common_nature | Member Posts

The little basilisk hissed, its beak gaping wide below huge, frightened eyes, and lashed its tail against the leaves and grass in an attempted mimicry of a rattlesnake. Newly hatched along with the spring tadpoles and toadlets, it had not yet developed poisonous breath, or stone gaze, or even a proper cockscomb. The hikers, who gently nudged it off the trail with a walking stick, would have nothing worse than a couple of slightly singed spots in their leg hair, where shorts had not protected them from the outraged glare of the tiny terror-to-be.

---

LL#1387

ravena_kade

Boss lady called Dad. The sister in law is being sent home with Hospice. They give her maybe a week.

She told him about part time. He's not pleased with it, but it's better than nothing and If I get caught up he keeps his car for another 18 months. He mentioned the coworker sounding like she didn't want to help and that she didn't want him back. Boss lady said she did't know about that (Yes she did. I told her) . Dad told her that I had the letter from the medical people and she sent 3 addresses to email it to.

I talked with him a bit to try and find out just what she said. He would have been hurt and pissed off if she told him what she told me. Maybe my reaction to her told her not to try it with Dad. F legacy. Take the money and enjoy your grand kids. I tried to impress upon Dad not to offer opinions to Ted, the head boss, that could seem to be criticizing. He just kept saying that Ted likes him. I said maybe, but not enough to give you full time. (Yes, I'm jaded).

A few hours later Dad got a call from the woman who will be the office manager once Boss Lady goes. She likes Dad. She likes him enough that she hems things for us. She needed to know where something was and how to fix a machine. I was glad to hear that conversation. He is useful. She asked when he was coming back. He told her about the letter and that they would only let him back part time. She was disappointed. I was happy to hear the conversation. Maybe she can get someone in our town to give him a ride. Maybe she can be his new buddy and get Ted boss to keep him for another year.

During my lunch break I went to the fridge and from the window I saw table legs flying off the deck. Dad was outside taking apart the old metal table and throwing it off the deck. It was way over 10 pounds. He had put together the chairs to the new set in the living room (he's so bored at home). Tomorrow I will move the new table top up to the deck. The thing came flat packed and weighs a ton.

snowstorm

Linden just called her a terror—in the nicest way possible. 😸

dragonofeternal

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Current Mood: tired of tokyopop's horse shit

tozka

1. I am currently on an island, the Isle of Wight.

2. Today I finished reading We Bought an Island, which I LOVED. It's a memoir of two sisters who bought an island off the Cornwall coast in the 1960s and turned it into (basically) an artists' retreat. This book is focused on them finding the island and moving in, and all the people they meet. It genuinely made me laugh out loud several times, to the point where it's coming home with me because I know I'll want to reread it later. Luckily I have the small pocket-sized paperback version; if I have to I can just put it in my coat pocket.

I desperately want to read the sequel, which talks about their life on the island after moving in, but I may have to resign myself to reading the PDF on Archive.org as the local used bookshop doesn't have a copy. I can always order one on eBay if I want to later, too.

3. While looking for Tales From Our Cornish Island (that's the sequel) at the local used bookshop, I found a different book about living on an island: Herm, Our Island Home, which I of course bought. This one is about a family (6 kids, 2 parents) living on an island 3 miles from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, around the same time period as the sisters on their island, actually.

4. I enjoy reading about people on islands, and I enjoy visiting islands. If I were going to live on an island, I'd prefer a larger one. But then I've never been enamored with small-town life, tbh. I prefer mid-sized places.

5. I re-watched Muppet Treasure Island the other day and then read Robert Louis Stevenson's fascinating Wikipedia page; I'd no idea that he'd written travel memoirs, nor spent the last years of his life writing from and about Samoa (an island nation).

6. Other islands I've been to: the UK (of course), Madeira Island, São Miguel Island, Barbados, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Manhattan Island.

7. Private artificial islands creep me out, especially when they're populated by billionaires. Public artificial islands are, I suppose, fine.

8. I just found this Wikipedia list of fictional islands and it's made me think back to how many of my favorite books as a kid were set on islands, or involved islands, most of them only lightly inhabited. They do make for interesting story settings...

9. "Let's all go to Gullah Gullah Island!"

arlie

My first post this morning was not the one I expected to write. Here's what was in my mental queue:

I, and many other people, have a chronic problem with browser tabs. Something comes up; I mean to check into it, and open a browser tab as a reminder. Perhaps it's a long article I don't have time to read in depth. Perhaps it's a product I intend to evaluate for possible use. Perhaps it's a set of tabs opened as part of a minor project that got interrupted. Whatever the cause, I tend to ind up with enough browser windows and tabs open to closely approach the limit of what my hardware and software can support, and routinely instruct my browsers to reopen all tabs and windows when restarted.

Unfortunately, the number of tabs a given system can support continuously decreases. The web sites include more and more self-refreshes and other causes of load on cpu, memory, and network. The browsers and desktop managers often implement new features that make this worse, though sometimes they do go the other way. And everything gets more bloated on each update.

This has been an issue since well before I retired, and I still don't have a good solution. Every alternate method of tracking work in progress has been more heavyweight, less reliable, or otherwise a problem.

My first attempt involved using Safari's Reading List feature. I stopped this when I discovered that while Safari could export bookmarks, it couldn't (wouldn't) export its Reading List. I still have a plist from a Safari instance on a now deceased computer. Sadly, it includes a lot more than the Reading List, making retrieving the data painful. (I never did that work, and it's now long past when the contents would be relevant.)

( Read more... )

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy, mild, and wet. It's raining lightly.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 4/24/26 -- We went out to Spring Fest.

EDIT 4/24/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen a fox squirrel.

It stopped raining, but it's still too wet for yardwork.

EDIT 4/24/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

alchemicink

These

thefridayfive questions are testing how good my memory is 😂

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?

High school was during the 2000s and my college years stretched into the beginning of the following decade

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?

I can't remember well what was popular back then because my style at that time was a very simple jeans/t-shirt combo 😂 I do kinda remember palazzo pants being in style for a bit during high school, and I did think they looked stupid

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?

Oh definitely! High school was when I started listening to Japanese music and I have been unable to stop since then 😅

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?

I used to have some stupid-looking bangs! Glad those are gone now....

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?

...Drinking? I have no idea because I never did "cool" things 😂 My friend group was comprised of nerds and goths. We mostly just watched movies together and hung out in our cars in various parking lots

seleneheart

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?
The 80s!

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?
Puffed up curly perms - Nancy and Karen Wheeler make me cringe.

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?
Oh, yeah, I found punk rock and never looked back. Social Distortion, Ramones, Black Flag, Bad Religion, Bad Brains, XTC. I loved New Wave also. I also love the newer post-punk/pop-punk bands like Green Day.

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?
Surprisingly similar to the wolf cut I currently have, but way more spiked up on top.

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?
In high school, we had an open campus and a mod schedule, so none of the teachers or administrators knew when anyone was supposed to be anywhere. We all left campus for lunch as soon as one of us could drive. Sometimes we came back for afternoon classes, sometimes we didn't.

My college was huge so I couldn't really say what the overall 'cool' thing to do was. My group tended to have pig roasts and camp outs in the nearby national forest, so that was pretty cool (sometimes literally - it got cold in those mountains!).

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Bad Brains - Don't Bother Me

badly_knitted

Title: Words Aren't Enough
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Jonathan Willaway, Varian.
Rating: PG
Setting: Just after An Act of Love.
Summary: What can anyone say to someone who’s lost so much?
Written For: Challenge 489: Amnesty 81 at

fan_flashworks, using Challenge 468: Sorry.
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators.
A/N: Quadruple Drabble.

( Words Aren't Enough... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

badly_knitted

Title: Acceptance
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Daniel, Jack.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 807
Spoilers: Meridian.
Summary: Daniel has come to terms with what’s going to happen to him, but now he needs to get Jack to stop blaming himself.
Written For:

be_themoon’s prompt ‘any, any, I will not have you tainted by my pain’, at

threesentenceficathon.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Stargate SG-1, or the characters.

( Acceptance... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

badly_knitted

Title: God Of Coffee
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 645
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Purely by accident, Ianto Jones’ reputation for making coffee has spread throughout the universe.
Written For:

dragonofeternal’s prompt ‘any, any, accidental cult acquisition,’ at

threesentenceficathon.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.

( God Of Coffee... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

arlie

I received an email this morning from Google. They've instituted a new control over information sharing to partners. They didn't say, but presumably it defaults to "share everything", and controls things previously controlled by other settings which I'd already turned off. There was a link to the page containing the new control.

When I clicked the link on Firefox, I got an unspecified failure, and the suggestion I try again later. When I clicked the link on Safari, I got informed it had been blocked by a content blocker, and offered a chance to try again without content blockers.

The next thing I checked was whether the email notification was fraudulent, and where the link pointed. It checks out as coming from google, and leading to google.

So we have a dodgy web page that might be usable to control some more-than-dodgy setting, if I were willing to load it.

Sadly, Safari declines to identify the content blocker involved, or what it's designed to prevent, so I have no information helpful in deciding whether to risk it. I suppose it might simply be 90% advertisements, 10% actual settings.

I presume chrome would load it without complaint, but that's not the point. (I regard chrome itself as a dodgy web browser, because of being controlled by a business funded by ad revenue, and probably other privacy-violating customer-annoying technologies as well.) The point of course is what potentially harmful thing is being done by Google's privacy-setting control page(s).

haunted_cherries

Working in tech support has its highs and lows with most of the lows being how painful it is how LITTLE people know or choose not to know about modern tech.

Like YES, if you put a sticker decal over the fans of your comp, it’s gonna heat up and NO, saying shit like “well most folks dont wanna know everything about how things work and that’s ok” isn’t the flex you think it is. It may be ok for YOU, but willingly sticking your head in the sand about how to keep your laptop up and running is WILD. 🙄

Y’ALL, please take care of your devices whenever and wherever you can and I will LOVE YOU for it. xD

felis

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fred_mouse

I've been doing a lot of staring at bookshelves (bookshops, libraries), online library catalogues, publishers websites, book recommendation sites, online book retail sites and a range of other places that seemed like a good idea at the time. I have not completed the full systematic search I want to have done, but I'm allowing that some of that is going to happen during the writing phase, because I do not actually expect to find the kinds of books I'm after in most of those places.

My spreadsheet of books now has over 150 entries. Quite a lot fail one or more of the inclusion criteria, and some of those are duplicates because I'm attempting to capture the sources as well (will I analyse that? no, probably not. Am I capturing it anyway because I think it will have the potential for me to talk about? yes). Several I've already started reading. I'm most excited about Attack of the Smart Speakers, which I'm halfway through, and as I'm writing my reading notes I keep writing enthusiastic commentary. This one is a bit frustrating because it is a library copy, and so I'm writing more than I would if I could just mark up my copy -- I've now ordered a me copy to annotate.

I'm also really happy with Orion Lost, although I'm not sure how much that one is going to fall in a heap in terms of getting done, because the next set of plot beats have the potential to go places I'm not comfortable following. Yes, it is middle grade fiction, and it will be resolved, but some of where it has already gone has required a few breaks. (I'm aware that these are me specific emotional land mines and that they aren't affecting my interpretation, just how fast I can cope with it). Plus, I put it aside to deal with library books that are due next week (I found three possibles of which two are yeses).

Which brings me to my evening -- I have spent some hours on The Nile and Fishpond websites looking for books that might suit my parameters. On The Nile, I found searching for 'AI' and then filtering to books / fiction / children and young adult did a reasonable job; on Fishpond I found no search that was useful. And then at the end of that I looked through my spreadsheet, picked what was reasonably priced and high in my priority rankings and was a variety of options, and ordered Slightly Too Many Books. Including one co-authored by Farah Mendelsohn, which was has been in my wishlist for multiple years and was about half the price I remember it being (Farah is going to be the GUFF delegate to the local con this year, so I'm extra motivated. Will I take everything I own of theirs to be signed? probably not. But I'm not ruling out the possibility).

And now I have to wait. The original delivery date range when I looked was mid May, and when I checked out it was early to mid June, so who knows when I'll get any of them. I have no shortage of things to be getting on with, but I'm presenting my initial findings at the end of May!

ravena_kade

The letter came from the med team. All it says is that Dad can't lift over 10 pounds until May 21 and that he will need to be allowed to go to Dr appointments. Very very generic. I am glad of that.

I will contact boss lady and ask if they have an email that they prefer to use for HR items. I know I won't hear back until Monday. I know better than to expect an answer on a Friday.

Fingers crossed that on the 21st they let him drive. It will be 90 days post op.

meningioma

i thought they were going to fix the translation...its just even more retarded aave bastardization tiktok slop now. what was teh delay for??? its still shit!!!

within 6 seconds theres already retarded bastardized aave """"tiktok""""" slang what is going on??
id love to be able to buy it but i dont know if i can take cringing every 3 seconds because i have to read stupid tiktok slop when i look down.

hearing my queen haruko momoi and having to read tiktok garbage should be considered a hatecrime. shame on whoever translated this shit.

and look at these comparisons!!! ITS ONLY FUCKIKNG ENGLISH!!!!!

THIS IS RIDICULOUS
between this and haruko momoi going to mexico recently, maybe learning spanish is the way.

its obvious that latam fans care much more about the source material at this point with this and the new anti AI dubbing law. im seriously pissed.
i knew it was wrong to be excited... i took off work for this crap...
T_T

Current Music: maron - YUNYUN HARDCORE ...despite it all.

snowstorm

Fits great
BUT
these days I try to stick to natural fabrics. 🐑🌾

dewline

So this looks like fun. And the history of how it got to the theatres makes the trailer more delicious, yes?

Of course, the timing is even more Problematic now, right?

Current Mood: nerdy

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Common Nature

April 2026

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Page Summary

scrubjayspeaks - Lake Lewisia #1387
ravena_kade - (no subject)
snowstorm - Sassmaster
dragonofeternal - Hello Instagram manga fan I am a very reputable investment proposal
tozka - regarding islands
arlie - On bookmarks, reading lists, browser tabs, etc. Also OneTab.
ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
alchemicink - Friday Five answers (4/24/26)
seleneheart - The Friday Five: High School/College
badly_knitted - The Fantastic Journey Quadruple Drabble: Words Aren't Enough
badly_knitted - Stargate SG-1 Ficlet: Acceptance
badly_knitted - Ficlet: God Of Coffee
arlie - Name and shame: Google
haunted_cherries - A Word of Advice from Your Local Techie
felis - Fixing and Fishing and Communication.
fred_mouse - Book acquisition
ravena_kade - (no subject)
meningioma - s-skibidi ....denpa?
snowstorm - Thanks for the free skirt. 🤷‍♀️
dewline - Coyote vs. Acme: The First Trailer

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don't fear the daystar

Member Posts

Lake Lewisia #1387

(no subject)

Sassmaster

Hello Instagram manga fan I am a very reputable investment proposal

regarding islands

On bookmarks, reading lists, browser tabs, etc. Also OneTab.

Birdfeeding

Friday Five answers (4/24/26)

The Friday Five: High School/College

The Fantastic Journey Quadruple Drabble: Words Aren't Enough

Stargate SG-1 Ficlet: Acceptance

Ficlet: God Of Coffee

Name and shame: Google

A Word of Advice from Your Local Techie

Fixing and Fishing and Communication.

Book acquisition

(no subject)

s-skibidi ....denpa?

Thanks for the free skirt. 🤷‍♀️

Coyote vs. Acme: The First Trailer

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April 2026

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