cthulhia | Reading

our walking tour of vienna was longer than the one in bratislava, about an hour long. it was also cleverly planned so that we'd end up back where we started, so we could find our ways back to the ship after being turned loose.

a consequence of that is that i sometimes took pictures of the same thing a couple of times. worse, the timestamps on my phone's camera, which picked up the time from the local phone network, disagreed with the timestamps on my real camera, which was off by a random amount from that. so, i've given up trying to put the pictures in any sensible order.

( many viennese pictures )

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siderea

2026 Jan 6: Görkem Şen (Yaybahar on YT): Yaybahar III Nadiri

Watch on YouTube

The description text:

The essence of gold was rare, he conquered with his virtue, offered his gifts and fell behind the sun...

Dedicated to the soul of my dear friend's father, Nadir Oğuz...

I am surmising that "Nadiri" means "Of Nadir". Yaybahar is the instrument, the artist is its inventor:

The name yaybahar (pronounced /jajba'har/) has Turkish origin. It is a composite of two words: yay means a "string" or a "coiled string" and bahar means the season "spring." According to Gorkem Sen, the name is derived from the idea of a new life or a new beginning. [1]

I assume this is the third one of its kind the artist has made.

Artist's website: https://www.gorkemsen.com/

ckd

As usual, ordered by first visit and asterisks indicate multiple separate visits.

2025 got my travel ramping back up (finally), even though I only went to two conventions and one of them (Worldcon) was literally in my city (between my apartment and my usual airport, though technically there's also an airport with international service between my apartment and downtown -- LKE). Two overnights from delayed flights; both would have stuck me at DTW (Romulus, MI) except that for the second one I was able to rebook on the next morning's IAD-SEA nonstop instead.

The big trip was Kraków and environs, with a bonus pair of overnights in Calgary because business class YYC-KRK was literally half the price of SEA-KRK or YVR-KRK. Having NEXUS made a Canada stopover easy; though I kinda miss the old iris scan kiosks, the new facial recognition ones are a lot faster.

Cambridge, MA*
Seattle, WA*
Romulus, MI
Arlington, VA*
Calgary, AB, CA*
KL678 YYC-AMS
Kraków, PL*
Jaworze, PL
Balice, PL
Sneads Ferry, NC
Minneapolis, MN
Harrisonburg, VA
Sterling, VA
Port Townsend, WA
SeaTac, WA
Tysons, VA

Airports (connection-only*, new to me@): BOS, SEA, DTW (should have only been a connection, sigh), DCA, MSP, YYC@, AMS*, KRK@, ATL*, ILM@, IAD.

dougo

When 2025 started, I decided to be a little pickier about movies, and not bother going to see the ones with a low Rotten Tomatoes rating unless I had some reason to suspect I would enjoy it more than the professional reviewers they survey. I'm not sure it made a difference in my movie-watching habits, because I ended up seeing even more new movies than I had around this time last year, and the ratings distribution looks pretty similar—maybe weighted a bit more towards 8s and 7s, which is good. It also didn't help that AMC Theaters expanded their A-List subscription to let you go to four free movies a week instead of "only" three, and I took advantage of this most weeks!

My number one favorite movie of the year is a sports movie, which is pretty unusual for me, although the original Bad News Bears is one of my top five favorites of all time. Eephus does have some of that feel, except instead of Gen X pre-teen losers, the teams are made up of Gen X middle-aged losers. And instead of charting their unlikely ride to the championship game, it's just one game, from the opening pitch to the final out. But it's a great demonstration of how a baseball game can have all the dramatic beats of a complete story, in fact many stories on different levels. I found it absorbing and affecting, and maybe you would too?

My number two movie, the only other one I rated a 9/10, is Fackham Hall, which is an incredibly silly satire of Downton Abbey. It's filled with gags, from puerile to intellectual, and made me laugh way more than anything else this year. It evokes the classic ZAZ comedies much better than this year's Naked Gun sequel did.

The list below is separated into groups by rating out of 10, and in descending order within each group. (I haven't rated anything a 10/10 in years, because in my mind that means "an old favorite that stands the test of time", and nothing recent has aged into that yet. Also, fortunately, I didn't hate anything enough to warrant a 2/10 or 1/10 rating this year.) I saw nearly all of these in movie theaters; the exceptions are marked with an asterisk (except I did see Thunderbolts* in a theater, it just has an asterisk in the title!). As usual, for me the 2025 movie year doesn't end until the Oscars award ceremony, so I'll post a final updated list after that happens—hopefully sooner than my 2024 list I finally just posted yesterday!

9/10 (great):

Eephus
Fackham Hall
8/10 (really good):
Tornado
Predator: Badlands
Freakier Friday
Honey Don't!
Black Bag
Train Dreams
Trifole
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Good Fortune
Weapons
A House of Dynamite
Left-Handed Girl*
It Was Just an Accident
Pavements
Relay
She Rides Shotgun
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
The Phoenician Scheme
( 21-148 )

Here's my current list of 2025 releases I plan to see in theaters soon:

Wicked: For Good
Zootopia 2
Is This Thing On?
The Housemaid
Avatar: Fire & Ash
Marty Supreme
Anaconda
The Plague
No Other Choice
Father Mother Sister Brother
The Choral
The Testament of Ann Lee
Sirat
Dracula: A Love Tale

And a selection of other 2025 releases I would like to catch up with:
( Read more... )

Let me know what else I missed!

jazzfish

Little movement this year.

( anno sargasso )

dougo

About a year ago I posted my list of the best movies of 2024 (really a total ranking of all the movies I watched); I mentioned my plan to post an updated list after the Oscars ceremony (which I consider to be the unofficial end of the season for watching 2024 movies), but I got busy that week, and then just never got around to it. Until now! They're divided into groups by my rating; an asterisk means I watched it streaming online instead of in a theater, and the ones I saw after my previous list are in bold. Stay tuned for my 2025 list coming soon, I promise!!

9/10 (great):

Flipside
Sometimes I Think About Dying
Challengers
8/10 (really good):
Hundreds of Beavers
Flow
Riddle of Fire
Good One
How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
Dune: Part Two
Conclave
Red Rooms*
Rebel Ridge*
The Dead Don't Hurt
Knox Goes Away
Hard Truths
Nickel Boys
Heretic
Bird*
The Fall Guy
Hit Man
( 21-176 )

For the record, here's my full list of 2024 releases that I didn't get around to watching. Maybe someday!
( Read more... )

dianec42

Current Mood: pleased

Went out snowshoeing today instead of doing chores. The laundry will still be there tomorrow.

Beautiful day for it. This time I wore Enough Layers. We managed to do the full loop around the reservoir at Woodford in about 3 hours, with lots of stops for snacks, photos, and random fun facts. Not bad, especially considering that the first time we tried snowshoeing a couple years ago we made it about 30 minutes before we got tired and had to turn back.

Now home chilling in random layers and Hello Kitty pajama pants. G** I love being retired.

siderea

Interesting:

2025 Dec 31: DwarkeshPatel YT fea. Sarah Paine: Human Rights Killed Communism - Sarah Paine:

Watch on YouTube

BTW, that's Sarah C. M. Paine, until very recently the William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy and the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History, both, at the US Naval War College. She's an incredibly interesting speaker. Recommended.

(Dwarkesh Patel is this random dude who mistakenly thinks he's a podcaster and keeps trying to have other guests, but in actuality was put on Earth to bring Paine to the masses. He's got something like 14 hours of her up on his channel.)

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jazzfish

Silmarillion update: I used to have what turns out to be a first-US-edition Silmarillion (not first printing, not in great shape) that was Pop's. Emily had the same edition in better condition and less smoke-infested, so Pop's went before the crosscountry move fifteen years ago, and then Emily's obviously went with her. In conversation Steph determined the particular edition from my vague description ("white-ish dust jacket, big fold-out map of Beleriand glued to the endcover"), found a site with a few copies that were well within my budget, and then while I was dithering bought one for me. So that was a nice end to the year.

The last time I read LotR, some ten or twelve years ago, was the first time I'd read Pop's copies. Before that almost all my reads had been in increasingly-decrepit Ballantine paperbacks from the eighties, bright blue/green/red with Darrell K. Sweet covers. It turned out to be extremely distracting to have the familiar words in different places on the page. Apparently I imprinted hard.

My nice fancy new edition of The Hobbit has an extensive editor's note from Christopher Tolkien talking about the changes they've made to bring it in line with what can be deduced of JRRT's desires for a Preferred Text. Unfortunately this means it's missing Tolkien's second-edition note, the one that begins "In this edition several minor inaccuracies, most of them noted by readers, have been corrected." (AKA "the Watsonian explanation for why I had to retcon 'Riddles In The Dark' to bring it in line with Lord of the Rings.") It felt downright weird to read the book without that note. Thankfully I also have a paperback with the psychedelic pink fruits and emus (no lion, alas; must be a later edition), so I can read the introductory note as is Proper.

... it occurs to me that Pop's hardbacks lack the Peter Beagle essay/encomium that appeared as the front page of my Ballantine paperbacks, which also imprinted though I was far too young to understand it. Text follows, so that I'll have it.

( Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. )

jazzfish

( Lost Highway )

( Mulholland Drive )

( Inland Empire )

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jazzfish

That sure has been a year. Further retrospective to come, I suppose.

What are you reading now?

The Hobbit, nth reread. Over at LG&M Abigail Nussbaum is blogging a reread of Lord of the Rings, and that's inspired me to pick them up again. I've a nice anniversary edition of Hobbit with JRRT's illustrations to read, and Pop Shackelford's late-seventies hardbacks of the trilogy. Unsure what I'll do for a Silmarillion but that is a next-week problem at the earliest.

Usually I'm a little annoyed by The Hobbit: it's tonally dissonant from LotR, more of a bedtime story than Serious Fiction. This time through I'm finding it an absolute delight. It's very clearly written to be read aloud, and the prose is just musical. I am also hearing the voices of John 'Gandalf' Huston and Orson 'Bilbo' Bean in my head as I read. Presumably this will extend to Richard 'Smaug' Boone as well once I get that far.

What did you just finish reading?

A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name / The Thousand Eyes duology, which came highly recommended ages ago. Sigh. I wanted to like these, and did like the first third of the first book. Csorwe is an Orc girl who's due to be sacrificed to her god, the Unspoken Name; instead she gets kidnapped by someone who is quite probably the book's evil sorcerer and becomes quite a competent right hand for him. I quite enjoyed Csorwe's point-of-view and voice. I liked it less when she was forced to work with a particular obnoxious character who she had good reason to hate, even less when we started getting his viewpoint and were clearly intended to sympathise with him, and much less than that when her viewpoint disappears entirely a quarter through the second book.

These are doing very neat things with gods and immortality. I wish I'd been less annoyed and more able to appreciate those neat things. If you can get past Talasseres being insufferable, and don't mind character-stretching wisecracking, I'd recommend them.

Before that, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, best summed up by her: "I started off writing this like ha ha, academia is hell, and then it was oh no, academia IS Hell." Cambridge graduate student in magic descends to the Underworld to retrieve her advisor, who she thinks she killed; she's accompanied by a golden-boy grad student for (it turns out) similar reasons. This sneaks in under the wire as my favourite read of the year. It opens with a passage complaining about inaccuracies in depictions of the journey to the underworld:

Dante's account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T.S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner's account was under serious dispute. Orpheus's notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas-- well, that was all Roman propaganda.

I love this, but then I would. It's great. I am deeply annoyed that the publisher (and the author's agent) refuse to even talk to Subterranean about doing a fancy edition.

What do you think you'll read next?

LotR, naturellement. After that, anyone's guess. Lord knows there's plenty on the shelf to pick from.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

siderea

"...but it turns out, mining is fun."

2025 Dec 26: Engineer Everything (user Engineer.Everything-i5g) on YT: Shall I go still deeper? #engineering #Minecraft #tunnel #mining #constr...

Watch on YouTube

twoeleven

i'm trying to finally finish working up pictures from our 2023 danube cruise. this has been repeatedly delayed, often by more working up pictures from more recent trips. (yes, our lives are hard.)

sunday and yesterday's delay was a reprise of the joy of HEIC. as folks may recall from my little adventure on some big hill in africa, HEIC is a great standard, except for two things. 1) only apple uses it to take pictures and video thus far, and 2) only apple implements it correctly thus far. no other software can cope with it properly.

the last time i needed to deal with it, i used blender. sunday's discovery was that blender's VFX tools won't work on HEIC files that contain just a single exposure. apple decides at random which photos taken with its phones do that. (if there's any logic to it, it's beyond me figuring it out. sometimes photos taken seconds apart will randomly have one or several frames.) the current version of imagemagick™ does only moderately badly at extracting frames from HEIC, so i needed to get that going, and i didn't want to spend eternity messing around running it under my old linux virtual machine.

so, sunday was lost messing around getting a current copy of imagemagick™ running on the mac side of my machine. that involved the usual trip into the ~~rabbit hole~~ cesspit of open sores software. but now that's done, and as a side effect, i now have an entire ancient development system running under an equally-ancient version of macos. yesterday, i finally worked up the photos.

thus, we finally return to 2023, in which our protagonists have just left budapest. the next stop on the itinerary was bratislava. but first, our riverboat had to get through the lock at the gabčíkovo dam. i'd never been locked through on anything, much less a substantial boat, so i took some pictures. and also a short movie.

Entering the Lock

( pictures! pictures! pictures! )

twoeleven

this morning, the temperature was unseasonably warm – the high was 55° – for a few hours, ahead of a powerful cold front. so i got in a little more gardening.

i brought in some anti-antler-rat netting i'd forgotten to bring in before, and went back to pruning the broken bush. once the cold front arrived, the winds were expected to pick up – they did, they're gusting to 40 kts – and i wanted to clear out any more damaged branches and dead wood before the wind brought it down.

now that i got into the center of the bush, i found that there was even more dead wood than my previously-raised estimate. so, most of that was cut out. i also trimmed a bit more live wood that was shading another bush.

fundamentally, this bush matches the pollyanna-ish definition that a weed is a plant out of place. it's a vigorous bush with small evergreen leaves. it's a fine architectural plant.

10% of it being out of place is due to company that built our house. they planted it next to the house on the west wall, with shade to the south of it. so, the bush, like most of the plants in that garden, wants to grow away from the wall. this makes it grow over a slow-growing pine tree and an azalea.

the other 90% i attribute to me just not keeping up with pruning the shrubbery. there's always more pressing outdoor tasks here: sowing, weeding, watering, mowing the lawn. and they get out of hand quickly. an overgrown bush? not really. it took 25 years for the bush to get this way. but now i think i've got it under control: i'll do as much pruning after the first frost and before the last as i can.

– – –

one of the seed pushers i buy from mainly sells to large gardeners and small farmers. their catalog just arrived. they seem to have realized that flowers are a high-margin crop that their clientele grows, but that they don't grow them by the acre.

so, not only have they greatly expanded the variety of flowers they sell, they're now selling flower seed by the ounce or half-ounce in addition to by the packet and quarter-pound and up. a packet of seed contains tens to hundreds of seeds, and might fill 10-20 square feet. a quarter-pound is usually tens of thousands of seeds, and will fill a good fraction of an acre. an ounce is high hundreds to thousands of seeds, and tens to hundreds of square feet. that's a much better match for my gardens.

also, because of labor costs/economies of scale, a packet of seeds is typically around $5 these days. but a (half-)ounce is only $10. much better. so, i'm going to order seeds for next spring and the spring thereafter, or for some of the short-season flowers, sow successive waves of seeds next spring.

jazzfish

Ordered replacement zipper sliders for my suitcase. Suitcases, rather; I never got rid of the one that lost its zipper last year. So I've got one to practice on, and maybe I'll have two good checked-bag-size suitcases.

Yesterday I went down to the States to ship my parents' xmas box (the last part of the gift arrived a few hours after I left for Minneapolis), and also drop off used books and thrift-store donations and poke around in both stores. In the event it was like treating myself to Xmas. The used bookstore supplied me with: a paperback of Walter Jon Williams's post-scarcity nanotech/cyberpunk thriller Aristoi, which for typographical reasons really needs to be read in hard copy; Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home, which I have vague recollections of someone recommending and even vaguer recollections of having read at some point; Tom Stoppard's last play, Leopoldstadt; and the collected poems of Hope Mirrlees, who you know (if at all) as the author of the very English fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist but who was apparently also a minor Modernist poet.

And from the thrift store there was a DVD of the Harrison Ford remake of Sabrina, which is something of a comfort watch for me, and also two madeleine pans. Yesterday evening and this morning I made two separate batches of madeleines; the first tasted fine but had a texture that wasn't really right, but the second seems to have turned out pretty well. Turns out they're serious about "room-temperature eggs," and also I may have used too much flour the first time. The pans did fine, which is a pleasant surprise for cookery from the thrift store. I suspect they may have been used maybe twice.

On the advice of the catsitter, a month or two ago I got Mr Tuppert a treat-puzzle, with sliders and pivot lids and little pockets for treats. He's been enjoying it, and has gotten quite good at getting the treats out of even the more complex bits. He's been much less impressed with the cardboard thing I got him to scratch on. Not even catnip can induce him to try it out. Ah well.

I'm staying warm, I'm staying fed. Next month is for sorting out What Happens Next.

dianec42

Current Mood: lazy

We had a bunch of friends over for Boxing Day snacks and socializing. This gave Mr Diane an excuse to bake ONE BILLION SNACKS, with the added bonus of leftovers for the rest of the year. It was great to see people and hang out. What with holiday baking and the attendant cleanup, plus some lousy weather, I was going a bit stir crazy. Snacks and socializing were a hit; I think this will become a tradition.

The up side of all that cleaning and tidying is that the house is now somewhat more pleasant to do stuff in (especially the kitchen). The down side is that I managed to put a few things in "safe places" and I'm not sure I've found everything yet.

The first rule of Retirement Club is ~~there are no rules~~ ~~don't talk about Retirement Club~~ I need to have some structure or I will never leave the house.

Some rough ideas for structure:
1. (With Mr Diane) Go out hiking once a week (snowshoeing counts as hiking);
2. Try at least one new location, food, or activity every week;
3. Every day, do something I didn't do yesterday;
4. Every day, SKIP DOING at least one thing I did yesterday;
5. DO NOT VOLUNTEER FOR ANYTHING FOR AT LEAST A MONTH! Seriously. I've met me. I WILL overcommit and burn myself out if I don't watch it;
6. Have some long-term goals as well as short-term activities;
7. Do stuff with Mr Diane;
8. Do stuff WITHOUT Mr Diane.

Activities so far have included yoga class and Open Knit (yes, cross stitch is also allowed). I still need to check out the senior center, the sports center, the Y, activities at the library and the museum, and actually GO to the library and the museum. Yes, I have a spreadsheet.

Speaking of structure, for 2026 I'm going to try a premade planner and skip doing a bullet journal. I've mainly been using the bullet journal in its capacity of "it's a free-form planner for people who don't like any of the planners sold in the shops". I've been doing some habit trackers but that's tailed off in the last few months. I just can't be arsed doing all the setup any more. I got a cute Pusheen weekly/monthly planner off my wish list this Christmas, which includes space for notes and 2 pages for 2027 planning, so I'm going to give that a go.

I should write up a 2025 "year in review" thingy, but honestly 2025 kind of stunk in a lot of ways so I might not bother.

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cthulhia

omphaloskeptic

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alt.fan.cthulhia

Reading

in and around vienna

Begin as you mean to go on?

Yaybahar III Nadiri [music]

Overnights, 2025

Best movies of 2025

up the down escalator

Best movies of 2024 - post-Oscars update

Surprise exercise...

On the work of human rights work [pols, hist]

Where I slept, 2025

a bit more tolkien to start the year

"elaborate on that." "no."

Another year over...

into the dark

Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow

"I initially planned to build a small storm shelter..." [civ eng]

a taste of bratislava

a little more gardening; a seed pusher gets clever

when you hold your tongue your wounds can never heal

Boxing Day and onwards

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January 2019

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