Hard Things

Jan. 28th, 2026 00:02
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Life is full of things which are hard or tedious or otherwise unpleasant that need doing anyhow. They help make the world go 'round, they improve skills, and they boost your sense of self-respect. But doing them still kinda sucks. It's all the more difficult to do those things when nobody appreciates it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our accomplishments and pat each other on the back.

What are some of the hard things you've done recently? What are some hard things you haven't gotten to yet, but need to do? Is there anything your online friends could do to make your hard things a little easier?

bombast

Jan. 28th, 2026 00:00
[syndicated profile] merriamwebster_feed

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 28, 2026 is:

bombast • \BAHM-bast\  • noun

Bombast is a formal word that refers to speech or writing that is meant to sound important or impressive but that is not sincere or meaningful.

// You need less bombast and more substance in this speech.

See the entry >

Examples:

“This is bombast that has not been thought through from a policy perspective. I know that many in the space community find this to be exciting and want to believe the hype behind such an announcement. Mars is exciting. However ... I think we have to ask ourselves whether getting to Mars is worth the moral costs in addition to the economic costs and potential risks to human lives.” — P. J. Blount, quoted in Newsweek, 28 Jan. 2025

Did you know?

Bombast settled softly into English in the mid-late 16th century as a textile term used to refer to cotton or other soft fibrous material used as padding or stuffing (its ultimate source is likely the Middle Persian noun pambak, meaning “cotton”), but within a decade it had extended from literal stuffing to figurative stuffing, referring to speech or writing that is padded with pretentious verbiage. The adjective bombastic, which followed bombast a century later, has been a favorite choice to describe blowhards, boasters, and cockalorums ever since.



Climate Change

Jan. 27th, 2026 17:27
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
What happens to forests when the planet warms up too fast

New sediment records from the Norwegian Sea offer a rare, close-up look at how quickly nature can unravel when the planet warms. During a past episode of extreme global warming, coastal forests along the Arctic margin collapsed within just a few centuries.

What followed was a cascade of change – widespread wildfires, heavy soil erosion, and a rush of carbon back into the atmosphere. The study shows how land ecosystems can rapidly flip from storing carbon to releasing it, amplifying warming long after the initial trigger.


Read more... )
pauraque: drawing of a wolf reading a book with a coffee cup (customer service wolf)
[personal profile] pauraque
This is the third and final part of my book club notes on As the Earth Dreams. [Part one, part two.]


"deh ah market" by Whitney French

A pair of cousins bend time and space to connect with worlds and relatives past. )


"Paroxysm" by Zalika Reid-Benta

A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. )


"Just Say Garuka" by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga

Two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice. )


the end

I think the group did not end up being super jazzed about this book on the whole, and I felt similarly. There were a few stories I liked, but some felt like maybe they needed another pass for cohesion, and the collection leaned thematically grim in a way that I had a hard time connecting with. Oh well, they can't all be winners.

The group plans to continue with The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories.
muccamukk: Grace stares at her laptop screen, rubbing her temple and looking appalled. (Lone Star: What Am I Reading?)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I honestly never did finish the last season of 9-1-1 Lone Star because I didn't like it as much after the cast change, and the new stories weren't grabbing me. Then I changed streaming services, and couldn't be bothered to find it another way.

But I was looking at what was on Crave, since I have that right now, and saw that there was a new show called 9-1-1 Nashville, and thought I'd give it a whirl.

Boy, whatever new direction notes they got, were not my thing. It's all about some rich guy and his sons fighting with each other, and a scheming baby mamma, and we basically don't meet any of the other characters in the pilot. How on earth did they talk Chris O'Donnell into this nonsense? He can't be that hard up!

Plus the rescues were just very silly. And this is by standards of the 9-1-1 franchise, which is already extremely silly. This girl gets carried into the air by a kite! Not like a special kite, just a... regular one. A tornado is bearing down on a country music festival and they save it with the power of heart!

I vaguely considered watching the second half of the pilot before deciding there's got to be other trash shows I'd enjoy more. When is the new Stargate show happening?

I think if you're interested in foe-yay half brothers who want to fuck, you might be in business?
aurumcalendula: image from Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half with a vhs tape added and a caption that reads 'vid all the things!' (vid all the things)
[personal profile] aurumcalendula
January 27 - 'What are your vidding ambitions for 2026?' for [personal profile] serrico:

Read more... )

(there are still slots open for the January Talking Meme here)

Brrrr.

Jan. 27th, 2026 20:52
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
[personal profile] edschweppe
Last weekend's snowpocalypse ... wasn't horrible, for me at least. I ended up with around sixteen or so inches of relatively fluffy snow; more than enough to need a lot of shoveling, but not too terribly bad.

This week is just going to be really, really cold. Never getting above freezing during the day, and down in the single digits at night. (The National Weather Service is currently predicting subzero lows Friday night. Yikes.)

And we may have a serious nor'easter for the weekend. Apparently the models are in fairly good agreement that there will be a big storm somewhere on the Atlantic coast, but the possible storm tracks are anywhere from way the hell south of here to right on top of me. Unsurprising, six days out ...
michifugu: by Flowerchild Ueda (Utsushicha Dame-na Kao - Io & Misa)
[personal profile] michifugu
Hey everyone! I wanted to write something after being busy these past few weeks accompanying my mom through her thyroid surgery.

The past weeks have been stressful as my mom underwent thyroid surgery. Afterward, she needed to spend three exhausting days in the ICU because her condition had worsened. My siblings and I took turns staying with her, which left me pretty tired, but I’m grateful she was able to leave the ICU quickly.

I also felt really bad for the elderly men and women in the waiting room who had had family members in the ICU for more than two weeks. I genuinely wish the best for their loved ones and hope they can be moved out of the ICU soon.

Right now, I’m staying at the hospital to accompany my mom. So far, her condition is okay, although she won’t stop coughing. We’re currently waiting for her doctor's assessment, and I really hope it's good.

Also, the hospital she’s staying at kind of sucks, the nurses are unprofessional despite it being a national cancer hospital, and we didn’t use national health insurance because the waiting list would’ve been way too long, and my mom was already feeling really uncomfortable as her thyroid nodule kept getting worse. On the plus side, one of the best oncologists is based at this hospital, so there’s that, I guess.

Anyway, I’m kind of stuck here just accompanying my mom and playing games on my laptop, lol. Thankfully, I downloaded a number of games for my emulator.

I’ve been playing Pokemon Moon and Bravely Default on the 3DS. I never had the chance to play Moon before, so that’s been nice.

Hopefully, my mom can be discharged tomorrow as her condition is holding steady.

Is this a Canadian thing?

Jan. 27th, 2026 16:13
muccamukk: Abe has a question. (Hellboy: Question)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I want to try making this Melt the ICE hat, which of course knits in the round. I haven't done that, so I looked up a couple tutorials on how to knit with double pointed needles. They both said, "these will come in sets of five." The pattern says, "divide evenly on 4 DPNs" (which I assume implies the existence of a fifth needle to work with).

Every single one of the many sets of DPNs I got from Mom comes in a set of four.

Why?
musesfool: image of a snowflake (nothing but winter in my cup)
[personal profile] musesfool
Today was super annoying because I had a very weird internet outage. Spectrum acknowledged that there was an outage in my area even! But it was only partial? Or intermittent? Just fucking weird. I could get to my work-related sites fairly frequently (outlook, sharepoint), but literally nothing else would load except for some reason gmail. Like, no news sites. No bank. No shopping sites. Bitwarden timed out trying to log into my password vault. I couldn't get anything at all to load on my personal laptop until I plugged in my phone to use it as a hotspot, which was greyed out and not allowed on my work laptop. Finally, around 4 pm when Spectrum said the outage was over but I still didn't have full service, I chatted with them and somehow their reboot of everything worked (even though I rebooted the modem and router several times on my own without any luck), so I was able to get full access to the internet on both laptops and on my TV. *hands*

In other news, I found that a stint overnight in the fridge greatly improved those cupcakes. I wasn't impressed by them at room temp (texture was super spongy), but they're really good with the extra time in the cold! So if you need vegan cupcakes, the KAB recipe is recommended, especially if you make them ahead of time.

Meanwhile, it looks like we might get a nor'easter this coming weekend? A big storm potentially, though with less snow and more wind. No warming of temperatures anyway. Oy.

*
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Bloods results from Friday afternoon came in. Read more... )

Dept. of Cold and COVID

Jan. 27th, 2026 14:33
kaffy_r: Image of personified Death with scythe (Death's definitee)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Yep, I Tested Positive

I thought I was coming down with the same bad cold that Bob was slowly recovering from. I don't get colds all that often, and I'd thought this one would pass me by, but nope, it appeared eager to settle in my head. Well, dang ... I headed for bed, hoping it wouldn't be too bad in the morning. 

Around 3 a.m. Saturday I woke up with aches that signaled a potential temperature. And indeed I had one; 100.7, significantly higher than the 97.9 I usually run. I knew that colds don't feature fevers so I tested myself for COVID. 

I didn't even have to wait the requisite 15 minutes, both lines were there in bright red within 30 seconds. 

Welp. 

I've felt like I've been hit by a truck ever since. I keep telling myself it's a smaller truck than it might have been, thanks to the booster shot I got last year (of course, I can't recall exactly when I got it, but I think it was in mid-summer.) but it's still a truck. I ran a lower temp on Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday, today, I haven't had a temperature since then and today I retook a test. At first, the only reaction was the control line. Huzzah! I was certain I'd gotten the first of the two negative tests I'd need to declare myself COVID free. As I said, Huzzah--

--except at the end of the 15 minute wait time, there it was, a faint but definite second line. 

Welp. Again. 

And it's still like being hit by a small truck. 

Ah well, I'm getting some work done on my NTBP* novel, escaping a corner I'd painted myself into. And I'm also making some bread. That always comforts me. 

And here, have something I wrote about cold decades ago. Since we're still in single digit temperatures with subzero windchills, it feels the same to me, although this was written after a relatively rare ice storm during a cold snap.


Glass City
 
The city is glass and I am cold.
 
When cold aches out of bone
into fingertips,
and back again;
into the back of my throat and under the sleeves of my coat
and back again;
why then I can't see the glass.
My own breath blocks my sight. Painfully.
 
Cold holds my body for ransom.
It slaps my face and makes my toes snap,
it steps on my feet and punches the small of my back.
Traitor body, to let it in.
 
Did it really start in the bone?
I am so tired of my bones doing that.
 
All about me, the glass trees rustle.
Splinters of blue light and silver at the top,
in the middle a puzzle and madness of glitter in the bright, faded sky.
 
Winter sun does that.
 
It's almost worth
the cold.

March, 1995

* not to be published
kat_lair: (TREK - bff)
[personal profile] kat_lair
***

Title: For the Wonder
Author:[personal profile] kat_lair
Fandom: Star Trek Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Pairing: Kirk/Bones
Tags: Drabble, Stars, Fluff
Rating: G
Word count: 100

Summary: “I never tire of seeing this.”

Author notes:
 For  [community profile] fandomtrees I wrote five drabbles for [personal profile] pushkin666. They were themed around the five senses. This one is sight. 

For the Wonder on AO3

For the Wonder )

***

[personal profile] cosmolinguist

This afternoon, my phone got stuck in a boot loop. It was bad enough when I was looking at it with utter confusion, but when D finished work and I could ask him to have a look at it, he looked just as baffled. Uh-oh!

I missed it immediately: my day is so much easier to get through with podcasts or audiobooks to keep me company. I struggled more to eat lunch (leftover balsamic mushrooms, on toast) without the distraction. There was a nice "like in the old days" element of having to read my library book and being left to just Wonder if an email I was waiting for had arrived or not, but it was difficult when I didn't have anything to drown out ambient noise when I was trying to relax. I do understand why separate mp3 players are having a resurgence (though I'd want a podcast player as well as an audiobook player and that sounds Complicated).

When D and I went to walk Teddy, V was upstairs so I wanted to lock the door. I grabbed their keys instead of mine, probably because I'd done that yesterday when they and I had been the ones going out and D had been upstairs working. But this time, by the time we got back to our street, the Tesco van was in our driveway, earlier than the time slot we'd been given. Poor V had had to scramble and move stuff to open the kitchen door and the side gate, and pile all the groceries on the dining table. We got back in time to put everything away but they were clearly exhausted and I felt absolutely awful at having inadvertently locked them in the house (my keys were right near the door but they didn't know that so it didn't actually help) and made them deal with an extra hurdle because Tesco was so early and with no earning.

I slept very badly last night and had an early start, going with D to his latest dental hospital appointment, so by the time I finished work I was feeling really gross and thought I'd lie down for a bit. I ended up falling asleep and waking up only when D told me dinner was ready and he'd sent our apologies for queer club which had already begun by that point. Oops. But it was kind of a relief, not to have to go anywhere else today; I was feeling gross even despite rhe nap and being around people felt difficult.

After we ate, D said he suddenly had a craving for a root beer float, and I said that thinking about ice cream made me want ice cream all of a sudden. We couldn't get root beer on such short notice but we did drive to the Co-op and get Ben & Jerry's cookie dough ice cream. D had had a big day with another minor oral surgery so early in the morning, we'd been good and a treat seemed like a good idea. It'd been a while since we'd done something silly just because we can.

trobadora: (mightier)
[personal profile] trobadora
We're nearing the end of the month, and I don't believe we have a host for February yet. Who's up for hosting?

Today's writing

Mostly structural work on an exchange fic, trying to wrangle it into a viable shape.

Tally

Days 1-25 )

Day 26: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] luzula, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] shadaras, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora

Day 27: [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] trobadora

Let me know if I missed anyone! And remember you can drop in or out at any time. :)

🔊 Daily music

Jan. 27th, 2026 15:07
bluapapilio: headphones connected to a heart (listening pleasure)
[personal profile] bluapapilio
@ Spotify

Enemies fallen when the sermon spoken
Taken by higher hand, amen
Hallow the martyrs when the Bible's broken
Summon the testament, amen
🎤
POWERWOLF - Army Of The Night

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piranha: red origami crane (Default)
renaissance poisson

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