Month: October 2024

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Shana tovah everyone! I finally have a chance to sit down and go through some of the posts I’ve been bookmarking in my RSS reader to share with you.

Blog Posts

Three Views of Victor Frankenstein’s Guilt – An essay from Calliope that was originally posted to Cohost, but they reposted it to their blog and I’m bringing it here so that you read it. Calliope has great thoughts on Gothic literature and I really love the diversity of ways one can read Victor Frankenstein’s motivation. Plus, it’s motivating me to reread Frankenstein for the first time in about two decades, right on time for Spooky Month.

Star Trek Writers’ Guides – Do you know about Cliff Pervocracy’s PDF hobby? You should. It’s great. Immensely relatable. He collects PDFs of… stuff… reads them, and writes about them. In this case it’s writers’ guides for both The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG). As someone who’s primarily familiar with TOS (and about half of DS9) and has just recently started watching TNG, these are fascinating. It’s really neat to read the evolution of what Star Trek thinks it’s all about.1

a bunch of podcasts (happy international podcast day) – I love podcasts (when I’m in the mood for them, anyway!). Dante did a neat writeup of podcasts covering different historical periods, that I’m absolutely going to go through for recommendations. And maybe someday I’ll write up a list of my own favorites…

On Content Warnings – A thoughtful writeup by Shel on the utility and drawbacks of content warnings. Well worth a ponder, especially as we (…I) move to a more blog-centric internet and try to come up with my own categorization systems.

This is a book about French peasants doing religious crimes – A writeup of a talk Laura Michet gave a few years ago! I definitely want to track down a copy of this book. I mean, who doesn’t want to read about oddball Medieval Christian heresy?

Art

A generated work of art that looks like a quilt

Daily Art on tumblr is working with generative art (as far as I can tell, older/more traditional generative art rather than newer generation general AI tools… please let me know if you find out otherwise). I’ve got it in my feed reader for a daily art bite. Really loving how a bunch of the designs a week ago turned out looking like quilt designs.

A cat biting the gills of a shark while a tall ship sinks in the background.
I got nothing. But this came through one of my tumblr feeds and it rules.

sweet nectar – art of one of wormvermin’s OCs. not embedding a photo because there is tity, though it’s closer to “classical nude” than “hardcore porn”

Other Stuff

https://howdidyoufind.me/ – A neat little website specifically for stories of how people found it. Hat tip to effika!

We all know that eggs are nature’s legs – Another inscrutable question from bcj

only Paul Hollywood knows that’s a slur, I guess – An exchange from The Great American Baking Show that left me and my wife shaking our heads in wonderment

Yom ha’Garbage

Need For A National Weather Modification Research Program – United States government, 1974. PDF hobby!! Haven’t read the whole thing, but I love it. Hat tip to Colin for finding this one.

beetbug spotted by graham
  1. Gene. My man. “No stories with Vulcans” for TNG? I know I love Vulcans more than a lot of people do but come on. ↩︎

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knitting needles and yarn on printed instructions
one half-row of two-color brioche knit… theoretically

In a classic turn for me, I’m not only learning a new knitting technique (brioche) but doing it in two colors at once. Brioche is a really cool and plush knit form that basically ends up with a double layer of fabric at the end, and a lot of designs end up fully reversible. I have heard from my pal Seth that actually, two-color can be a slightly easier way to learn brioche knitting because there’s an easier way to tell apart the two active sides of the knit… so I’m hoping that helps.

Since I’ve never done brioche before, I’m starting with a swatch to get my footing before I break into the hat pattern I’m planning to make (seriously it’s so cute, go check it out). I’m also going to swatch the repeating pattern to see what size needles I need to use to get the hat to be the right size. Because I am, as previously established, a brain genius who likes to make things hard for myself, I am going to swatch flat, even though the pattern is written in the round. This means that I’m going to have to remember which pattern rows are “wrong” sides and knit reversed stitches (purl where it says knit and vice versa) on all those rows. I’m guessing I’m going to mess up kind of a lot but what can I say? it’s an adventure.