Kimmel, FCC and free speech

Sep. 19th, 2025 08:13 pm
[personal profile] ionelv
That Kimmel hurt MAGA feelings and as a result got canceled by ABC is bad, but what FCC Chairman Carr said is much worse. It appears that Sen Cruz agrees:
“Look, look, I like Brendan Carr,” the senator said. “He’s a good guy. He’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him. But what he said there is dangerous as hell.”

“He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’ And I got to say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
teaotter: (Default)
[personal profile] teaotter posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Title: little pig little pig
Fandom: Original
Challenge: Riddle

Author's note: on the theme of things I can't figure out.


Read more... )

Check In: Day 19

Sep. 19th, 2025 06:49 pm
glitteringstars: (writing)
[personal profile] glitteringstars posting in [community profile] writethisfanfic
Hello, one and all! Happy Friday!

How did writing go today? Did you hit any goals?

The Big Idea: William Alexander

Sep. 19th, 2025 09:28 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by Athena Scalzi

You don’t have to fully understand something to enjoy or get value out of it. New York Times bestselling author William Alexander expands this idea to life itself in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Sunward. Read on to see how the world, though sometimes scary and incomprehensible, can also be pretty amazing.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER:

Sunward is space opera about parenting—specifically about parenting robotic kids, and more broadly about parenting kids who are wildly, gloriously, transformatively different from ourselves. 

It started as a short story that I wrote for Sunday Morning Transport, when pandemic parenting was much on my mind. My own kids were stuck at home, quarantined from the world but still trying to learn about it via disembodied classrooms. Their experience of grade school was simultaneously contracting and expanding in ways that I had no frame of reference for—except maybe in science fiction. Home was a spacecraft, isolated in the void. We lived in cramped quarters, bouncing off the walls and staring out the windows, but at least we could communicate instantaneously with every other ship and station. 

This mix of coziness, claustrophobia, catastrophe, and possibility messed with my head. I tried to squeeze the whole mess into a short story. Then the story grew into a novel—albeit a short one—about parenting juvenile bots in a turbulent solar system. 

Science fiction has lots of robotic kids. Some inhabit Pinocchio retellings, others Peter Pan retellings. Some are changelings, embodying old fears alongside newer uncanny valleys. Samuel Butler panicked about mechanical offspring in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” (which also predicts eventual war between the machines and humanity). Osamu Tezuka’s beloved Astro Boy broke ground for so much of our science fictional landscape; his 1962 story “Robot Land” includes a robotic uprising set in an amusement park, published eleven years before the movie Westworld

Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which you can find in his second collection Exhalation) critiques the impossible shortcuts that we almost always take in our stories about mechanical people. “Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed,” he says in the story notes, “but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way.” The digients of his novella are infants raised up by the constant attention of caring adults. Intelligent life needs to be nurtured. It takes time. There are no shortcuts. 

As adults we become increasingly skilled at pretending—to ourselves, and to everyone else—that we stand on certainties. Kids know better. They are much more accustomed to moving through worlds that they don’t understand, and don’t yet expect to. They find ways to navigate incomprehension. 

Science fiction can help us remember how to do the same—not necessarily in its literal predictions of the future, or in its warnings and cautionary tales, but in the way SF fosters an intuitive sense that all of this… <flails at the world like an unhappy muppet> …could be wildly, gloriously, transformatively different. 


Sunward: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

Round 30:Trope overdosed

Sep. 20th, 2025 01:44 am
abyss_valkyrie: made by <user name=narnialover7> (Default)
[personal profile] abyss_valkyrie posting in [community profile] retro_icontest
Made it! I did two icons of each trope. Could not help choosing Anne Boleyn for 'off with his head'!

Tanjiro(Demon Slayer), Chiaki Nanami(Danganronppa 2), 2X The Tudors, 2X Mirror Mirror






https://i.imgur.com/V0DPdOx.png
https://i.imgur.com/NeoOXTP.png
https://i.imgur.com/TYWqrAW.png
https://i.imgur.com/RacIjji.png
https://i.imgur.com/7h1jOzE.png
https://i.imgur.com/2NSqqWH.png
[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-eighth issue:

“Demetrios of Bactria as Deva Gobujo and Other Indo-Greek Myths of Japan,” by Lucas Christopoulos. 

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp368_demetrios_of_bactria_deva_gobujo.pdf

ABSTRACT

A particular Buddhist divinity named Gobujo is represented in several Buddhist temples in Japan dating from the eighth century on. Originating in Nara, its distinctive representation remained constant through the centuries in other temples in Japan, characterized by his wearing plate armor like that of Tang dynasty Chinese and Tocharian portrayals, holding a Japanese katana broadsword in his right hand, and having an elephant head positioned on his head. Chapters 1–3 of this article trace the way in which the divinity was created from the image and cult of Demetrios of Bactria, following his conquest of India and because of his support for the Buddhists of India, together with the transmission of his fame through the ages in the Buddhist sutras. In chapter 4, we will also investigate other related myths, cults, and customs in Japan, especially Buddhist theatrical plays, which also originated with the Indo-Greeks and traveled all the way through the Tarim Basin and China before reaching the archipelago at the easternmost point of the Silk Road — that is, Kyushu and Nara.

Lavishly illustrated with rare works of art.

—–
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/

 

Selected readings

day 8

Sep. 19th, 2025 06:23 pm

am i the weird one here

Sep. 19th, 2025 07:29 pm
wychwood: New Burbage (don't bother) (S&A - New Burbage (don't bother))
[personal profile] wychwood
I was reading an article about, more or less, how to tackle the discrepancies between what you want (short-term) and what you want (long-term) when I stumbled across the line "Everyone has once-worn clothes strewn on the furniture.". I've seen people talk about it as a "problem" sometimes before, but - is that really a common thing that people do?? I am now madly curious.
Poll #33636 floordrobes and other clothing distribution methods
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7


Do you routinely have part-worn clothes around?

View Answers

Never. Clothes are on my body or in the laundry.
0 (0.0%)

Maybe one or two items
2 (33.3%)

Half a dozen outfits in various stages of wear at any given time
3 (50.0%)

My entire clothing stock is spread around my living space in a quantum superposition of dry laundry not put away and various stages of wear
1 (16.7%)

Do you think it's totally normal to have multiple part-worn items lying around the bedroom etc?

View Answers

Absolutely
3 (42.9%)

It's not ideal but mostly, yes
3 (42.9%)

I wouldn't say normal, but people do it
0 (0.0%)

Why... why would you do that
1 (14.3%)

What's worst

View Answers

Washing clothes every wear
2 (33.3%)

Wearing clothes for multiple days
0 (0.0%)

Not tweaking your outfit every day for the exact circumstances
0 (0.0%)

Clothes
4 (66.7%)


(I wear most of my clothes once before washing them; jumpers and trousers mostly go for a week before washing; at any given time I have both home and outside trousers in use and I might have a jumper around that I'm wearing intermittently, but that's the maximum "part-worn clothes lying around" I get).

[ SECRET POST #6832 ]

Sep. 19th, 2025 05:51 pm
case: (Default)
[personal profile] case posting in [community profile] fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6832 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #975.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
calimac: (Haydn)
[personal profile] calimac
I did it. Rising from my bed of recuperation, I ventured up to the City for my first SFS concert of The Season Without A Music Director. This required two forms of public transit as well as a lot of driving, and my first eating out since early August. The meal was a little iffy - even ordering a smaller than previously customary dinner, I still overestimated how much I'd be able to eat - but everything else went OK.

And I got to hear a stunningly effective concert under guest conductor James Gaffigan. At least so far in its travails, SFS hasn't lost any of its MTT-given snazz. That was on vivid display in this program, four pieces of sophisticated 20C urban Americana.

The excitement kicked off with a gratifyingly tight and exciting performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F. Soloist Hélène Grimaud, dressed in sparkles, dazzled visually as well as audibly. I've called her the Argerich of her generation, and she demonstrated that pizazz. The outer movements were big and brash, which is surely how the composer wanted it. Gaffigan was clearly fully into it on the podium. But even more pleasing was the Adagio, which simply burst with sardonic New York color. The players knew just how jazzy they needed to be. At the end of the work, Gaffigan's first acknowledgment was to rush to the back of the stage to shake hands with the principal trumpet.

Gershwin's An American in Paris, which I've never much liked, was almost as satisfying, shining equally brightly with the same colorful sass, and again Gaffigan shook hands with the trumpeter. Duke Ellington's Harlem has a different style but worked to the same effect with even more jazz stylings, as much as was called for.

I only wish these had preceded instead of followed the one new and unfamiliar (to me) piece on the program, Carlos Simon's The Block, so I could have triangulated and better appreciated the style. As it was, the piece sounded like the answer to the question, What if the composer John Adams had been an urban ethnic?

The one odd clang to the concert came on noting from the program book previous-performances listing that SFS has already played each of these works within the last four years. Considering that, as others have noted, each of the works on the opening showcase concert last week had been played within the previous one year, the programming of last night's concert looks less bold and thematic and more timid and conservative. I think we're in for a lot of that this year.

Electrical, Rain

Sep. 19th, 2025 01:46 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
In order to finish my shop dust collection setup the last cord, the one going to the actual dust collector, needed to be hooked up.  For safety I turned off the entire garage/5th wheel panel.  Then disconnected all the wires going into the garage, pulled them out of the panel and tried to pull in one set of new wires.  Tried being the operative word.   I could NOT get them through the conduit.  Partway, yes, all the way, no.  I left the mess for the night. 
This morning I went back to work.  Eventually I remembered that -somewhere- there is an old fish-tape.  Fish tapes are long, slender, flexible, metal things. They are the right combination of not very bendable, but just enough to push through corners.  The fish tape got through on the second try.  That is to say it got through all but the last 1 foot of conduit.   It came out at a box just above the electrical panel.   I pulled the wire that far and then started trying to get it through the last foot.  I couldn't use the fish tape, there was a bend that was too sharp for it to go around.  I could get the wires to 1 inch from the end, where the stubbornly caught on a tiny ledge.  Took me more than an hour to finally, finally get the end off that ledge and out.  Whew!   All the wires are now re-connected.  Unfortunately I need one tiny part, for the box in the rafters, to finish the whole job, but at least power is restored to everything else. 
It rained last night, the very outer edges of tropical storm Mario.  We got almost 2  1/10ths of an inch. Enough to damp down the dust, which is very nice.  It is still cloudy and cool today at 2pm.  Makes it feel even more like fall. 

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