linux4all

This week was the Moon Festival, mid-autumn in the northern hemisphere, a harvest festival celebrated in Chinese culture and among its aficionados for about 3000 years. Due to the use of the lunisolar calendar, the event can be anywhere from mid-September to early October when a full moon is present. Last year it was around the former, this year the latter. The weather permitting, it is often held outside with friends and family, which is meant to coincide with the harvest gathering. Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the hallmark traditions of this festival; last year I made some, a fairly complex process, this year I received some from the Consulate, which I took to Anthony and Robin's where, joined with Matthew, we had a little festival of our own and imbibed several glasses of Maotai; at 53% that stuff is like rocket fuel, but doesn't have bad effects the following day. The following evening, I had a second Moon Festival with Kate, where we engaged in the dice game of Bo Bing, one of the many games of celebration held at such festivities.

There are several additional parts of the tradition that I find particularly charming. One is the reflection on distant friends who, although not present, will be gazing at the same moon at the same time as you are. Another is the opportunity for especially close friends to express their fondest desires and greatest dreams to each other, although one imagines that sometimes that can result in a bitter harvest, so to speak. But perhaps my favourite is reciting one of the variations of the story of the goddess Chang'e, whom the festival is named after. The version I tell recites how she drank an elixir of immortality and flew to the moon, becoming the moon goddess. Her heroic but still mortal partner, the archer Hou Yi, made mooncakes to show how much he missed her; talk about shooting for the moon. Chang'e would later be joined by a rabbit who had been exiled by the Jade Emperor for surrendering the elixir of immortality to the Queen of the West.

I did take the opportunity this year to reflect on distant and absent friends and on the new harvest from the last celebration. Despite some significant disappointments, I am more than satisfied with how this year has progressed so far. I also have my eye on an even more involved and interesting twelve months in the future, which involves a fairly significant life change. It is not something that I am prepared to discuss publicly, but those whom I have told know of its importance. I have already observed some sadness among you with the realisation of what this change will entail, but remember that no matter where we are this time next year, we will be gazing at the same moon and in celebration.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: The Rookery

sporky_rat

I spent four days hyperfocused on learning how to art on Procreste, the art program that's available on the iPad.

I can see a very obvious progression of ability and skill in the nine pieces of art I did, and this explains my family. They'd hyperfocus on something and five days later they're really good at it and ready to move on.

It explains a few of my things as well.

Still. Nine pieces of art. Eight of them were gifts to people, one was my DR character.

Definitely going to ease up on it now.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Rat te Kāinga

cimorene

Wax and I planted 136 bulbs yesterday evening: tulips (including 7 more of the red and white stripey Carnaval de Rio), crocus, daffodils, fritillarias, and three kinds of allium flowers - a few of the big dramatic puffy purple ones and then 40 smaller blue and red-clover-colored ones.

We bought a bulb planter a few years ago, a very handy little low-tech device. But we both have ADHD and we couldn't remember where we put it or find it again. Unfortunately, garden... stuff... tools... are spread around in the basement (very poorly lit and low-ceilinged so I hit my head on a beam at least 1/3 of the time I go there...), the boatshed that I can't enter because there's a smell that makes me like unable to breathe that nobody else can smell, and our uninsulated-but-enclosed porch, which WOULD be the ideal place, but it's too small. I guess if we lined the walls with cork board and cubbies and shelving and drawers like a garage workshop all the small garden tools would fit, but it's also the entryway/airlock area from the front door so... nah. There's a cabinet (one of the original wooden homemade kitchen cabinets from the house, so smaller than current cabinet sizes) that currently holds most of our tools, and there's one of those island-height tables with a vinyl tablecloth on it for basic repotting and stuff (whose top quickly fills up with muddy gloves and birdseed bags etc, because we have ADHD, but it's too necessary to eliminate the surface).

So we planted them with trowels, which is much more work, and I tried REALLY hard not to put my knees down on the ground but I ended up having to scrub the knees of my sweatpants anyway. Then we raked a few big bags of potting soil over the bare ground left after our plumbing excavation, because the surface left by the digger guy was mostly sand, and then we scattered the clover seed over that. Feeling very accomplished right now!

We put a bunch of bulbs near the new bushes, at the side of the house along the street, which is a place we don't usually think about much becasue we hardly see it. But we're running into a problem with our perennial beds:

There are two long rectangular beds with perennials in them running along the edge of the embankment/retaining wall leading up into the main yard. (We live on a hill.) And they have had perennials in them before, because a diligent gardening genius USED to live in this house - not sure if it's just the original owner, from 1950-, or her daugher-in-law, who moved out somewhere around 10 years before we bought the house. The intermediate owner did nothing to the garden, just let grass cover everything and mowed it flat, so the grass took over most of the perennials, and they only gradually started to come back when we weeded etc. They didn't ALL come back, but the shape of the beds as originally intended was still clear, so over the past 6 years we and our tenants have gradually added more perennials to these two beds. But kind of at random. In different years.

So looking at this long rectangular bed NOW, in the fall when everything has stopped blooming, it's like:

"I know there are a lot of daffodils... I think sort of mainly over here on the left?"

"Don't they go more towards the middle? I think there are daffodils out to HERE."

"Okay, let's try to put them down here I guess. What about this side of this bush? Some more tulips?"

"I think some of the tulips are there already. Aren't they? Were't there some tulips like over... here?"

"Oh, maybe. And what about up here then, in the upper left corner of the bed?"

"I think we put something there. I can't remember what though. Maybe it died."

Etc. Etc.

We need a complete map of these beds. Wish us luck remembering to document them next year.

cimorene

For long-time readers following along at home, you will likely remember our year-long struggle with the open septic tanks in the yard and the conclusion a couple weeks ago when the plumbers (and the digger) finally fixed it! Unfortunately, in the process, as well as digging up a bunch of grass and the gravel of our driveway, they had to dig up

The horizontal cement square at the base of the cement steps to our door connecting them to the cement steps a couple yards in front of them that led up the retaining-wall hill to the higher level of the yard. Why did they build these two steps with a little square of cement between them? Nobody knows. But because it was connected to both sets of steps, and it had to be dug up, the bottom step of each set of steps is now all crumbled and broken with rebar sticking out and the step down to the ground is now too great. I guess we're gonna get some bricks???

A row of established bushes marking the edge of the yard on the right of the driveway as you turn in. The broken pipe went under it. So we lost all of them. They were kind of straggly and unhappy anyway and we have tried several times to cut them back and fertilize them, to no avail.

A lot of the roots of the beautiful birch tree on the corner of the lot, planted by the wife of the builder of the house, so probably sometime around 1950. The city workers who dug up and repaved the street 1 year ago unfortunately cut right up to the base of the trunk at the corner, so it lost a bunch of roots then, and this new excavation went almost as close, but from about 120° off. Two different old people in the neighborhood stopped on their walks to tell us "Hey, that tree's gonna die." Which seems plausible based on how much of its roots it must've lost, but it will be really sad and we are at least SLIGHTLY hoping that maybe it won't? Wax wants to wait and see how it feels next spring before we consider calling an arborist. I looked at the city website, but there is no number for the people in charge of trees (it is on city land since they own the margin next to the road) or any contact information about trees, so I suppose there isn't a municipal "Is This Tree a Danger" number.

You can see the tree on the edge there and all the bare earth where the excavation was...

So we bought some clover seed to put where the grass used to be (hoping the headstart will help it outcompete the grass - we hate grass) (it won't grow until next spring though) and where the cement square was. We can't hope to repair the steps until spring thaw because it's too cold to be sure of being able to cure concrete already. And we also bought some baby bushes to replace our lost bushes.

One of the bushes is the extremely common native shrub dasiphora fruticosa, or shrubby cinquefoil (Swedish: Ölandstok, Finnish: pensashanhikki), the Creme Brulee cultivar, which is white. The yellow-flowered one is what you see everywhere, so this will be a little different. In the center are two spiraea betulifolias, birchleaf spireas (björkspirea, koivuangervo), a variety whose leaves turn red early in summer after it finishes blooming. And the last one next to the driveway is forsythia x intermedia Courtalyn, or border forsythia Courtalyn (forsythia, I guess? in Swedish, and komeaonnenpensas in Finnish), which will have yellow flowers. However, now we have to get one or more stakes to put around them to protect them from the snowplows. The old bushes were big enough to warn the plows off, but these guys probably not so much. And they're near the corner of the lot and the street corner at a T intersection which is a big danger zone for snow plows because of the way the street widens a bit at the corners there.

siliconshaman

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: thoughtful

tcpip

Two weeks ago, I gave a presentation on "Stoicism, Daoism, and Apathy" at the Melbourne Agnostics Society, which was attended by over fifty people. I have finally managed to compose my notes into something approximating a transcript of the event. At over 5,500 words, the presentation took about an hour to deliver and was followed by a Q&A session that ran for at least another three hours afterwards. Apparently true to their tradition, philosophers like to talk, and frankly, I was mentally quite exhausted at the end of it. Still, I am hardly going to spend this much effort if I didn't care very deeply about the subject and the potential for synthesis of these two great philosophical traditions.

However, it doesn't stop there. I've nailed my colours to the mast, so to speak, and visited the Melbourne Tattoo Company, who also did my Math-Rat-Tat three years ago. I had a couple of design pieces that combined my Stoic and Daoist interests, which were expertly compiled by my dear friend, Lara, and then etched into my skin by a talented young man named Jake. With plentiful etchings, he is a good walking advertisement for his craft. As is always in my taste, the design has many layers of symbolism which require elaboration.

The two-part taiji diagram, commonly known as yinyang ("dark-light"), represents the essential unity and inclusion of apparent opposites that are in dynamic motion. Instead of the seeds, however, I have alternating Stoic flames (a design originally from DT Strain), representing both the arche (basic state) and panta rhei (everything flows) from Heraclitus. When viewed as phase states, rather than fixed "elements" (c.f., Chinese wuxing), "fire" (i.e., plasma) was the first state of the universe. The tips of the flames also represent the Stoic cardinal virtues: Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance of Stoicism, with the flame bodies themselves the three treasures of Daoism: Compassion, Frugality, and Humility.

Finally, the taiji is surrounded by a Hellenic meander, itself named in the river in contemporary Turkey. Apart from the varied changes in direction that are part of the flow, it also serves as a border from which Okeanus, representing the great river that both encircles the world and separates our time in existence from the period outside it. Memento Mori! If you remember that you will die, you can live with purpose. Do not postpone what matters, avoid the distraction of things that don't matter, and focus on virtue. Nemo vir est qui mundum non reddat meliorem!

Current Mood: determined
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Ascendant, Particle Horizon

seekingferret

Hi Festividder!

Thanks for making a vid for me. My usual request is that I like to be surprised and I like to let people follow their own creative intutions. But I know that can be hard to get started, so here's some brief notes to guide you if you want guidance.

The Menu (2022) [SAFETY]

I found this movie mesmerizing. I love the way it uses the aesthetics of modern haute cuisine and twists them in monstrous directions.

Adam Savage's Tested (YouTube Channel)

I love Adam's enthusiasm for tools and making things, I love the way he lifts up other creators, I love how he explains things.

Women's Logrolling RPF [UMBRELLA]

The only canon I know here is the amazing defector article Earth’s Best Logroller Has Created Her Own Greatest Rival, and a few YT videos, and I assume you probably don't know much more than me so if you vid this, enjoy the adventure of discovery.

Jet Lag: The Game (Web Series)

By the time festivids is really going we'll probably know who won All-Stars, feel free to use the new source or not. Toby is my favorite guest player, I also love the Adam and Ben dynamics, and I love how they play off mastermind Sam.

Are You There God? It's Me Margaret (2023) [SAFETY]

We are in the Jews dancing part of this request list now. I liked how this movie balanced the grownups and the teens both going on journeys of self discovery.

Round and Round (2023) [SAFETY]

More Jews dancing. I thought this movie was shockingly good. I loved it as a sci-fi movie taking its premise seriously and I loved it as a movie about a Jewish family supporting each other through crisis.

הסודות | The Secrets (2007) [SAFETY]

More Jews dancing. This is my favorite movie about Kabbalah, I love how it takes the life and death stakes of God's secrets seriously while remaining in a more or less naturalistic posture.

tcpip

Although the trip to South America and Antarctica for Kate and me is two months away, there have been a few progressive and positive changes as that date nears. The first is a very recent decision from Chile that Australian passport holders no longer require a tourist visa for stays up to 90 days. That is quite beneficial, as there are a couple of visits to said country on the itinerary, including the capital, Santiago, and Punta Arenas in Tierra del Fuego. The second was a visit to the Travel Doctor-TMVC for a few various vaccines and boosters in preparation for the trip, of which the Yellow fever vaccine was most notable. I still had my WHO vaccine card from the last time I visited said clinic over twenty years ago for my first trip to Timor-Leste, and have carried it around with my passport ever since!

A third update is a decision by yours truly to flesh out the itinerary for various cities and towns that we're visiting that's not part of the standard tour. Unsurprisingly, this will include over fifty museums, art galleries, theatres, historic buildings and the like, which this lover of art and beauty cannot ignore, no matter what country I visit. Said locales include Santiago, Lima, Cusco, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, Stanley, and Montevideo, so if any readers have recommendations they are very welcome. What I haven't done yet is work out what to do on the several days on the cruise ship from Buenos Aires to Antarctica and return, which I suspect will be quite boring, and I'll end up spending most of my time either in the theatre, gym, or dining. Fortunately, a deck plan is available.

Finally, with some prior learning and a great deal of recent interest, I have spent a good amount of time building my Spanish language skills in recent months to the point that I feel fairly comfortable with B1 CEFR level communication. Most of this has been through Duolingo, as always. However, being of a certain age, I have also joined and enrolled in the Spanish language and literature classes conducted by the Melbourne city University of the Third Age. I must confess I prefer the current French title (which the concept originated in 1973) as "Union Française des Universités de Tous Ages". Still, each body is independent and makes its own rules, and I rather suspect I'm going to enjoy this environment.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Rachmaninoff, Op 29 The Isle of the Dead

vass

Books
Still rereading Stargazy Pie.

Listened to the audiobook of Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice. Yes, my first time with this series. I didn't read them back when they first came on my radar (late 90s, early 2000s) because I heard unpleasant things about the author's attitude to fanfic, and held a grudge. They came to my attention again recently because a Tumblr mutual was reading them and kept reblogging pretty fanart and also made me aware of the gender stuff.

That certainly was a 90s fantasy novel, for better and for worse.
After I finished, I read this person's shitposty summary of Assassin's Apprentice, and decided on the strength of it to put a hold on Royal Assassin at the library so I can read the next summary after I finish that.

Games
Hades II launched, and I went back to playing it (having set it aside back in March.) On a new save. Which is how I reminded myself that gaming for a long time really hurts my neck and shoulders and back and everything. Got as far as Granddad.

Crafts
sekrit!cross-stitch still in the drafting phase, but I did make some progress.

Tech
Still playing through Reeborg's World. I switched from the original levels to the Saskatchewan CS20 set to give myself a bit more practice before tackling Rain 2 and Storm 2 through 4. Currently I'm on level 19 of the Saskatchewan CS20.

Also dug out an old monitor with the intention of plugging it into my laptop. Couldn't find a DVI or VGA cable (I did say it's an old monitor!) and ended up buying a new DVI to HDMI converter cable. After which I couldn't find a power cable for the monitor. After which I found where I'd been storing the spare IEC connectors. You'll never guess what else was coiled up with them... oh, you guessed. (No, not a snake. A DVI cable and a VGA cable, of course!)

Garden
Impulse-bought and planted a couple of heirloom tomato seedlings (Tigerella and Cherry Roma.) It begins.

Cats
Wrestling and face-biting. All in good fun.

Nature
Saw a couple of magpies investigating some yellow leaves which I'd pruned from the broccoli and left to mulch.

Misc
Unwisely kept working on the miniblocks pumpkin after I'd run out of concentration, and started skipping steps without noticing. Disassembled it and started again. This is what audiobooks are good for.

cimorene

I had covid once, in April 2022 I think, and I had restless leg syndrome for the first time in my life during that infection. It was EXTREMELY uncomfortable - I couldn't sleep properly, and I mostly couldn't feel comfortable at all sitting up, but I also could not stop moving my legs almost constantly. I think I settled on weakly bicycling them. But since the rest of my symptoms approximated a severe flu, it also sort of blended into the background nightmare and I don't remember it very clearly.

That was the first time I ever had RLS, and I only know the name because I was googling the symptom at the time. Apparently it was a known symptom of that variant, or that's what the net told me at the time.

Well, I just had it for the SECOND time ever last night!

I fell asleep at midnight, and I guess I was awake with physical discomfort, verging on actual pain, from about 2 am to 7 am when I got up to give the cats their breakfast. It was a bit like the discomfort of a limb that's going to cramp or go to sleep in a bad position, but moving only eased it for a moment, so I was tossing and turning and only managed to sleep fitfully once during that, dreaming that I had RLS. After I fed the cats at 7 I microwaved a wheat pillow and when I went back to bed I put it on my thighs, which enabled me to fall asleep finally. Then, of course, I overslept.

Wax says that she gets RLS sometimes, but a mild version that doesn't bother her as much, and that it's apparently a known symptom of menopause?! Wow, I hate that.

And like so many problems, unfortunately, the most effective recommendations for managing it are all stuff like regular good sleep hygiene and good exercise habits, and it's like yeah I know, I'm TRYING! That, and maybe iron might help.

tcpip

Last Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the "Spaghetti House Siege", and my home was probably the only place in the world that held a "linner" (lunch-dinner) recalling the event. Instead of spaghetti, I delved into my moderate Italian heritage and held a "gnocchi fest", which is certainly my favourite food. During the day myself, Kate, Mel, Terry, Martin, Nitul, and Simon attended and later in the evening Marc joined in as well, with Mayday the rat deciding to keep company (Mayhem waddled home in preference). Prepared for the possibility of a few more attendees and, as is my wont, I over-catered, which is hardly a problem. My big surprise was the dessert gnocchi with pannacotta gelato. Anyway, it was insanely delicious, the company and conversation superb, the French sparkling and Sicilian lemon cordial flowed, and really, I just touched the surface of this amazingly versatile dish.

Also thematically Italian, the previous day Kate and I ventured to the Astor, Melbourne's glorious art deco cinema, for the 30th anniversary screening of Baz Luhrmann's 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" with a live choir. I could have done without the choir, which really detracted, a lot, rather than added to the experience. The film has held up well, taking the Shakespeare classic and putting it into a 1990s American business-gangster setting with several cute hat-tips to the original, but importantly, directly using the script. It's aged pretty well; it captures violence and tragedy, for which the famous romance is a plot device and a cautionary tale. Actually, it's still a bit weird how popular culture to this day thinks Romeo and Juliet is a romance; at least six people die in three days!

In more improvised dramatic arts, Kate experienced her first session of an RPG, namely "Call of Cthulhu", which always works well for single-person introductory play. I have also been working my way through an ElfQuest article in honour of a current campaign I'm running and in recognition of Chaosium's re-release of the classic game. An excellent source on the themes of this long-running comic (since 1978!) has the evocative title by Madeline Ffitch, "How a Comic Book About Feral Elves Got Me Through Middle School". Finally, the weekend also saw me complete yet another essay for my doctoral studies on Climate Change denialism, this time taking to task one of the very few academic climatologists who has contrarian views, through some very interesting selective data choices. Apropos this, I made a little announcement at the gnocchi dinner party, which will be revealed publicly soon; every so often, one must make significant life changes, and the time is now.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Corelli, Concerto Grossi Op 6

siliconshaman

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: mixed feelings

vass

Books
Listened to the audiobook of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 dystopian SF novel We, translated by Bela Shayevich and narrated by Toby Jones. I don't have any basis for comparison for this particular translation, but I thought it was good. The narration was exceptional.

This edition also included a forward by Margaret Atwood, an old review by George Orwell, and an essay by Ursula Le Guin, 'The Stalin in the Soul'. By the time I'd finished the novel, I had forgotten the Atwood forward. The Orwell review was interesting. The Le Guin essay got up my nose: it was about how market forces can suppress ideas just as effectively as state censorship (a valid point), but somewhere along the way became about the dangers of unserious writing.

Read Victoria Goddard's newest novella, Olive and the Dragon, and her previous ones Clary Sage and Traveller's Joy.

Currently rereading her second ever novel Stargazy Pie, because the fan server I'm in is doing a reread of the Greenwing & Dart series, and I'm hoping it'll lend me the momentum to read the rest of them.

Fandom
Still working on the concluding chapter to the fic I posted part one of at the start of this month. I've added at least a thousand words to the draft, and struggling with it.

Missed the nomination period for

trickortreatex and, subsequently, the signup period. Things have been difficult.

Did my Yuletide nomination a couple of hours before the AO3 server outage.

Games
Achieved A10 with all four characters in Slay the Spire and also killed the Transient before it faded; am now taking a break.

Tech
I've been working through the original levels of Reeborg's World, a gentle guide to programming using Python. As of this post, I've completed all the original levels except Rain 2, Centre 1 and 2, and Storm 2 through 4. (Edit with breaking news: I beat Centre 1 and Centre 2.)

Garden
Harvested some broccoli, purple and green varieties.

Hired a mower to come do what I was not managing.

Misc
Got out my old Lego Classic set, sorted the contents, and started working through the instruction booklet in order. I've never been into Lego: as a kid, I had my older brother's hand-me-down bricks and half an instruction manual with crayons scribbled across it. In my early teens I was in love with the short unit we did at school, using Logo to program Lego Technic sets (this was long before Mindstorms), but I couldn't get my parents to buy me Lego Technic to have at home. And as an adult the Lego kits just seemed too expensive and also too specialised. Recently I've been thinking I'd like to give Lego another look, in particular the less... "spend a lot of money on a playset to assemble and then dust" side of it.

Subsequently bought myself a "miniblocks" Halloween pumpkin kit from KMart, and have started building that. Much swearing has ensued. The quality really isn't as good as Lego, and the smaller size does not help.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Harvest Celebrations

This explains so much of my family

More bulbs, adhd taxes, and random gardening drawbacks

New baby bushes

Why a 'boring' life might be the happiest one...

Stoic-Daoist Synthesis Presentation and Tattoo

Festivids!

Acercándonos

Things

I had restless leg syndrome as a symptom during Covid

Gnocchi Fest, Fair Verona, and More

Good news/bad news..

Things

Profile

September 2019

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags