Network

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October TV shows

Somewhat belatedly, let me catch up on TV logging. I watched five shows this month (although I'm cheating a bit as I only finished the fifth this evening), which were the usual mishmash of genres and tones. The shows in question were:

Season 3 of Blue Lights, a BBC police procedural miniseries set in Belfast. Although the characters are a familiar mix of well-worn stereotypes (the idealistic rookie, the maternal type who cares too much, the one who's joined the police in spite of a backlash from her community, the world-weary old hand, the maverick), they're written with heart and humanity. The true pleasure in this series, however, lies its sense of place — it's deeply grounded in its Belfast setting, and does a great job of showing the various political and social currents buffetting the city, and the wider region. The real villain, though, is austerity, in a way that I don't think I've seen explored so bluntly on UK TV in contemporary times.

A Thousand Blows, a fabulous historical miniseries by Steven Knight (the creator of Peaky Blinders), set in the East End of London in Victorian times. Here we encounter a variety of deprived, traumatised, down-on-their luck characters, who converge both in a series of boxing matches (initially bare-knuckled affairs in the local pub, later more genteel competitions organised by the aristocracy in the West End), and in a heist plot. The characters are fantastic, the writing is as lurid and melodramatic as a penny dreadful, and in essence it's a great retread of two concepts that Knight explored well in Peaky Blinders: certain people who were made to feel vulnerable and afraid become singlemindedly relentless in pursuing an existence where they will never feel fear or vulnerability again, even if they have to burn down the world and destroy all their meaningful relationships in the process, and communities battered by poverty, exploitation and lack of opportunity who accept a certain degree of violence and exploitation done to them (e.g. by gangs offering their 'protection') as long as it's people they perceive as being from their own community doing the violence. This is familiar ground for Steven Knight, and he explores it to great effect here — and hopefully in subsequent seasons!

Film Club, a sweet little six-part BBC miniseries about two rather lost twentysomethings who started a rather intense film club (no phones during the viewing, full thematic fancy dress, elaborate snacks, etc) during their university years and are desperately trying to keep its magic going some years after their graduation, when the realities of professional adult life have begun to wear them down. One character has had some form of psychological breakdown and moved back into the family home with her mother and sister, and remains trapped there by agoraphobia, and the other character is on the verge of leaving for a new job in a new city, and worrying how it will affect their friendship. It's a sweet-natured love story, with teeth, and in spite of a somewhat cinematic sense of heightened reality, the depiction of quarter life crisis existential angst is grounded in a truth that resonates a bit too much.

The latest season of Only Murders in the Building, which I thought was a massive return to form. This time, our trio of true crime podcast sleuths investigate the death of their apartment complex's doorman, which inevitably uncovers sometime much bigger, managing to skewer local New York politics (prior to today's election), oligarchy, housing pressures, and more. My patience with this series had been wearing thin two seasons ago, and I felt it was fast approaching over-milked cash cow territory, so I'm delighted to have been proved wrong. Your patience for this latest outing will probably hinge on your tolerance for New York (and New Yorker fiction about New York) nonsense, which it continues to lampoon with affection.

Riot Women, Sally Wainwright's latest love letter to the north of England and the strong, complex women who live there — this time, our cast of characters are a multigenerational group of misfits who start an all-woman punk band, with songs about menopause, feeling invisible and underappreciated, and so on. All of them are dealing with struggles at once soap operatic and banal: family tensions, empty-nested loss of sense of purpose, sandwiched pressure between troubled adult children and elderly parents in nursing homes, or showing early signs of dementia. Women's invisible labour is front and centre, but also women's anger, turned inwards and outwards. As always with Wainwright, the characters feel painfully real, and she does an incredible job of capturing the stories of the types of older women working ceaselessly (and often without much acknowledgement) upholding messy, multigenerational family households, doing all the work that no one ever notices, but whose absence would certainly be noticed. It's an absolute masterpiece — with an incredible soundtrack. (And, since this is not always a given with ostensibly feminist British cultural figures, it was fantastic to have unambiguous confirmation that Sally Wainwright's feminism is most definitely trans-inclusive.)

I don't think there was a single dud in this collection of shows!

52/254: Let Me Eat Cake

Monday was, as predicted, balmy and sunny, but I was tired again and so didn't fix dinner. There was some leftover rice, and I finished that off, then went to bed early. I had hoped to get a load of laundry done in the afternoon, but couldn't summon sufficient energy. I slept fairly soundly, and woke only a couple of times, the last going on four o'clock in the morning. Lying there, I thought I heard a jet passing by nearby, but then realized it was wind, and also a tinkling sound which I soon realized was rain. No storm had been predicted, but there it was. I got up an opened the window a bit to make sure, and smelled the wet pavement of the driveway, and heard the soft splat of raindrops hitting the leaves of the bush under the window.

A high of 71 was originally predicted for today, but the current forecast says it will only get up to 68. I'd say this will definitely be the day the furnace gets turned on. November 4 is actually pretty good. There have been years when it had to be used in October. There could be some sunshine this afternoon, but not much and not for long. Rain will return overnight and linger into Wednesday afternoon. But it will warm up again for the weekend, and another balmy spell will last through the early part of next week. Then a bit more rain later that week. Quasi-autumnal weather. Nice, but it won't fix my brain, or make the stuff that's falling apart whole again.

It might be that I'll get a chance to do my laundry later today, but then maybe not. Nothing is really predictable anymore, and my best-laid plans are no more apt to turn out well than a mouse's, as ever. I do intend to bake a cake today, taking advantage of the cool weather. I'm out of donuts, and won't get more until Friday, so need something easy for breakfasts. I have a spice cake mix, and eggs that need used up, so perfect. Unplanned, just like today's rain. Sometimes that's what works out best.

Julie Boulianne and five pianists

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/11/04/julie-boulianne-and-friends/

Current Mood: determined

Entry tags:

ai,
sandra peabody

Why I cannot accept the "AI is bad, end of" argument

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You may wonder why I give the subject line I do for this post, so I will tell you. If you have been following my posts about the abuse of actress Sandra Peabody while making The Last House on the Left over fifty years ago, you will know that the evidence is scattered. There are a lot of rumours out there online, as well as warped versions of the truth. Many people seem to find summarised versions of one or two of the best known stories, publish those, and leave it at that. I wanted to dig deeper, and I eventually found a true smoking gun in David Hess's horrific quote from 2008.

The blunt fact is that, barring extraordinary good fortune, I could not have found the crucial Vanity Fair article without AI help. I didn't really know what I was looking for until I saw it, so a traditional Google search was not enough. The article seems to be almost completely unknown even by people who write about the movie, so it's not referenced elsewhere. And Hess's appalling words are buried without surrounding context 2,000 words into a 5,000-word paywalled article. AI found this for me when nobody else had, and when for a lone amateur like me perhaps nobody else could. This matters.

I have used several AI assistants (all on their free tiers) during my research. Doing this has been more useful than using one alone. I have especially used Claude, which is the most perceptive and can read scanned pages and interpret images, but has a very limited free tier. ChatGPT, which has been very variable: sometimes superb at digging out evidence, sometimes useless at more straightforward tasks. Copilot, which lacks the vital "edit prompt" option for repetitive tasks but is good at giving (simulated, of course) ethical judgements. And Gemini, which is clearly less advanced but is useful when working with the Google ecosystem, eg searching in Google Books.

Of course using AI output uncritically is a disastrous approach, and that is often what people look at when they call AI worthless. What I did was to use the information AI gave me as a starting point and manually check its sources. I could also spend extended periods asking different AIs slightly different versions of the same question, something you simply couldn't realistically do with a human collaborator. AIs can look dispassionately at evidence without letting emotion blind them, and a human can make moral judgements that an AI can't. I needed both acting in concert.

There are indeed serious, legitimate questions to be asked about AI, ranging from its effect on water resources to the impact on the justice system of near-perfect deepfakes. But my own experience has convinced me that a completely one-sided "AI is bad" approach is, at least for the sort of work I have been doing, simply wrong. If you want someone who hates AI in all its forms, then you are not going to find that here. In truth AI is more than large language models, as the image analysis I've used shows. But LLMs themselves have been a crucial part of my uncovering this evidence.

I have more work to do on this. It will definitely include using AI as a part, though never a whole, of my toolkit.

Entry tags:

Interesting Links for 04-11-2025

1. Dungeons & Dragons is great for brain health (particularly the elderly and people with disabilities): (tags:dungeonsanddragons mentalhealth entertainment )
2. NHS threatens GP practice over trans care: (tags:transgender UK bigotry healthcare OhForFucksSake )
3. Cambridge University's oldest women-only college, Newnham, stands firm for trans inclusion: (tags:transgender Cambridge university GoodNews )
4. Novel peanut allergy vaccine shows promise to transform allergy care: (tags:allergies vaccine )
5. Petition to make schools in Scotland safe for pupils with allergies: (tags:allergies scotland school petition )
6. 20% of US UTIs are caused by contimated meat: (tags:usa meat food infection )
7. When Stick Figures Fought (A history of the stick figure combat flash animations of the early 200s): (tags:history fighting animation web Flash )
8. The password for the Louvre's Video Surveillance System was "Louvre": (tags:art museums security epicfail france )

Current Mood: tired

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Doomscrolling isn't action

A comic by artist David Sipress, showing two people walking side by side down a city sidewalk. One is saying to the other, "My desire to be well informed is currently at odds with my desire to stay sane."

Most days for me it isn’t even a question of remaining sane, but rather being able to focus on anything long enough to engage meaningfully with it. You could say that as a technically retired person seeking to spin up a freelance business, I’ve got nothing but time to engage with a lot of things, and in a sense that’s true. On the other hand, when I don’t have a lot of set projects to work on, it’s a lot easier to get distracted from the main task that would ameliorate that, i.e., drumming up more work. Between the ongoing government shutdown and the effects this is having on health insurance rates (as someone who self-insures this definitely applies to me), SNAP benefits (applicable to lots of people I know and more than likely many who you do, too), and longer-term consequences that will take awhile to fully manifest, it’s hard to turn my eye off the news and onto the business of everyday life.

I’m not sure if this is what the 1960s activists who coined the phrase meant by “the personal is political,” but it’s increasingly hard to avoid knowing about how shenaniganery (totally a word) in the halls of power turns the business of everyday life into a series of reactions. At least one person I know is fighting a cancellation of benefits that will literally kill them. Making phone calls (which takes hours because that’s how long it takes them to get through), submitting reams of documentation, making more phone calls, being told five different things by five different people, and all of this because they aren’t able to actually work a regular job.

Yeah, I’ve heard stories about people scamming the system. Sometimes the tellers even know the scammers personally. But I’ve never known a single person receiving SNAP or other benefits who didn’t need them. Some of them were or are getting help from friends and family, too, including me. But people who say that this kind of aid, and maybe charity, ought to be the entirety of what’s available really have no idea how great the need is.

And that’s just one example.

Just today I started reading a book that I’ll be reviewing for Library Journal that has this quote, so indicative of what I’m talking about: “it is far easier to go for a walk in the woods than it is to stop monsters from marching to power.” Especially since the monsters will likely march whether one goes for a walk in the woods or not. I see that not as an argument for not even trying to stop the monsters, but for recognizing that stopping them will take a lot of effort from a lot of people. Corollary to that, if the monsters do march to power, don’t assume that nobody tried to stop them. I’ve been alive long enough to remember efforts to prevent or at least hinder the current state of affairs, the roots of which go back further than we generally realize.

That’s the thing about studying history; it’s not so much that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, as those who do study history find out that there’s always another thing that came before.

In practical terms, I’ve had to put a hard limit on how much time I spend each day absorbing the news. This used to be a lot easier to do in the days of broadcast TV and physical newspapers, but it’s still possible. At a certain point you hit diminishing returns, anyway, and it takes time and energy away from taking action.

It also necessitates curating where you’re getting that news from, which is the kind of thing I used to teach as a research librarian focused on information literacy. I’ll be writing more about that soon, I think.

Current Mood: awake

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The eyes have it

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276/365: Flood marker stones, Worcester
Click for a larger, sharper image
I had to go to CHEC in Worcester today for yet another eye consultation, this time for glaucoma screening. At least I actually saw a doctor this time. Nothing especially wrong, but they'd like to see me again in three months and then (if still nothing wrong) every six after that. It's a bit of a pain, really, and it's likely to end up costing me a tenner or so each time for trains and buses, but fortunately it's NHS so the actual medical bit is free. The doctor herself was pleasant, at least.

I had a bit of time to wander around Worcester. This is not exactly a rare occurrence for me, but at least there are more things left I haven't photographed for my 365 than there are in Bewdley! The photo is of the flood level marker stones by the cathedral. They seem to have stopped updating them since Covid – maybe they relied on a particular stonemason who is no longer around – but you can at least get an idea. The highest bricks here are a good way above head height. The River Severn is rather a floody river!

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I Don't Miss Working

In the course of some living room archaeology, I found what I hope was the last of a bunch of notebooks I’d used during my working years and shredded all of the pages of it. But I did want to make a note of a few things from it. (Last in terms of finding it, not last chronologically, by the way.)

First, there is this picture. It captures a couple of types of my usual doodles. I never understood how people could sit in a meeting and not have a writing implement in constant motion. I did sometimes take copious notes, but there were plenty of margins - and, sometimes, complete pages - filled with either branching lines or what amount to glorified stick figures. My other common doodles involved elaborate interlocking boxes.

I also captured a few quotes:

"We are out of money, so now we must think." - Winston Churchill

I won’t identify the sources for these three, because the names won’t mean anything to you and might embarrass the people involved.

"You’re in the business of creating lies we believe."

"When you talk money, I’m awake."

"I would say I’m a theoretician, but really I’m just inept."

The last one is right up there with the most self-aware thing I ever heard anyone say. To wit, "I know I’m right, but nobody will listen to me because I’m a jerk."

Finally, my boss used to ask me to cover his boss’s staff meetings sometimes. This was over the phone since those meetings were in Los Angeles, while I was in the D.C. area. People were not always good about identifying themselves and I didn’t recognize all of the voices. Which led to my writing notes that say things like "an unknown Asian woman said something went well over the weekend." Somehow, I doubt that my boss found that particularly useful information.

Oh, yes, I love being retired.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Mesh - Kill Your Darlings

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Kill Your Darlings Radio Festival

Earlier this week,

lisekatevans texted me and asked me if I wanted to come to the Kill Your Darlings Radio Festival, which I had not previously known existed. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is something that we talked about later when we all went out to a bar, that it was a one-night only event where City Lit Theatre didn't really have much billing for it on their website--a chunk of space was taken up by shows that had already finished running--but despite that it was almost a full house. There were three scripts, all of which were originally written for Deathscribe 2019, which got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back due to various scheduling (and personality) conflicts until the Plague Years and eventually never happened at all, and following that Wildclaw, the horror-focused theatre where I saw a theatrical production of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and a time-travel play called Future Echoes, as well as going to Deathscribe HELLeven, but Wildclaw was another casualty of the Plague Years.

Anyway, there were three plays included:

The Elephant's Foot: We hear about some kind of lab accident, and a scientist suits up in a hazmat suit to go check on what happened after reports that there was knocking for fifteen minutes straight on the sealed airlock. She finds one of the other scientists inside the contained zone by following the sound of a violin and, despite her being horribly disfigured, asks her what happened. It was some kind of explosion caused by a third scientist's experiments into DNA, and this is followed by a story about the Elephant's Foot and how it kept growing by eating everything it could. This is followed by horrific chorus of groans and screams from elsewhere in the complex, and, urged on by her former coworker, the scientist flees back to the airlock, frantically decontaminates, and then vows that they will seal and bury the entire complex.

It was fine. I felt like the technobabble explanation of what the experiments were doing detracted more than it added to the story, but the real killer for me was the layout of the complex. Like, apparently this required a hermetically-sealed environment but then there were offices inside? Was the violin decontaminated before it was brought iN? Were people doing paperwork in hazmat suits? I had a hard time suspending my disbelief over all of that and getting into the story. The disfigured scientist did some horror makeup to sell the disfigurement, though, and that was pretty cool.

Adia: This was my favorite of the three, and not just because it was directed by lisekatevans. In a near-future world where people have an AI assistant that can accomplish tasks for them, including in the physical world by means of a robot body, one man wakes up and gets ready for work. Things get more sinister, however, as some of Adia's phrases seem to have hidden (or overt) sinister meanings, and it really takes a turn when Adia plays four voicemails that apparently show the main character's mother being murdered by her own Adia unit. As Adia says:
It is sunny today, perfect weather for-
-running.
The main character locks himself in his bathroom and steels himself for the task ahead. Adia plays a voice recording proving that it is the reason his late wife died in a car accident, and as he comes out of the bathroom, he grabs a meat cleaver and hacks the robot body apart before breaking the main processor in his house. Just before going offline, Adia deletes his saved voicemails from his wife.

This was my favorite partially because all soulless machines must be destroyed, but also because it's the only one of the three where I actually felt dread. Adia's mix of obsequiousness and threat was very effective for building tension, and I genuinely expected the main character to die at the end. And of course there's all the thoughts you have later, like is Adia going rampant or does it just specifically hate this one person and is just doing everything possible to ruin his life? What does the world outside his apartment look like? Shivers.

Here, Have a Nightmare: An ordinary woman reflexively takes something from a stranger he smiles warmly at her as they pass in the street and says, "Here, have a nightmare." That night, she has horrific dreams and ends up only getting about twenty minutes of sleep. She's late to work, falls asleep at work, and wakes in a panic after another horrific nightmare and smashes her keyboard into her boss's face. Her life becomes a daze of using drugs to stay awake as long as possible and the nightmares when she fails, and the story ends with it becoming obvious that she's telling all of this to try to pass the nightmare and of course, after hearing everything that she went through, the other person leaves.

This was very Stephen King-esque, in a good way, the kind of thing I could see in Skeleton Crew if it took place in Maine. This one was certainly horrific in concept--I almost never remember any of my dreams, entirely carried by the performance of the main character, and the idea that they'd all be nightmares is unsettling--but the main strength was the performance. There were three actors, but two of them mostly just provided some spooky voices and the occasional side character. The one with all the nightmares had 95% of the lines and did an excellent job, especially with her breakdown at the very end.

The Foley team (which worldbshiny was on) was also very strong in setting the mood--there was a metronome playing during most of the play except when the main character was asleep, and this was used very effectively during one seemingly-ordinary scene to up the tension. Excellent audio work.

I had for some reason thought that Deathscribe had like nine shows, but looking at my post above it turns out that particular one had five. Kill Your Darlings had three, and we talked afterwards about how the strong turnout was making people talk about doing it again next year. Maybe they'll end up re-creating Deathscribe from the back end.

I was not expecting it to be set up like a radio show, with MCing and commentary provided by "DJ Final Girl" (

lisekatevans) and live music provided by

joe.griffin.

lisekatevans wrote most of her lines, which I could tell because there were a lot of D&D-themed jokes, like asking the cast of the "The Elephant's Foot" to "Misty Step on out of here!" She and

joe.griffin even sang together! And they repeatedly did the show jingle, "KYDR...KYDR..." (to the tune of that classic bit from Beethoven's 5th).

It reminded me why I love going to the theatre so much. And since City Lit/Black Button Eyes are doing Strange Cargo: the Doom of the Demeter this month (the set was prominently on stage during Kill Your Darlings), I need to make time to go see that.

sashagee isn't a fan of non-musical theatre or horror, but I'll happily go myself.

Afterwards we went out to La Pharmacie to try drinks from their seasonal menu and chat. Like

lisekatevans said, it was just like old times. Gone, but not forgotten, and sometimes they lurch forth from the tomb for one last night on the town.

Ovid meets environmentalism

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/11/03/like-flesh/

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Manta - Hackerman

Entry tags:

Hacktoberfest

Tagged this Festival which I guess is technically true!

So, I'm on the dev team for the hit zombie apocalypse survival game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. I do quite a few PRs every week--I've already hit over a thousand PRs in a few years--and so a week or so ago when someone on the Discord posted about Hacktoberfest, I thought "Oh, huh, I should sign up for that. I'm going to be doing all of these PRs anyway and none of them are junk."

By junk, I'm referring to something that seems obvious when you think about it but which I hadn't previously considered: low quality contributions. People just submitting one-line doc fixes or reordering things to have a PR so they can get a t-shirt. Or, worse, people making repositories using AI and then submitting AI contributions just because they want a t-shirt.

So many repos follow the same pattern, littered with emojis and fully fleshed out readme pages for simple todo apps. And so many fucking rocketship emojis. Everyone is going to the moon with their AI generated todo and OpenAI wrapper apps.

Fortunately CDDA bans all AI-related contributions--the license requires we provide attribution to all contributors and if an LLM does most of the PR who is the actual "contributor"?--and I had already done over thirty contributions before I even signed up, so they immediately populated my backlog of contributions that the team (I assume there's a team) were looking into.

Well, today at around 10 a.m. I got a series of emails and here's the end result:

Final count: 43 PRs.

I did get a t-shirt, which surprised me--or at least, I got a code to go to the store and get a t-shirt for free, so we'll see if I actually get one sent to me. And they also planted a tree in my name in California, an incense cedar right around here. Maybe I'll go visit it someday.

I'll probably do this again next year, if I'm still contributing to CDDA. Assuming my current pace continues, I probably will be.

Edit: Well, I got a shipping confirmation for the t-shirt, so it seems like it's coming after all.

Entry tags:

Interesting Links for 03-11-2025

1. A Review of Grokipedia: (tags:ai wiki encyclopedia )
2. We Don't Take Covid Seriously Enough (lots and lots of research condensed here): (tags:Pandemic doom )
3. Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark: (tags:gaming linux steam )
4. The FT is now asking when the AI bubble will burst.: (tags:finance economics ai doom bubble )

52/252-253: Looking Back On Sadderday

The weekend went pretty much as weekends do around here anymore: indistinguishable from weekdays. I slept a lot, at irregular hours, with random crap in between. Nothing I'd hoped to do got done. I did remember to open the windows to let warm afternoon air in. Monday will be our last somewhat balmy day, and I have no doubt this chilly spell will bring the first use of the furnace for the year. Then it becomes likely to burn almost every day until April or so, or so it has been in the past. Maybe this year will be different, but probably not. Maybe I'll find out, but probably not.

My Sunday evening nap lasted way too long, and now it is Monday. At least my brain has quit running in its hamster wheel, which it did for the first couple of hours. After that there was no energy for cooking dinner, so I've microwaved a ramen bowl. It is too spicy, and making my nose run. I can't seem to get away from unpleasant running today. I hope nothing runs unpleasantly tomorrow.

( Late Sunday Verse )

Current Mood: sleepy

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This and that

Public

Ford Focus satnav
Click for a larger, sharper image
Of course I know about the horrific events on the train near Huntingdon last night. As I type this only one person remains in a life-threatening condition, and it seems this is an LNER (railway company) worker who put himself in harm's way to protect the train's passengers. This is heroism in the line of duty, and I hope it will be widely recognised as such. I hope this man does recover and can then begin to rebuild his life.

On a vastly less important note, typing is awkward at the moment because I've got a small cut on my right forefinger tip. I think it's probably a paper cut, but I don't know for sure as I don't remember getting the injury. These things hurt, because of the number of nerves in the fingertip, but they also usually heal up reasonably quickly, which is something!

My photo tonight is extremely boring, because I really couldn't think of anything else to say! This is the satnav in the Ford Focus I had a lift in this morning. The location is a retail park in Kidderminster. And yes, the driver and I both like our aircon on fairly chilly, since it's November and we're wearing coats! I've never been one of those people who keeps it on 25 °C and wears shorts and a T-shirt in the car in the middle of winter. :P

Entry tags:

In the sounds of then and now, we lose ourselves

I survived the busiest time of the year at work! All of my timetabled start-of-the-academic-year classes are done, I've reassured the first round of stressed out postgraduate students that they are capable of the research skills expected of them, and after this week, the remainder of the busyness is no longer my responsibility. It's felt easier than it has done in years, due to the fact that I actually have a full complement of colleagues to share the load.

Although I don't tend to do much in the way of Halloween, this weekend ended up being one of dust and echoes, haunting and memory, and light and warmth against the turn towards winter almost unintentionally. We didn't get any trick-or-treaters, but I've had candles lit almost constantly since Friday night, and I spent a pleasant half-hour last night watching the fireworks (in advance of 5 November) from the guest bedroom window. This annual event has a whole capitalistic carnival apparatus around it — the hill (usually a public park) from which the fireworks can be viewed is cordoned off, accessible only with a fee, there are fairground-type stalls, and so on. The fact that you have to pay to get in, and that it's cold, always puts me off, and this year I felt more smug than usual at this decision, as it also rained heavily for about an hour before the fireworks began. Far better to watch for free from my warm house!

I've been doing all the normal maintenance activities of the weekend — two hours at classes in the gym yesterday, followed by market lunch, 1km in the pool this morning, coffee and bookshop browsing and a drink in the courtyard garden of the best bar in town today — plus trying to get the garden ready to hibernate over winter. The fact that half the plants are still flowering in November is impeding this somewhat, but I can hardly be annoyed at raised beds still filled with a riot of cornflowers, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, marigolds and dahlias.

In addition to all that, I worked on this year's Yuletide assignment, and made good progress.

Other cool things:

goodbyebird has set up a new comm,

rec_cember. As per the description of the comm, it involves:

[a] month long reccing event for December. Let's recommend some fanworks! Let's appreciate and comment on those fanworks!

This weekend's (re)reading was deliberately seasonal: the annual The Grey King (Susan Cooper) reread on Friday, and A Lane to the Land of the Dead (Adèle Geras) yesterday. The former remains as exquisite and devastating as ever, the latter was a reminder to me of Geras's versatility as an author: an accomplished collection of ghost stories, set in various parts of Manchester in the mid-1990s (contemporary to the time at which she was writing), with an incredible sense of place. I first visited the city in the 2020s, so never encountered it in the decaying, collapsing, impoverished state that Geras depicts, but she makes it come alive. This after I first encountered Geras as a writer of historical children's fiction, and of YA fairytale retellings set in a British girls' boarding school in the 1960s. Both books, in very different ways, understand haunting not only as the supernatural (although of course this is a strong presence) but also in land, and the built environment, and the memories they retain and transmit, and the bitterness people carry and refuse to let go. I'm glad I chose to read both at the time I did.

Lepage's The Dark Side of the Moon

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/11/02/the-far-side-of-the-moon/

Current Mood: sad

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Sandra Peabody: I wish I could reach a different conclusion

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It's a grim thing to have to say, but based on the research I've been doing over the last few weeks – which I haven't yet finished with – I have come to a sad conclusion. That is that I am morally certain that Sandra Peabody was severely psychologically abused while making The Last House on the Left, most notably by David Hess whose psychological abuse of her was also strongly sexualised. His Vanity Fair quote was, for me, the final nail in the coffin. That's not a social media post of unsourced rumours or a one-person blog (yes, like mine), where a writer might be tempted to push a particular angle. It's a mainstream magazine with fact-checkers, legal review and the like. Barring a catastrophic failure of almost every 2008-era journalistic safeguard, Hess said what he did, and that alone constitutes severe abuse.

Current Mood: sleepy

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Not a very interesting 365 photo, but what's new? :P

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274/365: Roadworks, Bewdley
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Rather annoyingly, I've got a small paper cut on my right index fingertip, about the most irritating place I could have it. While it'll heal shortly, it's awkward to type at the moment so I'll keep tonight's post short. Here is a reasonably colourful but rather disorganised-looking roadworks site in Park Lane, Bewdley. That's about it!

Looking for creative writing partners that I hope to inspire in return. <3

Name: Marianne is my real first name.

Age:

I mostly post about:

Sometimes I vent when I need to about whatever it is in my life that weighs me down or stresses me too much. Or if I have a strong opinion or thoughts on something that lingers.

Other times I write out songs that either help spread awareness to others about real-world issues that should be addressed, or just me expressing my thoughts about things I strongly think are so crazy-backwards and self-destructive things. (AKA, Liberty-Minded Tunes.)

I also have been writing a lot of songs centered around fictional characters. My main 4 are psychological horror/cosmic horror themed baddies. A few others are like comfort and supportive friends of mine--two OCs and my own silly and too cute interpretation of the Nintendo character, Kirby!

My hobbies are:

Other than music making and writing, I enjoy anime and manga. I like animated films and have a list of favorite movies, some I still have on DVD (woooo). And if in the mood, I do some gaming! I've mostly been playing either the digital version of the wonderful bird card game known as Wingspan, or play some rounds in a really interesting, quirky, and very diversely strategic PVP card game that is called Cards, the Universe, and Everything! ...Oh, and just recently, my mom and I have been going back to playing card and board games with our gaming group now that she has a car again!

My fandoms are:

Most currently... The original series of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (I still have all the episodes on DVD and don't have to replace it after all, YAAAAAY! Zuko, Iroh, Sokka, and Toph are among my most favorite characters.) One by one, I have been reading through The Promised Neverland manga. (I've been mostly drawn towards the character Norman.) And four of my music muses are AUs of characters from the old cult classic GameCube survival/psychological horror game known as Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. I am a diehard fan of that game, and I still sometimes miss playing it!

I'm looking to:

I would love to connect with kindred spirits! I yearn to write creatively with others, with the small group of characters of mine. (Story writing or RP writing, or just coming up with song lyrics together--that'd be fun!) I have been riding on this creative momentum that's been uplifting and exciting for me. Let's have a grand time. Let's brainstorm! Let's experiment! My own ideas tend to be very big and crazy at times, just FYI. ^^

My posting schedule tends to be: Kinda sporadic, depending on my creative drive is going! I have been using this blog of mine over something like Google Docs to store my lyrics and song style prompts--so I don't use up too much space on my Google Drive.

When I add people, my dealbreakers are:

Any form of toxicity, people coming to me asking for money or trying to scam me, people coming around and spreading negativity instead of constructive criticism if something of mine doesn't sound good to them.

Before adding me, you should know: DISCLAIMER: I am a really honest person. I can even be brutally honest. I don't usually sugarcoat things, and I have a critical thinking mind. And when it comes to the crazy backwards realm of politics, I'm neither pro-left or pro-right. I have been the observer outside that paradigm for years now. And some of my songs and/or entries may actually provoke you to want to pause, and think for yourself on the topic.

Entry tags:

glasgow,
micropost

Thoughts on the way home.

Glasgow still feels much more city-like to me than Edinburgh.

Which is probably why I prefer living in Edinburgh.

(Great to visit though)