ase

So basically these are all the same song, right:

Paul Simon - Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend

What else am I missing that goes on this list? And are there any equivalents about boyfriends? The only thing that came to mind was the Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You, which isn't quite the same vibe.

morbane posting in

jukebox_fest

Thank you for all your nominations at the tag set and thank you particularly for coming back to provide links to sources and lyrics to us after nominating on AO3.

Nominations for this year will close 11:59pm EDT, Saturday 25 April.

Now that we've set up the collection, we wanted to highlight an additional guideline:

In the past, we've received nominations for videos that are dominated by silence or dialogue. Since this is a music-focused event, we suggest you discuss music video nominations with mods if they have significant parts without music. We are likely to reject nominations for music videos where less than half of the video contains music, or where any non-musical parts would make a significant difference to the narrative of the video if excluded.

Further minor query: We've approved 'Daisy Bell - IBM 7094 and Hatsune Miku (Song)' in the past, but it seems a little odd to format IBM 7094 as an artist. 'Would Daisy Bell - Hatsune Miku ft. IBM 7094' work?

rydra_wong

It is currently 50% off on Steam, which I believe is as good as it gets in the post-Elden Ring era.

rydra_wong

I can STRONGLY rec Chants of Sennaar to anyone who enjoys deduction/puzzle games, and in particular the micro-genre of games that have translating a conlang (in this case, multiple conlangs) as their central mechanic.

Watch on YouTube

Looks like Sable, plays like a cross between Return of the Obra Dinn and Heaven's Vault.

(It makes the excellent choice which Sable also made and which more indie games should go for, namely putting all your characters in face-hiding hoods or masks so you can completely avoid uncanny valley bad face animation and spend your resources on other things instead.)

Made my brain ache in a good way and made me feel clever. I did have to draw maps (my spatial orientaion is terrible, so others may not need to except for one specific maze-like area), and make assorted paper notes to solve various puzzles.

You have to not only successfully translate each language individually, but, later in the game, interpret conversations between pairs of languages. This requires knowing that the languages have different word order -- in a very simple way -- one language does object-first Yoda-speak, several languages vary in how they form plurals, etc., but you do have to be able to translate in a grammatically correct way, not just word by word.

And to get to the "true ending," the game requires you to go all out and "speak" the languages, by using a given language to correctly describe a picture you are given (with no text).

I admit I did get a tiny bit emotional when I made it to the end.

Has a subsidiary stealth mechanic, which I mostly enjoyed; near the very end of the game, it did briefly hit the point of requiring a somewhat quick response, but was still ultimately within the capacity of my abysmal reflexes. Nonetheless, it's not a zero-coordination-required game.

sovay

Actually it appears that when younger I read several books by Leon Garfield without at any point committing his name to memory, which seems rude. I fell down a rabbit hole of recognition on the Internet Archive. I hadn't clicked with Black Jack (1968) because I expected more piracy from it, but the crash of affectionate recall prompted by The Stolen Watch (Blewcoat Boy/U.S. Young Nick and Jubilee, 1988) should have translated into a copy of my own even before it could read like a direct ancestor of Frances Hardinge. I remembered the ending of Devil-in-the-Fog (1966) without any of the twists the story took to get to it. I must not have had access to The God Beneath the Sea (1970) or I would have tried it on the strength of the title and almost certainly bounced. I had not read either the comedy of misapprehensions that comprises The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1971) or the sweetly macabre triangle of The Valentine (1977), but highly enjoyed both. At this point my ability to read novels off a screen conked out, leaving dozens yet of historical titles for me to explore at some more library-convenient date—Garfield seems to have been fully as prolific as Dickens who left an imprint on him that can be seen from Carroll crater. His closest contemporary in Georgian-Victorian picaresque-grotesque looks like Joan Aiken, whom I discovered around the same time and have never lost track of. I was reminded also of Sid Fleischman and Ellen Raskin. I would feel worse about mislaying him if I had not famously had to re-find Vivien Alcock's The Haunting of Cassie Palmer (1980) from a single scene that terrified me as a child sans author, title, or any hint of the wider plot; the late eighteenth century origins of that novel's ghost now look like plausible bleedthrough from one writer in the household to the other, especially since it was her first, although marked already with her own concerns of children and ambiguous adults. For people who like morally messy mentors, Garfield is a must. Most of his novels seem not to be supernatural, but the kind that wouldn't surprise if they suddenly turned into it. I hope he still fetches up in used book stores.

Current Music: Atomic Fruit, "Medicine"

github posting in

changelog

Branch: refs/heads/main Home: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth Commit: b8e8ded3b31d3871f41a68cf0dc160db5ce18d94 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/b8e8ded3b31d3871f41a68cf0dc160db5ce18d94 Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-04-23 (Thu, 23 Apr 2026)

Changed paths: M bin/search-tool M cgi-bin/DW/Task/SearchCopier.pm

Log Message:

SearchCopier: rewrite as direct port of SphinxCopier patterns

The prior SearchCopier took its own shape — bulk selectall_arrayref, ad-hoc chunking, per-doc log lines, wholesale DELETE-then-rebuild per journal — and missed practices SphinxCopier has been using in prod for years. Rewrite it as a near-mechanical port of SphinxCopier, with Manticore-specific deviations only where Manticore's semantics require them.

What's now matched with SphinxCopier:

work() dispatch structure, arg shape (jitemid, jtalkid, jitemids, jtalkids, full recopy), and log messages at INFO
sphinx_db()/manticore_db() opens the connection with a SET NAMES 'utf8' and errstr check
logcroak() after every query against the cluster DB and the search DB, so failures fail the task loudly and the queue retries
Full-recopy entry pass diffs dw1 vs log2 and batch-deletes missing jitemids; does NOT wipe the whole journal up front. Search stays available for the journal during the recopy.
Full-recopy comment pass has the "short path" for

( Error: Irreparable invalid markup in entry. Raw contents behind the cut. )

github posting in

changelog

Branch: refs/heads/main Home: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth Commit: 39a9497745cdab9f36c8d8cd669f7457a3595fd6 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/39a9497745cdab9f36c8d8cd669f7457a3595fd6 Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-04-23 (Thu, 23 Apr 2026)

Changed paths: M cgi-bin/DW/Task/SearchCopier.pm

Log Message:

SearchCopier: stream from cluster DBs, match SphinxCopier logging

importfull was doing selectall_arrayref on both log2+logtext2 and talk2+talktext2 for the journal, which loads every row into perl memory before doing anything. Workers were OOMing on real-world accounts.

Switched both loops to prepare + execute + fetchrow_hashref with mysql_use_result=1 so DBD::mysql actually streams rather than buffering the full result set client-side. Also merged the old "fetch metadata, then fetch text in batches of 1000" comment path into a single talk2 + talktext2 join, since we're streaming now. Working memory is bounded at one row at a time plus the %entry_bits map (jitemid -> bits arrayref) kept around for comment security inheritance.

Also upgraded work()'s logging to match SphinxCopier's verbosity so it's actually possible to tell who a job is for from the logs: "Search copier started for [Unknown site tag](), source ." INFO "Requested copy of only entry ." INFO "Requested copy of only comment ." INFO "Requested complete recopy of user." INFO "Copied less than a day ago. Skipping." INFO Start/branch lines emit at INFO; end-of-run summary still DEBUG on clean success and WARN only when there were errors.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) noreply@anthropic.com

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calimac

Matt Mahan: I'm the mayor of the third largest city in California!

Xavier Becerra: I've sued Donald Trump and won!

Katie Porter: I've sat down and talked with suffering Californians!

Tom Steyer: Let me repeat the question, slowly. Also, I'm the Change Agent!

Steve Hilton (or was it Chad Bianco?): All of California's problems are the result of Democrats running it for 16 years.

Chad Bianco (or was it Steve Hilton?): Yeah. Also, regulations are bad!

github posting in

changelog

Branch: refs/heads/main Home: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth Commit: 776ac7cd8c2185b53beb87c4c460205d19f00be3 https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/commit/776ac7cd8c2185b53beb87c4c460205d19f00be3 Author: Mark Smith mark@dreamwidth.org Date: 2026-04-23 (Thu, 23 Apr 2026)

Changed paths: A .github/workflows/tasks/worker-dw-search-copier-service.json M .github/workflows/worker22-deploy.yml R bin/schedule-copier-jobs A bin/search-tool A bin/worker/dw-search-copier A cgi-bin/DW/Task/SearchCopier.pm M cgi-bin/LJ/DB.pm M config/workers.json M etc/workers.conf

Log Message:

Add DW::Task::SearchCopier path and bin/search-tool

Stand up the new manticore-rt write path side-by-side with the legacy sphinx-copier. Nothing in production dispatches to it yet — only bin/search-tool's import-* subcommands. The two paths can run in parallel through cutover.

cgi-bin/DW/Task/SearchCopier.pm: new task class. Auto-routes to its own SQS queue (dw-prod-dw-task-searchcopier) via class-name derivation. Mirrors SphinxCopier's argument shape (full recopy, single jitemid, single jtalkid) and its security_bits / state / text-decode handling, so the search worker's filter contract stays intact when we eventually flip readers over. Tracks per-run stats (entries/comments/deletes ok/err); summary log is debug on clean success, warn when there are errors. Independent 24h memcache throttle on full recopies (separate key from sphinx-copier's).
bin/worker/dw-search-copier: 36-line runner cloned from dw-sphinx-copier; pulls from the new queue, calls work().
etc/workers.conf: add dw-search-copier: 1 so worker-manager spawns it.
bin/search-tool: CLI helper for the migration. Subcommands import-user, import-all, import-support, search, show, delete, count, flush. import-user delegates to SearchCopier->work() so the CLI and the worker share one code path. import-all replaces the retired bin/schedule-copier-jobs (deleted in this commit).
config/workers.json: register dw-search-copier as an ECS Fargate worker (256 cpu / 512 mb, spot, target 30% cpu, scale 1-10). The .github/workflows/ files are the auto-generated CI artifacts from running update-workflows.py.

LJ/DB.pm: incidental tidyall whitespace-only fixup.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) noreply@anthropic.com

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jazzfish

Being at the Gathering is helping my mental state for sure. Being around people, being away from my condo (which is both a refuge and a source of stress at the moment), having a tonne of distractions so I don't end up dwelling on money and future and all.

The welcome gift this year was a copy of Dice Realms, a game that involves customizing largeish dice by popping little plates on and off for the sides. Specifically it comes with several hundred of these little plates. I spent a couple hours on ... Saturday? evening playing "sorting my copy of Dice Realms" and that was a nice low-key way to unwind.

I've played (and, startlingly, won) a game of Princes of Florence, one of my longtime favourites, against serious competition, and had a good time with various 18xx games and even more various other games. Two nights ago we played Sextet, a six-handed version of Bridge. The deck has two extra suits, partners sit alternating, there are two dummies. As Eric observed, "In Sextet you can say 'my centre-hand opponent' in a non-derogatory way."[1] It was fairly ridiculous.

[1] 'Centre-hand opponent' in Bridge is generally reserved for when one's partner, who sits across, has made a particularly boneheaded play or bid.

I've seen the falls, I've chatted and gamed with a number of folks. This evening I hit the pool and hot tub and am now decompressing in my room with decaf tea and Cameron Reed's new book.

I don't think I'm doing well, but I'm doing alright.

marycatelli

Discovery after discovery as I revise along -- addition and addition to the tale --

So of course I'm going hmm, how long will this tale end up? It's kinda short now --

But it will still be kinda short if it continues at this pace. Ah, well.

hannah

Laugh Track [Fanvid] (0 words) by periru3
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: MASH (TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Sidney Freedman & Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt & Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Characters: Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Sidney Freedman, B. J. Hunnicutt
Additional Tags: Fanvids, Embedded Video, Mental Institutions, Infant Death, Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Episode: s11e16 Goodbye Farewell and Amen
Summary:

All I am is shreds of doubt.

Goodbye Farewell Amen: the vid. periru3 took the prompt and ran with it to suitably heartbreaking triumph.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Laugh Track - The National

ranalore

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: listless
Current Location: no rain but also no sunbeams trying to stab me in the EYE

flemmings

Lessee. Finished Thoughts Contingent on a Blithe Spirit, a Dr. Priestley, The Terracotta Bride, and a fast reread of After the Funeral because I'd totally forgotten Who Done It as well as Who Was Done in the first place. This is very pleasant. Evidently I do forget Agatha Christies because in turning out my shelves I discovered a paperback copy of The Clocks, which I could have sworn I never read in my life.

But mostly I've been beavering through Murder After Christmas, a seriously batshit version of English country house Golden Age mysteries. It has one of those seriously batshit English families that one usually finds in places like Wodehouse where genre stops you from taking them as anything but comedic. I'm not sure if the author, one Rupert Latimer, intended this to be comedic because the rest is fairly deadpan serious. The twists in the plot made my head spin, as they did the inspecting Inspector. I'm still going But wouldn't his third wife's family still inherit? But no, because evidently his first wife was still alive when he married his third? But she couldn't have been because didn't he remarry his first wife when the second one died so he couldn't have married the third until she was dead but wait... I don't want to have to reread this to find out but it's seriously going to bug me if I don't. Also am not champing at the bit to start When They Burned the Butterfly which sounds like a downer.

oliviacirce

It's Earth Day! I also missed yesterday, so here are two poems that go really well together, in my opinion. Variations on a theme!

( Third Rock from the Sun )

*

( On Earth As It Is On Earth )

celli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

musesfool

Today's poem:

Pyrocumulus
by Arthur Sze

Peony shoots rise out of the earth;

at five a.m., walking up the ridge,

I mark how, in April, Orion's left arm

was an apex in the sky, and, by May,

only Venus flickered above the ridge

against the blue edge of sunrise.

In daylight, a pear tree explodes

with white blossoms—no black-

footed ferret slips across my path,

no boreal owl stirs on a branch.

At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled

when a black bear snagged a shriveled

apple off a branch; and, waking out

of a black pool, I glimpsed how

fire creates its own weather

in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching

the ditch, I drop the gate: it's time

for the downhill pipes to fill,

time for bamboo at the house

to suck up water, time to see sunlight

flare between leaves before

the scorching edge of afternoon.

***

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Twins on tv

primeideal

Anthology of thirteen Chinese science fiction stories, all appearing in English for the first time. Ni notes in the introduction that "Even the most whimsical and humorous of space-travel stories will tend to end with a melancholic tone, because Chinese stories tend not to have happy endings," and in one story's endnotes, that "In the Chinese language, time is signified by the temporal adverb, so all actions are, without context, in the present."

Unfortunately, the prose comes off in many places as clunky at best and not proofread at worst, so I'm not sure how much to chalk up to the translation. And many of the stories (not only those written by men) were weird about (heteronormative) romance.

That being said, given my gripes with the prose, I did want to give a shoutout to "Qiankun and Alex," by Hao Jingfang, for successfully translating three-year-old speech in a way that makes it clear it's a three-year-old and not just clunky prose.

"What am I learning you?" Alex asks Qiankun.
"That which I don't know," Qiankun replies.
"What do you know?" Alex asks again.
"I know a lot of things," Qiankun replies.
"Show," Alex requests.

The two highlights for me were both on the longer side. "The Great Migration," by Ma Boyong, imagines that Mars' close approach to Earth every two years would culturally become an excuse for lots of travel, even when the technological needs weren't as prevalent. If you can suspend your disbelief at the dysfunctional premise, it's very funny (and based in reality, as Ni mentions in the endnotes, given the huge scale of migrant workers vacationing during Lunar New Year). Ma is also the author of "The First Emperor's Games," which I enjoyed from Broken Stars.

"They say that during every Great Migration, Olympus gets so overcrowded that Mars tilts a few degrees further on its axis."
"Is that a joke?"
"It's a red planet joke. I guess you haven't red enough to get it," I quipped back.
...
"You never know, apparently the occurence of one night stands increases tenfold during the GM."
"Of course, but the funny thing in this joke is that during the GM, whilst you might be able to find a partner you desire for a perfect one-night stand, you'll be hard pressed to find a room."

(How common is "whilst" in UK English, compared to "while"? I felt like the "whilst" per page count density was out of control, but that might just be my US dialect talking.)

"Flower of the Other Shore," by A Que, is a very humorous, meta, and occasionally fourth-wall breaking story about zombies. The narrator is a zombie, and his "who am I, what am I doing here" amnesia is reminiscent of "Project Hail Mary," in a good way. Zombies lose their powers of speech, but have innate sign-language skills.

Just as we are half fighting with instinct, and half talking nonsense, the thin man who was bitten gets to his feet, his body rigid, and starts charging towards the crowd: eyes blood-red, teeth bared. The blood from the wound on his throat has already darkened and begun to congeal.
"Hello, I'm new," he signals to me in a friendly manner. "What are the rules on this side?"
"Don't run in front of a--" I begin warning, but before I can finish signing "gun", the barrel of a Gatling gun sweeps towards him, its stream of high caliber rounds tearing him into two.

Spoilers: our narrator is not like other zombies.

"Shut your mouth!" the captain roars at me.
But I couldn't. "You don't understand, when you lose something for so long and finally get it back, you cherish it even more, like love and health, like your voice. When I became a Stiff, the first part of my body to go permanently stiff was--don't look at me like that, I mean my vocal cords. Rigor mortis set in, and I could only talk with hand signals. But the voice is a gift of gods, the cry of beasts, the chirping of birds, the rustle of the wind and the splash of waves of the sea, each with their own music. Besides, if I want to be with someone, I can actually tell her that I love her, and oh, Captain, has anyone ever told you they loved you? Ah...ah, judging by your face, that's a no.... doesn't matter, doesn't matter, there's still time, before you become a Stiff too... Don't hit me! Don't hit me!..."

Bingo: Translated, 5+ Short Stories, Author of Color, does One-Word Title count if there's a subtitle? "Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction."

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Naomi Novik, The Summer War: Fantasy novella about a girl who ends up unwillingly married to a fairy prince as part of a treaty and/or revenge. Is it petty of me to be annoyed that an author who got here by writing queer fanfic and then did not write anything queer professionally (as far as I know; I haven't read the Scholomance books yet) has decided that now there can be queer characters in the background but mostly in unflattering ways? And also that the main character still needs to basically be rescued by her brothers even though the story wants me to believe she is Smart and Independent? Yeah, probably.

Cat Sebastian, We Could Be So Good:

lysimache keeps telling me I should read the second book of this historical m/m romance series but unfortunately I am the type of person who has to Read The Whole Thing From The Beginning so I said, no, I was reading the first one first. So this is the first one. It was kind of meh. It had a great 1950s NYC setting but nothing really happened and then it just kind of ended. Also we all know exactly what books the author read about being gay in NYC because there are only two and everyone's historical gay romance regurgitates the same facts from them (seriously, you can go to places other than the Navy Yards, I'm pretty sure) so I was really confused that the author seems to have missed the part where "fairy" actually has a really specific meaning. I guess now I read the second one? The second one is baseball.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Captain America #9 )

What I'm Reading Next

I guess the second Cat Sebastian book in that series? Probably?

Current Mood: full

davidgillon

... has been dominated by buying the Humble Bundle with all 90 books from Shadowrun 4th Edition (Shadowrun is the RPG premised on cyberpunk meets the rebirth of magic - William Gibson wasn't impressed). A lot of them are in the 20-30 page range, but the larger background and adventure books run 140-220 pages of A4, and some of them have really been impressing me with the depth of background development (I suppose it helps that Shadowrun had had about 20 years of development at the point they were written).

Ghost Cartels is a campaign sourcebook involving a South American cartel managing to release a new drug worldwide while obfuscating the source of the drug from law enforcement. The first 50-odd pages are a sort of found-footage assemblage of leaks and intercepts and official documents telling the story as assembled by a group of interested Shadowrunners - thieves, hackers, assassins, mercenaries and spies - who are the game's common framing mechanism for this kind of thing as they watch from the sidelines and watch for jobs that might come their way. But 50+ pages of sustained found-footage storytelling is by far the longest I've seen them do and they really levelled up. The rest of the book lays out the adventure scenarios behind that story, as a group of shadowrunners are hired for black-ops and executive protection, starting with them working for a street level gang, but then being passed up the chain until they're working for the heads of the cartel as they stage a world tour to bring local distributors on board. Death on the Reik for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is sometimes claimed as the greatest roleplaying campaign ever. I own Death on the Reik, and I'm not sure this isn't better.

War! This one is a campaign guide to insurgency, counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare in a Siege of Sarajevo type situation, and someone really, really knows their subject. (I loved the bit about a crate of socks potentially being the most valuable thing you can hijack in a jungle warfare scenario).

I'm actually going to have to go back and re-read the first stuff I read, because I've clearly been missing half the story arcs that are buried within them.

Non-Shadowrun reading:

Tribals, Battles and Darings: The Genesis of the Modern Destroyer, Alexander Clarke.

I've had my eye on this for a while, and jumped on it when I realised that the Kindle edition was on offer at £1.29, not the £12.99 I thought I'd read. But, aargh, what a frustrating read. It's got a good first half dealing with the Tribal Class destroyers and their individual histories in WWII (though I kind of want to dive in with an editorial knife and completely re-order it), but then goes completely to pot dealing with the Battle and Daring Class destroyers that followed them, and a couple of pages on the Weapons class are outright wrong, their reduced length isn't inexplicable, it's because they were deliberately designed to be built in shipyards that didn't have the physical space to build a Battle.

Moonlight's Ambassador

Dawn's Envoy, T A White

Aka the Aileen Travers series, books 3 and 4. I started the series assuming from the titles that reluctant vampire Aileen would end up doing some sort of ambassadorial role between the different races in fantasy Columbus, but Aileen is temperamentally much better suited to punching someone in the face for annoying her. Especially if it's hulking vampire enforcer Liam, or at least she would be if he wasn't too fast for her to land a punch. Moonlight has a nicely non-obvious mystery as Aileen's bestie, and newest werewolf on the block, Caroline is implicated in a series of attacks on werewolves and vampires, while Dawn is rather more straightforward as the High Fey arrive in town intent on a wild hunt, and guess who's front of the queue for being hunted.

e

side-effect of shuffling playlists

Mid-Nominations Notes and Queries

Also, in the unlikely event that I've sold anyone on Dark Souls

un-Babels your Tower

Now there's always someone else in the back of your mind

[dreamwidth/dreamwidth] b8e8de: SearchCopier: rewrite as direct port of SphinxCopi...

[dreamwidth/dreamwidth] 39a949: SearchCopier: stream from cluster DBs, match Sphin...

California gubernatorial debate

[dreamwidth/dreamwidth] 776ac7: Add DW::Task::SearchCopier path and bin/search-tool

slowly i turned

discovery and expansion

Vid Rec: Laugh Track

some actors never came back from film shoots

(no subject)

one of a billion small miracles

mostly about podfic

fire creates its own weather

(SFF Bingo): Sinopticon, translated and edited by Xueting Christine Ni

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