frenzy | Network

Image: Laser-eyed loon flying away with the "Don't Tread on Me Snake" in her beak. The words "Don't Tread on US" appear in laser light trails around her head (by Cas Fern, local tattoo artist.)

I took a break on Sunday. The weather here in Minnesota has finally stepped up to join the resistance. Today we are expecting -20 F/ -29 C windchills and yesterday the windchills were around -11 F /-23 C. I won't lie. I let Mother Nature take my shift. There were things happening, including my singing group, but I spent the day baking hot cross buns and snuggling under blankets.

Rest is resistance, too.

If you are not from around here and/or would like to watch

naomikritzer talk about her experiences "commuting," and talk generally, along with Diana McCleery, about what things are like on the ground here in Minneapolis and St. Paul. My friend Cliff interviewed her on an SFF videocast:

Watch on YouTube

It's a good watch? I will say that the guy who opens and closes the video, Bob, is a bit of a character, but if you can get past that and some of the echo in Naomi's microphone, it's very informative. Naomi recently did a ride-along with the folks who are self-organizing to follow and harrass ICE vehicles and so it's fascinating to hear how it's being done.

I always feel that people don't quite talk enough about the mutual aid that folks are up to--but the truth is the quiet revolution just isn't splashy enough for the front page.

( Read more... )

I know this seems like a petty thing, in these parlous times, but I am having a hard time finding bookends. We are finally, finally getting all the books out of storage and sorted and on shelves and they might almost fit if we have enough bookends. (If you're going to do part of a shelf as 2 rows of paperbacks, that needs at least 1 bookend to keep the last ones from falling into the larger books that are going as single rows.)

Where can I find plain metal bookends, like the kind they use in libraries? I do NOT want to get them from Amazon, for political reasons. Neither do I want to get them from Target. Once, I might have tried Home Depot, but it turns out that they are cooperating with ICE in deeply distressing ways so I don't want to do business with them either. Etsy is generally recommended as an alternative to Amazon, but they just have decorative standalone bookends. Some of them are really pretty but they are too bulky for this purpose.

Public

US Treasury Secretary Bessent: It's a complete canard to think President Trump's action on Greenland is due to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well sure, no evidence for that at all. Except of course the letter Trump wrote to the Norwegian PM saying "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace".

Yes, I was surprised too. He can write?!

Oh, and also: he literally writes diplomatic messages like Truth Social posts.

Lesson for future constitutional scholars: all the checks and balances in the world are no bloody use if nobody will bloody well use them.

Current Mood: weird

I worked more yesterday. At least I got to the point where both of the jobs I had the goal of building over the weekend were "done"...as in a rough draft was written out and the application is starting up. Now I need to spend this holiday troubleshooting and fixing whatever is wrong with it all. At least that helps me feel progress was made so far. In the evening Mary Beth and I made our grocery run to Superlo. Okay, I guess I'd better go do this thing.

Current Mood: bluh
Current Music: Eric Dolphy - Conversations [Musical Prophet: the Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions]

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Current Mood: enthralled

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

10 happy times

1. Quiet mornings before my wife gets up when I can read, write and update my DW with Ella nearby.
2. Hammock time with Ella.
3. Browsing in a bookstore.
4. Cooking for my parents and/or wife.
5. When I'm in the midst of a solid piece of writing that is flowing.
6. Puttering around outside looking at trees and rocks.
7. Listening to music, discovering new-to-me music, talking to people about music.
8. Sending and receiving snail mail, whether it's Postcrossing or mail to/from people I know.
9. Figuring things out, making something new, having to work out how to put something together.
10. When you see something or hear something and it sparks an idea.

Challenge #7

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

I like my ability to be all in and focused in a conversation with a student, especially when it comes to their writing.

I like how I can chain together random things and make something beautiful.

I like my purple glasses.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

I keep copious notes on my phone and in commonplace books of raw material for writing. I collect stories from people, interesting words, bits of poetry, images, etc. When I have an idea for something, I page randomly through all of that and see what if anything sticks. Then I do an enormous amount of research (my favorite part of the process) and start a google doc with research notes and chunks of writing. Sometimes I do a sketch to help visualize the motion of the plot. When I wrote a crossover that involved House of Leaves, I sketched the house I was using as my setting so I could keep the physical space in front of me.

Then I write from both ends and the middle in pieces that are gradually stitched together. I'm not great at plots; I let the imagery and characters do the heavy lifting.

Once I have a draft, I rewrite it obsessively until I'm happy with it.

( pics )

I also generally carry sticky notes and have a lot of things jotted on those. I've been keeping commonplace books since middle school (they were spirals back then), so I have a lot of material. Honestly, I never have used most of it directly in my writing, but I feel like the ideas I have tried out in those pages are like training for when I do write a completed pieces. And sometimes I just enjoy writing short pieces that no one else will ever see, just for me.

Giffen plot and breakdowns, DeMatteis script, Hughes pencils #33, Tom Artis pencils #36.
Warning for suicidal behavior.

Issue #33, “Nitwits, Knuckleheads, and Poozers!,” begins with an old-fashioned narrative caption or two. “It’s a lazy afternoon, and Guy Gardner is bored. Heaven help us all.” ( Remember what being bored for a whole afternoon was like? )

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Current Mood: sleepy

Jan. 19th...

I Couldn't Believe That

The Highway Department

Called My Dad A Thief

But When I Got Home,

All The Signs Were There.

This week's song comes from the 2024 movie, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", the Bee Gees "Tragedy".

Watch on YouTube

This Week's Movie Quote...

R.: Can you swim?
E.: Well, of course I can swim, if the occasion calls for it.
R.: [throwing her overboard] Trust me. It calls for it.

Poll #34097

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

View Respondents

Which Movie Does This Quote Come From?

View Answers

Brother Bear
0 (0.0%)

The Jungle Cruise
1 (25.0%)

The Mummy
3 (75.0%)

I Don't Have A Clue...
0 (0.0%)

Last Week's Movie Quote

Buttercup: We'll never survive.
Westley: Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has.

It comes from the 1987 classic, yes there are classics from the 1980s, "The Princess Bride".
Such a cast: Fred Savage, Peter Falk, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane...

Watch on YouTube

Fooled very few of you again this week. :o

Those Who Knew or Guessed Correctly...

meathiel

seaivy

sidhe_uaine42

legalmoose LJ

christalin80

chaquir

murakozi

legalmoose DW

thewayne DW

joseph_teller

garote

Why do I always let days get this short before I get my act together anymore? Saturday I let get so short there was none left when I crashed, and nothing accomplished. Today I didn't get out of bed until a bit after noon, and I was going to do some laundry and empty the trash cans, and didn't do anything. Now it's almost midnight and I'm rushing to get this entry done, and I haven't even had dinner yet, though it is on cooking.

I suppose the latter is a small miracle, for these times. I haven't checked the weather report yet either, so I have no idea if tomorrow will be as near balmy as today was. I'm hoping not, savings on the utility bill not withstanding. I'm just missing the feeling of winter, and the mildness is making me fear the arrival of summer. But no time, no time, no time.

( Sunday Verse )

Now, we don't have a coffee maker. We have a french press, and we have a pourover thinger, and no coffee maker. Electric coffee makers are roach magnets, and I will stand by that statement.

But the job has a coffee maker, a nice new model after the pot on the old one broke, and the lid on top opens to the left, which means you have to hold the coffee pot in your right hand if you want to pour the coffee into the machine. Also, all the measurement numbers on the coffee pot are only visible if you're holding the handle in your right hand.

And you may say this is petty, and it is - well, it's petty for me because I have two hands, I might well be more annoyed, and justifiably, if I was missing one! - but somebody made a choice to hinge the lid on the left instead of on the back, and somebody, maybe that same somebody, made a choice to only put numbers on one side of the handle instead of both. And they didn't have to make those choices, they could've made different choices that didn't screw me over personally, me and all the other lefties as well as approximately half of all people who don't have mobility in their right hand or don't have that hand at all*, and they chose poorly. Probably didn't even think it through even a tiny little bit.

* Wait, is this a valid assumption? Or are people more likely to be disabled on this side or that side?

************************

( Read more... )

A coworker told me about a California-based burger chain that opened some locations in Maryland. From how he described it, I thought the nearest one would be a 90 minute drive away. Eh, maybe if I'm in that area. Then I find there's one about 30 minutes away and in an area I visit more often. Cool.

I was looking up some other nearby restaurants and sometimes the maps will show two different ones at one location? Apparently there's some kind of sub-franchise branding thing going on, where an existing restaurant will get some kind of license to make certain branded items in their own kitchen? I guess. I don't know how it works. What I do know is I'm less likely to go to those places because if they can't be bothered to have those items on their menu in the first place and instead sell them under the banner of another business, something is up and I don't want any part of that. The sub-franchises also tend to have terrible reviews. This usually doesn't happen with places that are busy enough making their own stuff.

The Goodwill VCR has a new belt, replacement remote, and it works again for an all-in price of about $25. Great, I'll take that as a win. It's not the fanciest VCR here but it does have the basics going on and that's what's important. Thirty years ago I was going for machines with as many features and functions as I could afford and I made use of that extra tech. Now I'm happy if it can play tapes.

I checked out Super Rajikon's site for some parts, and I thought that I'd have to go to Japan and be there in person to buy from them. Oh, they work with Buyee? Well, that makes things easier. I can't say the same about MOSAIC.WAV's site. Their online store is for only the truly dedicated and for those in Japan. But I won't be discouraged! If I have a big enough pile of excuses to go to Japan, they become reasons to go. (Do not apply that logic to other things.) Look, I know there are plenty of other countries to visit but I also know what butters my bread. Speaking of which:

Frieren Fridays are back.

I thought they might fix it quick, and they did. This patch, and one other, can be downloaded and installed via Windows Update.

What I didn't know was there was another bug also addressed by these patches.

The problem involved Remote Desktop and prevented you from connecting to a computer via Remote Desktop, I'm not sure if it bugged your computer trying to do the connecting or bugged the remote host that you were trying to connect to. Regardless, it should be fixed now.

The thing that I don't get is that I thought MS patches like this were tested through the beta program before public release. Perhaps they're just tested internally and their QA department slipped up and didn't do sufficient testing to catch these problems before they shipped.

Who knows. But at least they were prompt fixing it.

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-issues-emergency-out-of-band-update-for-windows-11-to-address-major-bugs-that-broke-pc-shutdowns-and-sign-ins

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/18/1932246/microsoft-forced-to-issue-emergency-out-of-band-windows-update

I am a knotted nebula—
a whirling flame
Shrieking aftire the endless darkness ...
I am the eternal center of gravity
and about me swing the crazy moons—
I am the thunder of rising suns,
the blaze of the zenith—
... the tremble of women’s bodies
in the arms of lovers ...
I sit on top of the Pole
Drunk with starry splendor
Shouting hozzanas at the Pleiades
... booting footballs at the moon—
I shall outlast the sun
and the moon
and the stars.…

*****

_Link

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frenzy

January 2026

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Network

Your Daily Laser Loon Art from the Resistance

Beavis and Butthead #22

bookends

Oh FFS

Keeping Going

Heated Rivalry rec

Snowflake Challenge #6

Snowflake Challenge #7

Snowflake Challenge #8

Green Friendliness: JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA #33, 36 (JLI 46)

Heated Rivalry rec

Interesting Links for 19-01-2026

Isn't It Punny.....

Songs From The Movies.....

Monday At The Movies.....

52/323-324: No Time

Job has a coffee maker

I come not to praise Caesar but to drizzle it on my salad

Microsoft releases out of band patch to fix shutdown bug in Windows 11 plus one more bug

Youth by Frank Horne

Profile

January 2026