nassima | Reading

but here I am at /r/EnglishLearning and somebody is asserting that the sentence "When they anchor in Sydney Harbour, they will have been sailing non-stop for three months" is totally wrong and unnatural, such that no English speaker would ever produce an utterance like that, and that instead what one ought to say is "will have had been sailing".

They've apparently never learned to quit while they're behind, either, and now have, uh, requested that people provide them with natural examples from the wild.

This leaves me a bit stymied, because how the hell does one search up natural examples of grammatical features in speech? But if anybody has any links, by all means, please provide them.

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( News links )

conuly

With shadowy pen I write,
Till time be done,
Good news of some strange light,
Some far off sun.

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Link

conuly

It's beautiful out there! And I'm going to waste it at work!?

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gloss

Meme from

sweettartheart

What is a food you loved as a child but do not enjoy anymore?
I really can't think of anything besides various processed meat things - Vienna sausages, devilled ham sandwiches, liverwurst, chopped chicken liver pâté - that just sound gross to me now. I didn't love them back then so much as ate them without issue.

What’s a food you used to dislike but now enjoy? What changed?
I've always been a pretty adventurous eater, but I don't think I liked spinach much. It was invariably old and tough, more like bad kale than anything. Now I add frozen spinach to so many meals, and saag paneer is one of my favourite dishes to order.

If you could eat only one cuisine for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
Indian, Mexican, or Salvadoran. I can't narrow it down further than that; each has tons of variety and flavour and I would never get bored.

What food instantly makes you feel comforted or happy?
Pastina with butter and parm, buttered white rice, or avgolemono soup.

What food reminds you most of your childhood?
Pot roast, vague "curry", spectacularly yellow (served with little dishes of peanuts and banana pieces[??] along with chutney), tuna casserole with potato chips, crescent-roll "empanadas" filled with sloppy-joe meat, and southern New England crispy thincrust pizza made by Greek immigrants.

Are there any foods you think are overrated?
Not really, though I'm not interested in steak and grilling and smoking and that sort of thing. (In general, I'm really put off by that online thing where people get incredibly aggressive about food opinions. It's all good! So what if someone makes [X] in a way your sainted grandmother never did? You don't have to eat it, chill.)

What traditional dish from your country would you recommend to a visitor?
From the US, I love succotash, as well as baked beans. From Canada, poutine, I suppose? Maybe yellow pea soup?

Who is the best cook you know, and what makes their food special?
Honestly, probably I am. Which isn't to say that I am anywhere near exceptional, but I love cooking and I feel pretty confident making a variety of dishes and trying new things. I just wish our kitchen had any room whatsoever and that more than one burner worked on the stove. Then I would be unstoppable, or something.

conuly

Poll #35226 Some questions that popped into my head today

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 67

View Respondents

Toilet paper rolls should be hung

View Answers

With the paper in front
54 (83.1%)

With the paper behind
11 (16.9%)

On a scale of one to ten, how much do you care about this?

View Answers
Mean: 5.74 Median: 6.5 Std. Dev 3.10

1		14 (21.2%)
2		1 (1.5%)
3		2 (3.0%)
4		5 (7.6%)
5		6 (9.1%)
6		5 (7.6%)
7		8 (12.1%)
8		11 (16.7%)
9		7 (10.6%)
10		7 (10.6%)

Which is more exciting when opening a package?

View Answers

Shrink wrap on something soft and fuzzy
7 (10.9%)

Bubble wrap on something not soft or fuzzy
57 (89.1%)

Edit: Fuck,

james, what did you do, madly refresh your friends page and answer this poll in the very second I posted it!?

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rydra_wong

For the Souls-curious and for people who enjoy watching Let's Plays of games they will never play*, I present a curated collection of Dark Souls 1 videos, in the hope that you will find one that you enjoy the vibe of.

The Emotional Journey

If you have half an hour, JessieGender's story of her quest to prove herself by beating Dark Souls is wonderful and very heartfelt:

I Played Dark Souls for the First Time in 2022

Captures the emotional journey of playing your first Souls game ("MOTHERFUCKER!!!"), and the way that they’re somehow a communal experience even if you play completely solo.

The Let’s Play (With Coaching)

Because he's a solid 40% of how I ended up playing Dark Souls:

Reggie VS Dark Souls

I discovered Reggie and Woolie via their excellent Disco Elysium Let's Play (absolutely the smartest one I've seen), and that was how I ended up watching this, on the basis that obviously I'd never be able to play a Souls game so no worries about spoilers, but they sounded interesting so it could be fun to watch.

Reggie's new to the game, Woolie is trying to coach him through it, and the process gives you the best look at how the mechanics work and how someone actually learns to play these games.

They're both extremely funny, and Reggie's earnest expressiveness (in contrast to Woolie’s cool gamer irony) is a joy forever. He’s a far better player than I am, but he fucks up, he has stupid gravity deaths, he panics and flails and giggles at his mistakes, and it’s incredibly endearing.

And I watched Woolie coach Reggie through combat basics, and the tutorial, and into the first few areas, and with that and Gigadad (see later), I went "… huh, maybe if I really worked at it I could beat the tutorial???" and then we know what happpened.

( Cut for length )

{*Be careful, though. That's how they got me.}

schneefink

My only experience with online TTRPG until now had been when my old D&D 3.5 group tried to switch to online sessions during the covid lockdown, but I didn't enjoy them nearly as much as in-person sessions (and I'm terrible at not distracting myself when at a computer) and concluded that online sessions are not for me.
But then recently I got a chance to play a D&D 5e one-shot online with friends and decided to give it another try. This time I enjoyed it much more, I had a great time. I think having facecam on makes a huge difference: it's much easier to stay engaged when you can see the DM and other players (and they you.)

( A short D&D tale )

This is also an opportunity to post an update on the state of my dice collection, because I got a few new ones since last time.

- The translucent green-blue-with gold set I got from Glasgow Worldcon 2024. This set and the green-orange one are what I used for Miyaki, my Stars Without Number character.
- The transparent dice with tiny turtles inside (!) were a birthday present from my TTRPG group two years ago. I barely use them because I prefer round edges, but they are so pretty.
- The frog and capybara dice I got from Fantasycon Vienna 2026.
- The opaque shimmery blue-and-green I also got at Fantasycon Vienna 2026, and I used them in the above one-shot.

gloss

online reads

Orbiting Space Junk: Torrey Peters and the impossibility of the great trans novel (Oakland Review of Books) This is an extraordinary essay, weaving together thoughtful criticism of Detransition, Baby, personal memoir, and a chronicle of the rapid changes to public opinion on trans issues over this decade.

The Long Game of Preserving the ‘Livers of the River’: The endangered elktoe mussel, hard-hit by Helene, plays a critical role in keeping rivers healthy. A state biologist is on a mission to save them. (The Assembly) While this piece could have been written and edited a lot better, the core information presented is very interesting.

The House Between the Trees (GMA) This is such a sad, beautifully-written account of an elderly Filipino woman trying to care for her two schizophrenic sons.

Fortnite Will Give Kids What They've Always Wanted: AI Pride And Prejudice Fan Fic: Neal Stephenson's company Whenere is bringing an AI-driven storytelling platform to Fortnite. (Aftermath) This is both appreciative of actual fanfic and hilarious about the stupid project.

No one actually likes AI influencers (Garbage Day)

A lot of ink has been spilled about the weird doomsday nerd sex cult running Silicon Valley and all the users suffering from AI psychosis, but not nearly enough has been written about the grifter nihilism that has wormed its way into the heart of not just AI or crypto, but social media, as a whole.

Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet: The "AI Torture Chamber" has opened an upsetting and absurd window into the effective altruist obsession with "model welfare." (404 Media; Sept 30)

One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel.

It makes me so mad that these fascist nerds are legitimately distressed by this, but completely comfortable with immiserating entire human populations and devastating the environment.

The man who planted a forest in Turkey's Mardin: Sehmus Erginoglu began clearing a waste site in the historic southern city 26 years ago. Today it is home to thousands of trees. (Middle East Eye, 2019)

One green shoot at a time: the women restoring mangrove forests in the oil-ravaged Niger delta: In a region of Nigeria blighted by decades of pollution, Martha Agbani and her team are not just replanting trees but regaining ownership of their lost lands and livelihoods. (The Guardian)

The Poetics of Indigenous Carto-Activism (C Magazine, 2021)

What does it mean to know a place and what social, political, cultural, spiritual, or geographical perspectives contribute to this knowing? For decades now, visual artists have been addressing questions of place through the implementation of mapping as an aesthetic expression and form.

ETA, Well, this is terrifying:
Exposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware: This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps mercenary surveillance vendors track and hack devices around the world. (Citizen Lab)

Israeli firm used ads to enable espionage, Canadian researchers say (CBC)

But Thursday's report marks the first time researchers have documented how “zero-click” spyware attacks can be enabled by targeted ads, Citizen Lab says.

“Zero-click” means that users don't need to click on a link or actively do anything for their devices to be targeted with spyware.

conuly

I only have a measly ant
To think with today.
Others have pictures of saints,
Others have clouds in the sky.

The winter might be at the door,
For he’s all alone
And in a hurry to hide.
Nevertheless, unable to decide

He retraces his steps
Several times and finds himself
On a huge blank wall
That has no window.

Dark masses of trees
Cast their mazes before him,
Only to erase them next
With a sly, sea-surging sound.

*******

Link

conuly

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

*******

Link

conuly

"Lovely War meets Howl’s Moving Castle in this new YA fantasy from acclaimed author Frances Hardinge, about the people caught in a game played by the gods where castles are moved around the world like chess pieces" and I gotta say, I'm offended by that blurb. The obvious DWJ parallel is Homeward Bounders, and this book has little, if anything, in common with Howl's Moving Castle.

Definitely worth a read, though.

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conuly

Or when the weather's bad, too.

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conuly

that Frances Hardinge had a new book out!?

gloss

Media Wednesday: finally finishing good books! Let's hope this keeps up. In visual media, the new season of Old Enough! is a little disappointing and I still have to catch up on a couple sitcoms.

books

This weekend, I read the first Poirot novel (The Mysterious Affair at Styles [1920]) and really enjoyed it. Sure, after a bit had passed, I started questioning some of the creakier plot elements, but it's still a great read. Poirot is adorable; I'd read a few of these when I was a kid (for some reason I was really into the film of Death on the Nile [there wasn't a lot to choose from at the video store, ok?]), but had retained nothing.

Next, I started Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970), mostly because I need an SFF book written in the 70s by a woman for r/fantasy book bingo so I can use Le Guin's Tombs of Atuan in another square. I didn't have very high expectations for the Stewart, in that I'm ridiculously picky with Arthuriana *and* I tend to find first-person a hard sell, but I read a third of it in an afternoon and loved it. It's fantastic -- beautifully written with such a compelling voice. I can't wait to finish it.

Except yesterday I was looking something else up about the bingo and remembered a book I got late last week. I opened it up and then I couldn't stop reading.

The hot, sandy assembly ground in particular was home to many different kinds of entities. Small, fanged cows ranged near the boundaries of the ground while the ghosts of missing akkas milled about with the other girls, pretending to be alive. Thamarai had even seen a group of Sex Demons, assiduously harvesting a tiny garden of millets.

This is Kuzhali Manickavel's A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School (2026). This is weird, occasionally gross, frequently funny, and intensely, even breathtakingly, familiar -- which might sound odd, given that I have never been a high school student in small-town Tamil Nadu? (Though I have been an isolated queer teenager, so.) But that's one of the strengths of Manickavel's work: while it is grounded in a particular place and experience of a(n aspect of a) particular culture, it also renders that specific intensity of teenaged emotion, where you feel everything but don't understand very much at all.

The Government Girls Higher Secondary School is overrun by countless supernatural entities, but these are also figures of the particular hell of being a teenaged girl in a patriarchal culture, one where you and your friends are helpless against harassment and assault and subject to near-total educational indifference because, as you tell each other resignedly, "we're no one." The entities' names (like "Sex Demon" and "Sandworm of Patriotism") suggest that in many ways, they serve the girls as tools for describing shitty reality and distancing themselves from it; the school itself is a microculture that passes down knowledge of how to understand and get by.

Manickavel's text, then, shares some standard genre assumptions about allegory/figurative works, but it also confronts these head-on. The guidebook that Thamarai finds says at one point,

Engaging with the supernatural has often been likened to coming to terms with one’s own homosexuality, in that these two things have nothing in common with each other.... Researchers have noted with some surprise that one of the biggest questions people have regarding the supernatural in the GGHSS is whether it will make them gay. The answer is yes, it will absolutely make you very gay. If you are reading this right now, it is because you are gay.

Manickavel balances the different valences around genre elements with verve and originality. It's just so good.

I love this whole book. I love how funny it is, as well how unique the entities are, but it's also brutally honest and so moving.

*
Related to my talking elsewhere about people's weirdness around daylight savings vs standard time: Ontario announced *yesterday* (two weeks before the change) that the extreme northwestern slice of the province won't fall back from Central Daylight, in order to stay matched with Manitoba. The rest of the province is on Eastern time and will switch.

conuly

But anyway, how's your day going everybody?

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conuly

i. Spring

the tips of each pine
the spikes of telephone poles
hold gathering crows

may’s errant mustard
spreads wild across paved road
look both ways

roadside treble cleft
feeding gopher, paws to mouth
cheeks puffed with music

yesterday’s spring wind
ruffling the grey tips of fur
rabbit dandelion

ii. Summer

turkey vulture feeds
mechanical as a red oil rig
head rocks down up down

stiff-legged dog rises
goes grumbling after squirrel
old ears still flap

snowy egret—curves,
lines, sculpted against pond blue;
white clouds against sky

banded headed bird
this ballerina killdeer
dance on point my heart

iii. Fall

leaf wind cold through coat
wails over hills, through barren trees
empty garbage cans dance

damp September night
lone farmer, lighted tractor
drive memory’s worn path

sky black with migration
flocks settle on barren trees
leaf birds, travel songs

october moon cast
over corn, lighted fields
crinkled sheaves of white

iv. Winter

ground painted in frost
thirsty morning sun drinks white
leaves rust golds return

winter bare branches
hold tattered cups of summer
empty nests trail twigs

lace edges of ice
manna against darkened sky
words turn with weather

now one to seven
deer or haiku syllables
weave through winter trees

Northern follows jig
body flashes with strike, dive:
broken line floats up.

***

Link

conuly

and the poledancing archer I legit have no idea how YouTube recommends things to me. No complaints, though, I will watch the hell out of both those people.

(But seriously, how did YouTube know that!? You know, I don't know what the hell tweaks they've done with their algorithm lately, but wow.)

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conuly

so much as the way those fascists talk about it.

conuly

Specifically, I've been doing some rough arithmetic.

So, the premise of mpreg is that people who have penises and testicles and XY chromosomes can get pregnant, sometimes or all the time. Weirdly, I've never encountered... uh... ffpreg, in which people with ovaries and vaginas and XX chromosomes can get other people pregnant. But anyway, let's assume it exists too. Which raises an interesting question about heterosexual couples - can they both get pregnant and also impregnate each other? Should we just assume that they're all hermaphroditic and that "male" and "female" are simply gender markers with no reference to physical sex?

Well, if we dig into that, we'll be here all night.

Anyway, in a high school biology textbook, virtually all people are either XX or XY. In real life it's not quite like that, but it's close enough for my math, and I don't want to make my math harder anyway. This math is going to be a lot easier if I ignore things like "reality" and "gender", so. Physical sex is one of the features of human existence that shows simple Mendelian inheritance patterns - it's not a multi-gene trait, I mean.

Now, back before conception, the gametes (sperm and egg) each contain half the genes of the parent, which are potentially half the genes of the new baby. If there is a baby. The egg cell will have an X chromosome, because the parent who contributes an egg only has X chromosomes, and the sperm will have either an X or a Y. In real life, there may be a screwup and you can get an embryo and thence a child with a weird combo like "X0" or "XXY" or whatever but, importantly, you can't have life without at least one X chromosome. It doesn't work.

And if we were to write a punnet square for sex, we'd get four options: X_mom1X_dad, X_mom2Y, X_mom1X_dad, X_mom2Y - half girl, half boy. If there are 600 babies born to such couples every year, we expect 500 xx and 500 xy. (Actually we don't expect that. If there is no artificial intervention then we get slightly more boys than girls, I don't know why. If there *is* artificial intervention then we tend to get lots more boys than girls, and everybody knows why. But this is not just high school bio, it's also high school math, or maybe middle school math.)

But let's look at a punnet square for a hypothetical mm couple, and this time without subscript because that's a hassle - XX, XY, YX, YY. One of those things does not work! So, taking away all the YY conceptions, they cannot survive, our options are XX, XY, and YX. If it doesn't matter who contributes the Y chromosome and who contributes the X chromosome then mm couples have a 2/3 chance of producing boys, which is to say, if there are 600 babies born to such couples every single year then we expect 400 boys to 200 girls, which is a just insane ratio.

However, if we also allow ffpreg... well, all their babies are going to be XX, right? So if mm couples and ff couples exist in the same ratio, and if they also reproduce the same amount, then out of our 1200 yearly babies with same-sex parents we'll see 800 girls and 400 boys.

This really shouldn't be enough to screw up the sex ratio of the entire population if the proportion of same-sex couples is about the same as it is in reality land. Same-sex couples are literally queer. There's just not as many people interested in it! But the people who write mpreg have a strong tendency to write a lot more same-sex couples than het couples. So maybe in the mpreg-verse, nearly everybody is in a same-sex relationship and hardly anybody is in an opposite-sex relationship. In this idyll, women outnumber men by a huge percentage. I hadn't meant to conclude by linking to The Matter of Seggri, but why not.