A song that you know all the lyrics of: This one initially felt difficult, until I remembered recently hearing on the radio (yes, I still listen to the radio; I don't spotify) Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road." It was one of the songs on "Born to Run," the album that catapulted him into fame's corrosive klieg light.
He was young, and the lyrics he wrote here are full of the kind of thoughts a young person thinks of as wisdom. These days I hear different things in the song than I did when I first heard it, particularly in the rough way he treats the woman, Mary, in the song. Still, I remember it so well because Bob, Dr. Gonzo and I put it into our small repertoire when we were a monumentally unsuccessful rock and roll band. We loved singing it - Bob on the melody, Dr. Gonzo and I doing two-part harmony.
When I heard it recently, I started to sing along, until my throat thickened with tears, possibly because I remembered singing it when I was young and thought I had what was wisdom - I don't know. But I know every word, every syllable of the song.
I started following Nova Black on YouTube a while back, but she hadn't uploaded in some time, so I was really happy to see her post again recently (explaining that she'd gone quite a few months without a working phone). She mostly posts about her life as a houseless traveler, but she wants to record more of her music to upload as she's able, and I hope she does! So go give her some views if you enjoy the song. ❤️
I’ve been diligently chipping away at gathering fics to rec this December, but hey, maybe more folks want to join in? And they’d need some time to prepare as well. So rec_cember is now a thing. Hopefully having a bit of a community around it can encourage more people to join in. Maybe have a weekly check in post during the month as well. I am pondering and scheming and whatnot.
Come hang?
Current Music:Florence + The Machine - You Can Have It All
A song that makes you cry: As I get older there are more pieces of music that seem to bring tears to my eyes, but one song never fails to make me weep, sometimes so hard that I have to force myself to stop; Paul Simon's "An American Tune." Paul Simon does his own song proud, but I find that these days, I love Willie Nelson's version. There's so much weariness laced with stubborn hope in the song's words, and Nelson sings as if he's known every day of that weariness, and gotten up every day with that stubborn hope somewhere in his heart. And the words about coming in the age's most uncertain hour? Now I weep even more as I listen.
The first edition. A hodgepodge perhaps chiefly of interest in what is included. Games. Short history and civics lessons. Discussions of wildlife and tracking. First aid. How to earn badges.
Some articles show that science has marched on from the day.
Sayings from Indians are invariably in crude English, but also invariably are to teach wise things to the boys.
I noted that in the fire section, they discussed the danger of wildfires, but didn't mention that first of all, you ensure you build your fire on bare earth. Anything burnable will carry the fire away, and roots are particularly dangerous. So, health and safety information may also be out of date.
the getaway (7229 words) by Lirazel Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Pitt (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Melissa "Mel" King/Frank Langdon Characters: Melissa "Mel" King, Frank Langdon, The Pitt (TV) Ensemble, Abby Langdon Additional Tags: Post-Season/Series 01, frank langdon is about to be the most divorced man in america, Emotional Infidelity, lbr frank is a drama queen, and he doesn't do anything halfway Summary:
Everyone should have known that Frank Langdon's getaway would be as showy as possible.
everything about it is a love song (200 words) by Lirazel Chapters: 2/? Fandom: The Pitt (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Melissa "Mel" King/Frank Langdon Characters: Melissa "Mel" King, Frank Langdon Additional Tags: Drabble Collection, Post-Season/Series 01 Summary:
Mel and Frank in 100-word slices.
I keep accidentally writing drabbles, so I'm collecting them here.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, queen of the queer cult movies, long may she reign. It may come as a surprise to some of you that in my misspent youth I belonged to a RHPS shadowcast, which is a thing where people get up on stage and act out the movie while it is playing at weekly midnight showings. (This complicates the question of how many hundreds of times I've "seen" the movie, because much of the time I was facing away from it.)
But now I am old and boring and go to bed at 10:30, so instead I spend my free time playing video games that are nearly as old as I am, such as The Rocky Horror Show for the Commodore 64, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. I like the blood dripping from the playscreen. Someone worked hard on that Since it doesn't have "picture" in the title, I guess the game is nominally an adaptation of the 1973 stage musical on which the movie is based, though it does use visual details from the movie. But the movie follows the play closely, so it doesn't really matter either way. You can choose to play as either Brad or Janet, two all-American kids whose car breaks down, forcing them to seek help at a nearby castle (castles don't have telephones, asshole!—no, no, I'm not doing this, I'm stopping now) where they encounter Dr. Frank N. Furter, who besides being a mad scientist is also the one thing that is the most threatening to 1950s all-American mores: a fabulous drag queen.
You can play The Rocky Horror Show in your browser on the Internet Archive. Note that it wants a numpad for the controls, so if you're like me and use a laptop without one, you'll have to either play it on a different machine or confuse the hell out of yourself trying to control it with the number row.
This one was a tad difficult, because I'm more apt to be dour than to smile. Still, this one never fails to make me grin. Lee Know is normally known as part of Stray Kids' danceracha threesome, since he's had a lot of experience as a dancer (he was briefly a backup dancer for BTS before debuting with SKZ) and helps with choreography. He's also the group's "mom" but in this song, he got to be a kid again himself. His voice is actually quite lovely, so listening to this is a pleasure for me. Together the song and its video are absolutely grin-worthy to me.
*I promise I'll try to include music that isn't KPop or the occasional anime intro or outro. But since that's where my musical head has been for the past few months, and probably where it'll be for the foreseeable future, you're going to have to suffer. Or, you know, enjoy. I'll probably have to put this caveat at the bottom of every entry in this meme exercise.
Kumoricon 2025 Registration Hall Oregon Convention Center Thursday, October 30, 2025 iPhone 13 mini photo
I have Kumoricon badge pickup down to a routine, with a preferred driving route from Barnes/Burnside to Everett/Steel Bridge to street parking underneath I-405. I left home at 2:30 pm so that I could listen to Marketplace on NPR during the drive – and fed Parking Kitty at 3:10 pm. I did a WAG and requested 45 minutes of parking time.
This morning we received an email from Kumoricon saying the Ginkoberry entrance was closed this year and that we could use the Holladay street entrance instead – which is what I did. I headed straight to Exhibit Hall E. Unlike last year, there was a long line which fed shorter lines in front of each of the badge stations. The wait in line this year was longer.
At the station, I presented the volunteer with a printout of my QR code and my photo ID. The volunteer was delighted. “You’re a Pro!” Apparently it’s much easier for their scanners to read paper than smartphones. And a lot of people don’t have their photo ID ready. I said I didn’t know if I was a pro or not, but she reassured me I was. She directed me to the program guide, lanyards, and clips, and I took one of each while she prepared my badge. She asked if I wanted a Day 0 ribbon, and I declined. “You’re the first to decline one!” Honestly, I don’t see why advertising that I attended Day 0 was cool in any way.
After leaving the station, I stopped to assemble my badge/lanyard, and then I walked back to my car. There were five minutes remaining on my Parking Kitty, so the round-trip Shizu-to-Shizu was 40 minutes. Unfortunately, it was now rush-hour, and I used one of my Lloyd-to-Home rush hour patterns so that I didn’t get too bogged down in traffic. Still, I didn’t get home until 4:35 pm.
Anyway, I’m now equipped for the convention tomorrow. I’ve already used Guidebook to plan a schedule. I’m not particularly optimistic for photography, as candid photography is nearly prohibited nowadays. 😞 I’ll set expectations low and hope to get one or two keepers over the three-day event. I’d actually like to skip Sunday if I could.
One bright spot is guest seiyuuKikuko Inoue! Belldandy! (And a zillion other well-known characters.) I don’t know if I’ll stand in line for an autograph, though. 🤔
Yesterday (Wednesday), the remaining bookshelves were delivered, and in the evening I shelved the books that I had staged. I wasn’t exactly sure how many shelves would be available, so I left some extra room. Books keep coming, though, and there’s no such thing as too much empty space.
At any rate, I’m happy this wall is finally done. Work on the library continues, with new furniture arriving next Tuesday. My own office furniture won’t return until several days after that.
Due to my not rigorously checking the design of the bookwall, I figure I lost about 10 linear feet of shelf space. That’s unfortunate, as I could have saved many of the above books that had to get cut so that I’d have enough space. Ah, well. Everything has to go at some point in time. These boxes of books will get taken to The Book Corner, run by the Friends of the Beaverton City Library.
I’ve also filled my recycle bin with more odd items. I wasn’t going to devote time to see if any could find a home. The recycle bin gets picked up tomorrow morning.
Also, is October 31 really tomorrow? I am...not prepared to operate on this timeframe. (At least my evening plans are now squared away. But there's still a lot of prep to do.) Anyway, here's:
What I Finished Reading This Week
Cunning Folk – Tabitha Stanmore Cunning Folk is a historical overview of "practical magic" in medieval England: who provided it, who requested it, for what reasons, and how government, the church, and society thought about it. It also proves that it's possible to write an informative book in a conversational tone. Stanmore approaches the topic with curiosity and respect for the people who made use of it; after all, what her subjects were doing was as rational at the time as turning to ChatGPT for answers is in 2025. She brings real insights to the topic--an aha! one for me being that authorities drew a distinction between magic and witchcraft, with the caster and/or customer's intent the determining factor in identifying the latter. Her explorations of the roles that class and gender played in attitudes toward practitioners (unsurprisingly, women lost that one), and society's multitudinous attitudes toward magic, full stop, were also illuminating. And I appreciate Stanmore's honesty: she regularly prefaces sentences or entire passages with "My preferred interpretation is..." or "I like to think that..." and that is all I want from a nonfiction author, that they make clear what is fact and what is only one of many possible explanations. At 230 pages Cunning Folk is quite a short book--certainly an overview where I would have loved an exhaustive 800 page tome on the topic--but it is a very good overview indeed, and the footnotes will allow anyone who's interested in going further to do so.
What I Am Currently Reading
Before Scotland – Alastair Moffat With under 30 pages to go I'll finish reading this one tonight or tomorrow.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I acquired Of Dice and Men by David Ewalt and The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel.
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