madrobins. Reading

nineweaving

... in a garden in Oxford.

The year was actually 1988, but finding it gave me the strangest sense of timeslip.

Nine

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

pegkerr

As I have referred to obliquely before, I am Doing Something with regard to the events in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Signal

I was pulled in as a volunteer, oh, perhaps a month and a half ago. I was asked to set up the project, and despite my genuine nervousness at the responsibility I was handed, I did. I analyzed what needed to get done, wrote documentation to describe the process, and handled it alone for three days. Then more volunteers were added, and I was asked to train them. Then the team was doubled again, and I had to train them, too, and incorporate them into the team. Then I had to set up a couple of subteams, hold standup meetings, and start thinking about process, team building, donor relations, technological security, resource sharing, and budget.

Rather to my astonishment, now that I have retired, I have become for the first time in my career, no kidding, an actual manager, overseeing a team of ten people.

Over the last week, things have ratcheted up, and the phrase "It's like herding cats" has definitely floated across my mind.

I've been told I'm rather good at it. But it's a bit daunting. I'm definitely spending more hours at it than I spent at my job at the Synod.

Wow. I'm an actual manager. Who knew?

Image description: Lower third: a double monitor showing a world map, and a hand holding a phone, also showing a map. Center: a hand holds a marker writing the words "Project Planning" in red letters. Just below stands a row of cats, lurching forward in an uneven line. Upper right: a partial view of a woman with the word "Manager" superimposed over her. Upper left: Signal icon.

Manager

10 Manager

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Mood accomplished

Tags:

sartorias

One thing that one has to accept with Dickens is that his heroines will be long-suffering, and that men will decide what's good for them, for which they will be grateful.

Given that, I think this the best of his books.

It has the fewest Victorian-plot coincidences, and it has the most and best swathes of bitingly funny satire of soi-disant high society. How the Lammle marriage comes about, and how each of them, in becoming a couple, brings the other down from spoken moral rectitude to the barest pretense of it is as horrific in a quiet way as all the rantings, drownings, and so on.

Bradley Headstone is a remarkably believable depiction of the stalker boyfriend who can't seem to stop himself from sinking into obsession--and violence. Eugene Wrayburn is a fascinating, witty guy for an idle dog.

There are some bits of brilliance--the depiction of the riverside society; Mr. Boffins' educational plan; the Veneering parties.

There were signs of actual personality on Bella's part (when we meet her, she is mourning over being forced to wear black because the guy she was engaged to--whom she had never met--had drowned, which pretty much has finished her socially. Why shouldn't she mourn?) even if the machinations behind her romance are quite wince-worthy.

Dickens also tries to make up for comfortably unexamined antisemitism, and the subsidiary characters are wonderfully memorable.

Altogether it's a real page-turner. Glad I reread it.

Tags:

reading

pegkerr

This was one of the weeks where the theme of this week's collage wasn't immediately obvious. I was buried in administrative projects, which included the work I'm not talking about relating the ICE Metro Surge here in Minnesota, various Things That Had to Get Done, and taxes. I checked a lot of things off my personal checklist this week, but feel stiff and logey, as I spent much too much time stuck behind a computer screen rather than being up and moving around.

Taxes are now done and filed, and I will be getting a modest return back.

As I worked on the collage during a Zoom get-together with friends today, I fretted about the collage as I assembled it. Sometimes I really like what I put together, and sometimes I'm vaguely dissatisfied. "It's boring," I complained to my friends.

"Put a dragon in it," Eleanor Arnason told me. "Dragons always make everything better."

You will notice the small brass dragon paperweight to the right of the keyboard.

Image description: Lower half: a woman's hands rest on the keyboard of a laptop. A spreadsheet is displayed on the screen. A cup of coffee and a brass dragon paperweight rests on the table to the right of the keyboard. Upper half: a heap of notebooks and paperwork related to taxes cover the surface of a table.

Administration

9 Administration

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Mood accomplished

Tags:

2026 52 card project

davidlevine

As you may now if you've been following me for some time, I'm a big fan of European-style Live Action Role Playing (LARP). One LARP I was really excited about back in 2024 was called Odysseus. Inspired by Battlestar Galactica (and other SF TV shows and movies), the game was played in Finland on an incredibly detailed and interactive spaceship set, and had a lot of hype after its successful 2019 run. So much hype, in fact, that the two 2024 runs were massively oversubscribed, and I was very disappointed not to get a ticket in the lottery.

But now Odysseus is back, in an exciting new form. The organizers, realizing that the massive volunteer effort and cost to create and then disassemble the spaceship set were unsustainable, have decided to crowdfund ten more runs of the game in 2026-2027. If the campaign succeeds -- which depends on them selling out all ten runs -- they'll have nearly a million dollars to play with, and will be able to set up a permanent spaceship set and pay the staff to run it. That'll give people choices about when to attend, create the possibility of runs in Finnish and Swedish (and maybe more!), and provide a facility that can be used for corporate events, educational events, and new and different science fiction LARPs. If the 2026-2027 runs demonstrate that this can be run as a sustainable business, it might go even longer than that.

But none of this will happen unless the crowdfunding campaign succeeds. I've backed it, pledging for 3 tickets for myself and my partners plus an additional pledge to increase the campaign's chances of success. I encourage you to check it out, and pledge if you can. I think I can guarantee that if you attend this LARP you will have a fabulous time.

Back the campaign here: https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/ellarion-tales/odysseus-first-light

Watch on YouTube

alfreda89

Charles is offering the story in PDF and in EPUB.

ICE cane to Newford, that magical boundary where faerie and humankind can meet.

Big mistake.

https://www.charlesdelint.com/IceOut.html

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

We Are Each Other's Keepers

Reading

portrait of the artist, 1918 ...

Performing some traffic maintenance today

2026 52 Card Project: Week 10: Manager

Wednesday reading--Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

2026 52 Card Project: Week 9: Administration

Help fund the Ellarion Tales LARP crowdfunding campaign!

A new free short story from fantasist Charles de Lint, a tale of Newford.

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December 2025

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