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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-08-19 10:14 am
oursin) wrote2025-08-19 02:53 pmThis has me thinking (for that is the way I roll) 'who is the novelist that this has escaped from?': Alan Turing Institute accused of ‘toxic’ culture -
“The problems are deep-seated going back to the foundation,” said Lawrence. “If you create an institute that has a lot of money and spends that money on itself and a club of universities, you create a lot of politics.”
***
A more cheerful thing: Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour saved for nation
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More on heritage and reconstructing the past: The museum where history keeps repeating itself:
The easiest mistake to make in historical re-enactment is to create an era that never quite existed, by playing too closely to period. At Beamish, there is a real thoughtfulness given to how every age is a sort of palimpsest.
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And Dept, Here Comes the Silly Season:
This strikes me as in the fine old spirit of Stephen Potter and GamesManShip/LifeManShip etc: The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek: One weird trick to frustrate the hell out of a Marxist bro:
My advice is intended only for special occasions. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, “a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves.” All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of.... The game works best when you choose something that is normally the prompt for a great deal of intellectual posturing, of talking in a loud, bored voice.... Don’t do this to anyone who will be hurt by it, as opposed to merely irritated.
Whereas this has escaped from the era of Ealing Comedy, surely? Daniel Jackson was just 14 when he and his friends saw a strip of forest between Serbia and Croatia, and decided to claim it. Now 20, he is the president of Verdis, but has been forced to live in exile:
[I]t seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis’s citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but “it’s a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved”.
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-08-19 08:59 am
cosmolinguist) wrote2025-08-18 09:37 pmCounseling after work today was about how I'm doing well in some ways -- I said I'm finally getting that much-needed holiday, we'll be away for nine days; she asked me how long it's been since I had that long a vacation; I said I didn't know if I ever had. (Turns out I probably have, but the fact that I legitimately couldn't think of any of those occasions is indicative (and that's partly because they're trips back to Minnesota and visiting family isn't really time off).)
So I talked about how fortunate I feel that I have the stability to do that: this is the first time I've had the money and the ability to have time off; before I either had time or money but never both at the same time.
But I also talked about how badly I spiraled on Saturday when some gloomy news about the Twins of all things. (tl;dr: billionaires ruin everything. The hope that things would improve when the team sold to different billionaires has been snatched away; the current ones are keeping the team and it's very clear they're going to starve it of funds -- bad teams make more money than good teams and this family believes they need money right now. They don't share the view that beat writers and podcasters and fans of the team have which is that a sportsball team is a civic institution; for them it's just a way to make money. Like Gleeman started his article the other day, "It's hope that hurts the most." Or as I learned it from English pals: "I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.") I was like I don't have a dog any more, awful things are happening in the country I'm from, I couldn't go back for my grandma's funeral or my family, work has been so stressful all year, I can't even manage to organize a hookup...and now I can't even have baseball as a little fun escapist thing??
So am I doing pretty good or pretty bad?? I feel bad about feeling bad, being aware that my bad-feelings are floating on a sea of basic-okayness and worrying that I'm being insufficiently grateful for it. But my counselor said that it's not like one is true and one is false; both can be valid.
I guess it's part of leveling up Maslow's hierarchy: once you get the basic shit sorted out you do start caring more about that higher-level shit. I didn't expect that to happen automatically; indeed against my will but it seems to have. I don't want to lose track of the fulfilment I do have. But also basic stuff isn't taking up all my time/mental capacity any more so I have to figure out what else to do with my adult life.
rachelmanija) wrote2025-08-18 01:08 pm
ffutures) wrote2025-08-18 08:32 pm
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-08-18 02:09 pm
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-08-18 10:27 amWhich 2010 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The City & The City by China Miéville
29 (100.0%)
Far North by Marcel Theroux
0 (0.0%)
Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
6 (20.7%)
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
2 (6.9%)
Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones
0 (0.0%)
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts
2 (6.9%)
oursin) wrote2025-08-18 03:00 pmThe Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist:
His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?
....
In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship.
(The Literary Review was kinder)
But also, while I guess Bensons are a minor fandom of mine, the diaries I would be interested in reading are those of Minnie (Sapphic romps at Lambeth Palace!) and of naughty Fred, EF Benson, author of the camp classics about Mapp and Lucia and the Edwardian bromance David Blaize. Though once attended conference paper claiming that the M&L novels were essentially romans a clef about his circle, so maybe he didn't need to write a bitchy diary as well.
I think we already had as much of AC as anyone would wish to know in that Goldhill volume on the family, which had a bit too much AC for my taste to begin with.
ffutures) wrote2025-08-18 01:09 pmjames_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-08-17 06:28 pmsilveradept) wrote2025-08-17 12:05 pmadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)oursin) wrote2025-08-17 06:39 pmThis week's bread(as last week's developed mould): Len Deighton's Mixed Wholemeal from the Sunday Times Book of Real Bread, 4:1:1 wholemeal flour/strong white flour/mix of wheatgerm, bran, and pinhead oatmeal, splosh of sunflower oil rather than melted butter, rather nice.
Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, started out as 70/30% wholemeal spelt/einkorn flour but ended up more like 50/50%, maple syrup, ground ginger, quite good.
Today's lunch: diced casserole beef slow-cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and water with star anise, served with sticky rice with lime leaves, cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds, and sugar snap peas stirfried with garlic
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-08-17 12:26 pm
