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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


More stories should dig into the chemistry, biology, and physics of falling in love.

On Writing Romance as Hard Science Fiction

Further Adventures and Home...

Sep. 25th, 2025 07:39 am
lydamorehouse: (Default)
[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 I don't know what it is about traveling, but it wears me out.

I've been home since Tuesday (a.k.a. failed rapture day), but today is the first day that I sort of vaguely feel human again. I'm up early, so it seems like a good time to recount the last days in DC for you all. 

Speaking of up early, [personal profile] naomikritzer rarely is. To be fair to her and all the other crepuscular folks out there, I am an unusually early riser. Every day of the convention I popped out of bed without an alarm somewhere around 6:30 am CT/7:30 am ET.  The fact that it was an hour later in DC than at home worked to my advantage because by 7:30 am a lot of coffee shops are actually open. So, just like every day of the convention, I wandered across Rockville Pike to get us both a nice espresso drink. But, on Monday, I was in no hurry to get back because I very wisely made us no plans until noon. 

First of all, I figured that after GoHing at a convention, Naomi would appreciate a slow morning. Secondly, both she and I walked a little too far the night before and woke up feeling it. On occassion, I plan fantasy trips for myself and I'm now going to be giving any directions that include "a twenty minute walk" a bit of a side-eye. I can walk for 20 minutes, but I do start to drag if there are lots of those! I mean, it does kind of matter whether or not the view is interesting. Some 20 minute walks feel faster than others. I had, at least, taped up my arches. My arches have been giving me trouble lately (I've been seeing a PT) so I was prepared and had been doing my exercises, but, man.

DC is funny because a lot of touristy stuff in it is both really centrally located AND really spread out. As that ad reminded us last night, the  Smithsonian Mall is big!

My plan for us that morning was to check out the DC fish market.  Maine Avenue Fish Market is the oldest continually-operating open air fish market in the United States. It was founded almost two decades earlier than the one in New York City, believe it or not. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Avenue_Fish_Market).  I will say? It doesn't look like much. 

Maine Avenue Fish Market
Image: fish market, with a haze of... my fingers? Not sure. Pretend it's an old-timey photo, since this was the best one I took.

The market is just off the L'Enfant Plaza metro stop (also on the red line!)  Enough people were headed to the market for lunch that we just sort of followed the crowd down to the wharf area. It is, in fact, little more than you see in the picture (minus my fingers). There's this set of stalls and another set of equal size directly behind. It's one of those places, though, where you can buy your fish or seafood on one side and bring it in a bucket over to the other and they will cook it for you fresh. Naomi bought a handful of shrimp for us to have this way and they were amazing. I ended up wanting something more like a full lunch, so I stopped at the little shop at the end which had prepared (but fresh!) sandwiches. 

crab cake and sweet potato fries
Image: crab cake with sweet potato fries.

I got the crab cake because crab cake is something I used to try to make at home without ever having experienced the "real thing." This was really very good and I will admit that I fed the pigeons, seagulls, and little brown ones (sparrows) bits of fries and hamburger bun. 

We could see the tip of the Washington Monument from the market and so Naomi convinced me (only slightly against my better judgement) that it was an easy "20 minute walk" (now my code word for any walk that I later come to regret) to the Smithsonian Mall. It wasn't bad, really. Washington, DC has a whole lot of really lovely parks along the river. This one had clearly been planted with a ton of cherry trees, many of which had been trained to droop and arch their branches over the walkway. I bet that in the spring, during cherry blossom season, the walk we took would have been absolutely stunning. In late September, it was a little muggy and kind of hot. 

We once again ran into a clot of Naitonal Guard, whom Naomi asked where they were from. Once again, it was West Virginia. She also asked them all what they did when they weren't serving in the Guard and it ranged from "just out of college" to "IT manager." Again, the group was largely white, though at least one person could have qualified as a PoC in my estimation. We wished them a good day, which, I know, was probably a wasted opportunity to yell at them about the current presidential administration, but, frankly, I don't see how being deployed here is their choice. For all I know, the whole lot of them voted for Kamala Harris. I kind of have to wonder at the fact that we rarely saw National Guard anywhere but touristy places (and subway/metro stops) if this wasn't a kind of quiet quitting on their or their commander's part. Like, they weren't actually marching in the streets. They were just boredly wandering the Mall or chatting amongst themselves at metro stops. 

I dunno. I will say, they were carrying guns, so just standing around did also feel threatening? If they were in Minneapolis/St. Paul doing this, I might feel really differently, that's for sure.

These days a lot of the popular Smithsonian museums require that you sign up for timed entrances. Naomi and I debated a lot the night before about how long we thought it would take to get from here to there, and what time would be most conveinent so that we could connect up with our friend [personal profile] mrissa .  We had settled on 3:00 PM for the National Musuem of Africian Amerian History & Culture, which nearly worked out? With our slow wander up from the wharf, it was close to 2:00 PM when we got to the Smithsonian.  We sat for a while in the shade, having bought cold water from the gift shop near the Washington Monument. Even though it was a crap shoot as to whether or not we'd've needed timed tickets, I convinced Naomi to consider wandering the National Museum of Asian Arts as it was directly across the mall, or thereabouts. We lucked out and were able to waste a bit of time in air-conditioning wandering the exhibits. I feel like the National Museum of Asian Arts is one of those museums that could be called "stuff a rich guy brought back from Asia in the late 1800s/early 1900s." Not unlike the Walker's Asian Arts section, honestly? But, it was nice not to have to be sitting in the surprisingly bright sun.  

My feet, at this point, were kind of killing me, but I had a secret plan to solve that once we were inside the Africian American History & Culture museum. Neither Naomi and Marissa like to sit and watch movies at museums, but my plan was to sit through all of them in the back row and massage life back into my feet. Which, once we got in, I totally did. 

I actually came out of that museum feeling almost kind of human again, though when another "20 minute walk" was proposed to get us to the restaurant, I will admit, I baulked and ended up hailing us a taxi cab. 

But, I get ahead of myself. 

The museum is huge. One of the reasons, of course, that the three of us wanted to go (or at least, I wanted to go) is because it is my darkest suspicion that if Trump gets a chance, he will destroy the collection as much as possible. I noticed a lot of people--mostly Black--actually filming everything they saw on their phones. I wonder if there is some kind of community or grassroots effort to collect and preserve the exhibit, particularly the history of enslavement, given just how many people I saw filming.  The musuem as it is set up now has its lower levels devoted to history. Very cleverly, you literally rise up out of slavery, as the story of kdinapping and enslavement starts at the lowest level, C, and you work your way up through the Civil War and Emancipation, B, and end in the Civil Rights to present level, A. Luckily for me and my feet, there was a nice 10 minute movie at the crux of each level (you go up these long ramps to move between eras) and so I watched each of those. 

I suspect I was supposed to do the opposite with the culture sections, ie, start at the top and work my way down? Because the top floor has a lot of physical art, like painting and such; the next level down has what I'd call the art of revolution--so like a lot of art that came out of the sixties and the Civil Rights movement, like this....

famous black power moment at Olympics
Image: statue of the famous moment at the 1968 Olympics when medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the symbol for Black Power during the National Anthem.

...and then the next level down encouraged people to interact with art by doing a dance-dance revolution type thing to hip hop, etc. It didn't diminish my experience to do it the "wrong" way, but, because the museum closed at 5:30 pm, I sort of wish I'd had more time to explore the art at the very top. Ah well. 

I will say, it was one of the better museums I've been to in a long time. No surprise, I suppose, given that it is a Smithsonian, but I really could have spent the whole day there exploring. 

Marissa wanted to return to a place she'd had dinner at the night before, Oyamel. There is apparently also one of these in New York, but, obviously, we were at the DC location. I was not feeling nearly as adventurous as I normally am, and so I ended up just having a lovely chicken tamale. I absolutely ADORED the atmosphere of the place, however. The three of us sat outside and the evening was fully magical in terms of temperature, the company, and that sense you get when you're traveling that you are having An Experience, you know? 10/10 would again and the next time I would order the cricket tacos. 

The metro was quite close, so we all hopped on and returned to out hotel. 

All and all, it didn't necessarily feel like we did All The Things, but I think we did enough of the things. Oh, and I got to use my superpower of being able to summon a taxi in a world filled with Uber and Lyft in order to get the three of us to the restaurant. It is a superpower that is normally very useless, given that I live in a town where taxis must be called on the phone and appointments made. But, I have rarely failed to catch a taxi any time I'm visiting a large enough city. I've hailed them in Chicago, Los Angeles, and DC. (I was too young to use this superpower when I was last in NYC.) And by hail? I mean, literally, I will be in a street and an available taxi will come by and I will stick my hand out and yell, "TAXI!" and they stop for us. 

Naomi thinks I had a past life as a New Yorker. Because this skill is clearly fairly useless in the modern era. But it is the reason I do not have a Lyft or Uber app on my phone.

So, yeah, there's very little to say about Tuesday other than Naomi and I did discuss the possiblity our pilot getting raptured. Luckily, that did not happen. 

Now, I'm home, returned to the "real world" where dishes must be washed and food prepared. Alas, down to earth once again.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Amid economic downturn and political strife, young American teen discovers her hidden potential.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack
[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

This site turns your URL into something sketchy-looking.

For example, www.schneier.com becomes
https://cheap-bitcoin.online/firewall-snatcher/cipher-injector/phishing_sniffer_tool.html?form=inject&host=spoof&id=bb1bc121¶meter=inject&payload=%28function%28%29%7B+return+%27+hi+%27.trim%28%29%3B+%7D%29%28%29%3B&port=spoof.

Found on Boing Boing.

(no subject)

Sep. 25th, 2025 09:41 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] anna_wing!

Dang! Academic smackdown!

Sep. 24th, 2025 09:25 pm
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I was reading the June 2025 American Historical Review tonight and came across Peter Lorge's review of A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science by Huang Pumin, Wei Hong, and Xiong Jianping, translatied by Fan Hao. It's one of the most brutal academic takedowns of a book that I've ever read. I'd like to share with you the first sentence from each paragraph, which manage to convey the sense of the whole thing, with my comments afterward in brackets.

  1. "The field of Chinese military history in the West has grown considerably in the last couple of decades but remains extremely small." [So this book should be useful.]
  2. "A History of Traditional Chinese Military Science is therefore valuable if only because there isn't much else." [My comment #1 was right, but just barely.]
  3. "The term 'military science' is particularly problematic. [Dang! We're not even out of the title and things are already "particularly problematic!"]
  4. "More problematically, the authors believe that Chinese military thought — or military science, in their terms — did not change after it was established in the pre-imperial period (before 221 BCE)." [It's never a good sign when any paragraph in a review begins with "more problematically."]
  5. "This brings us to a deep-rooted problem in this book's scholarship." [After two paragraphs of problems, we now come to "a deep-rooted problem"? Damn!]
  6. "Readers unfamiliar with Chinese history, let along Chinese military history, will find the discussions of history and warfare confusing." [In other words, if you know enough to understand this book, you know too much to learn anything from it.]
  7. "The translation itself appears to be generally competent, although the translator is not well-versed in the deeper meanings of either the technical military terms in Chinese or in English." [It looks like he's about to let the translator off the hook, but no.]

show review

Sep. 24th, 2025 11:43 am
calimac: (Default)
[personal profile] calimac
Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, Berkeley Rep

Hour-long one-woman show, sort of, by the musical theater star and Melania Trump impersonator. Mostly spoken, but with songs inserted: not greatest hits, but purpose-written songs expanding on what she's been talking about, co-written with her musical director and pianist Todd Almond, accompanied also by bass and drum kit.

It's one of those wryly amusing sample of life things. Her theme is that she's overly anxious to please people (including us, the audience), going back to her earliest days in the theater, where she specialized in being an ingenue. (Definition by examples: "Disney princesses, Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, Timothée Chalamet.") Also why, since premiering at 18, she's never been for any length of time without a boyfriend or husband, some of whom sound pretty awful in her telling. (Song about, Are there any good men out there?) She's been married three times, which she seems to consider a blot on her escutcheon. So did the clerk at the marriage license bureau, who - in an amusing story Benanti tells - wasn't sure whether the fiancé at her third marriage knew that she'd been married twice before.

Anyway, her third husband, whom she's been married to for ten years now (she's 45), seems to be the satisfactory one, and they have two little girls, so she segues into talking about motherhood, covering everything from overcoming your taught aversion to bottle-feeding when it turns out you can't breastfeed (the baby thought the bottle was great, but not the strangers who would see it and come up and say, "You should try breastfeeding") to answering smart-alec remarks from precocious kindergarteners. (Song on the theme "Mama's a liar" - she's trying to reassure her children and hide how broken the world is.)

Last topic, perimenopause. Oh boy. After which, she says, you become a crone and turn invisible. (As in, people don't notice that you're there.) "Well," she says, "I refuse to be invisible."

I saw Benanti play Liza in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center in NYC six years ago, and I've seen her talk about some of these things in online concerts. So I was a good candidate for this and enjoyed it.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished The Return of the Soldier.

Started Carl Rollyson, The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West (1997) and decided that I was possibly a little burnt-out on his Rebecca-stanning and took a break.

Moved on to Upton Sinclair, Presidential Mission (Lanny Budd #8) (1947), which occupied most of the week's reading.

On the go

Picked up the Rollyson again.

Have embarked on Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers (A Dance to the Music of Time #9) (1968).

Up next

No idea.

Jimmy Kimmel's return!

Sep. 24th, 2025 10:55 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

A. and I just watched Jimmy Kimmel's comeback monologue from last night. It was great — I'm glad to see him back. I've got to say, though: After seeing his supercut of all the time's Trump said not to take Tylenol in his press conference with RFK Jr., I feel an uncontrollable urge to take Tylenol!

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll



Realtor Reiko Kujirai has many questions, about her apparent rival and about herself, but very few answers.

Kowloon Generic Romance, volume 2 by Jun Mayuzuki
[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

This is a weird story:

The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards that could have been used for telecom attacks within the area encompassing parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

“This network had the power to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City,” said special agent in charge Matt McCool.

The devices were discovered within 35 miles (56km) of the UN, where leaders are meeting this week.

McCool said the “well-organised and well-funded” scheme involved “nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law enforcement.”

The unidentified nation-state actors were sending encrypted messages to organised crime groups, cartels and terrorist organisations, he added.

The equipment was capable of texting the entire population of the US within 12 minutes, officials say. It could also have disabled mobile phone towers and launched distributed denial of service attacks that might have blocked emergency dispatch communications.

The devices were seized from SIM farms at abandoned apartment buildings across more than five sites. Officials did not specify the locations.

Wait; seriously? “Special agent in charge Matt McCool”? If I wanted to pick a fake-sounding name, I couldn’t do better than that.

Wired has some more information and a lot more speculation:

The phenomenon of SIM farms, even at the scale found in this instance around New York, is far from new. Cybercriminals have long used the massive collections of centrally operated SIM cards for everything from spam to swatting to fake account creation and fraudulent engagement with social media or advertising campaigns.

[…]

SIM farms allow “bulk messaging at a speed and volume that would be impossible for an individual user,” one telecoms industry source, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the Secret Service’s investigation, told WIRED. “The technology behind these farms makes them highly flexible—SIMs can be rotated to bypass detection systems, traffic can be geographically masked, and accounts can be made to look like they’re coming from genuine users.”

Oddly recurrent stomach issues

Sep. 24th, 2025 07:05 am
andrewducker: (Hold Me)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Facebook reminds me that we had norovirus on this day in 2021 and 2023. Jane has spent the last 24 hours with D+V. What are the odds?

Bold

Sep. 23rd, 2025 04:14 pm
oursin: The Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel (Delphic sibyl)
[personal profile] oursin

These days, I will often find myself puzzling over, what was that person's name? connected with some Thing in the past. I was actually struggling to recall the name of the very weird woman who was the landlady of the bedsit I inhabited near Mornington Crescent in the very early 70s, with whom there came about Major Draaaama (it eventually popped into my mind, as these things do, a couple of days later when I was thinking about something else: see also, finding that book one is looking for in the process of looking for something entirely different.)

I am not sure if this is AGE or the fallibility of human memory, and is it actually AGE and the wearing out of the little grey cells, or just having That Much More stored in them, so that they resemble one of those storerooms in museums where no-one has catalogued anything for centuries and curators have gone in and nicked stuff to sell on eBay -

- I think this metaphor is going a bit too far, somehow.

And yet one can recall quite readily, in fact one might even say intrusively, an obscure pop song by a not particularly renowned group.

That is, after reading that Reacher novel, The Hard Way, the other week, I found myself being earwormed by The Hard Way, a single put out by The Nashville Teens (who were from Surrey) in 1966 which got to all of 45 in the charts. It's not on iTunes even or in any of the compilation CDs, it's obscure. And yet I remembered it and who it was by.

Maybe it was being repetitively played on one of the pirate stations of my youth?

WHY

Sep. 23rd, 2025 12:12 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
would my Framework charge if plugged into one outlet but not another? I tested the outlet from which it did not charge and it works for other devices.

[Update]

I shut it down for an hour and everything works again.

Potential new fannish activity

Sep. 23rd, 2025 09:26 am
brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I've aspired to be a tag wrangler at AO3 for a while, but each time they opened up applications, I haven't been able to find fandoms I wanted to apply for. They recently opened up applications again, and the fandoms they were looking for wranglers for included a lot of K-pop girl groups, including several that I have written about at length. So I put my application on the 19th and now I'm waiting anxiously to hear back (they said it could be 4 weeks, I put my application in 4 days ago, so I've go plenty of waiting to do). Fingers crossed!

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lsanderson

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