dianeduane | Reading

I finished the season of Legends of Tomorrow.
The theological incoherence has annoyed me yet again.
The ethics depends on the physics and the physics is never consistently defined.
I purely do not understand why what the Legends did is supposed to be the right thing to do.
Even more, I don't see why it is right this time and the opposite is right when Ollie does it.
Except the thing where the writers are very plural and can just do that.

So.

Annoyed me.

sovay

The snow has built a slice of six or eight inches against the glass of my office window, like the honeycomb of an observation hive. Out in the street it looks twice that height not counting the drifts which have crusted where the sidewalks used to be and swamped at least one car and its forlorn antennae of windshield wipers. I would have enjoyed more of the snowglobe of the day without the return of the phantom detergent which

spatch could smell even through the storm as soon as he turned up North Street, but I took a picture early on in the snowfall. None of the needles are visible any more.

I can't believe no one has ever written a crossover between Mavis Doriel Hay's Death on the Cherwell (1935) and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935). It must have been unspeakably awkward for Oxford to suffer two unrelated criminal investigations in separate women's colleges in the same year. Just as Sayers modeled her Shrewsbury College on Somerville, Hay fashioned her Persephone College after her own alma mater of St Hilda's and then inflicts on it the discovery of the body of the college bursar by the same quartet of students who were meeting that afternoon to hex the victim with no expectation of such immediate or spectacular results. They plunge into the business of detecting with the same gestalt enthusiasm, a fast-paced, fair-play, often very funny blend of detective and campus novel as their amateur sleuthing attracts the competitive interest of an equivalent circle of male students as well as the police and the resigned relatives who starred in the author's previous Murder Underground (1934). Every now and then an appropriately chthonic allusion surfaces from the winter damp hanging over the river which loops around Perse Island and its contested territory to which an Elizabethan curse may be attached, but it's not, thank God, dark academia; the ordinary kind can be lethal enough. With its female-forward cast and its touches of social issues in the humor, it would have made a terrific quota quickie. "Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult. It is sometimes considered that they are not quite human."

It delights me deeply that my mother regards the young Mel Brooks, as pictured c. 1949 in a recent edition of the Globe, as a snack.

Current Music: Dry Cleaning, "Cruise Ship Designer"

austin_dern

bunnyhugger called everyone together for final announcements, rules explanations, and a group photo --- I took the pictures --- at the scheduled noon, and we learned afterwards that Ypsi Pinball Podcast had supposed that all this stuff would be finished before noon and people would start going into games. Also bunnyhugger only started writing out the first round of matches --- top seed versus 16th, 2nd versus 15th and so on --- after the announcements, though either of us could have started writing that out as soon as we had the full attendance confirmed. It's always the things you think you don't need to coordinate.

bunnyhugger's first round, and the one the streamers chose to start with, was against KEC, and as everyone noted was a repeat of finals from two years ago. They would start later than the other groups, just because bunnyhugger was busy giving every other group the chance to start, and I think they ended up later than that because their first game --- Jungle Queen, one of KEC's picks --- was occupied. In the tournament format chosen every competitor chooses three games --- a classic, a middle-era game, and a modern game --- at the start of the match, before either of them have played anything against each other, and they will sometimes have to wait for another group to finish.

bunnyhugger won the classic Jungle Queen, thereby relieving my first worst fear, that she'd get swept. The next game was one of bunnyhugger's, Stranger Things, which she's played competently a fair bit locally but hadn't much touched in Fremont. But she had to have some picks for a modern-era game, and this seemed the friendliest of those available. It was not; she kept having trouble just timing the skill shot to start the game and took a loss. Back to KEC's games, the middle-era The Addams Family, where KEC had a disappointing game to bunnyhugger's really good in-the-groove play. This had the mildly embarrassing thing in bunnyhugger's last ball, where she overcame KEC's score, that while she had surely got the points she needed there were modes going one after another so she couldn't see the score to be certain. On to bunnyhugger's mid-era pick, FunHouse, which as the streamers noted was a game she just had to play and also that she'd be doing all the game's call-outs along with.

The irony for all of bunnyhugger's love of FunHouse is she isn't a particularly strong player at it, and the table was playing tournament-grade hard. But she had a fair game put up and was ahead at the end of her three balls, as the podcasters noted, the first time this match someone might win their choice. And then KEC --- who, Addams Family stumble aside, was playing really strongly --- went on a tear and blew past bunnyhugger's score. On to game five!

This was KEC's modern pick, the Stern game Mustang, and she knew the game in a way that bunnyhugger just doesn't. We used to, well before the pandemic began, have the game locally, but nobody much liked it or knew what to do with it then either. I've since played it enough in The Pinball Arcade app to be decent at it, in simulation, but there's no transferring that knowledge or experience orally, especially given how much of it is that I don't know how to describe what I'm doing besides making the yellow-lit shot. So for the first time someone defended her pick and she had a three-to-two advantage on bunnyhugger.

On to bunnyhugger's last pick, the classic game Scuba, a 1960s table with the smaller-model flippers placed about four yards apart. The gimmick of this game is you get the big points if you complete a set of five mini-targets that are blocked from the flippers by pop bumpers, so you have to aim to the sides of pop bumpers a lot until you get lucky. This era of game is always one of bunnyhugger's relative strengths but again, that luck element ...

Still, the choice was working out nicely, bunnyhugger being ahead at the ends of the first several balls, and while KEC was coming up, that's an era where it's inevitable you'll get a house ball, or a ball that pings wildly and goes out the enormous drains. Or that just dies when the flipper touches it, and can't be sent anywhere but the center drain. At the end of who knows how many rounds of the competitors trading physical places the podcasters said that was it, ball five, and bunnyhugger had won and they were going on to game seven.

It was not the end of the game. There was one ball left, and bunnyhugger played a little, and KEC played more and got that fifth hidden target, opening up a world of more points. She would beat bunnyhugger and, oh dear, knock bunnyhugger out of contention. For the third time in four tournaments my dear bride wouldn't make it past the first round.

What she did make it to? Back in June? Tuscora Park. Here's pictures to prove it.

A nearly decade-old plaque from the National Carousel Association commemorating Tuscora Park for operating the carousel.

And a slightly older plaque in better shape from the same group commemorating the same thing, as if the National Carousel Association got the idea of commemorating Tuscora Park in its head and the park wasn't going to turn them down.

The carousel's chariot, a nice long lion-esque dragon.

A sign warning what the rules are for each of the rides. The roller coaster, alas, is only open to those under 17 years old. It's your standard Allan Herschell Little Dipper, a knee-banger from the very old days.

Some of the kiddie rides, your usual sort of flat rides of things that go in circles.

This would've been a more interesting ride to Young Me since the chains would make it feel more believably like flying.

Trivia: The word basmati, as in rice, derives from the Hindi for ``fragrant''. Source: Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells, Harold McGee.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 19: 1957, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. I know it's hard to build a narrative over the Sundays but boy, do Sims and Zaboly lean heavily on ``Popeye goes fishing'' or ``Oscar and Swee'Pea try to get Popeye to buy them an ice cream soda'' premises.

beccaelizabeth

Today I rewatched Doomworld episode of Legends of Tomorrow.
( Read more... )

Characters who exist as full people with insides and motives and consistent characterisation
vs characters who exist solely to stir and steer those other guys
gets a bit frustrating.

It doesn't feel like a great time to be a villain fan
but it do seem like a good time to remember everyone is a person, not a villain.

Tricky.

I am stalling a bit on finishing the season and may switch to another show after that.
This bit was not my favourite.

sovay

It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for

threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.

Current Music: Dry Cleaning, "Evil Evil Idiot"

austin_dern

We got through the snow and unhappy roads to the Clubhouse Arcade, maybe fifteen minutes past the opening of the venue for practice. Nearly everyone of the invited sixteen competitors was already there, as were at least two of the invited alternates, so first thing was explaining to AJH's mother that she would not be needed to fill in after all. She took this news with courage and grace.

The challenges in setting up were small and mostly about table space. There were eight fewer competitors than the day before, and fewer mere onlookers, but still the front room was overcrowded. We needed table space for bunnyhugger's laptop, which would hold the official standings, plus space for the scoresheets I'd be passing out and collecting, plus the official printed rules, plus the plaque to be given to the first place winner, plus the trophies that RLM Entertainment had paid to have made for first through fourth place, plus the 3D-printed trophies that someone had made for fifth through eighth place, plus the Pinball Box, plus the sixteen paper bags of giveaway swag that bunnyhugger had gotten donated from various pinball-related businesses in michigan, plus the mugs that one of the places had made up for the competitors and that wouldn't fit in the bags. It was a lot of stuff and it would never all be together on a single table. I set up the computer and score sheets on a small round table, the pinball box and the championship plaque on the tall chairs beside, and then everything else went where people hadn't already filled up the place.

One of those weird little oversights is that while the International Flipper Pinball Association had mailed the championship trophy to bunnyhugger several weeks back we hadn't opened the box yet. As bunnyhugger noted, we didn't actually know that they didn't send us the plaque for Wisconsin or something. I thought it might make a nice moment at the start of instructions to open the box in front of all the assembled competitors. Also maybe to let people pose with me for pictures of their being handed the trophy, which would totally not be a way to trick them into touching the plaque beforehand and cursing them to a loss. But the Ypsi Pinball Podcast asked if they could get a picture of the trophy, for their on-screen graphics, and I obliged and it was opened (and for the correct state and year) and nobody made any kind of deal of it.

AJH had a microphone for the speaker system in the Clubhouse and set that up for bunnyhugger, saving her the inconvenience and embarrassment of using her own megaphone. Last time we used the megaphone we somehow got it into a mode where it recorded a couple seconds of audio and then played that back in unending loop. Why? No one knows. How to stop it? Again, none can say. The microphone system had no such trouble.

Another matter of figuring out where to put things: the paper printout with the full bracket, not just of the people still in the running for first (which was kept up on matchplay.events) but also the tiebreaker brackets, to figure out who would go to 12th and who to 15th place, that sort of thing. bunnyhugger got from somewhere a spreadsheet that has exactly who should play who, in what order, to get a logically satisfying resolution (like, if you lose your first round, you're playing for 9th through 16th place; win the second, you're playing for 9th through 12th; lose the third, you're playing for 11th or 12th; win the fourth, you're 11th place). The catch is that printing this spreadsheet out where normal people could see took us eight pages of paper and there wasn't any desk space near enough for that. (The day before PH and AJH had printed the same sheet out but smaller, fitting it into a mere three pages.)

They gave permission for me to post it, using painter's tape, on the glass wall of some redemption games that were not relevant, and that was satisfying except for the games themselves being behind some other tables so people needed to learn how to see where the sheets were and how to read them. But this slightly awkward placement, and that they couldn't get to the sheets without seeing me, did mean nobody went and filled in brackets on their own and so nobody messed up the brackets on me.

Final thing of setup was that one of the competitors had spent the last month asking bunnyhugger roughly every 75 minutes if there were any way she could help with the tournament. So, bunnyhugger warned, she would get turned over to me to do something with the day-of. Well, we met and I agreed with her that her offer of help was very kind and would be appreciated. Once the tournament began I never heard a word from her. That's all right. I was doing all right entering results and directing traffic by myself.

To pictures, now, please imagine that it's as hot as it is currently cold, and that we're in Tuscora Park, New Philadelphia, Ohio. Here, let me try and help you set the scene:

Some of the plaques for the Tuscora Park Carousel and one of its longtime operators. The National Carousel Association plaque indicates the ride might have had its centennial this year, although nobody can be perfectly sure of that.

bunnyhugger with our ride tickets, and wearing her shirt for the W.E. 'Bill' Mason carousel out in California that we'd visited back in 2023.

On the ride! And you can see the other rides, most of them for kids, outside.

Operator at work on the machinery at the center of the ride. And the long scrolls of text beside ...

... You can see are instructions on how to use the MIDI-controlled playlist, as well as favorites, such as The Washington Post March, The Animal Fair, Buttons and Bows, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, and something called Spiffy.

Slightly arty shot slightly out of focus and catching highlights on the inner side of a horse while the outside world looms behind.

Trivia: Shortly after returning from his voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin offered a hypothesis explaining how coral reefs --- created by the carcasses of many small animals that lived only in shallow water --- were made: as volcanoes gradually sank, their now just-visible summits provided new places where coral could grow, so the reef was wrapped around a defunct mountain. Darwin (and everyone else that century) had no idea how a volcano could sink. Source: Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik. The subsidence hypothesis would finally be vindicated with 1950s drilling, although (of course) the story is more complicated than this.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement Volume 19: 1957, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Yes, I finally reached the end of World War II! Spoiler: it came out well despite the American public being an incredible bunch of selfish whining crybabies.

sovay

On a theory, I believe, of sustaining me on literature, my parents very unexpectedly presented me with my own copy of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), which seems to have shipped from the UK as if the international post just worked.

Well, here we are, the 29th of July, 1940. What have we done with all the years since 1918? Armistice night in Piccadilly Circus is so vivid in the memory, it seems like last Wednesday week. What did happen to all those years – and what have we done with them? It seems we are back where we began. Anyway, there it is on the calendar, July 1940, and this war has been on for eleven months. And I am in London speaking these words, and when I am finished talking to you I shall go out of this building, past sandbags and bayonets, into streets of medieval blackness. As I hunt for the two pin-points of light that represent a taxi it will be about two a.m. here, which is nine in the evening your time, and I shan't be able to resist a thought of the dazzling glare which at that moment is lighting the sky above New York's Great White Way. I daresay there isn't an Englishman alive who is more familiar than I with Broadway at nine o'clock on a summer's evening.

Current Music: Dry Cleaning, "Blood"

austin_dern

Sunday opened with drama. It was snowing, as it had been, but it was snowing more intensely. And it didn't just look likely to keep doing that; it looked likely to intensify. The National Weather Service forecast was putting up new levels of watches, warnings, statements, and other ominous forecasts of how awful it would be. Using last year as a guide to how long this year's finals should take, we could see ourselves getting out just in time to hit the worst of the evening's storm.

We figured it likely we could stay an extra night. The Gerber Guest House had many rooms and it's far from peak tourist season. But we'd have to get in touch with the AirBnB host to arrange this. (It turned out we could also have contacted them through a more direct booking service, but we wouldn't find that out for precious hours.) But Monday was not promising to be any better, except that we could expect to do the driving in a sunlit snowstorm. And it wasn't just us; FAE rode with us and would have to stay an extra day if we didn't drive back that night.

As the person who'd be driving I made the call: whatever we faced would be better driven through in daylight. I offered to FAE to pay their room, trusting we could renew it (and we would), to remove that from being a consideration, and they accepted (to bunnyhugger's surprise; she expected they would thank me for the offer but decline the cash). With that settled we just had to make arrangements through AirBnB with whoever our host was! ... And they weren't answering messages right away. And we had to leave for the tournament soon. We weren't in danger of missing the official start of the tournament, but we were going to cut into the couple hours of practice time before the event began, and also, competitors get nervous when the tournament director isn't around crazy early. We had to save bunnyhugger from messages about how she wasn't at the venue yet.

The question was, do we prepare the room for check-out? And more importantly, do we take our stuff or just leave it in the room trusting they won't change the codes on us? I thought the thing to do was take the most important stuff, the things that would be catastrophic to lose or be separated from (laptops, medicines, the Pinball Box containing all our tournament-running supplies, which would have been going anyway) and quickly realized this list came to everything but our dirty laundry? And even that, I wore some event T-shirts I couldn't expect to replace, so ...

So we ended up packing up everything and taking it out to my car, but also did not pull the bedsheets and toss the towels in a heap like we're supposed to do at check-out. bunnyhugger left a note to the housekeeping service to explain things and we'd just have to hope it all came out sensibly. Which it did; within a couple hours we had our room rentals extended another day, room code unchanged, and we got back to find the room untouched by housekeeping or anyone else so far as we knew. The only harm done there is our laptops got quite chilly.

With Cedar Point visited for June what's next? Amusement parks, that's what, and our extreme summer trip (we spent the entire week in the 90s). Starting off, our smallest and shortest visit, Tuscora Park in New Philadelphia, Ohio:

Establishing shot, one of those tolerably symmetric views of the park. It's both a fountain and a drinking fountain here!

I didn't notice people tossing coins into the small amount of water but it seems like that's got to happen too.

And here's the thing that brought us here, the antique carousel. Less so the pool, which was closed by the time we got there.

While the park has a miniature train, it also has a piece of train-themed playground gear.

This was the first time I'd seen this picture-communication board for overloaded kids to point to what they want or need. (I've since seen them at other parks.) The other side is in Spanish.

And here's a view of the carousel, dead center, with the band organ behind it, so you know we're there for real.

Trivia: The winds from a 1999 storm caused the Eiffel Tower to sway about four inches. Source: Force: What it means to push and pull, slip and grip, start and stop, Henry Petroski. Which which you consider how little surface area the Eiffel Tower presents to the wind is a heck of something.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

beccaelizabeth

I keep on trying to come up with a good way to start a story with a relatable protagonist (ie kinda me)
and it is difficult.

To start with I do not go out much, so the story either starts at the duck pond or it comes to me.
... very little comes to me.
... mail order Adventure isn't the main chance, I feel.

I think I have a Terry Brooks book about it on the shelf below the edge of the bed but crucially once the protag bought the adventure he went to it. Which I personally would not be great at.

A protagonist who has to bring a support worker with them would be keenly relatable to many, but, I do not think support workers typically sign up for Adventure. I mean, there's supposed to be paperwork about making a safe working environment. They want to know before they go in that there are smoke alarms and an ongoing lack of fires. It seems like their number one priority would be to get away from Adventure as swiftly as possible and bring their person with them.

... at that point it is the support worker's Adventure, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind.

... got distracted by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Kingdom_for_Sale%E2%80%94Sold! which I haven't read in a reeeeeaaally long time. I should reread that.
... also vacuum under the bed.

I keep circling back to the Deck of Many Things because it is a way to have unexpected random Adventure happen. Like, pull the Throne card, and now you have a Castle of your very own. In D&D you probably have to fight something for it, but it's still yours already.
... imagine having to pay the taxes on a castle you can't even clear on your own.
... imagine one of them castles like in Book of Many Things, the sort with ghosts and all that, and it's yours now, and probably not far past the duck pond if it's somewhere you can actually get to.
... a lot of people would be quite put out about that.

Oh, imagine instead one of the existing castles suddenly being magically transferred into your ownership. Tourist trap... becomes a bit too literal if it's suddenly a challenge for adventurers.

There aren't many castles intact enough to make good defensive fortifications. I have looked around several of them. Not as big as you think, tea rooms are nice, not originally designed for accessibility. Rather the reverse. Also, extra flippin slippery in winter. Vivid memories of finding an icy patch in school uniform, do not recommend.

But if you suddenly got one of those via Throne card, you'd have a grade one listed building to look after, a sudden tax situation, a lot of tourists to look after, and not necessarily anywhere resembling a place to sleep. Or possibly somewhere resembling but full of waxworks.

... that is another way to have Adventure come to you. Imagine being one fo the tourists, and their support worker. Imagine how annoyed you'd be if you had to adventure your way out of a haunted castle and then realise you weren't even the main character, because the MC is taking the Throne back in the big stone thing.

In some rpg sule sets there are ways to turn downtime into magic items. In some sets you might not need anthing but time. Thirteen to thirty years of Epic Doing Nothing should make for some impressive magic items.

GURPS rules about religious magic item creation are what I'm thinking of but it has been Long since I looked up a GURPS rule so I can't cite it right now. ... several minutes poking the internet just tell me I have forgotten a lot about GURPS so I can't bet on this brain cell being correct.

ANYway, I'm not sure it's at all helpful to base an adventure on a Reward For Doing Nothing.

In Pathfinder ageing rules there's days you get an improvement to your mental stats - specifcally on tour actual birthday, you lose out on some physical and gain some mental. And in Pathfinder both Sorcerers and Oracles can have magic without any deliberate effort on their part, usually statted off Charisma. But you'd need a 10 in Charisma to even cast cantrips. So, in theory, you could wake up on the birthday you become Middle Ages, or officially Old, and just suddenly be able to do cantrips or orisons when you couldn't before. And it would probably be embarrassing once someone figured out why, because now they know how charisma you are not. But someone who was at a minus modifier on charisma was probably a bit clumsy with people and potentially not doing grand at friends. Might be a bit isolated. So, in a totally not a reward way, you could go from being isolated to having magic. It just wouldn't be the direction of causal in the other idea.

Also, if your prime casting stat is that low, you are not doing grand at Adventure without quite a bit of help.

I suspect I am not doing grand at Adventure. Unless visiting the ducks counts.
... the ducks would probably prefer a lack of pond based Adventure.

The Asking for Help phase is a bit trickier about Adventure when you don't have the social mechanisms implied by the existence of the Pathfinder Society. I mean if Pathfinders are real then you call the Guild and explain you need to found an adventure party, or hire one but that is very spendy. You'd have standardised Charters as suggested by effectively the Adventurer's Guild, and you could probably find a handful of people to agree to help you clear a castle for a split of the treasure.

You could not however get rid of them afterwards or get to be the one who decides who keeps what treasure, on account of all being the same level (enforced by Pathfinder Gulld in the computer version of Pathfinder, as is standardised pricing for hiring). Once you are out umbered by Adventurers they can pretty much do as they will.

It's a puzzler.

Of course if you call one of the real world emergency services about the potentially trap filled castle you are not going to be leading the response. They will treat you rather differently than a Fellow Adventurer. And if you decide you want to be them when you grow up it would have minimum Adventure content.

Even with Story people, if you call the Watchers or Slayers about a problem, this does not usually result in a new best friend Slayer, it is likely to resilt in a Slayer who does their job and tells you to wait outside while they do it.

Trying to work with Torchwood gets you treated like Ianto as best case, and more likely as fanboy from Random Shoes Eugene.

... haunting the usual protagonists is a rather extreme way to be In The Story and on the whole I would prefer not.

Call the Waverider for help and you could get all sorts. They're more likely to treat you as an equal but that might not go so great for you. Also they lie a lot a lot if they think they need to work around you, so your new friends might not be.

... okay it is one in the morning and the plot bunnies have gone down the well trod rabbit hole of And Then They Leave, instead of the useful one of And Then Adventure.

Today my best idea for how to get invited to storm my own castle involves a castle that is only Probably there, and they have to bring me to make the castle decide to Actually exist. It do make it sound like the least fuss version is to make it Not Actually Exist, but the tourist trap aspect would certainly solve that. ... being useful once in there would be a mixed bag though, even with the accompanying Diplomacy boost.

In the Book of Many Things their Throne castle is specified as having statues of Istus. I looked up Istus and she's the spinner of fate? Legends of Tomorrow has an equivalent. Tricky to recognise a shapeshifter goddess. Especially tricky to figure out which one fo the statues, if any, actually is a result of Flesh to Stone.

... I decided the shapeshifter friend needs a fancy freindship bracelet so she's recogniseable.
... that exact reason would be why she wouldn't wear it but worth a try.

Okay, silly oclock in the morning, time to go attempt rest.

tielan

Usually when someone goes reading through my work, they go through multiple fics in a single fandom, kudosing all the way. (It's a nice feeling.)

I've just had someone who's kudosed a single story each of SG1, Firefly, Merlin, JLU, Harry Potter, and Atlantis, and two stories of The Bourne Identity.

Now I'm wondering how the others just didn't hit their buttons...

Also, the stories in each were "oddball" - not the major or popular pairing in most cases, and often not one of my more popular stories.

For instance, the Merlin fic they kudos'd was Merlin & Gwen, modern AU, which is not even close to common for the fandom!

austin_dern

In my humor blog this past week? A brand-new MiSTing based on a comic book printed-text story that was never meant to be read, plus me falling behind schedule mostly because of the severe weather prolonged our stay in Fremont, a bit of stray 90s nostalgia loosely inspired by the Dilbert guy dying, and the start of a MiSTing that's been forgotten on the Internet for over 25 years now. Excited? Read on!

And now, I bring you the final dozen pictures from our Juneteenth visit to Cedar Point.

Live entertainment! By the Giant Wheel they had a small band playing as the Wild Mice. You can see their instruments; what's less obvious here is they also had tails and ears, and were color-coded to the mouse characters of the Wild Mouse roller coaster int hat part of the park.

Here's Chase, for example, whose recorded audio for the safety spiel makes him out to think he's the leader. Here, he's playing trumpet.

And a couple of the mice mid-playing. There were seven in the band, despite there being only six cars and assigned characters. Who's the seventh?

Here he is! Gary, representing the gray mouse who's on the ride sign but unrepresented with a train car. And once bunnyhugger revealed that I understood of course he had to be named Gary; it's an anagram of gray.

Back to Siren's Curse, here seen doing a test run pointing straight down, from behind the return leg of Iron Dragon.

Here's the Siren's Curse first drop seen from the other side, with Top Thrill 2's reverse spike and the Power Tower behind.

As you see, the car comes out to the end and all the brakes get put on.

And then it pivots ever so slowly ...

... and the track reconnects, and you wait a bit (there's audio of the Siren saying something incomprehensible) and ...

Whoosh! And the people beside you on the ground say uh-uh, I am not going on that.

Into the evening now; here's GateKeeper going past a golden-hour Giant Wheel.

And a last picture for the day of the Giant Wheel in the not-quite-sunset sky. Feels so weird to leave the park while it's sunlight.

Trivia: A 1920s study of Muncie, Indiana, found that 76 percent of working-class families purchased no books apart from those required for school, and when they did buy books, it was usually one or two, typically a picture book or Christmas gift. Source: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss. Sure glad it's completely different today!

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.

sovay

My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.

I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but

thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.

( These sisters waiting to wear their own clothes. )

Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.

Current Music: Dry Cleaning, "I Need You"

archangelbeth

https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/20/cdc-measles-briefing-lost-elimination-status-cost-of-doing-business/

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dianeduane

DianeDuane.com

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Word Salad II

A mirror blog of Diane Duane's "Out of Ambit"

Reading

(no subject)

I make sure there are hidden messages in my work

I Thought I Was the Bally Table King

Legends of Tomorrow: how and why to villain

I cannot feel it, the veil of black, a fine spray of white paint

Waking Up on Christmas Morning Hours Before the Winter Sun's Ignited

Pilgrimage, private life, mortality

Never Mind the Weather; When You Come to Tommy's the Holiday's Forever

Wondering where to begin a Story

oddities in reading

Yes, I've Got My Feet in the Window, Got My Head on the Ground

My dream house is a negative space of rock

Are you happy with your choice, mom?

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May 2017

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