univacgrl | Network

Posted by an

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-celebrates-9-million-registered-users/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266633

What is better than having eight million passionate, dedicated users? Having nine million, of course! That’s right, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently reached nine million registered users! Thanks a million (or rather, nine million!) to every member of our community for making this success possible.

Some of you have likely noticed that AO3 is occasionally—and temporarily—unavailable due to site maintenance. However, if you prepare yourself in advance, you don’t need to be deprived of content!

The best way to prepare yourself for maintenance (both scheduled and unscheduled) is to download works in advance to tide you over until the site is accessible again. You can find instructions on how to download content from AO3 in our FAQs! Works are downloadable in several formats — AZW3, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and HTML — letting you enjoy reading across devices: desktop, mobile devices, or even eReaders. Whether the site is temporarily down or you’re offline, having works downloaded means that you can always enjoy your favorite works!

Once again, thank you for your continued support of AO3 and for helping us grow each and every day. We look forward to celebrating many more achievements with you in the future!

https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-celebrates-9-million-registered-users/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266633

Today started with the slightly terrifying sight of Firefly in the garden. ( Read more... )
Enough excitement. I'm ready for a few really boring days!

Last night was pear pickup down at Pete Johnson's pear shed. Pete is a lovely guy. We loaded up some cardboard boxes for

loup_noir and then stood around talking. Turns out that Pete's Aunt and Uncle ran a lodge up at Denali (Alaska) and that their kids, like M's kids, worked on the railway for the cruse companies during the summer. I swear there is only 2 degrees of separation in this world. Pete had sent of something like 18 tons of pears that day, headed for a Del Monte cannery. We were loading 2nds into our boxes, but they were still lovely pears.

( Cut for medical description. )

After my session Chena & I took the walk that was strongly suggested before getting in the car and heading south to meet with

loup_noir and her husband. Their house is definitely well out toward the very end of the road, so a fun and pretty drive. I very much enjoyed seeing the garden and orchard, not to mention the tutorial on catching gophers. I'll be putting that information into practice very soon. They gifted me with some lovely, and yummy potatoes and a big bunch of equally yummy kale.

The drive home was through Anderson Valley and Boonville which was very pleasant. It is an easier road than highway 20 which I usually take and made sense since I was already quite far south from Fort Bragg. Usually it just adds 25 or 30 minutes to an already long drive.

Welp. I've been posting about this under lock, but let's make a public one too. My younger brother and his wife were supposed to be visiting me this week (with them arriving today), but those plans were cancelled at the last minute due to a combination of several reasons.

I'd already asked off work for the rest of the week, and I'm not taking it back. I'm just going to take a five day weekend and call it a day. Which, you know, I could use the break from work, so it's not a bad thing. And, hey, this way I won't have to worry about a lack of spoons when I have to go back to work like I did when I was off for the Fourth of July and playing D&D all weekend.

Sadly, I don't have much in the way of extra money right now, so I can't do anything fun while I'm off work. I'm fairly stocked on groceries at least, so I won't have to worry about that. I'll take what I can get on that front.

Right now, my plans are to basically switch between playing video games, reading fanfiction, and writing fanfiction (specifically for Black Emporium and the Dragon Age Reverse Bang) for the next five days. We'll see if that changes, but that's what I'm aiming for right now at least.

Current Mood: blank

Tags:

The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.

( ungenerous readings below )

Tags:

First thing today I had to deal with two people from PG&E vegetative management. Sigh. I walked them around pointed out all the places I'd had problems with the tree company's work, told them I wanted enough trees down so there would be little or no tree work for 15 years. I'm tired of being bothered by tree crews in my yard. At the end I quietly told them that I would get a No Trespassing restraint order against the company they want to use if I have to.
House and garage cleanup continues. While sorting the tools that came from Henry St I found a pair of linesman pliers. I don't remember getting them, though it might have been in a box with other tools at a garage sale. Anyway these were marked Kraeuter & Company. They were made between 1914 and 1930. The early tools were the first tools made with forged nickle steel. They have a pretty pattern on the handles doubling as a "anti-slip" feature. They look very similar to the ones in the second picture of this link. alloy-artifacts.org/kraeuter-company-p2.html#linemans

Bats and their identification came up in a conversation in

common_nature Having been to a lecture on bats a year or two ago I knew there were apps for your phone, but hadn't remembered that one needs a microphone capable of hearing the ultrasonic world. The upshot is that I ended up ordering a mic and the app here: www.wildlifeacoustics.com/products/echo-meter-touch-2 Undoubtedly you will here more about this device in coming weeks.

This is so I have a good record.
Dill
4 cups Water
3 cups Distilled White Vinegar
1/3 cup Salt. Make sure it does not contain iodine or anti-caking ingredients. Plain sea salt or pickling salt is good.
1+ Tbs Sugar.
Pinch Cardamon Seed
Sm Pinch Coriander Seed
1+ tsp Mustard Seed
Heat above ingredients to a simmer and simmer for 5 to 10 min.

To each pint jar that is stuffed with cucumber add:
1/2 teaspoon Mustard Seed
1+ tsp Dill Seed. Or 1 head of dill.
1 clove garlic
5 to 10 Peppercorns
1 grape leaf

Tags:

canning

Posted by therealmorticia

https://www.transformativeworks.org/2025-otw-election-results/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266563

The Elections Committee would like to thank all of our candidates for their hard work in this year’s election. We would also like to thank our departing Board Directors, Jennifer Haynes and Zixin Zhang, for all their work during their Board terms. With that, we are pleased to present the results of the 2025 Election.

The following candidates (in alphabetical order) have been officially elected to the Board of Directors:

Elizabeth Wiltshire
Harlan Lieberman-Berg

The new members of the Board will formally begin their term overlap on October 1. We wish them well with their terms.

With that, the election season comes to a close. Thank you to everyone who got involved by spreading the word, asking the candidates questions, and, of course, voting! We look forward to seeing all of you again next year.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/2025-otw-election-results/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266563

The weather is delightful right now--sunny and about 22 C/72 F--so I went to Central Square after lunch, for the Monday farmers' market and to buy ice cream.

At the farmers market, I bought Zestar apples--an early apple all three of us like--blackberries, peaches, and a loaf of Hi Rise bakery's "Concord" bread. I then walked over to Toscanini's, but noticed New City Microcreamery en route, and went in. I asked for a taste of the key lime pie ice cream, and was pleased that it tastes like key lime pie and works as ice cream, so I got a scoop and took it outside to eat at a nearby table.

Then to Tosci's, where the board said they had raspberry and sweet cream (among other flavors). I asked for a pint of each, and discovered they were out of raspberry. I asked to taste the mango sticky rice ice cream, which I didn't like. So I just got sweet cream, then walked back to New City for a pint of key lime pie ice cream.

I now have dairy ice cream from four different local ice cream places in my freezer, the other two being Lizzy's (chocolate orgy and black raspberry) and JP Licks (peach). Boston is a good city for ice cream.

Current Mood: pleased

Tags:

Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience.

rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile,

genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of

genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.

Tags:

A tiny breeze sounds like a rainfall as leaves shake free the dew. I hear the patter of percussion, stare at the clear opal sky of dawn, and then feel the air move around me. It's a little cooler. I see the pines sway a little. Two leaves spiral down from the tulip poplars. We are two weeks in from the first of August and the turn of the light. Copper brown cherry leaves are scattered on the deck.

I picked eight pounds of figs yesterday, pureeing 5.74 pounds into almost three "quarts," sitting in the fridge to dehydrate -- or be turned into fruit jellies -- in turn. (Quart jars hold 3 cups, i do not understand...) 2.5 pounds went into my first canned whole figs in a light simple syrup. I made twice as much syrup as i thought i would need, so i canned the left over to use with a later batch. Canning in light syrup is the least sugar method i can find. I'm trying to figure out a lower sugar (and added citric acid) jam recipe for the figs. My first quart jar packed with dried figs are less dried out than some past years, and i remember how i did have a jar sort of ferment on me last winter.

I am spending forever looking for approved fig and Fuyu persimmon canning recipes, while wrestling with the temptation to just follow random blogger recipes. Admittedly, lots of them look likely safe as sugar content can be double or triple approved recipes.

Tags:

morning writing

I've been cleaning up and putting away for a while now. It isn't just the normal entropy that attacks while one isn't looking, it is all the stuff coming up from Henry St that needs to be sorted, put away or thrown away. With the new stove coming the spice cabinet needs to be removed from the wall, so all the spices are being sorted and old ones thrown out. The spices are now sorted but I need to figure out where they will live temporarily, and then build a new cabinet for them. Yes, I want them in a cabinet, not in a drawer.
Everyone talks about using tools in a shop. Almost no one ever talks about maintaining the tools. In the last two days I did a deep clean, lubrication and alignment of the table saw. The saw wasn't used much the last few years and arrived with a thick coat of rust on the cast iron top. Rust is, um, sticky. Nothing slides easily over it. I used steel wool to take the worst of the rust off, then 220 grit sandpaper, a razor scraper to get up lumps of resin and (I think) some spilled oil based stain. 320 grit sandpaper in the orbital sander took the last of the rust and grime off the top. Having looked up proper table saw care, the next step was to wax the top with Carnuba wax. What a difference! There are gears underneath the saw that can get pretty gummy with dirt, sawdust and resin but that was minimal. A stiff scrub brush and a spray with graphite as a lubricant fixed things up. The final step was to check the blade alignment which looks fine. None of the tuneup was hard, it just took a while, and should make everything MUCH easier to use. If nothing else the wood will positively glide over that waxed top! Next up is re-attaching the fence to the body of the saw, which shouldn't take long.
One whole cardboard box of misc shop stuff, including lots of orphaned screws, bolts, washers, hand tools got sorted out and mostly put away. Several chisels got sharpened and hung up. Clearly I really need more peg board.
Early this morning I moved the mouse traps into the garden and caught two more voles.

Posted by callmeri

https://www.transformativeworks.org/1-million-mandarin-chinese-works-on-ao3/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266511

We’re very excited to announce that AO3 now hosts more than one million 中文-普通话國語 (Mandarin Chinese) fanworks! Mandarin Chinese is the first non-English language to pass one million fanworks, and we appreciate everyone who’s helped us reach this milestone.

AO3 hosts fanworks in a wide variety of languages: currently, the count is around 150! You can browse the Work Languages page to see more. We’re grateful that so many creators from so many backgrounds have chosen to host their fanworks on AO3, and we appreciate each and every fanwork that’s been shared.

Since many users are multilingual, we wanted to open the floor: which language(s) do you prefer to engage with in fandom? Do you read, listen to, watch, and/or create works in the same language? Is your answer the same for all the fandoms you’re part of?

Thanks to everyone who helped get us here! We look forward to seeing even more languages reach this milestone.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/1-million-mandarin-chinese-works-on-ao3/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266511

I've had voles in the garden for a while now. Mostly they haven't done much damage, but recently they got into the tanks in front of the house and killed several plants including a butternut squash that I am quite unhappy about. Voles are pretty easy to trap so last night traps went out. I put four mouse traps around each hole in the tanks. This morning there was a really big, fat vole in a trap. Since voles often come in pairs the trap got reset. This afternoon there is another big, fat vole in the same trap. Next up will be a hole in the garden. I don't like trapping and killing animals, but like rattlesnakes, there are some things that aren't ok. Eating my food crops is one of them. Of course the voles are there exactly because I removed the resident rattlesnake....

My new Starlink internet is now up and running. So far (an hour?) it is great.
Jesus from the roofing company came out and installed a new roof jack to get the cable from the antenna through the roof. It involved removing several shingles, installing the roof jack and installing new shingles. Not cheap, but the roof is brand new and I REALLY wanted it done right.
The hardest part of the whole setup was removing the stand on the antenna and figuring out how the antenna pipe attached to it, also fishing the cable down through a hole that already had multiple cables through it. That took five minutes at best. The rest was really easy.

There have been sacks of dry goods supplies on the kitchen counter for a month. Those sacks were joined by more last week when the Azure order came in. It was painfully clear that I didn't have enough storage jars. I ordered 6 - 5 liter jars and 6 - 3 liter jars. Yesterday they all got washed, dried and joined by at least 3 more jars such as the 3 liter jar that had a dab of bread flour dating from 2019 in it. By 5pm all but 3 - 3 liter jars were full and the pantry was much cleaner than it has been for a long time.

Now I can go on to sorting out the spice cabinet that is next to the stove. That cabinet will have to come down when we put the new stove in. The new stove is 6 inches wider than the old one and requires a hood, which the old electric stove didn't. Here is my current work-around for leveling up one of my stove burners. The cute little leaf shaped chopstick rest has been utterly useless for the years I have owned it, but right now it is perfect. The burner is just about level with it.

Off to dog class in a few minutes.

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: tired

Tags:

d&d: pyra cantha

I have to wait in line for a web form?!

Posted by Aditi Paul

https://www.transformativeworks.org/2025-otw-board-voting-now-open/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266374

The election has opened!

Every OTW member who joined between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, should have a ballot by now. If you didn’t get one, please check your spam folder first, then contact us via our contact form. If you are unsure whether your donation was made before the deadline, please contact our Development and Membership Committee by using the contact form on our website and selecting “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?”

The election will run through August 18, 2025, 23:59 UTC; check this time zone converter to find out what time that will be for you.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/2025-otw-board-voting-now-open/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=266374

Last week I was on vacation at Beth's family cottage, which normally would mean that I'd be reading a battered paperback. HOWEVER instead I was racing to finish Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets due to the unfortunate fact of it being triply overdue at the library.

A useful and worthwhile book; a compelling and depressing book; not, perhaps, an ideal vacation book, but so it goes. The book is composed of oral histories conducted by Alexievich in the years between 1991 and 2012 with various inhabitants of the Former Soviet Union. Alexievich is particularly interested in suicides, and several of the interviews/chapters circulate around people who knew or were close to people who took their own lives after the fall of communism; several others focus on people who were living in areas of the former Soviet Union where the end of the USSR led immediately to ethnic or nationalistic violence.

Many of the oral histories follow a pattern that goes

a. [recounting of an absolutely horrific personal-infrastructural tragedy or example of human cruelty that happened under Stalin]
b. but at least we had ideals
c. And Now We Have This Fucking Capitalism Instead And It's Not A Good Trade

and many others go

a. under socialism in [location] they said we were all brothers and I believed it
b. and suddenly overnight that changed and I will be forever haunted by the things I've seen since

Alexievich recounts the oral histories more or less as if they're dramatic/poetic monologues -- usually monologues of despair -- removing herself and the circumstances under which they were conducted almost entirely, except for a very occasional and startling interjection to make a point. (One oral history, of the horrific-things-happened-but-we-believed variety, is intermittently interrupted by anekdoty from the interviewee's son; Alexievich comments that no matter what she asked him, he only ever responded with a joke.) Some sections are compendiums of conversation gathered in a location, at a party or in a marketplace, sliding past each other montage-style. As a literary conceit, it's very effective, but I found myself wishing sometimes that it was a little less literary. It's rare that I read a nonfiction book and want the author to be putting more of themself into the narrative, rather than less, but I wanted to know what questions she was asking. That said, for various reasons, I'm considering buying a copy.

watervole was talking about how badly smoke from the fires in historic re-enactment affected her. That brought up some memories for me.
( Read more, pic )

"Well kiss my physics!" as read by Alan Rickman

You've got me? Who's got you?

AO3 Celebrates 9 Million Registered Users

Santa Rosa and Back

Fort Bragg and Back

Long Weekend

(no subject)

Cleanup, PG&E, Bats

Dill Pickle Recipe

2025 OTW Election Results

local food shopping

(no subject)

(morning writing)

Update

1 Million Mandarin Chinese Works on AO3

Voles

Internet, Cleaning

Pyra Cantha D&D: Summary for 8/15 Game

What fresh hell is this?

2025 OTW Board Voting Now Open!

(no subject)

Stoves, Mexico, Updated

Profile

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags