tbonejenkins | Reading

While looking for something else in my bookmarks, I came across this article that I'd found back in 2014. Considering the moment we are currently in now, it seems prophetic.

From Politico: The Pitchforks are Coming...For Us by Nick Hanauer

"If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when".

sartorias

I love Boston so much, especially this area around Harvard. The trees are rich with color, the air is brisk, requiring all my layers of flimsy California-wear, and the sidewalks brick with lumps of tree roots. I love it all.

Yesterday I went with Nine to the Mapparium on the other side of the river. (The bus ride down Massachusetts Ave is great for scenery!) If you've never heard of it--I hadn't until one of the Viable Paradise workshop writers clued me in--it's an enormous glass globe that you can walk into, to see the entire world, worked in jewel-toned glass, as it was in 1935. It was constructed to be a reminder that we are all in this world together; a needed warning then, as now. (Naturally those who need it most won't see or hear.)

We had a great time looking, then testing the amazing sounds created by voices enclosed in glass.

Afterward we met up with Rushthatspeaks for tea and chocolate at L.A. Burdicks. Oh, they know how to do chocolate so, so right. Delish. We chatted and reminisced and cackled like maniacs. Today we'll visit the Fogg to see a Botticelli that is usually hidden in a private collection. I can hardly wait!

I'm coming down from the high of a very successful workshop, and a month of splendid visiting and seeing and fast-lane busy. The workshop writers are so talented and so focused, and all this in beautiful Martha's Vineyard.

Tomorrow homeward bound!

elisem

In 2015, Naomi Kritzer wrote a story called "So Much Cooking." I really love it, even though it's a hard read these days. It's about a pandemic, and about making do, and about taking care of each other. One of the recurring plot points is that the narrator, a food blogger, doesn't have some significant ingredients for any recipe they try, so they improvise and this teaches the readers of their food blog useful tricks to get by when supplies are uncertain, partial, patchy. It was the account of making cookies without eggs or oil that made me think of possibilities. And the Sven-Saw cleaning actually went better than I expected.

It happened because there does not seem to be either mineral oil or mineral spirits or WD-40 or any other semi-plausible things around the house. This does not usually matter for me on a daily basis, but the Sven-Saw needed to be cleaned, and it was going to be a bigger than usual job for ADHD reasons. As is true of so many things around here.

It would be one thing if it were just the abundance of resin that the smallish tree stump I needed to saw was dispensing with every stroke. That might not have been too bad, but it got more difficult because as I was assessing what to do about this, I got distracted and had to attend to something, and then realized that meds were overdue, which meant fixing something quick to eat so the meds didn't bounce, and the Sven-Saw sat in the kitchen, patiently waiting.

I don't know if it was patiently waiting or what. It might be patient.

I try not to anthropromorphize everything, because some things don't like it.

Anyhow, it may or may not be patient. What it definitely was was resin-laden. And the distraction took long enough that the resin was doing its best to dry on the saw blade, and this is not the way a person is supposed to take care of their tools. Which set me looking for the right thing to use, and not finding either right things or wrong-but-maybe-worth-a-try things... until I realized that this was possibly solvable by the peanut butter trick.

The peanut butter trick is a thing someone taught me to remove glued-on or stuck-on labels from glass containers. When soap and water doesn't work because the adhesive in question doesn't care about soap or water, you take a very small spoonful of peanut butter, and you generously coat the label you're trying to remove with it. Go out beyond the edges some, because having it soak in at the edges is a win. Put it down and ignore it for at least fifteen minutes. Then come back and look at whether the peanut butter has at all soaked into the label. It probably has. And the now-altered label may well have changed its mind about soap and water. Try some soapy water and a scrubby or a rag or whatever you've got. Chances are, the label and its adhesive will now come right off.

I did have peanut butter, and I knew the peanut butter trick would probably work, but there wasn't all that much peanut butter, and what there was, I had plans for. So I tried an alternative.

Friends, I am here to report that it is quite possible to clean semi-dried tree resin off a Sven-Saw with mayonnaise in place of peanut butter. I did do some additional work on some recalcitrant bits with some dry baking soda, but honestly, some of those marks might have already been on there before I started. I'm pretty sure the Sven-Saw blade is shinier than it was.

But we probably should either lay in some of the usual remedies, or figure out where they have got to if we already have some, as is sometimes the case in this here palace of ADHD.

Anyhow, reading is educational, or a least good for jogging the memory, the saw is clean enough to put away until tomorrow, when I'll take up work on that stump again, and I am a relieved saw caretaker, because whew.

Have you used any interesting substitutes in household problem-solving lately?

elisem

The Sven-Saw is my friend. Even so, getting the muscle memory back to work is going to take a little while. And this particular stump is going to take a little while and then a longer while. After all, I haven't used it for about... whoah, thirty-some years? Eeep. But it's fall yard work season, and needs must.

As someone who has recently gone through the first intake session with a professional counselor for agoraphobia and for grief (which are the two things my GP requested I be seen for), I am now at least technically under care for these things, but anyone who's been through it knows that intake sessions are not quite getting-work-done sessions. They're more like is-this-therapeutic-pairing-going-to-work? sessions. (Signs point to yes. This is a relief.) I look forward to finding out what we can do about various things. In the run-up to this, I have been doing what I can to combat agoraphobia (or more like confuse and distract it) and hopefully lessen it with the strategic use of yard work. During the spring and summer, my goal was "get out and spend seven minutes at least in the yard improving something." It did help some. Also our yard looks better, which probably relieves some of the neighbors.

The Sven-Saw, a marvelous tool made here in Minnesota, enters the picture because there are some saplings that need to be cut off and the little stumps painted with stump-killer before winter. All of them are pretty much broomstick size or smaller, but there is one that's four to six inches wide depending on how you measure it. It's this stump that needs the Sven-Saw, because the stump killer wants a fresh cut to work on.

The biggish stump is inconveniently placed, and I have trouble getting at it. Part of that is pre-existing mobility and agility difficulties. The stump cannot be picked up and put on a convenient cutting frame; it has to be cut off horizontally a few inches above the ground. This is because of where it is: at the corner of the garage where the parking pad meets the alley. Our garage door is perpendicular to the alley. There is a small strip of land along the alley side of the garage which some long-ago person enhanced with a concrete-walled raised bed. It's not very tall, but it's tall enough to get in the way at the corner when I'm trying to get at this stump. It (the stump) is tucked in to a little notch of bare soil at the corner of the garage, where the alley-side raised bed strip ends before the length of the garage does. It (the raised bed strip with little concrete walls) stops early because some sensible person thought ahead, and designed it so that it is nearly impossible to run over the little concrete corner of the raised bed when trying to park. (I suppose someone might manage it, but they'd probably sideswipe the whole alley wall of the garage and then be too far in to successfully maike the turn into the parking pad.) Anyway, there's a little postage stamp of bare earth at the alley corner of the garage that runs a foot or so along the alley side of the garage before the concrete wall of the raised bed kicks in. And that's where the stump is.

Because of the concrete, I can really only get at the stump from one angle. While I can go at the cut from either side, it's all in the same cut, with a total variance possible of maybe fifteen degrees. Maaaaybe. This is due to the slight slope and where the pavement of the parking pad is. It's a tricky spot. Add in my mobility and agility difficulties, plus the dizziness and balance issues that have recently been added to my character sheet, and the necessity of bending over and trying to saw horizontally, and it turns into a two day job with a lot of breaks for resting while my gyroscopes reset.

All the other bits needing cutting and then painting with stump-killer will be much easier, barring one or two that are doing creative things around some pipes outside the house.Take the hard one first, get it out of the way. That's the plan. And it's a good plan.

It's just going to take a little longer than I thought.

Have you done yard work lately? If so, how has it gone? Any stump issues or adventures?

mark posting in

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!

elisem

(I call housecleaning and sorting through old treasures "attic archaeology.")

Quite a while back, Joel Rosenberg and a number of us had a joke that there should be a Minnesota Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (MSFFWA), and its motto should be "Quae narravi, nullo modo negabo," which he told us means loosely "That's my story and I'm sticking to it." There were cups made, bearing motto and also logo, which was crossed sword and space shuttle over the shape of Minnesota.

white mug with logo of crossed sword and space shuttle superimposed on state of Minnesota, with legend "Quae narravi, nullo modo negabo'

(There! Got one photo to work, I hope.)

boxofdelights posting in

wiscon

Hey you. Want to volunteer for a Feminist Inclusive Convention?

https://wiscon.net/volunteer/concom/

#WisConCommunity #WisCon #WisCon2026 #FeministSFF #Volunteer

ladyjax

( Read more... )

ladyjax

Per the Oaklandside:

Major federal immigration operation will begin tomorrow in the Bay Area

What it says on the tin. They're staging out at Coast Guard Island in Alameda (that only has one way off of it, BTW). I sat in on an emergency call with Bay Resistance and there will be some folks out there tomorrow morning. Not sure what the action is going to be. Organizations here have been collectively organizing for months so we'll see how it all shakes out. Oakland, the city council and Mayor Barbara Lee are pretty firm in how we collectively feel about this.

Unfortunately, San Francisco has Daniel Lurie as mayor and a bunch of feckless tech bros who think they want Feds in the street but are just now realizing that they have miscalculated with their bullshit (looking at you, Mark Benioff. YOU DON'T EVEN LIVE HERE ANYMORE).

In any case, I have the rapid response numbers on my phone, directions on how to document ICE activities (don't depend it on your phone. It is recommended that folks write information down) and a lot of crankiness. Moreso than my usual level.

Bay Resistance has a Get Ready page with ways to get involved. Do what you can, where you can.

I am worried. I am worried for Shirley and her staff at the restaurant, for all us out and about on our bikes and walking and living. However, i take heart from New York's response as well as other cities. The orange fucker is trying to speed run this and the cracks are there.

jazzfish

Joachim Rønning (dir.), Tron: Ares

Apparently I have developed sufficient distance to be at least somewhat objective about a Tron movie. Tron: Ares is ... not good.

It's not awful. It's fine. It's a movie-shaped object. The dialogue, especially in the first third, is too on-the-nose, too screenwriter-school, too concerned with making sure the audience picks up what it's putting down in terms of plot and character. It spends an insufficiency of time inside the computer and too much time bringing inside-the-computer to the Real World.

However. It does look pretty. It has nonwhite characters, something both previous films were sorely lacking. Greta Lee absolutely carries the bulk of the movie, and Gillian Anderson does the heavy lifting for all her scenes. (Zarf: "A good movie would have stabbed the kid and let Mom carry the third act.")

There's a plot. It's ridiculous, as is traditional. The Macguffin is "the permanence code," an algorithm that can allow things to come out of the computer and not fall apart after twenty-nine minutes. The rival heads of rival big-tech-AI companies are trying to find it: one (the one whose computer-world is red) to sell weapons and soldiers to the military, one (the one whose computer-world is blue) to ... make orange trees in Alaska? Just go with it. It's still the case that good, as Jonathan L-- observed in the late nineties, is higher on the electromagnetic spectrum than evil. Eve Kim, the good CEO, finds the permanence code in some forty-year-old five-and-a-quarter floppies that used to belong to Kevin Flynn. Julian Dillinger pulls his main security program Ares into the real world and sends it to get the code from Eve. Ares gets cold feet at the thought of killing Eve and goes rogue, and plot ensues.

Having said that, I can't actually be all that objective about the movie. I imprinted hard on Tron as a kid. I enjoyed Tron Legacy even when it felt like it was trying really hard to visually distance itself from the original. The Ares script is a mess, but someone told the designers that they were making a sequel not just to Legacy but to the original as well. There's a portrait of David Warner, who played the human villain from the first movie, in his grandson's office in the evil corp. I laughed out loud in the theatre when Eve's phone rang and it was the descending-arpeggio motif from Wendy Carlos's Tron soundtrack.

And towards the end there's about a fifteen-minute sequence where Ares ends up in the 1980s 'grid'. It -is- the original Tron, dim lighting and lack of textures and all. I laughed again when the Bit turned up, and caught my breath as Ares shifted into a proper lightcycle. That made me so happy. It even had a few moments of appropriately airy philosophizing, this time about the value of mortality rather than "if you're a User then ... everything you've done has been according to a plan, right?". Jeff Bridges returns to full-on seventies guru mode, and that's pretty good too. (People will say "It's just The Dude from The Big Lebowski" but The Dude was always channeling the same flower-child vibe that Flynn embodied, just twenty years later.)

So, it was absolutely worth it to me, and I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

Maybe I'll rewatch the multi-hour Making Of Tron stuff this week.

Postscript: I saw Ares in 3D. I mostly avoid things in 3D, it doesn't add much for me and costs a lot more. (My go-to "this was worth 3D" are Tron Legacy, which I might have a different opinion on now, and The Cave Of Lost Dreams, Werner Herzog's movie about cave paintings, which really did benefit from being able to see how the artists used the texture of the wall.) This was worth it mostly to say "yep, 3D movies do very little for me, even in the kind of effects extravaganza that they're sold for."

alierak posting in

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.

sartorias

Viable Paradise is about to begin, which means hunkering in the bunker.

But today the weather was perfect for the protest gathering at a very busy five-points intersection here on Martha's Vineyard, with A LOT of people and some winsomely unique signage. Lots of laughter and horn honking, and although there were two protesters for the current regime, and a couple of cars went by with passengers waving thumbs down, there was no violence whatsoever. Yay! I wish that would be true everywhere.

Interesting patterns in signage; many quotes from the Bible and from the Constitution, and so very many crowned clowns. One frog, one unicorn, and a bee. Many, but not all, were my age or older.

davidlevine

Thrilled to announce that I will be presenting a personal story (think "The Moth"), along with five other storytellers, at "Off the Rails: An Evening of Third Rail Storytelling" on Tuesday November 11 at CoHo Theatre in NW Portland. Buy tickets here: https://third-rail-rep.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/?acode=98d50fb4c33a811df1fa763ed72f3cfd&#/instances/a0FUv000002IzS5MAK

davidlevine

This coming weekend is OryCon 45, the very last OryCon! Come say goodbye to my hometown convention! You can find me on the following program items:

Fri Oct 17, 2025, 6:00 PM, Washington Room
Genre Hybrids
Stories that incorporate core concepts and elements of more than one traditional genre offer something particularly satisfying. What does or doesn’t work? A discussion of genre hybrids with writers who create them with recommendations.

Fri Oct 17, 2025, 8:00 PM, Lincoln Room
Choose Your Seat
When you settle down to watch a movie are you in a theater or snuggled on the couch streaming? We'll discuss preferences and the pros and cons of both.

Sat Oct 18, 2025, 2:00 PM, Gather Side Room
David Levine Kaffeeklatch
Come spend time with David Levine in an intimate setting.

Sat Oct 18, 2025, 3:00 PM, Madison Room
The Evolution of Technology in Science Fiction
Most early science fiction was action-oriented and centered around robots, spaceships and computers in futuristic societies. Nowadays there's far more to the genre than that. How has SF changed since the heyday of Asimov et al, for better and for worse?

Sat Oct 18, 2025, 7:00 PM, Oregon Room
David Levine reading
Reading and Q&A with David Levine

Sun Oct 19, 2025, 11:00 AM, Halsey Room, Table 1
David Levine Autographs

Sun Oct 19, 2025, 4:00 PM, Powell's Books at Cedar Hills, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR 97005
Powell's AuthorFest
I'll be signing my books, along with 18 other Pacific Northwest SF writers!

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tbonejenkins

Cafe in the Woods (Wordpress page)

June 2019

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Cafe in the Woods

A writer's journal In Touch With Yours Truly

Reading

To be continued

Boston

Reading Is Educational: thanks, Naomi!

Yard Work as Technique for Easing Agoraphobia

Database maintenance

Attic Archaeology, Kitchen Cupboard version: Quae narravi, nullo modo negabo

Call for Volunteers!

Dear Yulewriter

ICE is coming to town

fifteen minutes of tron

AWS outage

Flashing by . . .

Off the Rails: An Evening of Third Rail Storytelling

My OryCon schedule

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June 2019

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