bryant | Network

Happy Standard Time! Now I can finally stop being annoyed at everyone at work who says "EST" when it's actually EDT, for a few months at least.

Still feeling kinda discombobulated, although I don't think the timezone change had much to do with it, but I guess you never know. I slept in this morning, played a game or two of Magic with Quentin, and picked up Juniper from her usually Sunday morning babysitting gig, so she could drive home; she walked there, and can walk home, but wanted to get home quicker today. I went for a nice walk after that (it was a beautiful day), and then Junie drove me and Quentin to his D&D game, then picked up a friend of hers, and then she drove us to Alewife so they could take the T into Boston for some shopping and hanging out. I shopped on the way home for ingredients for dinner, once of the recipes from a Trader Joe's cookbook we'd gotten from Michelle & Eric for Xmas last year, from these people I believe. I don't see the particular thing on their site, but despite not having much experience cooking fish, and really not knowing at all what the heck I was doing with the asparagus, I managed to make honey mustard glazed salmon with roasted potatoes and asparagus, and it was pretty good. :^ ) Caught up on random online things after dinner, and now I've stayed up too late, oof.

cosmolinguist

( cancer, child death, suicide [no one I'm close to] )

thistleingrey

Jack Turban, Free to Be: Understanding Kids and Gender Identity (2024)
Rather nuanced.

Sophie Kim, The God and the Gumiho (2024)
Featured earlier this year on a local library's OverDrive landing page. It seems a good match for readers who like het romances, grey (not "good") lead characters, and a setting not unlike that of KPop Demon Hunters. Hmm---he's the fallen god of deceit (seriously, it's a whiny iteration of folktale Seokga, in a 'verse where Mireuk is bad); she's a gumiho, neither young nor nice; and together, they ... fight crime. Everyone whose physical presence is described resembles a kpop idol, and/or a character in a shoujo manga (but not necessarily manhwa).

Not my bag, but I like that the text lets the reader sort out the mythological tangles instead of pre-simplifying the 1990s-ish setting. As settings go, it's no harder than a contemporary semi-sageuk kdrama, after all (cf. the 2020 tv show Gumihodyeon (which isn't sageuk), or see the more spoilery summary---I haven't watched the show).

dianec42

I got to start a new color!

Is white a colour?
Will I ever decided which spelling of "color" I prefer?
Should I be using 3 strands instead of 2?
Am I going to use glow-in-the-dark thread in this project? NO!

Anyway. That's all the trees finished on the right-hand side. And a noticeable start on the moon.

minoanmiss

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

Current Mood: determined

irilyth

It feels like the last 48 hours have been like three or four days long, I'm not entirely sure why, just lots of different stuff going on. I slept in this morning, then ... something for most of the rest of the morning, and then played some Magic with Quentin. (We finished the Bloomburrow box, and had played a bunch of games directly out of it, and have now decided to shift to deckbuilding. I have a Frog deck, it says ribbit. He has an Otter deck, it says shit goddamn I'm complicated.) I then headed out for some pokego, Gigantamax Garbodor battle day, and that went pretty well, except I optimized things somewhat incorrectly, but it worked out ok in the end. Came home, ordered Sweetgreen for dinner, played another game of Magic with Quentin, enjoyed tasty Sweetgreen. Took Juniper and a couple of friends to a second-day-of-Halloween party, watched the Wonder movie with Quentin and Amy, and now it's super late and I'm so, so tired.

minoanmiss

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

Current Mood: pleased

solarbird

HEY IF YOU’RE IN NORTHSHORE AND CAN VOTE – vote FOR Kimberlee Kelly and vote FOR Sandy R. Hayes for school board!

Their opponents are people who were either low-key or openly anti-trans in the primary and they’ve both gone SUPER-high-key anti-trans in the general. This is how it always works and is why we always have to pay attention to “unimportant” races in the primaries:

Results page from the primary election back in August showing 35.83% turnout, a Christian Nationalist coming in third for school board in position 1, a low-key anti-trans candidate coming in second in position 4, and an overtly anti-trans candidate finishing second in position 5. In all races, there were three candidates, ignoring write-in votes.

So anyway, since people don’t pay attention enough in primaries, we have this shit.

Vote FOR Kimberlee Kelly and vote FOR Sandy R. Hayes, because their opponents are haters and shitheels.

(You can also vote for Carson Sanderson. Arun Sharma – who also seemed fine even if I voted Carson – dropped out after ballots were printed, and then endorsed Carson too.)

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

jesse_the_k posting in

access_fandom

My cognitive impairments mean I always mess up time zones. I’ve participated in many events in the past five years. Only one managed to sense my current time zone and adjust all the info on their site to match. (And of course I can't remember which one it was.)

Which is why I love https://dateful.com. It’s an excellent tool when you’re communicating across time zones. It’s free. It features:

Time Zone Converter: convert between major world cities and timezones instantly as you type
World Clock: up to 20 clocks to see how the rest of the world can participate in your event
Time Calculator: adds and subtracts times, dates, and durations

And best of all:

Eventlink: create a link that converts an event’s time to the user’s current time zone and day. You can add an event title, description, and URL (meeting link or a web page), and you can offer an “add to my calendar” which works with Apple, Google, and Outlook.

All that info in a single link. You don’t need an account, but if you create one, you can go back and edit your Eventlinks.

I’m able to do these things with the keyboard; I welcome insights from readers using adaptive technology.

cosmolinguist

I mentioned that we saw Deliver Me from Nowhere, but I didn't have time to get into my thoughts on it, so here are some.

"One of the things that confuses me about this film," D said in his review, "is who it's for, other than cosmolinguist." And I can't help him there, but it definitely is for me. It takes place around the time I'm being born, only a few years before this man would become my favorite musician (I was about three when I could locate and play "Born in the U.S.A." from my dad's record collection, holding the LP carefully and putting the needle down in a way that wouldn't scratch it).

I love that it's about men and masculinity in a way you don't normally see them: I love how the relationship between Springsteen and Landau is portrayed, it's intense and it's emotionally savvy. I don't love the way that women are such secondary characters in this movie that I don't even know Mrs. Landau's name, but I also love the way Jon came home at the end of some of these difficult work days and talked to her about Springsteen's big ugly feelings that were driving the direction his work and life was taking at that point.

I love that the single-mother girlfriend -- who as I suspected was a conglomeration of multiple real-life people -- seemed to confront him with the force of all those real women when he told her he was leaving for California: he's messed up and he's stuck and he seems unwilling to do anything about that. (The road trip and arrival in California shift the dial more toward "unable," but you can't blame this woman for assuming it's "unwilling"; this is clearly not her first experience of young men disappointing her.)

I feel weird because I'm the biggest Springsteen fan any of my friends know with one or two possible exceptions -- more than one person has told me they're relying on me to let them know whether the movie is worth seeing or not -- but compared to the real devotees I am barely a casual fan -- I've only seen him once and not until last year! A lot of my favorite songs are older than me, or close to it, so I have absorbed them in that contextless all-at-once haphazard way that culture is, without time to spread it out or an expert to steer you in it. Born in the U.S.A. rocketed Springsteen from success to superstardom, and my dad was apparently part of that wave because he had that record and no others. I found it on my own, noticed Springsteen's songs on the radio on my own, re-discovered him (after a teenage period of being mortified that I'd ever loved music so uncool as to turn up on classic-rock stations) with "The Ghost of Tom Joad" on my own...

I say all that to say that I'd never realized how entangled Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. are as albums. I liked that the movie portrayed them as so intimately bound up together. We couldn't have had the stadium-filling without the bedroom-recorded demos that were never meant to be heard by anyone else. That really struck me: a lot of my younger years were about me trying to skip the weird confusing maybe-ugly fixations of my brain and heart, I wanted to get right to the likeable if not successful bits. But of course you can't do that. The only way to the cool successful thing might be through the ugly private things.

And you don't have to; the weird confusing ugly stuff might be able to be loved too.

I want to talk about Frankenstein and Breaking the Code too, but this is probably enough for today.

irilyth

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

Happy Halloween! The teenagers (teenagers! two of them! they are wonderful) went out with their friends, various combinations of trick-or-treating and parties. We got about half a dozen groups of trick-or-treaters on our sleepy side street. I went for a pokewalk at like 20:30 or so, and it was nice. I checked various bowls of candy that people had left out for after-hours visitors; they were mostly empty, or full of Twizzlers, but a couple had peanut butter cups, yum.

I should try to remember that the answer to "should I go for a walk, even though I don't feel like it?" is always "YES, dumbass".

(And also, that the answer to "should I eat this thing that I've claimed I want to stop eating so much of" is always "NO, dumbass".)

minoanmiss

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

Current Mood: lolsobbing

lb_lee posting in

davis_square

Nobody's getting food stamps next month, and I'm doing something about it! Maybe I could do something... FOR YOU!

See, I've discovered that I'm a really good courier when it comes to getting stuff into free boxes! I've also discovered that I'm good at helping people clean out their kitchens (and other rooms, but right now, food is the important thing). I've helped people do this and can give references!

So: is your kitchen full of herbs, spices, teas, drinks, or food that you are never going to get to? (Teas and herbs/spices are SO useful to people, and so often forgotten!) Does looking into your cabinets stress you out? I can help with that! I can help clean out your kitchen, disappear the bad stuff into the compost, and transport the good stuff to local free pantries so that hungry people can eat it! You get cupboard space, your neighbors get fed, I get to prove to myself the government can't break my spirit, and everyone wins!

This is an open offer for the general Boston area, but because I am a pedestrian and stuff like canned goods are heavy, I'm most useful in the Arlington, Cambridge, Medford, and Somerville areas. I will be limited in how much I can carry, but I have two VERY sturdy 20 liter backpacks, a tote bag, and a heart filled with determination and spite.

Help us feed our neighbors! Spread the word to anyone around who might find this useful!

(I don't require payment for this. I am MAD.)

cosmolinguist

You ever look at all the tabs open on your work computer as you turn it off and think man, that's so much garbage that Tomorrow Me has to sort out, that poor guy, he's gonna hate me?

Had a kinda disappointing day at work today. I didn't get enough done, and next week is going to be busy so I really can't afford to do so little.

minoanmiss

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

Current Mood: determined

minoanmiss

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

Current Mood: hopeful

cosmolinguist

Somebody had brought their not-really-wanted nail polish to the queer social event I was at last night, encouraging people to use or take home anything they liked.

And just because I was sitting at the table near them for a while without much to do, and because I like bright colors, I ended up painting my nails. Bright yellow. (I was drawn to it because it looked like a fluorescent hi-vis yellow in the bottle. Once it was on it's "just" a nice bright primary yellow (someone else looked at it on me and said "I wore that color for a Simpsons drag show once," to give you an idea of what yellow it is), but that's still good.

I used to love nail polish, that and really chunky colorful jewelry were the only "girly" things I ever got excited about. And even then, my mom was always trying to steer me toward soft pinks and stuff and I chose more blue and green and the most "unnatural" colors.

But I haven't done my nails since before I left my old house. I was...busy, and then for a long time it felt too femme, like I struggled so much to get people to stop misgendering me, I didn't want to make that any more likely. And by the time that stopped being a concern I was well and truly out of the habit and all my nail polish that hasn't been touched in five or six years should probably be thrown away.

But here I did my nails very happily. It was nice that it didn't feel weird or feminine at all now. It just felt queer.

Also while making dinner tonight, I realized that when I'm chopping vegetables it's way easier to tell where my fingers end and the peppers or whatever begin if the ends of my fingers are bright yellow.

Not that I usually struggle with this, I'm used to doing it mostly by feel. It was weird that my eyes could help out!

That got me thinking about starting to acquire new nail polish (the old stuff I have needs to be thrown out really) based on what colors are easy for me to pick up!

The yellow has already half chipped off, so I'll have to see if there's any nail polish remover in the house that works! But this probably won't be the last time I paint my nails.

jesse_the_k posting in

access_fandom

When I started working on WisCon access in 2007, some kind soul (name lost) gave me a black teeshirt printed in tactile gold--with both Latin letters and braille. It sang the praises of ELECTRICAL EGGS, who advocated for handicap accessibility in the 1970s and 1980s. I loved the shirt but didn't know their history.

So I was thrilled when the September 2025 Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, volume 14 number 2, starts off with Eric Vero's article:

Oral History of The Electrical Eggs: Science Fiction, Disability Activism, and Fan Conventions

https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/1262

The journal offers PDF, HTML, and "simplified HTML" versions of each article; all are open access, peer-reviewed, and Creative Commons licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

ABSTRACT

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990, American science fiction fans in southern states organized, collaborated, and practiced accessibility at conventions. This grassroots movement began with the work of Samanda B. Jeude and a coalition of other science fiction fans who fought for visibility and access to convention spaces. In this oral history of their organization, “The Electrical Eggs,” I interview two key members decades after their participation in making conventions accessible. I complement these oral sources with brief histories of the role of eugenics and ableism in science fiction and the rise of disability activism in America. Although, the science fiction fandom still faces historical forces like ableism that have been present since its beginnings, the work of the Eggs is a testament to the power of collective action to provide accessibility in fan communities.

minoanmiss

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

Current Mood: worried

soc_puppet posting in

access_fandom

Between a friend contacting me a couple of weeks ago for help setting up Accessibility at the new con he joined, and just tonight hearing about the absolute bullshit that's been going on at TwitchCon (no ramp for their Guest of Honor wheelchair user to get up to the raised stage to receive an award, third year in a row with no ramps for him as a GoH), I figure I may as well share this here.

It's far from perfect, since I'm still almost entirely self-taught, and I built it on the convention I used to run Accessibility for, so there's some stuff that's not exactly universal, but hopefully it'll help someone out there!

( Convention Accessibility Timeline and Jobs )

This is far from perfect and from comprehensive both, but if you work on Accessibility for a convention, or are looking to get started doing so, hopefully you can use this as a sort of template to build around or tweak to your needs. Suggestions in the comments are very welcome, though I don't know if I'll be up to incorporating them into the post. Questions are also very welcome; I'll do my best to answer how I dealt with things, but anyone who wants to is free to chime in!

I've got more info to share as well, but I'm going to hold off on that for another post or two, as this one wore me out a bit already 😂

Edit: For clarity, since I was just overthinking it: This isn't a comprehensive list of services that were provided at the convention I worked; it's just a behind-the-scenes look at how I was involved in setting up some of the services we provided. (Plus some that I never got around to, like the ASL interpreters and Braille documents 🤦‍♀️) If you want inspiration for that, I suggest looking around for convention Accessibility Policies. Those should list out the various accessibility measures that a given convention has in place.