@Caerfinon@mastodon.social2026-01-01 12:57:48
A Reading Renaissance
#SimmerTales #TheSims4 #Comicstrip
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-11-28 23:49:06
Just finished "Orsinian Tales" by Ursula K Le Guin. It's... good, but not nearly as anarchist as a lot of her other work. These are short fiction stories weaving mostly through a fictional Eastern European country during the cold war, although some stretch farther back into history.
As typical for Le Guin a bunch of male protagonists, and a few parts that might seem to excuse sexual assault, which I've always found an odd thing in Le Guin's work (the rape in "The Dispossessed" bothered me too; the lack of strong female characters in "A Wizard of Earthsea" also sticks out to me). On the other hand, I've read from an interview that she wrote "Earthsea" absolutely knowing her audience (teenage boys) and intentionally writing something that would sell, which speaks to true mastery of her craft (I think the opening of "The Word for World is Forest" demonstrates what an expert can do wielding an intimate understanding of pulp science fiction tropes with intent, for example).
In any case, she writes sublime similes and sparse characters who nevertheless seem to embody deep wisdom about the human condition. I feel that often enough just a few words or sentences in a story bear forth hefty wisdom while around them Le Guin constructs something like an austere painting in muted tones, full of rich details that one can easily miss.
#AmReading #ReadingNow
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-10-30 17:30:09
Cool personal announcement: I’m now working with Hachette Book Group, 3rd largest publisher in the world! 📚😍
I’m helping with their email #marketing on their executive marketing strategy team for the next 1.5 months. Got many book lists to curate!
This is a dream come true in many ways, reading is my longest-standing and most consistent hobby. I don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t constantly surrounded by books - definitely not the Mariya before you today.
As a reader, as a writer - getting to see publishing from the inside and help promote products that I fundamentally believe do good in the world is a relief and a blessing. I’m so honored and lucky.
(Don’t worry, my agency is not going anywhere and we are still very much working with other clients!)
#books #publishing #emailmarketing
@hakona@im.alstadheim.no2025-10-27 19:11:25
Had some weird issues with my instance just now. Random stuff stopped working. Turns out my instance had only ipv6 connectivity, not ipv4. Reading worked mostly, but random stuff would fail, did not trigger my intuition as to where the error lay.
In hindsight, it was probably any direct fetch form instances with only ipv4 connectivity that failed. Posts that got sent on from or via elsewhere showed up, so it was not immediately obvious.
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-10-20 20:41:14
I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-10-17 02:24:17
Moody Urbanity - Odes 🎶
情绪化城市 - 颂 🎶
📷 Zeiss Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@trezzer@social.linux.pizza2025-12-17 14:20:56
The new Raspberry Pi Connect feature works really, really well. After setting one up for work, it has me rethinking what I want to do with my various pieces of pi-ware at home. The latest Raspberry Pi Imager is a bit of a joke, though. Two different installs for two different machines where it completely ignored my custom settings during install, so I had to set up everything twice.
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-11-04 21:10:54
Source: the 60 Minutes interview with Trump on November 2 drew 13.2M viewers, according to early Nielsen data, the highest-rated episode since January 2021 (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/04/trump-60-minutes-cbs-interview-ratings-vie…
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-12-05 08:28:04
"In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster film “Skyfall”, MI6 quartermaster Q realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva was a terrible idea. After a few seconds, the laptop infects the systems of MI6, releasing all physical doors and disabling all security guards, prompting Silva to escape and wreak havoc. A message appears on the laptop screen, taunting Q, reading “Not such a clever boy”."
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-12-13 00:30:41
Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow