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oursin) wrote2026-05-09 04:12 pmAre their minds wiped every night?
Though I suspect it's more just 'did not bother to do any research'.
Two pieces in today's Guardian Saturday.
The one about blokes being (IMHO) totally scammed over testosterone doesn't appear to be online yet, but I, who have done my time in the noisome pits of sex-related quackery, was going: this is the latest round of what used to be rejuvenation operations of various kinds (HAI! WB Yeats!), the Blakoe energiser, electrical belts, devices to prevent the leakage of the precious manly fluids, pills to restore Lost Manhood, and I wouldn't be surprised if radium tonics had featured at some point.
The placebo reaction is a powerful thing.
And then we get The rise of the literary nepo baby? The children of famous novelists on following in their parents’ footsteps.
Well, maybe in these parlous times it does help getting an agent and one's foot in the door at a publisher? But it is hardly a new phenomenon that there is More Than One Writer In The Family.
Will concede that perhaps I am thinking of those literary families of an earlier era which were perhaps more into churning out more or less hackwork as a cottage industry (e.g. the Allinghams).
Then I bethought me that Angela Thirkell's son Colin MacInnes was also a writer, albeit, as one may see from that Wikipedia entry, a very different article from Mama, wot. (I seem to recall from the bios of her that I read that they were estranged and he was a hostile witness.)
There's also a bit of a reverse pattern in the Drabble family, whereby John Drabble took to novel-writing after his daughters. (Famous Sibling Literary Feuds....)
rydra_wong) wrote2026-05-09 12:09 pmPostscript to my previous entry
* Just as you should not read The Fortunate Fall if you want a romantic Happily Ever After, you should not read What We Are Seeking if you want a book which neatly ties up all its plot threads.
It's not quite in the same league of non-resolution as Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (my beloved), but.
Assorted important things happen; the initial situation is radically changed; key decisions are made and alliances are formed. How it will play out is something that will clearly evolve over subsequent years and decades, but the book chooses to leave it at that moment of resolve rather than resolution, with the crucial shifts being internal and interpersonal.
* As an author, Cameron Reed may be the most "not aromantic but she believes in their beliefs" I've ever encountered.
Romantic love is a very real thing in her work, but it doesn't sway the moral or narrative universe of her novels in the way we're trained to expect (and the presence of an explicitly aro character in What We Are Seeking is not accidental).
I love this SO FUCKING MUCH.
* John Maraintha and Iren and Laura and Suddharma and Vo and Pirro and
snickfic) wrote2026-05-08 09:47 pmsome horror fic recs
Welcome Home by
Rabbit Heart by
remote by the sea by
How Does Your Garden Grow by
The Ship of Theseus Has Run Aground by
sovay) wrote2026-05-08 11:13 pmWith life and so much loss, time has weighted us
( We hoped for something more. )
Not having dreamed memorably for months, I was amused that last night I was apparently trying to compose a journal post describing a pre-dawn view of the river which presented itself as the Charles, although in waking life it is not crossed with any rope bridges that I know about, nor have I ever seen a market running down its banks to the water. Then I was distracted by discovering the existence of living root bridges. I had never seen anything like them in a non-secondary world. I love that they are not a historical technology.
torachan) wrote2026-05-08 07:43 pmDaily Happiness
2. Carla got her toenail removed this morning with no issue. However, she made the mistake of going to Costco afterwards and walking around for an hour so it kind of bled a lot. But she gave it a good soak tonight and we'll rebandage it and try and be more careful tomorrow. She's had issues with this nail for over ten years, just from a single incident of wearing slightly too tight shoes on a day with a lot of walking and standing, and it just hasn't gotten better in all that time, so it's good to finally get the old nail off and hopefully the new one growing underneath will be in better shape. We probably won't be going to Ikea tomorrow after all, though. :p
3. The old cardboard scratcher lounger we'd put out for Tuxie a couple months ago got ruined in the rain, so we bought him a new one and he seems quite taken with it.
torachan) wrote2026-05-08 05:52 pmWeekly Reading
Mystery at the Manor
Third in the Montgomery Bonbon middle grade mystery series. I really like these and am looking forward to the next, as apparently two had been released since the last time I checked on it!
Jesus Land
Memoir about a white woman whose Christian parents adopted a couple of black boys in the 70s, despite being incredibly racist. The blurb makes it sound like it's mostly going to be about the time she and one of the boys were sent to a reform school in the Caribbean, but it's as much about their time before that, too, and their home life that was just as abusive (physically and mentally) as the reform school.
How to Cheat Your Own Death
Third in the Castle Knoll Files series. I continue to enjoy these, and this book set up the next one, so I'm looking forward to that as well.
The Smart Girl's Guide to Revenge
The MC was betrayed by her con artist husband and is just out of jail and looking for revenge. I liked this, but there were multiple instances of the MC lying/trying to misdirect the reader, so I was really worried that it was going to turn out she really had been working with her husband all along and was going to get back together with him, but thankfully not.
Murder by Memory
Sci-fi murder mystery novella, the first in a new series, set on a spaceship traveling hundreds of years to its destination. I enjoyed this a lot and have already requested the sequel from the library.
The Silent Ones
Two ten year old cousins are accused of bludeoning an old woman to death. The entire family is immediately condemned by their entire town, but a therapist brought in to try and get the girls to talk has her doubts. This was a decent read, but the twists and turns ended up getting kind of far fetched by the end.
Skip and Loafer vol. 13
delphi) wrote2026-05-08 02:19 pmPost and Jam: All the Things I Wasn't by The Grapes of Wrath [1989]
While never reaching the ubiquity of Oasis's Wonderwall, there was a time and place where this would be in the repertoire of every young person who brought an acoustic guitar to a house party or camping trip.
All The Things I Wasn't by The Grapes of Wrath
kaberett) wrote2026-05-08 09:35 pmsome good things
One: the Greens now have five seats on my borough council, up from none. ( Brief further local politics. )
Two: we took ourselves out on a walk this evening; A spotted a deer, we followed it further into the trees, and spent a fun little while following deer (&c) paths through what looked like... they might perhaps once have been greenhouses on half-brick walls? but with proper big trees growing up through them now and zero evidence of any glass or metal frames or anything remaining! Had no idea that was all in there; hurrah for Tiny Explore :)
Three: I have got my bike baaaaaaasically back to working order (I might need to replace the rear brake cable, which is tedious, but braking is actually extant), and am looking forward to taking advantage of the increased mobility it provides!
Four: spent the afternoon inhaling the new Murderbot. That's definitely a Murderbot.
Five: more rye-caraway-poppy bread, including an end-of-loaf with my mother's fig jam and the fancy goats' cheese I got to have with asparagus yesterday. (The nice shop human warned me that it was best before the 11th, and was that okay? I explained that that Would Not Be A Problem. I am very much enjoying causing it to Not Be A Problem.)
petra) wrote2026-05-08 04:13 pmA cat sonnet
Upon the couch, on laundry, not just laps.
But just as all the old roads lead to Rome,
The cat returns to sit on me. Perhaps
She smells the cortisol of stress, and knows
That I'm inclined to stroke her velvet fur --
Once void-black, now specked galaxy, it flows
Softer than kitten fluff. And so she purrs,
Then settles with her head upon my wrist
And tush on laptop keys, immune to shame.
Despite spring air, my little cat finds bliss
In cuddling up and acting nearly tame.
Nine pounds of feline is enough to pin
Me to the couch, and so her reign begins.
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earthobservatory_iod_feed) wrote2026-05-08 06:11 pmNASA’s Psyche Mission Captures Mars During Gravity Assist Approach
NASA’s Psyche Mission Captures Mars During Gravity Assist Approach
Description
This colorized image of Mars was captured by NASA’s Psyche mission on May 3, 2026, about 3 million miles (4.8 million kilometers) from the planet. The spacecraft is approaching the planet for a gravity assist on May 15 that will give it a boost in speed and adjust its trajectory toward asteroid Psyche for eventual arrival in 2029.
The spacecraft is approaching Mars from a high-phase angle, meaning that the planet appears only as a thin crescent, like our own crescent Moon seen around its new Moon phase. From this viewing geometry, the Sun is out of frame and “above” both Mars and Psyche.
Figure A is a zoomed-out view from the imager. No stars are visible in the background since they are much dimmer than the sunlight being reflected by Mars.
The observation was acquired by the multispectral imager instrument’s panchromatic or broadband filter, with an exposure time of just 2 milliseconds. Even with this very short exposure time, the crescent is extremely bright and parts of the image are oversaturated. The light seen here is sunlight reflected off the surface of Mars and also scattered by dust particles in its atmosphere. Because the quantity of dust in the atmosphere can vary rapidly over time, the anticipated brightness of the crescent was hard to predict before this early image was acquired.
The dustiness of Mars leads to sunlight being scattered by its atmosphere, making the crescent appear to extend farther around the planet than if it had no atmosphere (as with our Moon).Of note, on the right side of the extended crescent, there appears to be a gap, which coincides with the planet’s icy north polar cap. The cap is currently in winter and mission specialists hypothesize that seasonal clouds and hazes may be forming in that region, possibly blocking the atmospheric dust’s ability to scatter sunlight like it does elsewhere around the planet.
The Psyche mission’s imager team will be acquiring, processing, and interpreting similar images in the lead-up to the close approach on May 15. The images are primarily designed to calibrate the cameras and to characterize their performance in flight as a practice run for the approach to asteroid Psyche in 2029.
For more information about the Psyche mission, read: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/
The post NASA’s Psyche Mission Captures Mars During Gravity Assist Approach appeared first on NASA Science.
oursin) wrote2026-05-08 07:32 pmAssortment
Story of enslaved boy featured in 1748 Joshua Reynolds portrait emerges in new study - I online attended a seminar the other week about black children in England from the C17th to C19th which leant fairly heavily on depictions in art (and also sounded a bit like the speaker had pulled out a bit at random examples from their 10 or was it more boxes of research materials) and implied that we could not know what happened to them once they were not more or less cute ornamental pets, so this article goes some way to show that sometimes the larger life story can be discovered.
***
This is interesting, given that it is a phase of the parturition cycle that doesn't tend to get that much attention - okay, I have read More Than The Average Person on 'bringing on the menses' and further measures if they were not brought on, and a fair amount about actual childbirth in history: but this is a bit unusual: Anticipating Birth in Early Modern England:
Scholars have described the days leading up to birth in the early modern period as a time when women purchased linens, prepared bedchambers, and called upon the services of a midwife and their gossips. However, manuscript recipe collections reveal that preparations in anticipation of labour went beyond such measures and incorporated the consumption of specific medicines. This article studies remedies that were designed to be taken six weeks before birth to reveal, in new ways, the experiences of late pregnancy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
***
More exciting work from the good people at CamPop, this time circling out from the census records: By linking millions of census records across decades, researchers are turning static snapshots of Victorian Britain into dynamic life histories – revealing how people moved, worked and lived in ways never before possible.
***
‘Live and let live’: Northern Ireland historian uncovers surprising era of tolerance of gay men:
Hulme said tacit ignorance and public silence enabled male queerness to flourish with only rare exposure, condemnation or regulation, with a “live and let live” ethos especially prevalent in the working class.
***
Muttering that this information can be found in the household recipe books at much less elite social levels, still, it's useful work if it gets people aware of just how diverse British food at that period was: The King’s Dinner: Family, nation, and identity on the British table, 1760-1820.
petra) wrote2026-05-08 10:53 amFamilect word: Cat-like reflexes / Cat-like timing
This morning, the cat jumped on my lap at minute 46, just as I was going to peel off the electrodes. I could've been petting her with the other arm, but nooooo.
She is generally the entity in the house accused of cat-like reflexes, but humans can do it too.
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fandomweekly2026-05-08 02:11 pm
[#300] Forever (The Fantastic Journey)
Theme Prompt: #300 – Ceremony
Title: Forever
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Rating/Warnings: PG
Bonus: Yes.
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Meeting Gwenith had brought Varian more happiness than he’d ever imagined. They were destined to be together, forever…
flo_nelja) wrote2026-05-08 02:57 pmPoly ships - Day 7
Rec post for art (traditional, digital, moodboards, gifs)
Have some of my fave Jack/Rose/Nine fanarts on tumblr!
Fanart by that-sweet-jester
Fanart by leeloii
Fanart by glitter-skeleton and another and yet another
Fanart by eccl3ston