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Posted by Sara Stamey

Thor, Bear dog, and I simply HAD to return to the mountains, despite some mobility issues. Another Geezer Adventure.

(Note: This is a rerun from 2023, posted just days before I learned that my never-smoker lung cancer had recurred with a large tumor in my chest that may have explained my continuing pain. A lot of treatments and complications have ensued, but our Geezer Adventures continue, with more adaptations. From Galaxy Quest: “Never give up. Never surrender.” This week, I’m tired after radiation treatments for a second recurrence, so revisiting this lovely day. I hope the glimpses of green help those suffering with the wildfire season that’s really hitting the West this year. Looking back, we are remembering our wonderful, departed Bear dog with love and some tears, though we have added young Reo dog to the family.)

According to Thor, Bear dog is about the same age in dog years as our own early 70s. We are all getting gimpy — much sooner than I expected — but we still feel the call of the wild. I finally said, “We ARE going up to Mt. Baker this week, and we’ll just go as far as we can.” We chose the Bagley Lakes trail on the skirts of Mt. Baker (the native Koma Kulshan), a pretty low-key hike. Even two years ago, we would have scoffed at the thought of this “light appetizer” hike presenting a challenge, but we have learned that we need to go with the flow of our bodies. We made it around the loop! And we were “Being. Here. Now” in the glorious mountain air with the lush greenery feeding our souls.

First, the steep mountain road winding above the ski lodge on the skirts of Mt. Shuksan.

The start of the trail still offers a glimpse of Mt. Shuksan.

Across the first lake, we see Table Mountain.

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-hikes-and-swims-bagley-lakes/

*****

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

 

 

Reading > cleaning

Sep. 12th, 2025 07:59 pm
[syndicated profile] thebloggess_feed

Posted by thebloggess

I decided to clean up the house and a frame I was polishing broke and the glass went through my finger and now I can only type with one hand because it keeps opening up and this feels like a sign that cleaning is dangerous and that instead I should be reading. And that isContinue reading "Reading > cleaning"

New Books and ARCs, 9/12/25

Sep. 12th, 2025 07:26 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

We’ve made it to another Friday, and here is a new set of books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound. What here is piquing your interest? Share in the comments!

— JS

oursin: George Beresford photograph of the young Rebecca West in a large hat, overwritten 'Neither a doormat nor a prostitute' (Neither a doormat nor a prostitute)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, my dearios, I am sure all dear rdrs are with me that tradwives are not trad, they are deploying an aesthetic loosely based on vague memories of the 1950s - and meedja representations at that - and some very creepy cultish behaviour - they are not returning to some lovely Nachral State -

And that as I bang on about a lot, women have been engaged in all kinds of economic activity THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY since economic activity became A Thing.

Why tradwives aren’t trad: The housewife is a Victorian invention. History shows us women’s true economic power

I have a spot of nitpickery to apply - it rather skips over and elides the move from the household economy into factories e.g., leading to 'separate spheres' with wife stuck at home (and even that was a very blurry distinction, I mutter); and also the amount of exploitative homeworking undertaken by women of the lower classes (often to the detriment of any kind of 'good housekeeping').(Not saying middle-class women didn't also find ways of making a spot of moolah to eke out household budget.)

And of course a lot of tradwives are actually performing as economically productive influencers: TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media - in a tradition of women who made a very nice living out of telling other women how to be domestic goddesses, ahem ahem.

Lost in FEELS

Sep. 12th, 2025 10:40 am
lydamorehouse: (pretty demon)
[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 This time I disappeared because I have been having way too many feelings about KPop Demon Hunters. 

WAY. TOO. MANY.

I did not like the ending of this film. However, to say that I'm currently obsessed with it might be an understatement, so obviously I'm in. I bought all the way in, otherwise I wouldn't be left like this--feeling betrayed. I'm not going to go into all of my feelings because all of them would have to be under the cut thanks to the fact that they're all releated to the ending, so MAJOR SPOILERS. 

But, yeah, I've literally been doing that thing that I do, which is to google the crap out of things that were mentioned in the film, like saja (fascinating stuff there!) and Korean water demons (mul gwishin), etc. 

For those of you who saw it, what did you think of KPop Demon Hunters?
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


I'd been posting reviews to LiveJournal since April of 2014 but on September 12, 2014, James Nicoll Reviews went live, with a review of Robert A. Heinlein's Between Planets.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


It's time for Bo to leave doomed San Francisco behind... just as soon as she completes one final task.

Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan

(no subject)

Sep. 12th, 2025 09:42 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] davidgillon and [personal profile] surexit!
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/143: Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean — Katherine Pangonis

...in Syracuse, the ghosts feel like they raise the city up; in Ravenna, Nicola thinks they hold it back. [loc. 3703]

Pangolis explores five ancient capitals (Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch) leavening historical detail with her own impressions of each city's modern remnants: a blend of history and travel writing which works better in some chapters than in others. Read more... )

New Worlds: Foraging (and Pillaging)

Sep. 12th, 2025 06:00 am
[syndicated profile] bookviewcafe_feed

Posted by Marie Brennan

The previous essay talked as if all armies are well-organized and supplied from home — but I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that isn’t always the case. Or, even if it is the case, the aforementioned problems with long supply lines or the disruption thereof may mean that an army has to fend for itself once they’re into enemy territory.

. . . or possibly in home territory, too. Poorly managed armies are absolutely not above looting their own countryside to make up the shortfall.

(Here I will pause to acknowledge that much of the following draws on Bret Devereaux’s exploration of pre-modern army logistics, particularly this essay, which goes into far more specific detail than I do here.)

When an army supplies itself off the surrounding terrain, we refer to that as “foraging” — a term that belies the violence usually involved. Water can often be obtained without much conflict unless you’re in an arid or drought-stricken environment (though whether that water is what we moderns would consider safe to drink is a separate question), and if you continually move to fresh pasture there might be sufficient grazing to keep your animals going (though they also need grain to be healthy). In many ecosystems, firewood is likewise reasonably available — remember how extensive forests used to be — though it would require a decent bit of labor to chop down enough for an army.

But while it’s not impossible that some foraging operations involve gathering wild foodstuffs, if you’re trying to keep hundreds or thousands of people fed, natural resources will not be enough. You’ll have to take those things from the surrounding population. Since they will very reasonably feel that they need those things in order to keep themselves supplied, this means foraging becomes a coercive process of extraction.

And a seasonal one, too. Pre-modern armies avoided waging war year-round not only because of weather concerns like mud or snow; they also had to consider the question of food supply, which above all means grain. Grain in the field is only useful to your soldiers if you have the organizational capacity to reap, thresh, and winnow it (though animals can eat it straight) — and not all armies are that organized! Even when you can do those things, it’s better to save time and effort by seizing control of unmilled grains, which you can boil into porridge; flour, which you can bake into bread; or the bread itself, which requires no additional labor (but also goes bad faster than flour, which in turn goes bad faster than unmilled grains). The exact timing of when food is most abundant will vary from region to region based on the crops they raise, but the general pattern holds that you most want to campaign when large amounts of food will be readily available for the seizing just as you run out of supplies.

So “foraging,” rather than evoking an image of soldiers digging up tubers or strolling through a forest picking mushrooms, should look more like the scene you’ve encountered in countless movies: armed men entering a village with little or no warning, while the civilians hide, plead for mercy, or attempt to bargain. What the movies tend to leave out is that the soldiers’ main goal is not general mayhem, wantonly burning down houses for no better reason than to show you they’re the bad guys; instead they are there for a purpose, and that purpose is food.

Which isn’t to say the general mayhem doesn’t happen. Soldiers in enemy territory have absolutely no reason not to nick any valuables they see lying around, and many of them have no problem with raping women for a moment’s diversion. Anyone who resists the incursion is likely to be hurt or killed, and fires can be either accidents or part of a campaign of terror against the general populace. A commanding officer who’s good at maintaining discipline will try to rein this in, but usually less out of compassion than out of practicality: soldiers who run off on their own to loot and rape are more easily targeted by resistance, and the longer the unit is out foraging away from the main body of their force, the higher the risk that they’ll wind up getting caught by the enemy. The officer should ideally want to get in, get what’s needed, and get out with a minimum of delay and fuss.

He has to be careful, though. I’ll get into the topic of discipline more specifically later, but several conditions are likely to worsen the violence of an army pillaging a civilian population, and one of them is brutal discipline within the ranks. It’s fine and in fact beneficial to maintain standards and impose consequences when they’re broken, but an army that flogs and executes soldiers for every infraction produces soldiers who look for any opportunity to pass the violence they’ve suffered along to someone else. Failure to pay your soldiers also results in atrocities — the Sack of Antwerp being an infamous example — as does a long siege, when the assaulting force finally enters the city that’s angered them by resisting.

But back to foraging. That risk of being caught by the enemy means that a foraging party will not generally be as small as that movie raid. Remember, they have to carry back enough grain (and other foods, and quite possibly some livestock herded alongside) to make a meaningful dent in the army’s needs! A foraging party often consisted of hundreds or even thousands of people, not all of them soldiers — we’ll be talking about the other people involved next week — along with carts, pack animals, and so forth. It’s a major operation.

One which slows the army down. If significant chunks of your overall force are ranging miles away from your central baggage train to scrounge for food and other supplies, you simply cannot move as fast as a direct, focused march toward your destination. This means that a defending army, which can send outriders ahead to tell (hopefully) friendly settlements to pull together supplies in advance of their arrival, can often cover more ground than the invading army which has to continually search a hostile neighborhood for food. Efficiency therefore matters a lot here, and a commander whose soldiers will get the job done and return quickly, or who has some amount of supply from home, or who’s willing to gamble on a fast march toward a rich target on the hope that he’ll be able to seize its resources before his current stock runs out, will get better results.

This also limits army size. After all, it does no good to muster a gobsmackingly large army if those guys are just going to starve a month into the campaign. And the larger your force, the slower you have to move in order to make sure you can forage the surrounding countryside intensively enough to keep everyone fed — which in turn makes your army more of a sitting duck for enemy action, and may the deity of your choice help you if for some reason you have to double back into an area you already picked bare. This is one of the reasons you will sometimes read of wars where multiple separate forces were sent under different commanders, approaching by different routes: instead of one logistically fragile forty-thousand-man army, you send two more resilient twenty-thousand-man units. Though that does introduce problems with coordinating the actions and objectives of the different groups . . .

Looping back to our previous discussion of supply lines, you can see how the advent of mechanized transport changes not only how many soldiers you can send where, but how they’re going to relate to the local populace. It becomes a lot more feasible to institute a “don’t target civilians” rule when the survival of your army doesn’t depend on raiding civilian settlements and taking away some or all of the food they need to survive. (Remember, these societies rarely have enough surplus to absorb big shocks well!) A pre-modern army could try to be “nice” to the people they intend to annex — goodwill is still useful to have — but that’s more likely to take the form of being generous to the elites who switch sides, while the common folk are expected to be grateful they got paid a pittance for the vital supplies the invaders took. Short of technology or magic intervening, foraging in enemy territory is never going to be a nice process.

The Patreon logo with the text "This post is brought to you by my imaginative backers at Patreon. To join their ranks, click here!"

SOTD: Twice, "Merry & Happy"

Sep. 11th, 2025 08:39 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

This morning the YouTube Music app decided I needed to hear "Merry & Happy" by Twice. Even though it's a Christmas song, I listened to it, because I love this song. It lifted my spirits, so I went back and listened to it again, which lifted my spirits some more. So now I'm sharing it with you.

After this experience, my daily affirmation for today was "Take joy wherever you can find it. If that means listening to Christmas music out of season, so be it."

anais_pf: (Default)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
These questions were originally suggested by [livejournal.com profile] wownelwow.

1. What is your favourite fruit?

2. What is the last book you read?

3. Do you like any of your school photos?

4. Do you ever blowdry your armpits to get the deodorant to dry quicker?

5. What was the last film you watched?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


11 sourcebooks that range across the shattered Earth of the Rifts tabletop roleplaying game from Palladium Books.

Bundle of Holding: Rifts Worlds 1




More World Books for the cross-dimensional tabletop roleplaying game

Bundle of Holding: Rifts Land and Sea (from 2022)

Mingled yarn of life

Sep. 11th, 2025 08:20 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

Text today from my general practice to book Covid + flu jabs - actually in a months time, but I now have a slot booked.

***

Having been moaning on over at bluesky about scholars these days not acknowledging existing (older) historiography, Dept of Preening Gratification was coming across footnote cite to 30 year-old co-authored work as 'A key starting point' for certain 'productive considerations' within the field.

***

On the other prickly paw, I am still failing to get up to a proper swing at the essay review - keep niggling and picking at the bit I've already done.

Partly due to Interruptions happening.

Also partly due to not sleeping terribly well this week for some reason.

***

Discovered today that I had somehow acquired an ebook of recent work on subject I have had far too much to do with and had totally forgotten about it. Looking up an area of Mi Pertikler Xpertize, o dear, a number of niggling Errours.

***

Attended a webinar the other day where someone claimed that a certain class of records did not survive in respect of the lower orders on account They Could Not Write, and I was more, no, it's an issue of preservation, what about those postcards that I spoke about on a TV programme once - but that is such an annoying story, what DID happen to the cards after the filming? - apart from the flaunting of Being Meedja Personality, so decided not to raise my virtual hand.

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
[personal profile] siderea points out that you probably have >a href="https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882720.html">"at least one underlying condition" for which the covid vaccine is (still) recommended by the US government, because most people do: the list includes being overweight, high blood pressure, depression, former smokers, and "physical inactivity." She speculates that the list may have been drafted to be as inclusive as possible, by someone who didn't have the authority to say "just give it to everyone."

The current official announcements, widely echoed, sounds as though most people can't get the vaccine, because the FDA is now being run by anti-vaxxers. That is almost certainly not an accident: if you think you can't have the vaccine, you won't ask for it.

Siderea also points out that even if you aren't on that list, a doctor can prescribe this, or almost any approved medication, to anyone they think it's appropriate for. In other contexts, this is what they mean by "off-label" use of a drug.

Note, however, that this may affect whether you have to pay for the vaccine yourself, rather than it being covered by insurance.

It has been pointed out elsewhere that you can always lie to them: nobody has a complete list of former smokers, for example.

The Big Idea: Ren Hutchings

Sep. 11th, 2025 05:37 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

The word “sonder” refers to the realization that every other person is living their own, whole life outside of what you see. For author Ren Hutchings, she has experienced this with side characters in media, wondering about their lives outside of the story. Expanding on this idea, she ended up writing An Unbreakable World. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how this companion novel focuses on characters who are outside of the spotlight.

REN HUTCHINGS:

I’ve always had an interest in the relationship between history and folklore, a theme which has influenced so much of my speculative writing. I’m most intrigued by a close, individual perspective, viewing the past as a moving tapestry of small lives and stories, rather than a series of big, significant events. 

Ever since I was a child, I’ve often found myself invested in a seemingly insignificant side character in a book or movie, that person who only pops up for a brief encounter and says three lines of dialogue. I’d be wondering about where they went next, or if they had a family, or what the rest of their life was like. Because of course they must have had a whole life that existed outside of that one time when they happened to cross paths with the heroes!

And so, when I set out to write a new novel set in the same universe as my debut, Under Fortunate Stars, I found myself pulled toward the stories at the outer edges. The result is a standalone novel that’s in many ways a companion piece to my first book, but in other ways its opposite. Because while Under Fortunate Stars was about a group of unexpected heroes who famously stopped an interstellar war and saved humanity, An Unbreakable World is very much about those folks on the periphery. In a vast galaxy fraught with intrigue and turmoil, this story asks what was going on with the people who didn’t become historical heroes.

The protagonists in this book are people whose names and deeds won’t be remembered in songs or poems. They’re people whose most important choices will never be known to history, whose motivations will never be examined by future biographers. The point-of-view characters are each struggling to find a meaning in their own lives, and looking in all the wrong places for an ever-elusive sense of purpose.

Almost everybody you meet in An Unbreakable World is experiencing deep isolation. Page is a petty thief who woke up from stasis without most of her memories, and while she searches desperately for any shards of her missing past, she closes her mind to the possibilities that the present is offering her. Meanwhile, Maelle has dedicated years of her life to plotting a long-game revenge scheme, and she’s likewise been ignoring every opportunity to take a new path.

On a distant world, Dalya of House Edamaun is an anxious young heiress growing up in a restrictive, sheltered society, on a planet that has intentionally cut itself off from the United Worlds of Humanity. She’s struggling with spiritual and existential questions, crushed by the weight of a responsibility she doesn’t feel ready for… until she comes to realize that she actually has more choices than she thinks. In forging small, intimate connections with others, each character finds the shape of their own story becoming clearer.

Both of the Union Quadrant books touch on themes about storytelling, memory, and the historical record. But the thing I really wanted to explore in An Unbreakable World is the way our search for a bigger meaning often begins with our most personal choices.

Most people will never do any epic deeds, or perform incredible galaxy-changing feats. And some people whose actions do have far-reaching effects won’t even realize it. Indeed, most of us will never know exactly how our lives will affect the fabric of history, or how far the ripples of our decisions travelled. But we can make choices about what’s important to us, about what we want to stand for and believe in. We can choose which things we find meaning in when our future isn’t clear and everything seems hopeless.

Sometimes, the journey to save yourself – and to accept that you’re somebody worth saving – can be just as monumental as a heroic quest to save the galaxy. 


An Unbreakable World: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

Charlie Offers A Carrot

Sep. 11th, 2025 05:36 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

Charlie knows you might be stressed out right now, and would like to offer you her carrot:

Charlie the dog, holding a carrot toy in her mouth and looking at the camera with puppy dog eyes, one of her ears flopped over into sport mode.

It’s dirty and slobbery, but that’s what makes it so special. She hopes you enjoy her gift to you.

-AMS

jesse_the_k: Panda doll wearing black eye mask, hands up in the spotlight, dropping money bag on floor  (bandit panda)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k

Open captions

my brief audio descriptionAsian man faces camera, sitting at laptop with white earbuds and animated face. Another person's back enters the screen. "This motion" is him pointing to his ear then the laptop and nodding. The picture on his desk is just the words "food" and "healthcare"

Stream: right on here )


When you want to view a YouTube short in the classic YouTube screen (with the controls you're familiar with!) you replace the word "shorts" in the link with the word "watch"

I first saw this and the link was youtube.com/shorts/I908J9_u0WE

To use the classic horizontal player go to youtube.com/watch/I908J9_u0WE


Edited due to a strange Markdown bug: when I create a bare link with angle brackets, uppercase letters are transformed into lower case.

<https://youtube.com/watch/i908j9_u0we> becomes https://youtube.com/watch/i908j9_u0we (and the video ID string in the code example are I908J9_u0WE)

but when I create a Markdown link [youtube.com/watch/I908J9_u0WE](https://youtube.com/watch/I908J9_u0WE) the case remains as typed.

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