looking for a link/website

Jul. 5th, 2025 02:43 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Sometime in the last couple of months, someone posted a link to a site that had interesting looking shirts made of linen, for lower prices than most places charge. I forgot to bookmark it. Can anyone point me to it? or to something else that fits that description, even if you didn't see it here?


Edited to add: A the shirts were less expensive than I expected, which is a large part of why I'm interested. Those may have been sale prices, I don't remember.

Also, the were made of either linen or a linen blend, not "line".
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

A. and I have recently started watching Lie to Me. We're up to s2e7 and I've got a couple of questions. After my recent experience with Person of Interest, I'm coming to you hoping that one of you will either know the answers or else care little enough about Lie to Me spoilers that you'll be willing to try to find the answers:

  1. What's up with the way Lightman walks? He just sort of flops around as he walks, and he tends to stand with his head tilted. I've come up with three possible explanations, but of course it might be none of them:
    1. Something in Lightman's past (which we'll learn about later in the series) explains it.
    2. It's an effort to try to make Tim Roth look shorter. (A. and I were both very surprised when I looked it up and he's 5'8"—we had both thought he was shorter than that.)
    3. It's just How Tim Roth Walks™.
  2. Is the science in the show at all accurate? If so, to what degree is it accurate and to what degree is it handwavium?
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates ‘performative reading’

You know, I was completely unaware that 'The Internet' hated upon this (whatever it is) until I came across this article and I think we are probably well into a realm similar to journo constructing a phenomenon on the basis of '6 people I spoke to in the wine-bar last week'.

Or maybe I just don't do TikTok and am missing this, but in my experience, few forms of social media are entire monoliths, what?

Why shouldn't people read in public? They're not doing it AT other people, honestly.

Can't help thinking that those who get aerated at people reading on public transport or while sitting quietly in a restaurant or coffee-shop are very likely those who think you should 'rawdog' long planeflights, sad gits.

Okay, these days I am pretty much always reading on ereader when out and about, so nobody can see what I'm reading. But back in the day I have read a lot of things that I daresay some miserable so-and-so would have considered 'performative', like Remembrance of Things Past on the Tube.

And among other things Marx and Rousseau on the train when I was commuting in from suburban Surrey.

Which phase of my life I was reminded of by a review headed 'A darker side of Lawrence Durrell' - I was not aware that there was any other side, actually - I habitually got in the same compartment of the same train each morning and there was the same young man making his way veeeeery slowwwwly through the volumes of The Alexandria Quartet. Months and months of Balthazar.

Wild Cards checklist

Jul. 5th, 2025 09:35 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
This is much easier for Martin's New Voices series....

Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Four works new to me. One is SF, two fantasy, and the magazine (which I have not yet looked inside) likely both. Two of the novels are series novels, one does not seem to me.

Books Received, June 28 — July 4



Poll #33326 Books Received, June 28 — July 4
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

FIYAH No. 35: Black Isekai published by FIYAH Literary Magazine (July 2025)
13 (48.1%)

Aces Full edited by George R. R. Martin (November 2025)
1 (3.7%)

Only Spell Deep by Ava Morgyn (March 2026)
4 (14.8%)

The Damned by Harper L. Woods (October 2025)
1 (3.7%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
23 (85.2%)

Strange dreams

Jul. 5th, 2025 07:18 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I practically never remember my dreams, but I remember part of last night's dream. Not enough to reconstruct any sort of plot summary, but enough to remember that it contained the following elements:

  • Heavy metal music (centered around a band named "Jihaad" — spelled that way to try to convey that the last syllable should rhyme with "bad," not with "sod")
  • Low-quality animatronic dinosaurs (they couldn't consistently count on the stegosaurus to walk, so they had four wheeled platforms that they'd put on its feet to move it out from backstage, then they'd let it take 2 or 3 steps in front of the audience, and pray that it didn't break down during that time)
  • Luchador wrestling (the wrestlers, the dinosaurs, and the band were on tour together in sort of a Mad Max type environment)
  • Male menstrual cramps (which I suppose implies the existence of male menstruation, but only the cramps came up in the dream)
  • Asshole bosses
  • The importance of proper punctuation

(no subject)

Jul. 5th, 2025 12:44 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] stillsostrange!
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/102: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill
[Author's Note] I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world. [p. 366]

Reread for Lockdown bookclub: original review here. I liked it even more the second time around, though I found myself focussing more on the silences, absences and unspoken truths of Alex's childhood than on the natural history of dragons. Interestingly, it felt a lot more hopeful when I read it in 2022 than now, nearly three years later.

Discussed with book club. Reactions were mixed. We wanted more about knots, and whether they were actually magic.

[syndicated profile] bookviewcafe_feed

Posted by Sara Stamey

Your virtual Thailand vacation continues as Thor and I visit The Hillside Retreat Elephant Sanctuary next to the Khao Sok wilderness park.

NOTE: Due to health issues, Thor and I haven’t been able to do much travel the past few years, so here’s our Thailand trip from 2020. We were lucky to squeak through the pandemic flight closures that February of 2020 as we returned from our three-week trip. Now crazy times just keep getting crazier. So escape for a few minutes from our new American dystopia to a country as beautiful and colorful as a dream! I’ll interrupt the reruns with occasional book reviews or Geezer Adventures…. (This blog series began 3/15/2025.)

After our nature walk around Our Jungle House eco-lodge, Thor and I boarded a van for a short drive along the Khao Sok park border to visit the elephant sanctuary recommended as the most ethical of nearby tourist attractions. Along the way, we enjoyed the lush jungle scenery and the sight of elephants walking along the road with their trainers, mahouts, following behind on scooters. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a photo.) The elephants obviously knew where they were going.

The dramatic, rocky upthrusts of limestone karsts punctuate the lush greenery.

We were warned that some of the other elephant “experiences” were exploiting and overworking the elephants by giving tourists rides on their backs. The Hillside Retreat offers a nurturing home for retired or injured/rehabilitated Asian elephants. Many of the elephants have worked in logging or other fields not employing elephants as much now, and their owners/trainers, or mahouts, cannot afford the high cost of feeding them.

After a bit of education, our first task at the sanctuary was cutting up fruit to feed to our assigned elephant.

I’m posting my complete blog entries on my own author website at www.sarastamey.com, where you can finish this episode and enjoy all the accompanying photos. Please continue reading by clicking on the link below, then you can return here (use “go back” arrow above) to comment, ask questions, or join a conversation. We love your responses!

https://sarastamey.com/the-rambling-writer-visits-thailand-part-13-elephant-sanctuary/

*****

You will find The Rambling Writer’s blog posts here every Saturday. Sara’s latest novel from Book View Café is Pause, a First Place winner of the Chanticleer Somerset Award and an International Pulpwood Queens Book Club selection. “A must-read novel about friendship, love, and killer hot flashes.” (Mindy Klasky). It’s also a love letter to the breathtaking wilderness of Sara’s native Pacific Northwest. Sign up for her quarterly email newsletter at www.sarastamey.com

 

oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished The Islands of Sorrow and it is a bit slight, definitely one for the Simon Raven completist I would say - a number of the tales feel like outtakes from the later novels.

Decided not for me: Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

Started Val McDermid, The Grave Tattoo (2006), a non-series mystery. Alas, I was not grabbed - in terms of present-day people encounter Historical Mystery, this did not ping my buttons - a) could not quite believe that a woman studying at a somewhat grotty-sounding post-92 uni in an unglam part of London would have even considered doing a PhD on Wordsworth (do people anywhere even do this anymore) let alone be publishing a book on him b)a histmyst involving Daffodil Boy and a not so much entirely lost but *concealed unpublished in The Archives* manuscript of Epic Poem, cannot be doing with. (Suspect foul libel upon generations of archivists at Dove Cottage, just saying.) Gave up.

Read in anticipation of book group next week, Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (1962).

Margery Sharp, Britannia Mews (1946) (query, was there around then a subgenre of books doing Victoria to now via single person or family?). Not a top Sharp, and I am not sure whether she is doing an early instance of Ace Representation, or just a Stunning Example of Victorian Womanhood (who is, credit is due, no mimsy).

Because I discovered it was Quite A Long Time since I had last read it, Helen Wright, A Matter of Oaths (1988).

Also finished first book for essay review, v good.

Finally came down to a price I consider eligible, JD Robb, Bonded in Death (In Death #60) (2025). (We think there were points where she could have done with a Brit-picker.)

On the go

Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands (Benjamin January #21) (2025). (Am now earwormed by 'The Battle of New Orleans' which was in the pop charts in my youth.)

Up next

Very probably, Zen Cho, Behind Frenemy Lines, which I had forgotten was just about due.

***

O Peter Bradshaw, nevairr evairr change:

David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes.

Holiday

Jul. 4th, 2025 10:54 am
athenais: (blue tiger)
[personal profile] athenais
We will grill burgers and corn for dinner. I'm making potato salad right now and an apple pie later. Fireworks have been going off in my neighborhood for the last two weeks, tonight will just be more and louder. I don't feel like pretty colors and sparkles are the vibe right now, personally. I'm keeping my big feelings in check with the usual suspects: SF/F fandom, K-pop fandom, Chinese costume dramas, games on my Switch, music from around the world, trips to the ocean, dreaming of future travel.

I highly recommend K-pop Demon Hunters on Netflix to any of my friends who like animated movies and have been subjected to my ravings of the past three years. It's really fun, has catchy music, and you might find yourself recognizing some of the details of being a K-pop fan...or a demon hunter, I don't know all your secrets.

John brought up a box of fanzines I've been keeping since the 80s and I don't recognize the top half of them. I am not sure if they're unusual and therefore something to put out on a fan table somewhere as freebies, I assume not, but I'm not throwing them out. It's just one box. I was expecting to feel nostalgia, but instead I just feel distanced from my own history. Huh. Well, maybe down at the bottom I'll see stuff from my friends. I have no idea why I collected these.

For those at BayCon this weekend I hope you have a great time!

July 4th

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:55 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Jay Kuo takes a break from chronicling the regime's crimes to share some honest hope for today, and the days and months ahead:

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/celebrating-independence
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Ninety years after her grandmother's family was stalked by a witch, international student Minerva Contrera's studies land her in a similar position.


The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

(no subject)

Jul. 4th, 2025 09:55 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] silveradept!

New Worlds: Pigments and Dyes

Jul. 4th, 2025 06:00 am
[syndicated profile] bookviewcafe_feed

Posted by Marie Brennan

Austere cathedrals and classical busts in white stone; movie peasants in layered rags of brown. Despite what you’ve seen, the people of the past loved color as much as we do. They painted their churches and their statues, they dyed their clothes, and while it’s true they faced greater limitations in their color choices and availability than we do, they still made use of what they had.

One of those limitations, of course, was money. Some pigments and dyes can only be made from sources available in one region; for quite some time, the only truly vivid blue paint in Europe was ultramarine, made from ground lapis lazuli, which had to be imported from Afghanistan. (The secret of creating Egyptian blue, calcium copper silicate, had been lost.) Others are expensive because of the effort involved in their creation; harvesting saffron is a labor-intensive process to this day, and so even in its native range, heavily saffron-dyed clothing was usually an elite textile. Others combine both of those factors: Tyrian purple has to be extracted from particular species of sea snails found only in certain parts of the eastern Mediterranean, and you need massive quantities, with one historian estimating twelve thousand snails required to produce enough dye for the trim of a single garment.

These factors are familiar to many people, but others may be less so. In fabric dyeing, for example, the first batch of cloth added to the vat will absorb the most intense, saturated color. Subsequent batches will have progressively more washed-out shades. The strong colors were therefore often the most prestigious and expensive. You also have to consider color fastness, i.e. the resistance of a pigment or dye to fading in light, washing out in the laundry, or rubbing off on the skin. (Probably quite a few of us here still have the experience of noticing the spine of a book becoming more faded than its cover, due to greater exposure to the light.) Fastness in dyes is achieved partly through the use of “mordants” that will help bind the color, but some options are more color fast to begin with — and, naturally, those will be more desirable and probably more expensive.

With pigments, you also have to consider the chemical behavior of the paint. Quite a lot of chemistry goes into figuring out how to make certain colors; unfortunately for painters, many of whom used to make their own pigments, quite a lot of those chemicals were horribly toxic. (They also stank: both dyeworks and artists’ studios tended to be fairly rank places, and even the paintings themselves could be unpleasantly odiferous.) But in addition to poisoning themselves with lead and mercury and other inimical substances, painters had to plan for how their pigments would react with each other. The composition of a work wasn’t just a question of form and perspective and other such concerns; they had to plot out their colors to make sure adjacent pigments wouldn’t form a chemical reaction that discolored or destroyed them both.

TV and movies also tend to make us forget that the palette of available colors was restricted to what you could get from plants, minerals, and other natural substances. While some truly vivid colors were possible, many of them were softer, more muted. The TV show of The Wheel of Time did a good job of showing this: the rural people of the Two Rivers don’t all wear brown, but neither do their clothes display a lot of intense, saturated shades. Getting past these limitations required more chemistry . . . and this is when we started killing people with wallpaper.

Scheele’s Green is a compound invented in the late eighteenth century and used both as a paint and as a textile dye. It was hugely popular in the nineteenth century because it was more brilliant and more durable than previous green pigments; people used it for everything from decoration to candles to children’s toys to food dye. It also happens to be a cupric hydrogen arsenite — yes, arsenic. Even if you didn’t put it in your food, you wound up eating it anyway, because things like wallpaper continually shed arsenic dust into the air, contaminating everything around them. That’s a notorious example, but hardly the only onet: the nineteenth century saw a huge boom in the development of synthetic aniline and azo dyes, many of which were profoundly unsafe by modern standards. But they also let people adorn their homes and themselves with colors that were previously impossible, and so in an era when many hazards weren’t yet understood, fashion trampled safety flat.

These days we have regulations saying you can’t paint your home with lead white or other environmental hazards, and we’ve developed safer alternatives. Looking at what’s available in your local paint store, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re done: we’ve developed pigments for all the colors, and there’s nothing left to invent.

For the layperson, that’s effectively true. But talk to a painter, and you’ll find out that there are still chromatic horizons to be conquered. Vantablack made news about a decade ago for being one of the darkest blacks in existence, absorbing more than 99.9% of visible light. It also made news for the controversy over sculptor Anish Kapoor securing an exclusive license for one form of Vantablack; only his studio is permitted to use it. The artist Stuart Semple retaliated by creating a “pinkest pink” pigment and licensing it to everyone in the world but Kapoor. We’re still developing the ability to produce new colors, and who knows where that could go in the future.

Especially since this wanders in the direction of weird tricks with optics and perception. There’s a whole category referred to as “impossible colors,” which are hues we’re not capable of perceiving under normal conditions. You can apparently achieve some of these by staring for a long time at a block of one color, until your cone cells become fatigued, then shifting to another; if you stare long enough at bright yellow and then at black, you will see stygian blue, which is as dark as black while also being blue. There are may also be colors outside the spectrum human eyes can perceive, though I’ve seen it questioned whether creatures like mantis shrimp actually see different colors than we do.

That uncertainty hasn’t stopped fiction writers! H.P. Lovecraft’s “colour out of space,” Terry Pratchett’s “octarine,” the seven colors of the “Neathbow” in Fallen London and its related games . . . these are generally used as markers of alienness, magic, or both. Sometimes they have special properties; sometimes they’re literally just decorative elements to make the setting seem more unusual, to extend it beyond the ordinary limits of human perception.

To fully explore this topic would require much more knowledge of color theory, chemistry, and physics than I possess. But if you find it interesting, I eagerly await your novel about someone attempting to develop a magical pigment for an impossible color!

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Every time I run something

Jul. 3rd, 2025 10:34 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
I embrace new tools. In Fabula Ultima, for example, the order in which characters go in combat varies. I found it hard to keep track of who'd gone, so I went out and got poker chips and little round labels. Now, I can just toss the chips representing characters into a bowl once they've gone. Order!

OK, except it turns out I can't tell blue from green under the ceiling light in the room where I DM and the names on the labels need to be bigger.

Whoam, whoam, like a wounded maggit

Jul. 3rd, 2025 09:30 pm
oursin: Cartoon hedgehog going aaargh (Hedgehog goes aaargh)
[personal profile] oursin

Well, in further conferencing misadventures, woke up around 5 am with what I came to realise was a crashing migraine - it is so long since I have had one of these as opposed to 'headache from lying orkard' - took medication, and after some little while must have gone to sleep, because I woke up to discover it was nearly 9.30, and I had slept well past the alarm I had set in anticipation of the 9.00 first conference session. But feeling a lot better.

I was only just in time to grab some breakfast before they started clearing it up.

The day's papers were perhaps a bit less geared towards my own specific interests - and I was sorry to miss the ones I did - but still that there Dr [personal profile] oursin managed the occasional intervention. There were also some good conversations had.

So the conference, as a conference, was generally judged a success, if somewhat exhausting.

I managed to get the train from the University to Birmingham New Street with no great difficulty.

However, the train I was booked on was somewhat delayed (though not greatly, not cancelled, and no issues of taking buses as in various announcements) and I initially positioned myself at the wrong bit of the platform and had to scurry along through densely packed waiting passengers.

Journey okay, with free snacks, though onboard wifi somewhat recalcitrant.

At Euston, the taxi rank was closed!!!!

Fortunately one can usually grab a cab in the Euston Road very expeditious, and I did.

So I am now home and more or less unpacked.

Given that Mercury is, I recollect, the deity of travellers, is Mercury in retrograde?

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