Clarke Award Finalists 2009

Aug. 11th, 2025 11:18 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2009: The Horrible Histories TV show debuts, Britons are treated to a Giles-worthy winter, and police decline to investigate the cash for influence incident so that they might better focus on the custard-tossing scandal rocking the nation.

Poll #33480 Clarke Award Finalists 2009
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3


Which 2009 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod
0 (0.0%)

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
2 (66.7%)

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
1 (33.3%)

Martin Martin's on the Other Side by Mark Wernham
0 (0.0%)

The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper
2 (66.7%)

The Quiet War by Paul J. McAuley
1 (33.3%)



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

Which 2009 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

Martin Martin's on the Other Side by Mark Wernham
The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper
The Quiet War by Paul J. McAuley


With an * on the McAuley because it was too grim and I didn't finish it.

(no subject)

Aug. 11th, 2025 09:22 am
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[personal profile] disneydream06
The Scorpions "Winds of Change" was most recently used in the movie "The Fall Guy".....


Monday At The Movies.....

Aug. 11th, 2025 09:16 am
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[personal profile] disneydream06
This Week's Movie Quote...

D.: You know what an older women does for me?
I.: Changes your diapers?
D.: Touché.


Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 1


Which Movie Does This Quote Come From?

View Answers

The Breakfast Club
0 (0.0%)

Pretty In Pink
1 (100.0%)

Sixteen Candles
0 (0.0%)

I Don't Have A Clue...
0 (0.0%)




Last Week's Movie Quote...

Sheik Amar: Tch, secret government killing activity! That's why I don't pay taxes!

It comes from the 2010 action movie, "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time".
It starred Jake Gyllenhaal and was based on a video game.
Sadly, it was a dud at the box office and there weren't any sequels to come.
Which is a shame because Jake was HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! hehehe.......



Those Who Knew or Guessed Correctly...
[profile] sidhe_uaine42
[personal profile] adminbear
[personal profile] meathiel
[personal profile] seaivy
[personal profile] merlinwon

All Things Video

Aug. 10th, 2025 11:02 pm
halfshellvenus: (Default)
[personal profile] halfshellvenus
Another weekend is ending (and it was a 100o+ one here). I spent some of it reading Idol entries (mine is here, and Idol could really use more readers and voters right now). Some of it involved forcing myself to go outside and bike in the hot garage (ugh). And there was also a Naked Gun viewing, about which I will say that nobody could ever reproduce Leslie Nielsen's comic genius, but the new movie is funny and Liam Neeson is better as the straight man than I would have expected.

Other viewings (since I'm about to stop streaming Acorn and Apple TV, but will keep Brit Box for now):
Apple TV
Silo - I enjoyed this a LOT, because you know I love a good dystopian setting! My one complaint is that too much of it takes place in the dark, and now that people are no longer using blue light to indicate "dark," it is almost impossible to see parts of the action.
Dark Matter - Multiverses with a side of romance, and I was sorry when it was over.
Constellation - OMG, let me fangirl for a bit over this. An astronaut survives a fatal incident on the International Space Station, but parts of her life don't seem quite right afterwards. Mismatched multiverses play a part in this one, and not just for that one character. Jonathan Banks (better known as Mike Ermentraut) plays a JPL scientist who also experiences similar effects. Loved it, and the space sequences were fantastic.
Mr. Corman - The characters aren't exactly endearing in this series about a 5th grade teacher with regrets, but the show grew on me, and some of the fantasy-sequences are bizarrely entertaining.

Acorn TV
Keeping Faith - A lawyer's husband goes missing, and disturbing secrets surface. It's kind of a hot mess, and the main character makes a lot of impulsive and rash decisions, but I watched it to the end.
Bariau (Inside) - Only 1 season available. Takes place inside a Welsh men's prison, and I liked it for the quantity of Welsh language in it. About 2/3rds of the show are in Welsh, with random detours into English--sometimes within the same sentence.
The Accident - Four-part miniseries about the collapse of a factory caused by teenagers who sneaked in to vandalize the place. Really well done.
The Gone - WHERE is the second season of this Tasmanian show with the visiting Irish detective?

And in other TV news, I dived into Wednesday, S2 on Netflix and quickly ran out of episodes. Only half of S2 is up, with the other half set to drop in early September. Which means scrambling for entertainment tomorrow, as it's another 100-degree day and I will be stuck biking in the garage AGAIN.

stipulate

Aug. 11th, 2025 01:00 am
[syndicated profile] merriamwebster_feed

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 11, 2025 is:

stipulate • \STIP-yuh-layt\  • verb

To stipulate is to demand or require something as part of an agreement.

// The rules stipulate that players must wear uniforms.

See the entry >

Examples:

“Nilsson’s reputation preceded her. The New York Times wrote of her: ‘Christine Nilsson, the Met’s first diva in 1883, could not only stipulate by contract her choice of roles, but could prohibit their performance by any other soprano in the same season.’” — Elise Taylor and Stephanie Sporn, Vogue, 20 June 2025

Did you know?

Like many terms used in the legal profession, stipulate, an English word since the 17th century, has its roots in Latin. It comes from stipulatus, the past participle of stipulari, a verb meaning “to demand a guarantee (from a prospective debtor).” In Roman law, oral contracts were deemed valid only if they followed a proper question-and-answer format; stipulate was sometimes used specifically of this same process of contract making, though it also could be used more generally for any means of making a contract or agreement. The “to specify as a condition or requirement” meaning of stipulate also dates to the 17th century, and is the sense of the word most often encountered today.



Humor

Aug. 10th, 2025 11:38 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This made me laugh.

The True Self

A few unrelated questions

Aug. 12th, 2025 02:23 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
(Some of which I may have asked before, in which case, forgive me.)

1. People often do say that the English subjunctive is in decline. However, literally nobody I've ever heard say this has provided any sort of evidence. Is there any data on this other than "yeah, feels that way to me"?

1a. I've also heard that the subjunctive, or at least some forms of the subjunctive, is more common in USA English than UK English, from somewhat more authoritative sources but with roughly the same amount of evidence.

2. I got into it with somebody on the subject of "flammable/inflammable". I am aware that there are signs that warn about inflammable materials, and also signs warning about flammable materials. Is it actually the case that anybody has ever been confused and thought they were being warned that something could not catch on fire? Or is that just an urban legend / just-so story to explain why the two words mean the same thing and can be found on the same sorts of signs?

3. Not a language question! I've recently found one of the Myth Adventures books in my house. Gosh, I haven't re-read these in 20 years. Worth a re-read, or oh god no, save it for the recycle bin?

*****************************


Read more... )

Spider Apocalypse

Aug. 10th, 2025 10:45 pm
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This article mentions seeing no grass spiders in a place that typically has them. 

Then I realized that I haven't seen any this year either.  Usually we have one every couple of feet here, so many it's hard not to step on the webs.  They're barely visible most of the time, unless covered in dust or rain or dew.  I may simply not have noticed them.  But with the ongoing insect apocalypse, it is concerning.  I have have seen other spiders spinning webs, though.

What are your spider populations like?

2025 Beaverton Night Market

Aug. 10th, 2025 07:24 pm
lovelyangel: (Mamimi Camera 2)
[personal profile] lovelyangel
Frutamania
Frutamania
Beaverton Night Market • Beaverton, Oregon
Saturday, August 9, 2025
Nikon Z8 • NIKKOR Z 85mm f/1.8 S
f/2 @ 85mm • 1/1000s • ISO 1600

In 2023 the Beaverton Night Market was held twice – once in July, and once in August. I’m not sure there was a night market in 2024. Instead, there was a full weekend of the Legendary Makers Market.

This year, the Legendary Makers Market was held on the same weekend as the Oregon Country Fair, so I wasn’t able to go. And, this year, the Beaverton Night Market was only one night.

Some Photos Below This Cut )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
The winners are:

Best Novel: The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed, Solaris
Best YA Novel: Heavenly Tyrant, Xiran Jay Zhao, Tundra Books
Best Novelette/Novella: The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed, Tordotcom
Best Short Story: “Blood and Desert Dreams“, Y.M. Pang, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue 408
Best Graphic Novel: Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way, Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio, IDW Publishing
Best Poem/Song “Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka“, Y.M. Pang, Invitation: A One-shot Anthology of Speculative Fiction
Best Related Work: Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Two
Stephen Kotowych, editor, Ansible Press
Best Cover Art/Interior Illustration: Augur Magazine, Issue 7.1, cover art, Martine Nguyen
Best Fan Writing and Publication: SF&F Book Reviews, Robert Runté, Ottawa Review of Books
Best Fan Related Work: murmurstations, Sonia Urlando, Augur Society, podcast

Activism

Aug. 10th, 2025 09:10 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
How To Make Your City Stronger With 4 Hours and a Shovel

Last month, members of Livable Lynchburg, a Strong Towns Local Conversation group, joined a walk audit alongside city staff, regional planners, and transit officials. At the corner of 12th and Polk, they noticed two stretches of sidewalk that were so overgrown they were nearly impassable.

Read more... )

Hot, Garden, Dog Class, Firefly, Rat

Aug. 10th, 2025 04:05 pm
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[personal profile] ranunculus
It has been hot, 106F yesterday, with the wind out of the south-east which always sets off my worst allergies.  Around here they call them the Diablo Winds.  It looks like there is now a cooling trend that will take us back into the low 90's again.  Although the last few days have been hot, in reality this has been the coolest summer we have had for many years. 
With the warm weather the garden is cranking out loads of produce.  I really should make pickles tonight. There is enough okra for a couple of jars of pickles, and there are lots and lots of cucumbers, though not very many pickling cucumbers.   The shade cloth seems to be doing its job of keeping things from burning. 
Chena's class yesterday went well.  We learned Send and Return.  Each of us had a cone set in front of us, and were to send the dog out and around the cone. Chena was happy to do it, though I'm not sure she quite got the concept.  We practiced having our dogs Stay in the down position while the instructor strolled around playing a loop of ducks quacking on her phone. Chena did break position on that one, but not the next one, which was a squeeky toy and a plastic bag being rustled around. During the  Backup was another new command for the class.  I've been practicing that for some time with Chena and she has it down.  No we are working on going straight back. We practiced Touch, where the dog touches a hand or item with their nose.  The instructor suggested we might want to put a buzzer next to the door so the dog could ask to go out. NO, NO, NO!!  Chena would be much worse than any cat about wanting to go in and out through the door!
While at dog class I handed the instructor, Nancy, a completely revised Core 2 handout.  The one she had given us was terrible.  Last week Kim got very confused about what we had been taught, so I wrote up notes for her. While doing that I referenced the handout which was a hodge-podge of disorganized bad writing.  Since I was already writing up notes, I went to work on it.  Nancy was surprised and a bit taken aback, but after glancing at my work and thinking for a moment she admitted that she knew the Core 2 handout needed work and that it had been hastily pulled together from multiple sources, which was blindingly obvious.  I don't know that I got it all correct, but at least each command is formatted the same, the commands are listed in alphabetical order so you can find them, and instructions don't stop mid-sentence.
Back at the Ranch, I've been spraying Firefly down with water.  She loves it. Then she goes and rolls in the dust. Sigh. Thank goodness there is a silicone based product in her mane and tail so they don't tangle too readily.  The dirt tends to fall right off. 
I saw a very large rat out at the hay pile last night. I have no idea where rats like that are coming from, these are rats that normally live near human dwellings and don't do well in our arid landscape.  I suppose now I'll need to bury my compost for a while.  Hopefully the screech owl I hear at night will fly by and take care of the problem. Or Chena will catch it, she tried last night.

Fossils

Aug. 10th, 2025 04:40 pm
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Stunning “wonder reptile” discovery rewrites the origins of feathers

An international team of researchers has published a breakthrough study in the journal Nature showing that early reptiles from the Triassic period had unique structures growing from its skin that formed an alternative to feathers.

The newly described Mirasaura grauvogeli from the Middle Triassic had a striking feather-like crest, hinting that complex skin appendages arose far earlier than previously believed. Its bird-like skull, tree-climbing adaptations, and pigment structures linked to feathers deepen the mystery of reptile evolution.

Birdfeeding

Aug. 10th, 2025 03:16 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly sunny, humid, and hot.

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

EDIT 8/10/25 -- I put out water for the birds.  They had drained the small metal birdbath.

EDIT 8/10/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/10/25 -- I watered the old picnic table, house yard, and patio plants.

EDIT 8/10/25 -- I watered the new picnic table and septic gardens.  I didn't have energy or daylight to pick up the hose, though; I had to turn it off and just leave it out.  :/  I'll try to reel it up tomorrow.  It's exhausting to maneuver.

I am done for the night.

DON'T EAT THE BLUE PIG MEAT!

Aug. 10th, 2025 11:33 am
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
You'd hope people would be smart enough to know that, but you never know....

Trappers and hunters in California are killing wild pigs, and upon butchering them, finding the meat inside to be bright blue! That would be a bit of a shocking discovery.

From the Gizmodo article: “I’m not talking about a little blue,” Dan Burton, owner of a wildlife control company in Salinas, California, told The Los Angeles Times. “I’m talking about neon blue, blueberry blue.”

YEESH!

Apparently the pigs are raiding squirrel-control stations that have a rodenticide containing an anticoagulant that is dyed blue to make it obvious to its handlers that 'this is poison'. The dosage isn't high enough to cause problems for the pigs, but secondary exposure to people consuming the tainted pig meat could be problematic.

https://gizmodo.com/wild-pigs-in-california-are-turning-neon-blue-on-the-inside-officials-warn-2000639638

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/09/033255/strange-wild-pigs-in-california---what-turned-their-flesh-blue

Success with computer input devices

Aug. 10th, 2025 06:21 pm
mtbc: maze I (white-red)
[personal profile] mtbc
I had mentioned how my work Mac, plugged in at home, was applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel. Now I have adequate solutions for both:

  • I installed an open-source utility named DiscreteScroll, which fixes macOS's unnecessary scroll wheel acceleration, making the scroll-wheel behave rather more manageably.

  • It turns out that Apple's idea of a UK-layout keyboard is not the typical one, it's kind of halfway to a US one. As the Mac doesn't understand the typical UK layout, I realized that I can just buy a US-layout keyboard, which I am used to anyway. Having despaired of making sense of the differences among the dazzling range of Keychron keyboards, I indulged in a nice, loud Unicomp.

In another keyboard victory, a couple of my UK keyboards had dodgy keys. I can be slow to realize things but, eventually, I had the useful idea of transplanting a keycap (using my pry an old Kindle open at the seams levers) to make one fully able keyboard from the two problem ones.

Admittedly, although working with Mac OS X instead of GNU/Linux usually slows me down some, for my day job I am finding the Mac not to be much of a hindrance.
thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
My first thought was 'AOL is still around?' Turns out that yes, it was. They had a terrible merger with Time-Warner, then were bought out by Verizon then are now owned by Yahoo? But they still exist. And until the end of September, will still have modem banks that people can access.

Modems? Modems are still made? I can't remember the last time I saw a modem in a store, much less connected to working hardware.

Apparently dial-up internet is still sort of big in rural areas, which makes sense. Not having DSL, much less fiber, dial-up is the best that can be managed. After AOL shuts down its modem banks, dial-up will still be available from Earthlink, Juno, MSN, and NetZero, and probably other smaller, local ISPs.

https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/network-providers/aol-will-end-dial-up-internet-service-in-september-34-years-after-its-debut-aol-shield-browser-and-aol-dialer-software-will-be-shuttered-on-the-same-day

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/10/0626249/aol-finally-discontinues-its-dial-up-internet-access---after-34-years

CrApple

Aug. 10th, 2025 08:23 am
arlie: (Default)
[personal profile] arlie
Updating my Mac to Sequoia 15.5 had a lot of bad consequences. The only good one is that it might have delayed for another year the dreaded time when I can no longer run that year's Turbotax, and need to switch to their online version, or hire a tax preparer.

I've just found the latest disimprovement. They turned on automatic updates. They've downloaded Sequoia 15.6 and scheduled it to be installed on my next restart, and there's nothing I can do about it. I turned off the unwanted misfeature, but its results are still scheduled.

15.5 was too big for my Mac Mini - performance sucks, random processes exit overnight, and I've had such desirable improvements (sic) as frustratingly slow character echoing in Numbers. They removed my old screensaver, and replacing it with one that soon stopped working, possibly as a result of one of those random process exits, this one of a daemon that doesn't either auto-relaunch or launch on request, as I expect from properly coded daemons in Apple's architecture. They gave me a very much unwanted "artificial intelligence" enhancement, which I turned off to the extent I could, and will probably have to turn off again after the unwanted update to 15.6 - unless of course they have removed the ability to disable it (they surely will eventually, just like they've already removed other 'retro' features).

Thanks, Crapple. I wish all your executives misery in this life and the next.

Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg

Aug. 10th, 2025 09:03 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Two Americans set out for Venus. Only one returned. Where is the missing man? Evans knows but Evans is not a reliable witness.

Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg

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