davidcook

If you haven't seen it yet, this post from Siderea.

TL;DR: J.D. Vance appears to be an educated, civilized nerd with more class and taste than Trump has, and not much charisma, just like most of us. This does not make him trustworthy, or decent, or even reasonable. He's best buddies with Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, who have made no secret of their belief that democracy has failed, and must be replaced with a corporate monarchy. Vance has his own public statements on the subject, such as

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.
...
And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’

He said that, on the record, in a 2021 podcast interview, in the context of Trump hypothetically running again in 2024. Vance had been close to Thiel and Yarvin for years before that.

This isn't just about Project 2025, which is at least partly about seizing the reins of democracy to serve movement-conservatism. Project 2025 is the warm-up act: these guys are openly opposed to democracy, even in name.

Regardless of who is President in 2026, I think there will be Congressional elections in November 2026. They will be more heavily gerrymandered than usual, and there will be heavily-armed troops from the National Guard, ICE, the new National Election Integrity Defense Force, etc. stationed outside (or inside) polling places, and guarding the transport of ballots. Despite pre-election polls saying Republican policies are massively unpopular, Republicans will win a surprise landslide, proving that the polls were wrong, probably concocted by paid DNC operatives, and the American people overwhelmingly support the Republican agenda. There may not be a 2028 election.

1. Big Tech Companies in the US Have Been Told Not to Apply the EU's Digital Services Act

(tags:Europe USA socialnetworking regulation )

2. How far away is quantum computing from affecting current cryptography?

(tags:cryptography quantum )

3. Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?

(tags:quantum mathematics )

4. What do AI fashion models mean for the future of beauty standards

(tags:ai fashion beauty )

5. Why Labour Looking Into Changing The ECHR Matters

(tags:Labour rights OhForFucksSake )

6. Who will win the Eternal Struggle?

(tags:war funny )

7. The Qweremin (a qwerty theremin)

(tags:music technology )

 
Happy Kalends of Septembris!  Are you ready for the Ludi Romani?

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882100.html



0.

With all the eager discussion of the possibility of Trump dying in office, I am in the delicate and unfortunate position of not actually being in favor of it.

Don't get me wrong. I, too, would enjoy to seeing something very bad happen to Trump. What I'd best like is him getting his just deserts – ideally being arrested, indicted, tried, found guilty, sentenced, having appealed, the appeal failing, appealing again, having that appeal fail, petitioning the POTUS for clemency and it not being granted, him being duly executed by the state as the traitor to the Republic and the Constitution he was proven to be. I'm not generally a big fan of capital punishment, but I am in fact willing to make exceptions; he seems to think he's an exception to a lot of things, and here I would agree with him.

But that's not going to happen, not in this time-line, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.

Perhaps he will simply keel over dead, and I confess I will take at least a little bitter satisfaction in it.

And it's certainly not that I don't wish us all to be spared even another moment of this Trump presidency. Of course I do.

Alas, as much as I hate to crush the pleasant fantasy of us being redeemed by the deus ex machina of artheriosclerosis finally doing its job and carrying off our oppressor: Vance is worse. Much, much worse.




1.

( It's perhaps understandable that you would not realize this.... Read more [6,770 Words] )

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The weekend continued sleepless af with a double whammy of financial stress and I got nothing done that I had wanted, but spatch took a picture of me when I got back in from my walk that I liked, which these days is vanishing. I am not confident a normal amount of summer actually happened.

In recent days, my numerous activities have been interspersed with a few cultural events worthy of mentioning. The first was a special nineteen-part concert, "Songs of Peace and Remembrance: 80 Years On" at the Melbourne Recital Centre from the Shenyang Conservatory of Music, which was nothing short of phenomenal; the erhu solo, "Soul of the Snowy Mountain" was especially captivating. As part of a national tour, the concert was built on the theme of Chinese resistance to the invasion from the Empire of Japan, and the end of the world anti-fascist war. At the reception before the concert, the former President of the Legislative Council, Bruce Atkinson, made the insightful point that the Second World War really started in 1931, with the invasion of Manchuria.

The second event was attending the Conquest Market Day at the ever-beautiful Coburg Town Hall, staffing the RPG Review Cooperative stall's fine collection of second-hand RPG systems from members. I am very thankful for the assistance provided by Andrew D., in delivering the goods, the stunning generosity of Rade V., in providing me a copy of the "Arkham Horror RPG: Hungering Abyss", and the ever delightful opportunity to spend time in the company of Liz B., and Karl B., and, of course, the many people who visited the staff, rummaged, reminisced and explored through our often curious stock. On a related note, this Wednesday I'll be starting up a new RPG story using the ElfQuest RPG and setting, from the comics (running since 1978!) by Wendy and Richard Pini.

The third event was the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance at Hamer Hall, of "Four Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten, Debussy's "La Mer", and finally, Modest Mussorgsky', "Pictures at an Exhibition", which was the main feature of the performance unsurprising as it correlates with a superb narrative, where the movements are quite independent but flow in sequence in a manner that seems perfectly natural. Following both romantic and impressionist styles, with British, French, and Russian thematic content, the performance was provided with a great sense of competence and creativity. The cultural diversity of the orchestra and the vast audience juxtaposed quite strikingly with a handful of boorish anti-immigration protesters who threatened an attendee just before the concert started.

On that note, significant discussion has been made of the "March for Australia" anti-immigration protests that were held over the weekend. Nominally, they argue that migration in a time of housing costs and unemployment is a problem. Factually, the protests are incorrect - net migration (the metric that really matters) is quite low compared to the 20-year average, but of course facts are quite irrelevant to the violent "white nationalists" who are organising these events. Given that more than 97% of Australians come from a migrant background (and needless to say, they don't like indigenous Australians either), it should be clear that we are enriched culturally and economically by our diverse migrant populations, and we have become more capable of a moral universalism as well. The overwhelming majority understands and embraces our diversity, but we must be aware that extremists are in our country, and they are organised, and therefore, we need to be organised against them.

I will be too busy to post tomorrow.

2012: O2 offers free wifi to multitudes, which I only now realize may be have been referenced in Kingsman, researchers determine that despite a century having passed, the Titanic remains at the bottom of the Atlantic, and in a glorious celebration of the effectiveness of the modern British educational system, doctors warn Britons not to drink liquid nitrogen.



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.


Which 2012 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
Embassytown by China Miéville
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
Rule 34 by Charles Stross
The Postmortal by Drew Magary
The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper

The kids take it in turn doing a variety of things, so that we don't have arguments every single night over who gets to choose teethbrushing things, who gets to be first to get put into pyjamas, who gets to check inside the parcel box when we get home, who gets to choose who gets out of the bath first, etc. This month, Sophia has odd numbered days and Gideon has even numbered days. Except that they swapped yesterday and today so that Gideon could have his birthday.

Except...that a few months ago we used the app Chwazi, where everyone puts their finger on the screen and then it picks someone (to be first player in a game, for instance). And Gideon loved it. So last weekend when I asked who should get out of the bath first he said "We'll play the finger game." - and I asked him if he'd be sad if he didn't win, and he said no, and then he and Sophia played it, and he lost, and I had to wash the hair of a sobbing child, who kept saying "I thought I would win!"

So this weekend, I asked him who was getting out of the bath first, and he said "Finger game!" and I said "Do you remember how sad you were?" and he said "Very sad!" and I said "So you should just choose." and he said "I have a plan, this time the person who loses will go first." And, of course, he won. And so, again, I had to wash the hair of a crying child who thought he'd found a way to beat probability.

All of which is to say that if you want to beat people at games of chance then I recommend 5-year-olds, who are both terrible at understanding it, and completely fail to learn from that.

Two singles; will ply them tomorrow, I expect. Assuming no plying/finishing disasters, this will go to niqaeli. ♥

I didn't win any awards in August but I did review 22 more works. James Nicoll Reviews is now 34 reviews away from its 3000th review.

August 2025 in Review

Marooned on a backwater planet, a down-on-his-luck actor sets out to transform his new home. Will he survive success?

Always the Black Knight by Lee Hoffman

1. 'The Long Walk' treadmill screening will test viewers' endurance

(tags:stephen_king movies exercise walking )

My paramount goal for last night was sleep and it failed so horrifically that I have had a flat and frustratingly nonexistent day, but in listening to the three different cast recordings of 1776 which I now own—1969 Broadway, 1970 London, and 1972 film—and rewatching a handful of scenes from the handily streaming film, thirty years after initial exposure in eighth grade social studies it finally clicked with me that so much of the appeal of its John Adams is directly proportional to his being such a disaster. Especially as incarnated by the superbly obstreperous William Daniels, the delegate from Massachusetts is simultaneously an incandescent engine of rage against the machines of tyranny and an indignant wet cat of a man endowed with the inalienable right of shooting himself in the foot, cf. the opening number devoted to establishing that he has achieved the political and personal milestone of pissing off an entire continental congress. His capacity for chill is somewhere in the decatherms and he wasn't even close enough to the door to be standing behind it when social finesse was handed out. He has the self-aware saving grace of a sense of humor which quirks out in unsuccessfully repressed smiles, but he's the awkward straight man just as often as he snarks drily for the Colonies; one of the best details of his physical acting is a nervous flicker of the fingers which stands sometimes for constant restive thought and sometimes for not knowing what the hell to do with his hands. It's not a comic characterization, but it does make the moments where he lets his guard down all the more quietly effective, because too often it's punctured for him. His own personality is among the obstacles of policy, philosophy, and factionalism facing a successful declaration of independence and down to the wire the play never lets him forget it. He dances so gravely and gracefully with Blythe Danner's Martha Washington, he earns the smugness with which he calls across to Howard da Silva as they whirl into the showiest choreography of the song, "We still do a few things in Boston, Franklin!" Who wasn't supposed to imprint on that unbeatable combination of furious integrity that shouldn't be let out unsupervised for five minutes? Damn this government for making any national celebration so meanly jingoistic, I couldn't even think about attending this spring's sestercentennial of the Battle of Lexington in my eighteenth-century shirt.

Cloud is SO HAPPY with her new nesting material:



Y'all. I'd missed an earlier message (thanks, FaceBook!) but I managed not to pick out sheep fleece (breed unknown). Due to the holiday weekend, this wasn't an in-person transaction, although I hope to return in a bitand be able to talk to the farmer in person!

...I am sitting on a few pounds each of alpaca (definitely huacaya, not sure if one is suri) and angora goat fiber a.k.a. MOHAIR. Mind you, I would have been very happy to work with raw WOOL.

Well, I'll be picking through vegetable matter and sorting this VERY SLOWLY for the rest of 2025 lol. :) I do own hand carders but I think I save my pennies for a drum carder for the holidays...

Sheep and alpaca! Raw unprocessed fiber bought directly from a local-ish farmer. I reckon processing this will be my hobby project for the rest of the year.



Fiber animal wonders about her own fate. :) :) I have...10g of catten floof (which is very spinnable!).

ETA: Also, this may have happened /o\

Six works new to me. Three fantasy, three SF, four are series (at least in a sense) and the other two appear to be stand-alone. Lots of TTRPG material.

Books Received, August 23 — August 30

Current rumors engulfing Bluesky have me recalling an old Communist-era Russian joke:

Every day, a man walks to a news stand and pays for a copy of Pravda, unfolds it, looks at the front page, and throws it in the trash. Every day he does this, for months, until finally the news seller asks the man, "So what is it you are looking for on the front page every day?"

"I'm checking for an obituary."

"Comrade, the obituaries aren't on the front page."

"Oh, this one will be."

I had just written an intensely miserable post about the state of my life and my health and whatever was supposed to have passed for my career, but then I discovered the existence of the 1970 London cast recording of 1776 and it surprised me into laughing out loud, specifically because while I had never heard anyone but William Daniels as John Adams and I expect no one again to match his particular abrasive flint, Lewis Fiander couldn't have been terrible from the amount of incredulous disgust he puts into his "Good God." Anything to do with American democracy is of course somewhat depressing to contemplate at the present moment, but not more so from a musical than from the news. In other charms of the week, I have two different kinds of infection in a body that is already not responding as hoped to several months of medicating for an underlying condition, so anything that distracts me from mere grim hanging on to someday reading other people's death notices is a net good.

I'm a member of an organization in Minnesota called MN350. It takes its name from the carbon dioxide parts-per-million that we wish we had. We passed 350 ppm long ago. We should aspire to having numbers that low again in our future. This year, I can't remember if I've seen any measurement in my house (even with windows open) below 500. The longer that humans burn fossil fuels, the higher that number will go.

I mention it now, because a few minutes ago I took additional measurements on 2 floors of my house. I was so tired again today, and I spent about 2 hours trying and failing to get some needed sleep just now. I thought maybe the sleep apnea was a lot worse (which might also be true), but I used the app on my smartphone to check the readings on the AirThings device (mentioned last year too), and the CO2 level was not great. I grabbed the even more portable Aranet and placed it next to the bed. It immediately switched over to the "red zone" alert level. That's not good.

• ground floor: 1,250ppm CO2
• upstairs bedroom: 1,452ppm CO2

Okay. So... I need to stop talking about how tired I always am and actually do something about the air quality indoors. I need to finally schedule that sleep test, so I can also get a new sleep apnea solution, since I didn't use the old machine when it gave my face a rash everywhere that it touched my face.

I'm tired of being tired. The potential causes are measurable. I just need to overcome inertia and rationally do something about these issues.

This is a small note about a delightful function. Not cryptography advice or serious commentary. Just amusement.

A couple years back I had occasion to read in slightly more detail than I had before about the state of the art in cryptographically secure PRNGs (CSPRNGs). These are PRNGs we trust to have additional properties beyond the speed and randomness requirements of normal ones -- inability for an attacker to reveal internal state, mainly, so you can use them to generate secrets.

If you look, you'll find a lot of people recommending something based on one of Dan Bernstein's algorithms: Salsa20 or ChaCha (or even more obscurely "Snuffle"). All the algorithms we're discussing here are very similar in design, and vary only in minor details of interest only to cryptographers.

If you follow that link though, you'll notice it's a description of a (symmetric) stream cipher. Not a CSPRNG at all!

But that's ok! Because it turns out that people have long known an interesting trick -- actually more of a construction device? -- which is that a CSPRNG "is" a stream cipher. Or rather, if you hold it the other way, you might even say a stream cipher "is" just a CSPRNG. Many stream ciphers are built by deriving an unpredictable "key stream" off the key material and then just XOR'ing it with the plaintext. So long as the "key stream" is unpredictable / has unrecoverable state, this is sufficient; but it's the same condition we want out of the stream of numbers coming out of a CSPRNG, just with "seed" standing in for "key". They're fundamentally the same object.

I knew all this before, so people naming a CSPRNG and a stream cipher the same did not come as any surprise to me. But I went and looked a little further into ChaCha in particular (and its ancestor Salsa and, earlier still, Snuffle) because they have one additional cool and weird property.

They are seekable.

This means that you can, with O(1) effort, "reposition" the Snuffle/Salsa/ChaCha "key stream" / CSPRNG number stream to anywhere in its future. You want the pseudorandom bytes for block 20,000,000? No problem, just "set the position" to 20,000,000 and it will output those bytes. This is not how all CSPRNGs or stream ciphers work. But some do. ChaCha does! Which is very nice. It makes it useful for all sorts of stuff, especially things like partially decrypting randomly-read single blocks in the middle of large files.

I got to wondering about this, so I went back and read through design docs on it, and I discovered something surprising (to me): it's not just a floor wax and dessert topping CSPRNG and stream cipher. ChaCha is also a cryptographic hash function (CHF)! Because a CHF is also something you can build a CSPRNG out of, and therefore also build a stream cipher out of. They're all the same object.

How does the construction work? Embarassingly easily. You put the key material and a counter (and enough fixed nonzero bits to make the CHF happy) in an array and hash it. That's it. The hash output is your block of data. For the next block, you increment the counter and hash again. Want block 20,000,000? Set the counter to 20,000,000. The CHF's one-way-function-ness implies the non-recoverability of the key material and its mixing properties ensure that bumping the counter is enough to flip lots of bits. The end.

Amazing!

But then I got curious and dug a bit into the origins of ChaCha and .. stumbled on something hilarious. In the earliest design doc I could find (Salsa20 Design which still refers to it as "Snuffle 2005") the introduction starts with this:

Fifteen years ago, the United States government was trying to stop publication
of new cryptographic ideas—but it had made an exception for cryptographic
hash functions, such as Ralph Merkle’s new Snefru.

This struck me as silly. I introduced Snuffle to point out that one can easily
use a strong cryptographic hash function to efficiently encrypt data.
Snuffle 2005, formally designated the “Salsa20 encryption function,” is the
latest expression of my thoughts along these lines. It uses a strong cryptographic
hash function, namely the “Salsa20 hash function,” to efficiently encrypt data.

This approach raises two obvious questions. First, why did I choose this
particular hash function? Second, now that the United States government seems
to have abandoned its asinine policies, why am I continuing to use a hash function
to encrypt data?

In other words: the cool seekability wasn't a design goal. Shuffle/Salsa/ChaCha was intended as a tangible demonstration of a political argument that it's stupid to regulate one of the 3 objects (CHF, CSPRNG and stream cipher) since you can build them all out of the CHF. (And, I guess, "obviously you should be allowed to export CHFs" though I wouldn't bet on anything being obvious to the people who make such decisions).

And then I googled more and realized that when I was a teenager I had completely missed all the drama / failed to connect the dots. Snuffle was the subject of Bernstein v. United States, the case that overturned US export restrictions on cryptography altogether! And as this page points out "the subject of the case, Snuffle, was itself an attempt to bypass the regulations".

Anyway, I thought this was both wonderful and funny: both the CHF-to-CSPRNG construction (which I'd never understood/seen before), but also the fact that Snuffle/Salsa/ChaCha is like the ultimate case of winning big in cryptography. Not only does ChaCha now transport like 99%[EDIT "double-digit percentages"] of the world's internet traffic (it's become the standard we all use because it's fast and secure) but that it was pivotal in the evolution of the legal landscape and all arises from a sort of neener-neener assessment that the law at the time was internally inconsistent / contained a loophole for CHFs that made the whole thing "asinine".

That is a thing that is happening.

My standard joke here is that any game involving reflexes and coordination is going to be an excruciating experience of innumerable repeated failures for me, so I might as well play one where that's the point. This is only partly a joke.

Necessary context for anyone who has not met me IRL: I am dyspraxic as fuck. I was in my late twenties at least, possibly thirties, before I could catch an object being gently thrown to me across a short distance. My coordination, reflexes and ability to react to multiple inputs in real-time are so bad that I can't drive (or cycle on the road) because it would be OBVIOUSLY WILDLY DANGEROUS for me to even try (people would die). I have to buy special shatterproof crockery because otherwise my plate turnover is so high.

It was only with climbing that I learned that I can actually acquire motor skills, some of them, slowly, if I have unlimited time to practice them on my own terms.

Further necessary context: I'd been looking wistfully at the Soulsbornes for ages -- having seen videos such as Jonny Sims's Bloodborne streams -- as something that I'd probably love if I only had any coordination or ability at all to cope with having to react to multiple rapid inputs in real-time.

One of my climber friends has argued that Soulslike games are basically the same as working on a hard boulder project: you fail and fail and fail and fail and that's the process, each time you try to learn a bit more or try something new, and gradually you make progress, and eventually, hopefully, you don't fail.

And that's a process that I fucking love, and that works very well for my brain. Perverse stubbornness is my jam.

But when I look at something like Bloodborne -- the combat exchange is over before I can even track who's where and what's happened.

So I was thinking grumpily/wistfully and in secret about how what I really wanted was not an "easy mode," but a Soulsborne game that I could adjust the speed on (maybe set it all to 20-30% slower!), just so I could get my foot in the door, just so I could begin to maybe try.

And I watched more videos of other games, and somewhere along the way I watched people figuring out and/or being coached on how to get through the fight with the Asylum Demon at the end of the tutorial* in Dark Souls 1.

(I also read that Dark Souls 1 has the slowest and, in some people's eyes, "clunkiest" combat of the Souls games — not necessarily the easiest, but more tactical, less fast-twitch.)

And I thought, "... huh, I wonder, if I really worked at it, maybe I could beat the Asylum Demon? That would be kind of cool."

To be clear: I bought the game with the goal of seeing if I could beat the tutorial.

( Cut for length )

Two sisters quest up a climate-change-and-blight ravaged coast and across the seas to find their missing sister.


Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei

1. My Top Five Favorite Techno Songs and Why They're All the Mortal Kombat Theme Song

(tags:music satire )

2. A historian reviews King & Conqueror (neither good nor accurate)

(tags:history UK TV review )

3. Spineless fence-sitter thinks killing children is bad no matter who does it

(tags:israel palestine satire politics murder children gaza )

Little smiley chap wanted to take a photo with me this morning.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

The joke of The Perfect Murder (1988) is that it is neither. Then again, despite its production credit, neither is it a Merchant Ivory except in the sense that it was executive-produced by Ismail Merchant in Mumbai. Directed by Zafar Hai who co-adapted the 1964 CWA Gold Dagger-winning source novel with its author H. R. F. Keating, it is an endearingly unwieldy triple-decker of comedy, crime, and city symphony, not necessarily in equal proportions or even order of priorities, but in a film so lovingly dedicated to the significance of imperfection, perhaps to expect anything else would be, like the case that gives the story its aptly misleading name, upside down.

Take the plot, a rococo compendium of cases from a smuggling ring to an attempted murder to a lost item report which pile chaotically onto the beleaguered hero only to cross-link at the last minute into the pattern so beloved of classically constructed mysteries in which even the silliest and most discursive puzzle-pieces can find a home. Or don't, since its Chandleresque twists and turns serve just as well as the frame for an essentially hangout movie that makes as much time for a kidnapping of mistaken identity as for the lie detector of a Nandi bull. Brought to the screen for the first and only time in his forty-five-year career by Naseeruddin Shah, Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote of the Bombay CID is an everyman of detectives, concerned, harassed, and unassuming in the khaki of his policeman's uniform that gives him far less authority dealing with government ministers and affluent businessmen than he might wish in the pursuit of justice. His self-deprecating honesty carries him through professional pratfalls like arresting the colleague he was sent to collect from the airport and tenacious gambles like anticipating the secret of a monsoon-drenched chandelier, but can't do much about the mundane middle-class problems of his salary and his schedule. "At the moment I'm trying to save to buy a color TV." Especially facing an impatient ACP, the last thing this modest, apologetically persistent officer needs is a wild card in the delicate negotiations of his job and of course that's exactly what he gets with the arrival of Stellan Skarsgård's Axel Svensson, Sweden's contribution to an international study of comparative police methods who wouldn't last ten seconds in a Nordic noir. It is culturally clever, but also just fun that the criminologist from the global north is decidedly the sidekick of the adventure, a lankily cheerful add-on who can be distracted by the most routine details of life in modern India—the marigold-garlanded mahurat shot of a Bollywood musical, a saffron-swathed sadhu under the colonnade of the Taj Mahal Hotel—looking at all times with his wilted straw hair as though he's been pulled out of the laundry half-steamed. "I've been running since I came to this country." He messes about the crime scene quoting Hamlet in Swedish. He moons romantically over suspects and film stars and requires as dramatic a rescue as any damsel in distress. Just this side of a jam Watson, he isn't the total drag on the investigation that Ghote accuses on the sullen, tinderous afternoon their latest failure has left them uncharacteristically on each other's last culture-clashed nerves, but even after the rains have ecstatically broken and the whole back-to-front left-handed spanner of a case with them, he remains most valuable as the inspector's wingman, his flash-temper Viking-height backing up the Maharashtrian manners of Ghote as he holds his ground against official caution and unavoidable corruption and comes up at last with the colorfully elusive truth. "Upside down!" they salute the circumstances of their bonding, an affectionate in-joke now that Axel has fallen in love with the city in all its helter-skelter absurdity and Ghote has upheld the honor of its detecting. "Welcome to Bombay!"

Indeed, in the vibrantly semi-documentary photography of frequent Merchant Ivory DP Walter Lassally, The Perfect Murder is a love letter to Bombay on the verge of its millennial renascence into Mumbai, not merely in the historical tourist postcards of the Victoria Terminus or the Gateway of India, but the street-level flânerie which does not treat ironically a stately elephant proceeding with the rest of the rush-hour traffic down Marine Drive, a Lovemate local train rattling between the washing-strung frontages of chawls, the chlorine-blue of the swimming pool at the Oberoi Towers and the cupped hands of beggars thrust like razor clams through the sand of Chowpatty Beach. The flooded green of a lawn of black umbrellas under the monsoon's curtain has no less reality than the green baize of an office inside the liner-white block of Mantralaya. It earths the Dickensian tendencies of the human characters whom Ghote has to wend his dogged way among, inconveniently factual even at their most flamboyant. Amjad Khan pulls out the Sydney Greenstreet stops as the expansively blusterous and epicurean builder Lala Heera Lal while Madhur Jaffrey in two scenes as his imperious wife blocks even the mildest hints of questioning as keenly as crucible steel. "What a woman. She was all the time giving me the feeling of being without my trousers on." Approaching the rest of the suspicious household nets a varied array of deflection, obstruction, and wasted time from Sakina Jaffrey as the languid daughter-in-law, Dilip Tahil as her ostentatiously clubbable husband, and Nayeem Hafizka as the histrionic younger brother whose room is exhaustingly tacked with self-portraits as Sherlock Holmes and posters for Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), insisting on playing the proper part of a murder suspect all the while the victim who could be a witness lies shtum under medical care and Parsi prayers, Dinshaw Daji's Mr. Perfect. "This is the sort of difficulty you have in police work in this city. If only people would behave in a simple, reasonable, logical manner!" It's too much to ask of even the heroes of this caper, out of sorts, out of place, out of luck, splashed with Holi dye or literally losing their shirt. Spouses in real life, Shah and Ratna Pathak have fun with the fractious marriage of the Ghotes, which would be far less in the soup if he would just once come home from work on time; the wistful fantasy he builds of her as the tranquil, docile, ideal Hindu wife would swerve too close to a shrew joke except for the time he brings the rescued Axel home for supper and Pratima turns on the best-bangled, bindi-dabbed, lord-and-master act with cut-diamond sarcasm. To complete the family business, their infant son Ved is an early cradle-credit for Imaad Shah. The sun in the intermingled score of synths, sarangi, and tabla by Richard Robbins, Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussein catches on fish-scale silver, mango-skin gold, the half-risen skyscrapers of a city pushing itself toward maximum. Keating who famously wrote the first nine Inspector Ghote novels without visiting India for himself makes his Hitchcock cameo at the international terminal, waiting to catch the next flight back to Europe.

It can be an awkward movie. Its mix of Englishes and untranslated Hindi is no strain to be immersed in, but the loose, improvisatory feel of much of its dialogue means it has no pacing to speak of even when it has to hit its marks of revelation and its tonal shifts are sometimes more collision than collage; it is refreshing to find a detective film without an exchange of gunfire, but it could have deleted one of its billboard-tearing, barrow-overturning chase scenes that never fail to leave a wackier level of disorder in their wake than the sufficient bewilderment of yet another investigative dead end. All the same, when Axel with his farewell gift of a kurta draped like a college sweater around his shoulders swings back at the gate to shout his characteristically no-chill support for Ghote across the crowded terminal, the viewer may regret that with an eventual twenty-five novels to choose from, there were not more screen translations made of these odd little mysteries, "altogether upside down." I watched this one because I was intrigued by its peripheral Merchant Ivory-ness in the same way as the occasional co-productions of Powell and Pressburger for other writers and directors and as was the case with Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943), I did not regret its hour and a half of my time. I got its dead-out-of-print DVD out of the Minuteman Library Network since the quality of the version available on YouTube actually is ghastly even without the random audio drop-outs or the smear like tape across the lens. It deserves better, this sweet and slightly bemusing snapshot starring a pair of actors who have had my phone book recommendation for years. This welcome brought to you by my upside-down backers at Patreon.

Current WIP: a gorgeous merino-silk-angelina blend.

Testing out a Dreaming Robots e-spinner, the Electric Eel Wheel 6.1. It's terrific and very easy to assemble and get running (at least after the learning curve on the Ashford Traveller treadle wheel). I hear the even more budget-friendlier Electric Eel Nano 2. (about $140 USD) 1 is fiddly, but I wonder. My use case for this is plying, which I find ungodly miserable.



Meanwhile, the local fiber animal is "helping" again. Cloud's floof is VERY spinnable so we're just randomly gathering catten floof while brushing her incredibly soft coat (she's mostly undercoat, and it's WILDLY soft).



(Sorry for the messy floor...I'm still under the weather and spinning is soothing/)

Pre-launch for Ex Tenebris, a "a gothic space investigation TTRPG" forthcoming from Black Armada.

Beyond the dark emptiness of space, beyond dreaming, lies the Tenebrium. Only you can unearth its mysteries, defeat the twisted horrors that lurk there, and keep humanity from becoming prey.

In Ex Tenebris, you play a ragtag team of investigators, protecting the Republic of Stars from terrifying supernatural threats. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.

I will be writing a scenario [Update #2] for this game. :3

:goes back to orchestration homework:

From Ringworld to the Laundry Files

Four SF Book Series Adapted Into Roleplaying Games

Recent supplements for the HOSTILE tabletop roleplaying game

Bundle of Holding: Hostile Hot Zones

A bit long, so it's hidden behind the cut.

( Read more... )

First contact on the lightless surface of an alien moon.

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

1. Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded. Now they want to silence him.

(tags:corruption oil globalwarming windpower propaganda usa )

2. Kpop Demon Hunters becomes Netflix's most viewed film ever

(tags:movies korea music demon netflix )

3. Fraudsters are training AIs on a musician and then releasing songs in their name

(tags:ai fraud music )

4. Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

(tags:science socialmedia )

5. Liberty chief blasts Labour over ECHR tinkering

(tags:rights Europe UK labour OhForFucksSake migration )

6. Dreamwidth is forced to block Mississipi

(tags:dreamwidth mississippi OhForFucksSake )

7. Donald Trump state visit: Ed Davey to boycott banquet over Gaza

(tags:USA Israel UK libdem Palestine gaza )

I said in the past everything that needs to be said again today.

I still mean every single word of it.

On a personal note, peace to Rai Weiss (https://news.mit.edu/2025/professor-emeritus-rainer-weiss-dies-0826) - physicist (co-won the Nobel Prize for detection of gravity waves at LIGO); learnt yesterday that he'd passed. I knew him only glancingly/socially (my husband worked with him as a grad student at MIT at LIGO Hanford) but I remember his extraordinary kindness and warmth.

A celebration of Chinese science fiction.

Sinopticon by Xueting Christine Ni

1. Scotland's birth rate falls to lowest level since 1855

(tags:scotland babies )

2. Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist

(tags:ai google fraud restaurant viaPatrickHadfield )

3. Judge sides with trans-inclusive sorority: They can admit trans women if they want

(tags:transgender women law USA GoodNews )

All these terrible people whose weight the earth cannot afford, doing their best to take the rest of us with them to their Armageddon with the most toys, and not a one of them will ever be a tenth of a thousandth as cool as the living tradition of an epic poem performed with chugging guitar riffs: Exhibit A, Ereimang's "(Kwakta Lamjel)" (2023). All you fascists bound to be boring.

Do I know anyone who is going to DragonCon this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia and who is

(a) willing to buy some BPAL for me there and ship it to me (Louisiana)
(b) in exchange for either filthy lucre (PayPal or Venmo) or
(c) 4 oz. handspun yarn just for you to be negotiated?

examples of my spinning:


wool, 2-ply


wool/sari silk, 2-ply

( and more )

re: (c), fibers I have on hand in sufficient quantity



These are wool. Front left (greens & blues) and front right (blues & greys) I have 4-ish oz.

In back, I have 1-2 oz. of others (pink & blue, sky blue, navy blue), which could be blended, or I could spin multiple yarns up to 4 oz.

(I can't get more of the colorways shown here because these were inherited from others' destashes.)

Also 2 oz each of the following:



- left: 25/25/25/25 flax/hemp/cotton/ramie blend
- right: 25/25/25/25 flax/hemp/bamboo/ramie blend

I have smaller quantities of various sari silk colorways that could be blended into most of these for effect. (The silk fiber is the stuff on the chair, not the wool yarn draped over the arm lol.)



Or I could order US-based fiber batts/combed top (etc) within an agreed price range and spin those for you.

But I imagine filthy lucre is the most interesting. :p Leave a comment or email me at yoon at yoonhalee dot com!

This one's going to an astronomer friend. I think catten is trying to figure out where the SHEEP are. :p



Earlier:

A collection of speculative fiction stories from Walter Jon WIlliams.

Facets by Walter Jon Williams

1. Consultation opens on Edinburgh's proposed new tram line

(tags:edinburgh trams consultation )

2. How to justify colonialism, Julius Caesar edition

(tags:history comic morality )

3. Trump is turning into Liz Truss but with more dictatorial behaviour

(tags:USA economics authoritarianism doom )

4. OpenAI Usage Plummets in the Summer, When Students Aren't Cheating on Homework

(tags:ai students )

5. Fixing the voting system brings in more women representatives

(tags:women politics voting reform )

The swallows have returned to Capistrano: last night there were three student parties on our street alone and a fourth around the corner. We are waiting to see if this weekend will bring a new installment of upstairs neighbors.

I opened the refrigerator door and the Brita pitcher fell off its shelf and disintegrated itself in several gallons across the hardwood, so the first thing I did within two minutes of getting up was essentially wash the kitchen floor. I spent the afternoon drying a load of towels and drinking cans of seltzer.

It jarred out of my head too much of the dream I had just woken up from, the slippage of a kitchen sink drama written by a less commonly revived playwright than Shelagh Delaney: a teenage girl and her father who was just about the same age when she was born and still has such a fecklessly fox-boned, adolescent look himself, the two of them as they knock about town, him getting into more fights than holding down jobs, always telling the secret histories of their city which sound half like industrial legend and half like he just made them up, are more often mistaken for a couple than his actual girlfriend with whom he seems to interact most in the form of sincerely less successful apologies. They are clearly each other's half of a double star, a nearly closed system without jealousy, only the exhilaratingly irresponsible habit of dodging the adult world as if it were the two of them against it. It is unsensationally apparent to the audience long before it would cross any other character's mind that in addition to his total improvisation of parenting, he is doing his damnedest not to pass on the next generation of his own implicitly incestuous abuse, which does him credit and gives him little help in figuring out how to support his daughter through a transition he never quite managed himself. Toward the end, it started to flicker between stage sets and the plain world, between rehearsals and history. "I won't meet you," I had to tell the actor, standing in between scenes outside the year of the original production, the same fragile shoulders and thistle-blond hair of his photographs in the role: he would be dead decades before I heard of the play, much less managed to track a copy down. I could tell him that his children had gone into the arts. Onstage she was outgrowing his frozen boyishness and if he could catch up to her, he would still have to let her go.

asakiyume linked Residente's "This is Not America (feat. Ibeyi)" (2022) and it made me think of Elizma's "Modern Life" (2025), both of which should come with content warnings for current events.

I have discovered that BBC Sounds became region-locked about a month ago, which means that one of my major sources for randomly discoverable audio drama seems to have spiraled down the drain. I am completely indifferent to podcasts. I am a simple person and just wanted to listen again to Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe being just as lit up as the fleet.

Hostile, the deep-space alien horror rpg from Zozer Games.

Bundle of Holding: Hostile (from 2022)

2011: The VAT is improved by altering it from the hard to remember 17.5% to the more memorable 20%, the government continues efforts to replace the Incapacity Benefit with an alternate program in which applicants have cinderblocks dropped on them from a height and there is absolutely no news involving PM Cameron and a pig.



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2011 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Declare by Tim Powers
Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers
Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan
Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0.2 – 4 August 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.2.

Mostly small updates again this time, but there’s one big one – the Redmond Central Connector final segment connecting to the East Rail Trail at NE 124th is already open! Ribbon cutting isn’t ’til September 12th, and I imagined it’d open early but I didn’t expect it to be this early.

• ADDED: Redmond Central Connector extension up to Eastrail at NE 124th is open earlier than expected! (Both maps)
• ADDED: Warning flag: the Pier 91 section of Elliot Bay Trail will close from 2 September to 2 October for repaving and rebuilding, including getting replacing that weird steep over-rail bridge. There WILL be a posted detour, but it’s kinda long and involves Magnolia Bridge, so I’m flagging it. (MEGAMAP only)
• ADDED: A block-long half-dirt connector between Ashworth and Densmore continuing N 157th for pedestrians and bicyclists willing to deal with a dirt path (both maps)
• ADDED: Extension of a Shoreline Trail Along the Rail fragment south of NE 185th all the way down to NE 180th; at previous check, it didn’t quite connect, and now it does (both maps)
• CORRECTION: 10th Ave NE from 155th to 185th was listed as UNMARKED BUT POPULAR, but has sharrow markings, so will be re-marked as SHARROWS (both maps)

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.

Enjoy biking!

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