Between the "30 days of Blake's 7" meme I was doing on DreamWidth and the subsequent outbreak of fanfic (currently about 10,000 words and end in sight), I have been somewhat immersed in Blake's 7 even before I went to do a bit of research on Hermit for said fanfic this morning and wandered off into the con reports. This probably explains why when I went to Co-Op this afternoon and their in-house radio started playing The Beautiful South's "Don't marry her, have me", I was immediately taken back to the first time I heard that song - as a Blake's 7 filk at Redemption 99. It was very funny then, and having just looked it up on the con reports page it's still funny now.
I've been feeling rather melancholy the last few weeks. February or March marked 30 years since I went to my first con. It was Neutral Zone in Newcastle, a multimedia con by the local Star Trek fan group, and I went because Gareth Thomas was a guest. I had a lot of fun, so I went to another one, the first Discworld con. And then the last Who's 7, and since then I've gone to at least one con every year.
I wrote B7 con reports and theatre trip reports back then. _Detailed_ reports. And I'm so glad I did, because although I wrote them for other fans who couldn't be there, now they're for me. 20, 25, 30 years on, I can read them and be taken back to that time when we were all young. All the people I met and made friends with.
Fannish networks change and we lose contact. We move on, from Usenet and mailing lists to LiveJournal and Twitter, and Tumbler, to other fandoms, and, and... People drift away, and sadly some of them have died now. It's ten years since Gareth died, eleven since we lost Pterry. But I still have online links with so many of those friends of long ago, and if there is ever another Redemption I will be there.
Rain! In June!
Jun. 6th, 2026 09:15 amCurrently on writing retreat at Union Pier in Michigan, and am utterly charmed at the concept of rain in June. Rain! In June! No wonder these trees are such a deep, deep green!
Little actual writing done as I've been laboring at Worldcon tasks, specifically the tetris of scheduling the writing panels. All zillion of them--which means juggling participants whose schedules might clash with times and places. Not a thing I am good at, whew, not at all.
Today I hope to get some actual writing done. So close to finishing off a piece, so close, the images swim in my mind.
Little actual writing done as I've been laboring at Worldcon tasks, specifically the tetris of scheduling the writing panels. All zillion of them--which means juggling participants whose schedules might clash with times and places. Not a thing I am good at, whew, not at all.
Today I hope to get some actual writing done. So close to finishing off a piece, so close, the images swim in my mind.
Jodie Foster
Jun. 6th, 2026 12:00 am"Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from."
Mo Udall
Jun. 6th, 2026 12:00 am"If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong."
Woody Allen
Jun. 6th, 2026 12:00 am"Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things."
Alec Bourne
Jun. 6th, 2026 12:00 am"It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated."
Scammed
Jun. 6th, 2026 07:59 am I got scammed yesterday. It's an occupational hazard for anyone who stands front of house in a place of worship. First comes the sob story and then- oh, by the way, could you lend me the money for the train fare to X? It's urgent and you're my last hope. Afterwards one notices the inconsistencies and improbabilities and kicks oneself, but in the heat of the moment one's sympathies override one's critical faculty. Ailz consoled me with the reflection that anyone who goes to the lengths these folk go to in their yarn spinning must really need the money- and could almost be said to have earned it. This one even had a confederate who backed up the initial phone call with another from (allegedly) the Isle of Wight.
I dreamed last night that we were being bombed by the Germans. The planes angled down one by one in broad daylight and dropped their bombs in a nearby street. There were big explosions.....
I dreamed last night that we were being bombed by the Germans. The planes angled down one by one in broad daylight and dropped their bombs in a nearby street. There were big explosions.....
אַ ליבעלע װערט אַ ליבע, אַ לידעלע װערט אַ ליד
Jun. 5th, 2026 11:52 pmFor six years I did not see
ladymondegreen except through a screen, so it was especially lovely to meet them in the bright hot afternoon by Spy Pond and catch up on the respective ways we had managed not to die since last we compared notes, after which it planlessly evolved that we repaired to my parents' house and ended up cooking a suitable dinner with interludes of watering the irises and the alyssum, touring the art in the house with my father, and lying around on the couch. Late in the evening
akawil and
pecunium came by to collect their spouse and talk programming and rocks with my parents and my mother had to kick all of us out into the night before her natural nocturnal clock ticked over to the point where she woke up. We are resolved to keep not dying so that it need not be another six years before we share a view of the water.
3W4DW book meme
Jun. 5th, 2026 10:48 amFound via
coffeeandink:
Take five books off your bookshelf. (Mine were all from my Print TBR bookcase. Yes, it is a whole bookcase.)
Book #1 -- first sentence: "The Saturday after Labor Day, at the last party wrung from the summer, my friend Kathy showed us a picture of her brother's two boys."
Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: "So I read science fiction and dreamed."
Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: "Hold the bucket and belay, there."
(I chose the second complete sentence.)
Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: "Vanessa's domestic skill and organization brio have been extolled by nearly everyone she knew."
(The last sentence was incomplete, but most of it was on the page, so I counted it.)
Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: "But if the Islamic world managed it before, it can do so again."
Make the five sentences into a paragraph:
he Saturday after Labor Day, at the last party wrung from the summer, my friend Kathy showed us a picture of her brother's two boys. So I read science fiction and dreamed. Hold the bucket and belay, there. Vanessa's domestic skill and organization brio have been extolled by nearly everyone she knew. But if the Islamic world managed it before, it can do so again.
(Well, that's a bit Dada!)
Book #1: The Smoke Week, Sept. 11-21, 2001 by Ellis Avery
Book #2: Mammoths of the Great Plains plus... by Eleanor Arnason
Book #3: The Hundred Days by Patrick O'Brian
Book #4: Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Msrriages by Katie Roiphe
Book #5: The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili
Take five books off your bookshelf. (Mine were all from my Print TBR bookcase. Yes, it is a whole bookcase.)
Book #1 -- first sentence: "The Saturday after Labor Day, at the last party wrung from the summer, my friend Kathy showed us a picture of her brother's two boys."
Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: "So I read science fiction and dreamed."
Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: "Hold the bucket and belay, there."
(I chose the second complete sentence.)
Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: "Vanessa's domestic skill and organization brio have been extolled by nearly everyone she knew."
(The last sentence was incomplete, but most of it was on the page, so I counted it.)
Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: "But if the Islamic world managed it before, it can do so again."
Make the five sentences into a paragraph:
he Saturday after Labor Day, at the last party wrung from the summer, my friend Kathy showed us a picture of her brother's two boys. So I read science fiction and dreamed. Hold the bucket and belay, there. Vanessa's domestic skill and organization brio have been extolled by nearly everyone she knew. But if the Islamic world managed it before, it can do so again.
(Well, that's a bit Dada!)
Book #1: The Smoke Week, Sept. 11-21, 2001 by Ellis Avery
Book #2: Mammoths of the Great Plains plus... by Eleanor Arnason
Book #3: The Hundred Days by Patrick O'Brian
Book #4: Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Msrriages by Katie Roiphe
Book #5: The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili
Henry Stimson
Jun. 5th, 2026 12:00 am"The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him."
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Jun. 5th, 2026 12:00 am"We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."
Edward Gibbon
Jun. 5th, 2026 12:00 am"All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance."
Senator Everett Dirksen
Jun. 5th, 2026 12:00 am"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money."
Addition And Subtraction
Jun. 5th, 2026 08:32 am Life is a process of addition and subtraction. You lose one thing and gain another. You lose the freedom of youth and gain the security of family life- and so on. Of course it's never as clearcut as that. There are gains within losses and losses within gains- and, if you're being properly Zen about it- both gains and losses are illusory.
You think you've found peace in old age but things still keep occuring- and the only peace that you can count on is that which comes from within......
Peace (on Earth, anyway) isn't about the absence of troubles and annoyances but how you deal with them when they arise.
As Kipling wrote (in a poem that's deeper than it seems)
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same......"
You think you've found peace in old age but things still keep occuring- and the only peace that you can count on is that which comes from within......
Peace (on Earth, anyway) isn't about the absence of troubles and annoyances but how you deal with them when they arise.
As Kipling wrote (in a poem that's deeper than it seems)
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same......"
Kurt Vonnegut
Jun. 4th, 2026 12:00 am"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
Eve Babitz
Jun. 4th, 2026 12:00 am"By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd be grown up."
Arthur C. Clarke
Jun. 4th, 2026 12:00 am"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."
Niels Bohr
Jun. 4th, 2026 12:00 am"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."
Did you bring gold? Did you bring silver to set me free?
Jun. 4th, 2026 03:01 amWe might not have spent the sunset at Marblehead Light if we had known that all five yacht clubs within earshot would fire off a salute of cannons in accordance with the naval tradition of evening colors in season, but on either side of the sudden harbor-rolling cracks of smoke it was a postcard of a sunset in the smelted oranges and wave-mirrored blues of a painted present from, partitioned by the nineteenth-century cast-iron skeleton of the light itself.
spatch had wanted to take me to water after I had spent the previous day in the kind of pain where as soon as it eased off a little I passed out. We ate roast beef sandwiches parked at the Mystic Lakes and drove north once rush hour had died down.
( I've brought silver to set you free. )
Home again with a bowl of noodles, I heard
rushthatspeaks' irresistible report on Tokuzō Tanaka's The Whale God (鯨神, 1962), a radiation of Melville I had known nothing about. Rob and I have not yet caught up on the latest episode of Widow's Bay (2026), but last week when we marathoned the previous three we were delighted to confirm that in its remix of New England horrors, Shirley Jackson had unambiguously entered the chat. Hestia, our own lighthouse, was golden-eyed in the cat tree.
( I've brought silver to set you free. )
Home again with a bowl of noodles, I heard