we_protect_each_other

A couple of days I ordered a Hong Dian M1 fountain pen. For those of you who didn't follow the link, it's an aluminum travel-travel fountain pen that's just over 4 inches long when closed. This is the third travel-sized fountain pen I've bought, and if I'm not happy with this one, then I'm going to write off travel-sized fountain pens entirely.

Anyway, it arrived today, and it looked great, so of course I had to fill it so I could see how it writes. I had a bottle of Noodler's waterproof ink that hadn't really worked with my Lamy Safaris, so I decided to try it with the Hong Dian. And it might have worked, except that the converter wasn't fully installed, so when I tried to fill it, then pen fell off the converter and into the bottle of ink. So I carried the bottle of ink into the bathroom, got a paper bowl, and poured the ink into the bowl so I could get the pen out. Once I had the pen out and cleaned, I tried pouring the ink from the bowl back into the bottle, but my hand slipped and I ended up pouring the whole bottle down the sink.

After cleaning the sink, I installed the converted and filled the pen with Pilot Iroshizuku ink. It worked well, and I'm very happy with it so far.

Also in pen news, Lamy has introduced the 2026 Special Edition Safaris. Apparently their theme for this year is "1983," because the colors of fluorescent yellow and fluorescent pink.

cosmolinguist

On the drive home from gym this morning (D was able to come along! it was so lovely to have him there with me for the first time since February), D was as usual pointing out the Good Dogs. We saw so many dogs enjoying a Saturday morning walk in the at-least-partly-sunny weather.

When my attention was directed to one particular dog, I couldn't help but notice that we were also going past a Greggs. I thought D would like to know that I was now thinking about pastry, so I said so.

We kept going, and my tired happy brain didn't think anything of it when he didn't turn the way he usually does to get home. We were chatting away, and he still hadn't turned, and then it occurred to me.

"Are you going this way so we can go to Greggs before we go home?" The one nearest our house was one of the few reasons that he'd still be driving this way.

So I got two vegan sausage rolls for brunch (I always eat breakfast before gym or I'll be too hungry to function). They were perfect: still hot (because Greggs is so busy on a Saturday morning, everything is fresh) and flaky and delicious.

As we left the shop, I said "Thanks for doing this. It really was just an offhand comment."

"Yeah," D said, "but a lot of the best stuff happens from following offhand comments."

It's true. I'm so glad we get to share so many silly little adventures.

conuly

Person A: You know you're supposed to finish the laundry if you start it during your shift!

Me, silently: Don't think of it as my three loads of laundry that I didn't finish during my shift, think of it as your three loads of laundry that I got started for you. Though really, if Person B had done her laundry during her shift like she should have then neither of us would be having this conversation today.

(There was no reason for all four of the women to have their hampers literally overflowing with clothes. Somebody, or more like several somebodies, clearly has been falling down on the job here.)

conuly

The trick is that the top arm needs to be firmly clipped to the drawer - not jammed to the back wall. Time will tell if my fix lasts.

Edit: No, X*, not thank god, thank me. I'm the one who fixed it! God had nothing to do with any of it!

* Not the real initial.

conuly

Honestly have never heard of this person before, but what an apropos sentiment!

Ah. It seems he was "the real Doctor Strangelove", "the father of the hydrogen bomb". Well, there you have it!

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( Read more... )

conuly

Trying not to think of you
yet your face colors
every contour
of my mind.
And every way I turn
inside of a minute
I collide
with your laughter.
I am wind,
and you
are chimes.

******

Link

mific posting in

stargateficrec

Shows: SGA
Rec Category: Genfic
Characters: John Sheppard & Rodney McKay
Categories: Gen
Words: ~1300
Warnings: none apply
Author on DW:

darsynia
Author's Website: darsynia on AO3
Link: Those Left Behind on DW
Those Left Behind on AO3
Podfic read by darsynia on the Audiofic Archive
Why This Must Be Read: A brief and lovely flashfic, about Rodney and John in the aftermath of Epiphany, with Rodney figuring out who made the time dilation field, and why they did so.

( snippet of the fic under here )

conuly

Going on week two of random mid-sleep wakeups wherein I am convinced I have badly overslept and missed my entire shift.

What even is causing this? (Don't say stress, I'm sure it's stress! But what is causing the stress!? Is it lack of sleep? Because the lack of sleep sure ain't helping, gotta say.)

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( Read more... )

conuly

and why is this the first time I've seen this fanvid?

(It's short. Go watch it, you don't need to know literally anything.)

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( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

I have done so many things!

a bunch of boring work that had been piling up the last couple days: I caught up with a bunch of e-mails, I got back to S about the FOI, had a meeting with my manager and also about that big Q4 project that doesn't have a name yet...I even had time to write two chatty e-mails to our CEO
I requested a GP appointment for V on our doctor's website
and in the process was reminded that I can book a cervical smear that way, which I keep getting reminders about, so I requested that for myself
I sent, hopefully, all the right versions of the documents to indicate my consent for top surgery; next thing I hear from them might be a scheduled date for it (the surgeon told me the waiting list is 2-3 months and I'm really hoping for August because it's such a quiet time at work)
I got back to the guy who is going to measure our house for the kinds of patio doors we want next week
I sent an e-mail to his office asking for an invoice so we can pay for them and the pink front door

Now I'm hoping to walk Teddy and then to go to yoga tonight!

cosmolinguist

Yesterday I went to London for work yesterday so had been up for 13 hours by the time I got home just in time to make dinner.

I was again this morning to travel luckily a much shorter distance for work. But still: in person, in new places, it's exhausting.

On the bus back home at lunchtime, I'd be more excited about getting there if I didn't have a couple more meetings this afternoon and a lot of tasks to pick up now that have been neglected over the last couple days while I've been busy with all this stuff.

By the time I finished work, my slight headache had turned into so much sensitivity to light and then sound that I took my migraine-y self to bed as soon as I'd managed to eat the dinner D made.

I suppose it's a very understandable time to have a migraine, but it's also very disappointing that, now that I could relax a bit, I can't even concentrate on anything, can't go to the gym like I'd been looking forward to, etc.

cosmolinguist

I try not to make my baseball posts complete gibberish for the 99.5% of you who don't understand what I'm talking about but some days I have to.

Today is one of those days, because I cannot possibly express how stunned I was, in this year of our Jacob Misiorowski 2026, to see the Minnesota Twins' Bailey Ober of all people throw not just a Maddux, which is pitching a whole game in less than a hundred pitches without giving up any runs, but he did it in less than ninety pitches.

Bailey Ober! He's pitching so slow that the Twins writer/podcaster I listen to has been doomy on him all season, because he was injured last year and his pitching is very slow now, which should make it a lot easier to hit.

Bailey Ober didn't throw a pitch over 89 miles an hour and he also won the game in 89 pitches!

If your fastest pitch is less than 90mph and you win the game in less than 90 pitches, surely we can call that an Ober now.

brithistorian

The other day on Facebook I read a post that was a repost of an earlier conversation from Tumblr (I'm sure you've all seen this sort of thing). Anyway, the topic was a discussion of whether or not a vampire policeman (a la Forever Knight) could use a judicial warrant to force you could grant them permission to enter your house. The discussion seemed to divide into two camps:

Yes, they can.
No, they can't, because the permission forced from you by the warrant is not a true expression of your will.

Recently I've been reading Seanan McGuire's October Daye series (highly recommend, if you haven't read them), which contain a lot of this sort of verbal jiggery-pokery tied into the magic system. This got me to thinking further about the vampire policeman problem and how, as the person in the house, it seems like there's got to be some combination of words that you can say which will simultaneously keep you out of trouble with human law (by honoring the validity of the warrant) while at the same time protecting yourself from the vampire (by indicating to the vampire that you do not freely give permission for them to enter your house), and which further could be stated in such a way that a bystander who is not aware of the existence of vampires/fairies/etc. would not find anything amiss in what you said. I was mulling this over while doing some chores and listening to some music when the Grateful Dead's "Trucking" came on and (in my opinion) handed me the answer on a silver platter[^1]: "If you've got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in." It simultaneously acknowledges that the warrant grants the power of entry and fails to grant your open personal permission to enter.

[^1] Upon writing it here, I'm wondering if "on a silver platter" has any relevance to faerie. Expect a post on that in the future.

conuly

Look at them!

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( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

I've just had a cute, kinda meta conversation about psychological safety at work.

I mentioned it offhandedly in the big team meeting this morning and just now a colleague called me just to ask about it. He said he hadn't heard of it before but he was interested. I'm no expert but I tried to explain that it's about feeling safe to challenge people, to be unpopular, to be more of your whole self at work.

It was nice that I could use an example where he once asked me about a new colleague he started working with who uses they/them pronouns; he wasn't sure what that meant or how to use them so he asked me.

And of course him asking me this is itself an example of psychological safety. Something that he noticed himself at the end of the conversation. He's cool, I really like him.

conuly

The fare is $3. If you commute, you take the bus or train twice a day, five days a week. Every week you spend $30*. You'd have to be caught and ticketed more often than once every five weeks in order to make this math not work out in your favor. And that is never going to happen, because there aren't nearly enough enforcement agents. As it is, the ones we have cost more than they make back. It's all a racket, but you'll notice the buses still aren't free because Albany is still in control of the MTA.

* I'm making a few assumptions here, first, that you're not sharing the same card among several family members with staggered schedules; once you spend $35 in a week on the same card, subsequent trips are free. Also, this is the full fare for most buses and trains, but not for the express bus.

cosmolinguist

Not only did diffrentcolours greet me this morning with "Happy Minnesota statehood day," this evening he got me blueberry muffins.

Because the other day when he looked up Minnesota's state soil (when the polycule was talking about gardening and V and I were waxing poetic about how amazing soil is, as we do) he saw that a) this date was coming up and b) the state muffin is blueberry!

(Of course states are bullshit, the United States doubly so. Land back! But blueberries are tasty.)

conuly

Fic one: Protagonist very recently, like, last week, left home to live with a friend. Protagonist wonders how his newly estranged family found him, then reflects that "the internet still exists". Technically a true statement in 1994, however, it's perhaps a bit more likely that they just used the phone book.

Fic two: Protagonist is touristing in NYC, casually stops in a bodega, buys a flip phone so he can text people. Not in 1992 he didn't - texting via phones was only just invented that year and phones were bricks!

You gotta laugh. Kindly and gently, but still - you gotta laugh!

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( Read more... )

conuly

Watch on YouTube

I was introduced to this piece - specifically Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity - via Wolf 359, the Christmas episode, aka the one where things go from "comedically dark" to "shit just got real".

conuly

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

****************

Link

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we_protect_each_other

January 2026

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Page Summary

brithistorian - Fountain pen geekery
cosmolinguist - Greggsventure
conuly - It really is all laundry all the time
conuly - I may have fixed the dishwasher at work!
conuly - Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.
conuly - Thread by Essex Hemphill
mific in stargateficrec - Those Left Behind (by darsynia) (Gen)
conuly - Blech
conuly - So here I am on my who knows how many-th relisten to Wolf 359
cosmolinguist - Today I am the executive of function!
cosmolinguist - Migraine
cosmolinguist - The Ober
brithistorian - There's magic in finding the right words
conuly - Pretty goldfish shaped dumplings!
cosmolinguist - Psychological safety
conuly - The sign at the bus stop reminds me that farejumping comes with a fine up to $150
cosmolinguist - State muffin
conuly - Two fics, two days - both set in the early 1990s
conuly - (no subject)
conuly - Black Cherries by W. S. Merwin

Whatever the mess you are, you're mine.

Reading

Fountain pen geekery

Greggsventure

It really is all laundry all the time

I may have fixed the dishwasher at work!

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

Thread by Essex Hemphill

Those Left Behind (by darsynia) (Gen)

Blech

So here I am on my who knows how many-th relisten to Wolf 359

Today I am the executive of function!

Migraine

The Ober

There's magic in finding the right words

Pretty goldfish shaped dumplings!

Psychological safety

The sign at the bus stop reminds me that farejumping comes with a fine up to $150

State muffin

Two fics, two days - both set in the early 1990s

(no subject)

Black Cherries by W. S. Merwin

Profile

January 2026

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