Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.

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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
oursin	11:48a	Happy birthday, theodosia! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1152790.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Friday, December 25th, 2009
pepysdiary	11:00p	Tuesday 25 December 1666 http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/25/ (Christmas day). Lay pretty long in bed, and then rose, leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till four this morning seeing her mayds make mince-pies. I to church, where our parson Mills made a good sermon. Then home, and dined well on some good ribbs of beef roasted and mince pies; only my wife, brother, and Barker, and plenty of good wine of my owne, and my heart full of true joy; and thanks to God Almighty for the goodness of my condition at this day. After dinner, I begun to teach my wife and Barker my song, "It is decreed," which pleases me mightily as now I have Mr. Hinxton's base. Then out and walked alone on foot to the Temple, it being a fine frost, thinking to have seen a play all alone; but there, missing of any bills, concluded there was none, and so back home; and there with my brother reducing the names of all my books to an alphabet, which kept us till 7 or 8 at night, and then to supper, W. Hewer with us, and pretty merry, and then to my chamber to enter this day's journal only, and then to bed. My head a little thoughtfull how to behave myself in the business of the victualling, which I think will be prudence to offer my service in doing something in passing the pursers' accounts, thereby to serve the King, get honour to myself, and confirm me in my place in the victualling, which at present yields not work enough to deserve my wages. (Comment on this)
oursin	10:59a	Happy birthday, neleh13! (Comment on this)
oursin	10:58a	Happy birthday, m31andy! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1152663.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
truepenny	9:08p	On Faith My inter-season episode, "On Faith," is live at Shadow Unit. It's a standalone story, so if you've been wanting to check out Shadow Unit, it might be a good place to start. And if you're already reading Shadow Unit, well, I hope you like it. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
mac_stone	6:45p	And on a more serious note: (Comment on this)
pepysdiary	11:00p	Monday 24 December 1666 http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/24/ Up, and to the office, where Lord Bruncker, [Sir] J. Mennes, [Sir] W. Penn, and myself met, and there I did use my notes I took on Saturday night about tickets, and did come to a good settlement in the business of that office, if it be kept to, this morning being a meeting on purpose. At noon to prevent my Lord Bruncker's dining here I walked as if upon business with him, it being frost and dry, as far as Paul's, and so back again through the City by Guildhall, observing the ruines thereabouts, till I did truly lose myself, and so home to dinner. I do truly find that I have overwrought my eyes, so that now they are become weak and apt to be tired, and all excess of light makes them sore, so that now to the candlelight I am forced to sit by, adding, the snow upon the ground all day, my eyes are very bad, and will be worse if not helped, so my Lord Bruncker do advise as a certain cure to use greene spectacles, which I will do. So to dinner, where Mercer with us, and very merry. After dinner she goes and fetches a little son of Mr. Backeworth's, the wittiest child and of the most spirit that ever I saw in my life for discourse of all kind, and so ready and to the purpose, not above four years old. Thence to Sir Robert Viner's, and there paid for the plate I have bought to the value of 94l., with the 100l. Captain Cocke did give me to that purpose, and received the rest in money. I this evening did buy me a pair of green spectacles, to see whether they will help my eyes or no. So to the 'Change, and went to the Upper 'Change, which is almost as good as the old one; only shops are but on one side. Then home to the office, and did business till my eyes began to be bad, and so home to supper. My people busy making mince pies, and so to bed. No newes yet of our Gottenburgh fleete; which makes [us] have some fears, it being of mighty concernment to have our supply of masts safe. I met with Mr. Cade to-night, my stationer; and he tells me that he hears for certain that the Queene-Mother is about and hath near finished a peace with France, which, as a Presbyterian, he do not like, but seems to fear it will be a means to introduce Popery. (Comment on this)
mac_stone	4:18p	Joyeux Noel! Here's me, wishing you joy, peace, and love. Oh. And this, too, because it's so very cheerfully obnoxious it sort of makes me wrinkle my brow in horrified bemusement, and laugh, all at once: Current Mood: Cheerful and grateful (5 Comments |Comment on this)
library_keeper	9:02p	Bitter-Sweet Geoffrey Hill’s poem Fantasia on ‘Horbury’ imagines the Victorian hymn-writer John Bacchus Dykes visiting the village of Horbury, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Horbury is not only the name of the village but also the name of Dykes’s most famous hymn tune, better known as ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’, reputedly (but probably not really) played on board the Titanic as the ship went down. Dry walls, and nettles battered by the dust, Odours from gathered water, muddled storm-clouds Disastrous over the manufactured West Riding. Mind – a fritter of excrement; step Aside, step aside, sir! Ah, but a priest In his prime watches where he goes. He goes To tender his confession. Forgiveness Journeys towards him like a brisk traveller On the same road. Is this Horbury? Yes: and he will perpetuate this refuge. Yes: and he will weaken, scribbling, at the end, Of unspeakable desolation. Alan Robinson, one of the few critics to have paid this poem any sustained attention, takes issue with what he sees as its ‘patronizing attitude’ towards its subject. He chides Hill for making fun of ‘the insecurities of this fastidious clergyman, anxious, amid the class tensions of the West Riding, about the gathering storm of revolution’. In its final lines the poem loops ominously back to its beginning, ‘this menace from concave stormlight .. these heads of nettles lopped into the dust’, which Robinson reads as an ‘oblique threat of the violent fate which might well overtake Dykes’. But this, he argues, is simply a ‘product of the poetic imagination’. Hill has taken a real historical figure and turned him into a fictional character – ‘authorial manipulation at its most extreme’. Oddly, neither Robinson nor anyone else seems to have bothered to go back to Dykes’s biography in search of the raw materials for the poem. The results are instructive. Hill calls the poem a fantasia, but, as it turns out, he has been scrupulous in constructing it on a ground-bass of documented events from Dykes’s life. It is the critic, not the poet, who has allowed his imagination to run away with him. ( Of poems and parsons .. ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
oursin	10:42a	Happy seasonal festivity of choice And here are the presents, for my DW/LJ friends, all from Good Gifts: Support an Afghan girl Access to a midwife Planting a spring flowering cherry (loveliest of trees) A cooking pot and utensils Medical fund for street children in India Text books for an African school 50 people protected from river blindness Oak Saplings I hope you like them! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1152328.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
artnouveauho	1:03a	Hear ye, hear ye Today, as you may know, is International Liza Day. It is the time of year when we contemplate the true meaning of Lizatude. You may wish to enter into the spirit of the day by exchanging jokes that fall flat, making references that make the 2 people who get them think you're a huge dork, and/or committing some hitherto-uninvented social faux pas in the middle of an audition. Alternatively, you may accept this mission: For my birthday, I desire tales of awesomeness! So if you've done or seen or experienced something awesome, tell me about it. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
pepysdiary	11:00p	Sunday 23 December 1666 http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/23/ (Lord's day). Up and alone to church, and meeting Nan Wright at the gate had opportunity to take two or three 'baisers', and so to church, where a vain fellow with a periwigg preached, Chaplain, as by his prayer appeared, to the Earl of Carlisle? Home, and there dined with us Betty Michell and her husband. After dinner to White Hall by coach, and took them with me. And in the way I would have taken 'su main' as I did the last time, but she did in a manner withhold it. So set them down at White Hall, and I to the Chapel to find Dr. Gibbons, and from him to the Harp and Ball to transcribe the treble which I would have him to set a bass to. But this took me so much time, and it growing night, I was fearful of missing a coach, and therefore took a coach and to rights to call Michell and his wife at their father Howlett's, and so home, it being cold, and the ground all snow ... They gone I to my chamber, and with my brother and wife did number all my books in my closet, and took a list of their names, which pleases me mightily, and is a jobb I wanted much to have done. Then to supper and to bed. (Comment on this)
oursin	8:42p	Very delayed reading post (going back several months): Part IV: mysteries and thrillers I already posted about compulsively rereading Robert B Parker and my reread of Susan Moody's Penny Wanawake series. I also did some light Travis McGee rereads. There were several latest volumes in series, including the last but one Parker (but that pretty much counts as a reread, hem-hem); Marcia Muller, Burn Out (2008) - she really does manage to not do the running on the spot that happens with too many series protags but have McCone move and change; SJ Rozan, The Shanghai Moon (2009), which I'm not sure I was quite so impressed with as some of the earlier volumes in the series; Margaret Maron, Death's Half Acre (2008), which was perfectly acceptable, and I've pretty much given up hope of her ever returning to Sigrid Haraldsen. Dick Francis and Felix Francis, Dead Heat (2007): acceptably readable, but was it, just occasionally, a bit info-dumpy in ways that were previously avoided? Jesse Kellerman, The Brutal Art (2008). Hmm. Readable enough, but I thought the love-interest who was an Assistant District Attorney didn't really come over (unlike his art-world mentor-figure), and I thought the plot did a bait and switch thing of bringing in an entirely new character very late in the day, which I didn't care for when his father did it, either. Andrew Taylor, Bleeding Heart Square (2008). I just could not get into this at all, and gave up. It just wasn't clicking for me, and while the ambience was vivid, it was also fairly grim and creepy and I needed a bit more of something or other, possibly engagement with any of the characters, to keep me in it. Barbara Michaels, Shattered Silk (1986). This is the one in which the protag opens a vintage clothing store in Washington, but I've forgotten most of the plot details, though I enjoyed enough at the time. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1152179.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
news [ theljstaff ]	11:37a	LiveJournal Major Notes: Get your holiday fix! Holiday debuggery We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update: If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go. If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account. If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate. If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase. If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help! Tweaks There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out! Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience. Give a little extra! We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity. Celebrate with holiday vGifts! Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends. Photos of the week We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics! For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... ) Curtains Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year! (256 Comments |Comment on this)
lilithsaintcrow	12:02p	Time To Get Laid Back I might post tomorrow, I might not. In any case, all the social stuff is done. I miss my sisters already. I’ve had a full house for two days and find myself wondering what I have to cook next and then realizing that it’s back to the normal schedule. The kids have settled down to watching Marx Brothers movies and I’m considering getting back on the treadmill. A couple days off is a nice, but I need to get back in the swing of things. An odd thing has happened, though, I’m getting wordcount just falling out of my head in dribs and drabbles. Something about cooking just makes the words come faster, no matter if I have to squeeze them in between stirring and roasting. Fortunately all the dinners have gone off smoothly. I won’t be sure how smoothly the writing has gone until I finish this draft. So, if I don’t see you here on Christmas Eve, have a happy holiday. Regular blogging will definitely resume Monday the 28th. See you ’round, guys. Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.
truepenny	12:37p	dream a little dream of ... Another AU Felix & Mildmay dream last night, this one claiming to be an animated series which might aptly be summed up as: "He's a gay wizard with a dark past; he's a cat burglar with a price on his head. Together, they fight crime!" (25 Comments |Comment on this)
truepenny	12:10p	Whatever it is you celebrate, have celebrated, or will celebrate at this time of year, I hope it is, has been, or will be very happy. And I wish you and all the world the very best for 2010. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
copyfight	9:20a	Nokia N900 Unboxing http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Copyfight/~3/amBuESlKy_g/nokia_n900_unboxing.php http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/12/23/nokia_n900_unboxing.php "Unboxing" in this case refers to the experience of taking a product out of its box. For the average consumer the unboxing experience is usually pretty mundane. But companies often put together special packaging that is sent to reviewers who are expected to be influential in their initial presentations of the product. In the case of the N900, Nokia has done an amusing job of appropriating ideas from "hacker" culture for its unboxing. (Comment on this)
oursin	10:04a	Gendered sf tropes? Was skimming through an essay in the NYRSF which was talking about the attractions of the post-apocalyptic/catastrophe scenario, and I paused and thought, 'This really is one for the boyz, innit?' (Even, or perhaps especially, boyz who are not really cut out for a Hobbesian state of nature, cf someone on my reading list who mentioned volunteers on a meal programme from some local elite boys' school who had no idea how to operate a tin-opener... No good raiding those suddenly empty supermarkets if you can't access the goods, folks!) I have the feeling that women regard this scenario with a good deal of scepticism and caution, because it tends not to be a happy place for female characters. One of the grimmest apocalyptic novels I've read was Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die (1928). Even some male catastrophe novels acknowledge this (e.g. some of John Christopher's). Trying to think of post-apocalypses by women, which deal with the grim bit rather than the bit where some kind of civilisation has been re-established following some apocalypse/catastrophe. Not many. (Charnas's 'Holdfast' sequence perhaps counts. Octavia Butler?) Another trope, which I alluded to in my book post yesterday, the notion of species with sentient males and non-sentient females. wild_irises asked 'are there any SF novels with nonsentient males?' and the only example I could think of was one of the alien races in the Lensman series, and it's so very long since I read those I can't be sure. Thinking of works by women, the sentient/non-sentient thing seems to play out around the concept of the robot/android. While in Joanna Russ, The Female Man, Jael's house includes as part of the furnishings a robot man rather more sophisticated than that envisaged by Connie Francis, in most instances these narratives are about the achievement of sentience. (There's also a trope about the alien. Woah, metaphor for gender relations or what? Males - either robotic or Other...?) There are probably a lot of instances I'm forgetting (or have never read) which contradict/support these hypotheses. Suggestions, anyone? This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1151800.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
oursin	8:20a	Happy birthday, cassandre! This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1151635.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.
desperance	6:48a	Oh wailie wailie This house is full of miseries this morning. Only one of whom has eaten prunes overnight (hint: icon). They hate it when I go away. Back in a week. No wifi where I'm going. Expect silence. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
pepysdiary	11:00p	Saturday 22 December 1666 http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/12/22/ At the office all the morning, and there come news from Hogg that our shipp hath brought in a Lubecker to Portsmouth, likely to prove prize, of deals, which joys us. At noon home to dinner, and then Sir W. Pen, Sir R. Ford, and I met at Sir W. Batten's to examine our papers, and have great hopes to prove her prize, and Sir R. Ford I find a mighty yare man in this business, making exceeding good observations from the papers on our behalf. Hereupon concluded what to write to Hogg and Middleton, which I did, and also with Mr. Oviatt (Sir R. Ford's son, who is to be our solicitor), to fee some counsel in the Admiralty, but none in town. So home again, and after writing letters by the post, I with all my clerks and Carcasse and Whitfield to the ticket-office, there to be informed in the method and disorder of the office, which I find infinite great, of infinite concernment to be mended, and did spend till 12 at night to my great satisfaction, it being a point of our office I was wholly unacquainted in. So with great content home and to bed. (Comment on this)
papersky	4:36p	Recent Tor.com posts Please comment there. Ian McDonald's Desolation Road. Dzur, Jhegaala, Iorich. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
truepenny	2:54p	UBC: The 'Hitler Myth' Kershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Oddly enough, I found an excellent one sentence summation of the thesis of this book in the next book I picked up, H. W. Koch's The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945 (1975): "Since he [Hitler] never said what he meant by 'nationalism' or by 'socialism' he could be, at least for a time, all things to all men" (p. 41). Kershaw's book is an examination of the public image of Hitler, particularly among non-Nazis, and how he managed to stay "all things to all men" for a phenomenally long time. The fundamental excuse which maintained Hitler's popularity, which Kershaw cites evidence for again and again and again, is that Hitler didn't know what his subordinates were doing (when in truth, of course, although the Nazi government was a wildly chaotic machine, no one with Hitler's paranoid and micromanaging character would have tolerated for a second the kind of ignorance people were attributing to him). Every time the Nazi government did something unpopular, Hitler was exculpated, so that Hitler and the NSDAP became widely separated in the minds of non-Nazis, while of course to members of the Nazi Party, Hitler was the NSDAP. Hitler's own very careful practice of speaking in generalities, and toning down his rabid fervor on certain subjects such as the "Jewish Question," and concealing his implacable determination to lead Germany into war, meant that people could project onto him whatever they needed to believe in and keep that quite separate from the dismal day to day realities of living in a fascist state. Kershaw also charts the decline and fall of Hitler's public image, starting with Stalingrad--Germany's first major defeat in WWII was also the first time that the Nazis' propaganda and lies were directly contradicted by inconvenient reality, and after that the chasm just kept getting wider and wider. Hitler's popularity, being built on lies and misdirection and--crucially--success after success, could not survive the truth of defeat. I have one other creepily interesting observation, which is that the standard defense of "Hitler doesn't know what his subordinates are doing" would later be picked up by the Hitler apologist, David Irving, who used it in Hitler's War to argue that Hitler was not responsible for the genocide of the Jews. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
oursin	8:37p	Very delayed reading post (going back several months): Part III Sff Not really all that much in this category, though I think there was a certain amount of re-reading. Phyllis Gotlieb, Birthstones (2007) - finally got round to this which has been sitting in the pile for some time. Good, but with a touch of worthiness. And a strong suspicion, that Gotlieb, like me, had read one too many (actually, one is too many) sf novels with a species with non-sentient females: and decided to work that out realistically. Kristin Cashore, Graceling (2008) and Fire (2009), since they were being mentioned all over the place. And were pretty good, and do a lot of the right sort of things, but somehow not (or not yet) in the class of 'major new discovery'. However, will do to be going on with and will probably read her next. Mercedes Lackey. Foundation: Book One of the Collegium Chronicles(A Valdemar Novel) (2008). Ummmm - readable but formulaic? Sharon Shinn, Fortune and Fate (2008). Very enjoyable. Not exactly pushing the boundaries of generic tropes, but it's just done very well with engaging characters. Madeline Howard, A Dark Sacrifice: Book Two of The Rune of Unmaking (2008). Again, not exactly pushing the generic boundaries. I thought this was going to be part 2 of a duology, but turned out to end on a cliffhanger and therefore we're in for at least a trilogy. While I was interested enough in Book One to buy this, I'm not sure I'm going to commit to the longer haul. Not particularly engaged by any of the characters. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1151483.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.

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