Network [Sally's Journal]

This is a prompt fest for Da-ge's birthday, January 1. In honor of that, he should live. So share all your prompts for Da-ge living.

FAQ:

1. Any and all types of fic are allowed given that they are tagged and rated properly (AND Nie Mingjue lives).
2. Nie Mingjue must be the main character. He does not need to be the POV character.
3. Fierce corpses count if they're sentient.
4. Art and fic are allowed.

Rules:

1. Nie Mingjue survives.
2. Art and fic are allowed.
3. No AI.
4. No character bashing.
5. All works are due by Dec 31, 2025 and will be revealed on Jan 1, 2026.

AO3 Prompt Meme Link

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1. Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband “Chad” and I have a 4-year-old son, “Lane.” Recently for his birthday, my parents gifted him a set of Winnie-the-Pooh books. It’s been a tradition in my family for the last three generations for kids to read these books. But my husband won’t let my son have them.

He says doesn’t want Lane to read them because he insists that Winnie-the-Pooh is for girls. I’ve never heard anything so stupid! How can I make him understand that Pooh is a character that has been beloved by both boys and girls alike for nearly a century now?

—Much Ado About Pooh

( Read more... )

****

2. Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife “Carla” and I have a 3-year-old son, “Andy.” Andy became a big brother last month when we had our daughter, “Isabelle.” Andy had been reliably potty-trained for four months before Isabelle was born, but within days of bringing Isabelle home from the hospital, Andy began having accidents. Carla’s solution has been to put him back in pull-ups. I don’t think allowing him to regress like this is a wise idea. She says to let him do it for the time being if it makes him feel better. It seems to me that taking a firm approach (making him go back to using the toilet or face punishment) would be in his best interest. Who is right?

—We’re Not Going Backward

( Read more... )

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1. I made a new post on Substack about Invisible Illness.

2.

amejisuto sent me Patrick Stewart's memoir + some cool postcards. I'm sure some of you will be seeing those soon. :)

3. OMG, y'all. I don't know what's wrong with me. I have been reading omegaverse, and most of it is just terrible--gender essentializing and infantilizing in a way that is deeply unappealing to me, but some of it hits me in the id. I like the unexpected genital combinations and the Pon Farr aspects and really dislike a lot of the more common facets of the trope.

4.

( Stranger Things recs ahoy )

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Posted by John Kovalic

https://www.dorktower.com/2025/07/28/bard/

https://dorktower.kovalic.com/?p=19622

This or any DORK TOWER strip is now available as a signed, high-quality print, from just $25! CLICK HERE to find out more!

HEY! Want to help keep DORK TOWER going? Then consider joining the DORK TOWER Patreon and ENLIST IN THE ARMY OF DORKNESS TODAY! (We have COOKIES!) (And SWAG!) (And GRATITUDE!)

https://www.dorktower.com/2025/07/28/bard/

https://dorktower.kovalic.com/?p=19622

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Recently read

Ginn Hale, Wicked Gentlemen. A collection of two M/M romance novellas following two men from very different walks of life, living in a dystopian setting. It was surprisingly enjoyable. It was very clearly a work of a relatively inexperinced author, but the world-building and the characters more than made up for it (and also for the horrifyingly bad epub file, which, no, I won't shut up about).

I think the first novella would have benefited from being written in third person rather than first, though. A sentence such as "the moon spread its light across my face and bare chest" would be unfortunate even in third person, but in first person it's just tragic.

Lee Welch, Seducing the Sorcerer. An M/M romance in a fantasy setting. The MC, Fenn Todd, is a former groom, current vagabond, who accidentally acquires a flying magical horse, and just as accidentally crashes that horse into the courtyard of the court sorcerer's tower. It's a charming and somewhat whimsical novel, nice enough to read when you just want to relax, but I don't think I'd ever re-read it. It doesn't have enough substance for that. However, kudos to Welch for conveying Fenn's working-class dialect through word choices and syntax rather than non-standard spelling. It worked really well.

Priest, Coins of Destiny, vol. 1. If I see "the scion" used as an epithet for a character ever again, it'll be too soon. The scion this, the scion that, time and time again. For fuck's sake.

Currently reading

Too many books. For example:

Everina Maxwell, Ocean's Echo. A quarter of the way through. I liked Maxwell's debut, Winter's Orbit. This is set in the same universe, so it's probably no surprise that I'm liking this as well. The first fifth was pretty stressful reading, because it deals with loss of autonomy and being a victim of state injustice, and I don't expect it'll get much less stressful. When I first started this, I totally lost myself in it. Surfaced two hours later, shaky with adrenaline.

Xue Shan Fei Hu, The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, vol. 3, which is just as ridiculous as the name suggests.

Plus nine others.

Up next

Let's get through some of the RIPs first, okay?

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It is a long time since I posted. I am not sleeping. I am waking at three o'clock in the morning and that's it. Awake. Doing that thing where you lie quietly with your eyes closed (and pretend you're asleep) is helpful but not the same as real sleep. I am desperately murderously tired.

Cat is being a bloody nuisance. For the past ten years he has refused to eat everything except for Royal Canin crunchies for very fussy cats - anything else was refused on the grounds clearly not edible and why were we being so cruel to our very beautiful cat.
Anyway a couple of months again he had a tooth infection (cleared up with antibiotics, thank-you for asking) but obviously his usual diet was hurting his mouth. So he didn't eat. He just yowled at us. After three days of non-stop yowling we persuaded him to eat some tuna, and also some luxury catfood. By eat I mean he licked the gravy off and leave the chunky catfood bits. He's now back eating the royal canin crunchies but is also demanding catfood in gravy. Loudly. With attitude. I have tried whizzing up the catfood with some warm water to make a delicious catfood slurry and it really didn't work. He will eat tuna. Mostly. But I'm not going to feed my cat Recycling caddy is full of the catfood he won't eat and it stinks. Man up the road (who has too much time on his hands) came round to give me helpful advice about cleaning it out. Bloody cat.

It has been a good season for blackberries. The freezer component is full to bursting of bags of frozen berries, and Monday I came home with another kilogram which we just had to eat because no room left in the freezer. Not a great hardship - I love picking berries.

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Moonpie started to get super hyped up, as usual, and so did they, so I picked her up... and ended up with two huskies eagerly jumping up on me to say hi to their best chihuahua friend!

Well, at least my feet were firmly planted. Before we saw the huskies, on our earlier walk, we bumped into a friendly yorkie (?) - no collar, no people. But well-fed and groomed, this isn't another Finn. He eventually disappeared under a fence, but I've been asking everybody I saw if they know whose dog he is exactly, because I was that worried. Was he outside alone in the heat? That's no good.

Anyway, I asked the guy with the huskies, and he had no idea, but he told me something else - the day before, he thinks he saw a fox! I'm not sure he wasn't just mistaken, but if he isn't - wow! I know we have bunnies on the South Shore, and coyotes in the Bronx, and whatever the city says we definitely have a full time population of deer mid-Island, so maybe a fox isn't so strange.

***********

( Read more... )

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Happy birthday,

forestofglory!

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https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2025/07/archive-cattle-point-oak-bay-british-columbia.html

This EPOD was first published February 20, 2020

Photographer: Stu Witmer

Summary Author: Stu Witmer

Named for being the delivery place for barges of livestock to the local farms in years past, Cattle Point is now a popular park and boat-launching site on Haro Strait between the San Juan Islands of Washington state (seen in the distance) and the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Characteristic of the Victoria area and recognizable by its alternating bands of light (quartz and plagioclase feldspar) and dark (hornblende) layers, the rock here is metamorphosed sedimentary and volcanic rock of the Colquitz gneiss. Glacial erosion processes, including abrasion, frost wedging and plucking, have produced a landscape known as roche moutonnée (sheep-like rock). Also in the area are erratic boulders of granodiorite, which were carried here by glaciers of the Fraser Glaciation 25,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Apparently, this is also a popular area to feed the birds. Note the crows in the foreground waiting for me to toss them some more almonds. Photo taken January 7, 2020.

Photo Details: Camera: Samsung SM-G960U; Exposure Time: 0.0003s (1/3585); Aperture: ƒ/2.4; ISO equivalent: 50; Focal Length (35mm): 26.

[1/25]

https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2025/07/archive-cattle-point-oak-bay-british-columbia.html

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http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20250730

The Girl Genius comic for Wednesday, July 30, 2025 has been posted.

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20250730

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Not about my opinion of the rain. It can stop any time. Still no pool time (but at least no reports of more flooding back home. Also learned that the center of decorative arts (which I didn't know existed until today) in Lancaster OH has a star trek exhibit and I'll have a week to get to it before it ends when I get back home.

No, the thing I changed my mind about is Star Trek Lower Decks. As much as I don't like binge watching, I only have this access for a week. I'm up for half way thru S4 and I am enjoying it. It's fun. It's unapologetic in its call backs to ALL the Star Treks that proceeded it. And because it's animated they can get away with so much more than you can live action (and OMG the holodeck training with Beckett stuck with the simulated crew infected with that water virus that makes them horny and insane...) I am glad I took the suggestion to keep on watching. It's worth it.

And since this is my Fannish 50 - women of fandom let me give you my faves and it might not be who you think (or who the show intends)

I can't decide between T'ana and D'vana Tendi so you get a packaged deal which is fine because they're both medical/science.

Tendi is probably my favorite. For one it allows them to expand upon and flesh out the Orions who we barely saw in the shows and make her more than 'pheromones and sex' She's bubbly, she's smart, she's friendly to a fault but she's also secretly dangerous. I like her very much (and if I wanted to run around a con all day in green face I could do it. hmmm maybe a local one where I won't be there all day...)

And then there's Dr T'ana.

I love that they gave us one minor to major character (depending on episode) on the command crew side of things who is a completely new race (I think. Maybe they were in a book somewhere) ANd no it's not because she's a cat that I like her. She's Bones in female form but more. She's a skilled doctor.

At the end of the day, she's ME. She's medical. She's a grumpy bitch. She's unapologetically kinky (the things she does on that holodeck). We all know it if I were on a starfleet ship I would absolutely be the most likely to tell someone to go suck a bag of Borg dick. I know I could never tolerate the heat of wearing a furry mask at a con, not even a short one. Too bad because I'd love to cosplay her.

Here's my ladies together.

I'm trying to watch Sinners. I am bored but it's about to get violent so there we go. I do love the soundtrack.

Mood::

hot

Music:: Sinners

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Posted by rkmilholland

https://somethingpositive.net/2025/07/29/july-29-2025/

https://somethingpositive.net/?p=1013

First Comic Previous Comic Next Comic Today’s Comic Latest Updates

https://somethingpositive.net/2025/07/29/july-29-2025/

https://somethingpositive.net/?p=1013

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(Up for adoption, if anyone wants it.)

We were just rewatching the last two episodes, and ( Spoilers for 1x09 )

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I just posted a a rec list of chill Chinese reality shows that I though people here might be interested in.

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nothing horribly bad, just odd. it was really hot, hit 90f with 60% humidity all day. closed early, sent my workers home early, spent the morning doing some irrigation. I didn't have any urgent tasks, so I weeded, which I find quite nice and soothing.

part way through the morning, something was in my eye causing blurry vision. not anything large enough to make my eye hurt and I couldn't see anything, but it was deeply disconcerting to have a blurry section in my eye. it might have been weird sweat? eventually it went away once I blinked a lot. may have also been something from my new spinning project

one of the pumps stopped pumping water and I didn't notice until I went down to switch the blocks, it was running dry for probably an hour after running fine for 20 mins while I fixed a line, so it's probably shot. unsure what caused it but it only started having problems after the o-ring fell out of the feed tube and I replaced it, but it was watering fine last week. augh. so we're down to one running pump. tomorrow I'm going to work on pump #2, which is down due to carborator/gas leak problem from earlier this year. there's a spare pump in the metal shed, which has a bad motor, so we might be able to take the pump off that one and slap it on the other.

it's been so dry here. we got a quarter inch of rain on sunday and we're parched again. all the sludge puddles at the ends of some of the veggie rows dried up in a day. we might get more rain thursday, but three days of 90+F weather requires watering no matter what. super looking forward to three days of beautiful weather in the 70s later this week. we're going to do a campfire friday night

I have my new atom L mostly set up and ready to go. I figured out that my secondary instagram account (fiber arts) is 2FA locked out, only options are: previous device, authenticator app, backup codes. I have none of those. So I decided to get a new tank mini screen. It feels silly to do that, but given my track record, I will break another phone within a year and it can be backup. And then I can get my instagram account unlocked properly and change the 2FA

I finished a yarn yesterday, spent some time in the shed, rotated the loom and repaired my skein reel, so once I whittle a new peg I will be able to skein off the yarn I've spun and post about it.

and it's only tuesday.

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The Obituary at the Guardian

( Error: Irreparable invalid markup in entry. Raw contents behind the cut. )

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This was the quarterly check-in so she can refill the Ritalin prescription, and cover anything else non-urgent.

I talked about how my gut is doing, and that I'm trying to reduce my use of naproxen (and NSAIDs generally) at the advice of the GI doctor. So far, that has meant waiting a little while before taking a naproxen because something hurts, and not taking it preventively for short walks. Airports, yes.

Carmen said there aren't a lot of good options, and recommended a turmeric supplement that someone she used to work for, who also did Ayurvedic medicine, recommended. I expressed some general skepticism, and specifically how much turmeric people had to eat to benefit. The recommendation is for a supplement that you tuck in next to your gum, so it's absorbed directly into the bloodstream. Carmen said "you can get it on Amazon," and Adrian pointed out after the visit that I should check the inactive ingredients carefully.

She also asked about my breathing, and I told her that recently, I've coughed up less phlegm after using the flutter valve, without having more trouble breathing. Less crap in my lungs is good, of course, and this means I won't worry much about skipping the flutter valve for things like travel and dental work. However, I'm basically sticking to the same twice-a-day schedule at least until the next time I see the lung doctor.

I also told Carmen about the strawberry allergy, and what symptoms I'd noted. I mentioned that I'm also probably allergic to stevia, and she made a note of both allergies.

The next appointment, in about three months, is for a physical exam, so longer and in person. At 1:30, so I can get lunch in Davis Square, weather allowing.

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Some book reviews that have lately crossed my line of sight.

Andrea Ringer. Circus World: Roustabouts, Animals, and the Work of Putting on the Big Show:

Ringer is not interested in the perceived glitz and glamour of big top spectacles. Rather, she presents the golden age circus as a site of working-class labor, where both humans and beasts toiled from day till night under the near-constant gaze of thrill-seeking visitors.
....
_Circus World _is the sort of book that will captivate (and, in some cases, horrify) a great many readers. It's a
must-read for anyone interested in the history of the modern circus; the same is true for historians of animal entertainment and industry. Gender studies scholars will appreciate Ringer's fresh insights into the ways circuses amplified colonial and patriarchal notions of race, gender, and family. Plus, the book's short length and bite-sized
chapters make it ideal for classroom use. Above all, _Circus World _succeeds as a work of labor history, one that takes nontraditional work and nontraditional workers seriously.

***

Dominic Pettman. Telling The Bees: An interspecies Monologue. Possibly a bit twee/poncey?

Weary of the insistent demands and disappointments of online life in the early 2020s, Dominic Pettman turned to a very old practice: Rather than commenting on current events by posting for his followers on social media, he would tell the bees instead. The record of this experiment is _Telling the Bees: An Interspecies Monologue_ (2024). "Indeed, this time-honored activity--practiced in villages all over Europe, for centuries--seems much healthier to me than confessing things to the digital ether, the anonymous world via social media," he writes early in the journal (p. 2).
....
In Pettman's case, as a resident of New York City, he doesn't have much access to actual, in-the-flesh bees. The apartment co-op won't let him have a hive on the roof, for one thing. At the start he makes do by talking to "wild" bees he encounters on his walks in Central Park, but as the seasons change and the threats of COVID-19 force
ever smaller spaces of interaction, Pettman conjures and speaks to virtual bee--"the memory of bees," as he calls it, prompting a wry rejoinder from a waggish colleague: "These bees ... Are they in the room with us now?" (p. xi).
Readers seeking a journal of material human entanglement with physical bees will not find that here. Pettman's virtual bees are much more akin to the "virtual animal totem" [.]

***

This one does involve actual encounters with the beasts in question, it would appear: Leslie Patten. Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion's Soul through Science and Story.

Patten then combats history and myth with a series of case and site studies in Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, and California, and interviews with mountain lion experts of every stripe--from trackers, hunters, and houndsmen (people who hunt with dogs) to wildlife biologists and conservation management specialists. Along
the way, Patten nimbly debunks so many myths about cougars--that they are isolate, cold-blooded killers who need to be managed to keep them from pets, livestock, and small children and that legal hunts are an effective way to manage and stabilize populations.

***

Hedgehogs in fact are ambiguously situated: Laura McLauchlan. Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness: The Contradictions of Care in Conservation Practice.

In the UK, hedgehog conservation is both necessary and supported by the public: Population numbers are in steady decline, while the animals themselves occupy a fond place in the British consciousness. The second section details her fieldwork in New Zealand at pest-control initiatives, including outreach events and community pest-control groups, conservation initiative Zealandia (a completely fenced ecosanctuary in Wellington dedicated to restoring
native flora and fauna), and her own "guerrilla" care for local hedgehogs. In New Zealand, hedgehogs are thriving despite their status as an invasive species, provoking widespread public animosity.

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Just on my walk to work this morning, twice I had to dodge tourist groups blocking the entire pavement. I thought that I had avoided this in escaping Cambridge, England, but apparently not. Not being attired for leisure, I occasionally have people ask me for help with local navigation. At least, a no-steps route at the Edinburgh end worked well for me today and took little longer. I don't feel enormously steady on many-steps and can experience some vertigo so it would seem foolish to make a frequent habit of them.

In considering the prospect of moving house a little south, it occurred to me that Glasgow's buses are best avoided and the south-side trains will go up to Central, not Queen Street from where the better Edinburgh trains depart. If I want an easy commute, it behooves me to remain near a subway station from which I can easily transfer at Buchanan to Queen Street. I wonder if there is any prospect of finding a garden flat (so better for L. the dog) in our youngest's school catchment area within easy reach of the subway; it seems a tall order.

At the last part of my way home tonight, I stop to pick up the car from a local car park. I left my parking space clear because the electricians are fixing a light above it. I did so on a previous day when there was word of their arrival, on which they helpfully spent their time partly on other activities that did not require cars to have been moved. So, second time lucky, one hopes. That first was a while ago, their work was interrupted by an unexpected-by-us holiday on their part.

Pensions guys presented to us at work and got me to thinking: I have a mountain of debt at a reasonable APR and I am in a high income tax bracket. I don't have much in pension savings so old-me will be in a low tax bracket. I expect that my debt grows faster than my pension. However, I can pay pre-tax money into my pension. So, better to direct spare post-tax money toward the debt or pre-tax into the pension? I wonder if a cranking of approximate numbers yields an obvious correct answer. It would be nice to not think about secondary factors like less debt means better APRs or that I can deduct paid mortgage interest from my US taxes.

Years ago I implemented a composable simulation language into which, were it handy now, I could easily plug these questions for a year-by-year simulation. Back when working on demonstrating that technology's application to financial planning, I was amused that such inevitably led to the question, when do you plan to die?, so this pensions question is a nice exception in that I can simply optimize for starting far-off retirement in the best position.

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Last week, P and I went to a Pitchblack Playback event this evening to hear Joy Division's "Closer" album played in full in the dark, at Cultplex in Manchester. The cinema PA was good - not oppressively loud like a nightclub, but bass you can feel and quality good enough to really appreciate the music and the production. They have to keep fire escape signs on for legal reasons, so you get given a little blindfold to keep the last of the darkness out.

I'm not really used to Joy Division as an album band. They only released two in Ian Curtis' lifetime, and their most famous track "Love Will Tear Us Apart" doesn't appear on either of them. There's about a billion releases in their name though, from live gigs, various scraps left around the recording studio, and other ephemera to feed the obsessive fanbase. So listening to this from start to finish was an odd experience. It covers a lot of ground musically, definitely anchored in post-punk driving guitars and basslines but embracing some of the electronic / dance vibes which would later be explored by New Order. If you're sitting in the dark with no distractions your brain certainly makes a lot of connections with other things.

Everyone sitting down was weird, but me and P tapped our toes and jiggled along to the music happily. Which made it a more communal experience than just doing it on my own, which I think would have been a different vibe again. But most people there were in small groups, with only one or two solo adventurers.

Due to P's broken leg we left shortly after the playback concluded - they had a second album listening party that evening, and the accessible exit is through the listening room, so we couldn't stay without essentially being trapped for the duration. It was an interesting experience and I'm glad she suggested it as a date idea.

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Sally's Journal

Da-ge Lives prompt meme

FAQ:

Rules:

Two letters with easy, easy answers

Sundries

Bard to the Bone – DORK TOWER 28.07.25

Almost forgot it's Wednesday

3 things make a post

We saw the huskies yesterday!

(no subject)

Archive - Cattle Point, Oak Bay, British Columbia

Girl Genius for Wednesday, July 30, 2025

So I've changed my mind

July 29, 2025

Murderbot TV plot bunny

Reality Show Rec List

had a weird day

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer

appointment with Carmen: naproxen, gut, lungs

Varied engagements with animals and the natural world

Commuting and retirement planning

Control in the Dark

May