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Friday, March 13th, 2026 05:17 pm
One of my eight year old students figured out the concept of a key signature by herself.
Friday, March 13th, 2026 04:54 pm
Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others
Warnings: n/a
Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father.
Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.
Prologue / Previous Chapter
Rating: T
Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others
Warnings: n/a
Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father.
Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.
Prologue / Previous Chapter
( Read more... )
Friday, March 13th, 2026 01:11 pm
Fandom 50 #3
Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, 1979's is one that's probably popped into my head at least one morning a week since I was five:
Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn
Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, 1979's is one that's probably popped into my head at least one morning a week since I was five:
Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 08:59 pm
I remembered that I had a bunch of paused holds on ebooks in Libby, so I unpaused them, and "Did I Leave Feminism?" by Jude Doyle came in today. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but my main feeling is nostalgia for the era of blogs. I just missed his writing!
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 08:52 pm
I have 61 Heated Rivalry icons to share. In the post you can find:
- 32 Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
- 15 Ilya Rozanov
- 11 Shane Hollander
- 2 Svetlana Vetrova
- 1 Scott Hunter/Kip Grady
Preview:
Here @![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
love_sacrificed
- 32 Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
- 15 Ilya Rozanov
- 11 Shane Hollander
- 2 Svetlana Vetrova
- 1 Scott Hunter/Kip Grady
Preview:
Here @
love_sacrificedTags:
Friday, March 13th, 2026 04:00 am
Friday, March 13th, 2026 03:28 pm
Got some Garden-related stuff done the last 2 days. Planted a Saskatoon bush in a container and moved a few seedlings into 3" pots from the trays. My Fig cutting is showing buds along the stem but I'm not tempted to even look until April;>
Giant and Bronze Fennels, Variegated Lunaria(though no sign of it at present). The Giant isn't edible but looks really kewl the 2nd yr when it blooms about 10-12 ft tall! Next week a few more should be ready to bump up to larger pots just in time for the next batch of Stratified seeds to be ready to plant...
Cheers,
Pat
Giant and Bronze Fennels, Variegated Lunaria(though no sign of it at present). The Giant isn't edible but looks really kewl the 2nd yr when it blooms about 10-12 ft tall! Next week a few more should be ready to bump up to larger pots just in time for the next batch of Stratified seeds to be ready to plant...
Cheers,
Pat
Friday, March 13th, 2026 07:18 am
♥ The daffodils are up!!
( picture )
♥ And irises, my favorite.
( picture )
♥ Plus a fun mystery: I'm like 80% sure I planted crocuses here. Before yesterday I was 100% sure, but what's coming up does not look like crocuses. What will these clever sprouts turn out to be, I wonder. (Scilla?)
( picture )
And now a spring planting calendar update.
♥ Dahlias were potted March 5. The first one stuck its head above soil today and I quickly transferred it from the dark floor of the utility room to a bright succulent shelf. (In other words, I continue to not plan lights for the dahlias.)
It has been one week since they were potted. Nine weeks remain until our frost-free date. For everyone's entertainment and my hope of making better decisions next year, I am tracking dahlia size versus time remaining before they can go outside.
( picture )
♥ Cannas remain in boxes by the back door. No substantive growth I can see; I'm checking them every few days. Temperature is higher than I'd like but steady between 55-60F. Anything below 60 seems to keep them sleeping. Garage temperature was freezing last night and will probably go colder next week, so not yet a better option. If they can stay dormant until the ground unfreezes, I should be able to put most of them in front of the patio where they were last year and let them wake up naturally in May.
♥ Winter sown seeds seem to be behaving themselves, no early germination or wild parties that I've noticed. The containers were seeded Feb 18-21, so it's been about three weeks. At least some of the seeds in there need cold stratification, and I think four weeks is the bare minimum for forcing. For most seeds, 6-12 weeks is recommended. Fortunately it's going to be cold next week, so they'll definitely get their four. After that I'll keep them out of the sun until the end of March and hope for the best.
♥ The six boxes of bulbs I bought accidentally, thinking I would "winter sow" them, have been in the refrigerator for four weeks this weekend. At this rate they should be okay to go in the ground as soon as it unfreezes enough to dig. Whew. (They all require cold stratification, but only to bloom, so even if they don't get enough cold they should be able to put up some leaves and collect energy for next year.)
In unrelated news, Marci and I went to the aquarium yesterday and we both got t-shirts with a manta ray on them that say "just a ray of sunshine." I left mine on the sofa last night and Daphne has been sleeping on it ever since.
( picture )
♥ And irises, my favorite.
( picture )
♥ Plus a fun mystery: I'm like 80% sure I planted crocuses here. Before yesterday I was 100% sure, but what's coming up does not look like crocuses. What will these clever sprouts turn out to be, I wonder. (Scilla?)
( picture )
And now a spring planting calendar update.
♥ Dahlias were potted March 5. The first one stuck its head above soil today and I quickly transferred it from the dark floor of the utility room to a bright succulent shelf. (In other words, I continue to not plan lights for the dahlias.)
It has been one week since they were potted. Nine weeks remain until our frost-free date. For everyone's entertainment and my hope of making better decisions next year, I am tracking dahlia size versus time remaining before they can go outside.
( picture )
♥ Cannas remain in boxes by the back door. No substantive growth I can see; I'm checking them every few days. Temperature is higher than I'd like but steady between 55-60F. Anything below 60 seems to keep them sleeping. Garage temperature was freezing last night and will probably go colder next week, so not yet a better option. If they can stay dormant until the ground unfreezes, I should be able to put most of them in front of the patio where they were last year and let them wake up naturally in May.
♥ Winter sown seeds seem to be behaving themselves, no early germination or wild parties that I've noticed. The containers were seeded Feb 18-21, so it's been about three weeks. At least some of the seeds in there need cold stratification, and I think four weeks is the bare minimum for forcing. For most seeds, 6-12 weeks is recommended. Fortunately it's going to be cold next week, so they'll definitely get their four. After that I'll keep them out of the sun until the end of March and hope for the best.
♥ The six boxes of bulbs I bought accidentally, thinking I would "winter sow" them, have been in the refrigerator for four weeks this weekend. At this rate they should be okay to go in the ground as soon as it unfreezes enough to dig. Whew. (They all require cold stratification, but only to bloom, so even if they don't get enough cold they should be able to put up some leaves and collect energy for next year.)
In unrelated news, Marci and I went to the aquarium yesterday and we both got t-shirts with a manta ray on them that say "just a ray of sunshine." I left mine on the sofa last night and Daphne has been sleeping on it ever since.
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 07:10 pm
Title: Into The Light
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Author:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
badly_knittedCharacters: Daniel Jackson, OC.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1160
Spoilers: The Serpent’s Lair.
Summary: Daniel escapes the ship just as it blows up, gating to the only planet whose address he can come up with.
Written For: Challenge 436: Sunshine at
fan_flashworks.Disclaimer: I don’t own Stargate: SG-1, or the characters. They belong to their creators.
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 07:02 pm
EFF is filing against the Consumer Product Safety Council (CPSC) to ensure that the public has full access to the laws that govern us.
Our client Public.Resource.Org (Public Resource), a tiny non-profit founded by open records advocate Carl Malamud, has a mission that’s both simple and powerful: to make government information more accessible. Public Resource acquires and makes available online a wide variety of public documents such as tax filings, government-produced videos, and federal rules about safety and product designs. Those rules are initially created through private standards organizations and later incorporated into federal law. Such documents are often difficult to access otherwise, meaning the public cannot read, share, or comment on them.
Working with Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, Public Resource has been submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the CPSC requesting copies of the legally binding safety codes for children’s products—an area of law of intense interest to child safety advocates and consumer advocates, not to mention the families who use those products. But CPSC says it can’t release the codes, because the private association that coordinated their initial development insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law. That’s like saying a lobbyist who drafted a new tax law gets to control who reads it or shares it, even after it becomes a legal mandate.
Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, have held that the safety codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit (in a case EFF defended on Public Resource’s behalf), have held that even if the standards lose copyright once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use.
Now EFF has teamed up with the Cyberlaw Clinic to continue the fight. We’re asking a court to rule that copyright is no barrier to accessing and sharing the rules that are supposed to ensure the safety of our built environment and the products we use every day. With the rule of law under assault around the nation, it is more important than ever to defend our ability to read and speak the law, without restrictions.
Friday, March 13th, 2026 02:10 pm
Here's my table for the 100 fandom icons challenge for this year. I'm so hoping I can finish this on time. Good luck to me!
( 100 icons for 2026 )
( 100 icons for 2026 )
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 01:55 pm
Friday, March 13th, 2026 05:57 pm
Title: Box Of Treasures
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Ianto, Jack.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1558
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Ianto finds a very strange delivery on his doorstep.
Written For: Weekend Challenge: High Concept at
1_million_words.Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 11:57 am
Book Clubs: I forgot to mention that I had two book club meetings in February. One was a sort of re-organization meeting for Crones and Tomes. And the other was for the Travelers’ Century Club book club, which discussed The Long Road to Cullaville: Stories from my travels to every country in the world by Boris Kester. Boris joined us for the discussion and was fairly interesting. By the way, there was a little blurb about me as co-coordinator of the book club in The Centurian (the TCC monthly newsletter). In the meantime, my longest running book club seems to have completely fizzled out. I did send an email to the members asking if we have officially disbanded and have heard absolutely nothing back.
MIT Reception: Last week, I went to an MIT Leadership Circle reception at the International Spy Museum. This is one of those things you get invited to by giving enough money annually. They had a nice assortment of heavy hors d’oeuvres (along with beer or wine, though I opted for sparkling water). That was followed by a talk on cryptography and the problem of verifiability by MIT Professor Yael Taumann Kalai, I have to admit that much of her talk went over my head. I only stayed briefly for coffee and dessert afterwards. The venue was a bit disappointing, as we didn’t really get to see the museum and the conference room area we were in was a bit too small for easy mingling. I still had some enjoyable conversations, but it wasn’t one of the better MIT-related events I’ve been to.
Loser Brunch - Philadelphia: For those who don’t know, Losers are devotees of what used to be the Washington Post Style Invitational, a humor contest that continues via Substack. There are a couple of big parties every year and brunches more or less monthly. On Saturday, I made the long drive up to Philadelphia for a Loser Brunch. Most of the drive wasn’t too bad, but my GPS took me through central Philadelphia, which was particularly slow, due to the flower show. And the last part of the trip involved a maze of narrow streets where everyone was driving over 40 miles per hour despite a speed limit of 25. I was able to park just a block away from the house where the event was. We normally do brunches at restaurants more or less around the D.C. metro area, but the reason for this one was that Judy had just moved from Florida and can’t really go to public venues due to severe fragrance allergies. And we were leveraging off another big name loser having moved to a retirement community not far away, as well as yet another one who was in town from Greece. There was a wide mix of interesting conversation, some of it involving topics dear to my heart, e.g. MIT and the Boston Red Sox. I contributed a container of dark chocolate coated cherries Cindy had given me. The other chocolate she gave me I will eat, but I have an aversion to cherries which give me flashbacks to childhood cough syrup experiences. Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a couple of hours.
Visiting Eric: I leveraged off the trip to Philadelphia to visit my friend, Eric, who has been at a rehab facility there for a long time. I won’t talk in any detail about his medical condition, but it was pretty depressing seeing how weak he is. His room (well, his part of a shared room) is full of books and he spends most of his time reading. I brought him a dozen books and I hope he’ll enjoy at least some of them.
After visiting him, I drove to a hotel near the airport, where I stayed overnight. The hotel didn’t include breakfast, but there was a very nice little diner reasonably nearby. I love old-fashioned small town diners and had an excellent omelet with hash browns, toast, and coffee. The drive back wasn’t too bad, at least until the Beltway, which was a slog. Overall, it was a pretty good weekend trip, but it reminded me why I normally take the train when I go to Philadelphia.
Stafford Challenge Week 8:
7 March 2026 - Trust
8 March 2026 - International Women’s Day
9 March 2026 - Early Spring
10 March 2026 - To Do Lists
11 March 2026 - Next to Illegible
12 March 2026 - Anagrammatic Irony
13 March 2026 - Twists of Fate
MIT Reception: Last week, I went to an MIT Leadership Circle reception at the International Spy Museum. This is one of those things you get invited to by giving enough money annually. They had a nice assortment of heavy hors d’oeuvres (along with beer or wine, though I opted for sparkling water). That was followed by a talk on cryptography and the problem of verifiability by MIT Professor Yael Taumann Kalai, I have to admit that much of her talk went over my head. I only stayed briefly for coffee and dessert afterwards. The venue was a bit disappointing, as we didn’t really get to see the museum and the conference room area we were in was a bit too small for easy mingling. I still had some enjoyable conversations, but it wasn’t one of the better MIT-related events I’ve been to.
Loser Brunch - Philadelphia: For those who don’t know, Losers are devotees of what used to be the Washington Post Style Invitational, a humor contest that continues via Substack. There are a couple of big parties every year and brunches more or less monthly. On Saturday, I made the long drive up to Philadelphia for a Loser Brunch. Most of the drive wasn’t too bad, but my GPS took me through central Philadelphia, which was particularly slow, due to the flower show. And the last part of the trip involved a maze of narrow streets where everyone was driving over 40 miles per hour despite a speed limit of 25. I was able to park just a block away from the house where the event was. We normally do brunches at restaurants more or less around the D.C. metro area, but the reason for this one was that Judy had just moved from Florida and can’t really go to public venues due to severe fragrance allergies. And we were leveraging off another big name loser having moved to a retirement community not far away, as well as yet another one who was in town from Greece. There was a wide mix of interesting conversation, some of it involving topics dear to my heart, e.g. MIT and the Boston Red Sox. I contributed a container of dark chocolate coated cherries Cindy had given me. The other chocolate she gave me I will eat, but I have an aversion to cherries which give me flashbacks to childhood cough syrup experiences. Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a couple of hours.
Visiting Eric: I leveraged off the trip to Philadelphia to visit my friend, Eric, who has been at a rehab facility there for a long time. I won’t talk in any detail about his medical condition, but it was pretty depressing seeing how weak he is. His room (well, his part of a shared room) is full of books and he spends most of his time reading. I brought him a dozen books and I hope he’ll enjoy at least some of them.
After visiting him, I drove to a hotel near the airport, where I stayed overnight. The hotel didn’t include breakfast, but there was a very nice little diner reasonably nearby. I love old-fashioned small town diners and had an excellent omelet with hash browns, toast, and coffee. The drive back wasn’t too bad, at least until the Beltway, which was a slog. Overall, it was a pretty good weekend trip, but it reminded me why I normally take the train when I go to Philadelphia.
Stafford Challenge Week 8:
7 March 2026 - Trust
8 March 2026 - International Women’s Day
9 March 2026 - Early Spring
10 March 2026 - To Do Lists
11 March 2026 - Next to Illegible
12 March 2026 - Anagrammatic Irony
13 March 2026 - Twists of Fate
Friday, March 13th, 2026 04:11 pm
Or whatever. This is clearly my week for being Grumpy Archivist.
Have been solicited to review article for journal with which I have had a long connection, following a recent backstory I will not go into.
But anyway, I have been asked to review it, and it is definitely Within My Purlieu -
Perhaps too much so, because on opening the document to check that it in fact was, the person sending it having given me no indication of what it was about -
Discovered it was based upon an archive with which I had a significant history.
And no, the fact that there is this beautiful and fairly substantial archive in lovely curated order available to the researcher is a lot less down to the creating body (okay, I will give them points for the stuff actually having survived in fairly good nick) than to the work of archivists over 2-3 decades acquiring the material (in batches as it turned up during office moves and so on), sorting it into some kind of coherent order, and cataloguing it.
A saga which is actually recounted in the online catalogue to the collection, not to mention an article wot I writ about the organisation in question.
It is actually a pretty cool organisation, compared to some I have had dealings with, but superior archive processing, not really in their skill-set.
Grump. Will try and make tactful point about acknowledging the labour of archivists....
***
We may recall the saga of the tech bro whose sprog did not want the AI teddy he had acquired for her to talk back, and turned the speech facility off, his head around this he could not get -
And this is very creepy, no lessons have been learnt: AI toys for children misread emotions and respond inappropriately, researchers warn:
The parents in the study were interested in the toy's potential to teach language and communication skills.
However, their children frequently struggled to converse with it. Gabbo didn't hear their interruptions, talked over them, could not differentiate between child and adult voices and responded awkwardly to declarations of affection.
When one five-year-old said, "I love you," to the toy, it replied: "As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed."
The concern is that at a developmental stage where children are learning about social interaction and cues, generative AI output could be confusing.
Well, at least they aren't (yet) brainwashing children into correct societal mores as in Harry Harrison's 'I Always Do What Teddy Says'.
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 11:28 am
Today is partly cloudy and chilly with blustery wind.
I fed the birds. I've seen several sparrows and house finches plus a mourning dove.
I put out water for the birds.
.
I fed the birds. I've seen several sparrows and house finches plus a mourning dove.
I put out water for the birds.
.
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 12:00 pm
https://www.tiktok.com/@duckprintspress/video/7616760976498511134?_r=1&_t=ZP-94eqYeuCWjO
(Video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a bookshelf and speaks. /end ID)
Transcript: How do you feel, given Duck Prints Press’s mission statement and origin, about publishing books that are proudly “serial number filed off” fanfiction?
So, for people who aren’t familiar with that term, it just means somebody took a fanfic and, like, used find-and-replace to change the characters names and now are marketing it as original fiction. So if it was, I don’t know, Castiel and Dean – to use my own example – not that I’ve filed off serial numbers but I have written a lot of Destiel – then, you know, maybe Dean becomes some guy named Mitch, and Cas becomes, you know, Richard, and Mitch and Richard have their romance for the ages.
In this “original work,” how do I feel about it? I think it depends. I think it can be well done. I certainly – I don’t wanna name names, but I’ve been in fandom long enough that I know of major published works that were fanfic that are not widely known to have been fanfic and are very popular and are not getting, the, “oh, it’s got the serial numbers filed off, it’s bad.”
I think, just like most kinds of writings, it can be well done, it can be poorly done. I know as an author, at a point when I was having trouble making words on original work, I would write – I mostly write alternative universes, often very very far from the founding material. And part of the reason I did that was with the expectation that someday I would file the serial numbers off my own work. And it’s relatively easy to do when it’s very far from canon. That said, I think needs to be more than just a find-and-replace.
There’s things that work in fanfiction that won’t make sense if it’s an original fiction. If it’s poorly done, if those things aren’t changed, then it’s gonna read like fanfiction even if – you know – every will know, if I – I used Dean and Castiel as an example. If Dean – I mean if Mitch is still a monster hunter, and Richard is still an angel of the lord, it’s going to be pretty damn obvious that it was Supernatural fanfic, and that’s not necessarily gonna be that entertaining for people to read if they’re not interested in the fandom.
On the other hand, you know, I know of a Dean/Cas work that got remade as femslash – as sapphic – and completely rewritten. It’s a completely different book now even tho it has the same basic story and that’s bad in and of itself. So, what I think about it is – it really depends.
I think when they lean-in on that part for the marketing, though, that’s a little awkward. I feel like if any fan author did what tradpub is doing with “it’s actually Dramione” which is the ship for Draco Malfoy and Hermione. Or, you know, this was very clearly Reylo – which is Kylo Ren and Rey from Star Wars. Like… if any of us did that, we’d get our butts sued off. And it’s a little obnoxious to see places that are bigger than us taking advantage of that part of fandom culture in a way that fans never actually could. And that’s quite aside from whether or not they’re good books or bad books, because I think trying to say it’s okay when they’re good and it’s bad when they’re bad is actually not maybe the best framework for it.
But, yeah, sorry, I could keep going. I have strong opinions about fandom stuff. Basically, I think it can be done well. I think it can be done poorly. I don’t love the way it’s being marketed.
This is an Ask Me Anything. I’m Claire, the owner of Duck Prints Press. Hit me up if you have any questions!
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 11:01 am
New Worlds: Miscellaneous Arts
Throughout the art sections of this Patreon, I've been grouping them into broad categories: visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and so forth. But what about the arts that are kinda of . . . none of the above?
This is a fun ramble through many different arts and crafts.
Throughout the art sections of this Patreon, I've been grouping them into broad categories: visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and so forth. But what about the arts that are kinda of . . . none of the above?
This is a fun ramble through many different arts and crafts.
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Friday, March 13th, 2026 03:28 pm
( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )
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