Ice Fishing? + Sunset

Feb. 13th, 2026 06:57 pm
yourlibrarian: Jumping Penguin (NAT-JumpingPenguin-sithari.png)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] common_nature


Spotted something last week with a sunset, it looked like a beam of light was coming up from the ground. Tried to zoom in on it to make it a little clearer but I think it was more noticeable in person.

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The next week

Feb. 13th, 2026 09:09 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I'm going to Huddersfield for work on Monday, Wrexham on Wednesday, and at the very end of today I had a call where I ended up agreeing to go to "somewhere near Walsall" on Friday next week (I'm still awaiting the promised email with more specific details than that!).

(For non-locals, these are all 2ish hours away, or less, but one of these in a week would usually be a big deal and leave me really tired the next day and etc.)

They're all trips I really want to make, all for unrelated things that just happen to have turned up at the same time. I'll be fine. But oof!

Tomorrow I'm helping a fellow Queer Club member move heavy furniture to his new place, while V has an unpleasant hospital appointment testing for something potentially serious. Sunday D and I will once again be doing tip runs for V's relative who's clearing out his mum's house...

Everything is... a bit intense at the moment.

I do have almost all of the next week off work (except for a trip to Chester lol, which I actually really want to do). Really looking forward to that.

oursin: Illustration from medieval manuscript of the female physician Trotula of Salerno holding up a urine flask (trotula)
[personal profile] oursin

I was reading this (and the various other reports about pro-natalist pontificating and getting women - the right sort, obvs - to BREED): Reform by-election candidate calls for ‘young girls’ to be given ‘biological reality’ check:

Mr Goodwin – who is standing for Reform UK in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election – argued: “We need to explain and educate to young children, the next generation, the severity of this crisis.
“We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life, and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

And I was thinking, you know who would be spitting tacks and riding in with all her guns blazing on this -

- no other than Dr Marie Stopes, who was so not about woman as mere breeding vessels. And was a) the daughter of an older mother and b) an older mother herself by the time she actually progenated.

Okay, she had views of the day (particularly when it came to daughter-in-laws, sigh), but she was also very much about women's choice, women pursuing careers, women not spending their entire lives in child-bearing, fewer but healthier babies through contraception and spacing, etc etc etc.

In many ways, yes, she was a monster, but a monster I would happily reanimate from the waves off Portland Bill where her ashes were scattered and send after these guys.

Just One Thing (13 February 2025)

Feb. 13th, 2026 12:03 pm
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Navigating disabilities

Feb. 13th, 2026 08:31 am
hunningham: Beautiful colourful pears (Default)
[personal profile] hunningham
Blue badge arrived this morning, and father-in-law and I are both excited. It's going to be easier to find parking spaces when I take Bryan somewhere instead of driving round & round and doing that mental arithmetic for "how far can he walk today?"

We also got a phone-call from the vision support team, and next Thursday someone is coming to demonstrate electronic magnifiers. We have many handhelp magnifiers and Bryan can use them to read large print one word at a time, but it's hard work for him. We're still hoping that some way of reading can be found.

Vision support have recommended applying for attendance allowance, so that's another thing for my list.

Thinking about walking - I have a new-found appreciation for bubble paving. It is so helpful having the road crossing marked, especially when there is a dropped kerb. I feel as if I should drop someone a thank-you note.

Today we are going to Compton Verny to see the exhibition on The Shelter of Stories. We've found that Bryan can still enjoy art exhibitions - I just have to do a lot of narrating.

Daily Happiness

Feb. 12th, 2026 06:36 pm
torachan: my glitch character (glitch)
[personal profile] torachan
1. They finally fixed the broken restroom at work! The store does not have enough restrooms. There is one set of gendered multi-stall employee restrooms upstairs, but the men's has only one stall. Downstairs there are multi-stall restrooms by the food court (two stalls in the men's) and two single toilet gender neutral ones on the other side of the store. The single toilet ones are closest to me now that my desk moved, as I just have to pop downstairs and it's right there, but due to some issues with the door/door frame, one of them has been closed since early December, and it has been so awful, especially during the holiday season. But now the door is finally fixed and both are open, so the days I've been at the store this week, there hasn't been a single time where I've had to wait for a toilet. Huzzah!

2. I made an appointment for my tattoo touch-up, now that it's fully healed. Since I'll be out of town half the week next week, I just asked for something the week after, and got set up for two weeks from today.

3. I usually take my lunch to work, but didn't have anything quick and easy to take today, so I planned to buy something, and remembered that they just introduced a roast beef salad, so I got that. It was really good! The dressing said it was truffle wasabi but neither flavor was very strong. I don't care about truffle at all, but I do like wasabi, and could have stood for it to be a bit tangier but I liked it. In addition to the beef and greens, it also had asparagus, baby corn, and tomatoes.

3. Chloe in the blankets again! (The previous picture I posted of her with her head sticking out from the blanket is now my most popular post on bluesky with like 1.7K likes. I normally get like ten lol. I think my previous most popular photos were a couple hundred?)

oursin: Hedgehog saying boggled hedgehog is boggled (Boggled hedgehog)
[personal profile] oursin

"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker:

London is being used as the backdrop for inaccurate viral videos that reach enormous audiences around the world by playing into the worst stereotypes about the capital.

This was an investigation into one man who was doing this thing:
Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.
“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.
That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”
At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”
....
The TikToker appears to have no concept of the potential real-world impact of his uploads, instead considering everything in terms of view counts and pieces of content.

So he made fake videos about immigrants being housed in prime properties, to which he had access through his job.

He had originally found he could make money through posting videos on TikTok but 'TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them'.

There seems to be just a total disconnect going on in the guy's mind (or he's just ethically vacuous) and generally he does not appear the sharpest blade in the drawer:

Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded.... insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.

He's also
baffled. He can’t understand how London Centric traced his anonymous hate-filled London TikTok account back to his employer by geolocating the wheelie bins in his videos.
“I thought no one’s gonna notice that,” he says. “Why would someone?”

As if people aren't doing this sort of thing all the time.

Just One Thing (12 February 2026)

Feb. 12th, 2026 08:12 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Daily Happiness

Feb. 11th, 2026 08:26 pm
torachan: anime-style avatar of me (me as a doll)
[personal profile] torachan
1. It's the annual insurance open enrollment period at work, and even if we want to keep the exact same plans we currently have, we are required to go in to a session with HR and confirm everything in person, which is annoying, especially as I looked at the calendar and the times they were having a session at the Gardena store were all not great with my schedule. But I saw that there was one at the West LA store today, so last night I messaged the HR guy who is handling it and asked if I could go to that one or if it's just for employees at that location, and he said it was fine, so I popped over there quickly this morning and got that done and then otherwise just worked from home. Plus I hadn't been to that store in several months, and it was nice to see my old employees.

2. I bought a couple sumo tangerines the other day at the store and had one for breakfast this morning and it was so good.

3. Suspicious Gemma! What am I plotting taking her picture like that!?

The manager type

Feb. 11th, 2026 11:06 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

This morning I got to call one of the candidates we interviewed yesterday and offer her the work placement. That felt nice.

But also weird. I've never done anything like this before! I am in a very technical sense her line manager, in that her actual manager, my manager, is now on leave for the next week and a half and he asked me to take care of this. Which meant not just the fun phone call but doing paperwork, and that meant having to write down my own name and contact details where it said "Manager."

Wild.

The less said about the rest of the work day the better, but the rest of the day was good. I went for a nice long walk in the warm(ish) drizzle with Teddy, who drank from so many muddy puddles that he had a big dirty circle on his snout. Like the dog equivalent of a kid with a milk mustache. The air smelled amazing, the plants and the soil are starting to wake up.

Then [personal profile] angelofthenorth invited us over for cheesy toad in the hole, which is a genius idea and I think I might have to make it in future. It was great to see her, and Mr Smith.

And since we'd all planned to go to the gym, she and I walked there while D drove V home and then came back to join me (Miriam having gone swimming). The gym is so much more fun with him there.

Copic Marker Layout for Practicality

Feb. 11th, 2026 01:27 pm
bread: vuvuzela (Default)
[personal profile] bread posting in [community profile] dreamwidthlayouts
Title: Copic Marker Layout
Credit to: [community profile] vuvuzela
Base style: Practicality
Type: CSS
Best resolution: Built in 1912x1074 – Mobile responsive
Tested in: Built in Firefox. Tested in Chrome & Opera on Windows OS. Tested in Android OS with Firefox.
Features: Mobile Responsive! Stylized home page, reading page, entry/comments page, icons page, and "more options" reply page.

Click for image previews

( Layout Instructions, Live Preview, & CSS )
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished Cakes and Ale, which is partly that early C20th litfic convention of a first-person narrator who just happens be around to hear a lot about the actual protags and the plot or at critical moments of same, but actually complicates it with Ashenden knowing that Rosie is not actually dead as everyone else supposes. Not sure the ending really worked.

I then, having got into an Edwardian/Georgian novelist rhythm, went 'ah! time for some Arnold Bennett! the one about the hotel', except I picked up The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which is 1900s thriller hijinx mode with European royalty shenanigans, false identities, etc etc (though I was wondering whether it might adapt into a screwball comedy movie?), and wasn't actually the one I'd read many years ago that I was thinking of.

Which was Imperial Palace (1930), which struck me as, although lacking the highspeed thriller plot element, remarkably like D Francis in its fascination for infrastructure (in this case, running a luxury hotel in London) and competence porn. The running-the-hotel bits and the trials posed for the new supervising housekeeper are, perhaps, at least these days, more interesting than the bits involving Hotel Manager and Rich Man's Daughter Gracie. To give her (and actually, Bennett as author) her due, she is not, whereas she would be in a lot of novels by his contemporaries, an unmitigated bitch (Aldous Huxley's Lucy Tantamount) or a tragic bitch (Michael Arlen's Iris Storm), she has some good points and was a competent racing driver, but she is still annoyingly entitled and egocentric.

I took a break from this because I suddenly had a whim to re-read Mary Renault, The King Must Die (1958) for the first time in absolute yonks. You know, Mary, the sexism and misogyny is not entirely just being Accurate for Period, is it, hmmmm? There is some great stuff in there, but.

On the go

Imperial Palace is very long, and still on the go.

Up next

I think I am up for some Agatha Christie, seriously.

confused about how as well

Feb. 11th, 2026 10:25 am
muladhara: (shinji and koromaru)
[personal profile] muladhara
It was my birthday on Monday, and now I am 45 years old.

Which feels fake, if you ask me. I do not feel like a 45 year old person. And yet I am.

I didn't do anything - just stayed in and chilled. Watched Labyrinth and Back to the Future. Then got bored of watching films, because I prefer to watch films with someone, and I do not have anyone else at the moment. So I watched a bunch of stuff on youtube instead.

I had the preceding week off work, and I'm not entirely sure I know where it went. I had a nurse's appointment and a dentist appointment, but they were on two separate days, so it's not like either of those swallowed one entire day. (Although I had shenanigans with the buses on the day of the dentist appt, so that swallowed more of the day than I would have liked).

Before I was off work, one of the ladies that I work with gave me a sewing machine that she wanted to get rid of, as she was having a clean out, and she'd never used it. It's pretty basic, but it does some fancy stuff (buttonholes, basic overlocking). I have tested it but not really messed with it much, but I am looking forward to using it. I would like to be able to make some clothes with it, because that way I can make things I like the look of, from the type of fabric I would like (natural fibres). I am already daydreaming about things beyond my skill level, lol.

Well, I say that, but actually making a basic jacket is one of the things I want to do, and really it's not that hard. I say, hubristically. But also my mum made her own clothes at one point, so I have books on how to make stuff as well as the internet so, fingers crossed, I might be okay!

Other than that, I thought work might be calming down, but no chance! I should know better by this point! Also I finally joined my workplace's union - I'd thought about it when I first started the job, but didn't think I'd be there very long, then didn't really think about it after that. But then the union rep asked me about joining yesterday (she's been on a bit of a mission to recruit members lately for reasons I'm not going into on a public post), so I did. It's only taken me two and a half years, heh.

I have also been doing some boring house stuff (mostly decluttering cupboards) and now I need to do another tip run before I can do the next bits.

And that's really it for the time being! Time to go and look at some books, I guess!

Just One Thing (11 February 2026)

Feb. 11th, 2026 12:00 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Daily Happiness

Feb. 10th, 2026 10:03 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
1. After much back and forth about it, it's finally settled that I will be going up north to help the new store for a few days, and the dates are set (next Wednesday through Friday). I would prefer not to go at all but I'm glad it's at least sorted, and I am curious to see the new store.

2. We went down to DCA for dinner tonight and had some very tasty lunar new year foods.

3. It's been fairly cool all day today and by the time we got home from Disney it was really windy and cold. It's supposed to tonight and maybe a little tomorrow. Hopefully it's all just overnight and not anything that will interfere with going out of the house tomorrow.

4. Jasper!

2026 Disneyland Trip #10 (2/10/26)

Feb. 10th, 2026 09:08 pm
torachan: john from homestuck looking shocked (john shocked)
[personal profile] torachan
We went down to DCA for dinner tonight. There's an after-hours event on the Disneyland side (Sweethearts Night) but that didn't seem to affect crowds at DCA at all, at least not as early as we were there.

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