Reading

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Sakamoto, Comica

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Public Presentations and Free Academic Books

In the next few weeks, I will be speaking on two very different topics. The first on September 13, hosted by the Melbourne Agnostics Society, will be on "Stoicism, Taoism and Apathy", where I'll be wearing my hat as the University Outreach Officer for the International Society for Philosophers (yes, there is such a thing). I promise that the presentation may be quite different from what one might assume from the title! I am not giving too much away, however, in previewing that there is a great deal of similarity in what could be called the psychological versions of Stoicism and Taoism, although even this touches upon a common physics and even metaphysics that correlates with the two; the Logos and the Dao.

The second presentation is part of the "New Zealand Research Software Engineering Conference" on September 23-24. Despite my deep wish to have another excuse to return to the home country, this conference is being held entirely online. My presentation, with the truly riveting title "Programming Principles in a High Performance Computing Environment", which will provide both an overview of
the current postgraduate cohort's programming experience, their needs, and the relevant training courses that I conduct at the University of Melbourne, especially in relation to high performance and parallel code. It will dovetail quite well with recent workshops that I conducted last week on "Regular Expressions with Linux" and "GPGPU Programming", along with near-future workshops on "Mathematical Applications and Programming" and the ever-popular "High Performance and Parallel Python".

Finally, on a related note, many would have seen from photos on Facebook that I am giving away a number of academic and general books, spanning my rather diverse interests; about five hundread in total and a shared Google Drive folder has been created for those who wish to peruse, with more (especially from business studies and computer science) forthcoming. I suspect after this, the next giveaway will be from my fiction books and then from my rather vast music collection. All of this is in aid of finding happy homes for various useful things that I don't have a strong emotional attachment to, creating more space within my abode, and, ultimately, thinking of where I will live for the next chapter in my life. But that is in a couple of years at least; nobody has ever accused me of acting with only short-term in mind.

Entry tags:

outer:health

on survivng

Over on the 32-bit cafe board, Eladnarra linked to a recent post of hers about disability in the recent blog post thread, and two other community members chimed in about their wives' experiences as breast cancer survivors, and I started thinking. My thoughts got a little overgrown for a reply on a message board, so I thought I'd write a post instead.

( cw for medical discussion, unsurprisingly )

I don't have a conclusion. Just... I was thinking about it.

Current Mood: nostalgic

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That was rather bizarre.

A rustle in the kitchen woke me up around 4:30am, and I couldn't get back to sleep. Upon emerging from the bedroom, I heard voices upstairs, which meant both kids were awake. So I went to investigate, and found them playing a DS game.

I mentioned something to the effect of being glad that they could still play their old video games, and Will expressed interest in revisiting some of the CD-ROM games that they played on the ancient iMac when they were little. That machine is buried downstairs in the office closet, but its box of games was nearby, so we looked through that.

Will then asked where the Myst CD was, and I said that I had moved it back into my box of PC games when we were packing. So I opened up that box, and the boys boggled over its contents. I told them that most of those games would only be playable on my old Windows 95 laptop, or in emulation.

Then I realized that the aforementioned Windows 95 laptop was right there, so I got it out and plugged it in. The hinge can't support the screen any more, but otherwise it still works.

And that's how I ended up playing the original version of You Don't Know Jack with my oldest kid, who wasn't even born when it was released. But it held up surprisingly well! And we were pretty evenly matched.

I didn't find much left on there in the way of personal documents, apart from a copy of the release notes for the final version of the ChaoticMUX source code, oddly enough.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Entry tags:

books

my top 15 works of fiction from the past 15 years

A good friend of mine (who reads as much as I do, if not more) recently sent me his current top 5 list and when I tried to reciprocate, I had such a hard time narrowing my list down that this is what I came up with, in roughly reverse chronological order.

The Murderbot Diaries series (7 books to date) by Martha Wells (2017-2025)

The Ambit's Run series (2 books to date) by L.M. Sagas (2024)

The Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik (2020-2022)

The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood (2020)

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone (2019)

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (2019)

The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club trilogy by Theodora Goss (2017-2019)

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2019)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (2019)

All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2016)

The Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie (2013-2015)

The Old Man's War series (6 books to date) by John Scalzi (2005-2015)

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (2012)

The Martian by Andy Weir (2011)

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

Honorable mention: Seanan McGuire, T. Kingfisher, Becky Chambers, Jim Butcher, Katherine Addison

And yes, I know that there's a new Old Man's War book coming out later this month, but I have plenty of other books to read in the meantime!

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Eliciting Explainability Requirements for Safety-Critical Systems: A Nuclear Case Study

One of my post-docs, and I was previously on the supervisory team for her PhD, has been partly occupying her time generating publications from her thesis. This is one such. She's addressing the question of what people actually want when they ask that an autonomous system provide explanations. In particular, though she doesn't really get into that in the paper, most explainability research has focused specifically on neural networks that are classifying things into groups, not on robotic systems that are taking decisions about what to do next.

Eliciting Explainability Requirements for Safety-Critical Systems: A Nuclear Case Study talks through her approach, and tries to categorise her results into groups. There is also some formalisation of the requirements into logic, though via the use of structured English to make it more comprehensible. Lastly she reports on some lessons learned.

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September 2025 Ink & Pen palette

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

Back to school for my kiddo! And I bought the Pelikan Pura to replace my Pelikan Twist and I have zero regrets.

Here’s this month’s stationary supplies:

Stickers

household stuff sheet from Eggtart Studio (via stickii; I think this was an advent sheet)

day to day icons sheet from Neko Mori Arts (via stickii, I think I bought this one specifically because I needed more habit stickers. Currently tracking writing days with these!)

Calendar from Mossy Pine (as usual; I got a whole year’s worth!)

These were the intersection of being a little bit back to school-ish and also having the right colour vibe to go with the inks I wanted.

Paper Products

Campus Diary free monthly calendar (new)

Clairfontaine Triomphe blank notebook (going since April 2025)

Koyuko campus notebook cover

I already talked about my new calendar for the year, a Campus free monthly diary. It worked great with the fountain pen I used for numbers in September so I’m pretty happy with it so far, and I’ve got it slotted into the green cover (pictured below) on the opposite site of my current journal. Because they’re slotted in opposite sides rather than using strings or clips in the middle, there’s a bit of a gap in the centre. I was worried this would be a problem for writing but so far it seems to be fine. I’ll try some ink testing with dip pens on the back pages when I next do swatching.

Fountain Pens and Inks

Pilot Elite E95S <m> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal, carry over from last month)

Pelikan Pura <b> – Diamine Snow Globe (blue with blue shimmer)

Pelikan Twist <m> – Diamine Winterberry (red with red shimmer)

The theme of this month is “omg I finally have pens that work with shimmer ink“. I loved these colours in the Inkvent 2024 calendar but was worried I woudln’t be able to use them.

Since my blog post about the Pelikan Twist I managed to find someone selling the particular model of Pelikan Pura that I’d fallen for with the broad nib I wanted at a sale price, so I decided to jump on it even though I’m unemployed and should probably not be buying $100 pens. But I *love* this pen as much as I hoped I would and it fills a gap in my collection so I don’t feel like I made the wrong choice. The Pelikan Pura anniversary design with the little Y geometric snowflake shape and the pretty teal colour is fantastic, and obviously I’m very excited about having a feed that doesn’t clog up with sparkle. It has a round grip so no issues with that (the way there were with the Twist’s odd triangular grip). I expect this pen will be inked almost constantly since it will likely be my sparkle pen going fowards, and I have a lot of sparkle inks from Inkvent to use. Honestly, this pen jumped immediately into second place in my collection (behind my beloved Pilot Elite).

After this month, the Twist will probably go back to being relegated as a sometimes pen because of the annoying triangle pen, although I’ve been playing with a coil grip thing on it that helps a bit and we’ll see how I feel about it after a month of use.

Entry tags:

outer:writing

maybe a second thing

ficwip posted: The Fic That Haunts You

The Fic That Haunts You is a 3-month event challenging us to make progress on fics we think about a lot but, for some reason, never work on. We'll attempt to get past this by identifying exactly what's getting in our way & making plans to get past it.

Look, I'm really bad at doing more than one thing at a time and I know this about myself.

"Then why did you sign up for this second thing?" you may ask, because I'm kind of asking myself that.

Except... well, I read the description and I know exactly what the Fic that Haunts Me is. It's the novel I've listed as my theoretical project for NaNoWriMo half a dozen times. The thing I've been trying to rewrite since 2010 or so. It's Puzzles. It's always Puzzles. And I've tried to write the first chapter or two at least four times, and never gotten past that. ( Read more... )

Entry tags:

leather,
photos

Leather notebook cover

A friend had a synthetic notebook cover that was falling apart. It was a simple flat cover, that held the notebook with an elastic, threaded through holes in the spine. We got the idea to replace it with a leather one. I took measurements in the pub, we went shopping for supplies, and I got to making.

( Details )

Finished notebook cover, with notebook
Photo by chebe

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Costume Bracket: Quarter Final, Post 2

Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.

( Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.

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1SE for August 2025

Watch on YouTube

Despite all the Welsh holiday footage, Astro managed to sneak in here quite a lot. Meeting the talkative long-eared owl was one of the highlights. She had many and varied opinions.

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Wish World/The Reality War

I went into Wish World/The Reality War knowing it was likely to be a hot mess and I was not wrong.

( Are we still doing spoilers? )

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Happy news of the day: Whoopi Goldberg wants people to watch more women's sports. So if you sign up for a free account on Pluto.TV and search for AWSN (All Women's Sports Network) you can watch a selection of women's sports matches and news and documentaries for free. Huzzah!

Thanks to The Happy Newspaper for the tip.

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Campus vs Traveler's blank monthly calendars (size comparison)

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

Back to school! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve decided to use September as my “new year” because it works well with my kid’s school stuff. So it’s time to bid farewell to last year’s calendar, and set up a fresh one! I’m moving from the Traveler’s Notebook free monthly calendar to the KOKUYO Campus one, mostly because the latter is a bit bigger. (Spoiler: the squares are about 18% bigger.)

Last year’s calendar was a Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar. I love the idea of the system of inexpensive refill notebooks and accessories in a planner cover that stays with you, but I wasn’t sure the slimmer form factor was going to work for me.

Traveler's Notebook blank monthly calendar with stickers on the front and a zippered pouch attached to the back cover. The biggest sticker is a shiny aurora over a mountain. On the upper left there is a smaller sticker of a fox-person sitting in lotus position with the caption "breathe" and in the upper right corner there is a sticker with a cat sleeping beside a witch had with the caption "today is a good day for getting cozy" — Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar with stickers on the front and a zippered pouch attached to the back cover. The biggest sticker is a shiny aurora over a mountain. On the upper left there is a smaller sticker of a fox-person sitting in lotus position with the caption “breathe” and in the upper right corner there is a sticker with a cat sleeping beside a witch had with the caption “today is a good day for getting cozy”

Overall, I thought it was a great little calendar. I liked the textured cardstock cover, and I liked the whole setup even more when I picked up the zippered pouch that I have attached to the back cover and use for stickers.

Traveler's notebook with plastic zipper pouch accessory attached to the back. In this photo it's flipped open so you can see the sticker sheets I have stuck in there. — Traveler’s notebook calendar with plastic zipper pouch accessory attached to the back. In this photo it’s flipped open so you can see the sticker sheets I have stuck in there.

I particularly liked this format when travelling this summer, when I decided to use the blank back pages I hadn’t used for testing pens as the place for travel journal entries rather than dragging my regular A5 journal around with me. The tall-thin format is pleasantly easy to pull out of a bag.

Traveler's notebook calendar with zippered pouch accessory attached to back cover. This shows the loose stickers I have in the pouch. — Traveler’s notebook calendar with zippered pouch accessory attached to back cover. This shows the loose stickers I have in the pouch.

But when I’m *not* out of the house (which is most of the time) the calendar is just a little small. I use my monthly calendars for tracking a bunch of things, and while some days there’s enough space, that’s not true of all days when I have more stuff I want to record. I’ve also found that a lot of my favourite “small” stickers that I use as habit trackers take up a lot of space. (The dogs below were marking days that I’d spent time writing.)

A peek inside my calendar showing fairly full calendar squares including some tracking runes, dog stickers, washi tape (marking longer events) and a note marking my last day at Intel.

Since I already use an A5 notebook for my journal, I decided I might as well match it for the calendar this year. Honestly I wanted to do that last year but a lot of the A5 options are Monday start and I thought that might be annoying when Sunday start is the more common format around here. The Traveler’s refill lets you fill in your own days of week. But this year I’m just gonna lean into Monday start. I conceptually like it better so I’ve changed my phone and stuff and we’ll see if I start having off-by-one errors.

So my new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year is a KOKUYO Campus Diary Free Schedule monthly calendar. I should note that although this is a blank calendar, the year overview pages are Jan-Dec still so … I dunno, I guess I could cover the labels or just start in the middle, but I apparently barely used those overview pages last year so I’m guessing it’ll just remain blank or I’ll doodle on it or something. While the book itself is clearly bigger, the layout is such that each day’s square is a bit shorter but wider.

Here’s some size comparisons:

The KOKUYO Campus blank monthly calendar with the Traveler's Notebook blank monthly calendar sitting on top. The Campus notebook is noticably wider and the squares are bigger, altough not as much as they might be since the Campus design leaves some blank space around the edge and the Traveler's does not. — The KOKUYO Campus blank monthly calendar with the Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar sitting on top. The Campus notebook is noticeably wider and the squares are bigger, although not as much as they might be since the Campus design leaves some blank space around the edge and the Traveler’s does not.

I did some measuring too:

Measurements comparing the squares in the Campus blank monthly calendar to the Traveler's one. Numbers in post below this image. — Measurements comparing the squares in the Campus blank monthly calendar to the Traveler’s one. Numbers in post below this image.

Traveler’s Calendar: 27mm wide by 33mm tall (total 891mm squared)

Campus calendar: 34mm wide by 31mm tall (total 1054mm squared)

So the Campus notebook squares are about 18% bigger, I guess. I don’t know yet if that’ll be enough, but I’m unlikely to start carrying around anything bigger than an A5 notebook so if this doesn’t work out I’ll likely have switch to a weekly planner for at least some of my tracking. My calendar seldom leaves the house but I carry it from room to room and into the backyard in my knitting bag, and A5 is my preferred size for that.

The Campus notebook is cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy if I bail on it part way through the year. It looks like I paid $5.50 for the Campus one and $11 for the Traveler’s one, so it’s half the cost but also neither of them is exactly going to break the bank. And yes, I did intentionally buy this earlier in the year to help me resist getting too curious about fall planner launches.

The cover is considerably less nice (thin enough that I will need a flat surface or pencil board to write in this, no pleasant texture) but I have a cover for A5 notebooks that should compensate for the thin cover, and I already own several pencil boards that I use with my current journal, so neither of those is deal breakers at this moment.

Campus Monthly free Diary cover. It's grey and has a picture of some calendar squares on it. — Campus Monthly free Diary cover. It’s grey and has a picture of some calendar squares on it.

I’m also curious to see how I like the Campus paper. It’s supposedly decent enough for fountain pens, and although I only use those for date numbers currently, I’ll be using the pages in the back of the calendar for ink testing. I’m curious to see how I like it, mostly for the fun of testing a different paper. Although they do have a lot of other cute paper products geared at students that are quite reasonably priced, and I’m never sad to have options.

Some things that did work well this year:

Thin washi tape for marking longer blocks of vacation and events. I love the way it looks even if it takes up a few precious mm of space.

Sticker “rewards” for habits. I’m amused by how much more rewarding these are than drawing tracking icons.

Switching to pencil for calendar writing. I tried pen for a while but didn’t love it.

Getting a pen shaped eraser so it fits in my pencil case better.

Getting a pencil board and using it also as a bookmark so my calendar always opened to the right page.

The zipper pouch for stickers.

I may keep the zipper pouch for stickers even though it won’t be stuck on a notebook any more (I mean, I could, but I’m going to try having both A5 notebooks in a single cover so it would be kind of in the way).

I haven’t actually written in the new calendar yet (I’ll be setting it up on labour day and I’m writing this the night before it posts) but I’m excited to try it out!

Current Mood: dorky

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notable quotables

hyounpark has recently started watching the 2022 revival of Quantum Leap, and tonight's episode? Revisited the World Series quake. As somebody who lived through that? ROFL, pedantry ahoy!

Me: "Hi Candlestick! ... wait, happy hour during Game 3 of the Bay Bridge Series? GET UNDER A SOLID DOORWAY NOW."
Me: "WHAT THE HELL YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE FERRY BUILDING FROM THERE IN 1989, NOT EVEN WITH THE FREEWAY COLLAPSE."
Me: "You can't get across the Bay in the time you have! The bridge is down, BART is down, that utility tunnel is at least FIVE MILES LONG, and even when you come up on the Oakland side you still have to get through the entire-ass Port of Oakland. And you're playing a white family, highly unlikely they would have lived in West Oakland at the time, so now you have at least another two miles of running to get anywhere where the apartments look like that and you could plausibly have none or very few Black neighbors, and OH WAIT YOU'D HAVE TO CROSS THE CYPRESS STRUCTURE TO DO THAT, which also fell down in the quake! Your 90 minutes are up, tick tick BOOM."

hyounpark: "Watching this ep with you is WAY more entertaining than watching it by myself would have been!"
Me: "And this didn't even account for going back to their new apartment in SF at least two miles in the wrong direction, RUNNING UPHILL, to look for the kid!"

*

The Strategist interviewed Sally Jessy Raphael a few weeks ago on some of her favorite things, and I feel seen.

"Let me explain. The first thing people say when they see me is, “Oh my God, you’re so short.” This is terrible. I am slightly under five feet. This means that if I go to buy grown-up clothes in the store, everything is too long. Everything. Every skirt, every pair of jeans, it doesn’t matter what I pay or where I shop. So, I have pinking shears. Everything I own, I pink with the pinking shears. It doesn’t make sense for me to go to Kohl’s and buy $9 jeans and then send them to be hemmed for $30. In New York, that’s what it costs to hem. So I gave up on having anybody hem them. And I’m having trouble threading my sewing machine. So pinking shears do everything."

I mean, not that I own a pair of pinking shears, but I'm always on the lookout for jeans that are short enough for me off the rack. Usually, they end up being some form of slim-to-straight fit cropped style, but the best pair of jeans I ever had was a flared sort of baby bellbottom style that I got at a clothing swap like 15 years ago. They didn't last terribly long (got holes on the inner thighs within a couple of years), but I loved the hell out of those jeans - they were button-fly (look, I bought my first pair of jeans with my allowance from the Gap in the early 90s and that's what I imprinted on), they had embroidered cuffs, they flared out below MY knee height just enough to balance my curvy hips better than any pair of then-trendy skinnies ever did, and I wore them at least twice a week while I owned them except in summer.

They were my holy grail of jeans, and I've been looking for anything like them ever since. I've tried on jeans from probably every American mass-market brand in the interim, but no. At this point, I own two pairs of Levi's Wedgie Straights because they are not "cropped" and come in a 26" inseam (so the knees hit where they're supposed to), and are suitable for the times when I just need plain old jeans that don't stand out. They are reliable. But they don't feel like ~me~ the same way these old jeans did.

I know the real answer is that I just need to buy a sewing machine and learn how to make my own jeans, but. Sigh.

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Small Web September, perhaps

Over in smallweb it's smallweb September and so I've been trying to list out the stuff I've been meaning to do on my website and haven't gotten around to.

So far my list is:

probably find a webhost that's not just uploading shit to my email provider?
put my original universe stuff together literally at all
reformat the character reference pages and get them up
putting the art up would also be nice
fanfic archive could use updating/incorporating
so could some random other pages like my Flight Rising lore

Not sure how far I'll actually get in the list but it's nice to kind of lay out what I'm thinking, at least.

The end of September I'm going to be hosting Fourth Wing Femslash Week over on Tumblr again, which people seem to be excited about. It's not a fandom that sees a lot of femslash, so it's fun to drum up some interest.

This week I've been focused on writing for a different event week over there, but after that my plate's mostly clear between now and then so we'll see what happens, eh?

Also at the end of the month I start classes again. Ughhhhhh. Not terribly excited about that, but I guess I'll worry about it when we get there.

Current Mood: rejuvenated
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition

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Culture and Multiculturalism

In recent days, my numerous activities have been interspersed with a few cultural events worthy of mentioning. The first was a special nineteen-part concert, "Songs of Peace and Remembrance: 80 Years On" at the Melbourne Recital Centre from the Shenyang Conservatory of Music, which was nothing short of phenomenal; the erhu solo, "Soul of the Snowy Mountain" was especially captivating. As part of a national tour, the concert was built on the theme of Chinese resistance to the invasion from the Empire of Japan, and the end of the world anti-fascist war. At the reception before the concert, the former President of the Legislative Council, Bruce Atkinson, made the insightful point that the Second World War really started in 1931, with the invasion of Manchuria.

The second event was attending the Conquest Market Day at the ever-beautiful Coburg Town Hall, staffing the RPG Review Cooperative stall's fine collection of second-hand RPG systems from members. I am very thankful for the assistance provided by Andrew D., in delivering the goods, the stunning generosity of Rade V., in providing me a copy of the "Arkham Horror RPG: Hungering Abyss", and the ever delightful opportunity to spend time in the company of Liz B., and Karl B., and, of course, the many people who visited the staff, rummaged, reminisced and explored through our often curious stock. On a related note, this Wednesday I'll be starting up a new RPG story using the ElfQuest RPG and setting, from the comics (running since 1978!) by Wendy and Richard Pini.

The third event was the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance at Hamer Hall, of "Four Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten, Debussy's "La Mer", and finally, Modest Mussorgsky', "Pictures at an Exhibition", which was the main feature of the performance unsurprising as it correlates with a superb narrative, where the movements are quite independent but flow in sequence in a manner that seems perfectly natural. Following both romantic and impressionist styles, with British, French, and Russian thematic content, the performance was provided with a great sense of competence and creativity. The cultural diversity of the orchestra and the vast audience juxtaposed quite strikingly with a handful of boorish anti-immigration protesters who threatened an attendee just before the concert started.

On that note, significant discussion has been made of the "March for Australia" anti-immigration protests that were held over the weekend. Nominally, they argue that migration in a time of housing costs and unemployment is a problem. Factually, the protests are incorrect - net migration (the metric that really matters) is quite low compared to the 20-year average, but of course facts are quite irrelevant to the violent "white nationalists" who are organising these events. Given that more than 97% of Australians come from a migrant background (and needless to say, they don't like indigenous Australians either), it should be clear that we are enriched culturally and economically by our diverse migrant populations, and we have become more capable of a moral universalism as well. The overwhelming majority understands and embraces our diversity, but we must be aware that extremists are in our country, and they are organised, and therefore, we need to be organised against them.

...hi.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: listless
Current Music: In Memoriam: Margaret Thatcher by Chumbawamba

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Thought process: "Why isn't there a biopic about John Brown? His life was weird and full of adventures and it would be a banger. Wait, maybe there is, let me check wikipedia... oh my goodness these are very different movies."

If anyone's seen any of these and they're worth watching (because good), or hatewatching, or avoiding like the plague, then let me know!

Santa Fe Trail (1940), with Raymond Massey as John Brown, also Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Ronald Reagan as General Custer. That's certainly some casting?

Wikipedia says:

[The film] depicted Brown completely unsympathetically as a villainous madman and Massey plays him with a constant, wild-eyed stare. The film gave the impression that he did not oppose slavery

and quotes from the film:

Mammy: "Well, Old John Brown said he's gonna give us freedom, but shuckins, if this here Kansas is 'freedom', then I got no use for it. No, sir." Then, a black man adds, "Me, neither. I just wants to get back home to Texas and sit till Kingdom Come."

So this certainly sounds like a gem.
The Good Lord Bird (2020 miniseries), starring Ethan Hawke as John Brown and an large cast including Daveed Diggs, Orlando Jones, and...Killer Mike? Sure, why not.

Did I know about this one? I bet I did—it won a lot of awards—but everyone's brain was oatmeal in 2020 and I am not sure I formed long term memories. Also maybe I heard of it and assumed it was about the Lord God Bird (the ivory billed woodpecker) because who wouldn't assume that?

Anyway the assessment of this is mostly a lot of awards and a positive rotten tomatoes rating so probably a safer bet watching Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass instead of Ronald Reagan as George Custer, yeow.

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Random Doctor Who Picture

Cover for the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventure Palace of the Red Sun by Christopher Bulis. Picture of a domed palace with four pointy turrets. The silhouettes of two figures, one in a long dress and one in a shorter one walk down an avenue of upright trees to the palace. Everything is in oranges and yellows.

Another blank in my memory. The back makes it sound like there is an underlying quest style narrative which, as I recall, is common in Bulis' works.

Current Mood: hopeful

someone bring harp, lyre, timbrel, dance, lute, pipe, and cymbals (both resounding and loud)

I can't really drink alcohol anymore so there's no point in saving a bottle of something expensive and wonderful for when the day finally comes.

I briefly wondered if I should acquire a vuvuzela so I have it when I need it, but I realized this will be basically a textbook example of a moment for which shofarot are made. I can usually get a good trumpet blast or nine. I'm prepared.

See you all in the streets. Maybe it will happen tomorrow.