Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Every Kind of Craft now open!

Jun. 30th, 2025 01:28 pm
yourlibrarian: Every Kind of Craft on green (Every Kind of Craft Green - yourlibraria)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] sewing101


Do you make crafts? Do you like to look at crafts? Would you like to get (or give) advice about crafts? All crafts are welcome. Share photos, stories about projects in progress, and connect with other crafty folks.

You are welcome to make your own posts, and this community will also do a monthly call for people to share what they are working on, or what they've seen which may be inspiring them. Images of projects old or new, completed or in progress are welcome, as are questions, tutorials and advice.

If you have any questions, ask them here!
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff




A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.


I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis




The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.


The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton




A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

Interview with DeWanda Wise

Jun. 27th, 2025 09:13 am
marthawells: Murderbot with helmet (Default)
[personal profile] marthawells
For Murderbot Day, a great interview with DeWanda Wise, about playing NavigationBot in The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon:

https://www.nexuspointnews.com/post/interview-dewanda-wise

I had worked with Paul on Fatherhood. He literally texted me and was like, "do you want to play a murderous robot?"

Every Kind of Craft now open!

Jun. 25th, 2025 12:47 pm
yourlibrarian: Every Kind of Craft on green (Every Kind of Craft Green - yourlibraria)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] sewing


Do you make crafts? Do you like to look at crafts? Would you like to get (or give) advice about crafts? All crafts are welcome. Share photos, stories about projects in progress, and connect with other crafty folks.

You are welcome to make your own posts, and this community will also do a monthly call for people to share what they are working on, or what they've seen which may be inspiring them. Images of projects old or new, completed or in progress are welcome, as are questions, tutorials and advice.

If you have any questions, ask them here!

Hobbit Time;>!

Jun. 25th, 2025 11:22 am
mdehners: (totoro)
[personal profile] mdehners posting in [community profile] gardening
So, I'm sitting on my porch, smoking a Hobbit/Churchwarden pipe, looking downhill to the TVA reservoir cove we live above, watching the birds and bees. Nice.....
This yr I planted Balsam Impatiens in the elevated beds along the N side of the house. My brother, Bless him's heart was in the right place when he put them in before we moved here but he's basically the anti-gardener. He can grow a lawn and that's about it so he didn't know that the N side of a house limits what you can grow. It'd be perfect for mini Hostas but they'd basically be tv trays for deer! I've had/have plenty of Tiarella/heucheras, Bleeding Hearts, Cyclamen and Columbine so after Spring blooms are a bit scarce. I'd originally planned to plant the Balsams in the E garden but with health issues this yr I wasn't able to go about on my knees so I just stuffed them in where there was space. So far they're Mauve and Lilac the former much more vigorous. The Bumblebees love them, esp the Mauves.
Lost pretty much all Lilies not far in the back of the beds to deer. Don't like the leaves but the blossoms?!?
With all the Rain we had this Spring I've lost about 1/2 my Lavender cultivars. Thankfully, most of those were Lavandins and the more sweet(and edible) angustifolias oddly were the survivors...including one vera from seed!
Unfortunately, with the various health issues and accompanying md visits I've hadn't the time, energy or md clearance(just had a spinal electric pain reliever installed 2 weeks ago) to even spend time smoking my pipe and watching the birds(and for you "woo-folk", Nature Spirits;>), let alone keep my beds up. Thankfully, things are slowed WAY down and starting this week I can do more than I have. Got the front 3 ft of the W front yard bed weeded and gave the Salvias a bit of a late "Chelsey Chop";>.
Slow and easy does it!
Cheers, Pat
swan_tower: (*writing)
[personal profile] swan_tower
cover art for THE ATLAS OF ANYWHERE, showing a cool, misty river valley with waterfalls pouring down its slopes

Well over a decade ago, I first had the idea of reprinting my short fiction in little collections themed around subgenres. When I sat down to sort through my existing stories, I found they fell fairly neatly into six buckets, each at or approaching roughly the cumulative size of a novella: secondary-world fantasy, historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, stories based on folktales and myths, stories based on folksongs, and stories set in the Nine Lands.

Five of those six collections have been published so far: Maps to Nowhere, Ars Historica, Down a Street That Wasn't There, A Breviary of Fire, and The Nine Lands. The sixth is coming out in September, but it's not surprising, given the balance of what I write, that secondary-world fantasy has lapped the rest of the pack -- more than once, actually, since The Nine Lands is also of that type (just all in a single world), and also my Driftwood stories hived off to become their own book.

So yes: as the title and the cover design suggest, The Atlas of Anywhere is a follow-on to Maps to Nowhere! Being short fiction collections, they need not be read in publication order; although a few settings repeat (both of them have a Lady Trent story inside, for example), none of the stories are direct sequels that require you to have read what came before. At the moment it's only out in ebook; that is for the completely shameless reason that replacing the cover for the print edition later on would cost me money, and I have my fingers crossed that in about two months it will say "Hugo Award-winning poem" rather than just "Hugo Award-nominated." ("A War of Words" is reprinted in here: my first instance of putting poetry into one of these collections!) But you can get it from the publisher, Book View Cafe; from Apple Books; from Barnes & Noble; from Google Play; from Kobo; from Indigo; or, if you must, from Amazon in the UK or in the US (that last is an affiliate link, but I value sending readers to other retailers more than I do the tiny commission I get).

Now, to write more stories, so I can put out another collection later!

New Interview

Jun. 24th, 2025 11:46 am
marthawells: Murderbot with helmet (Default)
[personal profile] marthawells
Great interview with Murderbot executive producer Andrew Miano:

https://www.nexuspointnews.com/post/interview-murderbot-ep-andrew-miano

First and foremost, my partner Paul Weitz read the book for pleasure, not with any eye towards adaptation, and came in with it and said, "this would make an amazing TV show." We all read it and really sparked to it and thought it was unique and special and funny, which is not something that you always get in a lot of sci-fi. [It is] also very meaningful and emotional. It was the whole package so it was very exciting and we went about it. We met Martha... One of the biggest things to focus on is how do you honor the book? How do you translate that to the screen? It's not easy, but I'm very fortunate to have Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz — two smart, talented partners — creating and running the show with their guidance and Martha's support and involvement to sort of capture and stay true to the books.

Photos: Charleston Food Forest

Jun. 21st, 2025 02:04 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] gardening
These pictures are from Thursday.  I went foraging at the Charleston Food Forest.  It's across the parking lot from the Coles County Community Garden.

Walk with me ... )

Photos: Coles County Community Garden

Jun. 21st, 2025 12:17 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] gardening
The Coles County Community Garden is across the parking lot from the Charleston Food Forest. It's not the kind where you rent a bed and grow what you want. It's tended by the community and anyone can come pick things to try.

Walk with me ... )

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Jun. 20th, 2025 10:18 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


While on a commercial expedition, an unexpected accident causes Mai, an engineer, and Juna, an HR person, to crash-land on a pitch-black planet called Shroud. They can't get out of their escape pod because the air is corrosive and unbreathable, and they can't call for help. Their only hope is to use the pod's walker system to trek all the way across the planet... which turns out to be absolutely teeming with extremely weird life, none of which can see, all of which communicates via electromagnetic signals, most of which constructs exoskeletons for itself with organic materials, and some of which is extremely large.

As readers, we learn very early on that at least some of the life on Shroud is intelligent. But Juna and Mai don't know that, the intelligent Shroud beings don't know that humans are intelligent, and human and Shroud life is so different that it makes perfect sense that they can't tell. As Juna and Mai make their probably-doomed expedition across Shroud, they're accompanied by curious Shroud beings, frequently attacked by other Shroud creatures, face some of the most daunting terrain imaginable, and slowly begin to learn the truth about Shroud. But even if they succeed in rescuing themselves, the predatory capitalist company that sent them on their expedition on the first place is determined to strip Shroud for materials, and doesn't care if its indigenous life is intelligent or not.

This is possibly the best first contact novel I've ever read. It's the flip side of Alien Clay, which was 70% depressing capitalist dystopia and 30% cool aliens. Shroud is 10% depressing capitalist dystopia and 90% cool aliens - or rather, 90% cool aliens and humans interacting with cool aliens. It's a marvelous alien travelogue, it has so many jaw-dropping moments, and it's very thematically unified and neatly plotted. The climax is absolutely killer.

The characterization is sketchy but sufficient. The ending is a little abrupt, but you can easily extrapolate what happens from there, and it's VERY satisfying. As far as I know this is a standalone, but I would certainly enjoy a sequel if Tchaikovsky decided to write one.

My absolute favorite moment, which was something you can only do in science fiction, is a great big spoiler. Read more... )

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