crunchysteve | Reading

last update was 25th March and I'm not going to attempt to remember everything done.

Healing: nipple is still very sore, still using the rubber (teething) rings inside my bra to keep the fabric off it (it is still noticeably swollen compared to the other). The rest of the skin has healed, and I think I've finally finished peeling. Most of my armpit is bald, which as a texture experience feels different from having shaved. I continue to have reasonable and exhausted days and have not correctly balanced how much I can get away with doing.

study: I've got lots of good books that meet my criteria, and I've been poking through them. Other parts of the project are going slower. I am frustrated by my inability to buckle down on one, but I am also aware that I'm working through the tasks that I said I was going to need to do to do it properly. I got an email from the ethics board about corrections, so that will be Monday's task.

weather: there has been a startling amount of rain. There was a cyclone that didn't get this far south, but did push a front through. Jandakot recorded 77.4mm on one day, which is a 51 year maximum for March*, and a total of 87.6mm in the five days of rain. Plus we got 16.2mm to 9amm Wednesday, and 6.8 mm to 9am this morning.

music: I missed the last rehearsals of term for the Monday night group, and that goes back this coming week. I have not practiced anything, not least because bowing was painful for a while. I have made it to two of the Wednesday night rehearsals - one to discover it was the end of term open practice / concert, and one where it was a greatest hits and I didn't get access to the music before the rehearsal, and so sight read everything (I did try a practice on the night before). I failed to go to the sunday recorder group last weekend because apparently when I updated my calendar to the new alternating fortnight I didn't do it right, and I'd been successfully doing it from memory up until now.

con: we are at not enough week's before the con. I have been dropping the ball more than I like and I have to find a solution. I have one I would like, but I don't know whether anyone will take it on. We have some fabulous guests. Plus we have both GUFF and DUFF winners attending. I know Farah Mendelsohn is one, but I can't pull the name of the other out of my head. I'm presenting in the academic stream, and at this point I don't have enough to say. argh.

*I use an aggregator site for my rain information, rather than the BOM, so they are going off their data set; they claim this as 'probably a record maximum'. They report 17.0mm as the March average (1973-2026), the previous monthly maximum as 83.6mm in 1992, and the previous daily maximum as 37.8mm, also in 1992. At the opposite end, 2011 had no rain in March -- that would be the year of the big hail storm, if I remember correctly.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

fred_mouse

Giordano Bruno was also burned at the steak by The Inquisition

.. oh. umm. I have no words for the image this presented.

fred_mouse

October

I've had some of these hanging around for a startlingly long period of time. I'm in a bit of a grump, which makes this the perfect time to look at a book list. I don't have a lot of energy to deal with interfaces, and I'm less likely to be interested in All! The! Books!

75 Notable Translations 2023 from World Literature Today (limited free pages) - the introductory section was interesting reading, but the list was text, with title, author, translator, publisher, and no info, and I didn't care to click through. I scanned through to see if anything caught my attention namewise, but wasn't really expecting much. I spotted Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera and Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami to click through, and both sound sufficiently interesting I've added them to the list.

Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2023 hypothetically this should be a list I'll find a lot on. But! I was at least somewhat on top of my reading last year, so before looking at the list, I'm taking a guess that some of the interesting ones I'll already have read. I do like the format, where each reviewer talks about their picks, and writes some number of paragraphs with the books discussed collectively. I was right that there are some books I very much enjoyed on that list. There were some that I don't remember ever hearing of (although at least one that looked interesting was already on the wishlist; I didn't check them all). And a surprising number that I started and bounced out of to 'finish after Hugo reading season' because I knew they weren't going to be my number one Hugo vote. Most of which I still haven't gone back to.

November

Locus Magazine 2023 Recommended Reading List - this page managed to annoy me before I'd read anything by popping an ad up over the 'reject tracking' button, so that I ended up clicking on the ad instead of the reject. This provides a long list of who provides the recommendations, and many of those I recognised are people whose suggestions I have previously bounced off, so I wasn't actually all that optimistic. And then I started skimming, and realised that I just don't care enough to click through, and title plus author doesn't give me enough to latch on to. I was interested to note that the most recent Greg Egan is self-published, and I'd be interested in knowing what the story is there -- although not interested enough that I allowed myself to be distracted from task Close! All! Tabs! I spotted an Octavia Cade collection that I didn't know about, so that went on the list. I was very bemused to see a collection by Tom Reamy, but again, did not go down the rabbit hole of finding out what was going on there (assumption: reprint?).

I could have gone looking at the short stories, and decided against it. Similarly the next tab I had open was a long list of short story links that I decided to just close. I do like short stories, I just don't need these lists sitting there being Tasks.

Nebula reading list - I'm assuming that this is a generic link, and what is on the page changes each year. Which means I was probably meant to be looking at 2024's list, but I'm looking at works published in 2025. After a bit of a look at the novels (which was a much shorter list than I was expecting) I decided to skip. At this point in time my focus is kids books, and there aren't any.

Esquire: The 30 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 - this one gives lovely potted summaries of why they are recommended, and it was so nice to engage with. I did end up adding books to the wishlist that i would otherwise have missed. Long, but interesting.

From the New York Public Library Best Books for Teens 2024 - this has an itty bitty drop down that would allow for selection of other years. As I'm in 'close all the tabs' mode I have chosen to not go down the rabbit hole. This shows me covers, with title and author as text; there are an assortment of filters available. Oh! and a potted summary for each. I didn't find anything very inspiring, but I did realise that I can use this as a list for my uni book search, because there is a kids books section.

December

Unusually, a video: The Top 10 Science Fiction Books Published in 2023 - I hadn't heard of most of these; there were two that I have on the wishlist, but I didn't have the motivation to add any of the rest to said wishlist, not least because several were subsequent books in a series. I skipped through much of this because I wasn't that interested in the commentary, at least on the series ones.

Reactor: Readers Pick Their Favorite SFF of 2025 - this is the first one of these I'm reading today, but I'm tired and grumpy, so I suspect I won't be putting things on the wishlist. ... and this is image plus link; I don't have the oomph to go clicking through, so looking at the pretty and then closing the tab.

fred_mouse

tagged by mabiana on tumblr to do a set of questions that overlap with the ones they answered here, so I'm combining them. I do not have the oomph to work out how to tag, please consider yourself tagged if you have the time, energy, and motivation to complete.

Have you ever been fooled by an ‘April Fool’s Day’ joke?

Almost certainly. I can't think of any examples, but I'm now very sceptical of anything I see on the relevant date and for the next couple of days. To the point that it took me a couple of days to start to believe the Kit-Kat heist might be true.

Do you prefer sweet things or savoury things to eat?tumblr version: sweet or salty)

I kind of like things that are in the overlap of sweet or salty. Some of the local east asian grocers sell various kueh lapis (translation: layer cake) and the one I love the most has a salted layer and a sweet layer. I also like very lightly sweetened breads, like brioche and hot cross buns. Other than that sweet/savoury is a very random kind of thing with me.

Do other people shorten your given name? Do you shorten your own name?

Only if they mishear it. It is not a name that really shortens sensibly. At various times over the years people have used extended versions, of which there are many, because it is the first part of a lot of compound names.

Are there opportunities to go walking where you live? Do you take advantage of that?

I'm not sure what 'opportunities to go walking are' - this is a good suburb for walking, with most roads having footpaths, shortcuts through sections of the suburb, and a few tiny bits of remnant bush. There are also lots of places I can go to walk, with a variety of parks, remnant bush, state and national parks in easy (car) reach. I don't walk as often as I ought, for energy and pain reasons.

Pineapple on a pizza – yes, or no?

eh. I did not learn to love it but I will eat it. This is because pizza pineapple comes from cans, and there is something in the older can lining materials that my body reacts very badly to, so for a long time cooked pineapple was something I couldn't eat without nausea even if it wasn't out of a can, because of the learned response.

Reading: planning to do a post on that later today

Last Series Watched: Nearly had to go ask Youngest what we watched, but realised it was the one about training working dogs--Muster Dogs.

Last film: It's so long since I watched a film, I don't know. I tried Everything Everywhere All At Once, and had to stop because of the flashing lights. Might have been one of the Benoit Blanc ones?

Last Song: Whatever the ipod was playing while I was working in the study. I think I've got it on shuffle on a playlist; I have a dock for it that means I just press a button and music happens.

coffee or tea: both. Used to be at work that I would buy a coffee on the way in, drink that slowly, and then for the 10am morning tea catch up make a cup of whatever black tea I currently had in the drawer. These days the coffee is still regular (artisanat makes a pot each morning), but the tea is less predictable. In the office at uni I do have black tea, but I also have tisane options--currently blueberry, some kind of red berry (might be currant?), rooibos, and peppermint, so the later drinks might not be tea.

working on: so many projects. actively trying to make progress on '21st' quilts for the offspring, none of whom are that young any more. three knitting projects active plus one that is waiting to be started. 'some' crochet projects. many books (reading). PhD. garden. a pile of half done craft and repairs in the sewing space.