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The August 2023 Nightmares Underneath Bundle featuring The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Chthonstone Games.

Bundle of Holding: Nightmares Underneath (from 2023)

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:51 am
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Faraday, Oregon, seems to have a missing persons problem. Its problem is much worse.

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am
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A robot muses contentedly on the events that led it to its rapidly approaching doom.

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

The Uncle's Story

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:16 am
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[personal profile] watervole

 If, like me, you enjoy 'The Importance of being Earnest' (and even possibly if you don't), this delightful little story by Kalypso will surely please you as much as it pleased me.

 

 

Knitting and me

Oct. 21st, 2025 09:30 am
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[personal profile] hrj
One of my retirement to-do items is "learn to knit socks; knit socks." Now "learn to knit" might seem an odd part of that equation, given that I've been knitting since I was 10 years old. (I.e., for well over 50 years.) The thing is, I never learned to follow patterns. I'm like a musician who can learn tunes by listening, improvise music, and put on a great performance, but who never learned to read notation. I have, in fact, knitted a pair of socks before by sort of reverse-engineering how to make yarn look like that. But I figured it was time to actually learn "by the book" as it were.

My first step was to learn to read patterns via a book on blanket squares, making a (cotton) baby blanket for my grand-niece, where each of the 16 squares has a different pattern. That way I could learn cabling, lace knitting, and all sorts of other variants. I won't say that I can remember all the individual stitch instructions by heart, but I can do them and know how to look them up. (And I can remember them during the course of a particular project--they just don't necessarily stick permanently.)

As part of the sock goal, I've been picking up some lovely hand-dyed, fancy fiber sock yarns. But I don't want to do my beginner learning on those! So I went to my local yarn store...oops, the last LYS I went to (in Piedmont) has closed OH NOES! Search...search...search...ok there's another LYS in the Elmwood district. (These are both over on the bay side of the hills.) Explain my goals "a nice boring plain-color sock yarn that I might not mind frogging a lot." Turns out the Piedmont store closed because the proprietor wanted to retire...but she's now part-timing at the Elmwood store. So that feels like a happy story.

Now I'm swatching. Swatching! Me! Seat-of-the-pants me! I had picked up a lovely (expensive) interchangeable needle+cable set. Should be good for all my knitting needs, right? Uh...the smallest needles in the set are size 3, which is definitely too large for socks. And doing online research, not only does that brand not do smaller needle tips for the interchangeable set-up, nobody does smaller needles for interchangeable cable sets. This probably has to do with the problem of the minimum size of the little screw-in thingy connecting the cable and needle.

OK, back to the store, and not knowing what size is going to turn out to be optimal, I went ahead and got circular needles in sizes 2, 1, 0, and 00. (I have some even smaller double-points from back when I was doing some medieval silk knitting.) I wanted the circulars because I want to do the thing where you knit both socks at the same time on the same circular needle. This may possibly be over-ambitious at this point in my learning curve, but when have I not been over-ambitious?

Back to swatching. At this point I've done size 2 and size 1 and we're approaching the target stitch gauge, so I have hopes that I'll hit it before I run out of needle sizes.

ETA: The sock book I'm working from is "Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Sock Book." It has vast amounts of theory alongside the specific patterns, which warms my scientist's heart, but makes for boring reading when I'm still figuring out how all the theory fits in with the practice.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:55 am
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The story that began the grand tradition of picking on a teenager's work.

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis

Strasbourg. St Thomas's church

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:45 pm
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[personal profile] cmcmck
Another Protestant church

The church preserves it's old organ console which was played by both the young Mozart (R) and Albert Schweitzer.


More pics )

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

Oct. 20th, 2025 02:04 pm
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A bundle for Daniel James Hanley's tabletop roleplaying game of Gothic and Romantic Horror in the decadent, disastrous age of Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon, and Lord Byron.

Bundle of Holding: Ghastly Affair

Clarke Award Finalists 2019

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:54 am
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2019: The Tories somehow find someone worse than May to be Prime Minister, UK pleas to the EU for a Brexit negotiation do-over on the grounds “our negotiators were fucking numpties” fall on deaf ears, and Tory MPs reject multiple Tory Brexit proposals, for which UK voters rebuke the incompetent Tories with a massive majority.

Poll #33744 Clarke Award Finalists 2019
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33


Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Rosewater by Tade Thompson
7 (21.2%)

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
2 (6.1%)

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
25 (75.8%)

Semiosis by Sue Burke
10 (30.3%)

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
4 (12.1%)

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
1 (3.0%)



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

Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
Semiosis by Sue Burke

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
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Mars being unfit for humans, there is no alternative but to make humans--or at least a human--fit for Mars.

Man Plus (Man Plus, volume 1) by Frederik Pohl

Flashing by . . .

Oct. 18th, 2025 07:57 pm
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Viable Paradise is about to begin, which means hunkering in the bunker.

But today the weather was perfect for the protest gathering at a very busy five-points intersection here on Martha's Vineyard, with A LOT of people and some winsomely unique signage. Lots of laughter and horn honking, and although there were two protesters for the current regime, and a couple of cars went by with passengers waving thumbs down, there was no violence whatsoever. Yay! I wish that would be true everywhere.

Interesting patterns in signage; many quotes from the Bible and from the Constitution, and so very many crowned clowns. One frog, one unicorn, and a bee. Many, but not all, were my age or older.

Football Games and Library Privileges

Oct. 18th, 2025 10:20 am
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[personal profile] hrj
Periodically I have enough to-do items at the U.C. Berkeley library that I organize a trip through the tunnel around that task. I alternate between driving or BART+bicycle, depending, but since I had some widely-spread add-ons yesterday, I drove.

Yesterday was a Cal home game. I should have biked.

All it meant was that I had to park in the downtown Berkeley parking garage and hike a bit more--no big deal--but circling the campus in the process of discovering this fact was annoying.

I also was able to have a chat with the Permissions Desk person to confirm what types of things my alumna library card does not get for me. Also to confirm that *everyone* hits a cut-off point past downloading a certain number of files from a library computer. I can get full JSTOR access in the library, including downloading articles to a thumb drive, but at some point (which seems to be variable) it declines to keep downloading. Changing terminals makes no difference. I should experiment with changing thumb drive *and* terminal to see if it's reading the drive ID in some way. (Permission granted for someone knowledgeable to explain the possibilities to me.)

This limit also exists when downloading files for Haithi Trust documents. Now the complicating factor for Haithi Trust is that *how* you are able to download the file depends entirely on the specific file and its permissions. Yesterday I wanted to download a copy of "A new picture of Paris, or, The stranger's guide to the French metropolis" a 1827 guidebook for the English traveler. I'd been pulling some screenshots for key information on my home computer, but don't have any download permissions on my own.

Problem is: A New Picture of Paris has slightly restricted permissions where you can only download one page at a time. And the download limit evidently is around 130 downloads. After which, not only could I not continue downloading A New Picture of Paris pages, but I couldn't download anything else. Fortunately, one of the other articles I wanted to get was available through a different online portal which allowed emailing the content as one of the options. (And without needing any extra log-on layer.)

I joked to the help desk guy that maybe I should go for a second PhD just to get the full library access. He pointed out that simply signing up for a University Extension class might do it. But I'm not sure I want to go that far. Mostly patience and workarounds will do it.

The only item on my shopping list that I hit a brick wall on was Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen (2025, by Sarah E. Maier & Rachel M. Friars). Only way to get it through UCB is inter-library loan, and that's not part of the alumni privileges. I was able to see a list of chapters with summaries and it looks like a fascinating book. But because it's criticism of modern media (about historic lesbians), it's somewhat tangential to my topic. Too tangential to shell out a hundred bucks for a hard copy. Even too tangential to shell out $35 for an ebook. (I fantasize about having both the standing and the nerve to request review copies of academic books, but I don't feel like I'm operating at that level currently.)

And now I'm deciding whether to hop on my fold-up bike and BART down to Walnut Creek for the No Kings rally (like I did last time), or park+BART then see how crowded the BART-downtown shuttle is. (Though it's a semi-reasonable walk, and I probably won't be doing other exercise today.) Last time I did the bike+BART thing and had the bad luck to get a flat. Which was awkward because I didn't take the bike bag with the tools and spare tubes (because I didn't want to lug it to the rally), so getting home involved a lot of walking the bike. No reason to expect it to happen again, but...salience effect, you know?
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Seven books new to me. Well, six and one replacement. Four fantasy, one historical, one horror, one science fiction. Two appear to be part of series.

Books Received, October 11 to October 17


Poll #33737 Books Received, October 11 to October 17
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 51


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Boys With Sharp Teeth by Jenni Howell (July 2026)
6 (11.8%)

Behind Five Willows by June Hur (May 2026)
16 (31.4%)

Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher (August 2026)
34 (66.7%)

Heir of Storms by Lauryn Hamilton Murray (June 2026)
4 (7.8%)

City of Others by Jaren Poon (January 2026)
20 (39.2%)

Starry Messenger: The Best of Galileo edited by Charles C. Ryan (November 1979)
7 (13.7%)

How to Lose a Goblin in Ten Days by Jessie Sylva (January 2026)
18 (35.3%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
35 (68.6%)

Another church

Oct. 17th, 2025 12:25 pm
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[personal profile] cmcmck
The church of St Pierre le jeune (St Peter the younger) which is now a protestant church although much older than that faith.

An image of the nations (ironically, all the catholic ones)



See more! )
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The tabletop science fiction roleplaying game of transhuman survival from Posthuman Studios.

Bundle of Holding: Eclipse Phase 2E (from 2022)
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The American orbital transfer station offers employment to Byron McDougall, a chance for Charlie Bond to search for an alternative to MAD, and for Diana Osborne, escape from her violently abusive father.

The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury
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Growing up is hard enough without the entire world falling apart around you.

Five Novels About Coming of Age During the Apocalypse

The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran

Oct. 15th, 2025 09:19 am
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Why do Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital patients keep plummeting from the 6th floor, and why do none of them bleed when they hit the tarmac? The explanation is outside Detective Suyeon's field of expertise.

The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran

All the different "me"s

Oct. 14th, 2025 12:52 pm
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There's a delicate balance to putting one's life in a lot of different online spaces. I don't want to simply duplicate content across them all. But periodically I want to indicate what I'm writing about where. So here's a brief guide:

Alpennia.com blog -- This is where the content of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project goes (including podcast transcripts). It's also where I talk about my writing and publishing projects in detail. (Like today's blog about getting back to working on Mistress of Shadows: https://alpennia.com/blog/fish-markets-19th-century-marseille) I haven't been doing that as much in the last couple years, but if you want to know details, that's where to follow me. There's an RSS feed of that blog that has a feed here on Dreamwidth, but it sometimes gets weird when I've set up posts in advance. And also, I don't get notified of comments on the RSS posts, so if you actually want to engage in conversation about the blog, you have to do it at alpennia.com.

Dreamwidth -- This tends to be long-form info about my everyday life, but also thoughts about books and writing that I don't necessarily want to tie directly to my professional site. (For example, I've moved book reviews--such as they are--to Dreamwidth.) The exception is that it's hard to post images in Dreamwidth so if I ever want to do anything will illustrations (like trip reports), those go to alpennia.

Facebook -- The only real profession posts there are links to the alpennia blog. Otherwise, it's for chatting with friends and family and nattering on about everyday stuff. Posts about the garden and wildlife get distributed randomly across fb and bsky. Before I retired, I friends-locked everything that wasn't a blog link, so that I could keep professional separation. Now I don't really lock anything there.

Bluesky -- This is much more for interacting with my bookish/fannish/etc. friends. I'm more likely to be posting about professional topics, though it also gets everyday stuff that I think might amuse/entertain people. I don't do memes much, but I'm more likely to engage in comments/conversations on writing topics. Bluesky is my professional network space.

Mastodon -- I have a mastodon account and cross-post the links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project stuff there, but not really much else. I do engage with comments or stuff I'm tagged in, but don't read the feed.

Discord -- I have a Discord "fan club" (it's labelled Alpennia, but is for all my writing) which is open to anyone who asks. It's relatively low-volume. The Discord gets some sneak peaks at projects and advance information that I'm not ready to post publicly. We occasionally get lively discussions, especially on gender/sexuality topics. Members of the Discord are also free/encouraged to post about their own writing, etc. (I'm also a member of a number of other Discords, though there are relatively few where I read most of the posts.)

Newsletter -- I have an email newsletter that I keep trying to get back on schedule with. Currently, it's primarily news about my publications and convention appearances. Sometimes I include "bonus content" about my books, but that was becoming daunting to keep up with.

The big thing I'm always hoping to find is interaction. Conversation. Sharing of ideas and feedback. My biggest disappointment about the alpennia.com blog is how very little direct interaction I get from it. (Hampered by the need to manually approve comments, due to comment-spam.) I wish I could figure out how to be more interesting.

Last pics from the cathedral museum

Oct. 14th, 2025 08:44 pm
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[personal profile] cmcmck
The building itself is stunning!



See more: )
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Fallen Woman turned private investigator Sarah Tolerance is hired to recover a fan. Carnage ensues.

Point of Honour (Sarah Tolerance, volume 1) by Madeleine E. Robins

I ran an errand

Oct. 13th, 2025 03:21 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
During which I encountered:

* A person supine on the sidewalk, having apparently been struck by a car exiting the expressway. There were EMTs so I didn't interfere.

* A person driving their RC car on the LRT tracks as the train was approaching, who seemed put out that I told him to get off the tracks.

* An angry screaming apparently deranged guy between me and where I needed to be to catch the bus.

Bundle of Holding: Huckleberry

Oct. 13th, 2025 01:57 pm
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This all-new Huckleberry Bundle presents Huckleberry, the mythic Wyrd West tabletop roleplaying game about tragic cowboys in a world doomed to calamity – unless you save it.

Bundle of Holding: Huckleberry

Clarke Award Finalists 2018

Oct. 13th, 2025 10:51 am
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2018: Tories vote to pitch the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, PM May’s Brexit progress is strangely uneven, while Prince Harry and Meghan Markle conduct an experiment to determine the depths of British racism.

Poll #33722 Clarke Award Finalists 2018
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7


Which 2018 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock
1 (14.3%)

American War by Omar El Akkad
2 (28.6%)

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
5 (71.4%)

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed
0 (0.0%)

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill
1 (14.3%)

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
1 (14.3%)



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

Which 2018 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock
American War by Omar El Akkad
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed
Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill
Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
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A diverse assortment of (mostly) non-Future History science fiction stories from Robert A. Heinlein.

The Menace From Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

More from the cathedral museum

Oct. 12th, 2025 09:42 am
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[personal profile] cmcmck
This gives you some idea of the age of the building:





Early medieval carvings:



More pics! )
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DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE POST A NAKED URL HERE.

Asking politely has failed for 20 years. Therefore, comments with naked urls will be deleted, as they break Recent Comments. To post links, follow the advice below.



DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE POST A NAKED URL HERE.

OK, results of this have not been what I wanted.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE POST A NAKED URL HERE.

I am beginning a count now (1:23 PM Oct 13) and if the naked url count hits ten, and I don't think it's someone trying to game what I am going to post, I will turn off anonymous comments for a week. If after that, I get another ten naked urls, I will try a month, and then a year.

If the offender has a DW account, I will block them.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE POST A NAKED URL HERE.
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13 works new to me. Four fantasy, two horror, one non-fiction, one thriller, and five SF, of which at least three are series.

Books Received, October 4 to October 10


Poll #33712 Books Received, October 4 to October 10
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 55


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

The Seed of Destruction by Rick Campbell (July 2026)
2 (3.6%)

Uncivil Guard by Foster Chamberlin (November 2025)
8 (14.5%)

Crawlspace by Adam Christopher (March 2026)
6 (10.9%)

The Girl With a Thouand Faces by Sunyi Dean (May 2026)
16 (29.1%)

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein (April 2026)
5 (9.1%)

Blood Bound by Ellis Hunter (April 2026)
1 (1.8%)

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (June 2026)
19 (34.5%)

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher (March 2026)
25 (45.5%)

Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Three edited by Stephen Kotowych (October 2025)
17 (30.9%)

Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills (April 2026)
16 (29.1%)

The Body by Bethany C. Morrow (February 2026)
4 (7.3%)

I’ll Watch Your Baby by Neena Viel (May 2026)
5 (9.1%)

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward (July 2026)
9 (16.4%)

Some other option
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
38 (69.1%)

Leveraging One's Geek

Oct. 10th, 2025 02:41 pm
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[personal profile] hrj
Oh, I could post about all sorts of things. Like Wednesday's adventures with the refrigerator/water-leak/street-full-of-police-and-ambulances. But I thought I'd talk about my experiments with productivity.

So at the start of retirement, I was thinking about how I tend to hyperfocus on things and was worried about making progress on ALL my projects and activities. So I set up this spreadsheet with a dozen categories of activities and checked off how many I "touched" each day.

It was a bit fun, in a gamification way. Problem is, gamification doesn't really work for me as an incentive. It just became a chore to remember to record. And I didn't feel like I was necessarily pushing all the projects forward. Touching is not pushing.

So now I'm trying to leverage my tendency toward hyperfocus. I'm giving myself one project to really drill down on for a week. Then I move on to another project. So last week was getting two months of podcasts lined up. This week was making significant process on the write-up for my analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo category. Next week I think needs to be household projects. But the week after should be fiction.

Of course, that's not *all* I'm doing. I'm still biking or going to the gym every day. I'm posting pre-written history blog posts. And I'm dealing with immediate crises. (See comment about refrigerator/water-leak/street-full-of-police-and-ambulances.) And I've been feeling a bit in a rut, so I've integrated a few non-routine things like going into Berkeley for book shopping.

I picked up a facsimile of an 1828 guide to Paris, which may be useful for Mistress of Shadows, which takes place in 1826. Of course, the book is in French...but the other thing I was shopping for was materials for starting to work on my reading French. Did you know that Berkeley has a specialty French language bookstore? Did you know they don't really have anything aimed at someone who wants to learn to read the language but doesn't care about speaking it? Ah well, I have some reference works and it's not like I have any lack of texts I'd be interested in reading.

Aubette 1928

Oct. 10th, 2025 07:59 pm
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[personal profile] cmcmck
This amazing art deco building was designed by the well known designers and artists Hans and Sophie Arp and and the architect Theo van Doesberg.

It's remarkable to think that all this was covered up and lost until restoration in the nineteen eighties and nineties.


See more! )

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