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Birdfeeding

Today is partly cloudy and cold.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

.

Current Mood: busy

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blogging,
personal

Monday Update 2-23-26

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poem: "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"
Poem: "Embrace My Fate"
John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds Order
Poem: "The Spectrum of Your Being"
Early Humans
Birdfeeding
Vocabulary: Bricolage
Today's Adventures
Science
Birdfeeding
Meteor Shower Calendar
Philosophical Questions: Life
Edible Landscaping Order
Meme
Photos: House Yard
Water
Birdfeeding
Books
Follow Friday 2-20-26: Active Communities on Dreamwidth Winter 2025-2026 A-I
Energy
Birdfeeding
Community Thursdays
Photos: Flowerbeds
Books
Birdfeeding
Hard Things

Safety has 49 comments. Food has 53 comments. Wildlife has 39 comments. Food has 67 comments. Robotics has 146 comments.

Last week's half-price sale in Not Quite Kansas went well. All sponsored poems have been posted, so you can find those via the title links on the sale page.

The 2026 Rose and Bay Awards are now open for excellence in crowdfunding. It's time to vote for your favorite projects!

The award period for eligible activities spans January 1-December 31, 2025.
The nomination period spans January 1-January 31, 2026.
The voting period spans February 1-February 28, 2026.

These are the handlers for the 2026 award season:

Art: gs_silva Nominate art! Vote for art!
Fiction: fuzzyred Nominate fiction! Vote for fiction!
Poetry: gs_silva Nominate poetry! Vote for poetry!
Webcomic: curiosity Nominate webcomics! Vote for webcomics!
Other Project: curiosity Nominate other projects! Vote for other projects!
Patron: fuzzyred Nominate patrons! Vote for patrons!

"The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds" belongs to Not Quite Kansas and needs $34.50 to be complete. Raymond and Gideon get attacked on the way home from research.

The weather has been variable here. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a large flock of sparrows, several starlings, one male and two female house finches, one female and two male cardinals, a mourning dove, and a fox squirrel. I flushed the great horned owl from the ritual meadow when I went out there. A skein of geese flew overhead, going north. Currently blooming: crocuses.

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Notes for "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"

These are the notes for "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds."

( Read more... )

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Poem: "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"

This poem is spillover from the October 2020 Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from

wyld_dandelyon. It also fills the "demons" square in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, an unprovoked attack, hellhounds, violence, gore, unexpected rescue, playing with prey, fatally injured opponents, minor injuries to main characters, awkward discussions, willing sacrifice, intimate magical healing, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

This microfunded poem is being posted one verse at a time, as donations come in to cover them. The rate is $0.25/line, so $5 will reveal 20 new lines, and so forth. There is a permanent donation button on my profile page, or you can contact me for other arrangements. You can also ask me about the number of lines per verse, if you want to fund a certain number of verses. So far sponsors include:

fuzzyred,

355 lines, Buy It Now = $44.50
Amount donated = $10
Verses posted = 13 of 118
Amount remaining to fund fully = $34.50
Amount needed to fund next verse = $0.25
Amount needed to fund the verse after that = $0.75

( Read more... )

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Notes for "Embrace My Fate"

Here are the notes for "Embrace My Fate."

( Read more... )

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Poem: "Embrace My Fate"

This poem is spillover from the October 6, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from

librarygeek. It also fills the "How do you want to do this?" square in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, sorting through a lair acquired by combat, reference to past abuse, cursed artifacts, damned souls, worry, magical body modification, restraint for safety, awkward emotional discussions, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

( Read more... )

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John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds Order

I picked out what I wanted from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds. This catalog has the Safe Seed Pledge, meaning everything is non-GMO/toxin-free. My partner Doug further notes that they have the best, easiest ordering system of all the catalogs we use. Call up the Smart Order Form and when you key in the product number, the rest autofills, tells you if it's still in stock, and lists the price. \o/ Somegeek earned their coffee today!

( Read more... )

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Notes for "The Spectrum of Your Being"

These are the notes for "The Spectrum of Your Being."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

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Poem: "The Spectrum of Your Being"

This poem is spillover from the September 1, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from

librarygeek. It also fills the "How do you want to do this?" square in my 9-1-20 card for the I Want Fries With That! Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, a headless chicken running around, a fight with bit character fatalities, moderate injuries to a main character, messy medical details, an imprisoned demon, torture, binding magic, demonic healing, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

( Read more... )

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vital functions

vital functions

Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )

ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.

Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...

Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.

Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.

Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...

Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...

NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.

Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.

This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.

A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...

Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)

Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?

advice from camera nerds

I take a lot of pictures of three classes of things:

Cats: This pictures are good on any camera, including my agéd single-lens SE.
Birds: These pics are shit on the aforementioned handheld phone.
Moss and lichens and bugs: These pics are fine on the phone, but could be much better.

My real constraint is my hands and arms. I can't hold my arms above my head, I can't hold a phone still very long, the non-ergonomic controls and shape of a phone are shit, I realistically can't carry a tripod on a hike, and I can't bear weight on my shoulders or the back of my neck for any length of time. (I recognize that this collection of constraints means my pictures will never be great, and that's okay.)

So, questions:

Are there any cameras that have particularly good ergonomics, are particularly light, or have a good reputation for accessibility?
I believe I could get a remote shutter trigger & a remote focus, so I could prop the camera somewhere and get a good pic from a less painful angle; do you know how to choose a hand-friendly one? (Not finger-fiddly, easy to attach & detach, easy to click buttons.)
On a modern camera, is it possible to get lenses good enough for bird pics that are not, you know, heavy? Last time I had an SLR I was taking pictures on film, so that tells you how out of date my knowledge is.
What's the lightest tripod that works well for people with shit fine motor control and no finger strength? I can sort by weight on hiking sites, but hikers put up with a lot of fiddly controls that I can't handle.

(I'm only looking for advice from your experience or from the experience of people you trust. Please don't GoogleKagiGoPT it for me!)

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Early Humans

Homo erectus fossils in East Asia rewrite the timeline of human migration

A new analysis dates three Homo erectus skulls from central China to about 1.77 million years ago, making them the oldest securely dated hominin fossils in eastern Asia.

That older age shifts the arrival of early humans in the region back by roughly 600,000 years and compresses the timeline of how quickly our ancestors spread across Eurasia.
[---8<---]
The same layer holds stone tools and animal remains, tying the skulls to a specific moment nearly 1.8 million years ago rather than the younger dates long cited.

Current Mood: busy

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Birdfeeding

Today is cloudy and cold.

I fed the birds. I've seen a large flock of sparrows plus one female and two male cardinals separately.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I planted 3 peonies 'Sorbet Mixed' under the apricot tree. The mix includes white, light pink, and dark pink. These cost $14.98, so about $5 a root. That's a great bargain for peonies, which average $20-30 each and catalogs and the high end is downright exorbitant. So if you want peonies, look for cheap ones at home or garden stores this time of year. Due to the unseasonal warmth, the ground here is unfrozen, so I was able to plant them immediately. \o/

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I labeled and mulched the new peonies.

I put out a fresh cake of peanut suet.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I started the process of trimming dead stems from the wildflower garden, which is going to take a while.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did more trimming in the wildflower garden. I discovered a little wildflower putting up leaves, probably echinacea, possibly penstemon or something else.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did more trimming in the wildflower garden.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- We hauled in the potting mix bags from last night.

I've seen a fox squirrel in the forest garden.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: okay? for the moment
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: stupidly, no

Entry tags:

done,
links

Done Since 2026-02-15

It's been a rather stressful week, and most of the time I've been very down on myself, mostly for procrastination. But I got through it. I think I'm supposed to count that as a win, even though it doesn't feel like it.

I did figure something out, though. I often (usually?) procrastinate things that may require a decision, because when I finally get around to them the decision often (usually?) turns out to be wrong. (The decision is sometimes to skip something with a time limit, and then regretting not going for it while I had the chance. Same thing.)

Now that Discord has started age-gating NSFW channels and servers, many people (including me) are looking for alternatives. Especially since it was revealed that their age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say. In particular, people are looking for open source alternatives, since those are less likely to be enshittified in the future. We have some time, because most fannish discord communities have few, if any, NSFW channels, and because moving a community is always an extremely lossy process (as those of us who left LJ for DW remember well) and not to be undertaken lightly.

It's concievable that matterbridge could help hold things togather. Not counting on it. I hate this timeline.

You should also replace links that use archive.today, which includes archive.ph et.al., which I have lots of links to. That's going to take a long time. See also Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links.

Links: You can find Babylon 5 on YouTube HERE. OpenFactBook - Country Data & Statistics is the replacement for the CIA's recently-shut-down World Factbook.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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Vocabulary: Bricolage

Sunday Word: Bricolage

bricolage [bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

noun:
1 a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2 (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3 (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4 the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

Definitely useful if you like upcycling.

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Today's Adventures

Today we went to the Crimson Market and made a few other stops.

( Read more... )

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Science

Scientists just mapped mysterious earthquakes deep inside Earth

Scientists at Stanford have unveiled the first-ever global map of rare earthquakes that rumble deep within Earth’s mantle rather than its crust. Long debated and notoriously difficult to confirm, these elusive quakes turn out to cluster in regions like the Himalayas and near the Bering Strait. By developing a breakthrough method that distinguishes mantle quakes using subtle differences in seismic waves, researchers identified hundreds of these hidden tremors worldwide.

Actual Real Life Update that is not just ranting.

- I am currently typing this at a Panera Bread restaurant like it was 2009.

- I got a Nine Inch Nails ticket! I go next week! This is the first time I have seen NIN live since the disastrous show at Fair Park in 1995, when the opening act was The Melvins, and Trent Reznor almost didn't go on because some assholes in the pit were heckling and throwing things at The Melvins. (I was in the stands, I didn't do it.)

Someone posted about it on reddit here. And yeah, that's pretty much what happened.

- The last "goth show" and concert I went to previous to this one was the Sisters Of Mercy in October 2024. And goddamn it, we are getting old. It was like the Gothic Old Folks Home turned out for that one. I imagine I'll see a lot of familiar faces at the NIN show, too.

- I'm also going to see Carpenter Brut in May. Which is Gothic Synthwave.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

Birdfeeding

Today is partly sunny and chilly.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/21/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I put out more birdseed in the hopper feeder.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

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Half-Price Sale in Not Quite Kansas

Tomorrow is the last day of the half-price sale in Not Quite Kansas.

fuzzyred is running a pool that will close later today, so if you want in on the quarter-price sale, now's the time to make your selections. If you're still shopping solo, the sale as a whole will close Sunday night.