nominated, keep your eyes out for any "clarifications" posts, because those happen when the exchange moderators detail the problems they're having with nominations. It can be something as simple as having nominated characters and relationships under the incorrect fandom, and sometimes it's as complex as trying to disambiguate which of the six canonical versions of a spandex-clad superhero was intended in a nomination, or whether it will be up to the people signing up to work it out for themselves which one they want. If you're the nominator, then you get to provide additional information to help the moderators place your nomination correctly. Moderators will also usually provide a threat to make sure that information comes in a timely manner, with the idea that either a nomination will be selected to be something, or the nomination will be rejected from the tagset, if clarifying information doesn't arrive by the deadline.

Signups



Set some time aside when it's time to do sign-ups.

More than that.

Still more.

Why? Because unless you're here only for the things you nominated and nothing else, you're going to want to spend some time looking at the tag set. Even if you are here just for the things you nominated and nothing else, you want to look at the tag set. There are a lot of gems in there, from properties you haven't thought of in years, or other popular things, or pairings that you might not have thought of initially, but there's a germ of an idea in your head about what you could write if you were assigned that, and now you're interested.

I'd also look in on the Crossovers and the Original Works tags, if you want to see some of the really fun ways that people imagine relationships and what kinds of worlds they envision or want to collide together. Original Works is also where a lot of the Omegaverse prompts live, but even if you're not an Omegaverse fan, some of the prompts in there can be creative sparks without having to try and figure out how to make existing characters work with it.

If you don't have enough from your nominations and the tag set by itself, some people start looking at the sign-up summaries, once they're posted, to see what other people have posted in their optional details field. It's still true that Optional Details Are Optional, but hearing someone describe what they do and don't want to happen in a work can help someone decide whether they want to offer that combination, or possibly stay away from it if the person who is offering it has Do Not Wants that would conflict if they were assigned that recipient.

Between nominations, tag set looking, and sign-up summary reading, it should be possible to build enough things to request and offer that meet the minimum requirements the exchange has set forth. So let's look at the sign-up form. It's split into two major sections: requests (what you would like to get) and offers (what you're willing to make for a potential recipient). There's a minimum number of each that you'll have to provide to successfully sign up for the exchange. The AO3 matching code works better with more options than fewer, so signing up with as much as you can is preferable to signing up with the minimums, but you should always only sign up with things you'll want to create or receive. The AO3 matching algorithm has the Bastard's sense of humor, and if you put in something that you're only half-hearted about, it will ensure that you match with your recipient or your gifter on that thing and nothing else.

On the requests side, the form will ask you for what fandom your request is in, then what relationship(s) from that fandom you're requesting. Both fandom and relationships should match exactly what's in the tag set, or your sign-up will be rejected with errors. The autocomplete dropdown will try to help you get the exact tag from the tag set, but on those rare occasions where the dropdown isn't helpful, copying and pasting the tag exactly as it is from the tagset should still allow it to go through.

After that, choose from the tickyboxes about what kind of thing you would like to receive. Common items there are fic (written), art (still drawings and/or comics,), vids (video content, usually re-cut footage set to music or some other audio track), and podfic (an audio track recorded by the gifter or the gifter and others). Most exchanges, if they're not specifically about vids or podfic, will usually just have fic and art in this space.

After saying which fandom you want, which relationship(s) you want, and what form you'd like to receive a gift in, there's the Optional Details section. The first rule about Optional Details is that they are optional. The person who is creating for you is not obligated to follow any of your optional details, but many people who are looking to make gifts will find those details useful to give them a direction to go in. A good reason to provide optional details in some form is that if you don't, the person gifting you the work is likely to write what they will enjoy, and there's no guarantee that your tastes will line up completely, even if you match in the algorithm. If you don't leave anything as a guide, you are tempting fate, and if I haven't mentioned it enough already, the AO3 algorithm has the Bastard's sense of humor and will give you someone who can complete an assignment that fulfills all the requirements and may not be anything like what you wanted.

The one exception usually granted to the Optional Details Are Optional (ODAO) rule is the Do Not Wants (DNW). Do Not Wants are the stuff that if it appears in a gift work will sour it immediately and permanently, no matter how well it's done, how tastefully it might be done, or how small the quantity of it is. You know people who have allergies so severe that they go into anaphylaxis even at the slightest inclusion of an ingredient in their meal or the presence of it in their environment? That thing that causes them such problems is a Do Not Want. It's poor form to use your Do Not Wants to box your gifter in to giving you something that is extra-tailored to you, if those things really aren't Do Not Wants, and some exchanges will say explicitly that they won't enforce Do Not Wants they consider unreasonable. Better to say what you do want and hope your gifter will follow that and leave the Do Not Wants for those specific things that will just turn you off the gift completely.

In your Optional Details, you can also indicate whether you'd like to receive treats, works created by someone other than your assigned gifter that otherwise meet the requirements of the exchange. Treats are generally pretty neat to receive, but sometimes a person doesn't want them, for their own reasons. If you do want treats, you'll also want to make sure that your AO3 account preferences have "Allow anyone to gift me works" checked, or any possible treats will fizzle.

The last field on the requests side is a place to link to your "Dear Creator" letter. Some people find it easier to put all of their optional details into a single entry, whether on Dreamwidth or Tumblr or somewhere else, and then point their gifter to that letter for things like what they like, what they dislike, possible prompts for their gifter to work off of, and the like. The "Dear Creator" letter is considered to be part of the Optional Details, and many times, exchange moderators say they won't enforce any Do Not Wants in a creator letter, because the letter itself is not required to be read, so make sure that you put your DNWs in the Optional Details box, just to be safe.

Okay, time for the offers side. The offers side works mostly the same way as the requests side, with choosing a fandom, relationship(s), and media, but for what you want to offer to someone else. Same rules apply about only offering what you want to create, because the AO3 matching algorithm is even more perverse on this side of the sheet than it is for request matches. It will almost unerringly choose the one that you were least enthusiastic about. The optional details field may still be Optional Details, but in some places it's re-titled as "Notes to Mods." This may be a place where you can mention if there are particular users that you don't want to match with, for whatever reasons you may have for this. There's no guarantees that such preferences can be accommodated, but those who are forewarned will do their best.

Once you've made your sign-up list and put in your details, click submit and wait. If you've forgotten something, or AO3 balks at something, the sign-up form will return, with highlighted spots where the errors are. If you succeed, you'll go to the sign-up summary page, and you'll see your own sign-up now in the list for other people to peruse and see if they can gather anything from your sign-up to assist their own.

Your Assignment



In normal circumstances, the AO3 algorithms will generate matches in such a way that every valid sign-up set will have one match of a fandom/pairing/medium trio in their requests with a fandom/pairing/medium trio in someone else's offers. In rare situations, a sign-up's request set may have no matches in anyone's offer set, or might only be able to match with someone who has already been matched with someone. In such rare cases, the moderators will reach out to the unmatched user and ask if they want to add requests to their sign-up. Adding additional requests and re-running matching often reshuffles everything so that everyone is matched. On the occasion that someone isn't matchable and doesn't change their sign-up, they'll usually head to the pinch hit list.

In any case, after matching, you should receive an e-mail from AO3 with your assignment for the exchange. Your recipient has matched you on at least one fandom/pairing/medium trio. Sometimes it's only one, sometimes there's more than one compatible match in the set. Your responsibility, once you have an assignment, is to produce a new work that meets one of the requests on the list, avoids the stated DNWs, and is sufficiently long/detailed to meet the requirements of the exchange. You don't necessarily have to create the thing that you matched on if something else catches your fancy, but you do have to create something off the request list put in front of you. The match is there to make sure there's at least one thing on the list that you said you wanted to create and they said they wanted to receive.

Your assignment is a secret.

Your assignment is a secret.

Because there's a good chance that you're in the same social spaces as your recipient, and you don't want to spoil the surprise! Even oblique hints about what you're creating might be enough for your recipient to deduce that you're their gifter. Run silent, run secret. The secret period extends from your assignment through the reveals of the works to the point where the authors of the works are revealed. Therefore, in your assignment, you cannot use the Notes or any other means to identify yourself as the creator of the work. Not even obliquely. Don't talk about the work anywhere during the anonymous period. Don't reveal who your recipient is.

If you have questions about your assignment, or need clarification on anything, contact your exchange moderators. If needed, they'll relay your question to your recipient, usually with some obfuscation in the form of other relevant questions to their sign-up and requests so as not to tip off the recipient about which of the things being asked about is the important one. Then they'll relay the response back to you.

Your assignment also comes with a deadline. Your completed work that conforms to the requirements of the exchange must be submitted to AO3 before the time posted as the deadline. The deadline is often something like midnight or 11:59pm on a specific day, but check the time zone. If it's UTC, that may mean you have more (or less) time than you think. I generally try to have my assignment done and submitted the day before the stated day of the deadline, just so that I don't potentially trip over any time zone issues.

To fulfill your assignment, you'll need to log in to AO3, and then choose "My Assignments" or "Assignments". You'll be presented with a list of all the exchanges you've received an assignment for. Scroll to the right assignment and click "Fulfill". At this point, you'll be taken to the AO3 New Work page, with a couple of key details already filled in about what exchange you are submitting this to, and who the gift recipient will be for the work. Everything else you fill in just as you would for any other AO3 work, with one exception. AO3's anonymity mask does not extend to series. If you put your work as part of a series, your recipient can click on the series title and be brought to the series page, with the author of the series unmasked, spoiling the anonymity. Series must be edited in after the anonymous author period expires.

If you know you're not going to get something done in time, or that you can't make the requirements, on your assignment page, there's a "Default" button next to the "fulfill" button. Most exchanges have a "no-fault default" deadline around a week before the deadline. Defaulting on your assignment means that you're saying you're not going to be able to complete something on time that meets the requirements. It happens, whether it's the well of creativity running completely dry, or life events conspiring to ensure that you have no time to complete your assignment, or any other reason. If you're not going to make it, and you know you're not going to make it, hit the default button as soon as you're sure. Doing it before the default deadline usually means you won't incur any penalty or be required to do make-up work before you can sign up for the next incarnation of the exchange. Default after the default deadline, or miss the assignment deadline, or turn something in that doesn't meet the requirements or hits someone's Do Not Wants will also likely incur a default, and there's a strong likelihood that you'll have to sit out an exchange round, or complete your assignment properly and give it as a gift, or otherwise pay a penalty of some sort before you're allowed to sign up again. Eject at the earliest point you are certain you can't complete the assignment to avoid being penalized for it.

Pinch-Hits



("Pinch hits" here refers to the baseball practice of substituting a different batter for the scheduled batter in the lineup, usually because the pinch hitter will have a higher chance of successfully getting on base and generating scoring potential.)

Every unmatchable assignment and recipient who has their gifter default and who has not defaulted themselves gets put on a list of people who need to have someone give them a gift. (Most exchanges run on the rule of "If you complete your assignment and gift someone else a work, then you must also receive at least one gift work based on your own requests.") This is the pinch hit list. ("Initial" pinch hits are unmatchable assignments, and "post-deadline" pinch hits are those that happen after the assignment deadline.)

Pinch hits are usually posted to a specific place, and will contain the entire requests portion of the sign-up for all interested parties to look at and make decisions about. Pinch-hitters are not limited to those who have signed up, but those who have signed up can collect pinch hits. (There may be a rule that you have to have completed and submitted your assignment before you can have a pinch hit assigned to you.) Initial pinch hits and early defaults will usually have the same deadline imposed on the pinch-hitter as regular assignments. As the assignment deadline approaches, pinch-hit deadlines will start to move past the initial deadline, but they will try to stay close to it. Pinch-hitters are often very good at turning around works quickly, sometimes because they see the request and go "oh, I know exactly what to do with that."

This may seem obvious, but no, you cannot pick up your own pinch hit. Even if it seems like that would be the easiest and most effective way of making sure it gets filled.

Betas



No, not the Omegaverse ones. Beta-readers.

It's not required, but it is recommended that if you have the time to do so, you run your assignment's draft form(s) past another pair of eyes to catch things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPaG) errors, to have someone with lived experience in a specific community read the work to make sure that it doesn't perpetuate awful stereotypes about that community (sensitivity reading), or to see if the plot coheres and the timelines work, and the characterization makes sense for the fandom, and other such things that will improve the quality of the end product. There may be channels and places where you can make these requests, but remember, your assignment is secret. You cannot directly advertise for a beta because you might be tipping off your recipient with your request.

The Yuletide exchange has created the "hippo" system to deal with the necessities of keeping assignments secret while also getting beta requests publicized, and most other exchanges use a similar system. The "hippo" is usually someone with a specific role, whose purpose is to obfuscate who is making the beta request. Use private messaging to tell the hippo the important details of who your recipient is, what you need for your work, how long the work is, and what the turnaround time you need for the betaing is. Longer turnaround times have higher success rates, because most hippos are also working on assignments. The hippo will then make a post to the channel / community, passing along those details and asking for interested parties to message them directly and privately with their interest. On the high likelihood that the recipient offers to beta, so long as there are others willing to offer and one of them is selected, the hippo can politely decline the recipient with the excuse of "another's offer has been accepted," preserving the anonymity of the exchange, with the recipient none the wiser that they've offered to beta their own gift.

If you can, getting a beta reader / viewer is helpful and often can make the final product stronger. But it does require you to be more on top of your assignments such that you can take advantage of the extra time for polish. For some people, this will be impossible, which is why betas are usually recommended rather than required for your gift works.

Reveals!



Once everyone who has completed an assignment has a gift, the deadline has passed, and the exchange maintainers and moderators have checked and made sure that all of the gifts themselves meet the requirements of the exchange, the works are released!

However! The authors of the works are not. This is to preserve a period of time where the recipient, the participants, and any and all interested parties can enjoy the works without having their enjoyment influenced by whether or not the creator is well-known, a Big Name, a Professional Name using a pseudonym, or any other factors where the prestige of the person doing the work might overshadow the work and the work's enjoyment itself. During the anonymous period, any comments on the work by the work author will be noted as "Anonymous Creator."

In the rare case where a work is incomplete and was not caught by the exchange maintainers, or steps on a Do Not Want and wasn't caught by the exchange maintainers, let the exchange maintainers know as soon as possible! That will likely produce an emergency pinch hit need, but everyone is supposed to have a gift that meets the requirements and avoids the Do Not Wants.

By accident, I did a work that trod upon a Do Not Want. The recipient let the exchange creators know, and in this case, thought the work was excellent and accepted it and enjoyed it, but still let the maintainers know, so that I was duly chastised about it. I did offer to write something that would not be that, but it was not required of me. When I wrote something that hadn't been requested by a recipient, and they pointed this out, I wrote something that did match, with a certain amount of cussing out my inability to read. These things do happen, and they are often accidents, so giving the opportunity to make things right as soon as possible is the best thing for everyone.

If you have received a gift that conforms to the requirements of the exchange, it is customary to leave an indication that you have viewed/listened to the work that someone has gifted you. For some exchanges, more may be required of you, such as leaving a comment on the gift work, but the customary indication of something having been enjoyed, even if without any further comment, is the kudos button. Comments are lovely and very much appreciated by creators, but we also know that sometimes the recipient doesn't have anything to say, or doesn't feel like they can put it down in a coherent comment. All the same, please do indicate that you have at least viewed/listened to the work in question.

Once you've gone through your gift work (or works), then it's time to explore the rest of the collection! There might be more things in there with your favorite fandoms and ships, or you might discover a new ship or fandom to check out by reading the works in the collection. While the anonymous author period is still going on, you won't know who made it, but sometimes it's a good challenge to try and get through as much as you can before the author reveals happen.

Some writers also take this opportunity to manually set the date of publication for their work. In a fast-moving fandom or a popular ship, things can fall off the first page of "Arranged By Date" very quickly. With the period of time between when something is submitted and when reveals of works are, a work might finally appear on page two or three once reveals happen. Generally, if a work is being re-dated from the original submnission date, it can be brought forward to the reveal date of the works, so it will have the opportunity to at least exist for a little while on the front page. (For less popular ships, even with the delay, the work might still be the top of the first page. You never know.)

Author Reveals!



Usually seven days after the works are revealed, the author anonymity period ends, and you can see who all the writers were. That might mean that you have some new people to follow and subscribe to. At the point the author anonymity ends, all the people who have subscriptions to you will also be notified that you've written something new, and the rest of AO3 will have the opportunity to see it regularly, instead of in the anonymous period.

With the reveal of the authors, the exchange is usually finished, with the exception of any post-event question and answer sessions or feedback requests. There's all the stories to be enjoyed, the comments and kudos to be had, and the brainstorming for what you might want to write about next time around. Or to go off with a fistful of new fandoms and possible pairings and canons to look at.

Congratulations for participating in the exchange!

vital functions

26 Oct 2025 09:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Two things finished, various things picked up and put down again.

Ouch!, Kerr & McRobbie: the subtitle is Why pain hurts, and why it doesn't have to; it's indicative of my current preoccupations that I was actively surprised that it is not, in fact, about chronic pain, except in passing, in that it's mentioned in the introduction in the context of pains the authors have experienced, and then it just sort of... vanishes again. What it actually is is more-or-less a tour of the sociology of acute pain, from a variety of perspectives and contexts, and an invitation to reshape your relationship with pain, optionally via the medium of sports.

It's very much aimed at a general audience (by which I mean both "not people with any particular pre-existing knowledge about pain" and also "not chronic pain patients"), with the infuriating-to-me feature of having not an actual bibliography but instead a "selected references" section, i.e. any claims I wanted to actually check required digging and then guessing (and in one case working out that they were actively wrong about which year the thing was published in, at least for referencing purposes). I did nonetheless get some useful information and vocabulary out of it (I'm especially here for the pointer to the 3P approach to pain management), and it prompted another couple of articulations.

Overall: not a disrecommendation; plausibly a light read if you have, you know, a recreational interest in pain; verify any specifics you want to rely on.

The Old Guard: Opening Fire, Rucka et al. A's conclusion was Well It Was Better Than The Second Film; mine was mild spoilers? )

and would be very happy to see that show up in an extended cut of the first film. The library doesn't have the second volume and I think we're unlikely to seek it out.

DW catch-up: halfway through September!

Playing. Inkulinati, mostly watching A play and occasionally making Suggestions. Does not work as well as a Shared Activity as I'd hoped (annoyingly I think I'd need to play basically all of it hands-on myself in order to internalise mechanics and strategy, rather than being able to e.g. swap who's driving for every level) but I am enjoying it happening in my vicinity. Today we also read the PDF of the art book together, which I am not counting as Reading because it was mostly looking at the pictures in another context.

And after six months I GOT UNSTUCK ON I Love Hue! The Ascension/Air/1, extremely gratified that searching for it revealed someone who'd managed to complete everything but that, and bolstered by this knowledge I turned brightness all the way up and the phone upside down and FINALLY managed to sort out the yellows, on my nth attempt... in way fewer than the average number of moves. VICTORY.

Cooking. Read more... )

davidgillon: Text: You can take a heroic last stand against the forces of darkness. Or you can not die. It's entirely up to you" (Heroic Last Stand)
[personal profile] davidgillon

 I've got an Asda order due for delivery later, but a couple of the substitutions in the confirmation email confused me, What the hell are "slice cheoni" or "pizza pepsal"?

Finally worked out it's a cheese and onion slice (euuww, that's going back), and a pepperoni salami pizza. C'mon, Asda, it's not meant to be an intelligence test!

Database maintenance

25 Oct 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Summary: nobody seems to have done the data analysis I actually want, because data collection is hard and then actually making it internationally comparable ditto, but the proportion of chronic pain cases that are primarily attributable to back pain Of Some Kind seems to be very roughly in the region of 20%-50%, depending.

Read more... )

silveradept: A dragon librarian, wearing a floral print shirt and pince-nez glasses, carrying a book in the left paw. Red and white. (Dragon Librarian)
[personal profile] silveradept
This week at my place of work has been instructive in the kinds of patience that you need to have with adolescents, and also an excellent example of how adolescent brains work, and how much they still seek connection with their peers even when, by themselves, they might recognize that a particular course of action is a bad idea.

First, however: For those of you who did not have the penis game as a part of your own adolescence, the penis game is essentially a form of chicken, where when it is your turn, the options available to you are to escalate the situation or to forfeit. Someone starts the game by saying the word "penis" as quietly as they would like. All the other participants (which can be pretty ad hoc) then have an opportunity to say the word "penis" louder than the first person. The game ends when nobody says the word "penis" louder than the last, or when the game is stopped by responsible adults who do not want young people saying "penis" loud enough to be heard. The collective goal of all the players is to say the word "penis" as loud as they can without getting into trouble with anyone else, even if the individual goal is to be the person who last said the word and didn't get in trouble for it.

Unsurprisingly, this is a favored game of young people who have penises and have been raised in a manspreading sort of culture. If you find people who are drawing penises on every available surface, they're probably also playing the penis game. The game is not segregated, however - those without penises can join in the game at any time and may end up being the person winning the game, simply because they'll be the last person to say it loudly without getting themselves or the group in trouble.

So, while I am at the help desk in my primary workplace, which was built as someone's homage to cathedrals and churches, with the attendant acoustic properties, loud and clearly from the teen area, I hear the word "penis!" As I am moving to handle the situation, I am thinking to myself, "Someone's playing the penis game. That's not a very smart decision in the library." By the time I get the space where I heard the word, I've got a bit ready to go about how playing the penis game sounds like fun for everyone involved, but it's a game that someone always loses. However, another co-worker has already been talking to them, and lets me know that this is the second strike assessed to this group for inappropriate language. So I have a message to deliver to our working staff when I get back to my spot, but before I can type up the report, once again, loud and clear, and possibly louder and clearer than the last one, the word "penis!" rings out again, and the teen librarian is immediately on the way, and I'm on my way to inform her that this is three, but by the time the staff converge, the group of teens has packed up and left.

What would possess young people to do something like this, in a space where they're definitely going to get caught and punished for it? To quote Agent Kay:
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

Also, we have a significant amount of brain research into adolescents and have been able to get the idea that the adolescent brain, through the teenage years, is very focused on building social connections and alliances so that when they get out into the world as adults, they have backup and peer connections and other people who they can use to get work, crash space, income, romance, and all the rest of the things that adults have and they want. That brain research has provided us adults with a couple of useful things to keep in mind when working with teenagers:
  1. If you can, separate a teen from their peer group if you want to get them to change behavior. If you discipline a teen in front of the peer group, they may front and become deliberately difficult because they're more interested in saving face with their friends than in doing the thing that they would otherwise do if alone.

  2. A group of teenagers together is more prone to make worse decisions than those individual teens would by themselves. Because games of chicken like this are also ways of demonstrating both loyalty to the group and a willingness to keep the fun going or not be the person who wusses out. Sometimes being the kid who can articulate "hey, this isn't going well, we should stop" can get the stop that everyone wants, but sometimes it only gets you made fun of. So, y'know, the whole peer pressure thing is real, and it often can drive teens to do things that in the aftermath they know are foolish and wouldn't have done individually.

Knowing all this allows us to tailor our messaging to target the behaviors that are not acceptable in the space, but also to know that if the teens are playing the penis game, or throwing food at each other, or getting up to one of the myriad ways they make mischief, sometimes even unintentionally, odds are good that it only got this far because peer pressure, and if they take a cool-down day or a cool-down set of laps, they'll come back to the library with a better attempt at behaving like people who know how to exist in public places. Which they mostly do.

Working with people and child development was not a required course in my library concentration. I picked up a lot of it from taking a course from the School of Social Work, instead, figuring that having a solid grounding in child development and their environments would help me understand what I was doing in the library. It didn't give me "classroom management skills," which I was apparently supposed to have picked up along the way as well, despite my classroom everything supposedly being limited to times where teachers or librarians would be there. It didn't give me much about how to deal with the people that I was going to encounter, outside of reference interviews, and I didn't get anything about managing subordinates or other volunteers, either. Admittedly, I don't want to ever have to manage anyone, but I appreciated being able to level up my game for how to handle difficult situations and difficult people once I was out in the working world as a professional. Most of that training, though, came after my first manager had already come within an inch of getting me fired for not having all these skills I was assumed to have and for not being able to people well in ways that she expected me to. I won't be surprised if at some point, I officially end up getting upgraded to AuDHD if and when that becomes relevant and necessary, but even the more neurotypical people in my profession don't get a lot of training about managing people, both from the position of the supervisor and from the position of the supervised, when they're in library school. And so many of them definitely don't get anything at all that has to do with how children and teens develop, unless their specific remit is children or teens, and that can cause serious friction unless the people who do have the training share it with everyone else to make sure that they're all on the same page and consistent with what they're doing to do when teenagers in their library start playing the penis game.

(Yet more reasons for us to think hard about the state of education for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) positions and what's actually needed and what has been held on to because it makes the people who work in GLAM feel learned and professional.)

Question thread #145

23 Oct 2025 12:36 am
pauamma: Cartooney crab wearing hot pink and acid green facemask holding drink with straw (Default)
[personal profile] pauamma posting in [site community profile] dw_dev
It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.
kaberett: A series of phrases commonly used in academic papers, accompanied by humourous "translations". (science!)
[personal profile] kaberett

One of the things I'm sure I've come across repeatedly in the books I've read so far is the idea that a very high proportion of Chronic Pain Cases are down to either back pain or headache. This is important because back pain genuinely is something that has a massive nociplastic component, especially in the lower back, that is unequivocally worth treating (despite myself I remain grudgingly impressed with the Boulder Back Pain Study; and, to be clear, I do myself have a grumbly section of lower back following an injury a few years ago that I am practising all my Theories on!).

This is an Important To Me framing device because my point is that treatments aimed purely at nociplastic pain/central sensitisation cannot be expected to work as well for people with ongoing or recurrent tissue damage/injury... but why it's worth using some of these approaches anyway, with the understanding of the actual scope of what effects to hope for or expect. Which means I'd like to know where they're GETTING those numbers from.

Mindfulness for Health )

The Way Out (... long, bonus tangential rant) )

The Painful Truth )

... aaaaaaand it is now definitely past bedtime so I'll finish Revisiting Books tomorrow. (My notes on Explain Pain, consistent with it being generally competent, are that it doesn't go anywhere near talking about what The Most Common Forms Of Chronic Pain are; might have a quick flip through when I'm next in the same place as my copy. Also couldn't find anything in Touch. Will be revisiting the current book, Ouch!, in the morning...)

Recent Re-Reading

22 Oct 2025 08:33 pm
davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
[personal profile] davidgillon

It's surprising that sometimes the reason you had quibbles about a book the first time around is the reason you like it more the second time around.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison

Teenage Maia is stunned when woken in the middle of the night to find out his father and half-brothers are dead in an airship accident and he is now Emperor of the elven lands. But as the despised fourth child, product of an unwanted fourth, political marriage, and mixed race at that, he has spent his life in internal exile and has not received the necessary education to rule. Maia isn't ready for the elven court, but neither are the elven court ready for Maia. 

I love this, I think the writing is gorgeous, but first time around I thought the neologisms were overdone. This time around it was the mention of chamomile tea, not isvret or ochor, that I found jarring.

The Witness for the Dead, Katherine Addison

Thara Celehar, cleric of Ulis, the god of death, wants little from life except to be left alone with his role as Witness vel ama, Witness for the dead in the city of Amalo. But witnessing for the dead, being able to recall their last thoughts for family, religious or legal purposes, inevitably leads to complications when your newest dead body has vivid memories of being pushed into the canal and hit over the head. But this isn't Thara's first investigation, being the Witness vel ama who solved the murder of Maia's father and brothers gives him the tools to pursue his religious duty, a duty he's already once destroyed his own happiness over.

Thara's a particularly dour kind of hero, a man who has allowed himself to be defined and delimited by his often stated I follow my calling, but all the more compelling for it.

The Tomb of Dragons, Katherine Addison

An unfortunate series of events leads to Thara finding himself Witnessing for a dead dragon haunting a mine, the site of a historic massacre of the last of the local dragon population. The problem being that doing so will put him at odds with powerful noble families, at a time of political uncertainty centred on the nobility. But Thara remains a man defined by I follow my calling. The first time around I was annoyed that Thara doesn't get an entirely happy ending, but this time I think I've come to accept that the mixed outcome is perhaps for the best, even if somewhat unfair on everyone. Thara really isn't the kind of person who gets entirely happy endings, and he definitely isn't the sort to presume he deserves one.

(I still haven't read The Grief of Stones, the second Thara story)

...p...p-p-PENIS?!!!

21 Oct 2025 10:56 pm
azurelunatic: melting chocolate teapot (418)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Today Belovedest had to bust the teenagers for playing "the penis game" in the library.

[You say the word increasingly loudly, in turns, until someone loses the game by being told to cut it out or being asked to leave.]

The weather's getting colder, but I have evolved myself an outfit to wear outdoors for lounging while the weather's in the high 50s F -- my slightly ratty plush bathrobe underneath my much more windproof corduroy floor length duster. And the ta'al fingerless mgloves Mama knitted for me, in rainbow stripes. They're just the thing for keeping my hands warm while I'm on the phone.

I've discovered I do enjoy cauliflower "wings", even though I don't enjoy chicken wings.

The scooter has arrived. I am plotting how best to bedazzle it. It does have its own USB power outlet! It also has head and tail lights. It's better for approaching counters than the wheelchair, since the tiller is so close to me.

[personal profile] norabombay points out that given all the poorly supervised international visitors who have been in and out of the White House, they're going to have to take it down to the studs when they refit it for #48 to use. So the general devastation in the East Wing is small potatoes as far as outrage fodder. And anywhere that the last major update was 1947-ish must really need some yanking out of the century of the fruitbat.

My legs are doing better. In part this is because I stuck ibuprofen in my nightly pill box, since I'd been waking up with aching legs and shouting knees pretty consistently.

Medication: the medication definitely has some activity. The main activity seems to be that my appetite has been fading in and out of "did we recently have chemo?!" mode. I'm tempted to give myself a week off every few weeks.

Makeup: currently waiting on a liquid formulation of the eyeshadow that promised to match the eyeliner, because the color is fantastic and I want it in a wide brush. I guess the powder can work for blending it out. (The powder just does not want to cooperate and layer on thick enough to get the color shift effect, even with a wet brush.) My skin continues to behave itself better than my ability to use foundation; there are only a few spots where I want to color correct if I'm doing Full Battle Makeup.

Games: keeping up with all the Gems of War events is sometimes tiring, but it does make winding down my brain at night much easier than other things I could be doing.

Perfume: went through my massive perfume spreadsheet and filled in the formulation for all the BPAL (which is the same except for that one spray). Cracked myself up at some of the descriptions I've left. One particular exceedingly long-lasting one
Read more... )

Soup Season

21 Oct 2025 10:27 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I have, today, made my first Soup of the autumn: carrot and leek and celery and a couple of potatoes for good measure (and I then added frozen peas to my portion, because I like them cold and not at all cooked and definitely not reheated repeatedly over the course of a week). Bread and cheese, fruit to follow. I didn't manage Monday Morning Soup Ritual this week, as you can tell from the fact that it's Tuesday, but. Soup.

Some other bits and pieces: I have reached the stage of Squash Week where I have more recipes I want to make than I have squash with which to make them (... and one spaghetti squash) (for which I have at least some open EatYourBooks tabs). I hit refresh in my Oxfam tab aaaaaand the sale has cycled around to 30% off 3+ books. I have a chilli order ready to go as soon as my new debit card arrives OR I get over myself and see whether the credit card is actually behaving. There is a batch of onions caramelising in the Instant Pot. The current pain book is abruptly unexpectedly absorbing -- it's much more Sociology Of Pain than I'd quite been expecting, but it's potentially building to making at least some of the argument I want to from a refreshingly different angle to everything else I've come across in my background reading so far, and in the meantime in spite of my frustrations with it it's prompting lots of Useful Thoughts.

And I am wearing my Seasonal Leggings (courtesy of Mardy Bum, findable primarily on Facebook, or Instagram for a bit of an idea) and my Extremely Enthusiastic Slippers, like so. Read more... )

[personal profile] mjg59
AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

AWS outage

20 Oct 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
silveradept: A librarian wearing a futuristic-looking visor with text squiggles on them. (Librarian Techno-Visor)
[personal profile] silveradept
The Document Foundation, responsible for the LibreOffice suite of office tools, posted a blog post in anticipation of the end of Windows 10 support with 10 reasons to ditch Windows and go to Linux instead. I appreciate their advocacy for such things, but I think their ten reasons are not actually good ones for the adoption of Linux, but realizing this means that I'm probably going to have to put down a blog post about it, rather than a social media quip. So, here we go once again, and I'm going to once again be a regular Linux user about this, rather than some superuser sysadmin.

It's a Not Top Ten List more than a Top Ten List )

vital functions

19 Oct 2025 11:00 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. No finishes, lots of fragments.

Started: The Old Guard: Opening Fire, Rucka et al. Their faces are WRONG and I don't LIKE it. (Shared Reading Experience.) I also don't like The Smoking, and I really feel the absence of the baklava scene.

In progress: Forgotten Fruits, Stocks, which despite saying I was going to DNF I have continued working my way through, with occasional grumpy squawks; Index, a history of the, Duncan, in very small nibbles; and I'm now a third of the way through Ouch!, Kerr + McRobbie, which is much more sociology than I was expecting when I bought it, having failed at that point to register that one of the authors is a sociologist. A bunch of the neuroanatomy is irritatingly (and unnecessarily! they could have just been less specific!) wrong; we've had a lengthy case study focussing on endometriosis but as yet no indication that they're actually considering the role of ongoing tissue damage. Not ruling out that they'll get there, though.

Dreamwidth catch-up: UP TO SEPTEMBER.

Listening. Cornish waves recording.

Cooking. Ridiculous Textures Of Beetroot from The Modern Vegetarian (good, did like); mildly underwhelmed by Bengali five-spice roasted squash, a totally acceptable meal it was very pleasant to be able to stick in the oven and forget about while I did something else; and stir-fried pumpkin with cashews from Rosa's Thai Café: the Vegetarian Cookbook.

Buttermilk continues to work. Managed some bread. Baked some crabapples and then singularly failed to actually make the ginger-and-lime caramel to coat them in, so this lot probably needs composting and I'll try again next week. Maybe. (Raymond Blanc recipe, from The Lost Orchard, which I much preferred at least so far to Forgotten Fruits.)

Eating. Particularly excited this week by Limonera pears, which are apparently DPO Spanish-cultivated Docteur Jules Guyot! All of the descriptions say "very reminiscent of Williams, flavour not as good unless you get them just right", to which I add that they are sliiiiightly firmer fleshed in a way that I think is an active plus.

I am very much enjoying yoghurt + hazelnuts + a drizzle of quince syrup.

Creating. ... took some photos of some plants?

Growing. MORE SAFFRON. Still very excited by the saffron. Also the chillis. (Home saffron also now definitively coming up, in the trough if not around the fig, but no sign of it intending to flower, alas.)

Cannot tell if the windowsill lemongrass is in fact just dried out or if it's in the Growing Many Roots stage. Grumpily aware that going digging is counterproductive. Pineapple continues pineapple.

Observing. A MUNTJAC. There was, at the plot, A Great Rustling out of the plum tree on the neighbouring plot, and I looked up and thought, for an entire moment, "gosh that's a remarkably large fox with a remarkably short tail", before my brain caught up with the data it was actually being sent. Less than twenty metres away. Think that's the closest one of them's ever been to me (at least that I've noticed)!