davidlevine | Reading

We've all heard it a million times: baking is precise and cooking is loose. Cooking is jazz, baking is classical. Cooking has room to improvise, but with baking you have to follow the recipe to the letter.

This is, of course, nonsense. For one thing, you can't control every variable every time. If baking required everything to be utterly precise, it would never work, because air temperature, pressure, and humidity all vary; you have to be able to work around those major variables. If it was true, you'd never see experienced bread bakers frown and throw another handful (or three) into the recipe. And most importantly, if this was true......how would we ever get new baked goods?

I think this is a mistake we make too often when we're thinking about bringing light into dark times for each other. We think of it has having to be precise and perfect for it to work. If we're not winning every struggle, we must be doing something wrong and should just quit. If we can't come up with the perfect phrasing to offer comfort to worried or grieving friends and neighbors, why even try? Maybe tomorrow we'll be warm and witty and precisely right. Or someone else can do it. Surely someone else has the right answer, and we can just use that.

So yeah, the lussekatter--you know what day it is--rose despite the plummeting temperature (and with it the plummeting humidity, oh physics why do you do us like this). They rose and rose and rose. Friends, they are mammoths. They are lusselejon this year. I forgot the egg glaze--I told you last year that I shouldn't mention that remembering it was unusual, and ope, it was an omen, I did not put egg wash on. They are still great. They are still amazing. What they are not--what they don't have to be--is perfect.

Last week one of my friends wrote to me to say that she'd made calzones but they'd turned out denser than usual. And you know what I thought? I thought, "Ooh, her family got calzones, I should make calzones one of these days!" And not in the "I'd do it better than that loser" way, either. Just: yay homemade calzones, what a treat. I watched her doing it. I remembered that I can do it too. Dense or not. Egg washed or not. Perfect or--let's be real, perfect isn't available, what we have is imperfect, and it turns out that's what we need. Lighting one imperfect candle from another, all down the chain of us, until the light returns.

2024: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=4078

2023: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3875

2022: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3654

2021: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3366

2020: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2953

2019: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2654

2018: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2376

2017: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1995

2016: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1566

2015: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1141

2014: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=659

2013: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=260

2012: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/840172.html

2011: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/796053.html

2010: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/749157.html

2009: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/686911.html

2008: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/594595.html

2007: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/2007/12/12/ and https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/502729.html

2006: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/380798.html — the post that started it all! Lots more about the process and my own personal lussekatt philosophy here!...oh hey, this is the twentieth year I've posted about this. Huh. Huh. Well, isn't that a thing.

jreynoldsward

Some thoughts about digital personalities in my work

(self-indulgent blather about my take on artificial digital beings, as I’ve written them)

I’ve been watching the latest AI developments with a somewhat…oh, what word do I want? Not jaded, not cynical, but definitely somewhere in between. Especially when I start reading about “AI Grandmas” and the use of that tech to speak to long-dead relatives. Oh, it’s presented with that same amber glossiness that seems to dominate the worlds of AI visual creations. But…we’re already seeing some of the dark side of these AI creations with reports of self-harm and worse coming from AI “personalities.”

One reason for my attitude is that the creation of self-aware digital personalities is something I’ve somewhat explored in my work, most notably the Netwalk Sequence series and the Martiniere Family Multiverse Saga. In both cases, the tech I explore is already somewhat different from what we are seeing. I don’t go into the nuts and bolts of just how that self-awareness ends up happening (well, a little bit in the Martinieres). But nonetheless, I think this dynamic of what that really looks like is something very much overlooked in the current hype around “preserving the memories of your loved ones” in order to recreate them in a digital simulation. I can oh-so-easily see how it could turn bad.

What happens if AI Grandma is toxic? Or if AI Grandma develops sufficient self-awareness to start meddling in the affairs of her descendants? It’s entirely possible. And while AI Grandma might not have the ability with current tech to really muck up her descendants’ banking and financial history…there’s still a lot of damage she can do to living beings.

The Netwalk Sequence was my first exploration of just what the problems with a separate digital personality creation could end up being. I started building the Netwalk Sequence world back in the ‘90s, when digital personality uploads were somewhat the fashion in fiction and in theory.

My base assumption was that digital personalities could completely upload to the internet upon their death. In that world it’s entirely possible to be a complete personality online, with full body immersion, using the mechanism of a highly sophisticated wireless communication chip implant called Netwalk. Uploading came later, in the midst of a dramatic political struggle where an older leader—Sarah Stephens—uploaded upon her death and began to stalk and attack her opponents. The new development was called Netwalk, and the uploaded personalities called Netwalkers.

A restraint that I created in the Netwalk universe was that Netwalkers would go insane and turn predatory on living beings if completely cut off from sensory inputs. They would attack alive users of Netwalk in order to gain sensory exposures and recharge themselves—as well as fulfilling agendas and settling resentments that hadn’t been dealt with in life. In some cases this would end up as possession of the living being by the Netwalker. As a result, with the exception of a handful of rogues, Netwalkers ended up being tied to a living host, most specifically that host’s Netwalk chip. In the Sequence, we see is how this plays out within one powerful family, the creators and controllers of this technology. With some other dynamics thrown in as well—the control of a war machine of unknown origin which has some influence on the development of the original Netwalk, plus intensely weird family history that involves a lot of infighting and struggles over who controls what.

There’s no grudge like a family grudge, shall we say?

In the Martiniere Multiverse, I postulate something closer to our current concept of the “AI Grandma,” where videos and recordings lead to the creation of digital thought clones. Thought clone appearances in the Martiniere Multiverse aren’t constrained to computers and devices, however, and they can hop universes. This is somewhat connected to a magical Fae origin which is tied to a computer worm that can also skip through assorted multiverses.

The Martiniere digital thought clones (digis for short) differ from Netwalker personality uploads at death in that they are specifically digital constructs of a once-living personality, and only become activated upon specific actions by a living person who is keyed into the algorithm. The digis are fully aware that they are digital constructs and are not the uploaded personality of the dead person they’re modeled after.

Digis don’t appear in every Martiniere book. To follow their development chronologically in series order, start with The Enduring Legacy, the fourth book of the Martiniere Legacy series. We see Gabriel Martiniere’s first awareness of digis shortly before his death, when he ties the appearance of a dangerously destructive computer worm to specific holes in not just his memory but the memories of his closest family. Gabe takes the first steps to establish the bounds of his digi, with a specific activation algorithm tied to certain family members.

More details about digis and their creations happen in two of the Martiniere Legacy standalones, The Heritage of Michael Martiniere and Justine Fixes Everything: Reflections on Mortality. Heritage shows Gabe’s activation; Justine goes into further complications. However, the most details and the most explicit multiversal version appears in the three books of The Cost of Power: Return, Crucible, and Redemption.

Like Netwalkers, digis are capable of possessing living beings and bending them to their will. There are malign digis and beneficial digis. We only see them in the context of one, powerful family because, in both cases, the artificial entities serve as chess pieces in ongoing family battles. They are obstacles that need to be navigated and overcome by the protagonists.

(Sarah Stephens and Philip Martiniere would probably strongly disagree with me but—nothing says that they are pawns.)

Back in real life, Netwalk is probably not at all feasible, though digis…may be. Current technology doesn’t allow for digis to function the way I wrote them in the Martinieres, but some of the same issues raised by both Netwalk and digis still exist. The news has multiple examples of people being influenced by AI interactions to do harm, whether to themselves or others. Or of people who develop a strong emotional attachment to artificial beings to the detriment of their attachments to living beings.

Rather than the apocalyptic stuff I postulated in the Netwalk and Martiniere books, that’s the real harm in uncritical adoption of the creation of artificial beings. At what point do we slip from a clear awareness that “this is a creation; this is not real” to uncritical acceptance of these creations as real beings?

What happens if we start treating these AI creations as something above and beyond an artificial construct?

What rights will they have as opposed to living humans? Or lack of rights?

What happens if they turn malign, either due to the manner in which they are constructed or due to abusive treatment from living humans? Then what?

All food for thought.

Meanwhile, the artificial beings I created in my own worlds are definitely not your happy-happy AI Grandmas. And at times, I wonder if those imperfect visions of mine may end up reflecting an actual reality.

We shall see.

redbird

tl;dr still waiting for things

The latest on that inherited IRA is that I got two email messages from Fidelity today, one saying that I needed to do something [unspecified] to transfer the money from BNY, and one saying specifically that BNY had told Fidelity that they, BNY, needed to talk to me.

So, I called BNY, and after various annoyances with their phone tree, talked to someone. He told me that they had no record yet of receiving the form I sent by next-day mail, but that if the form had arrived late Wednesday they might not be scanned until late today or even Monday. Also that once the form is scanned into the BNY system, it may take a few days before they actually transfer the money into my name, which would be necessary in order to move it to Fidelity.

So, I can (and probably will) call Monday to check that the form was in fact been received, but he thinks I should call later in the week, maybe Wednesday, maybe as late as Friday, and ask for my brand-new account number. Once I have that number, I have to fill out appropriate paperwork with Fidelity. *sigh*

I am both annoyed that even paying for next-day delivery, this is taking several days, and thinking that if I hadn’t paid for faster delivery I would be a few days further behind.

The man also said that once the funds are transferred, they will send me an acknowledgement by mail, including the new account number. However, waiting for that to arrive (rather than getting the information by phone) does not seem prudent, given the IRS deadline for the 2025 required minimum distribution.

swan_tower

Philosophy is one of those topics where, if you're intending to explore it in detail in your fiction, you probably already know more about it than I do.

The way we talk about it nowadays, it's the exemplar of a rarefied field of study, the province of intellectuals who hardly engage at all with the world around them. As a result, you're unlikely to center philosophy in your worldbuilding unless you know quite a bit about it to begin with (as I, freely confessed, do not). But I do know this much: philosophy is far from disengaged with the world. Indeed, its purpose is to consider why the world works the way it does, how we should engage with it, and other such fundamental and vital questions. So even though my own knowledge is limited, it's worth taking a bit of time to unpack just what philosophy is.

We've touched on parts of it already, because philosophy is not fully separable from other topics. The Year Six essays on sin and salvation? Those got grouped under my broad "religion" header for obvious reasons, but they're also philosophical topics -- specifically the branch known as moral philosophy, which concerns itself with ethical questions like what is good and whether one should weigh intentions or consequences more heavily in evaluating an action. For many people, religion has long been the foundation of moral philosophy . . . though the notion some hold, that a person can't really be moral without faith to enforce it, is utterly without foundation.

Last week's science essay also touched on philosophical matters, because philosophy asks questions like "what do we know and how do we know we know it?" This branch is known as epistemology, or the study of knowledge itself. That revolution in thinking I mentioned before, where the Royal Society said nullius in verba and started testing long-held dogma to see if it was right? That was an epistemological shift, one that declared sense experience and experimental procedure to be the proper basis of knowledge, rather than deference to authority.

Science also ties in with the logic branch of philosophy. How do you know if someone's reasoning is sound? Among specialists, different logical methods often get discussed in very abstract, dry-sounding ways, but we use them all the time in daily life: if you come home to find toilet paper shredded throughout the house and the only living creature who was there is the dog, ergo you conclude the dog is to blame, you're applying logic. Science, medicine, and the law all share the task of looking at the evidence and attempting to formulate an explanation that adequately explains what you see -- or, alternatively, to show that an explanation fails that test. Because, of course, the flip side of logical reasoning is the fallacy: incorrect reasoning, which fails at one or more steps in the chain.

The fourth major branch is metaphysics, and it's the hardest to pin down (thanks in part to the definition changing over time; that's what happens when your field of study has been around for thousands of years). This, I suspect, is what most people think of when they hear the word "philosophy," because metaphysics is the branch asking questions like "why does reality exist?" But here, too, it loops around to touch on other areas of culture, as the beginning and end of the universe fall under this header: religion-themed topics you'll again find in Year Six.

Enough of the abstractions, though. What does this mean for fiction?

Whether you mean it to or not, philosophy is going to soak your fiction, because it soaks your thinking. If your student at magic school decides to experiment with different ways of casting spells to see if what the teacher said is true or not, that's demonstrating a certain epistemological stance, one that says experimental results are the most valid way to answer a question. If your protagonist investigates a mystery and comes up with a theory about what's happening, they're using a specific logical approach. If your villain is pursuing a potentially admirable outcome by really terrible means, they're subscribing to a consequentialist view of ethics, the one commonly shorthanded as "the end justifies the means."

If you don't make a conscious effort to worldbuild the philosophy of your setting, its philosophy is likely to default to yours. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! But it can feel anachronistic or otherwise out of place. If the protagonist in your medieval-esque story approaches questions of knowledge and logic like a modern scientist, they're going to feel a bit like a modern person dressed up in fancy clothes. If the good guys all do that while the bad guys adhere to different philosophical stances, now you're adding an implied moral dimension to the result.

And I suspect that for most stories, it's that ethical dimension of philosophy where this influence becomes most obvious and, at times, problematic. Protagonist does a bad thing, but it gets brushed off because they've got a good heart and that makes it okay? The story is presenting a philosophical argument, whether the author thinks of it that way or not. When the chips are down and a character has to make a hard decision, which way do they jump? Will they bend or break a principle to help someone in need? Will they sacrifice their own desires for the sake of upholding that principle? This is the stuff of deep personal drama, and simply recognizing it as such -- and thinking about what stances the various answers would express -- can result in more powerful stories, rather than simple ones where the supposed hard choice is really a no-brainer.

But especially on that ethical front, it's going to be difficult to write a story that endorses a philosophy you, the author, do not support. Deontology, for example, is the field that looks at ethics from the perspective of obedience to rules . . . and for many of us, that rapidly leads to "lawful evil" territory. We'd have a hard time writing a sincere story in which the protagonist virtuously obeys a terrible order because their duty requires it -- not as anything other than a tragic ending, anyway. It could be the basis of a villain or an antagonistic society, though, and in fact we often deploy these elements in exactly that fashion.

So even if you don't have a degree in philosophy, just dabbling your toes in the shallow end of that ocean-sized pool can help you become more aware of what message your worldbuilding and plot are sending. And that, I think, is worth it!

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(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/fDGUFl)

lydamorehouse

... Mason did NOT PASS his first attempt at getting a driver's license.

On the flipside, he seemed in decent spirits about it. It seems that he did the the exact same thing that Jas (his partner) did wrong on their first test--he turned left from the far lane. Apparently, the tester did not seem to feel like a lot of other notes were necessary and told him to practice a bit more and come back in a week. All and all, for a fail, not bad at all.

Our of curiosity, for those of you who drive, did you pass the first time? Do you have any funny stories about spectacular fails?

I feel like I might know a few people who did, but most of my immediate friends did not. I failed three times, I think? I'm not exactly sure, but I know it took me slightly longer than a lot of my peers. My memories are pretty fuzzy about my tests. The thing I remember the best is that I wore a black beret (don't judge. It was the 80s) to my final test and I took my hands off the wheel while driving to adjust it and somehow I still passed. Apparently, the tester felt that showed confidence rather than foolheartiness.

I'm still not great at keeping both hands on the wheel.

lovelyangel

Staged for Christmas Packaging and Mailing

It’s a mere two weeks before Christmas, and I’m behind schedule. Today I printed 50 copies of my annual newsletter. Also, today, 23 photo calendars were delivered to my house. Yesterday, I received my Christmas postage stamps – and I updated, reorganized, and printed mailing labels. The only thing that was on time was four boxes of UNICEF Christmas cards, which I ordered a couple of months ago to take advantage of a free shipping offer.

This year I was able to reduce my photo calendar count by two. That was almost enough to compensate for higher printing costs. I used to be able to count on a 50% discount from Zazzle, but in the last maybe 10 years, I could get only a 40% discount. This year I watched and waited but was never offered more than a 30% discount. Net cost is rising everywhere, it seems. Their largest discount is usually offered between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I waited until then to place my print order – and that’s why calendar delivery was so late this year.

Interesting change – historically the calendars have been individually wrapped in clear plastic and then shrink-wrapped into bundles of five calendars. This year, the calendars were stacked unprotected and shipped loose. More cost savings, I assume. Packing wasn’t sufficient, and it’s surprising there wasn’t any damage. But everything arrived intact – and less plastic is a good thing.

So I got $600 worth of calendars for $420. Add $20 for shipping and handling. Deduct $60 for calendar royalties from 2024. It comes out to about $16.50 per calendar – which actually isn’t terrible.

The hard part now is writing 45 cards and packaging 20 calendars. That’s what I get for doing old Boomer type things. But theoretically I have the time now to do it. (Ha!) If only I weren’t also working on the house... and finances... and volunteer work. First world problems, indeed.

lydamorehouse

Okay, once again, I have failed to keep on keeping on with the blog. But, the vibes of Wednesday called to me, so here I am (as is becoming typical.) I have no idea what it is about Wednesday that provides time for me to think, "Oh, right, DW," but it does seem be The Day it Happens.So here we are.

Today, Saint Paul is blanketed in snow. I note this as it applies to several things I want to talk about.

First, my car, which is in the shop. It has not, in fact, failed me in any serious way. But, Mason is taking his drivers' license test tomorrow and our car needs to pass inspection. One of the things it needs to have? Two working front lights. What does it NOT currently have? YOU GUESSED IT. I was almost not able to bring the car in today because firstly, Troy is booked up weeks in advance due to all the holiday driving/travel that people do. I was able to plead my case with him and we agreed that if I dropped my car off ASAP in the morning, he'd just pop that new light into it at some point in between the regular work. If he has time, he'll make things more profitable for himself by giving me an oil change (which I told him to feel free to do, because Troy prices very failrly and a single light change is going to cost me almost nothing.)

But secondly? The sky opened up and DUMPED snow on us. I don't know the official number of inches, but we crested at least 4 inches (10.16 cm for my metric friends) because Saint Paul declared a Snow Emergency.

For out of town people, a "Snow Emergency" isn't really an emergency as in "OH GOD EVERYTHING IS SHUT DOWN," but more, "Hey, Saint Paulies, time to move your car to one side of the street or the other so that the plows can come through!" It's also the day when snow emergency workers, like ticketers, go to work.

You may recall from previous episodes that last snow season (2024-March 2025), I worked as what Saint Paul Public Works colloquially referred to as "taggers." Our official title might have been "ticketers?" But, our job was to drive around the city and write out parking violation tickets, get cars towed, etc., so that the plows could come through and do their thing.

I am hired for the snow season (2025-26), however the job has changed. We are now "runners" and will be no longer writing tickets. That job is now in the hands of retired and reserve police officers. What does a runner do, you ask? Let me describe it and you can tell me if you think this job will be any fun. A runner will ride along with a police officer, brush the snow from license plates, and stick tickets in windows.

Yep.

There is a reason they did not interview me for this job, nor ask for a resume.

However, it feels like a job that really doesn't need to exist, doesn't it?

The saddest part is that I LOVED being a tagger. It's sad because everything I previously loved about that job, the police officers now do. I believe I wrote about this at length before, but basically the things I used to love about the job are all very silly. No one likes handing out parking tickets. However, there were some "fun" things that absolutely played into that part of every kid who used to make siren noises and run around pretending to be a cop. (And yeah, ACAB, but when I did this, I was 5 okay??) Like, in the old job we used to get to use the radio to call in vehicles in need of towing, etc, and we got to use a code that included our temporary badge number. RADIOS, y'all. They're just fun. Because you get to say, "Over." Or in our case, "Clear." Once trained, we got to go out, alone, in company car with heated seats and (sometimes!) heated steering wheels. We got to put on the flashing lights. We got to wear a safety vest. We got to learn the somewhat arcane process of handwriting tickets in those old booklets you sometimes see if you watch 1970s cop shows. DUMB STUFF. But, like, it made the job tolerable, you know?

But the fun part was never, ever: go out in the cold and stick the ticket on the windshield.

Is the pay good? I mean, it's OKAY. But the shifts are TEN HOURS. It's never less than that.

Also, speaking of ACAB? I'm not particularly thrilled at the idea of spending ten hours in a squad with a cop. What are we even going to talk about? The last ICE protest I went to? Because "say, were you there?" could get pretty awkward, pretty quickly.

By chance, I had to turn down this snow emergency. As noted, Mason has his big test tomorrow and I need to be available to drive him out to the test facility. I do not try to work the late shift because I'm pretty sure Saint Paul would not pay me for sleeping in the squad car, and I can not do 8pm to 5 am. I'm too old for that shift. Luckily, there's usually also a day shift.

I'll let you know what it's like when I finally do one, though. Maybe I'll be surprised and there will still be awesome things.

lovelyangel

My Original 1 Share of Apple

I haven’t exactly been paying attention. However, a week ago (December 2), Apple stock closed at $286.19. At that price, the single share of Apple that I bought in 2002 for $28 (now 56 shares due to stock splits) was worth a hair over $16,000. Since then, price has dropped a little. Heck, last month I received my quarterly dividend from Apple for that my share(s) – it was $14.56 – more than half of what I paid for the single share. It’s still pretty crazy.

Previous Posts
Oct 2024 ($13,000)
Dec 2021 ($10,000)
Nov 2021 ($9,000)
Jan 2021 ($8,000)
Sep 2020 ($7,500)
Aug 2020 ($7,048)
Aug 2020 ($6,964)
Aug 2020 ($6,600)
Aug 2020 ($6,300)
Aug 2020 ($6,100)
Jul 2020 ($5,950)
Jul 2020 ($5,500)
Jun 2020 ($5,100)
Dec 2019 ($4,100)
Sep 2018 ($3,186)
May 2018 ($2,573)
Aug 2017 ($2,200)
Sep 2015 ($1,600)
Jun 2014 ($1,400)
Mar 2012 ($1,200)
Dec 2010 ($640)
Oct 2010 ($600)
Jan 2006 ($200)

elisem

So, just a few minutes ago in one place or another, I was reading what someone had to say about style. In the course of exploring a particular writer's habits and style, they said that they themselves weren't sure they knew what style was.

A long time ago, a sentence came into my possession that has been both comforting and humbling by degrees. It is this: "Style is what you can't help doing."

The comforting part is that if you can't help having style, or doing style, or whatever sort of verbing of style is accurate for you and your work, then you might as well stop any worrying about style and get on with the work. Saves a tremendous amount of time, really.

Thoughts?

jreynoldsward

So far it's been an open winter. We've had some snow, some frozen ground, but now things have warmed up a little bit, thanks to a series of storms brought in by an atmospheric river. We don't get it nearly as bad here as the people on the West side of the Cascades will, but all the same...it should be snowing here, and it isn't.

It's somewhat of an adjustment to not be worrying about a hard-keeping horse in the winter after twenty years with a hard keeper. Even in an open winter like this, I had to keep an eye on Mocha to make sure she wasn't losing weight, and she would have required a blanket or rain sheet on some of our stormy days so that she wasn't burning calories keeping warm. But now, with Marker, it's...simply not an issue. He went from a dry lot with hay nets (to keep him from wasting the hay. Boy is a very messy eater) to the big field and...has gained a little bit of weight. He's back to the next-to-the last hole on his rear cinch, and even then it's snug. Might have to punch another hole in it to fit.

But it feels weird to not be thinking about the blanket dance.

Marker had to take a little bit of a break because he strained a fetlock (we think) in his left hind. He recovered from that quickly. But I started poking around, and thought the root of the problem might be higher up, too, so I started putting liniment on his gaskins. Which he likes but...he also has shown a taste for the liniment itself. I discovered this the other day when he tongued open the cap and was licking the bottle. Spilled some today and he was licking it off of the truck tailgate. It has juniperberry oil in it so I suppose that's what the attraction is.

In any case, we're getting back into full work, riding in the field because it has the best footing. I haven't been taking him on the roads because the type of storms we've been having reduces visibility, and even with a bright purple quartersheet I'm not sure we can always be seen. At least it's not the driving, steady, pounding rain of Western Oregon. But intermittent showers can still leave me cold and wet at the end of a ride! Especially on a windy, blustery day.

On the other hand, it's no worse and actually better than some of those stormy days I spent skiing at Timberline. I use the same type of base layers out riding that I used when skiing--synthetic, yes, with the ability to wick moisture away from my skin. In some cases, those base layers are the same ones I used in those ski days. Couple that with some of my old ski sweaters and an old hardshell parka, and it's reasonably comfortable, even in the coldest weather. Oh, and insulated knee-high snow boots as well. I pushed wearing my regular boots as long as possible, then realized that I felt colder because wind could blow up the cuffs of my pants. Pulled on the insulated snow boots and did that ever make a difference.

The kind of riding I'm doing now has changed. Summer was a focus on schooling and refining skills--for both of us. I hadn't realized until this summer just how much I had modified my riding to accommodate Mocha's needs, then switched to young horse schooling with Marker. I've been doing light weight work to deal with tight back muscles, and that's also helped as well. But I needed to work on bringing my legs back, which...those tight muscles had been impairing. One of those sneaky impairments that creeps up on you with age, I suppose.

In any case, Marker and I spent a lot of time in the arena this summer, and it's pretty much paid off. He hits his canter leads darn near 99% of the time. He's much more confident and strong when cantering, too. I've found that some horses really do just need to have a lot of time cantering to be strong enough under saddle to be relaxed about it, and given that a lot of gaited horses often struggle with cantering under saddle, we had to spend a bit of time conditioning. And it's not consistent yet. I have a lovely, balanced, rocking-horse left lead canter. Right lead? He still wants to rush and speed up. More work and conditioning is required--rushing is a sign of tension. It'll happen over time.

But winter work is different from the intensive schooling of summer. Oh, I do a little bit of schooling. Right now I'm working on developing seat cues, and he's picking it up pretty well. We're doing small serpentines and circles where the primary cues are the weight of the outside seatbone and the turn of my head, and that's coming along nicely. It's interesting, because Mocha was the cattier of the two horses--up to her last days, she was capable of executing a sharp 180 turn off of her haunches tighter and faster than most of the other horses (it was one of her evasions when another horse started making her move her feet). However, she wasn't as responsive to seat cueing as Marker is so far--most of the time, I had to tune her up before I could casually weight a seatbone, turn my head, and have her respond. Marker? He has picked it up quickly. No tuning required. I can get that response with a weighted seatbone and head turn early in the ride, rather than later, after starting with heavier cues, then softening to the lighter cues. It'll be interesting to see how light I can make him on a consistent basis.

I also invested in some inexpensive oversized stirrups because I didn't like the way my regular stirrups work with the winter boots. Additionally, I had this sneaking hunch that they were making it more difficult to get on from the ground. Well, I've only had two sessions with the new stirrups but my theory has been confirmed--it is easier to get on with the oversized stirrups (just a hair wider), and they work a lot better with the winter boots. Plus they hang better from the fenders than the originals did. The biggest drawback is that they are plastic, so I wonder how durable they'll be in cold weather. Oh well. Gives me data should I want to upgrade to more expensive ones.

But, mainly, winter riding is just more about keeping up the fitness for both of us. A slower, more relaxed riding time. A chance to work on our connection with each other. A throwback to the days of my youth, only with a better quality of horse.

If I had been told years ago that I would still be throwing a leg over the back of a good horse at age sixty-eight, I might not have believed it then. Now? Well, I'm gonna do my darnedest to keep going as long as I can.

And in order to do that, I need to drag my rear out to the field and ride the horse in all seasons.

redbird

I went out in the cold today, took a shuttle buses that was replacing the central part of the green line, and walked into a Fidelity office to get the medallion signature I need on the BNY form.

They provided the medallion for my signature, but the woman who handled that told me she thought I would need to redo the _Fidelity_ forms once BNY had transferred the funds, because the inherited IRA would need a brand-new account, not the one I created for the purpose a few weeks ago. Having printed and signed those forms, I asked her to keep them, in case they are usable. (She may have been thinking I'm trying to move the money into an account that already has money in it.)

She also said I do need to put the form with the medallion signature in the mail to BNY, Fidelity can't send it to them electronically. I brought the medallion-ized form home with me, but before I put it in the mail I'm going to scan it and upload the scan to the Fidelity website, in case the previous advisor is right and they can do this electronically.

So that will be another outing in the cold, to a post office, in the hope the letter gets to BNY in good season despite both Christmas packages and the Republican effort to destroy the postal service. Fortunately, there are post office branches at this end of the green line, the part that's still running trolleys.

ETA: I scanned the document, and just uploaded it to the Fidelity website, with a message explaining that I will be mailing the hardcopy to BNY tomorrow.

alicebentley

My love affair with reading books started early, helped along no small bit by enthusiastic parents with a hodgepodge but large collection of books. The actual -amount- of books I read has varied wildly, impacted by work, activities, inclinations and supply.

I was reading very few books during the last handful of years of my bookstore, for instance. Just too busy/tired. And for a span of time after that, as if I'd lost the knack.

In previous decades acquiring a book always meant a paper copy to me. I'd nab the occasional ebook when that was extra convenient, but I really love the whole experience of holding a book, turning the pages, enjoying all the design choices the publisher makes to bring them into being. But as we all know, that leads to having thousands of books to provide habitat for, or potentially (shudder) move. So over the last half-dozen years I've been making a concerted effort to buy ebook variants, and gift or sell a bunch of the paper ones.

It's not the same experience, but it's easier on my aging eyes (thank you backlights and adjustable text sizes) and storage issues are much reduced.

A couple years ago my process at work changed. My day was filled with assembling models, sometimes ones I'd already done many times. The perfect environment to have an audiobook on headphones - especially if it's an audio version of a book I'd already read and didn't need to be completely immersed.

The books that really swayed me to this was Murderbot. I had already bought and read each of Martha Well's books as they came out, usually with a re-read of all the previous ones once a new one arrived. Kevin R. Free's audiobook was an unexpected delight, bringing me a way to revisit this favorite story while giving me a new view of the characters and events. And while still getting good work done!

After that I started binging audiobooks quite as badly as I've ever tucked into paper - and it's past time I wrote up more of these experiences. That's my big plan for more DreamWidth posting and I hope I will hold to it.

alicebentley

I love the idea of what social media can do for me, and what I could bring to it. But actually putting in the time and thought to keep up my end of the bargain endlessly escapes me.

This week I had work news to share, that I'd enjoy talking over with friends, and realized once again that I haven't been making a space for that.

I'll post quips or photos on FB, I doomscroll on Bluesky, and I enjoy the creative insanity that rumbles through Tumblr. But each of them has only a scant handful of friends I can expect to interact with.

The same is true here on DreamWidth of course. And I've been even worse than elsewhere on posting, or commenting, or sometimes even opening the page to read.

I've tried before, but I'm going to try again and make this a place where I post more, and reach out more. I'm even going to start rambling about all the terrible wonderful books I've been reading.

redbird

First: The cat in question seems to be basically well.

So,

cattitude has been worrying on and off that our cat Kaja was getting skinny. A few days agp. that got to the point of calling the vet and then taking the cat in for a check-up.

At the exam, the vet told Cattitude that Kaja has not lost weight; if anything, she has gained an ounce or two. What's going on is, the cat has lost some muscle mass, which has led to some redistribution of her weight, and what Cattitude noted was that her legs were thinner. The vet said it was probably arthritis, drew blood to test for some more serious problems, and sent her home.

We got the results this morning, and they are reassuring: Kaja's kidney function, liver function, and thyroid are all fine. So is her blood sugar.

The email said we could have them do X-rays to check for arthritis, but that would require sedating the cat.

Or, they can assume it's arthritis, and give her monthly injections of a pain-killer to treat that, and see how she's doing in a few months.

The third choice is to just monitor the cat's health for now, and give her omega-3 supplements. We need to discuss the choices, but it's Saturday, and none of them involves "so call the vet and set this up right away."

scott_sanford

Hey, look, fiction.( Read more... )

Current Location: Everywhere

elfs

The 2025 off-year election happened about a month ago. Democrats won a number of highly important races in places like Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, plus a large number of down-ballot elections at the city and county level, with the most notable being that of Zohran Mamdani winning the moyorship of New York. A lot of punditry came out and shouted, “The Democrats are winning!”

We’re not winning. It’s just that the Republicans have finally angered enough of the electorate that they’re beginning to lose. There’s a difference, and we need to understand it. As a wise old woman once told me, “Voting isn’t really how things are run. The career bureaucrats run things, voting is a way to object, mostly. Someone always benefits or they won’t do the work keeping the thing running. The fight is usually over who controls the benefit.”

That’s what’s happening now. The people who elected Donald J. Trump and the rest of his (now literal) clown cars are upset that he isn’t delivering. As Paul Krugman put it on his blog the other day,

Trump ran a campaign about bring prices down, cutting the price of energy in half, making groceries much cheaper. He obviously hasn’t delivered and hasn’t even made an effort to deliver. I’m glad that people feel betrayed.

That’s what happened on November 4th. The electorate objected to being mislead. They objecteda to being lied to by this guy. They objected to being betrayed. Oh, yeah, you can find a lot of “people” on 𝕏itter (most of them Russian robots these days) pumping the MAGA rhetoric, and it can be frightening when we read that these machines are better than we are at picking the best way to change an individual’s polticial opinions. But even all that psychological warfare can’t win when so many basic things like meat, coffee, and medication have seemingly doubled in price over the past year.

Therein lies the problem. They’re not protesting the mistreatment of their latino. They’re not protesting the economic tornado that has devastated America’s Black communities. They’re not protesting the wave of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-lesbian legislation, or the end of the postal service, or the termination of America’s prominence in science and medicine.

All of these will make it harder to live together as a nation in the future. The high prices, though, those are what make it harder to live at all in the present, and that’s what the electorate protested on November 4th.

The reason the Republicans are still winning is because they’re promising people they’ll do something. It may be objectional, you’ll hate some of it, but at least they’ll be doing something.

The Democrats routinely promise to do nothing. The grim joke with Democratic activist slogans is that, if by some miracle an election wave powerful enough to give them control of the goverment is allowed to ever happen, whoever they elect will issue a ton of pardons, a few congressional committee will issue reports about how bad it was but that nothing should be done because it would disrupt and damage “the comity of America” or whatever.

For example, Hakeem Jeffries, the current Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, floated the Democrat National Committee’s choice of slogan for 2026 as “Strong Floor, No Ceiling.” Like, what the fuck does that even mean? Let me propose a better slogan:

Arrest all them bastards.

With a few remarkable exceptions at the municipal level, nobody has said anything like that.

There is one (ONE!) politician right now who loves the same America I do. Who, every time he’s on camera, praises something great about it: the natural parks it preserves, the vibrant cities where so many people live together, the beautiful farms and countryside that feed us. Who loves the visions of the artists, the vibrancy of queer people, the excellence of Black and Muslim athletes and scholars.

That politician is America’s most noteworthy socialist.

When was the last time you heard a white Democrat Congressman praise someone who wasn’t white or male? I looked, and I can’t find a recent incident of someone else defending Ilhan Omar from the Republican’s constant barrage of abuse. I can’t find a recent report of someone else defending Sarah McBride, the only transwoman in the House of Representatives.

I don’t want to hear some half-hearted, mumbled concession that, “Yeah, they shouldn’t be mean to Mrs. Omar or Ms. McBride or Ms. Octavio-Cortez.” I don’t want them to look embarrassed or ashamed that hey have spend some effort defending a woman or a black person or a trans person or a latina. I want them to be proud of their colleagues, to say what admirable features, ideas, and perspectives those colleagues bring to the table.

I want to hear a white Democratic Congressman say, “Look, I don’t agree with representative Omar on everything— we’re Democrats, we’re allowed to think for ourselves— but these attacks on her patriotism, her citizenship, and her commitment to representing her District are un-American and must stop.”

I want to hear Democrats say that America is loud and proud in all its forms. That well-funded and well-run cities are necessary for the health of a powerful, dynamic country. That the very word “civilization” comes from a Latin term for “to live peacefully aside strangers.” That freedom isn’t made better when we take away students’ freedoms to be who they are inside, or citizen’s freedoms to travel without documents, or women’s freedom to live without having to marry.

Mamdani won on a simple idea: “New York City is a fantastic place to live. People are struggling, true, but history shows us a lot of successful ways to ease their burdens and make New York City an even better place to live.” It’s a progressive vision. It’s a postive vision.

Do that with the America, Democrats.

Embrace, admire, and defend the people whose life paths aren’t your own. Say how much you love America, even the conservative, rural parts of it. Say how great the country is, admit to its flaws, and say it could be even better.

And that you’ll arrest all them bastards.

mrissa

I'll be doing my usual recommendations for short stuff other people have read at the end of December, when I've had a chance to read the things that are still coming out in December, but I think I've seen the last of my new publications for the year, so here's what I've been up to!

...a year turns out to be a long time. One of the reasons I think it's good to do these year-in-review posts is that the sense of "oh wait, was that this same year???" is strong. I feel like my tendency to put things I've accomplished in the rearview and focus on the next thing is generally really useful to me, but it does tend to lead to a "what have you done lately" mindset. When it turns out that what I have done lately is a pile of stories. There were more SF than fantasy stories, which surprised me, it didn't feel that way...more on why I think that is in a minute. In any case, here's the 2025 story list:

The Year the Sheep God Shattered (Diabolical Plots)

Her Tune, In Truth (Sunday Morning Transport)

If the Weather Holds (Analog)

Disconnections (Nature Futures)

The Things You Know, The Things You Trust (If There's Anyone Left)

All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (Lightspeed)

Things I Miss About Civilization (Nature Futures)

A Shaky Bridge (Clarkesworld)

What a Big Heart You Have (Kaleidotrope)

And Every Galatea Shaped Anew (Analog)

The Crow's Second Tale (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Advice for Wormhole Travelers (The Vertigo Project)

She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (The Vertigo Project)

The Torn Map (The Vertigo Project)

So yeah! Stories galore! And with a very satisfying variety of publishers, with the exception that The Vertigo Project was a focus of a lot of my attention this year. Which makes sense! It's a pretty big deal. All the poetry I had published this year was with The Vertigo Project as well, although I have a couple of poems ready to come out in 2026 from other places. Here's the list of poems:

Club Planet Vertigo (The Vertigo Project)

Greetings From Innerspace (The Vertigo Project)

On the Way Down (The Vertigo Project)

Preparation (The Vertigo Project)

The Nature of Nemesis (The Vertigo Project)

I only had one piece of nonfiction out this year, The Stranger Next Door: The Domestic Fantastic in Classic Nordic Children's Literature (Uncanny). But it's a topic that's very close to my heart, and I'm glad I had the chance to wallow in it. Er, I mean, share it with you.

I suppose the other thing that could be considered nonfiction is that I wrote journaling prompts to help people with vertigo process their vertigo experience through creative writing. I also wrote a group workshop format for the same general ideas, and I ran the first of those workshops in November. It was lovely and seemed to be very meaningful to the people involved--and that's one of the things that's nice about the facilitator (that is, me) being someone with vertigo, it meant that I was talking about our experiences rather than their experiences. The Vertigo Project has been the gift that keeps on giving all year, and there will be more of it yet in 2026. What a great thing to get to be involved with. I'm so pleased to have done this work with these people.

I was also a finalist for the Washington Science Fiction Association's Small Press Award, for one of 2024's stories, A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places. I got to go to Capclave and hang out with a bunch of friends and enjoy being a finalist.

I think the main reason that I felt like I was doing equal parts fantasy and SF this year is that I wrote approximately half each of two novels, one fantasy and one SF. Both are still going strong. We'll see where they take me. I'm also working on some more short work in both categories. While I published a lot more short SF, my biggest news in recent months is that I sold a fantasy novella to Horned Lark Press. A Dubious Clamor features harpies, politics, operettas, pastries, and complicated friendships, and it's forthcoming in 2026. A lot done this year, a lot to look forward to!

swan_tower

In the beginning, there was the list.

Some of our oldest written texts are, in fact, just lists of things: types of trees, types of bird, that sort of thing. They may have been used for teaching vocabulary in writing, but they also serve as a foundational element for knowledge, one so basic that the average person today barely even thinks about it. But how can you learn about Stuff if you haven't first thought about what Stuff is out there?

The Onomasticon of Amenope goes a step further. Not only does this Egyptian text from three thousand years ago set out to help the student learn "all things that exist," but it organizes them into loose categories, summarized by Alan Gardiner as things like "persons, courts, offices, occupations," "classes, tribes, and types of human being," and "the towns of Egypt." This is a vital step in scholarship, not only in the past but the present: even today, we wrestle with questions of categorization and how best to group things, because there's no single "right" answer. What system is best depends on what you want to use it for, and how you approach this issue reveals a lot about where your priorities are. (Think of a grocery store: what's revealed by having dedicated shelving for things like "Hispanic foods" and "Asian foods," and what items could arguably be placed among them but aren't.)

Another very early category of scholarship is travel writing or travelers' reports -- basically, accounts of ethnography and natural history covering foreign lands. These have often been highly fanciful, reporting things like people with no heads and their faces in their stomachs, but why? It's hard to say for sure. In some cases the information probably got garbled in the transmission (think of the game "telephone"); in others, the observer may have misunderstood what they were seeing; sometimes the teller deliberately jazzed up their material, and sometimes they made it up out of whole cloth, perhaps to support whatever larger point they wanted to make. From our modern perspective, it often looks highly unreliable . . . but it's still a key element in laying the foundations of knowledge.

Once you have foundations, you can start building upon them. Much ancient scholarship takes the form of commentaries, works that aim to explain, expand upon, or contradict existing texts, often by pointing at another text that says something different. You also get textual criticism, which is our modern term for a practice going back at least two thousand years: when works are copied by hand, there is significant need for scholars comparing the resulting variants and attempting to identify which ones are the oldest or most accurate. Basically, undoing that game of telephone, lest things get garbled beyond comprehension.

What you don't tend to get -- not until more recently -- is research as we think of it now. There absolutely were people who attempted to explain how the world worked, but they largely did so by sitting and thinking, rather than by actively observing phenomena and testing their theories. That doesn't mean they weren't curious about things, though! How the heck does vision work, or smell? Why do objects fall down? What makes the planets seem to "move backward" through the sky, rather than following a straight path? What engenders disease in the body? People have been trying to answer these questions for thousands of years. The pop culture image of pre-Enlightenment science is that people just said "it's all because of the gods" and stopped there, but in truth, pre-modern people were very interested in finding more specific answers. Yes, it was all due to the gods, but that didn't mean there weren't patterns and rules to the divine design. Even medieval Christians, often assumed to be uninterested in or afraid of asking questions (lest the Church come down on their heads), argued that better understanding the mechanics of God's creation was an expression of piety, rather than incompatible with it.

But it's true that they largely didn't conduct experimentation in the modern, scientific method sense. Science and philosophy were strongly linked; rather than aiming to dispassionately observe facts, much less formulate a hypothesis and then see whether the data bore it out, people sought explanations that would be in harmony with their beliefs about the nature of existence. Pre-Copernican astronomy was shaped by philosophical convictions like "the earth we humans live on is supremely important" and "circles are the most perfect shape, therefore the one ordained for the movement of heavenly bodies" -- because why would divine entities arrange things any other way?

Scholarship and science were also strongly shaped by respect for past authority, to the point where luminaries like Aristotle were practically deified. (Or literally deified, in the case of the Egyptian chancellor Imhotep.) It marked a tremendous sea change when the English Royal Society in the seventeenth century adopted as its motto Nullius in verba, loosely translated as "take nobody's word for it." They resolved not to accept the wisdom of yore, not until it had been actively tested for veracity . . . and if it failed to hold water? Then out it went, regardless of who said it and how long it had been accepted as dogma.

This is, of course, a highly simplified view of the history of science. Not everything proceeded at the same pace; astronomy, for example, has an incredibly long history of precise observation and refinement of instrumentation, because correctly understanding the sky was vital to things like the creation of calendars, which in turn affected everything from agriculture to taxation. Biology, meanwhile, spent a lot longer relying on anecdata. But it's vital to remember that things which seem completely obvious to us are only so because somebody has already done the hard work of parsing the mysteries of things like the circulation of blood or the chemistry of combustion, which in fact were not obvious at all.

And this opens an interesting side door for science fiction and fantasy writers. The history of science is littered with theories eventually proved incorrect -- but what if they weren't wrong? Richard Garfinkle's novel Celestial Matters operates in a cosmos where Aristotelian biology and Ptolemaic astronomy are the reality of things, and develops its story accordingly. There's a whole Wikipedia list of superseded scientific theories, which could be fodder for story ideas! (But tread carefully, as some of those theories have pretty horrific implications, especially when they have to do with people's behavior.)

It's also worth thinking about what theories we hold today will look hilariously obsolete in the future. We like to think of ourselves as having attained the pinnacle of science and everything from here on out is just polishing the details, but you never know when an Einstein is going to come along and overturn the status quo with a new, deeper explanation of the facts. Of course none of us know what those future theories will be -- if we did, we'd be the Einsteins of our generation! But if you can spin a convincing-sounding foundation for your theory, you can present the reader with a world that contradicts what we think we know today.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/jG7X6K)

redbird

I went to the dentist yesterday to get my teeth cleaned, and on my way out made a follow-up appointment. When I got home, I realized that they'd given me an earlier appointment than I thought, or wanted, so I had to call them today.

I also got halfway through filing a claim for insurance reimbursement last night, before realizing that I didn't have the right paperwork. In the process, I found out how to file a claim for the glasses I had made a couple of months ago, which I'd thought would be complicated.

Those forms require a National Provider Identification number, which can be found online. Praise wikipedia! Googling didn't find me the relevant website, but the Wikipedia article has a link to it. The website is searchable by anyone, if you have the provider's name and location, and "Arlington, MA" was sufficient, without the street address.

Having talked to the dentist's office, I now have a 3:00 appointment for my next cleaning, and have submitted the insurance claim.

redbird

Books read in the last couple of months:

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories:. This is odd and somewhat disjointed, set in the same secondary world as A Stranger in Olondria (which I read ages ago and remember very little about). The threads all come together at the end. I’d been displeased earlier because I thought we’d lost both the first narrative voice, which I liked, and the continuity of the narrator's story. The book does get back to her story, or at least her sister and cousin’s stories.

James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks: read aloud, because Adrian had never read it. Still delightful, a fairy tale set in a world where people have at least heard of fairy tales.

Lorraine Baston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. Baston talks about rules as measuring devices, as sets of instructions, and as models, and various shifts in meaning over time. She talks about thick and thin rules, thick rules being ones with (more) examples and details, and which anticipate more exceptions. A about the change in how people learn/are taught all sorts of things, including math. I enjoyed this, and if that description sounds interesting you probably will too.

Edward Eager, The Time Garden: Children's magical adventures while spending the summer with a relative because their parents are in London, working on the premiere of a play. Another read-aloud, this one was new to me, and fun.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The state, as of 2023, and possible futures of the ocean and ocean life in the Anthropocene, according to an oceanographer. I asked the library for this because I liked the author's book about mollusks.

David D. Levine

Exactly what we needed

SARAH STEPHENS IS NOT YOUR AI GRANDMA

IRA

New Worlds: Getting Philosophical

In the Words of Gandalf

Christmas Preparations

It's Wednesday?

Apple $16K

reading about writing, thinking about art

Winter Ramblings with Horse

more IRA paperwork

Reading now includes Listening for me

Doing the work

cat health worries

Jenny Everywhere and the Pilfered Pyramid Profits Plot

All I Want Is A Democratic Leadership With A Heart, A Brain, and Courage

2025 in writing (my stuff)

New Worlds: A Brief History of Science

dentist, and insurance

Wednesday reading

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October 2025

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