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ysabetwordsmith posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
common_nature
yourlibrarianmarchmetamatterschallenge, I have been going through my tv_talk comments in case I discussed much about a show (mostly, no). However it was a good reminder about a great many shows I watched which I liked and would recommend, but might not think of if someone asked me.Want to leave a Kudos?
sarajayechan posting in fandom_icons
oursinWhat We Lose When We Gamify Reading, well yeah, but this is someone who considers Middlemarch 'a slog'. I'm also, of course, thinking about previous allotropes of this kind of thing - actual libraries you could buy of The Best Books - and of course display them on your shelves - and I'm also recollecting The Provincial Lady who can never manage to actually read That Book That Everyone Is Talking About. Of reading as something that is not, reading that thing that you want to read, when you want to read it, at the speed that seems fit (which may involve stopping and starting and hiatuses).
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If not a smaller, a more connected world than people maybe think: How likely is it that Alfred the Great sent two emissaries to India in the ninth century?:
Alfred’s embassy to India thus appears to be entirely historically plausible: India, with its Christian community and shrine of St Thomas, was probably always the intended destination, and its remoteness from early medieval England the very point of the embassy.
This feels like yet another story that might perhaps account for Why Are There So Few Women In [X] Field which is not down to actual aptitude and drive: There’s a long and embedded history of abuse in chess.
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Home Free: Vivian Gornick, interviewed by Chandler Fritz
Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.
The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus. Intriguing. When I was employed in an institution which at the time came under the aegis of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office I was obliged to attend an FCO Induction Course. This had very little relevance to my job, and among the proceedings were cautionary films about being got at by Soviet agents. In one case although the surface level involved the patsy being lured by publication in a Red journal his relationship with the tempter seemed to have definite homoerotic undertones.
skygiantsalias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --firebatvillain posting in agonyauntyourlibrarian posting in common_nature
philomythacosmolinguistAfter two days of utter misery at work, I was amazed that I actually got to finish on time -- I had not been expecting to!
The unstoppable force of my executive dysfunction met the immovable object of a deadline to respond to the Government's call for evidence on Developing the automated vehicles regulatory framework.
Ugh. I am so disgusted by the whole concept of self-driving cars that it was...well, not the only reason it's difficult to write about, but it was definitely one of them.
In other car-related news, I'm always delighted to read that other people are noticing the same things I am: not only are car headlights too damn bright, but cars are too damn big.
...while bigger cars may be safer for their occupants, critics insist they are considerably less safe for other road users. "Whether you're in another car [or] a pedestrian, you're more likely to be seriously injured if there's a collision with one of these vehicles," argues Tim Dexter, vehicles policy manager at T&E. He is also concerned about the implications for cyclists.
Research carried out in 2023 by Belgium's Vias Institute, which aims to improve road safety, suggested that a 10cm (3.9in) increase in the height of a car bonnet could increase the risk of vulnerable road users being killed in a collision by 27%. T&E also highlights concerns that high bonnets can create blind spots.
This is also something I've read about in the U.S., thanks to Victoria Scott:
If, in the span of one year, 18 fully-loaded Boeing 747s crashed with no survivors, we’d reappraise airspace. We’d question how we build airplanes and how we train pilots. We would recognize this as a failure of the system, not as individual mistakes of 18 pilots. Our roads should be no different.
The good news is that we have sensible solutions in plain sight: lower speed limits, redesign intersections, build roads that prioritize pedestrians and cars equally, and most importantly, reward automakers for building smaller vehicles with better visibility. The bad news is these require some sacrifice from drivers. Safer roads have lower speed limits—likely enforced by ticketing in one form or another. These roads also require more concentration to drive on. SUVs and pickups would need to revert back to 90s sizing, and all of our cars would need to shrink. These are all a hard sell in America, admittedly, but until they happen, we keep losing lives needlessly.
I genuinely love cars, and I’ve owned some big trucks. I understand the appeal of high speeds and lifted rigs, and I’m loath to give them up. But even I can’t accept a future wherein 7,500 are killed each year, especially when the solutions are so tangible and the rewards so massive. I’d accept small sacrifices if thousands more could live decades longer. I hope the rest of America agrees.
oursinSo, I may have mentioned I would be giving a paper in one of the Fellows' Symposia of the Institution with which I am now affiliated, coming up over the horizon very soon. And I had originally intended to revisit some research I did Before Events Intervened and Do Something with that, but it has not been coming together as I should like, needs more percolating I think. So I am instead returning to a project I put aside when other things supervened and demanded my attention, for which I did a preliminary paper or two, and can spruce up and get, I hope, some feedback on, and maybe kickstart this back into action.
Meanwhile....
I think I mentioned being solicited to give an entertaining and instructive talk on the history of johnnies/baudruches some months hence, which I have a fair amount of material already on hand for. However, what the organisers would like is An Image for publicity purposes, fairly soonish, and REALLY. One is tempted to go with the Dudley Hoard which require a good deal of imagination to reconstruct for their original purpose.
Younger scholar whom I have been somewhat informally mentoring has now submitted their PhD thesis and would like me to read it, and think of what might come up in viva.
The project which I was involved in for some considerable while which went very weird last year, with me being somewhat accidental being left out of the loop for some months due to error in email address, so I never really got the full story, is being revived in a smaller and more defined way as a journal special issue edited by Old Friend and Me.
Meanwhile I am in the process of getting the latest volume of the Interminable Saga prepped for publication.
cimorenebluerosekatie posting in fancakeelaynabranchandroot
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